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.

OK, back to regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Kickstarter got a whole bunch of press mileage last week out of the idea that it “gives out” more money to the arts than the NEA. Tim Mikulski explains why that’s comparing apples to oranges.
• Mike Boehm explains how the State of California’s recent withdrawal of support for city redevelopment agencies has hurt the arts.
• An inside look at the in-progress Chicago Cultural Plan, led by Lord Cultural Resources.
• The UK is creating a national youth dance company in response to concerns about holes in the country’s arts education system.

ON PHILANTHROPY

• Rob Stephany is the new director of the Economic and Community Development program for the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh. The program will coordinate with each of the Endowments’ program areas – including arts and culture – on place-based investments.
• Outgoing Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest offers a rundown of outcome-oriented philanthropy’s growth in the decade he has spent at the top of the one of the nation’s largest funders.
• What good has organized (i.e., foundation) philanthropy accomplished in 100 years? GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky analyzes a hundred case studies from Joel Fleishman’s book The Foundation: A Great American Secret to find out.

IN THE FIELD

• The Chicago News Cooperative, a nonprofit news site launched with major support from the MacArthur Foundation, is suspending operations, at least in part because the IRS apparently isn’t sure that newspapers can be nonprofits. Or at least that’s the reason given by MacArthur, whose legal counsel wasn’t satisfied with the fiscal sponsor relationship that CNC had with local public television station WTTW. Regardless, there’s some egg on the face of MacArthur, who invested $1 million in what is currently looking like a failed experiment. Meanwhile, a lot of us are anxiously awaiting the IRS’s long-anticipated arrival into the 21st century, in which real journalism will hopefully be recognized as a genuine public good.
• The Metropolitan Opera is the latest arts institution to adopt dynamic pricing.
• Following up on our post about bad public art, John Metcalfe shines a light on a European conceptual public artist whose prankster aesthetic seems to involve annoying as many people as possible.
• Brandon Reynolds takes an in-depth look at Kansas City’s jazz district, a creative placemaking initiative that hasn’t been very successful thus far.
• Some good news for a change: Hawaii’s symphony orchestra is back from the dead. And there’s a new “fire arts” festival in Pittsburgh.

RESEARCH CORNER

• It’s been a big couple of weeks for Big Data. First, the New York Times ran an article trumpeting the increasing importance of statistics and number-crunching in daily life (and the opportunities that abound for those fluent in such matters), to which Fractured Atlas’s Adam Huttler responded with a post about FA’s data initiatives in the arts. Michael Rohd had an interesting post on the artist as data scientist, making the point (which I completely agree with) that stories and emotions are data too. Joe Patti comments on the creepy side of Big Data, especially when the subject is us. And bringing it all back to the Grey Lady, their data artist in residence (yes, that’s his actual title), Jer Thorp, gave a well-reviewed speech at TEDxVancouver that is worth a watch.
• Great article on Data Without Borders, a startup nonprofit that connects data scientists with nonprofits in need, founded by yet another New York Times staffer. They’ve been getting a lot of (well-deserved) attention, and while still very young, could end up being the most significant fieldbuilding organization since GiveWell.
• Theatre Bay Area and its indefatigable Director of Marketing and Communications, Clayton Lord, are out with a new book on intrinsic impact in live theater. The anthology’s centerpiece is a study commissioned by TBA from WolfBrown of theatrical performances in six cities, using WolfBrown’s unique methodology for understanding intrinsic impact (basically, the emotional or cognitive effects that arts experiences have on individual participants). There are also four original essays and a number of interviews with leaders in the theater field. While the book is only available for purchase, the folks at TBA are rolling out a series of excerpts and supplementary material that can be consumed for free; check out this interview excerpt with Diane Ragsdale as an example.
• A new study purports to demonstrate a positive impact on test scores for Chicago public school children receiving arts education.
• Helicon Collaborative is out with a new paper looking at the characteristics of arts organization “bright spots” in the Pacific Northwest.
• Adrian Ellis revives the supply & demand conversation in a big way with this expansive article for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader.
• The NEA hosted a roundtable on arts education standards and assessment last month; you can read a brief report here or watch the webcast here.
• Welcome Joanna Woronkowicz, new program analysis officer at the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Kevin Bolduc writes about the progress of the Charting Impact project, which asks nonprofits to fill out a simple form describing their intended and actual results.
• Cogent article from the Foundation Center’s VP for Research Larry McGill on the value of being transparent about limitations in data quality.
• Interesting field experiment attempting to measure the effect of social pressure on charitable giving. Cool research design, although as several commenters point out, it would have benefited from a more sophisticated control.
• There’s a Journal of Art Crime?

Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> https://createquity.com/2011/05/tedx-talk/feed/ 6 https://createquity.com/2011/03/supply-is-not-going-to-decrease-so-its-time-to-think-about-curating/ https://createquity.com/2011/03/supply-is-not-going-to-decrease-so-its-time-to-think-about-curating/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:05:21 +0000 https://createquity.com/?p=2078  

Image by Flickr user Waddell and Condor

(Cross-posted from the NEA’s Art Works blog. The version that appears there was edited for length; this is the original.)

I’ve been waiting for a while to respond to the controversy that erupted after Rocco Landesman’s comments on supply and demand in the arts at Arena Stage in January. (Createquity’s previous coverage, provided by Aaron Andersen, is here.) Most of the very thought-provoking commentary in the interim has taken issue in one way or another either with the notion that demand cannot increase, or the appropriateness of the supply/demand construct altogether. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I want to propose a slightly different way of thinking about the situation.

The first thing for us to understand is that Rocco’s comments did not come out of nowhere. People in arts policy circles have been grumbling about the dramatic increase in arts organizations for years. I had actually been collecting links on this topic all through last year in preparation for a post on oversupply when the news of Rocco’s speech hit. Here’s Michael Kaiser, for example, noting that “so many people” over the past two years have suggested to him that we must thin out the field (he does not agree). Jim Undercofler, arts management professor at Drexel and former CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra, admitted recently that he was questioning his “initiating assumption” that there are too many nonprofits.¹ Here’s former Mellon Foundation Associate Program Officer Diane Ragsdale with a post on oversupply 10 days prior to Rocco’s address at Arena Stage. And this past fall, Grantmakers in the Arts’s much-heralded National Capitalization Project Report ended up making a lot of people nervous, primarily because of the inclusion of this statement among its core hypotheses: “there is an oversupply of product in some marketplaces, and…current funding practices do not address this issue.”

I take the view that, whatever the merits might be of reducing supply, there is virtually nothing anyone—funders included—can do to actually make it happen. For one thing, conversation about supply and demand breaks down a bit when the suppliers have an intrinsic motivation to be in the marketplace. Classical economic models assume that suppliers don’t have any particular emotional attachment to what they’re supplying; all they really want to do is to make money. As a result, if they’re not making money, they’ll exit the industry, leaving more to go around for everyone else.  As we see from Kirk Lynn’s contribution to the discussion, however, many artists (especially artist-entrepreneurs) have far too much passion for their work to consider exiting solely for financial reasons. The result of this lack of exit is a surfeit of fantastic art that few aside from its creators have time to take in.

Notice that I didn’t say in that last sentence “a surfeit of fantastic art that few want to take in.” An immutable fact of contemporary culture is that the volume of expressive content and product available for us to consume overwhelms not just our desire, but our physical ability to experience it all. The number of albums released on CD in 2008 is enough that a listener couldn’t get through more than an eighth of them even if he had his headphones on for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Users upload the equivalent of 176,000 full-length movies to YouTube every week. And that’s just the stuff that’s being released today! Meanwhile, every creator must compete not only with all of her contemporaries, but also with all of those who came before her whose work survived to the present—and that supply is not about to decrease anytime soon. (Unfortunately, creators cannot similarly count on dead audience members to be a part of their fan club.) Moreover, the phenomenon of oversupply—or, put another way, hypercompetition—is far, far bigger than the nonprofit arts sector. It affects industries ranging from video games to smartphone application stores, Facebook, cable TV, and yes, blogs. In many ways, it is existential in scope: our brains and lifespans are not built to withstand this onslaught of choices. The supply of artists, arts organizations, and even capital may increase with relative ease, but the supply of time in the day, last I checked, remains pretty constant.

So to me, the conversation we should be having is not about reducing supply. Instead it is about defining the responsibilities of cultural institutions to provide stewardship for a world in which supply of creative content is exploding and will never shrink. In this era of infinite choice, there is a desperate need for guidance as to how we should allocate the precious few hours that we have to experience something that will feed our souls, make us think differently, or incur a hearty laugh. In other words: for curation. We need someone to listen to, watch, and view all of the chaff so that we can confine our own time to the wheat. But quality curation-that is to say, curation that results from independent, original research and informed, critical judgments-is not just good for us as consumers. It’s just as important for the artists. In particular, in a hypercompetitive environment like this one, we need to look out for the artist with the talent and drive to make great art, but without an income stream that will support her as she makes it. The voices of these artists—the gifted but resourceless—risk getting shut out unfairly because many others have the capital and connections to bring their work to the attention of gatekeepers, even if that work is inferior.

I believe it’s critically important that, as we seek to impose structure and sanity on this world, we do not cut off the flow of new ideas and new voices in the name of triage. The main reason why we have this proliferation of nonprofits, I think, is because artists think it’s the only vehicle they have available to them to do their work. But as Adam Huttler points out, it’s not – in particular, fiscal sponsorship provides an attractive and immediately available alternative structure in which to accomplish one’s artistic goals. With fiscal sponsorship, there is no assumption of perpetuity; no mandate to form and submit to a board that may not understand or share the founder’s agenda; and much less in the way of paperwork and reporting requirements.

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

If I were a funder, I would be thinking about how to focus my support on organizations that are nonprofits for the right reasons. Funders can accomplish more impact by supporting institutions that work with and involve a wide range of constituents, be they artists, audience members, community members, etc.  And yes, that does suggest—as both Rocco and Grantmakers in the Arts have suggested—larger grants to fewer organizations. However, this only works with the other pieces of the puzzle if all of the following three things are true about the organizations receiving grants:

1. They actually pay the artists. This is how we can get away with not supporting artistic producers directly. There needs to be a mechanism for those producers (i.e., dance and theater companies, musical ensembles, individual painters, sculptors, etc.) to make money through the system that is being set up. If grantees that present the work of artists to the public are not compensating their creative collaborators proportionately with the support they’re receiving, this strategy is undermined.
2. They’re performing their curatorial duty. If all the organizations that hire artists and ensembles are too lazy or hamstrung by commercial pressures to seek out new voices and instead simply work with the same narrow pool of established names, there will be no room for innovation and the field will stagnate. Many funders’ well-intentioned focus on butts in seats in the name of community relevance creates incentives counter to providing good curation, while failing to instigate widespread increases in arts engagement. Institutions already have all the incentive they need to maximize butts in seats – it’s called earned revenue. By accepting charitable support, I would argue, organizations have an obligation to seek out work that isn’t guaranteed to put butts in seats. And if an institution’s cost structure won’t allow for that, even with subsidization, that is a telling sign that it may be overbuilt.
3. They play well with others. At this time of extreme pressure on philanthropic and especially government support for the arts, the field needs to make efficient use of scarce resources like buildings, equipment, real estate, and attention. There’s no sense in pouring millions of dollars into a new facility only to have it sit dark three-quarters of the time. That’s not only a huge waste, it is deeply uncharitable. Donors (including institutional funders) should demand accountability on this point.

Much has been written about the increasingly blurred line between creator and consumer of art. With plummeting production and distribution costs, unprecedented levels of global interconnectedness, and nearly 50% of the United States population engaged in some form of personal creation, it’s no surprise that we are faced with art all around us – more than at any previous point in history. Abundance of creative expression isn’t going away; it is our future. Maybe what really needs to be “fixed” is not supply and demand – since, with due respect to the NEA, that issue is a whole lot bigger than us – but rather, the processes and rationales we use for determining how to distribute public subsidy.

*

¹ All of the “too many nonprofits” talk reminds me of how differently we treat nonprofits from businesses for no good reason (after all, donors are customers too). You never hear anyone saying “there are too many small businesses”—by contrast, private-sector entrepreneurship is recognized as a critical mechanism for spreading innovation and a key source of real economic growth, especially in a recession.

TALKS AND SPEECHES YOU MISSED

• Marc Vogl and Jeanne Sakamoto of the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations, respectively, hosted a Grantmakers in the Arts webinar on the subject of retaining emerging leaders in the arts field. Here is the full 40-minute presentation, and Marc and Jeanne have also put together a NextGen Arts Leadership microsite with other resources on wikispaces.
• Andrew Taylor gave this keynote at the Arts Enterprise Summit in Kansas City last month called “The Art of the Business Model.” And he had a co-keynote with the wonderful Russell Willis Taylor at American University’s Spring Colloquium, which you can view here.
• Nina Simon’s keynote from the 2010 NODEM conference on design for participation.

THE LETTER OF THE LAW

• Did you know that Canada has a law against the broadcasting of false news?
• Great analysis from my Fractured Atlas colleague Marie Ortiz on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as health insurance reform.

PUBLISHING AND THE ACADEMY

• The American Association of University Presses considers new business models for university publishing.
• Christopher Madden argues for the role of academic publishing in strengthening international cultural policy.
• Lucy Bernholz considers the future of the publishing and information industries.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

• Pianist Vijay Iyer is one of the smartest thinkers in the arts anywhere (his undergraduate degree was in cognitive science). His essay on supply and demand from a jazz perspective is a must read. (h/t Brian Newman, who extends the argument to film.)
  
• Future of Music Coalition looks at how musicians make money.
• If the demand for new teaching jobs is so much higher than supply, why are salaries for newly hired econ professors still so high?
• In honor of Marginal Revolution’s migration to WordPress, here is a quartet of good reads from that site: prediction that small-government policies actually lead to bigger government in the end; considering the consumer surplus of the internet; thoughts on common mistakes of right-wing and left-wing economists, with summary by Arnold Kling; and thoughts on common mistakes of economists in general (thank you Ezra Klein!).

TRENDS AND THOUGHT PIECES

• We focus a lot of attention on using arts and culture to reframe urban life. But what about the suburbs? Yonah Freemark imagines a more sustainable suburbia.
• Doug McLennan writes of the walled garden problem and the economic incentives for new technologies not to adhere to the open-standards practices that have helped us make so much technological progress over the past couple of decades.
• Crowd-curation marches on, this time at museums.

PARTNERSHIPS, MERGERS, AND EXPANSIONS

• CultureBot’s Jeremy Barker marks the public debut of New York Live Arts, the new company formed by the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop.
• Not a merger, but this collaboration between fellow Lincoln Center tenants the Metropolitan Opera and Juilliard does beg the question of why it didn’t happen sooner.
• More on the Awesome Foundation’s, uh, awesome growth.

PLANNING AND EVALUATION

• GiveWell describes an interesting method for self-evaluation: giving an independent observer a chunk of money to allocate using GiveWell and other sources, and testing how useful GiveWell was in the process. It’s kind of like a lab experiment for smart giving.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy has released its strategic plan for 2011-14.

NEW PROJECTS AND RESOURCES

• Foundation Source Access is a new fundraising website from Foundation Source, a company providing back-end services to many small family foundations. While at first glance it might seem redundant with other types of crowdfunding sites aimed at individual donors, this project is interesting because of the audience. The huge national foundations don’t control all that much of the nation’s institutional giving, but it’s always been difficult to tap family foundation money without personal connections because of those organizations’ lack of infrastructure. If family foundations actually use this tool to seek out grantees instead of sticking with the tried and true (and that’s a big if), it could be an important new resource for fundraisers.
• Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) is launching craigconnects, a project to curate nonprofits and get them wider attention.
• TicketForce is looking to sell tickets to your Facebook events…in Facebook. (Thanks to Thomas Cott for the above two links.)
• Travel search engine Hipmunk has a new mapping overlay feature for its hotel searches. You can now see heat maps of food, shopping, tourist opportunities, and “vice” in the area around your hotel. I tried it out in my own neighborhood and found the data a bit suspect, but it’s still an interesting and very practical application of cultural asset mapping.
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies has a cool new resource called “Ask IFACCA.” Not only will they take your questions, they’ll publish some of the answers as well. Geek out alert!
• Great to see the DiMenna Center for Classical Music (new home of Orchestra of St. Luke’s) up and running in Manhattan, especially since the genesis of the project was a 2004 feasibility study by Exploring the Metropolis.

A quick note about some upcoming speaking engagements: I’ll be on a panel next month at the annual Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium hosted by American University, speaking on the topic of “What Makes a Good Arts Leader?” I’m looking forward to sharing the stage with the NEA’s dynamic and ubiquitous Director of Public Affairs, Jamie Bennett, and my good friend Stephanie Evans of Americans for the Arts. The symposium takes place on Sunday, April 3 in Washington, DC, and my panel is in the mid-afternoon (3:45-5:00). Secondly, I’ll be co-hosting a discussion as part of Kathy Supové’s Music with a View Festival at the Flea Theater in New York on March 30, talking about some of the themes raised in my article for NewMusicBox, “Composing a Life.” Come say hi if you’re around!

ADVOCACY UPDATE

• So, Congress reconvened and passed a two-week continuing resolution that features $4 billion in cuts – including the elimination of the $40 million arts education program at the Department of Education. Meanwhile, negotiations are taking place now on the longer-term continuing resolution that will fund the federal government for the rest of the year. The version that the House passed a few weeks ago contains a 25% cut to the NEA. Guy Yedwab has an excellent roundup of reasons to support the NEA (although I do advise leaving any return-on-investment arguments to the professionals). Lex Leifheit suggests that we get our parents and grandparents involved in arts advocacy, a la Sarah Silverman’s Great Schlep.
• Some general commentary on the budget fight: Richard Kessler reminds us that this is not just about the arts, but rather a wholesale attempt to roll back the New Deal, and David Brooks suggests that we should be allying ourselves with other interest groups who stand to lose from cuts to discretionary funding, not fighting against them.
• Obama is also trying again to lower the limits on the charitable deduction donors can take on their taxes. This has some in the nonprofit community worried, and it is worth noting that arts organizations are disproportionately supported by high-net-worth donors most likely to be affected by the changes. I don’t know, though – I am skeptical that the tax deduction is as significant a motivator in donor behavior as most people seem to think it is. (Most of the research I’ve seen on this suggests otherwise.) I think the impact to arts organizations would be real, but not as big as feared.
• There are advocacy doings at the state and local levels too. Governor Walker of Wisconsin, already endearing himself so much to lefty-leaning artists through his union-busting ways, is threatening to severely reduce arts funding in that state as well. At least Chicago’s new mayor – and former ballet dancer – Rahm Emanuel has pledged support. And it looks like our friends in Kansas may have enough support in the state legislature to save their arts council. (That article is well worth the read, by the way.)
• Don’t forget that government advocacy is not the only kind that’s important. The Meyer Foundation, which had long been an arts supporter in the DC area, has adopted a new strategic framework that leaves the arts out in the cold. Obviously many fewer people have the ability to influence the decision-making processes of private foundations than do government bodies, but those who do have that influence should not be afraid to use it.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

• The conversation Rocco started a month ago continues. The most interesting content lately belongs to Scott Walters, who recounted his experience attending a convening of arts leaders at the NEA to discuss the issues at hand; here is more.
• Meanwhile, the NEA released a trio of research reports re-examining aspects of the well-worn Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.  Perhaps the biggest headline comes from the fact that when you expand the definition of arts participation beyond ticket sales at the likes at the symphony, opera, art museum, etc. to include things like engagement with electronic media and personal creation, the proportion of people who engage with the arts rises to nearly 3 in 4. Thomas Cott has a great round-up of the reports themselves (which also examine the roles of arts education, age, and generation in arts attendance) as well as reactions from around the web.

ALL ABOUT ORCHESTRAS

• Man, a lot has been happening in Detroit since we last checked in. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s season is now cancelled, but rumors fly that management is considering hiring replacement players. Now the musicians are proposing binding arbitration to resume the season without a contract, under the terms that management last proposed, and are impatient for a response. Yikes!
• Last year, I predicted that composers would use the method employed by Eric Whitacre to create his Virtual Choir to crowdsource performances for their own pieces. It looks like this is now, in fact, happening, as Canadian composer Glen Rhodes is starting up a “virtual orchestra project” to play an original composition of his. (There’s a nice interview of Rhodes by Tara George at the above link.) Meanwhile, the YouTube Symphony, which is a live-action flesh-and-blood orchestra composed of members who auditioned via YouTube, is having another go-round under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas.

PHILANTHROPY AND GENEROSITY

• Americans for the Arts has joined up with Hyundai for a test of whether slactivism can help the arts: Hyundai’s new ad campaign, “Cure Compact Crampomitosis,” has AFTA as a charitable partner. For each person who joins the Facebook Causes page set up by Hyundai for the purpose, the car company donates 50 cents to AFTA – up to a maximum of $25k. (They are already more than halfway there.) On the one hand, I’m very glad to see a car company choosing an arts organization for support rather than any of the thousands of more traditional charities it could have picked. On the other hand, though, it seems like a pretty damn good deal for Hyundai…only $25k for 50,000 deep impressions? If just a handful of people buy cars as a result of this campaign, Hyundai comes out ahead. (In fairness, Hyundai is also matching donations made through the page, which nearly doubles the commitment as of this writing.) Well, good luck to them.
• Is giving money to the homeless a good way to help after all? Maybe it is, if you just ask them what they want and buy it for them.

THINKING CAPS

• I’m still making my way through Animating Democracy’s excellent Impact Arts site, but I can already tell it’s going to be a tremendous resource for me as well as the field.
• A new cultural policy think tank is in the house, and it wants your input: the Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability. Headed by Paul Nagle, ICSCS (pronounced “Isis”) is an affiliate of the British think tank DEMOS and takes a radically democratic approach to its work. Nagle has two guest posts on the IT Foundation blog that are well worth reading.
• Is extending copyright to fashion designers a good idea? UCLA economist and sociologist Gabriel Rossman says no.

COMINGS AND GOINGS

• Muhammad Yunus, the grandfather of microfinance, is being forced out as the head of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in what many see as a politically-motivated vendetta.
• Ex-Senator Chris Dodd is going to lead the Motion Picture Association of America, taking over for the legendary Jack Valenti.
• Former Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program Director Moy Eng will be the new head of the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, CA.

Image by Flickr user Mordac

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

—Theater Director, age 30

An Embarrassment of Riches

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

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

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

The Arts’ Dirty Secret

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

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

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

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

—Composer, age 27

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

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Grantee

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

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

—Jazz Musician, age 34

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Directing Donations

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

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

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

Aggregating Ability

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

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

Building Community

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

Putting it All Together: Guided Crowdsourcing

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

How It Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Summing Up

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Ibid: 49.

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

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

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

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

• First it was the state arts agencies; now the NEA is under attack. It turns out that the federal budget for the current fiscal year was never actually finalized, but instead was paid for bit by bit. As a result, the Republican House has called for a $22.5 million, or 13%, reduction in the NEA’s budget for the current fiscal year. As in, the one that is going on right now, for which grants are already being made. This would be the largest reduction to NEA funding in 16 years. (Not surprisingly, Republicans have since offered amendments to cut things even further…including one amendment from Scott Garrett (R-NJ) to eliminate the agency.) On top of this, President Obama’s budget for FY2012 (which begins October 1 of this year) calls for nearly as deep a cut – despite the fact that other cultural agencies (including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian) did not receive proportionate reductions. This NEA is brimming over with smart, capable leadership and has been moving in some really exciting directions lately; it would be a shame to see that momentum blunted by capricious political winds outside of its control. You can take action here; please do this, especially if you do not live in New York City, Boston, DC, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco. Your voice matters.
• If you don’t like the economic impact-focused arguments at the link above, feel free to use Arlene Goldbard’s alternative letter instead. Arlene makes the moral case for arts support like no other.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Barry Hessenius offers an important perspective on the pragmatic side of arts advocacy. No vote occurs in a vacuum or truly on its merits in politics; everything is a horse trade. It’s ugly, but it’s what those people in the Middle East are taking to the streets for.
• Other perspectives on this: Adam Huttler fires a shot across the bow of our single-issue, NEA-funding-focused advocacy model and argues for more strategic alliances with and awareness of non-arts-specific goals. Arlene Goldbard and Guy Yedwab suggest that if we want to make a good long-term case for public arts support, the term “arts” might not be the most helpful and we might want to make sure  the work we do actually serves the public. And Matthew Guerrieri has this awesome find of a clean energy industry economic impact study that promises substantially fewer jobs created per dollar spent than in the arts.
• Finally, the greatest threat to our public arts infrastructure may not be rabid conservatives, but apathetic progressives. I’ve been frustrated for a long time by the lack of reciprocity between the arts community’s support for the liberal establishment and the liberal establishment’s support for the arts. This week, we have Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, and Kevin Drum coming out as anywhere from mildly to strongly opposed to direct federal funding for the arts, and Tyler Cowen (though not exactly a liberal himself) denying that there’s a liberal case to be made. These are important voices, folks…a lot more important than Bob Lynch. They are thought leaders in the progressive community who don’t get the rationale for why the arts should have a role in federal policy. We need to educate them.

You Say You Want a Revolution

• Is this a game-changer? Kickstarter is letting organizations “curate” pages of crowdfunding campaigns. For-profits, nonprofits, and government are all represented among the current curators.
• I haven’t written too much about the crisis facing the Detroit Symphony; here is the latest news, some analysis from New England Conservatory’s Tony Woodcock, and more from Greg Sandow.
• Diane Ragdsale says in order to solve the supply/demand problem, we need to be able to identify mission-failing institutions and help them die. Sound familiar? By the way, here’s Diane’s manifesto on arts philanthropy and sustainability.
• Meanwhile, Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre goes for a more flexible business model. And a California legislator introduced a bill to create a flexible purpose corporation to compete with B-Lab’s Benefit Corporation and the L3C. Finally, Andrew Taylor writes on the intriguing economic set-up of Carnegie Hall’s upcoming Spring for Music orchestra festival.
• Shocker alert: Rosetta Thurman no longer identifies as a nonprofit professional. Don’t worry Rosetta, as long as you don’t adopt Dan Pallotta’s positions on compensation, you’ll still be okay in my book.
• Turns out the connection between the arts and regional economic growth goes back a long way:
  

  [C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses.

Someone’s Gonna Pay

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy names the top 50 donors of 2010; the LA Times susses out the biggest givers in the arts.
• Mike Bloomberg will once again generously support the arts in New York City.
• Assets for Artists is expanding to new locations. And so is the Awesome Foundation.
• More on supply and demand: Laura Zabel and Rebecca Novick editions.

Figuring Out the Details

• GiveWell is back with a typically thorough self-evaluation. Here’s an overview (bottom line: fewer causes, more “gold medal” charities), top-level priorities, GiveWell as a project, GiveWell as a donor resource, and web traffic stats.
• Andrew Taylor on prize philanthropy and unintended consequences.
• New study from the European Union on the entrepreneurial dimension of cultural and creative industries. And here’s one from Economist Intelligence Unit on the synergy between livability and economic development in urban places – culture is explicitly acknowledged as a component of livability.

Revolutions Can Be Fun Too

• Cool article about the Knight Foundation’s program supporting Random Acts of Culture.
• OKTrends considers the questions to ask on a first date. Want to know whether that hot chick will sleep with you? Ask her if she likes the taste of beer. How about that hot dude? Ask him if he’s ever imagined killing somebody. (I’m not making this up.)
• Congratulations to my friend and colleague Ron Ragin, whose performance on “Baba Yetu,” better known as the theme to the best-selling video game Civilization IV, helped the composer win two Grammys over the weekend. Here’s Ron bustin’ out the pipes for a PBS special on Video Games Live.

The gauntlet thrown down

Landesman cites the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts in saying that performing arts event attendance has dropped 5 percentage points. More specifically, in 2002, 39.4% of U.S. adults (or 81 million) attended either a jazz event, classical music event, opera, musical play, non-musical play, ballet, or art museum or art gallery. In 2008 that number dropped to 34.6% (or 78 million).¹

This 5% of decrease in attendance share, interpreted as demand, is juxtaposed against a 23% increase in the absolute number of nonprofit performing arts organizations during the same time period, interpreted as supply. The 5% is a decrease in percentage of attendees among the adult population, and the 23% is an increase in number of organizations, without reference to size or whether the additional 23% produce events at the same rate as previously existing organizations.²

It’s not a perfect comparison to put the 5% drop in percent of attendance against a 23% increase in number of organizations, but the opposite direction and the size of both changes is still disconcerting. If fewer people are attending arts events, but more organizations are creating them, then this could be a problem, right? Landesman said that we can’t realistically increase demand, so we ought considerer reducing supply. I.e., we need fewer performing arts organizations, or those organizations need to produce fewer events. This idea, that there is an oversupply of performing arts, has been met with negative reactions among many arts workers, to say the least. That the NEA also wants to fund fewer organizations has ratcheted up the anxiety level.

My problem is not that Landesman wants to further ration the already-rationed cookie jar. And I do not believe he thinks he can or should use the NEA to prune the gnarly tree of performing arts in the USA. My issue is that Rocco (can I call him Rocco?) presented a simplistic view of the economics of performing arts, one that hasn’t been much expanded in the discussion since, by focusing only on event attendance and NEA subsidies. Landesman, along with a passel of concerned bloggers, is ignoring what makes nonprofit economics sustainable, strong performance in multiple markets.

The demand function in nonprofit performing arts

Performing arts nonprofit organizations operate in at least three markets: markets for what people will pay to see them perform, the financial markets for debt, investments and endowments (do not apply to all organizations, and are not further discussed here), and the markets for private philanthropy and status. Markets for philanthropy and status are almost entirely missing from the demand side of Rocco’s equation (and the demand side of this traditional economic analysis by Devon Smith).

Rocco speaks of contributed revenue as if it is just a policy-driven subsidy, like a subsidy to the agribusiness industry. Or, as Trisha Mead later put it on 2amtheatre.com, a subsidy for scientific research and development, which is not a bad analogy when describing NEA funding. Frequently, a subsidy is the result of political influence, but when it is a well-intentioned policy instrument, a subsidy makes it possible to get things that we or the government think we need, but just aren’t willing or are unable to pay for on our own. It’s inherently paternalistic–making us eat our spinach (or at least pay for the spinach with a wee miniscule share of our taxes).

For now, I will use the word subsidy for policy-driven funding that somebody, like the government or a foundation, thinks is good for us. A subsidy pays for the spinach. But the vast majority of contributed revenue to arts organization comes from individuals (as the NEA knows; see page 1 of this report), out of sheer appreciation for the work that is generated. When a small business owner contributes $1000 every year to the symphony in her town, she is clearly stating that they music she enjoyed that year was worth at least $1000 more to her, and her community, than what she paid in tickets.³ That is a reflection of demand. Not only that, but she’s signaling to this organization that she likes what they’re doing. If they’re paying attention, and subsequently doing more of what they think she will like, then they are responding to market forces, just in a subtler fashion, and in a market with fewer participants.

Consider how demand differs from person to person. Conceptually it’s not complex. For any given thing that people buy, some people like it more, and are willing to pay more, than others. That’s why the iPhone cost so much when first introduced. Apple knew that some people would want one so badly that they’d happily pay a premium price, and when all their fanboys had one, it would be time to cut prices to reach the next group. If you can get everybody to pay the maximum they’d be willing to pay, then you’ll bring in the most money. Economists and marketers call it price discrimination. When you’re selling tickets you can do this, to a limited extent, with differences in price for seats in the front verses seats in the back (not exactly price discrimination), or through dynamic pricing (Trisha Mead is a big advocate of dynamic pricing). But to really get the most money, you’d like a way for somebody who adores your product to pay you even more than the highest price you’re charging. That’s exactly what you can do as a nonprofit organization when you accept contributions. If you have a good development & fundraising staff, you will get as much revenue as possible given the demand that exists. It will not be reflected, however, in the event attendance figures extrapolated from NEA surveys.

Some contributors aren’t so purely motivated. Corporations may donate for the PR or advertising. Sometimes donors want to sit on committees with other donors to make business contacts or find golf partners. Sometimes, they just want to be associated with a highly respected arts organization, because it impresses their neighbors or clients. This is the market for association and status. Don’t tell the donors that you know this, because such status may be more valuable when not explicitly acknowledged. But truly, there is demand for this. Naturally, this status is more likely to be supplied by larger, longer-lived institutions than by smaller upstarts.

Further, if you want nonprofit arts organizations to conduct R&D for the art world, donors (including foundations) often want to fund exactly that. They demand artistic R&D by funding it.

The demand to supply, and the benefits of competition to suppliers

The market for association and status is not limited to donors, sponsors and underwriters. It extends to the labor market, as well. Rocco is admirably concerned that if performing arts organizations oversupply, against lower demand, then they will have to share what he sees as a shrinking revenue pie with more organizations, which will eventually force organizations to pay their artists less, or at least will make it harder to pay artists a living wage. I think he’s generally right, if the industry structure remains fixed. When, on Twitter, a theater artist suggests that the “model is broken” if he or she doesn’t receive a living wage, I often reply that if they want to be paid more, then less theater should be produced.

Of course, each individual can’t alter the fact that artists supply their own talents for less than what the market will monetarily compensate. And, they really shouldn’t try. First, artists do get some intangible compensation. Anybody working for free, or almost free, creating art gets the intangible benefit of doing something that he or she loves or is driven to do. The artist may also receive respect and admiration from friends. Moreover, many artists are working to build recognition and reputation (or status), so that they have better opportunities to secure paid work in the future. There is a value to intangible compensation. And while we can’t perfectly measure that value, we know it’s there. If it weren’t there, people would stop creating art for free.

Further, the assumption that oversupply will lead to lower revenue per artist is one of those ceteris paribus arguments common in economic theory. If all else is held constant, then more theater and fewer theater-goers leads to less and less money for each theater. In real life, however, ceteris never stays paribus. If you want your city to gain a critical mass of creative, talented theater artists, it helps to have more production. Higher competition within a market will naturally give more options to your theater-goers, making it more likely that they’ll be able to find something they like. This might even increase demand, though there’s no guarantee this will happen, or happen quickly.

However, this is not a recommendation to form more theater companies or chamber orchestra groups. According to the National Arts Index, the vitality of the arts tracks fairly closely with the economy. Recessions impact all areas of demand discussed here. Since 2008, we’ve seen several orchestras fold or come close. Worse, the NAI research indicates that even during prosperous years this last decade, approximately 1/3 of nonprofit arts organizations ran at a deficit. This is a more serious concern, worthy of further analysis, but we still can’t leap to the judgment that this is driven by oversupply.

Conclusion

Demand is a function of more than just ticket sales and attendance. You have to include demand to provide funding, demand to contribute, demand for status, association, and even demand for truth and beauty. Further, the root of oversupply, if it exists, is in artists insisting on supplying more of their generative work to their communities. Rocco can’t stop this even if he wants to, and I doubt he really wants to. If it were to stop, our arts ecosystem would be less vibrant, would hold less potential, and would be less motivating.

Notes:

1. If you analyze the attendance decrease in absolute number terms rather than change in percent, the decrease is 3.7%. But the decrease in percentage of U.S. adults attending is 4.8%, which Landesman has rounded to 5%. The attendance number includes attendance at for-profit events (it’s based on a survey of attendees, many of whom will not know or care if they are at a for-profit or nonprofit event), and the organizations number includes fairs, festivals, and media.
2. The 23% increase in number of nonprofit organizations is taken from the Americans for the Arts National Arts Index. It is the increase from 2002 to 2008 in number of 501(c)(3) arts organizations in the above categories, plus nonprofit media organizations and fairs & festivals. It does not include for-profit arts organizations such as for-profit art galleries. If you convert this to the number of organizations per one million people, for more apt comparison to the change in attendees as percent of the population, then the number of organizations increased from 294 per million to 341 per million, a 16% increase. This isn’t a breakdown by organization size. We can’t assume that the total output of events increased 23% just because the number of organizations did. The additional organizations could be tiny, with low production capacity. If we look at both changes in terms of absolute numbers, you can see that attendance dropped 3.7% and number of organizations (not necessarily number of events) increased 23%. If we look at both changes in terms of percentage of the population, then attendance dropped 4.8 percentage points, and number of organizations per million increased 16.3%.
3. On the value of the $1000 from the small business owner: sure, there is a tax deduction, too. But even if she’s a rich business owner, in which case she might give a lot more than $1000, the tax deduction will only be worth $350 at most (less if a large share of her income is from dividends or capital gains), which means she still wants to give away at least $650 to the symphony.