VERMONT DAYS HOME VIDEO CONTEST

Ahhh…the long days of spring and early summer. A perfect time to get out and enjoy the beautiful natural scenery Vermont offers. Visit your local park; take a hike, ride a bike on a trail, teach your kid to fish, and wind it all up with a concert at your local historical site. Sounds like an ideal way to bond with your soul, not to mention your family and friends, right?

Actually, Vermonters do it all the time and on one weekend each year, “Vermont Days” weekend (June 9th and 10th), you can do it all for free, thanks to a collaborative effort of your friendly state agencies of Commerce, Natural Resources, and the Arts Council.

This year, however, with a lot of encouragement from Loranne Turgeon (interim Film Commissioner) we have added a new layer of opportunity to the mix. You know your favorite commercials, like most of the ones you see during any given Super Bowl? The ones that tell a story? The ones that you remember?

We want you to grab your digital video camera, go out and have fun during Vermont Days (next week!), and create a one- to two-minute film about your experience. You can think of it as being your own personal commercial. Or you can think of it as your own (2-minute) “Godfather, part 4.” (Okay, maybe “Dances with Moose” might be more contextual.)

The point is, we want you to enjoy Vermont Days (why not, since you live here?), take some footage, and share it with us. It’s a contest, but a very low-impact, low-budget contest. The rules in fact say, “Winners will receive some really cool stuff.” We mean it!

Think “America’s Funniest Home Videos goes to Cannes” and you’ll have the idea. So please, check your batteries. Bone up on your downloading skills (or is it uploading skills?), and enjoy Vermont Days. You won’t regret it!

Steamed and Ready to Roll: 2007 Congressional Arts Competition

Monday, May 14th, was a day of transition in Vermont. For the first time, the statewide, high school art competition came to a close and Sen. Jim Jeffords was not front and center doing what he loved most—talking to kids, exhorting them to greater heights of accomplishment, and basking in the admiration of his young cultural constituents.

That pleasure belongs now to Congressman Peter Welch who did an admirable job in bridging what the esteemed Senator started 26 years ago when he was in the US House of Representatives. VIEW PHOTOS OF THE WINNERS' ARTWORK

My role was to present the “People’s Choice Award” (to Armando Veve of South Burlington) and I used this opportunity to expound on the latest of my “soapbox” ideas. At past events, I have talked about the alternative to the Education Community’s worn “3 Rs”—the “3 As” (Academics, Athletics, and the Arts)—as a means to engage individual students, entire schools and even school systems in a more integrated and creative approach to learning. I have also exhorted students in the room, contrary to exhortations by the Governor and other members of the administration, “to leave Vermont as soon as they are able, put the great Vermont values they were raised with to the test in as many different cultural settings as possible, and only when they are good and ready to settle down, create a job, have a family, THEN come back to Vermont!”

This time I had a new soap box to stand on.

It seems that policy-makers, in particular the group that has been appointed to serve on the Governor’s task force to examine the economic development future of Vermont, chaired by Bill Stenger (of Jay Peak), have come up with a new acronym to capture the what students need to know as they prepare themselves for Vermont’s 21st Century workforce.

It is “STEM” which stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.
(You see where I’m headed, don’t you? Of course you do; you’re probably one of the so-called “cultural creatives” whose hidden talent is to see connections where others don’t!)

Like the 3 Rs (which aren’t), STEM leaves out the crucial part of student learning that allows them to access the right side of their brains. In an age where magazines like Forbes and Business Week are touting such things as “the MFA is the new MBA,” and where medical schools like Columbia are requiring students to go to art museums to increase their observational skills and learn how to better communicate about things that are subjective and interpretive, and where people like Daniel Pink (author of “A Whole New Mind”) are earning $25,000 a pop for lecturing on the value of integrating right-brained thinking into business, it is astonishing to me that our policy-makers are so slow to recognize the value of the arts.

STEM should be STEAM. All of us should make it clear to our elected and appointed officials at the state and local level (especially school boards!) that STEAM (not renewables!) is the potent force of the future.

Of course, if STEAM doesn’t do it for you, perhaps TEAMS will. Or MEATS (if it’s lunchtime). Or even MATES (if you are on the prowl or like to play chess).

The point is, it’s time for the Arts to be shared by more than just the artist community. Let’s make it happen. Full steam ahead.

OUR FIVE-YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN: 2008-2012

For the past several months I have labored mightily to give birth to the Arts Council’s next five-year Strategic Plan. This is not an exercise to be taken lightly. In fact, I have come to rue the moment I thought to myself, why pay a consultant when we can easily do this ourselves. Well, I have just four words to say to myself for that thought: What was I THINKING!?

The good news is, we are now ready to share our most recent draft with all of you.

I am going to tell you what is in the document. And then I’m going to tell you how we got there. And finally I will ask you to read it and give us—me, actually—your feedback.

What’s in the document is exactly what you would expect to be in a document of this type only without any of the boring details of exactly how many people we met with over the last 12 months, where we met with them, what we talked about, the questions we raised, the questions we tried to answer. Remember, this is a draft for comment, and some of the research is still being done (surveys to artists and arts organizations, for example) which will help refine future drafts and the final product.

But for now, there’s an Introduction which explains why we plan. Then there is a brief Executive Summary which, at least on the web, will have internal links that will get you directly to the meat of the plan. Next there is a background section which gives information about the national trends and research, and work done here in Vermont around the Creative Economy, the Palettes project, and other items that will give you a kind of “environmental context” for the plan itself, including our all-important mission/vision/values statements.

And then there is the Plan with its three very straightforward goals, two of which are directed outwards towards our constituencies, our supporters, or collaborators, and our Governor and Legislature; and the third of which is directed inward towards the Council itself.

How did we arrive at this plan? I know it seems hard to believe, but it was mainly by listening. The work of the Council is always so much greater than the sum of its parts. But it is the many parts working together that drafted this plan. Among the most influential parts of the planning process was the many days spent on the road visiting about 40 communities all over Vermont in our PaletteMobile as part of the Palettes of Vermont project. Diane Scolaro, herself a former local arts agency director, had the pleasure of doing most of that work, and the kind of information that those site visits provided to us has been so valuable. These visits, combined with ongoing input from grant panelists, from our board advisory committees, and, perhaps most important of all, our public Planning Forums held throughout the state in January, gave us almost more information and input than we could absorb.

I said “almost”…!

Since February, my challenge has been to distil everything we heard, both individually and collectively, into a clear and concise document that, as the Introduction says, “is a road map describing how we expect to engage with supporters and partners who believe in the power of art to change lives and improve the fiscal and social health of our communities. Our plan makes it clear to anyone who might consider collaborating with us, applying for support from us, or giving us funds exactly what we and they should expect in return from that collaboration, grant activity, or donation.”

So what I want you to do in the next couple of days—or even right now!—and click on this latest draft. It’s about 10 pages long, but the really important stuff is on the last two or three pages. Please, read it, and get back to me with your input.

This is important. It’s only been three months of my life so far. But we’re really talking about the next five years!

WHAT DO WE DO FOR ARTISTS BESIDES NOT GIVE THEM MONEY?

“What do we do for artists besides not give them money?”

This question-with-a-twist was voiced at a recent staff meeting as we were discussing the inputs we had received during our strategic planning forums in January.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of administering the Vermont Arts Council is the perception that “we don’t do enough” for the arts field. There is some truth to this perception in that, as Warren Kimble once famously pointed out in a board meeting, “what kind of business model is it that you think is successful by encouraging people to apply for support and then turn around and enrage nine out of every ten applicants?!”

Point well-made, point well-taken.

It is not, by any normal standard, a recipe for success: alienate 90% of your customers, and then expect them to appreciate the “valuable support” you offer to them. Yes, this is a dilemma and we are squarely on its horns. It is the challenge of running a competitive grant application program.

It is the challenge of not having enough money to award the full amount of worthy applicants’ requests (assuming a peer panel can agree on what “worthy” actually means!). It is the challenge of working in a state where our elected leaders’ (in both major parties, mind you) level of commitment to the arts sector is between one-eighth and one-tenth of their level of commitment to the rest of state government. Yes, you read right. Since 1991, state government has grown 81.6%. The Council’s appropriation has grown just 11.6% (the one-eighth factor). Since 2003, the General Fund appropriation has grown 32.8% while the Council’s General Fund appropriation has grown only 3.4% (the one-tenth factor).

All of which are reasonable explanations for why we don’t have enough money to support every individual or organization that our panels feel deserve support.

But the question remains, what do we do when we aren’t giving you (or your organizations) money?

For one thing, we are vastly improving our online tools that we believe will help you market and promote your work—regardless of whether you’re an artist or an organization. The Arts Directory and its related Arts Calendar, with its new itinerary planning tool, is something that anyone and everyone with an event should be taking advantage of. It not only is the only statewide resource of its size and scope, it also is tapped by literally every member of the broadcast and print media for their own calendars.

We also offer workshops open to everyone (often at minimal or even no cost) to help them with such career building techniques in grant-writing, making your work accessible to audiences with a variety of disabilities, marketing and promotion, portfolio building, and so on.

The truth is there will probably never be enough money to satisfy the demand that artists and organizations place on us. So it’s not so much about giving away money (giving someone a fish) as it is about helping people to get their own money (teaching someone to fish) that we are turning to more and more often.

If you have suggestions for what additional “fishing” techniques we should be exploring, please contact me.

DON'T GIVE UP, DON'T GIVE IN

Why is our request of the legislature so disproportionately large?

I am asked this question daily on my trips to the State House.

As I reported in the last issue, almost everyone I talked to in the State House was surprised and impressed by the number of emails they received from our recent Arts Alert. Some were also annoyed, but frankly, everyone I know is annoyed by the noise a squeaky wheel makes . . .

. . . which is why we got a little grease last week!

The Appropriations Bill passed out of the House Appropriations Committee last week included an increase of $16,000 for the Arts Council, 11,000 more than the amount recommended by the Governor. Yes, it is a far cry from the $180,000 we had hoped for, but it is a start.

So now the discussion moves over to the Senate. The Senate also received emails by the hundreds and our testimony was as well-received there as it had been in the House. I am prepared for the debate about the merits of supporting this program, but one question that was asked during our testimony made me realize that people still don’t know why we seem to be asking for such a disproportionate amount of money at this time.

The question was whether we were asking for additional state support to offset lost funds from federal sources. The answer is no. Even with the 40% cut back in 1996, federal funds still are significantly higher than our state appropriation. No, the “disproportionality” of our request is the result of two things: we haven’t kept pace even with inflation, and we haven’t kept pace with the overall growth of state government.
Since 1991, our general fund appropriation has increased at an average pace that is far less than inflation. In 1991 support from the Council meant a lot more (in terms of cash) than it does today for those organizations who are still receiving support from us. But recent data has shown that the Arts field has grown significantly during the past 16 years—that there are many more organizations competing for these fewer dollars. Ironically, if our appropriation has simply kept pace with inflation, it would just about close that gap between the blue and red lines in the above chart. Go figure.

But it gets even more interesting. Over the same time frame, the General Fund of the State of Vermont (the source of our line item appropriation) has increased about 86%. A lot of this increase is due to the rapidly escalating costs of education and health care as well as the additional social service burdens placed on the States by the 2001 and 2003 federal tax cuts. Nevertheless, in 1991 the Vermont general fund appropriation was about $600 million. Now it is approaching $1.1 billion. Had the Arts Council’s appropriation kept pace with the General Fund, our current appropriation would be closing in on $900,000 ($480,000 times 1.86).

But hey, we’re not THAT greedy! Let’s take a look instead at the growth of the State’s General Fund during just the past five years:
In FY02 our budget was about $512,000. Had our appropriation kept pace the General Fund, our funding from the state today would be just under $681,000.

Why is this all important? Vermont is moving ever closer to understanding that creativity and entrepreneurship is at the base of our future. Whether you are an artist or a salesperson, a ski bum or a plumber, your future—and your children’s future—is going to depend more and more on how well you adapt to an ever-changing world, a world of ideas and services not manufactured goods. Our future is going to require a different world view in which Islam is no more our enemy than Buddhism, where we can celebrate Ramadan as easily as we celebrate Mardi Gras. How will we get there? How will we adapt?

It starts in the family, it continues in school and in summer camp, and crescendos in college. If we’re lucky it resonates throughout all our lives.

What is it?

It is exposure to art and culture. It is experimenting with creativity in art, music, design and dance. It is the fundamental relationship that art and culture have to community and humanity. Our cultural expressions are what we communicate about ourselves to future generations. It forms the core of learning and experience that fuels the Creative Economy, and towns all over Vermont are discovering it; discovering its power to engage new leadership, new ideas, and new community energy. We are in it up to our eyeballs. And right now it’s hungry and needs feeding. The tab for dinner next year? $180,000.

PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER

Ten days ago we sent out an email asking you to send emails to your legislators in support of a $180,000 increase to the Arts Council’s budget that would fund what is currently called our Local Arts Partnership Initiative.

What happened?

It worked. By the time you read this, more than 300 of you will have generated more than 1300 emails to your respective members of the Vermont House and Senate. In a state where five emails on any given topic is a cause for concern and re-evaluation of priorities on the part of legislators, this response can only be characterized by one word.

Phenomenal.

As I sat in House Appropriations mark-up last week, it was abundantly clear that I was persona non grata to many members of the committee who had received dozens of these emails. But that’s okay. I’d rather be non grata to them than to all of you. My job is to represent you to them. Their job is to listen to you and pay attention. Trust me. A few individuals may be annoyed, but there is no doubt that they are paying attention.

My job is to make sure that they know how you feel about funding priorities. Their job is to figure out how to juggle those priorities so that everyone is equally happy…or unhappy. For the last few years, our field has been made increasingly and disproportionately unhappy. Why? In part because we were nice and understanding to the Governor and Legislature when times were flush and they were replenishing the Rainy Day funds for…well…rainy days. We were nice and understanding when the dot-com boom went bust. We were nice and understanding when the President’s tax cuts began to require services that were once paid by the federal government to be increasingly paid for by the state. We were nice and understanding when the high cost of health care, education, and the war began to hit taxpayers harder and harder. During the past 10 years I have heard every year that “There’s no money. Where’s the money for this increase going to come from?”

This year is no different, except for one thing. We’re not so nice and understanding anymore. Why? Because so many of our core institutions are one or two payrolls away from closing. Because 20% of them have less than a month’s operating reserve (the standard is six months minimum). Because several of you have closed or merged or “gone dormant.” Because for the second time in the last four years, despite there being “no money” the state has managed to authorize an emergency spending bill on behalf of the ski industry for a $200 thousand plus media blitz in major east coast markets to “help offset a bad January.” And because all this time (since 1991) state government has grown 86% and the Arts Council’s budget has only grown 11%. That’s why we’re so disproportionately unhappy!

The arts are an industry, much like any other. There are nearly 550,000 arts business in the U.S., and those businesses employ 2.7 million Americans. The arts contribute $135 billion to the economy each year. To put those numbers into perspective, the arts create more jobs in our country than the steel industry. (By the way, more information like this is available on the Americans for the Arts website. Arm yourself with knowledge!)

Although we supposedly operate in a free-market system, dominated by a laissez-faire economic philosophy, business and corporate interests receive enormous amounts of government support, publicity, and subsidies. Yet when arts advocates lobby for increased government support for our economic sector, we’re told the arts are a luxury, and the field should fend for itself. Imagine the hue and cry that would go up if government told other industries like textiles, agriculture, and automobiles, that they were on their own, and that they’d better shape up if they wanted to keep their jobs.

I have been told to my face by people who should know better that “Jobs in the arts aren’t good jobs.” I simply smile at them with a pitying look on my face, and reply that they may not be “high-paying jobs but you really can’t touch them for satisfaction and enrichment and their many other quality of life features.” Then I ask them how much they enjoy being Secretary of the Agency of—well, you get the idea.

Here’s what I’d like from you next. Send me a paragraph explaining why, in three sentences or less you actually think your “no good arts job” is in fact a great job! If enough of you respond, I’ll share it with those insensitive clods who still believe that the arts don’t deserve their attention.
In the meantime, keep in touch with your legislators. If you haven’t emailed them yet, there is still time. One request: make sure to include something personal about why this budget increase matters to you. Also, changing the subject header will distinguish it from the other 1300 emails that are already out there. Have fun. You’re doing great. Thank you.

THE QUESTION OF 'ARTISTIC EXCELLENCE'

For the past several months I have labored mightily to give birth to the Arts Council’s next five-year Strategic Plan. This is not an exercise to be taken lightly. In fact, I have come to Ever since the United States started down the road of public support for the Arts in 1964 a primary driver for determining who or what gets support has been whether it demonstrates something called “artistic excellence.”

The nature of arts professionals predisposes them to assert that “artistic excellence” should always be the prime directive for public funding agencies. That way, simply by receiving funds an arts professional (an artist or an administrator) may claim that the work he/she does is of high quality and therefore worthy of (more) support—a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

After more than 25 years in the arts (on both sides of the funding equation), I no longer buy the artistic excellence argument where public funding is concerned. Here’s why.

Public agencies (like the Vermont Arts Council) derive most, if not all, of their grant dollars from the American taxpayer. Every taxpayer, that is. Not just the one’s who prefer Pilobolus to Jay-Z, or Shakespeare to Spielberg. We therefore, as people who work for a state arts council, have an obligation to address the variety of tastes and preferences that are out there, and lead, wherever possible, everyone to as full an understanding of and appreciation for those disciplines we refer to as “the arts” as we possibly can.

The simple fact is that not everyone likes classical art forms. Not everyone likes Jazz. Or Abstract Expressionism. Or poetry. Or Shakespeare. Or Mamet.

Right?

Isn’t our job, then, to find out the breadth of what people do like, and introduce them to creative works from other cultures and, perhaps in this process, expand their world-view, and increase their opportunities to discover for themselves what art (in whatever genre or form it takes) brings into their lives?

In this eclectic, difficult-to-compare-apples-to-oranges situation, how does “artistic excellence” fit in? In my experience it really only works when artists and administrators are “doing the absolute best they can” under the circumstances they face. Context, therefore, is crucial.

Several years ago there was a great debate between Lloyd Richards of the Yale Rep. and Robert Brustein of the A.R.T. in Cambridge on just this topic. Brustein, if I recall correctly, said that art did possess an absolute standard where excellence was concerned and that the only the works of the highest caliber should ever receive support. Richards took the approach that not all producers have access to the best talent, the best facilities, and that context needed to be taken into consideration where funding decisions were made. It all boiled down to an argument in which Richards ended up advocating for a position that seemed to say that any art is probably better than none.

I agree with Richards on this one. The phrase “artistic excellence” used as criterion for funding suggests that people agree on what that term actually means. In my experience, they don’t. Most panel meetings I’ve been involved with are more like an elaborate and unspoken negotiation among smart, experienced people with definite points of view. Consensus gets reached around what should receive funding. But often, artistic excellence, by any one person’s standard, is too subjective to measure. Think about it. How often has a good friend come up to you with a new CD and said, this is great, ya gotta check this out…and you have and you say “how interesting” because you can’t find polite enough words to express how you really feel about the work. Different strokes for different folks, right?

What really determines funding decisions in my opinion is context. Context imbues a project in North Troy with the same relative urgency that a similar project in New York or Los Angeles possesses, despite the obvious differences in resources one might assume could be brought to bear in each of those different communities. The audience in North Troy may be smaller and have less opportunity to experience diverse cultural experiences, than one in L.A. The amount they can pay an artist might be less. And they most likely don’t have the kind of access to an enormously diverse and talented pool of artists in North Troy that they do in L.A.

But our question has to be, is the community is doing everything it can to get the best artists it can afford? If so, don’t we have an obligation to do whatever we can to support it? Yes.

So let’s ask the $64 dollar question: What deserves public funding?

This is easy…arts activities that benefit the public, ALL the public. Not just the stereotypical subset who think of art as that which is created to sustain the legacy of dead, European, white males. (Yes, I’m talking stereotypes here!)

And the $63 dollar question: Who makes the fund/not fund decision?

This is even easier…a “peer-review” panel is by far the best mechanism anyone has ever devised to review a varied set of applications. The panel reviews all the material, taking context into consideration, and its recommendation gets forwarded to an authorizing body (for us, our Board of Trustees elected by our membership) and in most cases they accept the panel’s recommendation. Applicants get a fair review from knowledgeable people. The public interest is served by the oversight provided by the Board.

An application for support for a symphony project in Island Pond thus gets the same contextual review as a symphony project in Burlington. It’s only fair. It’s only right.

And, if the truth be told, if it’s a symphony project that involves the Vermont Symphony it will have a whole mess of artistic excellence thrown in for good measure, too!

Thank you!