{"id":297,"date":"2013-09-30T05:15:05","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T12:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=297"},"modified":"2013-09-30T06:14:10","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T13:14:10","slug":"dinnervention-2-for-whats-sake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/09\/dinnervention-2-for-whats-sake.html","title":{"rendered":"Dinnervention 2: For What’s Sake?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\".\"<\/a>

.<\/p><\/div>\n

At one point during the dinner, Nina Simon<\/a> and I got into a few sentences of disagreement about where the line was between arts institutions and community centers\u2014and whether there should be one at all.\u00a0 For me, this is a complicated issue, and it\u2019s an area where I often end up feeling like the most conservative person in the room, especially when the room is filled with 11 other people making their names by questioning everything.<\/p>\n

Nina creates interactivity right at the border of the art\u2014it is interesting and inspiring, and I am so on board with the work she is doing to broaden and expand the impact that the pieces in her museum have on the community of Santa Cruz.\u00a0 And then I sometimes hear (and I should say, much to my chagrin, that I haven\u2019t been to visit Nina in situ<\/i>, though I should also say my reactions are to speeches that she has given, not to hearsay) things that give me pause\u2014moments of preferencing community gathering so far over the art that I get concerned the premise would work if the art weren\u2019t there at all.\u00a0 At which point I fear the pendulum has swung too far.<\/p>\n

Going middle of the road is so boring, right?\u00a0 But there I am.\u00a0 I feel a need to embrace that there is a continuum between art as personal enterprise and institutions as community-oriented on either side of which\u2014all art and no art\u2014we are at odds with the reason this field exists.<\/p>\n

I was once at a large one-day convening pulled together as part of the Wallace Foundation activities in San Francisco a few years ago–it was an unusual convening for me to attend in that it had a large contingent of artists, which led to energy in the room that was at once exciting and off-putting for me.\u00a0 As part of the programming, an artist was asked to come up on stage and demonstrate how he might pitch for funds for a project he was trying to put together.\u00a0 The artist, who crossed lines between theatre, dance and painting, jumped up, high energy, and he laid out a hypothetical project and then asked the audience, his investors, to ask him questions.<\/p>\n

“What justification do you have for why your art deserves to exist?” He was asked.<\/p>\n

“Art does not need to justify itself,” he said. “Art simply deserves to exist.”<\/p>\n

The crowd roared, and dollar bills rained from the balcony.<\/p>\n

I found myself mortified.<\/p>\n

In advance of the Dinnervention, I tweeted and messaged out the question that I hear in my mind over and over–“Art for whose sake? Art for what’s sake?”<\/p>\n

The predominant answer, which I found sort of frustrating, was a variation on “Art for fuck’s sake” — or, better punctuated (I think), “Art, for fuck’s sake!” \u00a0This, I feel, is myopic, because the unintended hubris inherent in it indicates a lack of true understanding of the apathy (as opposed to animosity) that exists in most of American society about the art we think is so obviously good.<\/p>\n

Art may not need to justify itself, but art does need to be justified.\u00a0 Arts institutions need to justify the presentation of art in that they need to explain why that art resonates with the mission, what good it is doing to the community, what role it plays.<\/p>\n

In my (short but steep) learning curve at Americans for the Arts, I have been schooled in the nuance of the “arts and…” argument.\u00a0 It is what Americans for the Arts does, by and large, make this type of argument, and while we sometimes get a knock for an overly large focus on “arts and economic impact,” the fact of the matter is that we reach in all directions to try and explain to people who don’t inherently care about art for art’s sake that they should care about art for other reasons–healthcare, military rehabilitation, idea accessibility, civic dialogue, improved scholastic performance, empathy, brain development, historical context, complex conceptualization, eldercare.\u00a0 On my wall in my office, like the rest of the people in my department (at my request), I have the top 13 things that local governments think is important as gathered by the National League of Cities.\u00a0 They are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Business attraction\/recruitment<\/li>\n
  2. Downtown\/commercial redevelopment<\/li>\n
  3. Business retention<\/li>\n
  4. Infrastructure<\/li>\n
  5. Small business\/entrepreneur support<\/li>\n
  6. Tourism\/entertainment<\/li>\n
  7. Community\/neighborhood development<\/li>\n
  8. Public safety<\/li>\n
  9. Environmental sustainability<\/li>\n
  10. Workforce\/job training<\/li>\n
  11. Affordable housing<\/li>\n
  12. K-12 education<\/li>\n
  13. Safety net services<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Those are the books of our Bible, because those are the areas where a whole lot of people are searching for solutions–and where often that solution can be found in art.<\/p>\n

    I have noticed, lately, a bit of mythology being built around the Time Before Nonprofit Status, when art was made and sustained based on true consumer enjoyment, the dollar at the door was what allowed you to continue or not, the audience dictated the content in the same way they dictated who was more popular, Coke or Pepsi.\u00a0 I used to find this disheartening, this idea that so many were suddenly yearning for a return to a time when so many fewer people could be practicing artists, when the art itself was manufactured, to draw from Henry Ford’s famous quote, much more as horses than cars.\u00a0 But that lament lacks detail.<\/p>\n

    The non-profit status is a bargain, and when I hear people talking about abandoning it now, I try to remind myself that that bargain isn’t for everyone.\u00a0 The nature of the bargain was the ability to accept donations from individuals and to be exempted from most taxation on the assumption that, through art, we were bettering society.\u00a0 We got the money in exchange for the common good.\u00a0 We got the freedom to solicit investment in work that we believed would change society for the better–Henry Ford’s cars–and the ability to freely extrapolate what the common public good meant.\u00a0 And then we forgot that, by and large, and the public whose good we were pursuing moved on–not away from art, but to other art, away from us<\/i>.<\/p>\n

    A new movement in the arts must be defined by what we can provide to a society already searching for solutions to ills–one defined by a caring for the community first, not for the artist first, but also by embracing that art is our core strategy for success, not an incidental.\u00a0 I believe in the power of the art, just as I believe in our power to amplify the art\u2019s impact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    This is part of a larger series of posts about the Arts Dinnervention.\u00a0 View the previous one here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At one point during the dinner, Nina Simon and I got into a few sentences of disagreement about where the line was between arts institutions and community centers\u2014and whether there should be one at all.\u00a0 For me, this is a complicated issue, and it\u2019s an area where I often end up feeling like the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298,"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":[12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-change","8":"category-main","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","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=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}