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There Is No Business Case For Social & Cultural Advancement

February 18, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

H/T to Artsjournal.com for linking to a FastCompany article about the problem with making a business case for diversity. I saw a lot of parallels between the rationale laid out by author, Sarah Kaplan, and the conversations I have been having about trying to justify the value of the arts in terms of economic/educational/social outcomes.

Kaplan writes (my emphasis):

Corporate leaders would be better served if they stopped trying to justify diversity with profit margins and stock charts—a mentality that can ultimately hurt the very groups these policies are meant to help (more on that in a moment)—and instead embrace diversity because it is the right thing to do.

[…]

Why doesn’t the business case work? Recent research suggests that what’s required for transformational action is a moral and legal case. The business case, because it is based in an economic logic, undermines moral arguments and weakens resolve to make anything other than incremental change. Indeed, experiments show that making the “business case for diversity” can increase bias against diverse groups while the legal case can inhibit bias and increase equitable behavior.

The business case for diversity also provokes people to focus more on economic than equality-based metrics of success. As a consequence, when there are downturns in organizational performance, believers in the business case are more likely to see diversity efforts as ineffective and to support dropping the organization’s investment in diversity programs.

Rather than go straight to that 3rd paragraph above, I did want to include her thoughts on justifying and implementing diversity because they are just as germane to the daily operations of arts and culture non-profits as anyone else.

There isn’t necessarily a moral and legal case to be made for the value of arts, culture and creative expression. However, there are similar consequences in using economic based metrics of success for arts and culture as there is for diversity goals. If there is a perceived lack of return in terms of economic activity, test scores, etc., interest flags and attention turns to the next big thing promising results in those areas.

In the long term, becoming adept in advocating the support of forms of creative expression because it is the right thing to do is going to be the better strategy.

One thing I was interested to read was Kaplan’s following thoughts that the business case for diversity is something you arrive at having successfully implemented a plan to achieve it. Her point seems to be, we really don’t know the actual benefits until it comes to pass. All the current rationale behind the business case for diversity are made on assumptions based on observations of the past and are focused on a narrow set of outcomes. Not only that, but it envisions that full diversity will unfold in a vacuum independent of everything else, neither affected by or affecting anything else.

It is worth noting that one of the reasons we don’t yet have compelling evidence about the economic impact of diversity is that we haven’t truly moved to inclusion and belonging. Diversity by itself will not produce the benefits that companies and policymakers wish to achieve. My sense is that by taking principled action, we will find myriad ways that more diverse workforces benefit companies and society. Said differently, we will eventually arrive at the business case; we just can’t start there.

In the same way, every claim made about how arts and culture can benefit the economy, education, social interactions, etc is based on piecemeal efforts supported by intermittent, unpredictable funding. We have no idea what the real impact a unified, consistent, long term investment in cultivating creative expression will have on economic, education, socio-political fronts. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it were revealed that advancements in diversity were significantly associated with creative expression, and vice versa.

Advocacy, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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You Can Tap Into The Arts, But No One Will Think It Does Any Good

February 17, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

In the wake of Kobe Bryant’s death, Dance Magazine related a short anecdote about Bryant taking tap dance lessons to help prevent additional injury to his ankles.

That summer, he researched ways to make his ankles stronger, and landed on tap dancing. “I worked on it all of that summer and benefited for the rest of my career,” he wrote.

Though Bryant continued to suffer from ankle injuries, tap helped him learn to keep his ankles loose and active, which helped prevent injuries elsewhere.

[…]

…Though he stopped dancing after that summer, he says that “for a year there I could tell my feet to do this and they would actually do that.”

Over the last couple weeks I have been thinking about why my initial reaction to this story was that it provides a good example of the value of the arts when I often warn about citing the prescriptive benefits of the arts. Let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more prescriptive than the idea that dance helped Bryant mitigate additional injury.

Ultimately, I realized that as a superb athlete, this was an example of how dance was supplementing his existing capabilities. Often when we hear about arts benefiting test scores, economy, social interactions, etc., there is an implication that the arts are improving things to an acceptable level. That there is some flaw to fix– a kid’s test scores need to be better; the foot traffic in stores & restaurants is tepid; people are having overly aggressive interactions.

With Kobe Bryant though, he is at the top of his field as an athlete and the tap lessons are something he used to provide a benefit his already demanding training regimen didn’t afford. While suffering a problematic injury is just as negative as poor test scores, low economic activity or negative social interactions, I can’t imagine anyone considered Kobe deficient and needed the arts to fix him. Tap was an available option he found suitable to his needs.

The difference between a supplemental activity and a prescriptive one is a bit subtle. In truth, at its base, the supplement is just as prescriptive. The context in which it is presented makes a significant difference. In Kobe’s case, there are no promises of outcome measures that have to be backed by qualitative data. The celebrity association aside, the value of tap dancing and the arts in general aren’t evaluated in terms of his scoring record.

Sure, saying ‘it worked for me” lacks the empirical evidence that people may want to justify funding. (It shouldn’t be used anyway.) Regardless of whether you have empirical data or not, if Shaq and Kobe both took tap together, the benefits each realize will vary based on dozens of variables in their physical, mental and emotional attributes.

For example, Kobe was open to exploring the way people in other disciplines achieve success and employed an approach Shaq probably wouldn’t have. He credits a conversation with composer John Williams for shifting his perception on leadership:

This conversation was held after the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals. Bryant said the talk helped him become a better leader and that he took some of Williams’ ideas into training camp for the next season. “I felt like there were a lot of similarities between what [Williams] does and what I have to do on the basketball court,” Bryant said. “And some of the things he said to me were fascinating.”

On the other hand, it is assumed that great achievement in one area occurs in a vacuum with no contributions from any other pursuits. You can tell people Einstein as well as myriad other highly accomplished scientists played musical instruments and no one credits any benefit to the music–even if Einstein credits his accomplishments to playing violin. So even though Kobe said he attributes tap dance for improving his agility and reducing injuries, few people will likely perceive tap as having anything to contribute to basketball.

Because really, no one would consider basketball and tap have any relationship with each other.

Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, creativity, State of the Arts

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Pop Music, Now With Less Pep

February 12, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Via Arts and Letters Daily is a link to an Aeon piece that claims pop songs have gotten increasingly sadder and negative over the last 50 years. They lay out their method of analyzing lyrics and data which seems to reinforce this idea. Sadly, all the death metal, goth, emo, etc music my friends and I listened to in my youth didn’t seem to factor in as much as I hoped. It is hard to believe anyone today is titling and singing songs more blatantly depressing than Girlfriend in A Coma.

But I wanted to know why this trend might be manifesting. They posited three factors which might influence this: success bias, prestige bias or content bias. These terms are defined along these lines:

We checked for success bias by testing whether songs had more negative lyrics if the top-10 songs of the previous few years had negative lyrics…

…prestige bias was tested for by checking if the songs of prestigious artists of the previous few years also had more negative lyrics.

…Content bias was checked for by looking at whether songs with more negative lyrics also happened to do better in the charts.

Acknowledging that there is still more work to be done on studying this, they came to the following conclusions at this point in their research:

Although we found small evidence for success and prestige bias operating in the datasets, content bias was the most reliable effect of the three in explaining the rise of negative lyrics. This is consistent with other findings in cultural evolution, in which negative information appears to be remembered and transmitted more than neutral or positive information. However, we also found that including unbiased transmission in our analytical models greatly reduced the appearance of success and prestige effects, and seemed to hold the most weight in explaining the patterns. ‘Unbiased transmission’ here can be thought of in a similar way to genetic drift, in which traits appear to drift to fixation through random fluctuations, and in the apparent absence of any selection pressure

What really interested me was the idea that the decentralization of the recording industry removed a bias for distributing happier language in songs:

Given this preference, what we need to explain is why pop-song lyrics before the 1980s were more positive than today. It could be that a more centralised record industry had more control on the songs that were produced and sold. A similar effect could have been brought about by the diffusion of more personalised distribution channels (from blank cassette tapes to Spotify’s ‘Made For You’ algorithmic tailoring). And other, broader, societal changes could have contributed to make it more acceptable, or even rewarded, to explicitly express negative feelings.

This concept got me thinking about claims that no one wants to see theater dealing with serious themes any more and only want to see big flashy musicals that provide escapist entertainment rather than challenge people to think about their lives.

It could be that the fact people experience music privately through earphones allows them to gravitate toward a personal preference for negative themes that they don’t feel as comfortable engaging with through their public attendance of theatrical performances.

Or it could be that since theatrical production is so centrally controlled, the content that is distributed and marketed has convinced people about the type of shows they want to see. This may be particularly true if people don’t feel as confident in their ability to choose theatrical performances they want to see as they do music they want to listen to. It is easier to defer to the expertise of others.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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The Socio-Economic-Ethnically Diverse Audience You Seek Is At The Library

February 11, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

There was an article on the Arts Professional site urging care in the Arts Council of England’s initiative to increase investment in libraries over the next decade. The author of the piece, Hassan Vawda, expresses concerns that attempts to revitalize libraries using arts may unintentionally damage all the beneficial elements of the library environment.

Statistics from DCMS’s Taking Part survey shows libraries are the only space used proportionally more by Black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) audiences than those who identify as White. In contrast, arts organisations and museums are used disproportionately by White audiences – despite more than a decade of language, policy and schemes aiming to support diversity.

[…]

People often have far more input into the way libraries are used as public spaces than they do with arts and cultural spaces – for all their outreach. At its best, the library is an intergenerational resource that adapts and moulds around the communities it finds itself in.

[…]

Outside the professional arts sector, libraries have engendered a trust that has eluded many traditional arts venues – and this must not be lost. The arts can definitely support the development of libraries, and amplify the case for reinvestment. But libraries must not succumb to the fate of the many art and culture-led spaces that have inadvertently become dominated by the middle classes.

As far as I know, there isn’t a similar effort in the U.S. to make libraries into trendy arts hubs. In fact, as Drew McManus pointed out today, the The Institute of Museum and Library Services is up for dissolution right along with the NEA, NEH and PBS.

However, pretty much all the observations Vawda makes about libraries in England are true for libraries in the U.S. Even if Black, Asian and ethnic minorities don’t use libraries in greater proportion than those who identify as White in the US, I feel pretty secure in saying libraries are visited by a much more ethnically and socio-economically diverse group than most arts entities.

Reading this article it struck me that there is potential to “get it right,” as it were. As Vawda mentions, arts organizations have a long history of outreach efforts that have had middling results.

The opportunity exists then in putting a lot of effort into studying very closely the environment libraries provide, both in general and as specifically appropriate to their neighborhoods/communities and implementing radical changes to transform existing arts organizations.

Or, perhaps more pragmatically, arts organizations can bring their resources to libraries and be guided by them about how those resources are deployed.

I say this is the more pragmatic option because in all likelihood, in choosing it, an arts organization is acknowledging the great difficulty established arts organization would have implementing the sort of internal radical change required to cultivate the level of trust engendered by libraries. Even this would be a difficult decision for many since there is no guarantee that a close partnership with the library will ever increase the level of direct participation with the arts organization.

If the organization has the internal will to implement former option of providing an experience with the same sense of openness and user agency provided by a library, partnering with the library would already be part of the plan or the organization would already be hitting satisfying benchmarks and see no pressing need to partner.

Though with as imaginative as people are and as different the dynamics of every community, it is distinctly within the realm of possibility that some few arts organization wouldn’t have to radically change their business model and philosophy.

Pretty much either option requires a recognition that if the people you are dedicated to serving won’t come to you, you need to move toward them and meet them where they are.

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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