by Joanna Woronkowicz
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we train arts administrators, and being around a business school this year has pushed that thinking in directions I didn’t expect. It’s made me realize that many of the problems we face in the arts aren’t really about funding structures or demographics or leadership pipelines, but about something much more foundational: the perspective we start from. So much of the sector’s instability stems from approaching our work from the standpoint of supply—assuming the art, the institution, the season, the budget, the mission are all inherently meaningful—and then teaching people how to operate that system. We pass along the belief that the organization is the anchor and that the public’s role is to be convinced, educated, persuaded, marketed to.
Spending time in a business school has made that contrast feel sharper than ever. Everything in a b-school is oriented around demand. What do people want? How do we know? How intense is that desire? How do you validate it? How do you respond to it or build around it? Entire courses are built on the premise that you don’t create a plan until you’re sure there’s an appetite for what you’re doing—or until you have a reliable strategy for cultivating one. It’s not that business schools have all the answers; they certainly don’t. But they model a worldview that is almost completely absent in most arts administration programs: the idea that an organization does not deserve to exist simply because someone believes in it. Demand—not intention—grounds the work.
This has made me rethink the usual conversations about where arts administration programs should live. People often say public affairs schools make sense because they focus on nonprofits, civic responsibility, and public value. On paper, that alignment looks neat. But public affairs programs are designed for institutions that already have a recognized public mandate. Their students learn to steward systems that society has already agreed are necessary. Arts organizations almost never start that way. They begin as creative visions that no one has asked for. Their public value isn’t pre-established; it’s fragile, aspirational, in need of cultivation. Public affairs schools don’t really teach how to build a constituency from scratch, how to make someone care who didn’t care before.
Others argue that arts administration belongs in arts schools. And there is a certain comfort in proximity—being close to the artistic process, immersed in creativity, surrounded by working artists. But arts schools, almost by definition, assume the centrality of the art itself. They reinforce the idea that the work is intrinsically valuable and that the public simply needs help recognizing that value. This is one of the most persistent and damaging assumptions in our field. It sounds benign, even noble, but it is still supply thinking. The art exists; therefore the public should care. And when they don’t, we treat it as a communication problem rather than a relevance problem.
Once you see the supply mindset, it shows up everywhere. It shows up in programming decisions rooted in tradition rather than curiosity. It shows up in marketing strategies that start with “How do we sell this?” rather than “Why would anyone want this?” It shows up in fundraising pitches that depend on the belief that donors should care because the organization is “important.” It shows up in conversations about audience development that treat participation as something people must be ushered into, not something that emerges from genuine desire or connection.
All of this contributes to the sector’s familiar list of struggles—declining audiences, unstable revenue, public skepticism, difficulty demonstrating value. These aren’t just operational problems; they’re conceptual ones. We keep trying to fix the symptoms without addressing the underlying worldview. We think the machinery of the organization needs tuning when, in fact, the machinery may not be aligned with how people decide what’s meaningful in their lives.
The more I observe, the more I believe that the real work of arts administration has very little to do with running an organization for its own sake. The real work is about understanding how cultural desire is formed. How people come to care about something. How a community begins to see a particular artistic experience as relevant or resonant or worth their time. How you build engagement not by insisting on the importance of the art, but by creating encounters that make its importance felt.
This is the part that’s missing from most arts administration education, regardless of where the program is housed. And it’s the missing piece that business schools, despite all their limits, inadvertently illuminate. Business schools aren’t teaching arts administrators, but they are teaching a mindset that our field badly needs: start with demand. Don’t assume it. Don’t romanticize it. Don’t build without it. Learn how to shape it, understand it, cultivate it, and respond to it.
When I think about the future of arts administration, I’m increasingly convinced that its academic home is much less important than its intellectual orientation. Whether it sits in a business school, a public affairs school, or an arts school, the crucial shift is from a supply-based view of the world to a demand-based one. From managing what already exists to understanding how and why people care. From preserving institutions to creating meaning.
If we made that shift—if we taught arts administrators not just to run organizations but to make those organizations matter—we’d solve more of the sector’s problems than any curriculum debate ever could.