Art Appreciation – by Flickr user Dusty J, Creative Commons license

Large-scale, randomized-control studies – the gold standard of science, regarded as the best way to demonstrate that one thing actually causes another – are extremely rare in the arts education field, given ethical restrictions on experimenting on kids and the subjectivity of so many things related to the arts. So when researchers working with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announced the results of such a study last fall, the art and mainstream media all rightly sat up and took notice. “Art Makes You Smart,” declared the New York Times headline, barely resisting an exclamation point and, perhaps inevitably, getting the findings wrong – though the enthusiasm for a thoughtfully designed study is certainly justified.

Crystal Bridges is an ambitious new museum of five centuries of American art located in Bentonville, Arkansas and funded primarily by Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune. When the museum opened in 2011, it invited elementary schools in the area to apply for all-expenses-paid class field trips to the museum, including structured tours focusing on five paintings and an hour’s worth of instructional materials for classroom use by the teachers. All of the eligible schools were given trips – but they were assigned by lottery to time slots over the course of a year, which gave University of Arkansas scholars Jay P. Greene, Brian Kisida, and Daniel H. Bowen a top-shelf research opportunity. They gave the same assessment of cognitive and interpersonal skills to two groups of students: one that had already taken their field trips, and another that would take their field trips the following semester. By matching similar groups to one another and using regression analysis to control for variables like demographics and poverty, Greene and company were able to isolate the effect of the visits more rigorously than is usually possible, and for a population of thousands of students.

So what good does a field trip to an art museum do? Researchers catalogued a range of benefits for those who went, ranging from critical thinking skills to measures of tolerance and “historical empathy,” but perhaps the most striking finding is how magnified those benefits were across the board for children from schools in rural areas and serving low-income populations, with effect sizes double or triple those of other students. In fact, most of the positive impact from these field trips accrued to students who had never been to Crystal Bridges before, whereas “much smaller or null effects” were observed in relatively more privileged students who presumably have easier access to enriching experiences like this one.

The report’s strongest finding suggests that it boosts attentiveness to visual detail, at least for a little while. As part of the assessment, students in both treatment and control groups were shown this rather eerie painting, which they hadn’t been exposed to as part of the study, and asked to write about what they thought was going on. Their essays were scored independently by two researchers for evidence of critical thinking using a method designed by scholars at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; basically, the readers added up instances of elements like “observing,” “interpreting,” “evaluating,” and “flexible thinking.”

For rural and poor students in particular, the field trip was correlated with higher critical thinking scores, and the increase was largely driven by more instances of “observing,” meaning that these kids cited more details in their analyses of the painting. The researchers bill this effect bluntly as enhanced critical thinking, but their other findings, which were less pronounced, suggest that something more specific may be going on. Students who had visited the museum were also more likely to try to imagine what people depicted in art were thinking (part of the authors’ measure of “historical empathy”) and less likely to want to censor anti-American art (“tolerance”). At least for a few weeks after visiting, when the assessments were administered, museums seem to encourage students to take art on its own terms: they look more closely; enter the world of a painting more fully; and suspend their prejudices more effectively. This is the state of mind that makes critical thinking – not to mention understanding and appreciation of alternative viewpoints – possible.

And from all appearances, kids love it. Not only were students who had been on a field trip more likely to say that they find art museums interesting and fun, they actually acted on this belief. All of the students were given coupons to attend a special exhibition at the museum with their families for free in the six months following the study; having visited with their class made them 18% more likely to take advantage.

Crystal Bridges now has a $10 million endowment for school visits. Rigorous studies along these lines would be a worthwhile use for what would amount to a very modest portion of the funding that this and other museums set aside for arts education. Art may or may not make us smart, but research can certainly make us smarter.

(Read our full capsule review of “The Educational Value of Field Trips” in Createquity Insider.)

The actual lecture portion of this talk occupies the first 52 minutes of the video, and the first 27 of those minutes are a recap/synthesis of material that will be familiar to regular readers of this blog (specifically, Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem and In Defense of Logic Models). Since I didn’t write out the speech in advance, I don’t have a transcript for it. However, below is a reconstruction of the new material from my notes, so you can get a taste for it if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing right now. (You’ll notice I make a number of generalizations in the speech about the ways in which arts practitioners interact with research. These are based on observation and personal experience, and are best understood as my working hypotheses.)

*

[starting at 26:55]

Why is this integration between data and strategy important? Because research is only valuable insofar as it influences decisions. This is why logic models are awesome – they are a visual depiction of strategy. And there is no such thing as strategy without cause and effect. Think about that for a second. Our lives can be understood as a set of circumstances and decisions. We make decisions to try to improve our circumstances, and sometimes the circumstances of those around us. Every decision you make is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision. Every decision, therefore, carries with it some degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be expressed another way: as an assumption about the way the world works and the context in which your decision is being made. These assumptions are distinguished from known facts.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your assumptions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile. Alas, research and practice in our field are frequently disconnected in problematic ways. Six issues are preventing us from reaching our potential.

Issue #1: Capacity

Supply and demand apply as much to research as it does to artists. There are far more studies out there than a normal arts professional can possibly fully process. I wish I could tell you how many research reports are published in the arts each year, but nobody knows! To establish a lower bound, I went back over last year’s [2011] “around the horn” posts, which report new research studies that I hear about. I counted at least 41 relevant arts-research-related publications – a tiny fraction, I’m sure, of total output. To make matters worse, research reports are long, and arts professionals are busy. For the Createquity Writing Fellowship program, participants are required to analyze a work of arts research for the Createquity Arts Policy Library. I collect data on how long it takes to do this, and consistently, it requires 30-80 hours to research, analyze and write just one piece! Multiply this by the number of new studies each year, and you can start to see the magnitude of the problem.

Issue #2: Dissemination

Which research reports is an arts practitioner likely to even know about? Certainly not all of them, because there is almost no meaningful connection between the academic research infrastructure and the professional arts ecosystem. Lots of research relevant to the arts is published in academic journals each year, but unless the faculty member was commissioned to do their work by a foundation, we never hear about it. Academic papers are typically behind a pay firewall, and most arts organizations don’t have journal subscriptions. To give an example, after I wrote about Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, Florida pointed me to a study in two parts by two Dutch researchers. It’s one of the best resources I’ve come across for creative class theory, but I’ve never heard anyone even mention either study other than him and me.

Issue #3: Interpretation

Research reports inevitably reflect the researcher’s voice and agenda. This is especially true of executive summaries and press releases, which is often all anyone “reads” of research “reports.” Probably the most common agenda, of course, is to convey that the researcher knows what he/she is talking about. Another common agenda is to ensure repeat business from, or at least a continuing relationship with, the client who commissioned the study. The reality, however, is that research varies widely in quality. There’s no certification process; anyone can call themselves a researcher. But even highly respected professionals can make mistakes, pursue questionable methods, or overlook obvious holes in their logic. And, in my experience, the reality of any given research effort is usually nuanced – some aspects of it are much more valuable than others. Unfortunately, many arts professionals lack expertise to properly evaluate research reports, not having had even basic statistics training.

Issue #4: Objectivity

Research is about uncovering the truth, but sometimes people don’t want to know the truth. Advocacy goals often precede research. How many times have you heard somebody say a version of the following: “We need research to back this up”? That statement suggests a kind of research study that we see all too often: one that is conducted to affirm decisions that have already been made. By contrast, when we create a logic model, we start with the end first: we identify what we are trying to achieve and only then determine the activities necessary to achieve it.

Here are a bunch of bad, but common reasons to do a research project:

• To prove your own value.
• To increase your organization’s prestige.
• To advance an ideological agenda.
• To provide political cover for a decision.

There is only one good reason to do research, and that is to try to find out something you didn’t know before.

Issue #5: Fragmentation

The worst part of the problem I just described is that it drives what research gets done – and what doesn’t get done. There is no common research agenda adopted by the entire field, which is a shame, because collective knowledge is pretty much the definition of a public good: if I increase my own knowledge, it’s very easy for me to increase your knowledge too. The practical consequences of this fragmentation are severe. It results in a concentration of research using readily available data sources (ignoring the fact that the creation of new data sources may be more valuable). It results in a concentration of research in geographies and communities that can afford it, because people don’t often pay for research that’s not about them. And it results in a concentration of research serving narrow interests: discipline-specific, organization-specific, methodology-specific. My biggest pet peeve is that research is almost never intentionally replicated – everybody’s reinventing the wheel, studying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. A great example of a research study crying out for replication is the Arts Ripple Effect report, which I talked about earlier. The results of that study are now guiding the distribution of millions of dollars in annual arts funding. Are those results universal, or unique to the Greater Cincinnati region? We have no way to know.

Issue #6: Allocating resources

Everyone knows there’s been a trend in recent years towards more and more data collection at the level of the organization or artist. Organizations, especially small ones, complain all the time about being expected to do audience surveys, submit onerous paperwork, and so forth. And you know what, I agree with them! You might be surprised to hear me say that, but when you’re talking about organizations that have small budgets, no expertise to do this kind of work, and the funder who is requesting the information is not providing any assistance to get it…just take a risk! You make a small grant that goes bad, so what? You’re out a few thousand dollars. The sun will rise tomorrow.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I participated in a grant panel recently. I enjoyed the experience, and am glad I did it, but there’s one aspect of the experience that is relevant here. There were seven panelists, and we were all from out of town. Each of us spent, I’d say, roughly 40 hours reviewing applications in advance of the panel itself. Then we all got together for two full days in person to review these grants some more and talk about them and score them. We did this for 64 applications for up to $5,000 each, and in the end, 92% 94% were funded.

So consider this as a research exercise. The decision is who to give grants to, and how much. The data is the grant applications. The researchers are the review panel. What uncertainty is being reduced by this process? How much worse would the outcome have been if we’d just taken all the organizations, put them into Excel, run a random number generator, and distributed the dollars randomly up to $5,000 per organization? And I’m not saying this to make fun of this particular organization or single them out, because honestly it’s not uncommon to take this kind of approach to small-scale grantmaking. And yet if you compare it to ArtPlace’s first round of grants, theoretically they had thousands of projects to choose from, and they gave grants up to $1 million for creative placemaking projects – but there was no [open] review process; they just chose organizations to give grants to. So there’s a bit of a mismatch in the strategies we use to decide how to allocate resources.

There’s a concept called “expected value of information” described in a wonderful book called How to Measure Anything, by Douglas W. Hubbard. It’s a way of taking into account how much information matters to your decision-making process. In the book, Hubbard shares a couple of specific findings from his work as a consultant. He found that most variables have an information value of zero; in other words, we can study them all we want, but whatever the truth is is not going to change what we do, because they don’t matter enough in the grand scheme of things. And he also found that the things that matter the most, the kinds of things that really would change our decisions, often aren’t studied, because they’re perceived as too difficult to measure. So we need to ask ourselves how new information would actually change the decisions we make.

There is so much untapped potential in arts research. But it remains untapped because of all the issues described above. So what can we do about it?

First, we need a major field-building effort for arts research. Connecting researchers with each other through a virtual network/community of practice would help a lot. So would a centralized clearinghouse where all research can live, even if it’s behind a copyright firewall. The good news is that the National Endowment for the Arts has already been making some moves in this direction. The Endowment published a monograph a couple of months ago called “How Art Works,” the major focus of which was a so-called “system map” for the arts. But the document also had a pretty detailed research agenda for the NEA, not for the entire field, that lays out what the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis is going to do over the next five years, and two of the items mentioned are exactly the two things I just talked about: a virtual research network and a centralized clearinghouse for arts research.

This new field that we’re building should be guided by a national research agenda that is collaboratively generated and directly tied to decisions of consequence. The missing piece from the research agenda in “How Art Works” is the tie to actual decisions. Instead it has categories, like cultural participation, and research projects can be sorted under those buckets. But it’s not enough for research to simply be about something – research should serve some purpose. What do we actually need to know in order to do our jobs better?

We should be asking researchers to spend less time generating new research and more time critically evaluating other people’s research. We need to generate lots more discussion about the research that is already produced. That’s the only way it’s going to enter the public consciousness. Each time we fail to do that, we are missing out on opportunities to increase knowledge. It will also raise our collective standards for research if we are engaging in a healthy debate about it. But realistically, in order for this to happen, field incentives are going to have to change – analyzing existing research will need to be seen as equally prestigious and worthy of funding as creating a new study. Of course, I would prefer if people are not evaluating the work of their direct competitors – but I’ll take what I can get at this point!

Every research effort should take into account the expected value of the information it will produce. Consider the risk involved in various types of grants made. What are you trying to achieve by giving out lots of small grants, if that’s what you’re doing? Maybe measure the effectiveness of the overall strategy instead of the success or failure of each grant. This is getting into hypothesis territory, but based on what I’ve seen so far I would guess that research on grant strategy is woefully underfunded, while research on the effectiveness or potential of specific grants is probably overfunded. We probably worry more than we need to about individual grants, but we don’t worry as much as we should about whether the ways in which we’re making decisions about which grants to support are the right ways to do that.

Finally, we should be open-sourcing research and working as a team. I’m talking about sharing not just finished products and final reports, but plans, data, methodologies as well. I’m talking about seeking multiple uses and potential partners at every point for the work we’re doing. This would make our work more effective by allowing us to leverage each other’s strengths – we’re not all experts at everything, after all! And it would cut down on duplicated effort and free up expensive people’s time to do work that moves the field forward.

I thank everyone for their time, and I’d love to take any questions or comments on these thoughts about the state of our research field.

(Enjoyed this post? Today is the last day of our campaign to make the next generation of Createquity possible. We’re thrilled to have reached our initial goal, but additional contributions are still welcome and will be put to good use in strengthening us for the future. Thank you for your support!)

Steve Powers, “Look Look Look,” Part of the “A Love Letter for You” project, commissioned by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2009-2010. http://www.aloveletterforyou.com

In the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Public Art Review, Jack Becker writes, “There is a dearth of research efforts focusing on public art and its impact. The evidence is mostly anecdotal. Some attempts have focused specifically on economic impact, but this doesn’t tell the whole story, or even the most important stories.”

Becker’s statement gets at some of the main challenges in measuring the “impact” of a work of public art—a task which more often than not provokes grumbling from public art administrators. When asked how they know their work is successful, most organizations and artists that create art in the public realm are quick to cite things like people’s positive comments, or the fact that the artwork doesn’t get covered with graffiti or cause controversy.

We are much less likely to hear about systematic data gathered over a long time period—largely due to the seemingly complex, time-consuming, or futile nature of such a task. Unlike museums or performance spaces, public art traditionally doesn’t sell tickets, or attract “audiences” who can easily be counted, surveyed, or educated. A public artwork’s role in economic revitalization is difficult to separate from that of its overall surroundings. And as Becker suggests, economic indicators of success may leave out important factors like the intrinsic benefits of experiencing art in one’s everyday life.

However, public art administrators generally agree that some type of evaluation is key in not only making a case for support from funders, but in building a successful program. In the words of Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) executive director Jon Pounds, evaluations can at the very least “help artists strengthen their skills…and address any problems that come up in programming.” Is there a reliable framework that can be the basis of all good public art evaluation? And what are some simple yet effective evaluation methods that most organizations can implement?

This article will explore some of the main challenges with public art evaluation, and then provide an overview of what has been done in this area so far with varying degrees of success. It builds upon my 2007 Columbia University Teachers College Arts Administration thesis, And Then What…? Measuring the Audience Impact of Community-Based Public Art.That study specifically dealt with the issue of measuring audience response to permanent community-based public art, and included interviews with a wide range of public artists and administrators.

This article will discuss evaluation more broadly—moving beyond audience response—and incorporate more recent interviews with leaders in the public art field. My goal was not to generate quantitative data on what people are doing in the field as a whole with evaluation (according to Liesel Fenner, director of Americans for the Arts’s Public Art Network, such data is not yet available, though it is a goal). Instead, I have reviewed recent literature on public art assessment, and interviewed a range of different types of organizations, from government-run “percent for art” and transit programs to grassroots community-based art organizations in New York City (where I am based) and other parts of the United States. I sought to find out whether evaluation is considered important, how much time is devoted to it, and the details of particularly innovative efforts.

The challenge of defining what we are actually evaluating

The term “public art” once referred to monumental sculptures celebrating religious or political leaders. It evolved during the mid-twentieth century to include art meant to speak for the “people” or advance social and political movements, as in the Mexican and WPA murals of the 1930s, or the early community murals of the 1960s-1970s civil rights movements. Today, “public art” can describe anything from ephemeral, participatory performances to illegal street art to internet-based projects. The intended results of various types of public art, and our capacity to measure them, are very different.

In the social science field, evaluation typically involves setting clear goals, or expected outcomes, connected to the main activities of a program or project. It also involves defining indicators that the outcomes have been met. This exercise often takes the form of a “theory of change.” Since there are so many types of public art, it is exceedingly difficult to develop one single “theory of change” for the whole field, but it may be helpful to use a recent definition of public art from the UK-based public art think tank Ixia: “A process of engaging artists’ ideas in the public realm.” This definition implies that public art will always occupy some kind of “public realm”–whether it is a physical place or otherwise-defined community—and require an “engagement” with the public that may or may not result in a tangible artwork as end result. This process and the reactions of the public must be evaluated along with whatever artistic product may come out of it.

The challenge of building a common framework for evaluation

In 2004, Ixia commissioned OPENspace, the research center for inclusive access to outdoor environments based at the Edinburgh College of Art and Heriot-Watt University, to research ways of evaluating public art, ultimately resulting in a comprehensive 2010 report, “Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation” (see a helpful summary by Americans for the Arts). The guide’s emphasis and content was shaped by feedback from Ixia’s Evaluation Seminars and fieldwork conducted by Ixia and consultants who have used its Evaluation Toolkit. Ixia provides the most comprehensive resources on evaluation that I have encountered, with two main evaluation tools, the evaluation matrix and the personal project analysis. These are helpful as a starting point for evaluating any project or program.

The matrix’s goal is to “capture a range of values that may need to be taken into account when considering the desirable or possible outcomes of engaging artists in the public realm.” It is meant to be filled out by various stakeholders during a project-planning stage, as well as at the midpoint and conclusion of a project.

Ixia’s “personal project analysis”is “a tool for process delivery that aims to assess how a project’s delivery is being put into practice.” I will not analyze it in detail here, except to say that something similar should also ideally be part of any organization’s evaluation plan, as it allows for assessing how well the project is being carried out.

Personal Project Analysis from Ixia’s “Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation”

Matrix from Ixia’s “Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation”

Ixia’s matrix identifies four main categories of values:

1. Artistic Values [visual/aesthetic enjoyment, design quality, social activation, innovation/risk, host participation, challenge/critical debate]

2. Social Values [community development, poverty and social inclusion, health and well being, crime and safety, interpersonal development, travel/access, and skills acquisition]

3. Environmental Values [vegetation and wildlife, physical environment improvement, conservation, pollution and waste management-air, water and ground quality, and climate change and energy],

4. Economic Values [marketing/place identity, regeneration, tourism, economic investment and output, resource use and recycling, education, employment, project management/sustainability, and value for money].

The matrix accounts for the fact that each public artwork’s values and desired outcomes will be different depending on the nature of the presenting organization, site, and audience.

It is unclear how widely these tools have been adopted in the UK since their publication, and I did not encounter anyone in the U.S. using them. Yet many organizations are employing a similar process of engaging various stakeholders during the project-planning phase to determine goals specific to each project, which relate to the categories in Ixia’s matrix. For example, most professionals I interviewed cited some type of “artistic” goals for the work. Some organizations prioritize presenting the highest quality art in public spaces, in which case the realization of an artist’s vision is top priority (representatives of New York City’s Percent for Art program described “Skilled craftsmanship” and “clarity of artistic vision” as key success factors, for example).

By contrast, organizations that include a youth education or community justice component may rank “social” or “economic” values higher. Groundswell Community Mural Project, an NYC-based nonprofit that creates mural projects with youth, asks all organizations that host mural projects (which may include schools, government agencies, and community-based organizations) in pre-surveys to choose their top desired project outcomes from a range of choices, as well as identify project-specific issues. Groundswell does have a well-developed theory of change behind all its projects, relating to the organization’s core mission to “beautify neighborhoods, engage youth in societal and personal transformation, and give expression to ideas and perspectives that are underrepresented in the public dialog.” However, some project-specific outcomes may be more environmental—for example, partnerships with the Trust for Public Land to integrate murals into new school playgrounds–while some relate to “crime and safety,” as in an ongoing partnership with the NYC Department of Transportation to install murals and signs at dangerous traffic intersections that educate the public about traffic safety.

Groundswell Community Mural Project, signs from “Traffic Safety Program,” a partnership between Groundswell, the Department of Transportation’s Safety Education program, and several NYC public elemenary schools. Lead artists Yana Dimitrova, Chris Soria, and Nicole Schulman worked with students to create these signs installed at locations identified as most in need of traffic signage.

Groundswell is just one example of many public art organizations that set goals at the outset of each individual project, based on each project’s particular site and community. While individual organizations may effectively evaluate their own projects this way, crafting a common theory of change for all public art may be an unrealistic expectation.

The challenge of reliable indicators and data collection

The Ixia report discusses the process by which indicators of public art’s ability to produce desired outcomes may be identified, with the following questions:

1. Is it realistic to expect a public art project to influence the outcomes you are measuring?
2. Is it likely that you can differentiate the impact of the public art project and processes from other influences, e.g., other local investment?
3. Is it possible to conduct meaningful data on what matters in relation to the chosen indicators?

For example, in studies seeking to measure any kind of change, good data collection should always include a baseline—i.e., economic conditions or attitudes of people BEFORE the public art entered the picture. Data collection methods ideally should also be reliable, unbiased, and easily replicated.

The “Guide to Evaluation” does not go into detail about any concrete indicators of public art’s “impact.” Therefore, the matrix seems to be most useful as a guide to goal-setting. As the Americans for the Arts summary of this report points out, “Ixia directs users to [UK-based] government performance indicators as a baseline source, but that is where the discussion ends.”

Liesel Fenner of Americans for the Arts’s Public Art Network mentioned in an email to me that while PAN hopes to develop a comprehensive list of indicators in the future, which can be shared among public art presenters nationally, “developing quantitative indicators is the main obstacle.”

According to my interviews with both on-the-ground administrators and public art researchers, many busy arts administrators find the type of data collection recommended in Ixia’s guide difficult, costly and time-consuming. It can be a challenge to get artistic staff to buy into even basic evaluation; says one community arts administrator, “artists are paid for a their leadership in developing and delivering a strong project. Many artists don’t see as much value in evaluation because, in part, it comes in addition to the difficult work that they just accomplished.” It is also uncommon to spend precious training resources on something like quantitative evaluation techniques.

Some are of the opinion that even if significant time were spent on justifying public art’s existence by “proving” its practical usefulness, this would still be a losing battle that could lead to the withdrawal of support for public art, the production of bad art that panders merely to public needs, or both. One seasoned public art administrator asked me: “Is architecture evaluated this way? The same way public buildings need to exist, public art needs to exist. It’s people looking to weaken public art who are trying to ask these questions about its impact.”

The challenge of evaluating long-term, permanent installations

Glenn Weiss, former director of the Times Square Alliance Public Art Program and current director of Arts League Houston, posits that economic impact studies are “most possible with highly publicized, short-term projects like the Gates or large public art festivals.” Indeed, the New York City Mayor’s office published a detailed report on “an estimated $254 million in economic activity” that resulted from The Gates, a large installation in Central Park by internationally acclaimed artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, based on data like increased park attendance and business at nearby hotels, restaurants, etc. However, most public art projects, even temporary ones, are not as monumental or heavily promoted as The Gates, making it difficult to prove that people come to a neighborhood, or frequent its businesses, primarily to see the public art.

Visitors crowd Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” (2005) in Central Park. Photo by Eric Carvin.

Weiss also believes that temporary festivals are generally easier to evaluate quantitatively than long-term public art projects. For example, during a finite event or installation, staff members can keep a count of attendees (some of the temporary public art projects I have encountered in my research, such as the FIGMENT annual participatory art festival on Governors Island and in various other U.S. cities, use attendance counts as a measure).

The few comprehensive studies connecting long-term, permanent public art to economic and community-wide impacts, conducted by research consultants and funded by specific grants, have led to somewhat inconclusive results. For example, An Assessment of Community Impact of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation Mural Arts Program (2002), led by Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert of University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP), cites the assumed community-wide benefits of murals outlined in MAP’s mission statement at the time of the study:

The creation of a mural can have social benefits for entire communities…Murals bring neighbors together in new ways and often galvanize them to undertake other community improvements, such as neighborhood clean-ups, community gardening, or organizing a town watch. Murals become focal points and symbols of community pride and inspiring reminders of the cooperation and dedication that made their creation possible.

Yet when asked to “use the best data available to document the impact that murals have had over the past decade on Philadelphia’s communities,” Stern and Seifert found that

this is a much more difficult task than one might imagine. First, there are significant conceptual problems involved in thinking through exactly how murals might have an impact on neighborhoods. Second, the quality of data available to test hypotheses concerning murals is limited. Finally, there are a number of methodological problems involved in using the right comparisons in assessing the potential impact of murals. For example, how far from a mural might we expect to see an impact? How long after a mural is painted might it take to see an effect and how long might that effect last?…Ultimately, this report concludes that these issues remain a significant impediment to understanding the role of murals.

By comparing data on murals to existing neighborhood quality of life data, Stern and Seifert considered murals’ connection to factors like community economic investment and indicators of more general neighborhood change (such as reduced litter or crime, or residents’ investment in other community organizing activities). The study also measured levels of community investment and involvement in murals. However, the scarce data available on these factors, according to the authors, are difficult to connect directly to public art in a cause and effect relationship. Stern and Seifert’s strongest finding was that murals may build “social capital,” or “networks of relationships” that can promote “individual and group well-being,” because of all the events surrounding mural production in which people can participate. It was more difficult to show a consistent relationship between murals and other theorized outcomes, such as ability to “inspire” passersby or serve as “amenities” for neighborhoods. The study recommends that “more systematic information on their physical characteristics and sites—‘before and after’—would provide a basis for identifying murals that become an amenity.”

A more recent 2009 report on Philadelphia’s commercial corridors by Econoconsult also demonstrated “some indication of a positive correlation” between the presence of murals and shopping corridor success. Murals are described here as “effective and cost efficient ways of replacing eyesores with symbols of care.” However, the report also adds the disclaimer that a positive correlation is not necessarily proof of the murals’ role as the primary cause of a neighborhood’s appeal.

So what can we assess most easily, and how?

My research revealed that quantitative data on short-term inputs and outputs of public art programs is frequently cited (sometimes inappropriately) as evidence of a program’s success in things like reports or funding proposals—for example, number of new projects completed in one year, number of youth or community partners served, or number of mural tour participants. However, in this article I am not really focusing on this type of reporting, as it does not address how public art impacts communities over time.

The good news is that there are several examples of indicators that are more easily measurable in certain types of public art situations, including permanent installations. These include:

• Testimonies on the educational and social impact of collaborative public art projects, from youth and community participants and artists alike
• Qualitative audience responses to public art, including whether or not the art provokes any type of discussion, debate, or controversy
• How a public artwork is treated over time by a community, including whether it gets vandalized, and whether the community takes the initiative to repair or maintain it
• Press coverage
• The “use” of a public artwork by its hosts, e.g. in educational programs or marketing campaigns
• Levels of audience engagement with public art via internet sites and other types of educational programming

Below I will summarize some helpful methods by which data is collected around all these indicators.

Mining the Press

Archiving press coverage of public art projects online is a common practice among organizations, as is presenting pithy press clippings and quotes in funding proposals and marketing materials as a means of demonstrating a project’s success. For researchers, studying articles (and increasingly, blog posts) on past projects can also provide rich documentation of artworks’ immediate effects, as well as points of comparisons. For example, the “comments” sections of online articles and blogs can generate interesting, often unsolicited feedback, albeit from a nonrandom sample.

One possible outcome of public art projects is controversy, which is not always considered a bad thing, despite now-infamous examples of projects like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc being removed. For example, Sofia Maldonado’s 42^nd Street Mural, presented in March 2010 by the Times Square Alliance, provoked extensive coverage on news programs and blogs. The mural’s un-idealized images of Latin American and Caribbean women based on the artist’s own heritage led some women’s and cultural advocacy organizations to call for its removal. The Alliance opted to leave the mural up, and has cited this project as evidence of the Alliance’s commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. The debates led Maldonado to reflect, “as an art piece it has accomplished its purpose: to establish a dialogue among its spectators.”

Sofia Maldonado, “42nd Street Mural,” 2010, Commissioned by the Times Square Alliance Public Art Program.

Site visits and “public art watch”

As an attempt to promote more sustained observation of completed works over time, public art historian Harriet Senie assigns her students in college and graduate level courses a final term paper project every semester that contains a

“public art watch”…For the duration of a semester, on different days of the week, at different times, students observe, eavesdrop, and engage the audience for a specific work of public art. Based on a questionnaire developed in class and modified for individual circumstances, they inquire about personal reactions to this work and to public art in general” (quoted in Sculpture Magazine).

Senie’s students also observe things like people’s interactions with an artwork, such as how often they stop and look up at it, take pictures in front of it, or use it as a meeting place.

Senie maintains that “Although far from ‘scientific,’ the information is based on direct observation over time—precisely what is in short supply for reviewers working on a deadline.” This approach towards challenging college students to think critically about public art has also been implemented in public art courses at NYU and Pratt Institute, and the aggregate results of student research over time are summarized in one of Senie’s longer publications.

I have not encountered any other organizations able to integrate this type of research into their regular operations; however, there may be opportunities to integrate direct observation into routine site visits to completed permanent public artworks.

In the NYC Percent for Art program, and its Public Art for Public Schools (PAPS) wing that commissions permanent art for new and renovated school buildings, staff members are expected to undertake periodic visits “to monitor the condition of artworks that have been commissioned,” according to PAPS director Tania Duvergne. Such “maintenance checks” can provide opportunities to survey building inhabitants or local residents about their opinions and use of the artworks.

Duvergne uses these “condition report” visits as opportunities to further her agency’s mission to “bridge connections between what teachers are already doing in their classrooms and their physical environments.” At each site, she tries to interview custodians, teachers, principals and students about whether the art is well treated, whether they know anything about the artwork (and are using the online resources available to them), and whether they want more information. Duvergne notes that many teachers use the public art in their teaching in some way, even if they do not know a lot about the artwork. While observing a public artwork during a site visit every few years is nowhere near as extensive and sustained observation as Senie’s class assignment, perhaps a similar survey and observation could be undertaken with a wide range of students and staff members over the course of a day.

Project participant and resident surveys

Organizations that create community-based public art usually have specific desired social, educational, or behavioral outcomes in project participants. Mural organizations Groundswell and Chicago Public Art Group describe thorough evaluation processes in which mural artists, youth, community partners and parents are all surveyed and sometimes interviewed before, during and after projects. Groundswell’s community partner post-project survey, for example, asks partners to rank their level of agreement about whether certain community-wide outcomes have been met, such as whether the mural increases the organization’s visibility, increases awareness of an identified issue, and improves community attitudes towards young people.

Groundswell’s theory of change (most recently honed in 2010 through focus groups with youth participants and community partners) articulates various clear desired outputs and outcomes for both youth and community partner organizations. This includes the development of “twenty-first century” life skills in teen mural participants. To measure this impact specifically, Groundswell has made it a priority to continue to track youth participants after they graduate, turn 21, and reach other checkpoints, according to Executive Director Amy Sananman. Groundswell recently hired an outside researcher to build a comprehensive database (using the free program SalesForce), in which participant data and survey results, and data on completed murals (such as whether any were graffitied, how many times they appeared in news articles, etc.) can be entered and compared to generate reports.

In 2006, Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program conducted a community impact study using audience response questionnaires as a starting point. Then- special projects manager Lindsey Rosenberg employed college students, through partnerships with local universities, to conduct door-to-door surveys of all residents living within a mile radius of four murals. The murals differed by theme, neighborhood, and level of community involvement. The interns orally administered a multiple-choice questionnaire with questions ranging from general opinions of the murals to level of participation in making the murals to perceptions of changes in the neighborhood as a result of the murals. They then inputted the surveys into a computer database specifically created for this study by outside consultants. The database not only calculated percentages of each response to murals, but tracked correlations between these responses and census demographic data, including income level and home ownership.

This research project was different from prior MAP community impact studies in that it assumed that “what people perceive to be the impact of a mural is in itself valuable,” as much as external evidence of change.

In 2007, MAP shared some preliminary results of this endeavor with me to aid my thesis research. At the time the research seemed to generate some useful data on which murals were appreciated most in which neighborhoods, and the correlation between appreciation and community participation in the projects. However, since then I have not been able to gather any further information on this study, or find any published results. I did hear from MAP at the time of the study that only 25% of people who were approached actually took the surveys, indicating just one problematic aspect of conducting such research on a regular basis. The database was also costly.

Most recently, MAP is partnering (page 160) with the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health & Mental Retardation Services (DBH/MRS), community psychologists from Yale, and almost a dozen local community agencies and funders with core support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on “a multi-level, mixed methods comparative outcome trial known as the Porch Light Initiative. The Porch Light Initiative examines the impact of mural making as public art on individual and community recovery, healing, and transformation and utilizes a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework.” Unfortunately, MAP declined my requests for more information on this new study.

Interviewing youth and community members can of course only generate observations and opinions, but Groundswell at least is also taking the step of also tracking what happens to participants after they complete a mural project. I am still not clear how to prove that any impacts on participants are a direct result of public art projects. Yet surveying project participants and community members about their feelings about a program or project, and how they think they were impacted by it, is one of the most do-able types of research (apart from the challenges of getting people to fill out surveys).

Community-based “proxies”

Groundswell director Amy Sananman has described some success in utilizing community partners as “proxies” for reporting on a mural’s local impact, effectively outsourcing some of the burden of data collection to other organizations. For example, the director of a nonprofit whose storefront has a Groundswell mural could report back to Groundswell on the extent to which local residents take care of the mural, how often people comment on it, etc.

PAPS, CPAG, and ArtBridge, an organization that commissions artwork for vinyl construction barrier banners, have described similar ideas for partnerships. ArtBridge hopes to implement a more formal process in which the owners of stores where its banners are installed can document changes like increased business due to public art. PAPS director Tania Duvergne also cites examples of “successful projects” in which public schools, on their own, designed art gallery displays or teaching curricula around their public art pieces, and shared this with PAPS on site visits.

There might be a danger in depending on community partner organization representatives to speak for the whole “community” or to provide reliable, accurate data. But if cooperative partners can be identified and regular reporting scheduled using consistent measurement tools, the burden of reporting on specific neighborhoods is lessened for the public art organization.

“Smart” Technology

Groundswell, ArtBridge, and MAP are all starting to utilize the new QR code smartphone application, which uses QR codes to direct public art site visitors to websites with more information about the art. Groundswell experimented this past summer with adding QR codes to a series of posters designed by its Voices Her’d Visionaries program to be hung in public schools to educate teens about healthy relationships. Groundswell can then track how many hits the website gets through the QR app. In general, web activity on public art sites is an easy quantitative measure of public interest.

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program has a “report damage” section on its website, where anyone who notices a mural in need of repair can alert MAP online. This is also a potential source for quantitative evidence of how many people notice and feel invested in murals.

Use of Interpretive Programming

Public art organizations are increasingly designing interpretive programming around completed artwork, from outdoor guided tours to curated “virtual” artwork displays. NYC’s Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit program provides downloadable podcasts about completed artworks on its website; other organizations include phone numbers to call for guided tours at public art sites themselves (as in many museum exhibits). Both in-person and virtual/phone tours can provide rich opportunities to track usage, collect informal feedback from participants, and solicit feedback via surveys. ArtBridge recently initiated its WALK program giving tours of its outdoor banner installations. After each tour, ArtBridge emails a link to a brief questionnaire to all tour participants, and offers a prize as an incentive for taking the survey.

A Philadelphia Mural Arts Program guided tour.

Concluding remarks: What next for evaluation?

While systematic, reliable quantitative analysis of public art’s impact at the neighborhood level remains challenging and undervalued in the field, new technologies as well as effective partnerships are making it increasingly feasible for public art organizations to assess factors such as audience engagement, benefits to participants, and community stewardship of completed public art works. The Ixia “Guide to Evaluation” offers a useful roadmap for approaching the evaluation of any type of public art project. At the same time, we should not forget the ability of art to affect people in ways that may seem intangible or even immeasurable, or, as Glenn Weiss puts it, “become part of a memory of a community, part of how a community sees itself.”

(Enjoyed this post? We’re raising funds through this Thursday to make the next generation of Createquity possible. We’re getting close, but need your help to cross the finish line. Please consider a tax-deductible donation today!)

Art Cars Attack, photo by M Glasgow

(Note: a follow-up to this post, “In Defense of Logic Models,” is now available here)

“I feel like whenever I talk to artists these days, I should be apologizing,” says Kevin Stolarick, Research Director for the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. To most in the arts community, Stolarick is better known as Richard Florida’s longtime right-hand man and research collaborator on his bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Stolarick, who first met Florida just after the academic had cashed the first check for the advance from Basic Books, proceeds to recount how the book’s success led to an explosion of interest from mayors all around the country wanting to redefine their cities as welcoming meccas for Florida’s new Starbucks-drinking, jeans-wearing idea people. Unfortunately, the mayors’ collective interpretation of the lessons from Florida’s book boiled down to, “all we need is to get us some gays and artists and a bike path or two, and our problems will be solved! The problem,” Stolarick tells us, a decade after The Rise of the Creative Class’s publication, “is that it’s a trap.”

This scene is unfolding in a basement auditorium in lower Manhattan, the site of a panel and presentation hosted by the Municipal Art Society of New York to give audiences the first public preview of the ArtPlace vibrancy indicators. ArtPlace, as many readers know, is a private-sector partnership among nearly a dozen leading foundations to support “creative placemaking,” a term invented by officials at the National Endowment for the Arts. Spearheaded by leadership from the NEA, the creation of ArtPlace is perhaps this Endowment’s, and by extension the Obama administration’s, signature achievement in the arts—despite the fact that it doesn’t distribute a cent of government money.

Stolarick’s presence at the event was appropriate, for in many ways it was The Rise of the Creative Class that made the current creative placemaking movement possible. For a time it was the kind of book that smart people buy for all of the other smart people they know – a genuine ideavirus. Florida, more than anyone else, was responsible for conflating creativity, innovation, and artistry in the popular imagination, and among the measures that he and Stolarick developed for the book was a “Bohemian index” associating the concentration of artists in a given metropolitan area with population and employment growth. Though the empirical claims in the book turned out to be built on shaky foundations, they were intuitive (and well-argued) enough that municipal leaders started taking notice. In fact, Carol Coletta, the current director of ArtPlace, was one of the first people to invite Florida to help put his ideas into practice in a real city context as co-organizer of 2003’s Memphis Manifesto Summit. Florida, Stolarick, and their associates became the first widely acknowledged spokespeople for the idea that a vibrant set of opportunities and amenities for creative expression could lead to regional economic prosperity.

But Florida wasn’t the only one drawing public attention to the economic power of the arts over the previous decade. Separately, the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania has been studying the relationship between concentrations of cultural resources and various social and economic outcomes since 1994. As then-Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Joan Shigekawa commissioned a groundbreaking collaboration between SIAP and The Reinvestment Fund to study the dynamics of culture and urban revitalization, work whose influence can be seen clearly in much of the policy that Shigekawa has since helped develop as Senior Deputy Chairman of the NEA.

SIAP, which is led by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, cites The Rise of the Creative Class frequently in its publications dating from that period, usually to position its approach in opposition to Florida’s. In fact, in 2008 SIAP published one of the most hilariously brutal program evaluations I’ve ever read, following the attempts of Florida’s Creative Class Group (CCG) to turn around three Knight Foundation communities by inspiring volunteer “catalysts” to drive toward the “4 T’s” of economic development (technology, talent, tolerance, and territorial assets). In that evaluation, Stern and Seifert offer a single overarching criticism: CCG forgot about its outcomes. Much like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes, the project team had a clear idea of what it was putting in to the process and what it hoped to get out of it, but a much vaguer sense of how it was going to get from Phase 1 to Phase 3.

South Park’s Underpants Gnomes, image courtesy Wikipedia

Which brings me to my central point: despite all of the attention paid to this issue in the past year and a half, despite all of the new money that has been committed to the cause, creative placemaking still has an outcomes problem. As a field, we have not yet learned the lessons of the Underpants Gnomes. And until we do, I’m worried that we risk repeating Stolarick’s apology to practitioners a decade hence.

Leaving the dots unconnected

“When times were good,” Kevin Stolarick explains at the ArtPlace vibrancy indicators convening, it was easy for city councils, funders, and others to buy into the ideas in Florida’s book on the strength of his celebrity and qualitative arguments. But now that cities are facing more economic pressure, Stolarick continues, “they’re saying, ‘we need proof – and that’s going to take more than Richard Florida’s next book.’”

“Proof” is a word that seems to give creative placemakers hives these days. Less than two weeks prior to the ArtPlace event, I had participated in a webinar given by the NEA to introduce its Our Town Community Indicators Study. Our Town is the Endowment’s public-sector counterpart to ArtPlace – likewise the brainchild of Rocco Landesman, it granted some $6.6 million to communities for creative placemaking projects across the country in its inaugural round last year. The Community Indicators Study is a multiyear data collection effort whose chief purpose is to “advance public understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities.” Yet when, prompted by researchers who were listening in on the call, the NEA’s Chief of Staff, Jamie Bennett, asked the Deputy Director of NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis about causation vs. correlation, this is the exchange that resulted:

Bennett: …Are you going to in some way be able through this project to prove [for example] that arts had a direct impact in causing the crime rate to go down?

Shewfelt: A lot of the language I’ve used today has been very carefully chosen to avoid suggesting that we are trying to design a way to specifically address the causal relationship between creative placemaking and the outcomes we’re interested in.

As a matter of fact, the NEA has chosen to forgo a traditional evaluation of the Our Town grant program in favor of developing the aforementioned indicator system. The project will no doubt result in a lot of great data, but essentially no mechanism for connecting the Endowment’s investments in Our Town projects to the indicators one sees. A project could be entirely successful on its own terms but fail to move the needle in a meaningful way in its city or neighborhood. Or it could be caught up in a wave of transformation sweeping the entire community, and wrongly attribute that wave to its own efforts. There’s simply no way for us to tell. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we can’t accomplish the goal of “advancing understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities” without digging more deeply into the causal relationships that the NEA would prefer to avoid.

The vibrancy indicators that were the subject of the ArtPlace convening face a similar quandary. The purpose of the indicators is to help ArtPlace “understand the impact of [its] investments.” And what is that desired impact? During a webinar delivered to prospective applicants last fall, Coletta declared that “with ArtPlace, we aim to do nothing less than transform economic development in America…to awaken leaders who care about the future of their communities to the fact that they’re sitting on a pile of assets that can help them achieve their ambitions…and that asset is art.”

ArtPlace Theory of Change

ArtPlace’s investments all have a singular focus on “vibrancy,” a concept defined in its guidelines as “attracting people, activities and value to a place and increasing the desire and the economic opportunity to thrive in a place.” While that was as specific as things got during ArtPlace’s first two rounds of grantmaking, the indicators project, which examines factors as diverse as cell phone use, population density, and home values, will go a long way toward concretizing ArtPlace’s primary lever of community transformation. Even so, ArtPlace doesn’t seem any more eager than the NEA to connect the activities of its grant recipients to the broader vibrancy indicators directly. Though the projects themselves are supposed to have a “transformative” impact on vibrancy, ArtPlace isn’t requiring its grantees to collect any data on how that impact is achieved. Furthermore, ArtPlace’s guidelines state clearly that the consortium has no plans to invest in research on creative placemaking beyond the vibrancy indicators themselves, despite its advocacy goals and a desire to “share the lessons [grantees] are learning to other communities across the U.S.”

To be clear, I don’t mean to question the value of research of the type ArtPlace and Our Town are leading. Efforts such as these, Fractured Atlas’s Archipelago data aggregation and visualization platform, Americans for the Arts’s National and Local Arts Index, Western States Arts Federation’s Creative Vitality Index, and others help to draw a clear picture of a community’s overall cultural and creative health and can serve as an essential tool within a broader research portfolio. But in order for those tools to really come alive in a grantmaking context, they have to be grounded in a clear and rigorous conceptual frame for the how the specific funded activities are going to make a difference, and then integrated into the actual process for selecting grant recipients. And that’s the part still missing from the vast majority of these efforts. In an upcoming article for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus (who co-authored the original Creative Placemaking white paper for the NEA with her mentor, Ann Markusen) writes, “it’s probably unreasonable to expect that a modest, one-year Our Town grant will move the needle, at least quickly….Because the geographic scale, time horizons, and desired outcomes vary across creative placemaking efforts, one-size-fits-all indicator systems may prove inappropriate.”

Without a clear and detailed theory of how and why creative placemaking is effective, policy and philanthropy to support creative placemaking is hobbled. Attempting to predict and judge impact based on indicator systems alone carries with it at least four problems:

• It doesn’t give a clear road map for project selection that will identify investments most likely to make a difference. Without previous research demonstrating causal interactions between grants given and differences made, it’s hard to know what effect a new grant will have – much less how to compare the potential effects of hundreds or (in ArtPlace’s case) thousands of competing investment opportunities.
• It doesn’t give us the tools to go back and analyze why certain projects did and didn’t work. Maybe a public artwork succeeds in drawing people to a neighborhood, but real estate values stay stagnant. Maybe development along a transit corridor was executed on schedule, but ridership is lower than expected. Broad, sector-level indicators will only tell us that the project didn’t work – not why.
• It doesn’t acknowledge the complex nature of economic ecosystems and the indirect role that arts projects play in them. Many economists agree that talented, highly educated individuals are key to community prosperity. But numerous considerations likely play into their decision to (re)locate in a particular place. When are the arts truly catalytic for a community, and when are they merely icing on the cake? Indicator systems would have no way of telling us on their own.
• It provides little insight on how to pursue arts-led economic development while avoiding the thorny problems of gentrification. Any thinking around policy interventions must acknowledge the possibility of negative impacts as well as positive ones. In the case of creative placemaking, an attendant worry is that longtime residents of transformed neighborhoods won’t have asked for the change, and may be adversely affected by it. To date, there is little shared understanding of how creative placemaking projects that benefit all community residents are distinguished from those that simply replace poorer residents with wealthier ones.

In her Reader article, Nicodemus writes that

The answer to the question “What is creative placemaking, really?” is that funders and practitioners are making it up in real time. We’ve entered an exciting period of experimentation, which makes sharing information absolutely critical.

In the interest of sharing information, then, I will report out below on some lessons I’ve learned from my own research on the topic over the past five years, as well as from a collaboration with ArtsWave, a funder supporting vibrancy through the arts in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region.

Toward a unified theory of creative placemaking: Filling in the blanks

The major deficiency of the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan was that they attempted to connect their activity (stealing underpants) with their intended impact (profit), without really considering the steps in between. To take an extreme example, if I start an organization called “Artists for World Peace” (there is such an organization, by the way), get some artists together to stand in solidarity, and put on a show, it would be unrealistic of me to expect world peace as the next logical result.

Yet most studies of the connection between the arts and economic development have attempted to measure the direct relationship between arts activities (whether single or in the aggregate) and economic outcomes. For example, the Social Impact of the Arts Project examined the correlation between cultural assets and poverty decline in Philadelphia, and a groundbreaking study by Steve Sheppard compared employment levels and real estate values in North Adams, MA before and after the opening of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. These research efforts have done much to shape our collective understanding of urban revitalization through the arts. But they share in common an unfortunate tendency to gloss over the details of exactly how creative activities are responsible for making neighborhoods and communities more attractive, and therefore, more valuable. This gap is especially problematic when one tries to apply the lessons of these studies to a policy or grantmaking context, where the details of how projects are implemented can make all the difference in whether a particular intervention is successful or not.

When I was in graduate school, before I came into contact with any of the research above, I created a simple model of arts-led gentrification to illustrate the specific case of a neighborhood lent a young, “hip” reputation by newly relocated artists. This model is different from others I’ve seen in a few ways. First, it casts neighborhood development as an iterative process, starting with tourism on the local level among artists. In other words, the people who are going to be checking out the happenings in a struggling outpost of the city are not, by and large, yuppies – they are other artists who are colleagues of the ones living in that neighborhood. Second, it emphasizes the role of bars and restaurants as attractors for other neighborhood visitors (including yuppies), whose viability is only made possible by the modest foot traffic generated by arts activities. And finally, it places at the beginning of the process not just arts activities, but specific kinds of arts activities: visible, storefront spaces like galleries and performance venues that signal the presence of art and draw visitors to a particular location.

Three years later, some of the thinking reflected above found its way into my grantmaking strategy work with ArtsWave, an local arts agency based in Cincinnati, OH. First, some background: in late 2008, ArtsWave had commissioned a research initiative designed to develop an inclusive public conversation about the arts in the region. Based on hundreds of conversations, interviews, and focus groups with area residents, two key “ripple effect” benefits emerged as especially valued by citizens:

1. that the arts create a vibrant, thriving economy: neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists are attracted to the area, etc…and
2. that the arts create a more connected community: diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better.

To its immense credit, ArtsWave didn’t just sit on these results and continue in the status quo. Instead, the 83-year-old united arts fund underwent a total transformation, taking on a new name and organizational identity, and most importantly, adopting these two themes as the new goals for its grantmaking.

My task, starting in January 2011, was to assist ArtsWave in creating a new framework for funding arts & culture activities based upon the ability of organizations to create vibrancy and connect people in the region. With the help of a volunteer task force consisting of ArtsWave board members, staff, community leaders, and grantee organizations, we worked backwards from the idea of “vibrancy” and ended up with an extraordinarily complex theory of change. Here’s the part that specifically deals with cultural clusters and neighborhood economic development:

Excerpt from ArtsWave theory of change: cultural clusters

Some elements of this model will certainly look familiar, though with some new wrinkles added: evening and weekend hours for storefronts, for example, as well as decreased crime and improved physical spaces (in general, not just arts spaces). ArtsWave, however, extended the concept to apply to regional economic development as well:

Excerpt from ArtsWave theory of change: regional development

Note here that the principal lever for the regional development model is that the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region is “differentiated” through the arts. That is to say, it attracts people from outside of the region because it gains a (deserved) reputation for being a more interesting place to be than its peer cities. And what helps differentiate Cincinnati is something we call “extraordinary cultural experiences.” We attach a very specific definition to “extraordinary,” focusing on its literal meaning of “out of the ordinary.” For ArtsWave’s purposes, experiences are extraordinary if they are associated with one of the following:

• Events or productions with a national or international profile
• Events or productions that feature something uniquely special about the region
• Events or productions that feature innovative programming or presentation

Not only do experiences meeting the above criteria help to differentiate the Greater Cincinnati region in the eyes of tourists or prospective residents, they also contribute directly to ArtsWave’s notion of “vibrancy” (the green arrow in the diagram).

What this approach does is explicitly connect the activities of grantees to the broader community change that ArtsWave hopes to create. A key innovation that came out of this process was the distinction between “Sector Outcomes” (in blue) and “Grantee Outcomes” (in purple). We defined grantee outcomes as the farthest point out in the model to which individual organizations could reasonably be held accountable—and those outcomes feed back into the evaluation and selection process at the grant application stage. All other outcomes, the sector outcomes, are a reflection on ArtsWave’s overall strategy, rather than on any one particular investment. This allows us to “aggregate” impact from the level of the individual project to the level of the broader context.

The beauty of designing a model like this is that it allows each assumption embedded in each link on the causal chain to be tested, if necessary. Of course, it would be impractical to do so for every investment a grantmaker might make. But that isn’t necessary. In order to provide the kind of evidence that mayors and other officials are looking for, you only need a few examples to demonstrate replicability. But we have to be sure that those examples really do show the effects of intentional creative placemaking strategy, rather than just a lucky coincidence.

Where We Go From Here

Despite the challenges I discuss in the first part of this article, I’m heartened to see creative placemaking funders taking some positive steps toward a more rigorous theoretical foundation for their work. In particular, ArtPlace is beginning to move in this direction with a list of ten signals grantees can use to judge whether their projects are making a difference. The challenge will be to unpack those relationships with the same rigor as is currently applied to collecting data.

Meanwhile, we would love feedback on the models we have created to describe economic development through the arts. While we are hopeful they can help to move the conversation towards a deeper consideration of the complex mechanisms involved in creating place-based vibrancy, we readily acknowledge that they aren’t perfect. Do they accurately reflect creative placemaking goals and processes? Which aspects of the model are best backed up by existing research and which are shakiest? Which seem intuitively right but have not been studied in depth? What are we leaving out?

If you have comments, questions, or resources to offer, please leave a comment here or get in touch at ian.moss@fracturedatlas.org. And in the meantime, Fractured Atlas will be eagerly researching how emerging evaluation methods in other sectors, such as outcome mapping, most significant change technique, and complexity science, can potentially be applied to the arts.

(Enjoyed this post? We’re raising funds through July 10 to make the next generation of Createquity possible. We are 53% of the way there, but need your help to cross the finish line. Please consider a tax-deductible donation today!)

TOO LONG; DIDN’T READ?

• Createquity is relaunching in the fall with a whole new editorial agenda, an expanded team, and a new website! We’re building upon everything we’ve learned over the past seven years to tackle the hard questions that matter and make principled, evidence-backed recommendations for the field that we can confidently stand behind.
• In order to give us time to prepare for these big changes and do them right, we’re going dormant for the summer starting this week. But don’t worry: we’ve scheduled some re-runs of “Createquity’s greatest hits” to keep things interesting.
• If you’d like to get involved, please donate to our Indiegogo campaign that will run through early July. Help us bring this dream to life!

Photo by k rupp

A Case for Change

Back in March, I co-hosted a Createquity Office Hours gathering for our editors, writers, and readers located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Among the attendees was a woman who wanted us to review a research report her organization had recently published. Createquity’s only real channel for such reviews at the moment is the Arts Policy Library, a format involving an exhaustive deconstruction of seemingly every strength and weakness of a research text. Because they are so labor-intensive to generate, we made a decision years ago to focus Arts Policy Library articles only on high-profile publications – which means that up until now, the way to get Createquity to review a research report has been to get lots of other people talking about it first. As I rattled off a few names of other outlets to whom this woman could pitch her study, I found myself admitting rather apologetically: “the thing is, Createquity is not a tastemaker when it comes to arts research. We don’t drive the conversation, we react to it.”

As I heard those words coming out of my mouth, all I could think to myself was, “Jesus, how lame is that?” If Createquity was not going to be a tastemaker for arts research, of all things, then who was? But as I thought about it more, I realized this observation wasn’t just true for research reports. Our recurring features like Around the Horn and public arts funding updates are necessarily reactive to events in the news. When we do a feature in response to a topic proposal from a guest author or Fellow, we’re reacting to that individual’s interest and expertise. Sure, we have a strong editorial filter, but as I reflected, I came to realize that we hardly exercise any editorial direction at all.

But maybe we should be. Createquity and I have come a long way since the days when I was a fresh-faced grad student with a crazy idea to start a blog about the arts in a creative society, eager to soak up as much information as I could about the field. Back then, blogs were still something of a novelty, and few writers and outlets were trying to draw connections across disciplines and comment on the “behind the scenes” elements of arts management, funding, research, and policy in a broader way. But as this personal blog chronicling my journey through business school has evolved into a multi-author, fieldwide resource read by thousands, a lot has changed alongside it. Social media has become the premier way to engage in discussion online and is changing our reading habits in substantive ways. Arts institutions have created dozens of venues for discussion and debate in the interest of advancing open-ended conversations about the future of our field. More and more, I hear from our readers that that they are simply too busy to keep up with it all. Whereas the problem in 2007 was not enough information, the problem today is that there is too much.

All of this has resulted in a resource that, after seven years, is no longer optimally serving its readership. Don’t get me wrong: I’m incredibly proud of what Createquity has accomplished, and continue to believe that we offer a quality of commentary and depth of insight that is unparalleled in our field. But whereas the crucial opportunity of 2007 was to expand access to conversations about the future of the arts to people who hadn’t traditionally been able to partake in them, the crucial opportunity of 2014 is to start bringing those conversations in for a landing. We’ve collectively learned enough about the way that the arts sector works, what kinds of challenges it faces, and what kinds of interventions are possible that we can begin to make the kinds of principled, evidence-backed recommendations that we can confidently stand behind. So why aren’t we putting actionable next steps in front of people who could conceivably make a difference?

A Theory of Change

Last winter, Createquity’s editorial team gathered in Philadelphia to discuss our strategic goals and the evolution of the site. To frame the discussion, we generated what’s called a theory of change, which is a way of depicting a strategy visually. I’ve now been a part of many theory of change development processes, and the capacity of this tool to open up new ways of seeing one’s role in the world never ceases to impress me. Our own exploration was no exception.

At Createquity, we’ve always placed great importance on quality: of prose, presentation, and analysis. We take pride in our ability to come up with insights that are not obvious and convey them with style. We also try to take an open-minded, objective approach – which is not to say that we never have an opinion, but rather that we adjust our opinions in light of the facts instead of looking for facts to justify our opinions.

These values have built our reputation thus far, and we’ve had the privilege of publishing some truly fantastic articles over the years. But as we fleshed out our theory of change, we realized that publishing articles is not really the point for us. Looking back on what we’ve done to date, the articles I’m proudest of are the ones that actually made a difference in the way that people in power approach their work – most notably the series on creative placemaking and research that began with 2012’s “Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem.” We want Createquity to be not just interesting but useful – in other words, we want to have an impact.

(Click to enlarge.)

Ensuring a consistent and direct connection between our work and potential decisions on behalf of the sector requires us to engage in advocacy in a much more proactive fashion than we ever have before. And so, beginning this fall, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Being the Change

Take another look at the diagram above and you’ll see a key activity for Createquity that is brand new: “Identify and articulate strong cases for change.” What will these cases for change be, exactly? Well, the truth is that we’re going to need to invest a little time towards figuring that out – after all, we’d prefer not to come out with guns a-blazing on behalf of some cause that we later decide wasn’t such a great idea in retrospect. But we have a pretty clear sense of how we’re going to go about it, at least. Createquity’s ultimate goal is to help the arts ecosystem “work better for artists and audiences.” So, what does that look like in practice? What are the characteristics of a healthy arts ecosystem versus an unhealthy one? Put another way, if everything were perfect, how would that be different from how things are today? Our next step is to map out answers to these questions in enough detail that we can start to see the picture as a whole instead of in little bits and pieces. In identifying the gaps between our perfect world and present-day reality, we’ll start to get a sense of where the biggest priorities are, and which of them are not getting enough attention. Once we know which areas we want to focus on, we’ll devote ourselves to researching the state of the evidence in those areas, with particular attention to “what works”: what kinds of interventions and next steps might conceivably move the needle on the things that we think matter most?

This new approach will require a near-total restructuring of our editorial process. Right now, we spend a lot of time (somewhere between 15 and 20 hours a week) assembling links from widely-read sources for regular columns like Around the Horn and the Public Arts Funding Update. Our other major editorial focus, the Createquity Fellowship, has produced some great content (and people) over the past three and a half years, but invariably our team spends so much time editing and mentoring that we hardly have any left over for writing. Imagine if we spent all of that time instead reading all those research articles and publications that hardly anyone else is paying attention to, but arguably have more to teach us? And then synthesizing what we’ve learned so we can point out the areas that badly need more of our collective attention?

For all those reasons and more, we’ve decided to reinvent Createquity from the ground up to support our new vision. When you return to this address in the fall, things are going to look very different around here! As exciting as this is, as you can probably tell, it’s going to take a ton of work. So we’ve decided not to post any new content to Createquity this summer to enable us to focus our undivided attention on preparations for the relaunch. If you just can’t imagine not getting your Createquity fix, we’re taking this opportunity to stroll through our back catalogue and repost some of our favorites. For those of you who have been with us from the beginning, you might be surprised at how fresh some of those old chestnuts still are.

Finally, if you’re as psyched about this new direction as we are and would like to get involved, there are lots of ways to do so!

• Spread the word: In its new incarnation, Createquity’s success is highly dependent on reaching the right people. If all goes according to plan, we’re going to be putting out some pretty important, compelling stuff in the fall and beyond – better than anything you’ve seen here before. By sharing what you read, you’ll be doing your colleagues a solid.
• Get into the weeds with us: If you’re not sure you trust us to make the right decisions about which of the arts ecosystem’s problems are most important, or what the research tells us about what we could do to fix them, I don’t blame you. We’re just a few people, after all. That’s why, when Createquity relaunches, the considerations and logic behind all of our major editorial decisions will be accessible via the website – often before any actual cases for change are generated. And if you want to get in there and debate us on the details, I guarantee we’ll listen to you. This is your chance to help steer us in the right direction.
• Help us pay for this thing: Createquity has been from day one an all-volunteer effort – we don’t even have a bank account. But this new website isn’t going to drop out of the sky for free, and we need to get our geographically dispersed editorial team together in one place for some in-person planning sessions, among other priorities. We’ve set up a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and would love to have your support – and we have some cool/valuable perks to offer in return. Please consider donating today – it will go a long way towards making our new vision a reality!
• Join the team: We love working with smart, awesome people! As part of the new plan, the Createquity Fellowship will be evolving into an explicit apprenticeship for joining the editorial team. We also expect to have ad hoc volunteer opportunities available. Stay tuned for further details as the coming months unfold.

Until soon!

Recently, Createquity waded back in to the smart-giving waters after an op-ed by bioethicist Peter Singer comparing donating to a museum to donating to a blindness charity understandably didn’t sit well with the museum community. Singer’s argument had its roots in an emerging area of applied philosophy called “effective altruism,” which argues that we have a moral imperative to do the most good we possibly can and use objective criteria to figure out what that good is. GiveWell has indicated its support for the effective altruist movement, so I thought it was high time to catch up with them to figure out where the arts fit in to all of this.

What was interesting was that the GiveWell folks seemingly came into this experience with a genuine desire to learn from my perspective as much as I was eager to learn from theirs. So at various points I found myself as suddenly the one answering questions, and in particular being challenged to articulate what funding opportunities might exist within the arts that self-aware philanthropists should be paying attention to.

This is a long but rewarding read. Tim and Elie were gracious enough to talk with me for over an hour, and the conversation will be of interest to anyone thinking seriously about philanthropy, advocacy, or research in the arts. That said, simply reproducing the whole thing verbatim here would make for by some margin the wordiest-ever post on Createquity (and that is really saying something), so rather than subject you to that, I’m sharing some of the highlights, condensing and moving things around a bit for the sake of readability.

On Where the Arts Fit in to GiveWell’s World

IDM: GiveWell hasn’t historically given a whole lot of attention to the arts, although I know the arts have been among a broader list of causes considered by the organization. I’m wondering if you can talk briefly about GiveWell’s current orientation to the arts, if any.

EH: There’s two main things I’d tell you about the arts and how they relate to the work that GiveWell is doing. For a long a time GiveWell was almost entirely focused on what we’ve termed evidence-backed, cost-effective, internationally-focused interventions. The arts really didn’t fit into the frame of GiveWell’s research process as it was originally constituted. More recently, as we’ve been working on this broader-scoped research that we call GiveWell Labs, I think it’s not as clear where the arts fit.

One of the things that we’ve always done at GiveWell is research the causes that we collectively, meaning our staff, are most interested in supporting. Early on when GiveWell just started, [it] was just Holden and Elie thinking about where we would give charity. I think now that’s broadened out to the staff we have. My impression is, and I’m certainly speaking for myself, but I think for other staff, that we tend to be more engaged in questions of giving to the causes that we’re currently researching, causes focused on international aid or US policy or scientific research, rather than the arts. And so to some extent those personal interests drive the research we’re doing.

One of the main reasons that we’ve done this is we’ve found that when we are trying to answer the question [of] where would we give our own funds, we tend to do better research then where we’re trying to answer something that I’d say is perhaps more of an intellectual question, which is where would I give if I were interested in something else? So that’s one part of the answer. The other thing I think is just important to ask, and it’s one of the questions that we’re asking for all the causes that we’re currently considering, is to what extent does this field have sufficient funding, versus not? I can’t say that I’m familiar enough with all of arts funding to know exactly how it stacks up, but [I have] sort of a superficial impression that there’s lots of ways in which people can get funding for the arts, whether through, let’s say, privately funded entertainment or government grants or otherwise, and there’s a lot of interest among philanthropists in providing that funding. And so one of the questions that we would have if we were to be involved in this area is what part of this field seems to be under-invested in. I think that question of where additional funding or current funding is not quite meeting the needs is one of the main ways that we’d think about this…[but] in many ways, because of the first point I made I don’t think we’re particularly well positioned to answer [it].

On Prioritizing Basic Versus Higher-Order Needs

IDM: Is it fair to say that GiveWell prioritizes serving the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid or hierarchy of needs? I’m wondering if those concepts of Maslow figure into any of your conversations or thinking about values, or if it’s more coming from an intuitive sense that poverty is central.

TTL: Yeah, I’d say we aren’t just focusing, and don’t want to just focus, on the bottom third or some tier of Maslow’s hierarchy. Traditionally, all the recommendations that we’ve made to date, as you point out, have been in global health and direct aid to people that have dire needs or needs that are different than the needs of people in developed countries.

When we were first deciding what causes we wanted to work on, we wanted to limit it to just causes that had really good evidence of effectiveness, and we found pretty quickly that the types of causes that had really good evidence were interventions in global health and developing countries and direct aid such as using bednets to prevent malaria deaths. There’s been over 20 randomized controlled trials that have connected the properties of bednets to reduce malaria and reduce malaria rates [and] deaths of, especially, people under 5 years old. There are very few interventions available to philanthropists out there that can claim that level of evidence. That was one of the big reasons for our historical focus on global health and direct aid interventions.

What we’ve been working to do recently is also open that up to a broader range of possible causes to look at, and that’s the project we’ve been calling GiveWell Labs, which still hasn’t made any recommendations yet. The causes we’re considering within GiveWell Labs include things that are not just focused in the same areas and includes things like trying to understand if there are ways that a philanthropist can improve scientific research or can change aspects of the political process in the US or elsewhere and a bunch of other causes as well.

We’re definitely very open to the idea that it’s possible to have more impact per dollar with things that are outside of developing health, or things that don’t just affect the bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy as you’re saying. But when there’s not as much academic literature on a specific intervention, it’s certainly a lot harder to understand that impact and it’s taking us a long time to try to understand.

IDM: Do you have a formal definition that you use, or even an informal definition, of what the good is that you guys are seeking to create in the world? Because I’m wondering when there are tradeoffs between those kinds of needs, how do you compare higher-level needs to lower-level needs in thinking about that hierarchy?

TTL: Yeah, I think this is a great question. It’s a hard one, and we have not formalized what values we are trying to maximize, if you will, or how to trade off the value of saving the life of someone that’s less than five years old versus maybe reducing the chance of mental development problems in another person, or improving the life of someone in a developed country, or maybe improving an institution like a government that will affect a whole lot of people.

EH: I think the main thing we’ve written that I would just point you to is this blog post [GiveWell co-founder] Holden [Karnofsky] wrote about a year ago called “Deep value judgments and worldview characteristics.” I care about self-actualization, so in some ways, I can easily imagine us being excited about things at the higher end of the hierarchy of needs, but I think it would really depend on the specifics of the circumstance.

One of the things that that blog post talks about is that we are not putting strong weights on achieving specific things in and of themselves – so some artistic endeavor as, like, some sort of achievement, as much as the broader impact that those types of activities could have on individual self-actualization. And so again, I think that one of the challenges for us in engaging with a type of philanthropy that we’re not particularly involved in now is understanding how the activities fund and would contribute to the types of goals that we would value.

On Effective Altruism and Strategic Cause Selection (aka Can You Work in the Arts and Still Be an Effective Altruist?)

IDM: I loved that you guys published a roundup of the GiveWell staff’s personal donation decisions this past December. It was super interesting. One thing I noticed was that there were a couple of staff who chose not to allocate all their charitable dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities. [But] some of the logic that we hear from a theoretical standpoint from effective altruists has to do with the idea of concentrating resources on high-impact opportunities rather than spreading the wealth around.

I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the balance between personal passions and feeding those through charitable activities on the one hand, and on the other hand, the moral imperative that a lot of people involved with this movement do lay out around the idea that you really should maximize the expected amount of good that you can do in your life.

TTL: The way I think about this broadly is that it’s important to me to have as big of an impact as possible and to approach that question sort of systematically. For me, not surprisingly, GiveWell is my primary resource for figuring out how to do that with the bulk of my funds – and I guess on top of that, it’s also how I’ve chosen to try to do that through my career – but then there [are] a bunch of reasons why maybe I should give in ways that aren’t just GiveWell top charities. I think you saw a bunch of these in the staff giving profile but, you know, it includes things like, well, if you have particular or special knowledge of a particular area then that might be a really good reason to expect that you might have a really good giving opportunity even if the broader community or GiveWell in particular hasn’t discovered it and developed the same sort of public degree of confidence that you have privately.

Additionally, for me, I think that certain types of heuristics in terms of one’s giving habits or patterns can be really useful even if they can’t quite be justified in this typical sort of straight-line effective altruist or consequentialist type perspective. Even if you can’t prove or you have no expectation that this marginal dollar if given by anyone would be best spent in this particular way, maybe if it’s related to something that you care a lot about or you use as a service yourself. Then that is an additional reason to value it, or to value the principle in general that people using that service might contribute to it to some extent.

IDM: In my professional life, I work with a lot of people who are very cause-centric, right? [Laughs] People care a lot about the arts. And so I’m wondering if you feel that there are principles from effective altruism, or from your general approach to giving, that could be applied even within a cause? As background, I’ll just tell you that when we were working on our effective altruism article for Createquity, we had a lot of debate internally about whether the idea of effective altruism in the arts is an oxymoron because of that cause-agnostic nature of effective altruism.

TTL: I don’t think it’s an oxymoron. I think that it’s totally possible to – if you can restrict the set of possibilities to some subset before, and then even within that subset, there [are] going to be causes that have more of the impact you’re looking for or less of the impact you’re looking for per dollar.

And so I absolutely don’t think it’s an oxymoron. I think that if I had some pot of money that was going to be dedicated towards the arts, then I would definitely be interested to know what are the opportunities to make changes out there, which of the opportunities seem to be most effective could actually be scaled up with more money, versus they might be really effective but giving them more money won’t allow them to do more of the same work, and other related questions.

EH: Yeah. I mean, I think there [are] a lot of the sort of questions and tools that we ask that I can easily imagine applying well to the arts. I think one of the main questions I’d have is, how does the arts funding ecosystem work, and what types of activities or outputs are for whatever reason not valued by the current funding infrastructure, but they appear to achieve the same types of goals, or the goals that one has as an arts funder or an artist?

Those are the types of things that I think come out of what I would characterize as the broad goals of an effective altruist, trying to use the part of your time or charitable funds that is being directed towards altruistic rather than perhaps personal goals as effectively as possible.

While I think people will reach different conclusions about which causes they are excited to work on, there is nothing that seems particularly problematic to me about someone saying, “the way in which I think that I can best contribute to the world is via the arts and, therefore, I’m going to try and maximize in some broad sense the impact that I have in that domain.”

On How to Think About Giving to the Arts

EH: Sorry, just to follow up actually I have a question for you if that’s okay. I mean, I think one of the questions that I would have when thinking about the arts is, what is the problem that additional funding could solve? I think that would help me because I think I have a relatively superficial understanding of what the problem might be, but I would characterize it in such a naïve way that I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful. So my naïve characterization might be something like, we could fund more art than we are currently funding, and the thing that would start to help me think this through more carefully would be, you know, what are we not funding that we should be, and how bad is that, and how much funding would it require? And I guess, then, ultimately, what could that mean to the development of a more complete, richer world arts community? Those are some of the things that I think I would want to ask when starting to think about this question.

IDM: Yeah, so two things, I guess, on that. The first is that I think the arts in some ways have struggled with this tendency of the broader philanthropic and nonprofit or social sector community to frame things in terms of problems, because what I think a lot of people in the arts might say is that we’re not here to solve a problem, we’re here to create possibility. We’re here to sort of extend the universe of what it is possible for humans to do in a way.

And in some ways, what we do has more in common with something like higher education or even science then it does with international development or aid or things like that. With that being said, I think that your question is still valid and important, because you focused it specifically around the idea of, well, what are the opportunities that we’re missing specifically with respect to funding?

I think that there are a lot of potential ways to answer that, but the reason why I asked about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is because if you think about where the arts kind of fit into that, you know, it seems pretty clear to me that where they slot in is in that top need of self-actualization. The arts, creativity, and sort of related concepts – I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s the only form of self-actualization, but Maslow himself talks about that being one of the ways in which self-actualization manifests.

[Later on…]

EH: I do think there is this question about the arts, which I would be interested in hearing from people who are themselves very interested in providing charitable support there, answering the question of how those funds will make a difference. Because I guess I don’t want to, sort of let the arts off too easy relative to any other cause, and I’d be interested in this question of trying to determine what is not being funded that should be, and why. Because it strikes me that there are a lot of institutions and individuals who are interested in being part of the arts and funding the arts, and so there’s something of an obstacle to overcome in terms of convincing, me, let’s say, or other donors that additional funding is really what is most needed there.

IDM: So let me ask, do you think that the greater obstacle for you is more about the value of the arts in the abstract, compared to some of the other things that GiveWell focuses on? Or is it more about, as you kind of expressed just now, a lack of familiarity or confidence that, in GiveWell’s term, there is room for more funding in the arts?

EH: I think the issue is more a room for our funding issue, but I’ll try to explain what I mean by that and then let me know if this makes sense. Basically, I think a world – like, imagine you could just take all of the funding and time that goes into arts and totally take it away, and now it all goes to just, I don’t know, like poverty prevention programs.

I mean, that doesn’t strike me as the ideal balance for the world. You know, like absolutely no entertainment or literature or painting or music. I mean, that does not seem like a good world to live in and so, now, again, I’m just kind of giving you my own values and my impression, [but] I wouldn’t want to see a world where there was none of that. And so, therefore, to me the big question is, does this area have sufficient funding or insufficient funding to engage humanity as much as it potentially can or should, relative to the other needs that people have? That’s a very hard question to answer, but that’s the way that at least I personally look at it.

IDM: So, I think my readers might kill me if I didn’t at least attempt to hazard an answer to that question. I’ll preface this by saying there is no sort of canonical consensus around the answer to that question of, you know, what is it that philanthropic intervention in the arts is supposed to do? But a while back I articulated two ways of thinking about justifications for subsidy of the arts which are mine alone, but also do have antecedents and connections to other work that people have done.

I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine a world where there is literally no art or entertainment, or anything like that. Because it’s part of human expression and people find a way to make it happen, sometimes in very adverse conditions.

[But] if it were only up to the commercial marketplace to decide what art gets created and who gets to be an artist, there would be two things that would happen. In the long run, over time, on average, you would have art and cultural products that cater to a wide, broad-based audience, and so you’d lose some of the diversity of product. You would lose a lot of the most interesting kind of expressions of human creativity that you get, and there are plenty of examples of artists who are considered very famous or important today that basically survived to the present day entirely because of luck. If they survived because of luck, then how many other geniuses or brilliant contributions to the literature or to the set of human achievement were lost, because they were never created in the first place or because they were literally lost? That’s one kind of justification.

The other justification is – so, if we go back to this idea of self-actualization and sort of take it as a given that for at least some people, the path to that is through being an artist or through engaging with the arts in some really deep sustained way in order to have peak experiences, understand and really experience what it means to be alive in this very present and visceral way [such] that you could make a moral argument that everybody deserves to have that opportunity – people’s access to the arts is determined in many ways by the market. And there are many disparities in the level of access that is available to people in various ways, for example due to cuts in arts education funding, it’s much less common now for people from poor or minority communities to have access to arts education than was the case in the past. That’s not necessarily to say that they won’t come into contact with the arts outside of school, but it’s less likely that they will have these pathways into discovering themselves through this medium that is one way to kind of achieve one’s potential. That’s sort of the way that I’m currently thinking about it.

EH: Got it. Yeah, I mean so those two points, and I think maybe this is just something about definitions, but I think that this problem that people who are perhaps socioeconomically disadvantaged have less access to the arts, it’s something that I would almost categorize as part of the general cause of inequality in the rich world. That’s to just say that is broadly speaking how I mentally file this cause, and it would almost be outside of art specifically.

On the first point, you know, I think the place I start is I think the most recent Giving USA survey data says there was roughly $14 billion given to the arts in 2012 and $19 billion given to international aid. And so the question is, you know, we can all agree that here should be, or at least I’m willing to agree that there should be some level of non-market-based arts funding, and then the question is should it be equivalent, roughly speaking, to the amount going internationally or should it be more or should it be less. That seems like the major question to try to answer and it becomes difficult to answer what the appropriate level should be in some abstract sense.

And so that’s why the approach that we’ve taken, at least in the research we’re doing under the name GiveWell Labs, is trying to look for specific areas that where we’re seeing ideas or problems that don’t seem to be funded in the way that they should be, where you can almost see the full concept and idea behind a lack of funding in a particular area. And you can say, you know, this thing, it would cost X dollars and it appears to have insufficient funding, therefore, this is something that is worthy of serious consideration.

On Evaluating and Allocating Resources to Research

IDM: You guys have devoted quite a lot of resources over the last few years to reviewing research literature, often either in connection with GiveWell Labs or to develop a knowledgebase of evidence-backed [interventions] in international aid.

I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about how your process has evolved and changed since you first started. I’m especially interested in whether you feel like you’ve kind of hit upon the answer at this point to what an effective research process is in terms of just going into a completely new area and finding out as much information as you can about what the evidence base is for guiding philanthropic decisions, or if you feel like there is still inefficiencies and problems that you’re still trying to figure out.

EH: Yeah, so the short answer is we don’t have it all figured out yet and there’s a lot we’re still trying to figure out about the best research process. The longer answer is that I think that we have come to a reasonably good process for our traditional research on international aid organizations but even that, you know, is not particularly formulaic because it varies a lot based on the specifics of the intervention or the organization.

There’s two different ways that we’ll look at an intervention. One is the more traditional GiveWell focus, which is very specific interventions that have a great degree of rigorous evidence evaluating their effectiveness. Another type, I wouldn’t even call it an intervention as much as a charitable program area, you know, where one might say hey, we could have a big impact on the world if we were to increase labor mobility or have some sort of software patent reform. These are areas that I don’t think one could call the activity we undertake evidence review as much as trying to get a better sense of the area.

I think the first kind is one where we have a pretty standard process we go through of looking for research that evaluates the question we have. You know, do bednets work, how well do they work. Then we are trying to think of all the questions that we have of the ways that the program could fail and then looking for literature on those questions. So, in the case of bednets, just to play out this example, it would involve how often do people actually use the bednets and was it the case that they only used the nets in smaller, randomized trials but in a larger-scale government program they might not. Or what impact does insecticide resistance have. So then we just go about listing out the questions and trying to answer them.

IDM: So, there’s a piece of that that you’re glossing over a little bit that I’m really interested in. I have to imagine that in the area in which you’re looking, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of studies that are potentially relevant to the questions that you’re looking at. So what are the filters that you use to decide which studies you’re even going to take a look at in depth? And then do you sort of structure the process in such a way so that you are looking at some of them at a shallow level, some of them at a deeper level, and so forth?

EH: The biggest filter that is imposed in the health interventions is we give serious priority to randomized controlled trials, which are created explicitly to evaluate the causal relationship between the intervention and the outcome in a way that other study methodologies have greater challenges to overcome.

That said, we don’t only focus on randomized trials. There’s evidence in our reports that comes from other types of evaluations, other types of studies, but because other types of studies often are not created in such a way to answer causal questions as directly, as easily, and it’s really the causal question is the one that we have (meaning “what can we say generally about bednet effectiveness?” is a question of what the causal relationship is between distributing bed nets and cases of deaths from malaria), we tend to prioritize the randomized studies.

TTL: The other thing that can be really useful when there’s thousands of studies in a general area that you’re trying to understand is using other people’s literature, or in the case at least when there is a lot of randomized controlled trials, there’s some times meta-analyses that are done to try to combine the statistical power of many of these different studies.

Now, I don’t know if this actually applies in the arts. I don’t know how common randomized controlled trials are or whether there is …

IDM: They are not. And I’ll just tell you guys that it’s a little bit funny to hear you talk about how you have so many doubts about the room for more funding in the arts and the general impression that the arts are overfunded. I don’t think that you actually used those words, but the thing is that compared to, like, the NIH spending on research, the amount of resources that actually go into research on the arts is incredibly paltry.

It’s true that there are big, big sums of money spent on arts organizations and arts interventions, but a lot of times that goes to things like buildings, whereas only a tiny fraction of that amount might actually go into studying whether that building ever made a difference to anybody.

I think it’s interesting because, while I think there are lots of arguments that you can make about the relative proportion of funding in the arts versus other areas, I would imagine that the typical ratio of funding that is spent on research about the topic or evaluations of the topic compared to the amount that is actually spent on the program delivery is way, way, way lower in the arts than it is in a lot of other fields.

TTL: It sounds like you think there is a lot of, the research on arts effectiveness is very underfunded.

IDM: I think so, yeah, and it’s, and because of that, you know, by the kinds of standards that you guys are using, the overall quality of evidence in the arts is pretty poor. There’s just, there are a lot of things that haven’t been studied, or they have been studied but not with the kind of rigor that you guys are looking for in your process.

EH: You know, the reason that earlier I was trying to distinguish between sort of these evidence-backed interventions versus other types of research that we’re doing for GiveWell Labs is I really think the latter is the one that seems like an easier fit for the arts, and the one that makes more sense.

It’s almost like I think there needs to be something of a more qualitative case that some part of the arts is underfunded or there is some segment that should be funded to a greater extent than it already is. I wouldn’t expect that rigorous evaluations are the right fit for evaluating that type of activity because I’m not even sure that we could agree on what impact we’re trying to evaluate.

IDM: Right. That makes sense. Could [you] describe a little bit more what that more qualitative analysis looks like? And in particular, I’m curious, is that entirely or almost entirely a theoretical exercise, or are you drawing in research that maybe doesn’t reach the level of randomized controlled trials and is maybe a little bit less expensive or less ambitious as part of the background for information-gathering for that analysis?

EH: I think the best way to get an idea of how we do that research is, we have these web pages that we’ve published that we call GiveWell Labs investigations of new causes or also called shallow investigations. They’re our initial look into various different areas.

On each of these pages, we do our best to answer the questions that we have about that area. It’s kind of like the things that we want to know in 10 to 20 hours of investigation. The questions we’re trying to answer are, what is the problem, and as part of what is the problem, some sense of how big a problem this is in the scheme of things. I think we’ve taken a lot of different approaches to answering that question, but on some level, trying as much as we can to quantify the problem and when we can’t quantify anymore, trying to explain it more qualitatively.

So you’ll see that on these pages. The other question that we’re trying to answer is a question about tractability. We can define the problem, but what can be done, and how likely are these goals to be achieved? Again, these require, without a doubt, a large degree of qualitative judgment about what it is and is not feasible and what is and is not likely, and we largely form these conclusions through conversations with people in the field. In the issues that are listed on this page, the shallow investigations, maybe we have two or three conversations with people in the field. Then there are other investigations that are larger, we call them “medium investigations,” maybe there we’re talking to 25 or 30 people to just try and triangulate what we can understand about the area.

Then finally, we’re asking the question, how crowded is this area? Who else is working here? How much are they funding? What are they funding? Putting it all together, areas where the problem is large and seems particularly tractable, and there is relatively little philanthropic funding, or if there is funding, we can understand why it is focused on part A of the issue but not part B. Those are very attractive and areas that say seem less important, less tractable, but highly crowded are less attractive.

In practice, things don’t kind of fall out so nicely; like normally problems have some combination of these factors and ways that require some thinking about how exactly to prioritize them. Those are the types of questions we’re asking and the types of information that we’re trying to feed into our process as we think about what we’re doing. To me, you know, these are the questions that I would have about the arts. Are we talking about, I don’t know, large museums in major cities? It seems like there is a lot of funding that goes to the Met, and the Guggenheim or other museums like that. I’m sure I sound hopelessly naïve when talking about the arts but that’s one type of question.

IDM: You are stating fact, my friend.

EH: And then maybe on the other hand, you know, you say, well, really the issue is funding of arts access in poorer communities. You could do a little investigation of that area and try to determine, is this something that people focus on and to what extent do they? We would wonder, like, is it that there’s no funding from local government as part of schools? Is there just no interest from major donors? How much money really is there? What could we expect to happen if this were to go well?

Those are all the questions that we ask. One thing just to add, and I know I’ve gone on for a little while on this, but another broad type of activity we’re undertaking in this area is what we call the history of philanthropy project where we basically say we recognize that all of these areas that don’t have that same type of rigorous evidence so arts, but also policy, or even science – it’s harder to know what will work.

One of the things we’re trying to look at is just what has worked historically when philanthropy has been involved, and this is an area where there is very limited information available. The basic idea is to try and do something that is more like investigative reporting or journalistic reporting where you better understand the role philanthropy has played. And I could imagine that also being helpful in thinking about arts philanthropy, where you can look back and say you know, what did someone do 30 years ago and what impact does that seem to have had? It obviously can’t be quantified in the way that saving lives with bednets could be quantified, but it can perhaps offer a deeper picture of what role philanthropy plays in achieving some outcome.

It’s a crisp spring evening in Philadelphia’s East Passyunk neighborhood, and the avenue is coming alive. Market lights cast a warm glow over a restaurant patio where groups of people dine at picnic tables and a band does a quick sound check on stage. A little further down the block, shops and boutiques begin to close up for the evening, dimming their display window lights as a nearby gallery begins to fill with people out for an opening and a cafe prepares for open mic night. Pedestrians meander the sidewalks and through a small public square, chattering as they pass sandwich boards advertising restaurant week and lampposts plastered with flyers for upcoming film screenings and art shows.  A cyclist darts past a couple hailing a slow moving cab on the narrow street, and a group of twenty-somethings crack open the door of a crowded bar before stepping in.

Summer night on East Passyunk Ave. in Philadelphia. Photo credit: Christopher Woods (Flickr user: ChrisinPhilly5448)

If Passyunk Avenue sounds like a place you would like to be on a Friday evening, you are in good company. Known for their bustling pedestrian-oriented streets, repurposed historic buildings, inviting public spaces, diverse cuisine and retail offerings and the presence of the arts, informal or “Naturally-Occurring Cultural Districts” (NOCD) such as East Passyunk are highly desired by those vying for an apartment in the hippest area in town, budding entrepreneurs seeking space for new venues, not to mention urban planners and policy makers around the country. The term “cultural district” has been used to refer to a variety of different types of urban neighborhood, and there are even some cultural districts in rural areas (note: for the purposes of this post, arts, entertainment, and cultural districts are collectively referred to as cultural districts). NOCDs evolve without any government intervention, which is the ideal scenario from an urban planning and economic development perspective—due to a fortuitous combination of circumstances, a particular neighborhood turns into a hotbed of cultural vitality without any effort or public spending. Indeed, studies have shown that the benefits of successful cultural districts go beyond their nightlife; these areas are often home to ethnically, educationally and economically heterogeneous populations, and also offer residents a variety of services, making them convenient and distinctive places to live and work.

Designating Cultural Districts

Many cultural districts seek to replicate the success of NOCDs through careful planning and policy, with varying degrees of success. Since the 1980s, cities across the country have tried to foster the development of these planned cultural districts in areas that share many characteristics of NOCD, but where cultural life remains somewhat isolated from the rest of a community, or is just beginning to emerge as a significant factor. The idea is that with a little extra help these neighborhoods could turn into the next cultural hotspot. The development of these districts typically begins with identification of a neighborhood’s potential, often through the nomination and application by local stakeholders. If selected, an official designation is awarded, sometimes accompanied by a suite of government incentives targeted specifically at artists and other cultural producers. Usually positioned as economic development strategies, these programs are designed to encourage artists, entrepreneurs, institutions and potential developers to build on and organize around existing arts- and culture-based assets. If successful, the initial effort to designate a district will eventually result in increased tourism, tax revenue and outside investment in the designated areas.

A concert in a vacant lot in the state-designated Station North Arts & Entertainment District in Baltimore. Photo credit: Theresa Keil, courtesy of Station North Arts & Entertainment, Inc.

Mere designation of neighborhood as an officially recognized cultural district can by itself provide several benefits, including:

• Credibility: Though the designation process and standards vary from state to state, designating a cultural district recognizes the arts and cultural resources as defining characteristics of an area. A state-level review process and subsequent designation also lends credibility to this recognition.
• Catalyst and Organizing Principle: Cultural district designation at the state level can function as an organizing principle amongst artists, residents, business owners, and community development professionals to establish cooperation and consensus as a neighborhood undergoes redevelopment or creates a neighborhood vision plan.
• Marketing Potential: Given the cachet of cultural districts, designation can be a powerful marketing tool for a neighborhood undergoing active development. Designation offers the opportunity to change or influence the narrative about a given neighborhood in a positive way, as well as influence future investment.
• Leverage Funding: In addition to some states enabling designated cultural districts access to specific loan funds, state designated cultural districts are uniquely positioned to attract regional and even national funding that might not otherwise be possible in the absence of designation. As an added bonus, the inherently place-based nature of a cultural district draws funding toward defined geographies.
• Formalizing Relationships: Designated cultural districts offer the opportunity to strengthen state and local partnerships, strengthening relationships between agencies at these levels. Depending on the district’s management model, designated cultural districts can also link artists and informal arts collectives and bolster working relationships across the nonprofit, private and public sectors.

There are currently 13 state-designated cultural district programs, with designation criteria and process varying by state. Statewide programs are usually administered by the program’s respective state arts council, or in some cases by a state Main Street program, another economic development strategy that leverages local assets and emphasizes local heritage and historic character in its approach. Management strategies vary at the local level as well: some are volunteer-led organizations, others are fused with a Main Street program or community development corporation, and a few are autonomous nonprofit entities.

Of the 13 states that have designated cultural districts, only five (Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, and Rhode Island) offer tax incentives for activity occurring within districts. These tax incentives can take the form of income tax exemptions, property tax incentives, sales tax credits or exemptions, preservation tax credits, or admissions & amusement tax exemptions. Other benefits for state designated districts include technical assistance programs or small grants offered directly to organizations, artists or other entities that are either located in designated districts or partner with the districts’ managing body.

A street view of Central Avenue in Albuquerque’s Arts & Cultural District. Photo credit: Kent Kanouse (Flickr user: KentKanouse)

Evaluating State-Designated Cultural District Programs

With the earliest state-designated cultural district programs now more than a decade old, it’s time to ask whether they are working effectively. To date, unfortunately, limited research evaluating state designated cultural districts exists. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) produced a 2012 overview of state cultural district policy and programs. The topic of cultural districts, designated and not, has also been addressed by Americans for the Arts, and was the focus of a 2013 AFTA preconference.

Several states have attempted to shed some light on the broad impact of their cultural district programs. The Maryland State Arts Council provides a yearly report on the economic and fiscal impacts of its arts & entertainment districts. According to the analysis, which uses the IMPLAN software and input/output methodology, an estimated 5,144 jobs were supported by arts & entertainment districts along with $458.2 million in total state GDP and $38.3 million in total tax revenues.

The Texas Cultural Trust used interviews, case studies, census data and tax records from Texas cultural districts to measure economic impact based on five indicators: population, employment, property tax base, taxable sales, and annual operating budget of the cultural district. The document also attempts to forecast the three-year impact of Texas’s designated cultural districts based on increased marketing and promotion, and changes in property value/property tax base increase.

The Iowa Department of Revenue evaluated its three-tiered state historic preservation tax credit program, one part of which is specifically applicable for the renovation of historic properties in designated cultural and entertainment districts. Using tax credit recipient surveys and Iowa Department of Revenue tax data, the study compares the Iowa historic preservation tax credit to similar programs in other states and evaluates the economic impact. It claims that every dollar awarded in state tax credits leveraged an additional $3.77 in federal and private investment.

Overall, the reports present the presence of a designated cultural district as a benefit and driver of economic development. Data on the number of people taking advantage of the tax incentive programs and the economic impact of these programs is missing from these reports, however, and from other state-designated cultural district programs with yearly reporting mechanisms. While the Iowa report provides an analysis of its historic preservation tax credit, it does not provide an analysis of those used specifically in its cultural and entertainment districts. This may be because certain data is difficult to locate: cultural district income tax benefits for artists, for example, are filed with an individual’s yearly tax forms and are therefore not publicly accessible.

Challenges

If better data on cultural district tax incentives were available, there’s a good chance it would show that the incentives are of little consequence for the artists, organizations, and developers catalyzing revitalization in designated cultural districts. Several sources, including the NASAA policy overview, a Johns Hopkins University report, and anecdotal evidence from conversations with district managers, suggest that even where tax incentives are available, not many people or organizations take advantage of them.

This is likely a function of the limitations of state cultural district incentives. Specifically,

• Stringent definitions of “qualifying artist” and “artistic work” significantly reduce the number of individuals eligible for the incentives. This is particularly true of the income tax and sales tax incentives offered by several state programs. The definitions often require art to be made and sold within district boundaries, which does not reflect contemporary art-making, marketing, and sales practices. “Industry-specific work” such as graphic design or commercial photography does not qualify for most state incentive programs, which prevents many creative professionals from using the incentives.
• Unclear guidelines for administration of incentives make it difficult for comptrollers or other government officials to determine eligibility for the incentives and to administer the programs consistently. In turn, this lack of an established protocol makes it difficult or impossible to use the credits, causing artists to seek alternatives.
• Insignificant amounts of eligible income derived from the sale of art, tickets, or other work that does qualify for the incentives further limit the potential pool of applicants. In a time when many artists derive their primary income from other jobs, proceeds from the sale of work might not meet minimum thresholds for reporting, or might go unclaimed on an annual income tax form due to complicated documentation requirements.
• A lack of promotion highlighting the availability of tax incentives leaves them relatively unknown to the public. Simply put, the existence of cultural district incentives is not widely advertised.

Given the hurdles for using districts’ incentives and the fact that most state programs do not offer incentives at all, it appears the success of cultural districts primarily stems from designation itself and the opportunities to market, program and organize that the designation provides. However, even the components of the programs that do not provide direct financial assistance still require funding and a management structure through which to administer the program. This brings us to another challenge for cultural districts: sustainability.

Regardless of management structure, dedicated staff time is vital to realizing the goals and reaping the benefits of a designated cultural district. Beyond small technical assistance grants, only two states offer operational support for the management of districts at the local level. The minimal funding available for this purpose seems disproportionate to the economic impact that cultural districts are expected to yield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of cultural districts lies in maintaining affordability for the artists, entrepreneurs, and other longtime residents and businesses of designated districts, ostensibly those catalyzing the economic impact of the neighborhoods. While many NOCDs are celebrated success stories, some, like New York City’s SoHo or Miami’s Wynwood District are criticized for becoming victims of their own success, having experienced rapid commercialization, rising rents and displacement of the artists and longtime residents of the neighborhoods.Policies for state-designated cultural districts do little to consider the long-term sustainability of cultural districts whose “assets” are in large part reliant on individuals who are vulnerable to economic shifts and rising cost of living. Existing cultural district policy does not address issues of affordability, putting the creative clusters that rely on affordable live and workspace options at risk of displacement.

Conclusion

State-designated cultural districts benefit communities across the country, serving as a organizing principle, lending credibility to creative communities at the local level and boosting marketing potential in the neighborhoods in which they are initiated. With some programs now more than a decade old, however, it seems the policy and incentives programs accompanying some of these programs lag behind. While steps are being taken to increase advocacy efforts and expand the applicability and usefulness of these credits, including an expansion of geographic limitations for eligible artists in both Maryland and Rhode Island, progress remains slow. As arts organizations, researchers, and policymakers continue to explore cultural districts and make decisions about the creation of new districts, several key pieces of data need to be added to the equation.

First, data on cultural district tax incentives should be collected and compared to the expectations of policymakers at the time of their creation. Specifically, how many individuals are using the incentives, and how much is being claimed as a benefit of these programs? In addition to providing a clearer picture of the costs and benefits of designated districts, this data would enable more strategic decision-making for promotion of incentives.

Secondly, policymakers and researchers should adjust programs to better support and sustain artists, administrators and organizations. Where incentives for artists and creative professionals are offered, policymakers need to consider how art is marketed and eventually purchased. For example, the relatively recent emergence of Etsy, Kickstarter and other online platforms has changed the way artists and creative professionals seek visibility for their work, network, and sustain their business. Furthermore, increased connectivity between major urban areas makes it common practice to live in one city as a practicing artist and participate in exhibitions in another metropolitan area. Existing policy incentives do not align with these practices.

Finally, cultural district programs need to consider and promote affordability when it comes to residential and work space within districts. Whether at the policy level or local district level, administrators need to consider how to incentivize property owners to continue developing and maintaining safe and affordable studios, galleries, venues and living spaces. Another aspect to consider is adjusting policies and programs to incentivize renters to remain in cultural districts.

At their best, designated cultural districts provide a policy framework that leverages existing creative energy to foster the type of asset-based economic revitalization observed in NOCDs. However, as designated cultural district programs age and additional states create similar programs, it is vital that administrators delve more deeply into the research and evaluation of these programs to monitor the success of these districts, as well as some of their unintended consequences and areas for improvement.

Summary

Published in 2011, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social web-inspired approach to museum exhibits and partnerships and serves as a handbook for museum professionals for engaging in participatory projects. The Participatory Museum looks at how audiences participate in online platforms such as YouTube and Flickr and extends those principles to visitor participation in a museum. The first section of the book presents the theoretical framework for participatory design, and the second lays out practical tips for designing participatory exhibits and programs including types of projects, evaluation tips, and advice on how to build institutional capacity for participatory projects.

Four main ideas make up the theoretical part of the book:

Scaffolding places clear parameters through design into an exhibit that help frame the visitor experience and the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding guides visitors and keeps requests for participation from being too open-ended.

Me to We Design, a recasting of Simon’s earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through personal entry points to make connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals. Those connections take many forms.

Social technographics are a concept borrowed from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement, audience profiles are based on types of activity and include creators, spectators, critics, joiners, collectors, and inactives. Good design considers how the actions of each audience type can enhance the experience of others.

Social objects function as a conduit for participation allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Giving objects a social dimension can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative.

In the second section, one chapter each is devoted to four types of participatory projects—contributory, collaborative, co-creative, hosted—three of which come from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). Simon added a fourth type, “hosted,” to accommodate projects that are done by outside groups within the museum. The participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants but needn’t be attempted in any particular order. She even demystifies choosing among models through a handy chart.

Analysis

At first, I was skeptical of the book’s wide applicability. Would it work well in the field regardless of museum type, location, or resources? As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions.

• The Participatory Museum is dense in practical information. Tips are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation.
• The examples are diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum
• Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it was clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

The theories underlying The Participatory Museum appear to be sound even if not originating in or having been formally tested in a museum environment at the time of publication. Simon translates what assessment does exist into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like. The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to incorporating participatory design into an institution.

Implications

Simon’s book has had an undeniable impact on the museum field, reigniting debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. In the four years since its publication there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation. And even within the field, participation and the principles laid out in the book have become the focus of conferences, institution-wide training sessions, and professional development workshops. Though participation does seem to be where the field is headed, the principles have met with some resistance from proponents of the more traditional museum experience and design and the absolute control and authority of the institution.

At the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques? The Particpatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

(For a briefer edition of this analysis, check out the abridged version.)

“This may sound messy,” Nina Simon, engineer turned experience designer, writes of participatory projects. “It may [also] sound tremendously exciting.”

Summary

Written in 2010 as a handbook for museum professionals who want to engage audiences in deeper forms of participation, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social, web-inspired approach to exhibits and partnerships. At the time of writing, Simon was a highly sought-after experience designer whose philosophy was made popular through her blog, Museum 2.0. Part argument for participation and part toolbox, The Participatory Museum aims to inspire readers’ enthusiasm about participatory design and prepare them to launch their own successful projects.

The book itself is the product of a participatory project. Simon used an online wiki format to allow readers to submit relevant case studies and assist with writing and eventually editing. The online version of the book features linked footnotes for the examples used throughout the text.

Taking cues from social websites like YouTube, Netflix, LibraryThing, and Flickr, The Participatory Museum explores how brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from virtual participatory experiences. Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as one in which “visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.” Participation encourages multidirectional content experiences: a museum, rather than limiting itself to sending information in the direction of visitors, can encourage those visitors to contribute information to the institution and even share among themselves. Participation also encourages more equitable relationships among all stakeholders, making objects and entire institutions more accessible.

All of this requires an adjustment in thinking about authority, the role of the visitor, and the flow of information between individual and institution. In participatory projects, museum staff members used to holding absolute authority in the interpretation of objects must cede some of that power to visitors. Simon asserts that the very process that makes participatory projects rewarding for museum audiences is often a source of apprehension for museum staff. Done right, according to Simon, “participatory projects create new value for the institution, participants, and non-participating audience members.”

Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins

Using the example of how interactivity has transformed entire organizations such as the Boston Children’s Museum, Simon imagines a future where some institutions are “wholly participatory.” The Participatory Museum advocates for the power of participatory design to fulfill idealistic mission statements about engagement, connection, and inspiring action. Nevertheless, Simon is careful to include the caveat that this new method of design isn’t meant to supplant traditional techniques but to augment them, and argues that the two can peacefully coexist.

Structure and scope

The book is organized into two sections. The first, more theoretical part lays out several participatory design principles, and the second details how four different models of participation can work in practice.

Participation in theory

For Simon, the first and perhaps most important point that undergirds all successful design is a clear connection between the institution’s mission and the benefits to be gained from a participatory project by the institution, participants, or audience. No one will be engaged – or fooled – if a museum halfheartedly invites participation because it has become trendy. To reap the rewards of participation, staff and leadership must understand how the project will advance the museum’s core purposes. This grounding in mission and clarity of benefits makes everything else possible.

The Participatory Museum identifies “two counter-intuitive design principles at the heart of successful participatory projects” that reappear throughout the book. The first is scaffolding, the guidance and constraints given to visitors to help frame the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding is necessary to set up a safe environment where audience members feel comfortable sharing and interacting with each other. Simon juxtaposes the completely open-ended request for participation with the thoughtfully narrow one.

Compare, for example, the open-ended dialogue program of British artist Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,with the Human Library, an event first held for youth at the Denmark Roskilde Festival in 2000. It Is What It Is attempted to encourage visitors to ask questions of people who had served in Iraq by creating a large gallery with provocative images from the country and installing living-room-style seating. At points throughout the exhibition, soldiers, translators, and others were on hand to answer questions from visitors. Simon argues that It Is What It Is lacked “sufficient scaffolding to robustly and consistently support dialogue”: the two times she saw it at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, there were just two guests sitting on couches next to a powerful object.

The Human Library explores similar terrain: it is intended for “anybody who is ready to talk with his or her own prejudice and stereotype and wants to spend an hour of time on this experience.” Participants select a “book” from a catalogue of stereotypes, such as a black Muslim, a cop, a Goth, or a quadriplegic; once at the “checkout counter,” they encounter a person embodying their chosen stereotype for a discussion lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. The experience was more carefully crafted, and it was a success at generating the kinds of provocative discussions the designers hoped for. The framing of the event as a library eased some of the expected reluctance in confronting visitors’ own prejudices, allowing participants to choose their own book provided a personal entry point into the activity, and even restricting the time helped set people’s expectations. Simon reasons that limitations make people more likely to participate and that better-defined parameters lead to higher-quality and more relevant participation.

Good scaffolding alone doesn’t automatically result in amazing social participation. Truly social interaction, Simon says, has to start with the individual, who begins to climb a participatory ladder from a personal entry point, her second design principle. “Me-to-We” design, a recasting of her own earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through those entry points to connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals.

Not everyone will always want to engage with others socially, even if an exhibit is designed to allow it. To categorize the different styles of participation, Simon looks to statistics on American adults from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement.

Forrester Research’s social technographics participation ladder.

In this framework, audience profiles are based on types of activity. Creators make up a small part of the participation pie, whereas critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives represent the majority in social platforms – and all but the last two (not just creators) count as truly participatory. Good design acknowledges the mixed composition of audiences and provides an outlet for each role to be involved, enabling the actions of each audience type to enhance the experience of others.

Simon devotes considerable attention to two other elements of design: technologies for social experiences and social objects. Each of these concepts is meant to aid in moving toward the “we” end of design. Simon asserts that mediating technologies can make people “more comfortable socializing with strangers” within the physical space of the museum. For example, Internet Arm Wrestling, an exhibit set up concurrently in several science centers around the U.S., enabled long-distance personal interactions. Visitors at one institution sat behind a metal arm and a computer screen and arm wrestled someone elsewhere at the same center or hundreds of miles away at another. The exhibit succeeded in engaging audiences in types of behavior they would not normally try within a museum or, probably, anywhere.

Simon doesn’t neglect the role of objects themselves in prompting social interaction. Simon argues that “social objects,” a concept taken from engineer and sociologist Jyri Engestrom, perform a similar role as mediating technologies, allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Social objects differ from regular ones in that they tend to spark interactions among audience members who see them. Simon uses the non-museum example of her dog, who serves as a focal point for social exchanges with passersby when she is out for a walk. Harnessing social potential is as much about good design choices as good object choices, and giving objects a social dimension is an art. It can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools such as panels and labels to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative..

Participation in practice

Shifting to the practical considerations for participation in the second part of the book, Simon borrows three categories of participation from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and supplies a fourth of her own. One chapter is dedicated to each of the participatory models:

• Contributory
• Collaborative
• Co-creative
• Hosted

Simon describes contributory projects as “casual flings between participants and institutions,” with the most common form being the comment box or feedback wall. As the name suggests, these projects solicit contributions from visitors, which can take the form of opinions, stories, or personal objects such as photographs. Of the four participatory models, contributory projects are the simplest to execute and can involve the most people. Even though these projects are relatively casual, scaffolding still helps institutions ask for and receive meaningful contributions through thoughtful questioning and modeling desired behavior. The London Science Museum incorporated visitor-donated toys into the exhibit Playing with Science, and visitors reported feeling a sense of ownership and pride in seeing their toys on display.

In collaborative projects, institutions still take the leading role in project development, but they work side by side with community members to create new exhibits, programs, and services. These projects usually require a higher level of commitment from participants than those in the contributory category. The National Building Museum in DC runs an annual program that collaborates with local youth to create an exhibit based on the photography and creative writing of community members. Participants take part in twelve classes and have the opportunity to “partially self-direct” an exhibit at the museum. To Simon, though, the exhibit is just the beginning. She asserts that the real measure of success for these projects is what happens after they end – specifically, whether participants remain involved with the institution beyond the project. Simon suggests establishing four non-overlapping roles for the management of collaborative projects: project director, community manager, instructors, and client representatives. Each of these roles balances different levels of authority and intimacy with participants, so keeping them distinct, Simon argues, is important to project success and staff sanity.

Co-creative projects may be undertaken at the initiative of outside participants. On the surface, these projects may look very similar to collaborative projects, but the key difference lies in the share of power between the institution and participants. Co-creative projects are demand-driven and “require institutional goals to take a backseat to community goals.” The special sauce that makes these projects successful is a mixture of non-specialists equipped to accomplish both community and institutional goals, and institutions genuinely desiring community input and leadership. Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum uses the co-creative model exclusively in developing their exhibits. Wing Luke staff members facilitate the development of the themes, content, and form of the exhibits by a team of advisors from the community.

In hosted projects, outside participants have almost complete power. One of the most common of these is a late night social event or reception sponsored by an external organization, although some museums may turn over a set of rooms for exhibitions controlled entirely by someone else. In all of these projects, the outside partner carries out their own project within the museum’s space. Despite the near-total abdication of power in these projects, creative constraints are still useful in ensuring a degree of consistency between community-led projects and those led by professional staff.

While the participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants, Simon believes that they needn’t be attempted in any particular order and shouldn’t be seen as a progression. She has even demystified choosing among models through a chart that walks through assessing your commitment to community engagement, desired control over the project, preferred level of leadership, availability of staff, skills gained by participants and benefits to nonparticipants.

Toward the end of the book, Simon devotes chapters to evaluating and sustaining participation. Evaluating participatory projects can be especially tricky because it must focus not just on results for the multiple beneficiaries but also on the process itself. And even the best design can crumble with inadequate institutional support and management structures. Simon suggests a few methods to get staff comfortable with taking on more challenging participatory projects, such as encouraging them to “spend time on the front lines with visitors” or conduct audience research. She also offers several strategies for keeping momentum going with newly started participatory projects, including hiring a community manager and cultivating a participatory culture from the very top.

Analysis

After reading The Participatory Museum, museums and their staff, regardless of their size or resources or content, should be able to begin their journey to reinvigorating themselves, right? What’s good for the web must be good for the galleries? I have to admit that at first I had my doubts.

Specifically, I was skeptical that the book’s techniques would work in a museum like mine, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Laos: tiny, few staff, little money, no technology, almost no repeat visitors, and in a developing country. Forrester Research’s social technographics data draws on audiences in North America, Europe, Australia, Metro China, Japan and Korea – all relatively developed places. If any setting could test the limits of this model, it would be here. As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions about its applicability.

Many books meant as guides meander through abstractions and skimp on specifics, but The Participatory Museum is as dense in practical information as in theory. Tips (“Generally, a platform that has one-fourth to one-half of the space open provides a feeling of welcome and encourages visitors to share”) are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation. For example, in the section on collaboration, she shares her involvement with The Tech Virtual Test Zone, a 2007 project of the San Jose Tech Museum that did not turn out as expected. Simon’s own personal example of participatory failure was a poignant reminder that even seasoned designers don’t get things right all the time.

The examples are also diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum—some, even, from organizations similar to mine. To cite just a few cases, Simon presents an advice booth set up in the University of Washington-Seattle Student Center, a community photo-documentation project at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), and a participatory book-tagging experiment in the Netherlands.

I also saw the applicability of Simon’s approach to the developing world firsthand recently, when my museum undertook a community-based participatory project similar to the VME’s. This work brought a flood of enthusiasm among community members previously untapped through traditional design methods. And a colleague in Indonesia recently quoted the book in justifying decisions she made within her museum. Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it’s clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

But can we trust the theories underlying The Participatory Museum’s recommendations for practice? While an exhaustive review of primary sources upon which the book draws is outside of the scope of this article, Simon certainly seems to have done her homework: her central typology of participatory projects (contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted) is taken from the literature on public participation in scientific research. She deftly adapts it to the somewhat different context of museums, and added the final category (hosted) herself to account for the use of a museum’s space by an outside organization, where she argues persuasively that the principles of successful participation still apply.

That said, readers should be aware that most of the theory underlying The Participatory Museum had not been formally tested in a museum environment at the time the book was published. Simon speaks forcefully about the need for more and better evaluation of participatory projects; she calls the lack of it “probably the greatest contributing factor to their slow acceptance and use in the museum field.” The Participatory Museum seemingly does a good job of enlisting what assessment does exist and translating it into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like, but the evidence presented in most cases is anecdotal. (There are exceptions, such as a 2002 impact study of Glasgow’s Open Museum, which lent objects to visitors in the community.) Purely on the basis of what was known in 2010, it is hard to be sure what tradeoffs would be involved in manifesting Simon’s ultimate vision of a new, wholly participatory kind of museum, or exactly how best to do it. Even so, The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to starting that process at an institution.

Implications

Whether you love or hate it, the impact of Simon’s book on the museum field is undeniable. With over 250 citations in books and journal articles, and required reading status in graduate museum studies programs, The Participatory Museum is widely touted as a must-read for museum professionals. The book has inspired conferences, institution-wide discussion sessions, and professional workshops around the country, and reignited debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. Simon continues to experiment with these principles at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where she has been executive director since 2011.

It’s hard to know how much credit The Participatory Museum can claim for this, but there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation in the four years since its publication. The Economist recently noted that museums were almost completely unrecognizable, having changed from being places “where people look on in awe” to being places “where they learn and argue.”

But is participation for everyone? There is a tension in The Participatory Museum between Simon’s utopian vision of wholly participatory institutions and her call for balance between traditional and participatory design. Writing about her divergent experiences during a visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming in 2008, she admitted:

I am an elitist when it comes to national parks. I like my parks hard to access, sparsely populated, and minimal in services…I believe in lowering barriers to access and creating opportunities for visitors to use museums in diverse ways. On this trip, for the first time, I truly understood the position of people who disagree with me, those who feel that eating and boisterous talking in museums is not only undesirable but violating and painful.

If participatory design is not the only worthwhile kind of design, where is the proper balance? How do institutions and staff know when they’ve hit the participatory sweet spot and when they’ve gone too far?

Indeed, the principles Simon advocates in her book have met with resistance from some quarters. While many institutions have begun transforming themselves into the new kind of museum that Simon envisions, others hold to their support of quiet contemplation and traditional design and seem to believe that they can meet their missions effectively and satisfy their audiences without these design techniques. Bruce Bratton, a Santa Cruz resident, and Judith Dobrzynski, a New York Times writer, are the most recent standard-bearers of the camp that is critical not so much of The Participatory Museum as of the concept of participatory design itself. Dobrzynski believes that the participatory trend, or as she calls it, “the quest for experience,” has led to a field-wide identity crisis in which entertainment has taken over the previously quiet and contemplative environment for which museums were known. Bratton’s more personal attack took aim at Simon’s own museum, calling it a “hobby circus” and claiming that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had devolved into a community center under her leadership.

The Participatory Museum does acknowledge these concerns about audience members who don’t want to take part themselves or feel that others’ participatory experiences are intrusive. Early on in the book, Simon argues that the segment of the audience seeking a more traditional experience should not be left out of the process of “mapping out audiences of interest and brainstorming the experiences, information, and strategies that will resonate most with them” that is foundational to audience-centric design. The research profiling participant types notes that “passive” participants outnumber creators anyway, and through strategic design they can still benefit from others’ contributions. But at the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques?

For all the accolades and buzz it’s received, The Participatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? Are there gaps between perception and reality on this front? (For example, the book presents little evidence that participatory design can make museum audiences less white.) Finally, how can we most effectively take Simon’s advice to put the audience first in any design, given the varied desires and priorities of individual members of that audience? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

Further reading:

• Nina Simon’s blog, Museum 2.0
• Jessica Shoemaker, A review of The Participatory Museum
• Sarah Jesse, What Would the Internet Do?
• University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center, Participatory Museum workshop
• Collections Link, Participation Portal
• Archaeology, Museums, & Outreach; Moving from Me to We
• Mike Murawski, Developing Questions for Visitor Participation
• Interviews with Nina Simon about the book:
  • Huffington Post, Nina Simon and the Participatory Museum Model
  • National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Five Question Q&A
  • Smithsonian Magazine, Nina Simon, Museum Visionary
  • Information and Design, The Participatory Museum

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• This is pretty much the most creative cultural tourism gambit ever.
• The Michigan House approved a plan to contribute $195 million in state money to the “grand bargain” to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from the city’s creditors; this money would join the $366 million pledged by foundations, $100 million pledged by the museum itself, and possible funding from union groups. Some creditors still reject the deal, although the judge overseeing the proceedings has refused their request to remove and appraise every painting in the collection.
• “National and local governments don’t take decisions about arts funding based on evidence, however convincing it is.” The Guardian argues that our only hope for better public funding is to create “the kind of solid public support that makes cuts politically dangerous or, even better, unthinkable” through closer ties to local communities.
• Score one victory for the arts lobby: after a vigorous campaign by organizations such as the League of American Orchestras, the Obama administration has carved out an exception for musical instruments in its new ivory regulations.
• Meanwhile, the FCC is accepting public comments on its latest proposed net neutrality rules, which would seem to allow internet providers to strike deals with content sites for faster service – deals akin to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Given the Commission’s recent flip-flopping, there’s no telling where this will lead, and we may not know until after the next election. One thing we do know: the idea of America itself is at stake.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Handler will be the new executive director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, sponsor of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Handler is currently the program director at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
• Moy Eng, former director of both the Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program and Palo Alto’s Community School of Music and Arts, has been announced as the first executive director of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a real estate services provider for artists and arts organizations.
• John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, will be the new host for an arts an entertainment program on KPCC, Southern California Public Radio.

IN THE FIELD

• Just a year after losing its highly respected director Deborah Cullinan to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts has just announced a major restructuring that will result in the closure of several programs and the layoffs of key staff. And NPR is cancelling “Tell Me More,” a little-heard daily talk show aimed at minority audiences, and eliminating 28 jobs. The National Association of Black Journalists blames lackluster promotion efforts.
• The San Diego Opera lives! But along with a full 2015 season, the company has announced layoffs including 13 full-time staff. And now the auditor is calling.
• New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning to gut-renovate its modern and contemporary wing to make room for a major gift of Cubist paintings and potentially create a new entrance from Central Park. Is this another case of museum hubris?
• The plan to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been finalized, with the collection going to the National Gallery of Art and other museums it chooses and the building and design school going to George Washington University.
• When you think of St. Louis, do you think of jazz? A $10 million expansion to Jazz St. Louis—to be called the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz—hopes to make the two synonymous, establishing St. Louis as one of the top hubs for jazz in the world.
• Lower Manhattan is home to a new performing arts school. Thanks to three years of significant growth, Pace University’s performing arts program will become a school within Pace’s liberal arts college.
• Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Jonathan Safran Foer on behalf of all of those without enough to read, Chipotle cups will now be adorned with short texts by literary luminaries. Not everyone is enthusiastic.
• Those Colorado Symphony mile-high marijuana concerts are now invitation-only, due to an overlooked regulation banning toking up in public. The Denver Post’s music critic went and got blasted – I mean, had a blast.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• AT&T announced that it intends to buy DirecTV. The “media chessboard is moving more than it has in the past decade,” with Comcast’s February purchase of Time Warner cable and Sprint’s overtures to T-Mobile…
• … and reports that Apple is planning a major new foray into streaming music with an acquisition of Beats Audio and of co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, though something is holding up the deal.
• Nearly four years after announcing a name change, a new mission, and a new grantmaking strategy focused on impact, Cincinnati’s ArtsWave (formerly the Fine Arts Fund) seems to be seeing results. The united arts fund raised a record $12 million for its annual campaign this year, helped catalyze last year’s creation of a new multidisciplinary arts festival drawing national attention, and is starting to form strategic partnerships with non-arts funders. Retiring CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson deserves a lot of credit for seeing this transformation through.
• The Hewlett Foundation’s Fay Twersky defends the decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative as data-driven in the face of William Schambra’s accusation that a leadership change was the primary driver. Let’s hope this public debate doesn’t dissuade grantmakers from following Hewlett’s lead on transparency.
• The Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund has announced a new capitalization program, including its largest-ever grant of $200,000 to the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. The Fund created the program in response to research showing that even many of the city’s strongest arts groups were constrained by having only three months of financial cushion.

BIG IDEAS

• Is it time for foundations to embrace partisan politics instead of trying to remain above the fray? Writers for the Stanford Social Innovation Review think so. “Partisan conflict is not an external factor that advocates can work around,” they write. “It is the defining axis of American politics today, and funders must be unafraid to reckon with it.”
• The expansion of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge – a promise to give away at least half of one’s fortune – to include billionaires from around the world raises questions about different cultural attitudes toward philanthropy (in China, public or transparent giving is eschewed) and about the relative merits of the Big Philanthropy model vs the more distributed community foundation model of giving.
• Arts entrepreneurship aficionados, look out: Barry’s Blog has a stellar lineup, uh, lined up for a weeklong blogathon on the topic starting…today!

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Academy of Sciences has hard numbers that show students learn better through hands-on activities than through lectures – at least when it comes to the sciences.
• Philanthropy Northwest reports on a year-long peer-learning project on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts involving 10 foundation CEOs in the region.
• Corporate giving is up again, according to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual tally.
• South Arts has released two research reports on arts education in the South. The first, a survey of nearly a third of all principals in the region, found among other things that Southern students have less access to visual arts and music than other American students but greater access to dance – with significant variation among Southern states. The second, case studies of nine strong arts education programs, found that the successful schools cultivated a shared vision of the arts, incorporated the arts into the core curriculum driven by state and national standards, and exposed students to working artists.
• Bringing the ability to make snazzy charts and tables to the masses, evaluators Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K. Emery have developed a data visualization checklist for the graphically challenged among us.
• In case you ever wondered about the correlation between per capita consumption of cheese and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets, Tyler Vigen has you covered.