One of the more radical phrases spoken during the recent Arts Presenters conference seemed to breeze over the room without much attention. In describing his collaborative research project, exploring the intrinsic impacts of live performing arts attendance, Alan Brown suggested that the cultural manager’s role was ”curating impact through artists.”
In other words, our ultimate goal is not finding, filtering, fostering, preserving, and presenting cultural works, but delivering the human and social impacts that engagement with those works provide. It may sound like a semantic distinction, but it’s a fundamental reshuffling of how most arts managers align their resources.
In this view, a compelling arts experience is not the end of our efforts, but the means by which our true product is produced.
Consider the following mission statements, for example:
- Playhouse Square Foundation is a not-for-profit performing arts center whose mission is presenting and producing a wide variety of quality performing arts… [ full mission here ]
- The Clarice Smith Center transforms lives through sustained engagement with the arts. [ related ”key messages” here ]
One is in the business of presenting and producing art. The other is in the business of transforming lives.
I’ll admit to being rather fond of the inversion, given its implications for how we measure and manage our organizations. But I can also see the challenge of the phrase in connecting with the core expressive power that drives that impact.
So many extraordinary expressive works are the result of creative self-indulgence, detachment from the expected, and even disregard for how they might be received. The dangers of defining our work through its impact are two-fold (at least): First, we might begin to assume we know in advance where and how that impact will arise. Second, we might compress the time in which we expect that impact to show itself (Will we transform lives this quarter? Or will it take several decades to transform even one? And is our board ready for that kind of long view?).
Despite these dangers, I’d encourage everyone to ask themselves, their co-workers, and their boards about the core and ultimate purpose of what you do. Do you present art? Or do you curate human impact through the arts?
I have some big problems with this verbal reconfiguration.
For one thing it reminds me of the execrable trend in business from a few years back “We don’t make [insert product here], we make solutions.”
Well, actually, you do make a product. Solutions are made [or not] by your customers.
Manufacturers, or artists or curators just aren’t solely responsible for the final outcome of the entire consumption/implementation process.
If museums et al. really wanted to get into the life transformation business, they’d start amputating patron’s limbs or handing them large sums of money.
As it is, the curator’s end of the transformation business is actually pretty well encapsulated in the first mission statement: providing for the possibility of a certain kind of transformation with a facility, programming, etc. while not costing the community too much money, on balance.
And we must recognize that that transformation is for many many people not a whole lot more desirable than an amputation.
–eric
Important post, Andrew, and well said.
To your list of dangers associated with focusing on impact, we might add one more: the danger that the desired impact(s) can be achieved in some other way than through an arts experience — and maybe achieved more efficiently and reliably, to boot.
This is a point that museum commentator Stephen Weil made about museum missions in the age of outcomes measurement. If a museum claims, say, to improve community cohesion in its local area (e.g. by creating forums for multicultural debate, examining shared pasts, etc.), and bases its claims for support on that kind of impact, it opens itself up to questions of efficacy: is giving $50K to that museum the best way to achieve the desired impact? Or, on an individual level, is attending that museum’s programs the best way to experience those kinds of benefits for oneself?
I think these questions apply not only to the extrinsic benefits of arts participation, but to the intrinsic ones, too. In both cases the risk is that, at the level of outcomes and especially long-term impact, things get a little generic. Lots of activities and experiences transform lives.
So we’re back to square one, in a sense, still struggling to understand what’s unique and powerful about…well, powerful art experiences, and to clarify the causal relationship between the product and the benefits.
I heartily agree with your main point that arts managers should be thinking beyond product to the effects of that product on their audiences. I would just add that we shouldn’t therefore conclude that the arts are in the same logical situation as the railroads in the 19th century, which all but disappeared because they thought they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business.
As your/Alan’s “curating” notion suggests, we’re not only about creating personal or collective transformation; we’re also about creating and presenting works of art. Maybe that’s what defines the curatorial role, after all: neither maker nor beholder but responsible to both parties, the curator has to keep his eye on both outputs and outcomes.
— Peter
The last theatre I worked for used art as a way to build community. The current theatre I work for provides a nurturing environment for diverse artists – these are paraphrased from the missions. The first was a community theatre with education and children’s theatre prominent; the current is a professional theatre. And the organizations do different things – fundamentally.
This is a good discussion, because it is a difficult one. One of the greatest personal frustrations I’ve had with measuring arts outcomes is that would-be evaluators seem oblivious to the notion that art in various forms is what distinguishes history from pre-history and civilization from wilderness.
I move that we all change our missions to: “Organization X creates, presents, and promotes Artform Y because without it, our civilization would decline into soulless barbarism.” I further move that we all do this simultaneously on January 1, 2010 (as a nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful bone-wielding monkey-men). Any seconds?
Thank you for these thoughts! Personally, I’m concerned about the ever-increasing expectation that artists of all kinds function as social workers (especially since art school training doesn’t give you any preparation for that). The further we get away from recognizing the intrinsic value of art, the more difficult the artist’s job is. I’m all for artists being socially conscious, but the amount of fuss & bother these days around creating and measuring impact is crazy-making. Funders even expect us to do the research to justify which populations are underserved. It gets in the way of the work.
Most arts groups in this country are small and all-volunteer, which means that in the bigger picture of the arts, management often comes at the expense of actually making art — the fun and satisfying part. My primary work in the arts is with an aerial dance collective that has been around performing for over 15 years and is the most community-focused group you’d ever meet. But we don’t do surveys to determine what the community’s needs are — we know because we’re a part of it and because we interact with other community organizations in our day-to-day lives, we make friends, we listen, and we actually care — simple really. And it prevents burnout — it contributes to a sustainable creative ecology. You give people a pile of papers instead of an opportunity to dance and share a meal and you’re undermining your organization’s long-term health.
The dance collective’s mission is “to foster artistic expression and creative movement through dance, education, performance and other community-building activities.” If we don’t keep continually focused on artistic expression and creative movement, we end up adding layers of paperwork that make us less effective as a community and in our larger community (and we’ve learned that the hard way). As a collective, we’ve been pressured and criticized many times over the years for not having a traditional board/staff structure, but again and again we reaffirm that for the work we do, our structure is the most effective. It’s lean and mean.
The typical middle-class solution is to create policies and procedures and paperwork to solve every issue so that you don’t have to deal with those messy individual people and situations. How much simpler and healthier to recognize that people are individuals, relationships are tricky but worth investment and risk-taking, situations are always changing, and improvisation is one of the most important skills you can have. We can waste a lot of time worrying about planning and measuring some imagined impact and not be prepared for the real opportunities.
The dance collective has had a huge impact on the community over the years, and I believe we’ve been able to do this because we have acted as a part of that community. We aren’t arrogant architects or social workers, we are simply good neighbors who are willing to share our best selves with our community — not towards any particular impact, but just because that’s a good way to live and be happy.
Amy