The arts are in trouble.
Or are they? “The good news is that the arts seem a little bit immune to challenging economic times. Donations to arts groups sometimes stay the same or go up,” says Samantha Crownover, one of the organizers of the Arts Enterprise Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Layoffs from arts groups may be the result of past difficulties that the economy only exacerbated, Crownover suggests. Still, even in good times, funding is dependent on at least rudimentary business and marketing skills that are seldom taught in conservatories or