Grids and Gravity: Budgets, narratives, and the illusion of support
In the first two posts of this series, Pouring Water Into Boxes: Artistic Labor and the Limits of Institutional Form, I examined how arts opportunities often pair expansive ambition with narrow material support, and how language-heavy application formats fail to embrace nonlinear artistic thinking. Here, I want to look at project budgets as another site where institutional design is at odds with how creative work can be imagined, described, and sustained.
My own relationship to budgets was not intuitive. As someone trained primarily in the dance studio, spreadsheets once felt alien to my way of thinking. Over time, in order to support my fellow artists and their small nonprofits seeking funding, I learned how to build and read them. What I learned, and what I try to share with clients today, is that thinking in terms of money can provide a clearer view of what artistic work actually requires to exist in the world: time, labor, coordination, material resources, and ongoing care.
At their best, budgets are grounding. They help artists translate vision into action. One of the most reliable grant-writing “tricks” I share with clients is to start with a budget and a timeline before writing narrative sections. When artists do this, priorities surface naturally. My work in helping to craft grant narratives flows easily. Project descriptions become more accurate, less grandiose, and more obviously actionable.
This “trick” is useful only because application designs tend to cue other priorities. Most begin by asking for expansive narratives about vision, significance, and impact, with timelines folded in along the way. Budgets tend to appear later. This sequencing matters. It signals what is most important, shapes how applicants allocate their attention and energy, and pulls focus toward articulation and vision before material grounding.
By the time artists arrive at the budget, they are often cognitively exhausted and emotionally invested in the story they have already told. Then the spreadsheet appears: rows, columns, fixed cells. The grid feels less like a net to capture needed support and more like a wall to climb. I recognize this because I lived it myself, and I still see it in experienced artists.
This tension is compounded by the scale of funding itself. Across most project grants in the U.S., support for artistic work is limited and highly constrained. When total funding is small, there is little room for honesty. A budget that fully accounted for time, labor, administration, and basic subsistence would, in many cases, immediately expose the inadequacy of the support on offer.
Artists will vie for $4,000 to put toward an ensemble choreographic work, for example, not because it is sufficient, but because it is what exists. Creative work is routinely pushed toward compressed timelines, partial accounting, and quiet assumptions about unpaid labor or personal subsidy. My clients describe the process as speculative and uneasy. They are asked to construct budgets that depend on funding streams that may never materialize. They struggle to pay people wages that reflect skill and experience.
Artists enter these conditions not because they make economic sense, but because the drive to make the work is not primarily economic. Artistic creation is a deeply generative human impulse. My clients routinely absorb instability in order to bring a vision into form. Arts funding structures quietly rely on this fact.
Managing funds requires administrative time: issuing payments, tracking expenses, handling taxes, maintaining compliance, reporting, and providing required public credit. Application systems for project grants do not compensate artists for the time spent applying, rarely for the work of managing the grant if awarded. I recognize that this labor is often expected to be covered by other grants or fundraising, a reality that simply adds more hours of work unrelated to the artwork itself.
The result is a particular kind of ethical strain. The mismatch between generative creative process and numeric constraint pressures artists to present plans they know are incomplete, provisional, or unsustainable. Even when they are acting in good faith, many experience this as a form of distortion—of their work, their values, and their responsibility to others.
Budgets and applications live in grids: spreadsheets, forms, boxes to be filled. Grids are excellent at organizing information. They are far less capable of supporting evolving futures. Human lives and artistic projects, by contrast, are subject to gravity and time. Artists juggle jobs and availability. Materials costs suddenly inflate because of supply chain disruptions. The creative process reveals a new area of exploration.
A net is also made of intersecting lines, but it behaves differently. It yields. It distributes weight. It allows movement without collapse. A grid is not a net. The gridded lines of a spreadsheet organize line items and allocate finite resources. They are not designed to flex and stretch to hold living, dimensional projects. When the grid cannot hold the weight, that weight does not disappear. It falls through.
This is not a failure of artists, nor an argument against planning or financial clarity. It is a design problem. When application processes lead with lofty ambition, move applicants into narrative expansion, and only later require compliance with constrained material structures, priorities become distorted. True costs are obscured from grantmakers, and applicants are encouraged to obscure them from themselves as well.
I recently heard an anecdote of a conversation between two NYC choreographers where one told the other: “Don’t do the math, or you’ll never do the project.” The message, to hide economic reality so the work can survive, has been heard and absorbed.
#pouringwaterintoboxes