ARTSblog

The first question (suggested topic) posed for this panel blogging on the Private Sector relationship was: How to define the relevance of the arts to business in the face of urgent and basic social needs. Once again we make the mistake of always approaching the business relationship from the perspective of our needs and not theirs. It is, think, an arrogant conceit and a strategic misstep to always approach this issue from what we want and need.

For three decades, the nonprofit arts sector has been seeking – with very limited success – to capitalize on intersections between it and the corporate / business community. The vast majority of efforts in this arena have been small and localized (i.e., individual arts organizations attempting to build bridges and form partnerships / alliances on individual, isolated projects, often limited to seeking corporate sponsorships; or Arts & Business Council/Business Committee for the Arts initiatives, for which arts organizations have shown far more enthusiasm than businesses). Larger forays into the promotion of sector wide collaborations have principally been limited to periodic dialogue characterized by the most general of precepts; lacking specificity, strategic / practical next steps, and any timeline for the accomplishment of specific agenda items. 

Recent developments that have elevated the importance of creativity to America’s global competitiveness, and expanded research into the role and value of certain skills that arts education purportedly deliver to the job preparedness of the workforce, have further opened (slightly) the door to move towards potentially more substantive relationships between the arts sector and the business community.

The arts sector knows what it wants:  more vocal support and money. The business community is not yet convinced what (if any) benefit accrues to it from furtherance of the relationship between the two sectors (aside from building community “good-will”), nor, specifically, how the arts might help it to harness the elusive concept of  “creativity” to its benefit. Recent studies suggest the two sectors, even after decades, do not yet even share a common, consensus vocabulary when discussing the issues. Most of the stimulus for further dialogue, research, and pilot partnership programs originates in the arts sector, not in the business community.

While concerted effort has been made over the past decade to convince government (at the local, state and federal levels), and the education and business communities, that arts education should be of equal value and importance (to other core subjects) to schools and to corporate America, and of the direct relationship between arts education and proficiency in science and math, the arts remain the step-child to science, technology,  engineering and math, and continue to be regarded as an ‘elective’ subject. Business does not value art to the same extent it values science and math, nor does it acknowledge any linkage between studying the arts and either proficiency in other academic subjects, or success in school in general (including attendance, behavior, motivation and self-esteem). Business and industry have yet to buy into the proposition that an arts background has a relationship to innovation in the workplace.

In short, though we have supposedly been in a dialogue with corporate America for years, we are still at the very beginning of fashioning any kind of workable, sustainable partnerships / relationships between business and the arts on a large scale. And a principal reason for that is our failure to find out what business thinks and wants (if anything) from a relationship with us. Some years ago, Harvey Seifert and I suggested that what we need is to move the agenda forward by:

1. Understanding what, specifically, the business community might want from a working relationship between the sectors (i.e., how such a potential relationship could be perceived of as actually benefiting business);
2. Establishing a common, consensus based vocabulary centered on the concept of “creativity”, its role and value,  and the methods by which creativity can be demonstrably grown, quantified, and managed;
3. Devising a strategic approach to insure that the potential value to both sectors of continuing exploration into the possibilities of collaboration and cooperation filter across and through all levels of the sectors;
4. Laying the foundation for the development of sustained channels for dialogue and action by and between the two sectors at a high national, executive level.

We can’t continue to talk around the issue and confine our supposedly “dialogue” with business to our perspective alone. We need to find out what business really thinks, and what we can specifically offer that will motivate them to work with us.  We really haven’t yet done that initial first step yet.

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