Meow Wolf Announces Layoffs (And Why I Quit in December)

Some questions you should be asking if you're running a company that relies on creativity for success

Meow Wolf just announced it will lay off 165 people tomorrow. I haven't been very vocal about my choice to leave Meow Wolf in December after nearly 6 years (I was the Director of Exhibition Narrative and then the Senior Story Creative Director for the Santa Fe-based immersive art/entertainment company). I really love and respect so many people who have helped shape Meow Wolf: from its inception, into its corporate shape, and today as the company tries to figure out how much money it can make and at what cost. I haven't wanted to be publicly critical and risk diminishing a lot of amazing work and dedication.

Speaking about my experience is to acknowledge the ways Meow Wolf has failed its lifeblood: its artists, creatives, and on-the-ground creative operators. In light of these layoffs - coming after I watched the company bloat at its senior leadership levels, offering astronomical salaries to entice former Disney, Nickelodeon, and other corporate bigwigs - I feel the need to say a few things that have been on my mind in the hopes that Meow Wolf, and other companies whose success rests on the work of creatives, do the hard work of applying creativity to not just their product but also the internal workings of the company.

To the outside, Meow Wolf appears to be a mecca for artists. A place where you get a salary (with benefits!) to spend your day creating art, surrounded by like-minded weirdos. And while that is technically true, there are some major factors that make that reality more of a mirage:

• The intensity and pace of production is, frankly, exhausting and counter intuitive to the spaciousness needed for true creative work;

• A massive inequity of power and money signals a value system where creative work is deemed less valuable than business strategy and longevity at the company not as important as experience with major corporations;

• A lack of meaningful reward for artistic contribution;

• And a lack of transparency from leadership that translates into a feeling of being a pawn in some larger game, even if that’s not the case.

Maybe I’m expecting too much from a business that is just trying to succeed in the system in which it exists. It already disrupted the immersive art industry, maybe it’s too much to ask the company to also do business radically differently. But what really IS success for a creative company? Is it the proliferation of the art, or the wellbeing of its artists? Is it the creativity of the product or the creativity of the business itself? If it's not possible even for a former art collective to do business differently, what kinds of resistance are even possible within the competition mindset of global capitalism?

I want to offer a few questions for any of us praying to both the Altar of Art and the Altar of Capitalism. These are hard, opposing deities to contend with. They both require deep sacrifice in full contrast to one another.

Making wild, groundbreaking, innovative art/experiences/products requires things like free time in the day to get lost in ideas, time and money to do things that inspire you, ways to feel alive in your body, safety and security to take risks, a clear understanding of the 'why' of what you're doing, trust in and from your collaborators, and a regular infusion of the unexpected.

To succeed in a capitalist system requires productivity, efficiency, rapid expansion, measurable and repeatable success, and a top-down hierarchy.

My prayer is for the executives at companies who have at the core of their mission the production and proliferation of art and creative experiences to reflect deeply on questions like these.

- How do you rapidly grow AND care for those who laid the soil? Can you?

- As you increase the amount of money being generated (and spent) by the company, what responsibility of equity and equality exists— both in how much people are paid and also in the way their artistic contributions are honored?

- Is it better for a company built on the brand of being subversive, unconventional, and radical to come clean about the ways that they’re not?

- Does it make sense for the going rate for an artist to be valued much lower than a senior executive? What does that say about our values as a society?

- Does it make sense that the people who put in investments of money (board, investors) and clout/experience (executives) should be exponentially rewarded when the company’s art is successful, rather than the artists that made the art?

- What does creativity ACTUALLY mean? And what does a human ACTUALLY need to be creative? Because if creativity means inventing something no one has seen before, creating something that will rock the world with its newness and weirdness and inspiration, then I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen very often in a beige conference room between 9-5, in back to back to back Zoom meetings, with heavily monitored hours, endless deadlines, or under the constant push to trim the excess and get to the “Minimal Viable Product.”

- Artists are generally people who don’t quite belong in the systems that have been created. But it is because of artists that the systems get changed. What if Meow Wolf– or any other creative company making its money by making creative work– chose to do business radically differently? Chose to make a new system? What if they chose to be the rule breaker, the disruptor in service of something other than the Beast of Capitalism. What if the metrics of success were radically different? What kind of portal to a new reality might we enter then?