Jack Fischer in the Mercury News offers a summary and commentary (username: ajreader@artsjournal.com, password: access) about a recent Silicon Valley Arts Summit. The summit brought community and arts leaders together to explore the role of the arts in San Jose and its surrounding area.
According to the official conference web site:
Attendees left the Arts Summit with a renewed sense of excitement about regional arts, a realization that they are part of a collaborative effort that has the power to strengthen the regional arts infrastructure, and a commitment to active participation in that effort.
That’s grant-speak for ‘we had a nice conversation, and we’re not sure if anything will come of it.’
According to Fischer’s commentary, the event was an attempt by the non-profit American Leadership Forum to give members something to lead. However, he says:
Really bold leadership would have drawn up a budget for the summit, then used the money to endow a fund to subsidize the rent of the area’s artists, musicians and choreographers, who still receive no housing help from the city. The record is that talk begets talk. Perhaps action would beget action.
The new twist on these ‘arts summits’ (okay, not that new) is the focus on the creative workforce, in addition to economic impact of arts audiences (when you think about it, the creative class discussion is just another flavor of economic impact, really). At the Silicon Valley event, that thought was further extended to discuss the public education system. According to Fischer again:
Sir Ken Robinson, a Los Angeles-based senior adviser to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said at a luncheon meeting of corporate CEOs at the summit that the real key to broader support is remaking a public educational system that was created for an industrial society. Robinson said that system is outmoded because it gives highest priority to math and science, followed by the humanities and, last of all, the arts.But in the post-industrial world that Silicon Valley epitomizes, surveys show that among corporate managers’ greatest concerns is where to find creative employees — individuals, Robinson said, with precisely the skills the arts engender, like generating ideas and solving problems in new ways.
Fischer is right to be moaning a bit about the now stale (and seemingly endless) conversations about valuing the arts in terms of urban economics. And he offers some great quotes from Ben Cameron’s closing keynote to reinforce that point (here’s one: ”People don’t say, ‘You know, honey, if we go the theater tonight it will generate five to seven additional dollars for the local economy,’ or ‘You know, children in communities with art museums score 50 points higher in their SATs.’ . . . They do it because it’s fun.”).
But he may be making a different mistake in longing for the days of the Medicis and the Renaissance patronage system in arts and culture:
…the Medicis weren’t asking Michelangelo why this was good for business.
Much of patronage way back then was about exercising and demonstrating power and affluence. It may be better to consider a new balance and incentive system for supporting cultural expression, rather than returning to an ancient one, or remaining stuck in our current economic impact trap.
