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Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

Art for ____________’s sake. What would you fill in?

A few weeks back I was in NYC and had the opportunity to attend a Public Forum event featuring the brilliant Jeremy McCarter reading from his new book Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals, and an equally brilliant panel of renowned activists and artists doing a staged reading of the timely, and at once harrowing and humorous, 1917 one-act by Susan Glaspell, The People. It was a great evening and McCarter’s book is now sitting on my Kindle, next in the queue. Toward the end of the evening McCarter turned to the rather large panel of activists and artists he had assembled and asked them to reflect on the phrase Art for Art’s Sake.

There was an awkward silence.

The first couple respondents squirmed a bit and then shrugged off the phrase as being all but useless these days. Others looked like they hoped they would not be called upon to answer.

Someone, as I recall, asked, “What do we even mean when we use that phrase?”

Indeed.

I remember thinking: This is so funny. A panel discussing ideals and art and activism, in a theater, and no on on stage seems willing or able to engage with the idea of art for art’s sake.

Then a visual artist from Cuba stepped up to defend the concept, suggesting that these words come to signify something quite specific and meaningful if you have ever lived under an oppressive regime that censors your ability to make the work you want to make.

Some nods of ascent.

Another panelist said he valued the phrase in the sense that his very existence as a black man making his living as a poet (a rare breed, he suggested) was meaningful to black and brown youth considering their own possibilities in life.

More nods of ascent.

But the question that it seemed most were wrestling with was: If not “for” someone else, or some other purpose, then why make art?

This seems to be the stance-du-jour on l’art pour l’art.

For the past three years I have led a variety of workshops (on business models, marketing, values, transformation, change) with arts admin types. Frequently, I include a slide in my deck with the following phrase and ask people to fill in the blank (it’s a question I stole from Clay Lord, who posted it on Facebook):

Art for ____________’s sake.

In three years, no one has ever said art.

The most common answers are “the society” or “the audience” or “the people.”

I get it.

I wrestled with art for art’s sake for much of 2014 as I designed my course on beauty and aesthetics for business school majors. That wrestling match ended the second week of class, when I brought in a graduate student from the art department, named Tara Austin, to do a drawing workshop with the students. At the end of her drawing workshop Tara talked about her own work, which is inspired by beauty in the natural world. At the time, she was doing a series of abstract orchids.

Tara Austin. Orchidaceae #4. Oil and Acrylic on Panel. 2015

Tara showed slides of several of her orchids and then asked if there were any questions. The first business student to raise her hand said something to this effect:

So, you said that you are only painting orchids. And, I mean, do you think this could be a problem? I mean, maybe people don’t want orchids, orchids, orchids. Maybe not that many people like orchids—maybe some like other kinds of flowers. Or something other than flowers? I mean, I just wonder, are you thinking about this?

Tara paused for a second and then replied,

Um. That’s a really interesting question. No, I’m not thinking about that, actually. I’m painting orchids at the moment because they are really interesting to me and so I guess I will keep painting them until I’m ready to move on to another idea.

After the fact, as I reflected on this moment, I thought it was quite brilliant. A quite reasonable question from a business school student: Is there sufficient demand for orchids? Do you know your market? Do you think you may need to diversify?

And a quite reasonable answer from an arts student: I’m interested in the idea for its own sake; right now, I’m not thinking about whether there is a market for orchids.

And I could not have architected a better moment to convey the different logics or rationalities of business and art, or what art for art’s sake, or research for the sake of research, or exploration for the sake of exploration, or excellence for the sake of excellence are all about. Through this brief conversation between an artist and  business student, I was able to experience the world of business and the world of art as parallel systems of value. This experience finally helped me make sense of, and come to terms with, the phrase art for art’s sake.

There are other parallel systems of value. In his 2010 monograph Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth, Bill Sharpe elaborates five “economies” and their “shared denominations of value” in a table. The last of these is the experience economy of art.

Economy Currency Statement of Shared Denomination of Value
Competitive Games Score The economy of scoring coordinates individual games of a particular kind into a collective competitive sport.
Democracy Votes The economy of democracy coordinates individual preferences into collective policies and powers.
Science Measurement The economy of science coordinates individual phenomena into collective ‘objective’ knowledge.
Exchange Money The economy of exchange coordinates individual use values of alienable property into collective markets.
Experience Art The economy of experience coordinates individual lives into the collective experience of being human

What Sharpe’s framework seeks to illustrate is the incommensurate nature of these various currencies of shared valuation. The score of a sports game may tell us who won or lost but it can’t help us understand the individual or shared experience of the game, for example. Sharpe elaborates on art as the currency of experience, writing (on p. 46):

To see something as art is to respond to it as an expression of personal experience, as the trace of life. To become art, something must move from being private to circulating amongst us as a means of sharing the experience of being human, taking its place in the continuous dance of our culture. In doing so, like dance, its meaning is made, shared, and reflexively remakes our experience of our selves.

Put another way: art is the way we share with one another what it means to be human. To embrace the notion of art for art’s sake in this sense, is also to say, “We need dance/poetry/theater because only the aesthetic form of dance/poetry/theater can allow us to share with one another the experience of being human, using the language of dance/poetry/theater.”

Something like this idea infuses the gorgeous 2012 book Artful by Ali Smith—an extraordinary piece of fiction cum art essay, or vice versa, that I just finished. The apt description on the back cover reads: “Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world. It is about the things art can do, the things art is made of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness.”

In one of four sections, On Form, Smith writes (on p. 76):

Even formlessness has form.

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left—say we lost everything—we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it. I placed a jar in Tennessee. Once we know it, we’ll never not know it. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. They always will. Rhythm itself is a kind of form and, regardless of whether it’s poetry or prose, it becomes a kind of dwelling place for us.

Valuing art for art’s sake is about understanding the value of this dwelling place.

And a bit earlier, Smith writes (on p. 74):

Form never stops. And form is always environmental. Like a people’s songs will tell you about the heart and the aspirations of that people, like their language and their use of it will tell you what their concerns are, material and metaphysical, their artforms will tell you everything about where they live and the shape they’re in.

When I read this passage I thought about seeing a presentation, four years ago now, by Georgetown professor of public diplomacy, Cynthia P. Schneider, who has argued that an important method for understanding any culture is to observe the works of its artists. Schneider has spoken and written extensively on the lessons in diplomacy from the Arab Spring, and in particular has examined the question that many were asking in the days following the revolution—Why didn’t we (America), in particular the CIA, see the Arab Spring coming?

Schneider asserts that this is the wrong question because it reflects a “twentieth-century-men-in-suits-around-a-table version of diplomacy.” Ultimately, she argues that we missed the Arab Spring because we were looking in the wrong place. Instead of “governments talking to governments and authorities talking to authorities,” diplomats and intelligence agencies should have been listening to the music of Arab hip-hop artists, looking at the graffiti on their walls, and watching their films. If they had, they would have anticipated the revolution. While they might not have predicted its time and date, she makes the case (using lyrics, text, and visual images) that they would have, without a doubt, sensed that it was coming.

This is also what it means to value art for art’s sake.

***

Just as we understand the value of research aimed at answering a question that may not have immediate utility to industry, so too can we understand the value of a set of questions being pursued through art for no other reason than because they are of interest to the artist. Scientists must increasingly defend “pure scientific research” as it is a space being eaten alive by the demands of economically lucrative industry-university partnerships. In the same vein, we need to be able to defend the “art for art’s sake” end of the art world spectrum, alongside the other end, “art for civic purposes,” which we have now, perforce, grown quite accustomed to defending.

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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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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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A Few Things I’ve Written

"Surviving the Culture Change", "The Excellence Barrier", "Holding Up the Arts: Can We Sustain What We've Creatived? Should We?" and "Living in the Struggle: Our Long Tug of War in the Arts" are a few keynote addresses I've given in the US and abroad on the larger changes in the cultural environment and ways arts organizations may need to adapt in order to survive and thrive in the coming years.

If you want a quicker read, then you may want to skip the speeches and opt for the article, "Recreating Fine Arts Institutions," which was published in the November 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here is a recent essay commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for the 2011 State of the Arts Conference in London, "Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy".

In 2012 I documented a meeting among commercial theater producers and nonprofit theater directors to discuss partnerships between the two sectors in the development of new theatrical work, which is published by HowlRound. You can get a copy of this report, "In the Intersection," on the HowlRound Website. Finally, last year I also had essays published in Doug Borwick's book, Building Communities Not Audiences and Theatre Bay Area's book (edited by Clay Lord), Counting New Beans.

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