The survival of the arts depends on technology, but not in the way most funders think. The sector’s real challenge isn’t innovation; it’s infrastructure. You wouldn’t know this to look at what work gets funded, though. For years, arts funders have conflated “funding innovation” with “funding technology”, channeling their support to novelty rather than stability. In doing so, funders have overlooked the real problem while actually making that problem worse.
Innovation funds and technical debt
On the rare occasions that arts funders explicitly call out technology in grant programs, it’s almost always in the context of an “innovation fund.” You see these all the time: send us your most innovative ideas for technology in the arts. Often there’s also a soupçon of techno-hype ladled on top: this year we are only accepting innovative ideas that make use of AI/blockchain/VR/mobile apps/quantum computing. The output of these programs tends to be one-off projects that are, at best, of momentary utility–interesting, maybe worthy of a write-up in the NYT, but of little lasting impact or value.
The problem with innovation funds is that they do nothing to address the arts sector’s most urgent issue: overwhelming technical debt. Technical debt is the accumulated cost of short-term technical fixes that quietly erode capacity over time. In the arts, it shows up everywhere. Choreographers can’t afford new laptops, so rendering rehearsal footage takes hours instead of minutes. Decades of underinvestment in technical staff have left museums unable to form a coherent response to generative AI. The music industry failed to tackle online distribution early on, so every musician now lives under Spotify’s thumb.
Innovation funds ignore these kinds of problems in favor of flashier, but far less impactful, projects. In so doing, innovation funds actually compound the problem: they require grantees to take on new technical infrastructure that they would not otherwise need, while simultaneously allowing existing infrastructure to crumble further. It still takes that choreographer hours to render rehearsal footage on that ancient MacBook Air they got in college, but, hey! Now they also have to maintain a closet full of motion-capture suits!
Innovation is not infrastructure.
“Arts + tech” is a program without a home
“Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.”
–Jill Lepore, What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong
But how did the philanthropic sector land on this idea of a focus on innovation? How did this particular way of funding technology in the arts come about?
IMHO, this stems from a problem of “arts + tech” not having a natural home with either traditional arts funders, nor with emerging technology funders. Both groups recognize a legitimate problem that needs solving, which is that the arts sector has no hope of thriving without embracing technology. Unfortunately, neither tech nor arts funders typically have the scope of understanding necessary to solve that problem.
Arts funders generally lack the technical expertise to comprehensively address technology issues in the arts. It is a rare arts funder that centers technology in its funding strategy, so more often than not tech is an add-on to an existing arts program. Innovation funds are therefore attractive because they enable the funder to keep the focus on domain-specific issues (how VR impacts dance, for instance) instead of overall technical capacity.
Technology funders, on the other hand, underestimate the staggering amount of technical debt the arts sector has accumulated. This leads to facile assumptions that the sector’s failure to embrace emerging technologies is due to a lack of courage or comprehension: if choreographers would only embrace VR, they could finally join the 21st century, and so on. Innovation funds are therefore attractive because they feel more like the VC/startup model they’re used to.
I am, of course, generalizing wildly here, in both cases. There are both arts and tech funders that understand the problems the sector faces, and that are making sincere strides to address it. But in the main, “arts+tech” is an issue without a natural constituency with any funders, and this results in programs that do not move the arts forward.
Where to go from here
I’ll go into more detail on where we might go from here in a future post, but for now I can lay out a few places to start. I see real promise in the Doris Duke Technology Lab and Bloomberg Accelerator models, which foreground adaptation over simple innovation. I’ll also (immodestly) mention the Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund, which I developed as a way to increase the technical capacity of arts grantees. None of these programs solve the problem on their own, but they point us in a more promising direction.
Moving up a few layers, I think there’s real promise in the sector-focused approach taken by funder coalitions in the Press Forward and Humanity AI projects, which marshall resources to solve specific sector-wide problems. A similar approach, but focused specifically on the arts ecosystem, could go a long way towards addressing the arts sector’s real problems.
The arts are already drowning in technical debt. Any funders that expect arts practitioners to take on even more of it in the name of innovation, without first addressing underlying capacity issues, are not serious about the sector’s survival. Until philanthropy starts treating technology as infrastructure instead of a playground for experimentation, we’ll keep mistaking novelty for progress.