By Isaac Butler
An intrepid reader alerted me to the fact that the Times has, in fact, covered the issues of creeping commercialism in nonprofit theater before with a great deal more nuance and old-school journalism than was on display in the article I discussed earlier.
For those of you who are interested, way back in 2002, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and there was neither facebook nor twitter nor youtube, John Rockwell wrote a very long piece about the moves by the Roundabout and MTC to purchase Broadway spaces and the implication this had for the whole sector. It's long, it's deeply reported and it's a fine piece of writing. It also includes follow-up interviews with Rocco Landesman in which he comes across as far more ambivalent about the commercial-non-profit hybrids he helped pioneer than he did in his earlier op-ed.
It's more grist for the mill. You can check it out here. As you know, I recoil from the view that the nonprofit tax code is merely another revenue model, one that carries with it no obligations or values for the organizations that take advantage of it. Sadly, this is the mainstream view of how nonprofit status is supposed to work. But as this article mentions, this wasn't always so. Putting A Chorus Line on Broadway was controversial at the time. The creeping commericalism (both in terms of content and behavior) of nonprofits really took off in the 1990s. When all this started in the mid-20th century, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Arts were supposed to be partially freed from market constraints in order to allow them to pursue excellence instead of box office, common good instead of real estate.
Now we seem to have the common belief that the nonprofit code is just another revenue model, and that nothing is majorly wrong with the American Theater that more twitter and better posters can't fix. I don't believe this to be true.
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