Five Trends and Then Some...

I just returned from back-to-back conferences in Austin TX (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies) and Chicago IL (Grantmakers in the Arts). Both conferences are designed to help us provide better services to our constituencies and I spent a lot of time absorbing the latest national trends. Here they are...

Trend #1 -- Eroding Public Confidence in our Institutions
With the exception of the US Military and the Small Business Administration, major institutions in all sectors (Public, Private, and Non-Profit) have seen public confidence wane significantly in the past few years. In general, if you are large, have a high overhead, and/or are slow to develop new products and services to meet changing circumstances--you are more likely than ever to be perceived as wasteful and a burden to society. The good news is that if you are a major arts institution, at least you aren't the US Congress, a Health Care organization, an insurance company or a bank--all of which are pretty much despised by the general public these days.

Trend #2 -- Burgeoning Accountability Movement
No matter how long you have been doing what you do, if you aren't "transparent and accountable" you are at risk. No data exists that proves the value of the arts on their own primarily because the arts have never existed in a vacuum. But we are nevertheless being asked to develop performance measures and key indicators that justify the investment. This is clearly a response to both the climate of deregulation on Wall Street (and the ensuing economic meltdown) and a few examples of some serious "worst practices" in the charitable sector and is related to the eroding confidence the public has in our institutions.

Trend #3 -- Declining Arts Funding
Although the amount of dollars going into the arts from the private sector has increased in the last five years, the share of all charitable giving (individuals, corporations, and foundations) going to the arts has declined a half-percent. In other words, while our "slice of the pie" has gotten slightly larger, the pie itself has gotten REALLY large. This is mostly because as governments have turned more and more to the private sector to make up the gaps in education and human services, the arts have been perceived as being less urgent. We have to get better and better at articulating our value to society and backing it up with cogent, believable data.

Trend #4 -- Arts Participation is Changing
Audiences for the traditional "western classical art forms" are declining: getting older, dying, and not being replaced by younger, "salt and pepper" audiences. This is not necessarily all bad news...it just means that if you present symphonies, opera, theater, ballet, jazz, or are a museum, you are probably not prepared to offer "art" the way the under-30 crowd likes to receive it.

Technology and the internet have created new ways of experiencing the arts, allowing for more direct, idiosyncratic access, even "flash mob" participation. Most significant is the rise of what is now called the "curatorial me;" the individual consumer who decides for him/herself what (s)he wants, when (s)he wants it, how (s)he want it (tv, laptop, or smartphone) and expects it delivered instantaneously for only a few dollars. This is radically redefining what an audience is, what an institution is, even what a community is.

Perhaps most significant is that opportunities for creating, sharing, and consuming art are increasing a lot, despite the loss of traditional audiences and the threats to arts education. One-third of all teenagers have created and shared works of art online--sometimes to audiences numbering in the millions! This is, needless to say, creating confusion and depression on the part of marketing and programming executives in arts organizations everywhere!

Trend #5 -- Woe Woe Woe!
As you might imagine, Trends 1-4 are creating a significant problem for the financial health of the non-profit arts sector. According to Grantmakers in the Arts data, only 16% of non-profit arts organizations are expected to end FY 2010 with a surplus and 65% have less than 90-days of operating cash on-hand. They are responding to this by downsizing, reducing HR benefits, reducing program commitments, merging/collaborating, creating new marketing strategies, waiting for emergencies to occur before taking action (which sometimes works but usually inspires panic), and even closing their doors precipitously.

At the very least, organizations are for the first time planning not to do "more with less," but to do "less with less." This is a new operating condition for our mission-oriented field. We have to start thinking of unlearning practices that are almost hard-wired.
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These are scary times in the arts. Our field is under-capitalized. Our traditional delivery systems (the institutions) are lacking demand (or perhaps there is too much supply?). Funders are demanding increased accountability and sometimes even collaborative input into programming decisions (egad!).

We are faced with new funding mechanisms that are tailored to the intensely "democratic" tendencies of the web--allowing great ideas to get noticed and funded by the general public through social networks. Strategic planning horizons which used to be five to 10 years out are now less than two. And we have just learned that even though the recession has been over for 18 months or more, it will be at least another two or three years before we begin to see a recovery.

So where do we go from here?

I'll explore some ideas in my next post...

(P.s. a big shout-out to Jonathan Katz at NASAA for setting the stage for this trend report and to others at Grantmakers, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Cultural Data Project for unknowingly giving me some choice sound bytes to share...)

How does Art support you?

I spent several hours on Pine Street at last weekend’s Burlington South End Art Hop (go SEABA!) encouraging people to step up to our video-camera and respond to this question on tape.

Some people acted suspicious, not because they found it odd that a stranger was asking them to speak about something so personal on camera, but because they couldn’t understand why was I bothering them about something that was so self-evident. After all, they were at the Art Hop, weren’t they?

Why indeed…

The purpose of this marketing campaign (ArtSupportsMe.org) is to get people to think differently about the role the arts play in their lives. The truth of the matter is that Art, in all its multidisciplinary glory, has never been, nor probably ever will be, given enough financial support. Foundations, philanthropists, businesses, public funding agencies have for years been faced with a nearly impossible task: to develop a set of clear and convincing reasons to increase the flow of dollars going into programs and services that nurture and sustain our various types of cultural expression. But, we asked ourselves, what if we turned that around? What if, instead of asking how we can all support the arts, we instead asked, how do the arts support us?

We are better now than we were in the 1990s at articulating the many “public value” reasons to support the arts,most of which address the Arts’ role in stimulating community economic development (just look at Church Street Market Place and the entire Pine Street Corridor if you don’t believe me).

But the good people at Place Creative helped us home in on the Arts more powerful and compelling effect—the emotional impact it has on each of us individually and on all of us collectively. For some of us whose careers are in the arts (either as artists or teachers or presenters, etc.) the Arts support us literally, with a paycheck, a commission fee, or some kind of remuneration that enables us to pay for food and shelter.

But for most of us, defining how Art supports us requires us to be articulate about subjective impressions and emotions—something we are not comfortable with very often and something at which language frequently fails miserably. For me, art has a way of inserting itself with great subtlety and meaning into even the most mundane activities.

For example, the style of clothing you wear; the make and model car you drive; the way you cut your hair, and adorn your skin and clothing with “accessories” ALL have their basis in a creative act—not just those made by the clothing designers and car-makers, etc., but by YOU, the person who selected that particular look (or automobile) at this particular time and place.

On a slightly less subtle level are the cultural expressions that appeal to you, from the art you hang on your walls, the books you read, and the music to which you listen and sometimes dance.

And there are the obvious, “big ticket items” like concerts, exhibitions, expositions, dramatic works, films, and a host of mixed media expressions that capture our collective attention in some way or other.

Those who create “popular” art tend not to need support from foundations and arts councils because their creative output is immediately attractive to their audiences who will pay for it. But the Mozarts, Van Goghs, and other artists who are now considered “classical,” “modern,” “post-modern,” “multi-cultural.” etc. tend not to connect with enough of an audience in their lifetimes to sustain themselves. They have always needed and will continue to need support from benefactors in order to pursue their craft.

And what do we get in return for their labor? Big moments like Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Berlin Wall on Christmas Day, 1989 or Picasso’s Guernica commemorating the atrocities inflicted there by Nazi-supported Fascist troops during the Spanish Civil War. We also get smaller moments by the hundreds: the shared joy of experiencing a play written by Shakespeare or Mamet; taking in a ballet choreographed by Balanchine or Morris; attending a concert composed by Brahms or Nielsen or performed by The Boston Symphony or the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble.

And finally we get the individual moments by the thousands: the experience of encountering Michelangelo’s Pieta for the first time; or something much simpler, like hearing your child rehearse her part in the school musical.

Art is part of everything that makes us human, makes us individual, and enables us to enjoy (or least tolerate) our brief journey through life.

So the simple question we start with, we hope, will create an outpouring of sharing and understanding about the value and importance of Art to all of us. Because, whether you like it or not, whether it’s to your particular taste or not, Art really matters, in all its magnificent forms. And in Vermont, we are blessed.

How does Art Support You?

Looking Forward

The Times-Argus recently printed an article which gave a pretty bleak assessment of state budget woes in the coming years. According to the article, this recession is "different from the three previous recessions...[because] employment and consumer spending aren't expected to bounce back as quickly."

Among the measures states will have to use to balance their budgets are to increase college tuition, reduce funding for the arts and other cultural programs, and push costs for employees and repairs into the future.

Thomas Friedman predicted this back in a June 2003 NY Times column. The federal government is out of money. The $789 billion it borrowed last spring will stave off some things for a while. But the budget crunch is, according to how I read Friedman, the result of services that used to be paid for with federal dollars (that, as taxes, are significantly less for you and me) now being paid for by the individual states (which, especially in a low population state like Vermont, are considerably more expensive for you and me).

I'm neither an economist nor an educator, but it seems strange to me that every time our government (federal, state, or local) gets into trouble financially they look first to the arts and to education to start restoring some sort of balance.

I can just hear the conversations around federal and state policy-maker's cabinet-room tables.
"What?! We have a deficit of 4 trillion dollars?!"" Shocking!!" "We must do something!" "I know, let's take away all funding for the arts at the federal AND state level. That will save us a solid $500 million. $350 million for the states, and $150 million for the feds." "Oh, good show, that should keep the middle class distracted and at bay for a few more years." "Well done!"

Trouble is, when the national debt is pushing $12 trillion and growing by nearly $4 billion a day, the problem will not be solved by cutting arts and education.

In fact, picking the arts first as a place to cut seems a little disingenuous...

Employment and revenues are the biggest problem (if you're a glass-half-full kind of person) or health care, interest payments on the debt, defense spending, social services, and corrections are the biggest problem (if you're a glass-half-empty kind of person). Either way you look at it, the arts sector and the education sector are a significant part of the solution to what is or is not in the glass.

The arts sector is a significant employer/training ground for much of what drives our high tech economy (where do you think, for example, the film and music industries get their talent from anyway?). After family, education is probably the single biggest indicator of how a person will become socialized as an adult. The longer one stays in school--or, more accurately, the longer one continues his/her commitment to learning, the more positive one's life experiences are likely to be.

Why in hell is anyone thinking of cutting these things?

Here's what I've learned over the years. With only a few brave, sometimes controversial exceptions (like Richard Florida), economists generally don't know what to do with "the cultural sector." It is a sector that has either matured in the past decade or so--usually well after most economists finished their graduate training, or it matured millennia ago and economists (and the policy-makers they advise) have lost touch with it.

In either case, today's economists and their their measuring tools are inadequate to the task. It is certainly possible keep track of ticket sales, and art purchases. But there is nothing other than the so-called "multiplier effect " that allows us to infer the kind of spending that goes on in parking lots, gas stations, restaurants, and hotels as the result of arts events. And that's just barely capturing the true value of the cultural sector.

How does an economist measure the impact of a teaching artist? Or the impact of a clustering of visual artists in run-down warehouse district? Or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? What tools has the economics profession developed that will convincingly relate the presence of a high-quality theater company or a cartoon school to the social and economic well-being of a village? (Yeah, White River Junction, that's a big shout-out to all of you! :))

What is it going to take for the soft science of economics to develop some harder edges where the arts and culture are concerned?

It seems to me that education and the arts are the absolute LAST places that government should cut. Biases aside, it's just not worth the price of elimination. Education is all about our future--our children's future. The arts are all about creativity and imagination.

We are going to need a lot of the latter if we are going to have a hope of delivering on the promise of the former.

So...if you want to do something to put a little more in the glass, click here. And, on behalf of artists and arts organizations in Vermont whose work inspires, thrills, entertains, and challenges us all, thank you for your ongoing support.