Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

On “looky-loos” and the institutions who are desperate for them and desperate for them to behave

Bathroom Celebs at the Met Gala. Photo: Courtesy of Twitter/victuuris95

On the recommendation of a couple friends who are artists I recently read Dave Hickey’s fantastic 1997 memoir Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy.

As I was reading a couple essays, in particular, I kept thinking about the recent tizzy over the behavior of a pack of celebrities attending the Met gala, who hid out in the bathroom to socialize, take selfies, and smoke.  AJ blogger, Judith Dobrzynski, who commented on the incident in her post, If This Can Happen at the Met and the British Museum … We Have a Big Problem, suggests that the Met is just one (though perhaps an extreme and high profile) example of a growing trend: people who don’t know how to behave in cultural institutions. In her post, Dobrzynski also recounts that the British Museum suffers approximately 50 acts of “pencil graffiti on its ancient sculptures” each year (mostly by schoolchildren).

Her conclusion:

I’ve increasingly noticed the posting of Don’ts, and sometimes Dos, at museums. They do not seem to be enough.

Reading Hickey’s memoir this past week I was suddenly struck by the way arts organizations have set themselves up for this very situation.

There are a few essays in Hickey’s memoir that I suspect will become lifelong touchstones for me. One is called “Romancing the Looky-Loos.” Looky-loos is Hickey’s dad’s term for those who pay “their dollar at the door” for concerts or art experiences, “but contribute nothing”–spectators, rather than participants. Hickey distinguishes these two types writing, “while spectators must be lured, participants just appear, looking for that new thing.”

Participants show up (no luring necessary) Hickey argues, because they have a “passion for what is going on” and because showing up is a way “to increase the social value of the things you love.” Participants show up for the conversation (both literal and metaphorical). While participants decide what they love and then give it their attention, Hickey says spectators love whatever is the winning side—”the side with the chic building, the gaudy doctorates, and the star-studded cast. They seek out spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions and corporations.”

The very next essay in the volume—also a new favorite—is called “The Heresy of Zone Defense.” Among other themes, Hickey riffs on basketball and how it has evolved since 1891 from being a “socially redeeming” activity for recidivist, working-class youth to a sport that is “more joyful, various, and articulate.” That evolution, Hickey argues, is a result of “changing the rules when they threatened[ed] to make the game less beautiful and less visible.” Put another way, the rule changes in basketball over the past century all have been designed to improve the game’s aesthetics.

Hickey contrasts the sort of rules that seek to liberate from those that seek to govern and says that “nearly every style change in fine art has been, in some way, motivated” by the latter. He contrasts the evolution in basketball from that of art, writing:

Thus basketball, which began this century as a pedagogical discipline, concludes it as a much beloved public spectacle, while fine art, which began this century as a much-beloved public spectacle, has ended up where basketball began—in the YMCA or its equivalent—governed rather than liberated by its rules.

Putting the two essays together I’m left with a few thoughts on both the Met smoking-in-the-girls’-room scandal and the more general “problem” (as it is being framed) of people “misbehaving” at cultural institutions:

First, if our economic models depend on drawing exponentially more looky-loos than participants then is it really reasonable to expect those lured to our events by aggressive marketing or buzz to be sincerely interested in the arts experience and aware of the rules of the game, so to speak?

Second, while concerns around smoking in the building or drawing on valuable artworks are, indeed, warranted, it strikes me that the big problem is not that people are no longer following museum rules on how to behave. The big problem is that, in response to this situation, museums seem to think the answer is to post more rules–a strategy that has already taken much of the joy out of arts experiences. Of course the celebs that are forced to make a command performance at the Met gala, or risk the wrath of Anna Wintour, rebel in the bathroom. Of course the school kids, confused perhaps because in other areas of life they are encouraged to create and participate, mistakenly draw on the sculptures.

So what’s the solution if, as Dobrzynski suggests, over time an increasing portion of the culture doesn’t seem to get the rules, or seems to grasp them but not to respect them?

Perhaps to find a solution we first need to reframe the problem from a version of “How do we survive in this world that is clearly no longer good enough for us?” to something else. Rather than trying to figure out how to police the culture, perhaps arts institutions could ask themselves:

  • Where are we aggressively luring looky-loos rather than inviting participation? and
  • Where are our rules seeking to govern artists and participants, rather than liberate them?

And let’s be honest: How many arts organizations actually want or expect meaningful participation from their version of the looky-loos? I’d wager most are lured primarily for the optics and economic gains to the institution.We want to eat our cake and have it, too. We want everyone to show up but we don’t want to widen our conception of what makes for a great arts experience. Inviting everyone and then shoving a long list of rules in their hands is a short-term solution likely to result in many of those people henceforth looking elsewhere for an experience that is participatory, relevant, and joyful–the NBA finals, perhaps.

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On Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theatre is it, Really?)

This essay was originally published in Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts by the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. Many thanks to Linda Essig for permission to syndicate it on Jumper.

On Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theater Is It, Really?) by Diane Ragsdale

But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. 

President John F. Kennedy (Remarks at Amherst College, 1963)

In his paper on the creative industries and cultural entrepreneurship Richard Swedberg examines “the parallels between the entrepreneur and the artist, according to the young [Joseph] Schumpeter” (Swedberg, 2006, p. 250). Swedberg conveys that, among other characteristics, the artist/entrepreneur (as contrasted with the static majority) “puts together new combinations,” “battles resistance to his actions,” and is “motivated by power and joy in creation.” I was disquieted when I encountered this discussion of cultural entrepreneurship a few years ago; however, it took completing a case study on the Margo Jones Theatre last year for me to identify the source of my unease.

Margo Jones is generally credited by theater historians with having founded the prototypical nonprofit-but-professional resident theater in Dallas, Texas in 1947. Among a handful of “pattern-setting elements” attributed to Jones’s theater, her adoption of the nonprofit form is said to have had “the most far-reaching effects” on regional theater in America (Berkowitz, 1982, p. 58). It is difficult to refute the statement if one considers that before 1950 there were almost no examples of professional (read: unionized) theaters organized as nonprofit corporations and that today there are hundreds. Nevertheless, it is ironic that one of the few enduring dimensions of Jones’s unique theater model—which combined elements of the community, academic, art, and commercial theater—was its nonprofit status.

While Jones founded her theater as a nonprofit “civic venture” (Jones, 1951, p. 67) there is considerable evidence that she didn’t actually run it like one. Jones is said to have “believed firmly that the head of a theatre must of necessity be an autocrat—which [she] unquestionably was” (Larsen, 1982, p. 123). Likewise, her biographer relays that when the business chairman of the board “expressed a desire to have more authority over how money was spent and accounted for,” Jones declared, “I will not be confined!” and “demanded 100 percent artistic and financial control” (Sheehy, 1989, p. 236). In return, the board of directors gave Jones a “free hand” and “unquestioning support” (Wilmeth, 1989, p. 365). Evidently, it “was not disposed to refusing her whatever she wanted” (Larsen, 1982, p. 183). Jones was able to dominate the theater in part because the economics of the arena-style venue she created enabled “the organization to depend solely on ticket sales for operating expenses” (Wilmeth, 1965, p. 269). Moreover, Jones actively avoided soliciting donations from the community, beyond the $40,000 (in 1946 dollars) she raised to convert a found space into a theater and produce her first season.

In her manifesto-handbook, Theatre-in-the-Round, Jones suggests three business forms that a resident theater might take: nonprofit, sole proprietorship, or stock company funded with investments from shareholders (Jones, 1951, p. 66-67). One of Jones’s so-called followers—though a maverick in her own right—was Zelda Fichandler, who co-founded the Arena Stage in Washington, DC in 1950 as a stock company utilizing shareholder investments. It sustained itself on box office income and converted to the nonprofit form only when doing so became a condition of a significant grant from the Ford Foundation. For years after the conversion, Fichandler expressed concerns about the potential influence of the public on the institution—a worry captured and explained in this poetic passage (Fichandler, 1970, p. 110):

I am not very strong on community giving, except perhaps when it represents only a small percentage of the total. I think we could well do without the hand that rocks the cradle, for the hand that rocks the cradle will also want to raise it in a vote and mix into the pie with it. For while a theatre is a public art and belongs to its public, it is an art before it is public and so it belongs first to itself and its first service must be self-service. A theatre is part of its society. But it is a part which must remain apart since it is also chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater—another organization that consulted with Jones before opening—was founded in 1954 as a hybrid nonprofit-stock company. It solicited donations from the community, which it combined with investments by its founder, Mary Widrig John, who held a majority of shares in the stock corporation. This unorthodox pairing reflected John’s desire (akin to that of Margo Jones) to involve the community financially in raising a theater from the ground, but to exercise control over its direction once raised. According to one chronicler, there was “growing dissension among the staff and board of directors regarding John’s authority. The crucial question to be answered was whether the theatre belonged to John or to the public” (Pinkston, 1989, p. 377). The matter eventually went to court and a judge ruled that the theater could not be nonprofit and have shareholders. It became a non-stock nonprofit corporation and John departed.

One imagines that if Certified B Corporations or Low-Profit Limited Liability Corporations had been in existence at the time either one would have been a preferable legal structure for these theaters, given the goals of their entrepreneurial leaders. It is no coincidence that we are witnessing the creation and adoption of hybrid forms of organization alongside the emergence of social, cultural, creative, and arts entrepreneurs. Such forms are ideally suited to those who want to do work that benefits society but don’t want to relinquish ownership or control over their enterprises to do so.

And this brings me to the source of my unease. For all intents and purposes, the Margo Jones Theatre (née Theatre ’47) was operated by Jones as if it were a sole proprietorship (i.e. a private enterprise). Put another way, in terms of funding and control, Jones’s theater was, to a great extent, lacking in publicness (see e.g. Andrews, R., Boyne, G. A. & Walker, R. M., 2011). Moreover, the characteristics that made Jones a highly successful artist/entrepreneur made it nearly impossible for the board of the nonprofit theater (owned by no one and therefore everyone) to exercise what is now generally taken to be good governance, including: oversight of the theater’s financial health, determination of the theater’s goals, and representation of the public’s interest in the theater. Tellingly, following Jones’s untimely death in 1955, the board of directors seized the power that had been denied them for years, dismantled many of Jones’s policies, and took the theater in a different (and ultimately fatal) direction.

As I ponder the motives, opportunities, and means of the three pioneering leaders highlighted in this essay, the parallel characteristics of the artist and entrepreneur as theorized by Schumpeter, and the emergence of new hybrid private/public organizational forms, a philosophical question emerges—in large part because I hear calls these days for nonprofit arts organizations to become both more entrepreneurial (i.e. innovative and self-sustaining) and more communal (i.e. responsive to, or representative of, the communities they ostensibly exist to serve).

Is there an inherent, underexamined, and perhaps necessarily unresolvable conflict between the autonomy or authority needed by the artist/entrepreneur and the publicness required of the 501c3 charitable nonprofit, in order for them effectively to fulfill their respective roles vis-à-vis society?

REFERENCES

Andrews, R., Boyne, G. A. & Walker, R. M. (2011). Dimensions of publicness and organizational performance: A review of the evidence. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 21(Issue Supplement 3), i301-i319.

Berkowitz, G. M. (1982). New Broadways: Theatre across America 1950-1980. Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield.

Fichandler, Z. (1970). Theatres or institutions? The American Theatre 1969-70: International Theatre Institute of the United States, Volume 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Jones, M. (1951). Theatre-in-the-Round. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Kennedy, J. F. (1963). Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963. Retrieved at: https://www.arts.gov/about/kennedy-transcript

Larsen, J. B. (1982). Margo Jones: A Life in the Theatre (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Accession Order No. 8222956)

Pinkston, A. (1989). Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. In W. B. Durham (Ed.) American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986 (376-386). New York: Greenwood Press.

Sheehy, H. (1989/2005). Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones (1st paperback ed.) Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Swedberg, R. (2006). The cultural entrepreneur and the creative industries: Beginning in Vienna. Journal of Cultural Economics, Volume 30(4), 243-261.

Wilmeth, D. B. (1965). A History of the Margo Jones Theatre (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Accession Order No. 6503696)

Wilmeth, D. B. (1989). Margo Jones Theatre. In W. B. Durham (Ed.) American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986 (362-369). New York: Greenwood Press.

 

 

Is artistic leadership at America’s arts institutions lacking? Is this at the root of declining relevancy?

Joe Horowitz has written a stirring essay on the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, and New York Philharmonic on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Center. In response, ArtsJournal has asked a number of people to consider the essay and to weigh in on a series of questions (paraphrased):

Is artistic leadership at America’s arts institutions lacking? Moreover, is this at the root of declining relevancy of the arts? Is something more, or better, needed from America’s arts institutions, particularly at this vexing and critical time?

This essay explores these questions through the lens of the American theater. At the heart of this essay rests the paradox of the Public Arts Institution—a paradox captured beautifully in this passage from a 1970 essay by Arena Stage co-founder, Zelda Fichandler, Theatres or Institutions?[1]

I am not very strong on community giving, except perhaps when it represents only a small percentage of the total. I think we could well do without the hand that rocks the cradle, for the hand that rocks the cradle will also want to raise it in a vote and mix into the pie with it. For while a theatre is a public art and belongs to its public, it is an art before it is public and so it belongs first to itself and its first service must be self-service. A theatre is part of its society. But it is a part which must remain apart since it is also chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.

This is a paradox I also wrestled with in an essay published in the most recent issue of Artivate called On Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theatre is it, Really?). 

Part I: Are We Weeding, or Breeding, Artistic Leadership Out of the Field?

Joe Horowitz’s story is a tale of three organizations, only one of which (New York City Ballet) succeeded in changing the face of its art form. What made the difference at the Ballet? By my reading, there was first and foremost a will on the part of both Balanchine and his impresario, Kirstein, to do so; and second, conditions were ripe for these institutional entrepreneurs to make their move.

Last year I worked on a case study on the Margo Jones Theatre, founded in 1947 (in Dallas, Texas) and hailed by most theater historians as the prototypical modern resident theater. Jones produced exclusively new plays and classics. In an average season Jones produced 4-5 premieres and two classics; in contrast, of 23 resident theaters surveyed in 1965 by journalist Sandra Schmidt, 15 produced no new plays at all and four produced only one.[2] At the time, most resident theaters exemplified the vibrant museum model described in Horowitz’s essay.

Historians often chalk this up to a discomfort with new fare on the part of both institutional leaders and their audiences. Perhaps. It seems Jones overcame discomfort by reading a minimum of one new script every day of her life from her college days onward and, more importantly, she made her audience comfortable with new fare through the same process: repeated exposure.

Like Balanchine, Jones had a vision and the will to execute it. Importantly, she also had a business manager who supported her commitment to new plays and a board of directors that gave her free reign. Equally as important, resident theater in America was in its pioneer period. But the first condition is critical. Jones was devoted to playwrights and preached far and wide that nonprofit regional theaters had a moral duty to produce new plays being rejected by the commercial stage, in lieu of relying on Broadway revivals–fare favored by both commercial winter stock companies and community theaters at the time.

We seem to have few such zealots running American LORT theaters these days.

Why is that?

I don’t believe it’s because none exist.

Consider the driving emphasis on instilling arts institutional leaders with business skills since 1960; the now mandatory requirements of a track record of raising money and delivering box office hits (that will fill Broadway-sized venues) to attain the job of artistic director at a major theater; the lack of artists on nonprofit boards, or even many individuals with an aesthetic sensibility; and the dramatic power shift from artist-leaders to business-leaders, generally.

Maybe we have been breeding, or weeding, artistic leadership out of the field?

Margo Jones didn’t like to raise money from the community, she demanded 100% control of her theater, and she walked into the job interview saying to the board, in essence: Count me out if you are planning to be a theater of the past, “striving to exist on box-office hits,” as I am only interested in creating “a true playwright’s theatre, presenting original scripts and providing playwrights with an outlet for their work.”[3]

If Margo Jones were applying to run an American theater in the hinterlands of the US today she probably wouldn’t stand a chance.

Part II: Artists are Getting it Done … But Are Institutions Getting in the Way?

I recently had the privilege of attending a Salzburg Global Seminar called The Art of Resilience: Creativity, Courage and Renewal. Among many inspiring presentations was one by artist Anida Yoeu Ali, a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Anida talked about a number of her works, including a performance installation called The Red Chador: Thresholds, created for a 2016 Smithsonian event called Crosslines: A Culture Lab on Intersectionality. The work asked viewers: “Can we accept a Muslim woman as a patriotic woman?”

The Red Chador: Threshold, Washington DC, USA | May 28-29, 2016. Commissioned by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Performance by Anida Yoeu Ali.                               Photo Courtesy of Les Talusan

Over breakfast one morning I asked Anida, “So how would you respond to the question, ‘What is the role of the artist post-Trump?” and she said, “Same as always. No different. Get up and do the work.”

The day after the election Anida took to the streets of Seattle, where she is now based, wearing the red, glittering chador she created for the Smithsonian performance installation and holding a sign that on one side said, I AM A MUSLIM and, on the other, BAN ME.

The Red Chador: The Day After, Seattle, USA | Nov 9, 2016. Performance by Anida Yoeu Ali.  Photo courtesy of Studio Revolt.

What’s my point?

Artists are doing something about it, same as always.

However, most artists depend upon institutional outlets for protection, platforms, and resources for that something to be fully realized.

To this very point, the New York Times recently ran an article on a new play by Robert Schenkkan, written in a “white-hot fury” in one week. Characterized as a “disquieting response to the Trump era,” it’s called Building the Wall.  Schenkkan says in the article:

We no longer live in a world that is business as usual—Trump has made that very clear—and if theater is going to remain relevant, we must become faster to respond.

While the article goes on to mention that a group of theaters has committed to producing the play within the next few months, it’s worth noting that (a) this sort of response is exceedingly rare; and (b) the theaters that have stepped up are largely part of a small alliance of exemplary midsized theaters (the National New Play Network) that has fought the past decade or so to shift stultifying practices around new play development in the US.

Most institutions are not able to respond quickly to artists (doing something about it) in large part because artists exist outside of institutions rather than within them. While resident theaters were initially idealized as homes for actors, writers, and designers what they have become in reality is homes for administrators and technicians. Even when artists are in residence they quite often have minimal (if any) power within institutions, or influence on them. And we have had a number of instances of institutional cowardice (if not censorship) in recent years. (See, e.g. this article on the experience of Anida Yoeu Ali and Gregg Deal at the Smithsonian event mentioned above.)

I have heard playwrights say that they write for television these days not only because they make more money but because it is a more creative and validating environment than the nonprofit American theater. That is a sobering thought.

Perhaps any lack of courage, vision, or moral imagination in arts organizations is related to the extent to which arts leaders have managed risk by disempowering artists or placing them outside the institution?

Part III: Do arts leaders identify too much with their upper middle class donors?

I was at a conference a few weeks ago and heard a development staffer bemoaning over her morning croissant that she had spent the better part of the prior two weeks trying to learn everything she could about some Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Couple in her city so that her institution could launch a stealth courtship and, with any luck, land a major gift. She commented that, as far as anyone could tell, this couple had never stepped foot in the doors of the institution. She fretted over the fact that she was dedicating every working moment to deeply understanding two wealthy people with no relationship whatsoever to the institution; while nary a nanosecond was being expended trying to learn about the values, hopes, dreams, and challenges of the loyal patrons who were not in a position to make an extraordinary gift to the institution.

While donor research and cultivation has become a serious science, the ideology driving such behavior has been with us since the founding of the nonprofit-professional arts sector in the US. I am amazed that we are able to say with a straight face that America’s 20th century nonprofit-professional theater companies were largely established to serve the general public when many institutionalized a practice (at their inceptions) that would ensure they paid attention to the needs of the upper middle class at the expense of all others.

In the 1960s Danny Newman persuaded theaters that it was better (not just economically better, but morally better) to focus their time and resources on the 3% of the population that is inclined to subscribe and to ignore everyone else. Though some artistic directors rebelled mightily against this approach in the theater industry—Richard Schechner and Gregory Mosher were among the most vocal who noted that it was undemocratic and had a stultifying effect on programming—it was embraced wholeheartedly by a majority of institutions. This was in large part because it was strongly encouraged by the Ford Foundation and its proxy at the time, Theatre Communications Group.

Today marketing firms promulgate customer relationship management models like this one promoted by TRG Arts. This sort of philosophy upheld over time will invariably orient an organization toward caring more about those who can buy more tickets and donate more money.

Arts institutions cannot uphold Zelda Fichandler’s notion of the theatre as belonging to the public but first belonging to itself if they are, essentially, social clubs for the upper middle class. The institution cannot be “chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter” if it has neither independence nor publicness.

Perhaps a driving focus on cultivating the patronage of the upper middle class has skewed the politics and purposes of arts institutions, and also has been a major factor in declining relevancy? On the most fundamental level nonprofit art institutions are among the cultural spaces that are able to bring people together across divides on equal terms—a vital function that is, at times like these, in and of itself a political act. However, it seems we have too gladly ceded that role to sports and (lately) to some exemplary libraries around the world (see, e.g., the library parks in Colombia) that have transformed their purposes for the 21st century.

Part IV: Good We Are Awake. Now, Can we Stay Awake?

Shortly after Trump was elected a particular a phrase from Tony Kushner’s masterpieces Angels in America, parts I and II began to appear on my Facebook feed, which is to a great extent populated by liberal arts types like me. That phrase: “The Great Work Begins.”

The statement, in turns hopeful and harrowing depending on its context in the plays, provoked two questions for me:

What is our Great Work in the arts? (which I addressed in this Jumper post); and

Why is this Great Work beginning only now, after Trump’s election?

Put another way, why does it so often take a crisis for those of us working in the arts, in the so-called civic sphere, to engage with the struggles, the pain, the hopes, the dreams, the fears … of our communities-at-large?

The extraordinary observer of the human condition, writer Rebecca Solnit, reflects in her beautiful book, Hope in the Dark:

Americans are good at responding to crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew.

She says this is, in part …

… because we tend to think that political engagement is something for emergencies rather than, as people in many countries (and Americans at other times) have imagined, as part and even a pleasure of everyday life.

“The problem” as she puts it, “seldom goes home.”

Unlike television (and libraries) the American theater didn’t use the Digital Revolution combined with the Great Recession as an opportunity to radically transform itself so as to become more relevant, more vibrant, more accessible, more vital—and yes, more economically sustainable.

It seems we have another shot as, for many in the arts sector, Trump seems to represent a wake-up call.

Perhaps now is the time to prioritize artistic vision over business skills; to grant artists primacy within the arts institution; and to shift attention from wealthy donors to the community-at-large. Perhaps now is the time to embrace the paradox of being Public Arts Institutions: a part of society—but a part which must remain apart in order to fulfill its multifaceted role as “chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.”

Finally, perhaps engaging in public affairs for the next four years will remind arts institutions that this is not the Great Work we must do now, this is the everyday work–the doing something about it–we should have been doing the past 30 years and that we must continue to do post 2020.

PS – Huge shout out to Deborah Cullinan at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I love her notion of art centers existing to ignite radical citizenship and I love the YBCA campaign that resulted in the tagline pictured in the photo at the top of this post, which was an inspiration for this piece. 

***

[1] Fichandler, Z. (1970). Theatres or Institutions? The American Theatre 1969-70: International Theatre Institute of the United States, Volume 3. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p. 110.

[2] Schmidt, S. (1965). The Regional Theatre: Some Statistics. The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 50-61.

[3] Sheehy, H. (1989). Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press), p. 88.

What is our “Great Work” in light of this election?

Several hours ago now, Donald J. Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the United States. I haven’t slept in 36 hours. As the results of the election became clear, more than a few theater friends on my Facebook feed began to post the words: “The Great Work Begins”—a reference to a phrase in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika. Fueled by confusion and concern, and with a desire to spur myself and others to both reflection and action, I offer this post (a combination of new thoughts and those I’ve generated elsewhere over the past two years). I hope I can enjoin others to engage in a practical and hopeful conversation about where we go from here and the perhaps “painful progress” that we in the arts need to make.[1]

By the way, I am honored and delighted to announce that I recently began a 15-month fellowship as a (mostly virtual) Arts Blogger/Writer in Residence at the Thomas S. Kenan Institute at North Carolina School of the Arts. In the coming months you may see some of my Jumper posts syndicated on the Kenan website and vice versa.

From the Wikipedia Commons

From the Wikipedia Commons

At 10:58 pm Eastern—before the game-ending number of electoral votes had been reached and while Hillary Clinton still had at least a few pathways to 270—columnist Paul Krugman posted:

We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks—incredibly, horribly—as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, like most readers of the New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in.

From where I stand, those working in nonprofit professional cultural organizations across the US—we in the so-called Creative Class—are, without a doubt, among those who did not understand our country, its culture, or its values. If we are shocked and outraged by the election results this only seems to prove the point. And this lack of understanding is disappointing given that art can be—arguably, should be—the way we share with one another what it means to be human (a powerful and democratizing notion I first encountered in Bill Sharpe’s wonderful monograph, Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth).

Looking at the programming on our stages it seems that many of us have existed inside a bubble, utterly out of touch with the Trump-supporting working poor in America, among many others.

How did this happen?

Virginia Woolf writes in her book, Three Guineas:

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.

This statement is hauntingly resonant when I think about the arts and culture sector in the US. The price of success has been the loss of our humanity as organizations. We appear to have lost our senses.

I came to this realization in June 2014 at a residential training with the organization Common Cause, which seeks to encourage NGOs and others working in the social sectors to join up to advance a set of common values in society—values like A World of Beauty, Social Justice, Equality, A Sense of Belonging, Broadmindedness, A Meaningful Life.[2] At the first gathering, when we went around a circle and talked about why we had chosen to come on the training, I said something to this effect:

I’m here because I don’t know if I can continue to work on behalf of the arts if the arts are only interested in advancing themselves.

I’m here because I’m worried about things like growing income inequality and suspect that growing income inequality may actually benefit the arts. And what are we going to do about that? I’m here because I’m worried about cultural divides and that the arts perpetuate them more than they help to bridge them.

I believe the arts could be a force for good, but I believe we will need to change as leaders, and as organizations, in relationship to our communities, for them to be so.

I was despairing about my life working in the arts when I spoke these words and I felt that same despair this morning in the aftermath of the election. But it is incumbent upon us to move on from sorrow as there is important work to be done. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued in this article that there are forces coursing through all modern societies that, while liberating for the individual, are challenging to social cohesion—meaning the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper together.

Friends, this is our crisis today. And we need to wake up to it.

Do we really want to be #strongertogether? If so, who better than the arts to help repair the divides in our country? Who better than we to contribute to the fostering of social cohesion? And do we understand that, without this, many other aspects of society—including the economy—will continue to break down?

So how do we begin again?

Honestly, it feels impossible at the moment. Nonetheless, I’d like to suggest that we might start by borrowing a page out of the play book of a colleague in the UK, Andrew McIntyre. For the past few years Andrew has been leading workshops in which he guides arts organizations to write manifestos. He justifies this work saying:

If you just want to organize the world a little more efficiently, you’ll get away with just a business plan. But if you want to change the world, leave your artistic mark, make a cultural impact or have ever used the word transform, then nothing short of a manifesto will do. Manifestos are open letters of intent that are fundamental and defining. They terminate the past and create a vision of new worlds. They demand attention, inspire and galvanize communities around us and knowingly antagonize others. They provoke action.

As citizens of a country that feels dangerously unstable, incoherent, unmoored, precarious, and divided, I suggest we begin by tearing up the generally lifeless and useless corporate mission statements that currently guide many of our organizations. In their place let us compose manifestos grounded in the reality of the present moment. Here are some questions to get you started:

What are you laboring for that transcends your organization and position within it—what values, goals, or progress in the world? Indeed, what are we laboring for collectively? Do we have a common cause?

It’s a small way to begin.

In his 2014 keynote address for a reunion of Asian American alumni at Yale, Vijay Ayer remarked:

Now that I am hanging my hat each week at that other centuries-old corporation of higher learning, just up the road in Cambridge, I am more and more mindful of what the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has called complicity with excess.

And as we continue to consider, construct and develop our trajectories as Americans, I am also constantly mindful of what it means to be complicit with a system like this country, with all of its structural inequalities, its patterns of domination, and its ghastly histories of slavery and violence.

Many of us are here because we’ve become successful in that very context. … Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America—which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.

As we write our manifestos, let us do so cognizant of the possibility that the success of our institutions may be related to decades of “complicity with excess” and let us also temper any tendencies toward self-righteousness, bearing in mind the words of American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political activist, Courtney Martin.[3]  Perhaps, she says,

…our charge is not to save the world after all, it is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.

If we are to fulfill our highest purposes as communal organizations—places where art can provide a way for people to share with one another what it means to be human—then it seems that we arts workers will need to let go of the notion upon which many nonprofit professional cultural organizations were founded: that we exist, essentially, to save the world with art (and, quite often, with Western European Bourgeois Art, specifically). Instead, it seems that our first charge is to live fully in our tragically divided country and participate fully in our tragically broken democracy. Fleeing physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually is to deny both our culpability and power to make a difference. (And, yes, in case you are wondering, I’m planning to move back to the US when I finish my dissertation.)

It’s time to walk out into our communities, with our senses wide open, and absorb “the relations between one thing and another.”

It’s time to find our humanity and help others to find theirs.

***

[1]  “The World only spins forward. We will be citizens. […] More Life. The Great Work Begins.” “Painful progress” is also from Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Peristroika: “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”

[2] These values are taken from the research of Shalom Schwartz. You can read more about this at http://valuesandframes.org/handbook/

[3] From her book, Do It Anyway, as cited by Krista Tippet in the session: Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin – The Inner Life of Rebellion. http://www.onbeing.org/program/parker-palmer-and-courtney-martin-the-inner-life-of-rebellion/7122

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Insiders and Outsiders: Reflections on “The Art of Relevance” by Nina Simon

Flikr photo by Susan Sermoneta, "Outsiders and Insiders Reflected" - Some rights reserved.

Flikr photo by Susan Sermoneta, “Outsiders and Insiders Reflected” – Some rights reserved.

This past week I read Nina Simon’s new book, The Art of Relevance. I am a tremendous admirer of Simon and have many times used her transformation of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History from an object-oriented museum to a participatory museum as one example of how to make a permanently failing arts organization more broadly relevant. As I recently remarked in a keynote address:

Since Simon became executive director of her museum, attendance has tripled, membership has increased by 50 percent, and more than 4,000 local artists and community groups have collaborated on exhibitions and cultural events. The museum has gone from five years in the red to three years of significant budget growth and surpluses. Simon has led an institutional turnaround based on creative risk-taking, grassroots participation, and unexpected community partnerships. This is social enterprise at its best.

Simon uses the analogy of doors, locks, and keys as the driving metaphor for relevance, which she defines as “a key that unlocks meaning.” She elaborates on her metaphor (on p. 29):

Imagine a locked door. Behind the door is a room that holds something powerful—information, emotion, experience, value. The room is dazzling. The room is locked.

Relevance is the key to that door. Without it, you can’t experience the magic that room has to offer. With it, you can enter. The power of relevance is not how connected that room is to what you already know. The power is in the experiences the room offers … and how wonderful it feels to open the door and walk inside.

Simon is an accomplished blogger and from a structural standpoint her book feels like a series of blog posts riffing on one giant question: How can mission-driven organizations matter more to more people? It is divided into 43 small (2-5 page) sections bundled under five broad themes. It is also chock-full with vignettes—concrete examples from her personal life, from her experience at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and elsewhere, and from other organizations (both cultural and not)—all aimed at demonstrating her points.

Simon also brings forward a bit of theory to support her anecdotes and propositions. She references cognitive scientists, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s “theory of relevance”— which explains how people are successfully able to convey and receive meaning (i.e. understand one another). According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance is a function of effect and effort. The more positive cognitive effect you experience when processing new information, the more likely you are to perceive that information as relevant; at the same time, the more you have to work at understanding new information, the less likely you are to perceive that information as relevant. Simon asserts that Sperber and Wilson’s “criteria for relevance apply to both extraordinary and everyday experiences” and gives the following example to demonstrate the theory deployed in such a manner (on pp. 32-3):

Imagine you are considering going out to see a movie. You start seeking relevant information. You read a review that gets you excited about a particular film (a positive cognitive effect). You feel confident you’ll enjoy that movie. If it’s playing at convenient times at a theater nearby (low effort), you’re set. You buy a ticket.

But if the movie is not showing nearby (high effort), or the reviews you read are conflicting and full of muddled information (negative cognitive effect), you’re stuck. You don’t get the useful conclusions you seek. It takes too much effort to find the right key to the door. You stay home.

Simon has many admirers in the arts and culture sector and at least a few detractors—in large part because she is a courageous bucker of the status quo. The participatory strategies that Simon advocates for achieving the goal of “mattering more to more people” are not without controversy. Simon has taken heat from those who see the move toward “participation” as detrimental to the very purpose and nature of fine arts institutions. Simon deals with this head on in her book. In a terrific section called OUTSIDE IN on insiders, outsiders, and inside-outsiders, Simon first fesses up to her her own tendency toward “insider entitlement” when it comes not to art, but to wilderness areas. Simon admits that she tends to be turned off (revolted, even) by parks (like Yellowstone) that have worked hard to make themselves more accessible and that are now not only jammed up with people but spoiled by ice cream vendors, paved paths, and other amenities that destroy the experience for purists like Simon.

She demonstrates sympathy with “protectionist-insiders” in the arts and other realms writing:

We all have our own personal Yellowstones, the insider places we want to protect from change. Embrace your inner insider for a moment. Think of something you love just as it is. A restaurant. A fictional character. An art form. A park. Now imagine someone saying publicly, “We are going to make X relevant to new people. We’re going to make some changes and open it up to new folks. We need to be more inclusive.”

When you are on the inside, this doesn’t sound like inclusive language. It sounds threatening.  It sounds like the thing you hold dear being adulterated for public consumption.  … It looks like a shift away from what was. A dilution of services, a distortion of values. That shift means loss, not gain.

Simon then considers the situation from the perspective of those who might come if only they could see a door and if only they had a key to open it. Simon refers to these inclined outsiders as “almost comes” and suggests that organizations need to cultivate “open-hearted insiders … who are thrilled to welcome in new people.” She eventually concedes the value of making Yellowstone accessible to all, through recognition that the great national parks should be for everyone; that making parks relevant to more people helps to establish their value and justify investments in sustaining them; and that as an “elite park user” she has access to resources and “backcountry trails” where she can achieve the “natural” experience she is seeking.

When I read this section on insiders and outsiders I immediately thought of Center Stage, a professional resident theater in Baltimore that I have often referenced in talks. In the 1990s Center Stage’s artistic director, Irene Lewis, began programming many more plays by African American writers, or about the African American experience, or featuring African American actors—in an effort to become more relevant to her community, which was 67% African American. (Theretofore, like many resident theaters at the time, Center Stage tended to program white plays, featuring white actors, performed for white middle class subscribers.) In response to Lewis’s shift in programming a significant number of its subscribers walked out the door. Jon Moscone (now at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) tells a similar story (from his time at Cal Shakes) in the introduction to Simon’s book. He writes:

…in 2011, we presented a Shakespeare play, The Winter’s Tale, directed by and cast entirely with artists of color. Our longtime audience rebelled. It broke open a new conversation with key stakeholders and board members, who saw the shift in relevance away from them.

Simon’s Yellowstone analogy, as well as the examples at Center Stage and Cal Shakes, demonstrate that what makes an experience relevant for insiders can be at odds with what makes it relevant for outsiders. Making one’s organization more broadly relevant requires standing up for values like inclusivity even if they don’t sit well with current patrons. One of the lessons from Center Stage’s successful transformation—as well as that of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History—is that such transformations can take a long time. It took ten years for Center Stage to replace its lost subscribers with those who shared its new values and vision. Too many organizations wade a few steps into the water with these sorts of efforts and then retreat in haste when the initial response is a complaining patron base. This is not work for the faint of heart.

Simon’s book provides encouragement, arguments, and concrete examples for those trying to figure out how to make their organizations more broadly relevant – but it does something else that is perhaps more important. It is great fodder for a discussion on some of the most important questions that organizations can ask themselves: Who are we for and why? What is the long-term risk of catering to a declining patron base at the expense of broader relevance? And what do we lose if we set our sights on being for outsiders (or “almost comes”) and not just insiders?

A brief email exchange with the sculptor Carter Gillies (who recently wrote a guest post on intrinsic value) really brought home for me how much is at stake in the way organizations answer such questions. Carter shared with me a conceptualization of intrinsic value by the brilliant UK cultural policy wonk John Holden. Holden has lately taken to thinking of intrinsic value as having three deployments (i.e. ways in which we tend to use the concept). Taking some liberties, if I were to substitute “relevance” (or mattering) for “intrinsic value” Holden’s three deployments might look like this:

  1. A dance work matters because dance matters (you can’t express a dance idea without something called dance).
  2. A dance work matters to the extent that I (or you, or anyone else) attend dance and have an emotional or spiritual or intellectual response and think, “This matters to me – I get something out of this experience.”
  3. And a dance work matters to the extent that a group of art world experts/enthusiasts (or protectionist-insiders in Simon’s terms) say it matters.

Real-world experience and theory would suggest that this is contested terrain and that these three deployments have the potential to undermine or threaten the other. The more an arts experience matters to the masses in a personal/subjective way, the less it (often) matters to elites. At the same time, the more we emphasize that dance must matter to as many people as possible (in a personal subjective way) the more we may undermine the idea that dance (as a way of expressing an idea) matters even when a particular dance work matters to very few people, or none at all.

***

As I finished Nina’s book I was left with three thoughts:

First, as inspired as I was by the book the research scientist in me was yearning for some empirical studies (i.e. experiments) as well as some more robust theorizing. While Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory seems to be a good starting point for understanding how one makes the choice to buy a ticket to the symphony or not, it may be limited in its capacity to explain relevance inside the concert hall, for instance. Aesthetic experiences don’t seem to be entirely akin to straight two-way communication. Anecdotally speaking, there are works of art (both visual and performative) that were quite off-putting to me at first (i.e. had a negative cognitive effect) and that required quite a bit of effort for me to grasp them, which ended up being incredibly rewarding (seeing Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz at the Walker Art Center in 2006 comes to mind). Moreover, the arts experience is constituted by more than the connection an individual may have with the art work itself. Simon addresses this in her book but Sperber and Wilson’s theory seems a bit overextended if used to explain how various elements (e.g. place, people, art, amenities, ancillary activities, past cultural experiences, trust in institutions, expectations) may combine to yield an experience that is perceived as relevant or not. For instance, perhaps being with people like you trumps an artwork you have to work hard to understand?

Second, and related to point one, considering that arts organizations are, in the main, in the business of creating aesthetic experiences one could argue that they should be much more well-versed in the nature of the aesthetic experience and the process of aesthetic development. All arts institutions (especially those with an educational mandate as 501c3s) need to be, as I believe Simon is, infinitely curious, willing, and eager to experiment with various ways of helping people connect with the art. As Simon says in her book, getting people to locate the door and walk through it is not enough—once they get to the other side the experience needs to be meaningful otherwise they won’t return. I would argue that, in particular, arts organizations should become experts in helping people cultivate an aesthetic sensibility–that is, helping them to expand and deepen their capacities to enjoy various types of aesthetic experiences.

Third, reading Simon’s Yellowstone analogy I was struck by Simon’s admission that she was able to let go of her “insider’s entitlement” with regard to Yellowstone (in part) because, as she put it, “as an elite park user, I have plenty of resources at my disposal, from maps to rangers to well-maintained backcountry trails.”  Yellowstone is able to cater to both casual park users looking for ice cream vendors and paved paths and benches and signs, as well as elite users looking to get off the beaten path and tramp around on the areas that newcomers would be unprepared to explore. If you extend the Yellowstone analogy to the arts it suggests that arts organizations might need to have different brands, experiences, and resources for insiders and outsiders; or that cultural institutions might need to specialize in one of these. Indeed, it’s an interesting question (from an ethical, aesthetic, and economic standpoint) whether diversification or specialization would be a better approach?

Simon’s book is a quick read and a must-read for mission-based organizations (most especially cultural organizations) that believe they could and should matter more to more people.

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When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable product

Photo by Duncan C, Flickr

Photo Chapman’s Homer, Christchurch by Duncan C, published on Flickr, Creative Commons License.***

A couple weeks back I had the privilege to give a talk in Christchurch, NZ at an event called The Big Conversation—hosted by Creative New Zealand, the major arts funding body for the country. The talk, Transformation or Bust: When Hustling Ticket Sales and Contributions is Just Not Cutting It Anymore (click on the link and it will take you to a transcript) was intended to address the general conference theme, Embracing Arts / Embracing Audiences. It was assembled on top of four cornerstone ideas:

  • Michael Sandel’s argument that we have shifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society in which, as he puts it, market relations and market incentives and market values come to dominate all aspects of life.
  • The notion that, paradoxically, the arts are facing a crisis of legitimacy (says John Holden) at the very moment when we have so much to potentially contribute as a remedy to the erosion of social cohesion that is resulting from global migration, economic globalization, a culture of autonomy, and the Internet (see the David Brooks op-ed, How Covenants Make Us).
  • The four futures for the social sectors predicted by NYU professor Paul Light in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis: (1) the unlikely scenario that nonprofits would be rescued by significant increases in contributions; (2) the more probable scenario that all nonprofits would suffer; (3) the most likely scenario that the largest, most visible, and best connected nonprofits would thrive while others would fold; and (4) the hopeful scenario that the sector would undergo positive transformation that would leave it stronger and more impactful, likely only if pursued deliberately and collectively by nonprofits and their stakeholders.
  • And a concept I encountered on Doug Borwick’s excellent blog: transformative engagement, by which Doug means engagement with the community that changes the way an organization thinks and what it does.

Building on these, I argue that in the US arts and culture sector we have for too long ignored or denied the costs of so-called progress in the arts–meaning, for instance, the costs of professionalization, growth, and the adoption of orthodox marketing practices including so-called customer relationship management and I suggest five ways that arts organizations may need to adapt their philosophies and practices in relationship to their communities if their goal is deeper, more meaningful engagement.

Ultimately, I pull the various threads of the talk together in a framework that seeks to conceptualize the difference between embracing the community and embracing the market. In setting this up, I build on Internet guru Seth Godin’s notion of, essentially, competing worldviews that inform the way companies approach marketing. In an interview with Krista Tippett on her NPR show, On Being, Godin remarks:

There’s one view of the world called the Wal-Mart view that says that what all people want is as much stuff as possible for as cheap a price as possible. … And that’s a world based on scarcity. I don’t have enough stuff. How do I get more stuff?… There’s a different view, which is the view based on abundance. [And] in an abundance economy the things we don’t have enough of are connection …and time.

Here’s the PPT slide of the framework I created that synthesizes the various ideas in my New Zealand talk:

worldviews

In many ways, this talk explores an idea that I first began to ponder when I wrote a blog post for the Irvine Foundation in response to its question: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? If so, what is it?

In my post, I answered the question in the affirmative and then offered the following as a more urgent issue:

While lack of meaningful engagement in the arts is indeed troubling, I would offer that a larger problem is that the nonprofit, professional arts have become, by-and-large, as commodified, homogeneous, transactional, and subject to market forces as every other aspect of American society. From where I sit, the most important issue in the arts field these days may be that the different value system that art represents no longer seems to be widely recognized or upheld — by society-at-large, or even within the arts field itself.

For the New Zealand talk I tried to explore the ramifications of the loss of this “different value system” (Jeanette Winterson) and how it relates to the issue of engagement.

Gap Filler: On Sustaining the Social Cohesion that Emerges out of Disasters

Because the conference took place in Christchurch (where two devastating earthquakes struck in 2010 and 2011) I reflected at the top of the talk on the solidarity and social cohesion that often arise in response to natural disasters. In his new book, Tribe,  Sebastian Junger introduces the seminal research of a man named Charles Fritz to explain why this is. Fritz asserts “that disasters thrust people into a more ancient, organic way of relating.” … “As people come together to face a threat,” Fritz argues, “class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group” (Junger 2016, 53-54).

Yet, as Junger reports, all too often, these effects are temporary. One of the best parts of the conference in New Zealand was being introduced to some amazing organizations and projects here—including Gap Filler, an intiative that began with a few people asking how they could sustain the sense of fellowship, volunteerism, and community that arose out of the first earthquake. One of the co-founders of Gap Filler, Dr. Ryan Reynolds, gave a truly inspiring presentation at the conference. It struck me listening to his story that Gap Filler could be the poster child for Creative Placemaking.

gap filler

Gap Filler’s first ten-day project was launched in November 2010. It began because Reynolds and others wanted somehow to fill the gaps in the physical and metaphysical landscape of Christchurch left by the loss of hundreds of buildings, including dozens of bars, clubs, and restaurants. They had the idea to gather a group of volunteers together to transform the empty lot where a popular restaurant, South of the Border, once stood into a temporary space for citizens to once again come together and eat, drink and socialize. Over the course of ten days—and driven largely by citizens who showed up on their own initiative to contribute to and enjoy the temporary space—the site came to host a temporary garden café, live music, poetry readings, an outdoor cinema, and more. The success of this first project led to further initiatives including art installations, concerts, workshop spaces and eventually semi-permanent structures. You can read more about Gap Filler’s projects here. (And here is an article, written in 2013, about the revitalizing influence of the earthquake on the Christchurch arts scene.)

Gap Filler was only one of several remarkable organizations/projects I heard about at The Big Conversation.

In any event, if you read the talk, I hope you find it worthwhile and will share any responses to it on Jumper.

And speaking of things worth reading …

ninas book

Nina Simon has a new book out! Those who have read Jumper for a while, or have heard me speak at conferences, know that the topic of matteringness or relevance is one I have been circling and diving into with some regularity for the past decade—and I am by no means alone in this. One of the greatest minds on this topic is Nina Simon at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and she has a new book out—The Art of Relevance. I won’t be united with my copy until I’m back in the US next month, at which point I look forward to reading it and writing about it on Jumper. In the meantime, I strongly encourage anyone interested in the topics of relevance, engagement, or participation in the arts to buy it and read it, as well.

***This photo is of the stunning sculpture by Michael Parekowhai, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,  and it was taken at one of the many sites where the work was situated in Christchurch following its presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale. It is currently housed at the Christchurch Art Gallery and is considered to be a symbol of the resilience of the people of Christchurch following the earthquakes.

The Value of Intrinsic Value in the Arts: A Guest Post by Carter Gillies

carter gilliesIn recent years an artist named Carter Gillies has written to me with some regularity in response to Jumper posts. I have always valued his letters, which are invariably insightful, provocative, warm, and encouraging. Recently, Carter dropped me a line and mentioned that he had come across a Facebook post by Clay Lord soliciting a better framing of the intrinsic/instrumental distinction.

Carter then shared that he had been rather astonished by the manner in which the word ‘intrinsic’ was being used by arts types posting comments as it was quite different from the ways that philosophers and psychologists have tended to use it. He wrote, “It was as if an entirely new word had replaced the one I was familiar with.”

He elaborated.

Inspired by his letter, I suggested that if he hadn’t already done so he should write a reflection on the topic and I said that if he did so I’d love to post it on Jumper. He agreed. I won’t preface what Carter has written beyond saying that I believe it is truly worthwhile for those occupied with understanding and articulating the value of the arts as it seems that there is something fundamental to this endeavor that many of us have either forgotten or abandoned for political expediency.

(BTW, if you are so occupied you may also want to check out the recently published report, Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture.)

Carter has a blog of his own, which you can check out here. I asked Carter for a bio that I could share to introduce him along with his post. Here’s what he sent me:

At some point during philosophy graduate studies Carter found himself with a lump of clay and a potters wheel and immediately knew he was intended for a life in the arts. It also turns out that the things most worth thinking clearly about are the ones we care about, and so he spends his days making pots and asking questions about the nature of art, beauty, and their place in the world.

This is a long post; but, hey, Jumper readers are used to that. 😉

So grab a coffee and enjoy!

Engraving from Mechanic’s Magazine (cover of bound Volume II, Knight & Lacey, London, 1824). Courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AArchimedes_lever.png

I sometimes look at the arts landscape and feel we have gotten our wires crossed. Its not always easy to define, but for me, at least, there is a pervading sense we are making correctable mistakes.

Difficult questions can often be solved by either moving up or down a level. The problem, it sometimes turns out, is in the manner we are addressing things. We find a new framework for measuring or by setting different parameters. Sometimes, also, it can be in a refining of our terms, scrapping some and replacing others. Sometimes its knowing the right questions to ask. Even a tentative answer to a good question is better than a great answer to a bad question. It just feels as though in the arts we are occasionally asking the wrong questions.

An apparent issue facing us is how we understand values. I’m not just talking about our own values as opposed to other people’s, but the role and function of values and where values actually fit in a person’s life. We often seem to talk about values without knowing what they are there for.

One problem I ran across recently was our use of the word ‘intrinsic’. This term has a long and storied history in the fields of philosophy and psychology, and yet when used in the arts we are often left dissatisfied.

I have seen too many references to ‘intrinsic benefits’ and ‘intrinsic impact’ not to be aware of at least one wrong turn we have taken. The distinction we use this term for in the arts is, in this instance, the difference between things that are good for us personally and wider social benefits. We take ‘intrinsic impact’ to refer to our own individual benefits, and ‘instrumental/extrinsic’ to refer to external social goods and the like.

The problem is that ‘benefit’ and ‘impact’ are already the language of instrumentality. They denote an effect, what something can be good for, the means to ends, utility, and this is precisely what is meant by instrumental. When we use the word this way we are not making a contrast with instrumentality as much as we are defining the way in which a thing is instrumental.

The way this term gets used in philosophy and psychology is to make plain the difference between things that are justified by something  outside themselves and things that are justified in themselves. It is specifically the difference between means and ends. A means is whatever thing benefits or impacts some other thing. The value is derived from being a means. It serves some other end. The end is not valuable in that way. It is that from which the means takes its value. It represents the value itself.

Think of it like this: We are measuring something and we wonder what measurement is justified. We take out a tape measure, hold it in place, and see that this here thing is two feet four inches. The operation of measuring has been successfully carried out.

But what exactly have we done? This is an important question. There are things in the world that we measure, and this becomes an empirical issue, but there is also the measure itself, the thing from which we derive measurements. That thing exists in the world too, but the role it has is different. It’s not thing being measured but that which does the measuring.

By Pink Sherbet Photography from USA [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Common

‘Two feet four inches’ is how something else measures up, is justified, by our use of the measure. We question how things will be measured, but we do not have the same uncertainty about the measure itself. That stands in a different relation to what we do. It is the ground we assume when we evaluate things in the world. It’s not a question, even an empirical question, but a definition. It’s the standard itself. It is the logic that connects things.

That may take some time to process, but it absolutely relates to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values. And this is crucial for us.

Consider: The world is full of things with instrumental/extrinsic value to us. There are plenty of means to our ends. But where does the value of our ends come from? If a means is valuable because it serves that end, where does the value of ends come from?

Ends function for us in much the same way as our yardsticks and tape measures do: The ends are that which measures the value of means. They are a logical aspect of the way we confront the world rather than an empirical question to be decided. Ends function for us by being accepted as intrinsic values, as things not needing to be justified. They are part of the definition. This is simply how we value the world. We deem these things worth holding onto. Its the scaffolding we hold in place to make sense of things.

And it turns out there are many such values. We put them in our important documents. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are not things we look to justify in some other way: They are the grounds upon which our actions are measured. Not every value is a means, and most others come to a place that requires no further justification: This is simply what we do. It describes a way of acting, a culture.

When we determine that something is beneficial for something else we have solved an empirical connection: “Yes, the arts are good for the economy!”. What we have not done, the thing we don’t always question, is what form of value the economy takes. The relationship we have proposed is that the arts are a means, and we are using the economy and its like to justify the arts.

But if we are saying the arts are important “because of their benefit to the economy” are we really saying that’s why the arts are important?

I don’t want to suggest that the arts are not worthy in this role, as the servant to other established goods. I simply question whether the arts are only that. We have given the arts as a means, but can we claim them also as an end? The role of servant is respectworthy, undoubtedly, but I know few in the arts who value the arts merely as the means to some further end. Additionally, perhaps yes, but not only on those terms.

There is a confusion here, and I’m not sure it is only by omission.

For most people in the arts the value of the arts does not need to be explained. The arts themselves are a measure of value. The arts are worthy in their own right. The arts have intrinsic value. They do not need to be justified.

But then, how is it we spend so much time talking about the instrumentality of the arts? Well, because not everyone gets it. Not every person values the arts as a centerpiece of how they think and behave in the world.

For many people the arts are not only incomprehensible but are entirely without value. So when we talk to these people we are talking to folks who do not yet have a meaningful role for the arts. It holds no significant place in how they look at the world. Its not a part of their scaffolding. It’s handing them a tape measure when they have no cultural practice of needing things measured.

How do we talk to them, even? How do we get them to see value in the arts? We know it as part of the foundation of our own values. How can we communicate that to others?

This is where advocacy steps in. And unfortunately these core values are not transferable in an immediate sense, like putting on a new coat. We are discussing the foundation of a person’s world view, so its not as simple as getting them to switch between metric and the US version. Its not a difference between two standards that do exactly the same thing. Its not just a matter of translating from one set of units to another. Rather, it’s the whole idea of measuring itself. And there is no simple translation for that. Core values are an integral part of who people are.

So how do we talk to people who are fundamentally different from us? Well, our intrinsic values are hidden from them, and theirs from us, but there are empirical connections between things in the world. And the arts have done a good job identifying where some of the overlap may exist.

The way we mostly talk to these people is we have found that our ends, the things we value in themselves, can be the means to their own ends. They value the economy? Well, the arts are good for the economy! They think that cognitive development is important? Well, the arts are good for cognitive development! We make our own ends the means to their ends.

But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient. That’s never only what they are to us. Sometimes we just have to make the case for a lesser value as the expedient means to secure funding or policy decisions. It’s better than not making any sense at all.

The question, then, is whether discussing the arts this way is a path to truly persuading folks to our point of view, to appreciating the arts in themselves.

Why is this an important question? Well, we are trying to convert folks to our cause, that the arts are not extravagant, and it’s a legitimate question whether this can be done by the rational instrumental means we are offering.

At some point in the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume rather conclusively argued that it cannot. You cannot simply derive an ought (intrinsic value) from what is (facts). You don’t become aware of the intrinsic value of the arts by pointing to the benefits they have. Things that measure value (oughts) have a different role from the things that are measured (what is). One is the foundation, the other what gets built from it. One is the definition, the other how that definition applies. Its a categorical distinction. And persuasion stumbles over even the best placed facts.

is-ought

In crafting the Ripple Effect report the folks at ArtsWave came to approximately this conclusion. As Margy Waller stated in a great guest post on Createquity, don’t try to change minds, change perspective:

Instead of reviving an old debate, we sought a new way to start the conversation – based on something we can all be for, instead of something we’re defending against an attack. And importantly, we aren’t trying to change people’s minds, but present the arts in a way that changes perspective……

Members of the public typically have positive feelings toward the arts, some quite strong. But how they think about the arts is shaped by a number of common default patterns that ultimately obscure a sense of shared responsibility in this area.

In other words, the arts may make folks feel good, but they are not thereby recognized as a good in themselves. The common default patterns are simply the mental habits that devalue the arts or cast them as at best merely means to other ends. Defending the arts with facts about the arts is not actually going to change people’s minds. Rather, what is needed is a new perspective in which the value of the arts are already seen as vital.

Arts Midwest published a report last year that also acknowledged the issue:

The public will building model posits that long-term change is accomplished by connecting an issue with the deeply held values of the audiences and stakeholders a movement seeks to engage. The theory is rooted in the understanding that people generally make decisions about what to think and do based on their core values and their assumptions about how the world works. They accept facts and data that support their existing worldview and values, and they tend to reject facts and data that stand in contradiction. To create—and sustain—public will for any issue, a movement needs to find the optimal values alignment that connects their audiences to the issue.

A few years ago there was an article in Mother Jones that explained “the science of why we don’t believe science.” The whole article is brilliant and insightful and well worth a read. The conclusion is this:

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

It is simply the case that the arts have been preoccupied in leading with the facts. As the ArtsWave and Arts Midwest reports demonstrate this is a gambit that plays for very low stakes. Its not a strategy that even remotely stands a chance of scoring on the level of fundamental values. Facts are disputable, despite the conviction with which we ourselves hold onto them. We find certain things obvious, and the reason we do is that the facts we hold dear always reflect our values. We ignore facts that don’t line up or contradict our core intrinsic values. Blame the human temptation for motivated reasoning. Instrumentality only gets us so far. It’s not the measure of value itself, but a fact aligning with some other value.

Studies the arts have conducted have barely begun describing the surface phenomena, and this is not yet an explanation. Yes the patient is sick, but we do not know the disease. We are confused about intrinsic and instrumental values so we blur the lines and fail to distinguish their radical difference. This is a category mistake, and not knowing this difference has too often blinded us.

I have heard it expressed that data and arguments in favor of the arts are like arrows we cast at the problems facing us: We hope some will stick. When the arrows fail we assume we just need better arrows, more armor piercing facts. The problem, unfortunately, isn’t the arrows but mistaking the target for a thing that can be reached in this way…..

Perhaps this is a better way of looking at it: In the third century BCE Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world.” Facts are like levers, but they do not function to move things unless resting on a congenial foundation.

fulcrum

In the arts we have thrown facts together, constructing the longest possible lever, but have seemingly forgotten we also need somewhere to place it. Those facts need to rest on values that can act as a fulcrum. The facts without value, or the wrong value, will simply have no leverage. They will fail to motivate. Something needs to hold fast. A lever hung on a speck of dust won’t work. Facts without a decent fulcrum are not even a lever, just a wobbly stick…..

The arts have mustered plenty of cogent facts as to why the arts are amazing, and yet we spend too much time scratching our heads wondering why our efforts fall on deaf ears. What’s at stake for us is not facts about the arts but the value of the arts. The sooner we embrace this the sooner we avoid playing losing games and spinning our wheels without significant traction.

To turn the tables on what Margy suggested, perhaps it is WE who need a change in perspective. The confusion we are mired in is thinking that our difficulty is practical when in fact the impediment is structural. We need to better understand this to make appreciable headway. We can celebrate both the good art does and the good art is, a structural difference, the lever and the fulcrum. That is the value of intrinsic value for the arts.

***

Archimedes’ Lever: Engraving from Mechanic’s Magazine (cover of bound Volume II, Knight & Lacey, London, 1824). Courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AArchimedes_lever.png

Tape Measure Photo Attribution: By Pink Sherbet Photography from USA [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

David Humes Is-Ought Attribution: From the Website John Ponders: https://johnponders.com/2012/11/15/humes-guillotine/

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Irvine asks: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? My answer: Yes.

A couple weeks back the Irvine Foundation launched an online Q&A series, Are We Doing Enough?—aimed at “exploring tough questions about engagement practices and programming.” I was delighted and honored to be one of a small group of “outsiders” asked to provide some reflections in response to one of the Qs. The first two issues of the series (Part 1 and Part 2) featured a group of Irvine’s current grantees, as well as Irvine arts program director Josephine Ramirez, addressing such questions as: Should artists be responsible for creating art for the purpose of engaging communities? What purpose do “engagement events” serve if people don’t start showing up at the museum? and Are culturally and racially-specific organizations negatively affected when mainstream arts organizations offer diverse programming?

Clay Lord, Vu Lee, Karen Mack, Teresa Eyring and I were asked to address the question: Is there an issue in the arts field that is more urgent than engagement? You can read how we responded here. I want to use this post to elaborate on my response, the conclusion of which was this:

While lack of meaningful engagement in the arts is indeed troubling, I would offer that a larger problem is that the nonprofit, professional arts have become, by-and-large, as commodified, homogeneous, transactional, and subject to market forces as every other aspect of American society. From where I sit, the most important issue in the arts field these days may be that the different value system that art represents no longer seems to be widely recognized or upheld — by society-at-large, or even within the arts field itself.

As I’ve mentioned from time-to-time on Jumper, the topic of my dissertation is the evolving relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater in America—how it has changed over time, why, and with what consequence. Some of the deeper questions motivating my research have been:

  1. What is nonprofit professional theater for?
  2. Are there clear differences between the way the theater that exists for the primary goal of making money relates to its employees, customers and market and the way the theater that exists to improve society through art relates to its front-line missionaries (i.e., staff and volunteers), beneficiaries (i.e., artists and audiences) and the community-at-large?
  3. If not, or if these have been eroding over time, is this cause for concern? Can and should we stem the tide? And if so, how?

In 2011 I helped to plan and document a meeting of nonprofit and commercial theater producers, who were gathered to discuss partnerships between them. Candidly, the room seemed rather stumped for an answer to a version of that first question. A few ideas were tossed out but nothing stuck–in large part because, as more than a few participants observed, nonprofits and commercial producers “are more and more the same in practice.” As I wrote in the report (available here in paperback or free e-file) anaylyzing the meeting:

Many noted that it is no longer evident what value nonrofits bring to the table, distinct from commercial producers. Some suggested that the interests of nonprofit and commercial producers are now aligned to the point where the shape of [their] intersection is less like a crossroads and more like two lanes merging on a highway.

And why is that?

Well, lots of reasons. But part of the issue seems to be that the 20th century witnessed not just the professionalization of the community arts but their corporatization. Once labors of love by amateurs, arts groups across the US incorporated as not-for-profit corporations but then put corporate leaders on their boards, hired staff with more corporate management skills, adopted corporate marketing techniques, and looked to major corporations like hospitals and universities for models on how to raise money and advance their institutions. Savvier arts nonprofits also opened for-profit subsdiaries, formed partnerships with commercial enterprises, or became real estate investors or developers … basically, they pursued any and all means of exploiting their assets. And, ironically but not surprisingly, much of this sort of activity was actively encouraged by private philanthropists and government agencies.

What’s been the cost?

In her book Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes:

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.

I don’t know about you, but I find this statement to be disturbingly resonant.

Here we are in the 21st century and it strikes me that the nonprofit arts have become increasingly dehumanized–which is ironic since arguably one of the primary benefits of the arts is that they stimulate the senses, awaken us to beauty, fill us with awe, connect us to others, and inspire us to be better humans. But as David Brooks seemed to be arguing in his January 15 column When Beauty Strikes Back (for which he took quite a bit of flack), the arts have forgotten or rejected this role and society is poorer for it. He writes:

These days we all like beautiful things. Everybody approves of art. But the culture does not attach as much emotional, intellectual or spiritual weight to beauty. We live, as Leon Wieseltier wrote in an essay for The Times Book Review, in a post-humanist moment. That which can be measured with data is valorized. Economists are experts on happiness. The world is understood primarily as the product of impersonal forces; the nonmaterial dimension of life explained by the material ones. …

The shift to post-humanism has left the world beauty-poor and meaning-deprived. It’s not so much that we need more artists and bigger audiences, though that would be nice.  It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life.

Perhaps the arts are losing a battle over the minds and souls of society in large part because we don’t seem to recognize that we have been fighting for the wrong side–don’t recognize it because, as Woolf says, we have lost our senses. We have been swept up in econometrics and CRM theory and funder logic models and we have lost our ability to see what is in front of us and to be distrubed. It now seems normal to us that some heads of nonprofit resident theater companies, for instance, earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while even great actors in America are leaving the industry because they just can’t bear living on the cliff’s edge of poverty year-upon-year–a circumstance that should be appalling to anyone running a nonprofit theater, if one recalls that a fundamental purpose for nonprofit professional resident theaters when they were envisioned in the mid-twentieth century was to provide a stable, living wage to actors.

That’s losing the relations between one thing and another … that’s losing your humanity.

***

Speaking of poverty, if you didn’t see the press a few days back, the Irvine Foundation made the major announcement that it will “begin work on a new set of grantmaking goals focused on expanding economic and political opportunity for families and young adults who are working but struggling with poverty.”

President Don Howard wrote in a blog post:

These are mutually reinforcing goals. If all Californians are to have real economic opportunity, their voices must be heard and their interests counted. Responsive and effective government shapes the policies that allow people the chance to earn a wage that can enable a family to live in a safe, healthy community, send their kids to school, and realize their potential. Conversely, if all Californians are to be heard, they cannot teeter on the precipice of poverty, lacking the time and the conviction to meaningfully participate.

This is Irvine’s evolving focus, and as the words suggest, the changes will occur over time. As many of you know, we are deeply engaged in important and successful grantmaking. We remain firmly committed to our current grants and initiatives, many of which are in the middle of multiyear plans driving toward specific impacts. We will see all of these current grants and initiatives through to their planned conclusions. And some will evolve to be part of our future work.

As I read the last paragraph I thought … Hmmm, I wonder how the arts program will fare in this evolution? Will it be one of the programs phased out?

What’s the case for the role of professional arts groups in expanding political or economic opportunity for families living in poverty? Venezuela created El Sistema. What have we created of late that comes close to having that scale of impact on the lives of the most impoverished? Has there been anything since the Works Progress Administration (a New Deal initiative under FDR), which gave us the remarkable Federal Theatre Project and related projects in other disciplines? The Federal Theatre Project, if you don’t know it, was a work-relief program that made significant funds available to cities and towns across the US to hire out-of-work artists. It resulted in a flowering of hundreds of new ad hoc companies that collectively brought vital, relevant theater—including The Living Newspaper, a form of theater aimed at presenting reflections on current social events to popular audiences—and other forms of art to millions of people who had never had such experiences. It was a short-term relief program intended to do two things: alleviate artist unemployment and awaken and inspire America as it struggled out of a Great Depression.

And it exemplified the extraordinary role art can play—when it is for the advancement of the many, rather than the few—in helping a nation that is struggling to find a way forward.

 

*The photo is of James Turrell’s Roden Crater and is mentioned in my post for the Irvine Foundation. (Here’s the link again!)

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A Q&A on the Beauty Class with Students from the SAIC

wg-hand-raised-img-2810-smlrRecently, I received an email from a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, preparing for a seminar on Arts Organizations in Society. She asked if I would be willing to Skype into the seminar to answer a few questions about the beauty class. Since the time difference made this impossible, I suggested that she email me a few questions and I answer them on a video, which could be played during class. Here are the questions the student sent me (with the times on the video where you can find my responses).

  1. What was it like for the beauty class students to begin to spend time with artwork? (00:00-04:55)
  2. How did you measure success in the class? (4:55-7:22)
  3. For students wanting to become arts administrators, is there anything in particular you wanted them to understand or know? (7:23-9:05)
  4. Did you talk with your students about cultural policy? (9:06-10:33)
  5. Would you agree that the Beauty Class offers a new, more beautiful framework for improvement to the role of an ethics course? (10:34-13:38)

The video is rather informal but I thought I would share it on Jumper as (1) I imagine both the Qs and As could be interesting to other students of art/arts administration; and (2) I am always delighted to hear from students who have read a post or two on Jumper and want to ask questions or debate ideas–and I want others to feel encouraged to reach out to me.

After the class, the student who contacted me kindly wrote a followup email and mentioned that this had been the last seminar before a month of papers and presentations. She then said, “There was a really wonderful several minutes near the end, where students volunteered and shared what beauty and aesthetics mean to them individually, inspired by conversation after your video.”

Sounds like an great way to end a term! Many thanks to the students of Arts Organizations in Society at SAIC for the opportunity to consider these questions and to be part of your class.

The whole video runs just under 15 minutes.

 

 

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The role of the arts in our interdependent world: hopeful signs but there’s still work to be done

Detail of "1000 Canoes," by Marsha McDonald at the Watrous Gallery, Madison (2015)

Detail of “1000 Canoes,” by Marsha McDonald at the Watrous Gallery, Madison (2015)

While in NYC last month I attended a forum produced at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts aimed at exploring the role of the arts in an interdependent society. The forum was held in conjunction with the 13th annual Global Interdependence Day. To be honest, when I received the invitation I had no idea such a day existed and felt a bit sheepish that I had missed the first twelve. Global Interdependence Day is an initiative arising from Benjamin Barber’s Interdependence Movement. (Again, I had no idea there was such a movement afoot, although I was familiar with Benjamin Barber’s perspectives on globalization). The five-hour forum was quite worthwhile, albeit, woefully under-attended—an outcome I chalked up to timing and weather (it was held on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon).

At the same time, it’s also possible that I’m not the last person in the arts and culture sector to be made aware of the Interdependence Movement and Global Interdependence Day. If you’re also in the dark about this movement, read on.

Interdependence and Vulnerability

What is the Interdependence Movement? Here’s a description I grabbed from the take-home literature:

The Interdependence Movement, founded by Professor Benjamin Barber, is a network of citizens without borders, including artists, educators, students, politicians, entrepreneurs, civic and religious leaders and other activists, who recognize the interdependent nature of our world and advocate for new forms of constructive interdependence. They aspire to solve the multiple cross-border challenges in economics, ecology, technology, war, disease, and crime that confront us. They are doing this by imagining, creating, and practicing new, just, rewarding, human, social, economic, cultural and governance relations, and stewardship of our common climate. (Emphasis added.)

In his introductory remarks at the event, Benjamin Barber several times used the phrases “bad interdependence” and “good interdependence.” Intrigued by this framing, I did an Internet search and came across a speech by Bill Clinton published in the Interdependence Handbook (edited by Barber and Sondra Meyers) in which he gives an example of each and then talks about strategy implications. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe we live in an age normally referred to as globalization, sometimes referred to as the global information society. I prefer the term “interdependence,” because it goes far beyond economics. There’s good and bad in it. I have a cousin that lives in the hills of northwest Arkansas that plays chess over the Internet with a guy in Australia twice a week. They take turns figuring out who’s got to stay up late. On the other hand, 9/11 was a testimony to the power of interdependence. … The Al Qaida … used open borders, easy travel, easy access to information and technology to turn an airplane into a weapon of mass destruction, to murder nearly 3,100 people, in Washington, Pennsylvania and New York from 70 countries. It’s a story of global interdependence, the dark side of global interdependence.  …

So if interdependence can be positive or negative, it’s obvious what we ought to be doing. … We need a strategy that builds up the positive and beats down the negative. We need to recognize that interdependence is inherently an unstable condition, and we need to move the world toward a more integrated global community defined by three things: shared benefits, shared responsibilities and shared values.

I then went in search of a neutral definition of interdependence.

The concept, of course, means different things depending on the field (biology, economics, international relations, etc.). The most common basic definition seems to be “mutual dependence between things.”  I also came across an interesting distinction made by political science/international relations scholars between sensitivity interdependence, which refers to mutual influence, and vulnerability interdependence, which refers to mutual need fulfillment that would be costly to forego.*

That word–vulnerability–caught my attention. Perhaps because I’ve watched all those Brené Brown TED Talks. (Yep, I’m a fan.)

Bear with me here.

Though Brown has been Oprah-fied over the past couple of years (and, as a result, some may be inclined now to dismiss her as a celebrity more than a scholar) she is a legit researcher and professor at the University of Houston (her field is social work) and she has spent more than a decade studying vulnerability in individuals. If you’ve watched any of her TED talks then you know that one of her research findings is that there are two basic responses to vulnerability: people can either become fearful,  distrustful, closed-off, even aggressive in relationship to others; or they can stay courageous, authentic, open, and compassionate–what Brown calls “wholehearted.”

(It strikes me that the same could be said of countries.)

Putting this all together, here’s where I come out: there is a tremendous need for the arts in our interdependent (read: vulnerable) world. As the five projects discussed at the Lincoln Center event (below) seem to attest, the arts can be an effective tool in the face of injustices, apathy, mistrust, ignorance, and fear. The arts foster understanding, connection, empathy, a sense of common humanity, and the imaginative pursuit of beautiful solutions to our most pressing systemic problems.  Here are the five quite inspiring projects that were discussed:

  • Actor Kathleen Chalfant read excerpts from the play Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Freedom, and then discussed with event moderator James Early its varying reception and impact in the UK and the USA several years back.
  • Producer Anne Hamburger and Lt. Colonel (retired) Art DeGoat showed video from, and discussed the impacts on various audiences of, the ongoing project Basetrack Live, an exploration of the impact of war on veterans and their families.
  • Mohsin Mohi Ud Din talked about the project Me/We Syria which uses handheld cameras to activate storytellers and change-makers in Syria’s Zaatari refugee camp.
  • Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq showed excerpts from their acclaimed documentary, These Birds Walk, about a runaway boy in Pakistan and the humanitarian efforts of Abdul Sattar Edhi to save tens of thousands of orphans and abused women.
  • Michelle Moghtader discussed the collective project of Shared Studios, Portals, which places gold shipping containers in cities and villages around the world and, using immersive audio and video technology, enables individuals across the world to meet face-to-face and have a conversation as if in the same room.

We need to “keep looking and looking, until at last we see and we feel”

As I walked home from Global Interdependence Day 2015 I began mulling over performances or exhibits I had seen in the course of my life that fit this bill. The first that came to mind was  the six-hour work of French theater-maker Ariane Mnouchkine—The Last Caravansary (Odysseys)—which I saw at Lincoln Center Festival a decade ago. Based on letters and images taken from refugee camps, its epic theater approach effectuated Mnouchkine’s desire that “we keep looking and looking, until at last we see and we feel.”[1]  One of the most touching and salient techniques of the piece was that all the characters, as well as the sets and props, were transported across the massive stage on large dollies operated by stagehands/actors. Here’s how Charles Isherwood described the effect of this in his review:

These questing Kurds and Chechens and Iranians and Russians are forever in transit, drifting between familiar homes left behind and a hoped-for-refuge, and at the same time frozen in place, immobile, paralyzed by their powerlessness to shape their destiny, or event place two feet on firm earth.

Mnouchkine’s theater collective is known for using aesthetically beautiful, massive theater works to make social and political critiques of particular local and global conditions. Her work is dynamically rooted in, and responding to, the present world.

Clearly not all art is aimed at such ends–for instance, some quite justifiably simply wants to entertain and lighten the weary heart. But I would argue that in these times we desperately need courageous artists (and producers, presenters and funders who will give them a platform) and beautiful works that hook our attention, draw us out of ourselves, and compel us to look, and to keep looking until at last we see and we feel. I can name a number of experiences I have had over the past year or so that have done this (for me) including: The Public Theater/Broadway musicals Fun Home and Hamilton; the exhibition America is Hard to See that opened the new space of The Whitney; an On the Boards TV download of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment; a stunning solo piece by the choreographer Crystal Pite called “A Picture of You Falling,”performed by Jesse Bechard of the Hubbard Street Dance Company; a cozy exhibition on how water shapes us, called Waterways, at the Watrous Gallery in Madison (pictured above) and one at the Chazen Art Museum (also in Madison) on the human figure in contemporary Chinese art; an exhibition by South African artist William Kentridge, If We Ever Get To Heaven, at the Eye Museum in Amsterdam; and the books Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.

As I think about these art works, those discussed at the Lincoln Center event, and many others–and their potential influence–I am inspired and hopeful.

And, yet, there is still work to be done.

Nurturing “public spaces that are not marketplaces”… 

Global Interdependence Day ended with everyone signing copies of the Declaration of Interdependence, which reads:

We the people of the world do herewith declare our interdependence as individuals and members of distinct communities and nations. We do pledge ourselves citizens of one CivWorld, civic, civil and civilized. Without prejudice to the goals and interests of our national and regional identities, we recognize our responsibilities to the common goals and liberties of humankind as a whole. We do therefore pledge to work both directly and through the nations and communities of which we are also citizens.

  • To guarantee justice and equality for all by establishing on a firm basis the human rights of every person on the planet, ensuring that the least among us may enjoy the same liberties as the prominent and the powerful;
  • To forge a safe and sustainable global environment for all-which is the condition of human survival—at a cost to peoples based on their current share in the world’s wealth;
  • To offer children, our common human future, special attention and protection in distributing our common goods, above all those upon which health and education depend;
  • To establish democratic forms of global civil and legal governance through which our common rights can be secured and our common ends realized;
  • To foster democratic policies and institutions expressing and protecting our human commonality; and at the same time,
  • To nurture free spaces in which our distinctive religious ethnic and cultural identities may flourish and our equally worthy lives may be lived in dignity, protected from political, economic and cultural hegemony of every kind.

Reading this statement I recognized that we need something more than the creation of bold, beautiful, socially relevant artworks.

Arts organizations in the US, in particular, must also more earnestly pursue the goal of being a “free space” (the last bullet of the Declaration of Interdependence above)—a space where people of in any given community can come together across divides and exist in relationship to one another on equal terms. Economic, cultural, geographic, and social barriers, misunderstandings, wrong beliefs, and biases persist despite much talking about them for a handful of decades, at least.

As Culturebot’s Andy Horowitz wrote recently in his post, The NEA at 50 and the Death of the Public Good:

In the absence of a meaningful commitment to, or belief in, the public good, all art – high, low, or otherwise – becomes merely entertainment product to be marketed to consumers. When we abandon the idea of the public good, we undermine our ability to create public spaces that are not marketplaces. This includes not only theaters, museums and concert halls, but also schools, libraries, and public broadcasting networks (as Sesame Street’s recent decampment to HBO reveals). The real crisis in the performing arts is the sector’s wholesale capitulation to a set of values that is inherently antithetical to the actual benefit of the arts to citizens in a democracy.

“… transforming us into people who care.”

The past couple of weeks, since attending the event at Lincoln Center, I have been thinking about my own work as a researcher, lecturer and blogger and what I am doing (or not doing) to advance the values of the Interdependence Movement.  Of everything I’ve worked on the past five years, since leaving Mellon, I have to say that the course on beauty and aesthetics that I taught last spring strikes me as being most directly aimed at fostering transcendental values like social justice, equality, sustainability, and a world of beauty. In between writing chapters of my dissertation on the American theater, I find myself daydreaming about returning to this work and thinking about what it could mean for every high school or college student to have the chance to take such a class–a class that one student characterized as, “transforming us into people who care.”

Transforming us into people who care could be one of the most critical functions of the arts vis-à-vis our interdependent world.

***

What are your perspectives?

  • Did you know about this movement? What are your thoughts on it?
  • Would you or your organization sign the Declaration of Interdependence? Or have you already? Why, or why not?
  • Do you consider yourself to be working in pursuit of goals like social justice, equality, democracy, and a world of beauty? If so, how? If not, what are your goals?

[1] July 19, 2005 review by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times – http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/theater/reviews/never-touching-the-ground-in-a-constant-search-for-refuge.html?_r=0

*David A. Baldwin, “Interdependence and Power: A Conceptual Analysis” (1980).

 

To share or not to share: On nonprofits and the disclosure of information to the public

confidentiality-agreementA couple weeks back the Chronicle of Philanthropy ran an article by Rebecca Koenig with the headline: Some Nonprofits Misuse Contracts to Hide Activities, Experts Say. The experts cited in the article include the president of CharityWatch (which provides information about the financial efficiency, accountability, governance, and fundraising of nonprofits), Senator Charles Grassley (who has long sought greater regulation and oversight of the nonprofit sector) and the president of Guidestar (which primarily collects and makes available for analysis financial data reported by nonprofits on IRS Form 990).  The article is focused on challenges that the media faced in gathering information on the uses and beneficiaries of the $487 million raised by the Red Cross after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.  Koenig reports that while the Red Cross ultimately complied with a request from Senator Grassley to release the information, it did so while issuing the following statement:

… our contracts with the great majority of our partners, while permitting us to disclose this information to Congress, do not permit us to disclose the information to the media or donors.

It is this statement that the article investigates, asking whether nonprofits should enter into agreements with others that prohibit them from disclosing information. This article is only one of a spate of news items of late looking at secrecy around the flows of money into, or out of, nonprofits and NGOs.

Another high profile case was that of the Tate museum in London, which refused to release information on the amounts of sponsorship received by the controversial oil company, BP. As covered in this Guardian article, among many others, Tate was eventually forced to disclose the amount of funds when a Freedom of Information request was made by a group of campaigners who argued that the figures needed to be released so that “a properly informed debate [could] take place about whether BP is an appropriate sponsor of the art gallery and its work.”  When the matter was brought before a tribunal, the Tate lost its case—which rested on the arguments that disclosing the annual amounts of funds would upset BP, deter future sponsorships, or lead to health and safety risks stemming from ongoing protests against the oil company. Evidently, in the tribunal’s estimation, the public’s right to know the facts and openly debate the matter trumped these other concerns.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy article raises or prompts several questions about the Red Cross case, which might be asked more generally about nonprofits and their various agreements with partners (particularly those that are not charities and, thus, subject to the same requirments regarding disclosure of information):

  • Who’s driving the lack of disclosure (the nonprofit or its partner)?
  • If the latter, is it appropriate for a partner to have undue influence on a nonprofit’s ability to disclose information to the public?
  • In either case, is the information actually proprietary? Must it be kept confidential in order to protect the privacy of individuals; or does the nonprofit simply prefer not to share certain information?
  • While there may be good reasons to keep some data private, should this be the exception rather than standard practice?

Anecdotally, I was far more troubled (from an ethical standpoint) by the refusal of Tate to comply with the request to disclose the amounts of its sponsorship than with any of the articles I have read over the past few decades suggesting that arts organizations have been getting into bed with unlikely partners in an effort to balance the books. This observation prompts me to pose two more questions:

  • What happens to the trust between an institution and the general public when a nonprofit refuses to disclose information about its activities?
  • How does lack of transparency affect the loyalty, morale, and (ethical) practices of those inside the organization (i.e., board members, staff, artists, and volunteers)?

 

990_IMAGE

Of course, the particular issue of contracts being used to limit the disclosure of information is related to more general issues around what types of information nonprofits reasonably ought to be expected to disclose upon request. US nonprofits with budgets greater than $25,000 are legally required to make their annual IRS filing (form 990) and articles of incorporation available for review. One could argue that making these mandatory documents available should be considered sufficient and that nonprofits have every right to refuse to make public additional details about their operations. On the other hand, one could make a pretty strong case that IRS form 990 has not kept pace with changes in the financial practices and activities of nonprofits and that it is quite possible for nonprofits to obfuscate activities that the general public (in the spirit of the law) has every right to request.

For the moment, I’m less interested in what nonprofits are (or are not) legally required to disclose to the public and more interested in understanding what motivates arts nonprofits to refuse to disclose certain types of information about the operations of the company and its finances, and whose interests are being served by doing so. I’m also curious whether this sort of thing is openly debated at the board level of nonprofits; or whether a couple staff members in the organization are generally determining what to share and what to withhold? If the latter, is this a good thing?

Perhaps questions like these could (should) be raised periodically with board, staff, and other trusted stakeholders?

  • Is there information about our ongoing organizational operations (its finances, activities, partners, policies, etc.) that we feel uncomfortable sharing with others?
  • If so, what causes our discomfort or what motivates us to try to keep this information out of the public spotlight?
  • Is it legal for us to withhold this information from the public, if requested? If legal, is it ethical (based on our code of ethics and our core values)?
  • Is there information about our organization that is not generally disclosed to the public that (legally or ethically) should be?
  • Would you characterize this organization as ‘transparent’? If not, based on what past behaviors or policies?

***

discloseWhat do you think? If you are working at a nonprofit would you want to tackle such questions? Or have you already? And what about the more general issue? What types of information should nonprofits reasonably be expected to disclose upon request (beyond the 990 and articles of incorporation)? What types seem out of bounds (beyond personnel records and the names of individual donors or beneficiaries, which are considered proprietary)? What are your arguments for or against disclosing information?

 

In defense of the quieting of the audience (and so-called passive participation)

Student of “Aesthetics & Business” Course in front of ChanShatz work at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

A couple weeks back I wrote a post about the latest research report from the Irvine Foundation, in response to which several people posted smart comments. My post dealt to a large extent with Irvine’s general recommendation to arts nonprofits to respond to audience demand for more active participation. Around the same time my post was published, the performing arts world (the theater world, in particular) was buzzing a bit about two audience member cell phone infractions that made the news. First, at the July 2nd performance of Hand to God in New York City, a young patron rose from his seat, ambled onto the stage, and plugged his cell phone into a fake outlet on the set just before the performance was set to begin; then, a week later, at a performance of Shows for Days at Lincoln Center Patti LuPone snatched a cell phone out of the hands of a patron who wouldn’t stop texting.* Lupone says she may walk off the boards for good she’s so unnerved and annoyed by audiences who can no longer restrain themselves. The misguided patron says he was drunk and didn’t understand he was breaking any rules.

Some have weighed in over the past few weeks to express sympathy and irritation at the constant threat of intrusion by phones at performances generally, while others have suggested that it’s time for performers and producers to loosen up and evolve their practices and expectations. Among those in the we-need-to-adapt camp is Scott Walters, who wrote a widely read post for The Clyde Fitch Report—Patti LuPone and Cellphone-gazi. Scott acknowledges that his own thinking on the issue has changed since he was an actor back-in-the-day; he now thinks, “If we really want theater to become a vibrant part of our culture again, [then] we need to get over this obsession about quiet.”

Lynne Conner and The Quieting of the Audience

Walters defends his stance in part with the argument that the quiet audience is a relatively new phenomenon and that for centuries the audience at the theater was an active participant. The same argument appeared a week after Walter’s post in a San Francisco Classical Voice article on what the arts can learn from sports marketing. The article by Mark MacNamara opened:

It’s important to keep remembering that the prim and passive persona of the performing arts audience these days is relatively new. Broadly speaking, the audience experience of old — from say, the Theatre of Dionysus to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées  — was in tone often much like right-wing talk radio: political, raucous, even violent and unhinged, but also profoundly communal, and thoroughly democratic.

We can thank, in part, theater historian (and AJ Blogger) Lynne Conner for much of our renewed awareness that being quiet in the theater is a modern phenomenon.  In numerous articles and books, Conner has reminded us that it was only in the 19th century that the audience lost its authority at the live theater; after centuries of talking back to, and talking about, the theater, patrons were put in the dark (thanks to the invention of the electric lightbulb), instructed to mind their manners, and intimidated into leaving interpretation to the experts. MacNamara writes:

The gist of [Lynne Conner’s] argument is that modern audiences have lost their “sovereignty” and the meme of the day remains, “Sophisticated audiences do not interfere with great art, and unsophisticated people should confine themselves to other spaces.”

While she has a relatively new book out that explores this arena, Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era, I first encounted Conner’s thoughts on this topic in a chapter in the 2009 Steven Tepper/Bill Ivey compilation Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. Conner urged organizations to consider ways to democratize the arts and make them more engaging. I found her research and reflections inspiring. That same year I was giving a talk called “surviving the culture change” in which I was making arguments along the same lines.

While I have been among those nudging arts organizations to think about how to make the live arts experience more relevant, meaningful, and dynamic, over the past few years I have begun to feel we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Yes, some arts organizations need to lighten up and stop scolding the audience; yes, some arts programming is hopelessly out of touch with changing values and demographics in many cities; and yes, as a result of overemphasizing the lines between amateurs and professionals, some arts organizations have inadervertently discouraged a relationship to the arts among most people.

However, it is important to bear in mind that the revocation of audience control in the 19th century emerged in response to concerns that certain audience members were becoming too distracted and disruptive. That they were showing up at the theater more focused on socializing (flirting, drinking, eating, and chatting) than on the action on stage. Such behaviors began to cause consternation among performers and, notably, more sophisticated (read: wealthy and educated) patrons. While we now use the term passive in a somewhat derogatory manner to describe this newly restrained audience, this was not always the case. At the time, the taming of the audience was generally perceived to be beneficial. When the ragers and revelers left the building, those that remained began to pay more attention to what was happening on stage.

So here we are again. The consumer is king and some audiences have, once again, become too distracted and disruptive. Some want to outlaw cell phones and create stricter guidelines, even if that drives certain patrons away (a move which seems to be history repeating itself). Others argue that there will be no audiences in the future if the live arts–across the board–don’t adapt to the changing times. Scott Walters suggests in his post that theater needs to step up its game rather than beef up its policing efforts:

We can’t keep the 21st century outside the theater much longer. People come through the doors (if we’re lucky) and they are carrying cell phones. That’s a fact. Sometimes they forget to turn those cell phones off, and they ring. Get used to it. It happens everywhere, and it will continue happening. Accept it, and make it irrelevant. Earn attention, don’t expect it. Overcome the distraction of the age by being so compelling that people can’t look away, and can’t be distracted by someone texting.

As much as I agree with Walters that the theater cannot command attention but must earn it, I worry about the loss of the arts experience that merits and rewards a quieting and a focus. For too many years we’ve shamed people into paying homage to art they don’t understand or like; now it seems we may be heading toward an overcorrection in which we shower people with stuff that will hook their attention in fifteen seconds and that they can immediately grasp.

Perhaps we could aim for someplace in between?

Active and passive participation are historically contingent concepts whose meanings have changed over time. Moreover, our sentiments about the virtues and vices of each have also changed. I’m not opposed to the development of more active forms of participation in the live arts; to the contrary, the rampant experimentation is exciting. I just hope we are not throwing in the towel on so-called passive arts experiences.

What I learned teaching a course in aesthetic (and human) development

Despite the need to change some practices, we still need environments that enable the focused attention that some art works (whether performing or visual) require and merit. Unlike beauty in nature, the internal logic of a piece of art cannot always be grasped instantly. Aesthetic judgments in art can’t be made on objective measures or even, quite often, from immediate sensory perceptions. While one might have an initial sensory response, an aesthetic judgment comes from within and often requires a quieting, a focus. Conner and others problematize the quieting of the audience because it reduces the audience’s sovereignty. But quieting the audience could also be interpreted as creating the optimal conditions for someone to have an aesthetic encounter.

The course on beauty and aesthetic development that I taught this past spring at the University of Wisconsin School of Business (to 22 undergraduate business majors) was, to a large extent, about doing just that. The students of the course discovered something about being present in the world in a different way when they turned off their phones, focused their attention on a sunset, stopped multitasking and really listened to a symphony from beginning to end, sat in the balcony of the Overture Center and watched Hubbard Street Dance, or stood silently in front of an artwork for 30 minutes (an activity captured in photo at the top of this post).

The class was an experiment and many of the choices I made this first time around were developed out of personal experience (thinking about how my own tastes and capacity to make meaning from arts experiences evolved over time) and from reading research on the nature of the aesthetic experience. One seminal book that guided my thinking was The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick Emry Robinson. Csikszentmihalyi equates the aesthetic experience to that of flow. He arrived at this conclusion as a result of a qualitative and quantitative study of experts in the art world (who, unsurprisingly, have aesthetic experiences more frequently than most of us). Flow is an experience in which one is deeply absorbed, one loses a sense of time, and one feels joy and mastery while performing an activity (whether writing a section of a novel,operating on someone, having a conversation, playing a video game, or experiencing a great artwork). In other words, the meaningful aesthetic encounter is not a passive one.

Importantly, it is difficult to achieve flow if one is stretched too far beyond one’s natural capabilities; arguably, many audiences come to arts events without the requisite knowledge or previous experience to feel mastery.

In planning the course I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the optimal order of experiences; and I made adjustments over the course of the term in response to subtle forms of feedback from the students. At each step, I wanted them to feel challenged but never incompetent. Moreover, I refrained from giving assessments for several weeks. I wanted the students to focus on the experience itself; and I wanted them to cultivate the ability to make and articulate (internal) aesthetic judgments. I also frequently encouraged them to generate a creative response to each experience (make a drawing, write a haiku, etc.) If I teach the class again I will continue to experiment with its methods. I’ve become compelled by this notion of finding better ways to help people cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. My aim is not for them to become patrons of the arts, per se (although that could be a beneficial outcome, as well); I simply believe that there is great value in this way of experiencing and approaching life.

If we want people to feel engaged (rather than bored) at orchestral concerts, museums, dance performances, and theater pieces there are many approaches we can try. We can try letting them keep their phones on and Tweet from the back row. We can try producing more spectacular works and encouraging people to jump out of their seats and shout back at the stage when they feel moved to do so. We can try taking performances and exhibitions to nontraditional settings and letting people eat, drink, and socialize as they experience the arts event. And we can try inviting the people to create the work and bring it to life with us. Many organizations are trying these very methods–and many others–with great success. Alongside these experiments in active participation strategies, however, I hope some arts organizations will also (continue to?) experiment with ways to make the so-called “passive” artistic experience more meaningful and rewarding, especially for newcomers. Something wonderful can also come from sitting quietly, doing nothing, and focusing one’s attention on the work.

* An earlier version of this post stated that LuPone stopped the performance to take the cell phone from the patron but this has been corrected to reflect that she took the phone during a stage exit during which her character was blocked to shake hands with audience members.

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Valuable data, questionable field recommendations. (A response to Irvine’s latest report on arts participation.)

risk question markA few years ago I had a meeting with a PhD advisor in the US to talk through the proposed chapter breakdown for my dissertation. When discussing the key components of my final chapter I conveyed that it would include a major section covering policy implications and recommendations for arts organizations, artists, and funders. My advisor smiled a bit and said, “Well, let’s see if you earn that section, first.” It was a good lesson. Whenever I come across a passage in a research study that begins, “The evidence suggests that arts organizations should, could, might …” my antenna goes up and I ask whether the recommendations are merited, or whether liberties have been taken.

I share this anecdote because I recently reviewed the findings from a very good study commissioned by the Irvine Foundation—The Cultural Lives of Californians, undertaken by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. While the report itself is chock-full of both data and provocative questions that I imagine could be of great value to arts organizations who are sincere about such things as broadening, deepening and diversifying audiences (the motto brought to us by Wallace and Rand back in the day), the Irvine Foundation seems to be overreaching with its follow-on recommendations for arts organizations.

A brief exposition:

A few years ago the Irvine Foundation (located in California) made a dramatic shift in its arts grantmaking strategy. As executive director of the LA County Arts Commission, Laura Zucker, once put it, “Irvine’s constituency seems to have shifted from arts organizations to people in the community not being served by arts organizations.” *

Irvine’s current aim is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians. Here’s the text that appeared in 2011 when it announced its plans:

Under the new strategy, the foundation will work to boost participation among low-income and ethnically diverse populations that have traditionally been underserved by arts nonprofits; support programs that expand how Californians actively participate in the arts, including the use of digital technology to produce or curate art; and use diverse, non-traditional spaces, especially in regions with few arts-specific venues.

In support of this democratic ideal the Foundation launched in 2013 a new Exploring Engagement Fund to support projects that “aim to engage new and diverse populations by adding active participation opportunities and/or incorporating the use of nontraditional arts spaces” (emphases added). While some nonprofit professional arts organizations in its portfolio met this news with enthusiasm, evidently uptake on the new program was slow. Many of the Foundation’s historic arts grantees seemed unwilling to follow the carrot.

I addressed this resistance a couple years ago in two blog posts (here and also here).  My view, in a nutshell, was (and still is) this: While the Irvine Foundation may have been justified in pursuing a brave new strategy, its grantees were also justified in rebuffing it. I wrote:

Irvine appears to be interested in bringing about a kind of diversity (i.e., change) in the arts sector we don’t often talk about: aesthetic diversity. … However well-researched and justified, Irvine must recognize (and I think it does) that its strategy is out of line with the missions of a majority of professional arts organizations, which were formed to present work by professionals for audiences that come to appreciate that work, not make it. … Irvine needs to recognize that it is endeavoring to coax organizations into uncharted territory. It wants to coerce a change that many cannot make, or do not want to make.

On The Cultural Lives of Californians

So here we are two years later and Irvine has released the findings from its latest study, which investigated differences in  arts and culture participation behaviors across California’s diverse population. It probably goes without saying that many of those surveyed are not patrons of traditional fine arts organizations. Researchers sought to understand (1) what counts as culture, (2) where culture happens, (3) its value to people, and (4) the role of technology in the cultural lives of Californians.

One outcome of the study is an expanded concept of arts participation–one that reflects seven types of behavior researchers encountered: art-making, arts-going, arts-learning, media-based consumption, supporting arts and culture (i.e., volunteering time, money or resources), using social media, and the nebulous category additional activities.  Irvine is not alone in expanding the aperture on arts participation. The NEA has made a similar shift in its periodic survey of public participation in the arts (discussed in this NEA blog post written by director of research Sunil Iyengar).

So, what’s the headline of Irvine’s latest report? Well, it seems to be a good news/bad news message.

First, the report “reframes” the broken-record lament that arts participation is in decline by advancing the much more optimistic perspective that if the definitions of ‘art’ and ‘participation’ are expanded to encompass such things as salsa dancing at the community center, singing at church, knitting at home, watching a YouTube video demonstrating how to knit, writing fan fiction, posting a comment to Facebook about an artist, or taking a photograph and posting it on Instagram–then, actually, significantly more people participate in the arts and culture than previously acknowledged.

(That this might not be encouraging news for orchestras whose audiences for concerts are in decline seems to be a perspective the report doesn’t want to indulge.)

However, the report is not simply a pep rally to drum up enthusiam for the breadth and diversity of cultural participation in California. The bad news? While the levels and varieties of arts and cultural participation overall are “encouraging, there is significant disparity between different groups of Californians.”

It strikes me that, to a great extent, Irvine is trying to grapple with this disparity and, in particular, trying to harness the energies of nonprofit professional arts organizations to solve this problem. To that end, the report includes several sets of provocative questions—all versions of, “So how might a professional arts organization help improve this situation?”

  • What tools or points of access can organizations offer to support individuals in their own art making and learning?
  • What are the opportunities for nonprofit arts organizations to entice and engage those who typically make art in private?
  • How can nonprofit arts organizations make their expertise and resources accessible to people who choose to engage culturally in non-arts-specific spaces, including private settings, such as the home?
  • What are the opportunities for the nonprofit sector to work in and with community spaces without being disruptive to the activity already underway?
  • How can nonprofit arts organizations make their expertise accessible to people who choose to engage culturally online or through mobile devices

I wonder if I am alone in bristling a tiny bit at these questions, which lead a bit too obviously in the direction of Irvine’s grantmaking strategy. Nonetheless, the market is changing, disparities exist, and it’s not unreasonable to at least turn to professional arts groups and ask, “So, what about this market? Do you think you might have something to offer here?”

While the report merely hints at possible strategies for arts organizations, a blog post by Irvine president Josephine Ramirez introducing the report is more direct.  In What Arts Organizations Should Know About the Cultural Lives of Californians, Ramirez states, “this study, and a growing body of research, point to several important opportunities and implications for arts organizations and the sector.” She mentions five, three of which are:

  • Respond to the high demand for more active arts participation;
  • Expand offerings to meet people where they are; and
  • Explore how the arts can stimulate greater participation and connection among California’s largest and growing demographic groups.

Sound familiar?

Basically, the conclusions drawn from the research are that arts organizations need to develop the sorts of programs and initiatives that Irvine has been trying to spur through its Exploring Engagement Fund.

Overreaching?

And this brings me to my basic concerns about the report. While it is extraordinarily worthwhile for a foundation to shine a light on arts and cultural participation among those disinclined to participate in traditional fine arts institutions, and while smart arts organizations will look at this data and seek to understand what it conveys about arts participation behaviors across diverse populations, I’m not sure that the implications proposed by Ramirez are realistic.

Essentially, Ramirez is suggesting that nonprofit professional arts organizations need to develop new products (e.g., those that meet the demand for active participation and those that happen where people are rather than in the traditional arts space) for new markets (e.g. first generation immigrants and other growing groups who are not currently participating in the arts). This is a move that carries enormous risks.

This Ansoff Matrix demonstrates the point.

ansoffmatrix

If a business is doing well, then (from its perspective) the best strategy is to continue to create the product it knows for the market it knows (market penetration). However, when that market is in decline (and one could argue that this is the case for many professional arts groups at the moment), its least risky move is either (a) to develop new products for existing markets (product development), or (b) to develop new markets for existing products (market development).

Asking arts organizations to develop new products for new markets sends them diagonally into the box marked diversification and is a high-risk move; there can be a significant chance of failure. And while Irvine might be willing to underwrite some of the financial risks associated with experiments in this realm, it can’t underwrite the strategic, operational, compliance, social, and psychological risks associated with such changes—organizations need to be ready, willing, and able to bear these on their own.

bridge jumping

Areas for further research?

There seem to be a few assumptions embedded in Ramirez’s recommendations to arts organizations to venture into this realm.

The first is alluded to above. It’s the assumption that profesional museums, theaters, opera companies, dance companies, and orchestras have the capabilities and resources to do this work. This assumption may derive from the difficult reality of an overbuilt nonprofit sector and a desire to see existing assets (whose value may be declining anyway) redeployed in service of a new set of needs. It may derive from the loyalty Irvine feels to its historic grantees and a desire to continue to support them in some way (rather than abandon them for others). Whatever the motivations underpinning the assumption, however, I am not sure it’s sound.

A related concern is that the emphasis on spurring traditional arts organizations into this realm seems to overlook the excellent work being done (for decades now) by grassroots or community-based organizations. They have the necessary skills, values, and ties to diverse populations. Many are already reaching representative audiences (which seems to be Irvine’s primary goal). They are also, quite often, underresourced. Would a better recommendation be that grassroots and community-based organizations merit greater investment to meet this growing need?

The second assumption is the flipside of the first: it’s that first-generation immigrants, the elderly, and the other populations about whose cultural lives Irvine is most concerned desire deeper engagement with opera companies, orchestras, dance companies, museums, and theaters. Is there evidence that this is true?

The third assumption seems to be that art-making is swallowing arts-going whole and that there will be no demand in the future for receptive arts experiences and organizations that are uniquely qualified to offer them. And yet reading the report I was struck by how much interest there still seems to be in good, old-fashioned, “passive” arts-going. Will professional arts organizations that avoid developing active participation strategies be at a disadvantage in the future? Or is there still a healthy market of people who want to buy a ticket, sit in a seat, and watch a show?

Has research already been done that could help address these questions? If so, please comment and send links. If not, would it be worthwhile to probe these assumptions?

***

From my perspective, the report is definitely worth a read. I was particularly interested in a section that reports on the relationship between use of social media (to experience, educate oneself, gather information, or tell others about art or artists) and ethnicity (p. 38). I also spent quite a bit of time examining two infographics that show the relative size of audiences for various forms of music and dance (pp.19-20), one that examines venues for arts-going by type of arts activity (p. 41), one showing rates of arts-going across income levels (p. 24), and one that maps the seven modes of arts participation (p. 12).  Again, it is chock-full of data and I would encourage arts organizations to dig into it.

Here are some links (that Irvine asked me to pass along) to get you started:

I would be keen to hear what others have made of Irvine’s new report or its field recommendations.

* Laura Zucker made this comment at a Grantmakers in the Arts panel that I was invited to attend and blog about in 2013. You can read the full post here.

 

It’s creative; but is it beautiful? (My talk at the Pave Symposium on Entrepreneurship and the Arts)

lightbulbsIn May, I gave a talk at the Pave Biennial Symposium on Arts & Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. The theme of this year’s conference was Creativity and New Venture Creation. The videos from the conference should be posted here by early July at the latest (please check back if you are interested to see the proceedings). In the meantime, you may read a transcript of my talk (with selected slides helpfully embedded).

The talk begins with a preamble on creativity and the reasons for my resistance to using that particular word in the title of the course on beauty and aesthetics that I recently taught at UW-Madison. The major thrust of the talk is an examination of the beauty course itself (what we did, why, and how it went). The piece ends with a section reflecting on the possible relevance of the course to those interested in “creativity and new venture creation” (i.e., those running arts enterprises). This talk evolved from, and expanded upon, two talks I gave earlier in the year: the first, on beauty and accountability, was presented at a board planning retreat for the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; the second, a talk on beauty and business, was presented at a UW-Madison symposium produced by the Bolz Center on Arts Administration. I am sincerely grateful to Howard Shalwitz & Meghan Pressman at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Sherry Wagner-Henry and Donald Hausch at UW-Madison, and Linda Essig at ASU’s Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship for the invitations to speak. Each invitation provided me with an opportunity to organize, expand, and deepen my thoughts on beauty.

Additionally, I have had requests for the bibliography from the beauty course. Here it is (with links where possible).

  • Conniff, G. (2006). The Work of Beauty.
  • de Botton, Alain (2013) Art as Therapy (a video sermon from the School of Life, introducing ideas from the book he co-authored with John Armstrong)
  • Forester, E.M. (1949, August 1). Art for Art’s Sake. Harper’s Magazine
  • Gardner, H. (2011). Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (New York: Basic Books).
  • Kimmelman, M. (2008) Michael Kimmelman on Art, Part 1 and Michael Kimmelman on Art, Part 2 (video excerpts from the Amir Bar-Lev documentary, My Kid Could Paint That). I also highly recommend the Michael Kimmelman 2005 book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, which I did not assign due to time constraints, but which is terrific.
  • LaRocco, C. (2011, April 5). Some thoughts, possibly related, on time, criticism, and the nature of consciousness. A lecture for Brooklyn Rail.
  • Marcus, G. (2013) SVA Commencement Address (audio recording)
  • Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press).
  • Scarry, E. (1999) On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press). The Scarry is dense and academic. You may instead (or in addition) want to read Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, which is terrific (set at a university) and inspired by Scarry’s text.
  • Solnit, R. (2005). A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (New York: The Penguin Group)
  • Wallace, D.F. (2005). This is Water. Commencement Speech to Kenyon College class of 2005.
  • Wilson, C. (2014). Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group). (Wilson’s title may sound frothy but this is serious criticism, written in an engaging tone and style.)
  • Winterson, J. (2002, November 25). The Secret Life of Us. The Guardian.

The last beauty class post

Photo Credit: Alex André for the University of Wisconsin

Diane and several beauty class students at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.  Photo Credit: Alex André

Well, 12 posts later, we’ve come to the last post in the series covering my course in aesthetics and business (aka/ approaching beauty) offered at UW-Madison, for undergraduate business majors.  This post basically walks through the last two classes in which the students took stock, reflected on their journeys, and thought about where they go from here.

(The photo (left) is from an article that ran in a UW-Madison magazine. Unlike my Jumper posts, it’s a quick read.)

As the course has come to an end, several people have asked me “What’s next with beauty? Will you do the course somewhere else?” The answer is, “Very possibly!” I am taking the next year to finish my dissertation on the American regional theater and Broadway, but then hope to return to beauty in fall 2016. A couple universities have already expressed interest in the class. We’ll see what actually comes to fruition. I’m also interested to explore possibilities beyond teaching the course again. A MOOC, perhaps? A publication? A grassroots movement? (Ok, the latter is a vainglorious aspiration; but in all seriousness, I’m more persuaded than ever that all high school and university students need a course like this–a course, essentially, in human development.)

And while the UW-Madison does not have plans to offer this particular course again (it was offered this year only because I pitched and designed the course as part of a one-time visiting guest lectureship), the business school does seem interested to continue its exploration of beauty and, at the very least, to include sessions on beauty as part of its ongoing Compass Leadership Program, which reaches hundreds of freshman each year. So, that’s terrific.

Creating More Beauty in the World

For my last session with the students I invited no outside guests; however, I did bring two artists into the room indirectly as I gave the students assignments to engage with their work. The first artist is the Madison-based photographer Greg Conniff.

GregoryConniffLafayetteCoun

Greg found me on artsjournal.com the second week I was in town and generously reached out to offer encouragement with the course and an essay he had written, The Work of Beauty, for a 2006 catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition of his work at the Chazen Art Museum.

I read the essay and knew immediately that I would assign it for the last class. It’s a moving, inspiring, humorous and well-crafted reflection on finding and creating beauty where you live. Here is one of my favorite passages (particularly meaningful because I moved from New York City to a small suburban village in the Netherlands and I have struggled to feel at home here the past five years):

And where we are, most of us, most of the time, is home. The character of home is made of many things, one of which is local beauty, either natural or built. This came into focus for me late one night alone on a small bridge in my neighborhood during a glorious blizzard. There, along the bridge’s familiar concrete balustrade, I was surprised by a row of ducks, a mother and her young, that someone had sculpted from the snow. They fluoresced in the glow of a nearby streetlight while the flakes, which continued to fall, fattened them with a glittering down. In the sculpture of the ducks I felt the presence of someone who had absorbed much local beauty and who, when circumstances allowed, passed the favor along. I went home and got my camera and woke my wife to come and see.

* * *

It is in our homes and in our hometowns, between work and family, that we live the story of our lives. Our challenge is to make a setting for that story so rich and sustaining that we won’t want to seek relief from it by fleeing to some manufactured elsewhere— some tourist Eden, if you believe the brochures. Why not live in a place of the sort people travel to? We could do this if we understood better the sustaining relationship we can have with our local landscapes.

The students seemed to love Greg’s essay as much as I do and many included lines from it in their final video collages or in their portfolio journals. I asked the students to sit someplace beautiful while reading The Work of Beauty and then to document that place. Here are two examples:

Photo by Megan Schroeder

Photo by Megan Schroeder

Photo by Natalie Ward

Photo by Natalie Ward

I also asked them to reflect on what it would mean (personally speaking) to take responsibility for creating more beauty in the world. Among other things, they wrote about paying closer attention to people–whether strangers, colleagues, friends, or family; being authentic or genuine in their daily interactions; designing work spaces that are uplifting rather than demoralizing; passing along what they have learned in this class; and (like Greg) planting gardens.

***

Susan O'Malley at the ArtMoves Festival in Poland 2012The other assignment I gave related to the recently (and tragically) deceased California-based artist Susan O’Malley.I didn’t know Susan personally but was aware of her work and know colleagues and friends of hers.

Here’s a passage from a moving eulogy written by JD Beltran, that was published in the Huffington Post:

She described her work as “making art that connects us to each other.” Simple, but enormously moving, it tapped into the mundane, and sometimes humorous, interactions of everyday life. Her projects included offering Pep Talks, asking for advice from strangers, installing roomfuls of inspirational posters, distributing flyers in neighborhood mailboxes, and conducting doodle competitions at high schools. Interested in shifting these otherwise commonplace exchanges into heightened experiences, her projects aspired to incite hope, optimism, and a sense of interconnectedness in our lives.

Christian Frock wrote, “All of O’Malley’s work, both as artist and curator, reflected a rare generosity and empathy for those around her — to the extent that her boundless enthusiasm sometimes baffled cynics unable to grasp the actual work of optimism. But she knew it was work and she took it very seriously. Under her professional interests on LinkedIn, O’Malley listed: ‘Making the world a better place. Staying positive in a world that does the opposite.”

When she died (just a few weeks into the term) I vowed to do something in the class to try to honor Susan’s legacy. I sent the students a link to the HuffPo article and some other information about Susan and her work and asked them each to create a mantra for the world–inspired in content from the beauty course and in design by Susan O’Malley’s work. Here are a few of their mantras.

your reality is your own

Megan Schroeder

Constance Colin

Lyndsay Bloomfield

Melanie Gerrits

Melanie Gerrits

 

Contemplating Values & Next Steps in Life

I spent a good chunk of my last regular session with the students doing an exercise with them using the Schwarz universal values. I first asked them to review a list of 58 values (see The Common Cause Handbook) and identify any that resonated. I then gave them the following sequential prompts:

  1. Go through the list again and mark the 10 values that are most important to you.
  2. Go through the list a third time and narrow that list down to 5 core values.
  3. Now, identify your top 10 and top 5 values on this map (also in the Common Cause Handbook).
Schwarz Theory of Basic Values as Mapped by Common Cause

Schwarz Theory of Basic Values as Mapped by Common Cause

 

What you see in the map is that all 58 values can be placed in one of ten universal value clusters, which are divided along two major axes:

  1. Self-enhancement (the pink, red & purple areas) as opposed to self-transcendence (the green areas);
  2. Openness to change (the orange and yellow areas) as opposed to conservation/preservation (the blue areas).

We then had a discussion about where students’ values were mostly clustered. In general, one would expect to hold values across the map but it is also not uncommon to hold values that cluster in one area. We noted that many had values clustered in the green (self-transcendence) section of the map.

We also talked about the career ambitions and next steps facing the students. Those graduating (all but a few students) expressed a combination of excitement and immense anxiety about upcoming moves to new cities and/or new jobs and/or to the unknown. I shared with the students a piece of wisdom that was passed along to me when I was in my 30s:

Burnout doesn’t arise because you are working too many hours; burnout is a result of living your life out of alignment with your values. If you are feeling burned out look at your list of values. There is probably some core value on that list that you are no longer upholding.

This Class in a Nutshell

Finally, in advance of the penultimate session I collected some reflections on the class from the students—including responses to the following question: If a friend asked you “What was that beauty class all about and what, if anything, did you get out of it?” what would you say? Now, clearly, I hold the power over their grades and their responses may have been influenced by this; but I was, nonetheless, curious how they would describe the class and its value. Here were some of their responses (abridged, in some cases)

  • In this beauty class you discover not only what defines beauty and why it is important in business, but you learn about yourself and what you find beautiful and why. Your homework consists of exploring various beautiful experiences – sometimes it’s exploring what others find beautiful and other times it’s making your own experiences and discovering your own idea of what you find beautiful. It is unlike any other business class you will take – it is routed in experiences and exploration – not numbers, grades, and midterms.
  • If a friend were to ask what the class was about, I would share that the course is designed to give business students an artistic perspective aimed at their everyday lives. Through a series of beautiful and art related experiences we reflect on our own personal tastes and aesthetics to ultimately gain some awareness for why we’re attracted to the things we are and what this means about us as a contributing member of a community and a person as a whole.
  • It’s helped me think in a different way, to see different viewpoints and other softer aspects of business that usually get overlooked.
  • It’s about forgetting about the fucking ROI for two seconds, stepping back, and realizing that there is a greater purpose to life than your damn material equity.
  • It’s transforming us into people who care.

Presentation of the Video Collages:

For the final session the students were asked to create five-minute video collages. The aim was to give others a peek into their beauty portfolios and to reflect upon what they had learned about beauty and themselves over the course of the term. The students did beautiful work–and the experience of screening the videos for each other was all the more moving because many of the students were incredibly nervous about this assignment. Here are two for you to enjoy, created by Christina Hoo and Constance Colin.

My Final Remarks–Inspired by the Late David Foster Wallace

Finally, for the last class I had the students read the commencement address by David Foster Wallace, This is Water. It’s a funny and moving talk–all the more poignant given that David Foster Wallace took his life a few years after giving this talk. I leave you with remarks I made to the students at this wrap-up session. It is advice I am endeavoring to hold onto myself:

I assigned one last essay for today – David Foster Wallace’s This is Water.

It’s a commencement address, actually, in which he begins by taking graduating seniors through the sort of typical, hellish day that he believes they are likely to encounter once they are out in the real world. And he talks about the sort of default setting that we can fall into as we go about living our lives—a default narrative in which we are the center of the universe and the whole world seems to be constructed to annoy and frustrate us as we go about trying to get through the day.

But then he offers a way out of this hell. He says:

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Wallace says that we have “the freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” or we can pursue a different kind of freedom, one “that is most precious” and that you “will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.”

He continues:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

His parting words of advice:

It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Throughout the past 12 weeks you have invested your selves into the assignments and experiences of this class and I believe that they have begun to return something to you … this consciousness that David Foster Wallace is talking about … a new way of looking at the world … a new way of knowing, doing, being.

I hope you will keep popping into museums, not to see everything, but to find the one or two pieces that hook your attention—perhaps because they make you feel uncomfortable, perhaps because they seem stupid and you need to figure out why anyone thought they were worthwhile, perhaps because they draw you in like a moth to a flame. Go to those pieces and spend some time. Document them. (Don’t forget to include the name of the artist and the title of the work).

I hope you’ll keep taking time for sunsets, for sitting quietly and listening to beautiful music, for days (or just hours) without your phones, and for days (or just hours) in which you allow yourself to get lost. I hope you will continue to wander and wonder.

I hope you’ll keep collecting quotes from the beautiful essays, articles, and books that you will read as life goes on … and reviewing them now and then.

I hope you’ll look at the big list of values every couple years and reflect on how you have changed and whether you are still living your life in line with the values that are important to you. If you start to feel burned out that may be a sign that you are not and that you are in need of an adjustment in your life.

I hope you’ll keep collecting experiences in your portfolio and reflecting on what you find beautiful, and why, and how your judgments or tastes are changing over time.

I hope you will continue to find beauty in “the thing to make the thing”—in the creative process, in the journey. I hope you are able to approach the work of life with optimism and creativity rather than despair and anxiety.

And I hope you’ll keep your eyes open for both beauty and her opposite, injury, and allow both to inspire you to seek truth and advance justice—to do your part to help repair and make more beautiful some corner of the world.

Stay conscious. Keep your eyes open. Live fully.

 

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