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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A lot of people are talking about the news that Detroit’s emergency fiscal manager is exploring whether the city-owned art on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts (which I visited for the first time just a few weeks ago) can be considered an asset in the event of a municipal bankruptcy. I will be shocked if anything like this actually happens, but in the meantime it’s provoking some rare discussion of deaccessioning in mainstream media space. See Tegan Kehoe’s recent piece on Createquity for more on the ethics and debate around deaccessioning.
• Wondering what to make of the IRS nonprofit oversight controversy? The Nonprofit Law Prof Blog has a good overview of commentary and analysis from lawyerly circles.
• A new paper by Roger Colinvaux examines the US tax deduction for charitable giving and comes to many of the same recommendations for reform as John Carnwath in his article on the subject for Createquity. Speaking of charitable giving deductions, countries in Europe that have similar legislation are finding that they have to extend the benefits to other member nations of the European Union, whether they want to or not.
• Next City takes a look at the record when it comes to the subsidies cities pay to Bass Pro retail stores (over $500 million to date!) in hopes that they will generate jobs. (It’s not good.) I’m kind of mystified as to why there isn’t more of this kind of before-and-after analysis of these kinds of policy interventions – it seems like rather fertile ground.
• The NEA Art Works blog has a nice interview with Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Denise Montgomery, the new executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
• Joanna Woronkowicz is moving on from the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts to become an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Public Affairs working under Michael Rushton, and offers a farewell post in which she touts the idea of an interdisciplinary research cabal focusing on cultural policy.

BIG IDEAS

• Dallas is making a big play to put itself on the world cultural map. Led by Maxwell Anderson, who is the head of both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Arts District, Dallas officials have launched a new network of “global” cultural districts to be managed by Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting, assembling an advisory board including representation from New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hong Kong…and lots and lots of people from Dallas.
• Congratulations to Mediuum, a digital marketplace for visual art, which has won the first Creative Arts Competition prize as part of MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for student entrepreneurs. The Creative Arts Competition is awarded for the “innovative use of the arts as a core component of business plans.” (h/t Joe Patti)
• Asking funders to be less insular may be a familiar refrain, but no one can articulate the case quite like Arlene Goldbard, and she does so again in a recent doozy of an essay. Meanwhile, Linda Essig has a review of Arlene’s new book, The Culture of Possibility.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “So, yes, it’s party time in the world of social impact investing.  But it’s a potluck my friends, and you’d better know what dish [you’re] bringing.” Michael Hickey talks turkey about money you have to pay back.
• Corporate giving is back on the rise, according to a new report from the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.
• The President/CEO of the New York State Health Foundation offers some perspectives on risk taking at the foundation level.
• Real estate in Detroit is so cheap, it only takes $142,000 to save a historic rock venue from being auctioned and get one of its theaters named after you.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Good rule of thumb for aspiring grad students (especially in the humanities): the more specialized your degree, the more useless it is. Sadly, specialization seems to be the prevailing trend. The University of Nottingham is blazing the trail of single-genre music studies with a two-year course in heavy metal studies. By the way, a study from 2004 indicates a negative correlation between a graduate degree and earnings for jazz players.
• Back when it was super popular, I though Myspace would be an incredible data source for researchers on the music industry. Myspace has largely fallen by the wayside in that regard, but two sociologists from the University of Chicago managed to grab a complete dataset back in 2007 and it’s now showing up in Richard Florida’s blogs.
• According to a new study, people of color tend not to move as much as whites and to stay close to home when they do, which perpetuates spatial inequality.
• A new meta-analysis of studies of art therapy on cancer patients indicates that “the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture.” And another study says don’t trust those correlations between music education and SAT scores – smarter students are more likely to take music classes, but that doesn’t mean music classes make you smarter.
• The study of diversity in Bay Area theater that Clayton Lord has been blogging about for a while is finally out; an abbreviated version of the executive summary is here. Five-word version: all the stereotypes are true.
• Sentences to ponder: “Voting is just another survey without individual consequence.”
• First there was Dance Your Ph.D., and now we have JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments – “the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format.” ArtScience ascendant!

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

•  At the end of April, the City of Philadelphia unveiled a free online tool called CultureBlocks for “research, planning, exploration and investment” in creative placemaking. Gary Steuer, the Chief Cultural Officer of the City of Philadelphia, gives an inside look at the tool, and the Philadelphia Inquirer has more on how it can be used.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning two statues to Cambodia, where they were determined to have been looted from. Tess Davis, a researcher on Cambodian antiquities, told the New York Times, “The Met Could have treated Cambodia’s request as an obstacle. Instead, the museum recognized it as an opportunity to set the moral standard for the art world.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jeremy Nowak, the co-founder and former CEO of  The Reinvestment Fund in Philadelphia, was named the interim Director of ArtPlace, a collaboration of organizations focused on creative placemaking.
• Tim Mikulski, the current editor of ARTSblog, is leaving Americans for the Arts, and posted a warm farewell. (ARTSBlog really flourished under Tim’s leadership, and he’ll be missed. -IDM)
• The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s new Research and Policy Director David Pankratz, who came to the organization and the city at the beginning of this year, offers his thoughts on Pittsburgh as a dream city for the arts policy enthusiast. Read David’s guest post for Createquity on creative placemaking here.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has announced its 2013 Doris Duke Class of Artists. The Doris Duke grant includes up to $25,000 for audience development and up to $25,000 for personal reserves or creative exploration during retirement.
• New Music USA has announced changes to its grantmaking strategy, uniting five  programs into one flexible fund targeting a wide range of music projects.
• You may have noticed that a new model of TV programming has emerged in the last ten years — dark, gritty shows — but shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are the product of a new model behind the scenes, as well, one that pay networks are better positioned to use, according to a New York Times article last week. YouTube just announced that it is piloting a system in which 30 channels will offer paid subscription access to additional content. I wonder whether these channels will find the same advantage pay networks on TV have, or whether paid YouTube will fizzle as a latecomer competitor to Netflix and Hulu Plus.

IN THE FIELD

• After a 191-day lockout, the musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra finally ratified a three-year contract. However, the Minnesota Orchestra’s season has been canceled, following an ongoing labor dispute.
• Finding ways around traditional funding and production models is also one of the goals motivating a growing movement of a very different kind — public libraries as performance venues. By bringing in artist talks, concerts, and comedy acts in the evening, libraries become more of a community hub, while the performers get a place to share their most expressive works, away from the pressure to bring in big ticket sales that they find at many venues.
• The 9/11 museum has decided to charge a mandatory admission fee when the museum opens next year, citing high security costs and questioning whether a donation-only model would support them after the first year. Not directly in response, but on-topic, Jim Undercofler wonders aloud why contributed revenue is considered less stable or predictable than earned revenue.
• The Rio Theater, a beloved mom-and-pop cinema in Monte Rio, California, recently raised $63,993 in a Kickstarter campaign to switch to digital projection and stay open in the face of rapid technological change.
• “How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target?” asks Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History director and Museum 2.0 blogger Nina Simon. She’s referring to museum marketing and mission, but it can apply to any organization striving for community relevance. Her answer is “social bridging,” deliberately creating programs that appeal to and “matchmake” unlikely segments of the population.
• The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York recently surpassed 500 members, many of whom are young metropolites. The New York Times provides a style-section type look at who these people are and what goes on at their gatherings.
• A growing number of business colleges and schools are using art as a teaching and learning tool, and some are amassing important collections of modern and contemporary art. Meanwhile, MIT is teaching young people computer programming as a thinking tool, with some artistic results.
• Dayton, Ohio may soon be the home of two separate museums dedicated to funk, leading some to speculate whether it can support two of them.

BIG IDEAS

• In an interview Laura Zabel, director of Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, talks about the new CSA (Community Supported Art!) supporting health care for artists rather than health insurance for artists, and other projects. She says, “In the work we’ve done in the Central Corridor we have seen that artists can see the opportunity in a challenge… and have nuts-and-bolts skills that can draw people, attention, and dollars to a place.”
• In a new book, Jaron Lanier asks, “Who Owns the Future?” and presents a manifesto for an economy in which the middle class is supported by micropayments for all data we create online, from tweets to purchasing decisions. For a summary, see Evgeny Morozov’s skeptical review in the Washington Post.
• How can foundations become leaders in their communities? The Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society has just published an essay on how the one group has done it,  Changing the Game: Civic Leadership at The Boston Foundation, 2001-2012, authored by the president of The Boston Foundation.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• In New York on May 23, and in Berkeley on June 2, Author Arlene Goldbard will give book talks to launch her two new books: The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, a collection of short essays on the potential for positive social outcomes through art and creativity, and The Wave, a novel set in a future in which the hopes and predictions of The Culture of Possibility have come true. Goldbard presents both books on her blog, and last week, Barry Hessenius interviewed her on his blog (parts I, II).

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s experiments with a tool called Strategy Landscape have drawn to a close (at least for now; they are considering re-releasing it open-source) and Kevin Bolduc shared some lessons learned from the project on their blog.
• The National Center for Arts Research has a short summary of the implications of the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2013 State of the Nonprofit Sector survey.
• The Centre for Economics and Business Research has released a report demonstrating the economic benefits of the arts and culture on the UK.
• The European Expert Network on Culture has released a report on strategies for export and internationalization of cultural and creative industries in the European Union. Find a brief summary here, and the report here.
• Pacific Standard Magazine reports on two studies that suggest musicians — or at least men holding guitars — are more attractive to women than non-musicians. I’d like to see more scientific (and less heteronormative) studies, but it’s an interesting theory.

Arlene Goldbard
I first came to know Arlene Goldbard’s work through her two-part series proposing “A New New Deal” from earlier this year, published by Community Arts Network. She has a blog at her own website that deals with “culture, politics, and spirituality.” Goldbard has been writing on these topics for a long time, as evidenced by the extensive archives of that blog.

Culturebot
We have Andy Horwitz to thank for Culturebot, a fascinating mishmash of theater, cultural policy, and Spanish-language content that claims to be “NYC’s first multidisciplinary, contemporary arts + culture blog.” I follow for Andy’s occasional but extremely lengthy diatribes tackling big ideas and big solutions.

Deceptively Simple
Former Time Out Chicago music writer Marc Geelhoed is a smart guy, and his blog reminds you of this fact continually through its subtle, thoughtful prose and tasteful design. What is not so smart is that, at least upon first glance, there does not appear to be a way to subscribe to it via RSS feed; as a result, my encounters with Deceptively Simple are far less frequent than it deserves. If you’re a read-it-in-the-browser sort, though, and you enjoy fine insights on music, politics, and related issues, this one may be for you.

Economic Turmoil and Change
This is the newish blog of Grantmakers in the Arts, the leading national affinity group for arts funders. ET&C culls thoughts on cultural policy and the recession from around the web and aggregates them in one place. Maintained by GIA Deputy Director Tommer Peterson, the site offers only minimal commentary, but what’s there is interesting.

My Favorite Thing That Is Getting as Much Money (50 Million Dollars) as The National Endowment for the Arts in H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Monument and memorial repairs in national cemeteries

[snip]

My Favorite Thing That Is Getting Twenty Times as Much Money as The National Endowment for the Arts in H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Expenses necessary for the manufacturing of advanced batteries

For veterans of the creative industries older than me, this week is no doubt invoking some unpleasant memories. The 1990s brought a firestorm of criticism from cultural conservatives upon the NEA, culminating with the loss of 40% of its funding in 1996 and a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Yet in the decade since, a lot of conversation has taken place around the arts’ unique value to society. Beginning with Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class and continuing with research into cognitive effects of arts learning and the RAND Corporation’s articulation of intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts, suddenly the arts no longer seemed the uninvited guest at the intellectual cocktail party. Perhaps no argument has gained as much steam as that of the creative economy: the idea that the arts and allied for-profit industries play an essential, even central, role in the 21st-century business paradigm. Certainly, it’s the most compelling case for this particular moment. As Ben Adler writes in The Atlantic:

In their search to find programs upon which to rest the complaint that the stimulus bill is too generous, some conservatives have seized upon one of their favorite whipping boys: the arts. “Even [House Republicans] can’t quite believe it… $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts,” declared Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana).

Pence intended to be ironic about the NEA’s role as an engine of economic activity. But he could have been sincere, since his comments were right on the money. Arts are actually a great form of economic investment, particularly public art, and they should be amply funded in the stimulus package. Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government, according to Americans for the Arts. There is hardly a person more likely to go out and spend her stimulus check than a starving artist.

I participated in a discussion on Daily Kos this morning that gave me pause. Even at this liberal bastion of opinion, there were one or two posters who were skeptical about the need for the arts to be included in the stimulus package. When pressed on this point, one of these asked straight up, “what is the economic multiplier associated with the arts?” I had to concede that I didn’t know. For all the pretty numbers in the Americans for the Arts economic prosperity reports, they don’t really tell us all that much beyond the fact that the arts are a big deal. Sure, they induce local spending, but how do we know that other industries wouldn’t do the same? How much of people’s spending on the arts is new spending, and how much is simply money that would be spent on something else if the arts weren’t there?

Arlene Goldbard has received some attention recently for her two-part essay The New New Deal on the Community Arts Network. After offering a number of interesting policy suggestions that would collectively cost a hell of a lot more than $50 million, she advises, “If we succeed in getting a real dialogue started about public cultural policy, it will be because we’ve enlarged the conversation beyond special-interest pleading, one among many weaknesses that have limited the effectiveness of mainstream arts advocacy….We need to make a strong argument for cultural democracy and community cultural development, using multiple realms of knowledge to show how this work advances essential public policy goals.” Goldbard cites nine “powerful” arguments in favor of government support of the arts, as follows (arguments elaborated upon in linked document):

1. Things are changing in a way that elevates culture’s role.

2. Community arts contribute powerfully to community development; they are essential to success in remaking damaged communities.

3. For our brains to serve the future, we must develop our creative imagination and empathic capacities through arts participation.

4. Culture is the balm that can begin to heal social injury, allowing us to face each other across every barrier that creates distance and objectification.

5. Cultural action promotes social inclusion, an essential public aim in a period of vast migrations.

6. Cultural action creates the container that enables people to face each other and enter into dialogue even about the most polarized, heated issues.

7. Marketplace culture, dominated by the commercial cultural industries, is skewed in ways that counter democratic cultural values; the public interest can bring balance.

8. Cultural participation is intrinsically pleasurable and inviting, creating a low threshold for civic involvement.

9. Arts participation develops our capacity to envision, dream and shape the future we desire.

Here’s the thing: all of these statements may, in fact, be true. As an artist myself, I am predisposed to think that they are true, and some of my own experiences match with these claims. However, my anecdotal impressions, even combined with others’ similar and similarly subjective opinions, does not a sound public policy make. While it’s hard to evaluate a claim like “Things are changing in a way that elevates culture’s role,” some of these ideas do in fact lend themselves to empirical study. Take #2 for example. There’s already a bunch of great work at the University of Pennsylvania on the arts and community revitalization [ed.–which Goldbard links to at the the bottom of her essay]; we need more of this research to establish causality and understand the effects with more granularity. Or #8 – cultural participation creates a low threshold for civic involvement. Well, does it? Are arts participants more likely to be civically involved in other ways besides attendance at arts events? And if so, which comes first? Or how about the social injury question, #4? Let’s make a list of major cultural schisms around the world involving large distinct populations that have resolved themselves positively in the past 20-30 years, and try to determine the role or lack thereof that the arts played in each case. Bonus points if said role involved government expenditures on arts organizations and infrastructure rather than individual artists working on their own or through the commercial entertainment/media industry.

A daunting task, to be sure. But I would argue that the key to changing the conversation about the arts does not lie in finding new talking points that are, at their core, based on the same old assumptions. The key lies in finding and generating data to back up (or disprove) those assumptions that we have all been using. And not just superficial counting measures, but rich, intelligent data — data that looks at the quality of arts experiences in addition to the quantity, data that considers creativity in all its forms rather than that housed in one corner of our tax code, data that compares the arts with potential substitutes, alternatives, and complements. Because at the end of the day, if we don’t come up with some hard facts with which to confront the skeptics, we’re never going to escape this eternal he-said (the arts are great) she-said (the arts are cesspools of immorality) conversation.