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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related reading:

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

Green Leaves – by Flickr user Thangaraj Kumaravel, Creative Commons license

(For the most up-to-date version of our healthy arts ecosystem definition, please see this page.)

At its core, Createquity is a research-based investigation of the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them. That description sounds straightforward enough, but it belies a complicated dilemma: how can we decide what issues are most important? To guide us, we’ve invested quite a bit of time reflecting on what a healthy arts ecosystem looks like. This conception, and the gaps between that healthy arts ecosystem and the status quo, underlie all of our research and advocacy work.

Our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem is rooted in several core principles:

Improving Lives. In our view, a healthy arts ecosystem maximizes the arts’ capacity to improve the lives of human beings in concrete and meaningful ways. While the evidence base for the benefits of the arts is continually developing and evolving, we feel confident in our core operating assumption that participation in the arts offers value to a large majority of human beings, and that arts participation (especially more active forms of participation such as creation or performance) can in some cases be deeply consequential or even life-changing. The nature of these benefits is wide-ranging, and can be as fuzzy as acquiring new perspectives on the world or as concrete as more money in one’s bank account. In particular, we see the arts as a uniquely effective tool for many people in the pursuit of self-actualization (conceived in the popular sense as the drive to reach one’s highest potential). We also recognize that the arts have a role in addressing other human needs, such as health, safety, and belonging, and that participation by some people in the arts can impact others who do not participate directly – for example, by fostering tighter community relationships or creating new economic value.

Pluralism. Experience and research alike tell us that different people relate to the arts in vastly different ways across different contexts, and for that reason our approach focuses on matching individuals with the opportunities that are most appropriate for them. While we do not assume that everyone will or needs to benefit enormously from having the arts in their lives, we do believe that the only way to determine who can benefit the most is through widespread and varied exposure to the arts.

Net Benefit. Our approach considers the arts to be in dialogue with the rest of the world, and as such we do not consider participation in the arts to be its own justification. Depending on the situation and people involved, cultural products and experiences can provoke boredom, contempt, or worse; in other circumstances, their production and consumption can contribute to bigotry, inequality, and other social ills. Even when arts experiences are harmless, they may not always represent the best use of anyone’s time and resources – especially when such resources are scarce. We don’t ever want to be in the position of supporting the arts at the expense of the rest of society, and we don’t think the arts ecosystem can be considered healthy unless people’s lives really are being improved in concrete and meaningful ways as a result of their participation in it.

People, Not Institutions. Unlike many discussions of a healthy arts ecosystem that place a heavy emphasis on nonprofit institutions, our definition focuses almost exclusively on people. We make this choice because it is not hard to see how the interests of institutions and their allies could (and perhaps do, regularly) come into conflict with the interests of other elements of the ecosystem, including those of professional and nonprofessional artists, audience members, donors, and the broader community. By maintaining a consistent focus on people, we still recognize the value of institutions – but only insofar as they facilitate or make possible the all-important task of improving people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways.

The Definition

With all that in mind, in a healthy arts ecosystem…

• Each human being today and in the future has an opportunity to participate in the arts at a level appropriate to his/her interest and skill:
  • “Common” opportunities (like participating as an audience member, getting a basic arts education or attending a class as an adult) are available to all
  • “Scarce” opportunities (like creating or performing art for a living) are available to those for whom it matters the most and who have the most to contribute
    • Who has the most to contribute?
      • People whose work connects to a large audience
      • People whose work wins unusual acclaim from experts
      • People whose work adds something unique to the cultural diet of humanity or whose culture is deeply marginalized in society
      • People whose work improves people’s lives in other concrete and meaningful ways
• The best possible mix of cultural products and experiences is available for the enjoyment, appreciation and use by human beings today and in the future
• Every opportunity is taken to improve the lives of human beings today and in the future through the arts, whenever the arts (alone or in combination with other practices) offer the most promising pathway for doing so
• Effective mechanisms or infrastructure exist as needed to help accomplish the above goals

Common vs. Scarce and Who Gets to Decide

This concept of “common” and “scarce” opportunities to participate in the arts is an invention of ours, and since it plays an important role in our healthy arts ecosystem we felt it would be useful to define it more completely. The notion of common and scarce opportunities proceeds from an acceptance of two realities: first, that we live in a world of limited resources, and second, that certain forms of participation in the arts require more of those resources than others. Opportunities that are easily provided (aka “common”) should be distributed widely, while more resource-intensive (aka “scarce”) participation opportunities should be concentrated to the extent possible with people who contribute or have the potential to contribute a lot of value through their artwork to the rest of society. To facilitate that idea, we’ve created a more detailed taxonomy outlining where various kinds of activities fall on the common vs. scarce spectrum.

Common – proactive steps should be taken to make opportunity available to all

• Participating at least once as an audience member in all arts disciplines
• Receiving basic exposure to the arts as a child in all arts disciplines
• Attending an arts class as an adult

A bit scarce – opportunity should be available to all, with the understanding that a minority will take the opportunity

• Exploring at least one arts discipline in depth during childhood
• Taking ongoing classes/lessons for one’s own enjoyment as an adult
• Participating regularly as an audience member, e.g. as a subscriber or superfan
• Informal curation such as remixing, maintaining a collection, etc.
• Creating or performing regularly in private

Scarce – opportunity should be available to as many as possible, with those who have the most to contribute receiving priority

• Participating in a pre-professional training program
• Creating or performing regularly for a public audience but not for money
• Creating or performing regularly as a side project or part-time job (part-time by choice)
• Having a public identity as an arts critic

Very scarce – opportunity should be concentrated with those who have the most to contribute

• Creating or performing art for a living
• Making a living as an arts critic

The notion of “the most to contribute” is likewise a new concept, and undoubtedly one with potential for controversy. We should stress that we are not proposing to put ourselves, or any other individual or group, in the sole position of deciding “who has the most to contribute” or what constitutes “the best possible mix of cultural products and experiences.” A close look at the definition reveals a dialogue between consumers writ large and the opinions of “experts” – meaning professional critics, artistic directors, knowledgeable fans, grantmakers, and others who regularly perform a curatorial role of some kind – in determining the composition of the “most to contribute” group. It’s important to recognize that this dialogue already exists in practice and that all we’re doing is putting a name to decision-making processes that happen every day all around us. Indeed, we would argue that every concept that’s described in our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem is also present in our current arts ecosystem – just perhaps not arranged or distributed in a way that serves everyone’s needs and interests as well as it could.

Scope Limitations and the Territory Ahead

Finally, we should close with a few caveats. The scope of our work at Createquity, and by extension our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, is perhaps arbitrarily constrained in two ways. The first is that, after much debate, we have decided to use a conventional, discipline-based definition of arts and culture for the time being. The industry boundaries that include most of our audience can be described relatively simply as the confluence of the visual arts, dance, film and electronic media, music, theater, and literature, along with support structures for activities in those disciplines. A case can be made for expanding our definition more broadly to include creative pursuits in other fields like the culinary arts and various design fields, and/or mechanisms for cultural exchange such as humanities and heritage traditions that don’t involve one of the disciplines mentioned above. We’re not quite ready to do that, but it’s something we’ll continue to explore, and we feel reasonably confident that our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem can adapt to any such expansion. Second, Createquity’s primary focus is on the arts in the United States. While we are interested in developments and conversations in arts and culture around the globe, we don’t want to pretend that we know more about the international context than we actually do. Again, this is a decision for now rather than forever, and we will give consideration to opportunities to expand our focus as they may come up.

We know this definition of a healthy arts ecosystem won’t necessarily resonate with everyone. Nevertheless, we’ve tried very hard to design it to be capable of speaking for as many people as possible, and are eager to improve it in any way we can. We consider this definition a living document and welcome critical feedback and debate, either on specific details or the entire premise. We plan to pose some of our open questions to our Createquity Insider feed, and asking good questions or pointing out things we haven’t thought of yet are both great ways to get invited to join our editorial team. And we’re always grateful to be made aware of opportunities to explain our thinking more clearly. We look forward to hearing from you!

Photo from Images_of_Money on Flickr

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on the controversy over the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) Theatre’s policy of not paying its performers. UCB is almost universally considered the leading improv theater in New York, and attracts much of the top talent. It’s not a small side project, or an isolated community; it shapes the social norms of the New York improv comedy scene. As such, the question of its role in defining the future of New York improv is real and the conversation deserves to be amplified by places like the Times. This controversy followed a similar uproar over former Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer’s decision to not pay her crowd-sourced band members.

When people discuss the issue of when performing for free is appropriate and when it is not, three logics emerge: utility, community, and justice.

The utilitarian logic suggests that if the artist is getting more out of the experience than the host, the artist should not be paid. Adam Thurman explains that for these professional performers, “the real enemy is being invisible.” If the exposure a professional gets from performing at a certain venue is good enough to get her jobs down the line that she couldn’t get otherwise, she should be willing to work for free because the future returns are high enough. If the exposure doesn’t help the performer get work or some other financial compensation down the line, he suggests that performer not take the gig for free. Amanda Palmer’s plan to not pay her band members makes sense under this logic—they’re all unknown musicians and they’re getting the opportunity to tour with a well-known pop artist. This opportunity is probably a pretty good resume booster for someone looking for a career as a back-up guitarist or a pop drummer. Popular improv comedian Chris Gethard agrees, saying “I owe everything to UCB.”

Following this logic to its conclusion leads to the idea that if performers are really getting a lot out of the experience, maybe they should be paying venues for the opportunity. This is happening in music and theater scenes all over the country.  Though much of this work preys on wide-eyed performers looking for a break, some folks are actually selling a great experience that performers wouldn’t be able to have otherwise.

One of UCB’s founders characterizes the question of whether to pay differently in one of the most important paragraphs on the Times’s report:

There’s a creative vibe at U.C.B., and to maintain it, we can’t pay people,” Mr. [Matt] Besser said in an interview. “If you pay, then you have to assign worth to shows, and then people will resent that.

This argument follows from the community logic. Here, performers are part of a community that a venue keeps alive. Paying performers would destroy the egalitarian we’re-all-in-this-together spirit. A similar ethic is commonly discussed in politics. Paying voters for showing up at the polls, though it may increase turnout, hasn’t yet caught on because it clashes with the idea that voting is something we do because we love our country, not for a few bucks.

But a day’s work deserves a day’s pay, right? The bank won’t hold exposure as equity (most of the time, anyway). Science fiction author Harlan Ellison lays out this problem bluntly, emphatically pronouncing:

By what right would you call me and ask me to work for nothing? Do you get a paycheck? Does your boss get a paycheck? … Do you pay the cameramen? Do you pay the cutters? Would you go to a gas station and ask for free gas? Would you go to the doctor and have him take out your spleen for nothing? How dare you call me and want me to work for nothing!

Amanda Palmer critic Steve Albini makes a related argument that if the person who would normally be paying is making money (i.e., Amanda Palmer or a venue that programs successful improv comedy), the performer should be getting paid.

With these three different logics leading to different answers on whether to pay performers, it makes sense that controversies would arise. We need to be asking what we want: low cost performances as a locus for social connection and creative expression, market-based exchange, or a day’s pay for a day’s work?

I’m very pleased to share that an updated and revised edition of this article appears in the Summer 2012 edition of the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, available here. In addition to updating our stats and actually naming our concept (“the Gate,” as a working title), we’ve rewritten essentially the entire middle section to address the major advances in crowdfunding that have taken place since original publication. Below is an excerpt of some of the new material:

Crowdfunding has brought a few clear benefits to arts philanthropy. First, the sites facilitate solicitation for smaller donations, making it easier for individual artists to leverage their social networks and aggregate modest giving into significant funding. Second, it is reasonable to assume that some portion of the money pledged through sites like Kickstarter represents new money for the arts, provided by donors who are motivated by the convenience and/or viral nature of the medium to give more or more often than before. Third, the sites provide a forum for interaction between artists and possible donors and audiences, potentially engaging fans in a project more deeply than is usually possible offline.

But these online donor marketplaces fall short of the full potential of crowdsourcing for arts philanthropy, in part because they use the same tools as the market and traditional philanthropy to cope with the lack of capacity to evaluate art. This can work in two ways. Some sites, like USA Projects, explicitly use traditional gatekeepers to restrict the number of projects available on the site: artists are eligible to post a project only if they have received an award or residency from the site’s “growing list of distinguished arts organizations around the country.” ¹⁸  Others, like Kickstarter itself, exercise little editorial discretion over which projects are posted. ¹⁹  This effectively creates an open marketplace for artistic support — but it doesn’t solve the problems with such a market discussed previously. A would-be donor confronted by the 27,086 projects on Kickstarter in 2011 may poke around the site a bit and stumble across something entirely new he wants to support, but more likely he will rely on guidance from gatekeepers (such as media sources or Kickstarter’s own staff) to choose projects. There is little incentive for him to browse unfamiliar proposals endlessly without some deeper reward for doing so, especially if he has limited funds to donate. ²⁰

More important, supporting a project on these sites is much like supporting a project in real life: you vote with your own dollars. Accordingly, the most fair-minded, informed, and thoughtful critics — the people best able to assess the long-term value of cultivating a given artist or organization — have no more influence than a casual browser or a relative of the artist with the same amount of disposable income. Crowdfunding sites thus fundamentally resemble the commercial marketplace, doing little to address the systemic inequities that pervade the market for access to consumers.

Daniel and I propose a fairly detailed scheme for exactly how this dilemma could be addressed, delicately balancing the open ethos of crowdsourcing with the need to privilege the opinions and wisdom of the most valuable contributors. This “guided crowsourcing” approach- which ultimately is about distinguishing between experts and non-experts when relying on the crowd to make good decisions – is by no means applicable only to philanthropy, and several recent articles show why. Remember that concerto contest that the Pittsburgh Symphony announced a while back, in which the winner would be chosen by voters on YouTube? In the end, the PSO decided to scrap the contest for lack of a candidate of sufficient quality, as judged by artistic director Manfred Honeck. Eric Felton considers the fallout and notes flaws in the process, which was a straight up popularity contest that did nothing to discourage voters with unhelpful motivations:

When the PSO announced the concerto semifinalists and invited the world to watch their YouTube performance videos, the voting public was soon posting comments on the PSO website explaining its choices. “My choice, was a student of mine in elementary school,” bragged one. Another declared her favorite “deserves everyone’s vote” because “I have watched her as a child starting to play the harp at First Baptist.” At least that was tangentially about her work as a musician, unlike the vote of confidence that one contestant got from a grateful neighbor: “Congratulations to that young man who shovels my walks…” And if the names on the postings are any indication, the young lady born in Puerto Rico managed to corner the support of Latinas. Whether it’s a matter of piling up five-star reviews on Amazon or securing the collective approbation of Yelp users, online ratings are all too often a measure not of product quality but of the promoters’ skill at Internet marketing and social-media manipulation.

I couldn’t agree more, and this is a major theme that Daniel and I address in our article. After drawing the gleeful attention of prognosticators and futurists galore, it seems that crowdsourcing as a concept is starting to see a backlash. David Leonhardt from the New York Times recently noted that prediction markets (a favorite trope of fans of the crowd) completely failed to anticipate John Roberts’s deciding vote on the recent Supreme Court health care reform case. Nevertheless, Leonhardt is quick to point out that relying on individual experts isn’t really any better, offering this set of wisdom-nuggets that collectively make our point:

The answer, I think, is to take the best of what both experts and markets have to offer, realizing that the combination of the two offers a better window onto the future than either alone. Markets are at their best when they can synthesize large amounts of disparate information, as on an election night. Experts are most useful when a system exists to identify the most truly knowledgeable — a system that often resembles a market.

Sometimes, this approach involves a wisdom-of-crowds approach to experts. My colleague Nate Silver, whose book on prediction comes out later this year, has found that a simple average of well-known economic forecasts is substantially more accurate than individual forecasts. Other times, the approach might involve as much art as science — and, again, the Internet allows for strategies that once would have been impossible.

Think for a moment about what a Twitter feed is: it’s a personalized market of experts (and friends), in which you can build your own focus group and listen to its collective analysis about the past, present and future. An RSS feed, in which you choose blogs to read, works similarly. You make decisions about which experts are worthy of your attention, based both on your own judgments about them and on other experts’ judgments.

Their predictions now face a market discipline that did not always exist before the Internet came along. “Experts exist,” as Mr. Wolfers says, “but they’re not necessarily the same as the guys on TV.”

Indeed, one of the examples that I use in my TEDx talk about citizen curation is that of Brad Bourland, a grocery store clerk from Austin, TX who has ranked the 20th century’s greatest 9200 movies, and watched 7000 of them. Is he really all that much less qualified to judge, say, a film festival than the people who have that job now? Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb’s Dave Copeland riffs off of Leonhardt’s article and shares the story of GeniusRocket, a company that has moved to a model of “curated crowdsourcing” after growing disenchanted with the more common popularity-contest variety. “The Key to Crowdsourcing? Smarter Crowds,” declares the headline.

The original version of “Audiences at the Gate” has become among the most-read posts on this site despite its prodigious length of nearly 6,000 words, but in the 18 months since Daniel and I offered these ideas up to the world, there has been no serious consideration that I know of to put them into practice. The wider world is starting to catch on to the promise of guided crowdsourcing. Who will be the first to try it in the arts?

Every once in a blue moon, an arts policy story breaks into the mainstream media—and as with most poorly understood subjects, it’s usually for some profoundly stupid reason. The news that the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter anticipates distributing more money this year than the National Endowment for the Arts was no exception.[1] The story, prompted by a February 24 interview of Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler by Talking Points Memo’s Carl Franzen, led to a flurry of content-free online chatter on well-trafficked channels with frothy headlines like “Could Kickstarter Replace the NEA?” and “Kickstarter Kicks the NEA’s Butt in Arts Funding.”

It’s worth noting that neither Strickler himself nor Franzen’s analysis suggested that Kickstarter was somehow in opposition to the NEA—indeed, Strickler went out of his way to emphasize that he has mixed feelings about the growth of his startup relative to the nation’s second-largest arts funder.[2] But not surprisingly, that was the direction the conversation immediately went. In a way, I can sympathize with the enthusiasm for this easy, attention-grabbing narrative: Kickstarter, after all, has been extraordinarily successful in positioning itself as the hot new tech tool that everyone’s talking about, the creative entrepreneur’s best friend, in more or less direct contrast to the NEA’s comparatively stodgy, bureaucratic image. The comparison, furthermore, is like catnip to conservative and libertarian opponents of federal arts funding, who see the numbers as justification for the argument that their taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to support art that they don’t directly endorse. Just as inexperienced artists sometimes mistakenly believe that Kickstarter is going to solve all of their fundraising problems with nary a lifted finger in sight, commentators who have more interest than background in the arts can easily fall into the trap of seeing Kickstarter as “the answer” to United States arts policy.

Seductive as it is, that narrative ignores a number of pertinent facts about the nature of both Kickstarter itself and the arts funding ecosystem in our country. Crucially, it misses the forest for the trees by incorrectly assuming that the NEA is one of the primary means by which our country funds the nonprofit arts sector, following the model embraced by governments in Europe and elsewhere. In reality, Kickstarter and the NEA combined comprise less than 0.5% of the total dollars arts organizations raise and spend annually. The NEA isn’t even the largest line item in the federal budget devoted to arts and culture—that honor goes to the Smithsonian Institution, with an appropriation from Uncle Sam exceeding that of the NEA’s by a factor of five. Instead, nonprofit arts organizations raise nearly half of their revenue from earned sources such as ticket sales and tuition fees, with the bulk of the remainder coming from individual donations (yes, people gave money to the arts before Kickstarter) and foundation grants.

from National Endowment for the Arts, “How the United States Funds the Arts”: http://www.nea.gov/pub/how.pdf

Moreover, as author and technologist Clay Johnson points out, the NEA and Kickstarter are fundamentally different beasts: the NEA is a mission-centric public agency intentionally focusing its resources in certain directions to attain specific goals, whereas the strings-attached donations that take place on Kickstarter arguably have more in common with purchases of goods and services than with grants. A solid quarter of Kickstarter’s distributions to date have gone toward projects that fall outside of the scope of what the NEA has traditionally supported, such as new product design and commercial entertainment (high-profile projects have included an iPhone dock, an iPod Nano watch, and a movie by Tom Hanks’s son). Indeed, to say that Kickstarter “funds” the arts at all seems an exaggeration; Kickstarter is a for-profit technology platform that takes a 8-10% cut (counting credit card and transaction fees) from the donations that come through its system, money that is currently being used to grow the company and will one day undoubtedly make its founders very, very rich. Saying that Kickstarter should replace the NEA is rather like saying we don’t need libraries anymore because we have Amazon.com.

*

It’s interesting to me that, in contrast to the apparently exciting (for some) notion of Kickstarter supplanting the NEA, no one has called for the reverse—that is, for the NEA to replace Kickstarter, or at least for Kickstarter to become more like the NEA. That suggests the NEA has a bit of an image problem relative to the darlings of the crowdfunding world. Why might that be? I suspect a big reason is the complex role the NEA plays in United States arts policy, one that is frequently at odds with the expectations placed upon it by liberals and conservatives alike.

Following the first meeting of the National Council on the Arts (the body that oversees the National Endowment for the Arts) in 1965, the Council released a statement that read, in part, “…The Council cannot create artists, but it is passionately dedicated to creating a climate in which art and the artist shall flourish.” That sentence neatly encapsulates the indirect role that the NEA must play in our cultural ecosystem due to its small size. United States citizens can be forgiven, I suppose, for thinking that the role of a federal agency called the “National Endowment for the Arts” is to support artists directly in the creation and production of art. But these days, aside from a handful of literature fellowships, it’s not—any more than the role of the Federal Highway Administration is to make and drive cars. Rather, the function of both agencies is to create and maintain a strong infrastructure to serve their respective constituencies.

One could make an argument that the NEA isn’t so different from Kickstarter in one key respect: neither entity really gives away its own money. In the NEA’s case, that money is ours, the taxpayers’, and just like Kickstarter it takes a cut of the pie for itself: more than 20% of the budget goes toward operating expenses or program support efforts rather than grants. But taxpayers get at least two things for their overhead dollars that their Kickstarter patron and customer counterparts don’t: curation[3] and leadership. The first is becoming increasingly central for the arts field as a whole, as the number of new and growing creative enterprises threatens to overwhelm an already crowded market. Rather than allocate its dollars to grant applicants via some automated process, the NEA invests considerable time in assembling peer review panels to assess each project’s merits and goals in relation to its strategic objectives (creating excellent art, engaging the public, and promoting public knowledge and understanding about the arts). Importantly, as a government entity with no obligation to consider the commercial potential of the projects it supports, the NEA is free to prioritize art that would otherwise fall through the cracks—either because of what it is, who’s making it, or where it’s happening. This freedom is what allows the NEA and other mission-oriented funders to create a subsidy-driven artistic marketplace to serve alongside the profit-driven commercial marketplace.

In short, by making strong, centralized, and values-based curatorial choices, the NEA has the capacity to exercise leadership. And leadership is the means by which the NEA can be relevant despite its modest budget as the most visible national government body supporting the arts. The Endowment has focused a singular attention during Chairman Rocco Landesman’s tenure on setting national priorities and forming partnerships and coalitions around them, resulting most obviously in a raft of new creative placemaking initiatives casting the arts as engines of economic redevelopment in urban and rural centers across the United States. The NEA has also put new energy and resources into its research activities, using its power as a convener to standardize and update methodologies and form liaisons with other branches of government.

Finally, there is one important respect in which the NEA leads by…well…following. Forty percent of the Endowment’s grant dollars go not to organizations or artists directly, but to arts councils via state and local partnerships. This arrangement is part of a decentralization strategy that is aimed at getting national dollars for arts access to every corner of the country. While some commentators feel that the NEA could do more to support arts access in rural areas and away from the coasts, the Endowment is without question a bigger boon to these regions than Kickstarter, whose marketplace-based model (mirroring the economy more generally) inherently privileges geographic clusters.

*

Right now, it’s not clear that Kickstarter is doing much more than offering a streamlined process for donations that would probably have happened anyway. Aside from a handful of lucky campaigns that “go viral,” anecdotal reports suggest that the vast majority of donors to a typical project are previously known to the recipient. That means that whatever biases and privileges exist in the real world also exist on Kickstarter. Artist-entrepreneurs who have either ready access to networks of family and friends with money or an already-existing fan base will have a noticeable leg up on those who are just starting out or paid their own way in college. In fact, Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing campaign model may exacerbate these inequities, by increasing the risk that those who begin with less will lose the benefits of all their hard work—a fate that befell more than half of all campaigns launched on the site last year.

Given all the above, it may seem ironic that it is Kickstarter that has seized the mantle of democratizing access to the arts in the public imagination, rather than the NEA. A closer examination, however, quickly reveals why. In recent years, the NEA has focused on arts access from the perspective of the audience, particularly through geographic reach. The Endowment publishes national studies on arts participation twice a decade, supports touring programs through its network of regional partners, and frequently supports established organizations that are capable of bringing in large crowds consistently. But these measures are often not so friendly to the creator. The NEA’s focus on pre-existing institutions, its requirement that applicants hold tax-exempt status, and its extensive application requirements and lengthy review process all erect barriers to participation no less formidable than those that face artist-entrepreneurs who come to Kickstarter without access to a video camera. The NEA is simply not set up to provide seed funding of any kind, relying on partners, grantees, and the private sector to fulfill that function instead. By contrast, Kickstarter allows pretty much anyone to sign up and start soliciting in a jiffy, and campaign timelines are purposefully kept short to allow for nearly immediate results. In short, if one fits the profile of an ideal Kickstarter project, that platform offers an infinitely more attractive vehicle for obtaining funding than the NEA.

*

Precisely because the marketplace for individual giving is so much larger than the capacity for government support, Kickstarter has the potential to deliver a transformative impact on the arts sector by cultivating more and better donors to the arts. (Kickstarter isn’t the only platform of its kind, of course, nor is it even the first. My employer, Fractured Atlas, partners with two of Kickstarter’s competitors, IndieGoGo and RocketHub, and many other online fundraising platforms cover the arts and beyond, including USA Projects, Power2Give, and ArtSpire. But Kickstarter’s large customer base and obvious cachet with the technology community currently put it in the best position to achieve what I suggest here.) Kickstarter has already taken a number of steps to encourage “browsers”—people who donate to projects to which they have no personal connection. The company offers a weekly newsletter featuring projects that catch the program team’s eye, and regularly highlights selected campaigns on its blog and other social media. A “Discover Great Projects” section of the website offers staff picks, and curated pages increase the number of voices in the mix. Strickler’s comments on a year-in-review thread from earlier this year also indicate that Kickstarter is working on ways to make it easier to find projects in close geographic proximity to you.

But Kickstarter could do more. For as much time as it puts into selecting projects to highlight, many, many more will pass unnoticed, a trend that will only worsen as the platform becomes more popular. By engaging its audience directly in the curation of its projects, perhaps through some kind of guided crowdsourcing process, Kickstarter would expose more of the “long tail” of its project pool to potential review by strangers. That would allow projects that originate from underserved communities and don’t already come in with strong connections to donors a more realistic shot at reaching their campaign goals. Kickstarter’s broad conception of creativity, one that reaches beyond the arts to video games, product design, and even social innovation, holds enormous promise for encouraging the cross-pollination of donors across various fields, perhaps even training a new generation of tech-savvy arts patrons and board members. A robust recommendation engine and more project discovery tools will likely be needed, however, to turn all of those one-time supporters doing a friend a favor into ongoing mini-Medicis (or should we say Bloombergs?) providing a regular stream of dollars to projects and artists they discover for the first time through Kickstarter. Were that vision realized, the notion of Kickstarter as a “funder” of the arts would not seem nearly so far-fetched.

*

I’ve been pretty harsh on the “could Kickstarter replace the NEA” meme, on the logic that (a) it’s not going to happen and (b) even if it did, it would have little practical impact because of the relatively small dollar amounts involved. Yet the NEA/Kickstarter cage-match narrative compels because it gets at a central debate in American society: the value of shaping markets through planning and policy versus letting them run free. While Kickstarter does not prioritize, and therefore is less successful at, distributing its funds in a way that acknowledges historical inequities and the biases of capitalism, in other respects it does represent a more accessible vision of the arts in America consistent with the Pro-Am Revolution. It is this commitment to lowering the barriers to entry that has made Kickstarter so popular with the media and, in particular, with the innovation-obsessed technology community. And though the NEA theoretically should be able to democratize access to the arts more effectively than a for-profit entity like Kickstarter, for creators, accessing the Endowment—with all of its rules and structure—simply requires a different kind of privilege.

For these reasons, it’s not that hard to imagine Kickstarter and the NEA learning from each other. Though Kickstarter’s mission is not to serve the arts community per se, it would be a shame to see it pass up the huge opportunity in front of it to do just that by flexing more curatorial leadership and empowering its audience to do the same. Meanwhile, crowdfunding’s open-access, instant-gratification model offers an important challenge to the Endowment as it continues to wrestle with how it can best do its job on pennies per capita. If democratizing access to the arts means anything at all, it must include not just who gets to see the artist but also who gets to be the artist. And on that last score, both institutions have a ways yet to go.

**

1. I’m not going to waste time crafting the world’s seven gazillionth article describing Kickstarter here. If you’re not familiar with it, Anastasia Tsioulcas’s blog post offers a good introduction from a classical music perspective.

2. Depending on the definition used, the NEA is either neck-and-neck with or far behind the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in money provided to the arts annually.

3. Kickstarter does “curate” its projects in the sense that they must meet basic eligibility requirements in order to get listed, but the review and due diligence process is far less extensive than the NEA’s.

“It’s not pure altruism,” says David Nicholas, a media director at BP. “Sponsorship can bring benefits to our reputation.” Even the negative publicity doesn’t seem to bother him.”Everyone has a right to protest – at least it gets people talking about BP!” But he denies that the company is trying to maintain an acceptable face. “If you want to try to put an artsy face on a roughneck in overalls, I leave that to you.”

Marco Compagnoni, a senior partner at the City law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, says objecting to big business sponsorship is “absolutely bonkers” but he rejects BP’s assertion that it’s for employee benefits. “It’s not done for the perks. Law firms aren’t munificent, activities like that are for marketing and keeping close to clients to help your business. We are doing an evening at the Leonardo and one at the Hockney because it’s a good atmosphere to talk to clients. It’s not to be nice.”

One of the most common conservative objections to government support for the arts, one that is sometimes voiced by liberals as well, is the potential for giving up undue influence and control (particularly over content). That’s never made much sense to me, because the fact is that so long as art requires significant subsidy from non-artists in order to happen, whoever’s providing that subsidy has the power to meddle unhelpfully in the artist’s affairs. So it’s really just a question of who you trust most – and least – to keep a safe distance. Is it big corporations or the government? Depends on whose government you’re talking about, I suppose. I’ll take a sponsorship from BP over one from Hu Jintao any day. The system we use in the United States – with its decentralized marketplace of tax-advantaged private foundations and individual donors making up the vast majority of subsidy – is extremely labor-intensive to maintain, but it may be the best we can do for freedom of expression.

Through the work of the Emerging Ideas Committee this year, I’ve become acquainted with a wealth of new approaches to old problems and exciting combinations of existing models about which I was previously unaware. You’re seeing some examples of them on the Blog Salon this week, and we’ll be sharing more on this space as the year goes on.

For every strong example of innovation we highlight, however, I’m sure there are five more that we missed. Not because they were not among the ones we chose, but because they were never even brought to our attention.

You see, part of the nature of being “under the radar” is that it’s hard for people who rely on conventional information sources to find you. The five young arts professionals on our committee set out at the beginning of the year to identify novel, smart projects that weren’t getting attention from the field as a whole. We used what resources we had at our disposal – most notably, our connection to the 30+ local Emerging Leader Networks around the country – but inevitably, our ability to “spot” innovative ventures is determined to a significant extent by those ventures’ visibility.

Each of us as human beings only has a finite attention span to work with, and in many situations, that capacity for attention is not enough to handle all of the possibilities before us. As a result, we tend to take defensive measures to limit the pool of choices: we may confine a job recruitment effort to people we already know, for example, or a funder might choose not to accept unsolicited applications. These decisions are almost always understandable in their own right, but as I’ve written in the past, their combined net effect is that unheralded artist-entrepreneurs face increasing pressure and competition to stand out from the crowd, which often forces them to choose between either self-subsidizing to some degree or toiling in obscurity forever. That makes it harder and harder for the outsiders and the economically disadvantaged to get ahead – and our field is poorer for their absence from the conversation. We need dedicated, knowledgeable people who can each “cover” a smaller slice of the arts world comprehensively and with integrity, and who are willing to share what they learn with the rest of us. That’s what good curators do – and we desperately need more of them.

This past weekend, David Dower from Arena Stage drove home this point quite eloquently with a long post about Arena’s curation process. A couple of years ago, Dower reformed the way that Arena Stage  scouts new plays, and one of the consequences was the end of Arena’s open submissions policy. Although it makes sense in theory that if you want to support new plays (or new anything), you should be open to anyone, Dower and his team were bowing to the reality that the volume of aspiring playwrights was such that no one could really get a fair hearing anyway. “When the submission policy was open, writers and agents had the impression they were getting their plays to me by putting them in the mail,” Dower explains. “But they weren’t. They were getting plays to a corps of non-staff readers with no real avenue to impact planning decisions.”

So how does an aspiring playwright, someone with a radically new and wonderful approach to narrative that deserves a fair hearing, get the attention of Arena Stage without an open admissions process? According to Dower,

The answer to that one is by being in motion in the world as a playwright. [Emphasis mine—IDM] If you’re participating in development labs and conferences, if your plays are somewhere in production …you have a much better chance of coming to our attention than if you are mailing a script to a theater that assigns it to a non-staff reader.

Dower goes on to explain that Arena Stage pursues partnerships with new play development labs so as to effectively outsource the curation process to them. The point? Even a huge, highly influential entity such as Arena Stage that is committed to the performance of new plays doesn’t have the capacity to evaluate everyone’s work. If the curation process were only up to them, a lot of people would get lost through the cracks. The only way for new playwrights to get to that level is to first succeed among a network of organizations and individuals who are “closer to the ground” – who perhaps offer less in the way of access to immediate fame, but who are in a position to offer more of their undivided attention.

I’ve spent a lot of time just now talking about new plays, and you might wonder what any of that has to do with new models for arts administration. But the truth is that they are hardly different at all. Either way, someone with an idea, whether an artist or an entrepreneur or both, can rarely bring that idea to life on her own. She needs the help of those with resources and connections to realize its potential. Yet the catch-22 is that those with resources and connections need help too: they need help distinguishing her great idea from the hundreds or thousands of pretty good, mediocre, and terrible ideas competing for their attention. That’s where curators, in whatever form they take, play such an important role. They are the ones who invest their invaluable time, expertise, and attention in sifting through the unfamiliar names, the aspirational efforts, and the half-baked notions. They are the ones who make it possible for the unconnected to become connected, and for the rest of the world to benefit from that connection. The ones who pursue this task with vigor, perseverance, and integrity are the unsung heroes of our field, for without them we would not be very innovative at all.

“Never Heard of ‘Em”: Why Citizen Curators (not Daddy’s Money) Should Decide Who Gets to Be an Artist

For the past few months, you’ve probably been besieged with emails and Facebook posts asking you to convince our politicians not to cut public funding for the arts. Often these appeals will include a link to some news story about how the arts will suffer if government grants are reduced. And if you click through and read the comments, invariably you’ll come across something like this:

The government—at whatever level—has no business funding the arts, especially so, when much of that art is mediocre or worst. Why should my tax dollars go to fund the fun of someone who thinks himself or herself the next Picasso? Exceptional art will find funding, as it always has.

In my arts policy coverage, I find this argument comes up a lot, and there’s a good reason—it’s difficult to parry.

Our first response to such arguments is usually to talk about the value of the arts. But note that the commenter is not saying that art itself doesn’t have value. The dispute is about the value of subsidy to the arts. The commenter claims, and quite rightly so, that art would still happen if the government didn’t help pay for it. In fact, that’s exactly what took place in this country for the first 175 years or so of its existence, before a real infrastructure for government arts funding came into being.

So why would we want to subsidize the arts anyway? I mean, if the deli on the corner is losing customers because its meats are stale and the service is slow, we don’t say that the government should subsidize the corner deli. We say good riddance! So is it really such a big deal if the arts are left to fare for themselves?

The way I see it, there are basically two reasons to subsidize the arts:

1. To give us cool art that the market wouldn’t otherwise support
2. To give access to the arts to people who wouldn’t otherwise have it

Each of these reasons assumes a market failure when it comes to the arts. The first suggests that, while the market can determine which art or entertainment makes people happy in the here and now, it is bad at judging the long-term value of art. It’s pretty easy to come up with examples of people who we now consider to be Great Artists who were not recognized as such in their day. The only reason their work has survived until now is sheer luck. Often, an artist’s real value to society comes not so much from the direct experiences that audiences have of his or her work, but rather from the profound influence that the artist has on other artists, some of whom may eventually reach a wider public.

The second reason is a straight-up class argument. Just as with many other services, because art has value, people shouldn’t be denied access to art just because they are poor, or happen to live in a rural area, or are confined to a nursing home or mental institution. The same argument applies to kids – just because their parents can’t afford to provide them with access to art, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have it.

I’m going to focus most of this talk on the first argument: that it’s important to subsidize art because the commercial marketplace is not good at judging art’s long-term value to society and future generations.

So we are agreed that the commercial marketplace is not so good at judging the long-term value of artistic product. But if you’re not going to let the marketplace decide who succeeds and who fails in the arts, then who should decide?

To be honest, I don’t have a great answer to this question. But the best that I can come up with is that I would want the people deciding to really know their shit. I expect that someone who has studied the arts, or even better, my specific discipline, or better yet, my specific genre and subgenre within my specific discipline, will have a better idea of the long-term value of my work to society than some schmoe off the street. That’s not elitism, that’s just common sense.

But you know, art is still a matter of taste. And people always have personal agendas, scores to settle, and so on. One of the really nice things about the commercial marketplace is that no one person really has that much power to determine what happens on their own. But the problem with the commercial marketplace is that most of the people in it are not the experts we want judging the long-term value of the work.

What we need is something I call an artistic marketplace: a system of buying and selling artistic products and services in which the currency is not money, but instead the respect of experts. In which success is determined not by how many butts in seats you have, or how many records you can sell, but by the extent to which your work impresses people who really know their shit.

So who are these people? They are anyone who experiences a lot more art than the average person, and thus has a basis for informed opinion. Professional critics are probably the most obvious exemplar of this category. But it also includes anyone who judges artistic work samples for a living: publishers, artistic directors, booking agents, record company execs, gallery curators, and the list goes on. It even includes, I would argue, people like this guy. [Slide: grocery store clerk who’s watched and ranked over 7000 movies] These people collectively form the demand curve within the artistic marketplace.

As we said earlier, the currency of the artistic marketplace is the respect and endorsement of experts. The problem is this: that respect does not exchange properly with the currency of the commercial marketplace: money.

This is important because the whole purpose of subsidy is to make that exchange possible. Remember, with subsidy we are actively intervening in the commercial marketplace because we don’t agree with the choices it is making about which artists and institutions should stand the test of time. And yet I am sure that any of us in this room, or any of us watching, can point to examples of brilliant artists working today, who are well-recognized by their peers, who nevertheless struggle to make ends meet. This wouldn’t happen if the artistic marketplace were functioning the way it’s supposed to.

So why is it that philanthropic subsidy isn’t more effective at helping critically acclaimed artists make a living? Well, for one thing, we can’t talk about this phenomenon without mentioning the intense competition for attention between artists of all stripes. I don’t need to tell you that the past 20 years have completely revolutionized our society’s level of access to art of all kinds. Production costs have fallen drastically, making it possible for amateur creators and performers to use equipment that only professionals could have taken advantage of a generation ago. And because of the internet, distribution costs have nearly disappeared entirely, particularly for film and electronic media, recorded music, and writing. Finally, storage costs – with the transfer of so much information to digital format and hard drive capacities metastasizing every year – are dropping through the floor as well. The net result of all of these changes is that it’s easier than ever before for people to create art that can “pass” for professional; it’s easier than ever before for these amateur artists to enter the public sphere by distributing their works to the world; and those works get preserved in the public sphere, accessible by anyone at any time, rather than languishing in the attic or in the creator’s imagination.

Bottom line: a lot more people are entering the artistic (and commercial) marketplaces on the supply side—they engage in personal creation or performance for public consumption. And because the same technological innovations apply to retired artists – even deceased artists!—not only does each new playwright or composer or painter have to compete with all of her peers, she must also compete with every artist who came before her. Unfortunately, she cannot similarly count on dead audience members to be a part of her fan base.

So there is a tremendous amount of competition in the artistic marketplace—a marketplace in which the currency is respect. But in order to get respect, one of the “experts” in the artistic marketplace has to give you their attention – which means they have to give you their time. They have to listen to your piece, read your play, look at your slides, be present at your audition. And time is becoming – for all of us – a really, really scarce resource. Our lives are being filled up – not least by all of this content that we are bombarded with every day. In fact, we are producing so much art in this world these days that we are overwhelming the human capacity to evaluate it all. Let’s say you are a music fan. If you decided you wanted to listen to all of the albums released in the United States in a given year – say, 2008 – you could put your headphones on for every hour of every day of every week of the year – and you still wouldn’t get through more than an eighth of them! So now it’s 2009, and you have seven-eighths of the previous year to listen to – plus all the albums from 2007, and the albums from 2006, and you get the picture. Or let’s say you enjoy hunting for videos on YouTube. Guess what: there are 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s the equivalent of 176,000 full-length Hollywood movies every week!

So you see what I mean when I say that we don’t have the capacity to evaluate it all. And more to the point, those experts in the artistic marketplace don’t have time to evaluate it either. So they triage. They take some shortcuts.

Let’s take an example – an example from music, since that’s the world I know best. If you review the rosters of major classical music presenters around the country, you will start to see a lot of the same names over and over and over again. The fact is, the first instinct of anyone awarding a high-profile gig will be to choose proven commodities: names that audience members are familiar with, excited by, and motivated to buy tickets for. There is a powerful incentive for these curators to make that choice: it’s called earned revenue! Even though presenters operate in the artistic marketplace, they also operate in the commercial marketplace, and the commercial marketplace demands that one take advantage of star power.

But let’s say that in this particular case, a presenter has decided to take a chance on a chamber ensemble that is not so well-known – in fact, it’s the first gig they’ve ever had at this level. But are they really unknown? For that programming decision to happen, the work of those musicians has to be brought to the attention of whoever is doing the artistic programming for the presenter. I’m telling you right now that it didn’t happen because that person was reviewing unsolicited work samples that came in through the mail or over the internet. The tidal wave of submissions is in all likelihood so massive that they can’t possibly give their full attention to each one. So what do they do instead? They are probably plugged in to the next level down of presenting opportunities, and may get out and see shows on a regular basis. They monitor what their peers are saying in their local community and around the country about particular artists, keeping an ear out for those that are generating buzz. And it is on this basis – career momentum, essentially – that programming of “new” artists actually happens.

So for an unknown chamber ensemble to get a major opportunity like this, they have to already be generating buzz and getting smaller performance opportunities. Here’s where it gets tricky. Those smaller performance opportunities don’t really pay the bills. Maybe the musicians are self-presenting, and thus sees their income swallowed up in production costs. Maybe they’re doing a lot of unpaid gigs as favors just to get exposure. They might even be doing club shows where the payout at the end of the night is $50 per musician if they are lucky. That doesn’t go very far toward paying for instruments, practice space, or the van rental if they’re on tour.

And how did they get those smaller gigs anyway? It certainly helps if they had a killer demo – the kind that it takes money to record. It helps if they had a lot of time to practice together, which means they have a dedicated rehearsal space. These things cost money.

And finally, in all likelihood, those musicians paid a lot of money for conservatory training, at the bachelor’s and possibly the master’s level. And during that time when they were getting trained, they probably weren’t making money either.

So we’ve just outlined a number of problems standing in the way of an unknown artist or group of artists getting a gig that pays them enough money to live on.

• There’s the problem of profile: in order to get that gig, people have to already know who you are.
• The problem of curatorial capacity: in order for people to know who you are and to stand out from the crowd, you need some career momentum.
• The problem of presentation: in order to get that career momentum, you need public showings and documentation of your work which you have to either pay for or subsidize.
• And there’s the problem of uncompensated time: in order to get and make those presentation opportunities successful, you need to spend thousands of hours in training and practice, which are thousands of hours that you’re not earning a living.

Do you see where I’m going with this? This process of getting attention presents us with a HUGE class issue. Is it any mystery why our arts organizations have trouble connecting with less affluent members of society? It’s not because they can’t afford the tickets. It’s not because they can’t get to the venue easily. It’s not because the genre as a whole isn’t “relevant” to them. Okay, I lied – it is all of those things. But I don’t think any of them are the main reason. I think the main reason is because these less affluent populations don’t know anyone in their communities who is a professional artist with those organizations. Because how could you be, if you grew up poor and couldn’t afford conservatory training and weren’t given lessons in school and anyway now you have to work two jobs to put food on the table and feed the kids? We talk a lot about cultural equity in the arts, and we typically frame it in terms of audience access: who has the opportunity to see one of these amazing artists perform, or witness their creations? But as more and more of us turn to creative expression as a way of affirming our identities in an increasingly connected world, I think the most important cultural equity issue of our time isn’t who gets to see the amazing artist, it’s who gets to be the amazing artist.

I’ve almost reached the end of my time, but I want to leave you with a few thoughts about where to go from here.

One of the big problems with the current system is that, of all the “experts” we identified way back in the beginning of this talk, only a few of them can back up their opinions with more than token amounts of money. I gave you the example of a presenter earlier, and others, such as grantmakers and some artistic directors, share this privilege. But that leaves out most critics, booking agents, and radio station programmers. It leaves out superfans and aficionados. Doesn’t their opinion count too? Apparently not, if you follow the money.

What we need to do is pretty clear. First, because supply in the artistic marketplace is increasing so dramatically, we need to bolster the demand curve to meet it, by getting more people who really know their shit to evaluate unknown artists. This will address the problem of capacity. And second, we need to do a better job of making sure that people who know their shit can back their opinions up with money, so that those who succeed in the artistic marketplace can also succeed in the economy more generally.

In “Audiences at the Gate,” an article published in Edward Clapp’s 20UNDER40 anthology last year, Daniel Reid and I discuss a model that aims to accomplish both of these goals. We suggest that one or more foundations could funnel some of the money that they give to the arts each year through a community of citizen curators who interact with each other via a web-based platform. These citizen curators could be anyone, really, but their influence on the foundations’ decisions – and thus their ability to direct the flow of philanthropic capital – would depend on their ability to build a reputation among their colleagues for knowledgeable, fair, and thorough evaluations of artistic proposals and work samples uploaded to the site.

This approach increases the number of people participating on the demand side of the artistic marketplace, and it explicitly directs philanthropic subsidy into the hands of experts. And there’s a third advantage as well: by consolidating discussions about which artists to support into one place, the model transforms curation into a team effort, avoiding needless duplication and saving everyone precious time.

I’m sure there are other approaches that might work too. But I do fervently believe we need to do something. As it stands, because the artistic marketplace isn’t functional, less affluent individuals get shut out, and we don’t get a chance as a society to benefit from their talents or perspectives. Thus, the first goal of artistic subsidy—cool art that we wouldn’t otherwise get to experience—is not fully met.

But if you’ll recall, the second purpose of artistic subsidy is to give people access to the arts who wouldn’t normally have it. And we’ve just said that access isn’t just about experiencing art as an audience member, it’s about getting to be in the show as well.

So if we can someday reform the artistic marketplace, we’ll actually be serving both goals of artistic subsidy at once – not to mention addressing the most important cultural equity issue of our time. Not bad, right? Let’s just hope that our government funding survives until then.

]]> https://createquity.com/2011/05/tedx-talk/feed/ 6 https://createquity.com/2011/03/supply-is-not-going-to-decrease-so-its-time-to-think-about-curating/ https://createquity.com/2011/03/supply-is-not-going-to-decrease-so-its-time-to-think-about-curating/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:05:21 +0000 https://createquity.com/?p=2078  

Image by Flickr user Waddell and Condor

(Cross-posted from the NEA’s Art Works blog. The version that appears there was edited for length; this is the original.)

I’ve been waiting for a while to respond to the controversy that erupted after Rocco Landesman’s comments on supply and demand in the arts at Arena Stage in January. (Createquity’s previous coverage, provided by Aaron Andersen, is here.) Most of the very thought-provoking commentary in the interim has taken issue in one way or another either with the notion that demand cannot increase, or the appropriateness of the supply/demand construct altogether. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I want to propose a slightly different way of thinking about the situation.

The first thing for us to understand is that Rocco’s comments did not come out of nowhere. People in arts policy circles have been grumbling about the dramatic increase in arts organizations for years. I had actually been collecting links on this topic all through last year in preparation for a post on oversupply when the news of Rocco’s speech hit. Here’s Michael Kaiser, for example, noting that “so many people” over the past two years have suggested to him that we must thin out the field (he does not agree). Jim Undercofler, arts management professor at Drexel and former CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra, admitted recently that he was questioning his “initiating assumption” that there are too many nonprofits.¹ Here’s former Mellon Foundation Associate Program Officer Diane Ragsdale with a post on oversupply 10 days prior to Rocco’s address at Arena Stage. And this past fall, Grantmakers in the Arts’s much-heralded National Capitalization Project Report ended up making a lot of people nervous, primarily because of the inclusion of this statement among its core hypotheses: “there is an oversupply of product in some marketplaces, and…current funding practices do not address this issue.”

I take the view that, whatever the merits might be of reducing supply, there is virtually nothing anyone—funders included—can do to actually make it happen. For one thing, conversation about supply and demand breaks down a bit when the suppliers have an intrinsic motivation to be in the marketplace. Classical economic models assume that suppliers don’t have any particular emotional attachment to what they’re supplying; all they really want to do is to make money. As a result, if they’re not making money, they’ll exit the industry, leaving more to go around for everyone else.  As we see from Kirk Lynn’s contribution to the discussion, however, many artists (especially artist-entrepreneurs) have far too much passion for their work to consider exiting solely for financial reasons. The result of this lack of exit is a surfeit of fantastic art that few aside from its creators have time to take in.

Notice that I didn’t say in that last sentence “a surfeit of fantastic art that few want to take in.” An immutable fact of contemporary culture is that the volume of expressive content and product available for us to consume overwhelms not just our desire, but our physical ability to experience it all. The number of albums released on CD in 2008 is enough that a listener couldn’t get through more than an eighth of them even if he had his headphones on for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Users upload the equivalent of 176,000 full-length movies to YouTube every week. And that’s just the stuff that’s being released today! Meanwhile, every creator must compete not only with all of her contemporaries, but also with all of those who came before her whose work survived to the present—and that supply is not about to decrease anytime soon. (Unfortunately, creators cannot similarly count on dead audience members to be a part of their fan club.) Moreover, the phenomenon of oversupply—or, put another way, hypercompetition—is far, far bigger than the nonprofit arts sector. It affects industries ranging from video games to smartphone application stores, Facebook, cable TV, and yes, blogs. In many ways, it is existential in scope: our brains and lifespans are not built to withstand this onslaught of choices. The supply of artists, arts organizations, and even capital may increase with relative ease, but the supply of time in the day, last I checked, remains pretty constant.

So to me, the conversation we should be having is not about reducing supply. Instead it is about defining the responsibilities of cultural institutions to provide stewardship for a world in which supply of creative content is exploding and will never shrink. In this era of infinite choice, there is a desperate need for guidance as to how we should allocate the precious few hours that we have to experience something that will feed our souls, make us think differently, or incur a hearty laugh. In other words: for curation. We need someone to listen to, watch, and view all of the chaff so that we can confine our own time to the wheat. But quality curation-that is to say, curation that results from independent, original research and informed, critical judgments-is not just good for us as consumers. It’s just as important for the artists. In particular, in a hypercompetitive environment like this one, we need to look out for the artist with the talent and drive to make great art, but without an income stream that will support her as she makes it. The voices of these artists—the gifted but resourceless—risk getting shut out unfairly because many others have the capital and connections to bring their work to the attention of gatekeepers, even if that work is inferior.

I believe it’s critically important that, as we seek to impose structure and sanity on this world, we do not cut off the flow of new ideas and new voices in the name of triage. The main reason why we have this proliferation of nonprofits, I think, is because artists think it’s the only vehicle they have available to them to do their work. But as Adam Huttler points out, it’s not – in particular, fiscal sponsorship provides an attractive and immediately available alternative structure in which to accomplish one’s artistic goals. With fiscal sponsorship, there is no assumption of perpetuity; no mandate to form and submit to a board that may not understand or share the founder’s agenda; and much less in the way of paperwork and reporting requirements.

So why would anyone form a nonprofit? A nonprofit still makes sense, in my view, if its focus is not on a specific artist or group of artists. Any organization that provides infrastructure – presenters, community arts organizations, arts education providers, local arts councils, service organizations, and the like – is a good candidate for the nonprofit form. Rule of thumb: if an organization would have no reason to continue on if its founder(s) left tomorrow, it probably shouldn’t be a nonprofit.

If I were a funder, I would be thinking about how to focus my support on organizations that are nonprofits for the right reasons. Funders can accomplish more impact by supporting institutions that work with and involve a wide range of constituents, be they artists, audience members, community members, etc.  And yes, that does suggest—as both Rocco and Grantmakers in the Arts have suggested—larger grants to fewer organizations. However, this only works with the other pieces of the puzzle if all of the following three things are true about the organizations receiving grants:

1. They actually pay the artists. This is how we can get away with not supporting artistic producers directly. There needs to be a mechanism for those producers (i.e., dance and theater companies, musical ensembles, individual painters, sculptors, etc.) to make money through the system that is being set up. If grantees that present the work of artists to the public are not compensating their creative collaborators proportionately with the support they’re receiving, this strategy is undermined.
2. They’re performing their curatorial duty. If all the organizations that hire artists and ensembles are too lazy or hamstrung by commercial pressures to seek out new voices and instead simply work with the same narrow pool of established names, there will be no room for innovation and the field will stagnate. Many funders’ well-intentioned focus on butts in seats in the name of community relevance creates incentives counter to providing good curation, while failing to instigate widespread increases in arts engagement. Institutions already have all the incentive they need to maximize butts in seats – it’s called earned revenue. By accepting charitable support, I would argue, organizations have an obligation to seek out work that isn’t guaranteed to put butts in seats. And if an institution’s cost structure won’t allow for that, even with subsidization, that is a telling sign that it may be overbuilt.
3. They play well with others. At this time of extreme pressure on philanthropic and especially government support for the arts, the field needs to make efficient use of scarce resources like buildings, equipment, real estate, and attention. There’s no sense in pouring millions of dollars into a new facility only to have it sit dark three-quarters of the time. That’s not only a huge waste, it is deeply uncharitable. Donors (including institutional funders) should demand accountability on this point.

Much has been written about the increasingly blurred line between creator and consumer of art. With plummeting production and distribution costs, unprecedented levels of global interconnectedness, and nearly 50% of the United States population engaged in some form of personal creation, it’s no surprise that we are faced with art all around us – more than at any previous point in history. Abundance of creative expression isn’t going away; it is our future. Maybe what really needs to be “fixed” is not supply and demand – since, with due respect to the NEA, that issue is a whole lot bigger than us – but rather, the processes and rationales we use for determining how to distribute public subsidy.

*

¹ All of the “too many nonprofits” talk reminds me of how differently we treat nonprofits from businesses for no good reason (after all, donors are customers too). You never hear anyone saying “there are too many small businesses”—by contrast, private-sector entrepreneurship is recognized as a critical mechanism for spreading innovation and a key source of real economic growth, especially in a recession.

Image by Flickr user Mordac

(This article originally appeared in 20UNDER40 anthologyⁱ edited by Edward P. Clapp, and has been republished with permission.)

Spurred on by major technological advances, the number of aspiring professional artists in the United States has reached unprecedented levels and will only continue to grow. The arts’ current system of philanthropic support is woefully underequipped to evaluate this explosion of content and nurture its most promising elements—but we believe that the solution to the crisis is sitting right in front of us. Philanthropic institutions, in their efforts to provide stewardship to a thriving arts community, have largely overlooked perhaps the single most valuable resource at their disposal: audience members.

We contend that by harnessing the talents of the arts’ most knowledgeable, committed, and ethical citizens and distributing funds according to the principles of what we have termed guided crowdsourcing, grantmaking institutions can increase public investment in and engagement with the arts, increase the diversity and vibrancy of art accessible to consumers, and ensure a more meritocratic distribution of resources. We envision an online platform by which a foundation may crowdsource philanthropic decisions across a wide-ranging network of aficionados, aspiring critics, artists, and curious minds, bolstering its capacity to give fair consideration to the full range of artistic talent available and ensure that the most promising voices are heard.

* * *

I. Choking on the Fire Hose: The Arts’ Capacity Catastrophe

In 2009, a play I directed off-off-Broadway was one of the best reviewed shows in New York at any level. It got the kind of reception that you’re told means your career will start to take off. The talent pool is so huge and the number of spots for artists so small, though, that even my really well reviewed, lines-around-the-block show doesn’t really help. I got paid $250 for six weeks of work on that show, and I made one connection with [an off-Broadway theatre]. If I am lucky (and that means really lucky, they have a lot of artists who they develop), in 3-5 years they will produce a show of mine. If they do, my pay for whatever mythical show that might be would probably be between three and five thousand dollars, and it would be for a project I had probably been working on and off on for several years. I’m in the process of leaving pursuing professional theatre to only focus on projects I care about because both the financial realities and the lifestyle created by those realities is not one I want to subject myself, my upcoming marriage, or my (a couple years down the road) child to.¹

—Theater Director, age 30

An Embarrassment of Riches

The muse works feverishly in the 21st century. In the United States, more than 2 million working artists identify their primary occupation as an arts job, and another 300,000 or so earn secondary income from the arts.² Yet those numbers only hint at a far bigger phenomenon: the ranks of those who create art, whether or not they earn any money from it, have ballooned to some 20 million adults in 2008.³ Many of those in this latter category fall under the rubric of what Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller have called “Pro-Ams,” serious amateurs and quasi-professionals who “have a strong sense of vocation; use recognized public standards to assess performance; …[and] produce non-commodity products and services” while “spend[ing] a large share of their disposable income supporting their pastimes.”⁴ Thanks to historically inexpensive production and distribution technology, more artistic products can reach more people more easily than ever before: as of January 2009, for example, users were uploading the equivalent of 86,000 full-length movies to YouTube every week.

The human brain—not to mention the human lifespan—simply cannot accommodate a considered appreciation for so many contenders for its attention. Even if a music lover kept his headphones on for every minute of every day for an entire year, he wouldn’t be able to listen to more than an eighth of the 115,000 albums that were released just in the United States in 2008.⁵ Because we do not possess the capacity to give equal time to every artistic product that might come our way, we must rely on shortcuts. We may look for reviews and ratings of the latest movies before we decide which ones we’d like to see. We often let personal relationships guide our decisions about what art we allow into our lives. And we continually rely on the distribution systems through which we experience art—museums, galleries, radio stations, television networks, record labels, publishing houses, etc.—to narrow the field of possibilities for us so that we don’t have to spend all of our energies searching for the next great thing.

Every time we outsource these curatorial faculties to someone else, we are making a rational and perfectly defensible choice. And yet every time we do so, we contribute to a system in which those who have already cornered the market in the attention economy are the only ones in a position to reap its rewards.

The Arts’ Dirty Secret

We regard the market’s lack of capacity to evaluate all the available art as a systemic and rapidly worsening problem in the arts today. Artists take time to learn their craft and capture attention; while the market may support an “up-and-coming” artist to maturity if she is lucky, making the transition to “up-and-coming” requires nurturing that the market will not provide. Before an artist becomes well known, the “market” she encounters is not the market of consumers but rather the market for access to consumers. This market is controlled by a small number of gatekeepers—e.g., agents, journalists, literary managers, venue owners—who each face the same capacity problems described above. Even the most dedicated and hardworking individuals could not possibly keep up with the sheer volume of material demanding to be evaluated.

This tremendous competition for gatekeepers’ attention frequently forces aspiring artists into a position of having to assume considerable financial risk to have even a shot at being noticed. An increasing number are receiving pre-professional training in their work; degrees awarded in the visual and performing arts jumped an astonishing 51% between 1998 and 2007.⁶ Others are starting their own organizations; the number of registered 501(c)(3) arts and culture nonprofits rose 42% in the past ten years.⁷

Yet all of this increased training and activity comes at a steep price, one all too often borne by the artist herself. Master’s degrees at top institutions can set her back as much as $50,000 per year; internships that could provide key industry connections are frequently unpaid. Artists in the field have been known to incur crippling consumer debt in pursuit of their dreams; the award-winning film documentary Spellbound, for example, was made possible because the co-creators maxed out some 14 credit cards to finance production. Indeed, a daunting investment of direct expense and thousands of hours of time not spent earning a living are virtual requirements to develop the portfolio and reputation necessary to translate ability into success. However one defines artistic talent, it is clear that talent alone is not enough to enable an artist to support herself through her work.

It’s not just those with education debt that have a hard time being a full-time artist, but really anyone without a safety net. I know I can count on one hand the number of composers I know in our age bracket whose parents didn’t pay for their undergraduate education (at least the vast majority of it).⁸

—Composer, age 27

If traditional gatekeepers lack the capacity to identify and provide critical early support to artistic entrepreneurs with little pedigree but plenty of potential, there is a real concern that to compete for serious and ongoing recognition in the arts is an entitlement of the already privileged. For a sector of society that often justifies philanthropic and public subsidy by purporting to celebrate diverse voices and build bridges between people who see the world in very different ways, this is a grave problem.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Grantee

Grantmaking institutions have a critical role to play in the market for access. Grants represent a very different kind of support from sales of tickets, stories, or sculptures. They may prove crucial for demonstrating proof-of-concept for a new venture—or simply for the development of a style, portfolio, and audience. Most important, they provide a temporary financial cushion that can allow the artist-entrepreneur to manifest her true vision rather than see it continually undermined by scarcity of equipment, materials, staffing, or time. They can make the difference in production values that ensures a serious reception from critical eyes and ears, and allow the artist an opportunity to use time that might otherwise need to be spent earning income to perfect and promote her work. In short, grants are a seemingly ideal vehicle through which to address the fundamental inequities created by the pinched market for access.

Sonically, anything you do is going to be compared to established artists whose studio budget has more zeros on the end of it than yours. And the sonic quality of the recording itself is often the first thing critics (and listeners) hear and respond to.⁹

—Jazz Musician, age 34

Sadly, the lack of evaluative capacity biases the philanthropic market for the arts just as it skews the commercial market. In a perfect world, foundation and agency employees would have the time and money to find grantees by continually seeking out and experiencing art in its natural habitat. In the real world, a notoriously small number of staffers at a given foundation or panel of experts from the community is often hard pressed simply to review all of the art that comes through the door.

Not surprisingly, then, grantmakers take defensive measures to protect against being overwhelmed by an inundation of requests. First, they explicitly narrow their scope through eligibility restrictions. Nearly half of foundations that support the arts refuse to accept unsolicited applications at all, and even those that do frequently consider applications only for particular art forms, geographic regions, types of artist, or types of projects.¹⁰ Until 2009, to cite an especially dramatic example, the Judith Rothschild Foundation in New York only made “grants to present, preserve, or interpret work of the highest aesthetic merit by lesser-known, recently deceased American [visual] artists.” Many grant programs additionally refuse to consider organizations without a minimum performance history or a minimum budget level, and a majority will not award monies directly to individuals, for-profit entities, or unincorporated groups.

Funders also narrow their scope implicitly through their selection process. The selection is usually made by some combination of the institution’s staff, its board of directors, and outside experts called in for the purpose (often in the form of grant panels).  Because so few individuals are involved in the decision-making process, triage strategies are unavoidable. Application reading may be divided up among the panel or staff, with the result that only one person ever reads any given organization’s entire proposal. When work samples are involved, artists’ fates can be altered forever on the basis of a five-minute (or shorter) reception of their work.

These coping mechanisms are perfectly understandable, given the sheer volume of art produced and imagined. But the unfortunate result is that institutional money is distributed with hardly more fairness than commercial money—and this is especially troublesome because of institutional grantmakers’ power beyond their purses as outsourced curators of other funding streams.  After all, for most individual donors and consumers alike, the art that they even have a chance to encounter is likely to be art that has already passed the muster of multiple professional gatekeepers. The capacity problem that hampers grantmakers’ ability to choose the most promising artists in an equitable way thus compounds itself as it reverberates through the rest of the artistic ecosystem.

The shortage of capacity and its consequences on the diversity, liveliness, and brilliance of the arts world are not going away. With the proliferation of digital distribution networks making it easier than ever to put creative work in the public eye, the defensive mechanisms that funders employ to limit intake are only going to become more and more strained. A solution is needed, fast. Fortunately, there is a cheap, practical, and responsible way for institutions to better cope with their lack of evaluative capacity: they can use crowdsourcing to harness the passion and expertise of a broader range of people dedicated to the arts.

* * *

II. Calling for Backup: Crowdsourcing (to) the Rescue

Typically, institutions select the members of their staffs and grant panels on the basis of passion for and experience with the arts, on the theory that these qualities promote discerning judgments about the merit of applicants. But such traits are by no means limited to this narrow group. Tapping the thousands of dedicated and knowledgeable devotees of specific art forms who engage in robust discussion of the arts every day would allow foundations and agencies to go a long way towards addressing their own capacity problems—and towards opening the distribution of arts philanthropy to a broader range of deserving artists.

Our proposal draws inspiration from the phenomenon of crowdsourcing, which is the practice of outsourcing some function to the public or a significant part of it. Crowdsourcing has its roots in the open-source software movement, which designed and built complex software through the collaboration of anyone with the time, interest, and ability to contribute to a project. The best known example of this practice may be Wikipedia, which draws on the knowledge and editorial acumen of a huge pool of often anonymous volunteers to create a crowdsourced encyclopedia. Rather than relying on a handful of experts, crowdsourcing enlists dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people to do the work—and, in its purest form, to ensure the quality of the end result. The following pages explore some of the ways the commercial and philanthropic sectors have deployed crowdsourcing to direct money to worthy causes, to harness dispersed talent, and to build community.

Directing Donations

Online philanthropy markets that allow individual donors to contribute to charitable causes and micro-entrepreneurs around the world—websites like Kiva, DonorsChoose, Modest Needs, and GlobalGiving—illustrate the practice of crowdsourcing funding decisions across a large number of donors acting independently. Some of these websites aggregate small donations to fund larger projects using a mechanism for voting with dollars. For example, at Modest Needs, donors purchase points that can be allocated to specific, prequalified projects described on the site (such as the cost of a replacement water heater for a single mother). When a project has received enough donor points, the amount requested is sent to the applicant.

Similar online giving models have been employed at a smaller scale in the arts. For example, ArtistShare allows “fans to show appreciation for their favorite [musical] artist by funding their recording projects in exchange for access to the creative process, limited edition recordings, VIP access to recording sessions, and even credit listing on the CD.” Kickstarter allows individual donors to make pledges to creative projects—in the arts, journalism, design, and technology—with defined funding targets and timing. If enough pledges are received by the deadline, the project is funded; otherwise, the funds are returned to the donor.

These online mini-markets facilitate individual support for artists by providing donors more direct access to the artistic process and environment. In cases where the projects funded can be appreciated online, supporting them is not so different from buying a ticket. An alternative model of crowdsourced philanthropy that has gained more recent prominence allows individuals to exert influence on how other people’s philanthropic contributions are spent. Two recent major initiatives by corporate foundations employ this “voting without dollars” concept. JP Morgan Chase’s Chase Community Giving program gave away $5 million in early 2010 to nonprofit organizations based primarily on the votes of Facebook users. Similarly, PepsiCo diverted the $20 million it might have spent on ads during the 2010 Super Bowl to the Pepsi Refresh Project, a new monthly initiative that invites “ideas that will have a positive impact” to compete for grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. Visitors to the site vote to determine the grant winners.

Aggregating Ability

In the examples above, the “crowd” need have no particular expertise to participate fully. (Indeed, one frequent criticism of these models is that a “one person, one vote” or social-network-based approach to philanthropy can all too easily degenerate into a popularity contest with little connection to the merit of the potential recipients.) But crowdsourcing has also proved very effective at harnessing dispersed talent. In the for-profit design world, Threadless, an online T-shirt company, produces designs created and voted on by users of the website. The winning designers receive cash prizes, and the shirts nearly always sell out, generating $17 million in revenue for Threadless in 2006.¹¹

Philanthropic foundations, too, have begun to take advantage of the expertise of passionate people from across the country and the world. Philoptima allows would-be donors to offer “design prizes” to anyone who proposes an innovative solution to a problem chosen by the donor, and “implementation prizes” to any non-profit that submits a promising plan to carry out the solution in its community. (The first design prize on this young site was offered by a new grantmaker seeking to create “a discipline-wide typology of the environmental sector.”) Since 2006, InnoCentive has partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to give global development organizations access to high-quality R&D resources; Rockefeller selects the nonprofits and contributes award money to a network of scientists to solve a specific “challenge” posed by the nonprofit.

Building Community

By engaging and connecting a broad cross-section of individuals, crowdsourcing also has the potential to create a robust community and locus for lively discussion. The Yelp Elite Squad, chosen by Yelp employees from among the popular local search site’s most active contributors, benefit from invitations to exclusive offline events in addition to greater exposure for their reviews. In the nonprofit sector, several websites that make grants emphasize the creation of a forum for the discussion of social issues. Ashoka’s Changemakers initiative is a “community of action” that collaborates on solutions through discussion forums, issue groups, and competitions that reward innovative problem solving. Another site, Netsquared, connects nonprofits, grant-makers, and individual social entrepreneurs both on- and offline to foster social change. The organization sponsors in-person meetings for social innovators and engages its community in a grants program for social action projects. The finalists of its grant-making challenges are shaped by these discussions and chosen by community vote.

Putting it All Together: Guided Crowdsourcing

The very best examples of crowdsourced community—the models that illustrate the potential of the concept at its fullest—augment the tools of crowdsourcing with just enough top-down hierarchy to promote an environment of shared opportunity and responsibility. We call this model guided crowdsourcing. So far, this technique has not been explored in depth by foundations, arts-focused or otherwise, but it has been developed robustly elsewhere.

As mentioned above, Wikipedia is perhaps the oldest and most famous large-scale example of crowdsourcing on the web. While the site is most often identified with the crowdsourced labor used to generate its principal product, some 14 million encyclopedia entries in 272 languages, Wikipedia is also home to a fiercely dedicated user community that has self-organized into a meritocracy. Though the site is open to editing and revision by anyone, a small army of experienced volunteer “administrators” boast additional powers, such as the ability to make edits about living people. These users are chosen by “bureaucrats,” who themselves are selected by community consensus, and disputes among editors are resolved by a volunteer-run Arbitration Committee. These responsibilities not only keep the community’s most passionate members fully engaged; it also puts them to work to improve the community and its project.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign used guided crowdsourcing to establish a seamless continuum between motivated volunteers and professional staff. As part of routine campaign operations, professional field organizers would assign new volunteers, who had been recruited online, progressively more difficult tasks to test their fitness for roles carrying greater responsibility. As the campaign progressed, many early volunteers rose to full-time staff positions, providing a clear path of upward mobility for the most dedicated and effective community members. This fusing of top-down leadership with grassroots openness enabled the campaign to achieve its own capacity breakthrough by establishing a viable presence in districts, towns, and whole states that had been considered off-limits by previous Democratic contenders for executive office.

Taking its cue from these successful efforts to shape a broad-based grassroots effort with gentle guidance from the top, a foundation could invent an entirely new model of arts philanthropy—one that matches the explosion of artistic content with an explosion of critical acumen to evaluate it.

* * *

III. Philanthropy’s Finest: The Pro-Am Program Officer Paradigm

We propose that a grantmaking institution supplement its work with guided crowdsourcing by creating an online grants management platform that will also serve as a social network, multimedia showcase, and marketplace for individual donors. By redirecting some portion of its grantmaking budget through this website, the foundation or agency can leverage the critical faculties of passionate and thoughtful arts lovers to address its capacity problem. A sophisticated set of algorithms will empower the website’s community to identify the most qualified and dedicated voices among its own ranks and elevate them to increased levels of influence on a continually renewing basis. In this way, those whose artistic judgments carry the most weight will have earned that status from their peers and colleagues.

How It Works

The process begins when an artist or artist-driven organization (nonprofit or otherwise) applies for a general operating support grant from the sponsoring foundation’s arts program—all forms of art are welcome. Rather than being sent to a program officer for review, the applicant’s materials—proposal narrative, samples of the artist’s work, a list of upcoming events or classes open to the public—will be posted online. This information will be incorporated into each applicant’s public profile on the site.

Members of the public will also be invited to create and maintain profiles. Once registered, they can view materials submitted by grant contenders and share reactions ranging from one-line comments to in-depth critiques. In order to jumpstart the conversation, ensure an initial critical mass of reviewers, and strike a constructive and intelligent tone, the foundation should reach out in advance to knowledgeable arts citizens (perhaps including some of the very gatekeepers mentioned above who might otherwise serve on grant panels) to encourage their participation on the site. The goal is to engage a broad range of art lovers in a robust conversation about the proposals under review—and about the arts more generally—thereby ensuring a better-considered distribution of grant money.

Of course, not all commentators will make equally valuable contributions to the discussion. Just like art, providing critical analysis and consistently thoughtful, informed, and credible feedback requires considerable skill and practice. In short, we want to be able to open up the process to anyone without having to open it to everyone. What qualities would we desire in those who influence resource allocation decisions in the arts? Certainly we would ask that our critics be knowledgeable in the field they review. We would also want them to be fair—not holding ideological grudges against artists or letting personal vendettas influence their judgment. We’d want them to be open-minded, not afraid to dive into unfamiliar or challenging territory when the time comes. And finally, we’d want them to be thoughtful: able and willing to appreciate nuance, and mindful of how what they are experiencing fits into a larger whole.

Technology now allows us to systematically identify and reward these qualities in a reviewer. On the website, a reviewer increases her “reputation score” by winning the respect of the community. Each user can rate individual comments and reviews based on the qualities outlined above; higher ratings increase a reviewer’s standing. To keep the conversation current and make room for new voices, the ratings of older reviews and comments will count for less over time. The reputation algorithm can also reward seeking out unreviewed proposals and commenting on a breadth of submissions. A strict honor code will require users to disclose any personal or professional connections to a project they review, with expulsion the penalty for violators. Reviews suspected of being at odds with this policy can be flagged for investigation by any site user, and the site’s administrators will take action where deemed appropriate.

Every quarter, the professional staff of the foundation will review the reputation scores of community members and choose a crop of users to elevate to Curator status. Selection will be based primarily on peer reviews, but the staff will have final say and responsibility over who is given this privilege. A clear set of guiding principles will be developed and shared to ensure that the choice is as fair and transparent as possible. Curators receive an allowance of “points” to distribute to various projects on the site, usually limited to the discipline or area of the Curator’s expertise. Curators are identified by (real) name to other users so as to foster a sense of accountability, and their profiles show how they have chosen to distribute their points. So long as a Curator maintains a minimum reputation score by contributing new high-quality reviews, he will continue to receive new points each quarter.

As a project accumulates points from Curators, it receives more prominent attention on the site. It might show up earlier in search results, appear in lists of recommendations presented to users who have written reviews of similar projects, or be highlighted on the home page. But since Curators maintain their reputation (and aspiring Curators gain their reputation) in part by reviewing proposals that have failed to attract comments from others, the attention never becomes too concentrated on a lucky few.

When it comes time to award the grants each quarter, the collective judgment of the Curators is used as the groundwork for the decision-making process. This approach ensures that organizations cannot win awards simply by bombarding their mailing lists with requests for votes, because the crowd exerts its influence indirectly through Curators selected on the basis of sustained, high-quality contributions. While it is still ultimately the responsibility of the foundation’s board of directors to choose recipients, we anticipate that adjustments will be made only in exceptional cases—that, essentially, the heavy lifting will have been done by the crowd.

Meanwhile, the very best contributors—the stars of the site—may be engaged by the foundation as paid Editors. Editors are part-time, contract employees who are sent out on assignment to see and review specific public events in their area associated with proposals on the site. Their reviews are highlighted prominently to give their expert work maximum exposure. This system allows the foundation to send trusted reviewers to distant events without having to pay exorbitant travel costs; meanwhile, the writer receives a financial incentive for exceptional ongoing service to the site and the arts community.

Of course, artists, administrators, and contributors won’t be the site’s only audience. Since work samples will represent an important part of many applications, the platform will also be a convenient way for the public to discover new artists and ensembles, guided by the judgments of a myriad of devotees. Each proposal uploaded will give passersby the opportunity to contribute their own money in addition to any comments they may have. As such, the site has the potential to become the first effective online donor marketplace for the arts. The sponsoring foundation could even give donors the option of tacking on a small “tip” to each donation to help defray the site’s (minimal) operating costs.

It is worth emphasizing that, despite the many roles website users will play in the grant process, they will not replace the foundation staff. One or more program officers will need to be in charge of the website and accountable to the board of directors for its successful operation. They will oversee the website to ensure that the ongoing discussion remains frank, thoughtful, and passionate—but not vicious or counterproductive. Such a desirable culture will not develop automatically; fostering it will mean setting and continually revising rules and procedures, reminding users of the funding priorities established by the foundation and engaging in dialogue about those priorities when appropriate, selecting Curators wisely on the basis of peer reviews, expelling users who violate the standards of the community, and developing a method to evaluate and report on the grants made through the site, both to the board and back to the users. Furthermore, we do not anticipate that this model would or should supplant a foundation’s or the field’s traditional grantmaking entirely. “Leadership”-level awards to major service organizations or institutions with a national profile do not face the same kinds of capacity challenges as grants to smaller producing and presenting entities or individual artists, and may require a greater level of expertise in evaluating factors such as financial health and long-term sustainability than a nonprofessional program officer may be able to provide. Thus, we see this approach as one element in a broader portfolio of strategies to optimally support the arts.

Few good ideas come to fruition without resources, and this one is no exception. The platform should be sponsored by a major foundation or institution with a substantial initial investment (we suggest at least $1 million) to signal seriousness of purpose and ensure a meaningful level of support to the artists and organizations involved. Although it would be possible to pilot the system in a limited geographical area or with only certain disciplines at first, the concept can only reach its true potential if a certain critical mass is achieved—enough to make it worth artists’ while to ensure representation on the site and worth reviewers’ while to contribute their time and curiosity to making it thrive.

We anticipate that this system will be highly sustainable. Once the infrastructure is in place, the website will be inexpensive to maintain, and may well prove cheaper than more traditional methods of distributing funds. The powerful incentives provided to both artists (access to a source of funding coupled with real-time feedback on their proposals) and reviewers (the opportunity to gain notoriety, influence, and even material compensation for doing something they love) should be sufficient to maintain interest on all sides.

Finally, the greatest beauty of the site is that there is ample opportunity to experiment with various approaches until just the right formula is found. If the original algorithm for calculating reputation scores turns out to be ineffective, it can be changed. If the rules against reviewing the work of friends turn out to be too draconian, they can be adjusted. If the foundation decides it wants to give Curators actual dollars to distribute instead of abstract points, that is an easy fix. Meanwhile, if the system proves successful, the sponsoring foundation could invite other funders to contribute their resources to the pool, making even deeper impact possible.

Figure I: Program theory for a guided crowdsourcing platform for the arts.

* * *

Summing Up

Our guided crowdsourcing model is designed to integrate many virtues of existing crowdsourcing concepts: giving small-scale projects access to new pools of capital; aggregating the expertise and labor of users; and creating a social space for strangers who share a common interest. When combined and applied to the arts, this triple crowdsourcing carries several special advantages:

• First, it addresses the lack of evaluative capacity in the philanthropic market, enabling a more meritocratic distribution of grants and thus a more vibrant and socioeconomically diverse artistic community.
• Second, because of the structural role of grantmaking institutions, the website indirectly addresses the lack of capacity in the commercial market: the path to commercial success will be made a little less arbitrary through the work of our volunteer curators.
• Third, the robust community we hope to facilitate will double as a feedback mechanism for artists and artist-driven organizations, enhancing the production of art even before grants are awarded.
• Fourth, the site will serve as an incubator for critical talent, identifying and empowering new commentators who can establish a reputation as informed adjudicators, while providing a new outlet for more experienced voices at a time when the job market for critics is rapidly shrinking.
• Fifth, by rewarding contributions that can serve as examples of critical analysis at its best, the site will encourage a more thoughtful and articulate public conversation about the arts. In so doing, it facilitates the establishment of a new breed of Pro-Am curators to match the convergence of amateur and professional in artistic creation and performance.

We expect that, if successful, this model will result in a more equitable distribution of philanthropic funds that always takes into account the actual work product rather than reputation alone; be based on the opinions of acknowledged leaders in the community who continually earn their standing among their peers; and fairly consider the efforts of far more artists and artist-driven organizations than would ever be possible otherwise. If really successful, the model could actually increase the size of the philanthropic market by providing what amounts to the first functioning donor marketplace for artists and arts organizations.

While guided crowdsourcing cannot guarantee all aspiring artists a living, by empowering a new and unprecedentedly large group of thoughtful consumers of the arts to help decide whose dreams deserve to be transformed into reality, it can provide more equality of opportunity than could ever be possible under the current status quo—and guarantee the rest of us richer artistic offerings than ever before.

It’s time to appoint the next generation of arts program officers: us.

* * *

NOTES:

i. Clapp, E. P., ed. 20UNDER40: Re-Inventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21st Century. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010: 81-97.

1. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 21, 2010. All of the individuals whose views appear in this article are critically acclaimed emerging artists under 40 years of age, and are quoted with permission.

2. Gaquin, D. Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2008: 1; See also National Endowment for the Arts. Artists in a Year of Recession. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009, and; Davis, J. A. & Smith, T. W. General Social Surveys: 1972-2008. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2009.

3. Williams, K. & Keen, D. 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009: 43.

4. Leadbeater, C. & Miller, P. The Pro-Am Revolution. London: DEMOS, 2004: 21-22.

5. This calculation is based on a conservative estimate of 40 minutes in length per album.

6. Kusher, R. J. & Cohen, R. National Arts Index 2009. Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts, 2009: 62.

7. Ibid: 49.

8. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 20, 2010.

9. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 22, 2010.

10. Foundation Center. “Foundation Directory Online” (n.d.). As of April 2010, only 1.3% of arts funders in the database accept applications with no geographic restrictions.

11. Howe, J. “Join the Crowd.” The Independent (London), (September 2, 2008): 2.