National Museum of Cambodia. Photo by kfcatles.

A heat map of museum activity in Asia would show the whole region aglow. At first glance, if you’ve been getting your story from mainstream American media, you might think Asian institutions are becoming just like us, or beating us at our own game: the National Museum of Cambodia recently put its collection online thanks to a grant from an American foundation, and the Mumbai airport recently unveiled the largest airport gallery in the world. Other stories might give the opposite impression: a museum in China was shuttered after nearly its entire collection of 40,000 artifacts was found to be fake; in some public museums in Southeast Asia, staff are government employees who have been demoted to what is seen as an undesirable role.

So what’s really happening? I have spent the last two years as Programs Director at a private ethnology museum in Laos, but I’ve been following these developments for much longer. During the three years I lived in China after college, I became interested in museums as a platform to share my growing appreciation of Asia with a wider audience. My interest deepened back in the U.S., as I researched China’s recent cultural policy changes and their impact on museums for a master’s degree in China Studies and then wrote more broadly about museum issues in Asia for a museum studies certificate. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the story is as complex as the continent, a medley of unique political systems, museum governance structures, geographies, human resource policies, levels of development, and education systems.

I can’t tell that whole story in a single post, but I do want to share some of what I have seen unfolding in museums across developing Asia.

The boom

Over the past several years, prominent news sources have reported the growth of museums in Asia: The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Economist. The focus is often on China. In 2011, at the People’s Consultative Congress, former President Hu Jintao announced China’s plans to become a world leader in the arts and to make cultural industries a pillar industry by 2015. To make good on its plans, Beijing earmarked more money for the construction of new museums and to make public museums free. But the government alone isn’t driving the growth. Affluent businessmen are opening their own museums to house the private collections they’ve amassed at auctions. All over China, even in sparsely populated regions, new museums go up at the astounding rate of about 100 a year.

But other places are beginning to share some of the spotlight. Further south in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country and fourth largest by population in the world, similar conditions for art museum growth exist: economic prosperity and strong competitiveness in the international art market, with Indonesian artists beginning to break local price records. Indonesia also has one thing to credit for the creation of new museums in general that China doesn’t: rapid political decentralization. Each province in the country must have a museum, and new provinces come into existence at a surprisingly frequent rate.

Thailand’s strong national interest in archeology and the sheer volume of artifacts being discovered motivate the building of new museums, although fewer than in China and Indonesia. Alongside these more traditional (albeit brand-new) institutions, a robust network of grassroots, community-based museums adopting unconventional practices has sprung up as the result of local training opportunities.

Though India has also seen a relatively modest increase in the number of museums, it has a growing network of international partnerships. Recent agreements signed with the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum may go further in raising the level of museum practice in the country through the loan of objects that will help keep exhibits fresh, research collaborations, and joint learning programs for staff and fellowships.

In Asia as elsewhere, museums come into being for a variety of reasons and through a variety of actors. Burgeoning economic prosperity is often the impetus for museum growth. Yet slower economic development does not preclude it. Because many national governments, occupied with meeting other development benchmarks, have been slow to invest in arts and culture for purposes outside of economic growth, other parties have stepped in. Organizations owned in whole or in part by foreigners, or grassroots artist cooperatives such as San Art in Vietnam or the Cemeti Art House in Indonesia, may fill the art-for-art’s-sake gap. Their unaffiliated status translates to more flexibility in hiring, fundraising, interpreting their collections, and setting their own budget and agenda. Private museums are still much less common in Asia than public ones, but they, too, are part of the boom.

Audience, outreach, and local impact

Tourism and the local audience

Tourism contributes significantly to the economies of Asian countries. This can be helpful in keeping up foot traffic for museums – but whose feet, and at what cost? Many Asian museums have geared themselves toward foreign visitors, for at least two reasons: money and education.

It’s not uncommon for museums to offer free entry for locals. These patrons’ lack of financial contribution, however, may lead to their neglect. In a country like Laos, in which tourists make up a large part of museum visitation, locals may be put off by the fact that the majority of guests are not like them – a familiar refrain for American museums struggling to reach out to underrepresented groups. When tourism drives the local economy, the tourist is king, and the quality of service provided to locals may receive little attention, if any at all, in programming and promotion.

In addition to having more money, tourists also tend to be better educated. One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking about exhibit design after moving to Laos was about assumed literacy and comfort with self-guided discovery. The same Asia that is home to economies such as Singapore, Korea, and Shanghai, envied for their top-ranking academic performance, also suffers from development-stunting education systems. Literacy statistics for Asia—especially South and Southeast Asia, which is most of the continent in terms of both population and landmass—look deceptively high when the reality is that they only measure basic, not functional, literacy. As museums in Asia have added less familiar objects to their collections and adopted the Western model of explaining them with labels, some have risked losing connection with their local audience. What good are labels and panels if your audience can’t read well enough to understand the signage?

Going local

But the story may yet have a happy ending. I have noticed several hopeful signs that Asian museums may be paying more attention to local communities. Last November, I met Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the director of the encyclopedic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai, India, at a conference. I was impressed with the recent push in India for museums to appeal to all segments of society. Mukherjee was clearly interested in this topic: he questioned speakers at the end of every session, challenging museum directors from the West to rethink their audience.

It turns out Mukherjee’s commitment to orienting museums towards their communities is working for him back home. At the CSMVS, local participation increased by almost 50% over a three-year period, thanks to a mix of dynamic exhibits and unconventional programming. In the United States, we take for granted that a museum will display objects from other countries. By contrast, typical museum collections in Asia consist primarily of artwork or objects from that country’s own heritage and history, given their focus on preservation and guardianship of national heritage. India stands out in Asia for its ability to host blockbuster exhibits of artwork and artifacts from around the world. Both the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert have brought shows to the CSMVS, and other notable exhibits have featured paintings of Rubens and Van Dyck.

Mukherjee has also experimented with museum buses, which carry objects from the collection to neighborhoods throughout Mumbai and offer free access to locals. The program began as outreach to schoolchildren, but has since expanded its focus to reach suburbanites. The CSMVS has also begun to partner with NGOs to do programs with marginalized communities, such as sex workers and HIV patients.

The push in India for accessible art goes beyond the CSMVS, and it includes public art. Leading that initiative is Rajeev Sethi, the designer behind the T2 terminal at the Mumbai airport I mentioned at the start of this post. Though the idea of art in airports is not unique, the initiative is much broader. Sethi envisions the whole country as a museum and advocates bringing art dug up from museum basements “back to lived spaces—railway stations, bus stops, public parks, hospitals” – to serve a richer pool of stakeholders than he believes the Western view of museums supports.

Faced with a rapidly growing consumer class, museums in Indonesia are also trying to adapt their approach to their public. Until a few years ago, Indonesian museums were run by the Ministry of Tourism, where they enjoyed relatively high levels of financial support and attention. Their main audience under this ministry was foreigners or traveling Indonesians, which meant that exhibits changed infrequently — it matters less if your information is static if you have few repeat visitors. Museums were seen mostly as places of leisure, and money was poured into them to attract tourists.

In 2010, control switched to the Ministry of Education and Culture, which has a budget predominately allocated to education, and funding levels dropped. But this move also prompted museums to begin to think of themselves as serving the people of Indonesia and having an important role in informal education. A series of locally focused initiatives began then that included a Museum Visit Year campaign and revitalization projects. Most recently, in 2013, thirteen museums in Jakarta took their collections to that most public and popular of institutions, the mall. They hosted a museum week cosponsored by the Jakarta Post and the Ministry that featured an expo-style layout of booths with exhibits. Visitors were able to see exhibits and objects they might otherwise not have seen. The organizers hope to make this an annual event, and there is optimism that over time the event will bring more visitors to the museums in their own cities.

Human Resources

The Role of the Curator

Staffing has traditionally been a challenge for private and public museums alike in Asia, limiting the vitality and even sustainability of these institutions. With a glut of museums opening quickly and then having virtually no visitors, or even closing, China‘s example has shown that the success of new museums often depends on having the right people running and staffing them.

Museum professionals in the West take for granted that decisions about the collection and interpretation of objects—a principal function of a museum—will be made by a curator, someone with specialized content knowledge and appointed for that specific purpose. In China, curation has only emerged as a distinct role over the past ten years. In that time, though, it has taken off: it’s not uncommon for established museums to have hundreds of exhibits a year. Flexing its new muscles in this area, the National Art Museum in China sponsored its first international Asian Art Curator Forum last September, which gathered eighty curators from thirty countries.

However, less developed countries in the region still have a long way to go. In the most extreme cases, such as some government museums, curators may actually be seen as unnecessary, since exhibits may only change every five years. More often, where turnover is somewhat higher, curation may be outsourced to independent consultants.

It’s not just curators, either. Several roles in Western museums, such as marketing, fundraising, digital media, and visitor services, simply do not have counterparts in Southeast Asia, where job categories reflect an institutional focus on preservation or research on new archaeological finds.

Training

Perhaps unsurprisingly, museum workers in parts of developing Asia come to the museum with very different training than what might be typical for young museum staff in America.  For example, those in parts of Southeast Asia may have studied history, art history, biology, anthropology or archaeology only up to the university level – and in some cases, maybe only at the high-school level. It’s highly unlikely that they have specialized museum education or experience interning or volunteering at a museum, so training happens on the job. For example, in Cambodia and Myanmar, the respective National Museums are charged with the professional development of the entire country’s museum staff after they are hired. What’s more, government museum staff may lack not only expertise but even interest. Because civil service positions are often coveted for their benefits rather than actual job responsibilities, motivating public museum workers can be especially challenging and those who are motivated may find themselves isolated.

This, too, is beginning to change. Thailand has taken a leading role in providing professional development in Southeast Asia through its involvement in regional networks such as the SEAMEO SPAFA Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts and with the support of members of the royal family through the Princess Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre and Museum Field School. Students from throughout Southeast Asia attend these programs, where instructors include regional experts and museum professionals from the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Add that to its relatively strong economic performance within mainland Southeast Asia and open government, and Thailand offers a possible vision of the future for museums in the region.

Leapfrogging into the 21^st Century

We sometimes think of museums in the West as in search of their second life, a return to some – perhaps nonexistent – point in the past when they enjoyed widespread popularity. For the majority of museums in Asia, the second life they are building is really a first life: until recently, many of them were essentially public storage facilities and archives.

Development economists talk about technology leapfrogging, in which emerging economies bypass earlier stages of technology use. For example, rural villages may skip entirely over having landlines in their homes to use smart phones, or skip over dial-up Internet and start with wireless. With increased opportunities to collaborate on shared challenges, leapfrogging may catapult Asian museums directly into the future, perhaps with Western museums along for the ride. Institutions around the world can benefit from grappling together on issues such as cultivating first generation audiences, stretching limited institutional resources, enriching visitor experience, representing underrepresented or misrepresented groups, motivating reluctant staff to rethink the role of museums in society, promoting social inclusion and diversity, and creatively seeking funding.

Some organizations already facilitate this dialogue. Through the Asia-Europe Foundation, an international nonprofit based in Singapore with nearly forty member countries, the Asia-Europe Museum Network ASEMUS collaborates on the mapping of Asian collections, supports staff exchange, and hosts a biannual conference. Though no formal US-Asia museum-specific organization exists, the American Alliance of Museums, which has been involved in supporting international programs for over twenty-five years, is expanding its international museum work and now includes a US-China Exhibition Exchange. And a number of individual programs have been building valuable bridges. The Asia Society has hosted several events bringing together museum leaders from the West and Asia, such as the 2012 US-China Museum Directors Forum and last November’s Arts + Museum Summit in Hong Kong. The Asia Foundation sponsors the Asian Art Museum Fellowship in Asian Art, and the Asian Cultural Council supports artistic exchange between artists and arts professionals in the US and Asia.

How could we embrace even more collaboration? One possibility would be to create an international non-Western certificate track in graduate museology programs designed for American students who would ultimately either work in Asia or specialize in Asian art at museums in the West. In addition to general courses in museum studies, the track would involve coursework in cross-cultural leadership, non-Western heritage practices, and language study. Through partnerships with museums in Asia, students would have summer internships in the region; after graduation, some would have the opportunity to go back to work for the host institution as a visiting specialist. Local staff would then have the opportunity to receive training from the visiting specialists in their own countries from individuals with knowledge of the local context. American universities that already have satellite campuses in Asia might be a good place to start.

Another idea might be to set up an organization similar to PUM Netherlands Senior Experts, a nonprofit that provides consulting services to small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets. PUM’s 3,200 volunteer specialists are matched with assistance requests and deployed abroad for up to several weeks to work on discrete projects; host organizations just pay for local accommodation and food. The advantage of this model over a traditional museum consultancy firm taking on international work would be its affordability, allowing even financially-strapped museums to participate, and focus on overall self-sufficiency.

As attention focuses on the museum landscape in Asia, it’s important to realize that the changes taking place there are as diverse as the region itself. In some places, evolution is rapid; in others, measured. But across the continent, I have been impressed by the sparks of life that characterize many new museum projects and programs. Asia is home to some of the most remarkable economic growth stories of modern history, including Singapore, South Korea, China, and India. As momentum builds across the region, I look forward to the changes it will bring to the museum and cultural heritage landscapes here.

We’ve had a great time in Philadelphia this week. Look out for additional wrap-up posts in this space coming soon!

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Never afraid to speak his mind, Rocco Landesman shares a few more words about his experience as NEA head, this time with the Public Theater’s Public Forum Podcast.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Ken Corbin, a 27-year IRS veteran, will take over as acting head of the IRS’s exempt organizations division amid the recent controversies at the agency.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight and Gates Foundations are now teaming up to fund the Media Impact Project, which will develop tools for measuring the impact of online media.
• Controversy over public-private partnerships is as hot as ever, this time appearing in the provision of public space. The Atlantic discusses the equity, efficiency, and quantity implications.
• Former hedge funder John Arnold and wife Laura have opened a controversial, highly data-driven foundation in Houston with promising results already in the areas of hunger and criminal justice, Philanthropy News Digest reports.
• Andy Warhol’s eponymous foundation is struggling with a serious institutional crisis in which leaders created perverse incentives for their art authenticators and salespeople, according to Richard Dorment’s crackerjack reporting for the New York Review of Books.
• A new fund to help young London theater producers is making a big splash, the Guardian reports.

IN THE FIELD

• Ever wonder how arts therapy works for victims of trauma? ARTSblog has a fantastic pithy explanation in their article on the use of art therapy with members of America’s armed forces. More on arts and the military from Americans for the Arts can be found here.
• In an evolving sharing culture, copyright has become a major challenge for museums attempting to make social connections with audiences. Carolina A. Miranda explains how this works today in a detailed article for ARTnews.
• Curation is an evolving artform. Erin Roos-Brown, a Program Manager for the Creative Campus Initiative at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, argues in her article on the topic that curation used to require an insulated academic and is now quickly becoming a social, entrepreneurial role.
• A fascinating New York Times report on using art to launder money explains how the culture around buying famous artworks makes it one of the best ways to hide your tracks–if you’re a criminal.
• Vancouver theater producer Caleb McMullen is boldly offering a guarantee on the price of the ticket for his company’s production of Proof. The Globe and Mail lays out the whys, hows, and whos.
• A judge has allowed composer Nathan Currier’s lawsuit against the Brooklyn Philharmonic to proceed, thus extending the saga of the most bizarre concert experience ever experienced into its 10th year. -IDM

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• The Australian breaks down the takeaways from the Aspen Institute’s meeting on the future of museums in a new brief summary.

BIG IDEAS

• Createquity’s Talia Gibas has a brief summary at ARTSBlog covering how to get into the weeds of what the STEM to STEAM movement is really trying to accomplish.
• Fast Company’s always enterprising online outfit FastCoLabs has been experimenting with a new part-long form, part-live blog format that has (thus far) had a remarkably positive impact on their analytics.
• The Atlantic’s Emily Badger challenges the virtues of the advancing personalization of Google Maps in her piece The Potential Problem With Personalized Google Maps. Her argument speaks to the potential for idiosyncratic exposure to reduce quality of life.
• Students all over the country are being told to purse their passion, but what if they don’t have one? Economists try to answer this question in this piece by Planet Money’s Chana-Joffey Walt.
• Artful improvisation is a useful tool for managers. Keith Sawyer explains what leaders should glean from jazz improv in particular in his review of Yes to the Mess by Frank J. Barrett.
• Congratulations to the lucky dozen who made the Barry’s Blog Dinner-vention guest list! The event will be held September 6 at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and will be recorded for posterity. -IDM

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts Education Partnership has released Preparing Students for the Next America, a new report in which they detail how arts education improves work readiness and enriches the lives of community members.
• D5, a coalition of funders, community activists, and thought leaders, have a new report on diversity in the philanthropy sector, how to improve it, and why it matters.
• The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University has a new report out on the use of program-related investments (PRIs) as a philanthropic tool over the past twenty years.
• Foundations still have a long way to go on the road to transparency, according to a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and the President and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation adds his thoughts on how to make transparency a priority in the boardroom.
• A new model of concert attendance published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing provides evidence for a number of counter-intuitive findings, including an indifference point in terms of attendance between contemporary and less-known romantic-period works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

[T]he growing influence of blogs, chat rooms and message boards devoted to the arts has given the local professional critic a slew of competitors….Many arts institutions even allow their audience members to write their own critiques on the organizational website.

This is a scary trend.

He goes on to add:

Anyone can write a blog or leave a review in a chat room. The fact that someone writes about theater or ballet or music does not mean they have expert judgment.

But it is difficult to distinguish the professional critic from the amateur as one reads on-line reviews and critiques.

No one critic should be deemed the arbiter of good taste in any market and it is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art. But great art must not be measured by a popularity contest. Otherwise the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best.

Responses are all over the original post and the blogosphere; Andy Horwitz has one of the best over at Culturebot. You don’t need to think too hard to guess at my reaction; after all, I’m on record as saying that I think citizen critics (though I prefer the term “curators”) are the potential saviors of the artistic marketplace. However, that’s not to say that everyone’s opinion matters equally in every context. I believe in experts, I just think that newspaper editors shouldn’t be the only ones who get to decide who the experts are. Much more on all of this here and here, but in the meantime try the short version below:

What we need…is a way of broadening out the selection and adjudication process to a greater number of people without sacrificing the qualities and expertise that make professional program officers [or critics -IDM] special. To do this, we’ll still want to access the crowd, but rather than treat everyone the same, we’ll need to differentiate between good members of the crowd – the ones who are generous with their time, consider differing viewpoints thoughtfully, and demonstrate personal integrity – and bad members of the crowd – “one-issue” voters, poorly informed fly-by commenters, and vendetta-carriers. Put another way, we want to give anybody the opportunity to participate meaningfully without having to give that opportunity to everybody.

In other words, we need to curate the curators – something that, gee whiz, it turns out the internet is pretty good at.

Many have already pointed out the irony that Kaiser wrote his commentary on a website, the Huffington Post, that relies for much of its content on unpaid bloggers (of which Kaiser is one, I can only assume). But I also found it ironic that Kaiser’s post drew an approving two–part response from Rocco Landesman, who cites the NEA’s recent collaborative grant program with the Knight Foundation as a positive example of bucking the trend. Rocco writes:

Very often there is no one even vestigiall­y qualified as an expert and what little opinion we get is from “cost effective” freelancer­s or a gaggle of blog posts. […]

Here at the NEA we are trying to do something about this. In partnershi­p with the Knight Foundation­, whose domain is both journalism and the arts, we have made grants in our new Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge. Each of the winning grantees (in Charlotte, Miami, Detroit, Philadelph­ia and San Jose) has presented a sustainabl­e business model for a new way of delivering arts criticism.

And yet one of the projects (out of five) awarded a grant in the first round of the program is the Detroit iCritic van, which parks outside of arts events and offers exiting audience members the opportunity to record a video about their experience and share it with the world. Several of the other initiatives also afford citizen journalists a prominent role, with few restrictions on access. If this isn’t the democratization of arts criticism, I’m not sure what is.

Following the field dialogue on participation is so interesting. I really do think people want it both ways: they want the good things that can come from decentralizing power, access, and speech (thoughtful praise and constructive criticism, freeloading on volunteer labor, the moral high ground of inclusiveness) without having to accept the accompanying challenges (mindless or malicious attacks, declining revenues, having to listen to people you didn’t really want to invite to the table).

That particular drama has played out for centuries, really – it speaks to the fundamental dilemmas of collectivism. But the difference now is the way in which recent communications technologies, and the cultures that have built up around it, make everything more open by default. The social web connects strangers to each other around shared interests and foments dialogue, dialogue that filters down into everyday practice and informs collective actions that previously took place in isolation. And so you have these formerly untouchable institutions who are all of the sudden the ones asking for a place at the table…because the conversation is happening, and the world is moving on, with or without them.

I think what sometimes gets missed by those who lament our shifting reality is the inexorable fact that there’s no going back. There just isn’t. Newspapers are never again going to be a dominant force in our lives, and the bizarre economics that briefly made it possible to subsidize full-time professional arts critics via want ads and real estate listings are not likely to return. It’s like complaining about the oversupply of artists – y’all had better get used to it, because it’s not going away. I’m confident that our emerging content delivery systems will figure out ways to match up the opinions of smart people with the consumers who demand them. But I doubt very much that it will look anything like the models of the past. I suggest that rather than pine for the good old days, we instead consider what kinds of systems and structures can accept these new voices as a necessary input and still produce meaningful guidance for consumer and society alike.

• AFTA’s Narric Rome shares the latest on how arts education has fared in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) reauthorization, which Jennifer Kessler reported on earlier this year. Mostly good news, from what it sounds like.
• Looks like net neutrality advocates dodged a bullet when the Senate rejected an effort by Republicans to turn back regulations that were put in place last year.
• It’s official: the zero-budget Kansas Arts Commission will be receiving zero dollars in matching funds from the NEA. Kansas is now contemplating selling arts license plates a la the California Arts Council.
• Jonathan Arbabanel gives the insider scoop on what’s happening with the newly-merged Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
• Did you know that, by law, artists in California earn royalties from future sales of their work? It sounds like a great idea, but Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman make a compelling argument at the Freakonomics blog that it’s actually not good policy for most artists.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT: INTERNATIONAL

• Christopher Madden finds a strong relationship between cultural expenditures and cultural employment in Australia and New Zealand.
• Did you know that UNESCO has a Creative Cities Network? Or that the network has a conference coming up in Seoul, South Korea? I didn’t.

PRIVATE DOLLARS

• You’ve no doubt heard of the ArtPlace grant opportunity (letter of inquiry due today!), but the initiative offers just as much money in loan financing via the Nonprofit Finance Fund. There is a separate process to get in on that action, and the deadline is December 1.
• Mitch Nauffts reports on Bloomberg Philanthropies’s emergence as one of the nation’s top foundations.
• The Richard and Rhonda Goldman Foundation, a significant supporter of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, is spending down and has distributed its last set of grants.
• More on the Irvine Foundation’s new arts strategy, from arts program director Josephine Ramirez and foundation president Jim Canales.
• Whoa, I’d heard of composer Ann Southam via Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, but I had no idea she was loaded.

IN THE FIELD

• Two Austin art museums, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse, have merged.
• Yet another orchestra is facing significant financial troubles: this time, the Dallas Symphony. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, by contrast, is doing great under the strong leadership of Deborah Borda, with Walt Disney Concert Hall averaging 95% of capacity.
• Well, this is a novel negotiating tactic: the NYC Opera’s unions have offered to perform for free this season in exchange for health care and power over future venues. City Opera rejected the offer.
• Americans for the Arts’s Amanda Alef scored an interview with the collective voice that is the Occupy Wall Street Arts and Culture Committee.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Mandee Roberts takes issue with the fact that architects are included in the NEA’s recent report on artist professions and income.
• The NEA’s Sunil Iyengar takes on Holly Sidford’s report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” So does the League of American Orchestras’s Jesse Rosen, and Andrew Taylor.

THIS ECONOMY WE LIVE IN

• Applications for art and design college degrees in the UK are down 27% from last year, and officials worry that the rising cost of higher education is squeezing out lower-income students.
• As the cost of postsecondary education ratchets up ever higher, Cooper Union is considering charging tuition to undergraduates for the first time since 1902. (h/t Xenia via the Createquity Tipster)
• The value of the worldwide underground economy (broadly speaking, enterprises that are not registered or licensed and don’t pay taxes to the government) is approximately $10 trillion, according to an economist at Johannes Kepler University in Austria. If it were a country, it would be the second-largest economy in the world after the United States.

IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

• Farewell for now to Sean Stannard-Stockton, who is taking a sabbatical from his excellent blog Tactical Philanthropy. Hope we’ll see him back again soon.
• Chicago Artists Resource has a great behind-the-scenes interview with Thomas Cott of the celebrated email newsletter You’ve Cott Mail.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• Congratulations to the folks at Animating Democracy for a fabulous blog salon at ARTSBlog, which took place over the past week. Doug Borwick makes a good point in noting the creeping influence of creative placemaking on the discussion there.
• Arlene Goldbard was also at the Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, and she had some things to say about the WolfBrown white paper on participatory arts that was presented there.
• Speaking of conferences, the Independent Sector Conference (about which I’ll have a report here shortly) wasn’t the only social sector gathering that met recently. Bunmi Akinnusotu offers a brief but informative dispatch about the 2011 Net Impact Conference in Portland, OR.
• Imagine my surprise to find this article on the Fast Company website (h/t Mission Paradox) by a former classmate of mine from undergrad, Adrian Slywotzky. Adrian recounts a fascinating pro-bono study by consulting firm Oliver Wyman (in which he is a partner) called the Audience Growth Initiative that looked at audience churn at nine major symphony orchestras.
• Fantastic advice from Seth Godin on how to get hired at a small company (a term that describes virtually all arts organizations).
• Bad Culture has posted Part II of its interview with longtime Bay Area cultural policy wonk John Kreidler. (Part I is available here.)
• Is Wikipedia, arguably the most successful crowdsourcing experiment in history, running out of steam? I sure hope not, but the encyclopedia has a huge backlog of editorial work (adding sources to articles, etc.) that is apparently stretching the capacity of the site’s volunteer contributors.
• Thank you, Beth Kanter, for highlighting the fact that curation (of content or otherwise) is an art form all its own.
• Coolness: Life in a Day, the YouTube project showcasing user-uploaded video all recorded on July 24, 2010, is now available in its 90-minute entirety – on YouTube, of course.

Tell us a little bit about your radio show – what is it? How did it come to be, and how did you get involved?

Endless Possibilities is a weekly radio program I have hosted since 2008 on WRSU, the college radio station of Rutgers University. I began hosting shows on WRSU in 2005 with a wildly free form show called Trivial Pursuits. My initial motivation was to interact with music in a very non academic way because I was beginning to feel some conservatory burn out. As fun as it was to segue Pierrot Lunaire into London Calling into Hauschka, I eventually limited the format of my show and renamed it Endless Possibilities. While I don’t restrict myself from playing any specific genres, the core of each show is decidedly contemporary art music.

You announced an open call for submissions recently. What kind of response have you gotten? What is your process for evaluating what comes in through the door?

I’ve actually had an open call for submissions to a semi-regular segment of the show, Explorations, for about as long as Endless Possibilities has existed. The original motivation was to highlight great new music that may not have the shine of professionally made recordings or a publicity budget. This has long been one of the best parts of college radio, and I was hoping to do a little bit of that for new music. Additionally, I was looking for music that presented me with a new idea or fresh approach to an old one. I am more concerned with the idea than execution, and I hope to give the audience, which I assume to be college radio listeners more than new music insiders, the opportunity to connect with something they haven’t been previously exposed to.

A large majority of the submissions have been more polished than I expected. Upon reflection, the music has to survive the composition, rehearsal, and performance stages before it can even exist as a recording, and then the submitter has to be proud of the result. The bar is a lot higher than a call for scores, and I have no shortage of air time. As a result, I’m able to program a little more than half the works I am sent. While I’ve received a diversity of submissions, one thing that is clear is that most of the music I receive comes from people who have an affinity for self promotion.

Do you feel like you’ve “discovered” any artists through your submissions process (i.e., that nobody knew about before)? Do you ever try to promote their work beyond the radio show?

One composer I featured was solicited the following day for a commission. Another composer, Nat Evans, wrote a piece for a chamber group I run, and we’ve performed the piece multiple times. I certainly haven’t catapulted any composers from obscurity to household name, but I am pretty sure I have raised the profile of some musicians, including International composers who do not seem to receive attention in America. Additionally, I’ve kept tabs on the composers I’ve programmed and mention them on my website when they are promoting new projects.

You mentioned that the recordings people send you tend to be more polished than you expected. On the one hand, that perhaps makes for a better listening experience, but on the other, it perhaps gets away a little bit from the original vision for Explorations. How do you negotiate that tension in your curation process?

It is interesting, to me at least, that I’ve had to be more concerned with creating a ceiling for the segment than a floor. Luckily, I have space during the rest of my show to feature music I don’t find appropriate for Explorations, and I have played submissions outside of Explorations as a way to promote a piece and maintain the spirit of the segment. Clearly there is a lot gray area in making this determination, but over time my familiarity with the new music world has made this judgement a lot easier.

How much of your time do you spend listening to people’s submissions? And what keeps you going?

Submissions for Explorations don’t really follow any week to week pattern, but I’ll listen to each piece 3 or 4 times to get a firm grasp of it before deciding if it is appropriate. These submissions also have priority over the albums I receive from labels each month for regular airplay (which is generally about 10 hours of music a month), and the time I spend on soundcloud/twitter/etc. seeking out new music. As for what keeps me going, I am pretty addicted to finding new music and hearing things for the first time, so I’m generally excited to sit down and hear some fresh sounds.

What do you consider to be “good” curation? Is it about ethics, is it about filling a gap, etc.? What kinds of shortcuts do you think are permissible, and which ones do you not let yourself take?

I think any curator, whether creating a concert series or publishing a monthly short story series such as One Story, needs to have a clear focus of the type of art it is trying to feature and what makes his or her space unique. There is literally more music out there than hours in the day, and as a curator I’m attempting to create a virtual space that a listener can approach and quickly recognize the space’s identity.

I also have to deal with the critical mass of music being created. My social networks help limit the amount and quality of music I come in contact with. For example, Paul Bailey’s alt-classical has been a great source for finding new material. I don’t think this solution would work for any other medium, but I rely on iTunes Smart Playlists to filter music: Some of these playlists help me cycle through tracks within genres, while others keep the newest albums I’ve received close at my fingertips (as well as cycle out older tracks) and shuffle the pieces to explore how music would fit together for airplay. These playlists took a while to set up, but have saved me countless hours by targeting the most important music to listen to, as well as varying the tracks to keep my interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In January, we decided to initiate a year-long research project by asking, “What lessons can the rest of the field learn or take away from novel, under-the-radar, and locally-based ideas, projects or approaches to old problems?”

[…]

This fall, our committee will present a selection of in-depth profiles on some of the innovative ideas, projects and themes we’ve uncovered throughout the year. This week’s salon is an effort to expand and frame that conversation.

[…]

We specifically looked for two types of writers:

• First, the artist/producer/entrepreneur: someone who is realizing the development of a new enterprise or idea by leveraging talent, harnessing resources, pioneering change, and perhaps creating wealth (economic, cultural, etc.).
• Second, the finder/curator: one who is specifically tasked, through either his/her job or passion, with uncovering new voices and bringing them to the attention of others.

Our hope is that the conversation is as much about the process of innovation (and tuning innovation into reality) as the content of the innovation itself.

Happy reading!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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