If you’ve been paying any attention at all to technology trends the past few years, you know that we live in the era of Big Data. All of those videos we upload to YouTube, hard drives we fill with government secrets (or cat photos, take your pick), and tweets we awkwardly punch out on touchscreen keyboards add up to a whole lot of gigabytes, the bulk of which are stored by someone, somewhere, indefinitely. By some estimates, human beings generate more data every two days than we did in the entire history of civilization prior to 2003 – and that was as of three years ago!

Indeed, these are exciting times for data nerds, and data nerds in the arts are no exception. Initiatives such as the Cultural Data Project, Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research, and the Americans for the Arts National Arts Index seek to collect or organize relevant indicators pertaining to everything from arts organizations’ financial health to audience reach and characteristics to long-term trends for musical instrument purchases.

Fractured Atlas is no stranger to data initiatives in the arts. Our Archipelago data visualization software is one of the largest such efforts, bringing together information on arts nonprofits, for-profits, fiscally sponsored projects, funding, audience distributions, and community context all in one place in the service of better understanding the arts ecosystem in a region. Facilitating data-driven decisions is a major long-term objective of Artful.ly, our just-launched cloud-based arts management tool, and a present-day reality for Spaces, our venue listing and booking service that can promote spaces with last-minute availability to users. Through our research advisory services work, we’ve helped funders such as ArtsWave organize their entire grantmaking process around principles of data-driven decision-making in order to further their philanthropic objectives. Everyone benefits when funders, organizations and individuals in the arts ecosystem make thoughtful decisions about resource allocation, setting up and responding to incentives, and more. At Fractured Atlas, we believe that data can and should be a crucial input into that thoughtful decision-making process, and we’ve been increasingly vocal in evangelizing for data-driven decision making throughout the arts and cultural sector.

There’s just one problem. Up until now, Fractured Atlas has not had any formal guidelines in place to ensure that we use data in our own decision making, with the result that our internal decisions – relating to management, marketing, strategy, and the like – have been guided primarily by managerial intuition. In a “doctor, heal thyself!” moment, we’ve agreed that is time for our practices to reflect our preaching, at both the program and institutional levels. In 2013, the scope of our operations, the size of the community we serve, and the financial stakes in our work demand informed analysis at a level of rigor that we have not historically practiced. (This directive was immortalized by our fearless leader Adam Huttler in the organization’s annual Strategic Priorities Memo with the colorful title, “Eating Our Data-Driven Dog Food.”)

So between now and next summer, Fractured Atlas is embarking on a pilot initiative to explore how we can use data and evidence to improve our decision-making process at all levels. We’re calling it Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization, and through this and future blog posts, we’re giving you the opportunity to be a fly on the wall as use this process as a way of grappling with issues of organization identity, strategy, culture, and impact.

What Is a Learning Organization?

As I define it*, a learning organization is one for which information and strategy are joined at the hip. It is, quite literally, an organization that has successfully forged a culture of learning and integrated that culture into its decision-making process at all levels.

Why is this integration between information and strategy important? Because every organization operates in an environment of uncertainty about what is going to result from its decisions, and every decision we make on behalf of an organization is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your decisions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. Of particular interest here  are what I call decisions of consequence: dilemmas for which the consequences of making the wrong decision and uncertainty about the nature of the right decision are both high. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Why, through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile.

In fact, I subscribe to the notion that research is only valuable insofar as it helps to answer a question that matters. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either: Jake Porway, the founder of a nonprofit that connects data scientists with social enterprises in need, wrote this past spring that “any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start [a data project] with a question, NOT the data.” In fact, all of the excitement around Big Data notwithstanding, data divorced from strategy is not likely to be very useful.

A learning organization solves this problem by forging a powerful feedback loop between information and strategy, with each feeding the other and adapting in relation to the other. The more obvious implication of this symbiosis is that organizational decisions must adapt in response to new information, as discussed above. But the less obvious implication is no less important: information-gathering must be directed by the organization’s decision-making needs. Without that intimate connection, there are no real safeguards to prevent organizations from thinking they are making data-driven decisions without really putting much thought into either the data or the decisions.

More broadly, a learning organization develops a culture of seeking out and using information thoughtfully from the highest levels to the organization’s grassroots. The most effective organizations are conscious about the impact they are trying to achieve, and willing to be open-minded regarding the paths they take to maximizing that impact.

*Some readers may be familiar with the term “learning organization” as defined by MIT management scientist Peter Senge in his well-known 1990 book The Fifth Discipline. My use of the phrase is broadly in the same spirit as Senge’s, but he sets out a very specific formula for what constitutes a learning organization that I don’t make use of here.

Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization

This fiscal year, which started in September and goes through next summer, we are undertaking a pilot project to put some of these principles into practice. The primary goal of the pilot is to develop a conceptual framework and a toolkit of situation-adaptable methods for reducing uncertainty about decisions of consequence. If we can reduce the uncertainty we have about those decisions through strategic measurement and information-gathering efforts, over time we’re likely to make better decisions that will in turn lead to better outcomes for Fractured Atlas and the people who benefit from our work.

As powerful as this idea is, it only works if we have a very concrete sense of what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization. While we’ve had a mission statement for some time now, the huge variety of programs and services Fractured Atlas offers is virtually impossible to fully capture in a single sentence. Accordingly, the first step in this process is to create a theory of change for every program at the organization, from which we’ll roll up an overall theory of change and logic model for the organization as a whole. This will allow us to define our overall goals as well as some key success metrics at various levels of operation, taking into account both Fractured Atlas’s mission objectives and its focus on developing programs that are sustainable with earned income.

Meanwhile, we’ve formed an internal task force to work on this project at a deeper level of engagement throughout the year. Affectionately called the Data-Driven D.O.G. Force (the “D.O.G.” stands for Data Over Gut), the group will meet every 6-8 weeks to receive calibrated probability assessment training, identify real-world decisions of consequence to use as case studies, and come up with measurement experiments to gather information relevant to those decisions. In doing so, we’ll be using a modified version of a methodology called Applied Information Economics as described in Douglas W. Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business. One major advantage of AIE is that it explicitly takes into account the cost-benefit of measurement strategies by calculating something called the value of information, which we’ll be exploring further in a future post.

At the end, we’ll attempt to formalize a process for identifying decisions of consequence in the future and fitting measurement strategies to the situation at hand. We’ll also present some recommendations for building infrastructure in the form of ongoing data collection, to address those questions that are likely to be asked again and again. And through it all, I’ll be writing about it here – so that anyone who wants to can learn alongside us.

Learning in Context: Why Philosophy Matters as Much as Performance

Data-driven decision-making isn’t just about crunching numbers. It’s a practice that requires certain values in order to work. The hard part of being data-driven is not the “data” but the “driven” – you have to be willing to question your assumptions and actually change your behavior in response to the new information coming in. Put another way, a learning organization is, well, open to learning new things -even things that suggest that the way that we’re currently doing things isn’t working as well as it could, or that we’re missing important opportunities to increase our impact.

It’s much easier to attain that kind of open stance if we train ourselves to expect failure upfront. In general, organizations as well as people have a tendency to be far too risk-averse. Being a learning organization means embracing a culture of intentional experimentation and productive failure: we’re likely not going to hit upon the secret sauce the very first time we try something – or, sometimes, at all.

Being a learning organization similarly requires that we think about ourselves from a system perspective – how are we making a difference in light of what everyone else is doing? And how can our experiences shed light on those of others? That’s why we’re not just going down this path on our own and in private. If the specific activities of the pilot project turn out to be a big waste of time (and I can’t guarantee that they won’t), we won’t be able to hide that from you or the world. But even that would ultimately be a good thing – because, in true learning organization fashion, it would cause us to reconsider the limitations of a data-driven approach. Embracing change is hard, but one of the very best things about it is that it can allow us to extract just as much (if not more) value from failure as success.

For me, personally, this project is very exciting. Of course I’m eager to find out what we’ll learn. But more than that, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization is an opportunity for us to exercise leadership in a way that reaffirms our highest standards for ourselves and for the field. I’m looking forward to sharing our journey with you.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The US Bureau of Economic Analysis, following new international standards, has adjusted the official method for calculating GDP to “include the amount of money business invest in … intellectual property.” This involves some tough calls: development costs for hit TV shows with potential for syndication and even greeting cards count, but journalism and blogs are deemed perishable. Some commentators interpret this as refreshing and official recognition of the economic value of creative productions.
• Back in April, Createquity explored what might happen if the federal tax deduction for charitable contributions went the way of the dodo. At the federal level, the debate rages on, but various states – including Hawaii, Minnesota and Kansas – have recently decided against capping charitable deductions within their states, citing negative impact on the nonprofit sector.
• Across the pond, it looks like economic arguments for the arts are becoming increasingly influential. Britain’s Culture Secretary preserved most of the UK’s £450m-plus culture budget in part by highlighting the arts’ role in driving economic growth. Not everyone is on board though: the Scottish Secretary of Culture responded by reminding Scots of this fall’s referendum on independence and declaring that Scotland “doesn’t measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in pounds and pence.” (Bonus: this recent post recaps the rise of “Art Works” justifications for subsidy in the US.)
• Why it’s important to pay attention to policy: an arts educator is California is “shocked” to learn his state requires the arts to be taught in schools. (Psst: so do forty-four others.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Darren Walker, currently a vice president of the Ford Foundation, has been named the foundation’s next president. His portfolio as VP covered arts & culture, and he was instrumental in the formation of the ArtPlace creative placemaking funder collaboration.
• Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.Com and intellectual crush of data geeks everywhere, is leaving the New York Times for ESPN. Good news for baseball fans, bad news for political wonks, though Silver will continue to cover elections via ABC News.
• Don Rosenberg, longtime music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been laid off along with 49 other employees of the paper.

BIG IDEAS

• Americans for the Arts has launched a new project to study America’s 600+ “Cultural Districts,” updating their 1998 Cultural Districts Handbook. As part of the kickoff, they hosted a blog salon last week.
• Are organizations that eschew dynamic pricing “punishing [their] staff[s] in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of“?
• FSG is launching a Next Generation Evaluation project. An initial post summarizes three long-held assumptions about evaluation and three “game-changing approaches” that could challenge them: Developmental Evaluation, Shared Measurement, and Big Data.
• With the backing of the Haas, Hewlett, and Packard Foundations, Shiree Teng has launched ImpactRising.org, a website designed “to help bring a level of standards to the consulting industry, to raise the quality of social sector consulting, and to to have some measure of accountability.” It includes tools and resources for organizations working with consultants and for consultants themselves.
• A scientist-turned-artist reflects on the differences between the two cultures.
  

  From funding levels (‘I write grant applications for research and it’s like taking an arts grant and adding a couple of zeros’) and the culture of peer review (‘It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience’), to scrutinising outcomes (‘In science, they really care about the outcome of their funding – I don’t get the same impression in the arts’), institutionally, science and the arts are still very far apart.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• We know the Common Core State Standards aren’t cheap; states across the country are scrambling to figure out how much the newer, “smarter” tests will cost them. But beyond that, the Common Core is also prompting some borderline-creepy partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit educational entities. Beginning in 2014, the American Council of Education, which administers the GED, is joining forces with textbook giant Pearson. The upside? The GED is getting re-written to align with Common Core. The bad news? The cost of taking the GED will almost double. Way to reduce barriers to a high school diploma, guys.
• Hyperallergic has a helpful summary of five approaches artists have taken in attempts to guarantee fair wages and benefits. And while he doesn’t explicitly mention artists, Adam Davidson uses the example of a wannabe-hair-metal-rock-star-turned-accounting-“cliff jumper” to illustrate how hard it is to determine the financial value of ideas.
• Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in June a $15m, 3-year grant to 5 major cultural institutions to support the development of mobile apps. The Guggenheim recently released its free, Bloomberg-funded app; others will follow through the end of 2014.

IN THE FIELD

• Is this the future of professional conferences? The ever-intrepid Nina Simon recently hosted seventy-five designers, museum professionals and artists in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art for a 2.5 day “camp” for participants to “take a risk” in creating exhibits. Beyond sounding super fun, the experiment generated reflection about what “taking a risk” even means in a museum environment.
• Abe Flores (recent winner of Americans for the Arts’s Emerging Leader Award) shares his thoughts on the distressing lack of racial diversity among respondents to AFTA’s recent report on salaries in local arts agencies.
• While the fate of Detroit’s art collection is still up in the air, the Wall Street Journal offers two arguments for keeping the works where they are, and the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts insists it’s too soon to panic.
• Jon Silpayamanant writes about what declining attendance at sporting events – and the measures teams have taken to preserve revenues – can tell us about the similar problems faces by live performances in the arts.
• Meanwhile, demand for classical music on Pandora (and iTunes) has been growing – and outperforming the company’s expectations based on market share. But lest we get too excited about our digital saviors, Spotify – the streaming service that musicians love to hate – is hardly rolling in cash; those pitiful payments to artists offset nearly all of its equally-pitiful revenues.
• Allan Kozinn chronicles the “sea change” in music conservatories as courses are added in the business of music, covering the use of digital technologies, the art of networking, and how to build a personal brand as part of a career.

RESEARCH CORNER

• This puts a twist on arguments touting the economic impact of the arts: new research from the Corporation for National and Community Service indicates people who volunteer their time with organizations have a 27 percent greater chance of finding employment, with the link strongest for those who traditionally have the hardest time finding work. Per the NEA’s Director of Research and Analysis, “If volunteerism is indeed a pathway to employment, then arts organizations, venues, and activities could be hotbeds for this crucial transition.”
• The chance that a child will earn her way into a higher class than her parents’ varies considerably across major American cities – her odds are better in New York or several California cities than in, say, Ohio. The driving forces seem to be not higher tax credits for the poor or taxes on the rich, but greater geographic integration of the poor and middle class, more stable families, stronger K-12 education, and higher civic engagement.
• Researchers in Ireland have found that listening to music from different cultures may prompt you to “denigrate outsiders” if the music sounds particularly unconventional to you, and conclude that “attempts to celebrate and share diversity may have the reverse effect.” Isn’t that also an argument for exposing children to lots of different kinds of music, all the time?
• Market research by IMPACTS into visitor-serving organizations like zoos, symphonies, and museums suggests that overall satisfaction is driven much more by the “entertainment experience” than the “educational experience” – entertainment is four times as important to visitors. (The linked piece does not define “entertainment,” so it is possible that really fun education may fare better.)
• Any idea how much you’d have to pay the Rolling Stones to cover “Brown Sugar” on your debut album? According to preliminary results from a new set of music-and-copyright quizzes hosted online by the Future of Music Coalition, fewer than a quarter of respondents can tell you – though we don’t know how many of them are aspiring musicians. Or Mick Jagger.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Future of Music Coalition has a comprehensive rundown and positive comment on the Obama administration’s new 2013 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement.
• Ouch: the Minnesota Orchestra will have to return nearly $1 million in state grants because of its never-ending labor dispute.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Some big changes are coming to Philly this year! Just a week after we found out about Tom Kaiden’s departure from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Gary Steuer has announced that he is leaving his post as the City of Brotherly Love’s first Chief Cultural Officer to take a position as President of Denver’s Bonfils Stanton Foundation. Here’s Gary in his own words talking about the shift.
• Margaret Ayers is retiring as president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation after 38 years (!) of service. Clark supports cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy. As part of the transition, Roslyn Black will direct the foundation’s International Arts Engagement program.

BIG IDEAS

• Adrian Ellis lays out his case for the importance of global cultural districts, and Michael Rushton immediately pokes holes in it. (In fairness, Adrian’s piece is really more about the importance of doing cultural districts right and takes the idea that they’re happening at all as a given. But Michael’s question – how much does the district part of cultural districts matter – is still an important one.)
• A very smart essay by Barry Hessenius on the importance of information-sharing around failure. Here’s a quote:
  

  One thing that seems clear to me is that – at least in the arts field – there may be a tendency to seek a solution to a given problem or set of problems, without fully trying to understand the root causes of the problem.  We identify a problem (e.g., declining audiences) and we develop seemingly rational theories about how to address the problem (content with more transformational potential, more engaging efforts et. al.), but often without spending enough time or pouring adequate resources in the harder part of identifying the cause of the problem (i.e., why are the audiences declining).

  I have no idea how much money we have invested in the last 20 years to support audience development efforts, but unless you believe those efforts have helped slow down the rate of audience decline (and that can be defined as “success“), then, in the main, those efforts have failed. The audiences continue to decline.  Why is the question.  We need to know the answer, and to the extent foundations that fund the arts are more willing to ask that question and attempt to answer it, the better off we will all be.

  And, before we settle on what the causes of the phenomenon on the declining audience are – arrived at by research and study – we need to make sure that research and those studies are credible and reliable and not just attempts to skew evidence to support a pre-determined theory of how to address the challenge.  I know we have spent energy in surveying our audiences, but there is credible evidence that people do not always respond forthrightly to surveying.  We have to dig deeper.

  Indeed. And I would add that, if you want to understand why audiences are declining, you need to study people who aren’t your audience.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• More about social impact capital for arts organizations, from the estimable Michael Hickey.
• A new service called Audiam allows musicians be compensated when their work appears on YouTube videos.

IN THE FIELD

• RIP LA’s Reprise Theater Company, most notable perhaps for the fact that it was directed by Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander.
• First bookstores, then music and electronics stores. Is Amazon about to disrupt the gallery business next?
• Colleen Dilenschneider makes some salient points about success stories not being the same thing as models for success.
• MoMA curator Paola Antonelli dishes about the museum’s new collection of video games.

RESEARCH CORNER

• For those who didn’t know (I didn’t), the GRAMMY Foundation offers grants for “organizations and individuals working to research the impact of music on the human condition.” The examples given focus on psychological and health-oriented studies.
• The latest edition of Giving USA is out, and giving to the arts rose 7.8% over last year’s figures – faster than any other cause area. The arts received a total of $14.4 billion in private philanthropic contributions, comprising 5% of the $316.2 billion total.
• Consistent with trends reported previously regarding corporate philanthropy as a whole, a new survey from Americans for the Arts reports that corporate giving to the arts is back on the rise.
• I’ve always liked working in the dark, and people have always thought I was a weirdo for it. Now, according to a new study, “those in the dimly lit room solved significantly more problems correctly than those in the brightly lit room. They also felt freer and less inhibited than their intensely illuminated counterparts.” Told you so, ma!
• A new “data brief” from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project looks at differences between majors, and notes that, interestingly enough, arts education majors are the least likely to be unemployed in the survey sample. (Media arts brings up the rear by that metric.)
• A couple of analyses are out on the recent NEA/EEOC data release on artist employment. However, a colleague pointed out on Facebook that the NEA’s tabulation inexplicably doesn’t seem to include the employment code for “composers and music directors” (27-2041). [UPDATE: I got a note from the director of the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis, Sunil Iyengar, who writes: “As it turns out, we DID include composers and music directors in our data for all musicians, but, inexplicably, we neglected to list the relevant code (27-2041) on the part of the web page that lists all the artist codes. So we’re correcting that bit, thanks to you.”] All in all, the boundaries are drawn kind of strangely, with the massive “designer” category including “commercial and industrial designers…floral designers…merchandise displayers…and other designers such as…memorial marker designers.” Creative workers for sure, but if you’re going to include people like that, where are the chefs and software programmers?

ETC.

• Congratulations to Nathan Yau on six years of Flowing Data.

• A lot of people are talking about the news that Detroit’s emergency fiscal manager is exploring whether the city-owned art on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts (which I visited for the first time just a few weeks ago) can be considered an asset in the event of a municipal bankruptcy. I will be shocked if anything like this actually happens, but in the meantime it’s provoking some rare discussion of deaccessioning in mainstream media space. See Tegan Kehoe’s recent piece on Createquity for more on the ethics and debate around deaccessioning.
• Wondering what to make of the IRS nonprofit oversight controversy? The Nonprofit Law Prof Blog has a good overview of commentary and analysis from lawyerly circles.
• A new paper by Roger Colinvaux examines the US tax deduction for charitable giving and comes to many of the same recommendations for reform as John Carnwath in his article on the subject for Createquity. Speaking of charitable giving deductions, countries in Europe that have similar legislation are finding that they have to extend the benefits to other member nations of the European Union, whether they want to or not.
• Next City takes a look at the record when it comes to the subsidies cities pay to Bass Pro retail stores (over $500 million to date!) in hopes that they will generate jobs. (It’s not good.) I’m kind of mystified as to why there isn’t more of this kind of before-and-after analysis of these kinds of policy interventions – it seems like rather fertile ground.
• The NEA Art Works blog has a nice interview with Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Denise Montgomery, the new executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
• Joanna Woronkowicz is moving on from the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts to become an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Public Affairs working under Michael Rushton, and offers a farewell post in which she touts the idea of an interdisciplinary research cabal focusing on cultural policy.

BIG IDEAS

• Dallas is making a big play to put itself on the world cultural map. Led by Maxwell Anderson, who is the head of both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Arts District, Dallas officials have launched a new network of “global” cultural districts to be managed by Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting, assembling an advisory board including representation from New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hong Kong…and lots and lots of people from Dallas.
• Congratulations to Mediuum, a digital marketplace for visual art, which has won the first Creative Arts Competition prize as part of MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for student entrepreneurs. The Creative Arts Competition is awarded for the “innovative use of the arts as a core component of business plans.” (h/t Joe Patti)
• Asking funders to be less insular may be a familiar refrain, but no one can articulate the case quite like Arlene Goldbard, and she does so again in a recent doozy of an essay. Meanwhile, Linda Essig has a review of Arlene’s new book, The Culture of Possibility.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “So, yes, it’s party time in the world of social impact investing.  But it’s a potluck my friends, and you’d better know what dish [you’re] bringing.” Michael Hickey talks turkey about money you have to pay back.
• Corporate giving is back on the rise, according to a new report from the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.
• The President/CEO of the New York State Health Foundation offers some perspectives on risk taking at the foundation level.
• Real estate in Detroit is so cheap, it only takes $142,000 to save a historic rock venue from being auctioned and get one of its theaters named after you.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Good rule of thumb for aspiring grad students (especially in the humanities): the more specialized your degree, the more useless it is. Sadly, specialization seems to be the prevailing trend. The University of Nottingham is blazing the trail of single-genre music studies with a two-year course in heavy metal studies. By the way, a study from 2004 indicates a negative correlation between a graduate degree and earnings for jazz players.
• Back when it was super popular, I though Myspace would be an incredible data source for researchers on the music industry. Myspace has largely fallen by the wayside in that regard, but two sociologists from the University of Chicago managed to grab a complete dataset back in 2007 and it’s now showing up in Richard Florida’s blogs.
• According to a new study, people of color tend not to move as much as whites and to stay close to home when they do, which perpetuates spatial inequality.
• A new meta-analysis of studies of art therapy on cancer patients indicates that “the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture.” And another study says don’t trust those correlations between music education and SAT scores – smarter students are more likely to take music classes, but that doesn’t mean music classes make you smarter.
• The study of diversity in Bay Area theater that Clayton Lord has been blogging about for a while is finally out; an abbreviated version of the executive summary is here. Five-word version: all the stereotypes are true.
• Sentences to ponder: “Voting is just another survey without individual consequence.”
• First there was Dance Your Ph.D., and now we have JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments – “the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format.” ArtScience ascendant!

Since I didn’t write out the speech in advance, I don’t have a transcript for it. However, below is a reconstruction of the new material from my notes, so you can get a taste for it if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing right now. (You’ll notice I make a number of generalizations in the speech about the ways in which arts practitioners interact with research. These are based on observation and personal experience, and are best understood as my working hypotheses.)

*

[starting at 26:55]

Why is this integration between data and strategy important? Because research is only valuable insofar as it influences decisions. This is why logic models are awesome – they are a visual depiction of strategy. And there is no such thing as strategy without cause and effect. Think about that for a second. Our lives can be understood as a set of circumstances and decisions. We make decisions to try to improve our circumstances, and sometimes the circumstances of those around us. Every decision you make is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision. Every decision, therefore, carries with it some degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be expressed another way: as an assumption about the way the world works and the context in which your decision is being made. These assumptions are distinguished from known facts.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your assumptions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile. Alas, research and practice in our field are frequently disconnected in problematic ways. Six issues are preventing us from reaching our potential.

Issue #1: Capacity

Supply and demand apply as much to research as it does to artists. There are far more studies out there than a normal arts professional can possibly fully process. I wish I could tell you how many research reports are published in the arts each year, but nobody knows! To establish a lower bound, I went back over last year’s [2011] “around the horn” posts, which report new research studies that I hear about. I counted at least 41 relevant arts-research-related publications – a tiny fraction, I’m sure, of total output. To make matters worse, research reports are long, and arts professionals are busy. For the Createquity Writing Fellowship program, participants are required to analyze a work of arts research for the Createquity Arts Policy Library. I collect data on how long it takes to do this, and consistently, it requires 30-80 hours to research, analyze and write just one piece! Multiply this by the number of new studies each year, and you can start to see the magnitude of the problem.

Issue #2: Dissemination

Which research reports is an arts practitioner likely to even know about? Certainly not all of them, because there is almost no meaningful connection between the academic research infrastructure and the professional arts ecosystem. Lots of research relevant to the arts is published in academic journals each year, but unless the faculty member was commissioned to do their work by a foundation, we never hear about it. Academic papers are typically behind a pay firewall, and most arts organizations don’t have journal subscriptions. To give an example, after I wrote about Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, Florida pointed me to a study in two parts by two Dutch researchers. It’s one of the best resources I’ve come across for creative class theory, but I’ve never heard anyone even mention either study other than him and me.

Issue #3: Interpretation

Research reports inevitably reflect the researcher’s voice and agenda. This is especially true of executive summaries and press releases, which is often all anyone “reads” of research “reports.” Probably the most common agenda, of course, is to convey that the researcher knows what he/she is talking about. Another common agenda is to ensure repeat business from, or at least a continuing relationship with, the client who commissioned the study. The reality, however, is that research varies widely in quality. There’s no certification process; anyone can call themselves a researcher. But even highly respected professionals can make mistakes, pursue questionable methods, or overlook obvious holes in their logic. And, in my experience, the reality of any given research effort is usually nuanced – some aspects of it are much more valuable than others. Unfortunately, many arts professionals lack expertise to properly evaluate research reports, not having had even basic statistics training.

Issue #4: Objectivity

Research is about uncovering the truth, but sometimes people don’t want to know the truth. Advocacy goals often precede research. How many times have you heard somebody say a version of the following: “We need research to back this up”? That statement suggests a kind of research study that we see all too often: one that is conducted to affirm decisions that have already been made. By contrast, when we create a logic model, we start with the end first: we identify what we are trying to achieve and only then determine the activities necessary to achieve it.

Here are a bunch of bad, but common reasons to do a research project:

• To prove your own value.
• To increase your organization’s prestige.
• To advance an ideological agenda.
• To provide political cover for a decision.

There is only one good reason to do research, and that is to try to find out something you didn’t know before.

Issue #5: Fragmentation

The worst part of the problem I just described is that it drives what research gets done – and what doesn’t get done. There is no common research agenda adopted by the entire field, which is a shame, because collective knowledge is pretty much the definition of a public good: if I increase my own knowledge, it’s very easy for me to increase your knowledge too. The practical consequences of this fragmentation are severe. It results in a concentration of research using readily available data sources (ignoring the fact that the creation of new data sources may be more valuable). It results in a concentration of research in geographies and communities that can afford it, because people don’t often pay for research that’s not about them. And it results in a concentration of research serving narrow interests: discipline-specific, organization-specific, methodology-specific. My biggest pet peeve is that research is almost never intentionally replicated – everybody’s reinventing the wheel, studying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. A great example of a research study crying out for replication is the Arts Ripple Effect report, which I talked about earlier. The results of that study are now guiding the distribution of millions of dollars in annual arts funding. Are those results universal, or unique to the Greater Cincinnati region? We have no way to know.

Issue #6: Allocating resources

Everyone knows there’s been a trend in recent years towards more and more data collection at the level of the organization or artist. Organizations, especially small ones, complain all the time about being expected to do audience surveys, submit onerous paperwork, and so forth. And you know what, I agree with them! You might be surprised to hear me say that, but when you’re talking about organizations that have small budgets, no expertise to do this kind of work, and the funder who is requesting the information is not providing any assistance to get it…just take a risk! You make a small grant that goes bad, so what? You’re out a few thousand dollars. The sun will rise tomorrow.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I participated in a grant panel recently. I enjoyed the experience, and am glad I did it, but there’s one aspect of the experience that is relevant here. There were seven panelists, and we were all from out of town. Each of us spent, I’d say, roughly 40 hours reviewing applications in advance of the panel itself. Then we all got together for two full days in person to review these grants some more and talk about them and score them. We did this for 64 applications for up to $5,000 each, and in the end, 92% 94% were funded.

So consider this as a research exercise. The decision is who to give grants to, and how much. The data is the grant applications. The researchers are the review panel. What uncertainty is being reduced by this process? How much worse would the outcome have been if we’d just taken all the organizations, put them into Excel, run a random number generator, and distributed the dollars randomly up to $5,000 per organization? And I’m not saying this to make fun of this particular organization or single them out, because honestly it’s not uncommon to take this kind of approach to small-scale grantmaking. And yet if you compare it to ArtPlace’s first round of grants, theoretically they had thousands of projects to choose from, and they gave grants up to $1 million for creative placemaking projects – but there was no [open] review process; they just chose organizations to give grants to. So there’s a bit of a mismatch in the strategies we use to decide how to allocate resources.

There’s a concept called “expected value of information” described in a wonderful book called How to Measure Anything, by Douglas W. Hubbard. It’s a way of taking into account how much information matters to your decision-making process. In the book, Hubbard shares a couple of specific findings from his work as a consultant. He found that most variables have an information value of zero; in other words, we can study them all we want, but whatever the truth is is not going to change what we do, because they don’t matter enough in the grand scheme of things. And he also found that the things that matter the most, the kinds of things that really would change our decisions, often aren’t studied, because they’re perceived as too difficult to measure. So we need to ask ourselves how new information would actually change the decisions we make.

There is so much untapped potential in arts research. But it remains untapped because of all the issues described above. So what can we do about it?

First, we need a major field-building effort for arts research. Connecting researchers with each other through a virtual network/community of practice would help a lot. So would a centralized clearinghouse where all research can live, even if it’s behind a copyright firewall. The good news is that the National Endowment for the Arts has already been making some moves in this direction. The Endowment published a monograph a couple of months ago called “How Art Works,” the major focus of which was a so-called “system map” for the arts. But the document also had a pretty detailed research agenda for the NEA, not for the entire field, that lays out what the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis is going to do over the next five years, and two of the items mentioned are exactly the two things I just talked about: a virtual research network and a centralized clearinghouse for arts research.

This new field that we’re building should be guided by a national research agenda that is collaboratively generated and directly tied to decisions of consequence. The missing piece from the research agenda in “How Art Works” is the tie to actual decisions. Instead it has categories, like cultural participation, and research projects can be sorted under those buckets. But it’s not enough for research to simply be about something – research should serve some purpose. What do we actually need to know in order to do our jobs better?

We should be asking researchers to spend less time generating new research and more time critically evaluating other people’s research. We need to generate lots more discussion about the research that is already produced. That’s the only way it’s going to enter the public consciousness. Each time we fail to do that, we are missing out on opportunities to increase knowledge. It will also raise our collective standards for research if we are engaging in a healthy debate about it. But realistically, in order for this to happen, field incentives are going to have to change – analyzing existing research will need to be seen as equally prestigious and worthy of funding as creating a new study. Of course, I would prefer if people are not evaluating the work of their direct competitors – but I’ll take what I can get at this point!

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

Finally, we should be open-sourcing research and working as a team. I’m talking about sharing not just finished products and final reports, but plans, data, methodologies as well. I’m talking about seeking multiple uses and potential partners at every point for the work we’re doing. This would make our work more effective by allowing us to leverage each other’s strengths – we’re not all experts at everything, after all! And it would cut down on duplicated effort and free up expensive people’s time to do work that moves the field forward.

I thank everyone for their time, and I’d love to take any questions or comments on these thoughts about the state of our research field.

The development of new technology has given our audience members new forms of entertainment and new ways to spend their discretionary time and money. This has made it far more difficult to sell tickets at prices that cover most, if not all, of the cost of production. People now entertain themselves with iPads, iPods, iPhones and numerous other electronic devices. They are entertained for so little money that high-priced performance tickets lose their appeal.

This is happening, of course, at a time of financial instability. This has made our audiences more price-sensitive and our donors less likely to make major contributions.

Of course, with more competition for entertainment dollars, we have to produce even more exciting and important art — and this often costs more money.

But with earned and unearned income difficult to come by, risk-taking seems death defying rather than simply scary.

It goes on from there – I would quote more, but I’d be re-printing more than half the piece. In short, even as more and cheaper entertainment/leisure options are popping up everyday, the support systems that get people interested in arts institutions (education and media) are fading away. Therefore, arts institutions are under pressure to reach new people by charging them less for cooler stuff, even though cooler stuff actually costs more money than the status quo. All in a time of economic recession.  Read the whole thing.

This article is a much shorter version of this. If you want the full force of my verbosity, read that one.

In Arts, Inc., Bill Ivey, former Chair of the NEA, makes the case that our artistic heritage is a set of public assets that should benefit all, but instead are often squandered by existing cultural institutions. Ivey seeks to remedy this through a Cultural Bill of Rights.

Each item in Ivey’s Cultural Bill of Rights fills a chapter in the book.

• “The right to our heritage—the right to explore music, literature, drama, painting and dance that define both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.”
• “The right to the prominent presence of artists in public life—through their art and the incorporation of their voices and artistic visions into democratic debate.”
• “The right to an artistic life—the right to the knowledge and skills needed to play a musical instrument, draw, dance, compose, design or otherwise live a life of active creativity.”
• “The right to be represented to the rest of the world by art that fairly and honestly communicates America’s democratic values and ideals.”
• “The right to know about and explore art of the highest quality and to the lasting truths embedded in those forms of expression that have survived, in many lands, throughout the ages.”
• “The right to healthy arts enterprises that can take risks and invest in innovation while serving communities and the public interest.”

According to Ivey, we don’t enjoy these rights because of  a failure of the government to prioritize cultural life and rein in corporate greed. An East Wing/West Wing divide devalues the importance of arts and culture makes it easier to treat the arts as political footballs. Congressional hearings on indecency result in industry self-censorship such as parental advisory warnings, V-chips and MPAA ratings that have a chilling effect on creative efforts. Government takes corporate preferences more seriously than the public’s interest in culture, passing intellectual property law that favors corporate interests and keeps use of artistic assets out of public reach.

Ivey does offer practical recommendations. He suggests cultural impact should be a component of merger analysis by the FTC and DOJ antitrust division. And Ivey would require the FCC to consider local cultural impact in its decision-making. Ivey feels that the fragmentation of governmental arts policy among many small agencies and institutions leads to fragmented arts policy. He would prefer a Cabinet-level department to implement consistent, strategic, aligned policy. Ivey also suggests that we significantly reform intellectual property law, encouraging the adoption of Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons model for greater legal sharing of content, and the reinstatement of copyright registration. And he speaks against the digital divide, advocating subsidies for those not able to afford access to high speed internet. He is also a strong proponent of net neutrality.

Arts, Inc. is based on Bill Ivey’s experience, unique vantage point, and extensive research, and is dense with supporting evidence, but the suggested cure is inconsistent with the diagnosed disease. It appears to be a manifesto, but calls for adjustments to the system, rather than revolution. Ivey prescribes fixes to the arts industries as if they are machines that can be fixed with better engineering. But the arts are an ecosystem, not a machine. No engineer designs it; it emerges from collaborating and competing forces in equilibrium. Individual institutions continually optimize activities within the bounds of their ecosystems, making systemic reform difficult.

Ivey offers the Cultural Bill of Rights as a model for reform. However, it is divorced from historical views of rights, typically based on active struggle. By contrast, Ivey casts advocacy for cultural rights in the mold of the environmental movement—one that has focused on public awareness. While either model can be grounded in grassroots activism, ignoring the models of struggle dilutes his assertion that these cultural rights are rights in the way that we think of them.

Despite these problems, there are uniquely useful insights in Arts, Inc. Few writers have Ivey’s qualifications to discuss systemic issues of policy-making. He connects all the dots between the U.S. federal government, artists, consumers, corporate owners of artistic assets and nonprofit arts institutions. The breadth of knowledge and research is impressive, and many of his solutions in the final chapter are remarkably practical in contrast to the manifesto structure of the bulk of the book.

This is a long piece. If you’d like the very short version, you can find it here.

In Arts, Inc., Bill Ivey, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998-2001 and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University (more expansive bio here) makes the case that our cultural and artistic heritage is a set of public assets that should benefit us all, but instead are too often captured or squandered by existing cultural institutions. Ivey seeks to remedy this through the framework of a Cultural Bill of Rights. Since the book was published in 2008, Arts, Inc. has been frequently cited by arts bloggers, and Ivey has continued to speak about the topics in the book at various seminars and conferences.

SUMMARY

Each item in Ivey’s Cultural Bill of Rights forms the basis of a chapter in the book, wherein Ivey explains why, in his opinion, we do not enjoy that particular right. He then goes into greater depth on how our government has failed to secure these rights, and closes with suggestions for how these rights could be established.

“The right to our heritage—the right to explore music, literature, drama, painting and dance that define both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.” In Ivey’s view, we do not enjoy this right because the vast majority of the cultural and artistic record of our own nation is owned by for-profit corporations, who seek to exploit whatever can be profitable and ignore or leave to molder those items with little commercial value. When perceived commercial value of a cultural artifact is low, preservation is inconsistent and ad hoc. Corporate rights owners don’t always take their de facto role as cultural archivists seriously. And intellectual property law greatly favors the owners, so when commercial value is high, costs for use can be very high indeed. Ivey cleverly illuminates the omnipresent property status of our cultural and historical record by including the rights owner and royalty fee for each photo used in the book.

“The right to the prominent presence of artists in public life—through their art and the incorporation of their voices and artistic visions into democratic debate.” Ivey asserts that the sacrifices often required of artists, and the difficulty generating an income, discourage many artists from fully utilizing their skills. Even artists who appear to have “made it” by, for example, signing a recording contract, still struggle to gain the attention of their employers. And artists whose potential contribution is not immediately recognized are less likely to be supported by industries focused on immediate profit. Ivey discusses Bob Dylan’s career, and doubts that Bob Dylan would become a well-known musical artist today.

Furthermore, according to Ivey, the public little understands and values artistic professions, which hinders the engagement of artists with their communities. Or, as Ivey quotes an art student friend from college, “Every family wants a Picasso hanging on the wall, but no family wants one standing in the living room.”

“The right to an artistic life—the right to the knowledge and skills needed to play a musical instrument, draw, dance, compose, design or otherwise live a life of active creativity.” Ivey presents a long list of reasons he has perceived why each one of us does not have equal access to artistic tools that provide us with a means of expression:

• Access to high quality training for the underprivileged is irregular and often dependent upon the limited resources of charitable organizations. Even free guitar tutorials on YouTube are not available across the digital divide.
• Universal arts education usually exists through primary school at some level, but then generally becomes elective.
• There aren’t enough art educators, and it is difficult for professional artists to teach in-residence without educational certifications.
• We conflate happiness with wealth creation, and so pursue skills suited to wealth creation rather than happiness.
• Participation has been reframed as attendance, rather than personal artistic expression.

“The right to be represented to the rest of the world by art that fairly and honestly communicates America’s democratic values and ideals.” Ivey opens the chapter noting that post-September 11th, many Americans were shocked to learn how lowly our nation is esteemed in some parts of the world. He draws a connection between this perception of the United States and the poor representation of our culture that is offered abroad. He notes that one of the most popular depictions of the U.S. in Morocco at the beginning of the 21st century was the television show Baywatch, because it was broadcast for free across the Middle East, due to a unique and pioneering distribution model.

Ivey says that this sort of misrepresentation happens because our official diplomatic apparatus, the State Department, places little to no priority on cultural diplomacy, viewing it as a soft power approach that ended with the Cold War. As a former NEA Chair, Ivey speaks candidly about an East Wing/West Wing divide in federal government. Arts and culture are represented in the East Wing, alongside social functions, typically presented by the First Lady and her staff. But the serious work of government happens in the West Wing. Ivey shares interesting anecdotes of his own lack of authority and resources, as a “small agency head,” compared to Ministers of Culture in other countries. As a result of de-emphasized cultural diplomacy, commercial interests, often assisted by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, have a near monopoly on sharing U.S. culture abroad.

“The right to know about and explore art of the highest quality and to the lasting truths embedded in those forms of expression that have survived, in many lands, throughout the ages.” In this chapter, Ivey speaks of what is typically characterized as fine art or “high culture”: French cinema, classical music, gallery art, Shakespeare, ballet, etc. Per Ivey, we don’t enjoy this right for several reasons: commercial arts industries, like cable television and movie theaters, have little interest in offering something different, foreign, or strange (these are considered niche market products); moreover, fine arts are perceived to have an aloof and sneering attitude, and do not engage younger audiences on their own terms¹.

“The right to healthy arts enterprises that can take risks and invest in innovation while serving communities and the public interest.” Here Ivey takes aim at both commercial and nonprofit arts organizations for playing it safe. Commercial interests play it safe to maintain large audiences. For example, Ivey says Clear Channel scientifically picks songs least likely to offend or irritate so as to reduce channel changing, with bland pop music the inevitable result. This science is applied to hundreds of stations, all programmed together. To take another example, publishers need take care to distribute products that won’t be banned for indecency by the world’s biggest retailer, Walmart.

If some artist or new artistic product proves successful, then risk aversion leads commercial cultural interests to copy the success as rapidly and profitably as possible until the original idea is completely played out. In the same vein, “bankable” talent becomes more important to risk-averse institutions than matching the right talent and artistry to the content or audience.

Nonprofit institutions are also guilty of risk aversion, according to Ivey. They want to limit the risk of losing philanthropic revenue streams and audience members, and so may make similar, safe choices in programming. Some nonprofit organizations may operate more to preserve an art form with a declining audience than to create risky content for a new audience, anyway. This is more likely if a nonprofit exists to maintain elite forms of entertainment.

The Failure of Government

Ivey pins our failure as a society to enjoy these cultural rights largely on the government. The East Wing/West Wing divide mentioned above that devalues the importance of arts and culture makes it easier to treat federal arts funding and obscenity or explicit content in the arts as political footballs. Even though the First Amendment makes direct regulation of artistic expression difficult and rare (with the exception of FCC fines for broadcasters), Congressional hearings on perceived indecency or obscenity tend to result in industry self-censorship such as parental advisory warnings, V-chips and MPAA ratings that have a chilling effect on creative efforts. Government also takes corporate culture industries’ preferences more seriously than the public’s interest in culture, leading to frequently extended copyright terms and intellectual property law that increasingly favors corporate interests and keeps use of artistic assets out of public reach.

Bridging the Cultural Divide

Ivey ends the book by acknowledging, for the first time, what he sees as good news and positive trends. Citing Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Ivey notes that creativity is again seen as a positive economic driver. Economists are increasingly interested in happiness beyond Gross Domestic Product. Corporations are taking greater notice of stakeholder benefit, not merely shareholder benefit. And influential work like Gifts of the Muse has informed conversations among arts leaders and foundations on whether we’d benefit from a greater focus on the so-called “intrinsic” benefits from the arts, such as increased creativity.

In addition to the digital divide, Ivey posits a cultural divide that cuts across class and other group identifications and separates people from artistic expression. Professionals with 80-hour work weeks, for example, don’t have enough time for arts in their lives. To help resolve this, Ivey suggests a new Arts and Crafts movement that would encourage craftspersonship and could serve as a correction or counterpoint to industrial production of cultural goods. Ivey notes that the Arts and Crafts movement linked an “aesthetic with humanitarian sensibilities,” and suggests this is an antidote for our increasingly shallow cultural participation and divided society.

Ivey also offers a list of practical recommendations that are more specific and concrete than the Cultural Bill of Rights. He suggests that cultural impact should be a component of merger analysis by the FTC and the Department of Justice antitrust division. And Ivey would require the FCC to consider local cultural impact in its regulatory decision-making. This sensible idea could be implemented at the agency level². Ivey feels that the fragmentation of governmental arts policy among many small agencies and institutions, such as the NEA, NEH, Smithsonian, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, programs within the Department of the Interior, the Kennedy Center, cultural attachés in the State Department, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Commission on Fine Arts, the Department of Education, etc, lead to fragmented arts policy arenas with narrow foci that cannot help establish the Cultural Bill of Rights. He would instead prefer a Cabinet-level department, parallel to Ministries of Culture in other nations, to implement consistent, strategic, aligned policy. Ivey notes the potential for abuse by a Cabinet level department, but believes that this could not make the situation worse than it currently is.

Ivey also joins the chorus of those suggesting that we significantly reform intellectual property law. He encourages the adoption of Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons model for greater legal sharing of content, and notes growing discomfort with digital rights management (DRM) in the digital publishing industries. Additionally, Ivey would like to introduce “statutory rates” common in music publishing to other forms of cultural property, so that rights to utilize other work can be legally and consistently and reliably obtained³. And he recommends that copyright registration be reinstated, so that an additional step is required to enforce one’s copyrights.

Finally, Ivey speaks strongly against the digital divide, and advocates subsidies for those not able to afford access to the information superhighway, so that our next generation of artists is not determined by the affordability of high-speed internet. He is also a strong proponent of net neutrality, and makes it clear that concerned citizens must be careful observers of both Congress and the judiciary, because intellectual property law is developed as much in court as in legislative session.

ANALYSIS

Arts, Inc. is a long book, based on Bill Ivey’s considerable experience, unique vantage point, and extensive research. It is also a slow read. It is dense with supporting evidence, which is welcome, but Ivey is not afraid to repeat a point, in detail, if it can be applied to the topic at hand. For example, he repeats his concern several times, at length, that copyright law is harmful to future artists who wish to build upon past work of others. And with every chapter except the last focused on the terrible state of affairs for arts and culture in the United States, it becomes polemical and pedantic pretty quickly, despite several interesting stories from his time as NEA Chair.

Ivey has written what appears to be a manifesto, but ends with a call for adjustments to the system, rather than revolution. I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Ivey has too many axes to grind, including his apparent belief, based on some experience with lobbyists, that high school band teachers are an entrenched special interest who will ruthlessly cut off at the knees any other form of music education in high schools, therefore limiting a child’s ability to create other forms of music.

Machine vs. Ecosystem

Most of Ivey’s recommended solutions are practical things that a somewhat unified and motivated government could accomplish, but it is not self-evident that such changes would guarantee the whole Cultural Bill of Rights. In Chapter 2, Ivey states, “If America’s arts system can be viewed as a giant machine connecting artists, heritage, and our expressive lives, fair use is the lubricant that smoothes the give-and-take of creativity.” Ivey prescribes fixes to the arts industries as if they can be applied by fiat; as if they are machines that were designed by an engineer, and can be fixed with better engineering. But I believe he is wrong. Arts are an ecosystem, not a machine. No engineer designs an ecosystem; one emerges when collaborating and competing forces and the actors therein find a sustainable equilibrium. No one designed the current set of inter-related systems of arts and culture generation and propagation. They emerged as a result of various incentives, initiatives, and interplay of different collaborators and competitors.

Individual institutions might themselves be machine-like, and subject to tweaking. But each individual institution, typically lacking the ability to change the environment alone, continually optimizes its activities within the bounds of its ecosystem, making collective acts of systemic reform difficult. Further, each participant in a system at equilibrium is primarily concerned with survival, not intentional restructure of the system. Ivey laments that both for-profit and nonprofit arts institutions are risk averse, but this is the natural consequence when institutions fear for their survival in a highly competitive environment. Equilibrium, after all, does not imply plentiful resources for all members. Equilibrium can be highly competitive (and in nature, often is).

The arts and culture landscape that Ivey wants requires systemic change, and systems simply cannot be adjusted and redesigned like a machine. Systemic change requires either immense cooperation and coordination among the most powerful members of the system (which might be arts consumers in this case), or revolution, or breakdown of the system into a disequilibrium that may be seized upon and exploited.

Regulating Preference

Just as Ivey writes as though the arts ecosystem were actually a machine that could be fixed, he writes about individual institutions and arts users as if their behavior and preferences could and should be changed to match his.

Ivey believes that the division of the market for arts products into smaller and better-defined niches, or the “long tail,” is bad for our cultural consumption. He believes this promotes a focused insularity of cultural preference, and does not expose consumers to new artistic forms or ideas. He contrasts this model with the radio stations and DJ’s of his youth, who would take on a curatorial role and introduce listeners to a diverse variety of content. However, he does not address the trade-off between breadth and depth. Niche focus allows for a greater depth of exploration and expression and risk-taking within that niche than would have been possible on Wolfman Jack’s border-blasting broadcasts, or the Ed Sullivan Show, which Ivey uses as an example of curated culture for a mass audience. Ivey desires that cultural institutions take more risks, so we should acknowledge that catering to a particular niche may facilitate managed risk-taking. A modern classical music ensemble can take more artistic risks with daring compositions than a larger symphony orchestra can, because the modern music ensemble has sought out a niche audience that supports the risks inherent in new classical composition.

As noted above, in Ivey’s desire for a new Arts and Crafts movement that might reconnect aesthetic and humanitarian values, he points out over-worked professionals as people who are on the wrong side of the cultural divide. But these over-worked professionals cannot be compared to exploited workers of the industrial revolution. A career working 80-hour weeks as a lawyer, doctor, investment banker or management consultant is one that is chosen and striven for, not one that is imposed upon a person. It requires a fair amount of cultural chauvinism to assert that these professionals, who have made choices that we hope are consistent with their values and preferences, are on the “wrong” side because their preferences do not match an artist’s preferences.

Rights

Ivey offers the Cultural Bill of Rights as a model for reform. However, it is divorced from historical views of rights, which are typically based on active struggle. Ivey does not even discuss whether his Cultural Bill of Rights is more likely to be granted or rather demanded and asserted. This is a strange omission in a discussion of “Rights.”

Ivey believes that fair use greases the creative gears and supports the rights of artists to create while borrowing from other artists, while intense copyright restrictions inhibit such creativity. The principle of fair use is described as too vague and inconsistently applied, and in any case, fair use is only used as a defense once legal proceedings are threatened or under way, making it an expensive principle to apply in practice.

Ivey wants an expansion of this; he clearly advocates for a wider freedom within the scope of law to encourage and empower artists. Yet he spends no time on the artistic vitality of illegal reappropriation of cultural products for creative endeavors, e.g.: unauthorized samples in hip hop; exposure of friends to new music through mix tapes, burned CD’s or shared mp3 files; or unauthorized video mashups and parodies so prevalent on YouTube. He seems uninterested in, or possibly unaware of, the emergence of creative internet memes (transmittable and mutable ideas or cultural artifacts) from open, authority-flaunting internet playgrounds like 4chan. The artistic reappropriation that Ivey champions (e.g., collage, pastiche, remix) is happening in spite of legal limitations.

The best review of Arts, Inc. that I’ve read was published in voiceXchange, a peer-reviewed online journal published by graduate students in the University of Chicago’s Department of Music. Eric Martin Usner points out, “As so many studies of popular culture have shown, law and control/ownership actually do much to inspire creative circumvention of ‘official,’ mainstream, or hegemonic arts through creative ‘piracy’—cultural disobedience.” Usner further notes that the heritage of civil disobedience, from Thoreau to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Gandhi and Vaclav Havel is relevant in any discussion of rights. Ivey doesn’t spend much time with the history of other struggles for rights, e.g., the Civil Rights Movement, gay marriage, and the Declaration of Independence. In these struggles, rights were demanded from and asserted against powerful institutions long before they were ever granted by powerful institutions, and typically focus on the prevention of harm to one part of society by members of the dominant culture. By contrast, Ivey casts advocacy for cultural rights in the mold of the environmental movement—one that has focused on public awareness and changing hearts and minds, with a fair amount of success. While either model can be grounded in grassroots activism, ignoring the models of struggle dilutes his assertion that these cultural rights are actually rights, in the way we think of them.

Ivey recognizes that a centralized Department of Culture to administer our cultural rights could potentially have too much power to encourage a homogenized or sanitized U.S. arts scene. He makes the argument that it wouldn’t be worse than the current situation, where art gets homogenized and sanitized by corporate interests. He writes, “The introduction of a central cultural authority in the United Sates could backfire, opening new opportunities for control that might make it more difficult, not easier, for Americans to achieve rich expressive lives. But, as we’ve seen, there’s plenty of poorly directed cultural interference going on right now⁴.” Ivey sensibly anticipates concerns about a more powerful governmental authority involved in arts and culture, but simply asserts that the government won’t be worse, more parental, or more homogenizing than for-profit arts industries. He doesn’t support this assertion. Much of the book is an exploration of how we are not able to trust corporate or public institutions to protect and perpetuate our artistic heritage, yet he believes part of the solution is a new government institution to consolidate others.

Useful Scope

Despite these problems, there are uniquely useful insights in Arts, Inc. The wider public debate (i.e., outside of the arts blogosphere) over copyright law in the United States rarely takes utility for future artistic endeavor into account, despite some current relevant cases in classical music and theater. And among arts and culture writers, few have Ivey’s qualifications (and interest) to discuss structural, systemic issues of policy-making. Ivey has written a book that connects the dots all the way from the U.S. federal government to artists to consumers of art to children first exposed to the joys of artistic creation to corporate owners of artistic assets and nonprofit arts institutions. The breadth of Ivey’s knowledge and research is truly impressive, and many of his proffered solutions in the final chapter of the book, labeled “Conclusion” in the table of contents, are remarkably practical in contrast to the manifesto structure of the bulk of the book. I highly recommend this chapter, even if you choose to skip the rest.

IMPLICATIONS

The Cultural Bill of Rights is difficult to compare to human rights or civil rights, as these are often very much about not being harmed by members of the dominant culture. The Cultural Bill of Rights, for example, will not prevent anybody in this country from being lynched, so it is worthwhile to examine whether they are potent as “rights,” or whether they are redundant with free speech rights. If Ivey’s Cultural Bill of Rights seeks to protect us from active repression of (or chilling effect on) our artistic expression, then it is redundant with free speech rights, and Ivey ought to add his influence to ongoing free speech advocacy. But if the Cultural Bill of Rights means that we have a right to be encouraged and subsidized to be more artistic and expressive, and I think this is Ivey’s intention, how should such rights be balanced against other priorities? For example, how can Ivey’s cultural rights be granted precedence over the arts industries’ rights to profit by artistic expression as best they can?

Instead of answering these larger questions, Ivey has assumed the supremacy of artistic expression, and offered solutions for his cultural rights in the style of environmentalism. This sets up the arts as something we really should appreciate more, and should protect, even if we don’t really want to, or we’ll be sorry later. In other words, the heritage and capacity for artistry that Ivey says we’re entitled to is the broccoli that we’re supposed to be eating instead of the potato chips that the cultural industries are feeding us. The recommendation to use the organizing tools of environmentalism is consistent with the tone of Ivey’s recommendations for governmental and bureaucratic reform. But this is at odds with the tone of aggrieved complaint throughout the bulk of the book. Despite Ivey’s best efforts to write a manifesto of articulated grievance and demand for change, I’m left with the conclusion that you can take the bureaucrat out of Washington DC, but you can’t take Washington DC out of the bureaucrat. Ivey is calling for new policy, not revolution. This is perhaps consistent with his view of the arts as a machine (which can be tweaked) rather than a system (which is more likely to be changeable in a period of disruption or disequilibrium). An arts advocate should decide whether she or he accepts some central premises of Ivey’s:

1. We are entitled to and have a right to a life of artistic participation and expression.
2. The current arts system is not delivering our cultural rights.
3. These rights can be reclaimed, though, through adjustments to the culture machine.
4. The best way to reclaim them is through grassroots organizing to change hearts and minds, as with the environmental movement, so that politicians are forced to take notice, so that policies can be improved.
5. Once government policy is improved, our access to our cultural rights will be improved.

If you can agree with all of the above, then you can agree with Ivey’s prescriptions. If however, you believe that the arts are an ecosystem rather than a machine, or if you believe that a more powerful governmental presence in arts and culture will not be a positive change, then you must seek other solutions.

FURTHER READING

Eric Martin Usner’s review in voiceXchange, cited above, focuses on Ivey’s call for a more expressive life for all people, as well as some analysis of the concept of cultural rights.

Jason Baird Jackson at Indiana University responded to Arts, Inc. just this March, from a folklorist’s perspective, with more in depth analysis of Ivey’s perspective on intellectual property.

Video of a panel discussion of Arts, Inc., hosted by the Center for American Progress. Ivey was on the panel with Robert Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), and moderator Sally Steenland, Sr. Policy Advisor for Faith and Progressive Policy at the Center for American Progress. The discussion focused on the theme of cultural assets as public goods.

Bill Ivey introduced many of the themes of Arts, Inc. back in a 2005 column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “America Needs a New System for Supporting the Arts”.

USA Today published exactly the reductive, brief review you’d expect from USA Today.

The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy at Vanderbilt University (Ivey is the Director) has a page about the book with well-chosen pull quotes.

Playhouse Square (photo by Ron Dauphin)

“Sustainability” and “community development” are ideals that many arts organizations strive to uphold. They want to stand on their own two feet financially, and they also want to play a role in revitalizing communities that have been abandoned by urban sprawl. Some arts centers, such as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark and PlayhouseSquare in Cleveland, are accomplishing both of these goals with one activity: non-arts related real estate investments.  We know from many, many studies (like this one from The Reinvestment Fund and another from the Center for Creative Community Development) that there is a strong connection between arts activities and real estate values. Is this the sustainable business model we’ve been looking for?

Well, it certainly can bring in the money. Carnegie Hall Tower in New York generates over $2 million a year in revenue for Carnegie Hall. NJPAC, with its holdings of 12 acres, “has an annual operating budget of $30 million, [and] has been in the black five years running. It has built an endowment of more than $55 million and raises about $11 million a year.” In Cleveland, a full 30% of the PlayhouseSquare Foundation’s revenue is tied to real estate.  And why shouldn’t these arts organizations be benefitting from the value they create? Thomas Kean (former governor of New Jersey who ushered in NJPAC) viewed the opening of Lincoln Center across the river in 1981 as a cautionary tale. Lincoln Center went in and transformed the surrounding area into a commercially successful one. Subsequently, Kean says, the Center itself missed out on that value because it hadn’t invested directly in the neighborhood property. By investing in surrounding property, these organizations are able to capture that value and channel it towards their mission-related activities. One might even argue that capturing this value is a responsibility of the organization in order to ensure its financial sustainability.

But should the role of an arts organization in community development extend to directly buying, selling, leasing, and planning the real estate development of large amounts of property? It’s a very deep question whose answer probably depends, among other things, on what the organization’s mission statement is. For example, when PlayhouseSquare was founded in 1970, its purpose was to save five historic theaters downtown. But after those theaters reopened, private investors didn’t rush in as expected. So Playhouse Square jumped in, taking a risk where the private sector wouldn’t. The result has been revitalization for the neighborhood and money in the bank for the non-profit.

Not all arts organizations who deal in real estate have such cozy relationships with their city, however. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, whose mission is promoting and developing the city’s downtown Cultural District, is currently appealing a ruling that would force them to pay taxes on two properties it owns but hasn’t developed (one is the site of the CMU Arts Management program’s Future Tenant Gallery). Two years ago it faced a lawsuit by a developer with whom it was partnering over control of the project site.  Large-scale real estate development is not for the faint of heart or the short of cash. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s mission is to develop the Cultural District, so it has made the decision that real estate investment is a risk worth taking. However, that’s a choice that each arts organization must face.

The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago chose not to take that risk, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. The city gave the school the old Hild Library in Lincoln Square to renovate back in 1998. Since then, the area has gone from tired-looking neighborhood to a pedestrian-friendly paradise, with a surprisingly low number of chain stores.  New Mayor Rahm Emanuel has praised the School for bringing the area to life. According to sources at the organization, Old Town School certainly worked (and still works) with business owners and government to encourage the development of the neighborhood, but it didn’t buy up property like other arts centers.  Then again, its mission is to “teach and celebrate music rooted in tradition,” not to redevelop a neighborhood.

Like any method for diversifying income, real estate investment has its pros and cons. There are also a lot of questions it raises that haven’t been addressed here, like gentrification, real estate monopolization, and whether an arts organization is really the best entity to plan urban revitalization. Do you know of other examples of arts organizations getting involved in non-arts-related real estate investments? How has it worked out for them?

I wasn’t about to stay silent about the conference, since I blog therefore I am; but instead of the mammoth undertaking of writing up every single session I attended, this post will instead pick and choose the speakers and sessions I found most interesting and attempt to tie it all up into a bow of meaningful themes.

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To the extent that any topic dominated conversation at the conference this year, it was the National Capitalization Project report commissioned by GIA, guided by a steering committee consisting of program personnel at some of the nation’s largest arts funders, and written by staff at TDC, a nonprofit consulting firm based in Boston. The report proposed a “common set of practices” for grantmakers designed to improve the financial condition of arts nonprofits, including:

• Encourage surpluses and operating reserves
• Take the long view and embed capitalization principles in conversations
• Encourage organizations to right-size
• Offer general operating support
• Project funding should be tied to core mission and fully funded
• Be clear about the structure and timeline of grants

One would think that these recommendations, and the force of the consensus and voices behind them, would be music to arts nonprofits’ ears. Several, like the focus on general operating support and operating reserves, have been embraced by more progressive funders for years. Others, like the recommendation to encourage operating surpluses as opposed to just balanced budgets, are fairly new ideas in the field (even though that one was called out by Adam Huttler years ago). What nearly all of the proposals have in common, though, is that they lend themselves toward treating grantees well. (What a concept, right?) That is, aligning investments with organizations’ core mission and programs, trusting them to do great work, and taking responsibility for the gravitational pull that an infusion of money can have on an organization’s operations.

The report has managed to draw some controversy, but not for the reasons you might expect. There was no cry of support for starving nonprofits of administrative costs or directing donations exclusively to specific programs. Instead, it was language like this that set off alarm bells for me and many others at the conference:

But, the economy is not the only factor that urges us to act. Another important factor is the changing behaviors of arts patrons, particularly their level of demand. At a time of flattening demand there is increasing supply, as noted above, in terms of both the sheer number of organizations and the supply of product. Neither the audience nor the public or philanthropic sector can support this level of oversupply.

The problem with this description is not that it is untrue (the existence of hypercompetition in the arts and many other industries involving content creation is indisputable), but rather that its overly simplistic dichotomy of supply and demand ignores the increasingly blurry distinction between the two. I think words like “oversupply” are very dangerous terms for arts managers to be using when, in the same breath, we like to talk about how important “audience engagement” is and how today’s patrons (and especially youth) want to “curate their experiences.” The path from curation to creation is a short one, after all – and once a creator, the urge to share one’s creations with the world is rarely far behind. We might as well get used to it: oversupply is our future, and a few targeted investments toward working capital or operating reserves here and there is going to do absolutely nothing to change that.

Seen in that context, the report’s recommendations begin to appear more problematic, mainly in that they seem to require either a noticeable increase in the pool of subsidy funds available to the arts or (far more likely at this point in time) the funneling of more resources to fewer organizations. Rightly or wrongly, this implication, as well as the choice to focus on “capitalization” in the first place, was read by many at the conference as a signal of support for the largest, best established institutions rather than the myriad of community-based and artist-led organizations that tend to struggle with smaller budgets. I am not sure that this is what either the steering committee or the report authors themselves intended (I heard several admonishments that “different organizations require different capital structures” and the like), but nevertheless that is how it came across.

Meanwhile, my colleague Anna Campbell made an excellent point in one of the sessions: all of this talk of capitalization means little if we are not thinking about where artists themselves fit in and how they benefit. In a field where already so little of the money subsidizing the arts actually ends up in artists’ pockets, such concerns are of no less relevance to them. One of the most important lessons I learned in business school was that our tendency to focus on income in conversations about socioeconomic disparities is misguided. Assets are far more important. If you have a million dollars, the decision to lose $50,000 a year while pursuing a full-time graduate degree in the performing or visual arts in a quixotic, risky quest for hipster glory doesn’t seem nearly so stupid as it would if you were broke. Effective capitalization, when applied to individuals, in a very real way enables risks and adventures that would either be impossible or impossibly misguided without it. Yet most artists never receive this opportunity unless they are born into it, and there is real question in my mind at least about whether better capitalization of institutions would make much of a difference for the rest.

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Another noticeable theme, albeit driven in part by which sessions I chose to attend, was innovation and a search for what’s next. Last year’s conference really only had one panel that was explicitly devoted to new ideas: Marc Vogl’s memorable session on the final day that included Adam Huttler, Ebony McKinney, Heather Cohn, and Nicole Derse from the Obama campaign. This one, by contrast, had several: a panel on innovative models of support for artists and arts organizations that featured one of the founders of Kickstarter; a breakfast roundtable on innovation in the field; an afternoon-long session on artistic entrepreneurship with Dennis Scholl, the VP of Arts for the Knight Foundation; even a semi-“closed” session on intergenerational dialogue in grantmaking that was primarily aimed at the under-35 set. And of course, there was a keynote from venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito, during which Ito sang the praises of agile software development, risk-taking, interoperability, failing cheaply, and serendipity, to a generally receptive audience. As he said, “the more you plan, the less lucky you are.”

So innovation, next-generation thinking, and entrepreneurship seem to be trending topics, so to speak, in the grantmaking field. Yet there was still plenty of room for more familiar conversations on arts education, social justice, cultural exchange, evaluation/assessment, and various offshoots thereof. I recognized a number of both panelists and themes from Brooklyn. The danger with such things, I guess, is that one can easily imagine people and ideas becoming balkanized into their own little corners of the room – the silos waiting to matter. Last year’s conference ended with a forceful closing speech from Ben Cameron that did a great job of weaving together the big questions at the forefront of everyone’s minds as the dawn of a new decade approached: demographic change and social equity, technology and the generation gap, increasing globalization, and the blurring between amateur and professional arts participation. This year, no such unifying threads were in evidence; instead, I got the sense that now that the Great Recession has stabilized and the specter of imminent, drastic change is (for the time being) averted, grantmakers were feeling once again the lure of more comfortable territory. Indeed, this year’s closing keynote by folk singer and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie (who, I must confess, I had never heard of prior to this conference) was met with a veritable avalanche of nostalgia from the largely Baby Boomer crowd. With so many directions that the conversation could go, we will have to work ever harder to focus it in ways that both advance the field and include as many people as possible. We will need more “truckers” (just visit the link) to step up and connect the various communities of practice to each other and to the larger discourse, so that we can all benefit meaningfully from each other’s work.

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Many thanks to everyone who made the conference possible, as well as all of those I met and met again in Chicago. See you next year!