Empty stage in expectation of performance, by Flickr user renewleeds

If all the world’s a stage, who can compete with Broadway? While gathering research as a doctoral student at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, Mirae Kim interviewed numerous arts organizations about funding issues. She spotted a pattern among local nonprofit venues: “Many theaters in New Jersey mentioned their need to compete against Broadway theaters in New York City – which perfectly made sense since they are only about ten to 20 miles away from Broadway,” Kim recalls. “They mentioned they cannot compete against Broadway theaters in the traditional way because of the different financial sizes, so several of them highlighted their community basis as a way of differentiating themselves from ‘commercial’ theaters.”

Kim’s curiosity about this distinction led to an intensive research study – Characteristics of Civically Engaged Nonprofit Arts Organizations: The Results of a National Survey – which she completed over a three-year period while working as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs. She broadened her inquiry to survey myriad nonprofit arts organizations throughout the United States, focusing on what differentiates the groups with a 501(c)(3) status from commercially driven ventures.

“It intrigued me whether the need for survival prompted nonprofits to highlight their civic engagement role – or if there were other reasons,” Kim explains. “One of the findings I didn’t expect was the role of associations and collaboratives in encouraging nonprofit arts organizations to recognize ‘civic and community engagement’ as one of the critical factors they should embody.”

A Winning Formula

Another unexpected outcome for Kim: her study won the inaugural Createquity Arts Research Prize, entitling her to a $500 cash award and a platform for sharing her work with a wider audience. In our review of more than 500 arts research studies for the Research Prize, Kim’s publication rose to the top for several reasons: a high-level methodological design, the use of previously validated survey instruments, a widely representative sample, and a topic with resonance in the arts community. This work exemplifies Createquity’s interest in encouraging arts institutions to prioritize community needs ahead of their own prosperity.

First published in 2016 in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Kim’s article includes and draws on a wide-ranging literature review. The study relies on a varied and robust combination of instruments and data sources including:

• structured interviews with 21 nonprofit arts organization directors
• a survey of 900+ arts organizations, with questions based on the qualitative interview results
• financial data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics to uncover income-source patterns

The survey was used to place arts organizations on a matrix measuring “civic roles” and “market roles,” based on a validated index of organizational behaviors developed by other researchers. Kim used the above methods to test hypotheses about the relationships nonprofit arts organizations have with other types of community organizations, their peer organizations’ emphasis on civic duties, the level of bureaucracy in their governance, and their reliance on program fees for revenue.

Key Findings

Kim uncovers several notable ways in which civically engaged arts organizations differ from more market-driven arts organizations, including:

• they maintain stronger networks with other community organizations such as schools, senior centers, etc.
• they consider civic engagement a key force driving the mission
• they’re consciously aware of their nonprofit status

The study finds that charging and receiving a higher share of program revenue negatively correlates with civic engagement. Indeed, revenue sourcing is one of the inquiry’s driving concerns. Noting that arts nonprofits often rely on a mix of contributions and selling tickets, Kim poses a central question that arts nonprofits confront: “How can they maintain marketable programs and share responsibility for the wellbeing of their community without compromising either?”

Many nonprofits surveyed reported high levels of involvement in both market roles and civic roles, so Kim conducted additional analysis taking market roles into account. She finds a greater correlation between network diversity (the number and variety of other organizations worked with in the past year) and civic engagement, when an organization performs both roles. Interviews with directors reveal that work with outside community groups and organizations helps arts nonprofits implement civically relevant programming and reach new audiences within their markets.

Perhaps surprisingly, “Characteristics” does not find a significant correlation between an arts organization’s reliance on government funding and its level of civic engagement. Kim points out in her literature review that several studies hypothesize a negative relationship between the two, while others argue for a positive correlation – and that empirical results are mixed. (At any rate, as Createquity has noted, the vast majority of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the private sector rather than government funding.)

Kim also hypothesized that a rigid and bureaucratic governance structure would be negatively associated with civic engagement. In fact, however, the survey responses indicate the opposite relationship. Because this finding conflicts with some of her interview data, Kim recommends more research in this area before a conclusion is reached, noting that this study does not establish a causal relationship between these factors.

Room for Growth

Kim notes that these findings cannot tell us definitively whether collaborating with other organizations causes nonprofits to be more civically engaged, or if civically engaged organizations are more likely to seek out collaboration. It also does not shed light on how effective the efforts of civically minded nonprofits are in achieving outcomes. However, the article does make a strong argument that partnering with other types of organizations will strengthen ties with communities and potential audiences.

The study’s survey instruments themselves contain a bit of wiggle room in terms of reliability. For example, respondents were asked to rate their involvement in various activities on a scale of 0 to 100, a huge range with no clear benchmarks that may have been vulnerable to bias in unpredictable ways. Future research on this topic would benefit from a lower reliance on self-reported, subjective measures like these.

Nevertheless, we find much to praise about the innovative approach that “Characteristics of Civically Engaged Nonprofit Organizations” uses to uncover and elucidate some of the key questions and priorities that nonprofit arts organizations face in the real world.

“I hope this encourages researchers to study the role of arts nonprofits, as they are critical elements to improve our civic life,” says Kim, now an assistant professor at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. “And I hope it helps arts nonprofit managers recognize the role of associations and informal networks in influencing program decisions at individual organizations.”

“Old World Inspirational Sign,” by Flickr user Nicholas Raymond

It’s no secret that embarking on a professional career in the arts requires a degree of boldness in the face of economic uncertainty. The prevailing stereotype of the “starving artist” indicates that people do so anyway – either willing to forego comfort for creativity’s sake, possessing alternative income (such as a day job or family help), and/or confident that their talent and drive will see them through. But how long do they stick with it before throwing in the towel – or professionally shifting gears? As the Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote: “Necessity is stronger far than art.”

A study from 2016 assesses the odds of artistic longevity through the prism of academia: does a formal education enhance one’s chances of making it (and staying) in the arts? Using data gathered by Statistics Denmark, “Artistic education matters: survival in the arts occupations” analyzes more than 27,000 employment records between 1996 and 2012 across five categories of Danish artists: visual artists, choreographers and dancers, composers and musicians, film/stage actors and directors, and writers (including journalists).

Authors Trine Bille and Søren Jensen estimate the impact of a formal artistic education on the length of artists’ careers in each of these groups. (The definitions of “relevant education” and “relevant industry” for each arts group are specified in an appendix to the report.) Among their key findings:

• Formal education reduces the rate of attrition (i.e., abandoning an arts career) for musicians, actors and writers.
• The same correlation is not seen among visual artists and dancers, though these samples are smaller.
• Exit rates – especially early in a career – vary between artists in different fields.

Methods of Inquiry

The Bille/Jensen report leverages Statistics Denmark, an agency that collects a remarkable census of all Danish citizens covering employment, income, industry, age, and gender, among many other topics. Made possible via a personal identification number associated with every Danish citizen, this is arguably the most robust longitudinal dataset we’ve ever encountered at Createquity. For its purposes, “Artistic Education Matters” homes in on people ages 18 to 70 (excluding pensioners) who have a positive income primarily generated by work in one of the five defined arts categories over the 17-year time frame of the study. Exit rates are marked by a ‘‘definitive exit from the artistic labor market’’ – a shift in occupation that continues throughout the observed period without a return to arts employment.

Via a literature review, the authors point to several hurdles in the arts labor market, including an excess supply of artists, paltry average income, skewed income distribution, and a low overall survival rate, with just 20% of the subjects remaining in their fields after ten years. “Compared to other fields of employment,” they write, “the arts seem to be a risky business.”

Bille and Jensen’s conclusions focus on artistic survival rates – the odds of remaining in an arts profession – more than income levels. Indeed, they cite a host of cultural and economic literature indicating that artistic education does not have a significant impact on income, noting that many artists are self-taught and theorizing that “indefinable” factors – such as talent, creativity, and ambition – may contribute more to higher rates of payment than formal training does. (Despite this conclusion, Bille and Jensen perform their own analysis of income levels in the dataset and find that, at least for Danish musicians, actors, and writers, a relevant education actually does positively affect earnings. Income from self-employment is not included in the study, though, so we should take those results with a grain of salt.) While acknowledging that “higher income makes [artists] better able to live from their arts,” “Artistic Education Matters” concerns itself mainly with education’s effect on longevity – not financial success per se – in a chosen arts field.

Bille and Jensen employ the Cox model of regression analysis to to investigate what factors predict longevity in the marketplace as an artist, controlling for income level, relevant experience (i.e., working in the field in which the artists studied), other experience, additional employment, and demographic variables such as gender and age.

Motley Crews

Overall, across the five artist groups studied, only about 20% remain in their chosen occupation after 10 years. The report makes clear, though, that the impact of an arts degree varies considerably by discipline. Below we discuss which groups benefit most from a relevant education, from most to least:

• Writers: the authors note that “it is not possible to separate authors from journalists” in the dataset, and this is the largest group, with 14,943 subjects. About 20% have a relevant education: for them, the exit rate after five years is 20%, compared to more than 60% for those without a writing degree. Bille and Jensen note that journalism in particular “functions more like an ordinary labor market, where an education may have an important signaling effect to employers.”
• Actors: the sample of 3,813 “film, stage, and related actors and directors” shows this group to be most vulnerable to an early exit. While Bille and Jensen note that “an actor can get a job without any formal education or other experience,” 16% of the actors had in fact formally studied their craft. At the five-year point, only 45% of those with a relevant education had left the field, compared to 75% of those without.
• Musicians: the sample of 3,161 “composers, musicians, and singers” shows 34% with a music degree; among this group, 55% left after five years, compared to 70% for those without. The authors note relatively high barriers for entry in this field: “technical skills may have an impact on the survival.”
• Dancers: The group of “choreographers and dancers” has only 296 subjects; just 9% of them have formal dance training, and this is said to have “no impact on staying in the profession” (the five-year exit rate difference is less than five percentage points). However, the authors note the small dataset: “The problem is that there are very few observations for this group.”
• Visual Artists: Among 4,851 “sculptors, painters, and related artists” (including workers commercial fields like advertising) the authors report that just 2% have a formal arts education, “which means that most of these visual artists were autodidacts.” Based on this small sample, the formal education “seems to have no impact” on an early exit.

Bille and Jensen also cite data from a 2005 French study – Gender differentiated effect of time in performing arts professions (Coulangeon et al), which investigated survival function estimates for musicians, actors, and dancers in France from the mid-1980s to 2000. Both studies indicate that the most vulnerable period of attrition for all artist groups is in the two years following entry to the labor market; the Danish study, with a wider dataset, shows an even more dramatic early exit rate than the French study.

What Else Might Be Going On?

An obvious and tempting conclusion to draw from these results is that, yes, an arts degree is valuable, at least if one works in music, theater, or literature and if one’s goal is to stay in the profession for as long as possible. Yet for all its specificity, this analysis leaves several key questions unanswered and hypotheses unexplored. Among them are:

• Are these results simply an indication that people who bother to get a formal education in the arts are more committed to their chosen art form in the first place? Could there be a sunk-cost effect where people feel like they ought to stay in an arts field longer if they invested substantial time and resources getting trained in it? Especially since, for most, that probably also meant not getting a degree in some other field?
• Are the conclusions about visual artists and dancers – that formal education has little impact on longevity – simply a reflection of limited data for those groups or is there something more to this than first-glance results?
• Is it possible that people who survive the longest in the arts have alternative income streams (such as family help) that wouldn’t be reflected in this dataset?
• What is the relationship between survival in the arts and financial success? The authors note that a relevant education correlates with higher salaries for three of the arts groups – musicians, actors, and writers – and these are the same groups in which education is seen to increase longevity.
• What role does self-employment play in all this? Unfortunately, the authors chose not to include income from self-employment in the analysis due to challenges with the dataset, which could have skewed the results in unpredictable ways.
• Would we see these same types of results looking at similar data from a different country and/or a different time frame?

The Bille/Jensen study would have benefitted from a closer examination of these hypotheses as they relate to the Danish dataset. With its literature review and emphasis on longevity, this report adds a helpful lens to research gathered by Createquity last year in “The BFA’s Dance with Inequality” – which cast some doubt on the importance of arts degrees for lower-income students – as well as our 2016 article “Who Can Afford to Be a Starving Artist?” But because the study is light on analysis of socioeconomic factors and personal wealth – particularly the role that secondary income support plays in extending an artistic career – it doesn’t illuminate its subject as much as it could.

Then there are socio-political aspects such as government support for arts education: Denmark has a robust social safety net compared to, say, the United States, which may play into arts longevity. Getting a formal arts education in Denmark – where university education is free and living costs are buttressed by a system of grants – does not entail the equity barriers found in countries with high, generally unsubsidized university costs (especially at the graduate level).

Still, with an extraordinarily comprehensive national dataset, thoughtful analysis, and pinpointed conclusions, Bille and Jensen make a strong case for the connection between formal art education and longevity in an artistic career, especially for those working in music, theater/film, and literature. This should be good news to arts school students and grads who hope to spend their lives doing nothing else.

Seats – photo by flickr user Ryan Wiedmaier

Build. Build. Build. So goes the unofficial mantra of arts marketers as arts organizations seek to maintain relevance in a changing society. Along with the parallel pursuit of financial stability, the goals have been clear: build demand for arts experiences to build and diversify audiences that build revenues. But the how in this seemingly linear formula – the pathways toward achieving these goals – remains less clear.

A 2016 report from the Australia Council for the Arts flips the usual script by drawing attention to the supply side of the equation. In “Showcasing Creativity: Programming and Presenting First Nations Performing Arts,” researchers Jackie Bailey and Hung-Yen Yang of BYP Group aim to understand the motivations – and the barriers – involved in presenting performances by Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (the “First Nations” referenced in the title). In contrast to most previous examinations of audience development and diversification, this study focuses on the programs themselves, and the people curating them. How does the current performing arts landscape in Australia promote or prohibit inclusive cultural narratives? What does it take to establish a supportive, equitable infrastructure? What cultural factors get in the way?

“Showcasing Creativity” is the second study in a series of three that explore Indigenous performing arts in Australia from the perspective of audiences, the market (i.e., presenters and producers), and the creators, respectively. The sequence of studies alone suggests multiple nuanced paths toward building audiences. More notably, it contextualizes the notion of audience development by placing it within a broader framework for addressing cultural inequities in the Australian performing arts infrastructure. In other words, it paints a picture of audience development as one point of intervention among many.

Interest vs. Attendance

In a national arts participation survey from 2014, nearly two-thirds of Australians surveyed expressed interest in First Nations performing arts (i.e., works with Indigenous creative involvement, Indigenous cultural expressions, or content tied to Indigenous-related histories, groups, or politics). However, the survey revealed that only one in four actually attended First Nations arts events. Exploring this gap between interest and attendance, “Showcasing Creativity” analyzes data collected through a mixed-methods approach that includes a mapping of publicly available programs across 135 “mainstream” venues (defined as presenting works from various cultural backgrounds with no sole focus on Indigenous arts and no control or management solely by Indigenous people); a survey among 44 mainstream presenters, six Indigenous presenters, and 11 producers; and 40 interviews with presenters and producers, half conducted before the survey and the other half after.

“Showcasing Creativity” primarily focuses on shortfalls in programming and marketing that, if addressed, might improve and increase opportunities to present First Nations performing arts. An assessment of the landscape revealed a number of key findings.

• Programming: Only 2% of approximately 6,000 works programmed in 2014-15 or 2015 (depending on a venue’s season) were First Nations performing arts. Moreover, a mere 12 presenters of the 135 included in the mapping were responsible for more than a third of this programming. Nearly half of Australian presenters did not program First Nations arts at all, and more than a third of works programmed were small in scale, with less than five performers. Five works, produced by companies with known brands, accounted for almost a third of total First Nations arts programming.
• Marketing: Though audiences perceive First Nations arts as “traditional,” they are motivated to engage with contemporary works, which accounted for 84% of First Nations works presented in 2015. Only a third of presenters reported that their most recent First Nations program, on average, filled more than 75% of house capacity. Although a third of survey respondents reported that box office results failed to meet their expectations over the past two years, audience satisfaction for those who attended was high – suggesting that box office results might be attributed to limited reach in marketing, as opposed to likeability of works.

Presenters also cited several motivators for presenting First Nations arts, including opportunities to:

• engage existing audiences with new and/or challenging content
• build new audiences
• support more Indigenous works
• engage local Indigenous communities
• demonstrate breadth in artistic excellence
• meet strategic goals tied to community engagement or a broader reconciliation agenda

Perceived Barriers

What, then, comes between these motivators among decision makers and the actual implementation of programs? One such obstacle is financial risk, which can be prohibitive for some presenters and producers. Nearly half of survey respondents cited financial risk as a major obstacle, along with the price tags attached to available, brand-name works. This partially explains why presenters tend to opt for smaller, cheaper productions. Despite this perceived risk, the report highlights opportunities to grow attendance in metropolitan areas, where there are more risk-taking audiences, not to mention an existing concentration of First Nations performing arts programming.

Other perceived obstacles that are less tangible but equally significant include:

• tokenism, as indicated by the third of mainstream presenters that programmed only one Indigenous work in 2015
• concerns about the receptiveness of conservative audiences to the seriousness of themes in First Nations works
• fear of wrongly selecting, presenting, and marketing Indigenous works in the absence of those with lived experiences and/or cultural knowledge that might otherwise inform decision-making
• systemic racism, which manifests through discriminatory practices and programming decisions that favor dominant, Western cultural paradigms

Also worthy of note: although the majority of First Nations arts programming (59%) takes place in larger Australian cities, they represent only 2% of total performing arts in those cities. By contrast, these percentages are higher in remote and regional parts of Australia (7% and 3%, respectively), despite deep-seated racial tensions that may cause non-Indigenous audiences to be less receptive to such works. This section of “Showcasing Creativity”  offers a rich trove of qualitative data that paints a highly revealing picture of the race anxieties of Australian audiences and programmers alike. As one interviewee suggests, “Living in a very European community it is hard to get audiences to engage with Indigenous work. People see it as earnest, preachy and not fun.”

Multiple Pathways

What does all of this mean? Readers may recall Createquity’s August 2016 feature, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” which sifted through a number of visions that emerged throughout the decades-old history of cultural equity advocacy in the United States. The big takeaway was that the four distinct visions that were parsed out – diversity, prosperity, redistribution, and self-determination – were not mutually exclusive, as one often had implications for another, despite differences in desired outcomes.

It’s no coincidence, then, that “Showcasing Creativity” similarly suggests multiple pathways for addressing inequities in the Australian performing arts infrastructure. One such pathway is the development of alternative presenting opportunities – such as Blak Lines, a touring initiative highlighted in the report that presents contemporary First Nations dance and theatre through a consortium of venues across Australia. This type of initiative – most aligned with the diversity vision for cultural equity, addressing homogeneity within mainstream institutions – holds promise in its ability to develop relationships between presenters, audiences, and Indigenous artists and communities, while providing leeway for targeted, localized marketing.

Another pathway might be increased opportunities for Indigenous people to help maintain creative control and integrity of First Nations works. As an example of the self-determination vision – which centers communities’ ownership of cultural life – this would include greater opportunities to involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in non-performer roles, where there is further underrepresentation. These include producer, technical, or administrative roles that often entail greater decision-making responsibilities.

There is also something to be said about how presenters find First Nations works. Nearly three-fourths of survey respondents indicated that prior relationships and peer networks with artists, producers, and community members are most important in this context. Similarly, in building capacity to deal with cultural sensitivities, peer-to-peer learning and long-term community engagement activities help to establish the meaningful relationships needed to foster in-depth, cross-cultural exchange. Ultimately, social networks and relationship building become central to addressing the intangible obstacles above.

“Showcasing Creativity” highlights the varying, simultaneous efforts needed to address cultural inequities, encouraging us to move away from any singular path and toward more coordination to effect and sustain infrastructure-wide change. The report’s section on barriers to programming First Nations work, in particular, offers a new and valuable contribution to the literature that is remarkable for its candor. As noted in this report, additional research about learning and training opportunities for technical and administrative roles might prove useful in understanding what barriers exist for Indigenous populations beyond performer roles. We would also love to see more research examining how these kinds of cross-cultural programming challenges play out in other national contexts.

Photo by NEC Corporation of America with Creative Commons license

Nowadays when we knock on the door of a child’s room to check in, we’re likely as not to see her staring at a screen. Is that a good thing? Should we be happier to find the kid reading, singing, or drawing?

These (and many other) questions lie at the heart of “Arts and Cultural Participation among Children and Young People: Insights from the Growing up in Ireland Study,” a 2016 report commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland. The report attempts to gauge the impact of children’s cultural engagement in the context of our digital era.

Authored by Emer Smyth, research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), “Arts and Cultural Participation” extracts and examines data from Growing up in Ireland – the National Longitudinal Study of Children (GUI), a government-funded study conducted from 2006 through 2013. Smyth’s analysis, which draws on the arts-and-culture part of the GUI data, views cultural engagement through a multifaceted prism. Covering a broad age range from early childhood to the throes of adolescence, “Arts and Cultural Participation” weaves seemingly tangential activities like reading, television viewing, and computer screen time into the findings, all while weighing the effects of social disparities in income, education, and cultural access.

Three key findings emerge from Smyth’s analysis of the data:

• Cultural engagement appears to boost both academic skills and socio-emotional wellbeing for participating children.
• The availability of school-based cultural activities correlates with extracurricular arts participation.
• Despite the best efforts of school-based interventions, engagement with culture and the arts varies widely among demographic groups in Irish society.

Casting a Wide Net

Growing Up in Ireland has a longitudinal design – with data gathered from the same subjects at progressive time points – that probes the cumulative effects of various activities in people’s lives over several years. The inquiry follows two cohorts of children: a group of 11,134 subjects recruited at 9 months of age and then surveyed at ages 3 and 5; and a second cohort of 8,568 children recruited at 9 years of age and again surveyed at age 13.

Smyth’s report for the Arts Council analyzes this data with respect to the likelihood of different groups of children to engage in cultural activities, the influence of schools’ emphasis on cultural activities on children’s cultural engagement outside of school, and the relationship between cultural participation, academic skills, and socio-emotional wellbeing. For younger subjects, researchers interviewed primary and secondary caregivers to learn about activities outside the classroom such as creative play and cultural outings. For older children, questionnaires given to principals and teachers tracked structured activities offered in schools – music, drama, painting and drawing classes – as well as more passive pursuits like attending cultural events. Data for the older group also includes interviews with the subjects themselves.

The GUI dataset tracks two sets of outcomes: cognitive development (as measured by standardized tests) and wellbeing (as measured by the prevalence of socio-emotional difficulties). They control for some individual and family characteristics, such as preschool childcare at age 3, but there are no controls for individual personality traits or certain other environmental factors that might have a role in shaping these outcomes. Thus, the findings are arguably not as reliable as would be the case if the study used an experimental design.

That said, there are other reasons to pay heed to “Arts and Cultural Participation.” While we can’t be sure that the outcomes in question follow solely from cultural engagement, the longitudinal nature of the study, with its ability to compare the same people at different points in time, points provides a useful (and relatively rare) companion to experimental inquiries that typically focus on the short-term effects of engagement. Also of note is GUI’s robust sample size (nearly 20,000 subjects) covering a broad and representative cross-section of Ireland’s population. And while there may be some cultural specificity to studying an ethnically homogenous country like Ireland, that makes the consistency of the findings with studies of the value of arts and culture in other countries all the more striking.

What is Culture, Anyway?

Perhaps the most distinctive trait of the Arts Council report is its broad definition of cultural engagement. The analysis incorporates the common pastimes of reading, watching television, and engaging in screen time (including video games) on computers or mobile devices.

The results are telling. Of all included activities, reading gets the highest marks in terms of enhancing both cognition and wellbeing. The report notes that among younger children, “being read to frequently and having more access to books contributes to improved vocabulary.” Unsurprisingly, such children later take up reading on their own. For older kids, “self-directed reading contributes to cognitive development (in terms of both verbal and numeric skills) as well as to academic self-confidence [and] socio-economic wellbeing.” The report cites the country’s relatively high use of libraries and recommends them as places to promote cultural engagement.

In contrast, television viewing and computer screen time yield mixed results: watching more television is associated with improved vocabulary and better reading achievement – but also with greater socio-emotional difficulties. Similar findings emerge for computer screen time. Smyth concludes that television and screen time may “promote verbal skills but at the expense of poorer socio-emotional wellbeing and more negative attitudes to school.” (Interestingly, no attempt is made to single out social media, possibly because at the outset of the GUI study in 2006, it was not as prevalent as it is now.)

Meanwhile, participatory engagement with the arts – activities such as painting/drawing, music or other types of creative expression, and attending cultural events – correlate with improvement in both test scores and socio-emotional wellbeing. These trends are amplified as the subjects age. “Being involved in a structured cultural activity is associated with positive outcomes across all domains,” Smyth writes, “with higher achievement levels, academic self-confidence and happiness, and lower levels of anxiety and socio-emotional difficulties.” However, it’s worth noting that the magnitude of benefits of arts activities was quite a bit less than the positive impacts of reading for pleasure (for pre-teens) or being read to (for toddlers).

Disparities in Access

Which segments of the population actually enjoy the benefits of cultural participation? The data indicates disparities in youngsters’ cultural engagement along several dimensions:

• Income. Among younger children, “more advantaged families are more likely to read to their child, take them on educational visits and cultural outings, and encourage them to engage in creative play.” Older kids from advantaged families report higher participation in organized after-school activities (which often require payment).
• Gender. Girls engage more frequently than boys across several categories of arts and culture. E.g.: “Remarkable gender differences were evident in the prevalence of painting or drawing (67 percent of girls did so every day compared with 42 percent of boys) and in enjoying music or dance (73 percent compared with 46 percent doing so every day).”
• Population density. Living in an urban area facilitates greater access to some amenities such as cultural venues, libraries, and cinema houses. However, the report cites “no significant difference between urban and rural areas” for participatory activities like painting/drawing, reading, and taking lessons in music/dance/drama.
• Immigrant status. The report cites a “significant difference” between immigrant and native Irish children in involvement in cultural activities in and out of the home, relating this in part to language barriers.

Despite these societal disparities, there’s one place where varied demographic groups can simultaneously encounter arts and culture activities: in school.

The Great Equalizer?

The report reveals a clear correlation between school-based cultural programs and extracurricular participation, both in structured after-school activities and in reading for pleasure. This suggests cultural curricula can offset some of the disparities described above: “school may be the main point of access to arts and cultural activities for many students.”

This effect is apparent even after taking socioeconomic characteristics of individual students into account. Yet Smyth notes that interventions such as Ireland’s Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) program, which launched in 2005 to ensure exposure to the arts among disadvantaged students, have not completely corrected the imbalance among different social classes. “In spite of urban DEIS schools’ promotion of cultural activities,” she writes, “their students are much less likely than others to read for pleasure or to take music/drama lessons and are more likely to spend a lot of time watching television or playing computer games.” What is not clear from the report is whether disadvantaged schools with these programs promote higher levels of cultural engagement in their students than schools without the programs would.

All in all, “Arts and Cultural Participation” makes a solid case for the benefits of cultural engagement among young people across all demographics. It points to school-based cultural activities as one means of increasing children’s engagement with arts and culture, even if it’s not a panacea. But while what we traditionally think of as arts activities (painting, drawing, music, etc.) can lay claim to some of these benefits, the most striking finding of the report is the across-the-board value of reading for pleasure, both in early childhood and especially in adolescence. So to answer the question posed at the beginning, if you catch your 13-year-old deep into the latest volume of The Hunger Games, it’s occasion to celebrate.

“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.

In a previous Createquity Research Spotlight, we wrote about the “What Works” initiative in the UK, which borrows a policy evaluation methodology from the medical community and applies it to (among other things) the arts. In this case, HULA is developing metrics to evaluate arts and humanities using the discipline’s own tools.

HULA does this by repositioning the humanities as “an assemblage of craft practices,” whereby each craft embodies distinctive goals, logical methods,and results that are passed from master to apprentice over thousands of years. For example, in the craft of pottery-making, we could attribute a set of tools, techniques, and sequencing – a general sense of purposeful and procedural logic – that all contribute toward creating a beautiful or useful product. By organizing humanities as individual practices and crafts, we can start to identify different steps, logical patterns, and tools that each activity utilizes to produce an outcome.

In this research context, human development itself is the desired outcome. The HULA white paper thus explores three key research questions:

1. How do the humanities contribute to human development?
2. To what extent are the humanities effective in achieving this goal?
3. How can we measure the effects of the humanities anyway?

HULA defines “human development” in terms of education, subdividing that definition in two ways: 1) education as a system of institutions, maintained by the state to serve utilitarian purposes (such as cultivating civic service or civic responsibility); and 2) education as an individual act of instruction, which relates to personal development. In short, the teaching of humanities is likened to the practice of “crafts,” which also help advance education and contribute to human development.

To explore how different humanities practices contribute to these educational outcomes, HULA identifies various elements – or building blocks – that make up different humanities practices. All of these elements are then sorted and coded according to HULA’s proposed methodological framework; this allows us to see which elements are different or common to various humanities practices, and thus track how they lead to similar or dissimilar learning pathways toward the goal of human development.

In Figure 1 below, HULA defines four sequential stages of a learning pathway and attributes possible elements of a given craft to certain learning processes or outcomes: input, processing, and short-term and long-term results. In this example, the red arrows represent the pathway of a political philosophy instructor who engages students in close readings (verbal input) and logical debate (cognitive-analytical analysis), with the aim to encourage understanding of political concepts (the short-term goal), which in turn may enable students to become more civic-minded citizens (the long-term goal).

Figure 1. Example of a HULA Learning Pathway. Adapted from “Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper”, by The HULA Research Team. 2015, p.15.

HULA’s application of coding schemes to different humanities activities requires a set of assumptions about each humanities practice or craft, including the elements it comprises, how it works, what it is trying to achieve, and which skills it develops. These assumptions draw on the implicit logic associated with the practice or craft. Once these elements are broken down, the study assigns the process and outcome advanced by each element. The elements are thus coded categorically along a structured framework of possible learning pathways, which allows us to track the progress and outcome of a given humanities practice or craft. To see how this coding process works in detail, the HULA study on 30 Years of Illinois Humanities Council Grant-Making features appendices of the “code structure” and “code sets” used to track the different methods and mechanisms followed by various humanities activities.

Does this sound complicated? Indeed, applying this methodology, with its myriad definitions and categorizations, requires users to absorb concepts that can be rather academic and abstract. This barrier could limit the adoption of HULA’s methodology beyond the realm of the academy.

Still, the research logic of the study is worth a deeper dive. The core concept of its design makes sense, especially when the terms of its application are simplified. Ultimately, by coding and analyzing humanities as a series of crafts – each of which has its own elemental purpose and logic –we have a new way of unpacking what each practice is really about, what elements it comprises, how it works, and towards which learning outcomes it steers.

If we can manage to make the language of the HULA model a bit more accessible, we just might have a promising methodology for assessing the value of the humanities – using evaluation tools drawn from the discipline itself, as opposed to metrics from other disciplines, which are often an imperfect fit.

Cover image: “Pottery” courtesy of Lennart Tange. via Flickr Creative Commons license.

The UK government has been asking just this question. Drawing from the experience of the medical community’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) model, which systematically assesses and synthesizes the cost-effectiveness of medical interventions to help the UK National Health Service (NHS) prioritize its public spending, the UK Cabinet office has envisioned its What Works initiative as a “NICE for social policy.”

Launched in March 2013, the What Works Network set out to evaluate the performance of public policies and programs using evidence collected throughout their implementation. For every policy or program, What Works tracks which social benefits that program has achieved and how much money those benefits cost per participant. What Works evaluations aim to help policymakers and practitioners improve their decision-making process by providing evidence and advising on which interventions offered the best value for money.

Generally speaking, the What Works methodology rates a policy or program on its effectiveness according to indicators that are specific to the sector in question. For example, the success of an education policy might be rated according to how many additional months of progress a student makes in a classroom. This rating becomes even more useful to practitioners when complemented by an estimate of how much money it costs per student to implement the policy.

Now in the Network’s third year of operation, seven “What Works Centres” and two affiliate members – What Works Scotland and the Public Policy Institute for Wales – have been established thus far across the UK, each focused on a particular area of policy. They monitor and evaluate interventions according to a standardized methodology in seven categories: educational achievement, local economic growth, crime reduction, health and social care, wellbeing, improved quality of life for older people, and early intervention for at-risk children. And yes, the What Works initiative is evaluating arts interventions within the broader context of these public policy areas.

For example, the What Works Centre for Well-Being analyzes the impacts of culture and sports on wellbeing according to the same four dimensions – satisfaction with life, happiness, worthwhileness, and anxiety – used by the National Statistics of the UK to assess personal wellbeing and subjective wellbeing. Similarly, the Sutton Trust and Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit provides an easy-to-read ranking on the cost-effectiveness of arts participation for improving educational outcomes for students aged 5-16, relative to other interventions.

So what does What Works say about how the arts work? A report issued by the UK government in 2014 presented a selection of early findings from the six What Works Centres that had been active up to that date. Two projects relating to the arts were included. One project from the Centre for Local Economic Growth examined 36 evaluations covering the impact of major sport and culture projects on the local economy and found that the overall measurable impacts were rare, and small if they existed at all. Built facilities, however – with sporting facilities comprising the vast bulk of the evidence – might increase the value of properties in their immediate vicinity. The Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit found that arts participation had a low positive impact on student education attainment (defined as “additional months progress you might expect pupils to make as a result of an approach being used in school, taking average pupil progress over a year as a benchmark”), but for much lower cost compared to some other learning interventions with similar impact, such as attending summer school or using teaching assistants. The Teaching & Learning Toolkit collects impact evidence from EEF projects covering 34 education topics, and impact results are regularly updated and summarized as they are collected.

What Works’s venture into evidence-based policy was still in its infancy at the time of the report’s publication. Since then, several new arts-related projects have been commissioned and evaluated. An “Act, Sing, Play” project sought to answer whether exposure to high quality music education was more cost-effective than drama participation for improving students’ literacy and math scores, and another “SHINE on Manchester” project assessed to what extent Saturday music education improved students’ literacy and math scores. While assessments of these two projects did not yield convincing evidence that participation in the arts helped achieve the designated outcomes of improved literacy and math scores, they also did not discount the possibility that arts participation might yield other positive outcomes.

Is evidence-based evaluation of public policy the wave of the future? In the United States, a loose alliance of several organizations would like to make it so. Results for America aims to spearhead smart policy changes at all government levels by encouraging the use of best available data, evidence and evaluation about what’s effective. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) is likewise active in this area, having recently absorbed the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a Washington think tank that had success in advocating for government reforms, into its grantmaking. At this very moment, LJAF is holding a $15 million competition to encourage government and nonprofit organizations to implement highly effective programs, and Results for America just launched a global initiative “identifying the policies, programs and systems that governments are using to support the production and use of data and evidence” called Results for All.

In theory, this approach of collecting, synthesizing, and ranking evidence from a diverse range of policy and program evaluations will help make that evidence accessible to a wide audience – and that is undoubtedly a good thing. At the same time, paring down the impacts of policies and programs to cost-effectiveness might be challenging when goals are less readily quantifiable, or where effectiveness needs to be assessed according to more innovative or perhaps even abstract criteria. In such cases, less relevant targets might become more appealing to policymakers because they are cheaper or easier to tag with numbers, resulting in an oversimplified framework for measuring impact that displaces a true understanding of effectiveness. Arts and cultural policies arguably are particularly vulnerable to this risk, particularly given that we are only beginning to understand the true nature of their value to individuals and society. At Createquity, we don’t think it is impossible for the benefits of the arts to be assessed under a What-Works-style evaluation framework, but we do have to be careful that we are attempting to measure the right things – the things that arts are actually good for.

The relatively small and weak body of information and data on the impacts of arts/culture policies and programs shows that there are significant gaps and limitations – but also much room to grow – for What Works’s assessments of arts interventions going forward. In the meantime, we can do our part to contribute evidence to What Works inquiries by submitting tips, research and assessments of public policies to the relevant Centres. As of publication, EEF is seeking new education interventions to fund and evaluate, and welcomes applications from “projects that show promising evidence of having a measurable impact on attainment or a directly related outcome” until December 9.

Cover image: “Mathematica” courtesy of the Ivan T. via Flickr Creative Commons license.

Ukulélé — photo by flickr user oh_debby

In a perfect world, who should have access to the arts? Among artists, arts administrators, and arts educators the answer is likely to be unanimous: “Everyone!” And yet for the most part, that conviction is based on little more than gut instinct and personal experience. Do we actually have any evidence that people are happier with their lives for having art in it?

Those of you who read Createquity’s recent article on television and wellbeing might have noticed an interesting tidbit: according to our analysis of data from the 2012 General Social Survey, there is no relationship between having attended an exhibit or performance in the past year and one’s satisfaction with life, after controlling for factors such as health and income. Left unexplored by that analysis, however, was the question of more active forms of participation – i.e., creation and performance. Enter “Artful Living,” a recent paper from Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Not only does the 2014 study reveal a positive correlation between several forms of active participation and life satisfaction (which some scientists refer to as “subjective wellbeing”), it finds that some forms of art increase people’s wellbeing more than others, and that the arts improve some people’s lives more noticeably than others, too.

In “Artful Living,” Steven Tepper and his team examine the relationship between several creative pastimes and subjective wellbeing, and compare findings across demographic groups. The authors focus specifically on “artistic practice” (including activities such as playing a musical instrument and craft-making), rather than more passive forms of arts participation, such as attendance and reception.

Drawing on data from three national surveys, the researchers find a generally positive relationship between maintaining an artistic practice and various measures of subjective wellbeing. For instance, using a dataset of over 20,000 responses to the DDB Needham Life Style Survey of consumer attitudes in the U.S., the authors find that all three of the artistic practices examined (playing a musical instrument, gardening, and craft-making) are all positively associated with life satisfaction. Moreover, life satisfaction increases with greater frequency of participation in any of these activities. While the relationships are positive across the board, there are considerable differences between those three practices: the wellbeing gains associated with playing an instrument are almost twice as large as those for craft-making.

Besides the differences across artistic practices, the researchers observe that these positive correlations are more pronounced among women and people of color than their male and white counterparts. The relationships are particularly strong for women engaged in craft-making and gardening and people of color who either play an instrument or garden. The authors theorize that this might be attributed to certain benefits of artistic practice like self-expression and a greater sense of personal control and efficacy, which might be particularly helpful for improving the wellbeing of historically marginalized groups.

In addition to the DDB data, the Curb Center researchers analyzed data from a survey of 1,700 college seniors at nine institutions (the Double Major Student Survey) and from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which surveyed slightly more than 4,000 graduates from 76 art colleges. The results from the Double Major Student Survey lead the authors to conclude that students who engage in arts activities have a more positive self-image and social outlook. The SNAAP data indicates higher levels of life satisfaction among former arts students who have continued their artistic practice, but only among those who feel that they have adequate time to practice their art. Those who continue to create art but feel they don’t have enough time to do so report lower levels of life satisfaction than arts graduates who gave up their creative work entirely.

While these findings are intriguing, it is difficult to say how meaningful these associations are, as the effect sizes are fairly small. The developed models include variables such as age, race, gender, income, employment status, and marital status, plus data on respondents’ artistic practice. All of these variables together only explain about 8 to 13 percent of respondents’ subjective wellbeing.

The authors try to contextualize the size of the wellbeing increases associated with an artistic practice by stating that the increases are comparable to or greater than those that result from being married or having children. That seems pretty impressive at first glance, until one thinks about the fact that over 30 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that spending quality time with a crying newborn at 2am is a decidedly mixed blessing. It turns out that the ups and downs of these life-changing events are reflected in wellbeing surveys: the impact of marriage on wellbeing is fairly mixed, and while individual studies have conflicting results, it seems like levels of life satisfaction generally aren’t so different for parents and non-parents.

A more helpful point of comparison is provided in a study that compares the wellbeing impacts of sports and cultural engagement in the U.K., which came out the same year as “Artful Living.” As in “Artful Living,” the British researchers found a positive, statistically-significant relationship between artistic endeavors and life satisfaction. However, the increase in life satisfaction associated with arts engagement is slightly lower than that of participation in sports. This certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, but it demonstrates how comparisons can be used to make the effect sizes intelligible.

Even with these caveats, “Artful Living” serves as a great example of exploratory work demonstrating the relationship between the arts and wellbeing in the U.S. It also gives us valuable insight into the varying effects of artistic practice on different populations. As always, additional research would be useful. While experimental methods would be desirable, incorporating more forms of artistic practice within a general population survey like the DDB Needham Lifestyle Survey might be an excellent first start. In the meantime, “Artful Living” is notable for taking the challenge of measuring the wellbeing impact of the arts head on, and lays a helpful foundation for future research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times Building, photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

One hot August day last summer, my Facebook news feed suddenly blew up with frustration directed at New York Times fact-checkers, editors, and writers over the geekiest of subjects: data quality. The complaints were coming from friends of mine associated with the Future of Music Coalition, frequent commentators on policy affecting musicians in particular and creators of all kinds. These are two brands that I respect enormously – the Times website gets multiple visits from my browser a day, and FMC puts out some of the best policy analysis out there – so of course I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

Remember the fierce debates that gripped the music industry when pirated MP3s started popping up on filesharing sites like Napster and Audiogalaxy? On one side, copyright defenders fought these sites tooth and nail, even to the point of suing individual users, in an unsuccessful effort to stem the tide. On the other, copyright reformists and anarchists embraced filesharing as a way of bypassing traditional gatekeepers. To bolster their position, the old guard frequently adopted doomsday-like language predicting the death of the music industry and the loss of artistic vitality. The new guard argued the opposite, contending that piracy was essentially free marketing for artists, and that if anything the increased exposure and attention would facilitate connections (and transactions) that would not have previously been possible.

So who was right? A cover story published last year in the New York Times Magazine by noted business and technology writer Steven Johnson would have you believe that piracy has turned out to be no biggie for artists and society. The article, entitled “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” attempts to explore how “today’s creative class [is] faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago.” (Johnson and his editors at the Times annoyingly use a different definition of “creative class” than Richard Florida, who originated the term—they specifically mean people who work in entertainment industries.) To do this, Johnson examined a raft of secondary data sources to assess everything from the size of the industry to average incomes to aesthetic quality.

Despite evidence that Napster and its successors have indeed undermined the value that consumers place on recorded music (annual revenues have declined from $60 billion to $15 billion worldwide), Johnson’s analysis finds that musicians, along with writers, directors, and other performers, don’t seem to have suffered greatly as a result. To support his contention, Johnson cites data from three sources that collectively show creative industry jobs, businesses, and incomes growing in relation to the rest of the economy between the turn of the millennium and 2014. He considers possible macro explanations for the trend, including declining costs of production and distribution and increased revenue from live music performances. He even attempts to address the quality of different disciplines over the time period, concluding that TV is in a golden age and that film and books are arguably no worse off than they were before. Far from harming the diversity of artists’ voices, according to Johnson, technological change has enabled it.

The article immediately provoked an intense backlash from artists and industry representatives alike, many of whom didn’t see their story represented in the data. The most thoughtful broadsides came from Future of Music Coalition, which pointed out that the case that artists and musicians have not suffered economically over the past 15 years relies heavily on the data from the federal government’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) and Economic Census, both of which turn out to be compromised. By the government’s own admission, OES is not an ideal data source for making comparisons over time, and some sleuthing by FMC and Thomas Lumley pinpointed a definitional change that appears to account for all of the growth reported in the number of musicians and then some. Meanwhile, according to Patrick Wang, general definitional fuzziness may be distorting the numbers of all creatives as well, with coaches, scouts and public relations specialists accounting for much of the growth seen in those statistics. Johnson’s article also neglects to mention that the number of artists employed by businesses, as reported in the Economic Census, has dropped—even though the number of businesses employing artists has grown. And there are a number of reasons why some of the more secondary elements of “Creative Apocalypse” (e.g., the analysis of the growth of live touring revenues) need to be taken with a grain of salt as well.

These are significant flaws, and it’s perplexing that Johnson’s editor at the Times, Jake Silverstein, persisted in calling the article “excellent” and “thoroughly researched” even after they were brought to his attention. That said, when a data source turns out to be suspect, it doesn’t always mean that the conclusion you were drawing from it is wrong. In November, the research team at the National Endowment for the Arts took another look at the issue through the lens of an entirely different data source: the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Unlike the OES statistics, the CPS is set up to be analyzed longitudinally, and there are no changes in how “musicians, singers, and related workers” have been defined over the past 15 years to muck up the analysis, making it a much better data source for this purpose.

The CPS data shows that the percentage of musicians in the workforce has remained largely stable over the time period, splitting the difference between Johnson’s article and the revised analysis offered by his critics. More importantly, the CPS data shows musicians’ real incomes rising substantially, and faster than overall workers, during the time period in question, albeit with substantial variance from year to year. (This had already been the strongest part of Johnson’s analysis – as he correctly pointed out in a response to one of the critiques, no one has been able to point to a data source that has musicians’ average incomes declining since 1999.)

So it looks like there has been some growth among creative fields, music included, in the past decade and a half. Why, then, does it feel to so many like the profession is in crisis? After all of this analysis, the biggest unanswered question is about the distribution of the growth. When we write a sentence like “musicians’ income has increased,” the mind immediately conjures a picture of a rising tide lifting all boats. But what the data is really saying is that the average of all musicians’ income has increased – which could mean that a few fatcats making a killing are disguising stagnation or worse for everyone else. In the original article, Johnson makes a weak case that this is not happening, using incomplete data on live music tour revenue only; however, in one of his follow-ups, he claims that he looked at median income for musicians, which has—surprise surprise!—outpaced the growth in average income during the years from 2004-2014. But before we get too excited about this, keep in mind that this analysis used the same flawed data set as had been discredited earlier, and the same challenge that skewed the numbers there (dumping a bunch of elementary and secondary schoolteachers into the mix midway through) could quite plausibly have affected the income figures too. Johnson’s rhetoric implies that all artists are sharing in the largesse, but if income inequality is increasing, that would be like touting America’s shared prosperity on the basis of stock market growth since the depths of the recession.

Another clue to explain the reaction to the article comes from the NEA’s response, which pulled the figures on real investment in new music between 1999 and 2014 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In contrast to movies, television programs, and books, which have seen steady or increasing investment over that time period, annual investment in new musical intellectual property products has declined an astounding 28% in inflation-adjusted dollars. The decline in recorded music revenues likely has a lot to do with that.

Overall, the picture being painted in the data (that we can trust, that is) is one of the same number or fewer people identifying as full-time professional musicians, but making more money on average. But as anyone who follows the music industry knows, that misses a significant part of the story. Thanks to technological changes that have made the means of music production and distribution cheaper and more accessible, it seems like a good bet that there are lots more people who are pursuing public identities as musicians today than there were in 1999. If that’s the case, but yet there are not more people able to make a living as a musician, it would mean that a data set that captured all aspiring musicians might well show average incomes going down.

So, back to Johnson’s premise: are we better off than we were pre-Napster? It depends on your perspective. There is still plenty of money to be made in the creative industries, and Americans are still as willing to pay for entertainment as ever, although the specific mix of goods and services is changing. But if you’re a creator who works primarily in music, it does seem like opportunity might be shrinking. So far, it doesn’t look like the decline in recorded music revenues due to streaming and piracy has spread to other industries and genres, but it’s unclear whether film and TV are being buoyed by shifting audience preferences or have simply managed to stave off a similar collapse that is coming soon.

Meanwhile, we’re left with the plight of the artist. In recent decades, researchers have found that one of the surest paths to unhappiness is to have expectations that go unfulfilled; Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow of a study that showed that “measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was ‘becoming accomplished in a performing art.'” It’s tempting to interpret the increase in access that technology has provided to aspiring artists of all kinds as an unqualified boon for society. But to the extent that the opportunity to have a public identity as an artist has translated to expectation of public success as an artist, we may be looking at a system that, in the aggregate, punishes people for pursuing their dreams – a creator’s curse of sorts. If true, that issue goes way beyond how Pandora and Spotify divvy up their royalties and whether Apple Music gives sweetheart deals to Taylor Swift. And part of the answer may lie in helping aspiring artists make more informed decisions about how much of themselves they’re really willing to give up for art.

Related reading:

• What am I worth to you?
• Artists not alone in steep climb to the top