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Forgetting Artists Bring Value To The Art

September 7, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Last week, Sunil Iyengar is the NEA director of the Office of Research & Analysis, penned a piece aligned with the occasion of Labor Day, commenting that the value of art often subtracts the artist from the equation.

Readers know that I have regularly written about arts having value beyond educational and economic outcomes for a few years now, but Iyengar comes at this general idea from a slightly different angle in focusing on the value the artists bring. While it is obvious that art doesn’t spontaneously burst into existence from nothing, it is also easy to occasionally forget the work doesn’t exists independently of the creative.

Iyengar writes (my emphasis):

For instance, we speak of the social and emotional learning (SEL) that derives from arts education. But where do teaching artists fit into the equation? How does their own vocational practice enable them to transmit SEL to others? Or we refer to the arts’ value for public health strategies. How do artists find themselves partnering effectively with organizations, in clinical and non-clinical settings, to build trust in community health providers?

Most conspicuously, we talk about the economic impacts of the arts—but how do we measure the opportunity costs for various sectors and communities that lack adequate support systems for artists?

It all sounds painfully schematic—using terms like “system,” “units,“ or “impacts” when discussing the arts. Know what’s worse? Neglecting to consider artists as central to any theoretical framework that might be used to launch a better and sustainable future for “the arts” nationwide.

He goes on to write about the high unemployment rates of artists during the pandemic and the low pay artists receive in the best of times, less as the economic picture began to recover during the Spring and Summer. He says while arts administrators have expressed hopes of a rebirth and re-visioning of the arts will result from the Covid enforced pause, any solution that does not improve conditions for artists and protect their interests and prerogatives will ultimately fail to achieve ambitions for change and revitalization.

Iyengar cites the results of a study conducted with participants of the Periscope program of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville in which:

…“several others initiated loose attacks against funding structures that require artists to engage with community development, citing concerns about stretching their capacity, inequality of expectations between themselves and other entities also engaged in processes of community development, and burdening their creativity,” the authors add.

Robinson and Novak-Leonard go so far as to state: “The failure of communities, and specifically, funders, to recognize the primary entrepreneurial motivation of artists–a desire to maintain control of their creative process—while ignoring the considerable social good artists undertake in their practices, undermines the effort, training, skill, and labor involved in the production of art.”

…The entrepreneurial artists in our sample demonstrated an ability to see and act upon opportunities in community on their own terms.

One thing to note is that Periscope is an entrepreneurship training program for artists so the study authors aren’t saying that all artists will naturally identify opportunities to engage with the community and pursue them.

I think there is a danger in looking at these results and using it to bolster the “arts should be run like a business” mentality and mandate entrepreneurship training for anyone seeking funding. That is doomed to fail if artists aren’t ready to embrace the effort to expand their capacity in that area. A one size fits all policy is ill-advised for any group and much, much, much less so when it comes to creatives.

Art(ist) Education, Working In The Arts

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Sometimes You’re The Wind, Sometimes You’re The Weathervane

August 31, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin made an interesting post that intersects somewhat with the questions arts organizations are having about putting content on digital platforms. Alas, I don’t know that it provides any of the answers being sought but he makes a crucial point about not confusing distribution capacity with influence and power.

He start with the following statement:

To be powerful, a medium needs two things:
The ability to reach people who take action
The ability for someone in charge to change what those people see and hear and do

Then he provides a number of examples which illustrate that impressive statistics about the extent of reach can be essentially meaningless. This is something to keep in mind when people cite number of impressions for websites, broadcast or print media outlets. But on the other hand, he notes that sometimes the people with control are exerting it haphazardly without any sense of how to focus it effectively:

People in the music business are flummoxed by the number of new acts that are showing up out of nowhere and becoming hits on TikTok. They’re talking about how powerful this company is.

But it’s not. It’s simply reporting on what people are doing, not actively causing it.

The folks with the power are the anonymous engineers, tweaking algorithms without clear awareness of what the impact might be.

The last bit he writes puts me in mind of my ongoing discussion about how the criteria we use to measure the value of something is frequently irrelevant, but people will be convinced of it measure’s importance.

Google and Amazon used to invite authors to come speak, at the author’s expense. The implied promise was that they’re so powerful, access to their people was priceless. But the algorithm writers weren’t in the room. You ended up spending time with people who pretended they had influence, but were more like weatherpeople, not weather makers.

[…]

There are still cultural weather makers, but they might not be the people we think they are.

Certainly that last line applies to those of us who work in the arts and culture industry. Sometimes we are the weather makers and no one gives credit, but sometimes we think we are the weather makers and don’t recognize what is really moving the winds and tides.

Advocacy, Arts in an Age of Technology, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Gentrification Is For More Than Just City Neighborhoods

August 30, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Shelterforce posted a video and article about how the term gentrification manifests in different ways and thus doesn’t always conform to the same definition in every community, leading to the term being applied very broadly. While this may not seem like a topic for a blog focused on arts management concerns, my organization recently received a grant to create a work addressing aspects of gentrification.

Shelterforce identifies four broad conditions people apply the term gentrification to and note that while over time all four may manifest in a community, only one may ever exist in the community.

In summary the conditions are: 1- housing costs rise, displacing residents who can’t afford rents and taxes. 2- Housing costs rise, residents aren’t displaced, but the character of the neighborhood changes over time. 3- Communities of color experience a “cultural displacement” where relevant businesses and places are lost or political displacement where power dynamics shift as wealthier, and perhaps whiter, groups flow into the neighborhood. 4- Communities who have experienced disinvestment are subject to new investment focused on attracting new businesses/residents rather than bolstering development for the benefit of current residents.

Until the last week or so I always associated gentrification with cities. In my mind it was something that occurred when there was focus placed on revitalizing neighborhoods either because artists, (perhaps displaced from somewhere else), had taken up residence in abandoned buildings leading to the area becoming the center of activity and with it a desire for an infrastructure supporting service, safety and quality of life. Or because a revitalization effort in one area created a ripple effect creating a demand for better quality of life infrastructure.

However, my mother has been recently talking to me about the changes that occurred in the local school district of the rural, update New York county in which I grew up. Both my parents started out as school teachers. My mother in particular would talk about how the disrespect and discipline problems she experienced substitute teaching in the 1980s convinced her she couldn’t return to teaching when we kids were old enough to take care of ourselves.

I always chalked it up to permissive parents and a shift toward the perception of the student as a customer of the education system. It is only recently that my mother talked about how people from NYC had moved up to our county because the school district was so highly regarded, but then started to push back against the culture that under-girded the excellence and close-knit cooperation that made the schools so attractive.

All this was invisible to me growing up. And the district was still very much rural at the time. My house was surrounded by fields of diary cows and fodder and the school buses picked up kids at their farms–as well as the housing developments speckling the hills here and there.

It is only in the last week or so that I realized that rural places can experience some of what is described as gentrification. I can also attest that not all aspects of gentrification appear together. When I went back to see the old house about five years ago, there were dozens of new houses awkwardly placed in the middle of fields, bare acres on all sides with only a few recently planted trees around them as foliage. (Other parts of the county have seen so much development, the exit off the NYS Thruway was unrecognizable from my visit even a few years earlier.)

However, despite all these new house in the area the same general stores, same pizza place, and same gas stations that were there as when I grew up. It amazed me that there hadn’t been enough pressure to see new businesses pop up to cater to the community. Unless there is “I got mine” mindset to keep the community from being attractive to other potential arrivals. There was one enterprising farmer started growing hops and opened a microbrewery. Many of the beer names have a Pacific Northwest theme so I wonder where their core clientele is located.

General Musings, Government Relations

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Seats Are Open, But So Are The Doors For More Diverse Stories

August 25, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

On Friday one of my colleagues at work is flying to NYC to see Springsteen on Broadway, the show that re-opened earlier than pretty much all the others. She purchased the tickets months ago when they first went on sale.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear most people share her level of optimism. A CNBC story reported that even the most popular titles are seeing very soft sales.

Although tickets have been on sale for months, neither “Wicked” nor “The Lion King” – the top two highest-grossing musicals in history – sold out their first week of performances. “Hamilton,” which historically sold out months of performances within minutes, also has plenty of opening week availability. Between September 14, 2021, and June 5, 2022, only one performance of “Hamilton″ is sold out.

A Forbes article projects some potential doom and gloom for the production of the show Pass Over, which has been getting a lot of great press. In fact, there is a suggestion in a couple articles that they moved up the date of their opening to last Sunday in order to take advantage of the the good press they have received.

This is somewhat unfortunate for the production of Pass Over because in addition to the high quality and expectations, there are a lot of good portents associated with the show. For one, it is the first show by a Black playwright to appear in the August Wilson Theatre since the venue was named for the esteemed Black playwright in 2005. (A lot of “about time” comments on social media noting that it took 15 years for that to happen).

According to a Reuters piece, Pass Over is among a number of upcoming shows which are being supported by first time Black investors.

However, seven new plays have been announced for this fall, all by Black writers. Some are being financed by first-time Broadway investors, including co-founder of television network BET, Sheila Johnson, who is putting money behind the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Johnson and celebrity chef Carla Hall are also investing in a new musical called “Grace” about Black culinary history.

Actor Blair Underwood and former basketball player Renee Montgomery are investing in the stage play “Pass Over”, a modern twist on “Waiting for Godot.”

“There is various new money that is coming into Broadway, and that money is extraordinarily helpful and it is also diverse money, which is also very interesting and new,” said Brian Moreland, producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” opening in October.

Whether we like it or not, money has a big influence in terms of what stories get told so this can be a positive indication for greater representation in whose stories get told and who is involved in telling those stories.

Audience Relations, Finance, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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