I Speak for the Rainmaker
Performing the fundraiser role in the nonprofit art world.
If you were to peek into web listings of job opportunities in the visual arts in the US —say, in www.nyfa.org— you will notice that a considerable portion of those listings that are not entry-level or basic administrative jobs involve the area of fundraising and development in museums and smaller art organizations: Director of Major Gifts, Development Manager, Chief Development Officer, and so forth, as well as a few Executive Director positions for small organizations that specify the requirement of being an experienced fundraiser. This is indicative of a couple facts: the first is that, in contrast to other occupations in the art world (such as, say, curatorial, for which there are many very talented and experienced candidates) there is a smaller pool of individuals with the niche expertise and talent for getting financial resources for an arts organization, and the second, that this need is so essential that regardless of the structure or model of each organization this component cannot be dispensed with. These professionals are, in many ways, the linchpins of the nonprofit art world.
I take a pause to elaborate here for the benefit of my Latin American and European readers: the development officer profession is particular to the US arts system because of the funding structure of the arts here. In other parts of the world there is usually a ministry of culture that provides a base of financial support to museums and other arts organizations. Aside from its virtues and challenges, the public arts funding system ultimately functions under governmental (and sometimes political) timelines and structures and largely alleviates, if not entirely eliminates, the need for private sponsorship. By contrast, in the US, federal and local (state and municipal) arts funding is weak and limited, which creates an over-reliance of private, corporate and foundation support that in turn requires institutions to hire people to help procure it.
I felt compelled to write about the sponsorship/fundraising profession because it is seldom discussed beyond internal circles (and therefore for those who have never witnessed how the funding sausage is made, the process might be a mystery). This is understandable: even though Warhol once said that “making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” the truth is that flaunting wealth in the art world and/or seeing art in mere terms of material assets often cheapens the art and puts the purity of its purpose in question. For that reason and for all practical purposes, monetary talk in the art world is taboo. I have memories of instances such as witnessing a collector friend reacting angrily to a dealer during an opening, saying “I really hate talking about money at an opening”, and on another occasion when someone was proposing teaching a class about auction houses at the museum where I worked, one of the senior curators at the meeting frantically poured cold water on the idea, saying: “we really should keep the market and the museum completely separate from each other.” When a curator leaves the nonprofit world and goes on to work for an art gallery or auction house, others privately comment that they went on “to the dark side.” Budget discussions are comfortable; discussions that might insinuate a close proximity between monetary investment and artistic independence — or, worse even, a quid pro quo— are really uncomfortable: there is no greater sin in museum programming than the appearance, unfounded or not, that money has purchased access to artistic validation (as it happened, for instance, in 1999 when the Guggenheim gave Armani a retrospective and it was later learned that the designer had given the museum a large, supposedly unrelated, monetary “gift” of $5 million, with the promise to give $10 million more over the following three years).
Adding to this uncomfortable relationship is the fact that many of us who went into the arts as a profession (artists, curators, etc. art dealers excluded) do not typically have the talent and/or expertise to deal with financial matters —and some of us sometimes wonder how much easier our life would have been had we instead pursued a much more financially profitable, even if spiritually less fulfilling, path.
This is where the fundraising professional comes in to save the day and to serve as a crucial liaison with the funder class.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of development specialties. One of them involves grant writing: it is needed at every scale, ranging from helping write grant narratives for artists to working for large museums; the latter often have a team of very able storytellers and writers who are able to craft compelling proposals and pitches to foundations, corporate sponsors and government agencies for potential support, and also excel at writing grant reports to sponsors. Because this tends to be mostly office work, they don’t have to do that much in-person interface.
The second kind of development job is much more concerned with face to face interaction with individual sponsors, often working with high-end donors and board members.
Development professionals who work in this area are models of restraint, sensitivity and timing. They always look impeccable, dressed with style but never overdoing it — always with a quiet elegance. They speak the language of the wealthy (and some are comfortable with it because they come from that world themselves or were exposed to it growing up). They are able to connect with those who exist in a world of wealth far away from the reality of the majority of us. A helpful way to understand this relationship is by reading a book by sociologist Rachel Sherman, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. In this book, Sherman explores the sophisticated, personalized service of the concierge service for very affluent individuals in high-end resorts— a service that comes down to intimately know the client’s profile and family relationships, as well as their needs, developing a particular ability to know exactly what the client needs and when they need it, as the character of Mrs. Wilson, the head housekeeper in Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park, states:
What gift do you think a good servant has that separates them from the others? It’s the gift of anticipation. And I’m a good servant. I’m better than good. I’m the best. I’m the perfect servant. I know when they’ll be hungry, and the food is ready. I know when they’ll be tired and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves.
I asked Sherman whether she saw any similarities between the nonprofit world and the high-end service industry. She replied: "The personalized, deferential attention that nonprofit staff have to offer funders is in some ways quite similar to the attention that luxury hotel works are required to offer. In hotels it is usually pretty explicitly specified by management". Further, she added: "In hotels I think the service is part of what people are paying for—that is they recognize it as valuable— whereas my sense is that in museums (for example) because the donors are not exactly "buying" this service it is perhaps more invisible, both to them as "consumers" and to management. So the commodification process is different."
Another area that Sherman has focused on in a more recent book, titled Caring on the Clock: The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work, has to do with what she describes as the emotional aspects of this concierge-like work. She describes how the personal attention that the care worker needs to provide is by its nature lopsided, "because client-employers typically have more money and status than lifestyle workers do, these relations take place in a context of inequality and thus may feel subordinating to service providers".
I often saw this this in action in my past museum life—not just how the development employee becomes fully attentive, serviceable, and empathetic “like a therapist” as Sherman puts it, to their client, but also involved in a way that can exact an emotional toll on them (and I also had my share of those experiences myself). I recall a museum colleague who worked in the Development department, working with high-level donors. She, like all the others in her department, had impeccable manners and a great ability to personally connect with those donors, always attentive and with a perennial smile often in situations when it was clear that the demands on her were enormous. Only on one occasion, when she had been required to be “on” for an extended series of social events, and while we were standing next to each other at a reception greeting these donors, I saw the mask slip off for a second when she turned to me with a stoic grin, and whispered, almost as an involuntary aside: “this is so stressful.” But a second later she was back in character and carried on.
Recently I thought about how those in this profession have to be bound by silence. A few weeks back I was interviewed by a journalist on the topic of museums, and the subject of fundraising and donor cultivation came up. I told the journalist that, given that I am not a development specialist he should speak to a person in that area about those specific topics. Just to be helpful, I offered to reach out to a few individuals in the field to see if they would be willing to speak to the aforementioned journalist, but when I did reach out, not a single one of them got back to me. This, I later realized, should not be at all surprising: what could possibly be the incentive for anyone working in this area to speak to a journalist?
So, like the Lorax who speaks for trees because they have no tongues, I wanted to speak for the development staff, for they can’t speak out for themselves. For all they know about the private lives and quirks of those philanthropists, collectors and beyond whose donations keep the wheels of the art world turning, the act of opening the curtain —even if slightly— to that private world would be not only a betrayal of trust but an unforgivable indiscretion that would come back to haunt them professionally. So with their “sober restraint” —as the British would say— they keep calm and carry on, like my stressed-out ex-colleague, fundraising for the arts, largely invisible to the public, but always there. If you are one of them I just want to say, at the top of my lungs: I see you, I feel you, and I thank you.