Scorekeeping

Thanks for a good article.

I personally think the only way of giving the public what they want is by having online forums and or blogs or 2.0 sites.

I think if the local governments had more 2.0 websites (where people can leave feedback and comments etc.) they would be in the "know" in regards to what the public wants (.i.e dancing classes or painting classes).

Many thanks for your article.

Kind Regards John

Hi Alan and others,

I have been reading your recent conversation about the “expressive life” on artsjournal.com. It got me thinking (which I believe was the objective, so well done!) about the larger, communal context of the artistic vibrancy discussion.

For context - I have been working for the Australia Council for the Arts has on developing ways of defining and measuring "artistic vibrancy" of arts organisations, which go beyond "artistic excellence" and also look at community relevance and artist development. Our published resources are now online at http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research

After reading your conversation, I think that there might be another way to understand artistic vibrancy, which may also be useful to how you understand the arts' relationship with the "expressive life" of an individual.

We could think about an organisation's "artistic vibrancy" in terms of how “vibrant” its most important relationships are.

From this perspective, artistic vibrancy could be understood as the quality of certain “relationships,” as follows:

Artistic quality or excellence of craft
- relationship with peers;
- artist’s relationship with themself

Audience engagement and stimulation
- relationship with audience

Fresh approach to the preservation or development of the artform
- relationship with the artform
- artist’s relationship with themself

Artist development
- relationship with the artist community

Community relevance
- relationship with the general community (national, State, local, specific groups)

Meta-relationships (relationships which cross all five elements) could include: relationship with staff and board; relationship with funders.

This idea feels like a small, conceptual breakthrough for me, though not sure it is of much use to anyone else ;-). As the physicist Richard Feynman once said, “All mass is interaction.” I think this is definitely the case in the arts.

The notion of relationships as core to the arts is certainly not new (network theory has reached even my ears!), but it may be useful for arts organisations to conceive of themselves as being deeply embedded in, indeed, essentially consisting of, a web of relationships (with themselves, other artists, public, audience, funders…).

On a practical level, thinking about an arts organisation as just one node of relationships, in the web of relationships that is the wider community, could help arts organisations understand why they should care about their wider relationships with the community. All relationships are connected: an organisation must nurture its relationships with public and community, and not just focus on their relationship with audiences and artists.

Thinking about an arts organisation as having a relationship with each individual in the community might also help with the tools of measurement for the expressive life.

For example, you could ask what impact the relationship with an arts organisation (even if the relationship is peripheral, in the form of institutional value – value merely by existing) has on each individual in the community’s “happiness” index, “creative” index and/or “social connectedness” index. You could cross-tabulate an individual’s results with their social connectedness results and so on, and adjust for other factors (like income and family), and see if artistically deeper-connected individuals are happier or more socially connected. This might be useful advocacy data for the arts organisations. I am pretty sure you have far more sophisticated ideas on this front, but this is off the top of my head, in response to your blog conversation.

Or in the context of helping arts organisations be more valuable members of their community, you could use the artistic vibrancy tools which we have published, and use the results to understand an arts organisation’s levels of connection with audience, artists, peers and community. The organisation could then use these results in future planning, to deepen these connections where necessary.

I think the relationship perspective can also be applied to “public value,” ie Holden’s idea of intrinsic, instrumental and institutional value. Really, this is like talking about an artist’s relationship with an individual, community or the general public.

Anyway, I look forward to future conversations on this front!

Jackie Bailey
Australia