Process background

Our research on this topic has been rather cursory. Jackie spent a few hours searching Google Scholar and John spent a few hours searching JSTOR and Project Muse.

Extent to which research exists addressing the topic area in general

Our initial searches have confirmed that literature on this topic exists. Much of the work on this topic seems to have been generated by sociologists working in the 1980s and ’90s, though we also unearthed nine (of 28) potential sources from the 2000s. This may in part result from the fact that John was already familiar with some of that work and derived search terms from his knowledge of it. There is also some historical research that traces the origins of our major arts organizations and current funding practices to their origins in the nineteenth century.

Extent to which research exists addressing the specific hypotheses that we developed

John focused his investigation on hypotheses 1a, b, and c. Among these hypotheses, 1a (“Arts organizations are not producing best possible mix because arts organizations develop programming that caters to the tastes of wealthy donors”) and 1c (“The current infrastructure does not connect people with the cultural products and experiences they are likely to appreciate because many wealthy patrons and donors are invested in maintaining the elite status of the arts institutions they support”) seem to be addressed most directly in the literature. There was little that specifically addressed 1b (“The current infrastructure does not connect people with the cultural products and experiences they are likely to appreciate the most because those institutions are dominated by wealthy individuals (board members) whose appreciation of the arts disproportionately favors elite/Western art forms.”)

Jackie focused primarily on hypotheses 2 and 3, though much of what she uncovered related more closely to 1a, b, and c. Regarding hypothesis 2 (“The arts infrastructure does not serve its function in a healthy arts ecosystem as well as it could because wealthy people usually lack the motivation and skill to consider effectively the overall needs of the ecosystem when making large donations”), there were a number of relevant articles and studies of the giving habits, motivations, and qualifications of wealthy individuals to have such influence over the sector. These were mostly from the ’90s, but there are also a few from the aughts. Most of the articles related to hypothesis 2 fit more clearly with 2a (“Wealthy people often support large, established institutions that may be overfunded relative to their positive impact on the arts ecosystem”), but without having actually read the entirety of each article, it’s possible 2b (“Wealthy people sometimes create or prop up high-budget vanity projects that divert resources and attention away from organizations that are more effective and whose missions align better with the goal of ecosystem health”) may be covered in a less-obvious way.

Jackie was unable to find much of anything related to hypothesis 3 (“Scarce opportunities are not distributed to those who have the most to contribute, because wealthy people who have less to contribute self-fund their artistic careers to a significant extent and in doing so crowd others out of the opportunity to make a living from their art”).

Areas of consensus and debate in the research /

Initial impression regarding the extent to which each hypothesis is supported by the research that does exist

There seems to be consensus that people’s tastes are informed by their social class, and that taste can serve as means of preserving social boundaries. There is also some research that directly supports the hypothesis that the tastes of prominent donors influence the art that organizations produce/present.

There seems to be a consensus that the sector is perhaps too open to the influence of wealthy individuals because of their capacity to serve as board members and/or large donors. It seems that wealthy individuals are much more likely to give with the interests of their own, privileged community in mind than that of the “greater good.”

• 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.

One of the most gratifying things about this campaign so far has been seeing the wave of support we’ve received from people whose work is central to our field. Barry Hessenius, whose blog is another widely-read resource among arts managers, graced us last week with a completely unsolicited and glowing endorsement of this project:

I hope you will go to the Indiegogo site and support this effort.  I did….I can give you two good reasons why you might part with the cost of a couple of Starbuck’s half caffeine, double mocha, caramel, latte frappacinnos:  First:  Ian and the people he has assembled to help with his newest reinvention of his site are exactly the people we want to support in our field – young, smart, dedicated, committed people who are already making a contribution to the field to help make things better for everyone.  Supporting that alone ought to be worth ten or twenty bucks.  But Second, I can almost guarantee you that if you follow whatever Createquity does over the next year you will read two or more posts that you (you personally) will find of great value to what you are doing on your job.  That ought to be worth a few bucks, no?

And how often do you get to play Santa Claus in July?

Indeed, it’s been amazing to see the movers and shakers who find value in Createquity’s work. Every year, with the help of a pool of nominators, Barry compiles a list of the nonprofit arts sector’s 50 most powerful and influential leaders. More than a fifth of the 2013 list has contributed to our campaign so far. The show of support from our field has been extraordinary, with donations from star consultants like Holly Sidford (Helicon Collaborative), Alan Brown (WolfBrown), Adrian Ellis (AEA), Jerry Yoshitomi (MeaningMatters), Claudia Bach (AdvisArts), and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus (Metris Arts Consulting); arts organization leaders like Adam Huttler (Fractured Atlas), Laura Zucker (LA County Arts Commission), Mara Walker (Americans for the Arts), and Kemi Ilesanmi (The Laundromat Project); current and former foundation leaders like Kerry McCarthy (New York Community Trust), Angelique Power (Joyce Foundation), and Marian Godfrey (ret. Pew Charitable Trusts); and fellow arts thinkers and information mavens Doug McLennan (ArtsJournal), Nina Simon (Museum 2.0), Thomas Cott (You’ve Cott Mail), Andrew Taylor (The Artful Manager), and Diane Ragsdale (Jumper). The latter four have contributed to our campaign in particularly special ways: Thomas, Andrew, and Diane all were kind enough to record video testimonials for us (embedded below), and Nina is donating two rare signed copies of her classic read The Participatory Museum, which are available to donors at the $100 level. Grab ’em fast!

I hope you agree with us that this is a pretty incredible list. Won’t you add your name to it and help us cross the finish line?

We’re excited to have passed the $5,000 mark in the campaign, putting us more than 50% of the way to our goal. It’s been utterly humbling to see how many of you think this project deserves your hard-earned dollars. To everyone who has donated or shared the campaign with others, we can’t thank you enough. For those of you just tuning in or still on the fence, we hope Diane and Nina can help convince you. If you value Createquity as a resource and feel that the site is worthy of a financial contribution, there’s never going to be a better time to donate.

If you’re reading this via email, you can check out Diane’s video here.

If you’re reading this via email, click here to watch the video.

Click here to see Andrew’s video if you’re reading this via email.

Earlier this week, Ian announced some big changes to the Createquity site, including our first-ever fundraising campaign to help us transform our work. As an all-volunteer effort to date, Createquity has never asked for your financial support before, and now we’re hoping readers like you will donate to help us raise $10,000 – a big challenge for us. So, what will your (tax-deductible!) donation pay for?

• The design and implementation of our new, mobile-friendly website. Our current site was last updated in 2009 and needs a facelift to take advantage of contemporary technologies, including easy access via phones and tablets where more and more of our readership is migrating. We’ll also need to rework the way content is organized on Createquity to support our new editorial direction.
• Our upcoming in-person planning retreat in July. Our team has already been working hard over digital communications (so many video conference calls!) to prepare for the launch, but there is no substitute for spending a full day together. We’ll use the time to make some of our most important and far-reaching decisions about where we’re going to prioritize our research efforts over the next 12 months and beyond.
• A cash reserve. In contemplating these changes, we’ve often found ourselves saying that it was time for Createquity to “go big or go home.” For us, going big means not just streamlining the editorial process to make more effective change, but professionalizing Createquity on the operational side. In addition to paying our people for the first time, this transition will involve various startup expenses like filing fees, software purchases, etc., and as any arts manager knows, it’s important to ensure smooth operations in the face of unpredictable (i.e., totally new!) revenue streams. Any funds we raise over and above our budget for the above two priorities will go towards ensuring Createquity’s sustainability.

In addition to my time, I’ve personally donated some of my own hard-earned, nonprofit-salary cash to the Createquity campaign because I deeply believe in the value of this project. I’ve been consistently impressed by the integrity of Ian and the Createquity team in publishing only the the highest-quality prose and most trustworthy analysis, something I imagine most of you value, too. More than most, Createquity is essentially prestige-blind: it has given young thinkers like me a chance at a public audience through the Createquity Fellowship, and served as a forum for insightful dialogue on both established and emerging ideas.

The next iteration of Createquity is going to be even more exciting, as we bring all of the site’s intellectual and cultural resources to bear on the thorniest problems facing the arts. This is an incredibly ambitious project, with the goal of transforming the field from the inside out through persistent truth-seeking. And instead of relegating that process to an anonymous conference room, we’re going to share as much of our thinking on Createquity as possible so that we can learn, debate, and experiment together as we move forward. It’s an investment that benefits us all. Won’t you donate to help make it happen?

Burning Man 2010. Photo by Robert Scales.

Burning Man is an arts event like no other. During the week prior to Labor Day, thousands of people collectively produce an alternative society in the Nevada desert, one driven by ten principles, such as radical inclusion of all attendees and their lifestyles, anti-corporate decommodification, and participation in cultural production. Thousands of artists spend much of the year producing interactive performances, fire art, and large-scale sculptural projects for their theme camps, the creative communities at the heart of the event. The all-volunteer Department of Public Works (DPW) arrives on the desert playa weeks in advance to implement the Black Rock City plan, complete with roads, lighting, sanitation systems, and an airport. The DPW also builds the wooden Man, which stands 50 to 100 feet tall at the center of the camp before it is ritually burned on the second-to-last night of the event. Repeat attendees—also known as “burners”—return time and again to have life-changing, inspirational experiences and otherwise participate in the community.

Burning Man has seen growth that would make many arts nonprofits green with envy: attendance more than doubled from 25,400 in 2000 to nearly 54,000 in 2011, and last year, for the first time in its 25-year history, the event sold out. (The U.S. Bureau of Land Management limits attendance each year as part of its permitting process, and the limits change.) Cultural and structural changes arrived with Burning Man’s popularity, reflected in its evolution into a favorite retreat for Silicon Valley techies, transition to official nonprofit status, and switch to a controversial ticket lottery. It’s easy to see Burning Man’s growth as evidence of its success, but its conversion from grassroots art community to arts institution has led many to ask a familiar question: can Burning Man go mainstream with its values intact?

Black Rock City from above in 2011. Photo by Simone Paddock.

Arguably, the answer is no. Burning Man’s overwhelming success has, at the very least, challenged its principles of radical inclusion and decommodification. The most recent controversy erupted when the sold-out 2011 event forced a change in the ticketing structure for 2012. Burning Man replaced its first-come, first-serve system with enough space for all with a lottery system that limited attendance to the lucky or cunning. Scalpers who put in multiple lottery entries quickly popped up selling tickets for up to $5,000, and organizers were left scrambling to find a solution that inhibited those who would profit from the event. In an attempt to help preserve Burning Man’s unique art theme camps, extra post-lottery tickets were distributed to key members who weren’t fortunate enough to receive tickets in the early rounds. Despite the Bureau of Land Management’s allowance of an extra 10,000 attendees in June, the fact that the ticketing debacle created a hierarchical attendance system has left the community scarred, and wondering what will happen in 2013. The news that Krug Champagne staged a marketing photo shoot at the 2011 event just made matters worse, and points ominously to the potential for further corporate exploitation.

A Burning Man ticket from 2010. Photo by Flickr user Stargazer 95050.

In another sense, though, Burning Man is stronger than ever, with attendees taking its participation principle to new heights beyond the boundaries of Black Rock City. Like Occupy Wall Street, Burning Man encourages creative participation in all its forms, and attendees are free to remix its governing principles in their daily lives. Aside from the massive number of self-organized, regional Burning Man gatherings that take place each year, a cursory scan of cultural events strongly influenced by Burning Man include: FIGMENT, a participatory arts festival in six U.S. cities; the Lost Horizon Night Market, a one night-only presentation of installations in rented trucks; the Post-Yule Pyre, a massive, annual fire fueled by discarded Christmas trees; Balsa Man, a tongue-in-cheek, tiny version of Burning Man created as an independent homage to the original; and countless other events large and small.

The tiny Balsa Man burns in 2011. Photo by Flickr user foxgrrl.

What sets Burning Man’s evolution apart from other parables of expansion is the strength of its community even as it moves into the mainstream. Though scattered throughout the world, burners seem to place a premium on remaining connected to one another, and it is in this communal space that Burning Man really lives. In this way, the decentralization of the Burning Man community and their independently-run projects reinforce the relevance of its core ideas and the central event even as it evolves. Interestingly, this potency seems at least partly based in the same combination of hyper-local, temporary space and globalized Internet communications that powered Occupy Wall Street in its early days. (It’s no accident that several live streams of Burning Man exist, and that volunteers often provide their own wi-fi, despite the event’s other emphases on disconnecting from mainstream culture.) Without a similar risk of eviction from Black Rock City, attendees can continue to use Burning Man itself as a touchstone for continued expansion beyond the reach of any single event.

SUMMARY

WolfBrown’s 2008 Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions, commissioned by The James Irvine Foundation and written by Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak (now known as Jennifer Novak-Leonard) with Amy Kitchener, aims to provide a broad view of how residents in California’s Inland Empire and Central Valley regions engage with the arts. These regions are similar to many parts of the U.S. that boomed during the aughts and were subsequently hit hardest by the 2008 recession. The Inland Empire (San Bernardino and Riverside counties) blends slowly east from metropolitan Los Angeles and Orange counties to the mountains and desert, and is a rare region of cheap housing in Southern California. Meanwhile, the Central Valley makes up a huge geographic area that includes the cities of Bakersfield, Fresno, and Modesto, the majority of California’s farmland, and a growing cadre of commuters to job hubs like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the recession, they continue to be rated the fastest-growing regions in California, and are home to approximately 10.5 million residents out of the state’s 38 million.

This study diverges from previous research on arts engagement in that it explores a much wider array of formal and informal settings for the arts, and more forms of participation. The home, churches, parks, and other community spaces are measured against museums, theaters, and concert halls, and the authors also start to look at activities like stitchery, social dancing, and digital photography. Differences among racial/ethnic cohorts, ages, and education levels are also parsed.

WolfBrown divided the study into two phases. In Phase 1, researchers under the supervision of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts conducted an initial door-to-door survey of 150-200 randomly-selected households in each of three Fresno area neighborhoods and three San Bernardino/Riverside neighborhoods, for a total of 1,066 households surveyed. The results from this phase were used primarily to develop hypotheses and to cross-check data from Phase 2, a non-random sample of approximately 5,000 respondents who were surveyed for the “California Cultural Census” via online and on-the-ground intercept surveys at cultural events. Phase 2, the primary focus of the Cultural Engagement study, isolated data from four racial/ethnic cohorts (White, Non-Hispanic; African-American, Non-Hispanic; Hispanic; and Native American, Non-Hispanic) and five focus samples (Hmong; Culturally-Active Latinos; African-American Faith-Based; Latino Faith-Based; and Mexican Farm Workers). Finally, the data was also viewed through the lens of Alan Brown’s five modes of arts participation below, a framework developed for a previous study on behalf of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

Cultural Engagement’s major finding is that the home is a hugely important setting for arts and cultural activities across genres, and yet funders and nonprofit service providers have completely overlooked it as an arts space. Other “alternative” spaces loom large: places of worship, parks, and community centers figure prominently across genres as locations for artmaking and creativity. The wide variety of venues parallels the study’s documentation of the immense range of artistic activities. In several instances, racial/ethnic identity resulted in significant variances in venue and type of participation; I’ll highlight some of this specific data.

The responses to questions regarding arts venues revealed the significance of alternative venues for several of the genres investigated: music, theater and drama, dance, and visual arts and crafts. Two genres, reading/writing and what the authors term the “living arts” (which involve a range of informal/amateur activities like preparing traditional foods, gardening, or taking photographs) were not surveyed for venue variation, presumably because the study’s authors assumed those activities take place outside formal venues by nature. Some of the more interesting findings here include:

• The home ranks as the most common location for three of the four arts genres measured: music (70%), dance (34%), and visual arts activities (51%). Eleven percent of respondents said theater activities took place at home, and a range of alternative venues were ranked similarly.
• The Internet is a significant venue for music activities. Thirty percent of the total adult population experience music online, and 46% of 18-24 year-olds download music, a sign that the figures for online engagement will continue to grow (and have undoubtedly already done so since the publishing of Cultural Engagement in 2008). Visual arts show the next highest online activity level at a relatively low 8%.
• Traditional venues still hold power. The theater ranks as the best-used venue type for drama activities (31%), museums and galleries second-highest for visual arts (26%), and theater and concert facilities third-highest for music (32%, about the same as the Internet).

Within the broader venue results, a number of variations by race/ethnicity also surfaced:

• Different racial/ethnic cohorts show a preference for certain types of venues. African Americans tend to prefer places of worship as venues across genre, with the exception of visual art. Hispanics and Native Americans are twice as likely as whites and African Americans to use nontraditional spaces for theater, likely in part because they also practice informal dramatic activities (like acting out stories) more frequently. The home dominates as a setting for dance activities for non-white populations (38-47%), compared to only 18% of white populations taking part in dance activities at home.
• Racial/ethnic differences in participation exist for reading and writing activities. For example, three quarters of whites reported reading books or poetry for pleasure, compared to 45-55% for the other three racial/ethnic groups.

Responses to a series of open-ended questions on active arts participation (inventive and interpretive on the Five Modes of Arts Participation scale) demonstrated an incredibly wide variety of activities within each genre. For instance, musical instruments played include the autoharp, beatbox, computer, and gamelan; theater/drama activities include improv theater, skits, and Renaissance Faires; and arts and crafts activities include scrap-booking, woodworking, and creating floral arrangements.

Brown and Novak note that this variety might point to the increasing fragmentation of artistic tastes, and also describe some findings that indicate unfulfilled interest in arts participation in a number of genres:

• Approximately a fifth of adults have some music background, but are no longer active, about as many as are currently active. The authors argue that this finding may show a reservoir of unfulfilled interest in musical participation.
• In the visual arts, 19% indicated an interest in visiting museums and galleries more frequently, and a massive 49% would like to take part in more participatory activities like painting, making quilts, or taking a class.
• While one third of respondents dance socially, the same number wanted to take dance lessons, more than in other genres. (Only 16% indicated an interest in music lessons, for example.)
• Eleven percent of respondents reported an interest in taking part in a book club, in contrast to 6% who currently do it.

As with the venue measures, the data for participation and unfulfilled interest in participation reveal some significant disparities by race/ethnicity and education levels:

• Respondents without college degrees showed higher levels of interest in inventive and interpretive modes of participation. The authors note that most public and private investment tends to focus on observational modes of engagement, and support the idea of expanding funding for the more active forms.
• Hispanics and Native Americans showed high levels of unfulfilled interest in informal/participatory theater and dance activities compared to whites and African Americans, who indicated a much greater interest in observational engagement.
• Spanish-speakers have a higher level of unfulfilled interest in reading, versus 20% for whites (who, according to the study, presumably don’t speak Spanish as their primary language).
• Within visual arts and crafts, the Hispanic cohort reported the highest level of interest in making quilts and other types of needlework at 21%, with even higher levels seen in the Hmong (34%) and Mexican farmworker (48%) focus samples.

Finally, to ensure as broad a coverage of participatory arts activities as possible, Cultural Engagement included questions addressing what Brown and Novak term the “living arts.” Living arts, in the authors’ estimation, are activities that are potentially undertaken without artistic intent, do not necessitate formal education or expensive materials, fall outside activities typically labeled as “art,” and may involve easily-accessible digital tools. The list of activities they wanted to include, but could not due to limits in the study scope, is instructive: body decoration like tattooing and hair weaving, a longer list of culinary and food preparation activities like cake decorating, engagement in genealogy, more writing activities, a more detailed breakdown of digital imaging activities, and various forms of household decoration. What they were able to include, however, indicates strong engagement in several “living arts” forms:

• Sixty-four percent watch movies, a level of engagement only exceeded by figures for listening to music on the radio and reading newspapers and magazines, and 52% of those surveyed take photographs. In both cases, whites were somewhat more likely to do so than other racial/ethnic cohorts. Forty-two percent prepare traditional foods, with relatively even participation across racial and ethnic groups.
• Twenty-nine percent reported gardening or landscaping activities, an activity most popular among whites (42%) and Native Americans (41%).
• Fifteen percent reported making videos, an activity least popular among whites (11%), with the other three racial/ethnic cohorts showing about 20% participation.

ANALYSIS

Overall, Cultural Engagement both challenges the traditional arts infrastructure and provides encouragement for the expansion of arts services to traditionally underserved places. The data shows that a great deal of arts engagement falls well outside the traditional boundaries of arts nonprofits; at the same time, it also indicates relatively high levels of unfulfilled interest in the activities currently provided by these organizations. However, the fact that the study relies heavily on a non-random sample of people already interested in the arts makes it difficult to extrapolate conclusions to the wider population, undermining one of the study’s five major goals. In addition, surprising results for some of the racial/ethnic cohorts indicate some interesting opportunities for further analysis.

Brown and Novak reason that the use of two data collection phases–the smaller, randomized sample from Phase 1, and the larger, non-randomized sample from Phase 2–allows them to eliminate a great deal of pro-arts bias from the report. Indeed, most of the questions from the two phases are nearly the same, and one might assume that the Phase 2 dataset is strengthened by similar results in Phase 1. They also weighted the Phase 2 data according to known characteristics of the surveyed counties in an attempt to eliminate potential bias. However, a close look at the report raises questions as to how effective these strategies ultimately were in eliminating pro-arts bias from the study.

First, the randomized Phase 1 component may include some pro-arts bias of its own, weakening its usefulness as a control. Brown and Novak mention in quite a few places that the door-to-door Phase 1 survey asked the respondent to reply in reference to any adult in the household, not simply him/herself. It’s unclear whether this instruction led people to respond for multiple arts participants as a single person with a high level of arts interest (as in the case of a someone who plays an instrument, but lives with a brother who attends plays), and if WolfBrown researchers accounted for this issue by filling out multiple forms for each represented person. In addition, even though data collection was attempted from a randomized sample pool, the respondent set might have suffered from some selection bias—the report refers to some difficulty in attaining cooperation from neighborhood residents, and in one neighborhood researchers had to abandon efforts to conduct door-to-door surveys and send mail-reply questionnaires instead. Those who did respond may have had more of an interest in the arts than those who did not.

Second, some of the Phase 2 results don’t stack up with arts participation figures from the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), which does use a random sample. While most of WolfBrown’s measures cannot be compared with those in the SPPA, many that do show significantly higher levels of activity. For instance, 30% of Cultural Engagement respondents said they “regularly” attend stage plays; only 12.5% of SPPA respondents in the Pacific region claim to have done so even once in the past year. Six percent of Cultural Engagement respondents perform dances, but just 2.1% of Pacific region SPPA respondents do. Meanwhile, 14% of Phase 2 respondents indicated they earn some income from their art, a data point that was not collected in Phase 1 or in the SPPA. This figure strongly suggests pro-arts bias, since the NEA’s estimate of 2.3 million full- and part-time arts workers in the United States represents only about 1.5% of the total labor force.

The survey bias may significantly undermine one of the five goals of the study, to “measure levels of cultural engagement, broadly defined” in the Inland Empire and Central Valley. Given that both Phase 1 and Phase 2 display signs of pro-arts bias, it’s difficult to take the reported levels of overall cultural engagement at face value. The four other goals don’t require as broad a view of the data, and Cultural Engagement serves them much better. They include exploring and defining what arts engagement means for the target regions; understanding differences in engagement across demographic cohorts; investigating the settings in which people engage with the arts; and developing recommendations for how Irvine can more effectively support arts and culture. Even if the report’s numbers for the general public represent an already arts-interested population, results showing an expansive definition of arts and culture, differences in engagement among racial/ethnic cohorts, and a wide variety of arts settings are likely relatively unaffected. WolfBrown’s recommendations to adjust Irvine’s funding to reflect these findings seem to rest on a fairly strong foundation.

The results for two subgroups merit further exploration in future studies: the Asian/Pacific Islander ethnic group and the Mexican farmworker focus sample. Surprisingly, the researchers were not able to survey enough Asian/Pacific Islander respondents to include them as an independent racial/ethnic cohort, other than the Hmong focus sample, despite the fact that Asian/Pacific Islander residents make up a significant population group in many surveyed counties. Because the Hmong are a minority ethnic group in several Southeast Asian countries, and maintain a unique set of traditions and cultural activities, it is potentially misleading to rely on the focus sample results to describe the tendencies of larger, mainline Asian populations in California.

The Mexican farmworker focus sample results were reported along with all other subgroups, parsed by arts activity and mode of engagement. Looked at as a single group, however, a number of surprisingly high engagement results indicate that this cohort may be ripe territory for further, more detailed study. They report higher arts engagement than the general Hispanic population in several areas:

• A much higher frequency of reading books or poetry for pleasure, at 68%, compared to the general Hispanic population, at 49%.
• A higher level of participation in many dance activities, including performing dances as part of a group (28% vs. Hispanic population at 6%), going to community ethnic or folk dances (28% vs. 13%), and social dancing at night clubs or parties (65% vs. 42%).
• In the visual art sphere, 48% responded that they make quilts or engage in other needlework, vs. 21% of the wider Hispanic population.
• In the living arts, they also reported by far the strongest participation among all focus samples or racial/ethnic cohorts for almost every category: 32% reported making videos, 42% design clothes, 77% prepare traditional foods, and 49% garden or landscape.

IMPLICATIONS

Cultural Engagement takes a big step toward recognizing the multitude of ways in which people engage with the arts. By including activities like preparing traditional foods, making videos, home decorating, and social dancing, the study expands the definition of an arts activity to include almost anything that involves some level of creativity on the part of the participant. The living arts section, in particular, hints at the massive range of activities that could conceivably be considered art. In light of the pro-am revolution, amateur and hybrid forms will likely continue to come to the fore.

Cultural Engagement records high levels of unfulfilled interest across a wide range of activities and racial/ethnic cohorts, but because no questions were included asking why people don’t participate as much as they want, we are left to speculate. Some sections of the report seem to imply that if only arts organizations can provide the right kinds of services, the one third of adults who desire dance lessons will come around. But why haven’t they already? Arts organizations might be tempted to dramatically re-imagine the types of activities they support on a broad scale, but perhaps it’s of more utility to think about how to expand their work to include amateurs without losing focus. For instance, an organization might move to support amateur drama activities by providing a venue free of charge, or send budding visual arts curators to tour decorators’ homes and provide advice to help them realize their visions. At the same time, if a gardening-specific arts organization appears, perhaps funders should consider supporting it, rather than rejecting it for falling outside traditional guidelines.

The James Irvine Foundation has responded to the results of Cultural Engagement with a few funding initiatives. Most recently, it created the statewide Exploring Engagement Fund, designed as risk capital to help nonprofit arts organizations produce programs outside traditional venues, for underserved audiences, and better utilize participatory forms. The foundation also cites the Inland Empire and Central Valley as priority regions, thereby aiding the growth of arts organizations within these communities. Irvine recently announced its first round of grantees, which includes support for the Center for the Study of Political Graphics’s effort to launch a new format for traveling exhibitions, Memoir Journal’s memoir-writing workshops hosted in nontraditional venues, and many other projects focused on experimenting with new forms of engagement.

But there’s plenty of room to discuss how to expand on Irvine’s work. Given that so many arts activities take place outside of the nonprofit arts, it’s worth considering how other foundations might support these activities more directly. For instance, a funder could create a micro-grant program directed towards things like book clubs, online video production, in-home crafting and decorating groups, or community-based folk dancers. This type of program would certainly seem risky from a foundation perspective, but what grantees lack in institutional knowledge regarding funder requirements, they might make up for in direct community connection and authenticity. Programs that expand funding eligibility beyond traditional 501(c)(3) organizations would allow foundations to respond more nimbly to an arts landscape that continues to grow more diffuse with every passing year.

Further Reading

• WolfBrown, Philadelphia Cultural Engagement Index, 2009
• Kelly Dylla, Arts Policy Library: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, Createquity, 2012
• Diane Ragsdale, A New Conversation About Culture, Grantmakers In the Arts Reader, 2009
• Andrew Taylor, The Audience Around Us, ArtsJournal, 2009

Gamification of Life (Jul ’11). Photo by VFS Digital Design.

In my first post on games and the arts, I wrote that the massive growth of the video games industry in the last 20 years is motivating the integration of game dynamics with all sorts of products and services. While games that take place in the real world have a long history (e.g. sports, board games), new forms are emerging as the lines between our online and offline lives continue to blur. A number of arts organizations are considering mobilizing games in the service of increased ticket sales, improved audience participation, and outreach to new audiences, but these so-called “gamification” efforts typically fail to take advantage of games’ full potential for creativity. This post provides a few paths forward for organizations interested in really delving into this rich world. Good games are hard to make, but done well, they can help arts organizations achieve their missions—and help them rewrite the rules for audience engagement.

Gamification: Scratching the Surface

Gamification refers to any system that uses game design elements in a non-game context, usually to encourage some desired real-world behavior like participation in market research or the achievement of health goals. In essence, gamification takes an act usually valued for its intrinsic qualities—play—and exploits it for an instrumental purpose. Its proponents claim to be able to make a game out of literally anything, a powerful idea that understandably excites arts organizations looking for new, innovative business models. Because instrumentality fundamentally defines gamification, though, these schemes can result in an experience that isn’t really very fun or engaging. For instance, the Brooklyn Museum’s tagging game to crowdsource collection indexes might help it organize its objects, and the Sydney Festival’s scavenger hunt-style mobile app might help its attendees navigate their offerings, but neither use game mechanics as more than a thin veneer over experiences that may (or may not) already successfully engage participants. Ultimately, many uses of gamification are as superficial as credit card rewards programs; cultural critic Ian Bogost has even suggested the name “exploitationware” to critique gamification’s more addictive qualities and removal of any expectation of actual play.

There’s nothing wrong with arts organizations using points and other game rewards as part of a toolkit to boost attendance, reach fundraising goals, or solve a host of other potential problems. However, those sorts of programs don’t take advantage of the intrinsic qualities of games that encourage creativity in players. In The New York Times, Sam Anderson quotes Frank Lantz, the creator of the iPhone game Drop7, describing why gamification doesn’t tap into games’ full potential as works of art in their own right:

He said that real games are far too fragile and complex to be engineered by corporations and that their appeal goes much deeper than reward schedules. “It’s as hard to make a really good game as it is to make a really good movie or opera or hat,” he told me. “Sure, there’s mathematics to it, but it’s also a piece of culture. The type of game you play is also a part of how you think about yourself as a person. There’s no formula that’s going to solve that equation. It’s impossible, because it’s infinitely deep and wonderful.”

Drop 7, photo by Dan Callahan.

Complex, well-executed games intrinsically provide both structure (in the form of rules) and the creative freedom to experiment (as participants explore ways to win through play). As experiences, they are playful, interactive, and also provoke participants to think through unfamiliar systems—a characteristic that runs directly counter to the mindless quality of most gamification efforts and aligns games more closely with challenging artworks. Games can be immersive, aesthetically interesting experiences that investigate many of the same sociological, cultural, political, and formal questions more traditional artists address. By investing in games for their intrinsic rather than instrumental qualities, arts organizations can serve their missions in a fresh way while engaging audiences primed to reflect on more commercial gaming experiences they’re likely already having. Fortunately, the broader culture of gaming provides plenty of fodder for an organization looking for models beyond compulsive point rewards.

New Game Subgenres and What They Can Offer

A number of relatively new subgenres can provide inspiration for game experiences that allow audiences to play as creative agents. Below, I’ve provided a short list of subgenres along with examples of how an arts organization might use them. As with any new project, the target audience should drive an organization’s decisions, since they hold varying levels of appeal for different groups.

• Role-Playing Games (RPGs) have their modern roots in Dungeons & Dragons, which was first published in 1974. These pen-and-paper games are essentially interactive fiction, in which the players determine the story collaboratively. To do so, players take on different roles and powers defined by the game master as s/he interprets the gaming guide, a set of rules defining the fictional world they inhabit, challenges to overcome, and possible player actions. The game evolves as players take turns, accomplish tasks, and interact with the fictional world. Video games that require players to choose an avatar as part of a fantasy or science fiction story are often based on tabletop RPGs. They have also given rise to the live action role-playing game (LARP), a theatrical variation that takes place outside the home and often involves elaborate costumes and battles with fake weapons.
  • Why an arts organization might create one: By taking on specific roles, audiences can engage with complex histories or present-day cultural landscapes. For instance, players at a museum could become artists in a particular collaborative (like the Bloomsbury Group) and create alternate histories of the artists’ work and lives through gameplay. A theater group could include well-known local performers as roles in the gaming guide—and then invite those performers to participate in the game by acting as the game master. RPGs tend to be most rewarding to play when participants feel welcome to riff on their roles, so organizers need to be willing to cede control of the game narrative to the players.
• Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are related to RPGs, and are similarly characterized by a fictional narrative. However, ARGs cultivate a deeper suspension of disbelief because they tend to take place over many weeks, and gameplay is interspersed with more everyday, “real world” activities rather than being governed by a text-based guide. Plots are often cloaked in mystery, and designers tend to run things from “behind the curtain.” In an ARG, instead of turning the page to find out what happens next, players must solve puzzles or find clues hidden in the real world, which then unlock communications from (often virtual) fictional characters that move the plot forward. ILoveBees is one of the most famous examples of this sort of game.
  • Why an arts organization might create one: Among other things, ARGs can take people all over cities to solve puzzles and perform different tasks, scavenger hunt-style. They can be useful if an organization would like audiences to visit partner venues, and demonstrate connections between disparate places or ideas through the ARG narrative. Because of the fictional plot, ARGs are also an opportunity for organizations to tell a story—it just has to be engaging enough that audiences want to discover the next piece.
• Blended Reality games take integration with the real world a step further. Rather than focusing on the fictional “layer” over reality, in blended reality games, the game world is our world, and play takes place without the intervention of characters or invented plot devices. Games like SFZero (which I have worked on) define themselves more as an “interface” for the player’s city than an alternate reality.
  • Why an arts organization might create one: These sorts of games have similar applications to ARGs, but don’t necessitate the creation of a fictional world. Rather than veiling the gameplay in a custom-made fictional plot, designers use our everyday fictions and symbols to color the game. In Paul Ramirez Jonas’s Key to the City, participants used keys to unlock dozens of doors throughout New York (many of which were at museums), endowing the normally symbolic gift of city keys with real-world consequences. Blended reality games can help arts organizations encourage participants to think critically about their everyday behavior in a more explicit way than an ARG.
• Augmented Reality Games use the camera, tilt sensor, GPS, and accelerometer features in handheld systems to interact with real world conditions. Players can kick a virtual soccer ball through their iPhone camera, or fight other players for territory using a GPS map of their locations.
  • Why an arts organization might create one: Depending on the audience, arts organizations may prefer to use technology to spur engagement in a game, and the use of smartphones can allow participants to play anywhere, in a much more casual way than most of the other game types listed here. Following the ARstreets graffiti game example, arts organizations could create augmented reality games that allow players to reimagine already-extant murals, change the marquees of concert halls, or design a building for an empty lot. The augmented reality game can be viewed as a genre unto itself, but it’s also possible to integrate augmented reality features into other types of games. For instance, in an alternate reality game, rather than finding physical clues in a gallery, a player could simply hold up his or her phone to the space and reveal a message hidden virtually. Creating a system that works well and offers substance beyond a “cool” tech factor would require a significant investment of resources, though.
• Serious Games engage with the real world through the lens of a particular pressing problem. As with Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil, these games often use elements of ARGs and crowdsourcing techniques to engage players to find solutions for in-game problems that hopefully have implications for the real world.
  • Why an arts organization might create one: A film festival presenting a particularly political series of documentaries might like audience members to gain a better understanding of the problems presented by working to solve them. Serious games can be created to find solutions to any problem, but engagement often depends on finding a sufficiently compelling problem and framing it well. Serious games can also cross the line into gamification if their design relies too heavily instrumental tools like adding up points and achievements, and less on intrinsic qualities like player imagination and interactivity. For example, American Public Media’s Budget Hero gamifies balancing the federal budget in a closed, virtual setting and has successfully garnered over 6,000 comments. If those commenters could work collaboratively toward their budgets, or in a more open-ended way, a different, less gamified experience would result.
• Big Games or Street Games tend to eschew heavy use of technology or fictionalized narratives and (as the names suggest) bring together masses of people to play in public spaces like streets, parks, or malls. Big game designers often borrow heavily from playground games like tag, hide-and-seek, or scavenger hunts, but view the site-specificity of the city environment and act of playing as an adult as potentially transgressive. Because these games usually necessitate the presence of an organizer or referee, they tend to take place in festival format, as exemplified by IndieCade, igfest, and Come Out and Play (which I work on in San Francisco).
  • Why an arts organization might create one: These sorts of games are often cheap to produce, and work nicely with a lo-fi maker/DIY aesthetic. They can help transform socially rigid spaces like galleries, theaters, or offices, but may work less well if a more polished experience is intended.

Come Out and Play New York, photo by Kate Raynes-Goldie.

In addition to how a genre fits with a particular need, arts organizations should also consider playability and the nature of engagement in the game. These qualities define the game’s mood and level of accessibility, and help shape the game to a particular audience.

Playability. Playability might seem like an intrinsic characteristic of any game, but a spectrum exists here as well, as many games prioritize abstract aesthetics and concepts over lived player experience. Penn & Teller’s Desert Bus video game, in which players must drive a bus in real time from Tucson to Las Vegas—a journey that takes eight hours and cannot be paused—intentionally eliminates as much actual play from the game as possible. Many gamified activities also deemphasize play, though in the service of chosen outcomes rather than art. Some ARGs and LARPs focus on the fictional narrative over play.

Nature of engagement. The nature of engagement indicates the sorts of activities a player must undertake to play the game. These can range from the simple and easy to learn, as with Foursquare (just go somewhere and check in), to The Jejune Institute, a months-long ARG that required players to visit multiple sites around San Francisco, listen to a special radio station in Dolores Park, and obtain information from street performers, among other tasks.

Experimenting with Games – SFMOMA’s ArtGameLab and Beyond

ArtGameLab wall text, photo by Rusty Blazenhoff.

SFMOMA’s current ArtGameLab exhibition offers a fantastic sampler of many of these sorts of games in a museum context, created in part to “break down institutional barriers to experimentation by providing new models for presenting multi-vocal, crowd-sourced content.” While a step in the right direction, the art museum’s own “institutional safeguards” prevented a completely untamed game experience (and curator Erica Gangsei certainly recognizes as much). The exhibition lives up to its claim as a “lab,” posing questions about how games can work within a large institution.

Labs are fantastic, but more fully realized game programs are the next step. While participatory art and activities of all kinds are slowly making their way into organizational settings, games represent an even deeper way to embrace contemporary, less hierarchical definitions of art. By offering an alternate set of behavioral rules, games present an opportunity for audiences and institutions to revise those that govern the presentation and consumption of art. Through games, organizations can rewrite what an arts experience really is, and recognize that changing the rules doesn’t have to be so scary.