Change I: Move Your Money, Move Your Theater?

So, elsewhere, most of the internet is talking about Outrageous Fortune, which so far seems to be a wake-up call about how shitty our industry can be sometimes (see also: How Theater Failed America). Yet again, the refrain I hear is, "Yes, we know it's shitty, but how do we change it?"

That's not to say that solutions haven't been proposed (I'm going to update my list of solutions-heard soon to take into account more things I've heard), but that when the conversation veers back to what's wrong in the world, we have to remember the major question: and how do we change it?

Anyways, Scott Walters put up a brief post a couple days ago comparing our desire to change theater to the nascent Move Your Money movement spearheaded by Huff-Po. He compares it to the desire to decentralize American theater.

I remember when I first really started thinking about the decentralizing theater problem last summer (when I first came into contact with Scott), I felt torn. I thought his idea was brilliant and necessary, to get the arts out of New York/Chicago/Los Angeles and into the nation. I also thought that I would never leave New York City to make it happen.

It reminded me powerfully of a baseball fan on the Daily Show (sorry, I couldn't find the clip) who, in the wake of the Roger Clemens steroid scandal, said, "This has brought shame on the entire sport of baseball... but honestly, I'll have forgotten about this come next baseball season."

It also reminds me of how, no matter how low Congress' approval ratings get, the re-election of incumbents remains above 90% -- because in general, people may dislike "Congress" but they do tend to approve of "My Congressman." And if each person on average thinks their congressperson is alright, but as a mass of congresspeople they seem to continue to do stupid things, then our usual check of elections will not have any effect. It's a systemic problem -- we want to change not our congresspeople, but the system by which congresspeople as a mass become stupid.

When Eugene Jarecki appeared on The Colbert Report, I had the same impression. See, I bank with a big bank: JP Morgan Chase. I became a JP Morgan Chase client when Washington Mutual, my bank, collapsed.

I loved Washington Mutual. When I had a problem with a vendor, I would call them, and they would call the vendor themselves and work things out. I was never on hold for more than five minutes with them. I had great customer service. When they went out of business, I was in Europe.

My credit card, on the other hand, is from Citibank. Citibank are cruel bastards. Every month, they sneak on average $5 of fees. If I call them and threaten to cancel, they refund me the charges. After an hour on hold and only after direct threats. When I went to go look for other credit cards, however, I can't find any that pays me nearly as much as Citibank does -- they're literally bribing me with their cash-back scheme (which pays more than any other credit card I qualify for, even after the fees take away, I've done the math). I've considered simply not having a credit card, just to get Citibank out of my life. There's the chance that, in the near term, when I get a business bank account I might get a credit card for the business, and therefore I won't be running such large sums on my credit card, and can close my personal credit card and just go with my debit card for personal purchases.

At any rate, the comparison between Citibank and WaMu was what really cemented my loyalty for WaMu. Their website was easy to use -- Citibank's was always broken, and for a full year I had to hit the "stop" button halfway through loading or else it would freeze.

Also, I had some experiences previously with another bank that was at one time a "local" bank (they're now national, with the demise of one of the other big banks): Wells Fargo. When I was heading to college, I went to my local Wells Fargo bank and opened an account. Right before I left I suddenly remembered something. "You do have branches in New York, right?" "Of course we do." This was a lie. Although it was possible for me to pay my bills online and get things mailed to me on the east coast, I spend about a third of my time on the West coast and two thirds on the East Coast.

Jarecki would call having local branches to me whether I'm at home in California or at home in New York "a convenience" that I'd have to do without.

When I was in Europe, the financial crisis struck, and Washington Mutual went under. I was terrified. Who would I be banking with? Citibank? That was my worst nightmare: to have Citibank hemorrhaging my personal finances the way they try to hemorrhage my credit card. And would there be a break in services while I was in Europe?

When JP Morgan Chase emerged as the buyer, I was tentative. I had no idea who they were and I'd never banked with them before. I wanted to see what they were like. They handled the transition from Washington Mutual to JP Morgan Chase seamlessly. By the end of the year, I was a happy JP Morgan Chase person. I haven't had cause to call them for support yet because, well, everything worked. There was one day that my debit card didn't work in an ATM, but they'd warned me ahead of time and told me how to work around it.

So when Eugene Jarecki was telling me to leave my bank, I couldn't see a compelling case to do it. I mean, I knew that Big Banks were a problem. But my bank is not a problem! They provide me excellent service and excellent care, at basically no cost (there's no ATM fee, no fee on my banking, using my debit card like a credit card has no fees, and then they pay me interest).

That's the problem with Move Your Money. Individuals act based on individual motives. My choices are not only positive for me, but most of the time they effect the people I know positively, they are good on the economy, etc.. It's only on the very macro-est economic of levels that my choice is bad, because I'm one of many people who are contributing to the existence of a "too big to fail" bank.

So, Scott threw out this suggestion that moving our theater would be like moving our bank, and that's our hope of decentralizing theater. I'm saying it's got some of the same problems.

In theory, in terms of the artistic future of the United States, I think we need to leave New York City. But there are no institutions I love nearly as much as The Public Theater. My home in Orange County, California not only lacks institutions like that, but lacks the audience and the institutions to create such institutions. As Don Hall pointed out, the first domino in the problem is real estate, and Orange County has such an incredible real estate bubble (even now) that the cost of starting up a theater company is inhospitable, especially considering as there are no theaters for rent anywhere (the concept just doesn't really exist), and car culture means that there is no such thing as a cultural center, nothing with which to attract people who you don't know.

Other than that, following the dream of decentralization means that I would basically pick a community at random and wander in. But that's really just a different form of cultural imperialism. If I can't create theater in my own community, then I guess I should just go where I want to be--to the community I want to live in, which is Brooklyn. I love it. I love the people, I love my artistic contemporaries.

It's a problem. And I'm part of it.

Diversity X: The Evolution Metaphor Again

Really quickly: the fact that diversity is contextual is what makes it diversity. If one set of adaptations in evolution were always the right one, there'd be no such thing as biodiversity -- there would be a homogenous population of creatures that all had stumbled their way towards the same set of adaptation. Evolution is driven not genetically, but by the environments creatures find them in.

That's why the New York centrism is part of the diversity problem. If we have a system in which there's only one environment where theater can thrive at all, then we're not going to have a lot of diversity.

In fact, one thing that might help diversity would be to have diverse methods of production and distribution. A multiplicity of contexts in a multiplicity of communities will be far more likely to produce diversity than trying to find a way to get a diverse number of people to apply for the same ten not-for-profit theaters in New York City.

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.

Diversity IV: Ways That Work

Those who support Isaac Butler's "sue the theaters" idea (which I don't think he was honestly advocating) or Scott Walters' "numbers out of a hat" idea (which was serious, if ill-received), do have one sharp retort to those of us who criticize: If not these ideas, which ideas?

Well, I certainly don't want to sit around sniping all day, so... some ideas that work.

Firstly, Thomas Garvey (who I stopped reading the same day I stopped reading Clyde Fitch) reacted last Monday to the Butler/Walters proposals in a post that goes between putting forward the same criticisms I made and some other points I don't know if I agree with. But it ends with:

To be fair, when "diversity" is the problem, maybe real diversity is the answer. But that doesn't mean chance is the answer. So count me unconvinced, although if Scott Walters can dream up more ways to undermine the system of privilege in this country, I'm all ears.

I want to repeat something I said at the time, which is that I think Scott Walters has discovered one of the better methods of encouraging diversity in this country, which is his attempts to decentralize our theater industry with the project formerly known as the Less Than 100,000 Project (I forget what it's called now -- sorry Scott!).

1. The only way in which it is possible for 7 MFA programs to be the gatekeepers of success is because playwrights are all fighting tooth and nail to break into NYC. There's a limit of number of theaters, which are all being absolutely inundated by submissions (as we've seen by the behind-the-scenes looks at literary departments).
2. It is much harder to get your work seen in a community that isn't yours, that doesn't share your background and your history. Many of the best works of art surface locally first, before they break-out in a wider realm. If there's no local market, it's much harder to take that first step.
3. If we developed local-grown theater, then those under-served communities would have a lot more theater-saturated audiences, which in turn develop more artists to begin with.

That's why I felt comfortable dismissing the names-out-of-a-hat idea -- because this idea seems so much more likely to work! I'm a firm proponent of that idea.

Secondly, there's a post by a blogger Ian Thal (who I hadn't read before, but now I will follow) on the subject which puts forward another proposal:

So now for my mischief: I challenge you critics, producers, and artistic directors who should be advocating for great theatre. Find an underappreciated, underproduced, perhaps unknown playwright who should be appreciated, produced and known. Better yet: find six, eight, ten, and advocate for them.

Obviously, this only works to a certain degree if you're inside the gates -- after all, I would love to give a diverse number of playwrights beautiful prizes for their work, but I'm still working on paying my rent with theater myself.

But on my theater company's blog, I authored a post about how producing is about love:

It turns out that a producer is just someone who falls in love with projects that aren't their own -- falls in love so hard that they have to fight to make the project.

If you put diversity in your mind, and prepare to fall in love with a diverse range of productions, and fight for others as hard as you'd fight for yourself, you can make things happen.

I have two projects for that company commissioned (for no money -- I said I was poor); I don't want to talk about them until they're done, but it happens that both are from playwrights of communities whose voices are missing. I didn't select them because of that, but at the same time, they had a voice that I couldn't possibly provide, something new that I knew no one but them could give to the world. It would break my heart not to see it on floorboards soon.

Anyways, that's the post: solutions that I think work. There are almost certainly more, but it's good to hat tip when you see them.

(Updated: I keep mis-numbering my own series. Fixed.)

Diversity III: Actually Everyone Talks About Diversity

Having just hit "publish" on my somewhat irritated rebuttal to 99Seats I do want to mention that his posting on the subject of diversity has been pretty stellar, as well as the posting by Isaac, and Scott, and Matthew. It's been really challenging to read. As of yet, I don't feel like I see an answer I like.

Scott put out a great piece on how fear of change holds us back from action on diversity--which, even though I rejected his one idea, doesn't mean I don't agree with that wholeheartedly. As a matter of fact, I happen to think that the project that used to be called the Less than 100 K project is a far more persuasive and effective way to change the system -- if we create local community theaters in diverse communities, and then find a way to recruit or tour local breakout talent across the country -- rather than making them all apply to the same ten theaters in New York City and then ignoring them until they rot away, never having been given the chance to prove themselves -- I think we have a much better chance at finding talent than simply pulling names out of a hat.

99Seats has a fantastic piece about the tropes of Race plays, and about his own experiences with race. The one thing I might say is that the whole "when black people write about race, they write about their own communities, when white people write about race, they write about race relations" I think boils down to something like this: when people say "race" they usually mean "minority race".

Is August Osage County a play about "race"? It's a play about a white family, a white community, and therefore, it isn't about race. The thing that has always gotten me about Raisin in the Sun is that its plot is largely the same as Death of a Salesman -- it's not a play about "race," but it is considered to be a "race" play because it's about black people. (And don't get me started on the "Black Family adaptation", as its producer put it to me, of Death at a Funeral)

So if a white playwright wanted to write a play, he has two choices: to write a play about two races interacting, or to write a play set in a non-white community. The latter would almost certainly be terrible. LaBute's story of a small Latino family in the Bronx? Mamet's trilogy of plays detailing the struggles of a family of Cambodians living in Indonesia? Alright, now I'm just having fun imagining poor Cambodian refugees shouting "Fuck" at each other and scratching their balls, but the point is that a white playwright doesn't exactly have a lot of options of how to frame a play "about race" except in that "black meets white" way, or in the metaphorical way.

The pit-fall, of course, is trying to write a play about race. Usually if you see one of those terrible plays 99Seats (I wish he would give up his anonymity just because it feels odd typing 99Seats over and over again) is talking about, the pit-fall isn't just the racial insensitivity, it's the same problem playwrights run into when they want to write a play "about war" or a play "about science."

I'm speaking from personal experience. I saw a play listing once that was calling for plays from Middle Easterners "about the Middle East." I said to myself, "Oh thank God, finally some diversity I can participate in!" and I sat down to write a play "about the Middle East." Well I was born in the Middle East, my family is from the Middle East going back generations, my grandfather fought in two wars personally and was involved in Israel's campaign against the British before independence.

The play I wrote was garbage.

I resolved never again to be deluded into writing "about the Middle East" again. What I needed to write was about what I was passionate about. Eventually, I wound up writing a different play, not consciously about "the Middle East" but actually based on my emotional response to the 2006 Lebanon War -- not focused on the event itself, but based on the emotional manipulation in the media around it. It wound up being a movement-theater piece, and the focus turned away from the 2006 Lebanon War and onto political manipulation. Was it "about the Middle East"? No. But it was the best genuine response to the Middle East I think I've been able to muster.

Lastly, Isaac has a fantastic response to that post and the discussion in general in which, among other things, he discusses his own experiences with anxieties. I think one of the thing he's getting at (and which 99Seats is sort of getting at) is the fact that we can't control when something we think isn't "about race" turns out to be "about race."

I recall my own experiences, in my AP English class, how after every book we read, there was always an essay response by a famous black writer about race issues in the book. Chinua Achebe on The Sound and the Fury, Ralph Ellison on The Heart of Darkness, I forget who I read writing a race issues paper Araby. The arguments range from right-on-target (Ellison's The Heart of Darkness essay is pretty apt, and, well, Joseph Conrad was writing about colonialism and The Congo) to kind of weak, weak tea (Achebe's response to The Sound and the Fury didn't really convince me at the time). Worse than that were the feminist responses we read after each (the one about The Heart of Darkness could and should have just said "There were no women in this book.")

Obviously, there are significant race issues in these books, but what irritated me was the dismissal of any possible content in the play that was not about race. All of the descriptions were reductive.

On the other hand, Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Atlantic Monthly uses Clueless to talk about the real goal: the seamless integration of characters of diverse backgrounds into the story being told.

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.

Sense of Place II - "Local" Grown Arts

I promise I'll get to a recap of the conversation I had by the weekend. I still want more time to chew that over.

In the meantime, I want to return to a concept that I found rather stimulating from the Thriving Arts Report: that a Sense of Place is core to the foundation of a thriving arts community. Take it as read everything I said before about a lack of sense of place in my own personal experience blah blah blah recap recap.

So, to move forward.

I saw a sign today in Solana Beach California that said "Shop Solana First!" which is a local version of the whole "Buy American" protectionism that we have in this country. Now, when it comes to international trade, I'm not necessarily a huge advocate of this, but on the other hand, when it comes to the arts and agriculture, I am.

To explain:

A while back I listened to Malcolm X's speech "The Ballot or the Bullet." I'm not a huge advocate of Malcolm X's philosophy in general, but there was a large segment of the speech that was very interesting. Here's the core quotation:

The economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure and simple. It only means that we should control the economy of our community. Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should white people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the white man? Why? If a black man can't move his store into a white community, you tell me why a white man should move his store into a black community. The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.

Now, there's clearly a black versus white definition of community that has absolutely no pertinence to the discussion. But if you substitute "local" for "black" and "NY" for "white" then what you get is a prescription for a theory of local arts.

This thinking has already become somewhat fashionable in one area: agriculture. There's a lot of talk already about "locally grown foods." "Buy local." A Farmer's Market is structured as a way to bring local-grown foods to the public eye.

In a way, a local arts fair is like a farmer's market: it's to bring to people's attention that there is something local. To towns whose only art is big plays brought from NY and actors brought from Los Angeles (like my town), people should be asking: why are we spending our dollars in ways that leave the community?

Build an ad campaign around these slogans:

Spend your entertainment dollars in your community: support local arts.

Spend your entertainment dollars on your own children: support youth arts.

Spend your entertainment dollars on your neighbors: support community arts.


Keep playing up that aspect. These are locals, community members. They're not faceless strangers. Inasmuch as road producers are the Wal-mart of the arts (see <100k on the subject of the Walmarting of our arts).

When we're talking about a sense of place and community, the question we're asking is: Would you be willing to spend slightly more to sponsor your community? (that's the economic way of asking "do you value your community over other communities").

That's the economic aspect of making local arts, and that's probably why the National Endowment of the Arts gave <100k Project their grant!

A Sense Of Place

The Thriving Arts: Thriving Small Communities report that <100k led me to has a number of interesting assertions.

One of the ones that was more surprising to me, inasmuch as I hadn't thought of it, is the necessity of a "sense of place" to a community.

In part, this is because my personal experience left me a little bereft of that as I was growing up. At the age of three months I emigrated from Israel to the United States, and although I can't profess that I felt alienated from America, there also was at least a certain sense of not-belonging, of aloofness from the environment.

The point of my arrival was not helpful to this. I arrived in the middle of Southern California's suburbian wasteland. The community my family lives in now, Irvine, has no "sense of place." There is no center to the city; it has no downtown. It is a chain of disconnected housing developments. It is the epitome of car culture. Most of the city was developed thirty years ago, and there is a complete and utter absence of history.

As a result, people come and settle in Irvine, and their children leave. There are very few families who are ingrained in the community; most are only staying for a while, taking advantage of good jobs and good education.

Nearby, there is a very different small town. Its an arts community named Laguna Beach (all of you reality TV folks know this town). It was founded in the 1930s by a colony of landscape painters. And in the 1960s it became the local hippy hub. Why did it become a hippy hub? Well, because of the artists who were already living there.

The people who live in Laguna Beach tend to be more invested in the arts. There are a lot more galleries, theaters, and amateur programs like amateur theater and an amateur choir.

Why is Laguna Beach so different from Irvine? Well, Thriving Arts: Thriving Small Communities points its fingers toward a number of things I can point to in Laguna Beach (one of the other ones is the fact that Laguna Beach, trapped amongst a series of bluffs, is forced to be built around a central main street right on the beach; another is the fact that the beach itself is an "environmental draw for tourism"). But I think that the original founding in the 1930s created a sense of place for the town--after all, it was landscape painters, and if landscape painters would like to be credited with creating anything, it's a sense of place.

Why is a sense of place important, though? How does it link up?

Last fall I went to the Czech Republic, which is a place that has a sense of PLACE. In fact, the history and the culture has become a generalized excuse for everything, and created an incredibly anti-cultural immobility, but that's a story for another day. While I was there, I had an excellent professor, Jan Urban. Jan Urban was the head of the Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution, working closely with Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus, the first two Presidents of the Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic.

For Jan Urban, all of the big problems came from a sense of identity. He looked at Nationalism as an extension of a search for identity in 1800s Europe, Nationality being identity based on language spoken. For him, a hugely influential piece of reading is Robert J. Lifton's Thought Reform, which broke down Chinese Re-education methods into a 12 step plan, mostly around the idea of breaking down a subject's sense of identity and rebuilding it along the lines you wish.

He applied those principles when he was in Mozambique, attempting to deprogram child-soldiers from their civil war. His method there was to use soccer to reform their militaristic identity, using the parts of their identity that are already beneficial (team mentality, competitive nature) and stripping away the parts of their identity that don't work in society (mindlessness and violence). We also applied those principles to come up with a way of tackling the PTSD and economic isolation of returning veterans.

If Jan Urban's hypothesis is true (which I strongly believe it is), and a sense of identity is at the center of how we interact with ourselves and our society, than building a sense of place is a large chunk of a sense of identity. And according the report, building that sense of identity is central to building a value of the arts.

This means that at the core of shifting values is shifting the sense of place. Los Angeles, for instance, is a place that is plagued with an extreme lack of a sense of place, and the solution to tackle that was a downtown redesign--which so far has not had any effect on the sense of place of the residents (probably because downtown is not where they live).

If that's the case, then in the next few weeks I intend to examine how the 12-Steps could be used to influence the sense of place of a community.

Quantifying The Health Of Arts Communities

Sparked on by the report that <100K posted, I've been interested in putting together a method of quantifying the arts community. At the time I assumed it was a tall order because I'm not an urban studies major, or a sociologist, or anything that would give me the academic background necessary. But of course, the only way to really get that background is just to JUMP IN, feet first.

So I did, beginning with a little tweet to the world, asking if anyone else was involved in this.

Ian David Moss, over at Createquity.com, informs me that I'm a little late to the game, because there is a lot of raw research to look at. But there's still a lot of work to be done, and the final quantitative analysis (he called it the "holy grail") is still elusive.

He was very helpful and tossed me a number of resources, so my next step will be analyzing not only the report from <100k, but also the sources he gave me, and of course the groundbreaking work by Richard Florida on the Creative Class. I will, of course, share as much of my realization here as is possible.

The NEA, NRO, and WHO-SICE II

In the comments section of <100k, Chris Ashworth says:

Moreover, I find myself increasingly uninterested in duking it out over the NEA. (Jotted down a few thoughts about this back in March.) The NEA fight feels like it’s burning a lot of energy that could be channeled much more efficiently into other, fresher ideas. Like, say, the <100K project.

To which I responded:

Indeed. Thinking about Beran's article, and Chris' response about whether we should care to reform the NEA, and I'm starting to wonder whether the NEA should keep it's top-down approach and WHO-SICE should take a bottom-up approach.

One model of supporting the arts (the one currently taken by a lot of arts communities) is helping to support the big, safe, consistent hitters. If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, or consider the Public Broadcasting System, you see a big, old institution that has some degree of public contribution, to keep a historic institution alive. That's not a very progressive thing for government to be doing, but it isn't necessarily an unimportant one--a Caretaker of the Arts. An inherently conservative approach to arts support.

The other model is something like the <100k that works from the bottom up. The report on developing arts communities seemed to place a lot more emphasis on the bottom-up approach. A Small Business Administration for the Arts, an Arts Developer. An inherently progressive approach to arts support.

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.

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.