ARTSblog

Popularity: 6%

by Joanna Chin, Program Coordinator, Animating Democracy

According to the recently released National Arts Index, one third of arts groups are not making their budget.

The downturn in the economy, combined with the Index’s clear results, has shown that when giving dries up, an alarming number of arts groups are slowly pulled into financial starvation. This unsurprising revelation, now rooted in the Index’s data, leaves the field in an interesting predicament: Do we beg for more money to support a clearly failing subsidy model? Do we follow the suggestions of others who say to let financially weak nonprofits die?

A Darwinist at heart, I was happy to stumble upon an article in Next American City revealing that perhaps a more optimistic alternative exists: adapt and survive. We, as artists, pride ourselves on being creative but, as business people, still cling to old paradigms of audience engagement or follow a step behind widely popular trends (e.g., social networking).

However, organizations such as FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics) in Brooklyn, NY, and Sunday Soup (a program of InCUBATE) in Chicago, illustrate the possibility of breaking away from government/funder aid with their innovative application of community-supported arts grantmaking. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9%

What an adventure! When Randy Cohen and I started putting the National Arts Index together in 2005, we had little sense of how expansive it would become. At first, we hoped to find about 25 or 30 national and annual measures of arts and culture activity that we could report on annually. We knew of a few national service organizations that kept what we thought were pretty good and robust measures of annual activity in their fields – think symphonies, opera, and theatre. We knew of periodical studies by the NEA and the Census Bureau, as well as some measures at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Urban Institute. When we got going, we thought we could cobble these together into a pretty good annual picture of arts and culture in the U.S. over time.

These turned out to be only a fraction of the data that we ultimately found, as you can see in the full Index report on this site. Our final report, with 76 indicators, really shows a more diverse and multi-faceted system of the arts in America, one that we knew was there, but had not been able to get our hands around. No surprise: there are so many dimensions to the arts system: people, groups, institutions, artistic disciplines, artistic genres, businesses, nonprofit, and government, products, services, experiences, jobs, volunteers, and so much more. Not only “no surprise,” but also “no problem”: we wanted the Index to be as inclusive as possible, so we were happy to find all of the different measures.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7%

At a time when the arts and culture community’s understanding of itself is shifting away from traditional conceptions of “arts participation” (i.e. attendance) and focus on publicly-supported business models, creating an empirical index such as the National Arts Index (NAI) is a daunting task. The challenge is that many arts-related data sources are anchored in conventional conceptions of the sector.  Consequently, the NAI makes huge steps forward by including both for- and non-profit indicators, by including indicators of personal participation, and by shedding light on lesser-utilized data sources (see pages 131-134 of the report).

The arts and culture sector seems to be moving toward a broader, more holistic, understanding of itself – one that spans a larger swath of the ‘cultural ecology’ – including professional arts, participatory practice and cultural literacy.  The cultural ecology framework developed by John Kreidler and Philip J. Trounstine in their 2005 Creative Community Index report (page 6) is a simple and elegant depiction of the cultural system. As we in the field continue to develop this broader self-definition, participatory practice and cultural literacy will need to be characterized at the same level of detail as indicators currently included in the NAI. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11%

As Bill Ivey says, “policy accretes around bodies of data.” If we can develop commonly-accepted metrics for characterizing cultural vitality, then we stand a better chance of influencing policy. You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score. And, if you are filling a void of scorekeeping, then you get to shape the rules for scorekeeping, which means you can change the conversation.  I see the National Arts Index (NAI) as a major step forward on a longer pathway of developing a set of generally accepted standards for assessing cultural vitality in communities, regions and the country. The Urban Institute has already done a lot of forward thinking about the topic, which you can read about here. What matters the most, however, is not the data itself, but the conversation that happens around the data and the extent to which the NAI can be used to galvanize discussion amongst people who can actually change policy.

When the NAI was discussed at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference back in October, it was interesting to see how some people immediately looked through the list of the 76 indicators to see what was included and what was not included. For example, one person pointed out that the NAI includes just one indicator of arts creation (i.e., “participation in music making, painting, drawing, and/or photography”). There are no indicators, for example, of the numbers of people who sing in choirs, or who compose music on GarageBand, or who belly dance.  Those types of data points simply aren’t available, or would cost a lot to generate. But what is the cost of not including them in the national conversation about cultural vitality? This is the risk associated with any aggregate measure like the NAI. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7%

The National Arts Index is the latest in a series of credible research reports to document the impact of arts and culture on a national and local level. Economic impact studies like the Arts & Economic Prosperity reports, employment data from the Creative Industries Report and other studies have all made significant contributions to our understanding of size and scope of the creative sector, helping to make the case for increased investment in arts and culture.

I know first-hand how valuable this information is to elected officials and policy makers when it comes to setting budget priorities. We continually reply on research from Americans for the Arts and other sources to keep civic leaders and the public informed and up to date on the health of our cultural sector. In difficult budget times like these, the NAI provides a new opportunity to engage in that conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7%

Americans for the Arts is pleased to announce applications for Americans for the Arts’ Professional Development Fund for Emerging Arts Leaders of Color. A total of five Joyce Fellows from the Great Lakes region (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) will be selected to participate in this program in 2010.  Fellows will receive stipends of $3,000 to support their attendance at the 2010 Americans for the Arts 50th Anniversary Summit/Annual Convention, 2010 National Arts Marketing Project Conference, and 2011 Arts Advocacy Day. In addition, fellows will have special opportunities to meet field leaders, connect with mentors, and receive individualized career coaching.  Support for this program is provided by the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation.

Eligibility information and application materials can be found here.

Popularity: 13%

This past week I attended a U.S. Department of Education “stakeholders” meeting on the reauthorization of the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The meeting was ground-breaking since it was the first time that the national arts education community had been invited to specifically address the reauthorization policy efforts. Since last June, the Department has been holding these meetings on various reform topics, typically broad and encompassing multiple sectors of the education universe. The meeting was led by Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement (OII) Jim Shelton and attended by Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development (PEPD) Carmel Martin, OII Associate Assistant Deputy Secretary Scott Pearson, and PEPD Deputy Assistant Secretary Emma Vadehra.

Held in the Department’s auditorium, the meeting began with short introductory remarks by Shelton and Martin and then the arts education advocates in the audience were given time to speak. While a transcript of the meeting is expected, it will be weeks before it is available.  I’ll just simply say that each speaker made a thoughtful and passionate case for strengthening the arts through ESEA reauthorization. In most cases, representatives from each organization cited research or programs their members had run – or the school administrators and arts educators in the audience spoke about their schools and districts and the positive impact that arts education makes locally. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 22%

Galileo Galiliei once said, “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.” I congratulate Americans for the Arts and their partners for doing just that by developing the National Arts Index. In so doing they have ignited a crucial national conversation about the arts, their health and vitality, and that of our communities and nation.

Artists, arts administrators and arts patrons may ask, “Why is this Index necessary? Why must we quantify the arts?  The arts are important for their own sake and they are good for our souls, for our children, for the world.” They are, but unfortunately that message doesn’t get through to many policy makers. I liken the arts community’s failure to verbally articulate the value of the arts to a conversation between two people who speak two different languages. One yells louder, figuring sooner or later the other person will understand. We must be able to translate what we value into what the person or audience to whom we are speaking values.  The National Arts Index will be an important aid in this translation process.   Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9%

Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, the National Arts Index is a real game changer. By widening the frame to look at music royalties, movie screens, and personal creative practice, Americans for the Arts has basically said to the nonprofit fine arts, “You’re now one of many; part of a sector but not the be-all and end-all.”  This new reality, coming at us from the premier US cultural advocacy organization, will have profound implications for policy actors and community leaders all over the country. Do we pursue policies to help out record companies undermined by interenet sales of singles and non-paying file sharing? What’s our position on extending artist and record-label performance royalties from the digital realm into terrestrial radio? How do we connect with the boom in social dancing, as documented by the Wolf-Brown California study?

Well, I for one think we do care about all these things and more. Now that we’re talking about the entire cultural sector, and not just about the nonprofits, we’ve got a fighting chance at creating a policy arena important enough to get the attention of big-time Administration and congressional players.  Americans for the Arts has decided to care about public policy as it affects all of America’s expressive life, and to me that’s a great thing.  Now we need to move on to think about how Fair Use, the overall intellectual property environment, trade in movies and TV shows, and mergers in the arts industries shape the ways art gets created, distributed, and consumed. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9%

On January 20, Americans for the Arts released the National Arts Index—a new framework to measure the vitality of the U.S. cultural sector based on 76 national indicators grouped by 4 overarching themes: Financial Flows, Organizational Capacity, Arts Participation and Competitiveness.  In a field where obtaining data can be like pulling teeth, assembling the breadth of this information is an accomplishment in itself.  For me, the real value is that we finally have in place an annual, national reflection of a creative sector that embraces a range of activity inclusive of both nonprofit and commercial cultural delivery models.

Reflections aren’t always pretty though. The National Arts Index shows us definitively over an 11-year period that the rules of engagement have changed. Buffeted by changing demographics, the economic business cycle, technology and increasing diverse cultural choices, traditional art forms that have been historic cornerstones of American public life and cultural identity are struggling to compete successfully to obtain the sources of financial support and the audience numbers they need to survive. By revealing long term trends and a key annual measurement of the vitality of the sector, the Index provides an additional incentive to seriously rethink how we support the development of creative expressions and access to the creative process through new models of engaging individuals and communities in the arts.   Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6%

I’m pleased to be joining all of you on ARTSblog to discuss planning – and surviving – the next important meeting while mastering the art of facilitation.

As someone who has designed and run hundreds of meetings of all descriptions over the years, I am often asked what sort of training is best to become an accomplished facilitator. I don’t think it’s the diet of ginseng or soy beans or other brain food urged on me from time to time. Maybe the real skill is in the listening, and in knowing when to chime in. As the oldest son in a large, chaotic family, I was often called upon to mediate differences in ways that, in retrospect, set the stage for my professional career.

Whatever the skill or its source, it has served me well enough to know that every staff member and trustee should be given the opportunity to learn the art of facilitation.  The tips, insights and counsel that I have sought to impart add up to a lifetime’s work, with something to offer staff and trustees at all levels.  Of course there will be challenges.  But this guide is my way of going ahead, sending back intelligence from the field, and doing whatever I can to help you succeed.

Now let’s have some fun!

Order Herding Cats and Cougars:  How to Survive the Meeting You Are Running While Mastering the Art of Facilitation from the Americans for the Arts online store!

Do you have a question for William Keens or need some meeting-related advice?  If so, comment below!

Popularity: 4%

Today, Americans for the Arts released our new National Arts Index at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.  This report represents a major milestone for arts in America. Never before has there been a single and annually produced measure of the health and vitality of the arts in America. 

While new for the arts, we interact with indicators daily. If you want to know about the stock market, you check the Dow-Jones Index.  Are we optimistic about the economy? Track the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index. Indicators are broad measures that compress a lot of data into a single indicator. 

The National Arts Index is an annual measure that uses 76 equal-weighted, national-level indicators of arts activity-making it one of the largest data sets about the arts industries ever assembled.  This new report covers an 11-year period, from 1998 to 2008. 

The 2008 National Arts Index score is 98.4-down 4.2 points from its 2007 score of 102.6 (2003=100). A score of 105.5 would return the Index to its highest point, measured in 1999. While the arts industries in the U.S. have become increasingly creative and the number of working artists and arts organizations is growing, audience demand has failed to keep pace-causing the National Arts Index to drop to its lowest level in the 11 years we’ve tracked. 

The overall Index score is only one of the big stories in this report.  Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 23%

Podcast: Download (Duration: 5:43 — 5.2MB)

Randy Cohen, Vice President of Local Arts Advancement for Americans for the Arts, discusses the new National Arts Index in this audio podcast. He talks about how the Index was created and how it can be a boon to local arts agencies and to the arts field as a whole.

Read more about the National Arts Index here.

Popularity: 15%

Podcast: Download (Duration: 10:31 — 9.6MB)

Derrick Ashong – or DNA as he is sometimes known – will give the keynote presentation to the Arts Education Preconference on Thursday, June 24. His presentation will discuss the impact of arts education and the value of the arts in creating social change.

Want to learn more about Derrick?  He spoke with Americans for the Arts staff recently about his arts background and the need for increased arts education in our schools. Take a listen. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 14%