Art(ist) Education

Deserve Is Not Part of the Equation

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Yesterday I speculated on the possibility of an arts education tax credit in the U.S. that mirrored one being proposed in Canada. Someone commented anonymously asking why the arts don’t just produce a product people will pay to see and support themselves.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but whether you can or should support yourself is not a primary criteria for tax credits and subsidies. Taxes and subsidies are a matter of politics and policy. The United States provides subsidies to every segment of the energy industry- oil, coal, gas, nuclear, ethanol, wind and solar. Now I just paid over $4.00/gallon for gas. Exxon/Mobile earned $30 billion in 2010 and paid $19 billion to their shareholders during that year. So why are subsidies needed? They cost the government over $20 billion a year and 70% of it goes to oil, gas and coal. Less than 5% of that goes to solar, wind and geothermal. I read a piece a few months back suggesting getting rid of the subsidies so that the renewables can operate on a more level playing field.

The same is true for farm subsidies, which also total $20 billion a year. Most of that goes to large corporations rather than supporting the small farmer.

No one would claim that energy and food producers aren’t generating products that people won’t pay for so why is it that the arts keep getting held up to this criteria? Why is no one squawking about these big expenditures to fuel and food producers? Granted, President Obama has proposed cutting about $4 billion in fuel subsidies and $2 billion in agriculture subsidies in 2012, but there is still a lot of money left on the table. A lot of it was put on the table in the first place and complaints about it were generally muted as a result of strong lobbying efforts and political pressure. The arts lack this and end up repeatedly demonized even though the benefits they realize are eclipsed by those of these other industries.

Tax credits are also a matter of policy. I did my taxes yesterday and among the tax credits available on the state and federal level were solar heating, film production and first time home buyers. Now given the big mortgage crisis only a few years ago, is it responsible for the government to continue to encourage people to buy homes? And doesn’t that discriminate against renters like myself? The production of Lost was successful enough that didn’t need tax credits, but they were available.

Hawaii, like many other states, wanted to attract productions and provide employment to residents. (Though it is something of a zero sum game.) Home ownership is seen as a sign of economic health and so the government encourages their purchase.

It will be the first to admit that it is rather cynical to say that it doesn’t matter whether you deserve a subsidy or not, it matters whether you have the political clout to get it and political will to pursue it. Like it or not, that is the fact of the matter.

Saying that there are worse things to have subsidized than your child’s piano lessons, tuition at arts summer camp, or trip to the museum, is a pretty weak rationalization to encourage people to advocate for such a subsidy. But you know, even outside the context of everything else that is subsidized, that is kinda true too.

Looking North: Tax Credits For Arts Education

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Americans for the Arts blog has just finished up a week long blog salon on arts education. On the last day of discussion, AFTA staffer Tim Mikulski reported that Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the government would provide a tax credit to parents whose children participate in some form of arts education. I tried looked around the web trying to find out more details, but there really isn’t much more than what Mikulski notes. There was a similar tax credit passed for children’s fitness programs in 2007 and that the arts education tax credit was promised during the 2008 election campaigns but hadn’t manifested.

Mikulski wonders what would happen if the President introduced a bill like this to Congress at the close of his entry. Actually, off the top of my head, I would say it shouldn’t be too contentious. Tax credits and rebates seem to be a tool Congress likes to use at the moment. The culture wars have always been about having tax monies spent on things that one finds offensive. In this case, one is making their own choices. The arts have always received a bigger subsidy via tax deductible donations than through grants from the NEA and NEH. In this situation, unlike with most donations, you would receive a deduction even though you had received a service in return and presumably, it would not matter if the money was spent at a non-profit or for-profit entity. If the NEA is suggesting that people’s arts experiences outside of a formal setting should be regarded as participation, then it only seems fair that all educational efforts be eligible regardless of the vendor’s tax status.

While making any arts education expenditure deductible might mean all that money won’t get directed to non-profits, it has the potential for increasing audiences for the non-profit sector if purchase of tickets to performances and museums count toward the credit. And it gets younger people in the doors. It could even increase demand for the arts in K-12 schools if purchase of supplies for art class, make up and costumes for drama, shoes and clothes for dance and instruments for music were all eligible.

What I think would be most important is the way the tax credit was structured. As one of the commenters to this story on the CTV website points out, this type of policy can tend to favor those with the money to provide their children with lessons. Just as there are those who don’t make enough to ever qualify for a tax rebate, there are going to be people in the lower end of the income bracket who will never be able to provide their children with an art experience. On the other end of the spectrum are those who will provide for their children in the absence of any sort of tax credit.

A well designed program would target those who can do so, but aren’t, or are doing so but would certainly be able to afford it better with a credit. A good sized credit and a low enough threshold to earn it, (need to spend at least $100, but you get $30 credit, for the sake of an example), that makes it easy to decide to arrange for some classes can help eliminate the perception that this is a policy that rewards an elite class. At a certain level of expenditure, the credit would cease to be applicable.

While it would be great to have parents required to expose their children to a diversity of experiences rather than spending $300/ticket to see Spiderman on Broadway and earning a big credit for a single experience, there really is no way to legislate people’s choices.

Art and Fabric Softener, Perfect Together

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Earlier this month, Huffington Post featured an article about a group that is definitely out in the streets serving the community. The Laundromat Project arranges for artists to do residencies at different laundromat’s around NYC. They allow people to make art while they are waiting for their clothes to get done. When I first saw the video below, I mentally smacked myself in the head for never recognizing laundromats’ obvious position as a social gathering place to reach out to people.

You just have to make sure no one has paint on their hands when they go in to take their clothes out! Watch the video because their ambitions for their constituencies are to get them involved with projects much bigger than using finger paints and sparkles. I have a cousin who owns a laundromat in the greater NY area. I sent her information on the group to see if she might want to host them.

The Laundromat Project from The Quotidian on Vimeo.

While we are on the subject of finger painting…

There was an amusing piece in Psychology Today addressing the perennial claim that your kid could replicate the work of abstract artists. A study was conducted in which:

“30 paintings by abstract expressionists. Each painting was paired with a painting by a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant. The images were matched on superficial attributes such as color, line quality, and brushstroke, and subjects were asked which piece they personally liked more, and which they thought was a better work of art.”

They did some tricky things like obscuring or mislabeling the signatures on the pieces to test if judgments changed. The labels did influence the psychology students but not the art students. Though, “In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality most of the time. (See the attached chart.) And preferences were pretty immune to labels.”

In the images they provide with the article. I could tell the difference between the profession piece and the one done by a child. However, I preferred the one done by the child. I was not alone.

“Even the art students preferred the child’s or animal’s painting over the professional’s-and judged it to be objectively better-30 to 40 percent of the time. And that’s even when they were labeled correctly.”

So there you go, for what it is worth.

Broader Definition Doesn’t Mean Lowered Expectations

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As I was thinking about writing yesterday’s entry on my drive home, there was a part of me that was experiencing some internal conflict. I do wholeheartedly believe in what I wrote at the end of my entry about the arts being a two way street-people in general would benefit from recognizing that many of their activities involve the arts and those in the arts need to acknowledge their arts training allows them to express themselves in non-arts activities and vocations.

This all derives from the idea put forth by the recent NEA report suggesting that more activities need to be recognized as involvement in the arts. What this means for most arts people is that they need to try to avoid the reflex to deem anything that does not approach some Platonic ideal of capital “A” art as not being art. Sorry everyone, time to get a little humble and admit that awful performance or painting you just saw is actual an artistic effort. Real art is a messy process as well you know, though granted some people never make any progress from their failures.

So that brings me to the question that was causing me some mental grumblings – Should we as arts people expect recognition of elite performance?

Now notice, I got what I feel is the source of elitism in the arts, dismissal of perceived substandard work as not art, out of the way before I asked this. What I am asking is if there should be an expectation of discernment between different quality performances. I ask this because there seems to be an anti-intellectualism trend emerging in the U.S. and perhaps other parts of the world and I don’t particularly think this is an area in which the arts should concede ground.

Yes, classical music, ballet and Shakespeare are hard to understand from the outset. But you know, so are the rules of football, baseball, cricket, poker and a thousand other activities. Before I attended my first football game, my father took me down in the basement and drew a lot of Xs and Os on our blackboard to try to explain the game to me. I really wasn’t that clear about the rules when I attended, though I did enjoy the tailgating and hanging out with the other fathers and sons who attended with us. In time, I got a better sense of when to cheer.

It wasn’t much different the first couple Shakespearean plays I viewed. I only caught half of what was going on, but what I did struck me as pretty damn clever and I stuck with it. The first time I took up Drew McManus’ challenge for Take A Friend To The Orchestra month and went myself, I didn’t quite understand or like everything, but there were some sublime moments.

My point is, while it takes a lot of hard work acquiring enough experience and education to attend an arts event, the effort isn’t any more involved in learning the rules for sports. Honestly, I think most aspects of arts attendance are a lot more straightforward than sports rules. Much of the impenetrable obscurity surrounding an attendance experience is due to regular attendees reinforcing the perception to bolster self worth and intimidate others. Read the script, libretto or watch a snippet of the dance on YouTube and you are half way to understanding the actual performance despite the vibes you might be getting from the rest of the audience. You can feel just as out of place at a sporting event. My first exposure to sumo wrestling was when I went to a match by myself a few years ago and people there were shouting things in a language I don’t speak. It took me a little while to figure out the rules, but I loved every minute of it.

But back to the question of recognizing elite performances. As much as people’s activities might qualify as arts participation. There is indeed a difference in quality, between a talented amateur and a person who has dedicated their life to mastering their craft. This is standard that should not loosened as the arts make an effort to do a better job of acknowledging all the ways in which people participate in the arts. My concern is that there will be a move to blur lines and equate artists in a way that diminishes recognition of true ability and talent.

There are athletes that operate at an elite level that few can approach and you don’t hear many people claiming that their high school or college teams are as good as professional boxers or basketball/baseball/football players. You will hear people claim a performance is as good as anything on Broadway. This may cause you to cringe that Broadway should be the gold standard when so many other exemplars exist, but the real problem is that the comment may be charitable at best. There is a perception that hard work over a short term and heart is enough to earn A’s in school or an acting/dancing/singing position. Shows like American Idol may perpetuate this idea, but it is definitely a misapprehension shared by people pursuing arts training and degrees. Regardless of the profession, there are only a few who can operate at an elite level and fewer still who have invested the effort to do so.

I am no more interested in starting a conversation about whether a classical musician is a superior artist to a jazz musician/a rock musician/country musician than I am about debating whether the marathoners and decathletes on the U.S. Olympic teams are better athletes than the sprinters and high jumpers. I do think it is clearer to people that this particular group of track athletes operate at the highest levels than it is that Itzak Perlman does as well. Even if these athletes lose their events, people whose only exposure to track and field is watching it once every four years can explain why they are superior performers. When he is playing a solo at Carnegie Hall, context just as prestigious as being the US representative at the Olympics, can people with a casual relationship to classical music explain what about Perlman’s performance makes him superior?

That is where some of the onus to educate falls. As we know, it takes more than just a single exposure to make someone appreciate the arts. Educating them about quality requires even greater work. Yes, we want people to know the arts are for everyone and everyone is participating in the arts to a greater degree than they imagine. But we have to maintain heroes for them to idolize and they have to clearly know why the person is worthy of being admired. This doesn’t detract from the recognition the star of the local community theatre production receives any more than Major League baseball stars diminish the glory accorded the powerhouses on the local softball team. No one confuses one for the other though.