As our “Art Restart” interviews have made clear time and time again, artists’ relationship with capitalism is uneasy at best. Should we really allow the market to dictate whose artistic output is valuable? Can and should art be treated like widgets? Or like a new app?

To the second question, Frances Pollock and Keith Hamilton Cobb might answer, “If the artist is up for it, why not?” Frances, an opera and musical-theater composer, is the CEO of a nascent company called Midnight Oil Collective (MOC) that cribs from the funding practices of tech accelerators, which after all are hubs of creativity, to connect creators with money not from nonprofit sources but from private investors. MOC also trains its artist partners to regard their creative work as intellectual property akin to the tech innovations of an inventor. This means that an artist working with MOC learns how never to relinquish the rights to her work from start to finish and also learns how to scale it as needed. The artist does not wait for a producer or non-profit entity to determine if and how the project will grow, turning over the reins to the project in the process; she remains its captain and determines what the project requires in its own startup lab, so to speak.

Keith, an actor and playwright with a lengthy and distinguished television, film and stage resume, is not only on MOC’s artistic board; he is also in the first artist cohort to fund and develop a new piece through the company. He is the director of “The Untitled Othello Project,” a hybrid theater-making-and-education innovation endeavor that brings together creative minds of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to examine and interrogate the esthetic, moral and pedagogical values promulgated by the Western canon, using the Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point. “The Untitled Othello Project” is currently in residence at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. 

Here Frances and Keith explain why this is the perfect moment for MOC’s brand of disruption in the art world and describe how the company funds and supports the projects under its wing.

https://www.midnightoilco.com/