Ukulélé — photo by flickr user oh_debby

In a perfect world, who should have access to the arts? Among artists, arts administrators, and arts educators the answer is likely to be unanimous: “Everyone!” And yet for the most part, that conviction is based on little more than gut instinct and personal experience. Do we actually have any evidence that people are happier with their lives for having art in it?

Those of you who read Createquity’s recent article on television and wellbeing might have noticed an interesting tidbit: according to our analysis of data from the 2012 General Social Survey, there is no relationship between having attended an exhibit or performance in the past year and one’s satisfaction with life, after controlling for factors such as health and income. Left unexplored by that analysis, however, was the question of more active forms of participation – i.e., creation and performance. Enter “Artful Living,” a recent paper from Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Not only does the 2014 study reveal a positive correlation between several forms of active participation and life satisfaction (which some scientists refer to as “subjective wellbeing”), it finds that some forms of art increase people’s wellbeing more than others, and that the arts improve some people’s lives more noticeably than others, too.

In “Artful Living,” Steven Tepper and his team examine the relationship between several creative pastimes and subjective wellbeing, and compare findings across demographic groups. The authors focus specifically on “artistic practice” (including activities such as playing a musical instrument and craft-making), rather than more passive forms of arts participation, such as attendance and reception.

Drawing on data from three national surveys, the researchers find a generally positive relationship between maintaining an artistic practice and various measures of subjective wellbeing. For instance, using a dataset of over 20,000 responses to the DDB Needham Life Style Survey of consumer attitudes in the U.S., the authors find that all three of the artistic practices examined (playing a musical instrument, gardening, and craft-making) are all positively associated with life satisfaction. Moreover, life satisfaction increases with greater frequency of participation in any of these activities. While the relationships are positive across the board, there are considerable differences between those three practices: the wellbeing gains associated with playing an instrument are almost twice as large as those for craft-making.

Besides the differences across artistic practices, the researchers observe that these positive correlations are more pronounced among women and people of color than their male and white counterparts. The relationships are particularly strong for women engaged in craft-making and gardening and people of color who either play an instrument or garden. The authors theorize that this might be attributed to certain benefits of artistic practice like self-expression and a greater sense of personal control and efficacy, which might be particularly helpful for improving the wellbeing of historically marginalized groups.

In addition to the DDB data, the Curb Center researchers analyzed data from a survey of 1,700 college seniors at nine institutions (the Double Major Student Survey) and from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which surveyed slightly more than 4,000 graduates from 76 art colleges. The results from the Double Major Student Survey lead the authors to conclude that students who engage in arts activities have a more positive self-image and social outlook. The SNAAP data indicates higher levels of life satisfaction among former arts students who have continued their artistic practice, but only among those who feel that they have adequate time to practice their art. Those who continue to create art but feel they don’t have enough time to do so report lower levels of life satisfaction than arts graduates who gave up their creative work entirely.

While these findings are intriguing, it is difficult to say how meaningful these associations are, as the effect sizes are fairly small. The developed models include variables such as age, race, gender, income, employment status, and marital status, plus data on respondents’ artistic practice. All of these variables together only explain about 8 to 13 percent of respondents’ subjective wellbeing.

The authors try to contextualize the size of the wellbeing increases associated with an artistic practice by stating that the increases are comparable to or greater than those that result from being married or having children. That seems pretty impressive at first glance, until one thinks about the fact that over 30 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that spending quality time with a crying newborn at 2am is a decidedly mixed blessing. It turns out that the ups and downs of these life-changing events are reflected in wellbeing surveys: the impact of marriage on wellbeing is fairly mixed, and while individual studies have conflicting results, it seems like levels of life satisfaction generally aren’t so different for parents and non-parents.

A more helpful point of comparison is provided in a study that compares the wellbeing impacts of sports and cultural engagement in the U.K., which came out the same year as “Artful Living.” As in “Artful Living,” the British researchers found a positive, statistically-significant relationship between artistic endeavors and life satisfaction. However, the increase in life satisfaction associated with arts engagement is slightly lower than that of participation in sports. This certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, but it demonstrates how comparisons can be used to make the effect sizes intelligible.

Even with these caveats, “Artful Living” serves as a great example of exploratory work demonstrating the relationship between the arts and wellbeing in the U.S. It also gives us valuable insight into the varying effects of artistic practice on different populations. As always, additional research would be useful. While experimental methods would be desirable, incorporating more forms of artistic practice within a general population survey like the DDB Needham Lifestyle Survey might be an excellent first start. In the meantime, “Artful Living” is notable for taking the challenge of measuring the wellbeing impact of the arts head on, and lays a helpful foundation for future research.

the artist’s hand — photo by flickr user farhad sarykov

Expanding the reach of arts organizations is notoriously challenging, especially when it comes to people who make less money, have less education, and may identify as of lower class than the average museumgoer or dance enthusiast. Createquity readers know that cost isn’t the most important barrier preventing people of low socioeconomic status (SES) from engaging with the arts. In “Why Don’t They Come?” (WDTC), we noted that the rate of attendance at free performances actually increases as income and education levels go up.

Since that article was published last May, a few new resources have come to light addressing the question from different angles. Later in 2015, Colleen Dilenschneider of the market research firm IMPACTS shared additional data, including a proprietary survey of 48 cultural institutions, that take the conclusions from WDTC a step further. Dilenschneider shows that free admission days don’t help to engage underserved audiences; they appear to subvert cultural organizations’ intentions by attracting a higher-SES audience and more repeat visitors than non-free days. Ultimately, these misguided audience development strategies are potentially harmful to cultural organizations’ financial sustainability, since they may cannibalize memberships and ticket revenues without increasing long-term attendance.

Dilenschneider isn’t quite ready to give up on free admission entirely. She attributes these perverse effects in part to failed outreach, which she suspects tends to target existing patron or marketing bases, rather than using innovative ways to reach underserved audiences. Her posts on free admission don’t specify how that might work, but another source suggests that a better understanding of social class could provide a key.

In WDTC, we cited NEA research showing that people who self-identify as middle or upper class are much more likely to attend an exhibit or performance than those who identify as working class – even if you control for income and education. As it turns out, this holds widely: research shows that class and social status are strong predictors of cultural engagement broadly. It seems that one barrier stopping people from seeing your show may be that those people don’t see themselves as the kind of people who go in for art.

But new research conducted in England by sociologist Aaron Reeves (and ably summarized by Pacific Standard) shows that, when it comes to active participation in art-making specifically, as opposed to passive consumption of art at an exhibit or performance, class becomes irrelevant. He analyzed national survey data to investigate the correlation between arts participation and demographic indicators such as social class, social status, income, and education. He finds that active arts participation is strongly correlated with education, but not with social class or social status – and it is inversely correlated with income. It seems art-averse audiences who won’t visit your museum may be enthusiastic amateur artists in their spare time.

This result doesn’t come out of the blue for people who have been following research into demographics of participation in the “informal arts.” For example, arts participation data for California that we reviewed last summer revealed less dramatic differences across education and income for active participation than for attendance. What’s new here is the finding that, at least in England, class and status per se don’t matter at all to levels of engagement and that lower-income adults actually engage more when you isolate art-making.

The bad news for arts advocates is that, for art-making as for art consumption, education is still critical to shaping preferences. Reeves suggests a few possibilities as to why education might be a strong predictor of active arts participation in particular. Higher education may select for high-schoolers who have demonstrated a commitment to extracurricular arts (it’s another box to check on college applications); it may serve as an incubator for cultural activity (for instance, a few dorm-mates staging Othello on the quad); and, most mysteriously, it may increase one’s capacity to process information. (One potential cause we can eliminate is the helicopter parent: Reeves controlled for parental encouragement to participate in the arts). Whatever the reason, as long as access to education remains unequal, it is fair to predict that access to art-making – and even the desire to make art – will also be unequal. In that sense, there are plenty of potential artists who are underserved.

The good news is that Reeves’s sociological analysis offers insight into the challenge of engaging low-SES adults as cultural consumers. He discusses arts consumption as a status marker, symbol of group membership, and class-related lifestyle choice. High-SES adults may attend a performance or exhibit in part because they know that it will be seen as normal and even admirable or expected when they talk about it with their peers. More fundamentally, over time, their tastes may have been shaped by repeated conversations of this kind to become entirely unconscious. Low-SES adults may encounter different reactions if they try to discuss a museum show or dance piece with their peers; other kinds of cultural consumption or leisure-time activity may be normalized or admired instead. (Our current research suggests that television in particular may fill this role.)

Reeves does not go into great detail about this social mechanism of taste-formation, but his account offers a way to begin to understand why free admission alone doesn’t ignite the interest of poor and less-educated audiences. The idea of belongingness may be a crucial subjective barrier, which suggests that organizations need not only to work harder to reach those audiences in their marketing, as Dilenschneider argues, but also to think more about these social dynamics in shaping their marketing. How might we begin to make audiences feel welcome?

Well, what about tapping into the taste for art-making? Reeves’s study shows that performing or making art is less likely to be “re-appropriated as a status marker,” and thus less likely to be associated with social status than art consumption. But the line between the two is often porous: think of the easels you sometimes see set up in front of paintings in a museum. What might it look like to appeal to art enthusiasts who consider themselves working class through their love of art-making? It’s unclear how large a subset of that elusive audience this is, but it could be a starting point – especially for adults who have some education but low income.

There are two caveats to consider before taking all of this information at face value. First, class may work differently in the US than in England; while we have seen data that likewise shows a correlation between class and arts consumption in the United States, a study that examined the correlation between self-perceived class and active arts participation (not just consumption) using US data is currently missing from the literature and would provide useful information. Second, the survey Reeves analyzed included too few arts participants of color to be able to draw any conclusions about race; this raises questions about how well his findings apply on our side of the Atlantic, although it is worth noting that US data tends not to show race to be a major factor in overall arts participation choices once socioeconomic status is taken into account.

Regardless, we know that even when arts and cultural events are free, low-SES audiences still aren’t coming. Thinking harder about the social formation of taste may help the field design more effective tools for outreach – and engage a new swath of people more fully in a healthy arts ecosystem.

Image by Florent Lemieux

If you’ve read a study about arts participation in the United States in the past few years, it’s a fair bet that it was authored, co-authored, or influenced by Jennifer Novak-Leonard. The University of Chicago researcher has maintained a breathtaking pace of output recently, nearly all of it focused on better understanding the ways in which people engage in and feel about arts and culture, broadly defined. The first five months of 2015 alone have seen the publication of no fewer than five texts listing Novak-Leonard as the lead author, picking apart arts participation statistics in every way imaginable over the course of some 250+ not exactly beach-reading pages.

The James Irvine Foundation, which has been a critical enabler of this work for nearly a decade, came out this spring with a cluster of arts participation studies by Novak-Leonard and others. Chief among these is “The Cultural Lives of Californians,” which synthesizes lessons from a new telephone survey of 1238 Golden State residents specially designed by Novak-Leonard and her colleagues at NORC at the University of Chicago. This so-called California Survey is an attempt to model a different approach to measuring cultural participation by offering a broader take on what “counts” as arts and culture than the statistics we typically hear about. Rather than limit the inquiry to questions about specific types of participation, the survey begins with an open-ended prompt about what role arts and culture plays in the respondent’s life:

People are involved indifferent types of activities that they enjoy or that are important to them. Please briefly tell me about any creative, cultural or artistic activities that you do.

If stumped, respondents were encouraged think broadly, with suggestions like “You could include anything you do that involves making music, dancing, roleplaying or telling stories, writing or making art. Also think of activities when you make something, or build, customize or repurpose something to your liking.” The resulting range of activities recorded is highly illuminating, and includes such seemingly off-the-wall responses as sandblasting mirrors, customizing old cars, and my favorite, making bowties that incorporate people’s personality characteristics. Clearly, Americans (or at least Californians) define cultural participation very broadly indeed. Importantly, about 15% of the responses had no correspondence with later closed-ended questions in the survey that asked about a range of specific types of participation, meaning that surveys that rely solely on closed-ended questions, such as the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, likely miss a substantial portion of the cultural activity that goes on. Yet even with this open-ended (and, let’s face it, highly leading) approach, a little over 6% of respondents to the California Survey either only mentioned sports-related activities or couldn’t come up with a single way in which they engage culturally, which probably sets a pretty hard upper bound on the percentage of the population that is culturally active for reasons elaborated on below.

While the bulk of “The Cultural Lives of Californians” is devoted to findings that are familiar from previous participation literature, a few new perspectives are offered. In particular, the report brings valuable attention to a consistent pattern of lower participation among immigrants, even those of the same ethnic background as non-immigrants. The authors explain that immigrants work more hours and have less leisure time than the rest of the population, which could account for the difference. “Cultural Lives” also documents a significant pattern of decreased art-making (as distinct from arts attendance) as people age, which overshadows the effect of income and education on that particular form of participation.

More than anything, the report repeatedly emphasizes the wide range of ways in which Californians engage with culture, and makes an argument for funders, researchers, and arts practitioners to use a wider aperture in conceptualizing participation. In particular, art-making activities that take place inside the home or outside of traditional arts spaces receive much attention from the authors, and the survey provides data on the demographic breakdowns of participants in such activities at a greater level of detail than we’ve seen in any other study.

Informal Yet Not (Fully) Inclusive

It turns out that “The Cultural Lives of Californians” is very timely for Createquity’s research process for that reason. A big question running through our investigation into socioeconomic status and arts participation earlier this year was whether poor and less-educated adults are less likely to participate in the arts generally, or just have different patterns of participation that don’t show up as readily in surveys and market research that focus on traditional nonprofit institutions. It’s long been an article of faith in the community arts field that the latter of these two assumptions is true; in other words, that the people who are not coming to the symphony or the ballet are instead experiencing music, dance, and other art forms in their homes, places of worship, and other “informal” contexts.

Despite its explicit goal of uncovering the hidden ways in which Californians participate in culture, there is not a lot of evidence in “Cultural Lives” to suggest that poor and less-educated adults are more likely than others to engage in the informal arts. For example, 60% of respondents with less than a high school diploma spent time with friends or family making music, compared to 73% with an advanced degree; there is a similar slightly upward trend by income associated with that activity. While we don’t see the kinds of dramatic differences across education and especially income as we do with various forms of physical attendance – the ones noted above are within the margin of error for the survey – there is no category of participation that demonstrates a clear pattern in the opposite direction, of higher participation by adults in the bottom income quartile or who never attended college. Put another way, while poor and economically disadvantaged adults may be more likely to sing to themselves or dance with friends than see the opera, the same is true of people with college degrees and well-paying jobs.

Survey Says…Don’t Trust (Most) Surveys?

Discussion about “The Cultural Lives of Californians” will no doubt focus primarily on its content and findings, but the study is no less notable for what it has to teach us about survey methodology and the art of measurement.

The project of which “Cultural Lives” is a part represents an ambitious and serious bid to move the practice of measuring cultural participation forward. In addition to the survey and accompanying analysis, the Irvine Foundation has also published a technical appendix that is longer than the report itself; a review of theoretical constructs and issues in arts participation research; and an entirely separate analysis of the California-based respondents to the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This last bit is especially important because it provides for direct comparisons between the “old” and “new” ways of measuring participation – the researchers even used the exact same question wording across surveys in many cases in order to facilitate such comparisons.

As a result, and because of the tremendous level of transparency provided by the authors, we can learn a lot about the effects that survey design and administration have on cultural participation data. Fortunately for the sake of making this article interesting, but unfortunately from the perspective of researchers and practitioners, it turns out that conclusions can differ substantially depending on the choices made in constructing the survey.

In her forward to “Cultural Lives,” Irvine Foundation arts program director Josephine Ramirez declares, “the new narrative is not about decline! Californians actually have a deep interest in the arts and lead active cultural lives.” While the report can’t comment one way or another on decline since there is no longitudinal component to the data, what I take Ramirez to mean here is that when you broaden the definition of what’s included in arts and culture, all of the sudden you see a lot more people participating than you did before. That is true, but it turns out that much of that apparent increase is attributable to the survey itself.

The values observed in the respondent set to “Cultural Lives of Californians” are consistently higher than seen in comparable questions in the SPPA and other data sources, sometimes dramatically so. For example, the California Survey reports a prevalence of acting six times higher than California respondents to the SPPA; four times higher for purchasing or acquiring art; and double the rate of attending a cultural fair or festival. These are not deceptively small adjustments within the margin of error; some of the differences here approach or exceed 30 percentage points. To their credit, the authors noticed this pattern and even made a table to summarize some of the most eye-popping differences in the technical appendix:

By way of explanation, Novak-Leonard et al. cite the broader frame of the California Survey as a whole (although this doesn’t explain the difference in directly comparable questions), and credit the open-ended question about participation at the beginning of the survey and example prompts throughout for jogging respondents’ memories. Most notably, they cast doubt on the methodology of the SPPA, implying that the abrupt transition to the set of questions about arts and culture as well as the switch in recall period from the past week to the past year are confusing for participants and result in false negatives.

These explanations are quite plausible and (with the exception of the broader frame, as discussed above) very likely account for at least some of the gap between survey results. However, the authors seem to go out of their way not to consider another possibility, which is that the California Survey may suffer from increased nonresponse bias. The response rate to the survey is substantially lower* than that of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which opens up a higher risk for bias in light of the targeted nature of the survey. The SPPA is an attachment to a larger, multi-modal measurement exercise called the Current Population Survey that is administered by the Census Bureau; thus, respondents to the CPS agree to participate in the survey without knowing that they’re going to be asked questions about their arts engagement habits. By contrast, the California Survey is a telephone-only survey that was upfront about being interested in people’s cultural lives, with the result that people who have richer cultural lives may have been more likely to respond. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the discussion of volunteering for an arts organization, as follows:

Forty-one percent of California adults donated money, goods or services to an arts or cultural organization or project and almost one-third (30 percent) otherwise volunteered to help an arts or cultural organization….These rates of support are substantially higher than those generally seen in other studies that ask about support for arts and culture….In addition, a report released by the United States Census Bureau in early 2014 finds that approximately 26 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 and older volunteered in any way…

In other words, the California Survey found that adults in California volunteer for arts organizations at a higher rate than adults nationally volunteer for anything!

This is not the first time that we’ve seen this phenomenon in evidence with participation data. In 2008, Irvine published the results of a survey by Novak-Leonard (then known as Jennifer Novak) and Alan Brown that purported to measure cultural engagement patterns among Californians living in the state’s inland regions. Createquity’s analysis of that report noted the following:

While most of WolfBrown’s measures cannot be compared with those in the SPPA, many that do show significantly higher levels of activity. For instance, 30% of Cultural Engagement respondents said they “regularly” attend stage plays; only 12.5% of SPPA respondents in the Pacific region claim to have done so even once in the past year. Six percent of Cultural Engagement respondents perform dances, but just 2.1% of Pacific region SPPA respondents do.

Now, with even more direct comparisons possible with the SPPA, we see such differences persisting or even expanding. Is the variance the result, as the authors suggest, of the SPPA not giving people enough to go on as they try to think of ways in which they’ve participated in the arts? Or is the culprit nonresponse bias, meaning that the California Survey’s numbers are inflated? My guess would be that it’s some of both, and that “true” participation rates are somewhere in between these estimates. Seemingly mundane details like where a question appears in a survey have indeed been shown to have surprisingly large impacts on results in some cases. However, in its 2012 review of the threat of nonresponse bias to public opinion surveys, the Pew Research Center observed, “survey participants tend to be significantly more engaged in civic activity than those who do not participate, confirming what previous research has shown…This has serious implications for a survey’s ability to accurately gauge behaviors related to volunteerism and civic activity. For example, telephone surveys may overestimate such behaviors as church attendance, contacting elected officials, or attending campaign events.”

Regardless of the explanation, the fact that two different surveys asking the exact same questions of the exact same target population could come up with such disparate results has important implications for anyone who uses survey research in their work. Ultimately, the lesson here is that survey results are much more sensitive to both design and administration choices than we would like to think. And with response rates for surveys getting worse and worse, there seems to be a strong suggestion that even with a random sample and a professional approach, a survey that signals too strongly the subject under study can bias results if part of what’s being measured is interest in that subject. That should be a heads up for every arts organization that surveys its own audience members, an extremely common practice throughout the industry. If your market research relies on people taking the time to tell you whether they’re interested in what you have to offer, odds are you’ll be hearing from the most interested people.

Fortunately, all hope is not lost for cultural participation research. As if publishing five reports in five months wasn’t enough, Novak-Leonard has been working closely with the NEA for several years now to address some of the deficiencies in the SPPA and introduce more inclusive questions. A marriage of the more thoughtful survey design elements from the California Survey with the increased resources for ensuring a representative data set that the federal government can provide would result in the best cultural participation data we’ve yet seen. Let’s just hope that those government statistics-gathering efforts can survive political pressure and budget cuts long enough for that vision can come to pass.

* NORC researchers actually calculated two versions of the weighted response rate, each of which used different assumptions for estimating what percentage of telephone numbers that didn’t result in a completed survey were eligible to be included in the first place. The higher of these response rates, 31.6%, is the one shared in the report’s technical appendix. Following a lengthy email exchange with two individuals at NORC who worked on the survey, my sense is that the lower number, 9.9%, is likely a better estimate. I am happy to share the details of the exchange with anyone who is interested. By comparison, the response rate to the Current Population Survey, of which the SPPA is a part, is 75%.

Another way to look at this issue is through the lens of opportunity cost. In basic microeconomics, an individual’s wellbeing is a function of consumption (or how much stuff you can buy, which depends on your wage rate and how many hours you choose to work) plus leisure (the hours you spend not working). This means that the “price” — or opportunity cost — of leisure is a function of your wage rate: choosing to spend an hour that you might have spent working engaged in a leisure activity.

Attending an arts event is both consumption and leisure in the sense that you have to buy a ticket and set aside the time to attend an event, and both considerations are relevant to considering how an individual might react to the price of an arts event. It’s not obvious which will be the stronger driver of demand in the market for theatre, so to answer this question, we turn to the data. In her 2009 study “Full-Income and Price Elasticities of Demand for German Public Theatre,” Marta Zieba examines this question empirically using data from German public theaters. She finds that that an increase in income is associated with an increase in demand for theatre, meaning that there is a positive “income effect” on theatre demand. However, the positive income effect on theatre attendance is offset to some degree by a negative price of leisure effect, meaning that while those with higher incomes are more likely to buy tickets based on their income alone, the higher price that they “pay” for their leisure time has a negative association with their tendency to buy theatre tickets. This also suggests that we would expect someone’s attendance rate to increase as their amount of leisure time increases. If we know that low-SES people have more time and a lower opportunity cost to attend arts events, it follows that cost may be a more significant barrier for this group than time.

(2) Methodological explanation:

To further explore the rate at which cost is a barrier for interested non-attendees, we used data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to calculate simple cross-tabulations of respondents who reported cost as a barrier to arts attendance for population groups at different education and income levels.

To consider the impact of cost as a barrier to arts attendance among different subsets of the population, we created a model that can theoretically equalize the rate at which populations of different socioeconomic statuses perceive cost as a barrier. In our calculations, we compared those with less than a high school education and those with at least a bachelor’s degree, and those in the bottom and top quartile of the income distribution. We used the following model to calculate these proportions:

where  refers to a subset of interested non-attendees in the GSS respondent pool with a particular income or education level, is the number of interested non-attendees within the subset who cited cost as a barrier, and is the number of attendees with that income or education level who attended an arts event. This model essentially takes the additional interested non-attendees who cited cost as a barrier to attendance among the lower socioeconomic status group (subset1) compared to the high-SES group (subset2), and converts them to attendees. To get the rate at which the lower socioeconomic status group might potentially attend arts events with this adjustment, we divide this number by the total count of respondents in the lower socioeconomic status subset in the General Social Survey who participated in the cultural module. Variations of this calculation involved converting all low-SES interested non-attendees who cited cost as a barrier to attendees, and all low-SES interested non-attendees who cited any barrier to attendees.

The GSS includes a number of survey weights to adjust for potential areas of bias. Because the raw counts of respondents were important to this exercise, we used unweighted data for these calculations. Readers are thus advised to consider these numbers approximations.

(3) On “informal arts”:

It’s important to remember here that not every form of non-media-based participation in the arts is captured by these figures. The statistics on barriers and motivations from “When Going Gets Tough” exclude any form of making art oneself, as opposed to experiencing the art of others, and the question about performances doesn’t count those held in K-12 settings. (It’s also worth contemplating the culturally loaded nature of the terms “exhibit” and “performance” and how those may influence the readiness of survey participants from different walks of life to connect experiences they’ve had to those words.) The range of activities considered in the SPPA is much broader, but neglects to incorporate several common modes like singing to oneself, displaying art in one’s home, or listening to music as part of, for example, a church service.

What little research does exist on these more “informal” activities suggests that they may be relatively more successful in attracting engagement from low-SES populations, although the data is hardly conclusive on that front. The Irvine Foundation, in collaboration with researcher Jennifer Novak-Leonard, has led the charge in recent years to learn more about a broad range of participation types. “Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions,” a 2008 Irvine-funded study by Alan Brown and Novak-Leonard (then known as Jennifer Novak) found that the home was the most common location for three of the four arts genres measured (70% of music, 34% of dance, 51% of visual arts activities), with “alternative” spaces such as parks, community centers, and places of worship also important to the Californians participating in the study. Notably, the authors’ analysis indicated that “inventive” and especially “interpretative” modes of participation did not skew towards more-educated individuals to nearly the same extent as “observational” participation, whether live or via media. A similar finding held for “arts learning,” “faith-based,” “heritage-based,” and “family-based” arts activities. Irvine and Novak-Leonard et al. have just released the results of a new survey of Californians that mostly corroborates these insights. An earlier, more qualitative investigation by Alaka Wali found evidence that people of all ages, races, incomes, and occupations participate in informal arts in Chicago, although even in that context there was still a small education gap between participants and non-participants. While these results suggest that informal arts experiences may play an important role low-SES individuals who do not attend exhibits and performances, it is important to note that the underlying surveys are somewhat more vulnerable to bias than the SPPA or GSS due to their arts-specific focus, lower response rates, and (in some cases) use of nonrandom samples.

(4) On leisure:

There exists a substantial literature on the concept of “leisure”: i.e., how we are spending the free hours we have, and how much those choices cost. Researchers define leisure in different ways, but one common approach uses the “third-person criterion,” which defines leisure as something that you cannot pay someone to do for you and that is not a biological necessity. For example, you can’t pay someone to or attend the symphony on your behalf and expect that the benefit that person receives from that experience will transfer to you.

In their study of leisure inequality, Sevilla et al. examine how the quality of leisure has changed since 1965 for different populations in relation to the quantity of leisure. Using the third-person criterion, survey data that examines how much utility people tend to get out of certain activities, and an examination of leisure time from time-use diary datasets, they propose that types of leisure are divided into three categories: pure leisure (where leisure is the main activity, so watching TV while making dinner doesn’t count); co-present leisure (time spent with a spouse or other adults); and fragmented leisure (in which leisure time is split up with non-leisure activities.) The categories are not mutually exclusive, so a leisure activity like attending a concert with a friend is considered both pure and co-present leisure. The authors, based on their review of survey data and prior work on leisure quality, deem fragmented leisure to be a lower-quality category than the other two. As a medium that is more likely to fall prey to multitasking, Sevilla et al. argue that television falls into this last category. Naturally, people do not all have the same habits when it comes to watching TV, but as long as there is at least some truth to the argument presented here, it suggests that the increase in hours of leisure time for low-SES people gives an inflated view of their relative wellbeing.

(5) Methodological explanation No. 2:

For this exercise, we modeled the total low-SES population of the United States who would have attended an arts event were cost no more likely to be a barrier than for high-SES populations, using numbers from the 2012 GSS and the 2010 US Census. In this instance we created a composite measure of low socioeconomic status that includes individuals who have no more than a high school diploma and are in the bottom half of the income distribution.

Since many adults aged 18-24 are in the process of attending college, standard education statistics cover adults aged 25 and above. To obtain a rough estimate of the number of 18-to-24-year-olds with low socioeconomic status, we used the proportion of adults aged 25+ who fit the definition described above and applied it to the total count of adults aged 18-24. We then calculated the difference in rates at which cost is a barrier for lower and higher socioeconomic status respondents and multiplied it by the proportion of low-SES interested non-attendees in the sample, using a survey weight to adjust for nonresponse. This number is then multiplied by the total adult US population to arrive at the estimated number of low-SES adults who are differentially affected by cost as a barrier to arts attendance.

(6) On the increase in leisure time:

Recent studies show that there has been a marked decrease in paid work for men and in unpaid work for women across all demographics in recent years; the gain in discretionary time across social strata can likely be attributed to this decrease. Since the low-SES population presumably includes people who work fewer hours for a lower wage, a decrease in work hours ostensibly indicates a decrease in available discretionary income. Since consumption inequality, or how much stuff people are able to buy, has largely kept pace with income inequality over the years, it follows that less discretionary income means less buying power.

FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following sources were consulted during the development of this article:

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• People with lower incomes and less education (low-SES) participate at lower rates in a huge range of activities, including not just classical music concerts and plays, but also less “elitist” forms of engagement like going to the movies, dancing socially, and even attending sporting events.
• This is despite the fact that low-SES adults actually have more free time at their disposal, on average.
• Cost is a barrier for some low-SES individuals who want to participate in the arts, but not as many as you might think. If we could somehow make it so that low-SES adults were no more likely to decide not to attend an exhibit or performance because of cost than their more affluent peers, it would hardly change the socioeconomic composition of audiences at all.
• A major contrast to this dynamic is television. Ironically, the for-profit commercial TV industry is far more effective than our subsidized nonprofit arts organizations at engaging economically vulnerable members of our society. Not only do low-SES adults watch more TV, low-SES adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than low-SES adults who do.
• Where to go from here? We’d like to better understand why people make the choices they do before offering recommendations. At the very least, though, we can say that television should receive far more recognition than it does for its role in shaping the cultural lives of socioeconomically disadvantaged adults.

* * *

Less is More – photo by flickr user Arthur Cruz

On March 18, the Empire finale aired on Fox. The two-hour episode was seen – on TV, in real time – by more than 17 million viewers nationwide. An estimated 50% of all African American households tuned in. In February, the New York City Ballet sold out its 2,500 seat house for three “Art Series” performances, as is typical of this series. (Each ticket, regardless of location, was priced at $29.) Last July, bachata star Romeo Santos sold out two nights at Yankee Stadium, performing for more than 100,000 people. (Two thirds of the tickets cost more than $100.) During the 2013-14 season, the Metropolitan Opera transmitted ten operas via satellite into some 2,000 theaters in 66 countries, including more than 800 in the U.S. Box office numbers hit $60 million worldwide. (Average ticket prices were $23.) Last summer, some 90,000 people put at least $300 and four full days (to say nothing of accommodation costs and travel time) towards attending Bonnaroo, the Tennessee rock/pop music festival. More than half of those attending came from farther afield than “the south.”

With statistics like these, it’s hard not to come away with the impression that “the arts” – from ballet to Bonnaroo – are alive and kicking, well-attended and avidly consumed by every demographic imaginable. A closer look at the data, however, surfaces evidence that individuals of low socioeconomic status (“low-SES”) – generally defined in our reading as those with at most a high school education and in the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States – consume the arts at a much lower rate than their more affluent counterparts. The latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) in the United States shows that in 2012, probability of arts attendance tracked closely with level of formal education: college graduates were more than two and a half times as likely to attend a so-called “benchmark” arts event in 2012 as those with no more than a high school education. Looking at income levels shows a similar correlative relationship: those earning between $20,000 and $50,000, who make up one-third of the US population, made up just a quarter of 2012 benchmark arts audiences in 2012. Statistics from the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands tell a similar story.

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012.”

Historically, research into the demographics of arts consumption has used a rather narrow lens to define “the arts.” The NEA’s benchmark arts activities, which have been measured in every edition of the survey since 1982, include only live attendance at ballet, opera, musical and nonmusical plays, classical music, jazz, museums, and galleries. However, the most recent edition of the SPPA makes clear that it’s not just benchmark activities that are at issue. Data from the survey shows that fewer low-income individuals attend pop and rock concerts than their wealthier counterparts, and significantly fewer of them attend visual arts festivals and craft fairs. In fact, people with lower incomes and less education are less likely to read books, go to the movies, take an arts class, play a musical instrument, sing, dance socially, take or edit photographs, paint, make scrapbooks, engage in creative writing, or make crafts.

All told, the data paints a consistent portrait of lower participation by low-SES adults in a breathtaking range of visual, performing, literary, and film activities. While this definition of “arts” doesn’t include everything (more on this later), it is broad enough, and the differences of sufficient magnitude, to be cause for significant concern. If those differences reflect disparities of access to more “common” arts experiences like participating regularly as an audience member, they represent a significant challenge to Createquity’s conception of a healthy arts ecosystem. When large numbers of people face barriers to participating in the arts in the way they might want to, we know that we’re missing opportunities to improve people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways. What’s really behind this phenomenon of lower participation rates among economically disadvantaged people? And what can, and should, we do about it?

THE PRICE IS TOO DAMN HIGH (OR IS IT?)

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts published “When Going Gets Tough,” a report that for the first time offers extensive insight into the reasons why people do or do not attend arts events. Drawing from a special cultural participation module within the 2012 General Social Survey (GSS), the survey asked respondents whether they had attended an exhibit or performance in the past year, and if not, why not. More than half of respondents had indeed attended at least one exhibit or performance during that time, and another 13% shared that they had wanted to go but decided not to for whatever reason. The report refers to this latter group as “interested non-attendees.”

The most common factor keeping people away from arts experiences, cited by nearly half of interested non-attendees, was that they “could not find the time.” This makes sense: before ponying up for a three-day festival in Tennessee or a five-hour opera, we first have to decide if we can afford the hours.

But while lack of time is undoubtedly an obstacle for many, it does not disproportionately affect lower-income and working class respondents. “When Going Gets Tough” notes that “not being able to find the time, including due to work conflicts, is increasingly mentioned…at higher incomes. [Only] 31% of those in the lowest income quartile mention time constraints, compared with 53% of those in higher income quartiles.” While perhaps surprising, this finding is not isolated to the arts: the phenomenon of less perceived time at higher incomes is well documented in the literature. According to Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee’s analysis of time use datasets from several countries for their cheekily-titled study “Stressed out on Four Continents: Time Crunch or Yuppie Kvetch?,” “complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from well-off families.”

Is this just a matter of perception? Do low-SES individuals feel less time-poor only because time pales in importance to other barriers they face? In fact, the preponderance of evidence suggests that low-SES people really do have more time at their disposal on average. According to a longitudinal study of time-use data by Almudena Sevilla, Jose I. Gimenez-Nadal, and Jonathan Gershuny, discretionary time has increased for all Americans over the last fifty years, and while hours of leisure time were once fairly equal across education levels, low-SES people have since enjoyed dramatic gains. By their estimation, low-SES men with at most a high school education have gained an hour more than their college-educated peers during that time; the corresponding differential for women is 3.4 hours.

Bottom line: all signs point to low-SES people having relatively more free time at their disposal and lower rates of arts attendance than their high-SES counterparts. That would seem to offer pretty strong evidence against the notion that time constraints are the primary factor keeping this demographic away from live performances and exhibits.

* * *

What about cost? For decades, our field has offered free concerts, outreach programs, and other engagement efforts that all rest on an assumption that the price of admission is a barrier to arts consumption for low-SES individuals. Taken literally, that assumption is supported by data from “When Going Gets Tough,” which indicates that cost was a barrier for nearly 40% of interested non-attendees. While the report itself does not go into detail on the extent to which cost is felt as a barrier across income strata, our own analysis of the underlying survey data indicates that low-SES individuals are indeed more likely to mention cost. Among interested non-attendees, 43% of people in the lowest income quartile were not able to attend an exhibit or performance because of cost, compared to 30% of folks in the highest quartile. Viewed through the lens of education, the difference is even more dramatic: those who had progressed no further than high school were almost twice as likely to see cost as an obstacle than respondents with a bachelor’s degree.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey. ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture

Looking at the motivations of people who did attend arts events, we see a similar dynamic. Adults in the lowest quartile of household income were twice as likely as those in the highest quartile to indicate that low cost or free admission was critical to their decision to attend an event. Even at events that were free for everyone, 29% of low-SES attendees said that low (or no) cost was a major reason for their attendance, versus 17% of those in the top income quartile.

So the way to get everyone participating in the arts is to invest more in free events and outreach programs to underserved populations, right? Not so fast. While it is clear that cost does affect the ability of some low-SES adults to engage with the arts, or at least live exhibits and performances, it’s not at all clear that removing cost as a barrier would make that much of a difference.

Consider this: “When Going Gets Tough” reports that there is only a 6 percentage-point gap between the lowest and highest income quartile for those who had free admission to the most recent arts exhibit they’d attended (64% in the lowest income quartile vs. 58% in the highest income quartile). While the difference in attendance at free performances is more pronounced in the GSS data, the most recent SPPA survey tells a different story: the rate of arts attendance at free music, theater, or dance performances actually increases as income and education levels go up. Moreover, this phenomenon has been observed in arts research going back at least half a century. For their seminal early 1960s investigation of cultural economics, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen surveyed more than 30,000 attendees at 160 events in the US and UK and found that not a single free performance was able to draw an audience that was more than 10% “blue-collar.”

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012.”

Admittedly, we don’t know the whole story here. Perhaps affluent adults are more likely to hear about free events, or have relationships with people who can get them free tickets. And even “free” is not necessarily free, if it still costs money to get to the location or pay for child care. Whatever the reasons, though, the data suggests that simply offering a free option is not sufficient for arts institutions to ensure a socioeconomically representative audience. In our own analysis of the survey data from which “When Going Gets Tough” was sourced, we modeled a scenario in which low-SES people were no more likely to face cost as a barrier in attending an exhibit or performance than their high-SES counterparts. Roughly speaking, this simulates what would happen if every exhibit and performance in existence could be attended for free. The result? Only 7% of the chasm in attendance rates between rich and poor, and between college-educated and not, would be bridged.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey via ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture, author analysis

“When Going Gets Tough” does find one other barrier to access that’s correlated with income: ease of getting to the venue. According to the report, “44 percent of adults in the lowest income quartile said the exhibit or performance was too difficult to get to….In contrast, only 24 percent of those in the highest income quartile mentioned this issue.” Yet, like cost, this factor on its own is not enough to explain the disparity. Indeed, according to our model, even if all barriers to participation were removed for low-SES populations and every person who wanted to attend an exhibit or performance in the past year were able to do so, it would still not close even half of the gap in attendance rates.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey via ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture, author analysis

Clearly, there is something else going on. If none of these barriers fully explain the low participation rates among the socioeconomically disadvantaged, what else is keeping them away?

ARTS VS. THE TUBE (MIND THE GAP)

Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem imagines a world in which “each human being today and in the future has an opportunity to participate in the arts at a level appropriate to his/her interest and skill” (emphasis added). Our concern about disparities of access to the arts stems from the potential for life circumstances to interfere with such choices. The revelations in this research, however, suggest that there is a significant proportion of economically disadvantaged people who do not take the initiative to experience the arts, even when time and cost are not issues.

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “When Going Gets Tough”

Our analysis of the GSS data underlying “When Going Gets Tough” shows that a lack of explicit interest is far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events. Just under a third of the overall sample neither attended an exhibit or performance in the past year nor could recall one they wanted to attend but couldn’t. Among the bottom income quartile, however, this number was nearly half – and for people who hadn’t finished high school, it was over 65%!

Amid the litany of arts-related activities for which participation correlates with increased income and higher education, one notable exception looms large. Aside from eating, television is about as close to a universal American pastime as exists today. A whopping 93% of us spend time in front of the tube on a typical day, according to the GSS, and nearly 97% of American households own a TV set. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s American Time Use Survey (ATUS), watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time (2.8 hours per day) in 2013, accounting for more than half of leisure time for those age 15 and over. John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey in “Busyness as Usual” show that television consumption has increased dramatically in recent decades across all populations, noting that TV has eaten up six of the eight hours of the discretionary hours we’ve gained on average since 1965.

While almost everyone watches television, it turns out that low-SES people watch more than most. A closer look at the Time Use Survey numbers shows that individuals with less than a high school diploma spent 3.77 hours per weekday watching TV in 2013, almost double the TV hours consumed by those with a bachelor’s degree and higher. What’s more, these less-educated individuals spent twice as much time consuming television as on all other leisure activities combined–including reading, socializing and communicating, sports and exercise, relaxing, and playing computer games.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the spending patterns captured in the BLS’s Consumer Expenditure Survey. Although individuals in the top income quintile spend only a little bit more of their budgets on “entertainment” on the whole than those on the bottom (5% vs. 4%), the distribution within this amount is quite different. In the lowest income quintile, more than half of spending goes to “audio and visual equipment and services” (which presumably includes TVs), while just over a tenth goes to “fees and admissions.” The top bracket, by contrast, spends more on fees and admissions than on A/V equipment and services.

It seems likely that quite a few low-SES adults are essentially substituting television for other forms of engagement with the arts and entertainment. Our analysis of GSS data offers strong evidence to support this hypothesis. It turns out that even within low-SES groups, a lack of expressed interest in attending an exhibit or performance over the past year correlates with more hours spent watching TV. Whatever sustenance people are seeking from live arts attendance, it seems the folks who don’t go are getting it (at least in part) from the small screen.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey. ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture

Is that something to be worried about? At least one group of researchers argues that it is. In their previously-mentioned study on leisure inequality, Sevilla et al. find that in contrast to previously mentioned increases in the quantity of leisure time, the quality of leisure time has declined across the board for people at all income levels, with an especially steep decline in leisure quality for low-SES individuals. In other words, even though low-SES individuals have experienced the greatest increase in number of discretionary hours since 1965, they have also experienced the greatest decline in the “quality” of how those hours are spent, as measured by their relative levels of different types of leisure. Sevilla et al. see increased TV watching as a prime culprit behind this decrease in leisure time quality, as watching TV is a passive, one-way communication medium that doesn’t require the presence of others.

On the other hand, TV is relatively cheap for the quantity of programming available and can be delivered on demand via devices we likely already own. And in the midst of what many are calling a new golden age of television, claims on the part of egghead researchers about “low-quality” leisure time might ring hollow to the folks who tune in every day.

(MAYBE) THEY’RE JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU

The truth is that we don’t know much about why low-SES people make the choices they do about how to spend their free time. Are they watching television because they truly enjoy it and happen to find it more fulfilling than going out to a concert, a museum, or a movie theater? Or are they doing so as a reluctant concession to circumstance, with TV being the only art form they can afford to consume (or the only one they don’t have to schedule in advance)? Or perhaps something in between – a “learned” and socially reinforced preference that has as much to do with identity as anything specific to the experience itself?

“When Going Gets Tough” offers some support for the last of these propositions. Survey respondents who self-identified as middle or upper class were much more likely to attend an exhibit or performance than those who identified as working class. This finding held even after controlling for income and education:

For example, among individuals whose household income was around the national median, approximately 60% identified as working class and 36% as middle class. Despite having very similar household incomes, only 48% of those identifying as working class attended at least one exhibit or performance, compared with 67% who identified as middle class.

Perhaps some low-SES individuals don’t attend arts events simply because they don’t think of themselves as the “kind of people” who attend arts events. Which brings us back to the question: is that a problem?

Art Gallery – photo by flickr user LWYang

We would urge would-be social engineers to tread carefully when it comes to deciding for poor people what their consumption preferences should be. (An instructive example here is the movement in New York City and elsewhere to reduce soda consumption, which has faced pushback from the very low-income communities it’s intended to help.) How far can one go to increase participation by underrepresented audiences before those efforts stop being perceived as generous and start coming off as patronizing? Until we know more about low-SES people’s subjective experience of their free time — whether they would spend their time differently if they had the opportunity, and whether there’s a place for the arts in those dreams — we advise against making too many assumptions.

There is a rich irony lurking just beneath the surface here: television, a largely for-profit commercial industry, routinely does a much better job engaging the most economically vulnerable members of our population than our supposedly charitable nonprofit arts institutions that receive tens of billions of dollars annually in government-sanctioned subsidy. As TV becomes increasingly untethered from broadcast networks and big cable channels and increasingly experienced on laptops and handheld devices, the nonprofit arts sector would do well to let go of its historical marginalization of the small screen. For better or worse, television is a powerful cultural force, and ignoring it is no longer tenable in an era of increased attention to cultural equity and community relevance.

BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

In the meantime, however, let’s not forget that we have identified one constituency that is clearly suffering under the status quo. More than 45% of low-SES adults who were interested in participating in an exhibit or performance over a 12-month period did not do so because of cost – a figure that is more than 10 percentage points higher than their high-SES counterparts. According to our analysis of the GSS data, roughly 1-1.5 million people in the United States over the age of 18 fall into this gap. Not only does cost of attendance matter more for low-SES individuals and families with less discretionary income, with income inequality in the United States exploding, the number of people who face economic barriers to their desired level of participation in the arts is likely to multiply if current trends continue. And remember that these numbers apply only to exhibits and performances, but there are lower rates of participation by low-income and less-educated adults in numerous other activities as well, including going to the movies and many types of art-making and arts learning. The SPPA even reports that the same education and income correlations we’ve been talking about apply when it comes to attending a sporting event, playing sports, and physical exercise. It’s likely that cost limits the ability of low-income and less-educated individuals to participate in all of these to some extent.

While it’s not surprising to see lower participation by socioeconomically disadvantaged adults in arts activities that they perceive as too expensive, it’s important to keep that gap in perspective. Our investigation has uncovered evidence that although this problem is real, it directly impacts the choices of a much smaller number of people than we might have guessed. As we continue our core research process at Createquity, we’ll be looking to understand better why poor people and those who have not attended college seem much less likely to even be interested in participating in the arts, as well as weigh this particular disparity of access alongside others that we have yet to examine closely or even identify. We look forward to sharing what we find.

Folklorists are uniquely suited to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Their research methods address uncovering artists outside the nonprofit arts infrastructure, a factor essential to building a sustainable local arts network.  If foundations and arts policy decision makers want to build such an environment for the arts, folklorists can aid them in taking steps towards authenticity and sustainability.

The Importance of the Informal Arts

Several studies over the last ten years have emphasized the importance of informal arts as well as nonprofit arts organizations, commercial arts, arts education, government, and businesses, in creating a healthy environment for the arts.

Cultural Development in Creative Communities (2003) came out right after Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class. Published by Americans for the Arts, it cites Portland, Oregon as an example of the new creative city, having “an especially large number of mid-sized and smaller organizations . . . [where] informal arts activities thrive . . . [and] many arts spaces sponsor project based collaborations . . . .” The authors (among others, Bill Bulick and Carol Coletta, current ArtPlace spearheader) continue: “Community asset mapping must encompass this breadth [commercial, nonprofit, and informal] in order to ferret out nodes and catalysts of cultural vibrancy, synergy, and impact.”

The authors recommend developing funding for project-based creative work with individuals and informal groups. They conclude,

The opportunity for our field is to broaden our definitions of culture, maximize participation and engagement, develop a climate that encourages creativity among all citizens, and channel that creativity towards building-and sustaining-our communities.

One of the key findings of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Research into Action: Pathways to New Opportunities (completed as part of a study of culture in Philadelphia in 2009) is that “Personal practice (including creating music or dance, painting or drawing, and sharing photos, music or videos online) is a gateway to attendance.“ The report goes on to cite Steven Tepper’s book Engaging Art, in which he predicts that “the twenty-first century will be shaped by the Pro-Am Revolution.”

In Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places (2002), Alaka Wali and colleagues make a convincing case that there is mutual benefit and reinforcement flowing between the informal and formal arts. The formally trained teachers and group leaders often derive benefits from teaching, such as new ways of thinking about techniques or ideas and hands-on experience in organizing and administrating. The students and less skilled artists benefit from the formal training of their teachers and gain inspiration from performances and exhibitions at formal arts institutions. Informal activities can also serve as incubators for experimental ideas in the arts.  Wali et al. recommend that the informal arts be incorporated into community development, that institutions that already intersect with informal arts be supported in expanding that activity, and that arts advocacy be built across informal-formal divides.

Barriers between Theory and Practice

It’s clear that many grantmakers and arts agencies agree that the path to a healthy, sustainable local arts ecosystem will necessarily include informal artists. Yet, their strategies by and large remain focused on nonprofit arts organizations. Research into Action hammers home the need for more programming that encourages personal participation in the arts, but it doesn’t even mention informal arts groups. A recent solicitation of perspectives from of regional arts councils participating in Americans for the Arts’s Local Arts Network yielded several examples of individuals who happened to be amateur artists serving on planning and advisory committees, but little targeting of “informal” artists specifically. Although many informal groups are led by professional artists, it is important to focus on the activity of the informal arts and their amateur practitioners, not simply viewing them as another source of revenue for practicing artists.

To be certain, there are significant barriers that have up to now kept funders from partnering with the informal sector.

• Visibility Barriers

In the Informal Arts report, Wali et. al. found that informal arts activities tend to fly under everyone’s radar. Activities occurring in “artsy” neighborhoods were more visible in the media than activities occurring in neighborhoods lacking that reputation. Additionally, researchers found no widespread recognition of informal arts practice as a concept within the informal arts world.

This means that it takes considerable effort just to find these groups. Combined with the economies of scale offered by larger nonprofits (enabling them to reach a larger number of beneficiaries), it should come as no surprise that informal artists often seem to escape the notice of arts leaders engaging in cultural planning and policy development efforts.

• Structural Barriers

The informal arts are—by definition—informal. Most groups are casual in attendance, unselective in ability required, and run by volunteers. They come and go according to availability of resources, popularity of the activity, and dedication of volunteers.  Some have organized leadership and discrete financial accounts, but many do not.

These factors make informal arts groups challenging to work with, especially for funders. Grantmakers are under heavy pressure to show exactly where their grants went and what kind of impact they had. This is difficult if not impossible to do with a group that may or may not exist from year to year. No wonder that when grantmakers do get involved with participatory arts, they often end up “formalizing” the group—building it into another institution.

• The Quality Barrier

Many, if not most, of the funders that support the arts have the word “excellence” in their mission statements or program guidelines. They want to support, and be associated with, high-quality art. The problem is that high quality participation and high quality art can’t be measured by the same factors. Some informal art is amazing, and some is amateurish in every sense.  If the goal is to create a more sustainable arts ecosystem, however, that means encouraging more people to experience the process of art-making, not just consume amazing art.

Barriers of structure, visibility, and perceived quality keep the informal and formal arts from collaborating at a strategic level.  The result is that informal artists’ voices are rarely heard in discussions about regional development, robbing grantmakers and arts agencies of the valuable information they could contribute about regional culture and what resources they need to thrive.

Folklorists Can Bridge the Gap

As Brendan Greaves points out, folklore is all about process—both the research process and the artistic process. Folklorists first locate practitioners of traditions and ask them about their involvement, in a method known as fieldwork. Some of this fieldwork is structured—that is, a folklorist will start with a list of persons of interest and gradually grow that list by ending each interview with “Who else should I talk to?” Unstructured fieldwork, by contrast, involves exploring an area through any means possible: attending festivals and talking to people, perusing community bulletin boards, and shuffling through the stacks of business cards at gas stations and talking to the attendants. The first result of such investigation is a list of arts practitioners, making that which was previously invisible, visible.

The second step in this process is to articulate why this tradition is practiced (the artistic process). What motivates the artist? Through interviews, folklorists get the answer to this question in the practitioner’s own words. This is extremely important because it ensures authenticity of the study.

Most often, folklorists have been asked to document cultural traditions that are rooted in community identity. However, the skills and methods described above don’t have to be limited to the realm of folk art. The North Carolina Arts Council demonstrated this when they worked in collaboration with the North Carolina Folklife Institute to map the cultural assets and needs in Wilmington, NC. Folklorists Sarah Bryan and Sally Peterson conducted structured and unstructured fieldwork, along with academic research and a public survey, resulting in a series of documents that outlined existing informal arts groups and distinctive regional traditions and recommended steps to be taken to grow these assets. Notably, this work uncovered informal arts practice across the spectrum of creative activity, including a network of artists employed in the film industry and a genre of music called “holy hip hop.”

Wayne Martin, Senior Program Director for Community Arts Development at the North Carolina Arts Council, explains that involving folklorists in this project enabled the Arts Council both to identify and begin engagement with artists outside the nonprofit infrastructure, and to understand community culture in an authentic way. “Folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in a variety of forms,” says Martin. “Folklorists understand how artistry is a window onto a community. They are able to articulate how the art that is produced there reflects the values of that community and makes it distinct.”

As beneficial as folklore research is, it has its own set of advantages and disadvantages relative to other methods of community research. This is a labor-intensive method that takes adequate time and human resources to be done well, and some communities that are extremely cosmopolitan might be too overwhelming to take on comprehensively. Furthermore, while folklore research can paint a rich picture of a subset of the community using qualitative data, quantitative data can be more useful for seeing the “big picture” in a region. That being said, folklorists can aid grantmakers and arts agencies in collaborating with informal arts groups by addressing the barriers of structure, visibility, and perceived quality.

–          Research addresses barriers of visibility

Through structured and unstructured fieldwork, folklorists uncover informal artists and groups that don’t have the resources to advertise themselves, making them visible and bringing them to the attention of grantmakers and arts agencies.

–          A collective approach addresses structural barriers

Instead of asking informal arts groups to propose projects that will fit a foundation’s mission, folklorists ask what resources they need to operate and grow and who they collaborate with.  By approaching the informal arts as a collection of individuals and groups, folklorists could help foundations and arts agencies identify resources the sector needs as a whole, instead of trying to work with each specific group.

–          Focus on process and participants addresses the “quality” barrier

The informal arts place more of an emphasis on the process of creating and experiencing art, not only on the “excellence” of the finished piece. A folklorist’s focus on the artistic process (why art is created, how it is created) as well as the process by which it is shared and experienced with others, gets at the reasons people participate, and how and why they bring their art to their community. It is imperative to know why and how people participate in these informal arts if foundations and arts policymakers seek to encourage such participation.

The Irvine Foundation’s new Exploring Engagement Fund, accompanied by a white paper written by WolfBrown, is an exciting step towards foundations supporting participatory and informal arts. The study points out various projects being undertaken by arts organizations around the world that embrace and encourage participatory art  (e.g., the Art Gallery of Ontario’s In Your Face open submission art exhibit;  inviting community members to create, perform and witness Headwaters, produced by the Sautee Nacoochee Community Association in rural Georgia; enabling anyone to learn to dance, together, at The Big Dance (2012) in London and the Bal Moderne in Brussels). Although the informal arts are certainly nothing new, it is novel for a leadership institution like the Irvine Foundation to actively encourage this kind of arts participation.

In the 21^st century, technology continues to make it easier to learn and practice art. The Pro-Am Revolution has blurred the lines between audience and artist, making arts participation more important than ever to the strength of the arts as a whole. The problem is that funders operate in a wholly different world from the informal arts. Because folklorists already work with the informal arts subgenre of folk arts and music, they are uniquely suited to seek out and find informal artists and groups, learn from them, and report back to grantmakers. Funders and arts policy leaders would do well to turn to folklorists to help them work with and strengthen the informal arts for the benefit of the sector as a whole.

Informal Arts is a series of case studies on the little-researched topic of adult participation in informal arts. By following twelve groups ranging from a quilting guild to a hip-hop collective, this 431-page report delves into the social and artistic value created by people actually making art.

The study found that:

• The informal arts bridge differences. People from all walks of life participated, and people of different ages, genders, occupations, and incomes worked together artistically. The authors say that this was possible because the barriers to participation were so low.
• The informal arts build capacity for community building. Participants reported getting better at giving and receiving criticism through their artistic activity, and some became more involved in their communities.
• The informal arts benefit the formal arts, and vice-versa. Informal groups can be incubators for new artistic directions, and formal institutions provide training and inspiration.
• Informal arts groups are present in many areas of Chicago, including areas like the Southside that aren’t traditionally known for artistic activity. However, even within those communities, not many people know about those groups.

I think that this report is pretty amazing in detail, and eye-opening in revealing how and why people participate in the arts. It was particularly surprising that none of the case-study groups met in a formal arts institution; they met in churches, libraries, parks, or private homes. The demographics recorded in the report defy the stereotypes of who participates in amateur arts groups.

The lesson for the arts and policy sectors to take away are:

• The arts don’t just have an economic impact. Adults (not just children) creating art has an intrinsic value, too.
• Formal arts institutions are not the only sources for art.
• In a world of social media, the pro-am revolution, and “the long tail,” the number of people wanting to create art is not going to decrease, and the extent to which they want to participate will probably increase.
• Formal arts organizations should become more involved in the informal arts if they want to thrive in the future.  They can do this by:

1. Enabling informal arts groups to do what they do, or
2. Directly engaging in the informal arts through sponsorship and partnership.

An illustration of the formal-informal arts continuum from "Informal Arts," 2002.

Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places (Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, 2002) sheds light on the little-studied topic of adult participation in informal arts. The report was commissioned by the CAP in response to “The Arts & The Public Purpose” (American Assembly Consensus Report, 1997), the 1998 NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, and a 1998 study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project that identified a strong relationship between arts participation and other forms of community engagement.  Given the CAP’s focus on the interaction of the arts and democracy, they approached Dr. Alaka Wali, Director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change at Chicago’s Field Museum to research the subject in more depth. The report, led by Wali along with ethnographers Rebecca Severson and Mario Longoni,  follows participants in a dozen groups in the Chicago area, ranging from a drum circle to community theaters to a quilting guild. While there has been a lot of investigation into the economic impact of the arts and especially of those consuming it, this 431-page report delves into the social and artistic value created by people actually making art.

SUMMARY

Both the CAP and the Center for Cultural Understanding are centered around how the arts can be used for social change and engagement. Accordingly, the areas of inquiry set out at the start of the project revolved around community development. In the words of Dr. Wali, the areas were:

1. What, if anything, does participation in these kinds of activities lead to in terms of interaction across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and class?
2. What kind of civic skills, if any, do people acquire as a result of their participation in these kinds of activities?
3. What is the relationship between the informal and more formal arts?

Their research consisted of fieldwork (which involved joining each group as a student), review of media coverage, census records, published literature, and sending a survey to 310 participants (conducted via email and mail with 166 responses). Through these methods, authors found that the informal arts do help participants bridge differences with their peers and gain skills that are transferred to their work and civic life. Additionally, findings indicated that while the informal arts benefit from the formal arts in terms of training, inspiration, and (very occasionally) resources, the formal arts benefit from informal arts in that they serve as incubators and they create potential audience members.

However, the study also found that the informal arts are often “invisible” because they take place in unexpected spaces and don’t exactly have marketing budgets. The authors recommended that the informal arts be made more visible by being further studied, talked about by civic and arts leaders, advocated for, and used in community development.

What are the informal arts?

By now you may be wondering what exactly the “informal arts” are. The NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts calls them “unincorporated arts,” while many refer to them as amateur,  leisure-time, or community arts. (Participants of case study groups described themselves as anywhere between “not ready for prime time” to “just people not professional”). The report’s official definition is that the informal arts are “creative activities that fall outside traditional non-profit and commercial arts experiences,” going on to say that they usually have no permanent home, virtually no fund-raising activities or secure income, and no selective membership.

To get a better idea, these are the groups that were studied in the report:

Table of case study groups excerpted from "Informal Arts"

Benefits of the Informal Arts

1. Bridging Differences

Through a survey, the authors found that informal arts participants in the study were very representative of the US population as a whole across all groups in terms of income, ethnicity, age, occupation, and gender. Diversity within groups was also common, with the exception of ethnicity- groups tended to be primarily of one race.

Something significant that they had in common, though, was education—up to 80% had some college education (compared to 65.6% nationally). Another commonality was the love of or need to make art. There were more than 32 references in the field notes to artists saying they “have to” or “must” do their art, with the phrase “need to express” being used 72 times.

This common drive to make art provides a significant motivation to find other people with whom to make it, even if that means crossing social boundaries. The study devotes quite a bit of attention to how informal arts settings offer lowered barriers to participation that enable such boundaries to be overcome.

• The spaces were accessible and felt accessible. Of all of the case studies, not one was held in a space dedicated to art. Through their interviews and survey of media, the researchers found that the places where informal arts take place are coffeehouses, police stations, office buildings, churches, social service agencies, the street, libraries, and parks. The report spoke of underlying preconceived notions of “[the space] is there for me”(public spaces) v. “[the space] is there for others” (formal arts places). Some participants learned of the activities at parks and libraries simply when they were passing through, or saw the group practicing their activity through a window or outside.
• The activities were accessible financially. Most of the activities were free or low cost, with some participants specifically stating that they did not take classes at formal arts institutions because they were too expensive.
• The groups exuded and fostered a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. Casual attendance policies prevailed—if someone had to skip a week, or even a few months, and it didn’t adversely affect the group, so it wasn’t a big deal. Older children would sometimes be brought along to avoid having to pay for a sitter. The atmosphere at group meetings was welcoming. Participants in the drum circle invited onlookers to join in, physically going up to them and handing them instruments. In the quilting guild, Asian music ensemble, and painting class, if a new member voiced concern over not doing the activity “right,” existing members would insist that they were doing fine and use self-deprecating humor to downplay their own ability.
• All talent levels were welcome in the groups. The painting class used the studio method in classes, in which the instructor goes from student to student, ensuring that everyone could work at their own pace. Participants could choose their own involvement level, and often the focus of their efforts—choosing which plays to produce was a group effort, and members of a painting class chose their own subjects and styles.  There were opportunities for everyone from beginners to highly skilled artists. Participants taught each other peer-to-peer by sharing tips and tricks. Finally, teachers and peers were gentle on criticism, especially at first.

2. Building Capacity

The authors found that informal arts participation built skills that are useful in community development, including consensus building, working collaboratively, and the ability to imagine and foment social change.

Although decision-making styles varied across disciplines, all involved some level of consensus building.  In the community theaters, decisions were made by the board or a director, but there was still discussion involved where everyone had their say, and eventually a majority developed.  In the South Asian music ensemble, disagreements would be voiced via email, and later key members of the group would mediate, keeping the group focused on their purpose and goals. Even the church choir director, though he had official control over the selection of songs, would frame the selection as a request, saying “Can we sing this on Sunday?”

The participants reported learning collaborative work habits in their artistic activities and carrying those skills over into their work lives and the public sphere. For example, an actor found that because he had learned not to “take over” as a result of receiving criticism in theater, he could now more effectively play the role of mediator at work. A drummer spoke of becoming more egalitarian and more willing to join community groups because of his role facilitating the group rhythm of the drum circle, in which he encouraged people who thought they couldn’t play while keeping advanced and master drummers engaged.

Researchers observed both groups and individuals advocating for causes they believed in. One member of the writing group told the group’s sponsors that the journal they published was too “heavy” and stereotypically “ghetto drama,” and she convinced them to change it. A kindergarten teacher in the drumming circle initiated efforts to help the homeless through her school and spoke up more to her supervisors after joining the group.  The authors of the study called this the ability to imagine and implement social change: a combination of the ability to form an opinion, to speak one’s point of view, and to be physically comfortable in the public sphere.

Informal arts participants frequently reported gaining other skills as well:

• 75% of respondents to the survey indicated that their ability to give and take criticism had improved since starting arts activities.
• 60% indicated that their problem-solving skills had improved; indeed, through their fieldwork, Wali et al. witnessed participants substituting materials, re-thinking strategies, and re-structuring roles in response to challenges that presented themselves.
• The authors recorded participants nurturing tolerance (especially regarding differing skill levels) and fostering mechanisms for inclusion using patience, humor, structuring of space (adding more chairs, etc), respect for people’s strengths even if their skills or experiences were less than one’s own, open-mindedness, and trust of strangers.

3. Strengthening the Entire Arts Sector

Despite the difficulty in defining terms and boundaries between the formal and informal arts—“amateur” and “professional” are words that describe employment status, but aren’t synonymous with talent level, for example—the authors found evidence of mutual benefit and reinforcement flowing in both directions. The formally trained teachers and group leaders often derived benefits from teaching such as new ways of thinking about techniques or ideas and  hands-on experience in organizing and administrating. The students and less skilled artists benefited from the formal training of their teachers and gained inspiration from performances and exhibitions at formal arts institutions (50.9% of survey respondents replied that attending artistic events inspired their own artistic activities “very much”, 39.5% “somewhat”).

The benefits that flow between the informal and formal arts aren’t only felt by individuals. Wali et al. use the case of the Hull House to illustrate how the informal arts serve as an incubator for new ideas for the formal sector. Viola Spolin, the originator of American improvisational theater (a practice that culminated with Spolin’s son co-founding the legendary Second City comedy enterprise) started her career by attending classes at the Hull House with Neva Boyd, a Northwestern University sociologist who used dramatics, folk dance, storytelling and games to stimulate creative expression and self-discovery in children and adults.  In addition, informal artists are frequently audiences for the formal arts. Some 45% of survey respondents indicated that they had seen displays or attended a performance at a college facility, 37% at a concert hall or opera house, 40% at a gallery, 58% at a museum, and 49% at a theater.

Invisibility of the Informal Arts

One of the most interesting findings of the report was that informal arts activities for the most part fly under the radar. Within their own neighborhoods, the groups were not well-known, and media coverage was uneven. Activities occurring in “artsy” neighborhoods were more visible in the media than activities occurring in neighborhoods where you wouldn’t expect it. The following two maps illustrate this dynamic. The first shows the informal arts activities reported in the print media during March 2001.

Excerpted from "Informal Arts," 2002.

Now, here is a map of the three most frequently mentioned locations for informal arts, as described by participants at each of the case study sites. (In other words, this is a map of the informal arts as reported by word of mouth.)  The districts in yellow have activities as reported by word of mouth, but not in the media.

Excerpted from "Informal Arts," 2002, edited by Crystal Wallis to show highlighted areas, 2011.

As you can see from comparing the two, informal arts activities were actually happening in many areas of the city, not just primarily in affluent areas, as the map of media reports would have suggested. And it’s not just that informal arts activities are invisible to the public—they are invisible to each other, too. Researchers found no widespread recognition of informal arts practice as a concept within the informal arts world.

Recommendations
The study recommends several policy interventions to assist the informal arts in conveying their benefits to more individuals and institutions.

1. Integrate arts practice in community development.
   The researchers point out that most community development strategies revolve exclusively around physical infrastructure and economic development and ignore strategies that build on existing social structures. They say that informal arts groups are an important anchor in depressed communities, and suggest that incorporating these groups into an overall community development strategy that can foster creativity, problem-solving skills, civic-mindedness, and personal satisfaction.
2. Enhance access to informal participation.
   Public officials and urban planners should expand resources, facilitate access and provide opportunities for informal participation and make this information as widely available as possible.
3. Build arts advocacy coalitions across informal-formal divides.
   “If the arts are ever to be fully recognized for their contributions to the public interest, broader coalitions in support of the arts must coalesce across divides of professionalization and specialization.” Furthermore, within the study is an implied recommendation for formal arts organizations to initiate audience-building strategies and outreach efforts targeting the informal arts, for which they found no evidence at that time.
4. Make the informal arts more visible.
   Civic leaders and leaders of arts communities should publicly recognize and remark upon the value of informal arts practice.
5. Collect missing data on social impact of the arts.
   The study makes repeated calls for further study of informal arts and of social impact of all the arts to augment economic impact.

ANALYSIS

With its case study approach and in-depth qualitative research, this study was a landmark seven years ago and its findings are still startling and incredibly intriguing today.  The methodology of the report is primarily qualitative ethnographic research balanced by quantitative evidence from a survey. The ethnographic research style is “participant observation,” in which researchers actually become members of the groups they study. This method allows the observers to compare subjects’ words with their actions. Their written observations (which form part of a 90-page appendix to the study) combined with interview transcripts were entered into a qualitative database management system. This system allowed for an incredibly detailed look at the data, allowing researchers to find things such as that “the code ‘need to express’ was used 72 times to mark passages concerning the compulsion artists feel to create.” The authors chose they case study method because they wanted a “bottom-up” perspective rather than a top-down survey of all the informal arts activity in Chicago. By exploring in-depth the dynamics of a relatively small set of groups, they were able to reveal the complex relationships among different participants, study sites, and arts institutions.

As explained in the summary, Informal Arts started out with three areas of inquiry:

1. Did participation in the informal arts encourage people to interact with people different from them?
2. Did participation build any skills in the participants conducive to community building? and
3. What is the relationship between the informal and the formal arts?

Research and findings pertaining to the first two questions are susceptible to expectation bias: that is, researchers may expect a certain outcome (i.e., that participants do gain skills as a result of informal arts participation) and as a result may err in measuring the data toward that expected outcome. Certainly, this susceptibility to bias is why the researchers’ observations are balanced by interviews and the survey. But even those methods may suffer from response bias, which happens when a respondent provides the answers to questions that they think the questioner would find desirable. Observation is in turn meant to correct this bias by confirming what participants say with what they do. However, questions about past events (e.g., have your skills improved?) or motivations (e.g., how much has attendance at artistic events inspired your activities?), can’t be confirmed through observation.

In the text of the report, there is a lot of use of the words “seems to,” “apparently,” and “likely” when referring to causation. For example, “passion to create apparently leads people to search out and join groups regardless of their location or composition,” or “the mechanism for developing these skills [that build capacity] likely lies in the regular creation of art” (emphasis mine).  On first read, it seems like the researchers may be jumping to conclusions, although it’s possible that their firsthand experience from interviews and observations convinced them of a causal connection that just wasn’t possible to generalize beyond the case study group.

In general, proving causation (especially when dealing with personal motivations) is very difficult. However, proof is a little easier when you have a control group. The report states that informal arts participation imbues skills in the participants such as collaborative work habits, consensus building skills, and the ability to imagine and foment social change. Without a control group, however, Wali et al. can’t claim definitively that arts participation caused people to obtain these skills, or that participants having these skills is not a result of self-selection. The report also says that the informal arts are a rich ground for formal arts audiences, but it can’t say that they make people more likely to attend formal arts organizations than if they did not participate.  By comparing the results of the Informal Arts survey with the contemporary NEA SPPA data, we can start to get an idea about what that might look like. For example, 40% of informal arts participants reported seeing displays in the last 12 months at a gallery, and 58% at a museum. In contrast, only 27% of US Adults reported attending an art museum or gallery at least once in the same time period. This isn’t a true comparison, however, because this study asked people where they attended arts activities while the SPPA asked people what types of activities they attended.

It looks like those who participate in the informal arts are more likely to attend formal arts institutions, but without identical questions and methodology for the two groups, we really can’t say for sure.

Even looking at this report with the most skeptical eye, however, there are findings that stand out.

1. Informal arts participants are surprisingly representative of the US population. In contrast to the skewed demographics typically seen among ticket-buyers to traditional arts events, the study found  that people of all ages, races, incomes, and occupations participate in creating art (although they are usually slightly more educated). The importance of this takeaway to arts advocacy, if it proves consistent beyond the study, can’t be overstated: artists aren’t only weird people who make weird art that no one understands (like many who oppose funding the arts claim). They are ordinary people from all walks of life—your neighbor, your coworker, your relative—who have a need to create and express themselves.
2. The informal arts don’t happen at arts institutions. Overwhelmingly (in Chicago at least) they occur in parks, libraries, and churches. This has some pretty big implications both for the non-profit arts sector and public policy (discussed below).
3. The relationship between the informal and the formal arts is complex and fluid. Artists move from one end of the spectrum to the other, sometimes switching roles in the process, both by choice and by necessity. The informal groups can serve as incubators for new initiatives later picked up by formal institutions, and formal institutions in turn provide training and inspiration.
4. The visibility of the informal arts is uneven at best and virtually nonexistent at worst. The maps indicate that there is a lot going on in economically depressed neighborhoods that isn’t noticed in the media.  Furthermore, the lack of study in this area and the dearth of formal arts institutions reaching out to these groups suggests that the informal arts are underestimated and overlooked by those in positions of leadership in the artistic and academic communities.

IMPLICATIONS

When Informal Arts was published in 2002, “amateur” participation in the arts was just beginning to gain more prominence. In 2004, Demos published “The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Economy and Society” describing people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards. Two years later, Chris Anderson came out with The Long Tail, about how the internet has increased consumer choice to the point that public interest is shifting to the long tail of niche interests. For pro-am artists, that means it’s easy to sell their art and find an audience online, through sites like CD Baby (c. 1999), Etsy (2005), FineArtAmerica (c.2008), ArtFire (c. 2010), or self-publishing with ebooks. Furthermore, the 2008 NEA SPPA found that 10% of all survey respondents reported performing or creating at least one of the art forms examined in the survey, up 2% from 2002. Recently, WolfBrown’s report “Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation” explored the new and unfolding relationships between art creation, art attendance, and media-based participation.

More and more, people are participating in the arts virtually instead of in person. The internet has become another public space in which people participate in arts activities. In this case, access to technology and the web becomes another barrier to be lowered in order to enable arts participation. It would be very interesting to follow up with these groups or even conduct an entirely new study to see what impacts, if any, this revolution has had on informal arts groups’ activities, recruitment, and structure, as well as if this trend has prompted more formal arts institutions to reach out to the informal groups.

The researchers make the argument (and I am inclined to agree with them) that the study of informal arts participation is beneficial to the sector as a whole because it illustrates how arts practice creates value in individual and civic contexts, not just economic impact. By now, economic impact is the rallying cry for arts advocates. But economic impact reports are at best incomplete and at worst misleading about art’s impact on society. The arts create many types of value, not all of them monetary, and to successfully advocate for the arts we must try to measure as many as we can. There has been some study on the intrinsic value of art to audiences (WolfBrown), and innumerable studies on how the arts help children, but not very many on the intrinsic value of adults creating art. Informal Arts not only conducted a survey, but took an ethnographic case study approach to the study of arts participation to uncover what adults get out of their participation. To my knowledge this report remains the only study on this topic to go so in-depth with qualitative research.

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. I see two primary ways for the arts sector to do this.

The first way is to enable existing informal arts groups in doing what they already do fairly well. The most common obstacle they face is a space to meet, which is available at any arts organization with a physical space. Sometimes groups need theaters, stages, or other specialized spaces (like community theaters and perhaps a choir or orchestra), but sometimes all they need is a room.  And although many of the groups in the study weren’t hurting for members, participants themselves reported having trouble finding the groups in the first place.  It wouldn’t cost much money for arts organizations to make it easy for patrons to find out about opportunities to create art in their specific discipline by calling the organization or visiting its website. In addition, if that institution were to partner artistically with informal arts organizations, it would recognize and validate that activity, encouraging the participants to continue and grow.

The second way is for the organization to directly engage in informal arts. This could mean having artists on staff give lessons, teach classes or facilitate groups (keeping in mind the financial barriers mentioned above). It could also involve reaching out to groups already meeting in libraries, parks, and churches and offering direct assistance in the form of teaching artists, funding, administration, or partnership.

__________________________________________________________

Although the field of arts research has barely begun to scratch the surface of the role that informal arts play and the ways they might impact the arts sector as a whole, it is clear is that the topic deserves more attention. Reading this report from the perspective of the formal arts sector, it’s a bit humbling to realize that the entire field plays only one part in the artistic life of the general public and our audiences. However, examining the benefits of informal arts participation as well as people’s motivations for doing it tell us a lot about the impact the arts have on society outside our walls. Given the constantly evolving patterns and definitions of participation (not to mention art), a better understanding of the informal arts will be increasingly valuable to both the arts and policy sectors now and in the future.

Further Reading:

• There’s Nothing Informal About It: Participatory Arts Within the Cultural Ecology of Silicon Valley. Maribel Alvarez, Ph. D. 2005
• Newsmakers: Alaka Wali, Director, Center for Cultural Understanding and Change, Field Museum: The Cultural Benefits of the ‘Informal Arts’. Philanthropy News Digest, 2004.
• Inside the President’s Studio: Alaka Wali (audio file). American Anthropological Association, 2010.
• Building Bridges at Chicago’s Field Museum.  Art Works, the official blog of the NEA, 2010.
• National Endowment for the Arts Announces Research on Informal Arts Participation in Rural and Urban Areas. 2010.
• Culture and Urban Revitalization:  A Harvest Document. Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert, 2007.
• 2010 Cultural Engagement Index. Conducted by WolfBrown for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.
• Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions. Conducted by WolfBrown, commissioned by the James Irvine Foundation, 2008.

Art and the Public

Art and the Public as a whole is designed to engage communities more deeply in the arts than by simply bringing a performance to their neighborhood or school and expecting them to turn into lifelong arts patrons overnight. A central theory behind the Art and the Public program is that many of the arts’ most acute benefits flow from participation at a creative or performative level, rather than from “appreciation” alone. As such, the most significant project of the A&P program would be an annual citywide festival rotating among the four disciplines of art, music, theater, and dance. This festival would involve simultaneous events all over the city, featuring participatory opportunities for adults and children alike. For example, organizers might set up in places like Flushing Meadows Park, Central Park, Coney Island, and so on for NYC Paints, with materials on hand and art instructors roving around to answer questions and show off particularly interesting or fun creations. An NYC Sings event would be a giant choral festival with sheet music to be provided, various types of music in different locales, and so on.

Another Art and the Public project would be the Ortiz Club, a series of themed discussions about current artistic creations. Again, events would be neighborhood-based and provide an opportunity for arts lovers to meet and interact while engaging with the works in question more deeply.

Finally, Art and the Public would present performances and exhibitions of lesser-known and emerging artists in combination with better known ones across the city. The model would borrow elements from both traditional rock festivals (that combine artists of varying notoriety) and the Wordless Music series (that combine artists from different genres). The pool of Supporting Start-Ups applicants and grantees would receive consideration for exposure through this program as well.

Arts Research

As I’ve written in the past, the research on the benefits (both intrinsic and instrumental) of the arts is still in many ways in a nascent stage. OFA has an opportunity to dramatically change that with targeted efforts to learn what we don’t yet know.

Despite a long history of support from the philanthropic community, the role of the arts in society remains one of life’s great enigmas. Countless individuals can tell passionate stories about how the arts have changed (or even saved) their lives, yet the actual benefits of the arts on a large scale are not well understood. In contrast to programs aimed at, for example, reversing climate change or ending poverty, initiatives in the arts can rarely claim such concrete, easily comprehended goals. This is in part due to the multiplicity of positive effects associated with active arts creation and participation:

• individual benefits such as the development of self-esteem and the pure enjoyment of experiencing or creating art;
• educational benefits such as improved visuo-spatial reasoning, enhanced school performance, and lower delinquency rates;
• social benefits such as the development of professional and personal networks;
• cultural benefits such as the building of links between disparate groups and the promotion of tolerance and diversity;
• economic benefits related to cultural tourism and community revitalization; and
• society-wide benefits such as better integration of creativity into the workforce and a livelier political and civic discourse.

While a growing body of literature attempts to study in depth the various social impacts of the arts, both consistent, reliable data sources and robust, sophisticated studies remain few and far between, particularly in comparison with fields like healthcare and education. Furthermore, those studies that do exist overwhelmingly tend to examine quantity of arts experiences without considering the quality thereof, thereby missing perhaps one of the most important determinants of impact. Finally, rigorous evaluations of individual arts programs are rare, with the result that most artistic providers are “flying blind” as to the true impact of their work and must base important strategic decisions on anecdotal evidence and intuition alone.

Arts research efforts at Ortiz would connect seamlessly with other programs at the foundation, incorporating literature review and sometimes small-scale studies in support of the theories underlying those programs (for example, the Arts Research program may study past attempts to turn for-profit enterprises into nonprofits in order to understand best practices and pitfalls in such efforts). I also shamelessly borrowed the cultural asset map concept from my work last summer at the Hewlett Foundation, proposing to create a version of the tool for New York City that would help to inform better grantmaking decisions and enable a baseline assessment of arts health.

Beyond that, the Arts Research program would engage in proactive research of important questions facing the field, with a particular focus on questions that have not received sufficient attention to date. To wit:

Professional evaluators with proven track records of innovation and rigor will be invited to compete for these contracts. Where possible, a technical advisory board will be employed to guide methodologies and serve as an independent check. Initial areas of focus will include:

• further study of the intrinsic benefits of the arts, with particular focus on different types and intensity levels of artistic experiences
• examination of how much the quality of arts programming as perceived by producers and consumers affects its impact on the latter
• efforts to clarify the causal link between neighborhood artistic activity and economic revitalization

Finally, the Arts Research program would offer a competitive opportunity for organizations to have their own programs evaluated professionally — whether or not they are existing grantees of the foundation. There’s one catch, though: participating organizations would have to agree in advance that the results of the evaluation would be made public, no matter the outcome. (Opportunities to respond and engage in dialogue about controversial studies would be made available, of course.)

Through it all, it’s very important that the foundation be able to evaluate itself. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a truly independent evaluation that is initiated in some way by the entity being evaluated. So, we decided to do the next best thing and place evaluation responsibility with the Board, which at least bears ultimate financial responsibility for the organization. An evaluation committee will develop goals and targets with staff on a yearly basis and a strategic framework for programs a few times a decade. We also decided to incorporate formative evaluation elements in programs themselves, through focus groups and site visits. Finally, just to keep everyone honest, I inserted this language in our report:

Furthermore, all foundation staff will regularly participate in the New York City arts community as patrons, ticket-buyers, and visitors, both to grantee organizations and non-grantee organizations. Each program staff member will be expected to attend a minimum of two performances or exhibitions a week throughout the year, vacation weeks excluded, and each non-program staff member and each board member will attend a minimum of two arts events a month. These visits will be unannounced and tickets or entrance fees will be paid for by the Foundation to ensure an unbiased audience experience. Staff will fill out basic reports for the Foundation’s internal databases describing the attendance at the event and anything notable or unusual about what transpired. The purpose of this regulation is threefold: first, to ensure that Foundation staff remains “in touch” with developments in the arts community through firsthand experience rather than the secondhand received wisdom of grant applications; second, to enable the Foundation to pursue giving opportunities proactively when appropriate, particularly in the context of its Supporting Start-ups program, rather than being able to respond only to organizations with existing grantwriting apparatus; and third, to “check up” on grantees as a way of informally auditing their activities and checking future proposals for internal consistency.

We also delved quite a bit into the operational details of the foundation (my colleague Michael Shay created an extraordinarily detailed 10-year budget and investment plan based on extensive research of peer institutions), but I figured this blog’s readers would be more interested in the program stuff. So, how’d we do? If you had $800 million to give away to the arts, where would you put it?

The Ortiz Foundation for the Arts (OFA) works to foster the visual, musical, theatrical, and terpsichorean arts in the five boroughs of New York City. In doing so, we aim to stimulate a highly creative environment that brings the community of artists and the city-wide community of New Yorkers together, strengthening each. Our grants are designed to enhance the vitality of both communities through diverse support for participation in the arts by artists and audiences, professional and nonprofessionals, and experts and amateurs.

In the course of our research, we found that the NYC arts community currently enjoys strong support from a trio of private and public funders, all in the $30 million range (stats for the city only). These are the Mellon Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. (Technically, the New York City DCA has a [much] larger budget, but for the purposes of this discussion we’ll consider its competitive program funding pool only.) The Ford and Peter Jay Sharp Foundations follow at $22 million and $20 million respectively, while the National Endowment for the Arts provided just over $14 million in 2008. The most significant corporate giver is the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, with $6 million in NYC arts funding.

At $41 million, then, the Ortiz Foundation would be the largest arts funder in the city by 2015. How to set ourselves apart? We identified five key areas of differentiation:

• Emphasis on smaller players. Although we recognize the indispensable role of large and institutional organizations like the Metropolitan Museum, the Public Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, we believe that the Ortiz foundation’s resources would be better spent fostering creativity among less-established artists and organizations. Although this emphasis means that many grants will not end up producing art that turns out to be popular, this is an important gap in the current structure of arts funding. Supporting organizations early in their careers—and later in their careers, if they do not wish to scale up to the size of a large institution—will have tremendous benefits to a large number of artists, and a corresponding large and disparate potential audience.
• Attention to non-professional artists. Primary and secondary arts education receives a good deal of attention from existing foundations. Citi’s arts funding is entirely devoted to education, a portion of Starr, JP Morgan Chase, and Hewlett’s giving is earmarked for it, and the Wallace Foundation, an education foundation, gives a small amount to arts education. However, the existing foundations mostly treat adults who are not (aspiring) professional artists as primarily potential audience members. This is a mistake. The benefits of the arts are many. Some of them accrue primarily to the artist; others are enjoyed by the audience, but would be enhanced if the audience has some experience with the art themselves. Part of the Ortiz Foundation’s mission is to support amateur or informal artists, contributing to the vitality of artistic life and the overall creativity of the city.
• Encouragement to experiment. The tendency to support established, professional artists and large institutions presumably arises because of the lack of objective standards in judging art. Arts funders are wary of saying, “We support the production of 100 new paintings,” without the imprimatur of a major museum or artist’s name to indicate the quality of the work. While this motivates a great deal of valuable arts funding, it reflects an erroneous belief about the arts: namely, that the only art worth supporting is the kind approved by one or another external force. In fact, the arts thrive on unrestrained experimentation and innovation. Supporting this by supporting start-up organizations and below-the-radar community groups is central to Ortiz’s mission, and is another factor that makes it distinctive as a grantmaker.
• Building community. The watchword at OFA is “community,” by which we mean not just the artistic community by the New York community, and all the communities within it. The arts have an indispensable role to play in tying and uniting us as New Yorkers. In a city as delightfully multitudinous as ours, the arts serve the important civic function of helping us understand one another’s beliefs, backgrounds, and cultures. The arts also bring together people of entirely different walks of life, and allow them to exchange ideas and experiences. While many foundations seem to classify their programs into those that serve communities and those that serve the arts, we believe that we serve New York as a whole by serving the arts, professional and otherwise.
• Supporting the field holistically. Many foundations and arts funders tend to treat each grant as a separate project, too often ignoring its interactions with other arts organizations and its implications for the field as a whole. With its strong emphasis on infrastructure and research, the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts seeks to achieve superior leverage for its funds by ensuring that many more stakeholders will benefit from the work supported by the grant than just the initial recipients. In this way, OFA supports the city’s arts ecosystem holistically rather than haphazardly.

(above section mostly written by my colleague Daniel Reid, with minor editing from me)

Tomorrow, a look at the specific program areas we developed, as well as our evaluation procedures.