Createquity.Createquity.

Createquity in Quotes: 2013

Ian David Moss — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 13:51:00 +0000

The arts, including painting, sculpture, installation, dance and music, are in part about creating a sensory experience—something for the audience to see, feel or hear. And perhaps more than any other discipline, food has the ability to appeal to all of our senses—a combination of colors, textures, crunches, smells and tastes goes into the making of a meal, and the selection and transformation of those elements is creative. When a creative, sensory form also has the capacity to express philosophies, inspire multiple interpretations, conjure narratives and/or allude to complex meanings, it is art, whether the medium is paint or piano or polenta. Food has not replaced art as high culture; it is art.

—Jacquelyn Strycker, From Palate to Palette: Can Food Be Art? (January 7)

Like the NCRP report, “Fusing” provoked strong and varied reaction across the arts and funding communities (GIA’s online forum on equity in arts funding provides a good sample) when it was originally released. It also provoked a strong and varied reaction in me. Reading it evoked frustration similar to what I feel when I read arts education reports that draw conclusions affirming my fundamental beliefs (i.e. that the arts are a powerful learning tool for children), without providing clear evidence for those conclusions. I understand and support the arguments the reports are trying to make, but wish they did a better job making them.

—Talia Gibas, Arts Policy Library: Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change (January 14)

Every research effort should take into account the expected value of the information it will produce. Consider the risk involved in various types of grants made. What are you trying to achieve by giving out lots of small grants, if that’s what you’re doing? Maybe measure the effectiveness of the overall strategy instead of the success or failure of each grant. This is getting into hypothesis territory, but based on what I’ve seen so far I would guess that research on grant strategy is woefully underfunded, while research on the effectiveness or potential of specific grants is probably overfunded. We probably worry more than we need to about individual grants, but we don’t worry as much as we should about whether the ways in which we’re making decisions about which grants to support are the right ways to do that.

—Ian David Moss, Solving the Underpants Gnomes Problem: Towards an Evidence-Based Arts Policy (February 25)

People intuitively feel artists are attracted to down and out neighborhoods and can invest sweat equity, money, and artist juju into properties. They’ve heard about the SoHo effect and how artists are often victims of processes they set into motion; they get priced out of the very neighborhoods they helped to turn around. Through my work, I’ve learned that it’s not so simple. Since the 1970s, thousands of American and European urban neighborhoods have been gentrified without artists involved, often by developers, often with public funding, chiefly to young professionals and to suburban retirees wishing to live in the city. Ann Markusen points out that gentrification is a function of generalized pressure on urban land markets—i.e. in NYC, every rich person in the world has to have an apartment—and that it does not occur in most small towns and in urban neighborhoods in vast portions of many cites.

—Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, Artists and Gentrification: Sticky Myths, Slippery Realities (April 5)

All in all, reforming the deduction on charitable contributions isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the arts. There are ways of changing the tax code that could actually increase revenues and diversify the sources of income for arts organizations, even while helping to reduce the federal deficit. Since any change creates uncertainty and will likely produce losers as well as winners, I can understand arts administrators and advocates who would rather stick with an imperfect status quo than commit their careers and their organizations to an uncertain future. However, I believe that participating in the discussion and shaping the outcomes to fit our sector’s interests will ultimately prove more productive than trying to block change from the start.

—John Carnwath, The Deduction for Charitable Contributions: The Sacred Cow of the Tax Code? (April 23)

In a Createquity post this May, Tegan Kehoe suggested “making responsible efforts to keep [deaccessioned] objects in public hands” as a reasonable standard that should avoid the worst outcomes of deaccessioning. But the proposed restrictions being placed upon the DIA would forestall even this approach. Let’s say the DIA wanted to invest in the goodwill of Detroit’s citizens by prudently selling or leasing artworks to other nonprofit institutions to help the city recover. According to Elliot Bostwick of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as quoted in the New York Times, most museums only exhibit between two to four percent of their collection at one time. It’s entirely possible that among the museum’s more than 60,000 works—some of which will never be exhibited—there are items that no longer support the DIA’s vision. If executed carefully, a sale of these holdings could be seen as an act of generosity on the museum’s part and actually benefit the institution over the long term, while ensuring that the deaccessioned works remained accessible to the general populace. Yet with the art authority resolution in place and counties threatening to remove taxpayer support, the DIA could be held hostage by the very laws designed to protect its interests.

—Jena Lee, Detroit Institute of Arts: What’s a Museum to Do? (September 3)

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.

—Ian David Moss, What We Talk About When We Talk About Race (November 19)

Earlier this year teachers in Seattle flat out refused to administer mandated state exams, claiming that the tests were a misuse of precious school resources, unfairly used as part of teacher evaluations, and an inaccurate indication of student learning. And Seattle isn’t alone. The organization United Opt Out National has assembled a state-by-state guide for opting your kids out of testing, claiming, “high-stakes testing is destructive to ALL children, educators, communities…and the democratic principles which underlie the purposes of public education.” Let’s say they’re right and standardized tests have got to go. What would be a scalable alternative? One possible solution percolating amongst education reformers may surprise you: portfolios. The practice of assessing learning with portfolios has deep roots in the arts world, visual arts and creative writing especially. Could portfolios save our public school students from a life of drill-and-kill?

—Lindsey Cosgrove, Portfolios: The Next Wave of Student Assessment? (December 30)

This was the first year that the most popular article on Createquity was not written by me, which I consider to be a mark of success for developing the authors (and editors) of this operation. In fact, I don’t show up until #5 on the list! Here were the most-read posts from 2013, in case you missed them:

In addition, honorable mention goes to 2012 posts Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation, Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem, In Defense of Logic Models, Burning Man is Dead; Long Live Burning Man, and Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative Placemaking Success, all of which were still going strong in 2013.

Createquity in Quotes: 2012

Ian David Moss — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:51:53 +0000

Becker’s statement gets at some of the main challenges in measuring the “impact” of a work of public art—a task which more often than not provokes grumbling from public art administrators. When asked how they know their work is successful, most organizations and artists that create art in the public realm are quick to cite things like people’s positive comments, or the fact that the artwork doesn’t get covered with graffiti or cause controversy.

—Katherine Gressel, Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation (January 7)

But more than that, I sometimes wish we wouldn’t take what we do so damn seriously all the time. Maybe this is coming from someone who’s spent too much time on Roadside America, but I think that by pretending that all artwork is sacred, we unwittingly make failure (acknowledged or not) unacceptable. Of course art is subjective, but that’s precisely the point. Maybe it’s okay to hate a specific piece of public art, if that’s one’s honest response. Maybe we should be encouraging honest responses. Especially to public art, which, unlike a bad performance, is still there the next day and, unlike bad museum or gallery art, is visible to you whether you want it to be or not.

—Ian David Moss, Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Public Art Worthy of Hate? (February 21)

Given all the above, it may seem ironic that it is Kickstarter that has seized the mantle of democratizing access to the arts in the public imagination, rather than the NEA. A closer examination, however, quickly reveals why. In recent years, the NEA has focused on arts access from the perspective of the audience, particularly through geographic reach. The Endowment publishes national studies on arts participation twice a decade, supports touring programs through its network of regional partners, and frequently supports established organizations that are capable of bringing in large crowds consistently. But these measures are often not so friendly to the creator. The NEA’s focus on pre-existing institutions, its requirement that applicants hold tax-exempt status, and its extensive application requirements and lengthy review process all erect barriers to participation no less formidable than those that face artist-entrepreneurs who come to Kickstarter without access to a video camera.

—Ian David Moss, Art and Democracy: The NEA, Kickstarter, and Creativity in America (April 9)

So if audience engagement is about utilizing the work of art to facilitate authentic, personally-relevant connections with others and the work of art itself, it seems we have an army of individuals waiting in the wings to be asked to the party. Teaching artists, still frighteningly in the margins of our quest to reinvent arts institutions, are experts in audience engagement. They do the following things exceedingly well:

Teach cognitive skills needed to think artistically and creatively

Teach aesthetic education, or the ability to make sense of art, not skills-based art-making

Understand how to create questions and activities that are relevant to diverse ages and levels of arts education

Work across the community, from performing and presenting works for discerning adult audiences as well as in schools in rural and low-income neighborhoods

Understand that what they do is spiritual in nature, and help create a link to individuals’ higher selves.

—Kelly Dylla, Why Teaching Artists Will Lead the Charge in Audience Engagement (May 10)

Art and science have a longstanding relationship, and it does a disservice to both to pretend that isolation from one another is the best approach. For example, there is a long history of illustration in biology. Chemistry uses pictograms with specific rules to convey structures and arrangements of atoms and molecules. Many of these traditional methods have specific rules to most accurately represent ideas, or particular aspects of an idea. These methods of visualization are developed to work within the scientific community, frequently to the exclusion of the lay person. But interesting things begin to happen once those strict rules of representation are relaxed. Most specifically, in Dance Your Ph.D. we see scientists imagine their works through dance.

—Shane Crerar, Understanding Through Tangential Questioning: Art, Dance Your Ph.D., and the Large Hadron Collider (May 16)

One of the reasons people sometimes feel anxious about evaluation and measurement is because they’re afraid of being held accountable, especially to things that they don’t have full control over or to metrics that don’t seem relevant to what they’re trying to do. When that happens, there are enormous incentives on managers and their supervisors to “cook the books” or otherwise game the system to show results that look better than reality, because any failure—even failures that are no one’s fault—reflects on them personally. That’s the danger of trying to enforce a data-driven culture without first developing the theoretical frameworks that determine what data you’re trying to collect. Because logic models separate the person from the program, they can distinguish between lagging initiatives that might just need more time to prove themselves, and failures of design that can be transformed into productive learning opportunities.

—Ian David Moss, In Defense of Logic Models (June 28)

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

—Jackie Hasa, Arts Policy Library: Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions (July 3)

Nevertheless, what “Discovering Fiscally Sponsored NYC Dancemakers” does show is that fiscal sponsorship is a major force in the New York City dance world. Sponsored projects account for hundreds of distinct enterprises and at least $3 million in annual expenditures. They reach tens of thousands of audience members and serve something like a thousand artists (assuming a reasonable rate of overlap between projects). And remember, this is just in one discipline and one city of the country.

—Ian David Moss, “Discovering Fiscally Sponsored NYC Dancemakers” (September 17)

In any particular place, changes in the proposed indicators will not be attributable to the creative placemaking intervention alone. So imagine the distress of a fundee whose indicators are moving the wrong way and which place them poorly in comparison to others. Area property values may be falling because an environmentally obnoxious plant starts up. Other projects might look great on indicators not because of their initiatives, but because another intervention, like a new light rail system or a new community-based school dramatically changes the neighborhood. What we’d would love to have, but don’t at this point, are sophisticated causal models of creative placemaking…

—Ann Markusen, Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative Placemaking Success (November 9)

Shared delivery does not reflect what I or, based on anecdotal evidence, the majority of people within my age bracket received in terms of arts education. My fifth grade generalist teacher was a woman named Mrs. Gonzalez. I saw her every day, and she taught me math, reading, science, history and so forth. My school had a visual arts specialist, Ms. Peters, whom I saw once a week. Art never really came up during my math/reading/science/history lessons, and math/reading/science/history never really came up during my art lessons, so if Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Peters worked together behind the scenes, their collaboration wasn’t readily apparent to me. The only visiting teaching artists I recall encountering in elementary school were members of a theater company who performed an abridged version of Macbeth during a school-wide assembly in our cafeteria. Afterwards they sat on plastic chairs and answered questions. They stayed for about an hour, and we never saw them again.

—Talia Gibas, Unpacking Shared Delivery of Arts Education (December 3)

Here were the most-read articles from the past year, in case you missed them:

Createquity in Quotes: 2011

Ian David Moss — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:17:05 +0000

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.

—Ian David Moss and Daniel Reid, Audiences at the Gate: Reinventing Arts Philanthropy Through Guided Crowdsourcing (February 22)

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

—Ian David Moss, Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating) (March 24)

The reason stories work for us as human beings is because they are few in number. We can spend two hours watching a documentary, or a week reading a history book, and get a really deep qualitative understanding of what was going on in a specific situation or in a specific case. The problem is that we can only truly comprehend so many stories at once. We don’t have the mental bandwidth to process the experiences of even hundreds, much less thousands or millions of subjects or occurrences. To make sense of those kinds of numbers, we need ways of simplifying and reducing the amount of information we store in each case. So what we do is we take all of those stories and we flatten them: we dry out all of the rich shape and detail that makes up their original form and we package them instead in a kind of mold: collecting a specific and limited set of attributes about each so that we can apply analysis techniques to them in batch. In a very real sense, data = mass-produced stories.

—Ian David Moss, On Stories vs. Data (March 29)

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

—Ian David Moss, TEDx Talk (May 15)

If subsidized arts workers are labeled as something like freeloaders in public discourse, then farmers, homeowners, hybrid vehicle buyers, the airlines, and the oil & gas industry are freeloaders too. Ayn Rand is very popular again among conservatives, so where is the conservative outcry against oil & gas subsidies? Instead, we are offered a redefinition of the “free market capitalist system” as something that requires government subsidy. Oxymorons rule the day when the free market must be subsidized, and arts created explicitly in the public interest, without a profit to distribute, must stand alone.

—Aaron Andersen, Federal arts funding: a trace ingredient in the sausage factory of government spending (June 1)

Over the last five years, the El Sistema “model” has become a sensation around the world as more musicians and arts leaders have visited Venezuela and felt inspired to adapt the program within their communities. Others have learned about El Sistema on programs like 60 Minutes and through the popularity of Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel. I had the opportunity to visit El Sistema in Venezuela in 2007, and everything about it was intoxicating: the enthusiasm of the teachers and administrators to save disadvantaged children through music, the level of the musicianship, the camaraderie of the students and teachers, the music-festival spirit of the program (it felt like my experiences at summer music festivals, only this program is all year long), the concert hall designed specifically to advance the education and performance opportunities of El Sistema participants, the participatory nature of every rehearsal and performance.

—Jennifer Kessler, El Sistema: The Movement (June 3)

So what are the implications of Informal Arts for the role of the nonprofit arts institution? None of the case study activities took place at a formal arts institution. I think that suggests that the majority of our arts institutions are viewed as places to consume art rather than to create it. Should they seek to change that perception to become viewed as places to create as well? The answer to this question will vary from organization to organization depending upon the resources and mission of each. But to ensure the future of any art form, there must be practitioners and consumers. And since practitioners often become consumers (and bring their friends with them), I believe it is in the long-term interest of arts organizations—large and small, presenting and producing, of all disciplines, including service organizations and arts councils—to encourage adult creation of art at the informal level.

—Crystal Wallis, Arts Policy Library: Informal Arts (July 6)

Those elements are clearly important, but the reality is that the arts ecosystem is far more complicated. It includes social service agencies, churches, and others that might provide arts programs. It includes not just for-profit firms that present arts programming directly, but also the companies that manufacture shoes for the ballet dancers, sell the strings for the guitars, and design the postcards for the show. It encompasses a huge range of patron roles from major donors and Board members, to passersby taking in a work of public art or ambient sound installation, to people who experience the arts only in their own homes. Arguably, it even includes Google, Facebook, Staples, and the IRS – entities with which almost every arts organization interacts, even if those entities are not arts-specific at all.

—Ian David Moss, An Ecosystem-Based Approach to Arts Research (October 17)

Is our advocacy goal a widely seen news piece outlining all sides of the issue? Or, do we want a successful budget outcome? I think it’s the latter. And when it can be achieved with a quiet effort, making sure to begin modeling this new way of thinking about the arts in our meetings with decision-makers, that is preferable to another big public debate. Because the big fight in the default way of viewing the arts is very losable. And in our efforts, we’re forced to expand a precious resource: the time and energy of staff and key supporters who have to work so hard to convince public officials that they won’t suffer consequences in the next election.

—Margy Waller, Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Shouting About Arts Funding Bad for the Arts? (October 24)

I’m not suggesting that the concerts that the City of San Francisco produces with the San Francisco Symphony are unworthy of public funding, or that $2 million is not a reasonable amount to pay for the Symphony’s services; I have no reason to make such presumptions. But it does seem to me a perfect example of how large-budget, historic cultural institutions have privileges of access at their disposal that few arts organizations founded within our lifetimes (including, therefore, hardly any organizations founded by or primarily serving racial and ethnic minorities) could ever dream of. Sure, Galeria de la Raza got 12 grants in 5 years from SFAC. But most of those grants had to be won with the approval of a panel of fellow citizens, with panel discussion taking place in public (CEG has one of the most radically transparent review processes in the country; see page 11 of the pdf). The San Francisco Symphony, to my knowledge, does not have its contract up for public review by a panel of citizen peers every year. It just gets the money.

—Ian David Moss, Cultural equity and the San Francisco Arts Commission (December 12)

Here were the most-read articles from the past year, in case you missed them:

Createquity in Quotes: 2010

Ian David Moss — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:38:11 +0000

The quantity of available, accessible, highly relevant information is expanding at a rate far faster than the human brain was designed to handle, while at the same time we’re gaining the ability to communicate meaningfully with more people than was ever before possible. For quantitative information, our information surplus is easily solved by means of computing power, but for the trickier qualitative questions (what does it all mean?), our task is harder than ever.

What We’ve Learned So Far (January 2)

Arturo’s story is inspiring to watch from afar. And it is humbling when I think about my discomfort with facing beggars on the street. I stopped my generosity experiment because I found myself resenting having to give a quarter or a dollar to the same strangers in the subway day after day. Gloria gave a stranger off the street not just a dollar, but her home, family, and unconditional love. Her generosity experiment will last a lifetime.

Five Generosity Experiments (March 30)

Nearly all of the sweeping changes in how we do business and live our lives that have taken place during the last 20 years can be traced to dramatic advances in communication and data storage technology. Twenty years ago, there was no World Wide Web, cell phones as we know them today did not exist, word processing software was still in its infancy, and a typical hard drive held 1/10,000^th of the space boasted by a comparably-priced device today. Think about that for a second. In a single generation’s time, our collective capacity to store, process, and share information has exploded beyond all recognition. This one development has completely transformed our work and our relationships, and its impact on the arts and arts organizations is no exception.

The Future of Leadership (April 13)

I think orchestras are most effective when they put forth their authentic selves. One non-traditional concert I recall enjoying was the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween extravaganza. The show started at 11:59pm and would feature an original film made by members of the orchestra, arrangements of popular theme music by the students, cameo appearances from the Dean and President of the college, and a hall chock-full of raucous, costumed, mostly drunk undergraduates. It was a PARTY. But it was able to be that party because it was a concert by students, for students. I can’t imagine how awkward it would have been to have a professional orchestra (playing past 11pm on those union contracts? Are you kidding?) try to replicate that fun-loving no-holds-barred atmosphere for an audience it wasn’t familiar with.

Orchestras and Authenticity (June 9)

Democracy is a wonderful thing, but grand leaps of imagination are not often achieved by group consensus. Yet one would be hard-pressed to argue that our dominant system of institutional giving is all that much better. The decisions of our corporate and foundation funders have an enormous impact in shaping the field, yet in most cases less than a half-dozen people have meaningful input into those decisions. Sometimes, a single individual might drive essentially the entire agenda for a portfolio of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. That’s an incredible amount of influence accruing to an incredibly small number of people. And individuals, no matter how dedicated or qualified, are increasingly not up to the task of responsibly evaluating the full range of artistic activity within their jurisdictions. There simply are not enough hours in the day or days in the year for a human being to give ongoing, fair, and substantive consideration to the work of the millions of artists and tens of thousands of arts nonprofits in the United States today. For all of Chris Jones’s lauding of the “noble tradition of the corporate giving officer,” what percentage of the participants in Chase Community Giving or Pepsi Refresh have had corporate giving officers regularly (or ever!) attend their performances or exhibits?

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too.

New Article on NewMusicBox.org (September 16)

The recent NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts shows that in the year leading up to May 2008, less than 35% of Americans participated at least once in “benchmark arts activities,” which collectively cover the bulk, though not all, of the disciplines and genres we have traditionally considered to be part of our field. That means that nearly two-thirds of American adults went the entire year without seeing a single classical music or jazz concert, attending a single musical, play, opera, or ballet, or visiting a single art gallery or museum. Let me repeat that in case it wasn’t clear: 65% of American adults did none of these things at any time in 2007-08. (By contrast, fully 99% of American households have at least one television, and there are actually more TV sets than people in this country!)

Arts participation and the bottom of the pyramid (October 5)

I think that the people who had transformative arts experiences as youth of the kind that Gary talks about [i.e., as audience members] – where they heard Verdi or saw a Matisse and were hooked right then and there – just got lucky. They were in the right place at the right time and were bringing to the table just the right cocktail of personal background, talent, and curiosity to have a magical moment. I bet if you polled arts professionals more broadly, though, the vast majority would report having their minds first blown by the arts during an active state of engagement.

The Myth of the Transformative Arts Experience (December 27)

Here were the most-read articles from the past year, in case you missed them: