Tyler Cowen presents a powerful idea in his 2006 book (reprised in 2010) Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding: arts policy is a battle between aesthetic and economic reasoning that can be settled by keeping the American system basically as it is. His sweeping argument draws on a deeply-researched history of arts policy in the United States dating back to the late 19th century. All of his historical analysis is developed in the context of a broader argument for a “decentralized” arts policy, which means moving the responsibility of arts policy decision-making from officials to consumers.

Instead of settling the debate over the role of government in the arts, this admirable attempt at finding a central policy philosophy amenable to free-market types and progressives alike leaves considerable room for interpretation and disagreement. His argument supports policy changes to the NEA’s grantmaking scheme that won’t satisfy conservative hopes of dismantlement. Meanwhile, protecting copyright and expanding State Department arts programs is unlikely to meet arts advocates’ demands. Cowen’s argument does, though, introduce a useful concept for policy analysts as they weigh alternatives.

Summary

Art Lovers vs. Libertarian Economists

Good & Plenty is written atop the backdrop of a hypothesized political discourse divided into two camps: aesthetics and economics. As Cowen explains it, the art lovers are high-minded, cultured people who want to promote the best art. In their ideal world, the government would support the most important artists such that high culture would be sustained. The libertarian economists believe the best art is that which serves paying customers. In this view, every purchase is a tiny message from society to the artist telling her to keep up the good work. All of these whispers reach meaningful volume when the art pleases society and won’t when society isn’t sufficiently pleased. The libertarian economist’s perspective leaves little room for government intervention.

Cowen maps these two groups onto the two major American political parties. He maintains that the fights over arts policy in the 1980’s and 1990’s—including attempts to close the National Endowment for the Arts and arguments over the definitions of decency, censorship, and artistic liberty—were essentially just arguments between art lovers and libertarian economists. Thus, he believes that finding policy instruments that resolve the philosophical conflict between these two stylized positions would help the US, and potentially Congress, reach a political consensus around a single American arts policy.

Decentralization

Cowen believes strongly in decentralization as a policy tool, and advocates for it throughout the book. The philosophy of decentralization holds that decisions made by individuals are better than those made by a committee or, worse, a political process, so we should place citizens in charge of determining the art they enjoy. The list of policies he suggests under this banner is long.

As an obvious and indicative example of decentralized policy, Cowen pushes for a copyright regime that balances access with rewards for widely enjoyed work. His nuanced argument focuses on the ways that copyright is still working in the internet age and suggests that it be left as is: providing an incentive for artists to create, but not foreclosing future technological innovation (even if it may threaten copyright).

Cowen also advocates for other, less familiar distributed approaches to funding the arts. Citing the historical role of private and corporate giving in support of the arts, he argues that the tax deduction for charitable giving acts as a support mechanism for the arts. He writes extensively about the role of education subsidies and government jobs programs in making the artist’s life possible–providing what he characterizes as low-responsibility jobs that lighten the workload on participating artists so they can advance their craft.

Though he does not advocate direct arts funding, he does make a case for two main ways to make it more decentralized: arbitrary and idiosyncratic selection. Arbitrary selection—choosing whom to fund entirely at random—works, Cowen believes, because it is better than the risk-averse selection process that dominates political or committee funding. Idiosyncratic funding choices, which he defines as making a funding choice as an individual according to one’s own taste even if that individual is supposed to be representing others, serves the same anti-conservative goal. He claims that many of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal arts programs met the arbitrariness standard. The Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) employment programs for visual artists gave a job worth roughly one third of their income to any artist who could provide the WPA with a framed canvas. The Roosevelt administration saw this as an anti-poverty program, paying people who had skills and could stimulate the economy if they had money in their pockets to do something, even if it wasn’t so useful. When the program ended, the WPA burned thousands of the paintings, and even sold some to a plumber as pipe insulation. Cowen claims that this type of arbitrary government spending on the arts helps to remove the decision-making of which artists are the best from the government and give it back to the people.

On the other end of the spectrum, he praises the historical role of nobility in the arts. He argues that when aristocrats followed their tastes and paid for art accordingly, they were unencumbered by the art-by-committee problem. Instead, they were able to make bold and radical artistic decisions that forecasted landmark innovation. He explains that this approach could be replicated in the US by removing the political burdens on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Removing the NEA’s dependence on the annual appropriations process could free the agency to make more radical decisions. He draws a historical analogue from the aristocratic funding of the arts to the American policy of providing tax subsidies to wealthy folks who make donations to arts institutions.

All of these approaches give us a picture of the patchwork American arts policy from the twentieth century to today. The common thread Cowen identifies is some degree of decentralization, whether it be a laissez-faire, property rights-based approach (as he would prefer) or a more muscular intervention like that of Roosevelt’s WPA. Cowen does not argue strongly for any single adjustment like changing the funding structure of NEA or increasing federal arts education spending. He advocates instead for us to keep doing what we’re doing: promoting the best art with decentralized funding mechanisms.

Analysis

Cowen’s case for a breakdown between art lovers and libertarian economists, who I will call aestheticists and econs for short, seems plausible. It is not uncommon in DC to see two warring parties duke it out over a fundamental philosophical difference. But is that what is happening in the arts? Certainly there are people who believe in sustaining high culture. Many of these groups receive a small but significant portion of their annual budgets from the NEA, and they lobby for more NEA spending. On the other side, there are many libertarian and conservative economists, like those at George Mason University where Cowen teaches, who find government spending counter-productive and potentially destructive when it interferes with private market mechanisms for providing products and services. Cowen likely spoke with many people in each of these camps, and did some extrapolation to arrive at the archetypal aestheticist and econ. Individual advocates on either side may not have arguments as pure and consistent as those Cowen attributes to them, but his simplifications seem reasonable.

If these were the only two perspectives in Washington, his argument would have a sound footing. He dissects more than a century of American arts policy, explaining along the way where it succeeded and failed from the aestheticist’s and econ’s points of view. His case that decentralization works for both sides is backed up by a thoughtful blend of historical and philosophical analysis.

But there’s a problem: there are a lot more than two sides in this fight. Cowen provides hardly any evidence that conservative congressional arguments against the NEA are based on a preference for market capitalism. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, incidents like those involving Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley centered on content at least as much as the means of financing. Similarly, many conservatives are today seeking ways to legislate against violence in popular video games and films, using Quentin Tarantino as a scapegoat. This suggests that many conservatives probably don’t condition their support of particular arts policies solely on free-market principles. Instead, their ideal policy would rein in government financing of the arts without removing their political leverage to define what content is appropriate and what is not.

The corresponding aestheticist model has the same problem. The progressive arguments for government spending on the arts have not only been about the importance of beauty or intrinsic value of art. Instead, they have also focused on the positive role of government in society, the potential for arts as a driver of economic development, and the importance to democracy of giving everyone a voice. Many progressives see the benefits produced by the arts as reason enough for the government to support them.

Finding a point of resolution between the arguments of aestheticists and econs has value—it creates frameworks for thoughtful advocates from the purists in each camp to find common cause—but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. Most people have deeper motivations behind their support (or lack of support) for the arts, whether cultural, moral, or politically strategic. There is also a growing body of literature in the field of psychology that suggests we don’t hear—and sometimes can’t even understand—alternative views or evidence against our position, making it compromise even less likely. This appears to be happening in debates about the arts. Framing the argument as he does allows Cowen to sidestep a lot of the complications that are really at the center of why these political debates persist. If only those who are really pure aestheticists or pure econs are moved by a proposed reconciliation, the political movement built on that message is likely to fail.

For a recent analogy, consider the politics over health care reform: a bill modeled on legislation proposed by a leading conservative think tank and enacted by a popular Republican governor was not supported by even a single Republican in the House of Representatives or the Senate. Many of the resistors explained that they were voting against a government takeover of health care or an invasion of government into the free market. The motivations underlying all of these arguments came from a fundamental distrust of government, not from a place of trying to build a health care reform bill that found a compromise between government-free and government-run.

Similarly, when President Obama was Senator Obama, he voted against a bill that would raise the debt ceiling. The outrage his White House has displayed during the debates over the debt ceiling since 2011 make clear what the debt ceiling is really about: flexing political muscle and signaling approval or disapproval of the current direction of policy.

I believe Cowen’s case that arguments over arts policy are really about creating the best environment for the arts to thrive is misguided. As in the health care and debt ceiling debates, the reasons for political opinions in the arts are complex, and that complexity matters if solutions to divisive issues are to be found.

Implications

Though I am not convinced decentralization is a politically feasible solution to the culture wars, its potential as a policy mechanism in the arts is still worth considering. Decentralization’s strength comes from a single argument: people know what they like better than the government. This idea, which is deeply Hayekian (see “The Use of Knowledge in Society”), is compelling because it is almost undeniably true. Paul Ryan and I have very different tastes in music; I wouldn’t want him to be budgeting the money musicians receive.

Hiding in this argument is a hard-to-solve conundrum: what if artists are not responsive to demand? When I was in music school, we all talked about wanting to make a living, and many of us took classes to that end, but most of us bought into the “starving artist” picture of our life. Most artists make art because they love it, not for the money. The argument that individuals know better than the government is used to support the market mechanism and invoke a market logic, suggesting that those who receive money will keep on working at their craft, while those who don’t will quit. In the arts, this mechanism seems to be broken, with people scraping by just to be able to do what they love rather than quitting and putting their efforts into something at which they could make more money.

The above is just one of the problems with a broad, uncritical application of decentralization to all arts policy dilemmas. However, Cowen’s decentralization concept can be a useful tool for systematizing the thinking policy-makers use as they consider ways to improve proposed interventions and look for potential unintended consequences. It also points to a few seemingly peripheral policy items for which arts advocates should be campaigning. Among the most politically salient are:

1. Keeping the academy funded. Ivory towers don’t have a great reputation in many Washington, DC circles, but they are an important tool for keeping artists employed. According to Cowen, many great artists depend on the government-subsidized open intellectual environment to create their best work, and this impact should be taken into account before cutting funding to colleges and universities.
2. Closing down the Internet will not win the copyright war. Artists use the Internet as a critical tool for artistic innovation and distribution. Though copyright and new technology have differential effects across artistic disciplines, art is broadly enhanced by the freedom technology provides. Copyright is not a moral right, it is a legal construction, and Congress should avoid legislating it as the former.
3. Maintaining the charitable giving deduction. Cowen makes a good case for why the charitable giving deduction, despite its drawbacks, is an important tool for funding the arts. Though many of the individuals who are taking the deduction likely have mundane, risk-averse artistic interests, his bet that enough idiosyncratic individuals are takings risks and funding innovative new projects seems like a good one to me.

Further reading:

• Review of Good & Plenty by Shawn Ritenour of Grove City College in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics
• Crooked Timber’s review of Good & Plenty
• “Funding Arts the American Way”, a review of Good & Plenty for Philanthropy Magazine by Rex Roberts

Photo from Images_of_Money on Flickr

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on the controversy over the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) Theatre’s policy of not paying its performers. UCB is almost universally considered the leading improv theater in New York, and attracts much of the top talent. It’s not a small side project, or an isolated community; it shapes the social norms of the New York improv comedy scene. As such, the question of its role in defining the future of New York improv is real and the conversation deserves to be amplified by places like the Times. This controversy followed a similar uproar over former Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer’s decision to not pay her crowd-sourced band members.

When people discuss the issue of when performing for free is appropriate and when it is not, three logics emerge: utility, community, and justice.

The utilitarian logic suggests that if the artist is getting more out of the experience than the host, the artist should not be paid. Adam Thurman explains that for these professional performers, “the real enemy is being invisible.” If the exposure a professional gets from performing at a certain venue is good enough to get her jobs down the line that she couldn’t get otherwise, she should be willing to work for free because the future returns are high enough. If the exposure doesn’t help the performer get work or some other financial compensation down the line, he suggests that performer not take the gig for free. Amanda Palmer’s plan to not pay her band members makes sense under this logic—they’re all unknown musicians and they’re getting the opportunity to tour with a well-known pop artist. This opportunity is probably a pretty good resume booster for someone looking for a career as a back-up guitarist or a pop drummer. Popular improv comedian Chris Gethard agrees, saying “I owe everything to UCB.”

Following this logic to its conclusion leads to the idea that if performers are really getting a lot out of the experience, maybe they should be paying venues for the opportunity. This is happening in music and theater scenes all over the country.  Though much of this work preys on wide-eyed performers looking for a break, some folks are actually selling a great experience that performers wouldn’t be able to have otherwise.

One of UCB’s founders characterizes the question of whether to pay differently in one of the most important paragraphs on the Times’s report:

There’s a creative vibe at U.C.B., and to maintain it, we can’t pay people,” Mr. [Matt] Besser said in an interview. “If you pay, then you have to assign worth to shows, and then people will resent that.

This argument follows from the community logic. Here, performers are part of a community that a venue keeps alive. Paying performers would destroy the egalitarian we’re-all-in-this-together spirit. A similar ethic is commonly discussed in politics. Paying voters for showing up at the polls, though it may increase turnout, hasn’t yet caught on because it clashes with the idea that voting is something we do because we love our country, not for a few bucks.

But a day’s work deserves a day’s pay, right? The bank won’t hold exposure as equity (most of the time, anyway). Science fiction author Harlan Ellison lays out this problem bluntly, emphatically pronouncing:

By what right would you call me and ask me to work for nothing? Do you get a paycheck? Does your boss get a paycheck? … Do you pay the cameramen? Do you pay the cutters? Would you go to a gas station and ask for free gas? Would you go to the doctor and have him take out your spleen for nothing? How dare you call me and want me to work for nothing!

Amanda Palmer critic Steve Albini makes a related argument that if the person who would normally be paying is making money (i.e., Amanda Palmer or a venue that programs successful improv comedy), the performer should be getting paid.

With these three different logics leading to different answers on whether to pay performers, it makes sense that controversies would arise. We need to be asking what we want: low cost performances as a locus for social connection and creative expression, market-based exchange, or a day’s pay for a day’s work?

Roy Hargrove, a popular jazz jammer, at work on his horn. Photo courtesy of Eddy Westveer via Flickr.

This is the second post in a series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Four talented young musicians step on stage at a West Village jazz jam. Each faces competing pressures: helping make the band sound tight and showing off her own skills. With this information, and a little bit of formal logic, we could conclude that this situation is hopeless (as we did in the previous piece of this series). Each member of the band faces a pair of incentives that together push her to overplay–meaning simply, as in Pitfalls, playing for a longer period of time than would normally be appropriate for the given tune–and make the music worse. Jazz jams from New York to LA are plagued by this fate, but many avoid it. Some, like the one at Fat Cat in New York City, host some of the best music around.

In order to achieve their goals, arts funders often need the organizations they support to work together. Many of these on-the-ground organizations face a set of incentives similar to the jazz musicians. Yet in the real world, successful collaboration is not unusual for arts organizations or jazz artists.

Why are some shared goals realized when incentives appear to be aligned against them? Doctoral degrees, book deals, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for attempts at answering this question. People and the institutions we make up are difficult to understand. Though there does not yet appear to be a consensus on a single set of factors that generate solutions, simplified versions of the theories posited by diverse academics like Elinor Ostrom, Robert Axelrod, Robert Sugden, Antonio Demasio, George Lakoff, and Daniel Kahnemen from economics, political science, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics can help funders move toward a fuller toolkit of productive impact strategies.

Jazz Jams That Listeners Can Enjoy

Looking at how a jazz jam works and how the members avoid failure helps us better understand which strategies foundations should be choosing. A jazz quartet that plays well together could draw on one or a combination of the following scenarios:

Cooperative Strategies: Jazz jams can be quite draining. A series of bad experiences can scar a player for life. Only the musicians who get a lot out of playing stick around to teach jazz to the next round of youngsters. Teachers have learned through experience that they are happiest when they get to play extra time and when no one else overplays. They also learn that pretty much everyone feels the same way. Since it is unlikely that they will run into a lot of players that feel differently, they need to develop a strategy that can work for them throughout the years and keep them energized to go onto the next jam.  Over time, musicians start to develop a simple plan: 1) the first time you play with a new group, don’t overplay. 2) If your bandmates overplay, you can overplay next time as payback. 3) If they don’t overplay, reward them by going along the next time and not overplaying. Cooperation is the best possible option for the group as a whole, so this simple strategy is able to gain momentum over time and become the dominant approach. The four musicians who show up at the West Village jazz jam have all been trained well and know this strategy. If they follow it, the players and the audience will leave happy enough to return another night.

Psychological: It is not often that jazz musicians are accused of being abnormally rational. Each player’s approach to the music is organic, complex, and deeply emotional. Even in everyday life, aside from the creative and culturally cooperative setting of the jazz jam, recent research suggests that no one always acts completely rationally. Our West Village jazz musicians are no different. Each of the players has interests and goals. These incentives can be understood by analyzing the individual musicians’ situations as if they were happiness-maximizing robots. The problem is that players in this group also have brains and bodies, and those don’t always work like a computer.

As the trumpet player reaches the stage, a lot is going through her mind. 98% of it is subconscious. Her fellow musicians start to play. Before she has even picked up her instrument, she hears the chord changes and watches the guitarist strike his instrument. Her brain mirrors this; her mind’s fingers are playing all of those chords. Though she is only observing, her neurons are quietly firing, providing her a subconscious empathic connection to her bandmate. She begins to play and comes to a decision point: should she overplay or play along with everyone else? Her decision draws on a number of simple rules for mental processing. One, called framing, tells her to use the information she has, as it is presented, to make the decision. She was just telling her friend how one of the players earlier in the night was a “ball hog.” The metaphor she used equates “overplaying” and “being a ball hog” and sets the frame for her: jazz is a team sport in which each member should sacrifice for the goals of the team. Using this framing, she decides to pass the ball to her teammate.

Social Context: Jazz musicians are members of social networks outside of just the jazz jam community. The social norms jazz musicians learn outside of jazz—whether in their homes, schools, or places of work or worship—matter inside jazz. When the bass player takes the stage, he is behaving in a way he finds appropriate given his upbringing and social context. Though he feels the urge to take off his shirt—it is hot after all—he probably won’t. He has learned that in this society, when you’re at an upscale music venue, you don’t take off your clothes even if you’re overheated. The same logic applies to his decision not to overplay. His society has conditioned him to appreciate teamwork and cooperation as important virtues. He decides to limit his playing to one turn over the chord changes, because he knows doing otherwise would be seen as inappropriate in his society.

Rules: There’s a sign on the wall of our imaginary West Village jazz haunt: UNLESS YOU’RE CHARLIE PARKER, KEEP IT UNDER 2 CHORUSES! As new players arrive, the doorman makes sure to point out the sign and let them know that they’ll have to pay a fine if they break the rule. When these fresh-faced jazz jammers reach the stage, overplaying doesn’t cross their mind. They know they have to play by the rules and do their best within their time limit.

Unspoken Rules: A young alto sax player walks into a bar on Frenchmen Street hosting a jazz jam. He sits down to watch a few songs and sees that certain players are getting kicked off stage, while others are allowed to stay on stage tune after tune. He notices the difference between the two types of players: the ones who get pushed off are overplaying, and the ones who get to stay are team players. A few songs later, he gets called to the stage. When he gets the chance to overplay, he decides against it because, even though the rule is unspoken, he knows that there will be costs to overplaying.

The Rules that Set the Rules: At the beginning of every jazz jam it hosts, a club in Harlem asks every non-playing person in attendance to vote on the rules for the night. Those in attendance raise their hands and voices in support of a reasonable limit on how long solos can be. They decide that musicians who break the rules can’t play the rest of the night; they’re the customers after all. The rules as determined by the audience constrain the freedom of the musicians to play what they want, but they do so in the interest of everyone there.

A Well-Intentioned Intervention at Our Dreamed-Up Jazz Jam

As one further complication, we could add to our hypothetical jazz jam the existence of an organizer. The person responsible for bringing the whole event about could use her power to influence where the jam is held, what the rules are, and who is allowed in. She could also draw on cognitive scientific, psychological, and game theoretic evidence that using the right language and setting the right context for the jam could change the outcomes. By facilitating the jam with this awareness, she could ensure the jammers work together to the benefit of all involved.

Funding Successful Cooperation

Foundations often use grant-making as a way to structure the incentives available for achieving their goals. Often times, the goals require collaboration among organizations they are funding and other organizations with a similar purpose. Foundations can be more successful if they learn how collaboration works and integrate this knowledge into their grant-making strategies. The simplified jazz jam situations I previously laid out provide a window into how organizations and people come to cooperate.

Foundations that select organizations for funding by assessing marginal costs against marginal social benefits may incentivize organizations to work against shared goals (see The Pitfalls of Shared Goals). Providing grants on this basis carries an implicit theory: the value organizations create together is worth no more than the value they create on their own. The alternative belief, that the value organizations create through collaboration is greater than that which they provide alone, suggests a broader range of strategies.

The Collective Impact approach, as described by John Kania and Mark Kramer in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is an important first step toward solutions. Kania and Kramer suggest that foundations should set a shared agenda, develop a common measurement system, work with organizations to help them fit into their highest-impact role, encourage cross-organization communication, and fund an institution to manage this process. These suggestions draw on the idea that, by changing the rules that make the rules and increasing the visibility of an organization’s failure to contribute to the shared goals, foundations can get closer to achieving their desired outcomes. Each of these suggestions is valid, but other strategies exist as well.

Foundations and other funders of the arts could turn to the varied explanations (above) of why people work together to define strategies that fit their unique needs. Take, for example, a funder seeking to increase the diversity of art making in their community. The funder may choose to fund an organization working to provide performance spaces for women and a separate organization working on offering music classes to underserved communities. Each of these organizations are important, but by emphasizing the individual impact they have on their focus, e.g., how many people became instrumentally proficient per dollar, the funder misses the opportunity to promote shared goals. Instead, the funder could attempt to reframe the work each organization does by offering combined team trainings with all of its grantees in attendance. It could set a standard that any organization which appears to not be working in concert with other organizations is barred from funding for a certain number of years. It could offer trainings on cooperative strategies, like the tit-for-tat strategy explained above, such that the organizations they fund would self-enforce cooperation. And it could even change the language it uses in the grant-making process to ensure that it helps organization leaders think of their organizations as one piece of a bigger puzzle.

In reality, many foundations do this sort of thing every day without knowing it. They consider long-term objectives and make decisions based on audacious goals rather than just near-term impact. They bring diverse coalitions together to discuss shared goals. While a short-run cost-benefit analysis may not see the value in time spent at a bar with other organizations in the community, the cooperative model we’ve been discussing makes sense of its importance.

The strategies foundations and other funders develop are particular to their mission. By understanding how collaboration works in a simple setting, funders can tweak their social impact strategies on the big stage to be more aligned with the evidence on how we reach shared goals.

For more on these topics, check out:

• “Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• “Spontaneous Order” by Robert Sugden
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• “Behind the Looking-Glass” by Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
• Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources by Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Never afraid to speak his mind, Rocco Landesman shares a few more words about his experience as NEA head, this time with the Public Theater’s Public Forum Podcast.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Ken Corbin, a 27-year IRS veteran, will take over as acting head of the IRS’s exempt organizations division amid the recent controversies at the agency.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight and Gates Foundations are now teaming up to fund the Media Impact Project, which will develop tools for measuring the impact of online media.
• Controversy over public-private partnerships is as hot as ever, this time appearing in the provision of public space. The Atlantic discusses the equity, efficiency, and quantity implications.
• Former hedge funder John Arnold and wife Laura have opened a controversial, highly data-driven foundation in Houston with promising results already in the areas of hunger and criminal justice, Philanthropy News Digest reports.
• Andy Warhol’s eponymous foundation is struggling with a serious institutional crisis in which leaders created perverse incentives for their art authenticators and salespeople, according to Richard Dorment’s crackerjack reporting for the New York Review of Books.
• A new fund to help young London theater producers is making a big splash, the Guardian reports.

IN THE FIELD

• Ever wonder how arts therapy works for victims of trauma? ARTSblog has a fantastic pithy explanation in their article on the use of art therapy with members of America’s armed forces. More on arts and the military from Americans for the Arts can be found here.
• In an evolving sharing culture, copyright has become a major challenge for museums attempting to make social connections with audiences. Carolina A. Miranda explains how this works today in a detailed article for ARTnews.
• Curation is an evolving artform. Erin Roos-Brown, a Program Manager for the Creative Campus Initiative at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, argues in her article on the topic that curation used to require an insulated academic and is now quickly becoming a social, entrepreneurial role.
• A fascinating New York Times report on using art to launder money explains how the culture around buying famous artworks makes it one of the best ways to hide your tracks–if you’re a criminal.
• Vancouver theater producer Caleb McMullen is boldly offering a guarantee on the price of the ticket for his company’s production of Proof. The Globe and Mail lays out the whys, hows, and whos.
• A judge has allowed composer Nathan Currier’s lawsuit against the Brooklyn Philharmonic to proceed, thus extending the saga of the most bizarre concert experience ever experienced into its 10th year. -IDM

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• The Australian breaks down the takeaways from the Aspen Institute’s meeting on the future of museums in a new brief summary.

BIG IDEAS

• Createquity’s Talia Gibas has a brief summary at ARTSBlog covering how to get into the weeds of what the STEM to STEAM movement is really trying to accomplish.
• Fast Company’s always enterprising online outfit FastCoLabs has been experimenting with a new part-long form, part-live blog format that has (thus far) had a remarkably positive impact on their analytics.
• The Atlantic’s Emily Badger challenges the virtues of the advancing personalization of Google Maps in her piece The Potential Problem With Personalized Google Maps. Her argument speaks to the potential for idiosyncratic exposure to reduce quality of life.
• Students all over the country are being told to purse their passion, but what if they don’t have one? Economists try to answer this question in this piece by Planet Money’s Chana-Joffey Walt.
• Artful improvisation is a useful tool for managers. Keith Sawyer explains what leaders should glean from jazz improv in particular in his review of Yes to the Mess by Frank J. Barrett.
• Congratulations to the lucky dozen who made the Barry’s Blog Dinner-vention guest list! The event will be held September 6 at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and will be recorded for posterity. -IDM

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts Education Partnership has released Preparing Students for the Next America, a new report in which they detail how arts education improves work readiness and enriches the lives of community members.
• D5, a coalition of funders, community activists, and thought leaders, have a new report on diversity in the philanthropy sector, how to improve it, and why it matters.
• The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University has a new report out on the use of program-related investments (PRIs) as a philanthropic tool over the past twenty years.
• Foundations still have a long way to go on the road to transparency, according to a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and the President and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation adds his thoughts on how to make transparency a priority in the boardroom.
• A new model of concert attendance published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing provides evidence for a number of counter-intuitive findings, including an indifference point in terms of attendance between contemporary and less-known romantic-period works.

from the Library of Congress

This is the first piece in a three-part series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Remember that group project you had in middle school where one of the members slacked off and got the same grade as you? What about that green stuff growing in the back (and maybe event the front) of your fridge in college? Sometimes, when a group of people is collectively responsible for a thing or an action, members of the group don’t do their part–leaving the project unfinished, or the refrigerator unclean.

Arts funders and policymakers are often shooting for goals that require on-the-ground organizations to work together. The Surdna Foundation, for example, “supports efforts that provide artists with business training and financial resources that enable them to be, and create, valuable economic assets for their communities.” One of the grants Surdna has made under this program is to the Rebuild Foundation, an organization that helps finance cultural spaces. This is an important effort, and it is a major part of “providing artists with…financial resources,” but it alone does not make financial resources and business training available to all artists. Instead, the Rebuild Foundation works within an informal network of organizations in St. Louis, Omaha, Chicago, and Detroit to help make the arts a more viable livelihood and to stimulate local economies by strengthening the arts. The strategies that Surdna and all other grant-making institutions put in place have implicit, if not explicit, theories of how the organizations they fund will work with others to reach the goal the foundation intends, e.g., viability of an artist livelihood.

Goals that require a shared purpose, as the goals of many foundations do, are not all that different from those you and your roommates had in college of keeping the fridge clean. Under certain circumstances, they can be left unmet. An understanding of some of the perspectives on why that happens and how to prevent it can help improve the outcomes of a foundation’s strategies.

Tragedy of the Commons

The most common answer to why shared goals are left unmet draws on an out-of-date example about which most people today know very little: common grazing land. Using the metaphor of common grazing land for all shared goals and resources goes back to ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In it, Hardin asks us to picture an open pasture. He argues each herdsman in town has the same incentive: to bring all their cows to this free grazing land. As more and more cows come onto the land, a threshold is passed beyond which the shared land is degraded and becomes unfit for grazing. He explains that typically we expect the invisible hand of the market to help us move toward a better society—competition weeds out the socially costly and leaves us with the socially valuable firms and products. In this case, the invisible hand of competition has led to the degradation of what was a perfectly good pasture. Hardin goes on to extrapolate this to other problems like pollution. Each potential polluter faces higher benefit than cost from polluting, so each chooses to pour their leftover grease into the sewer. Hardin calls all of these shared resources or goals “the commons” and names the overconsumption of them “the tragedy of the commons.”

Tragedy of the Jam Session

This same problem can arise in the arts on a micro-level. Take, for example, a simple jazz jam session.

In a smoke-filled room in the West Village, four up-and-coming bebop players take the stage. They’ve never played together before, but they’re pretty talented, so the audience is expecting a show. Each player wants to live up to that expectation; she hopes that everyone in the room enjoys the music, and that she herself will enjoy it too. At the same time, each member wants to show off her chops with some improv. Improvisation is limited to one player at a time in most bebop settings, and if it runs on too long in a context like this, it can ruin the tune.

Each player, then, has two main incentives: to play the song well together and to take more improv time than the other members. Playing the song well is a goal that all members share responsibility for meeting. Every member looks bad if the song flops. If the song sounds great, everyone has succeeded. Assuming the tune as a whole sounds good, each member can make herself look better by playing a solo that is a little bit longer.

The first soloist begins as the melody ends, and she faces each of these incentives. At this point, the band is playing well together, and it doesn’t seem like playing a little bit longer than normal will mess up the song too much, so she chooses to play one extra time through the chord changes. The player who follows faces the same incentives, and also chooses to improvise longer than necessary. Likewise for the third and the fourth soloist. Three-quarters of the way through the tune, the audience is texting and checking email–they came to hear jazz, not a bunch of overly-eager youngsters play worn out licks over the same tune for an hour. The shared goal that they set out to meet has gone unmet, and each member of the band looks worse because of it.

Making Tragic Grants

Individual arts organizations competing for grants are faced with a similar set of incentives as the herdsman or the soloist. A greatly over-simplified, but illustrative example may be helpful here:

Two organizations have a goal. This goal is something like providing a community and audience exposure for emerging artists and cultural innovators. Each organization uses this mission to define metrics and targets for success and measures performance by attendance and the number of performances held in a given year. Both organizations share a similar mission and constituency, so they look for funding from the same foundation.

Meanwhile, the foundation from which they are soliciting funding is attempting to meet its own mission of making the broader community a hub for cultural innovation. Let’s say it also believes that attendance and the frequency of performances are critical components of success, and it chooses to emphasize these metrics in the grant-making process by giving only to the best-preforming organization.

If both arts organizations know the metrics that the foundation is using for assessing potential grantees, they will compete to host the performances that will be most likely to draw the largest, most consistent audiences. A problem arises because an organization can win the funds by scheduling performances that directly compete with the other organization’s schedule, drawing away potential guests on an important night for their competitor. Similarly, one of the organizations can lose out on the funds if they attempt to develop new artists that will benefit the community-wide goal of innovation rather than attempting to bring in established, highly demanded performers. No organization is made better off by focusing on the broad shared vision; they are only made better off when they focus on the part of that vision that can be attributed immediately to their work. In this way, the shared vision of cultural innovation is lost to the competitive struggle for funding.

For the jazz quartet discussed above, multiple internal and external forces set incentives. The arts organizations’ incentives, on the other hand, are at least in part set by the foundation’s expectations for how the grant money will be used and what it will accomplish. Foundations thus have a responsibility to understand how the incentives they create promote or hinder cooperation between grantees.

Avoiding the Tragedy

If you’ve ever had a clean refrigerator, seen a good jazz jam, or observed organizations with competing incentives reach a common goal, you already know instinctively that the tragedy of the commons is not a necessary evil. People and organizations find ways to solve problems like these every day. Anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and ecologists have attempted to draw general lessons from people world-over who maintain working commons. In the next installment of this series, I will explain how their theories might work in the situations described above.