Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#359: David Cote (Playwright, Librettist, and Theater Critic) (pt. 1 of 2)
This week on the podcast is part one of our interview with David Cote. He’s a playwright, librettist, and theater critic based in New York City. When we recorded his interview, his opera, Blind Injustice was performed in New York at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in Cleveland at Playhouse Square. Last year his opera Lucidity premiered with On Site Opera in New York and then had its Northwest premiere at Seattle Opera. Next year Lucidity has its European premiere in Germany.
As a journalist, David’s TV and theater writing appears in The A.V. Club, Observer, 4 Columns, American Theatre and elsewhere. He was the longest serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York, and is the author of popular companion books about the Broadway hits: Moulin Rouge! The Musical; Wicked; Jersey Boys and Spring Awakening. https://davidcote.com/
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast, Making Art Work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion, and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent, or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts, Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi, Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise.
Nick Petrella:And I'm Nick Petrella. Today, Andy and I are speaking with David Cote. He's a playwright, librettist, and theater critic based in New York City. His subjects include wrongful conviction, climate change, music therapy, and social justice issues around police violence and the persecution of immigrants. At the time of this recording, his opera, Blind Injustice, was performed in New York at Jazz at Lincoln Center and in Cleveland at Playhouse Square. Last year, his opera Lucidity premiered with On-Site Opera in New York, and then had its Northwest premiere at Seattle Opera. Next year, Lucidity has its European premiere in Germany. Previous operas include Three Way at Nashville Opera and BAM and The Scarlet Ibis at the Prototype Festival in New York. As a journalist, David's TV and theater writing appears in The A V Club, Observer, Four Columns, American Theater, and Elsewhere. He was the longest-serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York, and is the author of popular companion books about the Broadway hits Moulin Rouge the Musical, Wicked, Jersey Boys, and Spring Awakening. This is a thumbnail sketch of David's professional career, so we'll have his website in the show notes so you can learn more about him and the breadth of his activities. Thanks for coming on the podcast, David.
David Cote:No, thanks. It's great to be here.
Nick Petrella:Let's start by having you tell us how your career unfolded after you graduated Bard College.
David Cote:Okay, wow. This is like an eight-year span here. That's really uh, you know, I look back now, I'm like, wow, a lot happened. I graduate, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, back then we had time to do things. Our brains weren't being atomized by social media. You know, there's a thing called time and a thing called space that no longer exists somehow. Uh and culture. That seems to have gone away too. Uh so I'll I'll try to be like enthusiastically cynical as I explain my journey through life. Um so yeah, I graduated in '92 from BARD, and uh at the time I literally was looking at headlines of the New York Times saying it's the worst time in generations for you know uh liberal arts graduates to enter the workplace. Which is like, oh, that sucks. Okay. But you know, it was great because I wouldn't I intend to be an actor, so that'll be easygoing. Um I didn't really have a plan. I really did not know what I was doing, except that I wanted to live in New York, came from small town, New Hampshire, wanted to go to New York, wanted to do theater. Um and I didn't really even know what the theater scene in New York was like. I didn't know anything about having a career. And but I was, yeah, and I was probably like, oh, I'm probably gonna be struggling and be poor. And I'm I was uh it's not that I was okay with that, but it's like that was the situation. And that might sound like I came from a place of great privilege, but you know, my parents are middle class from New Hampshire, which is different from middle class in New York or Los Angeles. Um yeah, so I mean I was just like, okay, let's do it. And uh yeah, so anyway, so I was like for about eight years I was an off-off Broadway actor, meaning I didn't get paid. I did crazy shows with wild titles and you know, unnecessary nudity and just kind of you know outrageous language, avant-garde, experimental stuff, and I loved it. It was great. There's a whole scene, it was a whole downtown, you know, believe below 14th Street scene. And yeah, nobody was, it was not commercial, it was not going anywhere, but it was a lot of fun. And uh I was mostly an actor, a little bit of a director. You know, you tried to get reviews, you tried to get audiences, and you know, people came. People came and saw shows. Um, it's just that you didn't have like talent agents coming to see your show with a hole in the wall and say, hey, let me move it to off-Broadway, and then we could see where we go from. It wasn't like that. There was no pipeline. Anyway, the point is that after about eight years, uh, well, after a few years of that, I was like, I wanted to get into writing about theater. Okay. So and I felt like the Times and the Village Voice weren't covering the scene well enough. So I thought we'd need a zine for Off Off Broadway. Um, yeah, so I put out something called Off, a journal for alternative theater. Um, so sort of early attempted branding that was half serious. And yeah, it was it was great. And I got to sort of like write about theater. I wasn't reviewing per se, but I was like writing about it, sending out writers to cover things, publishing uh artists' manifestos, and um, you know, we would you know, literally a zine. We would have photocopy it at our places where we were temping, you know, we would sneak in at night, photocopy 500 copies, staple them, and then leave them for free at theaters, and try to solicit some advertising and all that stuff. And then, you know, for about two years I did that, and yeah, it wasn't sustainable and I couldn't grow it, uh, but it was fun to do. I feel like everything I've done has been a combination of passivity and lucky breaks and hard work, sort of a weird sort of combination of those things. Okay, so in 2000, uh a job opened up at Time Out New York for a theater writer, and the theater editor was asking press representatives if they could recommend anybody who knew the downtown scene. And so, because my work threw off, the press reps would say said to Jason Zinneman, who was the theater editor at the time, contact this guy. And Jason's gone on to work in the Times, he covers comedy for them and other things. And he liked my writing. I interviewed and I got a job, a very low-paying entry-level job at Time Out, New York. And I stayed there for about 17 years. Yeah. So that was how I got, I went from like uh being a uh a college graduate to getting a toehold in like media.
Nick Petrella:Yeah. Yeah.
David Cote:Yeah.
Nick Petrella:And you were temping the entire time up until that point?
David Cote:Yeah, for like eight years I was doing yeah, uh working in a copy uh coffee shop, copy shop, uh, you know, waiting in restaurants, temping. But you know, actually the last couple year and a half or so of before timeout, I got a job at a website. So I rode the you know, the the dot com bubble briefly um for a site called uh culturefinder.com. And that was sort of a slight step up from temping. It was like more of an arts job. So yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Andy Heise:Earlier you you said something. It um a lot of the things you've done have been a combination. Did you say passivity?
David Cote:Yeah, I know. Luck and hard work.
Andy Heise:I was curious just what you meant by what what you kind of mean by passivity.
David Cote:Well, I say I say passivity, and I mean just sort of like being part of a scene and just sort of you know observing and not trying to lead necessarily. But you know, but of course, saying I want to start as the and I wouldn't do it alone. I started with a wonderful actress and and graphic designer named Jenny Woodward, who who was who could who could design on computers. So she was and she was a great editor, so we were we worked on off together. Um, yeah, I mean that's obviously was like a step forward where you're saying I want to do this, I want to put this out into the world. So that wasn't passive, obviously. But sure, I guess passivity is I think when things fall into your lap, um, which is as a result of hard work often. Yeah. Sure, sure.
Andy Heise:You put you put yourself in those in those positions to to be involved with those types of activities, and you get involved, and to your point, you weren't necessarily looking to be the whatever the leader of that community or that movement or whatever you want to call it, but you were contributing to creating that c community. And you didn't know but at the time, but you were gaining two years of experience that led you to, like you said, your first sort of toe hole in in uh in a career.
David Cote:Um Yeah, yeah, being an actor was fun, but it wasn't like I don't think I had the guts to sort of really go for that. But but writing has always been my I mean, my whole life, it's writing and theater have really been the constants, and I'm I'm very lucky to have that be the thread through my life, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Nick Petrella:So the writing with Azine for those two years, was it effective? What do you think?
David Cote:Effective in the sense that it was effective for me and that it sort of it sort of trained me how to write for a for a general audience, uh, and to write passionately and humorously to entertain a reader. Um some of the stuff was really kind of like uh what's the word? Some of it was it was advocacy for off off Broadway. I was sort of a reverse snob. I was like, you're you bums on Broadway, you don't know what you're doing, you you brainless tourist pandering jerks. You don't know what you're doing. You know, downtown is where the brains and the talent and the art really is. So I I was sort of uh, you know, I had a lot of attitude. And of course it was it was David versus Goliath, you know, commercially speaking. So it was effective in the sense that, you know, for some people they really they got their first breaks writing for it. So that was effective. And some people who went on to do have careers in journalism or publishing, um, it get for some people I think it gave them a sense of community. Um, and I if I suppose if I'd really tried hard to like find an investor and someone to to to to um seek advertising, uh maybe I could have grown it. But yeah. So it was effective. It was effective for me as a writer, I would say.
Nick Petrella:Exactly. And then so I'm wondering, so there's two parts of this. One, and that's clear for what you've been doing for the past, I don't know, two decades now. Did it bring audiences in? Did you get people coming in that maybe otherwise wouldn't have to the performances?
David Cote:Okay, I wish I had a yeah. I mean, did somebody tell me, oh, you wrote about our play in off and people came? I don't know if I ever I maybe somebody told me that at one point, but I don't have a firm memory of that. All I know is that when we had our first anniversary of the publication, you know, we threw a party at a theater and a bunch of people came, and that was that was cool.
Nick Petrella:Okay, yeah. So yeah, you did have impact.
David Cote:Yeah. Well, you know, it's like the internet, we didn't have the internet in like 99. Right, right. It was 90, we did this in 96, 97, 98. Um, but you know, at every theater downtown, there would be like an area where there are postcards, and you know, it'll be like a dozen postcards for shows, and so people can like sort of pick one up and and off was just part of that. It was like a community paper, basically. So it was getting the word out. Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Heise:Yeah, and uh Zine seemed to be making uh a resurgence here, not that they ever fully went away, right? But it's always been sort of this part of uh the you know counterculture, subculture DIY mentality of of artists who are are part of these types of communities that aren't mainstream, right? So they they kind of have always held on to these um the DIY sort of attitude, uh even with the advent of things like blogs and web pages and stuff uh in the in the uh in the late 90s. So uh but yeah, zines seemed to be kind of um uh still still pretty prominent within those within those um groups of people.
David Cote:Yeah, you know, I mean there's there's a conversation that's happening now around media and and the arts, but other things as well, about listings. You know, when I put together um off, uh yeah, I was definitely modeling it on the voice and on on to some extent timeout in New York. And so we had, you know, it was it's it was fashioned like a magazine kind of. And so it had feature articles in the front and listings in the back. And yeah, people right now, I mean, I think it's fascinating what's happened over the past 15, 20 years. It's like somehow listings are, you know, print listings are considered somehow some some ancient, um, inefficient, old technology. And it's like, no, actually, you could take this paper thing onto the subway, you know, you didn't you didn't need Wi-Fi, and you could actually scan with your eyeballs all these different listings. And it was handy and useful. And the editors and critics could say, you really should see this. Here's a red star to indicate you should really check this out. Um I think that that DIY thing you're talking about is is people like responding to the to the I don't you know there's the there's the mainstream, there's the subcultures, and then there's the internet, or there's what's on your phone. What the hell is that?
Andy Heise:Is it it's some somewhere in between? It's like it's not even a my smaller microcode.
David Cote:I mean it's not a mainstream, it's just like it's a flood of of it's a sewage flood. Uh everything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think people definitely want to have more local guidance to what's happening outs in the real world, you know, outside their door, for sure.
Andy Heise:So as Nick mentioned in the intro, and as you've you've talked about here a little bit too, um, you've had a multifaceted career as a as a playwright, a librettist, opera uh collaborator, and um a writer and critic of of uh theater. And at what point did you realize that you could build a sustainable career out of out of these things?
David Cote:Yeah, sustainable. That's a that's a key term.
Andy Heise:Uh which could be defined a lot of different ways, right? There's certainly financial financial sustainability, but there's also like your own sort of well-being, like mindset, uh mental health, that sort of thing.
David Cote:That's how I have to look at it, because you know, uh to the to to get a job that would make the the creative work I do sustainable would be an unsustainable life for me. You know, meaning that I can't, I just can't. I mean, when I in my acting years, I guess I was just, yeah, I had roommates, I was temping. I was you know, temping in the day and rehearsing at night. And um, you know, that was, and you know, uh my parents helped me. I mean, they they didn't pay my rent, but they they helped me, you know, several years to get to pay some of the bills. Um so yeah, that was not sustainable, but it was also like survivable in a way that you know may well probably isn't today because of price uh the inflation, I guess. Um so yeah, so so I mean I can't say for honestly that I make a great living off of opera libretti or playwriting. Um I mean like there are I mean you know honestly, there are about two or three librettists in this whole country who make a living off of their which says more about the you know the uh the timidity of opera companies than does about their talent, but um it's not easy out there. Yeah. So yeah, I would say sustainability. I mean, I've always you know the the timeout job was obviously a move towards stability and sustainability. Yeah, and then I f I freelance today, yeah.
Andy Heise:Yeah, yeah, sure. So maybe that full-time gig, uh I don't know if it was full-time, but that first employ employment job of writing um sort of maybe allowed you the bandwidth to kind of think about and explore or consider other things that you could be involved in.
David Cote:That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, after about eight years of like just churning out copy week, yeah, grinding and having a great time with it because you know, of course, these time out reviews were like, you know, 350 words to like 600 or longer, maybe sometimes it was variable. And yeah, you were reviewing Broadway off, off, off every week. It was fun, and it was uh, you know, it was fun. It was it was great, it was great tech, great technical writing workshop. Um, but yeah, definitely marinating in plays and musicals, week after week after week, yeah. After a while, you're just like, hey, I'm a creative person. I don't want to act, right? I don't want to act, but I I I mean I've always I've always wanted to, I've always been a writer. And yeah, after a while I was like, I want to write plays. I really do.
Nick Petrella:It's it it was paid research, really, if you think about it, when you look back on your career. Paid grad school, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, David, if there are listeners who want to become playwrights or librettists, what should they know before pursuing those fields?
David Cote:I guess they should know that success is not you know, everything that people say about entering the creative field is hard. You're you may have to put in years before you see any any um taking see any uh progress. I would say embrace the hyphen, I guess, is the thing. Because you you know nobody lived as a as a playwright alone. Uh even Tony Kushner, America's greatest living playwright, sure, uh writes spin plays. You know, his his next project or one of them is uh an adaptation of Death of a Salesman. So the greatest greatest American living playwright is adapting the greatest living, the greatest American playwright of 1949, uh kind of. So yeah, any playwright or opera libretta Stephen also maybe they teach, uh maybe they work, they work a job uh in the arts field or not or not. Uh maybe they're they're an arts administrator. I I know of a librettist who's who is or was you know also working in the administration of a major opera company. Uh or they um or they if you or they get a TV job. A lot of playwrights now, I think, uh very, very um pragmatically think of uh um a well-received play in New York or Los Angeles or anywhere to be like a kind of audition for a TV job. Um if you can get into a TV TV writer's room, that's that pays. But being being unless you get like unless you're able to rack up like five, $20,000 commissions in a year as a playwright, you're not gonna be really able to live on it.
Nick Petrella:So then just summarize if they want to do this, just plan on a portfolio career.
David Cote:Yeah, basically.
Nick Petrella:Yeah.
David Cote:Yeah. And find ways, like, I mean, I don't know if people talk about storytelling very loosely these days, but you know, I think I think storytelling is, you know, we're humans, storytelling's at our core. And uh if other areas of the world that are not strictly speaking the arts want to use storytelling, then then you should be then artists should be part of that. And I mean, I like if a if a business wants to have a storytelling department, whatever that means. Yeah. Yeah, be part of that. I I I have not personally gone into that area because I don't I know that's there are some actors who like do corporate retreats to help people with I don't know, speeches and presentations and things.
Nick Petrella:Yeah. We've actually got some guests on who do things like that.
David Cote:Yeah, yeah. Storytelling, storytelling. Yeah, it's I mean, there's that's it's in it's in the medical field, like you know, doctors or yeah, yeah.
Andy Heise:Um I was recently listening to uh a freakonomics podcast episode with the playwright David Adjme. I don't know if you've if you're familiar with um the podcast or his work. Um but he he described the uh arts as a long game where breakthroughs often take decades and don't always turn out the way uh we maybe expected them. Um and so given that opera and theater projects can take years to come to life, how do you think about keeping that momentum going forward uh when sort of it might feel like drudgery? And um how do you how do you manage that unpredictable nature of of the work?
David Cote:Yeah, I I I I heard that podcast. I I I know David a little bit. I mean, we're Facebook friends, but but uh But I mean I I interviewed him ages ago, like god, like in 2000 2009 or something for time out. And um he's yeah, he's brilliant. He's like one of the top ten playwrights, you know, who are you know like under fifty or I don't know how old he is, but uh who are like just doing really amazing work. Um Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's really honest. It's i you know, stereophonic took to ten years to to right to get up built. Um mostly operas, I mean, I guess with opera I've been luckier because it's a real it's a collaboration between writers, between a composer and me. Um so often those have taken like five years from initial idea to production. Okay. I don't think I have most operas begin because a composer uh because an opera company wants a composer to to do a piece. So they'll commit they'll commission it. And they they don't care as much about the librettist, which is very foolish of them. You know, you really shouldn't care about what words the people are singing. Uh but uh people in the opera world are much more fixated on music, although I think that's changing. But yeah, no, but David David was really I mean, David is such a strong personality, and he's very frank about holding on to your dream until into, you know, uh even if you feel like you're being you know compulsive or it's driving you a little bit of crazy, you should keep keep doing it. And I and I believe that too. I think writing is a compulsion. But you know, David is uh is very lucky in that he found collaborators like the director uh Daniel Auken and Will Butler of Arcade Fire to work with him on that project. And I mean I I have some directors I work with uh who are great dramaturgs, you know, they they're like play whisperers, they're able to read your read your draft and tell you what's what's going well with it or what needs fixing. Um collaborators are key, whether or not you're in production putting up a show, but just like you're just gestating something, a collaborator is really key, I think, at that. And I think that's that's that's part of like finding your community. And even if your community is like three or four people that you really trust, I think I think being a writer, you know, you should definitely when you have a draft and it's messy and ugly and stupid, you should show it to your the person you trust. Uh and that's that's a great way to keep the keep the flame going, I think.
Andy Heise:Yeah. It also makes me think about like, do you have multiple projects in the pipeline, like that you're sort of, you know, because of that long timeline, now you're kind of thinking about the how these things um sort of release in phases or go through different phases uh throughout that that time period.
David Cote:Oh yeah. Um when we were doing uh this opera that we took to Cleveland called uh Blind Injustice, when we we opened it in um in Cincinnati in 2019, um and you know the run was pretty short, it was like a week and a half or two weeks. And but we uh yeah, in the middle of it, I was to we were I was getting drinks with Scott uh Davenport Richards, the composer, and Robin Guarino, who directed it, and I you know I had been wanting to talk to Scott about this for a little while. I was like, I was like, have you ever thought about doing an opera about Paul Robeson? Because I'd had this idea for a while. Paul Robson was a great singer and activist in the in the 20th century, who um uh great towering figure in black arts, in in black politics, and you know, he was a he was a sort of lifelong uh supporter of the communist experiment. Uh in 1934, when he visited Moscow, he saw a side of Moscow that was very, very curated and cultivated to win his to win him over, but he saw a society of the future that he believed in, about that had equality and was was oriented on justice and equality, which he did not see in America at the time. And so it created a sort of problematic political bind in his entire life, obviously in the 50s with McCarthyism and all that. So anyway, uh but uh yeah, so I asked Scott if he was had ever, and he's like, well, actually, I have written a little bit about Paul Robeson. Uh he had written a sketch, uh part of a larger piece, I think, that has a scene with Paul Robeson in it. Um but he was intrigued, and because we liked working together, that became the seed of our next project. And yeah, yeah. So yeah, I'm always hopefully working on two or three things at the same time. And then you know the operas are on the one side and the plays are on the other side, and and um yeah, I've got I've always have I always have ideas that I'm just sort of saying you have to look at all your folders and be like, okay, which one really do I need to start start next? You know.
Nick Petrella:You know, as you're talking, I'm wondering, do you approach writing differently when you're working with music and composers as opposed to plays without music?
David Cote:Yeah, yeah. Um when I first started to do to do wanting to do any of these creative projects, I thought I thought I I want to start with a libretto because I feel like that's playwriting on training wheels. Because uh the words don't have to carry it all. You have music that can also fill out the blanks. Um so I um Yeah, so I mean I I uh well all I can say about technically, like with libretti, uh the language is a lot sparser, a lot more concise. I guess you could say it's lyrical. Um sometimes it goes into straight-up lyrics. Uh if if you sort of if within the fabric of a sung through opera you actually have a song uh that people are singing within the story, then you can sort of drift into like song structure, which is always fun because I love Broadway. Um now I love Broadway, even back in the 90s I hated it. No.
Nick Petrella:You've evolved.
David Cote:I evolved.
Nick Petrella:That's not true.
David Cote:In college, somebody turned me on to Sondheim, and I was like, okay, yeah, this is pretty this is pretty amazing. So um I love love my Stephen Sondheim. I'm not not very not very unique in that way, but uh um yeah, so and then of course the plays are just like yeah, the the with the libretti, the the the language is sort of singing to you first. I don't know what the music is gonna be like exactly, but I believe in the music of the words, and they're like sort of carrying me along by their by their sparseness and energy and and the poetic quality that they might have. Whereas in I think in playwriting, first of all, there's more of a story that I'm trying to tell in playwriting that's this happened, then this happened, this happened, and then the characters are talking to me in playwriting. Um the language, obviously, I I want to have as the as much delicious language as possible in the play, but uh the characters are sort of driving it. Um so yeah, with the libretto, you're just sort of like, how can I do the least amount here to inspire the composer? You know, you know.
Andy Heise:Okay.
David Cote:I mean, you want powerful language, but you know, the thing about opera writing is like you can have the most banal friggin' line, like um, like we sit here into our gazing into our screens, trying to make sense while the world around us burns. You know, and then you can somebody can set that to music, you know, and and it'll be like apocalyptic or something. Yeah.
Andy Heise:Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur or as entrepreneurial?
David Cote:Yeah, I mean I immediately think that my mind goes to capitalism. You know, like I of course, yeah, yeah. I haven't made enough money. I think uh yes, because you know, there's a the the root sense of that is like a self-starter or or just good.
Andy Heise:I I should say you don't have to say yes either because of this pod the normal podcast.
David Cote:Well, I'm not I don't know if I'm a businessman. Like one I've been I've been told I should self-incorporate, you know, or you know, I but I don't think that's necessarily necessary for the amount of money I make. Uh or I you know I would love to get an agent if that would help me get more work, but I don't really have an agent. So I but I yet I yet I start a lot of projects and some of them get realized. So yeah, I guess I consider myself an entrepreneur. Sure. Okay. I mean, I guess there's room for improvement. I mean, you know, I guess there's room for more ambition, perhaps. I'm Gen X, so you know, ambition. Ambition is like, I mean, uh, you know, it takes me a long while to decide I really want to sell out, you know. Maybe by the time I'm in my in my 60s, I'll really want to sell out, you know, by then.
Nick Petrella:Well, it's it's not always about money. It could be freedom to do what you want. You have the income. So there's that there's that aspect too. And you're influencing a lot of people.
David Cote:Yeah.
Nick Petrella:You know.
David Cote:Yeah, I mean, yeah. The well, you know, just getting the work out there, I mean, is is yeah. That's the important thing.
Andy Heise:Yeah, I think that's um I think that's at the core of entrepreneurship, right? You create something new and different that didn't exist before and you get it out into it. Exactly. The act of getting it out into in front of an audience or customers or fans or whatever you want to call them. Yeah, right. Um, I think that that is entrepreneurship is that that creative act that gets it out and money's a byproduct. Figuring out how to figuring out how to do it. I mean, there's no one way to make it happen, right? It's yeah, you do what you can.
David Cote:And maybe there's a sense of indep um outsider-ness or independence to it. I mean, I guess you could be an entrepreneur, you can be an entrepreneur inside of a corporation, I suppose. Maybe that's true. Sure. But I mean is that a term? It's a term. Yeah, okay. But yeah, to me, the the sense of it also is like, okay, I'm going to yeah, I'm gonna start this myself.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, yeah. Right. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's Andy was talking, I spoke over him there, but it's money's uh that's okay. The the money's a byproduct. Nobody got nobody goes into the arts to make money. That that I've met. I don't know.
David Cote:Maybe you have to well, yes, I know but uh or they go into the arts with money, with with with with uh that's totally different.
Andy Heise:There's that too. Yeah, totally different.
David Cote:Or they or they go into the arts because they really think the system sucks, and they really think we need to like, you know, as a civilization, we need to change it and not starve starve our artists, you know.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, yeah.
David Cote:I mean they're not starving artists, they're starved artists, you know, starved by by you know by a system, which sounds very vague. But yeah, more subsidy, more more money for the arts, less money for I don't know, weapons or other things.
Andy Heise:Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. So and money is just one money's just one line on the scorecard, too, right? I mean um it happens to be useful, you know, pretty useful, but um, yep, not not a motivating factor necessarily.
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