{"id":1116,"date":"2013-04-11T12:14:28","date_gmt":"2013-04-11T16:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/?p=1116"},"modified":"2013-04-11T15:49:28","modified_gmt":"2013-04-11T19:49:28","slug":"defining-our-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/2013\/04\/defining-our-value\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining Our Value"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Battersea\"<\/a>The recent flurry of articles around the \u201cfailure\u201d of the creative class to save our cities\u2014as Richard Florida\u2019s writings have been characterized as promising\u2014and the challenges of measuring the value of \u201ccreative placemaking\u201d has me wondering if we are nearing the end of the road for all of the instrumental arguments we have been making for the nonprofit arts over the past 30 years.\u00a0 Or perhaps we ran out of road a while back but just didn\u2019t notice.<\/p>\n

One of our most beloved arguments for support of the arts has been the idea that they contribute to economic development.\u00a0 With varying degrees of success and with varying qualities of arithmetical conjuring, we have clung to this instrumental argument in any way we can\u2014because it has resonance with those who control the purse strings and because it gives the work we do gravitas in an aggressively free market economy.\u00a0 We aren\u2019t frivolous\u2014we are remaking our cities and helping the economy.\u00a0 But a recent article<\/a> in Grist <\/i>by Susie Cagle demonstrates how imprecise and dangerous it can be to equate successful gentrification with social justice. \u00a0Flourishing commercial art galleries don\u2019t address the growing wealth inequality in America; they are beneficial as thriving businesses paying taxes and providing jobs, but that is all they are\u2014and all they need to be.\u00a0 Why then do we expect and even proclaim that the nonprofit arts will solve so many problems that everyone else is failing to solve, and that they will do it by improving economic performance measures?<\/p>\n

The appetite for instrumental (rather than intrinsic) measures of why the nonprofit arts matter is understandable.\u00a0 As a country, we talk in numbers and outcomes.\u00a0 We use market metrics not just to measure but to also legitimize<\/i> most of what we do, even when these metrics are inappropriate for what we are trying to achieve.[1]<\/a> \u00a0And the language around the intrinsic value of what we do is often received as vague, irrational and even sentimental. \u00a0I think there is an important truth contained in both intrinsic and instrumental measures, but think we have selected the wrong ones in the latter category.<\/p>\n

In his outstanding lecture at a conference in Baltimore in 2009, Jerome Kagan of Harvard talked about why arts education matters\u2014to all of us.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Dr. Kagan highlighted that \u201can excellent predictor of juvenile crime in a town or city is the magnitude of the difference in achievement between the top and bottom quartiles on the basic talents of reading and arithmetic.\u00a0 The size of this difference is also an excellent predictor of the incidence of adult criminality, depression and addiction to alcohol or drugs.\u00a0 America has one of the largest gaps between the top and bottom quartiles as well as the largest percent of incarcerated juveniles and adults of any developed society.\u201d\u00a0 Dr Kagan goes on to describe how important active participation in cultural activities is for helping young people develop both procedural knowledge (linking what our hands do with what our brains do) and schemata<\/i> (having the ability to create in our own minds representations of the world around us.)\u00a0 The latter is closely associated with success in scientific discovery\u2014but doesn\u2019t come as a result of drilling scientific formulae.\u00a0 Involvement in art and music require and develop the skilled use of both of these types of knowledge, and having this ability increases performance in other areas of academic work.\u00a0 The NEA has recently released reports that underscore this link.\u00a0 In addition, Kagan reminds us that \u201cThe combined use of hands and imagination makes an important contribution to what it means to \u201cknow\u201d something.\u00a0 You cannot learn to play tennis by reading a book.\u201d<\/p>\n

What if our value had nothing to do with how much money we generated, but by how we create opportunities for people to rehearse the skills of civil discourse (Martha Nussbaum\u2019s compelling argument) or for people to have the right to an expressive life, as Bill Ivey has coined the phrase?\u00a0 What if the very fact that we are not concerned with money as our most important metric is in fact the greatest value of the work that we do?\u00a0 What if bringing people together to form, however briefly, a community of experience is what we set as our highest aspiration, rather than a transactional measure of how much money this generates.\u00a0 We need money to operate our organizations, but what if every<\/span> measure of our success by our own reckoning was how successful we were in creating those communities for the greatest number of people,\u00a0no matter how our organizations need to be restructured and reframed to do this?<\/p>\n

The picture of the bee in this post comes from the floor of the Battersea Arts Centre in London.\u00a0 Built with small subscription gifts from many hundreds of Victorians who wanted a community based arts building, the motto inscribed near the bees, a symbol of industry and collective effort, is Not for me, not for you but for us<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0<\/i><\/b>\u00a0It may be that our biggest instrumental value is that we care about us<\/i><\/b> as an idea and as a necessity if we are to advance as a society.\u00a0 Perhaps we should start talking about how much this matters without defensiveness and with a great deal of pride.\u00a0 The creative economy is a by-product, not an end game.<\/p>\n


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[1]<\/a> Michael Sandel, What Isn\u2019t for Sale?, Atlantic Monthly, February 2012.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]<\/a> Jerome Kagan, Ph.D, keynote speech for Learning, Arts and the Brain, <\/i>held at the American Visionary Arts Museum in 2009.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent flurry of articles around the \u201cfailure\u201d of the creative class to save our cities\u2014as Richard Florida\u2019s writings have been characterized as promising\u2014and the challenges of measuring the value of \u201ccreative placemaking\u201d has me wondering if we are nearing the end of the road for all of the instrumental arguments we have been making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[25,91,61,46],"coauthors":[135],"class_list":{"0":"post-1116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-nas-experience","7":"tag-community","8":"tag-connection","9":"tag-meaning","10":"tag-value-2","11":"entry","12":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1116"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}