Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Value and the arts

The MBA degree program I direct recently held an alumni/student conference focusing on how we 'value' culture in the public realm...or how we attach value to creative expression and experience when confronted with the question: 'why should you be supported as an industry, as an organization, as an endeavor, when there are so many other needy causes for the public purse?'

One of our two keynote speakers, Adrian Ellis (of AEA Consulting), framed these 'public arguments for the arts' wonderfully in his speech, building from his work in the United Kingdom on the subject (his essay on valuing culture is available in PDF format). As in his essay, Adrian identified four broad categories of arguments for the arts, among them (this text is copied from his essay, but was mirrored in his speech):

• Economic -- investment in certain arts has a high 'multiplier effect,' generating direct and indirect expenditure, through the first round of construction or other investment related activity and subsequently by attracting inward investment and tourism, and thereby creating jobs;
• Social -- investment in the arts can ease social divisions by creating a context in which otherwise socially disempowered groups can participate in society on a more equal basis; and it creates 'social capital' -- to use the concept developed by Pierre Bordieu but catapulted into popular currency by the political sociologist Robert Putnam -- which increases social cohesion and therefore ameliorates the anomic, morally corrosive and socially divisive impact of the unfettered marketplace.
• Psychological and personal -- participation in the arts can accelerate intellectual and motor skills. The Mozart effect –your capacity for solving quadratic equations will be improved if your mother listened to Mozart intensively during the later stages of pregnancy -- is probably the best-known variant.
• Civic -- the civic argument, an amalgam of the above, is that a city with a vibrant cultural infrastructure, in which a range of different forms of public and private sector investment in the arts are undertaken, can create a virtuous circle of high economic performance, high inward investment, high educational attainment and high levels of civic engagement. The most powerful current incarnation of the argument is that promoted by the ubiquitous urbanist Richard Florida in his recent book The Rise of the Creative Class.

Both Adrian and our other keynoter, former NEA chair Bill Ivey (now running a policy and research center at Vanderbilt University), agreed that while these four areas of arguments had some limited merit or truth, they had been woefully under-researched, and chronically oversold.

Bill Ivey suggested that one weakness of our arguments for culture was their myopia. So often, he suggested, we focus so exclusively on the nonprofit and public arts, we miss the full spectrum of creative experience and heritage available to us. Bill is working at Vanderbilt and in Washington to bridge this nonprofit/commercial gap in policy-making and analysis. As an example, he offered a perspective on our collective efforts to rebuild the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s by a few million dollars, all while massive changes in copyright, media ownership, and other policy matters were radically changing the cultural landscape. In a sense, he said, our celebrations over the NEA increases were a bit like fiddling while Rome burned.

Adrian offered two perspectives on the struggle to assign public value: First, that any effort to discover and reframe the public value of arts and culture will take decades...but is essential work. Second, that we can move forward even in that vacuum of common values by recognizing the broader good of a 'vital cultural ecology' and finding ways to support one.

If anything, the conversation was refreshing in that we all recognized the elephant in the room and talked about it...the elephant of thin and distracting value arguments for the arts (arguments that draw us from mission rather than toward it). While effective for gaining public attention and public funds, these arguments will eventually run their course. The smart manager will be ready with the next set of arguments when they do.

posted on Wednesday, October 13, 2004 | permalink