Creative Children

Argh, go read The Frontal Cortex! Go read it! Today's RTWT is about how school teachers tend not to want creative students. He ends it with yet another plea for arts education for our children... which is nice to hear from a neurologist, rather than the vested interest of an arts educator.

Arts and Government I: From the Duh Department

David Byrne has a basically spot-on blog-post about a $14,000,000 bailout for opera in Los Angeles, which I got from a post by Scott Walters, who manages to avoid the reflex to defend the arts organization involved. I understand the emotional draw -- one of my first responses was, "shit, this is basically an argument against the field of Opera, which we all know couldn't survive a day without state support.

For me, Byrne's argument all boils down to:

Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places.

In a perfect world, where we weren't choosing between opera and children's education, I would passionately defend Opera's right to state funding. But Byrne is right: the county doesn't have the money to support the students it has. How can it ethically put a big whopping $14,000,000 into one opera?

There's also another argument that's implicit in Byrne's post that I want to highlight because I don't think he does it quite strongly enough. Talking about the Bilbao museum:

The show that’s up there now is a Frank Lloyd Wright survey (previously exhibited in NY’s Guggenheim), and a permanent collection hodgepodge — not exactly reasons to make a special trip.

And then a few sentences later:

Funding future creativity is a real investment — there’s a chance these kids will build, write, draw or play something that will fill theaters, clubs, stadiums, web pages, whatever. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies.

If we don't invest in creating a generation of young artists, museums, opera houses, theaters are going to get trapped in time. Slowly, a vaccuum will be created--I say slowly because there are a few MFA programs in this country that will produce people to fill it, but it won't be convincing. Like the Bilbao, there isn't going to be that compelling, new work to really draw people to the venue.

And also, when Byrne says:

I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.

He doesn't say that part of that greater value is that studies show that the best way to create audiences for the arts is to have children participate. A staggering majority of our arts audience today is people who participated in the arts when they were young. If less and less children get that opportunity, then--well, let's just say that however bad our decline is now, it could get even worse.

Diversity VI: Quality is Interactive? No, Diversity is Interactive

This diversity thing is fun!

I fell asleep thinking of Scott Walters' post discussing quality last night. I want to take something he said as a jumping off point for a reflection this morning. He said:

I think quality is interactive. Like a rainbow, which exists only when rain, sunlight, and an observing eye are in proper relation to each other, quality exists when a play with certain characteristics in a production with certain characteristics interacts with an audience who recognizes, appreciates, and is able to interpret those characteristics.

I agree. But maybe that speaks to our problem in diversity: a problem that has just as much to do with the audience as it has to do with the playwrights and the artistic directors. I couldn't find any good statistics on the demographics of theater-goers (I found plenty on Broadway, but I don't know if that's representative of theater as a whole -- I mean, I bet it's not), so I'll try and research more when I'm not jotting this down in a hurry to get my ideas on the page.

The problem is, if a play is considered to be quality based on its interaction with the audience, what does it mean to have a dwindling, educated, homogenizing audience?

I will say this: one of my classmates is the child of illegal immigrants who grew up in South Central LA. When I heard on NPR recently that California's latest round of budget cuts had basically decimated what was left of LA's arts-in-schools program and its ground-breaking jazz in parks, my heart broke to think that I would have even less of odds of working with anyone else from that same background.

Before we reach the level of MFA or not MFA, there's a moment in elementary school where students either get involved in the arts, or they don't -- even if they won't become art-makers in the future, they will become the arts audiences. As budgets get cut and public school scale back their programs, increasingly that moment is becoming only available to school districts in wealthy neighborhoods, or to private schools.

If that's the case, then the cards are being stacked against the arts to begin with. If arts are something only the wealthy, educated few receive, then no duh the arts are going to be made by the wealthy, educated few.

Educating Too Many Professionals

[update: in the original post, I mistakenly wrote that I was quoting Barry. In actuality, it was Barry asking the questions and Ian himself who had written the responses. My apologies.]

Speaking of Createquity, the last few days has seen Ian posting some conversations he had with Barry Hessenius. The second installment caught my eye, because it deals with art education.

The part of Ian's response that stuck out to me was this:

The reason is simple: the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow. If we are successful in our efforts and ensure that every child has the opportunity to experience all the arts they want to during their formative years, what happens to them once they get to college?

Now, Ian precedes that statement with an important set of disclaimers about how he's not dumping on the concept of studying the arts, and he doesn't want the arts to be an elite discipline--all of which is valid, and I appreciate what he's getting at.

So the question is a good one. What would we do in our dream scenario that arts education doubled the amount of people interested in the arts?

The problem, I think, is with what our arts education currently frames its goal to be. The goal, as Ian sees it, is framed right there at the top of that chunk: "the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow."

For the arts education system today, arts education is a professional system: it exists to create arts professionals. And in the higher-education world, this is correct, and is as it should be: once you're majoring in theater, you should be aiming to be practicing theater for your life.

Yet for some reason, this thinking exists even in elementary school. When we teach elementary school-kids music, we teach them how to play the tuba. And then the expectation is that, if they're good at it, they'll keep playing tuba and eventually get a good job at an orchestra playing the tuba. If they're not good at it, well then, they'll get something out of the rest of their education.

I'd like to contrast that with English. The philosophy behind English education, at least as I was exposed to it, was that English was a language, and therefore it enfused every part of the world around us. It didn't matter whether or not you were going to go into the literary criticism field one day, as a bank teller or as a media mogul or as a tuba player, your ability to think critically in English and communicate fluently in English was a key part of your job.

That's how we should tackle art. Our elementary school program should be an artistic literacy program, not an art professional program. Kids should be learning how to listen to music, how to express themselves in music--whether or not we train them in specific skills.

The example that resonates for me comes from Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed. Boal describes a short-lived Peruvian artistic literacy program where students were given cameras, and asked a series of questions which they had to answer through photography. One question, for example, was "Where do you live?" and one student responded to it with a portrait of his older brother, whose lip had been chewed off by rats in the night. The teacher asks, "Why did you take that photo to answer 'Where do you live?'" and the student responds, "Because I live in a country where these sort of things can happen."

That student learned something powerful about arts, communication, and critical thinking. Ian seems to imply that this student will now want to become a professional photographer, and therefore we'll need to make space for him. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Condoleeza Rice was given a beautiful full training as a concert pianist, but that didn't take her away from the realm of foreign policy.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair. What Ian really means is this:

If we’re trying to hook 55 million children on the arts in a system that pours 3.2 million new high school graduates into the market every year, even if only 10% of them decide to pursue professional careers, what happens to them when, by the NEA’s own figures, only 2 million artists can coexist in that market at any given time?

The 10% figure is a lot more reasonable. But on the other hand, it is somewhat looking at the glass half-empty. So, 10% of 55 million children on the arts adds another 5.5 million children to our 2 million artist ceiling. That leaves 49.5 million art-hooked but not professional people.

So, there's two options to what those 49.5 million will do. One is they'll say, "Well I didn't get to be an artist," and then never call us ever again. The other is that they'll say, "Boy, I love the arts, and I want the arts to still be a part of my life." And then they become our concert-goers, our donors, our audience.

If they become our audience, then the 2 million cap that Ian references will probably be raised. By how much? Difficult to tell. But surely as our audience grows, so do our artists.

But I agree with Ian that it won't just happen. If we teach those 49.5 million kids that the only way to participate in the arts is by being a professional, we shouldn't be surprised if they fail to materialize in our audiences. But if we teach them to hunger after any sort of connection with arts, and give them the opportunity to connect with arts in however their lives can connect to it, then they'll be the engine that drives the 5.5 million who practice it full time.

And suppose those 49.5 million turn into voters, into advocates for the arts. Then we'll have a much better chance of turning around the negativity towards arts funding, the lack of public support. And then we'll definitely have a shot of shifting the 2 million.

Are the Arts for Everybody?

Posting has been lax at this end for a number of reasons. One are the three professional websites; another is the book launch; lastly is my reading FSG's Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement, which gave me so much damn information that I haven't had the chance to process it all and post away on it, since I think it's going to be the core of what the Thriving Arts Report started sparking in my mind.

Before I get to FSG (I'm still neck-deep in sifting through my notes, and I only ever got a third of the way into my notes of Florida's Rise of the Creative Class), I'd like to take a moment to look over Createquity's Arts Policy Library, namely his first summary of Gifts of the Muse.

Before I launch into this, I would like to point out that although I have purchased the book Gifts of the Muse, I haven't gotten it to read yet, so my response is not to the book, but rather to Ian's response to the book. I'll report back once I've read it about whether I find it to be accurate. I trust it to be.

There is a central problem working in this book, though, as Ian describes it:

The one major gaffe I found in Gifts has to do with a central premise: that the intrinsic benefits the authors identify are distinguished from instrumental benefits by virtue of their uniqueness to the arts. McCarthy et. al. [the authors] state that the intrinsic benefits are “inherent in the arts experience” and include “a distinctive type of pleasure and emotional stimulation.” The inference, it seems, is that the reason people participate in the arts in the first place (and the reason, therefore, to subsidize them) is because they can’t get these kinds of benefits anywhere else. Or at least that is the position implied by the authors’ withering criticism of the instrumental benefits literature for not considering the opportunity costs of supporting the arts to achieve broader policy goals.

In the course of their discussion of the intrinsic benefits, though, the authors let slip an interesting quote from one of the few sources directly cited in the chapter. It’s buried in a footnote on page 46, so the casual reader could be forgiven for missing it. But it casts a profound shadow over the entire discussion of intrinsic benefits. The footnote is drawn from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Discovery of Psychology and Invention, and is as follows:

"When people are working creatively in the areas of their expertise, whether arts or nuclear physics, their various everyday frustrations and anxieties are replaced by a sense of bliss. That joy comes from what they describe as “designing or discovering something new” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 108)"

So nuclear physics counts too, eh? Indeed, elsewhere on the page, McCarthy et al. write “[Csikszentmihalyi]’s study of creativity is based on interviews with 91 exceptionally creative people from the arts, sciences, business, and government, [and] argues that we have underrated the role of pleasure in creativity of all kinds. His subjects all talk about the joy and excitement of the act of creation itself. But that enjoyment comes with the achievement of excellence in a certain activity rather than from the direct pursuit of pleasure.”

There's a terribly worrying, but nonetheless accurate question, which is: what is it that is unique about arts? Ian continues:

The entire chapter on participation patterns—everything from gateway experiences to frequent participation—could have written about any of a million hobbies and Pro-Am activities, from gardening to stamp collecting to astronomy to cooking and beyond. But curiously, the one “intrinsic” benefit that truly is unique to the arts—the creation of a space in society for experimentation and imagination for its own sake—is never mentioned. Nor is the capacity for communication between artists, either in the same generation or across generations, which allows them to cultivate a common language and heritage of aesthetic expression that is specifically about art itself.

Unfortunately, even the benefits that Ian describes don't seem to me to be completely unique to the arts. A space for experimentation and imagination for its own space--I saw that at the Williamsburg Cupcake Cook-off (an event I highly recommend, by the way). Communication within artists is unique to art, but only because of the stipulation that they be artists. If you're a foodie, you've joined a community of food-enthusiasts who also foster communication and culture and etc, that gives a "common language and heritage of aesthetic expressio0n that is specifically about art itself.

Unless.

Obviously, I like the arts, I don't think they're vestigal. I, as of yet, have not found anything unique about art that can be gotten nowhere else. It's just a different form of pursuing those goals. A different language.

To return to Ian for a moment, to his final conclusion:

I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe the arts aren’t for everybody—and maybe that’s okay. We should be glad that they produce all of these various benefits for some people, especially those who might have a hard time getting those benefits elsewhere, and equally happy that there are many opportunities for individuals who don’t connect to the arts to express their creativity and strive for excellence and seek to understand the world around them in other contexts. ... I don’t necessarily agree that the goal should be “to bring as many people as possible into engagement with their culture through meaningful experiences of the arts.” I don’t see how that represents success, unless that’s what those people want for themselves.

It's very true that the arts are not for everybody. But creativity is.

See, one of the mistakes we do get lured into is considering creativity to be the arts. As Richard Florida points out with some very compelling personal anecdotes about his father's manufacturing firm, creativity can be found in every line of work.

What has driven people away from creativity is the concept that it is something only artists can do. What we should be focusing on is the availability of creative environments, in which arts is a prominent but not a sole component. The arts should be something that everybody can do but not should do.

For instance: a group of my friends have created a brand-new sport called Circle Rules Football. Do you know how much more fun I would have had in physical education if we'd tried inventing a sport? My best subjects were English, Theater, and History, because I got the opportunity to be creative in each of those (yes I got to be creative in History. I don't know who else gets that opportunity). In high school, I wound up being very good at math, because we tackled math with creativity at that point.

I will be writing a submission to 20 under 40 tackling this subject: we've gotten to the point where we treat the arts like a trade, and thus we focus on the skills of art rather than the creativity of art. Can you imagine that I learned how to play the piano for five years and never listened to classical music? I never got the opportunity to write anything, to improvise--to do anything other than mechanically replicate the song at hand.

Theresa Rebeck has an essay on Lark Theatre's blog entitled "Can Craft and Creativity Live On The Same Stage?" I agree with her that the answer is yes, craft and creativity have to work together. But my problem with a lot of arts programs and arts education is a lack of exploration of creativity.

Partially that's because, as Gifts of the Muse and other publications make painfully clear, we still have a long way to go in terms of developing the language and information to analyze what exactly that means.

But we can do it. If anyone has read Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, there is a passage wherein he describes the artistic literacy programs in Peru. That's the direction to go: treating creativity as a language that crosses alphabets, and learning how to converse in that language.

Once we get into this "arts as a language" mode, the instrumental versus intrinsic benefits argument will become more moot. What are English's benefits: instrumental or intrinsic? There are strong arguments to be made for both, although both are exceedingly difficult to quantify.

Creative Workplace I: How Did We Fail?

Whereas Richard Florida's statistical observations in Rise of the Creative Class are not necessarily the best (for reasons that people far more qualified than me have gone into), his qualitative analysis of the workplace is fairly on-the-nose. It is, however, an ideal view of the creative class' workspace, and not always the accurate case.

Teachers, I think, can be placed rather squarely in the realm of the the creative class. The creative class, Florida observed, is marked by high job mobility. Instead, it seems like teachers are organized in the manufacturing class model: unionized, entrenched (by tenure), etc. The concept of state-wide curriculums and standardized testing, as well, seems to be an attempt to take the creativity out of the hands of the teacher, and standardize the system of education.

Perhaps this is the success of the charter schools and private schools: they are more likely to create a creative class environment for children. In fact, it may be that the creative class is better served by being taught in a creative class environment simply because it is a creative class environment, and the students will be modeling the place they will have to work for the rest of their lives.

The same applies to arts institutions and arts education. We need to take a look, because in some regards it feels to me like many people in the creative field are not working in that environment. And this may be why some of these institutions fail.

Just a thought.

Returning to the Field

So, I let this blog lapse for a while because it seemed extremely purpose-less and rambly, I would just make bitter commentary about politics and theater with no particular knitting theme except they interested me, and they have to do with culture. But now I'm picking this blog up with a new mission. Recently, I've become interested again in how we, as artistic citizens, can return the civic-artistic culture to strength.

My attention to this subject has in the past ebbed and flowed--at one point I was inspired by the concept of "Artistic Literacy" as propounded by Augusto Boal, and by the introductory arts classes at NYU where I study, to think about how a new arts curriculum could be designed to interest young children in the arts. I think most art classes today focus too much on the instructive, skills-based approach (teaching how to play the violin, teaching how to draw an accurate person) without giving enough of the reason to play (music appreciation, an appreciation of color and form). Instilling the concept of art as a method of communication is important to me, because I feel like when art goes wrong is when it forgets that it's a conversation.

So this thread of my life lapsed as I got involved in my own, smaller world of study, the theater company I'm working on starting, the publishing company I'm working on starting, my actual full-time job during the week, and silly things like family and my social life.

A few months back I stumbled across the >100k Project. You really ought to read his description of the project for yourself, but the thrust of it is using funding models to create sustainable, independent theater (and other arts) in small rural and exurban communities.

Lately, I've become really inspired by it, especially with this week's announcement of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement that finally has assured me that President Obama takes this as seriously as I do. The >100k project and WHO-SICE (I pronounce it "Whose Is?" for fun) seem like a match made in heaven, and the NEA grant that >100k has already won makes it look like reality.

So now I'm going to be thinking about this a lot more. I'm doing research, trying to put together my own statistical models (I'm not a statistician but my mother and father have both studied some in undergraduate and graduate schools so we'll be working together). I'm hoping that with the new Data.gov website and the general power of the internet, I'll be able to do enough research to really contribute some new knowledge.

Part of my goal is based around the work Richard Florida has done in trying to quantify the "Creative Class" as he calls it. The Cultural Economy is a subset of the Creative Class, and I think I want to figure out what our role is in it. I've just bought "The Rise Of The Creative Class" so this is my dumping ground for ideas related to it, and to the topics that >100k tosses my way.

I will probably still blog about other things as well, all theater and politics related, but with that clear focus in mind, I think I really can make this blog a regular and useful resource.