Finally, a damaging health issue that could be solved and mitigated by the nonprofit arts sector, but where are the data? What are the outcomes? And how did the organizations make the solutions permanent?
Henry Jaglom died last month. He was a prolific director of weird, tiny, and personal movies.
One of those movies, 1987’s Someone to Love, isn’t even mentioned in his obituary in Variety. In it, he appears as Danny, a director of weird, tiny, and personal movies. He’s rented the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica and brought all his friends and associates together on Valentine’s Day. The details aren’t important here, except for this one: all of the people he has invited are full-on adults, intelligent or attractive or both, and are choosing to be single. He wants to know why. And that’s the whole premise of the movie.
Among the guests was an actor of mythic proportions (both metaphorical and physical), Orson Welles. It was his final appearance in a motion picture. Near the end of the picture, in a direct conversation with Jaglom from what he calls “the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai,” Welles predicts the kind of technological pouncing on the neck of human social interaction, while at the same time explaining in some morbid detail why people choose to be alone. The clip below is prefaced by Welles’ introduction of the idea about “the great revolution of our times, which is the liberation of women. But by liberating women, we are freeing the last of our slaves. And for 15-20,000 years, there has never been a civilization, ever, even the great democracy of Pericles, Athens, there has never been a single civilization that has not been maintained by slaves.” Then, bellowing his raspy bass voice from the back of the theater, he states this:
“The [state of the American] family has collapsed,” says Welles a few moments after this scene, “because women are trying to do what men have never been able to do, which is to be both completely fulfilled in their work and completely fulfilled in their heart-side. Men have been notable failures combining these things. Why should women succeed any better than we did?”
Welles’s point, made 38 years ago, has been magnified by that technological revolution that happened immediately thereafter. It has created immediate validation on untruths, gossip, and slanderous accusations that have canceled lifelong careers (punishments that don’t necessarily match the crimes), shamed innocents (and the guilty as well), and in all ways, have pushed people to feel as though they are entitled to isolation and loneliness, both in the workplace and in the studio.
People have likely never been lonelier than they are now, which, given a planet with 8.142 billion people on it, seems staggeringly weird. According to sources such as the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), loneliness causes bad health, short lives, and often, horrific violence.
What if these health risks and increased diagnoses of anxiety, depression, and hyper-sensitive lashing-out, especially among those over 40, might be abated by an attack, not on bad actors, but on the scourge of loneliness? Loneliness begets exactly the kind of high, in-your-head sensitivity that is happening right now, not to mention acting as at the very least a correlative point in the uptick of gun frenzy and mass murders.
To that end, and because there would seem to be an obvious connection to the arts, I am stunned by the lack of data that connects to stories and case-making for the nonprofit performing arts sector on the treatment of loneliness. We have a few studies that relate both anecdotal and survey data that seem to indicate that participation in the performing arts, on any side of any footlight, can cause a feeling of community, being part of a greater good.
However, where the data lack power is any set of permanence or resilience. There is insufficient data as to whether this feeling of wholeness through community lasts beyond the art. The news around us suggests it does not.
In a 2019 study commissioned at the University of Chicago, researchers concluded, “Social isolation is a key predictor of mortality in the US and may be heightened in communities affected by violence.” Loneliness increases with age, not merely because friends and family members die off and your latest high school reunion seems more like a meeting of owners of a tontine than a celebration. Loneliness increases as radical life change leaves people befuddled and confused about what they’re supposed to do in new circumstances.
Add a solid dollop of copious technological advances that pronounce themselves lifesavers but instead become the cement overshoes of isolation. Self-driving cars. Streaming the latest movies to yourself at home. And don’t forget the billions invested in cyber-security and, conversely, legal (and illegal) cyber-tracking applications such as — wait, I won’t inadvertently advertise legal spyware for you.
The genuflection to technological things, whether the things are “smart” or otherwise, has to give us pause. (The genuflection to “things” in general should give us pause, but let’s take one thing at a time.) We have become infantile in our dependence to machinery formed by companies trying to sell it to us. The common theme among the advertisements seems to revolve around coolness, safety, and the kids. Oh yes, and the lack of necessary human interaction.
It’s time to get the data. Not just feel-good, emotional, soft-skill data, which tends to be unbelievable by its insistence on vague outcomes and rocky conclusions (for example, “78% of people who attend a performance feel better!”). Long-term data that proves that nonprofit arts organizations solve a health problem might be a start. Start with that premise, which has been promoted mercilessly (and badly) by most arts advocacy groups in the USA/DSA.
Here’s what we mean by shoddy data-gathering and conclusions from arts advocates. This is an ad paid for by Americans for the Arts:
When you click on it (from one of the social media sites), you get taken to a previous post where Americans for the Arts breaks it down for you. This one is from LinkedIn:
But when you take five minutes to search for the study that came to the conclusion regarding cortisol, you discover that the study is from Drexel University, is almost ten years old, only measured 39 total participants immediately before and after a 45-minute art-making (no definition as to what that was) session, and that 30 of them showed lower cortisol levels immediately after the session.
An entire data point based on 30 people is not a valid data point in any lab in the world. And yet, our own arts advocacy groups use this non-science to prove a point that, sadly, might even be helpful if this weren’t such a Peter Pan, “clap if you believe in fairies” disaster of advocacy.
But, as we reported in May (“No. Just No.”), Americans for the Arts is notoriously bad at advocacy. Sad, of course, because it doesn’t have to be. Does it?
Would some research company give a long-term study on the ways in which the arts reduce loneliness? And could there be discussion on what ramifications (positive or negative) that might have on health? Not a pithy little 39-person study…the real thing would be a good start.
Or are you fearful that the results might not be as rosy as you believe? But wouldn’t you want to know that, too?
Instead, we have arts organizations closing left and right, doing poorly, and the only answers seem to lie in others’ dissertations on paid tickets, economic impact, and other non-charitable reasons to exists. Crappy case-making leads to decreased funding, bad decision-making, and toxicity in the donor, foundation, and leadership pool. But yeah, let’s do another gala! Those are fun, right?
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