• A federal judge recently ruled that Pandora must continue to pay ASCAP, which represents song writers and publishers, a 1.85% composition royalty. It was a (not entirely clean) victory for Pandora, which was arguing against a rise to 3%. The Future of Music Coalition has a good primer on the issue. (Note that the royalty paid to record companies for sound recordings is much higher – above 50%, in some cases – and it is this larger royalty that Pandora cited last week in increasing the cost of their premium service.)
• FMC similarly offers a concise but thorough summary of the Congressional testimony debating the “notice and takedown” copyright enforcement system for hosting sites like YouTube.
• Amtrak’s writers’ residency is getting some amusing pushback from conservatives that points to some deeper issues regarding its role as a national service.
• Advocacy for publicly-funded arts agencies has a new platform: Stand for the Arts, an online initiative funded by Ovation TV, champions the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Americans for the Arts’s Arts Action Fund.
• Is that the pitter-patter of li’l artist feet in the distance? A female musician predicts Obamacare will prompt a “creative professionals baby boom,” and offers ideas for how the music community can better support it.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Vice President of Paul G. Allen Family Foundation Susan Coliton resigned last week after 15 years with the foundation.
• Judi Jennings, executive director of Kentucky Foundation for Women, is set to retire June 30, also after 15 years of service. Barry Hessenius has an exit interview with Judy.
• The Bay Area’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced the promotions of Shelley Trott and Katie Fahey to Director of Arts Strategy and Ventures and Associate Program Officer for the Arts, respectively.
• The beleaguered Minnesota Orchestra faces continued challenges following the end of a 16-month player lockout: President and CEO Michael Henson announced he is stepping down, prompting the resignation of eight board members and speculation regarding the possible return of the orchestra’s former music director Osmo Vanska.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Ford Foundation now has an artist on its board of trustees: Lourdes Lopez, artistic director of the Miami City Ballet and strong arts education proponent.
• More family foundations – nearly a quarter – are choosing to spend down their assets during the donor’s lifetime.

IN THE FIELD

• In a decision that has perplexed many, the San Diego Opera announced that this season will be its last after nearly fifty years of performances. Subsequent to the announcement, the organization gave itself a two-week reprieve in a last-ditch attempt to raise money.
• Big Brother is watching the opera: Lincoln Center, Alvin Ailey, the Public Theater, and five other NYC arts stalwarts have joined Audience 360, a new alliance that will share ticketing and customer information across the group. As many as forty institutions are expected to join when Audience 360, one of more than twenty such big-data organizations across the country, is launched in June. The information is expected to be useful for government advocacy in addition to marketing.
• The BBC has hired National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone as part of a new push to infuse arts programming across the media organization “like never before.” The new initiatives will include filming live arts events and a miniseries following young orchestra musicians, among others.
• Netflix’s CEO has come out in favor of a strong form of net neutrality after a deal with Comcast cleared up customers’ performance issues. Meanwhile, Apple and Comcast are exploring a TV streaming partnership with sterling connectivity, which would fulfill Apple’s hopes of playing in the TV space.
• The full story of how the reclusive Cornelius Gurlitt wound up with a 1,280-piece trove of Nazi-looted art – which he is now returning to the original owners.
• Bookstores in Manhattan may be a dying breed; bookstores in Brooklyn are thriving.
• Have a great idea for a creative placemaking project but no time to get off the ground? Take advantage of National Arts Strategies’ Creative Community Fellows Program, which includes a week-long retreat with fellow cultural “entrepreneurs,” a distance learning track, and an opportunity to pitch to funders and/or create crowdfunding campaigns. Applications are due May 7.

BIG IDEAS

• As Netflix-style aggregation of content spreads from music and movies to books, magazines, and newspapers, “almost all the value in media has come from bundling.” Consumers like it because it offers centralized curation and lower transaction costs than hunting-and-gathering individual items; providers like it because it can give them more data. (Whether it’s good for creators, of course, depends in large part on how the proceeds are split with the provider.) But don’t get too excited – it turns out that existing legal agreements may prevent Netflix itself – or anyone else – from offering anything approaching a comprehensive slate of films before 2020.
• Meanwhile, total revenue for recorded music has fallen each year of the millennium; at $8 billion a year, it is now less than half of its (inflation-adjusted) 1999 peak. Venture capitalist David Pakman argues that the only way to reverse this trend is to lower the price of streaming services to $3-4 per month, bringing the annual cost closer to more consumers’ historical willingness to pay.
• The Wu-Tang Clan’s new double album will be released in an edition of one, which will tour museums before being sold for millions of dollars.

RESEARCH CORNER

• To what degree do family and peer groups influence our perceptions of the label “artist”? Researchers parsing data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project found a sizable chunk of people creating artistic works do not self-identify as professional artists. Those with artists in their families, or those who attended arts-focused schools, were more likely to use the label. Can’t help but wonder about the degree to which socioeconomic status plays a role in this…
• …since a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data paints a portrait of the artist as a model of downward mobility. Creative types tend to grow up in relatively affluent households and to make less money than their parents, to a much greater extent than those in other careers. Let’s hope some things are more important than money, since art schools are the most expensive in the country after taking financial aid packages into account.
• The Arts Education Partnership’s database of statewide arts education policies has been updated and renamed as ArtScan. It includes a state-to-state comparison feature as well as information about past efforts to survey the status of arts education in each state.
• The Hewlett and Irvine Foundations have released an external assessment of their Next Generation Arts Leadership program, which they have renewed for another three years, to inspire other regions facing a potential arts leadership deficit. (The full report and executive summary are online.)
• The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture is out with a nationwide survey of media arts organizations – the “first-ever, comprehensive data set documenting the media arts field.” With nearly a quarter of respondents self-identifying as local cable TV operators, television still reigns as the primary focus of these organizations’ work.
• Two weeks ago we noted the ever-rising cost of sales in the international and antique art markets as a possible sign of an emerging “winner take all” economy. Others think it’s an insidious sign of something more akin to insider trading.
• March Madness = time to reflect on whether economic impact arguments for the arts really make any sense.

“I want change” by m.a.r.c.

Toward the end of the summer, bioethicist Peter Singer raised the hackles of art lovers everywhere with a New York Times op-ed that considered a hypothetical dilemma: should you donate to a charity that combats blindness in the developing world or should you spend that money instead on an art museum? After running through a cost-benefit analysis of each option, he determined that the charity addressing blindness “offers [donors] at least 10 times the value” of the museum.

Ouch.

To no one’s surprise, the arts community didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for the piece, calling Singer’s argument “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” Another round of alarm ensued recently when none other than megaphilanthropist Bill Gates threw his support behind Singer’s thesis. The responses from our field to date have generally coalesced around two broad counter-arguments:

•  Why does it have to be “either/or”? Why can’t we support both? Singer forces a false choice in “assuming charitable giving is a zero sum game.” Weighing the value of saving a life against the value of donating to an art museum is comparing apples to oranges when “both are essential, and if either disappeared you’d be in bad shape.” We need a holistic approach to ensure we don’t “solv[e] Third World crises at the expense of fostering crises right here at home.” Just as we have “multiple passions in [our] lives,” donors can and should target multiple causes and direct their charitable dollars in a “proportionally prioritized” manner. Anyway, we can’t really be sure than curing blindness is more important than inspiring the next Jackson Pollock, and even if we were, concentrating all our resources with one or two tried and true nonprofits runs counter to the “messiness and power of America’s [decentralized] approach to charity.”

• Saving lives is all fine and good – but only if those lives have meaning. If we’re so concerned with making sure that people can see, shouldn’t we also try to make sure they have beautiful things to look at? Singer’s logic is dangerous because he fails to acknowledge the “creative outlet[s] and emotional oas[e]s that only art museum[s] can provide.” If all philanthropic dollars were channeled toward alleviating disease and poverty, arts and culture would languish, society would become monochromatic and dull, and life would cease to be worth living.

As satisfying as these rebuttals may feel to arts advocates, they unfortunately miss the point. The crucial assumptions behind Singer’s argument are that

1. “there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one [sector] than in another,” and
2. we have a moral obligation to make choices that do as much good as possible.

It’s important to understand this perspective in the context of “effective altruism,” a relatively nascent but growing area of applied ethics that has been featured more than once on this blog, not to mention a recent edition of This American Life. Besides Gates, fellow philanthropic heavyweight and past Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest has declared himself a fan. “Effective altruists,” or EAs, are on a quest to “do good” by way of hard-nosed rationality. “Doing good” doesn’t mean recycling a little more, or occasionally doling out spare change to a beggar on the street. It doesn’t mean foregoing a high-powered corporate career to work for a nonprofit. It means taking the time to analyze how to do the most amount of good possible with the resources available – or, to use a more nerdy turn of phrase, to “[use] science and rational decision-making to help as many sentient beings” as they can.

Most funders are already in search of a big “bang for your buck,” but in trying to identify the objectively best causes to support, effective altruists stray from the conventional wisdom of mainstream philanthropy. EAs cast a global net when determining where to focus, and often settle on supporting causes in faraway parts of the world, the results of which they may never see in person. They also believe that while human lives are created equal, philanthropic causes are not. Those causes that can save or improve the most lives must take first priority.

How does this play out in practice? Let’s say you donate to the free medical clinic in your area. You do this for good reasons: you care about inequities in the American healthcare system, and want to give back to your community. You like the feeling you get when you walk by that clinic every day. Maybe you even know people who benefit from the services the clinic provides. The clinic gets its donation, and you get warm fuzzies. Everybody wins. Right?

Not so, an EA would counter. Despite your good intentions, your donation amounts to a near-waste of resources:

We understand the sentiment that ‘charity starts at home,’ and we used to agree with it, until we learned just how different U.S. charity is from charity aimed at the poorest people in the world. Helping people in the U.S. usually involves tackling extremely complex, poorly understood problems… In the poorest parts of the world, people suffer from very different problems…

We estimate that it costs [Givewell’s] top-rated international charity less than $2,500 to save a human life… Compare that with even the best U.S. programs… over $10,000 per child served, and their impact is encouraging but not overwhelming.

EAs advocate making evidence-based decisions even if they don’t resonate on an emotional or intuitive level:

Effective altruism is consistent with believing that giving benefits the giver, but it’s not consistent with making this the driving goal of giving. Effective altruists often take pride in their willingness to give (either time or money) based on arguments that others might find too intellectual or abstract, and their refusal to give suboptimally even when a pitch is emotionally compelling. The primary/driving goal is to help others, not to feel good about oneself.

If this approach leaves you with an empty feeling in the back of your throat, it is by design. “Opportunity costs” – the costs of choosing not to behave in a certain way – weigh heavily on EAs. Every time you make a donation, considering where your money could have gone is as important as considering where it will ultimately go (emphasis mine):

In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease…  Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people … But these people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Weighing choices isn’t limited to how we spend our money – it also applies to how we spend our time. Just as EAs dispute the notion that people should support whichever charities they feel “passionate” about, they question whether channeling those passions into a nonprofit or medical career is the best way to make a difference. Many suggest instead that people “earn to give,” saying they “might be better off…in a high-earning job and making a deliberate commitment to give a large portion of what [they] earn away.“ The organization 80,000 Hours, founded to “become the world’s number one source for advice on pursuing a career that truly makes a difference in an effective way,” elaborates,

Working at a non-profit can be a great way to make a difference. But it’s no guarantee. Amazingly, lots of non-profits probably have no impact. And do workers at [a] non-profit have more impact than the people who fund them? The researchers who push forward progress? The entrepreneurs who transform the economy? Policy makers? Maybe. No one stops to ask.

Putting ideas like these on the table is a great way to make those of us in the arts squirm. While there are echoes of the effective altruism movement in some recent trends within our field, like the “universal call” for better data on the impact of the arts and the pointed questions about who ultimately benefits from arts funding, the arts are chock-full of people – artists and arts administrators alike – who were drawn to their work by that same passion that EAs claim clouds our judgment. The idea of allowing cold rationality to dictate and limit our quest to “do good” flies in the face of our artistic sensibilities, and challenges the assumptions many of us made when we entered the nonprofit sector in the first place – even those of us who have a sincere desire to address social inequities.

Tempting as it may be, it would be short-sighted to dismiss the EA movement as the pet project of a bunch of aesthetically stunted curmudgeons. It’s hard to dispute the notion that we could improve the human condition if only we could get our act together and commit our resources to a data-driven approach. After all, the nonprofit darling of the moment, collective impact, is based on the same premise. What effective altruism does is counter our cause-specific argument for the arts with a dizzying moral appeal for cause agnosticism. And to be honest, it’s hard to see how the arts win if they play the game by the EAs’ rules. The “both/and” argument mentioned previously is unlikely to sway an effective altruist who weighs each decision as a choice between two different futures, one in which a museum gets funded and some lives get saved and one in which the museum struggles and more lives get saved. Even if the museum shut down completely, its patrons could probably find or create an alternative “creative outlet and emotional oasis,” while the people dying of malaria can’t very well make the mosquito nets themselves. The “we give lives meaning” argument likewise rings hollow when we’re talking about lending privileged lives (anyone living on more than $2 a day is privileged in a global context) a dose of incremental “meaning” at the expense of giving others a shot at basic survival. It also comes across as incredibly condescending to those others considering that they would likely never get the opportunity to visit or benefit from Singer’s hypothetical museum. In any case, art is hardly the only possible delivery mechanism for meaning. In the words of one effective altruist,

Trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience. In other words, it meets the sort of non-material needs that many people have.

Whether the EA movement sputters or gathers steam, taking the time to engage with its principles, even critically, is a healthy exercise. The bottom line is that EAs may actually be onto something when they argue it’s possible to make a bigger dent in one sector than another. Rather than insisting otherwise or dodging the argument altogether, we could heed the call to examine how altruism really manifests in our work, particularly when examined through the lens of what benefits the people we engage, rather than what benefits our organizations or our donors. Might we, too, have objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more “good” in one program, or with one population, than in another? Do we, too, have a moral obligation to maximize that good? How would that change how we operate and who we serve? Do we want to change how we operate?

If the effective altruism debate makes anything clear, it’s that to be able to make art, not to mention argue about it, is to be fortunate. Taking a hard look at our assumptions about what draws and keeps us to this work may not be easy, but if we squirm a little, so be it. In the grand scheme of things, a little squirming is a luxury too.

Plaque honoring financier Stephen Schwarzman, after whom the New York Public Library’s flagship building is named. Photo by Flickr user vagueonthehow.

Young whites poring over books, memorizin’ but never learning
And I wonder how the fuck they’ll justify genocide.
“I…I was in the library, honest to God, I didn’t even know.”
—From “The Library,” by Felipe Luciano of The Original Last Poets

On March 7 of this year, my friend and I attended a screening of the film Right On!, a seminal creation of the Harlem spoken word poetry movement of the 1960s. Featuring 28 performances by a group called The Original Last Poets, Right On! is essentially a double-album-length music video that presaged MTV by over a decade. The film’s monologues-with-a-beat offer a brutally honest window into black urban life and identity in the midst of the civil rights era. According to the movie’s producer, as relayed by the marketing copy accompanying the event, it was “the first ‘totally black film’ making ‘no concession in language and symbolism to white audiences.’” It was intense, confrontational, and not quite like anything I’d seen before. I loved it.

“The Library,” quoted above, is not even close to the angriest number in Right On!’s hit parade. But watching the images of what is now the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at the New York Public Library pass by as Felipe Luciano’s fellow Last Poets mockingly intoned “The Liiiiii-bra-ree,” I couldn’t help but revel in the irony of my location: the Museum of Modern Art.

*

As it turns out, Right On!’s run at MoMA was the world premiere of a digitally restored version of the film. Lost to the public for many years, Right On! had been little more than a fading memory until the museum’s To Save and Project festival of film preservation undertook the challenge of bringing it back to life with support from donors Celeste Bartos and Paul Newman.

The work of restoring and presenting Right On! to the public is the sort of thing that institutions like MoMA routinely cite in grant applications as proof of their commitment to diversity. Yet MoMA could hardly have been a more iconic symbol of the white establishment to serve as a setting for the Poets’ time-lapsed performance. Forged from Rockefeller privilege, MoMA was founded to promote the artistry of European modernism, and the most famous works in its collection are nearly all by dead white men. It has $1 billion in net assets, pays its (white) director a seven-figure salary that places him among the best-paid nonprofit executives in New York, and charges among the highest admission fees in the country for an art museum. It was the first target of Occupy Museums. The very room where the Right On! screening took place, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1, first gained notoriety within the filmmaking community for its D. W. Griffith retrospective in 1940, which surely must have included the racist and Ku-Klux-Klan-reviving Birth of A Nation.

Remarkably, the Poets themselves made an appearance at the opening night of the run. I can only guess that it was a heart-warming spectacle of racial healing and harmony, as Luciano didn’t respond to my request to interview him. All I know is that the following night, the night I was there, I counted two black people in the audience.

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Earlier this year, Talia Gibas analyzed Holly Sidford’s manifesto “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” for Createquity. “Fusing” has become a rallying cry for cultural equity advocates who believe that philanthropic resources are unjustly concentrated in venerable institutions with white European roots like MoMA. The study analyzed the flow of philanthropic dollars to the arts using data from the Foundation Center, and found that less than 10% of arts grant dollars went to serve marginalized communities, including African Americans.

Interestingly, the restoration of Right On!, undertaken by MoMA with the support of individual donors, not foundations, would not have registered as a project serving a marginalized community under Sidford’s methodology. And by excavating a treasure of the black cultural canon from functional oblivion with (from all appearances) the full cooperation of the creative individuals involved, one could argue that MoMA is doing the African American community a wonderful service, fulfilling its role as custodian of heritage in a truly inclusive way. But it’s also not hard to see the transfer in setting from underground movie theater in heady 1970 to establishment art museum in 2013 as a particularly insidious kind of cultural appropriation. It was a striking experience to watch Right On! from the comfort of MoMA, of all places. It was, in fact, like being in a museum, as if there were a glass wall between the movie and me allowing me to appreciate it as a cultural object while preventing me from truly entering its world. The raw, unfiltered power and emotion directed at the camera was boxed in and partially neutered by the time it reached me on the other side of the screen, sitting next to my white college friend and the many white people in the room who could have been my friends if I’d happened to come across them in a different context. As unmistakable as the film’s point of view was, it was easy, too easy, to compartmentalize it as an artifact of a different era, a time when revolution was in the air and the evils of racism were upfront and obvious.

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I’m not sure there is anything that has claimed as high a brain-energy-expended-to-public-output-generated ratio for me as race this past year. Way back in February, some of you might recall, I inserted myself into a discussion about race and the arts that had been started by New Beans’s Clayton Lord, then Director of Audience Development for Theatre Bay Area and now VP of Local Arts Advancement for Americans for the Arts. At the time, I noted that “virtually all of the recent discussion…in this particular corner of the blogosphere [was] happening among well-meaning white liberals who just can’t help themselves from occupying public space with their opinions.” I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Roberto Bedoya, head of the Tucson Pima Arts Council in Arizona and a longtime follower of this blog, thanked me for pointing it out and challenged me and five other bloggers—pale pasties, all of us—to “share with us some of [our] good thinking and deep reflection on [our] understanding of how the White Racial Frame intersects with cultural polices and cultural practices.” Piece of cake, right?

You can read the responses from Clay, Doug, Nina, Barry, Diane, and Roberto himself at the links provided. As eager as I was to participate (I promised I would, after all), extracting words from my brain these past months was like squeezing blood from a stone. The topic of race offers a white liberal like me a frustratingly narrow range of socially acceptable rhetoric. Like any self-respecting contrarian, I have no interest in saying what’s already been said, but at the same time I felt woefully underprepared to confidently take the conversation in a new direction. It took a long time, a lot of background research, and many discussions with family, friends and social and professional acquaintances who consciously engage with issues around race before I finally felt comfortable airing my views in public.

If there’s one positive and concrete suggestion I can offer in the wake of that learning process, it’s that we do what we can to create an open environment for talking honestly about race relations in all of their kaleidoscopic, maddening, shame-inducing complexity. The dialogue that Clay and Roberto have started is a great first step in that direction, but we need to keep it going if we truly want to achieve more than symbolic progress towards a more racially just sector. And the more I learn, the more strongly I suspect that in order to keep that dialogue going in an authentic way, we are going to need to take it into some very uncomfortable, challenging territory – for white people and non-white people alike, for anti-racism advocates and white privilege apologists both.

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Several of my fellow bloggers who responded to Roberto’s prompt made valuable points about the need and opportunity to be more inclusive and welcoming in our institutions’ programming and audience engagement practices. And certain artistic works undoubtedly have the power to hold a mirror up to ourselves and question the assumptions of our environment, as Right On! was able to do for me. But I feel that this conversation is missing something crucial if we neglect to expand the frame outward, to grapple with how our country and society’s dysfunctional relationship with race informs and warps our lives more generally.

Art and arts organizations are not capable of solving racism on their own. It’s not that the arts have nothing to say about race or that diverse cultural expressions aren’t important, but in the absence of a clear and shared understanding of the underlying factors that perpetuate racism, I fear that arts-centric interventions can all too often end up being little more than a band-aid – a way to reassure ourselves that we’re doing something important and valuable when in reality we’re really having very little impact at all. I believe that the sooner we as a field start framing our efforts not around “what can we do as artists and arts administrators to promote diversity?” but rather “how does racial injustice manifest today, what are its root causes, and how can we as human beings most effectively be part of the solution?”, the sooner we’ll actually have something to be proud of.

For example, I’ve now been a part of several organizations that have struggled with the fact that their staffs are mostly white. One of the most visible commitments to diversity that an organization can make is to have strong representation of people of color among its staff, board, and leadership. Not surprisingly, then, managers typically have these considerations at back of mind when entering the hiring process, and sometimes even explicitly consider race as a factor in their decision. And yet they get frustrated when they are unable to find competitive candidates of color at a rate that would, as advocated by Robert Bush, make them “look like the people [they] serve.”

Simple statistics, however, quickly start to illuminate some of the reasons behind this frustration. Virtually every arts administration job I’ve ever seen requires a Bachelor’s degree as a minimum condition of employment. I’m willing to bet that most arts administrators don’t realize that fewer than a third of American adults over the age of 25 have one. More to the point, however, black and Hispanic adults are 40 to 60 percent less likely respectively to have graduated from college than whites. So if having a Bachelor’s truly is a requirement for doing the job well*, then “success” as it relates to representativeness actually means matching the proportion of people with college degrees, not the general population.

Of course, if you have any conscience at all, the above rationalization is unsatisfying. It openly admits and does absolutely nothing about a basic racial equity issue: access to opportunities based on educational attainment. But therein lies the rub: if we actually care that the disparity in college graduation rates is causing our application pool to be less diverse, that is if we care enough to do something about it, our daily work may not be the most appropriate forum in which to take action. What’s needed to close that gap, in all likelihood, goes way beyond the arts.

(*This is, of course, an important question to examine in its own right, but in the interests of not biting off more than I can chew with one article, I’m going to sidestep it for now.)

*

The stark disparity in college graduation rates described above can be seen as one manifestation of the so-called “achievement gap” between white students and black and Hispanic students. This achievement gap is present from a very early age, though not necessarily birth. One contributing factor to the achievement gap, though undoubtedly not the whole story, is the vast differential in the quality of the schools available to white students vs. students of color, especially in urban environments.

America’s cities are highly segregated geographically, in part a vestige of real estate redlining practices and white flight following the Second Great Migration in the mid-20^th century. Even today, there is evidence that white homebuyers are willing to pay more money not to have to live in a neighborhood with lots of people of color. As a result, by some measures school systems in the United States are even more segregated today than they were when Brown vs. Board of Education was first implemented in the 1960s. Meanwhile, school systems are governed by local rules and jurisdictions and, crucially, paid for via local property taxes. Ever wonder why people move to the suburbs to send their kids to good schools? Well, that’s why. On a per-capita basis, suburbs are much wealthier than urban cores and therefore can afford schools that are less crowded and feature more amenities for their students.  People who don’t follow the education field may not realize that public school systems are struggling in large cities all across the country, not just where they live.

There is no magic bullet for fighting racial inequity; in the Atlantic Cities recently, for example, Emily Badger makes the case that establishing universal preschool is the best single thing we could do, but even the rosiest projections offered in that article make clear that such a measure would hardly erase the achievement gap. Nevertheless, as educated professionals, one action we could take that might actually make a difference is to locate ourselves in areas where our tax dollars will go to support these struggling school systems. And yet, many of my white peers are doing the exact opposite: explicitly shopping for real estate by school district, trying their best to ensure that their kid(s) will be less likely to end up in a bad situation – and, incidentally, a lot less likely to be surrounded by kids of color.

It’s awfully tough to ask someone to choose between fighting for racial equity and forgoing the best possible education for their child. I believe that sacrifice is a virtue, but I am not enough of a romantic to count on it as a large-scale strategy for social change. Perhaps the real enemy here, then, is not the racism-perpetuating behavior, but the system that sets up the incentives that encourage it. In this case, that system is the funding of public school systems based on local property taxes. If we really want to attack this part of the problem at its core, perhaps we should be advocating instead for a system that runs schools locally but funds them nationally, presumably through an expanded Department of Education. What can arts organizations do to push forward that outcome? And why is hardly anyone else talking about it?

Let’s take a step back for a minute and remember how we got here. We were wondering how a hiring manager could get her staff to better reflect the diversity of her community. Now, 900-some-odd words later, we’re talking about advocating for a giant expansion of the Department of Education, universal preschool, and in the meantime intentionally sending our kids to substandard schools. Does it make sense now why, despite all of our conversations about race and privilege, nothing ever seems to change?

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I like to think of myself as a technocrat – as I get older, I find myself becoming less and less interested in what sounds good and more and more interested in what works. On this blog and at my day job alike, I advocate for “evidence-based decision-making.” I champion logic models and theories of change as tools for taking apart complex systems. I push for a big-picture, strategic approach to everything, most of all to gigantic social clusterfucks that take lifetimes to unravel.

I don’t do these things for giggles or to increase my SEO ranking. I do them because I genuinely believe in the power of analytical thinking to help us make sense of the world. Using good research methodologies can tell us useful things like the fact that even your mom smoking crack while she’s pregnant with you doesn’t screw up your life anywhere near as much as being born into poverty, or that educating parents on how to parent better might just be a way to fix some of these problems.

In order to really be able to use research, you have to keep an open mind. You’re not going to learn anything if you’re not willing to let the research surprise you. And sometimes those surprises can be an unpleasant source of cognitive dissonance.

I think this is where I have the greatest difficulty with the “discourse” around race as I’ve most often experienced it in this country. Some months ago I wrote on this blog about the phenomenon of “mood affiliation,” a term coined by economist Tyler Cowen to refer (as I interpret it) to a tendency among participants in debates to ally themselves with a certain “side” and subordinate new facts or information to the preferred interpretation of their “team.” A more widely recognized name for this sort of thing is confirmation bias.

I feel like there’s a whole lot of mood affiliation that goes on in conversations about race. The population subgroups that are active in these conversations place a high value on coordinated action and messaging. That means that, if you consider yourself an anti-racist and would like for others to perceive you that way as well, there are very real social and even professional risks associated with taking certain positions on issues that may not be clear-cut at all. Something like stop-and-frisk may not be good policy (it’s not), but we need to be able to ask the question of whether it actually works before dismissing it on moral grounds – and, more importantly, be prepared to answer the question of what if it does? Alas, stories about race become politicized so quickly that it becomes much more difficult to take an unbiased, critical look at the situation than it is to rely on whatever position one’s identity group has rallied behind.

For that reason, what I crave the most is to see conversations about race imbued with the complexity and nuance they deserve. I’m not talking about the throw-up-our-hands-and-declare-defeat kind of acknowledgement of complexity, but the okay-let’s-get-into-the-weeds-and-figure-this-shit-out kind. In order for that to happen, critiques that question conventional wisdom about race are going to have to play a bigger role. Critiques like these:

• How important is race relative to other forms of difference? Race gets a lot of attention, but is it the most relevant lens through which to view social justice in the present-day United States? I’ve noticed that the idea of comparing injustices to each other gets a lot of pushback from anti-racists; the phrase “oppression Olympics” gets thrown about a lot. And I understand how, from an advocacy perspective, this line of thinking is counterproductive and can be used as a rhetorical device to turn underprivileged groups against each other. But from a policy perspective, asking these kinds of questions is essential. Policy always involves making tradeoffs among finite alternatives – taking one approach can often mean not taking another, so you have to choose priorities and emphases carefully. There are lots of unearned inequities among different segments of people in this life, many of which have established places in national dialogue and many of which have not. Did you know, for example, that height is significantly correlated with earning power? On the strength of a study conducted for his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell even claims that “being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I do think it makes sense to try to identify and target leverage points that trigger lots of injustices at once. One of those leverage points might be socioeconomic class, given that economic security touches so many areas of life. In no small part due to the legacies of historical discrimination, race and class today are closely intertwined: white families are on average an astounding six times wealthier than black and Hispanic families. But this means that a strategy to address class inequities, which can benefit from some existing infrastructure in the form of progressive taxation, will have the benefit of addressing many (albeit not all) of the racial inequities as well.
• Can we stop talking as if there are only two sides to this story? Too many of the mainstream narratives about race in the United States are stuck in mid-twentieth-century paradigms of black vs. white. The classic archetypes of the oppressor and the oppressed make for good movies, but the racial groups that feature in conversations about race today are insanely reductive visions of reality. Hispanic/Latino makes lots of sense as a language-based subculture (superculture?), but it’s not an actual race even though we often talk about it as if it is. Arab Americans are considered Caucasian by the Census, but try talking to them about white privilege while they’re going through US Customs. Most African Americans are actually mixed race, and first-generation African immigrants often have little in common with descendents of American slaves beyond their skin color. There are Jewish Venezuelans and white Africans and black Dutch. People of color are not a monolithic group, and don’t always like each other; there is a long and ugly history, for example, of East Asian bigotry against black people. Nor do they face the same challenges: whereas the college graduation rates for African Americans and Hispanics are 20% and 14% respectively, Asians have been north of 50% since 2005. We are prone to equate gentrification with “white people taking over the neighborhood” but ignore the role that people of color play in that process.  Even within the arts, we oversimplify the racial identities of our institutions, casually applying the adjective “white” to orchestras for example, in spite of a huge influx of Korean, Chinese and Japanese instrumentalists in recent decades. The anti-racist movement is fond of pointing out that race is an artificial social construct—maybe we should all start treating it like one?
• What is the role of assimilation in defining racial power structures? White people are not a monolithic group either. In the United States alone, there used to be bitter hatred towards ethnic Germans, rampant discrimination against Jews, and immigration restrictions erected against Italians, to name a few. What we think of as “white privilege” today was WASP privilege 100 years ago. What lessons can we learn from the dramatic cultural shift that has taken place in the meantime? And how much of a role has intermarriage between white ethnic groups (see below for more) had in making that shift possible? Moreover, does talking about white people as one group – since no white ethnic group would constitute a majority on its own – serve only to solidify the sense of whiteness as the majority default? In a long piece for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Heinz Foundation arts program officer Justin Laing criticizes “the normativeness of White people’s arts and culture experience that is often implied when ALANA [African, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American] work is referred to as ‘culturally specific’ or ‘ethnic arts’ or ‘folk arts,’ as though White artists’ and arts organizations’ work is less specific, ethnic, or folksy.” Laing goes on to write, “This false idea, Whiteness, is maybe the most damaging of all of the race-based fallacies because it plants deep within us the idea that White people are both separate and the standard; it’s a particularly harmful idea in our field that treats the best of White culture as classical not only for Europeans but also for the world.” To what extent does the diversity conversation in the arts perpetuate the very inequities we’re trying to dismantle?
• How is demographic change going to affect the way we think about race? The United States will be a majority-minority country within 30 years. Four states – California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii – along with the District of Columbia already hold this status. The vast splits between racial and ethnic groups in recent presidential elections remind us that in a democracy, having a baby is not just a personal decision, it’s also a political act. Of course, just increasing the numbers of brown people won’t necessarily lead to the end of white hegemony – see the early-20^th-century South or mid-20^th-century South Africa for proof of that. Perhaps more important, then, is the increasing trend toward multiracial families via adoption (especially by increasingly visible gay parents) and widespread intermarriage, both of which are and will continue to be facilitated by the growing numbers of non-white individuals in the U.S. Could this blurring of racial categories smooth over old tensions to the point that no one cares about them anymore? I wouldn’t discount the possibility, especially when you consider how much the drive towards acceptance of gay marriage has been driven by loved ones coming out as gay. The elevation of a mixed-race President may not signal a society that has moved beyond race, as some have over-optimistically claimed, but it may yet be a harbinger of America’s post-racial future.
• How committed are anti-racist white people to ending white privilege? This is an important point that I really don’t think we ever talk about. Merely recognizing that white privilege exists and feeling bad about it is not a recipe for change. Real change, all else being equal, must involve actual sacrifices on the part of those in power, with the white majority being the party in power when it comes to white privilege. Power is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but relative power is – and the privileged position in which white people find themselves in the United States is a result of the exercise of asymmetric power dynamics in the past. My questions for those who fancy that they would like to end white privilege are as follows: why don’t we ever talk about giving large swaths of land back to the Indian tribes who once occupied them, and whose value system is so rooted in the land itself? Why don’t we ever talk seriously anymore about reparations for slavery, the reverberations of which are still very much being felt today? (Such reparations would be hardly unprecedented, by the way.) Wouldn’t such things represent much more meaningful change than reminding oneself to make eye contact when one sees a person of color coming the other way?
• Would we be better off as a society if we were actually less conscious of race, not more? Even if that’s not the right or a realistic goal for the short term, is it what we should be working towards in the end? If so, how would that change how we approach conversations about race? In a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace eight years ago, Morgan Freeman famously called Black History Month “ridiculous” and called for its dissolution. Wallace asked how we can get rid of racism otherwise, and Freeman responded, “Stop talking about it! I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace, you know me as Morgan Freeman.” I imagine that many people reading this are familiar with the concept of priming in psychology – the idea that subtle stimuli can (often unconsciously) affect our behaviors and performance. There’s even a significant literature exploring the racial dimensions of priming; for example, one study found that simply identifying their race on a pretest questionnaire cut black students’ performance on GRE questions in half. Well, what happens when we continually prime white people to believe that they’re racist, and people of color that they are victims of racism? Does that in any way exacerbate the problem?

Introducing this sort of complexity into the equation may come off as an invitation to chaos. But think about it this way: would we be satisfied with a map of the world that just had the seven continents on it and a vague notation of which direction they are relative to each other? No, we do what we need to as a society to have hyper-specific geographic markers down to a few hundred feet, all connected, continually updated, existing within an ecosystem of other information like traffic patterns and mountain heights and vote totals.

I believe that the frame for our discussion must be both that large and that fine-grained in order to make real progress. On the large end of the scale, what do we care about most? Is containing racism, rather than ending it, acceptable? And if ending it is paramount, then is equality of opportunity sufficient for ending racism, or is equality of outcomes necessary? At the micro scale, who benefits and who suffers from racial constructs, to what extent and in what ways? In each case, down to the individual level, how much of that benefit or suffering is the product of socially-constructed and mutable ideas of race and how much is tethered to immutable realities of race? And what of those inequities are solely attributable to race rather than tied up in other kinds of disadvantage/privilege?

What can I say, it turns out that understanding and dealing with race is really hard! But I truly believe that only the hard work of identifying what our true values are and articulating how we resolve dilemmas when they come into conflict with other values can help us resolve the large-scale questions. And only the hard work of mapping out all of these intimidating complexities as they play out in individual lives will enable us to make the changes to our societal rules and behaviors that will end up serving the most people the most fairly. In fact, I don’t see how anything other than hard work, strategically focused, will make any difference at all. So let’s get to work.

*

(I am deeply grateful to Talia Gibas, Selena Juneau-Vogel, Daniel Reid, Hayley Roberts, F. Javier Torres, and Jason Tseng for their incisive comments on an earlier draft of this article, and to many others for their conversations and perspectives that helped expand my world these past nine months.)

Further reading:

• Andy Horwitz, Whites Only (Or, WTF is the Deal with Diversity in the Arts?)
• Maria Vlachou, The beginning and ending of a b&w week in Vienna
• Maria Vlachou, The new year
• Linda Essig, Diversity, Equality, Bus Lanes, and the Arts
• John L. Moore, III, Equity/Diversity/Change
• The Untenable Whiteness of Theater Audiences, discussion thread at MetaFilter
• Clayton Lord, Yes/And – tackling racial diversity by looking to things adjacent
• Clayton Lord, Carrying Forward, Clumsily (if you read one piece by Clay, I recommend this one)
• Jesse Rosen, Doing More About Diversity in America’s Orchestras
• Tiffany Wilhelm has put together a Google Document with lots of links to additional resources

“Will Work 4 Food,” a mural by New York street artist Lord Scotch 79. Photo credit: carnagenyc

Philip Glass drove a taxi, Patti Smith was a bookstore clerk, and William Faulkner worked the night shift at a power plant. It’s an old story: when they aren’t working in their studios, recording, or rehearsing for upcoming auditions, many, if not most artists spend their time at another job that brings in a steady income. Some take what few teaching positions they can at colleges and universities – an increasingly unstable source of employment. Others land full-time jobs in the commercial arts. They set aside their own visions and projects in service of students and clients, while earning a salary that no doubt inflates the $43,230 median wage of U.S. artists reported in a 2011 NEA study. Offering limited opportunities for recognition and financial growth, these gigs can seem like consolation prizes in a field where few ever achieve stardom. However, for those artists lucky enough to make it big one day, the financial rewards can be enormous.

The arts labor market has been called one of the oldest examples of a “winner-take-all” economy, a term popularized by Robert Frank and Philip Cook in their 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. The hallmark of this kind of market is extreme income inequality, whereby a small number of the bright, talented, and fortunate generate the majority of economic value. Case in point: according to the New York Times, 56 percent of all concert revenue in 2003 flowed to just a handful of pop music stars like Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. That left less than half the year’s proceeds to be divided amongst all other performers.

But the arts aren’t the only field in which a huge number of aspirants compete for few professional gigs, often choosing between what will sell and what they really want to do. Here we take a look at two other examples of “winner-take-all” economies and consider a future in pursuit of superstardom.

Fashion Models

In 2012, Gisele Bündchen earned $45 million. In addition to working her typical modeling gigs, the Brazilian thirty-something is a spokeswoman and endorsement queen contracting with big name brands such as Pantene, Esprit, and Versace. Her commercial success and business savvy have made her the Andy Warhol of the modeling world, although he never made nearly as much while alive. Gisele leads her supermodel pals in yearly earnings by a cool $36 million, with Kate Moss in distant second place.

Supermodel Gisele Bündchen reportedly earned $45 million in 2012. Photo credit: Tiago Chediak

The allure of such multi-million dollar salaries, the jet-set lifestyle, and the promise of beauty immortalized on the cover of Vogue has inspired many young women to pursue a modeling career. Popular TV shows like America’s Next Top Model have steadily increased the number of new hopefuls into the industry. Unfortunately, that has only made the dream harder to attain. Ed Razek of Limited Brands puts into sharp perspective just how tough it is to be one of 140 women to have strutted the catwalk for Victoria’s Secret over the years:

“There are seven billion people on the planet. That makes each of them not one in a million, not one in five million, not one in ten million. That literally makes them one in 50 million humans.”

All Bündchens aside, success in the fashion world is extremely difficult to attain. In fact, the median income for an American model in 2009 was $27,330. How is that possible? According to sociologist and ex-model Ashley Mears in her book Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, the sheer number of women competing for modeling opportunities today has caused pay rates to drop. A few years back a runway show would typically pay $1,000 to $5,000 a day. At this year’s New York Fashion Week, one model made between $800 and $1,000 per show and sometimes was only compensated in trade such as clothing, jewelry or makeup. She was also expected to front the expenses for her transportation to and from gigs, as well as for hotel stays. After all that, her agency still took a commission. A model can quickly find herself in debt if the jobs don’t line up – and they very well might not. It’s common for a model to go weeks without another opportunity. So why does she suffer through it all? For the exposure. Sound familiar?

Just like artists, models will often spend their own money on projects and ply their craft for next to nothing for the sake of exposing their work to a broader audience in hopes that they will eventually be “discovered.” If that moment never comes, the model may have to find a more reliable means of support. These jobs are usually less glamorous than shooting couture magazine spreads in exotic locations. In Pricing Beauty, Mears identifies the highest earner at one New York agency: a perfect size 8 who can charge $500 per hour for fittings with major American retailers. For all the cash she brings in, there’s little prestige in this type of work and agencies actually frown upon these jingle-makers of the fashion world.

The Bill of Rights (left) drafted by Model Alliance and W.A.G.E.’s “wo/manifesto” both advocate for fair pay and ethical treatment of industry workers.

Not all models are willing to accept current wage inequities within the industry. Model Alliance is an unofficial union formed by supermodel Sara Ziff that aims to establish ethical standards and fair pay for its workers. Their interests mirror those of labor advocates in the arts, such as Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), a New York-based group fighting for regulated payment of arts workers at nonprofit institutions. While both industries remain wholly unregulated, these labor organizations give voice to an under-paid and under-represented workforce. Which brings us to…

Lawyers (the curveball) 

Practicing law has long been touted by many a family member as one of the most lucrative, and therefore reliable, careers. However, a shift in economic climate and rise in digital technology and information access has eroded this old standard. Once upon a time in 2008, recent law graduates had a job placement rate of 76.9% in positions that required passing the bar exam. Since then many changes have swept the industry, including automation of once labor-intensive work, the outsourcing of mid-level clerk positions, an increase in price competition, and a trend towards doing away with the billable hour structure. Last year, the American Bar Association (ABA) reported that barely half of law school graduates had found work in comparable full-time positions. Couple this high level of unemployment with the enormous amount of debt incurred by students—the average is about $125,000 for private law school—and the situation starts to seem a little desperate.

Andrew Carmichael Post, a “boy-genius” who passed the California State Bar at the age of 22, still wasn’t exceptional enough to land a job with a firm after graduating. He resorted to living with his parents, wearing Goodwill, and working four jobs as a computer programmer while taking on small business clients just to afford his $2,756 monthly loan repayment. His total debt of $215,000 far exceeds the national average. Post is not alone in having to adjust his career expectations. Above the Law recently stumbled across a job post on Boston College Law School’s website with an annual salary of $10,000. Not only is that below the minimum wage, it contrasts starkly with the $6,500,000 earned by the highest paid general counsel in 2012 – and that figure doesn’t include his stock option. Incidentally, the law office that posted the listing defended the low salary, citing “valuable experience” as a perk of the position. Thirty-two hopefuls applied.

Detail of “Bad Reasons to Go to Law School,” an epic flow chart created by attorney Samuel Browning based on the book Don’t Go to Law School (Unless) by Paul Campos.

The legal industry has begun to respond to the changing shape of the marketplace. The ABA recently presented a report calling for education reform that would help reduce the time investment needed to obtain a law degree and promote lower tuition costs. It suggests training non-legal professionals in limited services and lowering requirements for taking the bar exam. Some law schools have already reacted by reducing class sizes. One has even lowered acceptance standards in an attempt to boost admissions after a drop in enrollment. A number of schools have opened nonprofit law firms to give graduates a little income and real world experience, while also addressing a growing need for affordable legal services. Dozens more plan to offer similar programs for alumni in coming years.

It’s uncertain whether changes within the legal field are here to stay, but for the moment they threaten to upend the lawyer’s traditional career trajectory from student to clerk to firm associate. They also hint at a future with more affordable basic legal services provided by lesser-paid specialists, while the talented and ambitious few in Big Law continue to command eye-popping salaries. Reflecting on the results of the 2013 Law Firms in Transition Survey, Tom Clay of Altman Weil wrote, “Firms are beginning to think more strategically about growth – trading up to improve profitability, rather then bulking up to drive gross revenues.”

Artists (home plate)

The rise of nonprofit law firms provides an interesting comparison to the arts. What would happen if arts schools now examined the law school model of running spaces where alumni gain experience, earn income, and provide a service to the community? Would this model temper dreams of art world superstardom and promote a more sustainable career path? Would it also provide a means of lowering education costs for artists, an issue the arts sector has debated heavily as more and more artists enroll in MFA programs, some with tuitions of nearly $100,000?

Many of those artists, just like Andrew Carmichael Post and his classmates, will likely have difficulty repaying their student loans. In “Artists in the Winner-Take-All Economy,” sociologist Mark Stern surmises that income disparity in the arts is representative of overall trends in our society, and we ignore it at our own peril. He also paints a rather pessimistic picture of an economy that perpetuates the culture of superstars ad infinitum once it takes hold. The outcome is a country wholly divided by income and accessibility, a depressing thought. However, if the arts are in any way representative of the rest of the system, then working to transform its micro-economy into a healthier and sustainable one may provide clues as to how to pull our society out of the superstar spiral.

Image by Giulia Forsythe via Flickr

The field of education is swimming in acronyms (care to forecast what a new AYP system will look like once CCSS fully replaces NCLB?) but a new one, MOOC, is causing a stir. MOOC, which as a New York Times columnist dramatically emphasizes, “aptly rhymes with nuke,” is shorthand for Massive Open Online Course.

In the simplest of terms, a MOOC is an online mechanism for teaching and learning that (metaphorically) blows the walls off the traditional classroom, and the gates off the traditional campus. In a MOOC, the instructor still stands at “the front of the room” and delivers content, but the audience has expanded to hundreds of thousands of people. And most of those people haven’t had to go through an arduous admissions process or, better yet, pay a nickel to get in the (virtual) door.

It’s important to pause here and stress what a MOOC is not. The online course you took for credit three years ago? Not open to everyone and probably didn’t have enrollment surpassing 100; not a MOOC. The free webinar your local funder hosted about a new grant program? While informative, it was not a sequential, structured course offering, therefore not a MOOC. The free course material, including videotaped lectures, course notes and reading lists you happily lap up on MIT Open CourseWare or Open Yale Courses? The content may be fascinating, but as it is posted in bulk without a registration process, live instructor, or formal assessment systems, it is also not a MOOC.

Online learning models have existed since the dawn of the Internet, and private universities have experimented with posting free content for years. The concept of a MOOC, however, is fairly new. One of its more obvious precursors, Khan Academy, is only about seven years old. Khan Academy began when its founder, Salman Khan, posted short, low-tech videos on YouTube to help his nieces and nephews learn math thousands of miles away. Today it boasts more than four thousand short videos and exercises on everything from arithmetic to physics, and interactive learning dashboards that help students pick their next lessons. According to lead developer Ben Kamens, it has about fifteen million registered users.

Khan Academy gained significant attention in 2010 with large grants from Google and The Gates Foundation. Around the same time, higher education began experimenting with putting content online in new ways. In 2011, Stanford professor and artificial intelligence guru Sebastian Thrun offered his popular Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to anyone with an Internet connection and ten hours a week to spare. A year later he founded Udacity, one of the two most well known MOOC providers. The other, Coursera, was launched by Thrun’s Stanford colleagues the same year. Meanwhile, Harvard and MIT teamed up to launch EdX. Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, and others jumped on the MOOC bandwagon, adding courses to the Udacity, Coursera, and EdX rosters. Suddenly MOOCs were all the rage. Little more than a year after the silly-sounded acronym was coined, the California senate passed a bill requiring universities in the state to offer and provide credit for MOOC alternatives to “oversubscribed” classes – i.e. courses that students needed to graduate, but were shut out of as a result of California’s pernicious budget issues.

The diversity of MOOC offerings has expanded as rapidly as their number. The majority of early MOOCs (and remember, by “early” I mean they launched waaaay back in 2011) tended toward math, engineering, and computer science courses with multiple-choice exams that could easily be processed by computer. As of this writing, however, Udacity has added “design” as a new course category. Coursera, meanwhile, boasts courses on everything from poetry to comic books to public speaking. Coursera has also partnered with alternative education sites, including the Museum of Modern Art, which recently offered a MOOC on museum teaching strategies for classroom educators, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Now to those of you who, like me, have found yourselves swept up in reminiscences of the reading list for an awesome philosophy course you took in college, a MOOC sounds the best thing since your dad gave you a set of “great lectures on world history” CDs for your birthday (‘fess up: you loved them). But in their short-but-swift lifespans, MOOCs have inspired their fair share of controversies. Some are small-scale and amusing hiccups, like the case of the failed MOOC about how to teach a MOOC.  Others, however, raise deeper questions about pedagogy and quality control. While “massive” numbers of people sign up for MOOCs, very few – according to one study, less than 7 percent – stick around to earn course credit or a formal certificate of completion. How do you prevent them from cheating—and how do you determine whether they are learning anything? A professor at the University of California, Irvine abruptly quit teaching a MOOC on microeconomics, citing difficulties in getting his thousands of students to read required material. Meanwhile, philosophy professors at San Jose State University formally protested the school’s plans to partner with EdX and Udacity, arguing MOOCs, “designed by elite universities and widely licensed by others, would compromise the quality of education, stifle diverse viewpoints and lead to the dismantling of public universities.” San Jose State went ahead with its plans and suffered another setback a few months later, when more than half of the students signed up for the first round of MOOCs failed their final exams. The university has since put its MOOC experiment on hold, though early rumblings indicate it may return, with some changes, next year.

Despite these difficulties, there are enough success stories that interest in MOOCs shows no sign of waning. MOOCs may well be on the verge of disrupting higher education in the United States. If they do, they will have a revolutionary impact on K-12 public education – and, by extension, arts education. At first glance, MOOCs don’t appear particularly relevant to the arts. While a handful of arts-focused institutions have jumped on the bandwagon early (offering courses like “Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works”), so much of best practice in arts education relies on hands-on experience that it’s difficult to grasp at first how online platforms could impact it. However, arts educators working with public school systems on a frequent basis need to pay attention for three reasons:

1.  Online learning may soon move to the top of any district official’s priority list. An effective K-12 system must provide a clear pathway to higher education, and our new Common Core State Standards put an unprecedented emphasis on college and career readiness. If our notion of how college is structured changes, traditional K-12 classrooms will shift accordingly.
2. If it does, those in the arts and humanities fields will have some catching up to do. Unsurprisingly given MOOCs’ origins, people in science and technology fields seem more favorably abuzz about MOOCs than those in the arts and humanities. While pedagogical concerns are valid, insisting our fields cannot be translated to a MOOC-like learning environment may set up an unhelpful contrast between artistic and scientific disciplines. Not long ago the University of Florida entertained a controversial “differential tuition” proposal that would have involved charging students less to enroll in science, technology and engineering courses than arts and humanities courses. The university’s rationale was to provide students added incentive to enter fields it felt spur economic development. While the debate never got into MOOCs specifically, it may foreshadow cost/benefit analyses that will only get more pointed if even a handful of MOOCs succeed. And speaking of cost/benefit analyses…
3. If MOOCs take off, they will turn the economics of education upside down. In their current structure – large, easily accessible, and most importantly, free – MOOCs may be to colleges and universities what Napster was to the music industry. MIT’s Michael Cusumano, pointing to the decline of newspapers, magazines, and the book publishing industry, cautions that price is an important signal of value, and that “’free’ sends a signal to the world that what you are offering has little value and may not be worth paying for.” He writes, “Stanford, MIT, Harvard et al, have already opened a kind of ‘Pandora’s box,’ and there may be no easy way to go back and charge students even a moderately high tuition rate for open online courses.” With the cost of higher education ballooning out of control, the idea that MOOCs signal it “isn’t worth paying for” may strike some as an overdue but welcome reality check. However, with Harvard University recently issuing a call to its alumni to serve as volunteer teaching assistants for the MOOC version of a popular philosophy course, one can’t help but wonder if a new precedent is being set for the teaching profession. Is it possible that in the not-so-distant future, a handful of academic hotshots fresh off their TEDTalks will be paid handsomely, while their discussion groups are farmed out to unpaid interns or retirees?

Taking these three points together and thinking about the implications for arts education, the issue of cost immediately stands out. While cheaper isn’t always better, it is more tempting, particularly to elected officials and the public employees who work for them. A few months ago the Georgia Institute of Technology announced it would offer a new, virtual master’s program at one-sixth the price of its traditional master’s degree. If this learning paradigm becomes common practice in higher education, K-12 will try to follow suit. Working with a school to include and integrate the arts, though, particularly through a shared delivery model, takes a lot of time and money. Arts educators will therefore need to be prepared to articulate how their work with students and teachers can complement and enhance the broad financial and pedagogical shifts that MOOCs portend.

That means starting to think now about how arts education will translate to a different platform. A few years ago, Thomas Friedman argued that any jobs that can be outsourced, will be outsourced; by the same token, any knowledge and skills that can be taught online will be taught online. Certain components of arts education are likely to transfer well: basic vocabulary, the elements of visual art, how to read music. The questions that remain are a) which components can’t be included, and b) which of those are most relevant and engaging to students on their own terms. A recent report commissioned by The Wallace Foundation finds increasing numbers of students using online tools and digital technology to pursue “interest-driven arts learning,” a “form of participation where youths research and learn about their creative passions and hobbies, connecting them to peers with the same interests who may extend beyond their immediate social circle.” In doing so, students appear to be gaining the same skills they would otherwise acquire in K-12 learning settings. The report also notes a contrast between the digital tools young people use when they make art on their own and the traditional materials and disciplines they encounter in schools. Does this mean that traditional artistic disciplines will become obsolete in classrooms? No, but it may mean that they are used explicitly to reinforce skills like precision and attention to detail that students explore outside of the classroom first, and then can later apply directly to their work in Sketchbook Pro.

This idea that students use in-class time to practice, refine and experiment with basic skills they learn online describes a “flipped classroom,” and also represents the most optimistic scenario for MOOCs in the long run. In a flipped classroom, the traditional roles of classroom time and homework are reversed. Rather than learn a concept in the classroom and then apply it at home via worksheets, students acquire content online via a pre-taped lecture or Khan-Academy-like lessons. Then they come to class to discuss and experiment.

Infographic from Knewton

In this model, teachers are less content experts and more partners in learning. TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra took this idea further with his vision of a “School in the Cloud” in which learning is entirely self-directed and a network of experts and educators (many retired, it’s worth noting) support children across the world. If MOOCs find their footing in education, they could serve as a “great equalizer” of educational opportunity. Beginning in the 1970s, public television via Children’s Television Workshop (aka Sesame Street) was developed specifically to reduce disparities in kindergarten readiness between high- and low-income toddlers. By most measures, it succeeded. If online learning, via some version of MOOCs, were designed for children with similar pedagogical rigor, classroom time could free up significantly. Cross-disciplinary applications, project-based learning, partnerships with cultural and community arts providers… these could become the core of what happens in all schools.

That’s the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic scenario reserves everything I’ve described above for the wealthy. In the pessimistic scenario, second-tier and community colleges are no longer economically viable, leaving students who cannot afford to attend bricks-and-mortar colleges to navigate through a maze of MOOCs. Those with the innate motivation and inquisitiveness to create a “school in the cloud” do so; the rest do not. ”Public” education shifts to an online platform. Students in wealthy districts with active PTAs and education foundations have the means to keep their bricks and mortar classrooms as spaces of inquiry and experimentation. The rest supply their students with iPads (as some large, urban districts are already doing) but not much else.

I’m an optimist by nature, but avoiding the latter scenario won’t be easy. Recent research out of Stanford points to a widening gap between rich and middle/lower income families’ abilities to invest in their children: to provide tutors, after-school dance classes, and opportunities to travel and explore. As our Secretary of Education put it while summarizing national data on arts in schools, “the arts opportunity gap is widest for children in high-poverty schools.” If MOOCs and online learning take off, it will be much easier for arts education providers to adapt within schools where they have existing relationships – and which are probably wealthier — than to start from scratch elsewhere. For MOOCs to “level the playing field” rather than widen the gap, we will need to make basic digital infrastructure available to all students and target online learning efforts toward vulnerable populations. Sesame Street did it with toddlers decades ago using a public broadcasting forum, but unfortunately the Internet doesn’t yet have such an equivalent. The “digital divide,” meanwhile, is persistent; while broadband access has improved for most Americans in the last few years, many schools continue to lag far behind.

MOOCs are extremely young, and for all their hype, may flame out as quickly as they rose to prominence. We are prone to misreading the impact technology will have on our lives. When televisions first became ubiquitous in American households, those in the Instructional TV movement opined that televisions (or Big Bird?) might replace teachers. They were, obviously, wrong. Even if they are a passing fad, though, MOOCs can still teach us something about the pedagogical benefits and pitfalls of online learning, and about cracks in the economics of public education. Many arts educators cite “21^st-century skills” and the demands of our “increasingly connected world” as an argument for teaching dance, drama, visual art and music in classrooms. As we consider the implications of increased connectivity for our students, we should take care to do the same for ourselves.

Awaiting Gentrification in Crown Heights – photo by Jeff Chou

It seems that you can’t read an article about New York City in any news source, whether it’s Gawker or the New York Times, without hearing the buzzword “gentrification.” But what do people mean when they toss this word around and how does it look to the people living in affected areas? Why do people draw a connection between artistic hubs and gentrification? Though gentrification is a catch-all term used to describe a range of interrelated outcomes, it is generally connected to changes in an area’s culture and character, demographics, the real estate market, and land use.  Due to a long history of rampant racial inequity in U.S. housing and public policy, the term is also closely associated with a larger idea of “a miscarriage of social justice, in which wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for ‘improving’ a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.”In recent years, two neighborhoods in New York City, Crown Heights and Harlem, have undergone dramatic physical, cultural and demographic changes. Both neighborhoods are attracting new residents along with businesses that cater to their tastes. You only have to walk down the streets of either these two neighborhoods to see that the process of gentrification is well underway, if not almost complete. In recent months, New York Magazine and the New York Times have published articles about the city’s reinvigorated real estate market, especially in areas like Harlem that even ten years ago were still seen as areas that needed civic investment and redevelopment if they were to appeal to mainstream middle- or upper-class tastes.

The massive transitions taking place in Harlem and Crown Heights are just as closely tied to economic status as they are to race. Sociologist Sharon Zukin defines gentrification as a process of spatial and social differentiation that results from the influx of educated, middle-class people into low-income areas. The form of urban gentrification seen over the last half century differs from previous incarnations because of the type of cultural capital these new urban dwellers bring with them. The new agents of gentrification seek out the same characteristics that made previous generations flee urban areas, namely distinctly urban attributes like diversity, walkability and historic significance. While these new urbanites may not always be economically well-off, they are drawn to the aesthetics of what they see as the “authentic” city, but inevitably their surroundings are eventually molded by their own presence.

Watching the process of gentrification unfold in New York City may be an opportunity to learn from arts-based community revitalization efforts in places like Watts, CA; Houston, TX; and Chicago, IL, and give policymakers, practitioners and residents an opportunity to envision an inclusive future for their community. Although both Crown Heights and Harlem have experienced an exodus of many of their black residents, blacks still maintain a tenuous plurality in most parts of these neighborhoods, indicating that while there is a threat of increased displacement, there may also be opportunities for those remaining to take an active part in the reshaping of their communities.  Will Crown Heights and Harlem fall prey to the oft-discussed negative consequences of gentrification? Or is there still opportunity for these neighborhoods to retain a connection to their original inhabitants?

Why Crown Heights and Harlem?

Both Harlem and Crown Heights (and more broadly, Brooklyn) have their own cultural currency tied to a heritage that has dominated much of U.S. popular culture over the past twenty years. These neighborhoods are synonymous with defining artistic movements in black culture like jazz and hip hop, art forms that have had a global impact. The connection these two neighborhoods have to cultural milestones such as the Harlem Renaissance and the early work of Spike Lee attracts new residents eager to build upon the past and contribute to a new phase of development in their own way.

Brooklyn racial demographics, 2000, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center 

Brooklyn racial demographics, 2010, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center

In spite of the fact that more and more young white New Yorkers are moving to the neighborhood of Crown Heights, a majority of residents are distinctly not part of the wealthiest tier of society.  Crown Heights is not the kind of place like Williamsburg or DUMBO that gets highlighted in discussions about the new wave of New York’s vibrant arts scene. There is plenty of existing grassroots arts activity from practicing individual artists, community based organizations, and community-based arts projects, it is still difficult for local cultural organizations based in Crown Heights to garner enough funding and support to work with under-resourced communities, with dueling priorities like crime and education. That said, the changing demographics of the area, as well as its proximity to attractions like the Brooklyn Museum and the Barclays Center and the resulting increase in real estate value, has attracted the attention of traditional and untraditional creative placemakers.

Upper Manhattan racial demographics, 2000, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center

 Upper Manhattan racial demographics, 2010, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center 

Although Harlem has a more well-established cultural brand and presence than Crown Heights, it too is becoming a hub for creative industry and the creative class, albeit in a different form. Tour buses constantly drive through Harlem, giving visitors a chance to view iconic landmarks like the Apollo Theater or visit the Studio Museum in Harlem. Over the past three years, Harlem has gained two independent multi-use creative arts spaces, MIST and ImageNation, started by long-time Harlem residents or advocates. These organizations are helping to shift the perception that change in previously distressed communities has to come from the top down. Instead, they demonstrate that culturally-based organizations can uplift and strengthen the creativity that already exists in a mutually beneficial way.

For all of the discussion of gentrification and displacement, it seems that many authors and researchers approach the issue from the frame of high-income whites displacing low-income people of color. What happens when high-income people of color become part of the process of redevelopment and reinvestment? The presence of MIST and Imagenation in Harlem highlight the nuanced dimensions of gentrification and confront misconceptions about what the process entails, who the drivers are, and how established residents play a part in the redevelopment of their neighborhood.

What Role Does The City Play?

Entire books have been written about New York City’s public policy, city planning, and their relationships with the arts and gentrification. Today’s New York has a unique relationship with gentrification because the constant hunt for refuge from the city’s high cost of living, paired with the city’s concentration of wealth, makes for some combustive elements.

In September 2008 the New York Times ran a brief update on a redevelopment project, titled Mart 125, which would include 67,000-square-foot space for a cultural and commercial complex across the street from the Apollo Theater.  Mart 125, an urban revitalization plan originally conceived nearly 20 years earlier in 1986, encountered delay after setback after delay until the Bloomberg administration issued an RFP to reinvigorate the project in 2008. As the Times article notes, arts organizations that met a threshold of financial stability and community involvement would get preference in the process of becoming a selected tenant. One of the selected occupants of this space was ImageNation, a small nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to “establis[h] a chain of art-house cinemas, dedicated to progressive media by and about people of color.” As part of executing that mission, the organization sought to create a gathering space for the community that could also serve as an affordable visual and performance arts venue.

Headed by Moikgantsi Kgama, a long-time Harlem resident with roots in the independent filmmaking community, ImageNation had been searching for a permanent home for its frequent events almost since its inception in 1997. The organization and its staff needed the room to expand and live up to its goal of becoming a go-to place for art-house cinema. In a recent interview Kgama noted that Mart 125 seemed to be the perfect opportunity for ImageNation to capitalize on the growing community reinvestment in Harlem. By the turn of the 21^st century the more commercial aims of Mart 125 were coming to fruition, with new outposts of Starbucks, H&M and American Apparel opening up on the strip of 125^th Street between Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X Boulevards.  The city and its various development agencies seemed poised to make good on their commitment to provide space for local cultural organizations. ImageNation and other organizations were strengthened by the rigorous RFP process and collaborative relationships with various city agencies, which asked them to meet tough benchmarks related to fiscal and organizational management to equip them for long-term success. Then the 2008 financial crisis descended upon the nation, the city’s priorities shifted and the community-based arts organization focus of Mart 125 stalled. Kgama and the staff of ImageNation remained determined to develop space in Harlem, along with other organizations like My Image Studio Theater Harlem (MIST). Both organizations opened space in Harlem in 2012, years after Mart 125 had come to a virtual standstill.

Today, MIST and ImageNation join a cohort of creative organizations run by people of color that are contributing to Harlem’s legacy as a creative hub for the city. These organizations are intentional about how they fit into the community and what role they should play in Harlem’s artistic ecosystem. Not surprisingly, they appear to be embraced wholeheartedly by the community’s new and old residents. ImageNation not only screens films and provides gallery space for up and coming artists, they also host engaging community events such as an attempt to create the world’s longest Soul Train Line, in honor of Don Cornelius, and to draw attention to Mental Health Awareness month.

In May of 2012 the New York City Economic Development Corporation issued a request for construction bids to resume redevelopment and attempt to continue on with the Mart 125 project. In spite of the delays with the city-sponsored community redevelopment, it seems that these community based organizations have been able integrate themselves into the neighborhood in ways that respect the integrity of Harlem’s long cultural history while contributing to the neighborhood’s evolution.  Would these organizations have been established in their current forms without the push for gentrification and development from the city? It is hard to tell. What is clear is that ImageNation and other local arts organizations have been able to capitalize on the interest in the “new” Harlem in order to gain access to the space they need to serve their community.

What Role Does the Private Sector Play?

In Crown Heights, the connection between gentrification and creative placemaking has been driven more by private sector dollars than by civic investment. Crown Heights is not connected to a specific cultural moment like the Harlem Renaissance, but it is increasingly being cited in articles about gentrification in New York City. Though there are established organizations in the community that use the arts as part of their programming, Crown Heights has attracted two large-scale creative placemaking projects that have met very different fates. While one has received a large amount of private financing derived from sources outside of the community, another, a brainchild of Crown Heights residents, has floundered.

Brooklyn’s recent resurgence as a cultural destination has been buoyed in part by the various enterprises of Jonathan Butler, creator of the website Brownstoner and co-creator of the very popular Brooklyn Flea. In 2012 it became public that Butler and his business partners were planning a large-scale development project in the heart of Crown Heights. The project being proposed is a mixed-use development that will provide space for artists and food vendors from the Brooklyn Flea to create and sell their wares. Unlike his contemporaries in Harlem, Butler epitomizes what many envision when they think of gentrification: white, wealthy, and attracted to the “potential” of under-resourced neighborhoods. Through his personal connections to Wall Street, Butler was able to raise seed capital from Goldman Sachs to fund his newest venture. This has given Butler and his partners the freedom to “seek input and support” from city agencies and politicians, without being completely dependent upon bureaucratic maneuvering to complete the project.  Instead of the drawn-out process that stalled Mart 125, Butler has been able to close on this $30 million project and is already in talks with potential tenants. Contrast this with the experience of the small arts organizations in Harlem, or the more recent attempts of a group of artists in Crown Heights who have been unsuccessful thus far in their attempts to purchase a building in the area for a similar purpose as Butler and his partners.

Although Butler has been able to breeze past the bureaucratic red tape and ecure space for his tenants, long-term residents of Crown Heights are wary of the project, seeing it as a harbinger of higher rents and changing demographics. Indeed, Crown Heights has had a high influx of white, upper income residents according to the 2010 census. There are also few signs that Butler or his private sector partners are looking at this as an opportunity to engage the diverse communities currently living within Crown Heights. On the day Butler announced the building purchase, Brownstoner posted a publicly available survey of potential tenants asking where interested businesses and business owners were currently located. However, questions about race or income levels, which would directly speak to the economic and social tensions that this project uncovers, remain unasked. In more recent reports it appears that tenants will be handpicked by Butler and his investors, maintaining continuity with the brand his previous ventures have established, regardless of how that affects the current community.

According to Ms. Kgama of ImageNation, it is difficult for small arts organizations that are led by or serve people of color to succeed because they often don’t have the fiscal backing or stability to compete for larger funding opportunities. At the same time, as Kgama points out, in rapidly gentrifying areas “it helps” for the organization to be led and staffed by people of color, so long as it is reflective of the surrounding area. Although there are a diverse range of experiences within every ethnic group, more often than not organizations led by people of color are more responsive to the wants and needs of minority groups, thereby making their host communities more receptive to their presence.

This also suggests that instead of a top-down approach, the needs of the community will be reflected in the programming showcased by the “gentrifying” organization. So far MIST and ImageNation seem to be embraced because their leaders made a conscious decision, reflected in their mission, to be reflective of and responsive to the cultural legacy of their host communities. It remains to be seen if Butler will take an inclusive approach to his new project, or if he is even concerned with avoiding perception as a malignant gentrifier. If he is, there are a few organizations in Harlem that he can ask for tips.

Image by Flickr user Mordac

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

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

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

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

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

—Theater Director, age 30

An Embarrassment of Riches

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

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

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

The Arts’ Dirty Secret

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

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

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

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

—Composer, age 27

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

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Grantee

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

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

—Jazz Musician, age 34

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Directing Donations

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

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

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

Aggregating Ability

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

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

Building Community

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

Putting it All Together: Guided Crowdsourcing

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

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

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

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

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

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

How It Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summing Up

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

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

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

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

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

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NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Ibid: 49.

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

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

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

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

1. Anything you could get for free, you took for free.
2. The success of a transaction was defined by the extent to which value was obtained relative to its cost — that is, whether or not it was a “good deal.”
3. Each day was a struggle to achieve program success/personal goals while staying within budget, but anytime a choice had to be made, the latter definitely had priority.

The thing about this is, most goods in this country cost the same whether they are purchased by little ol’ you or me or a giant like Hewlett–and most of the time, the cost structure is built for the former rather than the latter. As a result, the opportunity costs of day-to-day expenditures are far less noticeable in big-budget land. So all of the sudden, my decision-making process had to be readjusted: my goal was no longer to maximize value relative to cost but rather total value, assuming the cost didn’t exceed some arbitrary high amount. I found this unexpectedly difficult, because the kinds of cost benchmarks I had relied on before had always been the same ones I used in my personal life. Ian David Moss, composer and graduate student, sure as hell would never drop a few hundred bucks on a data resource just to find out whether it was useful or not–but for the Hewlett Foundation, it might well be a good investment. I’m used to situations in which the minimum acceptable option is the only one I’d be willing to pay for.

There are good things and bad things about budgeting in an intensively resource-constrained environment. Obviously, the downside is that smaller nonprofits and lower-income people are often forced to settle for imperfect solutions. So, Curtis the squatter’s friends eat unhealthy fast food and canned fruit in order to survive from day to day, even though a healthier diet would help them avoid more serious problems down the road. On the other hand, limitations like this foster an appreciation for efficiency and utility that I would argue is absent from plusher environments. I became quite proud of my ability to spot market inefficiencies and take advantage of them during my pre-business-school days, whether that meant using printing companies that catered to cash-starved, image-conscious rockers and charged much less than the traditional press down the street, or eating at the taqueria with the $4 burritos. Rich people like to think that they know something about managing money. Well, let me tell you something: being poor will make you an expert in the subject. Poor folks, the smart ones anyway, beat the market on a more consistent basis than any hedge fund manager alive, and with higher stakes to boot.* That’s why microlending has worked in the developing world, and that’s why I’ve argued in the past that small arts organizations are a more cost-effective use of philanthropic dollars. What I haven’t been able to figure out yet is how to balance the quality gain of having the “optimal” solution over a “good enough” solution, versus the efficiency gain from distributing resources more stingily across a wider range of uses and looking for deals at every turn. Oh, where’s a logic model when I need one?

* given the diminishing marginal utility of money.

At noon on Saturday I asked Michael and Curtis: “With only $20, how will you survive for the weekend — from now, until Monday morning?” (Curtis and I agreed to exempt rent. It was hard enough using $20 to meet food and personal needs — Michael would never figure out how to squat.) Michael wouldn’t sleep at Curtis’s place — he stayed at the Four Seasons, but to his credit, he hung out in Curtis’s neighborhood.

It’s not long before Michael finds himself flummoxed with the realities of life below the poverty line. In particular, he is incredulous at the dearth of options for healthy eating (fruit comes in cans because people don’t always have access to a fridge, for example). Throughout the course of the weekend, Curtis dispenses street wisdom in a similar vein:

“Why not stay at a shelter?” Michael asked.

“Not enough of them around,” Curtis replied. “And you have to be out by 6 a.m. If you got kids, you can’t take them out in the cold. So you stay in a store, or you stay in a vacant building. And no more food kitchens since the projects went down. Not a lot for poor people.”

Curtis then took out a cigarette. “See this? Always have a loose cigarette. You can always use a bathroom in somebody’s house — maybe even get a shower — for one. Maybe your kid took a dump in his pants. Maybe you need some toilet tissue. Always keep a cigarette for emergencies.”

I grew up in what I would characterize as a lower middle class household. My family always had everything we needed, but rarely everything we wanted. Thanks to generous financial aid programs and good test scores, I was able to attend two outstanding private schools from 7th grade through college for a tiny fraction of the cost of tuition. In both of these institutions, I was among a minority of students who received any financial aid at all. Following graduation, I worked several nonprofit arts jobs in Philadelphia and New York, going for a period of time without health insurance, and never achieving more than a break-even budget. In 2005 and 2006, I was supporting a very active performing ensemble that drained, even after donations and grant support, up to $5,000 a year from my already meager coffers. I learned how to avoid social situations that required me to buy drinks at a bar, or involved eating out at a restaurant more than once a month. I took girls on dates to pizza places. I enjoyed living in New York, but it was an incredibly draining experience, principally because I couldn’t really afford it. At any given time, I felt excluded from about 90% of what the city had to offer because of my financial situation. So I made do with the remaining 10% as best I could and tried to smile.

Though my upbringing was modest in comparison to many of those around me, I am well aware that I have lived the lifestyle of a king by Curtis’s standards. In New York, I lived in safe neighborhoods with easy access to public transportation, amenities, and entertainment. I managed to avoid any long-term credit debt and paid down some of my student loans. I had a computer and furniture and clothes and a roof over my head. And I always knew that no matter what happened, even if things got really bad, there were many, many people I could turn to for help.

Michael met Lena, a 45-year-old woman with three children who works part-time at a fast-food restaurant. She agreed to let Michael observe her strategies to put food on the table and keep her family together. Michael offered to pay her a fee for a week of conversation. Lena said, “How about we exchange our paychecks for one month.” Michael turned bright red.

So I’m not surprised at Michael’s shock and discomfort while immersed in Curtis’s living environment. I feel that I can say with some confidence that it’s not possible to truly understand what it’s like to be resource-constrained until one has experienced it oneself. There’s a reason why Knowing what’s best for poor people is #62 on the list of Stuff White People Like. At the end of the weekend, Michael’s brilliant solution for how to survive for 48 hours on $20 was “buy $20 of Yahoo stock. Hope for the best.”

It’s certainly worth reading the entire blog post over at Freakonomics, but be sure to read the comment thread as well. I particularly enjoyed this gem:

Touché!