What's In A Symbol?

The election is over; pundits are winding down their post mortems; the country is heaving a sigh of relief if not at the outcome, at least at the fact that it’s over; and our lives are returning to normal. Much has already been written about what happened on November 6, from the really interesting analysis by researchers at University of Michigan describing how “red” and “blue” break down across the country, to the extraordinary confrontation between Megyn Kelly and Karl Rove on Fox News shortly after Ohio was called for President Obama.  Historians and political analysts will spend a generation (at least) pulling apart every single moment of the 2012 Presidential campaign to try to pinpoint exactly what happened and why.

   

Let me make it easy for them.  I can tell you EXACTLY when Mitt Romney lost the election.

Let me first state that I am not a professional politician, nor do I possess a degree in political science.  I think of myself as a student of human nature as well as a reasonably observant (and very minor) participant in the political process.  Several weeks before the election, I ran into my friend Gerry, a lobbyist who has a much broader view of how politics works than I ever will. I asked him how he thought the election would go.  At the time, he was pretty sure the President would serve just one term.

And then the debates happened. 

Most agree that Romney won the first debate (by a lot) and that both candidates acquitted themselves well during the last two debates.  Maybe Obama won one or both, or maybe Mitt Romney did.  As far as I was concerned, however, Mitt Romney lost it about halfway through the first debate.  I don’t mean he lost the debate (I actually agree with the prevailing sentiment that Romney won the first debate). 

I mean he lost the election.

In response to a question about what he would do to lower the deficit, Romney took on Big Bird.  He said that among his first items of business would be to “defund” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and fire (my word) the debate moderator, the especially wounded-looking PBS news host, Jim Lehrer, from his “day job.” And yes, that would probably take care of Big Bird as well.

To me that was as telling a moment, as big a turning point, and as colossal a mistake as the Howard Dean scream at the end of the Iowa Caucus in 2004.  The difference, however, was that Dean’s scream was more the result of a unidirectional microphone he held himself during a crowd roar and thus an accidental, or circumstantial mistake that could have happened to anyone.  Romney’s mistake was deliberate and therefore both cruel and unnecessary.

While everyone commented about this gaffe at the end of the debate, and several articles were written, few pundits took it seriously.  Despite the surge of Big Bird’s popularity on social media of all kinds (I won’t pretend to understand exactly what a meme or a trend is in this context; all I know is that Big Bird took off like….well, a VERY big bird on Twitter and Facebook), most traditional reporters and pundits were treating the comment like what it was—a symbol for the presumed "cold, business-like efficiency" of the Romney Presidency.  What they didn’t understand was that it wasn’t just a symbol. 

It was a SYMBOL, dripping with kids, and education, and mom ‘n’ pop and apple pie; of afternoons spent playing on the living room floor in front of the teevee, waiting for Mom to come home to fix you a snack, or dinner—pretty much everything, in short, that makes life for a preschooler in these United States a grand adventure.

Firing Big Bird, dismissing it, in effect, as being an inconsequential piece of Americana that is not deserving of our collective support, quite possibly appealed to the ultra-right, tea-party base of the Republican Party.  But it awakened the sleeping beast inside every man, woman and child under the age of 40 who, I assume, grew up with Big Bird and his (her?) buddies on Sesame Street.  If Romney could so casually fire Big Bird, who or what would be next?  And if this is what he is like as a candidate…how much WORSE will it be if and when he becomes President?

The work of an artist, any artist, is to capture Life’s meaning in symbolic languages.  Whether articulated in music, sculpture, painting, poetry, prose, dance or film, the symbolic meaning of art tends to be far more profound than the sum of its parts.  Big Bird is not just a yellow and orange collection of cloth and feathers.  Big Bird is not just a big, goofy-looking puppet with a kindly voice providing guidance and comfort to legions of kids who need something constructive to do after 3 pm and before Mom and Dad come home from work.  Big Bird is not just one of several dozen large puppets that cost several hundred thousand dollars a year to put on television for a couple of hours a day, every day.

Most people don’t care a lot about candidates’ positions for or against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Institute for Museum and Library Services.  These are the Federal agencies whose combined $1.5 billion budget, if cut, will drastically harm the arts and cultural sector across the country, and will save only a tiny tiny fraction of one percent of the US deficit this year.  CPB, NEA, NEH, and IMLS are, in short, just a bunch of initials to most people.

Big Bird, however, is different.  Big Bird is a symbol of how precious life is, especially the lives of our pre-school aged children who are hungry to learn their ABCs, to count to 20, and to share.  Big Bird symbolizes the potential that we all have within us to aspire, to be more, to be better, to live a fulfilling life, and above all, to learn the basic rules of civic behavior.

Fire Big Bird?!? Take away Big Bird’s funding?!? Not a chance. Not for my kids.  Not for their kids, either. And certainly not if my vote has anything to say about it.

A New Arts and Cultural Alliance: St. Johnsbury VT

Several days ago I had the pleasure of visiting St. Johnsbury to attend, among other events, the centennial celebration of the Masonic Hall.  Fifteen years ago, the Masonic Hall served as the headquarters for the local Passumpsic #27 chapter of the Vermont Freemasons, and was known best for its charitable work and the phenomenal model train set in its basement.

Today, through a remarkable collaborative community effort, the Masonic Hall is now also the headquarters of Catamount Arts.  Therein lies a remarkable story.

For the past ten years or so, a slow reawakening has been occurring in St. Johnsbury.  The venerable cultural institutions that line Main Street, including the St. Johnsbury Academy (my favorite secondary school because the horizontal nav bar on their home page lists the Three As for all the world to see!), the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, and the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, have figured out, along with Catamount Arts, that there is safety in numbers.

During the centennial celebration, Charlie Browne, director of the Fairbanks Museum gave a brief talk on St. Johnsbury’s new Arts & Cultural Alliance on which they have all collaborated (reprinted by permission):

Catamounts Arts, with energy, momentum, and this splendid home, has taken its place as an extraordinary resource for culture and the arts in St. Johnsbury and beyond, alongside a world-class independent high school, St. Johnsbury Academy, a national historic landmark library and gallery, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, and the venerable and beloved Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium.  No other community of this size can claim such rich resources for art and culture.

Culture is our shared experience, values, heritage, vision, and sense of place.  Art is that universal human imperative to creative expression - from needlepoint to garage rock, from digital design to expressive dance, from filmmaking to poetry, from a well-tended garden to a well-crafted novel, from nature photography to culinary delights, and from watercolors to a handsomely turned cherry wood bowl.  Art in all of its forms shapes and illuminates our shared culture by expressing our values, inspiring our thinking and contributing to our heritage – across our generations.

Together, these four institutions have formed the St. Johnsbury Arts & Culture Alliance, with a shared purpose: to nurture that imperative in us all, and to do so in close collaboration.  I thank Jody Fried and his team, Joe Healy and his Academy colleagues, Matt Powers and his Athenaeum team, and Anna Rubin and her Museum colleagues for breathing life into this organization. 

Together, they have defined and celebrate a St. Johnsbury Arts and Culture Campus, one without walls, but marked by beautiful student-designed banners that line Main Street from the Academy to the Museum and along Eastern Avenue and Railroad Street.  

Together, they are creating a new authentic learning experience for Academy freshmen: the Freshman Humanities Capstone that will bring students into working contact with these like-minded institutions and their resources.

Together, Catamount Arts and the Athenaeum are launching a new arts education program, and a community public sculpture project is in the planning stages.  And together, these four institutions are finally coordinating and sharing their respective calendars or community events!  

Collectively, the Arts & Culture Alliance is a unique community asset, one with a tradition of innovation, and one that is driving a thriving creative economy, from which we all will benefit.  Thank you, Catamount Arts and your beautiful facility for being a leading part of this effort.

It would appear that the next hundred years is off to a very good start in St. Johnsbury!  Now, if I could only find out what happened to that model train set…

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On Assessment

“The Arts Council should do something fun, cheap, and available to any man, woman, and child that wants to participate.  I’m recommending we do a project with an artist’s palette; send them all over the state to any community that wants a bunch.  Let everyone decide for him or herself how they want to decorate their palette.  It’ll be fun, and it will do more to raise awareness about our work than anything else we could possibly do.”

“But will it work?  How are we going to know if it does everything you claim it will do?”

“Trust me, it will work.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.  That’s how.”

[The above conversation took place between two Council trustees at our Annual Meeting in the summer of 2005.  The argument was regarding whether to undertake what became “The Palettes Project.”]

*     *     *     *     *

For the sixth time since arriving in Vermont I am working on the Arts Council’s Partnership Application to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).  It is, in the truest sense of the word, a labor of love. 

When else does one have the opportunity to cram what could easily amount to a 150-page discourse on programs and services offered to artists, arts organizations, schools, and communities  into a mere 11 pages?  When else do we in this very limited field (there are only about 60 state, territorial, and regional arts councils in the USA) get to brag to our peers about the incredible work that, in some small but meaningful way, we have helped bring into existence within the borders of our small state?

Writing these applications is joyful.  It gives me a “5-hour energy boost” that lasts for months. It makes me incredibly grateful for the outstanding staff that works with me at the Council.  Their labors and those of our constituents nurture Vermont’s creative workers; engage our children in positive, collaborative pursuits; identify and preserve our most precious cultural landscapes; and in countless other ways improve Vermont’s quality of life.

There is, however, one aspect of applying for a grant (not just from the NEA) that has always perplexed me.  It is the inevitable question about evaluation/measurement/assessment.

While it is important for any non-profit, public-benefit corporation to be able to articulate why its work is worthy of public support (including tax-deductible contributions from private citizens), the degree to which “accountability” has crept into our daily lives is a diversion from the real arguments in favor of supporting the arts.

As a result of the conversation recreated above, the Palettes Project was approved unanimously by the Council’s trustees, all of whom trusted the gut instinct of a very experienced trustee (and their own) over the “cost/benefit-” or “risk/reward-”based arguments that staff was asked to present. And yes, it accomplished everything the trustee expected and much, much more.

How many times are we asked, sometimes in multiple ways, how we will know that our programs and services are successful?  For many of the things we do, the answer is quite easy.  We ask for reports from grantees and people who have participated in our Breaking into Business Workshops, and they simply tell us how great (or not!) the program or service has been.

But for the bulk of the money we spend on creation grants, operating support grants to organizations, project grants and arts education grants, the answer is often far more difficult to articulate.  We get a lot of responses like, “the smiles on the faces of the kids as they left the auditorium, were priceless.”  And, oddly enough, I completely know what the grantee is telling me when I read a statement like that.

The truth is really that there are no metrics  to help us ascertain the degree to which a visit to the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts had an impact on the development of a 5^th-grader from Island Pond.  Nor is there a measurement tool that captures the unique causal relationship between the economic vigor of a community and the degree to which that community embraces its arts sector.  Perhaps some university-backed psychologist with a $500,000 grant to do a longitudinal study in these areas might reveal something concrete that most of us already know instinctively.  But to arrive at the positive conclusions about the impact of such activities on people’s and communities’ lives is something that ALL of us working in the arts know.  We have experienced it.  But getting concrete, incontrovertible, third-party evidence at a price we can all afford is, in my experience,a waste of money.

I have borne witness to literally hundreds of so-called “economic impact studies” (which, more often than not, are about activity not impact); served on dozens of panels that expound on the value of collaborations, of marketing, of professional development; participated , collaborated, and advocated for public and private arts support, using every argument in the book, from Cultural Heritage Tourism to the Creative Economy; and written literally a thousand blog pages urging people to value and support the arts.  But it all comes down to a series of simple statements.  Feel free to add your own:

We support the arts because they inspire us to lead a better life.

We support the arts because they reflect profoundly on the human condition.

We support the arts because they provide the emotional, subjective anchors that are at the root of community.

We support the arts because they engage our young people and allow our elders to share their wisdom.

We support the arts because they allow people from different backgrounds to gain respect for, and insight about, each other.

We support the arts because they allow us to work, to play, to rest, and to recover.  Homo sapiens have known this for 40,000 years or more.  We don’t need a longitudinal study of any kind to tell us this.

The bottom line is that I am completely satisfied that the programs and services we provide to Vermont’s arts sector and the programs and services the Vermont arts sector provides to the general public are neither more nor less exemplary than those provided by every other State Arts Council and their arts sectors.  We all have been doing this for a long time, and shall continue to as long as people can dance, speak, sing, hold a brush or camera, and write.   It’s important work, and it matters. How do I know?

I just do. That’s how.

Vermont: The State of the Arts, 2012

[This post first appeared in the Burlington (VT) Free Press, January 1, 2012]

 I am frequently asked, what is the current state of the arts?  My response? 

Vermont.

Vermont is the State of the Arts.

2010 Census figures are not available, but based on 2000 data, Vermont is first in writers, seventh in visual artists, and fifth overall in the per-capita ratio of artists-to-citizens out of all 50 states.  I believe, however, that visual artists are extremely under-reported in Vermont, and that once the 2010 data is out we will find ourselves ranked first overall. 

From communities as diverse as Brattleboro, White River Junction, Island Pond, Rutland, Bennington, and the greater Burlington area, Vermont’s artists leave an indelible impression on citizens and visitors alike.  We are a creative state whose character is hewn as much from the keyboard and the brush as it is from the soil and the forest.  For most Vermont artists, the natural landscape informs their creative core (corps?).  For others, Vermont’s independent streak inspires provocation and even outrage, as certainly art should from time to time. The critical note, here, is that of all states I have heard about, Vermont artists describe themselves exactly this way:  “I’m a Vermont artist”—using Vermont as an adjective to encompass the depth and variety that very name conjures in the imagination. No other artist from any other state does this, to my knowledge…at least not with the same degree of commitment.

Arts institutions in Vermont—the “healthy” ones—are nimble, have strong community support, and make the most of digital media and social networking tools to reach out well beyond our border.  Virtually all who regularly apply to the Council for funding fulfill the “artistic excellence” requirement with ease. Grants, therefore, tend to be awarded based organizational capacity and the value and impact that their activities have in/on their communities, not on the past record of accomplishment; a subtle but important difference.  If nothing else, it indicates a sector that is fully mature, with very high standards, and aware of its important role in bringing quality programs and services to the public.

From the consumer’s perspective, therefore, the arts in Vermont are thriving.  There are many arts events to choose from, not just on the weekends, but on any day of the week.  And with very few exceptions, they are all of really high caliber. A glance through any community newspaper will prove the point.

The view is very different, however, from the creative/producing end.

Whether the root cause is the economy, donor fatigue from massive weather cataclysms, or the increasingly vocal, but very ill-informed, national movement to remove all so-called “nonessential government services,” the issue for all is survival.  The Kennedy Center’s Michael Kaiser believes that the key to survival lies in the diversity and excellence of programming coupled with an ever-expanding commitment to marketing and promotion.

Therein lies the rub. Arts organizations are mission driven.  If there is an extra dollar left over at the end of the year, the mission mandates that it be spent on programming.  The result is that Kaiser’s advice to focus on diverse, excellent, new programming with an emphasis on marketing is difficult to sell to trustees and audiences.

What the sector really needs are tools for analyzing the impacts of artistic activity on education, community economic development, and social services.  With the Pew Trust’s Cultural Data Project just getting started here in Vermont, and the new fields of “Social Impact Analysis” and “Brain-based Learning” coming into their own, we will soon provide policy analysts and state/local officials with much better information about why they should be advocating for significantly more resources to be spent on supporting and promoting the sector. 

Artists and arts organizations are generally pretty capable at corralling what they need to put on a show.  What they are less good at is reaching audiences in Boston, New York, Montreal, Albany, and the Berkshires (!) to let them know what is available less than a half-day’s drive away.  This is where the state’s interests and the arts sector’s interests are currently most in alignment and where immediate returns are already beginning to be found. (There are many others, but this is the lowest of the “low-hanging fruits.”)

Vermont’s arts sector is, from an economic policy perspective, one of its last great un(der)-tapped resources.  With the right kind of collaborative, strategic and socially-integrated investment, the arts sector could easily thrive and become integral to Vermont’s economic vitality, not just a pleasant, icing-on-the-cake afterthought.

The Difference of a Dollar

On a recent trip to Washington DC I had to pause in front of a Metro card machine to decipher its instructions.  As I pulled several bills from my wallet I became aware of a soft-spoken man standing a few feet away, quietly intoning “45 cents, folks.  That’s all I need.  It’s not a hand out, I just need to get home and I don’t have the right change.  Spare 45 cents?  Anybody?  Please?...”

Having lived in most of the major cities on the eastern seaboard, I was not buying his act.  I had seen too many hustlers and homeless people looking for an easy mark, and this guy was perfectly positioned at a spot where out-of-towners are most likely to stand for a few minutes with money in their hands figuring out, like I was, how to buy a Metro card.

Perhaps a dozen people were in the vicinity, all doing what I was doing, and as we all finished our business with the machines, the man suddenly squatted next to his bag, facing away from us, lifted both hands up next to his ears and noiselessly started to shake them.  He realized that none of us were going to help him.  Still shaking, and in his own private world of humiliation and embarrassment, he emitted a quiet keening sound as I, with a fresh Metro card safely in hand, turned from the machine to head through the turnstiles.

In that moment I realized that whatever else might be going on, this man really was desperate.  He needed 45 cents.  His life had been reduced to this almost insignificant equation and the look on his face as he stared at his bag, shaking with fear, anger, and frustration pierced my detachment like nothing has in a long time.

The fairy tale ending to this story is, having given him some money, I proceed onto the Metro feeling virtuous and the guy purchases his ticket and makes it home in time for his daughter’s birthday party. 

Instead, I gave the guy a dollar, received his heartfelt thanks, got onto the Metro and experienced a tidal wave of anger.  I felt that the entire encounter was an allegory for the arts in this country.  The arts sector is the unknown man in the subway looking for legitimacy and support from his fellow travelers.  The arts sector is the unknown man in the subway with a bag full of ideas, of projects, of potential, all waiting to be realized.  The arts sector is the unknown man in the subway in need of a few pennies more to help reach a place that other travelers will only dream of.  The arts sector is the unknown man kneeling in the subway shaking with sorrow, fear, and a little rage at the indifference of society.

I shared this story with a friend.  He pointed out that the real lesson to be drawn from this encounter was that, in reality, someone (me) had intervened and bailed the guy out—a perfect lesson in current political theory.  Let things get desperate enough and the private sector will step up and save the day.

Except, I argued back, that in this case, it wasn’t the “private sector” that stepped up and saved the day; it was me—a public servant.  Moreover, it was a public servant who watched as literally dozens of “private sector citizens” walked past and ignored the man’s pleas; who took the extra moment to process the look on the man’s face; who gauged that one man’s private torment, internalized it, and who finally reached into his wallet to give the man a dollar.  Did I feel virtuous?  Heck no.

What’s going to happen to the next person who needs 45 cents if the public sector isn’t around?  How will she fare? And the person after her…?  And the one after him…?

We are going in the wrong direction. The public sector is being made out to be the enemy of progress. And the need for the arts and humanities (not to mention human services, medical care, and social security) is greater than ever.

And yet… the overpowering message coming from Washington DC still is to cut taxes and cut spending…to ignore the plight of the bereft man at the Metro card machine.

Pushing this allegory to its logical conclusion I considered how the unknown man in the subway who represents the arts sector will fare next year when he again lacks the 45 cents he needs to change the world. What can this man expect from the public sector, represented by National Endowment for the Arts?

About 40 cents. 

Whose helping hand will it be next time?