Over on ArtsJournal there’s a real highbrow conversation by celebrity arts admin bloggers. Here’s the basic premise:
Are the terms “Art” and “Culture” tough enough to frame a public policy carve-out for the 21st century? Are the old familiar words, weighted with multiple meanings and unhelpful preconceptions, simply no longer useful in analysis or advocacy? In his book, Arts, Inc., Bill Ivey advances “Expressive Life” as a new, expanded policy arena – a frame sufficiently robust to stand proudly beside “Work Life,” “Family Life,” “Education,” and “The Environment.” Is Ivey on the right track, or is “Expressive Life” a dead end? Can we define what’s in and out, use “Expressive Life” to argue the value of heritage and artistic engagement, or should we just pump fresh oxygen into the old talking points? Is Ivey the Pied Piper, Don Quixote, or cultural policy’s rendition of Bernie Madoff? Beginning Monday, fifteen of the smartest thinkers on art and society will put Expressive Life through the wringer. May the public interest win!
“The whole idea of the professional artist belongs to the 20th century,” says Shan Maclennan, Southbank’s creative director of learning and participation. “Before that, amateurs were everywhere.”
We’ve written before about the “rise of the amateur” and how that’s affecting the contemporary landscape. I like to think of it as “the rise of the professional amateur” – which is something of an oxymoron. But the truth is that there are many, many talented people who for any number of reasons have not penetrated the ranks of “professional” artists. Should these people be barred from artistic expression? Should their creative output be denigrated because the gatekeepers of professionalism have not given their imprimatur?
When my friends and I started the WYSIWYG Talent Show back in 2004, we regularly played to packed houses because it was very porous – it wasn’t about professionalism, it was about sharing stories, talents and quirks. That being said, some very professional people performed and out of that soup of stories and individuals came some very polished and accomplished talents.
It has been said (I think of the Velvet Underground) that technical amateurishness should not be a barrier to artistic expression. And now more than ever with technology lowering barriers to access in art-making we should be encouraging a proliferation of creative expression. Does that mean that we do away with professionalism? Of course not. But we need a vast and thriving ecosystem of “amateurs” or “professional amateurs” to help nurture innovation and change. And to keep things fun. Art shouldn’t be something that is merely looked at, it must be participated in.
Oh – and I also want to make a quick note saying that, to me, ”amateur” doesn’t necessarily mean “Loud folk art practice” – it just designates someone who has a day job that is not their art.
…the favored technique used to fill budget gaps has been increasing ticket prices. When we increase prices, typically at budget time, we hope that a small increase will not be noticeable and we need the added revenue to break even. However, we have been doing this for so long that tickets prices are now too high for many people to afford regularly. It is not unusual to see tickets for major opera companies cost $250 or more and the best theater tickets are now well over the $100 mark in many cities. [...]No wonder so many people have stopped going to performances.
Dude. I know I’m not the head of the Kennedy Center and I’m not going to argue that ticket prices aren’t high, I’m just saying that ticket prices are not the major problem. It is being completely out of touch with the public.
This isn’t about learning to play for enjoyment, creation, expression or fun — it’s purely about valuing the classics more than anything you and your pathetic friends can make.
We live in a 2.0 world where, to be honest, people are looking to be participant/creators – or at least feel like it. It isn’t about how much it costs so much as it is about attitude, access and relevance. Access is not just defined by money, it is by tone of voice, it is about perception and it is about the experience.
Right now, in NYC, starting tomorrow there will be more art than you can shake a stick at, most of it for under $20. And a lot of it will be well-attended. Admittedly there are a lot of professionals in town, so its a bit of a fix, but at the same time, it is fun. Because people like they’re seeing their friends, seeing their friends’ work and just generally having a good time. Maybe if the arts felt less like an obligation and more like fun, that’d be a step in the right direction. Arts education wouldn’t hurt either – not just reinforcing the canon but educating people to enjoy their own creativity and expression. If people felt engaged in their own creative spirit they’re more likely to enjoy the creativity of others. (Big blanket statement I can’t back up).
Color me impressed. Createquity pulled together his best quotes from the past year and put them all in one big end-of-year post. Very cool and lots of good ideas. Check it out here.
What do our CO2 emissions look like in tangible, spatial form? Leading up to the Copenhagen Climate Change talks, San Francisco based Millennium Art had an answer. They teamed up with the United Nations Department of Public Information to create a global installation–a collection of three-story-high digital multimedia cubes, each representing the one metric ton of carbon dioxide the average human in an industrialized country produces every month.
I’m still digging around but with Pepsi Refresh and Coke’s Live Positively campaigns we’re seeing a distinctly different tone and approach towards giving. On the heels of the Chase Community giving campaign (which has taken some heat recently) I think we’re definitely seeing a trend. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how each of these initiatives works. What do you think? Is it a new way of giving money to causes that doesn’t require vast philanthropic infrastructure and gatekeepers? Or is it a cynical ploy that ends up making people run through hoops in a popularity contest with little chance of winning? Does it reduce Social Innovation through philanthropy to a popularity contest?
Sustained social innovation through philanthropy requires a lot of time and commitment, research and planning. On the other hand, it can get bogged down in bureaucracy and lose sight of the changes it was trying to effect.
What will be the outcome of this new way of crowdsourcing philanthropy? Will it further these brands aims? Will it make a difference socially?
And how will this affect arts groups? Does it change the way we look at the arts, fundraising and social responsibility? Hmmm…
I want to know what you think! Please comment with links, etc.
Outrageous Fortune: The Life And Times Of The New American Play by Todd London, with Ben Pesner, and Zannie Giraud Voss, examines the “collaboration in crisis” between the contemporary American playwright and the varied people who fund and produce new work. Published this month by Theatre Development Fund, the study draws on six years of research, including interviews and surveys with hundreds of playwrights, artistic directors and theater professionals. I was one of the playwrights questioned for this book and want to share how this work translated to me. This is not a book review, but rather a personal response to the study.
I found myself disappointed that I wasn’t disappointed in the books data and conclusion, and writing that is disappointing. The book is a postmortem on what the American playwright was and the realization that in free market capitalism the bottom line is the emphasis for the contemporary stage, something most playwrights learn quickly. This is seen not only in a statistic on page 24 that the average number of new plays per year from 1980-2000 was only 14, but also that grants and foundations (the major funders of my own work) are looking for “results”, such as how many people came to see the show and what was the impact. The question of playwriting commissions is brought into light, as one playwright speculates that a commission is designed to placate the writer, and not to produce the play in question. This is an idea that has been on my mind for some time and has only been reinforced by the study. Producing a new play can be risky business for theatres, but no theatre wants to be negligent of playwrights.
In the study the authors are discreet when attributing quotes (anyone who has meet London would expect nothing less), using “PLAYWRIGHT” or “ARTISTIC DIRECTOR” and “DRAMATURG” instead of real names so not to ruffle features or make the findings personal. I found this amusing, at times, as I was able to identify the author of several quotes by word selection alone. A quote at the top of page 216 comparing bread and butter to the theatre must be from the artistic director of INTAR. A comment on the death of Houston’s Infernal Bridegroom (one of this nations most aggressive theaters before closing it’s doors after, allegedly, not paying the bills) is a friend and famous site-specific specialist from New Orleans. I found this comforting that some of my disheartened thoughts and feelings on the state of the American stage were being echoed by people I like and respect.
The most telling matter in the study includes the rise of the MFA program as a minor league for the writer to shape their voice and style and gain connections. Once a literary manager told me he wouldn’t even look at a play if the letters “MFA” weren’t on the writers credits. Although becoming increasingly important for a younger playwright to get noticed, MFA programs are expensive and writers often go into a lifetime of debt for graduate opportunities. I hold an MA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from Columbia University and expect to have my loans, which are half that of others I know, paid by the time I am sixty. For the record, I am 34. On page 49, the authors wisely use the notorious Robert Anderson quote “You can make a killing in the theatre, but you can’t make a living”. To emphasize this point, I’ve made more money as a short story writer and blogger (where I’m nothing more than a jerk with an opinion atfederal prisoner 30664) than as a playwright. After all, you are reading this on Culturebot, bless your heart. However, in this frank study, the authors end with a chapter entitled “Positive Practices and Novel Ideas”. They address how we can re-think our approach to play development, and, most importantly, audience. How do we connect with an ever-aging theatre audience? What the authors do with this book is start a conversation on where we have been and where we need to go. And that is a conversation long over due.
So I took some of my snow-y downtime to catch up on reading The New Yorker. There was a fantastic article last week on China’s ”crash program for clean energy“. Far too much information to encapsulate here, but I love how this paragraph hits on the correlation between innovation, tolerance of failure and free expression:
“Add as many mail coaches as you please, you will never get a railroad,” the economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote. Scale is not a substitute for radical invention, and the Chinese bureaucracy chronically discourages risk. In 1999, the government launched a small-business innovation fund, for instance, but its bureaucratic DNA tells it to place only safe bets. “They are concerned that, given that it’s a public fund, if their failure rate is very high the review will not be very good and the public will say, ‘Hey, you’re wasting money,’ ” Xue Lan, the dean of the school of public policy at Tsinghua University, told me. “But a venture capitalist would say, ‘It is natural that you’ll have a lot of failures.’ ” Financing is not the only barrier to innovation. As an editorial last year in Nature put it, “An even deeper question is whether a truly vibrant scientific culture is possible without a more widespread societal commitment to free expression.” [emphasis added by Culturebot]
I think about this in relation to the arts and arts funding – people want “innovation” but they want reliability and safety as well. If we truly want to innovate the arts sector – and I think we do – we need to invest in small, nimble start-ups and provide them with infrastructural support to succeed. And supporting free expression in the arts is part of supporting free expression in culture writ large, which is part of supporting a vibrant scientific culture as well. On some level, I’m guessing, it has to do with information wanting to be free.
I was recently having a conversation with a few of my arts administrator friends reflecting on some of the more recent funding initiatives we’ve seen of late and wondering – who sets the priorities?? if anyone were to ask me – and all due respect to createquity but those of us who didn’t go to grad school are unlikely to get invited to the decision-making meeting – I’d say we’ve got a serious gap between life in the trenches and the major initiatives being undertaken by big time funders.
FIRST – I would like to see a real commitment to infrastructure and human capital. Arts organizations, particularly small arts organizations, like small businesses, are labor-intensive. they rarely pay well, they rarely have adequate human resources departments, there is no “career track” or performance reviews, incentives for performance, nor any investment in professional development. The arts admin infrastructures that have developed – like the grad school MFA programs in acting – have stifled innovation, creativity and resourcefulness. There should be more investment in small arts organizations and helping them develop adequate governance and management capabilities, there should be a commitment to making small, innovative arts organizations places where people can build careers, not just survive for a few years before burning out.
SECOND – Funders should start thinking about ways to use funding to encourage interdisciplinary, arts/non-arts collaborative projects. Part of the audience development problem is a relevance problem. Funding innovation means funding start-ups – not just big established orgs or “innovative” programs in those orgs. And many start-ups arise around a single project rather than an abstract idea.
THIRD – bigger investment, for longer commitments to smaller organizations. Really invest deeply in a few, small, innovative organizations and commit for ten years. I have heard that a big part of the success of Philly Live Arts is due to really deep support from the Pew Foundation that worked with Nick Stuccio on growth, infrastructure, planning, etc. Growing good art ecosystems requires long-term, substantial support.
I think numbers ONE and THREE are pretty related. There are numerous other things I would like from Santa and the Funders. I think support for independent producers would also be an interesting thing to explore.
PERSONALLY – I would like a funder to fund me. But that’ll take more than all the Christmukkah wishes I’ve got.
A new report released by the National Endowment for the Arts said that the number of American adults attending arts and cultural events has sunk to its lowest level since 1982, which was when the NEA began conducting the poll.
