Handling Negative Social Media Comments
“Great Art Does Not Require a Trail of Misery”
AUTHOR:
Monica Holt
Brent Reidy is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries at New York Public Library, where he oversees four libraries, 450 staff, and 50 million items. Before that, he spent nearly a decade as an arts consultant and several years leading the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. He’s seen a lot of institutions from the inside, and he chooses his words carefully.
I recently sat down with him for an episode of Arts Unscripted and near the end of our conversation, he dropped this gem:
“Great art does not require a trail of misery. And if your perfect concert exhausted your staff, it wasn’t a perfect concert.”
To say that resonated deeply would be an understatement. And when put so directly, I hope most leaders and teams would agree: obviously true.
So why don’t we act like it?
The myth we inherited
The tortured artist is one of the oldest stories we tell about creative work, and it has migrated from biography into institutional culture. Long hours become badges of honor. Exhaustion signals commitment. The person who never leaves the office is quietly celebrated while the person who protects their weekend is quietly questioned. Sacrifice, in our sector, has become confused with virtue. And we’ve built hiring practices, production schedules, and team cultures around that confusion without ever stopping to ask whether it actually produces better work.
Evidence would say: it doesn’t. A 2022 Goldsmiths University study published in the Creativity Research Journal followed 290 creative professionals over two weeks and found that they were more creative when they experienced higher wellbeing and positive emotions, directly contradicting the assumption that pressure and strain sharpen output. The most creative people in the sample weren’t the most beleaguered. They were the most open, conscientious, and emotionally stable.
Museums Moving Forward’s 2025 study of art museum workplaces found that more than half of workers have considered leaving the sector entirely in the last five years. The top three reasons were unchanged from the previous study: low pay, burnout, and lack of growth opportunities. Notably, smaller institutions were outperforming larger, better-funded ones on nearly every workplace culture metric, which suggests that resources alone don’t determine whether people feel cared for at work. Leadership does.
We’ve all watched talented, mission-driven people leave this field not because they stopped caring about the work, but because the conditions around it became unsustainable. They weren’t quitting the art. They were quitting what it had come to cost them. And every one of them took something with them that doesn’t show up in an exit interview — relationships with artists and donors built over years, institutional memory that can’t be written down, the specific knowledge of how a particular organization moves and breathes. That loss is real, and it compounds in ways most organizations don’t fully reckon with until it’s too late.
What this moment requires
This conversation tends to get absorbed into the language of wellness initiatives: meditation apps, team lunches, a note in the all-staff about taking time off. That’s not what Brent was pointing at, and it’s not what I’m interested in discussing today.
The culture of an organization is set by what its leaders reward and what they model. Whether the person who stayed until midnight gets praised in the all-hands. Whether the person who left at 5:30 to be home for dinner is quietly passed over. Whether “we’re all in this together” functions as solidarity or as permission to keep asking more from people who are already stretched.
The work we make and support is ultimately in service of connection, both between the art and the audience, and between the institution and the community it exists to serve. That connection doesn’t happen in spite of the people who create the conditions for it. It happens because of them. And you cannot ask people to build something generous and sustaining for others while offering them the opposite in return.
And listen, I know. Our field is under serious pressure right now…but in reality – hasn’t it been that way for quite some time now? Real and necessary arguments need to be made about financial sustainability, about the funding environment, about what survival looks like over the next several years. But none of that pressure justifies treating the people who do this work as a resource without limits.
The organizations still standing in ten years will be the ones that figured out the mission and the people who carry it are not in tension. That caring for your team isn’t something you earn after solving everything else. That a publicly celebrated concert or festival that left your staff in pieces was never, by any honest measure, a great event.
Great art does not require a trail of misery.
It requires trust and care so that our artists, teams, and community feel safe enough to take risks, supported enough to fail, and valued enough to come back tomorrow.
Monica Holt is President and CEO of Des Moines Performing Arts and host of Arts Unscripted. Previously, she spent 16 years in progressive leadership roles at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This article was re-posted from Monica’s own LinkedIn with permission.
