Arts and Culture Bad, Creativity Good

Last week I attended the Arts Midwest conference in Kansas City, MO. From what I saw of the city, it can still lay claim to the appellation, “Paris of the Plains.” The Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center left most attendees amazed and a little green with envy.

I ended up staying at the gorgeous Hotel Phillips which I was excited to learn has its own artist in residence.

Building Public Will For Arts and Culture

The conference session that unexpectedly grabbed my attention was Arts Midwest President David Fraher’s session on Building Public Will for Arts and Culture where he presented the results of the research findings on the subject.

If nothing else, the session reconfirmed the value of attending live performance over recorded because Fraher provided a good deal of insight and nuance that doesn’t come through when reading the report.

Essentially, building public will for arts and culture involves something of a reversal of the current focus in favor of grassroots efforts. As an example of what is envisioned being needed, Fraher and the report cite the way smoking bans emerged.

The Surgeon General never changed the advertising message that smoking and second hand smoke was bad for you, it was a grassroots desire not to have one’s health impacted by second hand smoke that brought about the change in laws. From the research results report:

For years, those seeking to reduce the incidence of smoking found themselves stymied. Facts and data about the harmful effects of smoking had motivated some to quit, but had failed to create fundamental change in social norms, systems, and policies. The facts were compelling, but they were overpowered by opponents who framed the issue in the context of individual freedom (i.e., “I have the right to smoke if I want to; I’m not hurting anybody.”).

Even the growing body of evidence around second-hand smoke had difficulty finding fertile ground until advocates realized they could reframe the same core argument to their own advantage (i.e., “I have the right to be protected from exposure to smoke.”). Co-opting the individual freedom value—backed by facts and data—allowed the sustainable changes in policies and systems that we experience today.

Fraher noted that currently, the arts and culture community generally put their effort into effecting one time change vis-a-vis staving off government policy decisions rather than long term, enduring change.

When you want to effect immediate change, you put 80% effort into advertising and 20% into grassroots. To effect long lasting change, it is reversed. 80% effort goes toward grassroots effort and 20% effort into advertising. Engaging in the latter course they are advocating will therefore require a shift of mindset and priorities in the arts and culture community.

One of the central precepts in this effort is a focus on community values. This means asking what do the arts have that align with community values rather than focusing on what the arts value and looking at what the community has that aligns with them.

Arts and Culture Are Poison

Among the findings that caused the biggest reaction in the conference session was that the term “arts and culture” is poison and turns people off, keeping them from entering the conversation. The perception is Art is something someone else does. Something to be watched passively that is inaccessible and intimidating. The search found that “creative expression” has a more positive association that opens the door to a conversation that eventually ends up at a discussion of art.

While they don’t suggest scrubbing every mention of art and culture from your conversations and literature, they do say it may be some years before the terminology trends back to a positive association.

People feel that creativity is part of who they are. They may not call themselves creative, but once they start to talk about what they do, they will admit they engage in creative expression. Even if people don’t feel they are creative, they apparently have an easier time envisioning themselves capable of creative expression than envisioning themselves creating art. (Again, the idea that art is something other people do.)

Another term that turned people off was “diversity.” It is better to promote an event as providing an authentic experience rather than providing/promoting cultural diversity.

Personal Health, Not the Economy

When talking about the benefits of an experience, mentioning that the arts improve the economy, make kids smarter and brings safety to communities are arguments that work with policy makers in government and foundations, but don’t really have resonance with individuals.

Generally people believe creativity makes them less stressed, happier, healthier and more connected with family and friends. (One thing Fraher emphasized was that family was family of choice rather than biological immediate family.) It probably comes as no surprise that despite the appearance of hyperconnectivity, research has found that there is currently a crisis of loneliness, perhaps the greatest in history. So promoting arts and culture in the context of health, relaxation and connectivity is more effective messaging.

The study cites the NEA’s finding that not having someone to attend with is a significant barrier to attendance. Fraher commented that they weren’t suggesting arts organizations start a dating service, but since I and others are experimenting with something along those lines, I would suggest not dismissing the idea too soon.

Survey and focus group respondents also had a strong, positive reaction to the idea that creativity helped one connect with oneself, but would back way from their initial enthusiasm out of apparent embarrassment that it made them sound self-centered. (Most frequently among parents with young children.) Appropriate subtlety and restraint may make this another effective approach to take.

Not Everyone Who Values The Experience Is Attending

As the effort to build public will for arts and culture moves forward, the key audiences it will focus on are women, young people and people of color. The study found strong interest among all these groups. Fraher joked that he felt bad for women because according to the study, men didn’t like to do anything. Men would respond that they valued spending time with their family, but when asked what they did with their family, they indicated Nothing in every category.

Fraher commented that there was a disconnect between the groups that say attendance is important and the groups that are currently actually attending. For example, there were a large number of responses in the under 40 category that said attendance at art performances, festivals, etc, were important to them but obviously the demographics found in arts venues track older. The lack of connection is due to familiar barriers of time, money, no one to attend with, etc.

One Message, But Not One Ad, To Rule Them All

The plan for the National Engagement phase for building public will is to develop a more unified message and create tool kits for groups to use. The expectation is that it will take at least 8-10 years before any type of measurable results begin to emerge.

Fraher mentioned a desire to be agile and share the messaging that works in one community with other communities. In what I felt was an indication that they understood what the research was telling them, he re-emphasized the focus on the grassroots nature of the effort saying that there wouldn’t be single national ad buys disseminating whatever the effective messaging might be.

While there was a lot in David Fraher’s presentation that doesn’t appear in the research results report, there are some interesting observations in the report that didn’t come out in the hour he had to talk about it. I am trying to decide whether I am going to do a second post on those parts of the report or not.

But don’t wait for me to decide, give it a look.

(When I originally posted, I identified KC as Paris of the Prairie rather than Paris of the Plains. Chicago and Saskatoon have both been called Paris of the Prairie.)

Get Back In There And Be Creative

If you have been reading my blog for any span of time, you will know that I have a particular interest in stories that show, to paraphrase Edison, Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Recently, Pacific Standard had an article where researchers found that persistence is an important factor in achieving a creative break through.

“Researchers report that people consistently underestimate how many creative ideas they can come up with if they continue to work on a problem, rather than giving up in the wake of mediocre initial results.”

The article references two similar experiments where people were asked to brain storm ideas, had a break and were asked to brain storm more ideas. During the break, the participants were asked how many ideas they would come up with in the second brainstorming session. In both cases, the participants underestimated how many ideas they would come up with.

The most interesting thing was that in one case, the participants were all professional sketch comedy performers at a sketch comedy festival.

Remember, this is the sort of thing these people do for a living. And yet they, too, significantly underestimated the number of ideas they would come up with on their second attempt. “This speaks to the robustness of persistence undervaluation,” the researchers write, “and demonstrates that it is not limited to novices in novel domains.”

In a study that didn’t involve the sketch performers, outside evaluators rated the ideas that came from the post-break session as “significantly more original” than those that came from the first session.

Apparently the reason why people underestimate how creative they will be is due to a sense of doubt generated by their initial attempt. Perhaps one of the most important elements in obtaining creative success is a supportive, but firm friend who tells you to get your butt back in there and try again.

Creative thought is a trial-and-error process that generally produces a series of failed associations before a creative solution emerges,” the researchers note. It’s often difficult to know when you’re nearing a breakthrough; that “Aha!” moment may occur immediately following a period of deep frustration.

[…]

…As Thomas Edison said: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

Again we come back to the need to allow for failures in the process of pursuing creativity.

Have You Gotten To The Point You Care When People Steal Your Work?

You know how you are supposed to check the batteries in your smoke detectors every time we go on or off daylight savings time? It may be worth having a similar rule for checking your intellectual property licenses for your online presences. Maybe every time you renew your domain name?

There was a recent story about a photographer who had set his Creative Commons License to allow commercial use with attribution.

When a map company used his image on one of their publications giving him full attribution, he sued them for their use of the image and lost.

The tone of the article is that it was sort of silly of him to be protesting the use of his work in a way explicitly allowed.

But it occurred to me that it would be very easy for many artists and organizations to accidentally find themselves in a similar situation as their online presence evolved.

For example, maybe your website or blog just starts out as a source of information for people about what you are doing. You set your license to require people to quote you with attribution or a link. You aren’t trying to monetize anything and you would be happy if people quoted you all over the Internet.

Later, your organization starts a new exciting program where you are producing all sorts of interesting stuff (or if you are an individual, you take up a hobby/refine your skills and get really good).

You start putting images and examples of your work online, forgetting your license is so permissive and the next thing you know you are seeing your work appearing all over social media, people are selling tshirts and tote bags with your images and are using your video and audio tracks in their own videos.

If you have been publicizing/bragging about achievements and have realized ambitions much greater than when you first established your blog, website, Pinterest, Flickr, etc, presence you may want to go back and review how much permission people have to utilize the content of those pages.

A similar issue may arise if you are featuring other people’s work and their more stringent use requirements aren’t clearly discernible.

Upon review, you may be surprised by how lax your settings are. Or maybe you will despair that no one wants to steal your stuff despite how lax your settings are.

The Old Utility of Art Argument

I bought the bowl below at a sale of student art. I have been displaying it on my desk for the last month or so. I recently had someone come in and comment that the difference between art and craft was whether you could use it or not, so this bowl must be art.

By that definition, the Paul Randolph designed Orange County Government Center must be art because it is a really difficult place to work in.

I grew up in Orange County and was in and out of the center fairly often.  When I was really young it was always a crazy looking place that presented a lot of places to potentially hide and play in (If I could only get away from my mother.)  As I got older, it was still a crazy looking place that captured my imagination, even driving by. But even 30+ years ago I noticed there were a heck of a lot of buckets deployed to catch leaks.

The argument about whether a work of art is worth the expense based on its perceived lack of usefulness is an old one. The criticisms become even more pronounced if the work isn’t immediately aesthetically pleasing or comprehensible.

In many respects, architecture faces greater difficulty with these issues. People may be angered by a performance they attended, but the experience is transitory. People may be scandalized by the amount paid for a piece of visual art, but it often disappears from view behind a museum or collector’s walls. Even if it is a piece of public art that reminds people of their dismay every day as they go to work, the expense of its existence is generally in the past. (Unless something falls off on to your head.)

Buildings, people have to live in and the cost of the distinctive design can frequently persist for years. To paraphrase an old saying, it is easier to buy a piece of art than to live in one. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, for example, has been faced with various problems particular to its design.

Unlike Fallingwater which is now a museum, and similar efforts to preserve  buildings as a historical tourism sites,  the government center is seeking to renovate a building with a long history of problems so that it can continue to serve its original function.

They are faced with a number of options and I obviously like the idea of turning the space into artist residences and workspaces. But this situation provides an interesting illustration of the tension between functionality and artistic and historical value.

Often we hear stories about an historical building being slated for demolition in order to build a parking lot, condo or supermarket. Does it count for anything that these renovation plans will allow the building to continue with its function?

There are a number of art works for which the natural degradation is a planned feature. Since even buildings without a distinctive design inevitably develop issues as they age, should this expectation be factored in during the design stage?

If arts organizations shouldn’t assume they deserve to persist forever, should creatives expect their work to be preserved forever? This is a logical extension of the sentiment that really hasn’t been touched upon.

In recent years an idea has been espoused that legacy arts organizations have become too entrenched in their practices to be responsive to an environment where expectations shift so quickly. The suggestion is that it is arrogant for them to think they deserve to be continually funded if they are not effective at delivering their services.

By that thinking, does the Orange County Government Center deserve to be preserved if it doesn’t allow for the effective delivery of services?

Should a sculptor expect their fountain to be preserved forever after the mechanisms to keep it working are no longer made? The full intended effect of the work is diminished by the impossibility of restoration.

Should muralists expect their works to be restored after a leaky roof damages it? What if it were demolished by a tornado?

I am not suggesting that some performing arts organizations don’t need to do a little introspection about their existence. Or that the Sistine Chapel’s time has come. I just want to point out that when you start to employ criteria like effectiveness in relation to the arts, you open the door a little wider for the age old utility argument.

Along those lines, it occurs to me that one of the reasons many of our public buildings are functional but so uninspiring and unremarkable is that governments don’t want anyone becoming invested in preserving anything about them.