Maximum Money for Art

The art budget is pretty small, in any context. For art-focused parties, what’s the biggest it could be, realistically, and why?

Here I will review the economics of art-focused parties, exploring how art fits in and how that could change.

Most parties and festivals do not emphasize art. Their focus is on headliner musicians, drinks at the bar, and giving you a place to see and be seen. The events I’m describing do not have a generic classification because they are deliberately secretive, quite rare, and widespread superficial mimicry. Find more context about them here https://youtu.be/BbIubSOMUYE

Why should artists get paid? Artists put in the work, need materials and space, sacrifice their bodies and vehicles to move shit around, and are usually stuck with most of the costs. They provide the sense that something special happened and provide an upgraded form of nightlife for a specialized clientele. But, entering into a world of “events” that favors organizers, venues, and financiers, they are on weak economic footing and tend to lose money on each event, effectively subsidizing customer ticket prices through their labor. Artists usually work the most hours of any contributor, except for event leads. In contrast, volunteers and DJs work very few hours for an event and command rather strong wages if you compare what they get (eg a free ticket) to their hours.

Thesis

Art costs a fair amount to make. Event attendees do not want to pay that much for it. Artists therefore compete to offer better art at lower prices. Events can increase the portion of their budget that goes to art (by cutting other things), and might thereby improve their event quality.

Overall Costs for an Event

The basic economic model for all events is pretty much the same. Take in revenues from tickets, upgrades, and possibly some donations. Spend to rent the venue, buy materials like paint, rent infrastructure like portapotties and golf carts, pay some of your staff, then pay paperwork fees like accounting, taxes, insurance, and legal.

Here’s a nice budget summary from Calling All Magical People.

It barely works. Almost everyone involved wants more money: the venue, the staff, and the rental companies. Almost everyone buying a ticket wants to pay less and will shop around or skip your event because of price. Being an organizer is about as stressful as being CEO, but the pay is incomparably worse and the career ladder is quite weak. Further, all event costs must be paid before any of your revenue arrives, which means you have to borrow and pray the tickets sell. Most tickets sell very close to the event date. Thank the party organizers!

The pattern is similar across most events: some tickets move immediately, then things slow down,then they pick up again at the last minute. In this chart, all the events finally sell out, which means revenues will balance costs! Sometimes events don’t sell out, and that’s when they will start blasting you with ads because that means they are about to lose money and quite possibly fold.

The smart business move is to leverage an established brand, use sweetheart deals, exploit volunteer labor to the maximum, increase ticket prices as high as the market can bear, and drop quality for every expense category. Of course, this will ruin your event over time and people will stop coming. This is basically what a “tourist trap” does with a cool attraction, and most annual events slowly drift this way over the years.

But life is not all about smart business moves! People involved in events are doing it for the love! They want to have fun, make memories, work with friends, build chosen family, challenge themselves, catch cheap thrills, and accomplish great things! Ideally, without losing too much money.

Kudos to Love Burn for making a sensational event! This is a $2m undertaking and they lost 50k against their 280k cash reserves. Edgy.

Sadly, however, when we ignore the “smart” business move we may find ourselves running out of money, and that is why many good events are not sustainable and do not repeat. When you go to these, it’s very likely you are hurting someone else financially. Often the organizers displace the loss so that many people superficially gain, but practically lose.

For example, if a Burning Man Camp fundraiser requires 100 people to work for 10 hours each to make the event happen, and they end up with $1,000 in profit, they basically got everyone to work for $1/hr, which will hurt many financially

Examples from Real Events

How much do events pay for art? As an artist, I wonder, what’s the most money that could be allocated to art? How do we get there? Where are we now?

I’ve put together data from a number of events, big and small, to explore patterns. Feel free to stare and speculate while the essay continues.

Comparing seven festivals, you can see that venue rental is a huge cost and art is usually around 10%.

• Festival A went from “in-house art only” to a strong sponsorship model across the two years shown.
• Festival B focuses on music but also hosts pretty strong art based more on its community and reputation than budget.
• Festival C is Burning Man, with the largest portion of expenses in the middle because they build a city in empty desert.
• Festivals E and F are focused on art and their data represent averages across a few years.
• Festival G is looking damn good in this comparison, thanks in part to their low rental costs.

Burning Man sets the expectation that you will pay full price for a ticket and bring your art for free, which is probably why artists don’t’ get paid (and thus I am writing this essay). The norm is to depend on art for quality, and yet offer artists a very bad deal. I think this made sense when there were no tickets or they were very cheap, but with a $500 ticket per person, bringing art on top of it is shocking.

Tracking the red in this chart, you can see the role of rental costs, which mostly go to the venue. The venue wants to take the largest cut they can without killing the event. They often have a strong negotiating position because the festival doesn’t have an alternative. Quality venues are scarce because, in most places, outdoor amplified sound has to end at 9pm. I blame the neighbors, but really it’s quite a common human desire to have a quiet night for your kith, rather than enable thousands of strangers to have an amazing night. Venues also need to make a lot of money in just a few weekends, while paying huge fixed costs, so they may understandably be cavalier and desperate. Developing a very happy relationship with venues is critical for event organizers!

Compressing “other expenses” in the middle is hard. At this point, I believe that audiences actually want this stuff more than they want art or music. For example, clean bathrooms and easy parking cost money. One rented portapotty is about $300, which is pretty sizeable compared to one art grant or comp ticket. Tradeoffs are hard and these investments decrease complaints, rather than increase praise. Depending on your event, you might focus on reducing complaints if it’s well-established and expectations are already high, or on earning praise if it’s new and needs to stand out to gain recognition.

I also collected data from other events.

• The Club Night was a fundraiser for a Burning Man group.
• House Party A was a music-focused event for an established friend group, with no venue rental cost or art budget.
• House Party B was a birthday party in a rented arts space, related to an arts group; it had tons of art, but not much art budget.
• House Party C and D represent recent experiments to increase the total portion of the budget that can be allocated to art.
• Burning Man theme camps here include the cost of tickets to Burning Man as “Rental” costs paid by attendees, showing how a theme camp may be a lot of money but it sits on top of a much larger expenditure of buying the base ticket.

In this set, you can see there are really no rules and anything is possible.

Getting a low price on a venue and covering overhead costs will always be a challenge, but under ideal conditions it’s possible to allocate as much as 70% of the total budget to art.

Here’s the same data presented in another view.

We can also use the same data to examine a different metric: how much money is allocated to art budget per person at the event? Subjectively, I’d say that this correlates pretty strongly with the total impact of art at the event.

• House Parties B and C had very strong art, based on people doing it “for the love,” so the metric is misleading here.
• Festival B had comparable art in 2022 and 2024, but increased headcount between the two years.
• Festival C is Burning Man, which has the most art, so you can tell that anything above that number ($20/head) is getting a pretty serious art investment. But this is also the party that gets the most art done “for the love,” so not a reliable industry benchmark.
• Events E and F have the best art by quite a bit
• Festival G features more expensive large scale pieces

These numbers imply direct cost to each ticket buyer. At Festivals E and F, you are literally buying over $60 of art with your ticket, which is quite a lot of money to put into art. Few people spend this much on art in a weekend, and here we have an event where every ticket buyer spends that much.

At Burning Man Theme Camps, it’s normal to try to slip the art costs in with creature comforts. People don’t want to chip in $100 in camp dues just to help us paint plywood flats for our cloud themed bar and makeout station. But if there’s a free shower or we provide dinner every night, then they will spend quite a bit and organizers have to divert some money into art to help secure location by providing interactivity. (Burning Man Theme Camps are in a difficult competition to deliver the most experiences, which they call “interactivity,” or lose their attractive placement. This incentivizes them to raise dues and add stress to the people who do most of the work, causing burnout and making the opportunity less attractive year over year.)

Why Do Events Have Art?

Events often feature art to make a magical wonderland where people can explore felicitously and have fun with friends and new people. Art facilitates interactions that develop rapport that create kinship that furnish community. If you’re doing it right, all of these steps are good and have some value of their own!

Much like electronic music, a small range of people really enjoy party art on their own. However, far more people are socialized into it by having good times around people who are into the art form. For me, intellectual stimulation is one of the most important ways I have fun. Going to parties with loving vibes, big smiles, and nice music is simply less engaging for me than Ratlantis inventing pizza then sinking beneath the waves before human civilization. For most people, however, relationships and feelings are primary and they will simply follow the people who accept them to whatever event is on offer.

Art can provide a clear economic value to the event in two forms

• Marketing. Art sells tickets to prospective buyers, the way that a DJ lineup drives sales.
• Quality. Art can make something a “better event.” Quality translates to reputation, which can be used for various things, from word-of-mouth marketing to a better negotiating position with venues or better quality volunteers showing up happy to pitch in. Quality also establishes customer loyalty, so it’s easier to sell more tickets next year and your event has a better stewarded culture that helps keep it on the rails and do its good thing more (and bad things less).

In most entertainment events, art doesn’t provide value and isn’t encouraged. At the movie theater, sportsbar, or strip club, you are not invited to bring your jellyfish puppet and show it off to people.

A common alternative is to have “vendors set up” in rows of EZ-ups where they can sell interesting artistic things like pretzels, tinctures, and leggings. In the “vendor” model, you can actually charge the vendors and, if they’re good, they can actually increase the quality of your event! Lightning in a Bottle, for example, draws people in partially because their vendors are so good! You can get great things there. This is surely a more efficient economic model, that depends on extracting shopping dollars from attendees. It just doesn’t happen to motivate people who primarily want art.

In-House vs Contractors

Like many functions of a business, it’s possible to try to keep art in-house or hire contractors for it. Most events I go to use a blend of the two. Burning Man uses all contractors. Events like Lost Lands use more in-house art.

An in-house art team is more reliable and will be more likely to use cost-effective formulas and professional approaches. The art may be a bit short on spark, as the same team has to deliver over and over, and its scale is usually very big without much meaningful content at a human level. It looks great in photos, which is good enough for business purposes, but may short you on event quality and personal meaning, depending on competition.

Working with contractors for art is a mixed bag. They are high risk and sometimes high reward. You start a conversation with some folks, find a compensation level that works for them (such as “2 free tickets and $500”), and then sign some deals and do check-in calls until the event. At the event, you help them get a good location, handle some of their needs such as power or access to water, then hope they do great and clean up nice!

Art contractors are often motivated by their vision and joyous camaraderie more than providing maximum benefit to the event at minimum cost. If you’re lucky, this means they overperform and bring new vision! If you’re unlucky, they disappoint and can make your event seem lower quality. I’m not sure here, but I think the “quality” of an event is assessed based more on the highest highs than the average or mode. In my experience, when a party I’m organizing has one or two amazing projects, alongside many more average ones, people just talk about the killer project so that’s what matters most.

To a large extent, it’s simply the volume and diversity of projects that makes the party stand out. Having four art projects might be good, but having a hundred makes people fly in for your event.

The RFP Process

Because festivals need to cover costs and deliver the experience attendees demand, contractors make a lot of sense.

To get them, a festival needs a rigorous RFP (“Request for Proposals”) process that helps shape the project and assess its likelihood of success.

The RFP asks questions such as these.

But events also need very high-touch artist liaisons to spend a lot of time in the DMs nurturing relationships.

The RFP and liaison are quite a contrast! We need to have high standards, on the one hand, but put in constant work to attract candidates who will jump through all the hoops demanded by the RFP! Balancing this is hard and the only reliable formula I’ve seen is to have an amazing reputation, so you can force artists through a brutal RFP process. Even then, you’ll lose some of your top performers who can’t handle the paperwork, and the liaison should make backroom deals to support them anyway.

In the RFP process, you have to have a good sense of what the team will actually deliver, whether that will be well-received by your attendees, and then give them only the amount of resources that will push them over the line from “won’t do it” to “delivered quality project.” You usually don’t want to fund them enough to do 100% of the project, because they’re often chomping at the bit to give it a go and have no idea how much they should ask for.

Most art crews are not very mature because the social ties holding the crew together are unstable and because individuals often move on from a subculture in just a few years. People leave for various reasons such as mental health problems that develop from the activity, time for a baby, busy with a new job or partner, find they have alienated too many other people, or they just found something else to do.

Read more about Art Crews in my previous essay.

How Can Events Do Better?

In theory events can optimize their art offerings with various best practices.

1. Reuse content. For in-house art, try to use old materials in new ways to reduce costs. You could even lend out the same materials to trusted contractors.
2. Get decent storage. Storing old copies of your flyers is not very valuable, but storing shade structures and carpets makes a lot of sense. Orderly storage that many people can easily access is the dream.
3. Work with reliable, independent artists. People who show up, deliver, and please crowds are good for your event. People who need more attention cost you management hours. Mitigating their burnout is a good goal, but surprisingly hard.
4. Work with self-funding artists. Sometimes people want to bring art and don’t expect money for it. You should almost always say yes to this!
5. Allocate as little resources as possible to get most of a project realized. As an artist, I hate this, but as an organizer, I’d rather get 80% of the project at 20% of the cost. A “comp ticket” is a stronger incentive when the event’s ticket price is higher. Often, artists won’t know how much to charge and you can sign them for low prices. If they come in asking for the moon, however, my experience is that they’ll reject a realistic offer and just not come. Burning Man only funds a small percent of all art at the event, and they only cover 50% of costs at most, only counting materials and never counting labor or accommodations for artists. It’s wild out there.
6. Develop and retain staff to interface with artists. New artist liaisons struggle because they lack process, best practices, or relationships. This is close to a sales role, with lots of high-touch work and then lots of relationship tracking paperwork.
7. Use art to address other priorities of the event. Generally, art projects should provide their own payoff for their own reasons. That’s their job. But it’s great if they also support institutional goals such as “people need more food options” or “we need more daytime activities.”

Ideal Futures

Realistically, those who do the work of putting together plans when there are none (organizers) have the most control. They act before people like staff or artists have even thought of the event. Organizers won’t even put on the event if the money is wrong. So what does it look like for the money to be right?

Events won’t allocate 100% of their budget to art because they want to provide bathrooms, security, a ticketing platform, and other basics that you only notice when they’re missing. Most organizers need to get some money for themselves or their causes, and most other players are similarly motivated. Can you align these interests with art, such that the organizers fundraise for their art group and staff fundraise for their art too? Can you rent a venue that also supports art?

Yes, and that is a great goal. However, the art budget at the party still depends on allocating revenue from the party directly to art that is on display at the party.

Art budgets are most efficient when they stimulate productivity, rather than fully fund it. Once the event becomes a desirable showcase, and producing art for it becomes valorized by the community, many artists will deliver art despite a limited budget.

However, shorting artists can discourage them. Artists burn out, leave for more supportive opportunities, or just don’t bother trying any more.

It is possible to throw a party that allocates more money to art. Exploring the cursory data above, I see great promise in the events with higher art budgets (per capita or as a portion of total spend).

This essay reviews art budgets, how to make them go further, and some reasons they might be what they are. To increase them comes at the cost of other things. Is it worth it to cut other things, just for more art? In many cases, I think the answer is yes. To me, it seems clear that the most popular nightlife events in my environment feature art heavily or even center around it .But to make this case more powerfully it would be necessary to do a further exploration of why art should have more budget.

Why Art?

Art helps make a quality event to a distinctive and choosy audience. Is this audience worth cultivating more than other audiences that don’t value art? I think so, but I’m not sure why.

Art can become a competitive moat, by making your event have something special that other events can’t match. It should be possible to show what most events offer, just by their flyers, and then compare those that claim to offer art. I believe it’s harder to throw a party with quality art, which should help protect an event organizer from the competition, but I’m not sure.

Is there an emergent property of an event once it takes on enough art, that everyone feels invited to participate? Does this unlock our “creative self” allowing us to be someone beyond the usual strictures of identity?

Perhaps a better framing is to zoom out from the quality of the particular event or financial success of the organizing body. Perhaps the real magic is the way artistic production can help more people feel included in shifting groups that harness their passion, focus them on projects, activate the creative self, and create a satisfying social practice of artistic collaboration and creation.

In any case, it’s a lot of fun and I highly recommend it.