The Expressive Energy Grid

I’ll confess to being a metaphor man. I’m always seeking and assessing different ways of describing the world that help me understand and explore it better, and help me describe and discuss that world with students and colleagues. But when it comes to describing the part of that world I serve — the arts and culture industries, either narrowly or broadly defined — I’ve usually come up flummoxed.

A colleague describes the network of arts and culture organizations as ‘a multi-national corporation with thousands of branch offices and no headquarters.’ That metaphor tends to draw affirming nods and laughs from a room. But like most metaphors, it comes bundled with assumptions, in this case, that there should be a headquarters (which I don’t believe is probable or even desirable).

So, here’s what I’m thinking lately: The arts and culture organizational infrastructure is a power grid, a loose-knit collection of utility companies that discover, refine, and distribute a unique and essential form of energy.

When looked at as a whole system, the arts and culture infrastructure in the United States comprises physical structures, organizations, and individuals within public, private, and nonprofit entitities. It has branches in public schools and universities, in urban and rural communities, driven by a range of different motivators. It has functions that discover and refine talent and skills in individuals and groups and then share that value with the local community.

Frequently, the talent discovered is considered worth sharing beyond community boundaries, and cars, trucks, planes, and electronic communications carry it there. Networks have evolved within the system to provide the paths for these cross-community connections, and those networks talk amongst themselves (arts presenters, museums, media networks, etc.). The infrastructure has functions that capture and hold particularly compelling examples of talent — in public warehouses, in the code of scripts and music manuscripts, in recorded media, in storytelling and legends, and in a thousand other forms. Portions of this system are highly regulated by government or foundation policy. Other portions are creatures of a market economy. Still others work within the logic of other economies — from gift to learning to heritage to family.

From almost any angle and perspective, this collection looks like a cluttered mess of disconnected or loosely connected individuals and enterprises — a thousand branch offices with no headquarters. But the force that drives the system and courses through it is remarkably elemental. It is a force that sparks potential and builds connection, that compells and inspires creation and innovation, that fuels a full range of insights and advances in community, in learning, and in commerce. This force goes by a thousand different names, but let’s call it ‘expressive energy,’ since expression is what compells and defines it, and like any energy, it carries transformative force from one system to another.

So, what if we consider ourselves all part of a national and international power grid, a utility network that inspires, refines, retains, conveys, and connects expressive energy?

Like other utility networks we have a mix of ownership and incentive, we have local, regional, and national structures. Expressive energy, like electricity and other forms of power, degrades over distance (at least in some essential qualities), so national distribution requires local hubs, generators, and switching stations. Utilities have publicly held components, or highly regulated quasi-public or private components, either because the network can’t succeed without them, or because the core purpose is too critical to leave to market forces. Utility networks also have essential nonprofit components, providing research, learning, analysis, and even evaluation and control. Utilities are also bursting with private and entrepreneurial enterprise, pushing innovation and filling gaps in the system with market-ready responses.

Most importantly, the expressive energy power grid discovers and delivers a national and international resource that’s essential to every element of our society — business, civic life, education, community, and on and on. Expressive energy transforms physical resources and human potential. It drives engines of all kinds, within each of us, among groups of us, and between all of us.

Viewed this way, there need not be a corporate headquarters, nor an overpowering government control, nor a narrowing of the system’s diversity and change. Rather, it requires that we accept a highly complex, interconnected grid of roles and responsibilities. We can work to acknowledges the essential connections that make each part of the system successful, and adjust incentives to build that success — sometimes through regulation, sometimes through learning, sometimes through incentive by public or private champions, sometimes through market innovation, sometimes through good old conversation.

Also viewed this way, arts and cultural endeavors are not disconnected, but all part of an essential utility network that feeds an invaluable and insatiable public need. And on the positive side, the source of this energy is NOT defined by scarcity. Expressive energy is abundant, even though it lays dormant or disconnected in many corners of our world. But the results of this energy are just as essential to individual, community, and national success as are our electrical power grid, our water utilities, and our public transportation system. They are therefore just as worthy of public, private, and community attention, investment, and protection from harm.

The Expressive Energy Grid metaphor, to my mind anyway, has potential to allow all of us and our organizations to be different and connected at the same time. In the public discussions and debates, perhaps the metaphor moves us from the dismissive posture of ‘art as a frill’ and toward the unbridled urgency of ‘drill baby drill.’