Working In The Arts

Kickstarter CEO Say More Needs To Be Done To Support Participation In Arts

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The National Endowment for the Arts asked a number of different people to respond to the 2022 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

One of those asked to respond was Everette Taylor, CEO of Kickstarter, a site that has essentially become the alternative to foundations, governments, and institutional funders as a funding source for creative projects.

He says a partnership with Skoll Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Creative Capital to provide $700,000 in funding to 600 BIPOC creators helping them raise $11.7 million.

“In recent research, still unpublished, Kickstarter creators report earning $5.15 in additional revenue from each dollar raised on Kickstarter. That places the total estimated economic impact of the $700,000 fund at close to $70,000,000, a 100x return on that cultural investment.”

That data comes from one of his recommendations about making funding to creatives more accessible, especially for smaller scale projects. Part of that includes making it easier for people to apply with fewer strings and follow up reporting burden attached.

His second recommendation is about strengthening community among art makers by providing some infrastructure for creating networks and sharing work, and encouraging cross-pollination and collaboration.

His third recommendation referenced changing the definition of art making, including who gets to participate in making art. He lists all the projects that have been funded by Kickstarter highlighting the expansive storytelling techniques facilitated by books, tabletop games, roleplaying games receiving support. He points to these games as something of an underdeveloped framework for allowing more people to participate in a creative process.

He warns that AI is in a position to marginalize and supplant many of the burgeoning creatives who have only just begun to realize success through opportunities for funding that platforms like Kickstarter provides. There is something of an implication that as much as Kickstarter has done to help these artists, their capacity is still comparatively too narrow to provide the support and resources the creative community needs to succeed.

President Carter & The Arts

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In honor of former President Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, I thought I would share a piece that appeared in ArtsATL about Carter’s interaction and appreciation for the arts.

The article initially caught my attention due to its focus on Carter’s interactions with musicians who lived in Macon, GA where I had lived for a time:

In that interview, Carter mentioned that when he became governor, he got to know some of the people at Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia — among them Otis Redding.

“It was they who began to meld the White and Black music industries, and that was quite a sociological change for the region. So as I began to travel around Georgia I made contact a few days every month or so with Capitol Records, just to stay in touch with people in the state, and got to know all the Allman Brothers, Dickey Betts and others. Later on, I met Charlie Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band.” As time went on, Carter realized the importance of the arts and music to bringing people together, says Paige Alexander, CEO of the Carter Center.

Not everything he did as governor of Georgia was always pro-arts. During his tenure the State Arts Commission was eliminated and arts funding severely cut. Though by the end of his term in 1975, the funding increased from $128,000 to $183,000 ($1,069,256 today).

In 1973, apparently in the wake of the success of the movie Deliverance, he created the State Motion Picture & Television Advisory Commission in an effort to tout Georgia as a filming location. Not quite the movie I would be promoting as a good representation of the people and locations available in the state. But the state has become a very active filming location, especially in recent years.

Carter himself became interested in woodworking and painting when he was in the Navy and took it up more actively after his term as president. And, of course, he was active in wood working of another sort via Habitat for Humanity.

Adults Find Joy Returning To Ballet Without A Lot Of The Baggage

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Over the last decade or so, I have been pleased to periodically read articles about people taking up dance classes as adults. As someone who advocates for people to recognize they have the capacity to be creative, it is always encouraging to read that people are connecting to that aspect of themselves.

Though I feel like it is rare to see articles about people taking up their instruments, singing, acting, or visual arts practice again. We know it is happening, but maybe it isn’t deemed as news worthy?

In any case, the LA Times recently ran a piece about the trend of people returning to or picking up ballet in a pretty significant way.

Interest in adult ballet has increased by 75% over the last three to five years, according to Patti Ashby, U.S. National Director of Royal Academy of Dance, the primary ballet organization in the country that trains teachers and tracks national engagement with ballet. And the number of adult ballet summer intensive programs have nearly doubled since the pandemic, according to the weekly online ballet-centric magazine Pointe.

And as you might expect, there is an “adult ballet” TikTok trend which probably both reflects and cultivates this.

The trend is also alive and well on TikTok, where the popular hashtag “adult ballet” retrieves countless videos of women documenting their progress in the dance form. Professional ballerinas such as Mary Helen Bowers, with half a million followers on Instagram (@balletbeautiful), stream ballet-inspired workouts that focus on feeling beautiful while building strength.

An encouraging positive aspect accompanying this return to dance is that many participants aren’t experiencing the focus on ideal body standards associated with the dance form. Some of those interviewed expressed they had some anxiety in that regard prior to starting classes. Finding that the old stereotypes didn’t exist in these classes, they were free to enjoy the experience and focus on their practice.

Arts & Culture Orgs Still Important, The Basic Requisite Skills Have Changed

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Seth Godin recently wrote that while many professions are just as important as they were 30-50 years ago, the basic skills required for those professions have changed.  Pharmacists no longer have to mix their own medicines, opticians no longer have to grind lens, lawyers have templates from which to generate documents, graphic designers aren’t required to be skilled in drawing by hand.

He concludes with:

In your work, are you fighting the change or leading it?

It’s hard to see us going back.

I attended a webinar Ruth Hartt was delivering today where she made a similar point about audience expectations, noting that while everyone acknowledges audiences for arts and cultural activities are shrinking, programming and marketing still tends to center the tastes of the older, diminishing audience and donor base.

To some extent, while it is important to have programming that reflects a broader segment of the community you wish to serve, Aubrey Bergauer has often spoken about audience feedback that focused more on the language, images, and experiences being focused on the arts organization and their needs vs. externally focused externally on audience expectations and needs. She has mentioned very few comments are about the programming, compared to comments about promotional language “reading like inside baseball.”

These observations are much in-line with Ruth Hartt’s discussion of Clayton Christensen’s research indicating consumers respond best to language and images that tells them how the product fulfills a need they have or aligns with what is important to them.