Developing Shared Values

In one of my recent posts at the Clyde Fitch Report, I proposed that artists can and should be more proactive in articulating our common shared values. My suggestion was born out of my sense that we have democratized the definitions of value and quality, increasingly accepting individual definitions of these judgments, each of which has equal validity. As a result, we have lost a common ethos that, amongst other things, provided a basis for culture to occupy a central place in our society.

I have previously written about an axis of artist intentionality that spans from pure self-expression to pure community expression. While an artist is always expressing him or herself, the impetus for that expression can lie anywhere on this spectrum. Prior to the Enlightenment, artists in the West had little choice but to operate at the community expression end of the spectrum because of the ubiquitous presence of the church. Through a common narrative that defined the contours of life generally, the church was the keeper of social order and even provided the legitimacy for rulers of the time. Whether people liked it or accepted it, there was a defined set of values that the religious framework imposed, which also determined artistic value during this time. With the shift engendered by the coming of the Enlightenment, individuals gained greater autonomy and agency and rich patrons were able to set the parameters of artists’ expression, though this still left the artists in a position serving others’ needs and desires.

Since then, we have undergone a multi-century process that shifted the locus of value and validation from the outside, whether societal as in the church or individual as in the patron, to the individual. The latest stage of this process, so far, is the deconstructionist/post-structuralist position that each individual is the creator of his/her own valid truth and experience. Such a framework, however, results in an environment in which each person’s unique set of values has the same validity and where competing realities - at least conceptually - co-exist equally. Judging by the public dialogue in this country, it is easy to conclude that we have fully embraced this understanding.

At the same time that the locus of determining value has shifted from the community to the individual, I note that artists have relatively recently shifted, probably in a related fashion, the point of view of their expression. Whereas artists formerly worked to express the world around them, often in an aspirational way, more recently artistic work gravitates towards expressing the artist’s inner life in reaction to the world around him or her. In this context, the line of artistic development passing through impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, surrealism, dadaism, abstract-expressionism, and conceptualism, deals in the individual impressions, senses, and experience and represent the ascendancy and triumph of the individual.

At the same time that the center of value has shifted, there has been a concomitant slow steady process of expanding access to self-control over one’s life to a broader and broader set of people. Persistently, groups have fought for and often gained the right to be included and “equal.” While this shift has allowed us to begin to address some of the inherent inequities and rejections that our previously held common narrative produced, we have further to go in order to truly say that we can have an inclusive community that values and validates each of its participants.

Along with the shift of determining value from the communal to the individual and the enlargement of those with access to self-determination, there has been a natural shift in determining quality. The result is that the only arbiter of quality now - outside of places where the market applies - is the individual, yielding a loss of a communal experience. I believe that this shift, along with a myriad of other factors, helps explain the diminishment of the importance of "culture" in our society and why so many of our institutions are struggling to find an audience and, essentially, a raison d'etre. In addition, it has given rise to what I refer to as the "balkanization" of culture in our society where there are multiple groups and aesthetics existing with little connection to each other. As a result, they often do not generate sufficient scale to have a collective impact and often are actually unsustainable in the long-term.

To be sure, this debate - in which individual “control” of determining quality and beauty is in opposition to a common universal definition - is an ancient battle, at least as old as the Greeks. And like so many old rhetorical dialogues, the poles of argument are logical and clear, but do not accurately reflect the complexity or nuances of the world we live in.

I am not suggesting a definition of culture that is common and excludes groups that don't align. Nor am I suggesting that the hi-culture/lo-culture distinction should be restored or is the best. What I am suggesting is that all of the democratized aesthetics, cultures, styles, practices, and groups are actually driven at some level by a set of common values - things their proponents find important. However, there is no attempt to articulate this commonality nor is there any discussion of this, so we all continue in our separate worlds.

What I envision is finding the commonalities so that we can build appreciation for and acceptance of those things that we are not familiar with, based on the commonalities that exist. If we can relocate that sense of value of culture in a more common place, as it used to be for better or for worse, we would be able to have a stronger need for and acceptance of all of the various practices and styles that are with us.

You can read the entire text of my previous post on Culture & Kibbitz at the Clyde Fitch Report on which this post expands here.

On a National Cultural Bank

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz, at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post, which more fully develops and details the need for a bank and how it would function, here.

In its Taking Note post on Nov. 5, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) research staff analyzed some high-level economic data prepared by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Looking at the nationwide investment in “long-lived artworks” -- which the government defines as artworks “exploited” in physical media for more than one year -- the data indicates that over the past 15 years, we have invested in some sectors much more than in others. Without other, corresponding data however -- such as whether more movies are being created, or that fewer movies with bigger budgets are being made -- this high-level data cannot draw an accurate picture of whether investments in the cultural sector are ensuring a rich, flourishing sector, or how they impact individual artists. (See my more detailed look at the data here.)

The nonprofit sector, especially the cultural sector, is perpetually undercapitalized. This is understandable since the sector’s financial structure does not provide mechanisms for capital investment like the for-profit sector does. Nonprofits must rely on earned revenue and tax-based incentives to philanthropic giving for its capital because the underlying reality is that nonprofit markets generally cannot and do not generate sufficient surpluses of earned revenue -- which would be a source of needed capital for investment -- to sustain itself over time.

While we cannot know what the future will look like, this much we do know: the “traditional” institutional and industrial pathways for funding the creation and distribution of artistic product that existed during the latter half of the 20th century is largely gone. While artists are adjusting and finding new ways to express themselves, they are, at the same time, shouldering economic burdens formerly handled by others. Data such as that analyzed by the NEA can help us understand the macro trends in our creative sectors, but it cannot really tell us where investments need to be made. This can only be ascertained by a thorough analysis of the entire ecology of how artists are creating, distributing and making sure there is an audience for their work. But even if we did have, or did develop, such an analysis, we would still then need a mechanism to fund the capital necessary to deliver systemic support and relief.

When we talk about “systemic investment support where it is needed,” we are indeed talking about a national scale -- a monumental effort that may seem impossible in an era of partisanship infecting all conversations, cultural or otherwise. But assuming we could one day have such a conversation, a self-sustaining National Cultural Bank offering investment capital where a particular sector’s need can be demonstrated could provide the necessary systemic support and investment.

Read the entire fully developed post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

NEA Analyzes the BEA

Last month, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released some detailed analysis of national economic data related to the arts. In its Taking Note post at the NEA Blog on November 5, the NEA research staff detailed their conclusions drawn from some aggregated national data on the creative sector. In that post, they presented the capital investment in “long-lived artworks” created from intellectual property in the major arts industries: television, motion pictures, book publishing, and music, as well as “other materials” (theatrical scripts, greeting cards, and commercial stock photography). This data captures the amount of annual new investment in creating cultural products that are disseminated through physical form and that can be exploited over the long term (longer than one year). Additional costs in exploiting these artworks, such as marketing, copying, and distribution, are not considered investments but are part of annual national industrial expenses. Once calculated, the annual investment is added to our national “balance sheet” assets and tracked over time against the revenue the assets generate as the initial investment is depreciated. The result is a “value” of our national long-lived artworks assets each year.

Dance and theater are notably missing from this data as choreographic creations and plays produced are not generally embodied in a physical manifestation and, therefore, cannot be exploited over time without some additional expenditure of resources. One assumes that these activities are bundled with our annual expenses, which are tracked in other data records.

The capital investment figures, assembled and projected by Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) economists, show “that investment in new movies [over the past decade and a half] has generally increased, while production of new television programs has strongly increased. The production of new books, alternatively, has been flat. As for investment in new music, that has been in decline throughout the time period over which BEA reports real investment in entertainment and artistic originals.”

The methodology used to determine the investment when actual investment numbers are not available, as in the case of music, is a complex formula that projects the investment made each year based on a projected ratio of investment to revenue, as detailed in a BEA report, Research Spotlight – Artistic Originals as Capital Assets, published in 2011.

As with all such aggregated data, it is essential to remember that the data does not reflect the experience of one or of any given artist, that a data point alone does not demonstrate a causal connection of any kind, and other data may conflict and need resolution. For example, the data in these reports shows that there is an increased investment in the creation of new films over the past 15 years, yet anecdotal evidence is pretty strong, with well-known filmmakers such as Spike Lee turning to crowd-funding, that traditional funding sources are investing in fewer but bigger budget movies, not more movies. Similarly, in the music area, despite the significant decline in investment in new music, we hear that there is abundant activity creating new work, though it is often being funded by musicians directly or through new avenues such as crowd-funding. If both are true, it would seem that either more music is being created at a lower cost, which would seem to fly in the face of Baumol’s cost disease, or the alternative funding mechanisms are not captured in the BEA methodology. And just this past week, the Financial Times reported a significant drop in cable television viewers despite the dramatic increase in investment that the data reports, indicating that some real shift in the ecology of television is occurring or there is very serious over-investment. As these examples show, it is essential for us to integrate this kind of high level aggregated data with other data to reconcile contradictory information, variations, and other trends as part of understanding what is truly happening in creative areas.

The BEA research spotlight notes an additional point, which intuitively appears to be positive but really only shows how difficult it is to extrapolate trends or definitive answers to specific questions from high level aggregated data. According to the spotlight, from 1980 through 2009, on an inflation-adjusted current-dollar basis, capital investments in this area grew from 0.21% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 0.35% of GDP, an increase of 67%. The data, which taken on its face could lead one to assume that the culture sector is booming, can really only be taken to say that culture takes up a larger piece of the economic activity in our country in 2009 than in 1980, but this does not tell us anything about the impact on individual artists, how they do their work or make a living, or how the GDP has grown or diminished.

After reading this data, I was thinking about how such data, not directly tied to how an artist today makes a living, should be considered by those interested in cultural policy. By trying to reach an understanding of the entire ecology of a sector, it is more likely to be able to develop policy and, where necessary, direct support and an investment of resources to ensure a flourishing cultural sector, but we cannot rely only on these high level aggregated figures.

An easy way to see the importance of understanding the entire ecology is to look at the dance field, which is not captured in these numbers. In recent decades, the number of dance-only presenters in the United States has dramatically decreased from more than three dozen to less than ten. At the same time, domestic policy in light of the end of the Cold War and internal domestic policies in other countries, mainly in Europe, dramatically reduced touring funding for US dance artists as well. Touring has always served as a backbone of dance companies, generating sufficient revenue to support a company and produce new work while also providing opportunities to “distribute” the new work. The reduction in touring opportunities caused by fewer presenters and the diminished funding for such activity has directly altered the scope of activity for many companies and decreased the overall stability of the field. While not specifically a capital investment like the others already discussed, this revenue stream was a critical piece of the lifecycle of dance artworks and its diminishment has made a negative impact on the overall environment for dancers and dance creative works.

Perhaps what is most revealing about the NEA analysis and the BEA data is just how much the economic underpinnings of our creative sectors are changing. What it fails to illuminate, however, is the actual impact the changes are having on the lives of individual artists and if considered alone, it can, in fact, be misleading. While we might rightly assume that the nature of music and “filmed” entertainment creation is changing because of the increased investment the data shows, we would be hard pressed to find anyone in the publishing world who will tell us that their industry has not changed dramatically despite the investment we have been making remaining flat over time. In short, as I have noted in other comments, high-level aggregated data such as the NEA presents is illuminating and interesting, but only marginally helpful in understanding the actual impact on artists’ creative process and practice. To understand changes in these, we need a much fuller and robust understanding of the entire ecology in which artists’ create and exploit their work.

Beware the Metrics System

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz, at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post here.

Last week at a committee meeting (I sit on the board and nominating committee of an arts organization), we were asked what metric we should use to measure our progress on equity, inclusion and diversity. The organization strives to serve the entire complexity of its field and with a limited number of board seats to replace each year, assembling a proper slate can be likened to a jigsaw puzzle, where pieces can form many pictures instead of just one.

Metrics qua metrics are tricky: by trying to capture a complex phenomenon in a simple number, they tend toward the reductive and are more subjective than we think. The Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek has cogently critiqued the idea that economic measures are objective, because they are actually normative -- related to good and evil because we apply value judgments to a measured number; surpassing the desired metric is success, not meeting or surpassing it is failure. And to paraphrase Nate Silver in his consideration of data, metrics need a direct connection to specific strategic goals or they will be less effective and we may miss an understanding of the impact our actions have. Moreover, relying solely on supposedly objective metrics often incentivizes behavior in unintended ways that do not advance the underlying imperative.

Metrics to measure success at building diverse communities may quantify how a “picture” is changing, but, in and of themselves, metrics do not effectively measure success as they do not get to the heart of the matter. These issues require an ongoing and evolving conversation because what underlines them are questions of community -- from who participates to the way the group treats its members. Therefore, the snapshot of a simple metric, at best, can only indicate the state of a group at a given moment in time. While a snapshot can be informative, -- and when compared to past and future snapshots it can document change -- it exists outside the context of a continuum that has a starting point and a goal. Standing alone, a metric is only a data point floating at sea.

For this reason, I suggest that any metric aiming to measure the success of a group’s efforts toward equity, inclusion and diversity must begin with a clear articulation of the intentions and goals of that group. As with any strategic imperative, a clear concise and comprehensible statement of the organization’s goals and intentions should provide sufficient guidance for an institution if it persistently measures and evaluates this statement through self-examination and adjustment—which metrics can aid. Unless considered in this way, metrics are potentially harmful, becoming fixed goals resulting in judgments rather than signposts along a journey towards organizational fulfillment. While metrics can play a role in organizational dialogue, it is the dialogue that matters, not the metrics, especially for a strategic imperative like equity, inclusion and diversity, which is rooted in communal relationships and dynamics.

Read the entire post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

More on the Apocalypse that Was or Wasn't

A couple of months ago, I posted at the Clyde Fitch Report in response to Steven Johnson's New York Times Magazine article The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't and a trail of responses taking exception to the data he used and the conclusions he drew.

At the time, I commented that while the data seemed to show that the arts have not lost ground and in many cases have continued to grow in the recent past, anecdotally and despite what Johnson offered, individual artists of all stripes report that it is much more difficult to make a living now than in the past. Some two weeks ago, the National Endowment for the Arts research office posted the results of analysis on other data in an effort to help answer the questions Johnson posed. Their analysis concluded that:

• creative industries such as film, sound recording, and the performing arts have fared well in recent years, but publishing, as a share of U.S. GDP, has remained flat;


• the long-term growth in the number of musicians, measured as a percentage of all U.S. workers, has been flat;


• musicians' earnings declined and remain less than the earnings of U.S. workers as a whole, although their real earnings, adjusted for inflation, have grown; and


• year-over-year investment in new musical compositions has been in long-term decline.

While none of this contradicts Johnson's original conclusions, it points again to the difficulty of projecting an individual artist's situation from aggregated and average statistics.

What seems most salient here is that while musicians make up a consistent share of the US workforce, there is a long-term decline in the investment in the creation of new work. This would seem to indicate, for example, that more revenue is being generated from existing music than new work and/or that a smaller percentage of the musician's working are generating an increased amount of income, leaving the rest of the field to struggle with a smaller piece of the pie.

While not conclusive in any way, this new data and its analysis gives us a bit more detail on the evolving environment in which artists try to make a living.

Contradictions of the Creative Economy

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz, at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post here.

Lucy Sexton, the executive director of the [Bessie] awards, was not the only participant to remark on the difficulties that New York dance artists face, but she also noted that the number of dance companies in the city was higher than it was a decade ago.
Brian Seibert, New York Times, Oct. 20, 2015

We often hear that despite a growing arts industry, the lives of artists have grown increasingly difficult. I wonder, though, about the paradox of such statements. If the industry is growing, it should be thriving, and shouldn’t people be more successful? Why is there so much focus on difficulties?

Despite a lack of consistent definitions and key frames of reference, there is strong evidence that culture and its value are growing worldwide. Studies agree that today, culture contributes a larger piece to the economic pie and there are now more people employed by this sector globally — and in the United States. However, it is hard to draw a complete picture because most reports do not include information about earnings. Still, aggregated information and averages are available, though, as Steven Johnson noted in his recent controversial New York Times article, such high-level aggregate data-points are only of limited use and may not accurately portray the individual’s story.

Recently, two U.N. agencies concluded that the creative economy is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy. Notwithstanding this growth, real changes in local creative ecologies are forcing artists to adjust to some very burdensome challenges. For example, rising real estate costs in many urban centers is seriously threatening artists’ way of life. The high cost of real estate may also diminish artists’ proximity to their colleagues, tearing at the fabric that feeds artists’ practice. In addition, artists face fundamental changes in the ways they generate income. Evolving institutional funding priorities and diminished revenue streams in certain areas are forcing artists to rethink how they sustain themselves and their practice. And, of course, the digital revolution has affected both practice and sustenance for artists.

In response to changes in their environment, artists adeptly shift their practice. Greg Sandow recently recounted some of the history of how classical musicians have adapted, tracing the shift from a patronage model, where artists earned support with no claims on their work, to entrepreneurial musicians hired as employees to perform particular jobs. More recently, Matt McDonald described his shift from dependent musician with a record deal to a successful musician-entrepreneur generating more income and artistic success with the change.

Looking back, despite what we often hear, artists have persistently evolved with their environment in order to produce exciting work, responding to this evolution with resilience. So perhaps it is chimerical to try holding onto the 20th century model in which artists expect to create art for art’s sake and thus be delivered of a career. In the future, we may see that we had a golden age for artists and it was an anomaly. For practical steps, we can look to the concrete recommendations of the Center for an Urban Future’s “Creative New York (2015)” report. Its holistic analytical approach culminates in almost two dozen specific recommendations and is a model for how we can offer strong advocacy in response to the sometimes contradictory forces at work today.

Read the entire post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.

Nonprofits Raising Capital

This excerpt is from my regular column, Culture & Kibbitz, at The Clyde Fitch Report. You can read the entire post here.

A dance company I am involved with is in the midst of a business analysis and planning process. Like most of its nonprofit brethren, the company engages in a constant, exhausting search for capital, which I define as the resources needed to operate in pursuit of the organization’s mission. For any business, capital is essential to the life of the organization and accomplishing its goals. Generally, nonprofits have an ongoing and sometimes overwhelming difficulty in building sufficient revenue to meet their capital needs.

A for-profit company can offer the promise of sharing future profits to motivate people to supply its capital needs (along with the concomitant risk of loss). Nonprofits rely on other, often more intangible, incentives. Sometimes, as with tax deductions for donations, incentives are fostered by the government to achieve policy goals; sometimes institutions offer incentives themselves. All are designed to garner additional capital to subsidize the nonprofit’s insufficient earned income. Putting it in simple terms, we have traditionally relied on philanthropic impulses to support nonprofits, while for-profit companies rely on the potential for personal enrichment.

In addition to traditional fundraising pathways and motivations, there are new and additional opportunities to access capital, which all institutions should consider folding into their fundraising activities. The most common is crowdsource funding (or crowdfunding). Total crowdfunding is predicted to approach $35 billion this year, or more than double the $16.2 billion raised through this method in 2014, of which $2.7 billion –– $1 out of every $6 – was raised in the arts and entertainment area, making crowdfunding a source of capital nobody should ignore. Although this new method may be more in line with younger artists’ approaches — more project-based and freed of historical strategies and practice — it is of such potential value that even those organizations with established ways to generate unearned capital must consider it. While it is not yet clear whether these alternatives will become permanent or significantly impact nonprofit organizations, at the very least they offer one more avenue to generate needed funding.

The new instruments for raising capital that have popped up since the beginning of this century are driven simply by promising greater participation and closeness to the creative process. Kickstarter, the most widely known example, describes the motivation thus:

Backing a project is more than just pledging funds to a creator. It’s pledging your support to a creative idea that you want to see exist in the world (emphasis added).

This motivation could well describe other platforms, such as ArtistShare and IndieGogo, among others.

If properly structured, nonprofits should be able to combine this approach with traditional tax incentives that have proven so appealing and effective, thereby expanding their arsenal of capital-raising tools. As with all fundraising, however, it is essential to appreciate and address the motivation of those providing the capital and to further appreciate that the traditional incentives are largely absent here unless incorporated in some hybrid approach.

There is no doubt that artistic and cultural organizations and individuals will continue to need to raise capital constantly to accomplish their goals. As new capital-raising vehicles arise, organizations that decline to explore and utilize them to their advantage do so at their own peril, particularly those nonprofits that resist considering the accumulation of capital to realize their mission.

Read the entire post in Culture & Kibbitz at The Clyde Fitch Report here.