{"id":609,"date":"2016-02-02T13:38:01","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T12:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/?p=609"},"modified":"2016-02-02T19:47:28","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T18:47:28","slug":"irvine-asks-is-there-an-issue-in-the-arts-field-more-urgent-than-engagement-my-answer-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/2016\/02\/irvine-asks-is-there-an-issue-in-the-arts-field-more-urgent-than-engagement-my-answer-yes\/","title":{"rendered":"Irvine asks: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? My answer: Yes."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A couple weeks back the Irvine Foundation launched an online Q&A series, Are We Doing Enough?<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u201daimed 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<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0Part 2<\/a>) featured a group of Irvine’s current grantees, as well as Irvine\u00c2\u00a0arts program director\u00c2\u00a0Josephine 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?<\/p>\n

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?<\/strong> You can read how we responded here<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0I want to use this post to elaborate on my response, the conclusion of which was this:<\/p>\n

While lack of meaningful engagement in the arts is indeed troubling, I would offer that a larger problem is that\u00c2\u00a0the 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\u00e2\u20ac\u0160\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u0160by society-at-large, or even within the arts field itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhow it has changed over time, why, and with what consequence. Some of the deeper questions motivating\u00c2\u00a0my research have been:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What is nonprofit professional theater for<\/em>?<\/li>\n
  2. Are there\u00c2\u00a0clear 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\u00c2\u00a0society through art relates to its front-line missionaries (i.e., staff and volunteers), beneficiaries (i.e., artists and audiences) and the community-at-large?<\/li>\n
  3. If not, or if these have been\u00c2\u00a0eroding over time, is this cause for concern? Can and should we stem the tide? And if so, how?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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\u00c2\u00a0answer to a version of that\u00c2\u00a0first question.\u00c2\u00a0A few ideas were tossed out but nothing stuck–in large part because, as more than a few participants\u00c2\u00a0observed, nonprofits and commercial producers “are more and more the same\u00c2\u00a0in practice.”\u00c2\u00a0As I wrote in the report (available here<\/a> in paperback or free e-file) anaylyzing the meeting:<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    And why is that?<\/p>\n

    Well, lots of reasons. But part of the issue seems to be that the 20th century witnessed not just the professionalization\u00c2\u00a0of the community\u00c2\u00a0arts but their corporatization. Once labors of love by amateurs, arts groups across the US incorporated as not-for-profit<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0corporations but then\u00c2\u00a0put corporate\u00c2\u00a0leaders on their boards, hired staff with more corporate\u00c2\u00a0management skills, adopted corporate marketing techniques, and looked to major corporations like hospitals\u00c2\u00a0and universities\u00c2\u00a0for models on how to raise money and advance their institutions. Savvier arts nonprofits\u00c2\u00a0also opened for-profit subsdiaries, formed\u00c2\u00a0partnerships with commercial enterprises, or became real estate investors or\u00c2\u00a0developers\u00c2\u00a0…\u00c2\u00a0basically, they pursued\u00c2\u00a0any 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.<\/p>\n

    What’s been the cost?<\/p>\n

    In her book Three Guineas<\/em>, Virginia Woolf writes:<\/p>\n

    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\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    I don’t know about you, but I\u00c2\u00a0find this statement to be disturbingly\u00c2\u00a0resonant.<\/p>\n

    Here we are in the 21st<\/sup> 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<\/em> humans.\u00c2\u00a0But as David Brooks<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0seemed to be arguing\u00c2\u00a0in his\u00c2\u00a0January 15 column When Beauty Strikes Back<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>(for which he took quite a bit of flack), the arts have forgotten or rejected this role and society is\u00c2\u00a0poorer for it. He writes:<\/p>\n

    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<\/em>, 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. …<\/p>\n

    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. \u00c2\u00a0It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    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\u00c2\u00a0the wrong side–don’t recognize it because, as Woolf says, we have lost our senses. We have been swept up in econometrics\u00c2\u00a0and 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\u00c2\u00a0normal to us that some\u00c2\u00a0heads of nonprofit resident theater companies, for instance, earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year\u00c2\u00a0while even\u00c2\u00a0great actors in America are leaving the industry because they just can’t bear\u00c2\u00a0living\u00c2\u00a0on the cliff’s edge of poverty year-upon-year–a circumstance that should be appalling to anyone running a nonprofit theater,\u00c2\u00a0if one recalls that\u00c2\u00a0a fundamental purpose for\u00c2\u00a0nonprofit professional\u00c2\u00a0resident\u00c2\u00a0theaters when they were envisioned\u00c2\u00a0in the mid-twentieth century was to provide a stable, living wage to actors.<\/p>\n

    That’s losing the\u00c2\u00a0relations between one thing and another … that’s losing your\u00c2\u00a0humanity.<\/p>\n

    ***<\/p>\n

    Speaking of poverty, if you didn’t see the press\u00c2\u00a0a few days back, the Irvine Foundation made the major announcement\u00c2\u00a0that it\u00c2\u00a0will “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.”<\/p>\n

    President Don Howard wrote in a blog post:<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    This is\u00c2\u00a0Irvine’s evolving focus<\/a>, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    As I read the last paragraph I thought\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 Hmmm, I wonder how the arts program will fare in this evolution? Will it be one of the programs\u00c2\u00a0phased out?<\/em><\/p>\n

    What’s\u00c2\u00a0the case for\u00c2\u00a0the role of professional arts groups in expanding political or economic opportunity for families living in\u00c2\u00a0poverty? Venezuela created\u00c2\u00a0El Sistema<\/a>. What have we created of late\u00c2\u00a0that comes close to having that scale of impact on the lives of the most impoverished?\u00c2\u00a0Has there been anything\u00c2\u00a0since the\u00c2\u00a0Works Progress Administration (a New Deal initiative under FDR), which gave us the remarkable Federal Theatre Project and related projects in other disciplines?\u00c2\u00a0The Federal Theatre Project<\/a>, if you don’t know it,\u00c2\u00a0was a work-relief program that made significant funds available to cities and towns\u00c2\u00a0across the US\u00c2\u00a0to hire out-of-work artists. It resulted in a flowering of hundreds of new ad hoc companies\u00c2\u00a0that collectively\u00c2\u00a0brought vital, relevant theater—including The Living Newspaper<\/a>, <\/em>a form of theater aimed at presenting reflections\u00c2\u00a0on\u00c2\u00a0current social events to popular audiences—<\/em>and\u00c2\u00a0other forms of art\u00c2\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n

    And it exemplified the extraordinary role art can play\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhen it is for the advancement of the many, rather than the few<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u201din helping a nation that is struggling to find a way forward.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    *The photo is of James Turrell’s Roden Crater and is mentioned in my post for the Irvine Foundation. (Here’s the link again!<\/a>)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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    A couple weeks back the Irvine Foundation launched an online Q&A series, Are We Doing Enough?\u00e2\u20ac\u201daimed 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,7,19,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-609","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-beauty","7":"category-democratization-of-culture","8":"category-engagement","9":"category-ethics","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p15Pqw-9P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}