{"id":20,"date":"2011-04-12T21:00:01","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T04:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=20"},"modified":"2011-04-21T11:36:03","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T18:36:03","slug":"we-need-new-beans-to-count","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2011\/04\/we-need-new-beans-to-count.html","title":{"rendered":"We Need New Beans to Count"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bean<\/a>

Bean Farmer by bahurvrihi from Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.<\/p><\/div>\n

As an industry, the arts suffers from a value problem. This was thrown into sharp relief for me in an interview I had with an artistic leader from rural Wisconsin, who pointed out, \u201cWe\u2019re all bean counters because the people we deal with, what they count is beans.\u201d\u00a0In almost everything we do to advocate for the arts, we place financial worth front and center, and in so doing we allow, even encourage, the people we\u2019re trying to convince of art\u2019s value to forget that that value is much more than economic.
\n\u00a0
\nExplicating value is difficult, especially for something as impermanent and subjective as art.\u00a0But we all know what that value is \u2013 we\u2019re artists, we believe strongly in the ability of art to stretch across divides, to instill empathy, to educate about new experiences, to encourage creative and critical thought, to transform relationships.\u00a0 More than that, we believe in something even more primal to what we do, pre-language, pre-thought: an ur-impulse in art that, upon contact, rearranges something within us when we interact with it, changes our emotional and intellectual make-up in some fundamental way, and leaves us different.\u00a0 We believe that art makes better people.
\n\u00a0
\nAnd yet we spend all of our time talking about the fact that one dollar into the arts generates eighteen dollars out.\u00a0 We talk about butts in seats, and dollars per head, and return on dollar-for-dollar investment.\u00a0 We talk about side impacts to restaurants, businesses, parking garages, coffee shops.\u00a0 We count the beans we know how to count, and then present them to other people who know how to count them, and declare ourselves valuable.
\n\u00a0
\nThe unfortunate side effect of this phenomenon is that we end up convincing people that art is a luxury, not a necessity.\u00a0Sure, if that theatre shuts its doors, those other businesses are going to lose some traffic, but, when you\u2019re looking at the beans we look at, the loss of this art or that art, seen in purely economic terms, is manageable.\u00a0 By not formulating and disseminating a vocabulary about the arts that includes terms for explaining the ethereal, or intrinsic, impacts of the work we do on the people who watch us do it, we\u2019re turning off the part of the conversation that is about what a world without art would do to the people living in it.
\n\u00a0
\nThe author Barbara Kingsolver, in her book High Tide in Tucson<\/em>, writes about wants and needs, and the difference.\u00a0 She says:<\/p>\n

“Want<\/em> is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs<\/em>, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would argue, and I think we would all argue, that art and the expression of empathy, emotion and connectedness that goes along with art, is as fundamental a need as anything else that would rattle around in that bucket, but it\u2019s clear to me that not many others think that way.\u00a0 The NEA is under threat (again), arts education continues to disappear from schools, as it has for the last three decades, etc, etc.
\n\u00a0
\nIt is time to start trying to grow some new beans, to start quantifying, as best we can, the formerly unquantifiable, most-important-part-of, art.\u00a0 And that\u2019s what we\u2019re currently trying to do in a national study of the intrinsic impact of live theatre.\u00a0 In 18 theatres in six cities across the country, we\u2019re distributing over 49,000 surveys that have been designed by the research firm WolfBrown to quantify the intellectual, social, emotional, empathic impacts of the art we do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Accompanying that work, we\u2019re conducting interviews with audience members, artistic and administrative staff, and major thinkers in the arts across the country to try and better understand how they talk about the arts\u2014all with a goal of developing a new vocabulary (and a new web tool to utilize that vocabulary) that will allow us to more accurately express why art matters.\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nFor the sake of the field, and the betterment of the people we serve, we need to get started counting some new beans, and we need to teach the people who control our funding how to understand their worth.
\n\u00a0
\nFor more information on the Intrinsic Impact study, visit http:\/\/www.theatrebayarea.org\/intrinsicimpact<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared\u00a0on artsmarketing.org<\/a> in advance of my appearance on a panel on evaluative measures in philanthropy at the Americans for the Arts conference this June.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As an industry, the arts suffers from a value problem. This was thrown into sharp relief for me in an interview I had with an artistic leader from rural Wisconsin, who pointed out, \u201cWe\u2019re all bean counters because the people we deal with, what they count is beans.\u201d\u00a0In almost everything we do to advocate for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,7,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-audience-development","9":"category-language","10":"category-main","11":"category-research","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}