Animal Farm: a Fable.

Selling out at the box office is preferable to doing it in your creative practice. What one person sees as "Selling Out" is another's "Survival Tactic". Survivors seldom see their actions as betrayal or principle-abandonment and dismiss peer criticism as jealousy and sour grapes. 

The competitive world of subsidised arts is akin to pigs at a trough: individual companies and artists try to get their snouts deep enough to feed themselves for the next one to three years at each feeding. The cunning  understand that with proper preparation, they can get to the front of the queue before the feed is even in the trough! Make friends with the 'farmer', become his favourite and, not only will you get the choice feed, you'll continue to avoid the chop. The 'difficult' or stubborn who want to go their own way and won't be yoked, the ones likely to snap and bite rather than stand still and look cute, the ones with unusual or unfashionable markings from suspicious 'foreign' places, will get the scraps and be butchered without a second thought. Its good husbandry: the thinned out herd will have more to share and grow stronger without the competition of those aggressive runts getting in the way and reducing the Cute Quotient.

Suitably 'streamlined', the remaining herd can be groomed and trained to jump hoops, win rosettes and deliver choice cuts just the way the farmer wants them: as long as most of the customers are happy, the farmer is too. Rising overheads and running costs encourage butchers to buy what they know will sell quickly to the most customers and at highest profit. There will be customers who don't get what they come looking for, but that's just business for you.

The dish of the day becomes less popular with daily consumption. Demands for diversity mount but the remaining herd- uniform, obedient and docile, can't deliver this demand and a crisis develops as bored customers make less frequent purchases. With increasing worry; the farmer dyes his herd with the markings of the culled, teaches them new tricks, adds a set of papier mache horns here and a synthetic shaggy hide there- and customer interest is momentarily aroused, but once they notice the flavour is not right they don't return. In desperation now; the farmer brings out the house-trained specimens of the original herds he'd been keeping as a curiosity, for mating and stud, only to find that time spent as pets disconnected from their natural environment has left them impotent, irrelevant and destined for glue and pet food. 

Ultimately; maintaining the remaining livestock is no longer viable as customers lose interest and shop once or twice a year with their children out of a sense of "tradition". Herds dwindle further and shops finally close.