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

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

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

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

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

(For a brief summary of this article, check out “How Art Works: the I’m-late-for-work version.”)

With “How Art Works: The National Endowment for the Arts’ Five-Year Research Agenda,” the National Endowment for the Arts is getting proactive. Acknowledging that the NEA’s research efforts have been mostly descriptive in the past, “How Art Works” is intended to usher in a new era of strategic inquiry for the agency and the sector alike.

Released in September 2012, “How Art Works” “stems from a collaborative research inquiry.” Over the course of ten months prior, the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis and the global consulting firm Monitor Institute conducted interviews and solicited input from a host of people inside and outside the arts sector. (A full list of thought partners is included in Appendix B.) The resulting report lays out a conceptual framework that is meant to aid in the planning and assessment of the NEA’s research priorities from 2012 to 2016, and to facilitate reporting to the White House Office of Management & Budget, Congress, and the public on the Endowment’s progress.

Summary 

The practical goal of “How Art Works” is actually broader than this: beyond a research agenda for the NEA itself, it “proposes a way for the nation’s cultural researchers, arts practitioners, policy-makers, and the general public to view, analyze, and discuss the arts as a dynamic, complex system.” The strategy involves stating “feasible, testable” hypotheses about all manner of arts-related impacts on individuals and society in the form of a system map. The map in turn is intended to provide a theory of change to guide arts research and to facilitate field-wide investigation and discussion.

Mapping the Impact of the Arts

The fundamental hypothesis of “How Art Works” is as follows:

[E]ngagement in arts contributes to quality of life. Quality of life contributes to society’s capacity to invent, create, and express itself. This capacity contributes back to art, both directly and indirectly.

The effects of engagement in the arts are cyclical and reciprocal, inherent and instrumental, and can be seen in artists, participants, and society at large.

To specify and organize the range of possible interactions, reactions, and transactions, the major feature of “How Art Works” is a system map, a visual representation of the parties and forces at play. According to Innovation Network, “this approach involves first visually mapping the system of interest and then identifying which parts and relationships are expected to change, and how.” A system map facilitates discussion with the goal of getting everyone on the same page.

In the “How Art Works” system map, the major components of the arts ecosystem are represented as “nodes” connected by arrows representing the relationships between those nodes.

The map’s starting point – the Big Bang for the entire arts ecosystem as we know it – is the “human impulse to create and express.” This impulse is the motivation to experience or participate in artistic creation. The rest of the nodes on the map spring out of this drive and fit into four broad categories: Inputs, Art itself, Quality-of-Life Outcomes, and Broader Societal Impacts. In order to clearly define each node on the map, “How Art Works” includes a graphic representation of what the authors call a “Multi-Level Measurement Structure” for each component or variable within the main nodes, which will inform the measurement model for future research involving each part of the system. For example, here is the Measurement Structure for one of the two system Inputs, education and training:

Each Measurement Structure includes a list of “definitional questions and methodological challenges” (not pictured here), which are designed to help readers imagine how one might effectively gather data on all of these various and in some cases slippery concepts. Challenges include things like “insufficient data available,” difficult-to-isolate factors of change, or the limitations of prior research.

To summarize the map, we’ll walk through each of the nodes within the four main categories and briefly touch on the methodological challenges and observations on potential future research.

Inputs. According to “How Art Works,” the translation of the universal impulse to express into actual artistic activity depends on two Inputs, education and training and arts infrastructure.

Education and training represents all manner of arts learning opportunities, “from YouTube and street jam sessions, to K-12 and adult arts education, to apprenticeships and conservatory training.” It is education, both informal and formal, that allows for skillful expression of ideas for artists and develops a stronger sense of personal taste for arts consumers.

Arts infrastructure is described as the “institutions, places, spaces, and formal and informal social support systems that facilitate the creation and consumption of art.” These support systems include venues, organizations, schools, networks, unions, and associations, as well as less concrete elements like financial and volunteer support and public policy. Of course, the quality of available infrastructure matters as much as the quantity.

Art. Given the initial spark to create and the infrastructure and training to fan the flame, the next category is the Art itself. The artistic product, represented on the map by the yellow circle, has two sub-categories: creation and participation. Arts creation is the production of an artistic work within an established or emerging set of artistic principles with “the intention of communicating richly to others.” Arts participation includes creation but extends more broadly; it is defined as “the act of producing, interpreting, curating, and experiencing arts… and the consumption of these outputs.”

Finally, we move on to outcomes of the art, of which there are two types included as part of the map: Quality-of-Life Outcomes (so-called first-order outcomes) and Broader Societal Impacts (second-order outcomes).

Quality-of-Life Outcomes. Quality-of-life outcomes are the direct effects of interaction with the arts on individuals and communities. The report acknowledges that these outcomes could be positive or negative, though the word “benefit” is consistently used to describe them. The two nodes in this category are:

• The benefit of art to individuals, and
• The benefit to society and communities.

The outcome called the benefit of art to individuals encompasses the “cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological effects” on participating individuals over time.

The second outcome, benefit to society and community, is farther-reaching than the first. This node encompasses “the role the art plays as an agent of cultural vitality, a contributor to sense of place and sense of belonging, a vehicle for transfer of values and ideal, and a promoter of political dialogue.”

The report points out a few definitional questions, methodological challenges, and issues for further exploration to keep in mind with these Quality-of-Life Outcomes:

• In current research many of these effects are intertwined and overlapping. Determining what can be isolated and tested will be an important step in illuminating these outcomes.
• One complication when measuring the benefit of art to individuals is the uneven distribution of participation in arts activities. Presumably some people who like the arts like them a lot and choose to engage deeply and consistently, whereas others may never feel compelled. This is a methodological challenge because it makes data about impact difficult to generalize across the entire population.
• It is unclear whether the impact of the arts on children versus adults is different enough to demand separate evaluation strategies.

Broader Societal Impacts. The final node of the system map represents the second-order outcomes on society at large. A more detailed version of the map (immediately below) shows three new elements within this category:

• societal capacities to innovate and express ideas,
• new forms of self-expression, and
• outlets for creative expression.

These outcomes are included as “works in progress” in the report, which declines to offer a measurement structure for any of them. The latter two in particular are moving targets, as new art forms, techniques, and platforms continue to emerge; the authors cite platforms such as YouTube and Facebook and forms of expressions like data visualization as examples.

System Multipliers. Beyond the nodes themselves, the authors posit that certain forces act on all of the various components of the system to varying degrees, all at once, to affect the system’s environment. These so-called System Multipliers are like societal weather. They don’t necessarily change what you’re going to do in a day, but they might change how you do it, or how long it takes.

There are five multipliers proposed: markets and subsidies, politics, technology, demographics and cultural traditions, and space and time. It’s easy to imagine how these forces could shift the arts sector in big and small ways. Technology, for example, has completely changed the way we share and consume art. It has also changed the ways artists get compensated for their work, for better or worse, in ways many did not see coming even five years ago.

Obviously, the reach of these multipliers is vast. The authors explain at a high level how each multiplier could affect the arts sector, but do not provide insights on potential research applications beyond suggesting they be periodically tracked using evidence from individual research projects.

Shaping the Research to Come

In the final section of “How Art Works,” the authors assess to what extent the NEA’s current research priorities square with the hypotheses represented in the map. These pages feature a list of priority projects initiated or planned by the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis over five years beginning in 2012, with each project keyed to an element of the map.

After reviewing the opportunities and potential areas of emphasis, the authors call attention to “a research gap associated with the nodes and relationships on the left side of the map: Societal Capacities to Innovate and to Express Ideas, and, in the expanded version of the map, New Forms of Self-Expression and Outlets for Creative Expression.” These nodes “mark a vast unsettled terrain” that “ultimately may hold the most promise and profit for those seeking to measure arts-related impacts.” Despite this promise, however, “How Art Works” notes that “most of the NEA’s research agenda for the next five years will continue to focus on arts infrastructure, education/training, arts participation and creation, and individual and community-level benefits,” areas where the NEA already has significant investment. The reasoning is that there are gains to be made in the short term by building on recent findings about Inputs and the benefit of art to individuals.

The report encourages the NEA to decide whether the rapidly-evolving “work-in-progress” elements outlets for creative expression and new forms of self-expression, as well as the catalyst of the system, the human impulse to express and create, are areas the Office of Research and Analysis can address in the next five years, or whether others will need to take the lead. “A reasonable approach might be to lodge these concepts in the broader dialectic of the arts research community, so that new hypotheses, research questions, populations, data sources, and methods might be proposed by groups outside the NEA.”

Finally, the authors point to the need to strengthen structural support for this research, for example through the NEA’s ongoing efforts to partner with other federal agencies for both program delivery and data collection. These priorities include “a clear need to build national time-series (preferably longitudinal) data collections including arts variables.” Additionally, over the next few years the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis plans to consolidate arts-related data and make it publicly available to other cultural researchers.

Analysis

“How Art Works” does a good job of defining a reasonable and comprehensive model of the arts’ impact against which to consider the NEA’s own research efforts. However, the report is a bit like an impressionist painting: from far away it looks complete, but when you get close, individual features are hard to make out. It is a step forward to be sure, but its broad-brush approach and failure to build explicitly on past attempts, combined with a few untended loose ends, represent a missed opportunity to be a watershed for cultural researchers.

The Necessary Specificity

”How Art Works” is certainly not lacking in grand designs. A map of any sector from public agencies to individual consumers that fits within a report as short as this one is inevitably going to work at a high level. But there are times when the map’s lack of specificity and detail seems to call into question its value entirely. Take, for example, Illustration 5 (the second image above), the Measurement Structure for education and training. This diagram divides all of arts education and training into two sub-categories – arts subjects and non-arts subjects – and then further divides those into art itself and evaluation of art, then further into modes of instruction, and finally into discipline “types” being studied.

This framework is frustratingly generic. Arts education is an area we actually know quite a bit about. There are professional associations representing every corner of the field, from in-school arts teachers to community-based organizations to art therapists. There’s even the National Center for Creative Aging, which has a bird’s-eye view of current trends in arts education for older adults. The NEA’s own prior research is especially strong in this area, though this isn’t reflected in the text or the diagram. At some point in the process of making this and other models widely applicable, specificity – and with it utility – have been somewhat lost. If the goal is to direct further research, the system map should take full advantage of the knowledge we have already.

Doing so might have pointed out areas where the frameworks don’t quite make sense, even at the very high level on which they operate. For example, the generic language of “art as a subject” and “art in non-arts courses” brings to mind child-age learners in school settings. This seems a strange choice, since education and training according to the authors is meant to include arts learning in informal settings for learners of all ages. It may be that the map needs to be generic for universality, but it certainly shouldn’t implicitly narrow the field with imprecise language.

The audience for How Art Works is described briefly as “researchers, practitioners, policy-makers in the arts and in other sectors.” But this lack of specificity serves neither experts in the field, who are offered scant new insights into their focus areas, nor those less familiar with the arts, who will glean only the most general outlines of the work involved, even for well-established fields of practice like arts education. For those completely oblivious to the arts sector and all of its components – those who have never considered the connection between a community dance studio, what goes on inside the walls of the Kennedy Center, and, say, the economy – this report could be educational, but only to a point. Some nodes are more instructive than others. Benefit of art to society and communities for example (pictured above), could enlighten and spur new thinking for people who don’t spend all day dissecting the impact and values of the arts. But education and training wouldn’t provide much information for people who don’t already know what arts education looks like in all of its various forms.

Building on Prior Work

As a framework for understanding the effects of the arts, “How Art Works” misses important chances to incorporate and build on prior work like Gifts of the Muse. Published in 2005, Gifts is an extensive literature review that attempts to compile all of the various claimed benefits of the arts to individuals and society and evaluate and connect them in one text. It details the intrinsic benefits (captivation, pleasure, expanded capacity for empathy, cognitive growth, creation of social bonds, expression of communal meaning) and instrumental benefits (attitudinal, behavioral, health, community, economic) of the arts, assesses the available evidence, and makes recommendations on how to fill some of the gaps. Like “How Art Works,” Gifts constructed a working model of the benefits of the arts, the summary version of which is pictured here:

A few years before Gifts, the Cultural Dynamics Project (a collaboration between The Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the consulting group National Arts Strategies, and the California non-profit Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley) likewise created a system map of the arts and cultural sector. The collaborators’ hope was that such a map would “inform our arts policy, expand our understanding as arts professionals, guide and contextualize existing and future research on the field, and drive more thoughtful funding initiatives among those seeking to support and evolve this complex system.” That sounds familiar. It’s worth noting that the individuals involved with the Cultural Dynamics Project didn’t let 8.5×11-inch paper shrink their vision or cause them to over-generalize. The map comes complete with instructions on how to attach four sheets together to reveal the full diagram. Another attempt to conceptualize the benefits of the arts was Alan Brown’s 2006 essay “An Architecture of Value.” Brown’s model explicitly builds on Gifts of the Muse and focuses on the language we use to explain “the value and benefits of arts experiences.”

While “How Art Works” has the additional mandate of providing research guidance for a particular (and important) player in the field, it’s odd that so much of the report – and presumably the effort that went into making it – was spent on ground well-covered by these and other previous works – especially since several of the individuals involved in those previous initiatives were consulted during the discovery process. “How Art Works” isn’t entirely duplicative, but it isn’t 100% additive either. With the ultimate goal of getting everyone on the same page so that arts research can proceed in a more coordinated manner, it’s ironic that these prior efforts to map the system were scarcely mentioned in even the footnotes or appendices of the report.

Neglecting the Negative

“How Art Works” sets out to “[provide] a conceptual frame for planning and assessing research priorities so that the NEA can improve its ability to meet a core goal: To Promote Knowledge and Understanding about the Contributions of the Arts.” One would expect such a report to accentuate the positive when it comes to the impact of the arts. But if the system map presented is meant to be realistic – a picture of how art really does work, and not a romantic representation of how we would like it to work – the possible negative effects of self-expression should be acknowledged more explicitly. Take, for example, this sentence from an early paragraph describing the forces at play in the system map in the simplest terms:

The impact [of the arts on a person] also flows back to the artist, directly in some instances (e.g., the artist sells a work of art) and indirectly through education, infrastructure, and society’s general embrace of creativity and freedom of expression.

In fact, creativity channeled through the arts does not always lead to an expansion of freedom of expression. Sometimes it leads to a backlash and a crackdown. We have seen widespread objections to certain works of art: the agency has been repeatedly accused of funding “pornography” (see reason number five of these Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment of the Arts). In 1998, after decades of periodic controversy over NEA grants, the Supreme Court ruled that the agency could make “decency” a consideration in funding decisions. This kind of stipulation doesn’t stop the production of controversial work, but it does send a message about the value of certain works of art, and art more generally to society, and it has real implications for artists’ ability to find financial support for their work. The impact that circles back to the artist is sometimes a structural restriction of creativity and expression.

Art itself can also be intrinsically harmful. The authors acknowledge in a footnote that, “[b]ecause communities do not all have the same values, ideals, or political inclinations, art that is seen as beneficial by one community can appear threatening to another.” But this understates the potential for art to do damage; for example, there is no shortage of racist music out there reinforcing and promoting prejudice. Finally, the arts can have unintended indirect effects, such as their ever-controversial role in neighborhood gentrification. Many observers have argued that  the influx of artists into an area can spur a kind of neighborhood change that is harmful to residents who subsequently are priced out of their homes or experience a more metaphorical sense of displacement. That kind of impact is not included in the benefits to society and communities structure, but nevertheless represents an example of a tangible outcome that could be caused by the arts.

Implications

So, what if it worked? What if we pursued this research agenda as laid out, and we really did have all of the metrics under all of the nodes defined in five years? We would know how things work now. But I can’t help wishing that this research agenda were more aspirational. If we had instead a working map of an ideal arts sector, could we be stronger at the end of five years instead of just smarter?

Such a map would show how and where we want average people to encounter the arts in their community, and what the impacts of those encounters would be. It would chart how public sector dollars can work with private and community foundations and individual donors to support a diverse and healthy arts infrastructure. It would theorize what tax structures and other policies could benefit individual artists, and those hypotheses would be tested in the research to follow, instead of simply stating that all of these elements exist.

Such a report would also draw on prior research in these specific areas. A literature review was conducted as part of the process of creating “How Art Works,” presumably for the purpose of assessing the current state of knowledge in the arts. But somehow those insights don’t seem to have made it into the final product, save for an annotated bibliography provided in Appendix A and sorted by map node. By drawing a map that got into details about what we already know and what we have yet to find out, “How Art Works” could have launched the sector into a new era of coordinated, proactive research.

Instead, we will have to be satisfied with the report’s more limited ambitions. By the time this research agenda was released, the NEA had already made an inaugural round of fourteen research grants. Fordham University studied the impact of arts programming on the social skills and mental health outcomes of at-risk youth, exploring the benefit of arts to individuals, society, and communities. Harvard looked into factors contributing to “birth” and “death” rates of arts and cultural institutions, which pertains to arts infrastructure. The University of Dayton studied the relationship between arts engagement and quality of life, investigating arts participation and arts creation. And the University of Georgia performed qualitative research to generate a hypothesis about community-built practice such as playgrounds, mosaic sculptures, murals, and community gardens, looking into the benefits of arts for societies and communities. This research is compelling, and the best examples will hopefully lead us forward as a field. Happily, the quality of that work will not be diminished by a grand vision that is, arguably, still under construction.

Further reading:

• Barry Hessenius, Research and Data Blogathon Day #4 (Barry’s Blog)
• Ian David Moss, Arts Policy Library: Gifts of the Muse (Createquity)
• Alan Brown, An Architecture of Value (WolfBrown)
• The Cultural Dynamics Working Group, The Cultural Dynamics Map: Exploring the Arts Ecosystem in the United States
• Ian David Moss, Live-blogging the “How Art Works” convening (Createquity)
• Keith Sawyer, How Art Works (Creativity & Innovation)
• Alexis Clements, A Grand Unified Theory of Art? (Hyperallergic)
• Mark Robinson, How Art Works? (Thinking Practice)

SUMMARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANALYSIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMPLICATIONS

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

• Who knew, he’s a new music fan! He’s talking about how he was just at the Ojai Music Festival and became totally transfixed by an opera and Steve Reich’s Drumming (strange to think that I have friends who were involved with that performance). Later he name-drops Tan Dun.
• “An America without great performances would be impoverished, no matter what our GNP.” Jim Collins said it, so it must be true, right? I have to hand it to him, he knows how to give a speech. Feels a little like a stump address, but he’s a performer for sure.
• Apparently the #1 performing stock among all publicly traded stocks from 1972-2002 is Southwest Airlines. I suspect this might involve some cherry-picking of dates (what’s the best-performing stock from 1972-2008?), but it’s still surprising given the industry. He’s trying to make the point that choices have more significance than circumstances.
• He says that the answer to the performing arts field’s problems is not to become more like a business. He’s making the point that there’s mediocrity in all fields (yes!) and that just because a practice or habit comes from the corporate world doesn’t mean it’s better. The important difference (as he puts it) is between “good” and “great” and the key factor is a culture of discipline. Momentum takes a long time to build, even for so-called “overnight successes.”
• Hammering home that we each need to think about our own role in this puzzle, not just sit back and say to ourselves, “yeah, we should totally change the way we do things as a field” and then assume that other people will take care of it. Applicable to any desirable social outcome. That said, his insistence on calling us the “performance arts” is a little grating.
• Now saying that concentrated executive power, as we seen in companies, is actually the special case, not the general case. In the social sector and in society at large, it’s much more common to see diffuse power maps in which many parties have enough negative power to kill action. So the most effective leader (a “Level 5” leader in his taxonomy) in the social sector is not the one who can just make the right decisions, but the one who can create the conditions in which the right decisions can happen. In other words, a facilitator more than a despot. Man, maybe I need to read this book.
• Since money is merely a necessary input to the social sector, rather than a signal of success, Collins suggests a hybrid approach to measuring impact in the social sector, particularly in the performing arts. He likens it to a trial: building a case for impact, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative factors. “Thou art guilty of great results!”
• Points out the differences between values and practices. Practices can change, values cannot. As much as traditions are revered, they are not values, they are practices. The challenge is to adapt by changing practices while holding values constant.

Occasional over-the-top motivational speaker moments aside, a good speech and a good session. Later, I attended seven different panels for about fifteen minutes each thanks to NPAC’s inexplicable decision to pack all of the four-day conference’s dozens of breakout sessions into one three-hour period. My divide-and-conquer strategy wasn’t all that successful, since I only caught little bits of each event and couldn’t manage much context from it. The most interesting sessions I saw were “The Not-So Distant Horizon” featuring Artsjournal.com‘s Douglas McLennan and “futurist” David S. McIntosh and “Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs” with WolfBrown and officials from the Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland. The former attempted to put in one place all of the broad cultural trends affecting the performing arts, while the latter demonstrated a novel approach to measuring emotional and spiritual impact by borrowing techniques from psychological research.