Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis

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

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

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

Implications

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins

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

Structure and scope

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

Participation in theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forrester Research’s social technographics participation ladder.

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

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

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

Participation in practice

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

• Contributory
• Collaborative
• Co-creative
• Hosted

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

The fourth meeting of the Cultural Research Network Virtual Study Group will take place on Thursday, February 20 from 2-3:30pm EST. Createquity readers are invited to participate in this live session, which will take a look at two resources that were established to help folks sort through (and evaluate) current arts and culture research: Createquity’s own Arts Policy Library and the Arts Education Partnership’s ArtsEdSearch. You will find a brief description of each resource below. If you are not already familiar with these sites, and ArtsEdSearch in particular, please take some time to explore them before the webinar, as the speakers will start from the assumption that attendees already have some familiarity with each resource.

This is also a reminder that if you self-identify as a cultural researcher, you’re welcome to join the CRN. It’s easy and free! In addition to Virtual Study Group sessions like these every month or two, we trade calls for papers/proposals, job listings, and advice about methodological issues on a regular basis.

Createquity Arts Policy Library

Every year, dozens of research studies, books, evaluation reports, and other texts examining the impact of the arts on individuals and communities are published. In many instances, this literature is the product of an exhaustive investment of time and dollars from foundations, universities, or the authors themselves. Yet many busy arts professionals, to say nothing of casual observers, don’t have time to make it all the way through even one of these documents, much less evaluate its soundness and put it into context with other research. Enter the Createquity Arts Policy Library, which has two important goals: first, to bring greater attention to the important ongoing work in the field of arts research; and second, to synthesize (not just summarize) it for a lay audience. To do this, each text is analyzed in three parts: first, a succinct summary of what it says; second, an analysis of the strength of its arguments, looking at everything from methodological details to the relevance of the questions it seeks to answer; and finally, an attempt to deduce what new information the text gives us in light of the other work we’ve already read, picking out broad themes or trends that may be of interest.

ArtsEdSearch

ArtsEdSearch, a project of the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), is the nation’s first online research and policy clearinghouse focused entirely on student and educator outcomes associated with arts learning in and out of school. ArtsEdSearch focuses on research examining how education in the arts—in both discrete arts classes and integrated arts lessons—affects students’ cognitive, personal, social and civic development, as well as how the integration of the arts into the school curriculum affects educators’ instructional practice and engagement in the teaching profession. To be included, all studies must meet a set of criteria for excellent research developed in consultation with the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the American Evaluation Association (AEA). Launched in April 2012, ArtsEdSearch currently includes summaries of over 200 research studies, syntheses of the major findings of these studies, and implications of the collected research for educational policy.

Click here to register for this event. Hope to see you there!

First published in 2007, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education by Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, and Kimberly M. Sheridan offers a new approach and perspective on the “real benefits” of visual arts studio education. The authors believed that by studying the intrinsic value of teaching art rather than its instrumental effect on other subjects, like math and reading, they would be able to make a stronger case for the importance of studying art.

Summary

Studio Thinking presents the researchers’ careful observations and analysis of 28 visual art projects taught in five high school level studio art classrooms at two Boston area high schools with “exemplary” arts programs. Using an admittedly subjective approach, Hetland, Winner et al. worked to incorporate evidence-based methods in the study as much as possible and developed a code system to calculate how often specific habits and skills observed being taught. Through this rigorous process, they were able to identify four “Studio Structures of Learning” and eight “Studio Habits of Mind.” A second edition published in 2013, Studio Thinking 2, features a new addition to the core Studio Structures of Learning, further explanation and examples of habits of mind, and new information on the application of the authors’ research since the book’s first publication.

According to the authors, the Studio Structures for Learning are four modes of instruction germane to the studio classroom: Demonstration-Lecture; Students-at-Work; Critique; and Exhibition (with Transitions functioning as a sub-structure between the other four). These Studio Structures create a supportive atmosphere for learning eight so-called Studio Habits of Mind (SHoM): Develop Craft, Engage and Persist, Understand Art Worlds, Stretch and Explore, Envision, Express, Reflect, and Observe.

These habits are taught in a non-hierarchical manner, each no more important than the rest, and a class may consist of several habits taught in “clusters” and/or interwoven into the Studio Structures. The combination of Studio Structures and SHoM is what Hetland, Winner et al. call the “Studio Thinking Framework.”

Studio Thinking notes that the Studio Thinking Framework can be useful as a method of self-assessment for both teachers and students, as well as in non-classroom settings. The authors are now using the framework as a guide to conduct a study that examines the transference of studio thinking – i.e. the degree to which students’ engagement with the SHoM leads to their using similar dispositions when engaging with subjects such as math and reading.

Analysis

The Studio Thinking Framework has been widely embraced since it was first introduced, with the original Studio Thinking making the New York Times bestseller list and the authors consulting on a number of national, state and local arts education initiatives. While well executed on the whole, Studio Thinking suffers from several limitations in its methodology and design that narrow the extent to which it truly “makes a case” for different forms of arts education.

The Studio Thinking study focused solely on the visual arts and more research is needed to determine how applicable the framework is across all arts disciplines. Furthermore, the visual art classes studied mimic a pre-professional studio teaching style commonly found in college-level and adult arts courses, which implies that the research may have little to say about the art classes more common to secondary and primary settings. By the authors’ own admission, Studio Thinking’s descriptive and theoretical approach makes no attempt to “prove” anything about the benefits of arts education. Given these methodological limitations, the use of the framework in transfer studies, the promotion of it as a tool of advocacy, and arts advocates’ quick adoption of it, all seem a bit premature. It would be more prudent and helpful to conduct research that compares the differences between teaching arts and non-arts subjects from the perspective of studio habits of the mind to more accurately pinpoint the benefits of arts education relative to other subjects and students.

Implications

Studio Thinking‘s reception to date, and in particular the alignment of the Studio Thinking Framework with federal and state arts education initiatives, suggest that the authors’ findings will have some long-term influence on the way educators, advocates, and policymakers think about studio arts and education as a whole. Does Studio Thinking promote a space in society where teaching the arts is valued for its own sake and not a means to an end? In one sense it does isolate how studio learning encourages the development of important critical skills necessary to produce creative, engaged individuals. However, the decision to focus on the results of the method of teaching and use the study to once more look for arts transference to other subjects should concern arts advocates. It suggests an easy leap for policymakers to say, “Thanks for showing us how to better structure curriculum and classes for the other still ‘more important’ subjects. So now we really don’t need the arts.”

As the emergent Studio Thinking movement focuses more on expanding and generalizing what is learned in studio classes beyond the studio, a clear distinction between the effects of the art and the effects of the teaching will become increasingly important.

For a 75% shorter read than what you’re about to experience below, try Studio Thinking: the condensed version.

At the turn of the millennium, arts education found itself increasingly under the axe in a school system beleaguered by budget cuts, low grades and poor test scores. Arts advocates and educators were scrambling to prove the worth of the arts as a means of boosting those test scores and grades in academic subjects deemed “more important,” like math and reading. Motivated by claims of evidence supporting this case, Project Zero researchers Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner conducted a meta-analysis of related research studies dating back to the 1950s to determine if there was in fact a direct correlation. They found no evidence to support the notion that studying the arts caused students’ standardized test scores or academic grades to improve. Arts advocates reeled at this disclosure, which provoked no small amount of controversy in arts education circles. Nevertheless, Hetland and Winner believed that by taking a different approach to the research—one based on the intrinsic value of teaching art rather than its instrumental effect on other subjects—they would be able to make a stronger case for the importance of studying art. They thus set out to determine the “real benefits” of a visual arts studio education. The result was the first edition of Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, authored in 2007 by Hetland, Winner, Shirley Veenema, and Kimberly M. Sheridan.

Studio Thinking exhaustively presents the researchers’ careful observations and analysis of 28 visual art projects taught in five high school level studio art classrooms. Their findings suggest that students not only learn “dispositions” specific to visual art, but also six general “habits of mind” that are potentially useful in other subjects. A second edition published in 2013, Studio Thinking 2, features a new addition to the core Studio Structures of Learning, further explanation and examples of habits of mind, and new information on the application of the authors’ research since the book’s first publication.

Summary

Studio Thinking and its update present what the authors identify as the “real curriculum” of a visual art studio education. The authors focused on the visual arts to establish parameters for the study, but hoped that others would look more closely at other arts disciplines. At the time the initial research for Studio Thinking was conducted, there was no other arts-related research that examined the day-to-day teachings of studio art, so the authors developed a methodology based on traditions established by three pioneering non-arts classroom studies: Magdalene Lambert’s Teaching Problems and The Problems of Teaching; James W. Stigler & James Heibert’s The Teaching Gap; and Harold Stevenson’s The Learning Gap.

To observe studio instruction in practice, Hetland and Winner worked with five visual arts teachers at two Boston area high schools with “exemplary” arts programs, the public Boston Arts Academy and the private Walnut Hill School for the Arts. They chose the former for its student demographics, which mirrored those of the Boston area. The Walnut Hill student body, by contrast, was mostly middle and upper-middle class, with a diverse mix of local and international urban and suburban students, and a high concentration of Koreans. At both high schools, students were admitted by portfolio review and/or admissions assignments and interviews. They spent a minimum of three hours a day working on their art under the guidance of their teachers, all of whom were also practicing artists with Master’s degrees in art or art education.

The setting of the study is the studio class environment, which, according to the authors, differs from a “traditional” classroom setting in a number of ways. Traditional classrooms arrange desks in rows facing the front of the class. The teacher often lectures or gives a presentation, and sits at his/her desk while students work on tests or other in-class assignments. In an art studio,  by contrast, easels, horse-stools, and various seating apparatus are typically arranged in a loose circle. In the center of the room the teacher lectures, demonstrates, or sets up a still-life model. When not giving a presentation, the teacher roams the studio space executing tasks or visiting students at work. Special lighting and music may also be employed in the studio class to promote an active and focused atmosphere.

Over the course of the yearlong study, Hetland, Winner et al. observed the instruction of 28 art projects. Using an admittedly subjective approach, they worked to incorporate evidence-based methods in the study as much as possible. By videotaping the classes, they were able to compare their direct observations with documentation and more thoroughly analyze student-teacher interactions. They requested post-class written reflections from teachers, conducted interviews with students, and examined samples of the student’s artwork for learning patterns. A code system was created based on their initial analysis, which took into account teacher’s intentions as stated in their interviews and calculated how often specific habits and skills were taught. The code was further refined with the assistance of consulting field specialists and distilled into categories that described what the researchers had observed being taught. Through this rigorous process, they were able to identify four “Studio Structures of Learning” and eight “Studio Habits of Mind.”

According to the authors, the Studio Structures for Learning are four modes of instruction germane to the studio classroom. Initially observed in each teacher’s class were three structural elements: Demonstration-Lecture; Students-at-Work; and Critique. Each studio class features a combination of these activities. In Studio Thinking 2, Hetland, Winner et al. introduce a fourth culminating structure called Exhibition. It is described as an “overarching” structure that encompasses the original three. The authors also identify a fifth sub-element called Transitions, which is the time spent transitioning between all other structures.

An illustration of how four Studio Structures are integrated into Walnut Hill teacher Jim Woodside’s studio class. The authors call this studio time organization a Punctuated Class whereby the structures are layered with shorter intervals between them.

These Studio Structures create a supportive atmosphere for learning eight “Studio Habits of Mind” (referred to in the text by the somewhat unwieldy acronym SHoM): Develop Craft, Engage and Persist, Understand Art Worlds, Stretch and Explore, Envision, Express, Reflect, and Observe. The authors assert that these SHoM are what the studio arts “actually” teach. Each is considered a “disposition”—a term and theory borrowed from the work of Project Zero co-founder David Perkins and his colleagues—or way of thinking that includes specific core skills, an inclination to use those skills, and an alertness to opportunities to put them to use. Not all eight habits of mind are not necessarily present within each studio project, but usually several are learned within a successful course. The authors found that the habits are taught in a non-hierarchical manner, each no more important than the rest, and a class may consist of several habits taught in “clusters” and/or interwoven into the Studio Structures.

Each structure emphasizes the studio habits in different ways. For example, when Walnut Hill teacher Jason Green gave a presentation on clay assembly, the researchers observed four SHoM embedded in the Demonstration-Lecture segment of his class. As he manipulated the clay and spoke, the students “learn[ed] to observe as they look[ed] carefully at ceramics; they learn[ed] to envision as they plan[ned] their designs; they learn[ed] to express as they think about conveying some kind of idea or feeling in their set; and all the while they [were] learning to acquire technical skills required for expertise in ceramics.” Put in the authors’ terminology, the teacher “used a ‘cluster’ of Observe-Express-Envision-Develop Craft: Technique.”

The Students-at-Work structure allows students to spend in-class time working on an assignment, while keeping the classroom focused on art-making goals. Teachers are able to give individual attention and address the specific needs of each student, creating a tailored approach to learning studio habits when students require help. While a cluster of SHoM are embedded in the art project, the teacher draws each student’s individual habit needs into the foreground as he circulates the room to offer one-on-one guidance. For example, a student may be encouraged to “Envision” what another color would do for a painting, or “Persist” in pulling the final composition together.

In the context of the Critique structure, the period when students and teacher collectively analyze individual artworks, the students integrate SHoM through a process of inquiry, observation, and discussion. This structure allows them to make connections with habits different from those that may have been taught in other stages of the class. During a critique, the teacher may compare a student’s unique style to a particular artistic movement unfamiliar to the class (Understand Art Worlds). Another student may be asked to explain why she made a particular artistic decision (Reflect) and how the work would differ if she had done it another way (Envision and Express).

New to the second edition of Studio Thinking is the fourth structure, Exhibition, which the authors claim incorporates all eight SHoM. Through the staging and presentation of the artwork produced within the Studio Structures, students learn different but supportive skills that provide a broader context for understanding the purpose of art, and for deepening their comprehension of the studio habits.

The combination of Studio Structures and SHoM is what Hetland, Winner et al. call the “Studio Thinking Framework.” An interesting outcome of the original study, described in the second edition, has been its application as a method of self-assessment for both teachers and students. Rather than focusing solely on skill development, such as drawing techniques, instructors may evaluate their own teaching weaknesses and strengths through the lens of the framework, or set goals to improve certain dispositions in their students by altering their teaching approach. The authors also report instances where students themselves have used the framework to assess and improve their skills and dispositions.

Other Applications of the Studio Thinking Framework

Hetland, Winner et al. suggest that the Studio Thinking Framework can also be useful in non-classroom settings, such as teacher education programs, museum and gallery education, new technology research, and even policymaking. The authors suggest using the framework to inform new teachers of the “purpose and rigor” of arts education and to improve museum- and gallery-offered courses. They also present ideas for adapting the framework to non-arts subjects, and attest to witnessing its use in a variety of classroom environments:

Teachers have reported to us that the Studio Habits of Mind are broad enough to offer guidance for curriculum and teaching in their disciplines, and the Studio Structures for learning foster classroom cultures of thinking and learning across disciplines by modeling how to organize classroom time and interactions around personalized and collaborative projects.

According to the authors, non-arts subjects can easily make use of the Studio Thinking Framework by dedicating most classroom time to the Students-at-Work structure. By using a studio, laboratory, or workshop model, teachers can personalize the classroom setting, provide instruction across a wide range of skill levels, and more effectively guide students in their dispositional learning.

Hetland and Winner, with the help of Lynn Goldsmith of Education Development Center, are currently using the framework as a guide to conduct a study that examines the transference of studio thinking – i.e. the degree to which students’ engagement with the SHoM leads to their using similar dispositions when engaging with subjects such as math and reading. At the time of Studio Thinking 2’s publication, the authors were only able to cite one instance of potential direct transference of a SHoM (Envision) to a non-arts discipline (geometry). Preliminary findings from comparing the performance of arts majors, theater students, and after-school squash players on spatial geometry problems developed from standardized tests indicated that the art majors performed better initially and also gained more on the test than the other two groups. The authors caution, however, that the experiment does not conclusively demonstrate transfer because they were unable to assign students randomly to the three groups to create a “level playing field.”

Analysis

According to the authors, the Studio Thinking Framework is “a set of lenses for observing and thinking about teaching and learning in the visual arts and beyond.” In Studio Thinking and its second edition, the authors succeed in presenting visual arts studio teaching as a flexible model that not only promotes art techniques and skills, but also critical observation and thinking habits that are applicable in many disciplines. The four Studio Structures and eight Studio Habits of Mind are easy to comprehend and have broad appeal. Together they provide a dispositional vocabulary that augments the skill-building aspects of an arts curriculum with an alertness to opportunities and inclination to use those skills beyond the classroom. With the Studio Thinking Framework, the authors have created a common language and working model that can be used by educators, administrators, and policymakers in discussing arts education. That enables advocates to speak more broadly about what is achieved through arts learning.

Indeed, the Studio Thinking Framework has been widely embraced since it was first introduced, with the original Studio Thinking making the New York Times bestseller list. On a national level, the authors have consulted on the development of Turnaround Arts Initiative, a project of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which pairs several under-performing urban elementary schools with famous artists like Yo-Yo Ma and Chuck Close to provide enriching studio-style arts classes. At the state and local level, the new Common Core State Standards place an emphasis on the dispositional vocabulary invoked in Studio Thinking and are arguably supportive of the authors’ position that SHoM is the core of arts education. As part of a K-12 arts integration program in Alameda County, California, the framework has been implemented as a shared conceptual language across disciplines to communicate with teachers, administrators, advocates, and parents. Their students have been taught to use SHoM as a method of self-assessment and critique.

Despite this positive reception, Studio Thinking suffers from several limitations in its methodology and design that narrow the extent to which it truly “makes a case” for different forms of arts education. The authors acknowledge that the study’s reliance on ethnographic methods renders it inherently subjective. Another set of researchers might have identified a different set of habits, such as those outlined in Eric Booth’s “The Habits of Mind of Creative Engagement.” It is important to understand that Studio Thinking‘s descriptive and theoretical approach makes no attempt to “prove” anything about the benefits of arts education, but rather “make a case” for them.

Studio Thinking focuses on the visual arts at the expense of other arts disciplines, although the authors report a few positive findings and comparisons by other researchers and experts in the areas of dance, theater, and music. Notably, Boston Ballet’s Center for Dance Education conducted a two-year study to determine whether the habits were taught in dance and concluded that all eight were present in their dance studio classrooms. Matthew Hazelwood, former conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of Colombia, reported using SHoM as a way to enrich his orchestra class instruction, and theater teacher Evan Hastings is using the framework to help his students track and assess their own development. Nevertheless, more research is needed to determine how applicable the framework is across all arts disciplines.

Finally, the study was conducted in just two high schools in the Boston area, both of which cater to students who already have a strong interest in and aptitude for the arts. The visual art classes studied by Hetland, Winner et al. mimic a pre-professional studio teaching style commonly found in college-level and adult arts courses, which is unusual in most high and middle schools and practically non-existent at the elementary school level. If the “real benefits” of arts education are found only in a college-style course, the research may have little to say about the art classes more common to secondary and primary settings, taught as they are in most cases by teachers less skilled or credentialed than those the authors observed. Would the eight studio habits have been as evident if classes serving students new to the visual arts, or younger students, or special-needs students, had been a part of the study? And would those same students learn the SHoM as readily as the arts-inclined students in a studio-structured environment?

Given these methodological limitations, the authors’ use of the framework in transfer studies, their promotion of it as a tool of advocacy, and arts advocates’ quick adoption of it, all seem a bit premature. While Studio Thinking has certainly added to the arts education conversation, the findings arguably appear only to scratch the surface of the benefits of teaching art. Rather than rushing to test transference and apply the framework across disciplines, it would be more prudent and helpful to conduct research that compares the differences between teaching arts and non-arts subjects to both arts-interested and uninterested students from the perspective of studio habits of the mind. Doing so might more accurately pinpoint the benefits of arts education relative to other subjects and students, and go much further in supporting the authors’ claim that the arts teach “a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school.”

Implications

Studio Thinking‘s reception to date, and in particular the alignment of the Studio Thinking Framework with the President’s Committee’s agenda and the Common Core State Standards movement, suggest that the authors’ findings will have some long-term influence on the way educators, advocates, and policymakers think about studio arts and education as a whole. In doing so, will it make an intrinsic case for the value of teaching the arts?

The eight Studio Habits of the Mind as implemented by Alameda County “Art is Education” program. Note: Understand Art Worlds has been altered to Understand Communities.

On the one hand, these developments are encouraging in a country where arts education has been increasingly marginalized over the last couple decades. The success of these early programs will have a hand in determining whether the Studio Thinking Framework will continue to have influence and application. If the results are favorable, perhaps more studio-style arts classes will be incorporated into students’ everyday curriculum in the interest of promoting a studio-centric version of increasingly popular habits-of-the-mind learning. Studio Thinking openly advocates for incorporating studio teaching methodology into these other classroom formats and, in this way, the authors offer a way of valuing arts education that could potentially encourage a demand for it.

But this also implies that Studio Thinking makes a case for studio format arts education as the only area where these particular skills and habits can be learned, which it doesn’t. The authors make a pointed effort to illustrate how SHoM can be applied to non-arts subject areas. If students can get the same benefits from conducting a chemistry experiment or building a physical model based on mathematical theory as long as there is an emphasis on habits like Envision, are we once more back to the drawing board in trying to articulate why arts education is important?

The decision to focus on the results of the method of teaching should concern arts advocates. It suggests an easy leap for policymakers to say, “Thanks for showing us how to better structure curriculum and classes for the other still ‘more important’ subjects. So now we really don’t need the arts.” As it is, the authors’ ongoing research into using the Studio Thinking Framework as “the foundation for more precisely targeted and plausible transfer studies” hews closely to the instrumental language of looking for causal relationships between the arts and other academic disciplines. If the studio structures and habits are indeed the “the real benefits of visual arts education,” then using the framework to once again test for improved performance in other subject areas is more than a little ironic.

Does Studio Thinking promote a space in society where teaching the arts is valued for its own sake and not a means to an end? In one sense it does isolate how studio learning encourages the development of important critical skills necessary to produce creative, engaged individuals. However, as the emergent Studio Thinking movement focuses more on expanding and generalizing what is learned in studio classes beyond the studio, a clear distinction between the effects of the art and the effects of the teaching will become increasingly important.

Additional Reading:

• Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, Art for Our Sake
• Peggy Burchenal, Abigail Housen, Kate Rawlinson, and Philip Yenawine, Why Do We Teach Arts in the Schools?
• Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, Continuing the Dialogue
• John Broomall, Is This The Book That Will Change Arts Education?
• Lois Hetland, Why do we need the Studio Thinking Framework, anyway? 
• Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly M. Sheridan, et al., Studio thinking: How visual arts teaching can promote disciplined habits of mind

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

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

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

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

“How Art Works” does a good job of defining a reasonable and comprehensive model of the arts’ impact against which to consider the NEA’s own research efforts. However, the report is a bit like an impressionist painting: from far away it looks complete, but when you get close, individual features are hard to make out. There are a few contributing factors to this problem:

• There are times when the system map is lacking specificity and detail in previously well-researched areas of the arts sector, arts education being one example.
• The report fails to take full advantage of prior attempts to map the impacts of the arts. As a result, the report isn’t entirely duplicative, but it isn’t 100% additive either.
• Negative ramifications of the arts are arguably understated. If the system map presented is meant to be realistic – a picture of how art really does work, and not a romantic representation of how we would like it to work – the possible negative effects of self-expression should be acknowledged more explicitly.

By the time this research agenda was released, the NEA had already made an inaugural round of fourteen research grants. The research is compelling, and the best examples will hopefully lead us forward as a field. Happily, the quality of that work will not be diminished by a grand vision that is, arguably, still under construction.

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

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

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

Summary 

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

Mapping the Impact of the Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shaping the Research to Come

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

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

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

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

Analysis

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

The Necessary Specificity

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

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

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

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

Building on Prior Work

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

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

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

Neglecting the Negative

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

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

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

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

Implications

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

The Social Impact of the Arts Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1994 with the intent of studying the connection between the arts and community life. Over time, SIAP has established mechanisms to help us measure how the arts benefit the areas they inhabit. Culture and Community Revitalization is the result of two years of research done between 2006 and 2008 and consists of summary materials, a literature review, three policy briefs, and a community investment prospectus. The Rockefeller Foundation, which commissioned Culture and Community Revitalization, asked SIAP to partner with The Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution, and find ways to “merge cultural data with other types of information on urban revitalization.” Despite some promising findings from the research overview, Stern and Seifert end on a pessimistic note, cautioning that more research is needed before policy decisions can be based off of SIAP’s linkage of cultural engagement to community revitalization.

The literature review covers a vast array of research on the relationship between the creative sector, economics and social benefits, ultimately determining that while most research explores the connection between culture and economic gains, more work needs to be done better understand the less-quantifiable social impacts. The policy briefs make the case for local policymakers to place more of an emphasis on the arts as a way to unlock the human capital in urban areas. Finally, the community investment prospectus provide practical recommendations and case studies that demonstrate different approaches to investing in cultural clusters.

The main strength of the report is its innovative approach to quantifying the ways arts and culture contribute to community revitalization. One of the main highlights of the Culture and Community Revitalization project is a methodology called the Cultural Asset Index. Stern and Seifert were able to build upon The Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis methodology to demonstrate that a concentration of cultural assets can be connected to a rise in real estate value. Conversely, the study fails to fully grapple with the potential downsides of neighborhood cultural investment strategies, particularly when it comes to issues around gentrification and displacement. Stern and Seifert’s research leads them to conclude that the benefits of creative clusters are not only about economics but also creating and strengthening social bonds across different types of networks.

Stern and Seifert suggest that cities can encourage the development of “natural” cultural districts by attracting private investment; focusing on “quality of life investments” such as regular trash pick-ups, and more green space;  pursuing workforce development policies that help young people gain entry into the creative sector; and gathering more data and background information about how these cultural clusters work.

Stern and Seifert’s research has been applied in practice since the publication of Culture and Community Revitalization. Most notably, the national creative placemaking initiatives Our Town and ArtPlace have used SIAP’s work in varying degrees to shape their approach to arts funding.

(For a much briefer version of this analysis, please see the Executive Summary.)

SUMMARY

The Social Impact of the Arts Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1994 with the intent of studying the connection between the arts and community life. After all, “if the arts and culture do, in fact, have an important role in improving the lives of ordinary people, we should be able to measure it.” SIAP has completed 13 projects and dozens of related publications since its founding in 1994 and in recent years has frequently partnered with The Reinvestment Fund on its research.

From 2006 to 2008 SIAP’s Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert researched and compiled a set of documents that sought to investigate the real impact of the “creative economy” on community and economic development. The Rockefeller Foundation funded SIAP and The Reinvestment Fund to partner and “merge cultural data with other types of information on urban revitalization.” The project’s publications included a literature review, three policy briefs, and a community investment prospectus in addition to a range of summary materials. This project led SIAP to frame its subsequent work around the concept of “natural” cultural districts, or specific geographic areas dense with cultural assets that have evolved in grassroots fashion.

Literature Review

The centerpiece of Culture and Community Revitalization is an expansive literature review covering three main areas related to the creative sector: culture in the current context, current theories about culture-based revitalization, and the neighborhood-based creative economy. Stern and Seifert argue that, in contrast to the wealth of literature on quantifying the impact of the creative economy, a nuanced approach to the social and community benefits of developing creative sectors has yet to be fully explored. In the end, it may be the community-building influence of the creative sector that will prove the most impactful.

Culture in the Current Context

Stern and Seifert begin the literature review with a tour of various longitudinal shifts that they see as critical to understanding the context in which the creative sector now operates. They begin by analyzing what they call the “new urban reality,” characterized by a few specific factors: increasing social diversity, expanding economic inequality, and the physical reshaping of the city’s industry hubs.

Whereas the middle of the 20^th century was characterized by the exodus of middle and upper class citizens fleeing the urban core for suburbs, the last three to four decades have seen this trend dramatically reverse. An influx of new residents has shifted the types of diversity in urban neighborhoods, especially in the makeup of households (more unmarried households) and the age of inhabitants (more young adults). Additionally, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are increasing the ethnic diversity of urban centers and introducing new forms of artistic engagement into the mix. Meanwhile, income inequality in cities has been exacerbated—as the urban core becomes more attractive, the cost of living has also increased accordingly, pushing out low-income residents. The authors note that the cultural economy is specifically susceptible to the plight of “winner-take-all” markets, a theory promoted by Robert Frank and Phillip Cook that “changes in the American labor market have expanded the number of job categories in which the most skilled members reap a disproportionate share of rewards.”

These demographic and economic changes in cities have also contributed to changes in cities’ physical and geographic structure. Buoyed by the resurgence of cities in general, rehabilitated downtown areas began to serve increasingly important business, entertainment and recreational functions. Production clusters, or decentralized collections of small firms operating in related industries in close proximity, have emerged as a “new kind of spatial organizational form” that is particularly relevant to creative occupations.

Meanwhile, a significant reshaping of the nonprofit cultural sector has been taking place. The authors suggest that “the marketization of the nonprofit cultural sector—the increased stress placed on earned income and financial performance—has been the dominant policy of the cultural sector for the past 15 years.” Over the years these financial pressures, exacerbated by expectations placed on nonprofits by their funders, have put pressure on mid-sized organizations and further stratified the field. The number of small cultural organizations has exploded, but cooperation between community-based groups and large cultural institutions has proven challenging. In the context of this shifting landscape, the dominant paradigm of the cultural sector has changed from high culture vs. mass entertainment to large and broad vs. small and niche.

Given the changes noted above, the notion of a centralized “cultural policy” in the U.S. is essentially obsolete. The arts have never had much of a stronghold in the policy arena, but the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 was born out of a time when top-down, ambitious social and cultural policy goals were the norm. With the subsequent rise in power of global corporations and special interest groups however, government is now “more likely to find itself brokering transactions between contending interests than setting its own agenda.” Nevertheless, the lack of an entrenched cultural bureaucracy and special interests has its advantages. As Stern and Seifert see it, their absence may make it easier for the cultural sector to innovate and be integrated into other areas of policymaking.

The Current State of the Literature

Stern and Seifert divide current research on the economic and social value of the arts into two main categories: creative economy literature and community-building literature. In addition, there is an emerging third category that looks at the negative effects of culture-based revitalization; however, this literature has largely been ignored by researchers who tend to focus on the first two categories.

The first wave of interest in economic development and the arts began with a 1983 study by the Port Authority of NY and NJ that calculated the economic impact of the arts based on nonprofit expenditures and cultural consumption. Similar studies soon followed and contributed to the formation of the first “cultural districts.” A second strand of creative economy literature focuses on creativity’s role in an area’s overall economic productivity. Over time creative economy scholars have expanded the definition of the cultural sector to include both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors; the oft-cited Richard Florida has a particularly broad definition.  Stern and Seifert choose two bodies of research for more in-depth examination: the Center for an Urban Future’s economic impact study of New York City creative industries and Ann Markusen’s work on the economic role of artists. The Center for an Urban Future suggested that policymakers should begin to look at the arts as an economic sector and take bold steps to help neighborhoods working toward permanent cultural development. Markusen focused on the “hidden contributions artists make to regional economies,” concluding that the unique contribution of artists provides an “artistic dividend” to economic development.

Geography is another important factor in the economic development of the arts.  A 1996 study of the Los Angeles design industry by Allen J. Scott suggested that firms choose to be in close geographic proximity to one another because doing so encourages efficiency, innovation, and process improvements. Stern and Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project applied these ideas to Philadelphia, eventually leading them to the concept of “cultural clusters” or “natural cultural districts” that take into account both production and consumption and both economic and social lenses of impact, all at the neighborhood scale.

In contrast to the research on the economic benefits of the cultural sector, studies focused on community building and culture tend to focus on grassroots and community engagement practices. The bodies of work Stern and Seifert examine in depth are Maria Rosario Jackson’s work with the Urban Institute’s Arts and Culture Indicators Project, Alaka Wali’s studies of informal arts in Chicago, the Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley studies of immigrant and participatory arts, and SIAP’s own work on metropolitan Philadelphia. The Urban Institute’s initial study made suggestions for a “conceptual framework” for research and measurement in the field that would include a broad definition of culture. A later report catalogued “initiatives to integrate culture into broader indicators of metropolitan well-being.”

These studies also began to define the “unincorporated,” “participatory,” or “informal arts” to describe cultural activities that take place outside of traditional institutions. Alaka Wali’s Informal Arts project assembled 12 ethnographic case studies of informal arts activities in the Chicago metro area. The report concluded that informal arts strengthen the entire arts sector, bridge social boundaries that sustain inequality, and build community assets.  Wali followed up on Informal Arts with a study for the Field Museum that looked at cultural, social and artistic practices in the Chicago-area Mexican immigrant community, concluding that “through engaging in informal arts…, Mexican immigrants are creating significant social resources, promoting economic participation, developing civic skills, and reaching out to non-immigrants.”

The Silicon Valley studies, by Pia Moriarty and Maribel Alvarez, sought to place the informal arts into local community context and existing models of cultural production. They introduced the concept of “bonded-bridging” (in-group bonding that supports out-group connections) to the literature, and found that despite informal arts practitioners’ “modest and concrete” goals, a “facture [between formal and informal arts contexts] runs through the Valley’s self-identified ‘cultural community.’”

Despite the considerable volume of research on the cultural sector, Stern and Seifert still feel that the potential negative effects of urban revitalization represent a significant gap in the literature. Without closing the door to new evidence, they argue that the “empirical documentation of art-based gentrification is not particularly strong” and suggest the connection between arts-based urban revitalization and gentrification has been overhyped to date. By contrast, Stern and Seifert maintain that economic inequality in the creative sector is a much more pressing, and well-documented, issue. In fact, their study of artists in six American cities “between 1980 and 2000 found that artists were consistently among the individual occupations with the highest degree of income inequality.” Many of the high-paying jobs in the creative sector require advanced schooling, creating a lack of opportunity for residents who have education equivalent to a high school degree or less.

An Ecosystem-Based Approach

SIAP proposes a new way of thinking about community-based revitalization in the creative sector that integrates both economic and social perspectives on the arts which they term the “neighborhood-based creative economy.”  Stern and Seifert see this framework as providing a potential path toward activating the cultural economy of urban neighborhoods, further integrating local residents with the regional economy and civil society.

In SIAP’s conception of the community cultural ecosystem, nonprofit arts organizations must share the “cultural opportunity provider” role with other entities including street festivals and performances, for-profit cultural firms like dance academies or movie theaters, and non-arts community-based organizations. This is not to say that nonprofits cannot still play an important role beyond serving as direct-service providers. They are also fiscal sponsors and networking agents between regional entities and creative sources; additionally, they often open their physical space to smaller groups. Overall the community cultural ecosystem is interdependent, no matter if the arts organization is a for-profit, nonprofit or “informal” artistic entity.

To provide a quantitative counterpart to this theoretical notion of the community cultural ecosystem, Stern and Seifert constructed a matrix for Culture and Community Revitalization called the Cultural Asset Index. SIAP identified four cultural asset measures–nonprofit cultural organizations, commercial cultural firms, individual artists, and regional participation rates–and localized each of these measures to block groups within the Philadelphia region. Using a factor analysis, Stern and Seifert were able to reduce these four measures to a single variable (a “cultural asset score”) that explained 81% of the variance in the four measures. Then, through regression analysis, they developed an equation to model predicted cultural asset concentrations in Philadelphia based on per capita income, % non-family households, and distance from the city center. Finally, they identified neighborhoods that had higher-than-expected cultural asset scores based on those inputs. One of the purposes of this analysis was to integrate SIAP’s work with the Market Value Analysis methodology of their project partner, The Reinvestment Fund, which resulted in some of the findings reported elsewhere in this summary. Stern and Seifert suggest using this information in various other ways, such as classifying areas strong in cultural assets as cultural districts; targeting workforce development efforts towards low-income, culturally rich areas; and targeting social inclusion interventions towards low-income, culture-poor neighborhoods.

There is a natural tension between the creative economy and community-oriented ideas of cultural revitalization: whereas the latter seeks to lift up currently marginalized elements of the population, the economic approach tends to concentrate resources on “the most visible and profitable aspects of the creative sector.” Unfortunately, the bulk of the discussion and research on the value of culture to society seeks to justify investment solely through an economic lens and valorizes “creative” workers at the expense of everyone else, potentially exacerbating economic inequality. Due to the substantial support labor required by creative occupations, Stern and Seifert encourage policymakers to explore untapped workforce development opportunities that may be lurking within the creative economy.

Despite some promising findings from the research overview, Stern and Seifert end on a pessimistic note, cautioning that more research is needed before policy decisions can be based off of SIAP’s linkage of cultural engagement to community revitalization. They do argue forcefully that in a rational world, policymakers would limit their investments in large-scale cultural projects whose primary purpose is to serve tourists, given the lack of evidence to suggest how low- and moderate-income individuals can benefit from such initiatives. Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge that a number of factors play into policymaking decisions regarding culture and revitalization, and admit that even the promising evidence of social benefits SIAP documented likely isn’t compelling enough or on a large enough scale to garner the support to push through substantive policy changes. 

Policy Briefs and Community Prospectus

While the literature review forms the center of the Culture and Community Revitalization project, SIAP bolsters it with a set of policy briefs to highlight practical applications of its findings. The first policy brief, “From Creative Economy to Creative Society: A social policy paradigm for the creative sector has the potential to address urban poverty as well as urban vitality,” synthesizes much of the literature review and makes a full-throated case for a neighborhood-based approach to cultural development focused on social inclusion rather than economic prosperity. Stern and Seifert advocate for a revitalization strategy that is “both place- and people-based—that is, it should be grounded in a given locale but have active connections with other neighborhoods and economies throughout the city and region.”

The policy brief recommends that policymakers move away from the centralized planned cultural district model that has been in vogue for some time and instead “identify grassroots nodes as leverage points for public, private, and philanthropic investment” to create sustainable, multi-faceted forms of culturally based redevelopment opportunities.  Focusing on smaller-scale cultural clusters and resources would better address the concerns of “winner-take-all markets,” the relegation of much creative activity to the informal economy, and displacement as a result of gentrification.

In their second policy brief “Migrants, Communities and Cultures,” coauthored by Domenic Vitello, Stern and Seifert use immigrant communities in Philadelphia as a case study for the ways in which the informal arts sector can help build important community ties.  Philadelphia’s rapidly growing, ethnically and economically diverse immigrant populations are also home to diverse forms of cultural expression, but they don’t tend to generate relationships with established cultural organizations. In spite of this, the arts can serve as a connective force that can help immigrants adapt to their new surroundings and form social connections in their new communities.  Due to a stronger immigrant presence in the informal arts sector, cities will need to better research how these newer forms of cultural expression can be better utilized to improve the lives of immigrant communities.

“Cultivating ‘Natural’ Cultural Districts,” the  third and final policy brief, introduces the concept of “natural” cultural districts, which are neighborhoods or areas in a city that have “spawned a density of assets— organizations, businesses, participants, and artists— that sets [them] apart from other neighborhoods.” Because these hubs are naturally occurring and build on pre-existing assets, they  offer advantages over cultural districts planned entirely by the city. Stern and Seifert write that the latter “only occasionally are economic successes; most require high, on-going subsidies and effectively feed contemporary cities’ growth of economic inequality.” Stern and Seifert suggest that cities can encourage the development of “natural” cultural districts by attracting private investment; focusing on “quality of life investments” such as regular trash pick-ups, and more green space; pursuing workforce development policies that help young people gain entry into the creative sector; and gathering more data and background information about how these cultural clusters work.

Finally, the community investment prospectus provides a framework for the for-profit and nonprofit sectors to consider modes of investment in arts and culture to facilitate the establishment of vibrant communities. Authored by The Reinvestment Fund’s CEO Jeremy Nowak, “Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for Community Investment” calls for broadening  “the notion of who…should be part of planning, policy, decision-making and financing related to this field” as well as “top-down and bottom-up strategies that will expand the resources available.” The investment prospectus is accompanied by a case study detailing how a mixture of private and public investment transformed the Crane Arts Plumbing Company’ building in Old Kensington Philadelphia from an industrial space to a true arts hub in the neighborhood. The building now houses “37 studios for different artistic mediums, rooms for three arts organizations, and space for community events.”

ANALYSIS                                                                   

Overall, Stern and Seifert present a comprehensive scan of the current state of the work on urban revitalization and the creative economy. Unlike many other studies on the subject, Stern and Seifert have created a quantitative methodology that allows users to quantify cultural activity in specific locations. Their research highlights some areas that need further study and emphasizes some theories that have the potential to truly change the way policymakers and practitioners view the relationship between culture and economy and even how the cultural sector can be organized and operationalized.

That said, there are some weaker points of the study that need more clarification or further research to drive home the ideas Stern and Seifert really want to promote. One of the main themes of SIAP’s work is the positive social impact of cultural activity, but Stern and Seifert seem to waver between emphatically making this point and stressing the need for further study. In addition, the authors don’t fully weigh the meaning of gentrification and related negative impacts of culture-based revitalization, and neglect to make constructive suggestions for further inquiry.

Does culture truly contribute to local economies?

One of the main highlights of the Culture and Community Revitalization project is the Cultural Asset Index. Most research on the arts’ economic and social effects hasn’t attempted nearly as much depth or specificity in showing the relationship between cultural density and other indicators. Stern and Seifert were able to build upon The Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis methodology to demonstrate that a concentration of cultural assets can be connected to a rise in real estate value. SIAP’s methods to identify rich concentrations of cultural assets in unexpected places could potentially be really empowering for neighborhoods and residents. By uplifting the cultural value in diverse areas, the Cultural Asset Index and its associated correlations can help people within and outside these areas to understand how culture shapes their communities for the better. However, it is unclear exactly how SIAP calculates the index, which could hamper efforts for those unfamiliar with the concepts to understand how it works.

Stern and Seifert conclude that the benefits of creative clusters are not only about economics but also creating and strengthening social bonds across different types of networks. Through its work in Philadelphia and beyond, SIAP is attempting to create empirical methods that show how community arts and the informal arts contribute to the social and economic landscape of cities. A significant weakness of the community-building research cited in the literature review is that the studies take practitioners’ subjective impressions of neighborhood impacts at their word without trying to measure them quantitatively. An example of a more quantitative approach is SIAP’s earlier work establishing a connection between community culture and child welfare in Philadelphia—low-income block groups with high cultural participation were more than twice as likely as comparable block groups to have low truancy and delinquency. More importantly, in original research completed for the Culture and Community Revitalization project, Stern and Seifert found that block groups with high participation rates were twice as likely to undergo economic revitalization, defined as “above average poverty decline and population gain,” a finding supported by further analysis using real estate market classifications from The Reinvestment Fund.  SIAP posits that the correlation between cultural engagement and poverty decline is connected to the cross-geographical/class/ethnic pollination that occurs in cultural hubs. However, Stern and Seifert have not yet been able to clearly attribute these changes to cultural engagement or identify the specific mechanism that causes that change. One possible explanation, supported by the research in the literature review, is the increase of a neighborhood’s “collective efficacy” – its residents’ ability to imagine and work towards positive change.

The authors also postulate that cultural engagement leads to broader civic engagement, but admit that there is little data that can provide linkage between the two.  Part of the “social role” of cultural engagement is defined as the ability of formal and informal arts organizations to attract attendees from outside the local community, helping urban residents experience different parts of their city. Unfortunately, a “lack of comparable data on other forms of community engagement”  to back up the claim that the arts serve as a connective tissue for the social improvement of communities  weakens the case that the benefits of cultural clusters can be seen in social outcomes as opposed to economic outcomes. In spite of this, the original research SIAP has done thus far has uncovered some promising indicators that deserve further exploration.

Much of the data collected is specifically tied to place—namely Philadelphia—making it hard to extrapolate the findings to the nation as a whole. In their analysis of cultural clusters, Stern and Seifert speak to the way that neighborhood-based cultural ecosystems localize the production and consumption of their products and how that contributes to economic stabilization and revitalization. Since much of their reporting focuses on Philadelphia at the turn of the millennium, it is difficult to know whether there were conditions specific to the Philadelphia economy that contributed to their findings or if these were more universal trends. That said, since Culture and Community Revitalization was completed in 2008 SIAP has undertaken studies of other cities, namely Baltimore and Seattle.

Does the idea of “natural cultural districts” resonate with grassroots arts organizations?

Stern and Seifert do a great job of cataloguing the benefits of “informal” cultural participation. For example, they dedicate one of the policy briefs entirely to exploring how the informal arts help connect immigrant communities to services and networks in their new environments. Depending on the intended audience is for this set of research, Seifert and Stern could be providing a great amount of assistance not only for interested researchers who are not specialists in the field, but for advocates and staff of community-based organizations as well. However, the way the report is organized makes it difficult for me to envision the same community-based organizations they uplift in the reports being able to effectively use the research in their work. However, if this is not their intended audience, who are they trying to influence? Do they see this report as a way to help practitioners advocate for the importance of their contributions to their local landscapes?

What role does gentrification play?

Although rising real estate values are a positive outcome on the surface, especially in economically depressed or distressed areas, they do not necessarily bring rising income levels or job prospects to neighborhood residents. While these changes can benefit longtime residents of a developing creative cluster, it is only a benefit to those who actually own property and can manage the subsequent rise in property taxes. Many times, the smartest option for these types of residents is to sell their property (if they even own it in the first place), which could disrupt the neighborhood’s population dynamics and character—low-income residents are not going to sell property with an increased value to other low-income individuals who simply cannot afford the rising price of their real estate. If SIAP’s “natural” cultural districts do not create jobs that are widely accessible to existing residents of the area but eventually drive up the cost of real estate, the question emerges: how truly beneficial are these creative clusters to the average person? Moreover, how do the economic and demographic shifts in these clusters change the nature of the cultural assets that are produced?

Overall, the authors were largely dismissive of the effects of gentrification and its relationship to the arts in their literature review. However, Stern and Seifert do not provide a clear understanding of how they are defining gentrification for the purposes of that assessment, or specific examples of research that failed to show a displacement effect. Instead, they assert that there is not enough clear information about gentrification for them to truly consider it as a factor in their research. This struck me as an odd claim, especially given Stern’s background in U.S. social history and his research on racial inequality. This is a disconnect that continues throughout their body of work.

Stern and Seifert draw a connection between cultural clusters and both economic inequality and rising real estate costs, yet they treat these shifts as wholly separate from the broader issue of gentrification. My personal understanding is that economic inequality and expensive real estate are considered prime contributing factors to gentrification. Since Stern and Seifert do not acknowledge the relationship between these phenomena, it would have been helpful for them to provide the reader with a clearer understanding of what they mean using terms like gentrification or neighborhood stabilization instead of assuming universal understanding of these terms.

IMPLICATIONS

Regardless of whether or not the strategies SIAP promotes are the best ones to employ, they are definitely some of the most influential theories out there. Joan Shigekawa, the Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Jeremy Nowak, the Interim Director of ArtPlace, were both involved with the organizational entities that funded and collaborated in the Culture and Community Revitalization project. Prior to her term at the NEA, Shigekawa was the Associate Director for Foundation Initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the study. Nowak is the co-founder and former CEO of The Reinvestment Fund, one of the lead partners in this work. As a result, they’ve begun to explore some of the ideas SIAP has developed about the creative economy into the institutions they now run.

How has work on culture and urban revitalization progressed since the study was published?

In my research, it has been difficult to find models of community revitalization using cultural clusters that do not tie into some, if not all of the theories that are covered in this series of research studies.  Stern and Seifert’s research on local production and consumption, as well as their emphasis on the social benefits of creative placemaking, are deserving of policymakers and advocates’ attentions.   Curiously, at the end of Culture and Community Revitalization’s literature review the authors seem to downplay the role of natural cultural clusters in enhancing urban revitalization, stating that in spite of the correlations between culture, social engagement, and economic improvement, these correlations “do not produce direct-enough benefits to generate enthusiasm among those who actually determine the fate of cities.”

Yet, as previously mentioned, two large philanthropic entities are in the midst of executing their own round of funding based on the idea that cultural assets can improve communities socially and economically. Nowak’s ArtPlace is a collaboration between foundations to put “art at the heart of a portfolio of strategies designed to revitalize communities.” Prior to heading up ArtPlace, Nowak helped it get off the ground as president of one of its original funding partners, the William Penn Foundation.  ArtPlace makes grants in all 50 states and has awarded over $42 million to different organizations thus far. The NEA’s Our Town program, begun under Shigekawa’s tenure as Senior Deputy Chairman of the agency, explains its grantmaking objective as providing funding for “creative placemaking projects that contribute toward the livability of communities and help transform them into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.” Notably, both funding entities have supported SIAP and TRF’s latest collaboration in partnership with the City of Philadelphia, an interactive data portal called CultureBlocks, specifically designed to bridge the gap between cultural assets and City Hall in the name of community revitalization.

All of this philanthropic activity does beg the question: if natural cultural clusters already exist and are improving their communities, is it really necessary for the public and private sector to get involved? Observing the trajectory of the ArtPlace and Our Town initiatives will help bear this question out.

Are there better models out there?

As pointed out in a previous Createquity piece on the arts and gentrification, there are some really innovative artist and community-driven projects focused on neighborhood revitalization and stabilization across the country. These projects include Project Row Houses in Houston, the work of Theaster Gates Rebuild Foundation on the South Side of Chicago, and the Watts House Project in Watts, CA. Though these projects have been subject to their own criticisms, they do seem to provide an alternative to both completely “natural” cultural cluster development and the completely government-initiated cultural district approach. That said, the aforementioned projects have all been implemented within the past decade—it is still too early to truly determine how deep of an impact they will make, both locally and nationally. Will another innovator be able to combine the work of the artist/community developers and the theories promoted by Stern and Seifert? Is that even the path that should be taken or is it best to leave “natural” cultural clusters alone to develop according to their own ethos?

Additional Reading:

• For more information on the concept of “natural” cultural clusters
• CultureBlocks website
• Local NBC news affiliate on the launch of CultureBlocks

Tyler Cowen presents a powerful idea in his 2006 book (reprised in 2010) Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding: arts policy is a battle between aesthetic and economic reasoning that can be settled by keeping the American system basically as it is. His sweeping argument draws on a deeply-researched history of arts policy in the United States dating back to the late 19th century. All of his historical analysis is developed in the context of a broader argument for a “decentralized” arts policy, which means moving the responsibility of arts policy decision-making from officials to consumers.

Instead of settling the debate over the role of government in the arts, this admirable attempt at finding a central policy philosophy amenable to free-market types and progressives alike leaves considerable room for interpretation and disagreement. His argument supports policy changes to the NEA’s grantmaking scheme that won’t satisfy conservative hopes of dismantlement. Meanwhile, protecting copyright and expanding State Department arts programs is unlikely to meet arts advocates’ demands. Cowen’s argument does, though, introduce a useful concept for policy analysts as they weigh alternatives.

Summary

Art Lovers vs. Libertarian Economists

Good & Plenty is written atop the backdrop of a hypothesized political discourse divided into two camps: aesthetics and economics. As Cowen explains it, the art lovers are high-minded, cultured people who want to promote the best art. In their ideal world, the government would support the most important artists such that high culture would be sustained. The libertarian economists believe the best art is that which serves paying customers. In this view, every purchase is a tiny message from society to the artist telling her to keep up the good work. All of these whispers reach meaningful volume when the art pleases society and won’t when society isn’t sufficiently pleased. The libertarian economist’s perspective leaves little room for government intervention.

Cowen maps these two groups onto the two major American political parties. He maintains that the fights over arts policy in the 1980’s and 1990’s—including attempts to close the National Endowment for the Arts and arguments over the definitions of decency, censorship, and artistic liberty—were essentially just arguments between art lovers and libertarian economists. Thus, he believes that finding policy instruments that resolve the philosophical conflict between these two stylized positions would help the US, and potentially Congress, reach a political consensus around a single American arts policy.

Decentralization

Cowen believes strongly in decentralization as a policy tool, and advocates for it throughout the book. The philosophy of decentralization holds that decisions made by individuals are better than those made by a committee or, worse, a political process, so we should place citizens in charge of determining the art they enjoy. The list of policies he suggests under this banner is long.

As an obvious and indicative example of decentralized policy, Cowen pushes for a copyright regime that balances access with rewards for widely enjoyed work. His nuanced argument focuses on the ways that copyright is still working in the internet age and suggests that it be left as is: providing an incentive for artists to create, but not foreclosing future technological innovation (even if it may threaten copyright).

Cowen also advocates for other, less familiar distributed approaches to funding the arts. Citing the historical role of private and corporate giving in support of the arts, he argues that the tax deduction for charitable giving acts as a support mechanism for the arts. He writes extensively about the role of education subsidies and government jobs programs in making the artist’s life possible–providing what he characterizes as low-responsibility jobs that lighten the workload on participating artists so they can advance their craft.

Though he does not advocate direct arts funding, he does make a case for two main ways to make it more decentralized: arbitrary and idiosyncratic selection. Arbitrary selection—choosing whom to fund entirely at random—works, Cowen believes, because it is better than the risk-averse selection process that dominates political or committee funding. Idiosyncratic funding choices, which he defines as making a funding choice as an individual according to one’s own taste even if that individual is supposed to be representing others, serves the same anti-conservative goal. He claims that many of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal arts programs met the arbitrariness standard. The Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) employment programs for visual artists gave a job worth roughly one third of their income to any artist who could provide the WPA with a framed canvas. The Roosevelt administration saw this as an anti-poverty program, paying people who had skills and could stimulate the economy if they had money in their pockets to do something, even if it wasn’t so useful. When the program ended, the WPA burned thousands of the paintings, and even sold some to a plumber as pipe insulation. Cowen claims that this type of arbitrary government spending on the arts helps to remove the decision-making of which artists are the best from the government and give it back to the people.

On the other end of the spectrum, he praises the historical role of nobility in the arts. He argues that when aristocrats followed their tastes and paid for art accordingly, they were unencumbered by the art-by-committee problem. Instead, they were able to make bold and radical artistic decisions that forecasted landmark innovation. He explains that this approach could be replicated in the US by removing the political burdens on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Removing the NEA’s dependence on the annual appropriations process could free the agency to make more radical decisions. He draws a historical analogue from the aristocratic funding of the arts to the American policy of providing tax subsidies to wealthy folks who make donations to arts institutions.

All of these approaches give us a picture of the patchwork American arts policy from the twentieth century to today. The common thread Cowen identifies is some degree of decentralization, whether it be a laissez-faire, property rights-based approach (as he would prefer) or a more muscular intervention like that of Roosevelt’s WPA. Cowen does not argue strongly for any single adjustment like changing the funding structure of NEA or increasing federal arts education spending. He advocates instead for us to keep doing what we’re doing: promoting the best art with decentralized funding mechanisms.

Analysis

Cowen’s case for a breakdown between art lovers and libertarian economists, who I will call aestheticists and econs for short, seems plausible. It is not uncommon in DC to see two warring parties duke it out over a fundamental philosophical difference. But is that what is happening in the arts? Certainly there are people who believe in sustaining high culture. Many of these groups receive a small but significant portion of their annual budgets from the NEA, and they lobby for more NEA spending. On the other side, there are many libertarian and conservative economists, like those at George Mason University where Cowen teaches, who find government spending counter-productive and potentially destructive when it interferes with private market mechanisms for providing products and services. Cowen likely spoke with many people in each of these camps, and did some extrapolation to arrive at the archetypal aestheticist and econ. Individual advocates on either side may not have arguments as pure and consistent as those Cowen attributes to them, but his simplifications seem reasonable.

If these were the only two perspectives in Washington, his argument would have a sound footing. He dissects more than a century of American arts policy, explaining along the way where it succeeded and failed from the aestheticist’s and econ’s points of view. His case that decentralization works for both sides is backed up by a thoughtful blend of historical and philosophical analysis.

But there’s a problem: there are a lot more than two sides in this fight. Cowen provides hardly any evidence that conservative congressional arguments against the NEA are based on a preference for market capitalism. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, incidents like those involving Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley centered on content at least as much as the means of financing. Similarly, many conservatives are today seeking ways to legislate against violence in popular video games and films, using Quentin Tarantino as a scapegoat. This suggests that many conservatives probably don’t condition their support of particular arts policies solely on free-market principles. Instead, their ideal policy would rein in government financing of the arts without removing their political leverage to define what content is appropriate and what is not.

The corresponding aestheticist model has the same problem. The progressive arguments for government spending on the arts have not only been about the importance of beauty or intrinsic value of art. Instead, they have also focused on the positive role of government in society, the potential for arts as a driver of economic development, and the importance to democracy of giving everyone a voice. Many progressives see the benefits produced by the arts as reason enough for the government to support them.

Finding a point of resolution between the arguments of aestheticists and econs has value—it creates frameworks for thoughtful advocates from the purists in each camp to find common cause—but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. Most people have deeper motivations behind their support (or lack of support) for the arts, whether cultural, moral, or politically strategic. There is also a growing body of literature in the field of psychology that suggests we don’t hear—and sometimes can’t even understand—alternative views or evidence against our position, making it compromise even less likely. This appears to be happening in debates about the arts. Framing the argument as he does allows Cowen to sidestep a lot of the complications that are really at the center of why these political debates persist. If only those who are really pure aestheticists or pure econs are moved by a proposed reconciliation, the political movement built on that message is likely to fail.

For a recent analogy, consider the politics over health care reform: a bill modeled on legislation proposed by a leading conservative think tank and enacted by a popular Republican governor was not supported by even a single Republican in the House of Representatives or the Senate. Many of the resistors explained that they were voting against a government takeover of health care or an invasion of government into the free market. The motivations underlying all of these arguments came from a fundamental distrust of government, not from a place of trying to build a health care reform bill that found a compromise between government-free and government-run.

Similarly, when President Obama was Senator Obama, he voted against a bill that would raise the debt ceiling. The outrage his White House has displayed during the debates over the debt ceiling since 2011 make clear what the debt ceiling is really about: flexing political muscle and signaling approval or disapproval of the current direction of policy.

I believe Cowen’s case that arguments over arts policy are really about creating the best environment for the arts to thrive is misguided. As in the health care and debt ceiling debates, the reasons for political opinions in the arts are complex, and that complexity matters if solutions to divisive issues are to be found.

Implications

Though I am not convinced decentralization is a politically feasible solution to the culture wars, its potential as a policy mechanism in the arts is still worth considering. Decentralization’s strength comes from a single argument: people know what they like better than the government. This idea, which is deeply Hayekian (see “The Use of Knowledge in Society”), is compelling because it is almost undeniably true. Paul Ryan and I have very different tastes in music; I wouldn’t want him to be budgeting the money musicians receive.

Hiding in this argument is a hard-to-solve conundrum: what if artists are not responsive to demand? When I was in music school, we all talked about wanting to make a living, and many of us took classes to that end, but most of us bought into the “starving artist” picture of our life. Most artists make art because they love it, not for the money. The argument that individuals know better than the government is used to support the market mechanism and invoke a market logic, suggesting that those who receive money will keep on working at their craft, while those who don’t will quit. In the arts, this mechanism seems to be broken, with people scraping by just to be able to do what they love rather than quitting and putting their efforts into something at which they could make more money.

The above is just one of the problems with a broad, uncritical application of decentralization to all arts policy dilemmas. However, Cowen’s decentralization concept can be a useful tool for systematizing the thinking policy-makers use as they consider ways to improve proposed interventions and look for potential unintended consequences. It also points to a few seemingly peripheral policy items for which arts advocates should be campaigning. Among the most politically salient are:

1. Keeping the academy funded. Ivory towers don’t have a great reputation in many Washington, DC circles, but they are an important tool for keeping artists employed. According to Cowen, many great artists depend on the government-subsidized open intellectual environment to create their best work, and this impact should be taken into account before cutting funding to colleges and universities.
2. Closing down the Internet will not win the copyright war. Artists use the Internet as a critical tool for artistic innovation and distribution. Though copyright and new technology have differential effects across artistic disciplines, art is broadly enhanced by the freedom technology provides. Copyright is not a moral right, it is a legal construction, and Congress should avoid legislating it as the former.
3. Maintaining the charitable giving deduction. Cowen makes a good case for why the charitable giving deduction, despite its drawbacks, is an important tool for funding the arts. Though many of the individuals who are taking the deduction likely have mundane, risk-averse artistic interests, his bet that enough idiosyncratic individuals are takings risks and funding innovative new projects seems like a good one to me.

Further reading:

• Review of Good & Plenty by Shawn Ritenour of Grove City College in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics
• Crooked Timber’s review of Good & Plenty
• “Funding Arts the American Way”, a review of Good & Plenty for Philanthropy Magazine by Rex Roberts