We promised to “us[e] these final months to make connections across the threads of different investigations we’ve done and articles we’ve written over the years, tie up loose ends, and, as much as we can, tease out what it all means for practice.” Here’s how we delivered on that promise:

• We published four issue briefs summarizing our research, lessons learned, and open questions on arts participation, cultural equity, arts careers, and the benefits of the arts.
• We offered a final, holistic set of recommendations for arts philanthropists and advice to arts researchers, building on all of our work to date.
• As a special bonus, we did a roundup of the Top 10 Arts Stories of the Decade since we’ve been covering the field.
• We’ve updated our Higher Education Resource Guide with these and other materials published since it was originally released last summer. We’ve also made it easier to access – no need to fill out a form before you get a link to the PDF.
• We just updated our research process page and included links to some of the training materials we’ve used to get our editorial team and contributing associates up to speed on capsule review writing, rapid research screening, and more. And if you’re interested in getting even deeper under the hood, just ask.

In addition, you might find the following of interest:

• The estimable Barry Hessenius interviewed me for his blog shortly after the news of our sunset went live. In it, I go into greater detail on the reasoning behind the decision and what I think it means for our sector.
• The forthcoming winter issue of the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader has an article by yours truly about why arts research is broken and what we can do to fix it. No direct link yet, but it will be available here by early March.
• For those of you missing our monthly Newsroom roundups, we offer a whole page that has links to the primary sources we drew from to generate that piece every month. But if you’re pressed for time, here is what I suggest: subscribe to ArtsJournal, GIA News, and (if your work involves arts research in any capacity) the Cultural Research Network. If you can check off those three you’ll be doing pretty well in the staying informed department.

Although Createquity’s journey has come to a close, I’m far from done writing, and I have several interesting projects in the hopper that will involve exploring the challenges and opportunities of effective strategy, learning, and decision-making across the social sector (not limited to the arts). The materials and tools I’m developing as part of that exploration will be relevant to anyone trying to make a difference in the world, whether you’re an individual donor, foundation, government agency, or investor. If you’d like to keep posted on this work, feel free to sign up here and I will make sure you are added to any forthcoming email lists.

Before I sign off, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my deepest thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible, from that scary moment when I sent an email to my contacts telling them to look out for the launch of a new website (for which I had yet to write any content) on October 26, 2007. Thank you to Nancy Livingston, who as my second-year advisor in business school encouraged me to get over my anxieties about starting a blog and suggested the commitment device that led to me getting Createquity off the ground. Thank you to Jonathan Koppell, who let me use original blog posts for Createquity as graded assignments for the independent study we did on arts policy at the Yale School of Management, greatly enhancing the richness of the content offered there. Thank you to Thomas Cott and Doug McLennan, who each provided syndication support that was instrumental in Createquity’s audience growth in the early years – and a special extra thank you to Doug for providing such an invaluable resource in ArtsJournal all these years and for donating classified advertising to our cause. Thank you to Tommer Peterson, who invited me to be the first-ever official conference blogger for Grantmakers in the Arts after encountering my writing at Createquity, first exposing both me and my writing to that community in a relationship that would continue to blossom over the decade to follow. Thank you to Adam Huttler, who has followed along from the very beginning and, after inviting me to join the team at Fractured Atlas, gave me the autonomy I needed to pursue my vision for Createquity without interference from my day job. Thank you to Rob Weinert-Kendt for giving us the best pull quote ever, which we still use to this day (“so amazingly good it’s almost in its own category of resource”). Thank you to Barry Hessenius and Nina Simon for using your own considerable bully pulpits in support of Createquity at crucial moments. Thank you to Sunil Iyengar at the National Endowment for the Arts for inviting Createquity to be the first entity to formally respond to drafted plans for the agency’s new 5-year research agenda in 2016. Thank you to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Fractured Atlas, the Howard Gilman Foundation, CultureLab/Alan Brown, Mailchimp, and everyone who donated to our crowdfunding campaign or subsequent appeals for providing crucial financial support. Finally, thank you to everyone who was part of the sausage-making process: our current and former editorial team members, particularly Talia Gibas and Daniel Reid who were the first to take the plunge with me and my thought partners in designing the new Createquity some four years ago, along with John Carnwath, Katy Coy, Jack Crager, Michael Feldman, Louise Geraghty, Katherine Gressel, Jackie Hasa, Katie Ingersoll, Shawn Lent, Carlyn Madden, Ruth Mercado-Zizzo, Fari Nzinga, Rebecca Ratzkin, Clara Inés Schuhmacher, Devon Smith, Salem Tsegaye, Lauren Warnecke, and Benzamin Yi; our advisory council members, Norman Bradburn, Harris Cooper, Marian Godfrey, Maria Rosario Jackson, Carlos Manjarrez, John Paxson, and Angelique Power; our contributing associates and other volunteers, Andrew Anzel, Daniel Arnow, Caitlin Butler, Ben Coy, Ally Duffy, Sarah Frankland, Shelly Hsieh, Teresa Koberstein, Miguelina Nuñez, Ron Ragin, Michael Rushton, Michael Spicher, Michael Wilkerson, Stephanie Wykstra, Sacha Wynne, and Guy Yedwab; and our Createquity Fellows, Alicia Akins, Aaron Anderson, Lindsey Cosgrove, Kelly Dylla, Crystal Wallis Graves, Tegan Kehoe, Jennifer Kessler, Jena Lee, Hayley Roberts, Jacquelyn Strycker, and Dan Thompson (in addition to Jackie, Katherine, and Talia mentioned above). Whew! Apologies if I left anyone out. Most of all, thank you – yes, you, on the other end of that screen – not only for welcoming us into your life, but for staying with us to the end.

With that, it really is time to say goodbye, with best wishes for a productive, fulfilling, and safe 2018 to all. It has truly been a pleasure and a privilege.

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

A Collective Approach to Building Knowledge

One of the most basic concepts in economics is that of a “public good” – a product or service that does not get “used up” as more and more people use it. Knowledge, by this definition, is pretty much the epitome of a public good – in fact, the more people that use it, the more valuable it arguably becomes.

Sadly, the incentives facing arts researchers push them to operate in silos, sacrificing the efficiency and potential that a more intentional, shared approach would bring. If you’re a researcher who wants to earn a living and you’re not in academia, you’re basically at the mercy of a fragmented market of funder and arts organization clients, most of whom have very parochial concerns and who rarely coordinate with one other on their research goals. In our experience, many of those in a position to commission research at these organizations have limited if any research training themselves, constricting their ability to exercise independent judgment on the best methods and designs for the job in the context of a rapidly evolving profession. Consultants and nonprofits who conduct such research seldom retain much control over the process and deliverable requirements of such efforts, making a centralized and consistent strategy for building knowledge quite difficult to execute. In addition, research contracted as work for hire often carries an implicit or explicit presumption of confidentiality, meaning that some of the most interesting work to understand the field is never made public at all.

College- and university-based researchers may have more autonomy over their portfolios, but face a separate challenge of visibility for their work. In all my years of following and participating in national arts conversations, I have never encountered a single arts funder or non-academic organization leader who makes a practice of reading arts-related research published in academic journals. (This is by no means an arts-specific phenomenon, by the way; a 2007 study estimated that half of all journal articles are only ever read by their authors, editors, and peer reviewers.) And if faculty members want to access funding beyond their internal department or university resources in order to take on larger-scale projects, they are subject to the same warped funding dynamics discussed above and in our previous recommendations piece.

All of these circumstances add up to an intense tragedy of the commons scenario in arts research. Even though research on neglected topics would provide benefits to a widely dispersed audience, it doesn’t happen because no single player is willing to take on the cost and risk of investing in it on their own. As a result, people pay a lot of good money for bad research, and don’t pay money for good research that could be happening instead.

This is not a problem that’s going to be solved overnight, but a clear step in the right direction would be for more convening, collaboration, and coordination between arts researchers, practitioners, and funding bodies. Createquity is not the first to call for such a change, but we see a different path forward than the one past efforts have tried to hew. Historically, the little convening that has taken place among arts researchers has tended toward light-touch facilitation, with no real goal (and thus, no outcome) other than to provide a space to share and learn from one another’s work. While better than nothing, this type of convening is ill suited toward the much more critical (and useful) task of developing a shared research agenda and coordinating a division of labor for the field.

During its life, Createquity offered a demonstration of how one might go about pursuing this latter goal, and we consider that to be one of our organization’s most valuable legacies as we prepare to sunset at the end of this year.

To Get Answers that Mean Something, Ask Questions that Matter

Since Createquity’s relaunch three years ago, the overarching research question driving all of our work has been this one: “what are the most important issues in the arts, and what can we do about them?”

In order to actually answer this, we needed to decide what “importance” means from the perspective of the arts ecosystem. We started off by defining what a healthy arts ecosystem actually looks like, and continued by drawing an equivalence between the cross-disciplinary, holistic concept of wellbeing (or quality of life) and ecosystem health. Doing so enabled us to connect the arts to broader conversations across the social sector about human progress, and create a framework that would make it possible to compare priority areas within the arts against each other. Thus, by 2016, we were describing a healthy arts ecosystem as one in which “the maximum possible collective wellbeing is generated through the arts.” [Note that the use of a term like “maximum possible” is aspirational in the sense that Createquity must make judgments in an environment of significant uncertainty. We aimed with our work to create a fuzzy but fundamentally accurate picture of (a) the world that is and (b) the world that could be with the benefit of different choices.]

With those definitions in hand, we were able to operationalize our tagline as follows:

• “What are the most important issues in the arts?” ➤ “What are the biggest gaps between current conditions and the maximum collective wellbeing that could be generated through the arts?”
• “What can we do about them?” ➤ “For any given gap, what is the most promising strategy or set of strategies available to close it, after taking cost and risk into account?”

Our research approach placed these questions in the context of a three-phase process, ultimately leading to an advocacy campaign for some kind of concrete change in the sector (what we called a “case for change”):

Phase I, the Discovery Phase, involved examining a wide range of potential problems or opportunities in the arts in order to determine which ones were most pressing from the standpoint of increasing overall quality of life. Each of these gaps between present-day reality and the world that could be was conceived as a separate research investigation. So, many of the big feature articles that you may have read on Createquity, such as Why Don’t They Come?, were the direct result of a Discovery Phase investigation – in that particular case, an exploration of the extent to which socioeconomic disadvantage was interfering with adults’ ability to experience arts and culture as consumers.

We identified potential investigations through two routes: our own intuitions and experiences, and external input. The latter involved assessing the results of our reader polls, as well as feedback from our advisory council members. By blending these two methods, we could have some assurance that we were investigating issues that our audience cared about, while at the same time not ignoring neglected topics that might not be receiving the attention they deserve.

Each of these investigations involved a thorough review of the evidence in order to estimate as precisely as possible how many people are affected by each issue, by how much, and in what ways. The plan was to then move the most consequential of these issues into the second phase, where we would consider strategies to close the gap between the status quo and the better future that may be possible. Finally, where we’d identified both a significant gap and at least one promising strategy to address it, we’d develop a case for change that translates all of the learning we have undergone into concrete recommendations and calls to action.

In 2014, Createquity buckled down and went to work on the Discovery Phase, hoping to complete our work with a flexible and nimble structure of quasi-volunteers. Unfortunately, this structure proved ill equipped for the significant expenditure of time and mental bandwidth that a systematic evidence review requires, and as a result we were only able to complete a small fraction of our overall Discovery Phase research agenda in the time we had. If funding had been available, we would have pursued the rest of the work using an innovative model called the Synthesis Project.

Borrowing from regranting arrangements often used by foundations and public granting agencies to reach smaller organizations, artists, and communities that they don’t have the capacity to reach directly, the Synthesis Project was a strategy to dramatically scale up Createquity’s Discovery Phase work over a two-year period. In this model, funding and management of research is funneled through one organization which in turn subcontracts individual projects out at market rates to teams of consultants. Instead of one to two research investigations a year, there might then be eight to ten. And instead of multiple agencies managing different timelines and approaches, there would be one centralized agency (in this case, Createquity) coordinating and overseeing all research projects.

The goal of fast-tracking myriad research projects is to build and share knowledge fast enough so that it can be acted upon. This means we aren’t continually stuck in Discovery mode, and instead can move into Strategy and Advocacy phases with a smart prioritization of the relative levels of urgency associated with a wide range of problems and opportunities facing the arts sector. At different key moments, the collective review and reflection on myriad investigations could be used to prioritize areas for further field-wide research and advocacy.

Although Createquity was ultimately unable to transition the Synthesis Project from concept to reality, we still think it’s a great idea, and welcome efforts by others to adapt it in the future. The industry is rich with research that can and should be mined for the gems that will help us to determine where the greatest opportunities lie to advocate for and build a healthier arts ecosystem, and what questions still remain to be answered in order to help us get further along the path toward a case for change.

Specific Gaps in the Literature that We Already Know About

Although we only got through a small portion of our research agenda in the end, it was still enough to identify some glaring gaps in the literature that it would behoove the field to fill as soon as possible:

Arts Participation
From a series of Createquity investigations, we know that many people get their primary cultural fix from things like listening to the music soundtracks of popular TV shows or attending their child’s band rehearsal – activities that do not involve the nonprofit sector at all. The big unanswered question hanging over that observation is this: would nonprofit arts organizations offer a better or more varied type of experience for the people who aren’t currently being reached by them? In other words, does watching a popular television program foster the same benefit to those audience members that attending a live stage play does? And if it does, what is the policy justification for subsidizing the cost of providing the latter, but not the former?

Arts Careers
Much of the evidence currently available on the topic of socioeconomic status and access to arts careers is indirect and based on incomplete data. The vast majority of research on artists’ livelihoods only examines artists’ current socioeconomic status, not their status at the time when they were deciding what career to pursue (and earlier). We thus don’t know much about, for example, the extent to which having rich parents or not affects people’s ability to contemplate pursuing an arts career at all. In addition, we don’t know how the level of intrinsic interest people have in pursuing arts careers might vary across socioeconomic background and other demographic categories, regardless of the reasons.

Cultural Equity
The question mentioned above – how does the level of exposure to and/or interest in arts careers and arts administration jobs differ across race and other demographics (e.g. income, education) – has significant implications for cultural equity advocacy as well. In addition, we don’t know as much as we should about the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable, and whether those ingredients are consistent across demographics. Are the demographics of the staff (artistic, programming, and administrative) and board at arts and cultural organizations predictive of a) the demographics of their participants and b) the quality of experience that participants have? What effect does the scale of an arts organization (or an organization with arts programming) have on its ability to create specific benefits for artists, audiences, and communities of color? Finally, are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal, and how do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies?

Benefits of the Arts
Research on the wellbeing effects of the arts could benefit from more longitudinal studies and more experimental and quasi-experimental designs, especially as regards the social and economic impacts of the arts. Even the very best work in this area (e.g., Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project) still traffics primarily in correlations rather than directly measuring causality. A good example of a study design that takes advantage of a natural experiment is Stephen Sheppard’s analysis of the economic impacts of the opening of MASS MoCA. More generally, it is likely that there is quite a bit of variation in wellbeing effects between disciplines, between different modes of artistic participation (e.g., passive, active, solitary, communal), and between categories of participants. Research syntheses and comparative studies looking specifically at these kinds of differences are generally few and far between.

Organizational Culture
In preparation for awarding of the inaugural Createquity Arts Research Prize, Createquity team members analyzed more than 500 arts research publications released in 2016; a similar process was underway for 2017 research before we made the decision to sunset the operation. An analysis of these publications confirms that very little publicly available research examines one of the most important open questions about the arts ecosystem: what motivates the decisions of donors, funders, and organizations supporting the arts. In particular, to what extent do wealthy individuals disproportionately shape ecosystem outcomes? And how can organizations and donors be incentivized to act in a more ecosystem-serving and wellbeing-maximizing way? We’ve seen a lot of theoretical literature and commentary on this, but very little empirical research, which is a major reason why the 2016 Createquity Arts Research Prize went to Mirae Kim for her work exploring these themes.

Other Observations

In the literature on the benefits of the arts, we very rarely see the impact of grantmakers analyzed as distinct from the impact of programs. When commissioned by grantmakers, such evaluations tend to imply that 100% of the credit for any success can be attributed to the grantmaker’s actions. Yet the truth is that some programs would have happened even without support from that particular grantmaker, and by choosing to spend money on that program the grantmaker is opting not to put that money somewhere else. We’d love to see more sophisticated approaches to determining the real impact of grantmaking decisions, not just the impact of the programs those decisions support.

There are a constellation of suboptimal funding practices in the realm of research and evaluation that deserve close scrutiny. For one thing, the field could benefit from more rationalization between the costs of research (broadly conceived) and the potential value of research. Funders rarely if ever seem to conduct explicit cost-benefit analysis when it comes to arts research. There is actually a methodology to do this that is not that hard to implement in its simplest form. We also strongly recommend against the practice of requiring grantees to demonstrate the impact of the grants they receive without offering to pay the full cost of generating that knowledge. Not only is such a posture unfair to the grantee, it sets up extremely warped incentives if the grantee’s continued funding is contingent upon a good evaluation and the grantee is also responsible for overseeing the evaluation. This would all be made much easier if funders were more willing to make use of existing research on the relevant category of intervention in their strategy design, and evaluate a representative sample of funded projects in the context of judging an overall portfolio rather than assuming an evaluation is needed for each and every investment.

Finally, it would be great to see more international collaboration on arts research. Some of the very best work these days is coming out of the UK, which seems to benefit from a far stronger knowledge infrastructure featuring the likes of NESTA, What Works Wellbeing, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been contacted in the past couple of years by Canadians eager to learn from their colleagues south of the border. And there are plenty of interesting arts research projects happening all over the world every day.

A Call for Leadership

The arts research field desperately needs a champion to provide leadership and make progress on the issues described above. Although the problems are serious, existing infrastructure like the Cultural Research Network could be leveraged to make progress on shared field goals, like developing a common research agenda, establishing and improving data standards, and co-funding valuable research projects that would be difficult to find a single champion for.

Who might be that champion? Almost anyone could step up to the plate, but in the United States, Grantmakers in the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts are probably the most obvious candidates. Alternatively, this could be a good role for a university entity like Vanderbilt’s Curb Center, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research, or Virginia Commonwealth University’s Arts Research Institute. We know that in Canada, an organization called Mass Culture is attempting to play this role, and additional policy and research efforts are underway at the Banff Centre.

Research can help us do our jobs better and make the world a more exciting, loving, and equitable place, but only if we give it the time and resources it needs. The infrastructure for building and spreading knowledge in the arts sector has long been under strain, if not entirely broken. But another world is indeed possible, and here we’ve tried to lay out the first steps toward making it a reality. The good people who work day in and day out to create experiences to cherish for a lifetime, and those who ultimately benefit from that programming, deserve nothing less.

Thanks to Rebecca Ratzkin for her contributions to this article.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

This article summarizes lessons learned, as well as recommendations going forward for foundations, government agencies, individual philanthropists, and others providing resources to support the arts. A subsequently published piece contains further recommendations aimed at people who commission and/or conduct arts research.

For the past three years and change, Createquity’s mission has been to research “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” During that time, in networking meetings with potential donors or friends of the organization, I would often get questions along the lines of, “so what are the most important issues in the arts?” Or people might ask for advice on where a donor should give if she were interested in making the most impact in the field. For a long time, I resisted answering these kinds of questions directly, because Createquity’s approach involved deeply investigating a wide range of potential issues before coming to firm conclusions about which ones might be most deserving of our attention, or what kinds of actions we might want to advocate for. Now, however, with Createquity having announced its intention to cease operations at the end of 2017, the time has come to share what we do know – even if there are still significant gaps in that knowledge – and what we think it means for those trying to improve people’s lives through the arts.

Please note: the analysis that follows is a hybrid of formal evidence review, informed opinion based on our collective firsthand experiences working in the field, and logical inference. While we have tried to make it as clear as possible throughout, we welcome questions about what is (and isn’t) backing up specific assertions, and will respond to them in the comments as they come in.

Consider Your Funding from an Ecosystem Perspective

From the very beginning, Createquity has advocated for an ecosystem-level view in arts funding. We’ve actually gone so far as to write out a detailed definition of what a healthy arts ecosystem looks like in practice.

Okay, that sounds nice, but what does it actually mean? Think about it like this. An ecosystem is kind of like a big theatrical production. There are a bunch of different roles to be played, and effective casting in those roles is crucial to giving the audience a good show. Right?

So, the huge difference between a theatrical production and the arts ecosystem is that there is no director making those casting decisions. A bunch of people just walk up to the stage, pick a part they want to play, and go to it. Some of those people might be better suited to playing a different role than the one they chose. In some cases there are two (or more) people duplicating the same part, and constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Another actor might play a role brilliantly, but disappear for the second half, or refuse to share the stage with anyone else. It’s all just a big uncoordinated mess.

Our only hope of bringing some order to this chaos is to recognize that, whenever we design strategy for a new program or redesign an old program, we’re casting ourselves in one of these roles. And it might seem obvious to say, but I’ll say it anyway since it’s so important: when designing the role we want to play, we must ask ourselves, who else is in the cast? What are the roles that aren’t currently being covered? And which of those roles am I or my organization best suited for?

I want to specifically call out that, in my experience, the highest-leverage decision points are often the ones least likely to receive this level of scrutiny. Sure, you may have set up a committee or commissioned an external consultant to decide how to refine and move forward on some specific program that you piloted last year. But how much due diligence went into deciding why your organization exists at all? Its geographic focus and target population? The originating logic behind its flagship initiatives?

People are fond of calling for more leadership in the arts sector. But the thing about an ecosystem is that it is fundamentally leaderless. Which means that we all have to be leaders if any leadership is going to happen. And to me, in the context of grantmaking, that means all of us taking the time to thoroughly understand the arts funding landscape before deciding what role is most appropriate for us to play.

A good rule of thumb is to start with the premise that every other funder is not doing this – in other words, that every other funder is less strategic than you. That flies in the face of the philosophy of humble servant leadership that we’re taught to model in philanthropy. Even so, I would argue that it is a useful working assumption, because if you believe it, then you must believe that it is your responsibility to be the actor in the ecosystem who fills the gaps, who does what needs to be done and what no one else is willing to do. It is up to you to find out what what is needed and neglected, and prioritize that over what might get the best press or the fanciest gala tickets.

And the reality is that my assertion above is likely to be more true than not for anybody reading this. The majority of philanthropic contributions to the arts comes from individual donors, most of whom have a very transactional relationship with specific charities they support and who are notoriously difficult to organize as a constituency. A landmark study of donor motivations commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation concluded that only 16% of individual major donors are motivated by impact, and only 4% consider the effectiveness of an organization the “key driver” of a gift; I would guess that these numbers are even lower for arts donors. Another fifth or so of arts philanthropy comes from corporations, many of which are motivated less by the mission outcomes achieved by grantees and sponsorship recipients than by the benefits those relationships can offer to the brand.

The overarching lesson to take from all of this is that it’s crucial to conceive of arts philanthropy broadly. Resist the temptation to overspecify the solution before you truly understand the problem. We see a lot of programs, especially at organizations that give out smaller-sized grants, that have tons of restrictions on what can be funded, for how long, how the money must be spent, etc. While there may be reasons (like internal capacity constraints) that justify these decisions from the perspective of the granting organization, at a system-wide level this practice results in intractable gaps in the funding landscape and strongly distorts incentives for prospective grantees. Wherever possible, we recommend pushing for the maximum level of flexibility that your donor or ultimate stakeholder is comfortable with – and if the donor/stakeholder is you, pushing yourself to be as clear as possible about the outcomes you’re interested in while being as open-minded as possible about the pathways to accomplishing them.

Regardless of the more specific advice below, this is the most important. Take the time to understand how your work fits into the overall landscape of needs and opportunities in the sector. An eager audience is depending on you to do it.

Don’t Put Your Name on That Fancy Building

Several years ago, the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer made a splash in the arts community by writing a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Good Charity, Bad Charity,” which compared the merits of donating to help construct a new museum wing and donating to an organization fighting a disease that can cause blindness in the developing world. Whipping together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis, Singer wrote, “a donation to prevent trachoma offers at least 10 times the value of giving to the museum,” adding, “the answer is clear enough.”

Predictably, the arts blogosphere kind of freaked out, writing response after response defending or deflecting the practice of giving to the arts while characterizing Singer’s argument as “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” It turns out that Singer’s piece was part of a broader outreach effort on behalf of a movement called effective altruism, which is devoted to the idea of figuring out how to do the most good with the money and resources available to you. Effective altruists believe that answering such questions involves hard tradeoffs, and necessitates a discipline called “cause prioritization” at the very highest strategic level. Not surprisingly, the arts often serve as a convenient example for effective altruists of the sort of “bad” philanthropy to be avoided in favor of higher-potential giving opportunities.

Our instincts may tell us to get upset about this, but the reality is that museum wings are easy targets for effective altruists for a reason. There is an argument to be made that capital investments in fancy buildings are the single worst category of arts philanthropy there is, and may be among the most wasteful uses of (non-fraudulent) philanthropy in general.

How so? First of all, capital projects are enormously expensive. According to “Set in Stone: Building America’s New Generation of Arts Facilities, 1994-2008,” the most comprehensive review of the data on capital construction in the arts that we know of, the average cost of a building constructed by or for a nonprofit arts organization around the turn of the millennium was at least $21 million in 2005 dollars (equivalent to $26 million in 2017). At the extremes, a single project can cost as much as hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Each year, arts organizations spend upwards of $1 billion on such campaigns, with most of that money coming from private philanthropy. Foundations devoted at least 10% and possibly as much as 38% of their arts budgets to capital projects in 2014, according to figures from the Foundation Center.

One major problem with capital projects sucking up so much donor interest is that they disproportionately benefit wealthy, established organizations presenting European art forms, often smack in the middle of places with very large populations of color. Moreover, artists rarely see a penny of this money; the most immediate beneficiaries of these expenditures are construction companies and their suppliers. Beyond equity concerns, however, capital projects frequently turn out to be bad investments even on their own terms: “Set in Stone” documents numerous cases of projects that failed to meet visitation benchmarks, exceeded expectations for ongoing maintenance costs, and/or ran over budget (by an average of 82% in the case of performing arts centers). The authors “found compelling evidence that the supply of cultural facilities exceeded demand during the years of the building boom … especially when coupled with the number of organizations [they] studied that experienced financial difficulties after completing a building project.”

This is not to say, of course, that every capital investment is a bad idea, or that arts organizations should never build new buildings. But given that buildings often come with ample opportunities to lure individual donors to the table (via naming rights, gala invitations, etc.), it’s even harder to defend institutional grantmakers’ investment in capital projects when there are so many more neglected priorities in the sector.

Where to Put That Money Instead

I’m admittedly biased on this one, but I believe strongly that our field has badly underinvested in knowledge. Annually, according to the Foundation Center figures cited above, just 2% of foundation arts grant dollars and 0.7% of grants go to research and evaluation. If my experience over the past decade is any guide, individual donors add virtually nothing to this total.

Even more concerning than the overall level of spending is the distribution of those resources. Existing research initiatives are heavily weighted toward primary data collection and analysis for specific, one-off projects, and most are limited in scope to a single geographic area, arts discipline, or both. As part of Createquity’s business planning process in 2016, we put together an exploratory graph of arts research initiatives, plotting them by breadth of geographic scope and where they sit on the spectrum between isolated data-gathering and more holistic efforts at building knowledge. You’ll see that, prior to its demise, Createquity stood virtually alone in the sector in focusing on the cumulative construction of knowledge through synthesis and interpretation of existing research – and yet even Createquity’s paltry annual operating budget for this work proved impossible to sustain.

This is a tremendously neglected area of arts funding, and that neglect has real consequences for how we all do our work. There is ample evidence that arts leaders are increasingly overloaded with information and need help making sense of it all. Because our field has not invested in the resources to make it possible to do so, it is likely that every day we are missing out on opportunities to shape the arts ecosystem for the better because we do not understand the evidence that’s already right in front of us. Indeed, the choices we are making may even be causing active harm.

As Createquity’s experience demonstrates, filling this gap and others related to our field’s knowledge infrastructure will require a new will to invest in field-building more generally. One of the persistent structural factors holding back such efforts is the difficulty of engaging individual donors in field-building conversations. Despite their importance to the arts ecosystem generally, in 15 years of working in this field I have yet to encounter a single effective strategy for organizing and communicating to individual donors about field leadership issues. Overall, individual donors represent a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase the arts field’s leadership capacity and overall potential for impact.

Moving on to more programmatic issues, there is a strong case to make that a worthy focus of arts philanthropy is advocacy to restore arts education cuts, especially for underprivileged youth at all age levels. Our judgment on this issue derives from several related observations. First, there is a lot of baseline evidence that arts education is beneficial for children, especially for those who have not yet entered formal schooling. Second, we know that in the United States, arts education cuts have disproportionately fallen on low-income families and black and Latino children. Finally, we have some glimmers of evidence that disadvantaged children benefit disproportionately from exposure to arts education. These factors, combined with the incredibly broad reach of arts education as compared with other types of arts interventions, suggest that evidence-based arts funders will find arts education of great interest. With that said, we should add the caveat that it is an arena already receiving a lot of attention, which may mean that much more work is necessary to create the political conditions for donor impact.

Speaking of evidence, Createquity’s review of the literature on the wellbeing benefits of the arts found that some of the strongest available research indicates that older adults and adults in clinical settings can benefit disproportionately from the arts. Participatory activities like singing, in particular, help to reduce anxiety and depression, improve subjective wellbeing, and even fend off the onset of dementia. And when it comes to attendance, according to the NEA’s research, nearly a quarter of adults aged 55 and older in persistent poor health were interested in going to an exhibit or performance in the past year but were not able to, which is a greater percentage than any other demographic examined in the report. This appears to be a highly neglected focus area; I am not aware of arts programs at any foundations in the United States with more than $1 billion in assets that have older adults or people in hospitals as the primary target audience.

Finally, on a more speculative note, it seems likely that the health of the arts ecosystem in the United States and beyond is more generally tied up with the health of the social safety net in those places. Many of the problems in the arts are reflections of larger issues that affect wide swaths of society. While the details of how they play out in the arts may be unique to the field, we can’t hope to solve them by focusing solely on our sector. When Createquity began developing a formal research agenda three years ago, I assured my colleagues on the editorial team that if our inquiry were to reveal that the most important issue in the arts is not an arts issue at all, they could count on me to make that case. Sure enough, after a decade of closely observing trends and shifts in arts policy, I’m more confident than ever that we are wasting our time if we are not taking society-wide issues like health care, wealth inequality, rapid technological progress, and structural racism into account when we develop arts and culture policy. We would do well to shift our working assumptions such that we believe an issue affecting the arts is not specific to the arts until proven otherwise, and therefore the solution to the issue is likely to live outside the arts as well. How can we work more effectively across issue-area and industry silos to make unified progress on these challenges that affect us all so deeply?

Suggestions for Individual Donors This Holiday Season

Createquity has always focused on the broad strokes of arts policy and philanthropy, and we’ve never positioned ourselves as a source of recommendations for individual charities to support. Still, every once in awhile I get requests to make those recommendations, particularly from people who don’t know the arts field very well and do not have strong existing commitments to specific organizations.

Although our recommendations are not as strongly rooted in evidence as those of, say, GiveWell, we do have a few ideas for donors whose primary area of concern is the United States:

• If you are interested in knowledge-building and field leadership issues in the arts, we recommend supporting Grantmakers in the Arts. GIA is the only entity deeply engaging grantmakers across disciplines, geographies, and sector boundaries, and is therefore best positioned to make strides organizing this constituency for greater impact. GIA has an existing knowledge-building function that we would like to see become significantly more robust. We’ve been pleased to see that the organization has begun engaging more foundation trustees in recent years, as well as more arts grantmakers outside the United States. In addition, it might be a good thing for the field if more individual donors, especially high-net-worth donors, were part of GIA’s revenue base and governing constituency.
• If you are interested in supporting arts education nationally, a donation to the Kennedy Center for the national Turnaround Arts program may not be a bad idea. An evaluation of Turnaround Arts from several years ago offered reasonably promising evidence for the effectiveness of its ambitious model (which uses arts integration as a holistic strategy to “turn around” failing schools), and the program has since expanded considerably. GIA and Americans for the Arts have national arts education advocacy initiatives, though we are not in a position to judge their effectiveness. Arts Education Partnership is a national arts education leadership organization that also has a research database called ArtsEdSearch.
• If you are interested in supporting arts opportunities for older adults or in clinical settings, several organizations in the US and UK have programs with solid evidence behind them, including TimeSlips, Elders Share the Arts, and Sing for Your Life’s Silver Song Clubs.
• If you are interested in supporting organizations in your local area, consider that smaller, grassroots arts organizations, particularly those rooted in communities of color, are more likely to be under-resourced relative to the benefit they are capable of providing. If you are not from the community that leads the organization you’re interested in supporting, however, do your homework first to confirm that your help is wanted before you offer it. Many local communities also have well-regarded arts education initiatives, such as Big Thought in Dallas and Ingenuity, Inc. in Chicago.
• Finally, while not a donation, we strongly suggest supporting ArtsJournal by purchasing a premium email subscription ($28/year) or classified advertising. ArtsJournal is a crucial news aggregation resource that has been the source of more than half the links offered in Createquity’s Twitter feed and monthly Newsroom articles over the past several years. Its content is generated from following hundreds of both mainstream and niche media publications and methodically curating the most relevant and thought-provoking content, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. Information resources like these are notoriously fragile in the digital era, and ArtsJournal is no exception: founder Doug McLennan has seemingly not taken a vacation from it in the ten years that Createquity has existed. Supporting ArtsJournal is a great option in particular for small-dollar donors who are not itemizing their deductions.

As much as we wish we could, we are unfortunately not in a position to make recommendations regarding charities outside of the United States at this time. We would love to see someone else take on that challenge, however!

Parting Thoughts

To be a philanthropist, whether the money is yours or simply has been entrusted to you, is a remarkable privilege in every sense of the word. The world is probably never going to see the day when literally everyone seeking to make the world a better place through the arts does so strategically and wholly without regard to self-interest. But the more we can nudge individuals, organizations, and actions in that direction, the more meaningful all of our work will become.

The magic of knowledge is that it is highly leveragable. What you have just read is a summary of a decade of inquiry into the inner workings and external context of the arts ecosystem. If the insights from that exercise ultimately guide even a mere handful of important decisions by well-placed individuals, it will all have been worth it in the end.

Until then, in this season of holiday generosity, and for many more on the horizon, we wish you happy giving and many happy (impact-adjusted) returns.

Among this illustrious group of organizations celebrating their tenth anniversary this year is a little arts policy think tank you might know as Createquity. On October 26, 2007, a modest post here entitled “Hello, world” promised a simple chronicle of a young artist’s journey through business school, with little hint of the much more meaningful work to come. It’s a big milestone for us, one that we savor with pride. But this particular birthday is also bittersweet, because Createquity will not be joining our decade-old brethren for the next ten years. This year, 2017, will be Createquity’s last.

To understand why we’ve decided to end Createquity’s run, it’s necessary to travel back in time a bit. When we relaunched Createquity as a bona-fide think tank for the arts three years ago, I knew full well that we were plotting an ambitious path rife with pitfalls. We were taking on an insanely complex mission—to review, understand, and synthesize arts research more comprehensively and strategically than anyone had ever attempted before—with hardly any institutional infrastructure or startup financial support.

It was beyond audacious. But we felt strongly that to try and fail would be better than not to try at all. Arts leaders are drowning in information. Every year, governments, foundations, universities, and scientists invest thousands of hours and millions of dollars generating research about critical issues in the sector. But according to a 2016 survey sponsored by the Hewlett and Knight Foundations, nearly 80% of arts administrators have difficulty keeping up with information in the field, and only 5% typically read research reports all the way through. With so many professionals lacking time to fully engage with research or a framework to apply the findings in practice, a huge amount of potential goes to waste.

When Createquity relaunched in 2014, our vision was to facilitate progress towards a better world by compiling, vetting, and interpreting relevant insights from the research literature for people with the ability to make a difference. And in three years, we came a long way toward pulling off that vision. We delivered deeply informed analysis and surprising insights on topics including the benefits of the arts, arts participation patterns, artist careers, cultural equity, and the history of the nonprofit arts sector. Our research-driven features have received tens of thousands of page views—according to figures provided to us by the National Endowment for the Arts, more than the NEA’s own flagship research publications. Most importantly, in my view, we began to create a robust logic for how all of this research could optimally inform leaders’ decisions affecting the health of the arts ecosystem—decisions that affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the United States and beyond.

With the exception of a single six-month stretch, we did all this with less money in our annual budget than what I got paid to stuff envelopes all day in my first-ever arts job. At first, the resource-scarce environment didn’t faze us. Createquity had been a 100% volunteer operation in its previous incarnation, after all, with no budget or legal entity separate from my bank account. We were passionate, we believed in what we were doing, and most of us were employed full-time elsewhere or had other gigs to pay the bills. Sure, money would be nice, but it wasn’t the main point.

But then we started doing the work. And let me tell you, to do this work justice takes time. Hundreds of hours of time for every project we did. Over the past three years we’ve completed seven formal research investigations resulting in ten feature articles. That represents just a small fraction of an expansive research agenda we designed during that same period to help us identify, in a very literal sense, “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” With team members contributing just a few hours a week on average, getting through that research agenda was slow as molasses and put extraordinary strain on our capacity.

In theory, this is a simple management problem with a simple solution: increase your capacity. Alas, doing so proved to be anything but simple. Both firsthand experience and conversations with media industry experts quickly established that ads, subscriptions, and individual donations (including crowdfunding campaigns) could be a helpful revenue supplement for a niche publication like ours, but far from a core anchor. Providing research or consulting services for hire could have helped pay the bills, but would have run a very high risk of taking us off mission as the unsubsidized work took second fiddle to business realities.

That left grant funding as the obvious answer—obvious not just because it was the only realistic alternative, but also because the funding community is a core audience and beneficiary of Createquity’s research. But the national funding landscape is almost perfectly set up to make a project like Createquity extremely difficult to capitalize. The vast majority of arts funders’ portfolios are restricted to specific geographies, to the point that we found we couldn’t even win grants in our ostensible home of Washington DC because our services were not locally targeted enough. The very few grantmakers that do fund on a national basis typically eschew general operating support and are largely uninterested in supporting grantees indefinitely. These are among the reasons why the arts field has, since the 1980s, dug a formidable graveyard for failed think tank initiatives, some of which have become so buried under the weight of history that I only learned about them for the first time earlier this year.

Even so, our first year out of the gate gave us hope that we might defy the odds. After a successful crowdfunding campaign enabling us to redesign the website and hold our first planning retreat, we quickly staffed up our editorial team, laid out a research agenda, and started reeling in our first funders, culminating in the fall of 2015 when we raised a round of seed investment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a business planning process.

As we’ve written about before, one of the most important outcomes of the business planning exercise was the recommendation to package Createquity’s remaining research investigations into a two-year initiative. To speed up the process and make it more robust, we would outsource the investigations to professional contractors through a competitive process, leaving the Createquity research team to manage the various overlapping projects in centralized fashion. We called it the Synthesis Project, and we expected that following this “surge” of funding to conquer the frontloaded inquiry part of our research agenda, we could shrink Createquity back down to its grassroots form for the follow-through (focusing on advocating specific action steps associated with priority issue areas). That way, we would skirt the challenges of long-term sustainability that had doomed so many knowledge-building initiatives of the past.

We had phone calls and meetings galore, hosted events, shook down every prospect, called in every favor, and deployed every bit of reputational capital we had in our efforts to get the Synthesis Project funded. It wasn’t enough. The planning grant we received from Mellon in 2015 was to be the last new institutional funding to come our way. On top of that, in the past two years, our two largest general operating funders each decided to refocus their portfolios locally, which meant that we no longer fit their guidelines. All in all, keeping Createquity funded at even a basic level in the years ahead was shaping up to be a major ongoing challenge.

Ultimately, we decided that it was better to close up shop than continue to fight what increasingly looked like a losing battle. We are using these final months to make connections across the threads of different investigations we’ve done and articles we’ve written over the years, tie up loose ends, and, as much as we can, tease out what it all means for practice.

Next week, we will be publishing four briefs laying out the insights we’ve gathered on the issue areas of arts participation, cultural equity, arts careers, and the benefits of the arts. Over the next couple of months, we will be polishing up our internal training materials and resources to make it as easy as possible for people in the arts community to carry on aspects of the work we’ve started in their own spaces and in their own names. And in November and December, you can expect to see some parting thoughts from our team to philanthropists and researchers seeking to optimize their investments in the arts in the decade ahead. Our goal in all of this is to activate the latent potential of our work over the past ten years into the most accessible and actionable content possible. The goal, in short, is to go out of business in style.

Our tentative plan is to cease publishing at the end of 2017. After that, the website will stay up in an archival state indefinitely. Of course, if someone decides to make another go at something akin to the Synthesis Project and wants to pick up where we left off, we will do our best to facilitate that.

I want to be clear that I still believe strongly in the mission of Createquity. This announcement comes just two days before the start of the 2017 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, which I’m extremely fortunate to have the honor of attending for the ninth year in a row. My wish for Createquity’s final birthday is for all of my friends and colleagues at that gathering to consider the urgent need for a more efficient, networked, strategic, and meaningful approach to building knowledge in service of improving lives through the arts. Though Createquity’s window of opportunity to bring that vision to life has closed, our experience has only reinforced my faith that doing so is not only possible, but tremendously worthwhile.

Many folks have asked what’s next for me. I’ve begun an independent practice working with philanthropists, investors, and governments to deploy resources for good in the social sector; you can read more about that work here. I also expect to continue writing in 2018 and beyond, though about a different set of topics than covered here, and will share more information about that in a future post. In the meantime, although I will miss the environment of learning and intellectual ferment that Createquity has provided in my life for ten years, I am excited and energized by this opportunity to bring a decade of inquiry and discovery to a graceful and meaningful conclusion. I am grateful to all of you for your role in that journey, and I invite you to join me in being a part of Createquity’s final act.

Cover image: “Dramatic golden sunset” by Cindy del Valle

As longstanding concerns about cultural equity find voice in policy initiatives like these, administrators at organizations that celebrate European art forms, which are noticeably overrepresented among the biggest-budget nonprofit arts institutions in the United States, are snapping into action. Several years ago American Ballet Theatre, better known to some as the house of Misty, launched Project Plié, “a comprehensive initiative to increase racial and ethnic representation in ballet and to diversify America’s ballet companies.” Chamber Music America released a robust new statement of commitment to racial equity earlier this year. The 2016 League of American Orchestras conference was, for the first time, devoted entirely to the topic of diversity in the field. Hosted by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the choice to convene in a majority-black city and bring in Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson as a keynote speaker did not go unnoticed. Sessions focused on helping orchestras become more reflective of the country, including diversifying boards, audiences, and the players themselves.

In case you may be wondering about the reasons behind such a focus, consider that the proportion of African American and Latino musicians in U.S. orchestras is just 4%, a number that has barely budged since 2002. (The corresponding proportion of the United States population is almost 30%.) And it’s not just musicians. According to the same research, since 2006, the percentage of top executives of color in American orchestras has fluctuated between 5.2% and 1.6%, and the percentage of board members has consistently hovered under 8% people of color during the same period.

The consistency of these numbers over time is striking, given that there are more initiatives in place than ever before to diversify orchestras. The Sphinx Organization was founded in 1996 specifically to increase the percentage of black and Latino musicians in orchestras, and has since won prestigious awards and raised millions of dollars toward that mission. Forty years’ worth of foundation-funded fellowship programs for black and Latino musicians, with the number of such programs increasing dramatically in the past 15 years, have similarly failed to move the needle.

The issue goes far beyond orchestras. According to the most recent figures from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, audiences for classical music, ballet, opera, plays, and musicals are all at least 78% white. Depending on the art form, that figure is a full twelve to seventeen percentage points above the national proportion of white people–a gap that has actually widened since 2002.

Things could still change, of course. Perhaps more time or a different approach is all that’s needed for these diversity initiatives to succeed. But at this point, it’s time to start asking the question hanging over all of this: what is the endgame? What happens if, despite the sincerest of intentions and tireless efforts to integrate, most organizations rooted in European forms of artistic expression never achieve anything close to proportionate representation of the demographics of their communities? What then?

In the wake of the protests following Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra took to the streets to play free concerts in its communities. From the BSO facebook page.

White-ish Institutions

Createquity foresaw this tension in a piece published last year entitled “Making Sense of Cultural Equity.” The basic premise was that conversations about cultural equity (and any number of associated terms and topics) are informed by underlying visions of success that can be wildly divergent, but are rarely articulated explicitly. Based on our review of the literature and our own experiences in the field, we identified four archetypal models of cultural equity that together explain a surprisingly high proportion of the debates and dialogue that occur on the topic. The dilemma described above is at the center of a conflict between the Diversity vision of success (which wants to see fully integrated, large-budget “anchor” institutions providing benefit to entire communities) and the Redistribution vision (which holds that we should be shifting the balance of arts policy and philanthropic resources toward organizations and cultural traditions rooted in historically marginalized communities, including communities of color).

By any reasonable measure, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity” is one of the most successful pieces we’ve ever done. In addition to placing among our top ten most-viewed articles, we’ve been asked to present or write about it by organizations including Americans for the Arts, Grantmakers in the Arts, Independent Sector, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, and Moore College of Art + Design. But despite the positive reception, I do think there’s one area where in retrospect we missed the mark. In the article, we stated that “[t]he one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called ‘mainstream’ institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous.” That link above takes you to our notes page, where we elaborate on the definition of “mainstream”:

Language can be a source of great confusion in conversations about cultural equity, and many commonly-used terms are highly contested. In this article, we employ several key concepts that can benefit from further elaboration. Please consider the following definitions as you read:

Mainstream institutions: In the course of our reading, we came across the term “mainstream” institutions or organizations with some frequency. Although rarely defined explicitly, we infer that this term typically denotes nonprofit organizations that 1) were founded by white people; 2) do not have a focus on an art form or an audience connected with a specific community of color or other oppressed community; 3) receive funding from foundation and government sources; and 4) have some professional staff.

This language did not escape the sharp eyes of Justin Laing, at the time a senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh who had also been a key spark behind Grantmakers in the Arts’s racial equity initiative. On Twitter, Justin shared a number of comments on the article, including the following:

Middle & upper class white America is “a stream” not the “mainstream” of America. Referring to this group as “main” is 2 overrepresent. 5/9

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

Just as referring to ALAANA arts orgs as “specific” is a marginalization or underrepresentation and perpetuates a #WesternCanon center (6/9)

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

As it turns out, we did have extensive internal discussions about the problems with the term “mainstream” as we were preparing the piece, but we ended up using it anyway, largely because it seemed fairly well established in the literature and we were trying to be careful to use the language from our readings rather than invent our own. But Justin’s feedback, and subsequent conversations that I have had with him and others on these topics, have convinced me that we should do more to interrogate the way this term is used.

In the research literature, the term “mainstream” is often contrasted with the language “culturally-specific” (a term that we did avoid), and it is this combination that provokes the fiercest resistance from cultural equity advocates. The logic on researchers’ part is that “culturally-specific” organizations explicitly target a specific demographic population, whereas “mainstream” organizations target everyone. On its face, this seems perfectly reasonable. In practice, though, the dynamic is asymmetric. Organizations celebrating European art forms tend to have been founded earlier than organizations that primarily serve communities of color and benefited from the structural advantages enjoyed by white culture at the time (and since), enabling them to capture much of the sector’s wealth. And yet virtually none of these institutions identify as “culturally-specific,” despite what the statistics shared at the beginning of this article might suggest. Indeed, aficionados of these art forms often wax poetically about their universal appeal, pointing proudly to the way that classical music, for example, has become a national symbol of pride in Venezuela through the famous El Sistema program, the way that it has spread like wildfire in East Asia, and the extensive outreach and education initiatives many American orchestras have undertaken in low-income, black and brown communities. But many cultural equity advocates see orchestral music as unabashedly and irredeemably white: it originated in Europe, the vast majority of composers presented (even by Latin American and Asian orchestras) are European or European-descended, and most of the people who enjoy it are of European origin. To them, when we talk about culturally-specific organizations, that includes symphony orchestras–and ballets, and operas, and encyclopedic art museums. And it’s not at all obvious to them why certain culturally-specific organizations should continue to receive such a disproportionate share of public and philanthropic support compared to other culturally-specific organizations. In fact, they think it’s pretty obvious that the balance is out of whack.

Now, some readers might blanch at the application of so stark a label as “white” to organizations like orchestras, especially at a time when they are trying so hard to attract more diverse audiences and workforces. And truth be told, I share some of these reservations. While I’m generally skeptical of claims to universality, I struggle deeply with the way that essentializing art forms by race, and the organizations that practice those art forms, seemingly erases the people of color who do participate in and have fallen in love with European-derived traditions. According to the NEA’s figures, more than a million African Americans saw a classical music concert at some point in 2012; nearly 600,000 Latinos took in a ballet performance; and the list goes on. That’s a lot of people. Do opera singers of color agree that opera will always be a white art form? Whose place is it to judge whether someone’s choice of profession might be (as I have seen suggested by some) a manifestation of internalized racial inferiority?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and can’t speak for people of color working in these traditions. That said, even if we stop short of labeling Shakespeare theaters and the like “white,” it seems obvious that they are, and will likely remain for some time, at the very least “white-ish.” In the end, we can’t force people to love Beethoven, Balanchine, Botticelli, Brecht, or anything else, no matter how much educating, exposing, coaxing, and pleading we do. And in today’s United States, it is increasingly art forms that did not originate in Europe that are getting the love: as of this year, the most popular genre of music to listen to is hip-hop. (From that link: “Classical music was in last place with just 1 percent of all music consumption in the year-to-date.”)

Difficult Choices

In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we defined mainstream institutions, in part, as “…founded by white people.” But it may be more helpful to consider mainstream institutions and Eurocentric institutions as two different things. Professional orchestras, ballet companies, and operas not only have a mandate to serve a broad audience, but must do so via a particular art form. Many other large-budget nonprofit organizations–performing arts centers, festivals, and some museums, to name a few–are not necessarily so constrained. It’s somewhat easier to imagine this latter group of institutions transforming in ways that authentically serve an entire community, service that would in fact justify disproportionate subsidy from a local arts agency or an impact-minded philanthropist. Separating our concepts of “mainstream” and “white” could allow us to treat European art forms as just one of many types of cultural expression within a mix of organizations and communities, instead of privileging them as the historical default. Just as importantly, that distinction would make it easier to justify allowing some organizations to continue maintaining a largely white identity when that is the most authentic expression of their mission. The problem arises only when such organizations seek and receive disproportionate philanthropic resources on the pretense of serving or speaking for an entire community that’s much more diverse than they are.

Were the field to adopt this new understanding, an unavoidable question would face every organization celebrating European cultural heritage in the midst of a substantial nonwhite population: is our foremost loyalty to our art form or our local community? In answering, boards and executives would need to realize that true commitment to the latter could mean dramatic changes, changes that would make their organizations unrecognizable to the individuals who founded them. Yet reaffirming a primary commitment to an art form with clear ethnic roots–which, I want to emphasize here, is an equally valid choice under this paradigm–would be a signal to the world that the organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts can only reach so far. And yes, that may make it untenable to go after large sums of money from foundations and government agencies on the premise of being a local “anchor institution.”

Unity in Diversity?

Ultimately, this discussion highlights the importance of clarifying what we really mean by cultural equity, and what we want for our communities and our sector. In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we noted the tension between integration and cultural ownership as one of the central fault lines separating the Diversity vision from other definitions of cultural equity:

Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

If we adopt a cultural policy that stereotypes organizations practicing European art forms as hopelessly foreign to anyone who doesn’t share ethnic roots with their founders, we leave behind millions of people of color who want to engage with those art forms and make them a part of their lives. But if we are so committed to providing African Americans and Latinos with opportunities to participate in classical music that we write those expectations into law, does that imply a corresponding expectation that organizations practicing traditions like mariachi and Butoh will likewise reach beyond their immediate communities? As a society, how much do we want our cultural policy to emphasize affirming identity vs. broadening horizons?

Again, I don’t know where that balance should be. But I feel certain that we ignore the question at our peril. Every diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative that fails to grapple with the inherent tensions living within those words risks birthing strategies that sound wonderful on their own terms but work at cross purposes in combination. Until we rise to the challenge of understanding and articulating our goals at the system level, we’re going to keep running into the same issues, and having the same arguments, over and over again.

This piece was adapted and expanded from material originally cut from “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” by Clara Inès Schuhmacher, Katie Ingersoll, Fari Nzinga, and Ian David Moss, as well as from a keynote speech I delivered to the Orchestras Canada conference in May 2017. I’m grateful to Clara, Katie, and Fari along with many others for helping to shape my thinking on this topic, and to Justin Laing for challenging me to dig deeper. Justin and I will be presenting a session exploring these issues in further depth at this year’s Grantmakers in the Arts conference.

“Confederate Statue” | by Flickr user Paul Sableman via Creative Commons

A deadly protest in Charlottesville, VA on August 12 against the removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee fomented an immediate national uproar that only intensified after President Trump’s equivocal statements refusing to concentrate blame for the violence on the white nationalist demonstrators who organized the event. (Angry responses from the arts community included Kennedy Center honorees bowing out from the awards’ festivities, which Trump subsequently cancelled plans to attend, and the mass resignation of the entire President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which had in recent years promoted national initiatives and research in arts education.) But amid the controversy focusing on the specific people involved, a parallel maelstrom has formed over the broader relationship between Confederate iconography, bigotry, and hate speech. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, both elected officials and vigilante activists in numerous U.S. cities took quick action to remove monuments lauding the Confederacy. Others took a more cautious approach, perhaps concerned that taking down Confederate relics may diminish the role art can play in processing and contextualizing that history. The mayor of Louisville, KY initiated a review of public art in the city to determine which pieces could be interpreted as “honoring racism” in an effort to create a public dialogue around the monuments’ potential removal; this type of citizen-engaged process was strongly favored in a statement from Americans for the Arts. Meanwhile, corporations around the country took steps to distance themselves from white supremacist culture and the organizations at the center of the Charlottesville protest, with Spotify taking action to ban racist music from its platform. Too often, arts advocates speak of the arts as if all that humans create is virtuous; the events of this past month offer a sobering reminder to the contrary.

Disney splits from Netflix in the streaming race. Disney has announced it will not renew its licensing agreement with Netflix in 2019, with plans to launch a new Disney-owned streaming service. Given that Disney owns not just its self-branded properties like Mickey Mouse but also Pixar, ESPN, and the Star Wars and Marvel Comics franchises, this is no small matter. Netflix appears to have braced for the change by continuing to produce original content at a ferocious rate, signing ABC/Disney producer Shonda Rhimes and acquiring the Scottish comic book company Millarworld. Netflix seems to be banking on continued success despite debts tipping the $20 billion mark. Up to now Netflix has outpaced its streaming rivals, anticipating the shift from licensing to original content and growing steadily in subscribers despite an ever-shrinking library of licensed titles. In essence, Netflix is a platform that has become a network; while Disney is late to the streaming game, it’s also the biggest and perhaps most recognizable company to attempt what Netflix has already done, in reverse.

Big News starts competing for nonprofit cash. Yet another one bites the dust: New York City’s famed Village Voice finally ceased its print operations, a trend among struggling alt-weeklies. With advertising revenues failing to keep up across the board, a new dot-org has been created for the U.S. arm of the Guardian to raise money from donors and organizations committed to independent journalism. Others don’t appear to be far behind; The Atlantic’s new majority stakeholder is Emerson Collective (which is run by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and expected to have full ownership of the publication within five years), and longtime New York Times newsroom manager Janet Elder will be in charge of building a similar philanthropic arm at that media behemoth. While the Times has explored revenue incentives such as limiting online views for non-subscribers to 10 clicks-per-month, the Guardian has resisted a paywall, opting instead for Wikipedia-style box ads requesting donations at the end of each article. These nonprofit inroads by major media outlets will likely place further pressure on the few foundations that already support journalism (many of which support the arts as well), which could be bad news for smaller media sources like the Voice that are already feeling the squeeze.

Hurricane Harvey lashes the Houston arts scene. Catastrophic flooding in the Houston’s major performing arts venues and municipal parking garages throughout the local theater district have brought the city’s major dance, theater and opera companies’ fall season openers to a halt. Arts advocates have quickly banded together to provide aid for Houstonians and fellow arts organizations, some of which had only recently finished multi-million dollar renovations addressing damage from 2001’s Hurricane Allison, and the National Endowment for the Humanities committed $1 million to the effort. As the waters recede from the largest storm Texas has ever recorded, the region faces daunting and costly recovery efforts potentially lasting several years, just as Hurricane Irma barrels toward Miami and the Southeastern United States.

Venezuelan President freezes out Dudamel and the National Youth Orchestra. Superstar Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, pressured for years to speak up about deteriorating conditions in his native Venezuela, now finds himself ensnared in exactly the sort of political controversy he had hoped to avoid. Dudamel has recently become increasingly vocal about the political strife in his home country, and is rumored to have assisted a musician who was arrested and allegedly beaten for participating in anti-government protests. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro openly criticized Dudamel on television, and shortly after the remarks it was announced that a government-sponsored tour in which Dudamel was to conduct the National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela – with stops in Illinois, California and Virginia – would be cancelled. Though it’s likely a move of political retaliation, no official reason has been provided by the government.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• The hunt for a new leader of Grantmakers in the Arts is over: Eddie Torres will be the organization’s new CEO starting this fall. Torres comes to GIA from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, where he has been Deputy Commissioner. And in another twist, GIA is moving its offices from Seattle to New York, likely spurring additional turnover.
• Dianne S. Harris has joined the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a senior program officer in the humanities and higher education division.
• Cinematographer John Bailey is the newly appointed president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
• The Mid-America Arts Alliance has acquired local arts service organization Artists INC; the latter’s head, Lisa Cordes, has joined MAAA as director of artists’ services.
• The arts community has suffered two untimely deaths in recent months: first, Ebony McKinney, program officer at the San Francisco Art Commission, passed away July 29 at age 41; and Dr. James Catterall, author and founder of the Centers for Research on Creativity (CRoC) and professor emeritus at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, passed away August 23 at age 69.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• Ten to 12 minutes of mindfulness is enough to boost creativity, according to an experiment conducted by Erasmus University.
• Employment in the UK culture sector is up 20% in past five years, according to the Creative Industries Federation.
• UK research suggests people who engage with the arts as a participant or observer are more likely to be charitable with their time and dollars. And arts patrons who buy their tickets online are most likely to add a donation, compared to walk-up and phone buyers.
• Dancing rewires the brain, improving multi-tasking ability, says research from the Universities of Houston and Maryland.
• A new report from IFACCA shares key findings on the governance and operation of national arts councils and cultural ministries.
• An article published the Center for Effective Philanthropy points to research debunking myths about differences between “new” and “established” funders.
• Rutgers scientists have created technology that makes art – and study participants prefer these paintings over works shown at Art Basel.
• Atlantic Media Strategies has synthesized research predicting trends in media consumption over the next few years.
• How is print is surviving in the digital age? Just fine. Fine, that is, for current affairs or news publications in the UK.
• TV dramas with diverse characters and storylines have been linked to improved tolerance and changed attitudes among those who watch. A new study suggests this effect holds true specifically for transgender rights.
• The Guardian reports that binge-watching and on-demand television services have all but ended family TV time. Meanwhile 100,000 Canadians cancelled TV service in the first half of 2017 – a figure that’s down 22% from last year’s pace.
• Google queries about suicide rose by 20% in the days after 13 Reasons Why – a show about teen suicide – hit Netflix, according to research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
• An analysis of BBC’s “culture poll” suggests male and female film critics find different things funny in comedies. And a USC study finds that movies are still dominated by men, on- and off-screen.
• A report from a summit co-organized by the National Endowment for the Arts and the International Documentary Association explores issues related to the sustainability of the documentary film industry.
• Arts engagement can ease economic, cultural and political divisions, says research coordinated by the University of Kent based on survey data from more than 20,000 UK respondents.
• Economists say college educations, long thought to be a neutralizer of inequality, do not provide equal access to upward mobility for students from low socioeconomic households.
• Multiple studies cite the varied benefits of snapping photos. Taking pictures can increase enjoyment and enhances memory of certain experiences, provided you’re documenting moments by choice.
• A study on the listening habits of millennials shows they hold high regard for public radio, particularly local coverage, but wish it would go further with reporting.
• A study by Music Reports claims one key to landing a song on the Billboard Top 10 is working with a team of collaborators.
• One in three respondents think classical music is “aloof” and needs to “lighten up” in order to survive, according to a YouGov poll in the UK.
• Economists have evaluated the impact of the European Capital of Culture program on GDP. Various European cities selected to participate in the year-long arts and culture program have seen a boost of nearly 5%, with residual positive effects lasting years.
• A survey commissioned by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation reveals gaps in diversity among professionals holding leadership roles in university libraries.
• The arts are key to building belonging among communities, according to research conducted in Canada, which advocates for improvements to facilities and programs committed to community arts engagement.
• The UK Labour Party conducted an inquiry on class-related gaps in arts participation, citing cost as a barrier, and reporting suggestions and recommendations.
• A new survey reveals details about Russia’s book piracy problems. And books contain far more naughty words than they used to, but some say, “who f*)&ing cares?”

“Europe” by flickr user Charles Clegg

Title: Culture, Cities, and Identity in Europe

Author(s): from Culture Action Europe: Katherine Heid, Mehdi Arfaoiu, Luca Bergamo, Natalie Giorgadze; from Agenda 21 for Culture – UCLG: Carina Lopes, Jordi Balta Portoles, Jordi Pascual; Simon Mundy

Publisher: European Economic and Social Committee

Year: 2016

URL: http://www.eesc.europa.eu/resources/docs/qe-01-16-463-en-n.pdf

Topics: urban planning, creative placemaking, cities, Europe, economic development, community revitalization, social cohesion, community identity

Methods: narrative literature review, case studies

What it says: The report aims to assess what is known about the relationship between culture (defined as “cultural industries, visual and performing arts, heritage and the creative industries”) and cities along four dimensions, as follows:

• Culture as a vehicle for economic growth: exploring traditional economic impact and value-added studies on the cultural and creative industries, heritage, cultural events, communications technologies, and “cultural routes,” the study concludes that “the benefits of culture for the economy follow a multidimensional path, having first a direct impact by creating jobs to support cultural production, then attracting tourists and amateurs as culture is being exhibited and promoted, and lastly sustaining regional investments and growth as the cultural value and knowledge of the region is recognised and exploited.”
• Culture as an instrument for reconverting cities: exploring literature on culture and urban regeneration, spillover effects of cultural activities, and the European Capitals of Culture program, the study stresses the importance of citizen participation in planning initiatives and an integrated approach, and recommends the adoption of culture/heritage impact studies.
• Culture as a tool for integration and inclusiveness: exploring literature on intercultural dialogue and migration, gender, and special needs (i.e, disability), the report emphasizes the importance of diversifying organizational management, programming, and audience development strategies.
• Culture as a pillar of European identity within Europe and beyond: examining the literature on the contribution of cities and regions to European identity, the role of non-European cities in maintaining cultural relations with Europe, cross-border cooperation and mobility, city networks, and cultural rights, the study discusses at length the notion of “global cultural citizenship.”

Within each section, the authors offer several case studies of “good practices” representing on-the-ground approaches toward achieving the goals in question.

This main part of the report is preceded by a brief review of data on cultural participation in Europe, the role that culture plays in society as perceived by citizens, and economic data on the creative industries. The report concludes with a set of 17 recommendations to the European Economic and Social Committee for its future work in cultural policy. These recommendations encompass five themes:

1. Recognize cultural rights as fundamental to human development: Envision culture as an enabler of dialogue and exchange, promote cultural diversity in the framework of human rights, and deepen exploration of the relationship between culture and human rights.
2. Acknowledge culture as necessary for sustainable development: Make culture a separate category of concern in sustainable development conversations, recognize the impact of culture on public and private initiatives, and incorporate culture into social cohesion strategies.
3. Include new players in the democratic governance of culture: Bring civil society organizations into dialogue around policymaking, and recognize the importance of grassroots cultural initiatives.
4. Support exchange between cultures to foster social and economic development: Emphasize cross-border cooperation and mobility, encourage collaboration among cities in and beyond Europe, allow migration to be part of the solution, and support the role of cities in international sustainable development.
5. Empower cities’ decisions on culture to shape our future: Use cultural spaces to shape participation, engage communities on the periphery of cities, use culture to active public spaces for increased security, fund cultural processes, and reinvest cultural benefits in cultural ecosystems.

What I think about it: Despite the relevance and importance of its subject matter, “Culture, Cities, and Identity in Europe” is a prime example of the limitations of narrative-style literature review. Because it makes little effort to distinguish between the studies it cites or synthesize across them, the central portion of the report reads mainly as a series of disconnected (and lengthy) quotes from other authors. To its credit, the report does attempt to offer takeaways in the set of policy recommendations advanced at the end of the document. Some of the ideas offered are worth exploring – in particular, the idea of integrating dialogue and communities of practice around culture and human rights – and the holistic/integrationist stance of the authors very much matches Createquity’s. However, the language of the recommendations is often so vague and general as to significantly undermine their usefulness.

What it all means: Though it doesn’t offer much in the way of striking insights on its subject matter, “Culture, Cities, and Identity in Europe” will be useful to someone looking for a bibliography on the topics covered, particularly from a European perspective. It’s also worthwhile to compare this pan-European take on culture and urban policy to American approaches; of particular interest from a US perspective is the bid to redefine European identity as tied to an inclusive, globally conscious notion of cultural citizenship rather than any particular set of ethnicities or national origins.

“Acrylic DC Capitol – Red White & Blue” by Nicholas Raymond

Several months ago, I gathered in a room with a few dozen funders to imagine “the Philanthropia of our dreams.” Among two days’ worth of mostly traditional breakouts at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference, this workshop was a clear outlier. Over the course of nearly three hours, we told remarkably personal narratives about our relationship to philanthropy, recounted moments that had reminded us why we do what we do, and mused about what the coming decades might hold for our field (shared with the group, in at least several cases, in the form of a drawing). Summing up the tenor of the afternoon, the session concluded with nominations for inspiring songs to comprise the “Sound of Philanthropia” playlist.

The aforementioned intervention was concocted by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a participatory art and community organizing project designed to generate public dialogue about cultural policy. The USDAC engages in participatory action research, instigating events such as locally distributed “Imaginings” (of which the workshop at Grantmakers in the Arts was one) and the national “People’s State of the Union” to source first-person, often arts-based narratives about what is culturally important, and what an ideal future might look like. The organization grew out of a collaboration between founder Adam Horowitz and longtime community arts activist Arlene Goldbard, who now bear the colorful titles of “Chief Instigator” and “Chief Policy Wonk” respectively.

Createquity has been following the USDAC’s progress with keen interest. Its work has scored an honorable mention in our annual roundup of the top 10 arts policy stories twice in the past three years – once marking its launch in 2014, and the second time in recognition of the release of its policy platform late last year.

It’s the latter effort that is of particular relevance to this audience. Most self-styled think tanks and research initiatives, Createquity included, are expert-driven: we seek to understand the world through finding and/or commissioning research and analysis of the highest quality possible, prioritizing methodological rigor and scientific standards. In the USDAC’s case, although the research questions it sets out to explore are fundamentally the same as Createquity’s – what are the most important issues, and what can we do about them? – it arrives at the answers via a radically different path. Unapologetically qualitative, decentralized, and improvisational, the USDAC coopts the language and methods of art in the pursuit of knowledge, resulting in rich, overlapping narrative tapestries on a wide range of topics.

The USDAC has produced two publications thus far reporting the results of these activities: 2015’s “An Act of Collective Imagination,” which offered a look back at the USDAC’s first two years of existence, and “Standing for Cultural Democracy,” the official policy platform released in December 2016. Both documents offer a mix of information about the organization itself and its programming, along with some philosophical context-setting that bears repeating here. The USDAC is, fundamentally, a project to understand and advocate for the role of artists in the broader cultural sphere. That project defines culture extremely broadly, as “all that is fabricated, endowed, designed, articulated, conceived or directed by human beings,” and thus topics as far-flung as racism, human rights, and social attitudes toward climate change are all deemed cultural issues. Its definition of cultural policy is similarly broad: “the aggregate of values and principles guiding any social entity in matters touching on culture.” Therefore, the USDAC reasonably argues, interest in cultural policy among the population can be assumed to be universal, and because of that, it’s important to try to involve literally everyone in its formation.

That philosophy explains the USDAC’s inclusive and participatory approach; indeed, as a bystander to the organization’s activities, I’ve consistently been impressed by the wide swath of people who engage with its programming. In particular, it seems to reach lots of folks who don’t typically engage with the sort of expert-driven processes described above. Still, there’s a difference between open access and true inclusivity, and in the absence of any formal sampling procedures, there’s reason to question how representative the organization’s participatory action research truly is. (No information is provided in the reports about the participants other than their total number and some of the locations of the Imaginings and other events.) Given the progressive political leanings of the founders and their networks, for example, along with the project’s generally urban orientation, I would be very surprised to learn that more than a handful of self-identified conservatives contributed to the various discussions. If true, this represents a philosophical conundrum for a project that prizes inclusion and holds “culture is created by everyone” as a core value, especially so since political identification is presumably more likely to correlate with differences in one’s priorities and vision for the future than other vectors of diversity such as race, gender, geography, or age. An Imagining held exclusively among Donald Trump supporters might well yield some very different narratives and areas of concern than what we see from the USDAC today.

My other concern with the USDAC is that the funnel from the action research to the policy ideas is never fully explained in either publication, or any other materials that I’ve come across. Both publications are solely credited to Goldbard, though certain sections acknowledge other contributors and “An Act of Collective Imagination” includes a suite of quotes from participants in USDAC programming. I certainly find it plausible that the Imaginings may have helped shape areas of focus for the platform, and perhaps yielded a proactive suggestion here and there. But if the Imagining that I attended and the post-event writeups on the USDAC’s website are any indication, detailed discussion of the sorts of policy proposals included in the platform was not on the menu at these events. In a fully citizen-driven process, one might have expected the platform content to come from, say, something like the petitions on change.org combined with a public vote, but that doesn’t appear to be how the document came together.

All of this raises some legitimate questions about “Standing for Cultural Democracy”’s claim to be a true and full representation of the people’s voice. (A claim which, I should stress, would have been a remarkable achievement for a three-year-old grassroots organization with barely any budget.) But leaving that aside, the USDAC’s cultural policy platform is also a compendium of ideas that deserve thoughtful consideration, regardless of the process that led to them. Specifically, “Standing for Cultural Democracy” includes the following recommendations:

1. Institute a new public service jobs program. In addition to direct funding for jobs that address cultural infrastructure, the platform recommends that percent for art initiatives be expanded to include community-engaged art projects and that existing public service job programs target artists for outreach.
2. Support a culture of justice and equity by distributing resources in representative fashion for the benefit of all communities, and by creating a “national learning community” for allies for social justice.
3. Redeem democracy with creativity by integrating arts modalities into political dialogue and democratic decision-making processes, and organizing hackathons aimed at designing political reforms.
4. Reform the culture of punishment by adopting Campaign Zero’s ten-point policy platform, supporting prison arts programs, and creating art that spreads awareness of related issues and potential solutions among the broader public.
5. Invest in belonging and cultural citizenship by encouraging governments and private institutions to adopt a “policy on belonging,” supporting long-term artists’ residencies at the neighborhood level, supporting community arts centers, and repurposing disused and underused spaces for creative activities.
6. Integrate community cultural development and the work of artists into all social programs affecting culture. In addition to direct involvement of artists, “Standing” advocates developing curricula for explaining the value of artists to professionals in “community building, social service, and public policy” settings.
7. Support artistic response to artistic and natural cultural emergencies by promoting the value of arts-based interventions in crisis situations, offering training to artists to provide these services, and integrating artists into emergency planning processes.
8. Adopt a cultural impact study in communities where physical developments are planned that might disrupt the existing cultural fabric.
9. Reconceive education to support creativity’s central role by advocating for arts integration at the national and local levels, bringing teaching artists into schools, and training artists to work in educational settings.
10. Adopt a basic income grant at the federal and state levels to increase the social safety net for artists and everyone else.

Since most of the proposals require (in some cases substantial) new resources, “Standing” offers several ideas for how those resources might be acquired, including a tax on media advertising, a “Robin Hood tax” on bank transactions, a Creative Breakthrough Fund that functions as a kind of venture philanthropy resource for arts-based social innovation, and social impact bonds in which private investors pay for the success of social programs that would otherwise be sponsored by local governments.

While these proposals cover a lot of ground, they vary widely in quality. To me, the standout is the Cultural Impact Study, which could easily be implemented as a smart add-on to any creative placemaking project. Modeled after the environmental impact statements that have gained wide adoption nationally, the USDAC has gone so far as to include a template resolution for a Cultural Impact Study in an appendix to the platform that could be deployed in a local government or other context. The Creative Breakthrough Fund is likewise a strong idea with immediate potential for application.

By contrast, some of the other proposals seem to take the value of citizen artists on faith in a huge range of contexts. It could be true, for example, that “artistic response” to natural disasters and other civic emergencies is sufficiently effective in healing trauma to warrant the kind of scaling up that the USDAC calls for, but we’re not given much guidance for why we should believe that’s the case. And the notion of employing/deploying artists to liven up public hearings and other administrative functions of government sounds like it could be disastrous as easily as it could be great. Indeed, these ideas are symptomatic of an odd myopia in the USDAC’s vision of success: despite the incredibly broad problem space created by its wide-ranging definition of culture as all human activity, the solutions it proposes are nearly all rooted in artistic practice. By its logic, systemic ills like racism and environmental injustice not only can be solved by citizen artists, they won’t be solved without them.

That said, the platform is not completely dogmatic in this respect and admirably draws upon other policy agendas where appropriate, most notably by embracing Universal Basic Income and Campaign Zero’s policing reform agenda. I likewise appreciate another aspect of the platform’s general construction: it assumes very little new legislation or cooperative action at the level of the federal government, which could have easily made the proposals moot in an era of partisan gridlock and Presidential hostility to the little infrastructure that does exist.

“Standing for Cultural Democracy” well epitomizes both the value and the limitations of the USDAC’s participatory approach to policy development. As a standalone document, the uneven quality is a distraction, and at times it comes across as overly optimistic about the value of integrating arts-based approaches into contexts and spaces where they’re not usually seen. And my questions around the degree to which the process accurately represents the aggregate desires of the people, participants and non-participants alike, put a damper on the enthusiasm I would otherwise have for its innovative approach.

Still, I have to say that I am glad an organization like the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture exists. If we think about the role of the USDAC within the larger ecosystem of analysis, dialogue, and thought leadership around cultural policy, its added value becomes much clearer. The USDAC’s broad definitions of culture and cultural policy, despite stretching the boundaries of usefulness on their own terms, offer a desperately needed counterbalance to the professional nonprofit arts sector’s bias toward looking after the interests of specific institutions and art forms. Its welcome-all-comers engagement strategy helps to establish the relevance of cultural policy with a potentially greater and far more diverse audience than any traditional think tank or foundation-commissioned white paper will ever reach. And even if most of the actual ideas in “Standing for Cultural Democracy” turn out to be dead ends, that hardly matters if the remaining ones offer real potential for impact.

It would be interesting to think how the USDAC’s creative, brainstorming-driven approach can be deployed within that larger ecosystem to the maximum benefit of all. “Standing” offers ideas for how to improve the world without a whole lot of evidence to back them up; others (like Createquity) wait for evidence to arrive and may leave promising ideas on the table in the meantime. As with Y Combinator’s basic income pilot with 100 Oakland residents, an environment where generative cultural policy proposals can be tested and evaluated before receiving a wider rollout could give us the best of both worlds. Combining the kind of creative energy and willingness to think outside the box demonstrated by the USDAC with an appropriate degree of skepticism and open-mindedness around treasured assumptions sounds to me like an ideal way to develop any kind of policy.

For the past decade, Createquity has taken a technocratic approach to covering arts policy in the United States and beyond. We’re not mindless cheerleaders for arts funding; we recognize that governing requires making tradeoffs in the face of limited resources, and have argued against certain types of government arts support in the past. Nevertheless, we believe that the National Endowment for the Arts and other targeted federal agencies do valuable work and are worth saving.

Here are some perspectives on the current budget situation that you may find of use:

Are all these cuts actually going to happen?

Probably not, but that doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real. It appears that Trump’s budget was heavily influenced by staffers from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has long targeted agencies including the NEA and CPB out of an ideological belief that the government shouldn’t be funding the arts and humanities at all. Nevertheless, the budget proposal is already running into opposition from Congressional Republicans, who are seeing it as unrealistic and poorly targeted. Furthermore, eliminating the NEA and NEH will require an actual act of Congress, not just a ratification of the president’s budget. All of that suggests it’s unlikely (though possible) that the agencies will disappear completely, at least in FY18.

That said, it seems virtually certain that we will see at least some cuts. Trump’s budget is so aggressive in so many areas that pushing back on all fronts simultaneously will be very difficult—indicative of a classic hardball negotiation technique.

How will regular people be affected if these agencies are actually eliminated?

It depends on where they live. The vast majority of foundations and individual donors concentrate their giving in the immediate geographic area around where they’re based, which means that the areas with the most wealth (largely big cities on the coasts) are also the ones that receive the most philanthropic funding. As a result, resources are few and far between for arts organizations and public radio and television stations alike in rural America.

In the NEA’s case, the agency has made a point to provide direct funding in every congressional district in the country. Perhaps even more important, though, is the NEA’s system of partnerships with state and regional arts councils, which come with a carrot of matching funds from the federal government in exchange for appropriations from state budgets to their respective state arts councils. In the years following the Great Recession when state budgets were under severe pressure, many of these state arts councils survived in no small part because of this matching fund arrangement. Meanwhile, an external assessment estimates that eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would mean 12 million people losing their access to over-the-air public television, mostly in isolated areas.

As for arts organizations, museums, and public broadcasters in other regions of the country, some will have a tough time to be sure, but the overall effect on the ecosystem would be subtle. The United States didn’t have the NEA, the NEH, CPB, or IMLS for the first 190 years or so of its existence. We believe these agencies create more value than we spend on them, but if they are eliminated, arts and culture will soldier on.

Speaking of creating value, I read that the NEA gets a return of $9 for every dollar invested. Is that true?

No, and we wish arts advocates and the agency itself would avoid using this misleading statistic. It falsely assumes that none of the matching funds leveraged by the NEA would otherwise be there for grantees if the federal funding went away. In reality, matching funds are fungible to a large degree, meaning that the non-federal money is often already committed and it’s really the government that is providing the match, not the other way around. (The big exception here is matching funds for low-budget state arts councils, as discussed above.) Framing it as a “return on investment” is even more misleading, as this implies an astronomical multiplier effect to the spending that simply has no basis in evidence.

Right. So why can’t the arts just fend for themselves on the free market?

They already do. The United States is an outlier among developed-world economies in that its arts funding system is highly decentralized and market-driven. Just 1.2% of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the federal government, so artists and arts organizations have no choice but to sink or swim in the private sector. And as noted above, for all conservatives’ trumpeting of the free market, private philanthropy isn’t very generous to the rural areas and red states that helped Trump get elected. In any case, getting rid of the NEA doesn’t get the government out of the business of funding the arts. In fact, the most significant federal arts funding sources are the Smithsonian ($840 million) and the Department of Defense ($437 million for military bands alone). Yep, that’s right: we spend three times as much on military bands as we do on the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Not to mention, it’s a little rich to complain about nonprofit arts organizations drinking from the government trough when we give away billions of dollars in free money to for-profit industries including oil & gas, corn, and airlines.

Wait, so if the NEA is so insignificant, why bother fighting for it? Wouldn’t it be easier to just take the money and create a parallel private endowment with the same mission?

Yeah, that does sound nice, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t work. Just to maintain current funding levels, which are well below the agency’s inflation-adjusted peak from 1992, one would have to raise an endowment of approximately $3 billion, which would rank up there with the nation’s largest private foundations. Interestingly, Kansas tried to do something like this several years ago—Governor Sam Brownback terminated the Kansas Arts Commission with the plan of setting up a new private entity, the Kansas Arts Foundation. The plan never got off the ground due to poor fundraising results, and the next year, the arts council was brought back to life under a new name.

The NEA’s budget is slight, but as a result it’s had to learn to accomplish a lot with a little (by federal government standards, anyway). The agency does important knowledge infrastructure work, most notably by organizing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted every five years in collaboration with Census Bureau. The SPPA provides us with widely-used statistics about arts participation that would be extremely hard to replicate with the same accuracy in the private sector, because the imprimatur of government is so important for reliable surveys. As a government agency, the NEA also possesses an important power to help set agendas in an otherwise leaderless ecosystem. The contemporary creative placemaking movement was almost entirely incubated at the NEA under the leadership of former Chairman Rocco Landesman, which looms as one of the Endowment’s biggest policy wins in recent history.

What about the argument that the arts and media are better off operating outside the influence of government?

We largely agree with this—it’s one reason why the United States is better equipped to withstand creeping authoritarianism than democracies with more centrally controlled institutions. But as noted above, America’s arts funding system is already far too weak to make political work risky for artists in the way that it is risky in some other countries. Thus, while protecting freedom of expression could be a valid argument against increasing the agencies’ budgets by too great an amount, it is not an argument for decreasing them.

What about other agencies? Is the impact on the arts limited to the Endowments, IMLS, and CPB?

Unfortunately, no. The Trump budget is very wide-ranging in its targets, and includes relevant cuts to the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Interior Department’s National Heritage Areas, funding for after-school and summer enrichment programs within the Department of Education, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which helps fund low-income artist housing initiatives.

Is it wise to put energy into defending the NEA and these other agencies when there’s so much else going on (climate change, threats to immigrants, international relations, etc.)?

That’s a tough call, but we believe the answer is yes. The Trump administration represents a unique challenge for America today, and picking battles seems to play into its strategy. Legislators make the budget, legislators for the most part want to keep their jobs, and they respond to pressure from their constituents. So you know what to do. #SavetheNEA.

Cover photo credit: Felix Russell-Saw

We have long maintained that research – however rigorous or innovative – has little value if it exists in a vacuum: the sharing of discoveries between researchers is essential to a collective understanding of arts issues and, ultimately, a healthy arts ecosystem. We also support the idea of critical evaluations – and ongoing discussions – between peers about the work that is being generated in the research community. This new prize advances these goals: we encourage our readers to nominate work that they greatly admire and believe truly moves our field forward.

What We’re Looking For

Createquity is seeking research that advances the current scholarly conversation, applies new methods to old inquiries to uncover fresh and important insights, and/or explores new avenues of investigation.

Our definition of arts research is broad, and may include studies published in peer-reviewed journals, reports commissioned by foundations or government agencies, dissertations, self-published work, even in-depth blog posts. We are open to quantitative work, qualitative work, empirical work, and theoretical work. It can be from any country in the world. The only requirement is that the research must be about the arts or be written with an arts audience in mind. Generally speaking, we are interested in research on the arts that employs methods from the social sciences, broadly conceived—economics, psychology, sociology, etc.—as well as neuroscience and medical research; please note are NOT looking for historical, biographical, or aesthetic analysis of a single artist’s or small group of artists’ work, or cultural criticism focusing on specific works of art.

Our evaluation criteria will include:

• Relevance: the work has research goals that either 1) connect directly to Createquity’s interest in “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them,” or 2) facilitate essential knowledge infrastructure that helps make a broad range of research investigations possible.
• Rigor: the work uses methods that match up well with its research goals, and executes them without obvious flaws.
• Added Value: the work either 1) makes a unique contribution to the literature or 2) is designed explicitly to replicate previous work on an important and under-studied topic.

After getting through an initial screening round, candidates for the Arts Research Prize will ultimately be judged and selected by an external panel of distinguished experts. Additional information is available on our Frequently Asked Questions page for the prize.

We Need Your Help!

Createquity systematically gathers and reviews research in the arts and culture sector on an ongoing basis, and we continue to mine the depths of academic journals and our personal networks for studies published in 2016 that we should be looking at. But we need your help to make sure we haven’t missed anything important! Accordingly, we’ve announced an open call for nominations.

The deadline for nominations is April 10, 2017. You can submit up to three nominations total. If you have more than three you’d like to recommend to us, or have any other questions, please email Rebecca Ratzkin at rebecca@createquity.com.

Thank you for participating in this exciting initiative!