Book Review: Performing Policy

This book review was originally posted as a guest post at the Clyde Fitch Report

Artists have always had a hard time making a living. Unless engaged in certain commercial areas, they produce unique one-of-a-kind products and cannot reap the rewards of scale that most purveyors of goods enjoy. Performing artists have it even tougher. Their customers can’t walk away with a product; they’re buying an ephemeral experience. Still, to earn a living, artists must engage with the market as others do. They must seek customers, ally themselves with funding sources and deliver their product — often on an agreed-to schedule. It is not unusual for artists to “outsource” these economic functions to producers or managers. Until relatively recently, artists had to choose to work in a commercial environment, serve a patron (a version of a commercial arrangement) or work as an amateur driven by non-market concerns. In all cases except when working as an amateur, artists have depended on the taste and beneficence of others.

For more than a century and a half, as a result of the continually increasing personal agency and autonomy sought by our Western culture, we elevated the arts and the work of artists to a higher plane. The notion of creating “art for art’s sake” entered the cultural consciousness in the mid-1800s, enabling the “work” of artists to be separated, philosophically, from the vagaries of the marketplace. The nonprofit structure developed by the early 1900s, and, several decades later, a number of foundations, followed by the public sector, made critical investments in building an infrastructure that professionalized the arts.

In his new book, Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programs Redefined U.S. Artists for the Twenty-First Century, artist-academic Paul Bonin-Rodriguez responds to the shifts that have lately consumed our cultural sector. He argues that the 1990s culture wars forced a rethinking of, and retrenchment from, the elevated status that artists had come to enjoy, and that we must reframe the context and connection of artists to the broader culture; they should rethink their relationship to communities as well as to their own practice. Reflecting on his own evolution as a practicing artist, he writes that artists can no longer segregate the economics of their work from their art and practice. In short, they must confront a new cultural ecology.

From the outset, Bonin-Rodriguez sets a high bar for himself:

Performing Policy demonstrates how a movement in arts and cultural policy begun in the 1990s redefined U.S. artists’ roles in American society and enhanced their prospects for the twenty-first century.

Often arguing in definitive language, he seems to propose that the policy initiatives he cites were broadly embraced by the culture sector. In fact, they were successful but limited in their impact. He even admits that of all the policy discussions he cites, none succeeded in offering a clear “job description for the term artist.” Bonin-Rodriguez then offers just that.

The heart of his argument resides in his preface (describing his own journey and evolution), his introduction (outlining the history and making his argument), and his coda (summarizing his analysis and pointing the way forward). In between these endpoints, Bonin-Rodriguez offers a historical and analytical review of three policy paths that have been pursued in reframing the artist’s societal function and purpose. His review of these three paths then alternate with three case studies that illustrate the reframing.

He writes, for example, of the American Assembly’s “The Arts and the Public Purpose” convening in 1997. At this meeting, a group of committed arts advocates and policymakers responded to the vilification and overall diminishment of the arts that resulted from the aforementioned culture wars. Acknowledging a shift away from the optimistic, post-World War II heights of liberalism, this group argued against the “art for art’s sake” ethos and for one in which the arts imbued value into the culture. Funding programs soon followed the changing rhetorical landscape.

Indeed, the nonprofit organization Creative Capital, formed in 1999, adapted venture capital concepts and made longer term commitments to artistic projects — and linked those commitments to the development of economic skills for their recipients. They sought to

. . .contribute to cultural vitality by focusing specifically on artists… dream[ing of] a freedom of expression properly administered and strategically marketed.

Performing Policy p.73

Leveraging Investments in Creativity, a 10-year funding experiment, focused increasingly on place in the projects it supported seeking to model new methods of cultural support and distribution strategies based on geography, cultural specificities, and the public-purpose roles that artists serve in communities.

This path, Bonin-Rodriguez concludes, traced an evolution — from a focus on space to a focus on place. He points to the recent creative placemaking initiatives begun by the National Endowment for the Arts and now carried on by ArtPlace America and other groups.

Even as Bonin-Rodriguez focuses on the changing context of art and artists in our culture, he acknowledges that such questioning and evolution is not so unique. He observes that the culture wars were really part of a larger societal trend, one reflecting a shift in Cold War rhetoric: from art symbolizing the triumph of Western society and therefore funded as “a tool of the state,” to a Reaganist faith in “privatization and personal responsibility.” He argues that artists, like other workers “squeezed out of the workforce,” have been forced to rely more and more on their entrepreneurial capacities.

Yet this shift, as the author portrays it, ignores the fact that there have always been artists who used their entrepreneurial skills alongside their creative practice to get by. He contends that all of the policy efforts of recent decades successfully built a theoretical framework for arts participation and support in our culture, but did little to ameliorate the volatility and availability of actual funding sources for artists to support their work. Artists, like so many others, must fend for themselves to make a living.

Faced with a continuing disconnect between artists’ practice and what arts policy professionals propose, the author suggests that artists simply accept the new demands placed on them. To succeed and be fulfilled, he proposes that artists must adopt, and our educational system must support, a hybrid role in which artists will not only create art but also produce art. By accepting the increased agency and autonomy of a hybrid role, Bonin-Rodriguez believes that artists can build a career and make a living. Fully engaging and integrating with their communities, taking a politically activist role, artists can bring value to their audiences and build the deep connections their line of work demands. If artists will live the rhetoric of policy makers, in other words, artists will be performing policy.

The book is informative in its historical analysis of attempts by altruistic non-artists to build policy structures aimed at ensuring participation in, and support of, artists in our current culture. Although the author believes this effort was successful, he acknowledges that it is still difficult to make a living as an artist. At the end of the day, as the French say, plus ça change: for artists to make a living, they still depend on the tastes and desires of those who fund the art.

Art Works: Sowing Data Seeds

Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released three new reports that provide much good information for a number of critical discussions and are examples of a rich and flourishing NEA research agenda, which potentially could have a great impact on our national dialogue about the arts and culture. Whether the timing is coincidental or not, these reports join a number of other reports and studies that, like the NEA reports, provide hard data about the impact of the arts in our culture or dig into what is happening to audiences. Taken together, they all form a solid foundation for arts leaders and advocates to plan their strategic directions and arguments. As these data releases show, we can finally begin to rely on hard data to discuss the impact and contribution the arts make to our economic life.

The NEA reports provide deep analysis of audience engagement with the arts through 2012, look at the reasons people interested in the arts do not actually participate, and provide some macro data on how the arts fit within our larger economic environment here in the United States. While one of them, A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings From the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012, identifies trends in existing NEA data, the other two sets, the eight ACPSA (Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account) Issue Briefs and When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance, represent a significant advancement by integrating NEA data with data drawn from other government sources. The result is a broader cultural overlay and contextualization of the NEA research and its implications. Similar to its strategy to leverage funding for the arts through collaboration with other governmental agencies and funding sources, the NEA looks to be pursuing a similar plan to leverage resources with regard to its research and the dissemination of information.

A Decade of Arts Engagement, tracking trends in the 2002, 2008, and 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), confirms that there has been a steady decline in participation by the audience in the traditional arts. Additionally, the data show that a core cohort of audience members who purchased the vast majority of tickets are not only declining in number, but are purchasing far fewer tickets when they do attend performances or go to exhibits. This trend is supported by the same trends in other reports, like the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s just-released 2014 Patron Loyalty Study: Loyalty by the Numbers. This study looked at 17 Philadelphia cultural institutions and found that 3% of their patrons provided 62% of the group’s earned revenue. Furthermore, when donations were considered as well, this group’s spending declined by 12% during the seven-year analysis of the data. The Philadelphia study, going beyond the NEA report but consistent with other studies (such as the 2008 Oliver Wyman study commissioned by nine leading symphony orchestras), also shows that while significant numbers of new audience members are coming to cultural events, they do not return.

This apparently endemic issue of churn, when considered in conjunction with the declining numbers of audience and the decline in revenue generation that the continuing audience provides is one of the most critical threats to the business model of our arts organizations. While not directly aimed at this dilemma, the NEA’s new When Going Gets Tough (NEA Research Report #59) offers data that is likely to be helpful in plotting a strategy to address this continuing issue of audience engagement.

Overlaying SPPA data on the 2012 General Social Survey (a regular sociological survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago), this report specifically looks at the motivations of both the attendees and those who do not attend the arts. It has deep analysis of a cohort that arts managers will naturally consider to court: those people who express interest in attending arts events, but don’t actually attend. The data is analyzed in every way imaginable and reveals that acquiring such audience members is likely to require niche-driven campaigns that address each target group’s particular but different motivation for attending or not. Put another way, there is no one single marketing or communications strategy that will successfully engage the diverse audience that exists because different cohorts are motivated by different reasons and desires.

For example, socializing with friends or family members was the most common motivation for those attending exhibits or performances and was mentioned by 76% of those attending performances and 68% of those attending exhibitions. However, for those who expressed interest but don’t attend, only 22% of the respondents expressed the lack of someone to go with as the barrier to their attendance. One might conclude, therefore, that socializing is important for those already attending, but this would not be the most impactful strategy with which to engage newcomers. This socializing motivation was confirmed in the Culture Track ‘14 study (the most recent edition of a periodic study done by LaPlaca Cohen) that surveyed 4026 arts participants from all 50 states and found that socializing and relaxing were the main reasons respondents participated in culture.

Despite this large interest in socializing as a motivator for participation, When Going Gets Tough found that amongst racial and ethnic minorities, and first-generation immigrants, other motivating reasons were more important. For those already attending, non-Hispanic blacks and African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Pacific Islanders most frequently attended performances to support community events and organizations. Non-Hispanic blacks and African-Americans less frequently mentioned socializing among their reasons for attending the arts. But for those interested but not attending, the lack of someone to attend with was cited by a higher proportion of non-Hispanic blacks and African-Americans (32%) and Mexican-Americans (42%) than other ethnic groups (17%). For Mexican-Americans, difficulty in getting to the venue was cited at an even higher rate (47%) than lack of someone to go with.

Some of the other highlights of this report include the conclusion that life stages of people is a better predictor of participation than age alone and that socio-economic status and people’s self-identified class identity have an impact on participants’ motivations to attend or not. Rich with great detail on the complex nature of our audiences, When Going Gets Tough should provide much detail and strategic information to plan how to approach existing and potential audiences by providing some understanding of their motivations and desires.

When Going Gets Tough is not the first time the NEA has looked at barriers to attendance at arts events. In 1982, analyzing that year’s SPPA, the NEA released Age, Desire, and Barriers to Increased Attendance at Performing Arts Events and Art Museums. Although that report does not overlay on the GSS, it does show that the top barriers to attendance were the same as they were in 2012: not enough time and the high cost of attendance. In the thirty years since the first report, however, the occurrence of these leading barriers to attendance has only increased. Similarly, not having a companion with whom to attend the event has increased as a barrier, though much more dramatically, as shown in this chart.

1982 Barriers			2012 Barriers
1. Not enough time	42.6%		1. Could not find the time	47.3%
2. Too expensive	29.9%		2. Costs too much	38.3%
3. Art form not available	27.2%		3. To difficult to get there	36.6%
4. Too far away	19.0%		4. Could not find anyone to go with	21.6%
5. Poor performance time	15.8%		5. Did not want to go to that location	9.0%
6. Lack of motivation	13.8%
7. No one to go with	9.2%
8. Traffic, transport, parking issues	8.6%

Looking at the reports mentioned above and others, such as the Wallace Foundation’s The Road to Results: Effective Practices for Building Arts Audiences, it would seem that there is a growing body of data and literature that can be marshaled in the critical discussion of audiences and how to deal with their evolution. Perhaps of greatest impact, these analyses reveal information about the motivation of then current audiences in terms of why they attend and, more interestingly, what drives those interested in attending that never do, providing tools for planning by arts and civic leaders.

At the same time that the NEA released A Decade of Engagement and When Going Gets Tough, it also released a series of seven issue briefs that provide macro economic analysis of the contribution the arts make in our culture and economy. The briefs summarize data generated in the first-time Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, a partnership between the NEA and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Detailing the contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP – Brief 1), data on arts and cultural workers and their compensation (Brief 2), the impact of tax-exempt cultural organizations (Brief 3), and the sector’s contribution to the nation’s imports and exports (Brief 5), amongst others, we begin to see the arts and culture sector through the economic lens used to consider other industries. This should provide, or at least be the beginning of developing a vocabulary for the arts and culture sector that will allow us to engage in the conversation on equal footing with other participants in economic and policy discussions.

Though not explicitly stated as a policy, we can see the NEA efforts in this and similar areas to leverage its resources and assets taking root and beginning to sprout. The NEA Our Town funding initiative, along with its sometimes partner ArtPlace, occupies a prominent place in the recently released Community Development Investment Review: Creative Placemaking from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Together, these two programs are recognized for the effects their concerted efforts have at integrating the arts into our civic planning, which is the focus of this entire issue of the Investment Review.

From all of this, it seems clear that the NEA has a rich and activist research agenda. Some of the current research goals are: quantifying the efficacy of NEA-funded programs, “advance[ing] public knowledge about the arts’ contributions to American life,” “track[ing] the long-term relationship between the arts and livability in communities throughout the nation,” and “address[ing] knowledge gaps concerning the arts’ link to human development at every stage of the lifespan.” In looking at these research questions of great import to the cultural life of the country, one might begin to conclude that the endowment is looking to seed a foundation for a national cultural policy, or at least to ensure that the data necessary to form such a policy exists. What is most exciting about these initiatives and focus is that in the absence of a governmental body to argue for cultural policy, the research and its conclusions are helpful for arts advocates to acquire the ammunition necessary to make their case for greater funding and acceptance of the arts in the United States.

Over the past two decades, we have lived through enormous changes in our arts industries. They continue to evolve at breakneck pace, turning upside down the relationships between creators, distrbutors, and consumers of the art we are creating. Only now, however, through the issuance of government reports such as those mentioned above and the research being reported by private and other public sources, are we beginning to have a picture of motivations of new cohorts of arts creators and consumers. At the same time, and possibly in response to the increasing demand for metrics, we are beginning to see economic analysis in a format that is consistent with that of other industries, allowing the arts and culture sector to engage on an equal footing. In this way, we are joining the likes of other countries, such as Canada, Australia, and Spain, who are ahead of us in striving to understand the contribution the arts make to their economic and cultural life, acknowledging the critical role the arts play in the life of their society. All in all, it is a welcome development that can only bode well for advancing our sector and its place in our society.

Expectations

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations.

Recently, three published pieces raised the question of our expectations as artists and how we present our work.¹ While not all discuss the same topic, each one raises, at least by inference or implication, the question of how an artist can fulfill his or her expectation of a reasonable living wage in our current environment.

These pieces, addressing various aspects of this topic (which I have been mulling and discussing with colleagues for a while) are: Why “Where”? Because “Who”: Arts venues, spaces and traditions by Brent Reidy of AEA Consulting for the James Irvine Foundation, Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, a report by BFAMFAPhD, and The Pomplamoose Problem: Artists Can’t Survive as Saints and Martyrs. Two of the pieces, Artists Report Back and The Pomplamoose Problem detail the gap in the reality of making a living that artists face. The third, Why “Where”? Because “Who” details the changed expectation of current audiences and the changing relationship between audience and artist regarding the space in which the art takes place.

The heart of the matter is that we expect to be able to earn a reasonable living through our art, but the current environment makes this an unrealistic expectation except for a very select few. We partially find ourselves in this situation because of the overwhelming success of our funding and cultural policies and strategies during the twentieth century (particularly the second half of that century) that aimed to professionalize the artistic landscape and broaden the reach of culture throughout our society.

While there has always been a commercial industry that existed alongside amateur practitioners, commercial opportunities were traditionally limited and selective. Through the use of “leveraged funding,” pioneered by the Ford Foundation and then adopted by the government and other funders, we built a strong and vibrant professional non-profit creative sector.² A natural outcome of this “professionalization” was an increased expectation for all participants that it was possible for the first time, certainly within our country’s history, to earn a living as an artist.³ This sense has been strengthened by the institutionalization of arts education and training that came with the professionalization and to which Artists Report Back responds.

As we have transitioned into the twenty-first century, however, the demographic and social milieu has fundamentally shifted, resulting in a gap between the expectation of artists and the expectation of audiences. To put it another way, audiences are increasingly skipping the traditional artforms (often referred to as “high” or “fine” arts) because these artforms, at least as they are traditionally presented, no longer deliver the value they once did. The success of our strategies of the past hundred years in increasing the supply of artists has not been matched with strategies to insure sufficient value and demand for the work of those artists. The result is the gap many funders are now seeking to address.

It is well documented that our country is in the midst of a major demographic shift from a European based Caucasian culture to a multi-ethnic culture. The vast majority of the traditional arts that have been professionalized in this country flowed from a European background and aesthetic system that is not the same as that of other heritages, many of which have a different (or additional) set of cultural artifacts and experiences that they value. As the ethnic and racial balance in our country shifts, so do the cultural experiences and artifacts in which audiences find value, which is directly linked to demand.

At the same time, disruptive digital technologies have eviscerated the underpinnings of many industries and the previous generation’s work, turning the business models of our sector upside down. The underlying issue - the inability to rely on making a living as an artist today - is not limited to the non-profit sector. Taylor Swift’s recent withdrawal of her catalog from Spotify and the pitched battle between Amazon and Hachette are indications that the pressures from these shifts are also wreaking havoc with the commercial segments of the creative industries.

Many of today’s funders and analysts in our sector are understandably focused on the changing rules of engagement between artist and audience. Some, like Bill Ivey, have nostalgically focused their writing on the shift or return to a public engagement with the arts that is reminiscent of past times and norms.⁴ Unfortunately, this earlier kind of engagement never included a professionalized sector, and consequently the expectation of artists that they might reasonably earn a living from their art did not exist or at least did not exist on the general scale it does today.

Reidy, looking at it from the audience point of view, urges artists to go where the audiences are and not expect audiences to come to them, as they have in the past.⁵ For Reidy, these changes are irrevocable:

The most shortsighted of these efforts are calculated attempts to hook new patrons and somehow convince them to come back to the places they do not currently attend. Increasing attendance back at base is possible, but only when an organization can re-legitimize and ground itself through efforts that reach new patrons in genuine ways. For the work to be truly effective,[ ] it must be part of the mission, not only of strategy, and an organization must be committed to meeting its current and future patrons where they are, not where that organization wishes they were (emphasis in the original).⁶

Looking at it from the artist’s point of view, both The Pomplamoose Problem, and Artists Report Back urge that we address the crisis of the difficulty artists have to earn a living. Each assumes artists should be able to earn a living. Perhaps just as Reidy acknowledges the reality of a changed expectations and desires of audiences, so too must artists acknowledge the changed reality of their situation. And some may already be doing so.

The Pomplamoose Problem responds to a report by the band Pomplamoose, in which the band details the costs and revenues of their recent self-produced tour. While the band believes that their investment and personal loss on the tour was well worth it, their loss is bemoaned in the Pomplamoose Problem as a sign of how we are failing our artists and this forms the basis of the post’s call to action. The only real difference I can see, however, between the Pomplamoose artists and the Pomplamoose Problem commenter is that they have different expectations.

Along with Brent Reidy’s findings and recommendations, it seems that this is the real message that more and more are suggesting for our sector: changing expectations are required to continue making art and being satisfied with the return on that work for the artist. Such a change, though, may spell the end of the “professionalized” arts sector we have come to expect. As the Pomplamoose band's reactions shows, it is possible to be successful in the current environment, though to do so, today's artists may need a different set of expectations than those of artists of a previous period.

---

^1. Many thanks to Thomas Cott and You’ve Cott Mail for alerting us to these and many other salient conversations.
^2. A second outcome of this process was the solidifying of a dichotomy between “high” and “popular” art. With the return to an earlier relationship between artist and audience, as Reidy and others report, this distinction is also waning or disappearing.
^3. For a concise and enlightening history of this process, see, for example The Performing Arts in a New Era, from the Rand Corporation for the Pew Charitable Trusts, 2001.
^4. See, for example, Ivey’s Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy, Counterpoint Press, 2012.
^5. While not explicitly stated, the report appears to be addressed more to institutional readers than individual artists, but his points are just as applicable.
^6. Reidy, p12.

A New Sense of Value at the Core

This article originally appeared in the Dance/USA Journal, Vo. 25, No.1, Spring 2009, as part of a series of comments on the state of the field from a diverse set of DUSA Trustees.

Recently, my family entered the 21st century by getting a DVR. Suddenly, we are able to choose and enjoy any entertainment offering when and how we want it. We have been freed from the past, where the only way to experience culture was communally, joining with others at a set time to partake in what was being offered.

This change has been coming for a long time. Television, like radio before it, fostered a regular presence for the performing arts that one could enjoy in private. As is inevitable, technology has continued to advance so that information and experiences are now available on demand, at any place and any time. The result, epitomized by the DVR and like devices, is that each of us can act as a curator, determining our own personalized entertainment, obviating the need for communal experiences, which is inherently a part of what we in the dance community do best.

Studies show that the most reliable predictors of commitment to the arts are continued exposure and education, whether in a formal setting (such as at school), or in a private setting (such as in the home). Those who make the commitment are guided to it by their own private curator(s). It is not surprising, then, that as individualization has replaced community, we have lost the innate appreciation for and valuing of the live arts, which we as a nation should hold dear. Even worse, life is often experienced today through simulacra, replacing real experiences with ones that we believe are real. Umberto Eco would say, rather than using these representations to invoke previous memories, we now take them as the real thing without yearning for the lost original.

As a response to this individualization of experience, engaging audiences - meeting them on their own terms to empower their individualization - is currently a high priority among funders and administrators. Recent studies conclude that although more people participate in dance and classical music than ever before, fewer and fewer experience these arts in the theater or concert hall. In a world of individualized experience, culture is falling prey to the elevation of the individual over the communal. Opera and theater director Peter Sellars, at the American Symphony Orchestra League (now known as the League of American Orchestras) annual conference two years ago, described how he and Music Director Esa Pekka Salonen moved the Los Angeles Philharmonic out of the concert hall. Others have embarked on similar efforts to redefine the relationship between audiences and classical arts.

Last spring, impresario Gerard Mortier, at his keynote address to Opera America, implored us to remember that performance is truly unique and transcendental when it is experienced live. Peter Gelb, who as general manager redefined the Metropolitan Opera by offering performances around the world in high-definition video transmission, believes that his program's success depends on audiences in Des Moines, Palm Beach, San Antonio, and Edinburgh knowing that they are simultaneously watching a live performance along with 3,600 others sitting in the theater in New York.

Curious about how younger people feel about live performance, I asked my son (for whom technology and on-demand access to information and experience are innate) about it because he periodically asks me to take him to a ballet or opera performance. He told me that live performance is all-enveloping and cannot be matched by a two-dimensional version of the same experience. It might be satisfying in a different way, but it is not the same.

Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report on the state of theater around the country. It concluded that we have successfully stimulated the supply of theater performances and spaces over recent decades, but put little effort into stimulating demand. The result is an over-capacity of theaters and theatrical offerings with insufficient demand to draw adequate audiences.

At New York City Ballet, we perform seven times a week for 23 weeks in our home theater each year. Like many of our Dance/USA colleagues, we are suffering from decreasing demand and outlets for our artistry. We now sell 330,000 tickets annually in New York, a decline from the 400,000-plus tickets we sold 25 years ago. Increasing costs are conspiring with these diminishing audiences to threaten our very business model. I spend much of my day learning to address this challenge - whether through exploring ways to increase audiences or re-imagining how we present our work to make it more available to more people in more places.

But these efforts, and those of my colleagues, will be for naught unless there are audiences who appreciate and value the live performing arts we esteem. Sufficient demand for our art is essential to our future and the future of the field. And it is the only way to assure the future of our artists' unique work and its relevance. Herein, then, lies the crux of the matter: unless we are able to inculcate a new sense of value for the live performances we all believe so deeply are core to our dance experience, we are in danger - in danger of losing our relevance and our very future,.

This is the greatest challenge we face and I urge all of us - government, foundations, administrators, and artists - to face it head on and with all earnestness. I am unsure of how to accomplish it or what the answer is, but, one way or another, we must all commit to what we have neglected over recent decades: stimulating demand and appreciation for live cultural performances.

Chaos

"The 21st century is a really terrible time to be a control freak, . . . In the 21st century, the level of control is going to be decreased, . . ." Jared Cohen and Alec Ross in the New York Times Magazine, July 18, 2010.

I've been thinking a lot about chaos lately. Thinking about the increased level of chaos we all live with. We have seen the disintegration of nation states and the rise of failed states around the world. At the same time, the proliferation of non-governmental actors, capable of sowing tremendous destruction and disruption, has raised questions about the long-term viability of the sovereign state model that has been the norm since Bismark. Most interesting, however, is the level of "comfort" young people seem to have with this situation that sets many of us on edge.

Growing up today, one is constantly engaging in multiple discussions, through different technology, with many people. "Multi-tasking" is accepted as the norm and more time is spent interacting than contemplating. The end-result is a flat experience, devoid of the richness and depth that comes with allowing time to affect our thoughts and experience.

Creativity can be seen as the synthesis of data in a unique and inventive way. Sometimes, the creativity yields a result that resonates broadly, imbuing it with increased societal value. Sometimes the creativity yields a result that is banal and uninteresting - in which case we would hesitate to call it creativity. In either case, though, time and contemplation play a critical part.

The implication of total involvement in the immediate here-and-now is that we no longer are able to engage in the non-linear contemplation of data that happens as our mind works over time. In the end, it is our loss as we no longer will synthesize our experiences to create a unique response, diminishing the richness of our artistic and cultural life.

What is most curious for our future is how the work of young artists, engaging constantly in flat, broad, immediate interactions will differ from the work of other generations, steeped in long contemplative exploration of themes and experiences.

Dancing With a Digital Presence - The Time To Create Digital Dance Content Is Now

I was asked by Dance/USA to write an article about the importance of dance companies participating in the digital world. This is a topic I feel very strongly about. For most companies, the dilemma is how to allocate resources to this new need when they are stretched so thin already. The article was published in the DUSA e-journal on June 28, 2011 at: http://www.danceusa.org/ejournal/post.cfm/dancing-with-a-digital-presence



I am evangelical. Evangelical about the need for every dance artist and company to have a digital presence and footprint. Evangelical because any artist who does not plan and implement such a presence or footprint can only expect a diminished audience in the future

In 1995, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive technologies” to describe unanticipated technological changes that fundamentally alter the markets in which they are introduced. Such changes disrupt a then-existing market and the way consumers interact with that market, requiring companies to quickly and radically adjust their businesses. Some examples include the Ford Model T, which made the horse and buggy obsolete, or, more recently, downloadable digital media, which marked the severe decline of CDs and DVDs. Faced with such a change, a mature business must find the resources to adapt its methods to the new technology while, at the same time, maintaining its existing customer base and revenue stream.

Our younger and our future dance audiences, born into a world where digital content and communication are ubiquitous, have already incorporated these disruptive digital technologies into their lives. A soon-to-be-released study by WolfBrown finds that younger audience members have a significantly greater interest in technology-based dance engagement activities than older audience members.¹ Therefore, I am unequivocal about the need for most artists and companies to find the required resources to create digital content. Unfortunately, this demands a complete rethinking because most non-profit dance company business models allocate resources to creating work for the stage and for marketing those works, with little, if any, surplus remaining to invest in creating media content.

In our metric-driven arts environment, which demands measureable results, the proposition of reallocating existing resources for media development is a challenge because there is minimal guarantee of a measureable return on that investment. Even those, such as the Metropolitan Opera, who have plunged into this new world wholeheartedly, have reportedly invested a level of resources beyond what even our largest dance companies or most prominent artists can afford. One would expect, then, that our younger, newer companies and artists, who have not yet allocated all of their resources and who are more naturally predisposed to living in the digital world, will more rapidly and completely adapt to the possibilities of the new technologies, incorporating such work into the essence of what they do.

And then, as always, the aesthetic questions of how media intersects with dance and choreography become paramount in considering presenting dance in a media format. The three-dimensional space a dance occupies differs fundamentally from the space a dance occupies in a virtual or digital medium. The rules of these spaces differ from each other, and achieving desired aesthetic results requires approaches uniquely appropriate to the performance medium. At the least, this requires modification to adapt the work to the space in which it appears. During periods when concert dance was regularly seen on television, choreographers adapted their works to capture their vision on camera in a way that was, arguably, successful in the choreographer’s mind’s eye.² Unfortunately, that model -- adapting dance works in a studio with a media team whose expertise was in the aesthetics of the virtual space of television -- became economically unsustainable as the funding environment changed. Since then, the vast majority of dance (as well as theater and opera) is captured in live performances,³ and generally results in what are felt to be disappointing two-dimensional viewer experiences.

Paradoxically, the ease of creating and distributing digital content today has resulted in large amounts of available dance footage and a diverse set of viewing options of varying quality. Unfortunately, little of it seems to have the high professional standards we might wish to see representing our artform and our artists digitally. Currently, quantity seems to be trumping quality, partially due to the continuing stratospheric cost of creating high-quality digital performances. Recent data, however, seem to provide some clues about how audiences are using digital media to access dance and suggest an approach that may be helpful to those struggling with these issues.

In February, the NEA released a research report that provided deeper analysis of the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.⁴ One of the critical findings for our field is that “the vast majority of participation in theater and visual arts is through attendance, whereas the majority of participation in music and dance occurs via electronic media.”⁵ Compared to the small portion (8 percent) of the U.S. adult population who participates in the arts solely by attending performances,⁶ “over half reported viewing or listening to a performing arts event or a visual arts program (via recorded or broadcast media), or accessing arts performances or programming online (via Internet).”⁷ However, other data indicates that active or serious dancers are the only cohort to express a real interest in watching a dance performance on a digital device.⁸ This relatively limited interest in watching digital performances, contrasted with the large portion of the audience participating in dance digitally, argues i) for creating digital content that is ancillary to the core business of putting dances onstage, and ii) for not investing the significant resources required to make acceptable digital performances for audience viewing.

In the face of this data, it is hard to deny that companies and artists must engage with digital technology in some fashion, the greater the better, or face diminished audiences for their work in the future. It may well be, however, that the best use of resources is not in the digital capture or presentation of performances but in areas of marketing opportunities and audience engagement programs. Despite this, it is possible to imagine the balance shifting toward reallocating resources for aesthetic issues as technology and audience tastes continue to evolve.

Of course, as the argument above implies, the key to success in the age of digital media is articulating a clear strategy, the goals desired, a plan for implementation, and the benchmarks to measure that success. With such a framework in place, any dance organization or artist can properly evaluate the need for and scale of acceptable allocation of limited resources to this endeavor. However, there is no question that such resources must be spent and that participating in the digital realm is essential for communicating with audiences and capturing their imaginations and support in the future

Footnotes

¹ WolfBrown. (2011). How Dance Audiences Engage: Summary Report from a National Survey of Dance Audiences, July 2011, Draft made available June 1, 2011, p. 49.

² There have always been artists who have attempted to incorporate media into their dance and movement work as one element of the total work they are investigating. Given the focus of this piece on the challenge for artists and companies in utilizing digital media or incorporating it into their business model, incorporating media as another element of a creative work is outside the scope of the discussion.

³ “Live” here refers to the method of capture of the dance performance, thus including simultaneous broadcast (Live from Lincoln Center, e.g.), as well as live-captured post-production edited versions of dance performances (Dance in America, e.g.).

⁴ Novak-Leonard, Jennifer and Brown, Alan. (February, 2011). Beyond attendance: A multi-modal understanding of arts participation (Research Report #53). Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts http://www.nea.gov/research/SPPA-webinar/Novak-Leonard.pdf

⁵Novak-Leonard and Brown, p. 16.

⁶Ibid. p. 83.

⁷Ibid. p. 71.

⁸WolfBrown, p. 61. Given the greater interest in younger audiences for digital dance performances, an interesting question is whether the aesthetic disappointment is more or less important to artists dependent on the state of the digital environment in which they matured.

Scientists and Artists

Yesterday, I attended the kick-off meeting of a new partnership between SUNY, the SUNY Research Foundation, and the New York Academy of Sciences. This partnership, an outgrowth of the SUNY strategic plan and New York State strategic plans for SUNY to be a prime motivator of economic development in the state, was established to support the implementation team on which I serve. Our mandate is to develop an entrepreneurial culture throughout the state and in SUNY.

The meeting, held at the Academy offices overlooking the Ground Zero site, was all day and was attended by some thirty SUNY, Research Foundation, and Academy colleagues. Each of the SUNY representatives was asked to make a brief presentation on their campus' research, funding, technology transfer, etc. Needless to say, we don't compete in this arena, so my presentation took a different point of view.

Here are my comments with the five slides I was able to present.

Comments at the Kick-Off meeting of the
SUNY-New York Academy of Sciences Partnership
February 24, 2011

Well, I certainly feel like the “odd man out” in this group. Despite overseeing an arts training program, where we are creating entrepreneurs every day, I will not be able to present the same kind of quantitative information about technology transfer, incubators, and private-public partnerships as the rest of you. So I ask that you indulge me for a few minutes so that I can present a different perspective on the topics we have been discussing: entrepreneurship and economic development. I am very grateful to the Academy and the Research Foundation for giving me this opportunity to address you.

While it is a common perception that the arts don’t drive economic development, all the data show that the arts are instrumental in certain kinds of development. Over the past 50-75 years, we have seen, time and time again, that urban planners have turned to the arts as instigators of urban redevelopment. In addition to serving as engines of urban development, the public spends between $150-160 billion annually on the arts and there are some 2.2 million artists in the United States workforce.

But it is difficult to quantify the direct effect of the arts in terms of prospective economic development. While artists embody the characteristics we are looking for - risk-taking, innovative thinking, resilience, and a necessary tolerance for failure – the effect of producing art or of artistic communities is only indirectly measureable and almost only in retrospect after a great investment of time and effort. In a world in which precious resources must be allocated and in which we are less and less competitive, we are all striving to identify the most efficacious use of our resources to produce maximal results. As we have fallen behind other cultures and societies, we have focused on our competitive shortcomings in science, mathematics, and related subjects, choosing in many cases to elevate these areas over the arts, whose benefits are harder to quantify.

So how exactly can the arts participate in our goal of reenergizing our economy and in economic development?

Last August, I was graciously asked to address our faculty on the topic of creativity. One of the critical points I addressed was the existence of creativity in all spheres, not just artistic ones. Today, I would like to further develop that thought and look at artistic endeavor as an indicator of successful scientific creativity and innovation.

As a starting point, I would posit that the traditional distinction between the arts and sciences is, in some ways, a false one since artists and scientists engage in like explorations. I would go farther and argue that the essence of scientific advancement is driven by the very same impulses that drive artistic activity – understanding the world, taking risks in this exploration, pursuing this exploration until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, and a persistent attempt to conform the exterior world of experience to the inner world of the mind. While their means of expression may be different, both scientists and artists seek to respond to experience and increase our understanding of the wonder of nature and life.

Part of my argument last August was that creativity, the ability to imagine or invent something new, is not limited to any single discipline. In fact, the “symptoms” attendant to creativity - an openness to newness or change, a flexibility of thought and outlook, a natural curiosity, and, at least in certain areas, an ability to synthesize data in ways that may be at odds with common or accepted ways, can easily describe the successful scientist. It will not be a surprise to any of you that the successful scientist, like the successful artist, necessarily has a tenacity and corresponding tolerance for failure. Innovation, creating something new from the old, requires many of these same traits as well.

Recently, I have been reading the works of Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, who have been looking into the relationship between artistic activity and successful scientists. What they have found is that there is a “very significant relationship between success as a scientist and evidence of adult arts and crafts avocations.”¹ They surmise that successful scientists who are also practicing artists have a wider range of physical and intellectual skills than the average person or scientist. Their data show that a Nobel laureate in science is 29 times more likely to create in the arts than a member of the public.²

In my talk last year, I commented that creativity often involves the synthesis of complex and sometimes apparently unrelated data into a coherent whole. The Root-Bernsteins similarly state: “Creative scientists [have the ability] to explore a wide range of apparently unrelated activities and to connect the knowledge and skills gained thereby into integrated networks that can be brought effectively to bear in raising and solving important scientific problems.”³

Over time, many well-known men of wisdom have been scientists and artists. Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, Samuel Morse, Max Planck, and Alexander Graham Bell come to mind. Many of these and others have commented on the unity that their artistic and scientific endeavor created and how it was essential to their success. Laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal [Ka-Chal] commented that “[a scientist] would possess something of this happy combination of attributes: an artistic temperament which impels him to search for, and have the admiration of, the number, beauty, and harmony of things.”⁴ Max Planck, echoing Ramon y Cajal and others said that “[t]he pioneer scientist must have . . . [an] artistically creative imagination.”⁵ As noted above and in the attendant list, I think it is fair to say that many of our great scientists were polymaths and omnivores who exceled in multiple fields to the benefit of us all.

But how, getting back to where we began, does this relate to economic development?

We live in a world that craves innovation and creativity. Not only are we all curators of our own experience, but we need new ways of building our businesses in order to compete. In a recent blog post, Root-Bernstein quoted a number of big business leaders who acknowledged the inter-relationship between creativity and innovation. These leaders, from companies such as Boeing, United Technologies, Lilly, and Bayer, go further, articulating their understanding of the necessity of the arts to creating an environment and set of skills to maximize creativity and innovation.⁶

Looking ahead and planning how to ensure New York State is competitive, there is a critical place for the arts. As data and experience show, those who integrate the arts into their training and experience are more likely to be more creative and, therefore, able to make a more impactful contribution to business and society. Let’s not forget this as we allocate our diminishing resources and strive to build an entrepreneurial culture and spur economic development.

Thank you.

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¹ Root-Bernstein, Robert, et al. “Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma XI Members.” Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, Volume 1, Number 2 (2008): 53.
² Ibid. 55.
³ Ibid. 56-57.
⁴ Ibid. 57.
⁵ Ibid. 58.
⁶ Root-Bernstein, Robert and Michelle. "A Missing Piece in the Economic Stimulus: Hobbling Arts Hobbles Innovation." Imagine That! Annals of Ordinary and Extraordinary Genius. Psychology Today, 11 Feb 2009. Web. 20 Feb 2011.