“Museum” by flickr user World’s Direction

Title: “Taking Charge – Evaluating the Evidence: The Impact of Charging or Not for Admissions on Museums”

Author(s): DC Research Ltd.

Publisher: DC Research / Association of Independent Museums

Year: 2017

URL: https://www.aim-museums.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Final-Report-Taking-Charge-%E2%80%93-Evaluating-the-Evidence-The-Impact-of-Charging-or-Not-for-Admissions-on-Museums.pdf

Topics: museum admission, admission price, museum attendance, museum finances, UK, Wales

Methods: literature review, survey, case studies, interviews

What it says: Purpose and product: DC Research Ltd undertook this study in the first half of 2016 to understand the effects of charging or not charging for admission at UK museums – and of changing a museum’s policy toward charging – on attendance, visitor diversity, funding, visitor experience, and institutional relationships. (The research was commissioned by the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), in partnership with Arts Council England (ACE) and the Museums Archives and Libraries Division (MALD) of the Welsh Government.) The researchers produced four documents: the full report discussed here, a separate executive summary, a summary of the results from Wales, and a “Success Guide” capturing lessons learned for use by museums.

Methodology: The authors reviewed the existing literature on the consequences of charging for museum admission; conducted a survey generating usable responses from 311 museums across the UK; produced 20 case studies, primarily of museums that had changed their charging position, involving site visits and interviews with a variety of stakeholders; and consulted 18 museum experts through one-on-one conversations. Notably, all of the study components excluded National Museums and Galleries, which have tended to be the emphasis of much previous research into this issue in the UK. The authors also had access to AIM’s proprietary Visitor Verdict database.

Findings: Few clear patterns emerged with respect to what kinds of museums charge for admission or the effects of charging. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that other factors, including how a change in charging policy is communicated and managed, seem to matter more for nearly all of the metrics considered. The main exception is that charging seems to be associated with more time spent in the museum (longer “dwell times”) and possibly with greater likelihood of using the museum shop and café. Unsurprisingly, charging was found to provide a useful focal point to welcome visitors and collect data.

Of the 311 respondents, 57 percent charge for general admission and/or specific exhibitions, with a mean general admission price of about £6 for adults; this was higher for museums with more visitors and those that reported being a key attraction in their area. There was a stark difference in perceptions between institutions that are free and those that charge: the former mostly believed that being free had a positive effect on the number and diversity of visitors and on spontaneous donation and secondary spend; the latter mostly believed that charging did not have much effect on any of these. (Interestingly, separate data suggests that the average visitor experience rating was similar across the two kinds of institutions.)

Only 26 percent of the 311 respondents changed their charging policy in the last three years, with 70 percent of those who did being museums that already charged and merely increased price or scope. The institutions that increased charges mostly believed that these increases had no significant effect on number or diversity of visitors or spontaneous donations. The nine institutions that went from free to charging reported that adding a fee did reduce attendance overall (by some 35-40 percent, anecdotally) and disproportionately for locals and repeat visits, but did not seem to affect the social diversity of attendees. Data from AIM’s Visitor Verdict offers some support for this last point: the 2016 breakdown of attendees by social class was nearly identical for charging and free museums. The museums reported, however, that special outreach and discount programs are necessary to achieve this. (Some of the institutions that switched from charging to free reported an increase in diversity, although data was often thin.) The institutions that added a new fee also reported that spontaneous donations decreased, but that this was more than offset by the admissions income.

In terms of best practices for changing charging position, the authors conclude from their case studies that communication is the most important factor for success, emphasizing that staff should be trained to be confident and positive, stakeholders (especially the local community) should understand why the change is happening, any increase should ideally be tied to an improvement in the visitor experience, and thoughtful pricing tiers and discounts are key to maintaining the diversity of attendees.

What I think about it: The design of the study means the authors rely mostly on what museums perceive to be true, and so it doesn’t allow analysis of causality – especially since so few of the institutions involved changed their admissions policy. The authors wisely adduce external data (especially from Visitor Verdict) to triangulate those perceptions and adjudicate among them, but because the dataset is proprietary, it is hard to know how much confidence to place in it, and the authors do not address that question. As a result, the findings on the effects of charging must be taken with a grain of salt. More interpretation, perhaps from the case studies, might have increased the usefulness of this study.

The real value of the work may therefore be in the success guide, which provides practical advice to museums considering changing their policy. Here the anecdotal approach yields valuable insight, and the narrative style allows the authors to put their suggestions in the context of specific institutions they have learned from so their applicability to other institutions can be weighed by the latter’s staff.

The report would be strengthened if the authors made available the list of relevant institutions in the UK and/or of those that received the survey (to clarify how representative the response base is) and the survey instrument itself, without which it is sometimes hard to interpret the summarized responses. For example, only 3 percent of respondents charge for specific exhibitions only; one-third of free institutions believe being free has no impact on “admissions income”; and respondents are more likely to charge admission if they report that competition for visitors is more intense in their area.  These findings strike me as quite counter-intuitive, and I’m not sure how to evaluate them: access to the survey would help me understand whether I am interpreting the terms differently from the respondents. These are also examples of when more interpretation from the authors would be useful: if these things are true, what do they mean? If not, why do the museums perceive them to be?

What it all means: This is a topic on the minds of many museums: about half of the institutions surveyed have considered changing their admissions policy, though the vast majority think it is “not very likely” or “not at all likely” that they will change in the next three years. That last point, and the fact that such a small number of institutions actually did switch from free to charging or vice versa, suggests that this debate might be a proxy for more fundamental issues – and potentially a distraction from real engagement with them.

For example, the debate about charging in the US is often considered in terms of equity and access. This report (and especially the Visitor Verdict data it cites) suggest that charging or not charging is not the main factor in achieving diverse attendance, though the grain of salt mentioned above must be added. If that’s right, this report is a salutary reminder to focus on what matters to achieving our desired ends, which may be more about communication and implementation than admissions charge. But one additional caveat applies here: like many studies touching on diversity in the UK, this one focuses on social class based on occupation; race is not considered.

“Vista Paradiso against the blue sky” by flickr user See-ming Lee

Title: Culture Urban Future: Global Report on Culture for Sustainable Urban Development

Author(s): UNESCO and many others

Publisher: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Year: 2016

URL: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002459/245999e.pdf

Topics: urban planning, cities, economic development, community revitalization, social cohesion, community identity, cultural heritage, sustainability, resilience

Methods: survey of regional and global trends, case studies

What it says: The report aims to provide a global overview of the role played by culture – including cultural heritage, creative economies, and diverse forms of cultural expression – in developing thriving cities that are people-centered, inclusive, and sustainable; in the process, the authors hope to make the case for culture as a force “at the heart of urban renewal and innovation.” Their proximate purpose is to influence the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 – “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable” – to ensure that culture is incorporated robustly as a lever of change. That’s a big ambition with fuzzy borders, and the report accordingly adopts a strategy of profusion, combining across its three hundred pages:

• Part I: Eight regional analyses covering every part of the world, authored by local experts. (The versions in this report are condensed; full versions are available separately online.) Each lays out for its region the history of urban development, trends within cities (e.g., suburbanization), challenges to continued development with a special eye to the role of culture, and high-level policy recommendations.
• Part II: Twelve thematic reflections on the role of culture for sustainable cities grouped into the categories of People, Environment, and Policies. Each of these consists of an essay by an expert on a different general idea, such as “humanizing cities through culture” and “enabling access to public spaces to advance economic, environmental, and social benefits.” These meditations draw on the literature in a general way and with relatively few citations (though more are available online) to point to possible ways to use culture in urban development, sometimes drawing on successful examples from the field.
• One-hundred-eleven case studies: Throughout the first two parts, short examples of specific interventions are summarized in inset boxes (e.g., an app developed to map the informal public transit network of vans in Nairobi; the gradual development of the historic city in Coimbra, Portugal). These are typically a paragraph or two long and seem designed to illustrate the breadth of ways culture and urban development intersect.
• Forty-four “perspectives”: Also throughout the first two parts, mini-essays from luminaries such as architect Renzo Piano and the head of the Library of Alexandria offer first-person takes on a range of issues, from “creative placemaking as urban policy” to “people-centered heritage conservation in Beijing.”
• Conclusions and recommendations: See below.
• Eight “dossiers” on UNESCO programs relevant to culture and urban development. These brief primers, gathered in an appendix to the report, describe things like the role of cities in the World Heritage program (one-third of the sites on the list are historical urban areas) and the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities.

The report’s short “conclusions and recommendations” section acknowledges the difficulty of summarizing the state of global urban culture in a few crisp proposals, but the authors do offer 12 recommendations with a few sentences of description for each. These draw out ideas that recur throughout the other sections of the report, and they are grouped into three themes:

1. People-centered cities are culture-centered spaces: enhance the livability of cities and safeguard their identities, ensure social inclusion in cities through culture, promote creativity and innovation in urban development through culture, and build on culture for dialogue and peace-building initiatives.
2. Quality urban environments are shaped by culture: foster human-scale and mixed-use cities by drawing on lessons learned from urban conservation practices, promote a livable built and natural environment, enhance the quality of public spaces through culture, and improve urban resilience through culture-based solutions.
3. Sustainable cities need integrated policy-making that builds on culture: regenerate cities and rural-urban linkages by integrating culture at the core of urban planning, build on culture as a sustainable resource for inclusive economic and social development, promote participatory processes through culture and enhance the role of communities in local governance, and develop innovative and sustainable financial models for culture.

What I think about it: While far-reaching and well-intentioned, “Culture Urban Future” suffers from key limitations. First, the report’s purpose is not really to assess or synthesize the most up-to-the-minute academic research, and the paucity of citations or even explicit connections to the literature limits its usefulness as a guide for in-depth inquiry. Second, as a general primer encompassing (at least in theory) all cultural aspects of cities everywhere, it skims vast expanses, summarizing trends to raise awareness in a general way without engaging with any particular topic in great depth or contributing significant new insights that would merit further evaluation as independent evidence-based claims.

What it all means: The report may be useful to students of urban development or urban culture as a primer to some of “the current policies and practices of urban regeneration and sustainable development that have put culture at their core,” in the words of the report’s mission statement. This especially pertains to those with a specific regional interest who can focus on the relevant section for a partial overview of trends and practices. The topic itself certainly merits further study: the report notes that although it was only in 2007 that the majority of human beings lived in cities, urbanization is accelerating dramatically: 67% of the world’s people are expected to be urbanites by 2050. Increasingly, human culture will be city culture, so we would do well to get our “culture urban future” right.

the artist’s hand — photo by flickr user farhad sarykov

Expanding the reach of arts organizations is notoriously challenging, especially when it comes to people who make less money, have less education, and may identify as of lower class than the average museumgoer or dance enthusiast. Createquity readers know that cost isn’t the most important barrier preventing people of low socioeconomic status (SES) from engaging with the arts. In “Why Don’t They Come?” (WDTC), we noted that the rate of attendance at free performances actually increases as income and education levels go up.

Since that article was published last May, a few new resources have come to light addressing the question from different angles. Later in 2015, Colleen Dilenschneider of the market research firm IMPACTS shared additional data, including a proprietary survey of 48 cultural institutions, that take the conclusions from WDTC a step further. Dilenschneider shows that free admission days don’t help to engage underserved audiences; they appear to subvert cultural organizations’ intentions by attracting a higher-SES audience and more repeat visitors than non-free days. Ultimately, these misguided audience development strategies are potentially harmful to cultural organizations’ financial sustainability, since they may cannibalize memberships and ticket revenues without increasing long-term attendance.

Dilenschneider isn’t quite ready to give up on free admission entirely. She attributes these perverse effects in part to failed outreach, which she suspects tends to target existing patron or marketing bases, rather than using innovative ways to reach underserved audiences. Her posts on free admission don’t specify how that might work, but another source suggests that a better understanding of social class could provide a key.

In WDTC, we cited NEA research showing that people who self-identify as middle or upper class are much more likely to attend an exhibit or performance than those who identify as working class – even if you control for income and education. As it turns out, this holds widely: research shows that class and social status are strong predictors of cultural engagement broadly. It seems that one barrier stopping people from seeing your show may be that those people don’t see themselves as the kind of people who go in for art.

But new research conducted in England by sociologist Aaron Reeves (and ably summarized by Pacific Standard) shows that, when it comes to active participation in art-making specifically, as opposed to passive consumption of art at an exhibit or performance, class becomes irrelevant. He analyzed national survey data to investigate the correlation between arts participation and demographic indicators such as social class, social status, income, and education. He finds that active arts participation is strongly correlated with education, but not with social class or social status – and it is inversely correlated with income. It seems art-averse audiences who won’t visit your museum may be enthusiastic amateur artists in their spare time.

This result doesn’t come out of the blue for people who have been following research into demographics of participation in the “informal arts.” For example, arts participation data for California that we reviewed last summer revealed less dramatic differences across education and income for active participation than for attendance. What’s new here is the finding that, at least in England, class and status per se don’t matter at all to levels of engagement and that lower-income adults actually engage more when you isolate art-making.

The bad news for arts advocates is that, for art-making as for art consumption, education is still critical to shaping preferences. Reeves suggests a few possibilities as to why education might be a strong predictor of active arts participation in particular. Higher education may select for high-schoolers who have demonstrated a commitment to extracurricular arts (it’s another box to check on college applications); it may serve as an incubator for cultural activity (for instance, a few dorm-mates staging Othello on the quad); and, most mysteriously, it may increase one’s capacity to process information. (One potential cause we can eliminate is the helicopter parent: Reeves controlled for parental encouragement to participate in the arts). Whatever the reason, as long as access to education remains unequal, it is fair to predict that access to art-making – and even the desire to make art – will also be unequal. In that sense, there are plenty of potential artists who are underserved.

The good news is that Reeves’s sociological analysis offers insight into the challenge of engaging low-SES adults as cultural consumers. He discusses arts consumption as a status marker, symbol of group membership, and class-related lifestyle choice. High-SES adults may attend a performance or exhibit in part because they know that it will be seen as normal and even admirable or expected when they talk about it with their peers. More fundamentally, over time, their tastes may have been shaped by repeated conversations of this kind to become entirely unconscious. Low-SES adults may encounter different reactions if they try to discuss a museum show or dance piece with their peers; other kinds of cultural consumption or leisure-time activity may be normalized or admired instead. (Our current research suggests that television in particular may fill this role.)

Reeves does not go into great detail about this social mechanism of taste-formation, but his account offers a way to begin to understand why free admission alone doesn’t ignite the interest of poor and less-educated audiences. The idea of belongingness may be a crucial subjective barrier, which suggests that organizations need not only to work harder to reach those audiences in their marketing, as Dilenschneider argues, but also to think more about these social dynamics in shaping their marketing. How might we begin to make audiences feel welcome?

Well, what about tapping into the taste for art-making? Reeves’s study shows that performing or making art is less likely to be “re-appropriated as a status marker,” and thus less likely to be associated with social status than art consumption. But the line between the two is often porous: think of the easels you sometimes see set up in front of paintings in a museum. What might it look like to appeal to art enthusiasts who consider themselves working class through their love of art-making? It’s unclear how large a subset of that elusive audience this is, but it could be a starting point – especially for adults who have some education but low income.

There are two caveats to consider before taking all of this information at face value. First, class may work differently in the US than in England; while we have seen data that likewise shows a correlation between class and arts consumption in the United States, a study that examined the correlation between self-perceived class and active arts participation (not just consumption) using US data is currently missing from the literature and would provide useful information. Second, the survey Reeves analyzed included too few arts participants of color to be able to draw any conclusions about race; this raises questions about how well his findings apply on our side of the Atlantic, although it is worth noting that US data tends not to show race to be a major factor in overall arts participation choices once socioeconomic status is taken into account.

Regardless, we know that even when arts and cultural events are free, low-SES audiences still aren’t coming. Thinking harder about the social formation of taste may help the field design more effective tools for outreach – and engage a new swath of people more fully in a healthy arts ecosystem.

• A bit about our process

After defining our hypotheses more precisely, we defined five “research questions” that we felt would inform those hypotheses:

1. How is access to arts education distributed?
2. What is the quality of available arts education?
3. What are the benefits of arts education?
4. What are the differences in outcomes for formal vs informal arts education?
5. What is the role of arts education in self-actualization?

We divvied up the research questions and agreed to start by going through artsedsearch.org. We logged relevant research reports in Zotero and traded periodic emails with updates and suggested areas of focus.

• Determine the extent to which research exists addressing the topic area in general.
• Determine the extent to which research exists addressing the specific hypotheses that we developed.
• If possible, arrive at a broad understanding of where there are areas of consensus and debate in the research that does exist. (Looking for just a general impression here, not an in-depth review of particular studies.)

There is a ton of research on arts education, a fair amount of which addresses our hypotheses (and, more directly, on our research questions). In brief, there seems to be a lot of stuff on the distribution of access to arts ed in formal school environments. The majority of it was conducted at the state level (with a subset run through WESTAF, providing some consistency in methodology). These surveys seem reasonably comprehensive, though we don’t yet know exactly what they tell us and what they omit. Regarding the distribution of quality, many of the access studies also cover this, although we believe the rigor of this part of the research is less high/consistent, in large part because how authors define quality varies. (The report “Qualities of Quality” does a good job of outlining why comprehensive studies of the qualities of arts education have been difficult, and the major debates in the field that lead to lack of consensus around what kind of arts education “counts.”)

Regarding the benefits of arts ed, although there are lots of summaries of the literature, there are fewer studies that are more ambitious than assessing a single program or a program across a reasonably intimate community. ArtsEdSearch.org has a good overview of this part of the field, though they are clearly coming at it from the perspective of advocates (which is also true of aggregators like http://artsaskformore.artsusa.org/artsed_facts/ and http://artiseducation.org/research-tools/research/3). We suspect these studies will mostly not be models of rigor or objective analysis. We’ve tagged some of the reports that try to aggregate this work or get indirectly at broader, longitudinal effects with “major research report.” (We aren’t certain where research on the instrumental benefits of arts education would go in our hypotheses. The definition of a healthy arts ecosystem doesn’t really seem to address these, though they seem crucial to the arts ed debate.)

Regarding the differences in outcomes and availability for formal vs informal arts education: much of what is available on informal arts education (i.e., out-of-school arts education) is about museum or field-trip-based experiences, with some studies of specific out-of-school programs. It could be that there is more out there we didn’t find, given the trickiness of wording this search. (We tried things like “informal,” “out of school,” and “out of the classroom” arts ed, which seem to be the commonly-used phrases.) There is, however, some other material on out-of-school learning opportunities generally (i.e., not arts-related) and distribution across socio-economic status. This sub-literature, which we’ve only begun to search, would presumably also cover truly informal arts education in the home (e.g., parents’ playing classical music after dinner). As an aside, we encountered a fair amount of literature on art teacher prep, which may be useful to “quality,” and we’ve saved a couple of these articles.

We had hoped to investigate another research question on the role of arts education in self-actualization, but did not have a chance to do so.

• Identify any hypotheses that are missing from the list but should be added in light of what you’ve found in the research.
• If possible, arrive at an initial impression regarding the extent to which each hypothesis is supported by the research that does exist. Again if possible, assign a low/medium/high level of confidence to this impression. You can divide the hypotheses into subcomponents if that’s useful.

Many American children do not have access to meaningful, formal basic arts education (i.e., repeated exposure to multiple media as consumers and producers in a formal learning environment), which is itself a necessary component of a healthy arts ecosystem.

This hypothesis seems to be well supported by the research. We’d give it a “high.”

Many American children do not have access to meaningful, informal basic arts education (i.e., repeated exposure to multiple media as consumers and producers outside a formal learning environment), which is itself a necessary component of a healthy arts ecosystem.

We haven’t found much research here – and there’s the problem of defining “informal” arts education mentioned above. We’d likely have to get at this indirectly (e.g., through general surveys of arts activity, possibly even retrospective to childhood, and assumptions about learning components or pathways). More likely, we can set it aside. “Low.”

This lack of access to meaningful basic arts education as children prevents many people from reaping the instrumental benefits (e.g., X, Y, and Z) of this “common” opportunity.

We found a lot of research on the benefits of arts education, but are only at a “medium” confidence level here because we aren’t sure about the quality of the work. Most challenging would be showing that arts ed’s instrumental benefits can only or most effectively be achieved through arts ed, which would follow from a strong version of this hypothesis.

This lack of access also prevents many people from acquiring the exposure to a wide variety of arts that would lead them to pursue and benefit from “common” opportunities later in life.

AND

This lack of access also prevents some people who would have the most to contribute as and desire to pursue careers as artists and critics from recognizing and cultivating their interest and ability and from contributing fully to the ecosystem.

Unknown. We didn’t look into what drives people to take up common or scarce opportunities as adults, per se. While several reports point to insufficient arts education as resulting in declining audiences, they are not terribly robust.

Much current formal arts education in America is not as meaningful as it could/should be as a “common” opportunity because it is not structured to help guide students on their own path toward self-actualization.

We’re at “low-medium” here given what we know about research into quality. Again, we haven’t yet looked in to self-actualization particularly.

• Report back on the utility of Zotero, Papers, and Google Docs/Sheets for tracking preliminary investigations like these. Decide whether to commit a team-wide solution at this point or experiment with other options in the next round.

We used Zotero this time to collect sources. Both of us found it a helpful tool for collecting bibliographical information quickly. Daniel found that regardless of how he came across an article, he could usually find a reference in eric.ed.gov, the federal government’s education research database, which Zotero can read easily; he then attached full-text PDFs where they were available from another source. Reading through abstracts quickly in Zotero seemed more cumbersome, however, than reading them in Excel. This was Talia’s second time using Zotero and she found it pretty user-friendly. Unfortunately, the bulk of the state arts ed access surveys were only available as PDFs online and had to be entered manually, which was time consuming. Neither of us had a lot of time to explore the notes or tagging features in full.

• A bit about our process

We spent a total of about 12-14 hours on research over the last two weeks, primarily casting a broad net in search and then entering sources and taking stock of the whole by re-reading abstracts to get a preliminary feel for the literature.

We began working independently, though I ended up focusing on the first hypothesis (common opportunities and poor adults) while Jackie focused on the third (busy people and the arts). (Neither of us turned up a lot on the second, about scarce opportunities for poor adults, that wasn’t about arts education.) We did keyword searches in EBSCO, Google Scholar, and JSTOR. I personally found it to be especially effective to use Google Scholar to find similar articles to ones I found promising or by authors whose work seemed relevant. The bibliographies of some of the more recent studies were also good at pointing us toward the most influential sources.

We compiled our sources in a Google Sheet (which I’ve shared with the full group), including basic bibliographic information and an abstract or introduction. Where possible, we saved full-text PDFs to a shared DropBox folder. I began working with Papers but found that it didn’t recognize a lot of the PDFs I tried to import. It recognizes links to JSTOR, EBSCO, Springer, and the like, but without full-text access, this feature hasn’t been especially useful. I abandoned Papers for the time being to focus on the research. So far, in this compile-as-much-relevant-research-as-possible stage, I’ve found Google Sheets and Dropbox to work reasonably well.

We have not yet figured out how to get full-text versions of restricted articles through JSTOR. Jackie went to her library and used the search engine, but couldn’t access her e-mail to send PDFs (though she could e-mail citations through JSTOR itself). I will to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch but could not use JSTOR from my laptop. The computer lab was full, so I haven’t yet learned whether I can e-mail PDFs to myself from the computers that have JSTOR access. We’re curious whether others have cracked this, especially since we’ve found several journals with lots of relevant articles that we can’t read (e.g., the Journal of Cultural Economics, Poetics, and Social Research).

• Determine the extent to which research exists addressing the topic area in general.
• Determine the extent to which research exists addressing the specific hypotheses that we developed.

John hypothesized at the retreat that, for a given topic, we’d likely find either very little research or an entire world of it. As it turns out, Art and Poverty is a planet of considerable size, with many angles and lots of writing. Some of it falls outside what we take to be the scope of this area (e.g., work on using art to engage the poor through social work; on using art to drive economic growth or end poverty either through related economic benefits or through arts as a medium for advocacy; and on disparities in arts education and the results for poor adults – though it’s obvious that, if we decided to pursue this topic, that will be highly relevant).

I’d say we’re still getting our heads around the rest, identifying possible topics where we haven’t found many sources to do more targeted searches. So far, much of the literature we found addresses the following topics, organized by hypothesis:

1. Poor and economically insecure adults are significantly less likely to have access to “common” opportunities to participate in the arts as producers or consumers for a variety of reasons.

There is a lot of writing on who participates in or consumes the arts, to the point that a few summaries or lit reviews exist on the topic. Some of this describes characteristics of those who do, including socioeconomic factors like income, class or family background, and education; some approaches the question by examining barriers to participation (e.g., cost, awareness), often through self-reporting via surveys. The NEA’s SPPA is the major data source for the US, although much of the work is about the UK or Europe, at local, national, or even international levels. We aren’t yet sure whether a clear picture emerges of a sharp economic divide in cultural participation: it undoubtedly varies for formal arts vs informal arts and by type of art (there are some studies comparing consumption of “high” and “low” music and film), and education may be the real determinant, rather than income, to which it is obviously related. I suspect the data isn’t airtight, but there seem to be a lot of individual datapoints suggesting that, at least, the poor underparticipate in formal arts activities outside the home. We aren’t yet sure how good any of this literature is. (Jackie pointed out that WolfBrown has done some work on the informal arts, so John, if you have tips for digging into that, let us know!)

Most of the arts-specific studies seem to approach the question from the point of view of arts organizations: they either look at audience data or separate the general population by level of consumption of the arts (e.g., often, sometimes, never) and see how these groups are different from one another. The search has led us to speculate about other kinds of research that might exist, searching for which is our next step. This includes answers to questions like:

• What are poor people’s attitudes toward the arts?
• What are poor people’s awareness about arts opportunities and prices?
• How do cultural opportunities map against income level by neighborhood?
• What is the total cost of participating in common arts opportunities (including indirect costs like transportation)?
• This could be a red herring, but the idea of “social exclusion” came up in one or two sources from around 2000. I don’t know if the idea caught on, but it was defined as ‘a shorthand term for what can happen when people or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown.’ Might be worth looking into futher.

2. Poor and economically insecure adults are significantly less likely to have access to “scarce” opportunities to participate in the arts as producers for a variety of reasons

Again, most of the work here is about arts education. We’ve also started pulling articles on artists’ income, which could reveal a strong circumstantial argument that becoming an artist virtually requires the kind of resources that most poor people do not have access to – especially if we can also find research on the cost of producing art, which is part of our hypothesis.

3. Many people who would benefit from common or scarce opportunities to participate in the arts do not take advantage of them due to pressure from social and/or professional environments that treat participation in the arts as an unwelcome distraction from economically productive activities.

From Jackie: I was actually surprised at the amount of literature out there on leisure time use. A lot of it seems to stem from Thorstein Veblen’s work on the leisure class (published in 1899!), and getting revised later in the 60’s and onward as it became clear that wealthy people were no longer the “leisure class,” but rather, the “harried leisure class.” It seems like the discussion gets pretty complicated from there, with a few different viewpoints, but cellphone/smartphone technology seems to have made the problem worse? I definitely don’t feel like I have a great handle on this body of knowledge yet, and there was very little specific to the arts that I could find. It does seem like we can make some strong inferences regarding the arts, though, since most people participate in their leisure time. I also found a summary of Baumol’s “cost disease” as it relates to the performing arts in this piece, which seems somewhat tangential, but definitely interesting as we consider the time resources necessary for arts participation.

A lot of what we’ve found so far is about perceived time-stress, which is useful as general context. We have found some material on leisure time broadly, which is a start, but only a couple of sources linked directly to the arts. We want to pursue this further by following the bibliographies of these. We also want to dig into sources like the American Heritage Time Use study to understand how the arts fit into how Americans spend their time.

• Identify any hypotheses that are missing from the list but should be added in light of what you’ve found in the research.

So far, we haven’t added hypotheses. Each of the current hypotheses is pretty Brobdingnagian, so we’re more likely to break them down or narrow their focus, though this will require actually reading many of the studies we’ve compiled. (But see the note about hypothesis three in the next section.)

• If possible, arrive at a broad understanding of where there are areas of consensus and debate in the research that does exist. (Looking for just a general impression here, not an in-depth review of particular studies.)
• If possible, arrive at an initial impression regarding the extent to which each hypothesis is supported by the research that does exist. Again if possible, assign a low/medium/high level of confidence to this impression. You can divide the hypotheses into subcomponents if that’s useful.

1. Poor-and-common: There seems to be lots of evidence that the poor are not consuming (formal) arts as much as richer people, although we’ll need to read more deeply to make sure this actually supports our more precise hypothesis. I’d give this one a preliminary high, though.
2. Poor-and-scarce: We haven’t compiled much research on the poor-and-scarce hypothesis.
3. Busy-and-uncultured: There seems to be support for the idea that leisure time has decreased in quantity and quality, and that this is bad for arts consumption (or at least shifts such consumption away from formal arts outside the browser). We actually framed the hypothesis around cultural pressure at work or in society, though – I’d say we don’t yet know whether that’s supported by research. If we adjust that to something like, “Many people who would benefit from common or scarce opportunities … do not take advantage of them due to increasing time-stress and fragmentation of leisure,” I’d give it a medium – though Jackie might be bolder.

• Report back on the utility of Zotero, Papers, and Google Docs/Sheets for tracking preliminary investigations like these. Decide whether to commit a team-wide solution at this point or experiment with other options in the next round.

As I noted, Papers didn’t prove to be immediately and obviously helpful, as compared to Google Sheets and Dropbox. If we can figure out how to use it to organize full-text articles, it might be worth exploring – but, since it isn’t free, I suspect Zotero will be at least as desirable, if we want a purpose-built software solution.

A Voice from the Other Side of the Grant

Two remarkable artists gave plenary talks that not only moved and inspired everyone I spoke to in the audience but also demonstrated the speakers’ facility with the written and spoken word. Each is the kind of artist any of us would be proud to have supported, the kind we have in mind when we think about artistic excellence. And, in the course of retelling her own development as a writer, each offered important lessons for how to think about grant program design.

Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of Water by the Spoonful and In the Heights, grew up “in the barrio” in Philadelphia; among her family, she was “the one who got out,” though not the only artist: a cousin was inspired by her success to write his first novel from prison. He has just finished his third. That inspiring success was enabled – or at least facilitated – by three critical grants, one received when Hudes was a sophomore at Yale, one when she was a graduate student in playwriting at Brown, and one when she had achieved enough commercial success with In the Heights to face the hard choice between signing up to write for the screen and re-devoting herself to less remunerative but more personal writing. In each case, as she put it, it was the length (one to two years), quantity (enough to allow her to quit the jobs she held to pay the rent), and quality (no strings attached) of the grant that made it transformative. At least in this case, it seems that the best thing a grantmaker could do was spot a potential talent, give her the gift of time, and get out of her way.

These grants worked differently from each other in an important way, it seems to me. The first freed a young artist who had thrown herself into theater at college from the need to work over a summer, offering what may have been her first chance to get lost in a single project; the second gave force to the eternal promise of the MFA as an uninterrupted opportunity to focus on craft, to experiment, and to produce. Both awards encouraged an early-career artist in important ways: they were bellows to a spark that, for all anyone could know in advance, might have sputtered out rather than catching.

The third grant, by contrast, emboldened an artist in full command of her powers to turn down a lucrative screenwriting gig – “my agent fumed,” Hudes gleefully recalled – to pursue a project with much less commercial promise that she couldn’t quite get out of her head. The result was the Pulitzer-winning Water by the Spoonful, the second play in what is now a trilogy. This third grant was a different kind of gamble: by this point, we could be pretty sure Hudes was going to make something wonderful (television and film are both vibrant media, after all), but the grantmaker presumably believed she would make something more wonderful without financial pressure.

It’s hard to know what might have happened without any one – or even all three – of these philanthropic interventions. Hudes clearly has immense inner resources to complement her immense talent: she had made it to Yale before the first of the grants she mentioned, and from the lectern she conveyed such mastery and conviction that it was hard to imagine her not creating art and amazing audiences. If cultural philanthropy did not exist, perhaps Hudes would have made the time and mental space to make equally acclaimed work. Or perhaps she would have followed so many of her classmates into business or medicine or law and put her art on hold, for a few years or a lifetime. Ultimately, we can only celebrate what did happen, and take Hudes seriously when she says that the support she received – long-term, sufficient, and unqualified – was crucial for her.

Considering How We Give

We can also think hard about what Hudes’s example tells us about how we select grantees. Of course we do our best to assess talent, but is there a way to know in advance who has the grit to persevere in a life dedicated to art, which can be hard even with grant support? Is there a way to identify the established artist who has a new, brilliant idea that won’t attract commercial support, that she can only pursue with philanthropic dollars? How can we nurture the excellent art that otherwise might not happen?

Expertise and judgment must be the answer, and, thanks to IRS rules, it is almost always the expertise and judgment of panels that determine which individual artists and arts organizations receive grants. I moderated what seemed to be one of the more tactical of the breakout sessions, in which Createquity’s own Ian David Moss and Ed Harsh of New Music USA presented on ways of “Rethinking the Grant Panel.” Diane Ragsdale has an excellent summary of the presentations in her final post from the conference, so I will only say here that there seemed to be a hunger to discuss the specific changes that some funders are making to their panels. Some of the questions that we could only touch on (or didn’t even have time to) in the one-hour session include:

• How can we use technology effectively to expand grant panels to fairly evaluate the work of a growing number of artists?
• What kinds of expertise are most important on grant panels? Should a jazz pianist’s proposal be evaluated only by other jazz pianists?
• At what stage and by whom should different criteria (artistic excellence, project potential, financial sustainability, etc.) be evaluated?
• How can we balance the advantages of a model that requires consensus among judges (e.g., fairness, direct comparison of applicants) with the advantages of a model that gives weight to the passionate advocacy judges may feel for an especially strong applicant?
• What should be the role of deliberation, face-to-face or otherwise, in selecting grantees?
• From a technical perspective, should we account for “easy” and “hard” graders among panelists?
• Who wins and who loses when we adopt new techniques like dispersed panels or applications that emphasize public presentation through a website?
• What promising innovations is no one trying yet?

We plan to continue the conversation about these and other questions; leave a comment if you’d like to be a part of it.

We actually know surprisingly little about how private arts funders give to individual artists. Grantmakers in the Arts publishes an annual report on the state of giving to arts organizations that, despite the imperfections of the data, is an excellent guide to the field. GIA is now a year into a similar project covering giving to individuals, which was the subject of a breakout session at the conference and a plenary discussion at the “Support for Individual Artists” preconference. GIA’s Tommer Peterson (the quiet heart of the conference) is leading work with Alan Brown and Claudia Bach to catalogue the various ways funders can support individual artists, from outright cash grants made directly to artists to the provision of a variety of in-kind services through a financial intermediary. Once a taxonomy is established by March 2014, the real work will begin, as data is collected from pilot sites to test the system before GIA establishes a national database. Within a few years, we may learn much more about the tools available to us as funders and how those tools are currently being used. In the meantime, GIA has collected articles on the topic and provides updates on what they’ve learned so far on their website.

Who Will Support the Sensitive Child?

And, of course, we can continue to learn from artists what makes the difference to them. I want to close by returning to the second artist who gave a plenary talk at this year’s conference, National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney. Finney opened with a quote from Willa Cather: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” She spoke movingly about growing up as a “sensitive child” and the editorial attention of a high-school English teacher who helped her realize that her intense experience of the world was something to be treasured, mastered, and recorded. (Hudes spoke of similar attention, from a local street musician who give her a crucial cassette and an unforgiving Russian piano teacher.) Toward the end Finney posed a question that was also an exhortation (roughly transcribed): “Who looks for and seeks the sensitive child before she needs money to make her art? Call out her name to let her know she has been loved and cherished. Make her know that what she has witnessed – whatever it has been – greatly matters in this world.”

For those of us with our heads fully in the technical construction of grant panels by that final breakfast, Finney was, as she said artists must, “saying the hard thing beautifully.” This was a plea to consider the stage when an intervention – philanthropic or otherwise – can make the most difference in fostering excellent art: the stage when a child is learning how to confront and express the creative impulse within her, is accumulating unbeknownst to her the resources and materials that will fuel her art for years, and is making the choices that will one day turn her into a professional poet.

There is a clear message here for those who grant in arts education, but there is also an important lesson for those of us who support adult artists. It matters that we give; it matters to whom we give; and it also matters when in their development as artists we give. There is something special about support that comes early enough to turn the sensitive child into an artist – or that, later, comes at a moment when the artist must choose between art and another of life’s demands. As we strive to improve our grantmaking, how can we more effectively intervene with the right person at the right moment to make possible the commitment to a potential masterpiece – or to a lifetime of creating excellent art?