While I was in the Learning to Lead session at the APAP conference, Steven Tepper was discussing his new book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation in America’s Cultural Life just next door. It was tough deciding which session to attend and I eventually stayed in Learning to Lead and bought the audio recording Tepper’s session.

There were a number of interesting insights from his book that Tepper shared. One of the things people are concerned about is that arts audiences are disappearing but according to Tepper, participation is dropping all over. There are declines in church attendance, voting, involvement in formal political processes and even major league baseball games.

But says Tepper, It’s not that like sports less, its that we like a little sports more….It may not be case that we like arts less we may actually like arts more.” He doesn’t expound, but I think he is referring to The Long Tail economic model which essentially deals with selling a lot of niche items at higher volumes. His implication, as I understood it, was that people will value a lot of small experiences over the larger, more formal ones in the future.

Something he pointed out was that there is a shift in where people are getting their arts experiences. They aren’t just getting it on the internet and TiVo, but also in places like churches which are bringing arts experiences to their constituents both within services and independently of them. He suggested that churches could be potential partners for arts organizations.

Tepper cited survey results that said high quality art wasn’t a prime motivator for attendance. Rather celebrating heritage, socializing and supporting their community bigger motivation than quality. Social connections have long been a strong factor in arts attendance and apparently remains so. This is one of the reasons why churches could be strong partners. Not only do people who attend church participate more often in other areas of life, but churches provide a social connection.

This may be more true now than ever before given that many churches now offer counseling and assistance with things like job placement, parenting and child care in addition to sponsoring social gatherings for demographic groups. The church that rents my theatre has niche social groups for every permutation of age, marital status (and desire to be married), employment/student status and gender.

Though it does sound like one of those jokes about ordering coffee in Starbucks when a pastor introduces someone as a member of the Thirtysomething, professional single women social group. Yet if the Long Tail situation is indeed developing, services focused to these type of divisions may be what people desire. (Despite the fact that you will either go insane or print up different labels for the same product trying to serve every possible group.)

There are signs that there is a growing interest with involvement in artistic creation. UCLA administers an annual survey to students about their aspirations. Over the last decade there has been a small but noticeable increase in the number of students with a “desire to create, write something original or be accomplished in a performing art.” Tepper acknowledges that what they create might not be worth experiencing. He notes that students are experiencing frustration. Colleges and universities are having a hard time responding since the classes addressing the myriad creative areas are only available to majors. Students are coming to school with creative hobbies but don’t have a formal way of advancing their skill/knowledge.

So perhaps the role that arts organizations can fill in the future is responding to this need to hone one’s creative skills that schools are not able to provide. In the best situation, arts organizations will be partnering with schools to provide the types of experiences students are looking for rather than competing or duplicating efforts.

I have talked about the Pro Am — professional amateur — trend in earlier entries. (Not surprisingly in relation to a piece Tepper wrote before.) People are investing a great deal of time in their interests these days and technology is making it easier for them to gain expertise. There was a time when this was not so and the learning curve for amateurs was so much greater.

It may not longer be the role of the arts organization to employ those who have acquired a high level of skill in their field to exhibit it to others, but rather to invite these Pro-Amateurs to become partners/participants/students in the creation of art. I have often wondered what the next phase for arts organizations is going to be. I don’t think the future would be too bad if this was the role arts organizations played. The scary part for existing arts organizations is figuring out what their organization is going to look like and making the transition.

**Apologies to regular readers for falling off my regular posting schedule. Engaging my constituents (look for posts next week) and problems logging in to my blog contributed to my delay**

I haven’t had a chance to read through the report WolfBrown put together for the Major University Presenters on Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of a Live Performance but I did just finish listening to the audio recording of the presentation on the work that Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak did at the Arts Presenters conference.

What was most interesting to me about the study they did was their ambition in collecting information about audience experiences. They randomly surveyed people during the period between the time they arrived and the start of the show about their readiness to receive the performance they were about to see and then asked the same people to take home a survey and return it within 24 hours.

I hope to address the study in more detail in another entry. I wanted to address the comments one of respondents on the session panel had about the study. Artist agent and APAP Board President Lisa Booth had mixed feeling about the report. She was happy that there was a measure of success being developed that didn’t evaluate an artist on the number of bodies he/she attracted to the venue but rather on impacts in other areas.

On the other hand, she worried that some presenters might use the report to justify serving only a small group rather than the larger community. Providing experiences of high intrinsic value for 10 people is anti-ethical to most arts organization’s purpose.

And while she was glad that there was a new metric of success being developed that wasn’t based in dollars or butts in seats, she was also concerned that in the eagerness to justify the value of the arts in some quantifiable way, the arts community was trying to measure what can not be measured.

This last bit was very interesting to me because Lisa Booth seemed to recognize the inevitable if these measures became widely used. If foundations and governments start basing their funding on the intrinsic value a performance has for a community, arts organizations will probably try to measure everything imaginable to show all the levels on which a performance meets funding agendas. Just as the arts aren’t well served by showing economic impact, they probably will be equally ill-advised to create numeric values for changes in things like self-actualization, captivation, social comfort level and questions raised.

As it was at least one person in the room at this convention of presenters, agents and artists had nagging doubts about the value of art in today’s society. One of the questions submitted to the moderators on an index card that was read but left unanswered was “What is the value of these impacts in a world with global warming and war?” The fact that the moderator choose to read the question as he announced time was up rather than ignoring it entirely is an acknowledgment that questions about our priorities as a society are ever present.

There is no short simple answer for the question but I offer this- After September 11, 2001 people were saying there would be no more comedy or laughter ever again. When I heard that I knew with 100% certainty that it was wrong and that even with the destruction of the Twin Towers hovering in our consciousness, recovery would come sooner than people expected. I had been through enough tragedy and grave problems in my life that I knew people couldn’t exist in with the absence of artistic expression in some form. My current concern isn’t that the arts will disappear. It is that I have no idea what media/channel/form it will best express itself in the future.