Pragmatic Aesthetics I: Goal-Based Art

I threatened a while back to start articulating the aesthetic theories that I'm working with, that I spent the last of my college days refining.

The motivating force behind this development was when, in my freshman year, Karen Finley stood in front of all of us and declared that because there was no right or wrong in art, there was no need to study form, and that we were all wasting our time studying art. This was after an enraging performance of The Passion of Terry Schaivo that raised every hackle in my artistic soul.

The Experimental Theater Wing was definitely born out of that post-modernist moment of "What is art?" and constantly asking the question of where we draw the line. I knew that I, personally, had some impressions of what art should and shouldn't be, a critical frame, but I had no way to articulate it that was non-arbitrary.

My first strong sense about this aesthetic realm is that just because the rules are not absolute does not mean that they are arbitrary. The core assumption, so far as I could suss, of a lot of post-modernists is that since truth is relative, we therefore create it in each moment. But I don't believe that the first part leads to the second part necessarily.

So I went in search of some philosophical language that addressed how to talk about something which is relative but not arbitrary, and I fell on William James' Pragmatism like manna in the desert. His prime assumption, which is that "philosophy is rules for action" was a needed bearing. Why do we criticize and theorize? Not simply so that we can diss artists we hate and prop up artists we like. It's so that we can make better art. In other words, aesthetics help us make choices that make our artwork better.

What's better, then? I spent four years in search of what "better" means in the realm of art. This "better" is where the relativity lives.

I thought about it for a while, and I slowly came to the conclusion that there's two separate issues; there's the goal that the artist has in mind for the created work (which is a truly individual and moral choice), and how well the work accomplishes that goal. Based on the goal that the artist wants to fulfill, there are some clear rules for which choices will be more or less effective. They are relative -- relative to the artist's context, relative to the artist's goal -- but they are not arbitrary.

Because of the goal, the efficacy becomes measurable. Any rule stated about a created work should be able to predict success within a certain context; success and its context is defined by the goal.

Now, each created work accomplishes its own individual work. But if it is a work of culture, there is one common function it performs, whether it be an advertisement, a twitter feed, a play, or a blog post. The function of culture is to form a bridge between the creator(s) and the audience member(s) to convey some piece of knowledge or experience. This is how we gain knowledge and experiences without being there firsthand.

Now, what knowledge or experiences will we, the audience, want of the creator? This is where we return to Pragmatism as James put it: we will value the knowledge or experiences that help us live our lives in the way we want to live it. To put another way, we will value the knowledge or experiences that help us make effective choices in our own lives. These are knowledge or experiences that help us make accurate predictions about the world around us, so that our choices will be more effective.

So, to recap:

1. The point of an aesthetic is to provide a means for making effective choices.
2. Each work should have a goal with measurable success conditions.
3. The aesthetic choice within the work is valuable to the degree that it helps achieve the goal.
4. The function of culture is to transmit knowledge or experiences between creator(s) and audience member(s).
5. The knowledge or experiences that the audience will value are those that help make accurate predictions about the world they live in.

Alright, that's the nut basics of pragmatic aesthetics, my attempt to use pragmatic philosophy to create a critical language for the arts. I'm hoping to lengthen my thesis into a book on the subject, which goes into more depth about the principles above and goes into more.

Anyways, the whole point of this was I have some posts I'm going to be working on that are critical responses to other works, and this is the groundwork I'm working in.

On The Meaning Of What We Do

Scott Walters picks up on an important question -- the important question -- posed by Tom Loughlin:

When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

Scott's answer:

Our society is built on stories. We communicate our values, our ways of interacting, our aspirations according to the stories we tell each other over generations. The idea that there is value in helping others who are in dire need, for instance, which underlies the Haitian relief effort, is passed on from generation to generation by the stories we tell that reinforce that value. Without that story, or with a more dominant counter-story, such admirable behavior would likely be scarce.

I think I'll take a crack at answering the question, because the question goes back to what my goal was when I began this blog, the philosophy that underlies how I try to approach theater, politics, and everything.

There's a lot of evidence to support the theory is that what drives humanity to create the complexity of our civilization is our ability to communicate. Mankind makes discoveries, and then it shares discoveries with one another, and passes them down. Mankind discovered other ways to encode that communication -- first carved into stone, then written on pages, printed, broadcast, and then finally put into the digital sphere.

You can look at the history of science. A theory begins with a single man making a statement. Someone responds to it. Someone adds on to it. Someone criticizes it. Someone corrects it, someone else rebuts the criticism. The conversation evolves the ideas, and it only evolves as we respond and add on.

That's what culture is. Culture is an aggregation of everyone's attempts to join a cultural, historical conversation about today, tomorrow, and the future. It's a big conversation, much of which is chatter -- Twitter, in a way, is a microcausm of the language. There are conversational threads like the permanent conversations about sex, about governance, about happiness. There are conversations that crop up and rage suddenly in a context and then fade away as people move on (is the Leno-Conan thing going to be important in 2011?).

I'm reading up on mimetics lately to try and support this idea but the idea is this: our society is built on two things: the fitness of our bodies, and the fitness of our ideas. In fact, at this point, we stress the fitness of our ideas more than the fitness of our bodies, because they are far more flexible and pay back to the fitness of our bodies much quicker.

That's what we're doing here in the theater: we're trying to enter this big cultural conversation in the ways we know how. We've got things to say, memes/ideas to spread, things that we hope will add to the survival of the species. We're a tiny shred of society's conversation, or a sliver of its imagination. We're just individual neurons firing inside the great mind of society.

Can we guarantee that our firings are doing something? I don't know. Ask a neurologist which brain cells are "vital" in the working of the brain. We lose some all the time. Often, it's the connections between brain cells which are more important than the neurons themselves -- and that's the conversation.

I forget who it was who first implanted the meme into my head that playwriting is the supreme act of arrogance -- writing as though people care about what you have to say. But the truth is, people are surprisingly interested in what everybody has to say. And we don't have to reach everyone ourselves -- we just have to be 6 degrees away from everybody.

One of the important memes that this conversation includes is, as Scott notes, generosity. That conversation goes so far back in history we can't remember where it begins, but you can see it in the Gospel ("Give to other people, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands--more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to other people is the way God will give to you."), and you can see it in the Gospel of Wealth ("In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.")

As we debate the issues back and forth, in sermons and books and advertise and put on plays, the ideas evolve. They get more specific. When I was young, it seemed like people wanted to help Africa, so they sent food and clothes. Then African economists got together and pointed out that buying food and clothes and sending money was counterproductive in the long term. Nowadays, it seems like we've refined our tools for giving. All of a sudden there's microloans, we're debating whether it's more effective to use pesticides or mosquito nets, we're talking about how closely linked government reform is to international aid. A century ago, we didn't even have a movement that believed that people in other countries might be as worthy of our aid as people in our own.

How often is theater at the center of the debate? Not all that often. But then again, how often is any of the 6 billion people on this planet at the center of the debate? The new rabidly self-aggrandizing type of person typified by the Balloon Boy family or the Salahis is the compulsion of Americans who do not want to be at the edge of the debate, do not just want to be one neuron in a mass of coordinated neurons -- they want to drive the debate. The Salahis, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck; people who aren't content with chiming in with their two cents.

Let's just keep the conversation rolling, so that our ideas can literally evolve and hopefully make us more fit as a society.

Building Community And Its Creativity

In my time blogging here, my one honor has been being in communication with a small group of intelligent, passionate people who are interested in developing the cultural conversation in and around communities. Whether looking at it on a national scale, or from a theater angle, for from a rural small community scale, we've gotten to stretch our legs discussing the theories of arts development in the United States.

So. A friend of mine who is in the Peace Corps in Senegal mentioned to me that she is embarking on a set of projects in a small town in Senegal (approx 20,000 residents). She chiefly wants to tackle cultural gender issues, and create an outlet for creativity that she says is stifled in the local schools. She asked me for advice.

I am drafting her an email with my own pearls of wisdom, but I wanted to ask the general community its thoughts. If you're reading this blog, you've probably spent time thinking about issues related to this one. What's the practical advice/solutions/directions you'd want to pass along?

Solutions III

Two more solutions I remembered but haven't posted:

• Arts Sponsorship - This is a solution aimed at individual, free-lance artists. I discovered, quite by accident, that Olympic team-members are given a form of sponsorship by certain large companies by which they are paid full-time for part-time work. This allows them time to hone their craft and also work for a living, and involves a financial sacrifice on the part of corporate firms. Granted, this economic crisis is not the time to go instituting this strategy (after all, Home Depot who had previously been doing this just said they would dump the Olympic Team), but let's save it in the piggy bank. After all, the arts will always be hard.
• Publicly Traded Patronage - I introduced this method on my blog earlier this year, and it's still esoteric and sketchy (mostly just a thought experiment), I do contend that it might be possible to structure a stock-market-like system by which people "buy in" to supporting a local artist, only rather than doing it for financial dividends, they do it for artistic dividends. There was some criticism of the method.

For your reference, the earlier solutions posted were (you can stop reading here if you already read them:

• Involving Social Bigwigs - At the League of Independent Theater's Get Lit with LIT event, the New York State Council of the Arts' Director of Theater Robert Zuckerman (a good person to know) talked about strategies for getting politicians to notice what we do. He talked about a group in the Bronx (I can't remember their names -- sorry!) that have a Politicians' Amateur Night, basically a talent show for politicians. No matter how terrible the politicians are, it gets them visibly involved in arts--and Zuckerman observed that it also gets their lobbyist friends butts in the seats. Stemming from that, I would suggest that arts groups try to get comp tickets into the hands of politicos and maybe other important social heads. After all, there's no better "application" for support than having them enjoy your work.
• Instant Reviews - The post that used the phrase Guyyedwabian was actually about a South African group's attempt to start conversation in the immediate aftermath of a performance. Basically, they attended the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and afterwards tried to engage the exiting audience in a review directly after the performance. The concept is outlined here, and an informative post-mortem is outlined here. (By the way, does your organization perform post-project post-mortems? You really should.)
  

• The Less than 100k Project - Built to address the NY-centrism of the theater world (although the principle could apply to any art discipline), Scott Walters is developing a funding approach to cultivate community arts in small communities. The thrust of the idea is to allow theater groups in small communities that lack theaters to apply for a 3 year developmental process that will eventually wean them into independence.
• Community Storytelling - A conversation I had with Scott about the aforementioned project asked "how do we make such a community theater actually part of the community?" My suggestion was that the theater focus on the stories and history within the community--go into the community, collect their stories, and present them. This invests the community in the product, and serves a needed social function. This idea was inspired by StoryCorps, the Laramie Project, and Anna Devere Smith's work, but as Scott pointed out, rather than having the stories leave the community (such as the way StoryCorps deposits the stories in the Library of Congress), the stories become a part of the community. Not everyone understands what "theater" is or could be, but everyone loves sharing stories.
• Shared Measurement - The company I currently work for specializes in standardizing business processes for Information Techonology companies. As the aforementioned FSG report documents, there is a rise in non-profits standardizing their tools of self-analysis, and sharing the results. In the same way that these metrics allow the for-profit world to study impact, non-profits need to have a more methodical approach to their role in society, both instrumental and intrinsic. My personal belief is that public policy needs to take this up rather than trying to match the foundation's per-project or per-organization funding model... but more on that when my analysis comes out.
  
• Healthcare Reform - We all want Healthcare Reform for a bigger, more universal reason than just the plight of artists. However, the current employer-based healthcare system discriminates against two groups: the unemployed, and free-lancers. Artists are, often, free-lancers (as opposed to the Arts Administrators who are often full-time employees). If a public option for healthcare were to support artists, it would ease the burden of artists attempting to support their healthcare--and might ease the bottom-line of small non-profits that have to spend a lot on healthcare for their employees. It might even help heal the divide between Administrators and Artists.
  
• Creativity Education - The current arts education approach has been, in my experience, a largely instrumental one: music training, for instance, teaches you how to play an instrument, not how to listen to music or how to write music. This is a large failing in the arts, because it tells people that art = craft, not art = creativity. Granted, as Theresa Rebeck rightly points out in her discussion on the topic, these two concepts are not mutually opposed. However, our early arts education stresses craft and ignores creativity, which probably creates the anti-craft backlash later on. Augusto Boal describes some very interesting approaches to what he called "Arts Literacy" that were attempted in Peru at the time--my favorite was where he talks about asking children questions and asking them to answer the questions in photographs. One question was "Where do you live?" and the answer was a photograph of a young boy whose upper lip was chewed off by rats. The teacher asked "How is that photo 'where you live?'" And the boy answered "I live in a country where these things happen." A much better understanding of art than learning how to draw a human face properly.

Solutions I

I got a smile this morning when I saw the phrase "Guyyedwabian/Culturefuturesque" dropped casually into a fellow arts wonk's blog.

At any rate, I've been focusing on an upcoming more in-depth analysis of the FSG Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement report that I've been swimming in for a while. That's why posting continues to be slow (I usually post in fits and starts, though, so I'm sure you're used to it).

Since my blog-roll is a little backed up and I haven't posted in a while, I thought I'd post something that should become my own little CultureFuture running segment.

When I first started this blog, the question was, "How do I influence the future of culture?" That was the impetus behind the name. Until I got on this arts-wonkery rampage, I didn't really focus very closely on this message. At the time, my belief was that simply talking about the future of culture was a start--and I was right. But it was time to move on to solutions.

When I first started diving into the theatrical blogosphere, I saw everywhere--everywhere!--prescriptions about what was wrong with American theater. Mike Daisey, perhaps, takes the cake for being one of the louder and more forceful voices, but there were a lot of people raising a million issues.

In a way, the problem with the arts is similar to the problem of Health Care: there isn't one thing that needs to be changed, there's a system of problems. And because of the scale of the problems, artists didn't seem to know where to start.

Like in health care (climate change too), I've watched the debate evolve from "What's wrong?" to "What are the solutions?" You start seeing posts like: "Well here's one simple thing we can do..."

For instance: I have a close friend who graduated with a degree in Experimental Theater, but wound up on the front-lines of the health-care battle. She's not actually involved in the healthcare reform debate right now--instead, she works with a small not-for-profit (operating entirely on donated food and office space) whose charter is to find low-income clinics that are being closed, and organize the community to defend them.

The health-care bill is large, but I don't know if that's one issue they've tackled: making sure that hospitals are close. After all, having health insurance won't help if you get a heart attack and have to sit in a car for 25 minutes before a cardiologist can see you. And as the economic crisis and the rising cost of health-care take their toll, more and more hospitals are closing their low-income accessible clinics.

But that's just one part of the puzzle. Keeping track of all the healthcare solutions (tort reform, insurance regulations, public option, defense of low-income clinics, preventative care techniques, etc.) or all of the climate change solutions (smart grid, solar panels, painting roofs and roads white, etc.) is difficult.

So for the arts, I've started hearing solutions that sound reasonable, and should be kept track of. So starting now, I'm going to create a quick bullet-point list of solutions--different approaches or policies--that I (or other folks) think would help the arts. And I want the list to grow. To the point that eventually becomes a checklist. Any artist should be able to look at the list and go: "Which of these do I do? Which of these can I do?"

Without further ado, my current list of solutions. Comment this post if you know of any specific solutions you've come across:

• The Less than 100k Project - Built to address the NY-centrism of the theater world (although the principle could apply to any art discipline), Scott Walters is developing a funding approach to cultivate community arts in small communities. The thrust of the idea is to allow theater groups in small communities that lack theaters to apply for a 3 year developmental process that will eventually wean them into independence.
• Community Storytelling - A conversation I had with Scott about the aforementioned project asked "how do we make such a community theater actually part of the community?" My suggestion was that the theater focus on the stories and history within the community--go into the community, collect their stories, and present them. This invests the community in the product, and serves a needed social function. This idea was inspired by StoryCorps, the Laramie Project, and Anna Devere Smith's work, but as Scott pointed out, rather than having the stories leave the community (such as the way StoryCorps deposits the stories in the Library of Congress), the stories become a part of the community. Not everyone understands what "theater" is or could be, but everyone loves sharing stories.
• Shared Measurement - The company I currently work for specializes in standardizing business processes for Information Techonology companies. As the aforementioned FSG report documents, there is a rise in non-profits standardizing their tools of self-analysis, and sharing the results. In the same way that these metrics allow the for-profit world to study impact, non-profits need to have a more methodical approach to their role in society, both instrumental and intrinsic. My personal belief is that public policy needs to take this up rather than trying to match the foundation's per-project or per-organization funding model... but more on that when my analysis comes out.
  
• Healthcare Reform - We all want Healthcare Reform for a bigger, more universal reason than just the plight of artists. However, the current employer-based healthcare system discriminates against two groups: the unemployed, and free-lancers. Artists are, often, free-lancers (as opposed to the Arts Administrators who are often full-time employees). If a public option for healthcare were to support artists, it would ease the burden of artists attempting to support their healthcare--and might ease the bottom-line of small non-profits that have to spend a lot on healthcare for their employees. It might even help heal the divide between Administrators and Artists.
  
• Creativity Education - The current arts education approach has been, in my experience, a largely instrumental one: music training, for instance, teaches you how to play an instrument, not how to listen to music or how to write music. This is a large failing in the arts, because it tells people that art = craft, not art = creativity. Granted, as Theresa Rebeck rightly points out in her discussion on the topic, these two concepts are not mutually opposed. However, our early arts education stresses craft and ignores creativity, which probably creates the anti-craft backlash later on. Augusto Boal describes some very interesting approaches to what he called "Arts Literacy" that were attempted in Peru at the time--my favorite was where he talks about asking children questions and asking them to answer the questions in photographs. One question was "Where do you live?" and the answer was a photograph of a young boy whose upper lip was chewed off by rats. The teacher asked "How is that photo 'where you live?'" And the boy answered "I live in a country where these things happen." A much better understanding of art than learning how to draw a human face properly.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some solutions, so I'll periodically do this feature again, hopefully with a longer and longer list of solutions.

Sustainability IV: Legitimacy Pt. 3 (Too Legit To Quit)

Another thought about legitimacy and worldview (see the previous post) strikes me as I was listening to Jaydiohead. If you don't know, Jaydiohead is a quite fantastic mash-up of Jay-Z and Radiohead.

Jay-Z is from the world of rap, and in the world of rap, legitimacy is currency. They work on a legitimacy-currency system called "cred," which is a measure of how "legit" they are. You get your cred on the street, and that's what makes you legit.

If I sound like the whitest person alive in that last paragraph, it's for obvious reasons. I am not from that background, so I don't know what in that phraseology was legitimate and what was absolute horse-crackers. When I talk the talk of art-bloggers, I know the language. I know how to judge "legitimacy." Although I might disagree with my fellow art-community folks, I feel fairly confident of my ability to smell bullshit.

When I listen to Jay-Z, it often sounds to me patently ridiculous--especially the ones where he's talking about his life as "hustler" (a word whose meaning I can't ever hope to grasp in a non-superficial way). One line in one of his songs is "This is black superhero music." I was listening to this at work, and it caused laughter amongst my workmates.

I am not condemning Jay-Z. I'm just showing that legitimacy is highly relative, very localized. It draws upon your knowledge of the world around you, and it's 100% perceptive.

William James, philosopher, spoke in his series of lectures on Pragmatism (collected in a volume called Pragmatism which is one of the books that defined who I am) of how we create and collect worldview. His theory of worldview is that we basically start with a supposition, and then test it in our local world, and if it accurately predicts the environment we live in, we keep it. These beliefs remain in our world-view until something comes along that challenges it, and then we make the simplest reshuffling possible to adjust.

This creates a barrier not of language, but of experience. Because the things I do will not resonate as "legitimate" in the world of "hustlers" and the things that hustlers do seem, well, foreign and strange in the world of an upper-middle-class art-blogger.

If an arts organization wants to be legitimate, they have to understand the experiences that have shaped the local worldview. If you want to change their worldview, you have to figure out what will be legitimate, but will challenge their current worldview.

It's also important to note that those things that you hold to be true will not strike people to be true just because you insist on it. You have to speak their language, and then challenge their notions.

One powerful example of this to me is a report I heard once from Iraq, in which they discussed that part of the reasons Sunnis feel disenfranchised in the current (at the time of the report, illegitimate from their perspective) government is because in the Saddam Hussein era, Sunnis were told that they were 50% of the population, and now the new government tells them they are only 20% of the population. The fact that the Sunni population is objectively 20% of the population doesn't change the social fact that Sunnis believe they are half of the population. This is a huge challenge that I don't have an answer for, but this was an example of legitimacy problems in action.

Sustainability III: Legitimacy Pt. 2

So, if I just left you with the last post about the importance of legitimacy in arts organiztions as a key component of sustainability, it would be one of those frustrating things I see on the blogosphere where they make a solid claim ("Integrity is important!") without really giving you an approach to applying the claim. I can't promise I'll have a strong recipe for legitimacy, but here's one part of legitimacy, told yet again through our sociopolitical narrative lens.

(by the way, it is important to use the sociopolitical narrative lens to look at this sort of stuff because, as the Thriving Arts Report put it, our strength is drawn from status as a social movement)

So, at the beginning of the campaign, even as far back as the 2004 Keynote Address, it was clear to me that Barack Obama was a different candidate from others. I can't say I knew back then that he'd be a President, but I knew I wanted him to be a President. And it was from the way he spoke--I knew little about his platform, and he certainly hadn't emerged with his practical-idealist hybrid of society-changing reforms.

A lot has been made of his eloquence, but it's more than simple eloquence. In fact, not a lot has been made of the absence of his eloquence for a long time. For me, the greatest of Obama's speeches are far behind him: the rhetorical flourishes of the "Yes We Can" speech in South Carolina are substantively different from solid speeches like the Reverend Wright speech or the Inauguration speech.

For the rhetorical, "eloquent" speeches, he was channeling passion and a beautiful mastery of images and linguistic skill. The Inauguration speech was a far more minimalist speech, but it was simply revolutionary in terms of its content. But it wasn't "eloquent," it was simply straightforward.

Yet I would argue that it was that second mode of speech that got him elected, rather than the "eloquent" speeches that fired his base early in the primary. Why?

Jon Stewart was asked once why he backed Obama so strongly. He had backed John Kerry in 2004, but only a bit implicitly. He still had a lot of scorn for Kerry, and he clearly wasn't happy about the choice. In the time that I've watched The Daily Show, I haven't seen him excited about really any other candidate.

When asked why, Jon Stewart had simple answer. He said that Obama was the only candidate he'd seen in a long time who seemed to describe the world the way he personally saw it. He was sick of standing in the rain and hearing politicians tell him about how sunny it is.

That simple ability to look reality in the face and describe it accurately is what drove Obama into power, not the "eloquence" with which he wrapped those realities. That "eloquence" was him describing the world in the way that the excitable, idealist base of the Democratic party would see it. But when it got to the general election, he espoused a far more Moderate worldview. Because that's the world view that most independents and centrist Dems/Reps could agree with.

When Obama talked about our energy crisis, it rang true with a younger generation who had agreed with Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. When he talked about health care, he talked about it in a way that rang true with all of the uninsured or poorly insured. When John McCain talked about the world, it rang false--and let's not even talk about Sarah Palin. (We should be careful to over-generalize, because there are quite a substantial part of the population to whom McCain and Palin did ring true).

At any rate, this isn't meant as a political post, this is a post about art development. So what is this discussion of Legitimacy?

The point is that if you want to be a legitimate organization, you need to understand the worldview of the people you're trying to serve, and you need to be careful not to contravene it. There are a number of theaters that try to tackle "issues," but rather than trying to tackle the local issues that are close to the hearts of their neighbors, they tackle big global "issues," which to the local folk might not be as crucial.

If you want to be a Legitimate (and therefore Sustainable) organization, you need to tell people it's raining when it's raining, and tell people it's sunny when it's sunny. They have to trust your judgment when you describe the world. You need to look around at the community, and figure out how their day-to-day existence meshes with your artistic aims.

This, by the way, is why artists are most successful at making art for other artists: their personal day-to-day matches the day-to-day of their audience. But it doesn't necessarily match the day-to-day of their audience. And that makes them hard to get legitimacy there.

(not that everything has to outwardly resemble the day-to-day... try not to be overly reductionist with my argument!)

This, I think, is why in Germany they did a "theater piece" in which a man went into a field and farmed every day for a month, and other farmers came to watch. It's sort of a perverse over-the-top version of what I'm describing.

"The Office" is successful because it very, very accurately describes the awkwardness and absurdity of the way people actually interact, not in the way Hollywood thinks we interact. (note: "The Office" is NOT successful because it accurately describes office life. You could make a perfect representation of office life and it would bore the crap out of people. It's an expressionistic representation of the experience of office life).

So, that's one of the ways to cultivate legitimacy: to really strive to understand what people are actually going through, and find ways to represent that.



(a little closing note: this is my 200th post, and is very slowly growing in readership, which I hope might be a sign of this blog gaining just a tiny fraction of that legitimacy!)

Sustainability I: Secretary General Wanted!

So, I'm a little swamped since my family's trip to Alaska, and mentally I'm swamped because I haven't been able to sit down with Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class, a book which is step 1 in the project of quantifying the arts. There's a lot to be desired there, but... anyway...

I'm writing this actually about an email I got on a mailing list for Emerging Arts Leader. A decently large dance company named Misnomer Dance Company was looking for a Managing Director.

I was struck by a moment of shock as I looked at this. It seemed to me like putting out an ad for Vice President, or some equivalently crucial position. It just struck me as wrong to be putting out a web advertisement for one of the two most important positions in your organization.

Then I saw a similar, even more worrying ad, which read: NEEDED: Secretary-General. Amnesty International.

How does an organization go about looking for its own head? It seems to me that the day an organization has to search outside itself for a head is the day that organization dies. It's a complete failure for an organization to admit that none of the people who support the head of a company or group is capable of running the organization.

That's what the question of sustainability in a community arts program really means. When the person leaves, who do they leave behind? Who have they trained to continue in their role? Have they groomed the people who work with them to be heirs?

To cite a counter-example, two of my friends who didn't previously know each other but had both attended UCSB in different years chanced to meet. The older one (who graduated a few years ago) inquired as to whether an organization she founded was still in existence. It's purpose was to bring arts to an under-served community: theater to students not majoring in theater (who are often shut out of theater programs in schools that have theater departments).

She was pleased and surprised to find out that the other friend (who she had never met) had served as the chair of the same organization a year after she graduated, and that he had indeed passed it on to yet more students.

There had been a natural line of succession. I don't know if it had been planned or if it simply had the good luck to happen (as had happened at my high school with six successive years of a literary magazine before the ball was dropped).

The key of sustainability, in human terms, is succession. In fact, in this regard, the "Champion," who arts-communities hunger for, may in fact be harmful; many arts "champions" have a 'do-everything-themselves' ethos that actually fails to create the next generation of leaders.

An arts community has gained nothing if, a decade after it begins, it's forced to advertise "Arts Leader Needed. Email resumes."

Sense of Place III: Richard Florida's View on Creating Arts Communities

Well, not directly. Richard Florida's seminal book The Rise of the Creative Class doesn't particularly speak about the arts as a distinct phenomenon. His book is mostly concerned with the Creative Class, which encapsulates artists, engineers, architects, etc. etc. etc. We are only included inasmuch as we are part of that movement, and when Richard Florida talks about the "Rise" of the Creative Class, it doesn't feel like he's talking about us: he's talking about our creative cousins in the Entertainment world, or in the Software world, or the Engineering world. Whereas those other realms are exploding, the fine arts and drama continue to decline.

Before I say anything more, bear in mind: I'm on page 3 of the book (which is better than it sounds; I've made it through two prefaces already).

But his conclusions seem just as valid for the arts world as they are for the other realms. And whereas the Thriving Arts Report speaks to small communities (10-30k, on average, it seems), the Rise of the Creative Class is basically only talking about cities.

So one of the points he makes exceedingly early on (p. xxviii, before you even get to Chapter 1) is that for the Creative Class, as opposed to other industries, people don't follow jobs, jobs follow people.

That's a big whopping surprising point, and it seems to jive pretty well with my own personal experience, is that people make their choice of where they want to live based on, well, where they want to live. Which from a common-sense perspective seems like a duh moment, but it's in opposition to the economic supply/demand view that people will be driven to where there are job opportunities.

The art community is probably the biggest proof of this. Why do theater people pile into NYC when they could probably start a company much, much easier in a low-rent, low-competition community? Because they'd feel left out, unsupported; there isn't a "community" to join.

R. Florida goes on to postulate that place has become the central organizing unit of the economy, not job. Whereas previously, people lived in Flint, MI for their whole lives because that's where their job was, and they met and knew people because those were the people in their local economy.

SO: What does this mean for our "generating arts communities" conversation?

Well, in the same vein as the Thriving Arts Report's "Background Values" (of which Sense of Place was one, in agreement with R. Florida), Florida puts forward a few Indexes to try and to forecast where the Creative Class congregates. I haven't gotten to the full indexes (I'm on like p. 30 now that I'm at the end of this post), but so far he's mentioned:

The Gay Index
The Bohemian Index
The Melting Pot Index

all of which he uses to comprise:

The Tolerance Index.

What he's basically saying is that there is one central Background Value that the Thriving Arts Report missed: there needs to be an OPEN community for arts (and other creative classes) to thrive.

Yet the Thriving Arts Report cites two fantastic examples of arts CREATING the open community (arts integrating the Hmong and the Amish in small Minnesota towns). This, I think, goes back to my father (a manager--Whyte's Organizational Man--who rose through the ranks of the Creative Class of Software Engineering) and his reaction when I told him about this: the cycle is recursive, either recursively positive or recursively negative.

If you have an open society, artists come. If artists come, creativity thrives. If creativity thrives, artists come. Etc. And the opposite is true.

But at any rate, what we're aiming at is breaking the cycle, and therefore Richard Florida seems to be saying (so far) that this is what's necessary to cultivate arts (and other creative fields):

1) Recognize that place is more important than economy.
2) Recognize that place is a cultural, creative experience.
3) Recognize that cultural, creative experiences require openness and tolerance.

So, there's one revelation so far. There are others on their way.


P.S. Richard Florida also explains, in his chart, why every single artist I've met from Florida (the state) has been from Gainesville, including the head of my program. Gainesville is on his list alongside Boulder, CO at the top of small communities with high Creative Index scores.

Issues with Quantification II: "Social Movements"

I just finished breaking down the Thriving Arts report I keep whinging on about into its component parts--just the distilled information in my MindMap software. So now the ruminating begins while I look-up other sources.

Today's question comes from one of the more surprising but enlighting passages in the report:

Of greatest significance to the present study, the work [by Mark J. Stern and Susan Seifert in their Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP)] discusses commuity arts as "weak organizations" with strong social impact. The study suggests the need to understand cultural community based organizations more as "social movements" than as classically modeled formal organizations." (emphasis mine)

So far so good. I like this, because it explains the fact that even though most art institutions are short-term and fall apart, the art community thrives. In a way, it would be the same as postulating that the strength of an economy is independent of its component corporations.

Which is true. My brother (an economic Libertarian) points out that one of the greatest stimuluses of innovation is a liberal bankruptcy law, allowing an entrepreneur to feel comfortable striking out on his own to try out a new idea. 50% fail. So? The innovation makes up for it. Compare to countries that still have Debtor's Prison, and I'm sure there's no comparison. In fact, if we covered the cost of healthcare in this country, it'd be even easier to start a company. But I digress.

In the artistic world, it's the same. Can an artist who fails carry on? Will there still be an arts community outside of their own efforst if they fail? A leader is a person who will carry on with what they're doing no matter what the world around them looks like. But a community can't: in the face of adversity, it slowly withers, slowly.

At any rate, let's take that assumption as true: the arts community shouldn't be measured in terms of the health of its particular organizations or institutions. Metrics like "age of theaters" or "operating budget of largest theater" are not good measures of the health of a community. What we are trying to pin down lives outside of these institutions. Hence the reason nobody has come up with an accurate index yet--they're the difficult to measure, since they're not easily defined.

So, how does this change the metric system? Well, for one, it means to leave it less organization-centric and more human-centric--which is always a good shift in thinking. For instance, if I wanted to look at metrics relating to children's exposure to the arts, a classical indicator might be to measure the number of after-school arts programs. But measuring something like % of children in community who have attended at some point an after-school arts problem, or % of time on average that a child has been working in the arts... those numbers are a bit more useful to us. Although not necessarily helpful enough.

Two other questions present themselves from this information:

1. Is there a sociological method of tackling the prevalance of a particular social movement? I'm guessing there's not one that works 100%, or there'd be a lot clearer knowledge of, say, the degree to which feminism or democracy or socialism is prevalent in a given area. (Actually, if sociologists had a more accurate way of tackling that, we'd have a much clearer idea of what we're doing in Iraq. After all, it seems to me that the Bush Administration put a heavy emphasis on the existence of organizations and institutions, irregardless of the long-term viability of those organizations/institutions).
   
   
2. Is there a quantitative methodology of tackling the prevalance of memes? Again, probably not yet, and not in a way that's 100% accurate. But I'm going to try and track down the science involved, such as it exists. After all, art is a series of memes: the meme of practicing art, the meme of viewing arts, etc.

Well, that's my stream of consciousness for the night. What have we learned?

1. Arts needs to be tackled as a movement, not a set of organizations
2. Sociology studies movements, so any theories they utilize might apply here
3. The study of the spread of memes might also help to spread the arts
   

How To Start I: NPR

So, looking at this research (I'm still in the research/concept phase of the project, sneaking it in among the show I'm preparing for and my unrelated job as a technical writer), the first huge question that dawns on me is:

How do you start changing a community?

The problem, as I see it, is that the Thriving Arts report predicates the creation of an arts community on an already extant set of background values: a sense of place, a tradition of informal arts, a few people who already personally enjoy the arts, etc. The question, however, is where you start if such a thing is not available.

Obviously, there isn't such a thing in the universe as a place where there is no tradition of any arts or etc. The question is, where can you find a good thread to start with, a tiny spark that you can gently blow on and put kindling with to start a frame.

The one I was thinking of this morning is one that I've been thinking of for the last few days: National Public Radio.

I don't know exactly what NPR (and I suppose by extension PBS on TV) has in terms of reach in regional areas. But when I listen to Car Talk (the number one rated radio show), people call in from everywhere. Brooklyn. Tallahassee. Squunk Corners. The Hubble Spacecraft. The South Pole. So if we make the assumption that NPR is listened to everywhere -- at least some shows on it, at least a little bit -- then NPR's arts programming might be the beginning.

It would be really cool if NPR had an arts show that was quite as engaging as Car Talk is. After all, many of the people who listen and call in to Car Talk are not people previously interested in car. They're not the people who have a dead car on their lot that they're tinkering with. They're people like me--I've never even owned a car but I listen in. It's fun.

The other day on NPR, they were interviewing a publisher, and asked him whether fiction books published about the financial crisis are still going to be relevant three or four years from now, when the financial crisis is not what's in our minds. The publisher said, "It doesn't matter what it's about. If the characters are well written and they are put in engaging situations, people will read."

That's what we need to do with the arts, I think. We need to communicate a vision of the arts as being full of real characters and engaging situations. I don't mean on-stage. I mean us, as arts practitioners. We have to be real and engaging, and we have to be real and engaging when we discuss our work. We need a show where a couple of artists talk about art, and they don't use any sentences that begin with the word "Postmodern".

The Sloan Foundation understands this. They fund projects which promote science in fiction, but in engaging ways that bring the art into human contexts. And my favorite project that illustrates what the Sloan Foundation is talking about is WNYC's Radiolab. Each week, they ask a question ("Why do we laugh" or "What is music") and then spend the episode examining specific scientific aspects of that ("Do animals laugh" or "When does speech become song?") But the way that the hosts examine the questions, it isn't heavy on the science. It's high on the wonder.

A non-NPR example of this is, quite famously, Mythbusters. Another great example would be what Ace of Cakes does for the wedding-cake industry. By the way, Ace of Cakes is actually probably a good foundation for a community arts.

So how can we start an arts community? Well, you can start with a popular radio or television arts show (none of which exist, by the way--I'm a hardcore arts person, and I don't listen to a single arts podcast regularly, because... I haven't found any that are as engaging! Consider that a challenge, reader community: get me a podcast that I can subscribe do with my open-source music program that makes the arts fun and engaging). Then, you create a fan-club locally for the show. Start by watching/listening to the show together, move on to actually trying some of it hands on.

Hesto presto! It's a beginning.

The NEA, NRO, and WHO-SICE

Via >100k, NRO's Michael Knox Beran has an interesting op-ed about the NEA. Read the article. It's not very long, and it's written in the simplistic tone of voice that the NRO brings to most of the subjects.

Aside from a slight overdose of contempt, there's actually an important kernel of truth in the article. The following is the reaction as I posted in the comments section:


I wonder if the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement is going to steal Rocco’s thunder of any reform for the NEA. I mean, if you’d have asked me a month ago what the NEA shoould be doing, I’d have said finding innovative new approaches to bringing creativity to communities and funding them in their early years, but if WHO-SICE (I pronounce it “Whose Is?”) takes on that role, then the NEA will become more of a caretaker of big, established venues.

The core point that I agree with is that the NEA has become a very unimaginative body, which is why Obama has to create a whole separate office to deal with “innovation.” The bold and imaginative direction that he[Beran] sees it going is in restoring the civic focal point–which in the report by the Minnesota Regional Arts Council is an important arts developmental point.

I guess where I would differ with Beran is on the capacity of the NEA to change. I think rather than a structural problem, what Beran is pointing to is a problem of administrative culture. What remains to be seen is whether a new Administration and a new appointed head can shift the culture far enough to change its behavior.

UPDATED: Looking back on this post now I realize I conflated the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation with the rebranding of the White House Office of Public Engagement. I leave the error simply because I wish it had been called WHO-ISCE, so I could imagine a grumpy longshoreman musing as to the identity of a person he's never met before and only just noticed.