For What It's Worth

What good are the arts beyond the personal aesthetic pleasure we gain from them? There is quite a list out there, of these so-called instrumental benefits of the arts: they make us more empathetic people, or so a grant to the Minneapolis Institute of Art hopes (in a recent review essay I claim that we still don't really know much as to whether this is true, or even whether it would be a good thing if it were true)*, they help doctors be better at their job, and suffer less burnout, and Americans for the Arts has a long list, some of which … [Read more...]

The New York Times reports on a stunt by New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, in which at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he registers his protest of the plaza named for donor David Koch: Mr. Saltz was carrying a long strip of paper that had been printed to blend in with the granite used for the fountain. The words on it matched the typeface of the fountain’s inscription. Mr. Saltz then attached his sign to the fountain, so that it no longer read “David H. Koch Plaza.” Instead it declared, “Climate Change Denier Plaza.” This is not the … [Read more...]

A new working paper from Amy Whitaker and Roman Kräussl suggests a new model of finance for visual artists (described by Isaac Kaplan in Artsy here). The abstract of the paper (free download here) is: Using unique historical sales data from the Leo Castelli Gallery, we introduce a novel model of evaluating art market returns using first-sale prices alongside auction results. We create a sample portfolio to analyze what would have happened if the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had retained 10% equity in the work they sold through … [Read more...]

I won't link to all the stories on the Metropolitan Museum's new policy of charging out-of-state residents $25 for daily admission - if you're reading this you've seen them already. Here are few additional considerations: A common refrain is that the museum can "afford" to have free admission for all, either through better management of costs, or through increased donations from the very rich. I don't doubt this. But is it a good idea? When a museum chooses free admission it is making a choice on how to use its limited resources. It is … [Read more...]

In a new blog post, Anna Bull talks about the paucity of women orchestra conductors, noting only 1.4% of working conductors in the UK are women, and riffing on this statement by award-winning (male) conductor Mariss Jansons: “Hmm, well. Well I don’t want to give offence,” said Jansons, “and I am not against it, that would be very wrong. I understand the world has changed, and there is now no profession that can be confined to this or that gender. It’s a question of what one is used to. I grew up in a different world, and for me seeing a woman … [Read more...]

Soft power is the ability for a country to have international influence through means other than the threat of military action or aggressive economic policy (i.e. hard power). How do the arts and cultural diplomacy work as soft power? What ends are being pursued, and how do the arts serve as a means to that end? Researchers through King's College London conducted a study, with extensive interviews of diplomats, at the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG). This is a fascinating paper that I will be sure to add to future syllabi in courses … [Read more...]

The British Council and the University of Edinburgh have teamed up to prepare an empirical analysis of the actual effects of soft power (my introduction on soft power and the arts is here). How does this work? The idea is to take measures of different assets of a country that we think might contribute to its soft power, and to take measures of outcomes that we think might be influenced by soft power, to see if there's any actual evidence of impact. The report has a lengthy, careful review of what we know and don't know about soft power, the … [Read more...]

This week saw the release of two major studies in the UK on culture and soft power: Soft Power Today from the British Council and the University of Edinburgh, and The Art of Soft Power from King's College London. There's a lot of depth to each of the reports, and I'll write about each of them in subsequent posts. I'm relatively new to this aspect of cultural policy, so consider this introduction my own attempt to get a few things sorted out, and some preliminary questions. I began with Joseph Nye's seminal article from 1990. That was a time … [Read more...]

I've been away from the blog for a while, but I just can't keep myself away from economic impact studies of the arts. The latest is from Arts Council England - you can read the report here. Three things: First, the goals of the study are not clear. Britain's Office of National Statistics conducts an annual business survey from which estimates can be derived of Gross Value Added from different sectors, and these figures form the basis of the (2015) arts-sector estimates contained in this report. In other words, we can look up the size of the … [Read more...]

Two recent publications derive indices to rank different cities according to their cultural vibrancy - from the National Center for Arts Research in the United States, and the European Commission for European cities. They have the same fundamental problem. In each report, a selection of data series applying to cities' cultural ecosystems is chosen. These are then weighted. The US study makes a ranking of cities according to different measures, then applies weights to how the city ranked - you can see the method on page 7 here: measures of … [Read more...]