Three experiences converged into one idea for me this week: if the arts can be viewed as a part of the solution to social problems they will increase their standing in the hierarchy of public causes.
1 – I attended the partners’ lunch for San Diego’s Monarch School, our local charter school for homeless teenagers, where I heard story after story of individuals and businesses initiating projects to raise resources, including money, for the school.
2 – My youth orchestra participated in the League of American Orchestras/Feeding America national food drive.
3 – I participated in the preparation of the local arts and culture economic impact report.
The simple trajectory of my thinking started at the luncheon when I realized arts organizations do not generally have people and businesses offering to organize fund raising initiatives (a 5K run for example) independent of the staff with the intention of donating all proceeds to the organization. If we do get such a call, we are likely to hesitate and quite possibly decline the offer because we lose control of how our name is used for fund raising in the community. Monarch School gets these offers and accepts them.
In fact, I understood that as a participant in the national orchestra food drive my organization was behaving like the businesses that give unsolicited help to Monarch. The staff we called at our local Feeding America affiliate was thrilled to get an offer out of the blue to collect food. We filled four collection bins with over 550 pounds of food in one day. But this wasn’t a mission related activity for us, and not one we could likely sustain. Nor did this project bring our program or students in direct contact with food bank staff or clients.
I saw through juxtaposing these poverty related experiences with the preparation of our San Diego arts and culture economic impact report that the language and data arts advocates share with policy makers does not carry the same weight with the general public. Trumpeting economic impact does not draw unsolicited offers to help with our mission. Elected officials want to have information they can quote to show investment of public dollars into the arts will create jobs, draw high spending tourists to their city, increase tax revenues, and keep youth engaged in safe activities.
Of these impacts, I believe the general public, including our arts audiences, only thinks about the benefit to youth. Our audiences think about the art but give almost no thought to the job creationg or tax generating side of the arts. (Haven’t we all been asked at least once in our arts career, “Is this is your full time job?”) The public cares about mission, purpose, and impact. People offer to help Monarch School because they see the school helping students get out of poverty and integrating them back into society, not because of the student/teacher ratio or curriculum.
The wider public does not see the arts participating in other community causes. Though artists and arts organizations work in education, health care, job training, economic development, and elder care, this work isn’t very visible compared to professional productions and exhibits. An opera company with a high school program that works with students to create their own opera is hard to notice amidst a season of large scale productions. Likewise, a museum program for Alzheimer’s patients is much less prominent than its gallery exhibits.
There is great work being done to create healthy communities through the arts, but its space of the public mind-share is limited. This is probably because much of this work is being done by small organizations or individual artists that have limited resources for trumpeting their impact while the rest exists as small programs inside large civic arts organization like opera companies, symphony orchestras, museums and regional theaters.
I believe that the more we highlight arts activities that create community and touch individual lives the more successful we will be at persuading the public of the value of the arts. These community service programs at arts organizations have to become a core component worthy of the same promotional attention as other activities. This may be the most important step to communicating the arts’ value to the broadest swath of the public; a result that will bring greater support for the professional art making we all love to see and do.
I am a NYC-based choreographer. I think the question of what art and artists and arts organizations are PERCEIVED as doing is key. In NYC even if the reality has been that artists and arts organizations had to multi-task, there has also been the luxury (at least as compared to much of the rest of the country) of being able to say that making art is a thing in and of itself. And of course it is! But not all of us achieve that, or even want to achieve that, and in fact, what does it mean?
Graham Kester wrote a book about the ways in which the critical reception of community-located art needs to encompass the ways in which engagement happens; that the outcomes may not be the measure of artistic success in such work. This is a pretty radical re-thinking of how arts criticism works, and I think it is related to how there has been, often, a downplaying of work that depends on artists, draws on art training, or is a result of the energy and organizing ability of the arts community. I’ve thought often in the last couple years of my experience in the Development office at the Pratt Institute. Pratt harbors an amazing collection of k-12 community arts-in-education initiatives, the most famous of course the Saturday School established by Charles Pratt at the very beginning. But there are many others, started by faculty and staff either independently or in response to Federal initiatives like America Reads. The Institute itself does not seem to regard these as a collective resource, generally permitting these fantastic and effective programs to exist as they can, each separately looking for resources and space.
I think that this is a uniquely creative time for rethinking institutional, and personal, profiles. There is a huge question that only the arts community has the knowledge to answer, and that is: what actually do we do, daily? the answer is: so very very much, as everyone does, daily. The difference is, the way we do things can often be so very much fun, so joyful, so satisfying, so deeply positive. We need to celebrate our actions and talk them up. Because then they will expand, and grow, and be recognized as the indispensable activities that they actually are.
I know a baroque group in Delaware that for several years back in the 1990’s actually organized a 5k run and mountain bike race as a benefit for the group. They had the group, complete with harpsichord and strings, out performing next to the course. They had local sponsors and were partnered with a bicycle store and a running store.
It did make them some money and they ran it for a number of years, but ultimately the amount of effort it took wasn’t worth the financial return. And they found that it didn’t do much to increase their audience either. At least in Delaware, the folks who would come out at 7am on a Saturday for a race just didn’t seem to be the same crowd that would show up the night before for a baroque concert.
But perhaps in a difference place with a different group, the results would differ.
Very interesting. I am interested in getting the title of Graham Kester’s book. I can’t seem to locate him on Amazon
“I think that this is a uniquely creative time for rethinking institutional, and personal, profiles. There is a huge question that only the arts community has the knowledge to answer, and that is: what actually do we do, daily? the answer is: so very very much, as everyone does, daily. The difference is, the way we do things can often be so very much fun, so joyful, so satisfying, so deeply positive. We need to celebrate our actions and talk them up. Because then they will expand, and grow, and be recognized as the indispensable activities that they actually are.”
Thank you, thank you! This is really a special insight. Another aspect that i think connects with this is the mis-categorization of leisure time in general, due to the industrial requirement for consumption at scale. In essence, all joyful work is perceived under leisure, which if not consuming the products of toil hasn’t a place on the map.
Artists inspire their communities such that leisure time is for more than consumption, which can be a bit frightening to one way distributors.
Perhaps the status quo simply out evangelizes on this point in part by choking off art-making?
http://supportarts.artistorganizedart.org