Collaboration is central to the creative life and operation of all arts organizations. Virtually everything involved in an arts organization’s producing and presenting apparatus engages a high degree of collaboration. Over the last couple of decades as resources have become limited and grant dollars more curated and narrowly accessible, the natural tendency for collaboration has extended more and more among artists and across individual organizational platforms. When made more consistent and formal among a group of artists or organizations such collaboration constitutes new economies of combination.

Combination adds value as appropriate resources are combined toward a shared purpose; which may be a combined artistic enterprise (an integrated combination format), or combined resources aimed at serving individual artistic aims (a non-integrated combination format). Importantly, economies of combination are not to be confused with the merger of two (or more) organizations into one. In combination no artist, artistic vision or mission is altered, eliminated, subsumed or taken over.

Remarkably there are still many within the arts support system and our communities at large convinced that artists are too competitive with each other to share anything. But anyone observing arts professionals outside of the grants making arena or the performance marketplace knows that interaction, collaboration and sharing among arts professionals is pervasive and dynamic.

The arts marketplace, like any marketplace, is by its nature competitive. But it’s a myth that arts professionals are so competitive that they cannot collaborate or share ideas and information. The arts community is much larger than the arts marketplace. Anyone attuned to the community knows that any new idea, discovery or invention is shared laterally and almost instantly throughout the community.