August 2009 Archives

Wired has now posted the article The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine from the latest issue of the magazine. They've labeled it a "Gadget" story which just shows they don't give themselves enough credit for illuminating cultural transformations. 

I encourage you to read the whole piece. It gives evidence and examples of products and services to support this conclusion.

We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.

This is a societal change with immense implications for all artists and arts managers that pride themselves on producing and promoting excellent work that must be experienced at certain hours in a quiet and respectful environment. The article contains a warning.

Companies that focus on traditional measures of quality - fidelity, resolution, features - can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability. And that means someone else can come along and drink their milk shake.

This summer's NEA report on arts participation told us for certain that arts participation of all types is dropping across the country. Here is information to help us all understand why. The speed of change around us is accelerating, and getting yourself a Facebook fan page does not mean you've changed with it.

The glimmer of hope is that people still want to come together in shared experience - otherwise the upcoming Twestival would have no legs. They just want the experience to be flexible, convenient and affordable. Will the arts change fast enough to meet this need for people or keep losing ground? It will take all of us to create an answer in the affirmative.

As an everyday arts advocate, I've been ruminating on the interview the NY Times published with new NEA Chair Rocco Landesman last Friday. (The NEA's 10th) The interview gives us much more to think about than how Mr. Landesman's style and perspective will play out with Congress, though that's what others have given the most attention.

AJ blogger Lee Rosenbaum wrote immediately about Landesman's comments and has continued to follow the reactions from Peoria's Congressman and Peoria's arts community. Judith Dobrzynski made her observations a couple days later on her AJ blog.

I'm more interested in how Landesman's rhetoric connects to the wider social transformations challenging our country right now, and how he's articulating his priorities. When he states,

"I don't know if there's a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it's not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman,"

Landesman is really saying large cities are better than suburbs small cities and they deserve more government investment in the arts.

He further demonstrates his dismissal of the suburbs by describing his idea for creating an "Our Town" program that connects artists and small towns. He says:

"When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town," he said. "There are ways to draw artists into the center of things that will attract other people."

The program would also help finance public art projects and performances and promote architectural preservation in downtown areas, Mr. Landesman added. "Every town has a public square or landmark buildings or places that have a special emotional significance," he said. "The extent that art can address that pride will be great."

Suburbs don't have town squares or historic buildings, but they are full of people. And, these people are feeling the sting of losing ground - economically, politically, and as the long-time ethnic majority.

With the agenda and prejudice Mr. Landesman has already articulated, he's on track to further distance this large swath of our national population from the arts and the essential role the arts play in bringing individuals and communities together. Hopefully he'll move away from believing that quality and geography are mutually exclusive criteria and embrace them both as means to a greater end.

Mr. Landesman is now the arts leader with the largest megaphone. What he says and what he does will ripple out to every state and municipal arts agency, major foundations, arts organizations of all sizes, and individuals. He's doing more than running a 170 person federal agency. He's responsible for articulating a vision that makes the arts meaningful in the eyes and lives of all Americans. I'm looking for him to invite everyone to be part of his vision.

UPDATE
Here is Rocco Landesman's official first statement from the NEA website.

The day after I posted my musings about Comic-Con International and what the non-profit arts can learn from it, I received a call from Angela Carone, the arts reporter at the local public radio/tv station asking if I'd participate in an extended dialogue on the topic. Along with me, Angela invited Tyler Richards Hewes, Executive Director of Orchestra Nova San Diego, and Edward Wilensky, the Director of Media Relations for the San Diego Opera.

Angela posted our dialogue over three days. She asked us questions about "high art" versus "low art," Comic-Con's use of social media, and the changing nature/loss of arts journalism when compared to Comic-Con's embrace of citizen journalists and bloggers. There are certainly more people that grew up being comic book fans working in arts than we really know. Maybe we need to have sessons that include Comic-Con organizers at future non-profit conferences so the dialogue about what can be learned from the world of Popular Arts is brought to the center of our internal conversations and not convened by a journalist with a foot in both worlds.

For a taste of Comic-Con, check out all of Angela's coverage at her blog Culture Lust.