Arts Intranet

Randy Cohen

On January 31, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman posted a blog about (1) the issue of supply and demand in the arts and (2) the ratio of arts administrators to artists.  I had the opportunity to augment the first point using additional data as well as clarify the second in my posting.  Because these are two issues that may arise for you, we thought it worth posting here so you have the facts at your fingertips.

An examination of years of trend data indicate that demand for the arts is indeed lagging supply. The good news is that it also indicates that audiences are not walking away from the arts, but rather broadening how they choose to engage in the arts.

There is also one noteworthy correction to be made in the Chairman’s numbers and thus, one of his points.

On the supply side:

In our annual National Arts Index report, released just two weeks ago, we track the Urban Institute’s count of registered nonprofit arts organizations as one of our 81 national-level indicators. In the past decade, the number of nonprofit arts organizations in the United States has grown 45 percent (75,000 to 109,000), a greater rate than all nonprofit organizations, which grew 32 percent (1,203,000 to 1,581,000). Or to take the more startling look, between 2003 and 2009, a new nonprofit arts organization was created every three hours in the U.S.

Emily Peck

In 1968, 7,000 companies were asked how much they give to the arts and why they give to the arts.  In the original BCA Survey of Business Support of the Arts which was conducted in partnership with the National Industrial Conference Board we learned that businesses give to the arts to improve corporate image, improve sales and services, aid employee recruitment, attract other industries to the area, encourage tourism and benefit employees, community and society.

Sound familiar?

In the current study, many of these same reasons still resonate with the business community.  79% of businesses say that the arts increase name recognition while 74% say that the arts offer networking opportunities and the potential to develop new business.  66% say that the arts stimulate creative thinking, problem solving and team building.  While half agree that arts support has the potential to increase their bottom line and slightly fewer believe that the arts can offer special benefits to their employees and that the arts can help recruit and retain employees.

The Creation of Adam, Bob Bosch, used with permission

I always dread the first day of classes. I’m currently getting my master’s in operations research and the first day of class is the time when I start to stand out. In every class, we start by going around the room and saying our name and what we do. It usually goes something like: Bob, military employee; Jim, government contractor; Pete, different government contractor… you get the point. Then comes my turn, “Meredith, Americans for the Arts.” Immediately, heads turn and everybody identifies me as the oddball.  

However, there is a growing and little known area of operations research known as “opt art.” This stands for optimization art and this field utilizes optimization algorithms (operations research technology) to make portraits, pictures, and designs. Some of the pictures are created using the classic “traveling salesman problem” where the goal is to reach every point (city) exactly once in the shortest distance. Others are created with knot problems or using a pointillism approach.  

Dr. Bob Bosch is applying this technology to make portraits using dominos. He has made several portraits of famous people (like Marilyn Monroe) and will even make you a customized portrait of your loved one.

What an adventure! When Randy Cohen and I started putting the National Arts Index together in 2005, we had little sense of how expansive it would become. At first, we hoped to find about 25 or 30 national and annual measures of arts and culture activity that we could report on annually. We knew of a few national service organizations that kept what we thought were pretty good and robust measures of annual activity in their fields – think symphonies, opera, and theatre. We knew of periodical studies by the NEA and the Census Bureau, as well as some measures at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Urban Institute. When we got going, we thought we could cobble these together into a pretty good annual picture of arts and culture in the U.S. over time.

These turned out to be only a fraction of the data that we ultimately found, as you can see in the full Index report on this site. Our final report, with 76 indicators, really shows a more diverse and multi-faceted system of the arts in America, one that we knew was there, but had not been able to get our hands around. No surprise: there are so many dimensions to the arts system: people, groups, institutions, artistic disciplines, artistic genres, businesses, nonprofit, and government, products, services, experiences, jobs, volunteers, and so much more. Not only “no surprise,” but also “no problem”: we wanted the Index to be as inclusive as possible, so we were happy to find all of the different measures.

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At a time when the arts and culture community’s understanding of itself is shifting away from traditional conceptions of “arts participation” (i.e. attendance) and focus on publicly-supported business models, creating an empirical index such as the National Arts Index (NAI) is a daunting task. The challenge is that many arts-related data sources are anchored in conventional conceptions of the sector.  Consequently, the NAI makes huge steps forward by including both for- and non-profit indicators, by including indicators of personal participation, and by shedding light on lesser-utilized data sources (see pages 131-134 of the report).

The arts and culture sector seems to be moving toward a broader, more holistic, understanding of itself – one that spans a larger swath of the ‘cultural ecology’ – including professional arts, participatory practice and cultural literacy.  The cultural ecology framework developed by John Kreidler and Philip J. Trounstine in their 2005 Creative Community Index report (page 6) is a simple and elegant depiction of the cultural system. As we in the field continue to develop this broader self-definition, participatory practice and cultural literacy will need to be characterized at the same level of detail as indicators currently included in the NAI.

As Bill Ivey says, “policy accretes around bodies of data.” If we can develop commonly-accepted metrics for characterizing cultural vitality, then we stand a better chance of influencing policy. You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score. And, if you are filling a void of scorekeeping, then you get to shape the rules for scorekeeping, which means you can change the conversation.  I see the National Arts Index (NAI) as a major step forward on a longer pathway of developing a set of generally accepted standards for assessing cultural vitality in communities, regions and the country. The Urban Institute has already done a lot of forward thinking about the topic, which you can read about here. What matters the most, however, is not the data itself, but the conversation that happens around the data and the extent to which the NAI can be used to galvanize discussion amongst people who can actually change policy.

When the NAI was discussed at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference back in October, it was interesting to see how some people immediately looked through the list of the 76 indicators to see what was included and what was not included. For example, one person pointed out that the NAI includes just one indicator of arts creation (i.e., “participation in music making, painting, drawing, and/or photography”). There are no indicators, for example, of the numbers of people who sing in choirs, or who compose music on GarageBand, or who belly dance.  Those types of data points simply aren’t available, or would cost a lot to generate. But what is the cost of not including them in the national conversation about cultural vitality? This is the risk associated with any aggregate measure like the NAI.

The National Arts Index is the latest in a series of credible research reports to document the impact of arts and culture on a national and local level. Economic impact studies like the Arts & Economic Prosperity reports, employment data from the Creative Industries Report and other studies have all made significant contributions to our understanding of size and scope of the creative sector, helping to make the case for increased investment in arts and culture.

I know first-hand how valuable this information is to elected officials and policy makers when it comes to setting budget priorities. We continually reply on research from Americans for the Arts and other sources to keep civic leaders and the public informed and up to date on the health of our cultural sector. In difficult budget times like these, the NAI provides a new opportunity to engage in that conversation.

Galileo Galiliei once said, “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.” I congratulate Americans for the Arts and their partners for doing just that by developing the National Arts Index. In so doing they have ignited a crucial national conversation about the arts, their health and vitality, and that of our communities and nation.

Artists, arts administrators and arts patrons may ask, “Why is this Index necessary? Why must we quantify the arts?  The arts are important for their own sake and they are good for our souls, for our children, for the world.” They are, but unfortunately that message doesn’t get through to many policy makers. I liken the arts community’s failure to verbally articulate the value of the arts to a conversation between two people who speak two different languages. One yells louder, figuring sooner or later the other person will understand. We must be able to translate what we value into what the person or audience to whom we are speaking values.  The National Arts Index will be an important aid in this translation process.  

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, the National Arts Index is a real game changer. By widening the frame to look at music royalties, movie screens, and personal creative practice, Americans for the Arts has basically said to the nonprofit fine arts, "You're now one of many; part of a sector but not the be-all and end-all."  This new reality, coming at us from the premier US cultural advocacy organization, will have profound implications for policy actors and community leaders all over the country. Do we pursue policies to help out record companies undermined by interenet sales of singles and non-paying file sharing? What's our position on extending artist and record-label performance royalties from the digital realm into terrestrial radio? How do we connect with the boom in social dancing, as documented by the Wolf-Brown California study?

Well, I for one think we do care about all these things and more. Now that we're talking about the entire cultural sector, and not just about the nonprofits, we've got a fighting chance at creating a policy arena important enough to get the attention of big-time Administration and congressional players.  Americans for the Arts has decided to care about public policy as it affects all of America's expressive life, and to me that's a great thing.  Now we need to move on to think about how Fair Use, the overall intellectual property environment, trade in movies and TV shows, and mergers in the arts industries shape the ways art gets created, distributed, and consumed.

On January 20, Americans for the Arts released the National Arts Index—a new framework to measure the vitality of the U.S. cultural sector based on 76 national indicators grouped by 4 overarching themes: Financial Flows, Organizational Capacity, Arts Participation and Competitiveness.  In a field where obtaining data can be like pulling teeth, assembling the breadth of this information is an accomplishment in itself.  For me, the real value is that we finally have in place an annual, national reflection of a creative sector that embraces a range of activity inclusive of both nonprofit and commercial cultural delivery models.

Reflections aren’t always pretty though. The National Arts Index shows us definitively over an 11-year period that the rules of engagement have changed. Buffeted by changing demographics, the economic business cycle, technology and increasing diverse cultural choices, traditional art forms that have been historic cornerstones of American public life and cultural identity are struggling to compete successfully to obtain the sources of financial support and the audience numbers they need to survive. By revealing long term trends and a key annual measurement of the vitality of the sector, the Index provides an additional incentive to seriously rethink how we support the development of creative expressions and access to the creative process through new models of engaging individuals and communities in the arts.  

By Merryl Goldberg, Ed.D., Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, California State University San Marcos

The selfish or shallow person might be a great musician technically, but he’ll be so involved with himself that his playing will lack warmth, intensity, beauty and he won’t be deeply felt by the listener. He’ll arbitrarily play the first solo every time. If he’s backing a singer he’ll play anything he wants or he’ll be practicing scales. A person that lets the other guy take the first solo, and when he plays behind a soloist plays only to enhance him, that’s the guy that will care about his wife and children and will be courteous in his everyday contact with people.
- Art Pepper, from Straight Life excerpted in Gottlieb (1996), p. 278.

The arts may have lost their way with regard to a purposefulness in today’s education, perhaps even in society, but it is not too late to revolutionize the wheel. I started this piece with a quote from Art Pepper, a great jazz saxophonist. Arts education is often framed as if it is outside the realm of life, as if it is simply a subject to be studied (or not studied). Pepper, in musing about musicians and their attitudes, stumbles upon key parallels to the role that arts can, and over the years have played, in education. Namely, what one learns in order to play music well, or for that matter, what one learns in practicing any art form, can transfer to what one does in everyday life.

By guest blogger Don Glass, Ph.D., Director of Outcomes and Evaluation, VSA arts, Washington, D.C.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is getting a lot of airplay in Washington this Fall. In addition to several conferences and a virtual forum, the United States Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) just released a Tool Kit on Universal Design for Learning on the web.

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) defines Universal Design for Learning as, “…a framework for designing curricula that enable all individuals to gain knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm for learning. UDL provides rich supports for learning and reduces barriers to the curriculum while maintaining high achievement standards for all."

Why is UDL important for arts educators to get to know better?

Engaging the Arts for a Creative Workforce
Graduation season is now upon us and soon the job market will be replete with fresh eyed graduates, eager to apply the skills they learned in school to their first jobs.  After listening to speeches that troll the smorgasbord of opportunities available to them after they leave their alma mater, they will depart their schools convinced that they have been adequately prepared for success. 

But to what extent is this true?  Both the art and business communities have been buzzing with the claim that the workforce in the United States is far from where it needs to be creatively. 

Modeling of democratic values and principles in the schools has gone off course, but it is not too late to change direction.

By Merryl Goldberg, Ed.D., Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, California State University San Marcos

If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that—but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he’s got to take risks....I’ve always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that’s where the great art and music happens.
 - Miles Davis, Reading Jazz: A gathering of autobiography, reportage, and criticism from 1919 to now

Arts Education is, technically, core to the school curriculum according to federal mandates and certain state mandates. However, it is rarely made accessible to all students despite earnest advocating on the part of dedicated organizations and individuals. Advocates in the arts have developed many compelling arguments defending art’s value within schools. Many of these advocacy efforts focus on art’s impact on “soft skills” such as: children’s self esteem, ability to care, and insight into cultures and ways of communication across cultures. Other efforts focus on art’s more quantifiable impact, such as test scores or better daily attendance. While these efforts have merit they just haven’t made a true impact in terms of changing school policy toward the arts. I suggest a different tact.

LaPlaca Cohen, in partnership with Discovery Communications and Antenna Audio, has recently released Culture Track 2007, a new national study (actually the fourth done by them since 2003) looking at attitudes and behavior of cultural audiences.  (The report is available from the LaPlaca Cohen Web site) Conducted by e-mail, the results are unusually immediate, and because of the previous research, historical trends can also be reviewed. The research also breaks down the survey respondents into Frequent Attendees (who attend at least one arts event/month) and Infrequent Attendees.  Some the of the 2007 results show little change from past studies, and I will focus here on the trends and what I see as the particularly enlightening findings:

A new study, Portraits of Donors, conducted by The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University was recently released by Bank of America, looked at the philanthropic patterns of high net worth households. This report is based on data already gathered and issued in an initial report that examined giving by the wealthiest 3.1 percent of households. This new study explicitly looks at giving by the wealthiest Americans those that have a net worth of more than $1 million and annual income of more than $200,000. Eighty percent of the sample had a net worth of more than $2 million, and the group of responders was clustered into 12 archetypes:

• The Very Wealthy
• The Bequeather
• The Devout Donor and the Secular Donor
• The Entrepreneur
• The Dynast
• The Metropolitan
• The High Frequency Volunteer
• The Strategic Donor and the Transactional Donor
• The Altruistic Donor and the Financially Pragmatic Donor

While space won't allow describing the characteristics of each of these donor groups, or their behavior, there are a number of very interesting results relevant to giving to the arts that I would like to highlight. Let's focus first on the sweet spot those categories that seem most likely to support the arts (in bold above): Entrepreneurs, Dynasts, Metropolitans, and High Frequency Volunteer. To combine them all, the most likely arts donor would be a person of high net worth with substantial wealth coming from a business they own, who also gives a philanthropy allowance to their children, lives in a major metropolitan area, and volunteers more than 200 hours a year.

In his keynote kickoff of the NAMP conference, J. Walker Smith (a.k.a. Research Rockstar to Julie Peeler) explained that time is the new currency in a time-starved world. He studies lifestyle trends and ultimately seeks to understand the ways in which people understand the 'good life' what people want to get out of their lives. To marketing directors and brand developers, this information is the Holy Grail. But it keeps shifting and, in fact, Walker proposes that the extent and range of this change in consumer behavior has not been seen since World War II.

I liked 90% of what he said but the missing 10% gives me pause and I want to stir the pot a piece.

Recently, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) celebrated 25 years of sponsorship of the arts and they decided to celebrate the public art way. Since they wanted greater logo real estate as corporate sponsors, they decided to commission original works and installations on their own. This session presented a case study of UTC's sponsored public art in Madison Square Park, NYC and Broadgate Arena, London, UK. The most interesting component of this case was how they used surveys, conducted by Audience Research & Analysis, to measure the impact of this endeavor.

How to you measure the value of public art, which by nature, has a more elusive, serendipitous, and iterative visitor experience than say a theatre or museum?
How can you design an assessment survey that documents valued added to both the consumer as well as the sponsor? (The presenters generously shared their powerpoint with me for this blog).

By Nick Rabkin
Center for Arts Policy
Columbia College Chicago
August 8, 2007

It is so rare that arts ed or arts ed research gets coverage in the daily press. The recent article in the New York Times about the "Studio Thinking" research project (1) is significant first because of its rarity. It is already generating a buzz about arts education that we rarely feel.

It is important for another reason as well, though. For the last decade or more a debate has raged about the "intrinsic" vs. the "instrumental" value of arts education. Ellen Winner, one of the "Studio Thinking" researchers, played a very big role in that debate several years ago, when she and colleagues published a "meta-analysis" of arts education research in which she found no evidence that arts learning contributes to student academic achievement. (2) Hence, she argued, it was scientifically irresponsible to make a case for the arts' place in schools because they improve student performance in other subjects. Furthermore, she suspects that education policymakers will reason that if they want to improve math achievement, they will teach more math, not more arts. In the end, the arts are important in their own right and should be justified in terms of the important and unique kinds of learning that arise from the study of the arts.

Some researchers who believed that there was good evidence the arts did contribute to higher achievement across the curriculum criticized Winner's meta-study, arguing that it excluded good research from its scan.  As one of many places in the country where teaching artists were inventing new ways to improve schools by connecting the arts to other subjects, many folks here in Chicago felt Winner's study simply ignored their work and contributions. Others, more committed to arts education traditions, thought Winner bolstered their argument against "arts integration" and for "sequential and discipline-based instruction" in the art forms.

While I am in Wisconsin and South Carolina this week, several partners are unveiling their local reports across the US. One such example is the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington's press conference in DC on Monday afternoon. The Cultural Alliance sponsored the AEP3 report for Greater Washington, including: the District of Columbia; Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland; Arlington and Fairfax Counties in Virginia; and the city of Alexandria, VA.