Are the arts about selling tickets to shows or about art? Of course performances and exhibitions don’t happen if they don’t have money to be produced, but – as evidenced at an arts marketing conference where I recently spoke – the business of selling tickets seems often to determine the measure of success rather than the art. “Art” is a positioning for selling tickets.
I’m currently working on a project that involves creative people outside the arts, and many of them seem to have disdain not for art but for the formal artist class. To these tech and science people – whose success depends on creative innovation – artists’ claims to public good seem little more than strategy for selling their shows. And from the tech perspective, the public good the arts provide – next to the creativity they employ fighting cancer or inventing the next civilization-changing app – seems meager.
They understand how their creativity has to have impact (and techies talking about how their products are going to “make the world a better place” have become a cliche) because their success depends on it. To those outside the arts, though, it’s often tough to see the larger value that artists talk about for their work beyond the ticket sale. And even if there is a larger value, what does it have to do with them?
So artistic leadership. At a time when creativity is busting out all over and astonishing discoveries about how the world works are changing how we interact with it, are our artists central to understanding how the world is changing or are they little more than buskers trying to beckon our attention while the world goes on about its business?
Having spent 30 years curating and directing arts organizations, I’ve always believed that there are four criteria that determine the success of any performing arts organization: 1) artistic success (subjective, but the most important); 2) critical acclaim (if they’re not writing about you, they’re not talking about you); 3) box office results; and 4) the overall financial health and well-being of the organization (you have to stay in the black to keep moving forward). All four of them are working together simultaneously, but stem from #1.
Former NEA Chair Dana Gioia’s 2007 commencement speech at Stanford University is a great rebuttal to such thinking: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/june20/gradtrans-062007.html Most notable is his statement: “Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.”
Rob Gibson, Savannah Music Festival
Acts of creation are acts of faith. This is what gives the arts their intrinsic value. All else is frosting on the cake.
Questions like the one you raise are incredibly open ended leaving the only accurate answer the feeble “it depends.”
In our case at WaterFire Providence we create art that is admission free and open to all. There are no tickets to our installation/event/happening. We bring about 1,000,000 people into what would otherwise be a dark and empty urban park on Saturday nights mainly in the summer but also increasingly into the spring and fall. About half of those people travel to experience WaterFire from out of state and they stay in our hotels, eat in our restaurants, shop in our stores and buy tickets to and attend many of the other amazing arts and cultural activities Rhode Island offers. All of this leads to some pretty significant impacts for our community including $114,000,000 of economic output, more than $9,000,000 in direct tax revenue for the State and 1,294 for community residents. Additionally, WaterFire secures several million dollars of equivalent paid traditional and new media value painting Providence in a positive light and helping to position Rhode Island as a popular cultural tourism destination.
These economic impacts are all well and good and they get the attention of government officials which allows us to segue into the more important conversation about the power art has to change things in our community. WaterFire’s real value is that it builds and celebrates community and establishes a pride of place which we believe is a critically important catalyst for change. If people don’t feel good about and invested in where they live, the most talented leave for a better place while many others stay behind in a state of complacency making change near impossible.
As one example of how we effectively use our platform to bring about change, this Saturday night marks our 3rd annual “C is for Cure: A WaterFire Lighting for RI Defeats Hep C” where we partner with RI Foundation Innovation Fellow Dr. Lynne Taylor on her public health project to be the first state to eradicate Hepatitis C. Not only have we been able to significant raise the awareness of this silent epidemic but working with the medical community we offer free screening for the disease and follow up counseling. As in the past, we anticipate positive results as a from this testing which will lead to the actual saving of lives. In 2014, we were honored to have a photo of WaterFire be used on the cover of the Rhode Island medical journal which was dedicated to Dr. Taylor’s initiative. More recently, Dr. Taylor was one of 12 physicians from around the country to be honored at the White House for their work on infectious diseases. Here’s a link to a video of Dr. Taylor explaining what WaterFire means to her project. https://youtu.be/9ZAJnH5Q73g
WaterFire’s engagement with and impact on the community is much more complex than this, but in the end we create and present art that is open and accessible to everyone including many who might be intimidated by or could not afford admission to experience it in traditional settings like museums or concert halls. We use this powerful platform to help bring about real change in our community. So to answer your question, we don’t feel that we are “buskers trying to beckon attention while the world goes on about its business..” We believe that we are art and community leaders.
Warmest regards,
Peter A. Mello, managing director
WaterFire Providence
peter@waterfire.org | 401.273.1155 x130
“Art creates life far more that life creates art.” — Oscar Wilde
Well, compare having the venture capital to influence/inspire a mass market versus your average artist or institution.. The only artists who can compete on that scale are singer-songwriter corporations like Adele and Taylor Swift. And yes, they are considered artists by the wider world and they are competitive for the most part.
The classical arts world have largely (in the last 50 years anyway) viewed themselves as the opposite of entertainment. It served that purpose, to balance commercialism if you will. And yet, there is plenty of room for balanced projects in between the two realms for clever artists (aka craftsmen) to explore.
At the institutional level, which is your main concern, artistic leadership may only ever have impact to a city-wide scale at best (touring exhibits and companies excepted), ideally with a grant-funded PROJECT (never a useful product that someone can lease and take home with them) that almost everyone, insider or not, can immediately imagine finding very useful and FUN, if not absolutely necessary like Uber. The closest I’ve seen so far in classical music (my field) are cellphone apps you’re allowed to use in concerts that give you info about what’s playing in real time. In the age of Shazam, this is the best we’ve come up with? And again, it’s tech driven; so who needs the artists beyond performance?
No, real innovation that changes the game for the classical arts comes from translating the practical values the artist class holds dear to those you speak of in tech; using laymans terms such as effective analogies, short demonstrations, participation, and yes, more technology. The collaborative effort has hardly begun, because #1) such efforts have been grant-driven, rather than cap-driven, and #2) arts institutions are so opposed to thinking commercially (ie. if 78% of Americans can’t use your product, create a cheap starter version).
The big pendulum may yet swing back toward arts-centrism, but right now, even the arts are about immediate payoff for the consumer. I’ve served within the purely artistic tower most of my life. Now I serve my art in another way, by directly connecting outsiders with the WHY and the HOW. With capital and expert growth management, we could scale up, hiring many thousands, to have the profound social impact our tech friends admire.