Arts bailout/stimulus (last time)

The discussion, in so many comments, of my arts bailout post has been terrific. Many thanks to everyone.

In one comment, my friend Chris McGl stressed, as others did, the difference between a bailout and a stimulus, which I'm happy to acknowledge.

Chris also offered a link to data from Americans for the Arts on the economic impact of arts activity. Everyone concerned with this question should look at this data. It's important, and often cited in these debates:

The $166.2 billion in total economic activity [each year] has a significant national impact, generating the following:

5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs

$104.2 billion in household income

Etc.

But I don't quite know what to do with these numbers. What's the baseline? What do other industries contribute? How do these numbers break down from state to state, and city to city? Which kinds of spending for the arts has the most economic impact?

I also think there's something just a little disingenuous about these arguments. And there's a pitfall waiting just beyond them. What's disingenous is that we -- people in the arts (among whom I certainly count myself), and especially arts advocates -- don't support the arts because of their economic impact, or their effect on students' test scores, or for any other reason not directly linked to art itself. We support the arts because we love art, and think it's good for the world. We then cite extrinsic benefits (to adopt the term that specialists use), like the economicc effect of arts spending, to build a bridge to people who don't share our love of art, and give them a reason to support us.

Which is perfectly reasonable. Advocates for other industries will do the same. The pitfall, though, comes once we've made our economic case. Someone else comes along, and says, "Well, if the point of arts support is to generate economic activity, my own industry can generate even more of it." And then we've lost. This is why the Wallace Foundation, in their "Gifts of the Muse" report, suggested not using extrinsic arguments, and instead stressing the intrinsic benefits of art, which (as I've said) is where all of us start in the first place.

It can also be where we end, even if we start with economic arguments. When someone else says that their industry will do more for the economy (and hence should get the money), we're likely to come back with something about how intrinsically wonderful the arts are, what their moral impact is, how much they make us better people. That, joined with the economic data, becomes our argument.

Americans for the Arts supplements their economic data with a very helpful FAQ, in which they say:

Social service organizations, libraries, and all entities that spend money have an economic impact. What makes the economic impact of arts and culture organizations unique is that, unlike most other industries, they induce large amounts of related spending by their audiences. For example, when patrons attend a performing arts event, they may purchase dinner at a restaurant, eat dessert after the show, and return home and pay the baby-sitter. All of these expenditures have a positive and measurable impact on the economy.

And certainly I've heard others say that. A friend of mine, highly placed in the music business, said exactly this to me the other night.

The only problem here is that this is exactly the argument made in New York in support of Wall Street bonuses -- the very bonuses that raised such fury from ordinary people, and in Washington, from Democrats and Republicans alike, and most notably (most vehemently) from the president. In New York, restaurants are hurting and real estate prices are down, all because people who work in finance don't have as much money as they used to.

I feel this personally. My wife and I own an apartment in New York. Should we want to sell it, the young, well-off Wall Street people who bid up prices earlier in this decade are largely gone. Or at least there are fewer of them. They're the ones who bought almost all the apartments that changed hands in our building in the past few years. So our options, if we sold, would shrink -- quite beyond the decline in real estate prices that's the result of the bursting of the housing bubble.

But that doesn't mean that I support those bonuses. Nor does it mean that people in the city do. In fact, the idea has now been floated that New York's economy is out of whack, that too much of it depends on Wall Street money, which shrank dramatically when the bubble burst, and may not return. The thought then is to reorient the economy, not to put money back in Wall Street.

The same kind of thinking could apply to this trickle-down effect of the arts, the spending for restaurants and parking and the like. (Assuming those expenditures continue. As the recession grows, aren't people less likely to eat out when they go to a show?) Let's say a city's downtown is full of restaurants, expensive places (where, by the way, I myself love to eat). Let's say these restaurants would suffer if arts activity should shrink.

Maybe that means we have too many fancy restaurants! Maybe our economy is out of joint. Maybe we're spending too much money, society-wide, on fancy things (here we can also bring in the high salaries that top people in classical music make), and not enough on health care. Which we know is true!

So then the dinner and dessert argument can start to seem a little hollow. (Though I feel for the unemployed baby sitters!) And the arts again appear elitist.

We need to do better than that. (Though, God, I love those restaurants.)

(I think this is all I have to say on this subject.)

February 9, 2009 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

6 Comments

By Dave Irwin on February 9, 2009 7:44 PM

I agree that it is best to stress the intrinsic benefits of the arts. I became very uncomfortable when some educators began to tout the "Mozart Effect.," and we have all received surveys of arts organizations asking us to detail all the financial benefits we provide to the community.

I should, however, say that I think one of the most important attributes of arts in the schools these days is extrinsic. Just getting young people involved in a school band or choir provides an important activity for the students to learn and socialize in a decent environment. i.e, it keeps them busy doing something productive and beneficial, and teaches them life skills beyond music. Even marching bands make a big contribution to the lives of students that way, and often give them their sole contact with jazz or classical music.

This is such a timely and important conversation.
Thanks, Dave. And your point is important, too.

By David W. Fenton on February 9, 2009 10:58 PM

You write in your post:

Someone else comes along, and says, "Well, if the point of arts support is to generate economic activity, my own industry can generate even more of it."

This is missing the point.

The current issue (or, the issue when you originally posted, since I doubt any arts spending has survived the "sausage making") is whether or not spending money on the arts in a stimulus package is more effective than spending it on something else in that spending package.

The main criteria for good stimulus:

1. has an effective multiplier, i.e., $1 of government spending produces more than $1 in economic benefit.

2. produces its stimulative effect as quickly as possible.

The arts spending I've heard about seems to me to have been intended rather than for maintaining present arts programs and employment in the arts more than it is for adding new programs and jobs. Thus, it's very effective stimulus.

For criterion 1, there is no startup cost -- all the money goes towards maintaining present programs that are presently contributing to the economy, so as much as possible of the money allocated flows directly through to the intended endpoint.

For criterion 2, again, it's ideal, in that there's no waiting time -- all you're doing is keeping things going that are already in place.

Of course, the issue is not "is this stimulus spending good?" so much as "is this stimulus spending better than the alternatives?" That is an argument worth having, but it's one that can only exist with comparative data about the effectiveness of alternative stimulus programs.

My understanding was that during the shaping of the President's proposal, it was difficult to find "shovel-ready" projects sufficient to create a stimulus proportional to the expected economic loss. "Shovel-ready" is just shorthand for my criterion 1, i.e., how quickly the stimulus can start producing economic effects.

All commentators I've heard say that aid to the state governments to help avoid laying off police and teachers and workers in state agencies (as in California's 2-day furlow) is one of the most effective forms of stimulus -- the jobs already exist, and keeping them from going away is going to prop up the economy immediately by keeping it from absorbing a hit in an already contracting environment.

My understanding is that the proposed arts projects and jobs are like that, in that they don't create anything new, but just keep arts organizations from shrinking under the onslaught of our massive economic contraction.

In my opinion, it's not fair to claim that arts spending does not belong in the stimulus unless you can show that there is some other spending in some other sector that would be equally quick and effective (or moreso) and would support also programs that benefit more people (as part of their secondary effect).

--
David W. Fenton
http://dfenton.com/NoComment/
It's good to have such clear thinking here. Good for me, certainly. I'd only say that the calculations -- so to speak; I doubt if much solid calculating goes on -- in all of this are bound to be approximate, at best. And as I said in my first post, it's when arts funding goes directly up against funding for things like public health -- as happened in San Francisco -- that the debate gets uncomfortable. I think that's happening, explicitly or implicitly, all over the country now. And I'm not convinced that people in the arts are confronting that.

By Chris McG on February 10, 2009 12:57 AM

I knew Greg would say this, so for what it's worth, I remember going to a presentation in Philadelphia in 2005 or 6 (can't remember that well) by an organization called Artspace, who redevelop vacant warehouses and real estate into artist spaces. Anyway, the presentation was on the economic impact of the arts, and there was a comparison of return on investments in the arts vs. sports. Arts seriously trumped sports, though I don't remember the exact data or source of the data. I can't find anything on Artspace's website, which is here: http://www.artspace.org/

Maybe someone from Artspace reads this blog? Or someone from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance who was at the same presentation?

In the end, I'm much happier now that I work for an small arts organization where I can finally focus mostly on the intrinsic value of music. All this data is mindnumbing.
Great example, Chris. I'm sure that arts spending gets a greater return than sports spending. Especially public spending for sports stadiums. That's a boondoggle, from everything I've read. (For instance, Jim Bouton's book -- neglected, I think -- about his fight against a new stadium in Pittsfield, MA.)

And I agree. The discussion about data is mind-numbing, not just for you and me, but for everyone. Which is another political problem. It makes it all too likely that many people will fall back on prejudices, for instance a belief that art is a frill. And thus shouldn't be included in a stimulus. Again, I think people in the arts haven't thought enough about how to combat that.

By Richard Mitnick on February 10, 2009 10:13 AM

The very best bailout/stimulus for "The Arts" is when consumers spend money to buy tickets, art, recordings, whatever, and some of that money goes to the artist.

By magus on February 10, 2009 1:44 PM

I think one reason that artists so often go for the extrinsic arguments about the benefits of the arts is that arguments for the intrinsic benefits don't counter a prevailing cultural idea that making art is not work. I feel like artists are expected to do our work on our own time. I sometimes think of this as the "artists' tax." You can do your work, but expect not to get paid for it. Many artists work a day job, then put in the time creating "products" that benefit the community at no benefit to the artist other than satisfaction.
Yes!

This is something we should never forget. The people who do most to support the arts are artists themselves.

By Rebecca on February 24, 2009 3:22 PM

Check out the following article in this month's Pittsburgh Magazine for another take on the subject: http://www.wqed.org/mag/features/0209/arts4.php
Definitely is another take. Thanks, Rebecca.

Old debates
Seems like a couple of points often -- always? -- come up when I talk about changes -- aging, shrinkage -- in the classical music audience.

Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.

(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)

But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.

But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.

These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/

For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16% rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.

(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)

Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.

One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!

This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.

But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens' Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.

And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

So if the people in their 20s went to the opera constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.

Back in the day
Once upon a time, a generation ago or so, classical music was far closer to everyday life than it is now. We all know this, I'm sure. But it's good to be reminded. So here are four quick appearances of classical music in the popular culture of the past.

The Birds (the classic Hitchcock film, released in 1963): Tippi Hedren, the star, playing a woman in her 20s, visits a normal middle-class family, husband, wife, 11 year-old daughter. The family has a piano. Hedren sits down and plays Debussy's First Arabesque, which isn't identified, any more than her playing is remarked on in any way. Nobody says, "Oh, you play classical music." It's just taken or granted that she might.

Laura (the classic noir -- or, more accurately, semi-noir -- thriller, released in 1944): Vincent Price, playing a high-society type who appears to be in his early thirties (Price himself was 33 when the film was released), is a suspect in a murder case. Where was he, the detective asks, on the night of the murder? At a concert, he says. What music was played? Brahms's First and Beethoven's Ninth, he replies. And whether a concert program like that makes sense, or would have been heard back then, the fact that he's at a classical concert is simply taken for granted. There's nothing special about it. Of course he might have been there.

House Dick (a hard-boiled mystery thriller by E. Howard Hunt -- yes, the Watergate burglar, though that doesn't matter for my purposes here, and he turns out to be quite a sharp writer): The world-weary hotel detective, banged around by life, attracted to the wrong kind of women, has had a hard day. He goes home, and listens to Brahms on the radio. This is just a throwaway reference, nothing special about it, no need to explain why a tough ex-cop would listen to classical music. He just did it. The book was published in 1961.

And now my favorite, an extravagant interlude from Skylark Three, the second (despite the "three") in a trilogy of science fiction novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the greatest name in the great old tradition of "space opera," stories in which evil aliens plot destruction, planets explode, and the laws of physics are pretty much ignored. This book was serialized in Amazing Stories magazine in 1930.

For our purposes here, it doesn't matter why two married couples in their twenties are traveling through space, many times faster than the speed of light, saving the galaxy from a ghastly threat. Or why one of them plays a Strad. But here they are, entertaining themselves in a rare quiet moment:

"What say [says the hero, Richard Seaton] you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we'll sing us a little song? I feel good...it's the first time I've felt like singing since we cut that warship up."

Dorothy brought out her "fiddle" -- the magnificent Stradivarius, formerly Crane's, which he had given her, and they sang one rollicking number after another. Though by no means a Metropolitan Opera quartette, their voices were all better than mediocre, and they had sung together so much that they harmonized readily.

"Why don't you play us some real music, Dottie?" asked Margaret, after a time. "You haven't practiced for ages."

"Right. This quartette of ours ain't so hot," agreed Seaton. "If we had any audience except Shiro [their Japanese servant, an ethnic stereotype from a thankfully bygone age], they'd probably be throwing eggs by this time."

"I haven't felt like playing lately, but I do now," and Dorothy stood up and swept the bow over the strings. Doctor of Music in violin, an accomplished musician, playing upon one of the finest instruments the world has ever known, she was lifted out of herself by relief from the dread of the Fenachrone invasion and the splendid violin expressed every subtle nuance of her thought.

She played rhapsodies and paeans, and solos by the great masters. She played vivacious dances, then "Traumerei" and "Liebestraum." At last she swept into the immortal "Meditation" [this would be by Massenet, the "Meditation" from Thais], and as the last note died away Seaton held out his arms.

"You're a blinding flash and a deafening report, Dottie Dimple, and I love you," he declared -- and his eyes and his arms spoke volumes that his light utterance had left unsaid."

It's sweet that she plays light classics, which Doc Smith reveres as if they were the greatest masterworks. But note that these aren't culturally fancy people. Great scientists the men might be, and galaxy-spanning warriors, but as the dialogue shows, these are colloquial people (well, three of them are -- Seaton's buddy Crane is adorably stiff), in their behavior perfectly normal twentysomethings from their time. But classical music (which, if my memory is accurate, shows up just twice in the Skylark trilogy, is an easy part of their lives.

Dion on YouTube
He's singing his first big hit in the balcony of a theater, with his group (aka two backup guys) the Belmonts. The song is gentle, and if you listen to the words, it's supposed to be sad. "Why must I be a teenager in love?" But Dion is cocky and confident, enjoying his easy triumph. So this -- in Milan Kundera's famous definition -- can't be kitsch. There's no subtext telling us that he knows he's being sad, because he's not being sad. But the song is honest. It's about something he might have felt before he was famous. And surely it catches the helpless longing all the girls listening to him felt, all the girls clapping dutifully, right on the beat (because we white people hadn't yet learned what a backbeat is).

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Smart, searing TV series. For instance: Cameron looks like a teenage girl, but really she's a killer robot from the future, reprogrammed to help people, rather than kill them. But she's still a killer. And though she tries to understand human beings, she can't grasp empathy. Someone finds a turtle on its back, and turns it over, so it can walk again. Why do that? Cameron asks. Later she attacks -- with unrelenting violence -- a friend of the people she's helping, because she thinks he's a liar. "Stop," she's told. She looks down at the man -- battered, groaning -- and with no expression turns him over.

Lucinda Williams, Little Honey
Her most joyful album, but also her roughest -- very frayed, vocally, with edgiest band she's ever had. I don't know if I trust the joy (and I'm sad to say that), but she sounds like she's bitterly earned it.

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Arts bailout/stimulus (last time)

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