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 Community II: Arts Factories

One of the interesting historic notes discussed in Rise of the Creative Class is how the original Factory came into being. Obviously, in the original market days, labor was divided into a community: someone would gather raw materials, sell it to a merchant, and the merchant would sell it to an artisan to turn into a finished good.

As the level of finished good grew in complexity, it might go through multiple of these stages: someone gathers raw materials, sells it to a merchant, merchant sells it to an artistan who turns it into a refined good, refined good is sold to a merchant, merchant sells it to another artisan who finishes the good. This was called factoring.

Eventually, someone figured out that the middle-man could be skilled by assembling all of the parts of a product’s development under one roof: in a factory. Now a factory owner buys the raw material, and his workers usher the raw material through all of the steps of its development until the end.

However, it is clear that in the developed world, this model is breaking down, as it is no longer profitable to employ men in a factory at wages they are accustomed to. The cost of each worker has gotten too big. Partly, this is because of the conditions of the worker: back when each artisan was self-employed, he set his own hours and conditions, and would work to produce as much as he needed to support himself. But the factory aims to maximize its own profits, which makes the hours and conditions increasingly difficult.

On a seemingly unrelated subject, my brother and I came to discuss the armies of amateurs who now exist, and seem to want to do valuable but low-quality jobs for no pay. For instance, whereas an amateur couldn’t compete full-time making furniture, because Ikea would drive him out of business, he could create small amounts of low-quality and low-cost items to sell informally, so long has he does this in his leisure time aside from a sustaining job. Once a man takes up this sort of job outside of work hours, he no longer has quite the same pressure to make ends meet through his furniture business, and therefore is free to enjoy himself and make as little or as much as he needs.

As a mindgame, I asked my brother to consider whether it would be possible for a company or project to harness the armies of amateurs to contribute bits of work, remotely, at their own pace. This is the equivalent of Factoring, but without the factory.

It was only later that I realized that this is already being done, largely through the power of the internet. For instance, Wikipedia harnesses large amounts of amateur experts, without compensation, to create a repository of knowledge. Each person contributes in their free time, without expecting pay, up to their abilities.

Other open source projects are equally Factoring projects: Linux, for instance, is entirely built by programmers in their free time pushing around bits of code to build an operating system which now competes with Windows and OS X.

I also came across a curious real-world example of this as well. In Alaska, my family came across a beautiful small Musk Oxen farm. This farm operated by raising musk oxen, then sending those raw materials to various indigenous tribes to be knitted into sweaters or blankets. These tribesfolk were paid the same no matter how much they put out—they were only required to make at least one sweater or blanket. Then the blankets/sweaters are sent back to the farm, which gathers them all and sells them. This co-op structure is basically using an army of skilled amateurs to convert furs into sweaters.

Now, since this is an arts blog aiming to discuss the development of arts communities, it is time for me to cut to the chase. What I am getting at is that this model could be used to build an arts community. Rather than creating a single, complex organization (an arts Factory), the arts could be “Factored” out to a distributed number of arts amateurs, who contribute as much or as little. But once they’ve contributed, they’ve got a tie (at least a weak tie, possibly even a strong tie) in to the arts community.

When I had the conversation with Walt (at <100k Project) and some of Walt’s friends about arts community development, the idea I came up with at the time is to have a project that goes out into the community to collect stories and present them as part of an evening of theater. In a way, this is factoring, inasmuch as it factors the job of the playwright into the community. This is what The Laramie Project did, although the Laramie Project was sort of factoring colonization, because the results of their work left their community (StoryCorps is the same way—and came up for criticism for Walt for this same reason).

At any rate, this is a model for a small number of artists to build a larger arts community. By factoring out the creative work, they start to create an arts community that lives outside of themselves. At the same time, they lower the participation threshold, which is one of the most important barriers to the creation of an arts community.