Interview with Doug Borwick

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on....................."

Doug Borwick is currently President of the Board of the Association of Arts Administration Educators and has for over 25 years been Director of the Arts Management and Not-for-Profit Management Programs at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC.   He also writes a blog on engaging the arts in communities.  I wanted to ask Doug questions about the University degree programs in arts administration and some of the issues that face that sub-sector of our field, and to get a better sense of how those issues impact the whole issue of professional development in the arts as well as other challenges we face.

Here then is the interview:
1.  Barry:  What have you learned in your tenure as the President of the Association of Arts Administration Educators? What are you optimistic about, and what gives you pause for concern, for the future of our university degree in arts administration programs?

Doug:  The most important lesson for me has been the true meaning of ours being a young field in academia. While Oxford, Cambridge, and their descendants have had centuries to figure out what an education in English or philosophy should include, we are only now, just more than forty years into the development of the field, even realizing how different our programs are.

Arts administration programs are unique in ways unheard of in more established disciplines. Because of the youth of the field, they reflect the personalities and interests of their individual founders, their home departments, and their institutions in ways completely foreign to, say, mathematics. And the youth of the field gives the administration of the host institutions (and their accrediting agencies) far more sway over content and faculty hiring/promotion decisions than is true in other disciplines.

Arts administration programs housed in business schools emphasize management and finance; those in arts programs emphasize understanding of the medium; others focus on marketing, research, community engagement, or policy. They are all arts administration programs, but they turn out graduates with very different areas of expertise. And I’ve not even touched upon the differences between graduate and undergraduate education.

This issue is complicated by the fact that arts administration is highly complex. I refer to it as the ultimate liberal arts discipline. It’s necessary to understand economics, finance, management, marketing, leadership–all of the traditional management tools/skills, but it’s also important to understand not-for-profit-specific areas (e.g., fund accounting, fundraising, volunteer management, board development), the art form and its history, sociology, politics and advocacy, ethics, and community organizing to name a few.

The fact that the practitioner field itself is not aware that it does not agree on what it wants in arts administrators does not help. I’ve spoken with numerous professionals who want “more” and “better” from arts administration graduates, but they do not know that they don’t agree on what they want “more and better.” Some want higher order finance skills, some board development, some advocacy, etc.

That said, what I’m proudest of at AAAE are the strides we have made in curriculum guidance. Almost a decade ago, we began developing a set of standards in a broad range of categories for graduate programs in arts administration. These were, necessarily, focused on what the vastly disparate member programs were offering. Round one was a set of graduate standards. Round two, completed in my first year as President, presented refinements of those and added a set of undergraduate standards. In these two phases, the work was in-house and available only to AAAE members. As we finalize the i-dotting and t-crossing of both, we are getting ready to make these public, institute a continuous-review process, and actively solicit field input in refinement and development of the standards. I know some may think that backwards (“Get field input first.”), but that would only work (from an “art of the possible” perspective) if we were beginning with no programs in place.

I am also pleased about the fact that we have made some progress in establishing links with the field in ways that are uncommon in academia. In my first year as President, I met with and discussed partnership possibilities with AAM, Americans for the Arts, Chorus America, Dance/USA, LAO, the NEA, OPERA America, and TCG. Out of those conversations, AAAE created its Research Advisory Council to act as liaison between the needs of the field and of academic institutions. It’s in its infancy and the wheels turn very slowly in academia, but I have high hopes there.

As for concerns? The vastly different perspectives, needs, and interests of academia and practitioners make working together difficult. There is mutual if not distrust then lack of understanding. You know, stereotypes of academics looking down on those outside the ivory tower and on-the-ground professionals disdaining “pointy-headed, head-in-the-clouds intellectuals.” The reality that I’ve seen on both sides does not, for the most part, bear out those perceptions, but the fact that they remain in people’s minds could derail efforts to work together or cause the inevitable delays in implementation to be seen as lack of commitment.

Another very practical concern is that, given the many things that could and should be done, AAAE is a small organization with one part-time staff person. The individual Board and committee members have demanding day jobs that make undertaking new initiatives a challenge.

2.  Barry:  Do you think the curriculum at these programs (both undergraduate and graduate) meet the challenges facing the next generation of leadership?  Besides the basics of nonprofit arts management (finance, fundraising, program design and oversight, marketing, board relations and the like) what broad areas do you think are currently underserved (for example:  is there sufficient preparation in public policy and advocacy, or in the more subtle management skills such as how to motivate employees, how to listen, how to communicate effectively, conflict resolution, organizational adaptability etc.)?   Are there standards for graduation requirements across all the programs and how are these standards monitored and determined?

Doug:  No curriculum can meet all the challenges. As I’ve said, AAAE has made major strides in articulating the areas that should be addressed, but there are many, many areas. The best to be hoped is that each program (undergraduate or graduate) will provide depth in a few and breadth by covering most.

This is the time, also, to articulate the role of our curriculum standards. AAAE is not an accrediting body. Even if some members and some outsiders might want it to be, the politics of academia preclude that at this time. AAAE’s curriculum standards are a statement of our best current understanding of what graduates of our programs should know and be able to do. The role of the standards is to serve as guidelines in program development, curricular improvement, and advocacy on the part of programs within their host departments and institutions. As for the on-going development of the standards, one of my last acts as President of AAAE will be to formalize standing committees to oversee constant review of the standards and to solicit field input into their content.

That said, if you take all our programs together, I would say there is no content area that is missed. In individual programs, the answer will likely depend on one’s point of view. I might say that some are woefully inadequate with respect to community engagement. I suspect from your perspective many are not up to snuff with respect to the practical, hands-on aspects of advocacy. In addition to the institutional constraints and individual preferences I’ve mentioned already, there is the constraint of what can be covered in how much depth in, for instance, a two year Master’s degree. I do believe that opening up the standards to feedback from the field will assist AAAE in determining, in general, which things need more emphasis and which less. Given that we are academic institutions, I suspect that we may need to devote a bit more time to nuts and bolts preparation (especially for our younger students) and somewhat less to theory.

3.  Barry:  Further to the above question: Are our university arts administration programs preparing their graduates to be more entrepreneurial, adaptive and innovative?    Are the base curriculum models mired in a too traditional, and arguably, outdated and antiquated approach?  In his keynote address to your organization's annual conference in 2010, Ben Cameron asked: "…does the present environment and the possibilities of innovation through applied research invite us to rethink our larger training - rethinking what we teach, with whom we teach, indeed what we are ultimately trying to instill?"

Ben went on to ask:  "In addition to teaching subscription theory, should we also teach voter registration and MoveOn.org as paradigms of engaging public energies? While the internship at the nearby LORT theatre may be hugely valuable, can we entertain the notion that the more valuable experience may be with the political campaign, the sports complex, the environmental justice center? Should marketing and audience development be taught in tandem with social psychology? Should we insist that EVERY research project—including supporting of productions and marketing—be interdisciplinary, requiring students to engage their colleagues in econ, business schools, emerging technologies and more? What would happen if we too adopted the five-stage business development model in lieu of our training emphasis (which typically is based on only two steps—training and, if lucky, mentoring)? Do we dare prioritize post-graduation capital even at the cost of student aid? Indeed, might our primary goals be the cultivation of acute external awareness, deep curiosity, rigorous self-scrutiny and a deep abiding understanding of, and commitment to, risk? As training programs, can we promote to our students and model a vision of the arts that are firmly rooted in the world, rather than insulated from that world; that speaks with the world in dialogue, rather than to the world; that mirrors the same principles of nimbleness and openness, of innovation and curiosity that we may seek to impart?"   

Is that a dialogue your field has prioritized? What are your thoughts on Ben's inquiry?  Is Jim Undercofler's launch of a degree in arts entrepreneurship for Ithaca College an isolated, ground-breaking experiment or a trend in arts administration curriculum thinking?

Doug: There are a variety of important questions you are asking here. First, with respect to entrepreneurship, there is a good deal of discussion going on. Each of our last three conferences has had several sessions devoted to it. One of our Board members has volunteered to begin developing a curriculum standard addressing it. We have hope of partnering with some organizations advocating for entrepreneurship in academic programs (although our human resources for accomplishing that are limited). I am convinced that Jim’s proposed program at Ithaca College is at the vanguard of a real movement in the field.

Regarding your question about curricula that are “too traditional . . . outdated and antiquated,” we face a significant dilemma. To a large extent, our programs, especially the graduate ones, are judged by the success with which they place graduates in positions in established arts institutions. If those institutions do not truly value graduates with an entrepreneurial bent (and by “value,” I mean hire), it can be counter-productive for arts administration programs to place a significant emphasis on it. This does not mean they will not; it simply means that there could be risk to them in doing so. In spite of that, as I said above, this is a wave of the future for our programs.

As for Ben’s questions to us in 2010, AAAE has recently added a new curriculum standard in the area of community engagement. One of its functions is to foster the kind of awareness of and interaction with the broader community for which he was advocating.

4.  Barry: University degree in arts administration programs are an enormously valuable asset for our sector.  But are they underutilized?   Due to costs, scheduling and location isolation, by and large our university arts administration programs are unavailable to the majority of our current managers.  What role do you think these programs might play in the future (if any) in terms of the wider picture of addressing the professional development needs of our sector's managers?
and
5.  Follow-up: What movement is there in the arts educator field to offer access to its curriculum online, on demand - in whole or in part?

Doug:  Underutilized? From whose perspective? Over the last few years, perhaps due to the economy, we have had a big boost in graduate program enrollment. (While that may seem counter-intuitive, the downturn in employment has encouraged many to seek higher education.)

You are right, though, that a traditional in-residence degree is not an option for people with full-time jobs. Several member programs of AAAE have degree programs that are largely online, designed to accommodate the needs of working professionals. We began work on compiling a list of workshops and short-term training programs that may be of interest to those seeking continuing education in the field. That effort still needs work. It should be noted that our programs can be at the mercy of host institutions that discourage online offerings (a dwindling number to be sure) or non-degree opportunities.

I have spoken with some of the national arts service organizations about collaborating on professional development training. The idea was met with some enthusiasm (in some quarters). However, as with any collaborative effort, the time and energy required to pull off such partnerships can be daunting.

6.  Barry: Is there any data / research on the composition of the students enrolled in these programs - compiled in the aggregate?   I'm wondering whether or not there is proportional representation of multicultural groups in particular?  What is the field doing to ensure such representation for the future of an educated and trained arts leadership?  It wo uld also be informative to know the breakdown of enrollees as to gender, geographic hometowns, age etc.  Is that data available anywhere?

Doug:  I am not aware of significant quantities of the kind of research you describe. I would like to have access to it, but collecting and analyzing such data annually would require resources that AAAE simply does not possess right now. And our member programs are surveyed within an inch of their lives. This should probably be high on this list of things to do for AAAE in the near future. Unfortunately, that is a very long list.

With respect to your question about multicultural representation in our programs, on a purely anecdotal, observational level, the make-up of our student bodies appears to me to reflect, in large measure (except younger), the make-up of arts audiences: upper middle class, white, and female. While that’s a gross over-simplification, it’s an issue for the arts as an industry, not just the arts administration profession.

7.  Barry:  And speaking of research, what kinds of research (either that being done, or that which ought to be undertaken) do you see as essential for the future of the arts educator field?  What kinds of information and data does the field need that it does not have?

Doug: I should probably defer to our Research Advisory Council on this. The question is precisely why we established the group. This may be the time to point out that I am the first President of AAAE from an undergraduate program. (It’s not been too long since undergraduate programs were first allowed to be members.) Not only that, I am not a researcher. I’m a qualitative kind of guy with a background as an artist. I had to spend a bit of the first portion of my term assuring the members that while I was not a researcher I understood the value of it and wanted to be proactive in focusing on its role in our field.

8.  Barry:  Virtually all of these programs tout that graduates can expect to land prominent positions post graduation.  From your observations, is there a hiring bias in favor of those who have completed these kinds of programs over those without such training coming up from the ranks?  And is that a problem for our sector (i.e., will such a bias be an obstacle to recruitment and retention of those without such training coming into our field as they will perceive that upward advancement and promotion would be that much more difficult than it already is for them)?

Doug: Here again, research data would be extremely helpful. As the director of an undergraduate program, my perspective may not be too useful to this question. My graduate program colleagues tell me about the placement of their students (and I have observed it as well). I would say that the older the field gets, the more there is an expectation among arts organizations that their “hires” have some academic preparation. But here is yet another difficulty facing the field. Experience is vital; knowledge is crucial. (This is why there is an expectation in AAAE programs that students will have substantive field experience in some form or other.) How do you get both in the “correct” proportion? I think those doing the hiring today have an intuitive sense of a sliding scale between academic preparation and experience. Soon, if not already, a “zero” on either scale will likely be a deal breaker.

I truly believe that as the discipline of arts administration comes of age, some kind of academic preparation will be essential for placement. The days of the artist-turned-administrator (without any management training) are numbered, if not over. I don’t see that as a bad thing.  The field is complex and its relationship with society at large will become even more complicated as time goes by. The opportunity to understand the theory of the practice that education or training provide will be critical.

I’m not sure I fully understand your last question. If you mean that the need for education will discourage those without that education from entering the field, isn’t that true in any professional arena? If it’s a numbers question, we do have the issue that pay has not changed enough to keep up with the increasing need for professionalism.

9.  Barry:  As someone who has for a long time championed the idea that "engagement" at the community level is essential for the survival of arts organizations, what is your take on the current debate and dialogue on the topic of "engagement"?  While "engagement" is a hot-button issue for the field - is it similarly a front-burner topic within the curriculum of the nation's arts administration programs?  How do arts administration programs integrate this kind of thinking (or other current threads in marketing and other areas) into the courses they offer?

Doug:  As I have said (incessantly) on my blog, I am thrilled that engagement is on everyone’s lips. I am also terrified at the prospect of it becoming trivialized as a fad or as an attempted quick fix for fundraising or to increase ticket sales. (The latter simply will not work and the possible result would be the conclusion that engagement is not important or is ineffectual.)

When I first began attending AAAE conferences, I proposed a lunch table discussion dealing with the topic of engagement. Two people showed up (one by accident). Granted, one reason for that, although not the only one, was that I was new and totally unknown there. Today we have a curriculum standard addressing it and a number of our programs focus prominently on the issue. I am hopeful that the issue of the arts engaging substantively with the communities in which they work is now one with sufficient momentum to keep it in play along with (and more important, in support of) marketing, fundraising, and advocacy.

10.  Barry: What advice do you have for your successor of AAAE?

Doug:  (Thank you, thank you , thank you for asking this question. I might not have put this together otherwise.)

• Remember how disparate our programs and their needs are. Serve as translator between them and an advocate for all.
• Don’t try to do too much yourself. Use your energies to push forward (rather than implement) initiatives. Take advantage of the new blood in the Association to develop and carry out selected new programs.
• See yourself as a liaison between the arts industry and the programs training those who will manage it. 
• Facilitate dialogue. Seek out the industry. They are bigger than we are.
• Remember that what we do has the ultimate purpose of connecting people with the arts.
• Figure out how to do it all with (virtually) no money. 

Thank you Doug.

Have a great week.

Don't Quit.
Barry

Clout Blogfest - Arlene Goldbard wrap up

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on................."

Here is Arlene Goldbard's Wrap Up to the Political Clout Blogfest:

I'm grateful to everyone who took part in this blogfest, here on my website and through their own blogs, and especially to my cohost, Barry Hessenius. It showed me that there is considerable energy and imagination to bring to questions of cultural policy and political power, and that this resource isn't being tapped enough to support the ongoing, vibrant dialogue that should be front and center in public discourse.

It also surprised me to be charged with excessive pessimism by two of the participating bloggers—Roberto Bedoya and Diane Ragsdale—as I usually field the opposite charge, having to deny being a mindless optimist (or an optimist at all, since I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic with her eyes open to enormous potential).

The blogfest made me realize that for me, this is not one topic, but three, and my thoughts and feelings about each are very different: (1) Cultural development: What is happening? What does it all mean?; (2) Public cultural policy and funding; and (3) What's needed now.

(1) Cultural development: What is happening? What does it all mean?

Every culture develops; the question is how. Many influences come to bear on the cultural landscape: technologies; changes in population; interventions by institutions and funders; and all of the forces that affect every social sector.

Here in the United States, we've seen remarkable changes in the past few decades, as digital technologies have expanded our capacities for artistic creation, dissemination, and interaction. Culture is now at the center of civil society to a much greater extent than at any time in our history. We conduct our national conversation about even the most crucial issues through music and media. Consider how much of our political discourse is now shared in video clips comprising performances of dialogue, music, and accompanying images. I get up to a dozen short movies every day via email from people who are trying to alert me to important issues and occurrences, or engage me in public campaigns. They are now our primary form of public discourse.

Nobody made this happen through the application of conscious strategy. But it is self-evidently the new cultural reality, and all indications are that it will grow and evolve for some time. I've written often about the ways scientific research is converging with what many of us know about art through lived experience: how artistic capabilities have been survival traits for the human species; how art can heal the mind and body; how culture can create the container for social healing; how movement, imagery, and music can help us access important cognitive functions and promote understanding far better than old-style dry data, by providing a human context for information and connecting ideas and emotions.

When a new reality emerges, not everyone perceives it. It takes some time to filter up and trickle down. The most important question is whether some of those who don't yet get the new reality are in a position to impede it. Right now, among those who don't yet understand the centrality of human creativity—especially artistic creativity—to life as it is now lived and to a sustainable future are many of the operators or our existing social institutions, including policymakers. They are still so strongly attached to an old mechanistic model of value that they simply cannot perceive what is otherwise evident everywhere.

Unfortunately, living as we are—camped out on the bridge between paradigms—those gatekeepers get in the way. But the signs are strong that it's only a matter of time. The public and nonprofit sectors tend to be behind the curve when it comes to social innovations. So right now, foundations and government agencies are particularly enraptured with metrics and benchmarks, insisting that numbers are the best language in which to convey value, even social value.

But take a look at the most exciting thought leaders in the business sector, and you will see something very different: a growing recognition that the obsession with metrics distorts perspective, pushing people to serve the numbers (the business equivalent of pervasive "teaching to the tests" we see in education); and that success is all about relationship, which is subtle, fluid, human, and subjective. Business thinkers are urging businesses to tell stories; to hire people with the skills of improvisation and imagination; to learn how to listen and cultivate connection; to privilege meaning over metrics. It only a matter of time before nonprofits and government catch up.

When they do, my guess is the first thing they'll see is that culture can no longer be neatly divided into for-profit/non-profit, nor into the traditional disciplines (this is dance, that is theater; this is painting, that is sculpture)—or rather, there is no point in insisting on all these boundaries unless you're a resource-provider who wants a convenient set of gates to keep. Culture is an ecology, as I perpetually insist, in which each element interacts with, supports, and influences the others. The sooner the guardians of our official policymaking see this, the better. It exhausts arts advocates to keep coming up with even halfway plausible arguments to rope off the subsidized arts from the commerical ones, and in their exhausted state, absurdities abound. You get advocates bemoaning the state of music, for instance, when music—considered as whole sphere, from community choirs to elementary music lessons to symphony orchestras t o Broadway musicals to salsa dances to jazz clubs to the top of the hip-hop charts and beyond—permeates practically every waking moment of almost every life. (Several guest bloggers alluded to this, including Diane Ragsdale, taking off from a framework proposed by Bill Ivey.)

(2) Public cultural policy and funding

But I don't want to wait around for that to happen in its own good time. Bureaucracy moves at a snail's pace, resisting anything that might disturb its well-worn rut. And the nonprofit and public sectors belong to the public, both literally and figuratively. We pay the taxes, grant the tax exemptions, elect the decisionmakers who employ the regulators. In return, we get institutions and agencies charged with responsibilities that the marketplace can never effectively perform: ensuring human rights; investing in social well-being through education, health, housing, conservation, culture, and other social goods; providing a buffer zone between the marketplace and the citizenry, so that those who lack power and privilege do not succumb to the war of each against all that is unbridled capitalism.

I applaud the DIY energy that Diane Ragsdale described in her blog, grounded in nonprofit sector resilience:

Is it a stretch to think that such resilience might very well go hand-in-hand with our decentralized, indirect subsidy system? When government closes a door, quite often some wealthy individual opens a window (and doesn’t attach strings to funding like expectations of ‘access’ or ‘education’). And should no benefactor open a window? Well, there’s always the market (after all, it’s in the DNA of many in the sector).
But I can't just say, "Oh, well, that's going great, so let's leave government to the people who are now calling the tune and focus our attention elsewhere." Those window-opening wealthy individuals are a lot less thick on the ground for arts work in rural communities, low-income communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color, for one thing—and I don't want to live in a public culture shaped by a sort of social Darwinism that privileges the taste and clings to the comfort zone of wealthy donors. Of course, many artists and groups are resilient and resourceful in finding ways to stay afloat. But I can't help wanting to see what they could do if subsistence didn't take so much time from creative thinking and practice. Watch out, world!

Even more than that, it appalls and nauseates me that we have let this country become a wholly owned subsidary of Corporation Nation. I can't just sit blithely by while politicians fund the planet's largest prison system, subsidies for Big Oil, a war industry that every day makes living more dangerous and deadly, and tax breaks for the wealthiest, then stand with straight faces to say we can't afford decent education, healthcare, or the kind of cultural development investment that even the poorest nations typically make. The surrealism of that big lie, and evident ease with which so many people swallow it, indicate a cultural crisis of epic proportions. I know mine is a minority voice in holding the public sector to a full measure of public responsibility, but so what? On this, I know I am right, and some guest bloggers see it similarly, including Dudley Cocke:

This raises the question of how, in our democracy, the majority of us have become subjugated to a wealthy minority of us. When we talk about the arts gaining political power, I think this is the bigger problem we need to address, and I’m worried that we’ve lost the democratic infrastructure to pursue a solution.

Roberto Bedoya said it well in his blog: "So advocacy for me is not about arts advocacy, it advocating for and defending the very meaning of public—of the public good embedded in civil society."

Just so, Ra Joy and others advocate artists' involvement with civil society in its entirety:

My second recommendation for building political power for the arts is to position cultural organizations as centers of democracy. I believe deeply that democracy is a verb—it’s not something we have, it’s something we do. And I think more artists and cultural organizations should “do” democracy.

With artists and cultural organizations involved—as good cultural citizens—in the full range of public discourse and deliberation affecting their communities, support for cultural development also spreads across the public and non-profit sectors, rather than being sequestered to a few small arts agencies. Under Rocco Landesman, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been moving this way, creating pilot partnerships with other agencies of federal government. This is a good beginning, but too often gets sidetracked by the arts agency being the weak partner, which ends up distorting democratic cultural values in favor of conforming to the language, values, and bureaucratic structures of the larger, stronger partner agencies. Ultimately, the public interest in cultural development has to be encompassed by a comprehensive cultural policy that mandates across-the-board involvement and cooperation. If a nd when that happens, it will be both top-down (a policy directive from some future White House) and bottom-up (the public sector finally integrating what has long been evident to many of its citizens).

(3) What's needed now

In my writing and public speaking, I've mentioned the NEA more in the last couple of years than during the two previous decades. Why?

It's because the agency's funding is such a rich and handy symbol for everything that's wrong with our current cultural policy and national advocacy. First, there's the absurdity of spending only 50 cents per capita on the public interest in art: 50 cents to balance the excesses of the marketplace, make space for marginalized voices, water the roots of creativity!?! Second, there's the fact that though the FY 2012 NEA appropriation is only $8 million less than FY 1980's $154 million (68 cents per capita), the real value of the appropriation has dropped by over 60 percent. In the same period, our spending on prisons and associated costs increased by 500 percent in constant dollars, more than a doubling of real value! (This chart only covers 1982-2007, but is still worth a glance.) Do you need the numbers to know that the story has been the same with respect to war (if you do, we're still spending more than two annual NEA budgets a day, seven days a week, on war), and on subsidies to Big Energy, Big Pharma, and Big Guns?

Who are we as a people? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered? Most advocates never mention our egregiously distorted national priorities when they drum up support for the NEA's appropriation. Most never mention that if they succeed in helping another $10 million to be restored to that appropriation, they will still be far less than halfway to securing even the paltry value of 1980's appropriation. I suspect that my feeling about these realities is the reason why a couple of bloggers felt I was too pessimistic.

That's why I talk about the NEA: I have the idea—perhaps mistaken—that the starkness of the contrast between conventional discourse and hard reality will help to awaken the urgent sense of cultural citizenship we need. Otherwise, sure: the agency is still minuscule compared either to its counterparts abroad or to the landscape of need and opportunity here in the U.S. Diane Ragsdale is ready to consider letting it go: "What if the NEA were disintegrated and its components set free to be recombined (with other components) into an agency to fund the realization of Ivey’s Cultural Bill of Rights?" Politically, I don't see much wisdom in jettisoning the NEA at a point when our national cultural policy dialogue is so anemic that its replacement is likely to be nothing. But neither is it the centerpiece of my vision for the future, as you will see below.

It isn't a lack of good ideas that keeps things stuck. Instead, I think it's three factors:

First, pervasive resignation to the status quo. This still allows for creativity in wiring around it, finding pathways to success that bypass a stultified system, as Diane Ragsdale pointed out, instead of trying to change it. But it keeps this conversation from enlarging to engage a much broader group of those who are affected (which is to say, everyone). I'd like to see a lot more people pointing out what our current spending says about public priorities, for instance, contrasting culture to incarceration, and demanding that change.

Second, too many artists and arts organization reps are hanging onto old barriers and boundaries within the cultural landscape. What do they get out of pretending there's some guarded frontier between not-for-profit land and Hollywood? A sense of specialness, often, that is some kind of compensation for feeling marginalized. The public has to be the main beneficiary for any good public policy. Stand down the border patrol and invite the public in.

Third, there's a puzzling resistance to articulating cultural goals that serve the entire body politic. We should adopt the overarching cultural policy goal of an active, engaged citizenry, participating in a rich public cultural life.
There are many private actors whose funding choices influence the cultural landscape: foundations, corporations, collectors, investors, and so on. They have no obligation to adopt public goals, or indeed, any conscious goals at all. Some are interested in publicity, some in beauty or innovation or prestige or the expression of personality or a hundred other things that can be pursued through art, and all of this is part of the landscape.

But the public sector should and must be shaped by the principle that there is a public interest in cultural development, that should be guided by democratic values of pluralism, participation, and equity (often summarized with the rubric "cultural democracy"). As distinct from private actors, our overarching public purpose should be to balance other forces, the ones that tend to consolidate cultural privilege, power, and wealth. It is an essential and uniquely public role, and most of the deficiencies on our own cultural landscape can be traced to the fact that we have abandoned it.

Instead, I propose four governing ideas that can sweep across the cultural landscape, sending ripples in all directions.

Encompass the whole landscape: If you look at the entire cultural landscape as an ecology, you see some parts that are very richly fed and others that need nourishment. The instant we begin to consider how they can be conjoined (the way everything in the forest, dead or alive, supports something else), ideas spring up for new revenue streams to underwrite cultural development. Some commenters on the blogfest proposed ways of doing this, such as a small tax on commercial events to subsidize noncommercial ones. My favorite is a tax on advertising to support new creation.

We have an excess of passive, capital-intensive entertainment, and limited exposure and accessibility to diverse voices: it should be a public goal to pursue balance; let's tax video games to support youth arts learning and participation.

We should adopt the goal of a vibrant, multi-directional media landscape. We have an excess of authoritative voices broadcasting from the center to the margins, and limited exposure and accessibility to other views of the world, other ways to tell the story; let's require commercial news and public affairs providers to tithe to a fund for independent media and community broadcasting. We should adopt the goal of full cultural citizenship. We have an excess of museums and public monuments enshrining a white-father view of U.S. history; let's support a much fuller story that acknowledges everyone's contributions to our common culture, not as an add-on during Black History Month, but all year round.

To implement this policy of cultural ecology and cultural democracy, we need a nuanced, decentralized system that stresses relationship over metrics, where multiple, diverse actors can collaborate or act independently, in a fluid dance of development that mirrors the process of art-making: skillful, experimental, story-based, humane, aware.

Total arts integration: We should push for artists and arts work to be an integral part of every public- and nonprofit-sector agency and activity. This is already beginning to happen organically in the private sector, with a few inroads into government and nonprofits. Education is better with teaching artists in every classroom; communications are better when artists are devising creative ways to place data in human contexts; health care is better when storytellers are part of every clinic and hospital intake process, helping patients to discover the roots of their own resilience and healing; and so on. Similarly, artists are functioning more and more as citizens, bringing their gifts to public forums, to organizing projects, and to street-level campaigns.

This is a snowballing phenomenon: everyone can work on it in any local, state, or national context, and the aggregate of all our efforts will shift the weight toward culture as the container for our national conversation about values, identity, democracy, and community. Right now, at the agency level, existing allocations for public information that no one reads and public hearing processes no one trusts can be repurposed for artists' work in community engagement. In future, a new public service employment program can create jobs for artists and creative organizers, helping to address our epidemic unemployment through investment in cultural development.

Give culture standing: In the first installment of this blogfest and elsewhere, I proposed a cultural impact report:

We need to institute something like a “cultural impact report,” analogous to an environmental impact report, assessing the cultural impact of public actions such as leveling historic neighborhoods to build sports stadiums. If a community’s cultural fabric has no legal standing, we’ll just keep on making those same inhumane and short-sighted “urban removal” decisions over and over again. The environmental impact report was one of the first innovations of the environmental movement to infuse daily public decisions with environmental awareness. I’m not saying it would be easy to institute a cultural counterpart, but campaigning for it would do a lot to raise cultural awareness.
Maybe that's the right device and maybe something else would be better, but however it is implemented, the goal is essential: to give culture standing in our public and private deliberations. Right now, there are grounds to stop a freeway or sports stadium from decimating a well-established community and shredding its cultural fabric: officials and regulators may discover an endangered species habitat, or run a cost-benefit analysis that calls the allocation into question. But there's no basis for taking cultural life per se into consideration. We've seen the results of ignoring it, such as neutron-bomb urban removal that creates downtown wastelands no one visits unless there's a stellar attraction at the shiny new peforming arts complex. Virtually every public and private action has cultural impact. Just imagine what would change for the better if we started taking it seriously.

Achieve cultural equity: This is a public-sector responsibility, to regard all members of our national community with the same respect, and to take action to remedy the structural racism and embedded privilege that have skewed cultural funding toward the haves. Everyone has the right to full cultural citizenship, the sense of belonging in one's own community, the sense that one's cultural contributions count, the unequivocal invitation to be an equal contributor in shaping cultural life. As I wrote in the first blog in this fest:

We need cultural equity, in which access, funding, and other social goods are distributed fairly among all groups and categories. There’s always been a contradiction that funding is skewed toward the haves—mostly white, urban institutions—but when advocacy time comes around, the have-nots are expected to be good sports and rally to the cause. In my dream, the most powerful spokespeople for the subsidized arts—the heads of the major institutions and agencies—stand up to advocate in no uncertain terms for equity for communities of color and others without the same access to capital. That would attract some attention!

Contending ideas are out there, but they don't get much play. Bill Ivey's Cultural Bill of Rights seems unobjectionable, but weak, in that it makes no reference to impediments to the right to culture: what about the right to a fair share of resources, and the right to remedial action to balance the embedded racism and sexism of past allocations? What about the right for communities' cultural fabric to be considered in policy decisions and allocations affecting it? In 2009, I was part of a group that suggested an alternate framework, which still seems sound to me, although it does not encompass a complete range of policy issues. At her Creative Infrastructure blog, Linda Essig proposes four priorities for public funding.

These are not special pleading for artists, but broad public-benefit policies that incorporate acknowledgement and support for the public interest in art and artists. Culture precedes politics, as my friend Jeff Chang is fond of saying. By the time new laws and appropriations happen, innovations are embedded across the cultural landscape. The next step to real political clout? Democratic ideas of culture need to be in much, much wider circulation: written about, debated, blogged about, filmed, sung, danced, and staged, feeding the rich soil in which cultural democracy can take root.

Thanks to everyone who took part in this iteration of the needed conversation, "Clout: A Blogfest on Art & Political Power." Can't wait to see what's next!

Clout Blogfest Wrap Up

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on....................."

While this limited dialogue may not be representative of the whole field, in reviewing the entries by Roberto Bedoya, Diane Ragsdale, Ra Joy and Dudley Cocke, plus the comments from readers here at and Arlene's blogsite, I am left with several impressions:

1.  There simply is no consensus on what approach "advocacy" and the development of real political clout for us ought to take.  We are all over the map without focus and a united front. It would seem we remain unable to, or even incapable of, agreeing on a conceptual context for how we ought to approach the development of political power (or even if we should), and how that power might be best obtained, managed and manifested.  I suppose it's hard to agree on how to fight for who and what we are, when we haven't yet agreed on who and what we are about.  Power is about leveraging strengths and consensus.
That's a problem for us.

2.  Within the various threads of what might be the best approach, there seems to be an overarching exclusivity bias.  Those who think we ought to take this or that approach, seem not to want to embrace any other approach.  While as Roberto pointed out what works in one place at one time, might not work in another place at another time (and one is reminded of former House Speaker Tip O'Neil's famous maxim:  "All politics is local"), what I continue to argue for is a quiver with lots of arrows in it, and we don't seem to agree on that need.  As Arlene pointed out there are two principal means to exercise real clout -- either by amassing people power by organizing volunteer, grassroots foot soldiers to carry the message forward and demonstrate an active and concerned constituency (whether the result of a true 'movement' or otherwise), or a deep pockets war chest to buy the best lobbying effort one can afford.  Most special interest groups don't have even the potential to develop both people and money.  We do.  So why does if have to be one or the other?  The most powerful and arguably successful group with real political clout in the  country is the NRA - and they combine a highly organized and sophisticated army of volunteers ever at the ready to fight for their agenda, with a successful fund raising apparatus to pay for that organization and one of the better federal and state lobbying efforts.  It remains a mystery to me why anyone would opt for one at the exclusion of the other.
This too is a problem for us

3.  As several people pointed out, we have thus far failed to develop any successful strategy or process to involve artists in the advocacy matrix.  We remain without one of our very likely most promising and powerful assets in the failure to organize and mobilize the vast number of artists in this country.  Unquestionably this is a major challenge and obviously (given our lack of progress in this area) one that is daunting.
That is a continuing problem for us.

Some other reactions:
1.  If I inadvertently created the impression by echoing Arlene's Oliver Twist observation that I thought our advocacy work is characterized by the 'bleakness' Roberto points out - then I want to correct that. While I am continually disappointed by our advocacy work, and often frustrated by our failure to move towards political power and clout, I don't consider this work to be 'bleak".   I am buoyed by and deeply appreciative of the dedication, passion, and hard work of the many who fight the good fight.  I heartedly endorse the kind of action Roberto cites in having artists "testify" via their art to secure local City Council support, and equally applaud his efforts at enlisting effective coalitions to support the arts agenda.  My position is that we might not have to continually have that fight if we had more effective political clout via the access and power one gets by amassing money, and that all of this goes hand in hand.  Many arrows in the quiver - none at the exclusion of any other.

2.  Further to Roberto's analysis of the past and current culture wars, I have a different take on that.  In large part what we call the culture wars have little to do with the arts.  Rather they were principally a fund raising tool by the radical right.  Nothing works so well for that element than to raise the specter of gays and pornography and that is precisely why they zeroed in on Mapplethorpe.  We have to be more sophisticated I think in understanding why our enemies attack us.  It is a conceit and far too easy to think that we are always actually the target.  Often times we are simply the "easy" means to a greater end.  Those who ply power in the political arena are almost never one-dimensional, nor are they unsophisticated.  We underestimate what we are up against by thinking too simplistic about what our opponents do.

3.  I disagree with Diane's opening two paragraphs.  I believe the vast majority of arts organizations do indeed want more government support (and every other kind of support they can get), and that our failure to get it is precisely because we lack the clout necessary to compete in the lobbying marketplace.     I do agree with her that we lack the will to do what is necessary to get that power - and the chief problem there is that it takes time, people and money to organize on that level.  Yes, we pride ourselves on our resilience and that we are survivors - perhaps fooling ourselves in the process that our ineptitude is a good thing. We are reactive, not proactive. Again, I don't see that the failure to secure more government support opening other doors necessarily means those doors might not open anyway (with government support), and I honestly believe fundraising too ought to have every arrow in the quiver that might be helpful.

I don't know if Diane's postulation that the arts may be consciously (or subconsciously) shunning the tactics I espouse because it is ambivalent about the benefits of public funding is correct or not. My gut tells me she is wrong.  But perhaps she is right.  If she is, I think that is unfortunate for us.  And I think it a mistake to characterize the reason for being political as only related to funding.  There are all kinds of government decisions that impact we artists and arts organizations do.  I do think she is right in asserting that some of the larger institutions in our field perceive there is little for them to gain outside their efforts to work the system for their own direct advantage. Arlene made the same point. Territoriality and "in it for ourselves". I have seen this over and over again.  I think that situation is also tragic for us.  If we can't somehow see that we are all in this together, then it will very likely always be that we are divided and the development of real political power will remain axiomatically difficult, if not impossible.

4.  To Diane's query:  "A different, but perhaps related, question is when will those artists and arts and culture organizations that are not benefitting from the current ‘arts system’ (that is, the large majority of them) take control of and reframe the conversation around culture?" I can only echo:  When indeed?  (And I would also point out that the overwhelming lion's share of government support for the arts isn't at the federal NEA level - it is local money - and so it is a mistake to characterize the need for political clout to be about the endowment.  It is only partly about federal funding.  It is much more about local funding - that's where the real money is.)

5.  I have long agreed with Bill Ivey's assessment and analysis and Diane's thinking that we need to reframe cultural support in terms of "citizenry". The challenge is how to go about addressing that challenge - and alas it seems to this reporter that we have made precious little progress since Bill's thoughts first surfaced some years ago.  How is the real question that we seem never to get to.

Finally, Diane's thinking on a new role for federal support and questioning whether or not the NEA might better be reconstituted is something I have wondered myself for a long time.  Though I suspect my priorities for the agency (spending more money, time and effort on improving the ability of the field to succeed (the sustainability, capacity building aims we are all too familiar with by now) in doing such things as convening more national summits to address such issues as the development of a national arts policy, exploring a national data policy, addressing the need of the field for professional development, etc. etc. etc.) is different from hers and likely different from other people's thinking too.   I don't want to be glib in commenting on Diane's thinking, so I need more time to think about the very important issues she raises.  I had hoped that last year's multi week blogfest on the NEA would raise the issue of whether or not the agency ought to be re-thought from top to bottom, but it never did.  As 40% of the agency's budget goes to the states on a per capita basis, I suspect there is an entrenched group that would not want to entertain any rethinking that would threaten that revenue stream unless their interests were protected.  There are a host of other problems with reinventing the agency including the reality that in Washington DC it is hard to replace something with something new.

6.  With respect to my esteemed colleague (and I personally think one of the best advocates the arts have in America) Ra Joy's thoughts, again I would argue for both people power and money power to go hand in hand (ala the NRA).  Please folks let's learn something from the NRA - we have the same potential power to raise both a foot soldier citizen army and a huge war chest (as I have previously suggested if every performing arts organization and museum in the country were to hold one benefit performance or exhibit - the proceeds of which went to fund advocacy / lobbying and the development of political clout - every two years (just one), we could raise millions and millions of dollars.)  And we can do it within our own resources without recourse to having to necessarily mobilize and incentivize the wider public.  We control our own destiny.  Again it would take far less than most people think it would take to garner some real political clout.  Alas, it would seem Arlene is right - the passion and commitment to do that don't seem to be there.

7.  There is no bigger fan than I for what Bob Lynch, Nina Ozlu Tunceli and the whole AFTA team has done with the Arts Action Fund and building an effective state advocacy network - but I wait patiently for that network to spearhead an effort to create local Action Fund PACs on the state level.  And the fact is that once a year arts advocacy days, at either the national or state level, while valuable, are hardly enough.  Advocacy is a 24/7/365 job and we need a far more sophisticated network than what we have and the only way to develop that network is to pay for it. It cannot be a wholly volunteer effort.  And you don't build relationships with a once a year visit.  Sorry that's the fact.

I like Ra's thinking on developing the arts as center hubs for democracy, and I think his specific suggestions are excellent ("We should provide cultural organizations with the training and support they need to register voters, provide easy-to-use voting information, and play a more active role as catalysts for community engagement. By strengthening the connections between cultural organizations, community members, and civic issues, we can bolster the arts and build bridges across sectors."  - and I might add we should run arts people for public office.)   And as to Ra's idea that:  "We need to invest more time and resources around formulating winnable policy goals. We need to do a better job of sharing best practices and innovative ideas for both the public and private sectors. We need to think about how our policy initiatives can empower individual artists and be meaningful for for-profit arts business." I can only agree wholeheartedly.   But that will cost money.  THAT is the kind of thing I think the NEA ought to be doing.

8.  Dudley Cocke, I think accurately asks the bigger question when he observes:   "in our democracy, the majority of us have become subjugated to a wealthy minority of us. When we talk about the arts gaining political power, I think this is the bigger problem we need to address, and I’m worried that we’ve lost the democratic infrastructure to pursue a solution.After these past 30 years of intense privatization and the rise of a pervasive proprietary culture, we all seem to be living in boxes defined by class, race, age, politics, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Where are the commons (neutral grounds in New Orleans’ parlance) to meet and think together, regardless of difference?"

I don't know Dudley how the wider society (let alone us) will deal with that issue - which is not new to the world.  I only know that in terms of political power and clout those with money carry a big stick, and the daily grind of trying to defend one's position, let alone move forward, is a slow, laborious step by daily step process fought in the trenches and those that aren't engaged in those small battles invariably lose the war.  We are only peripherally engaged in those battles.

9. Finally, I hope somehow the movement Arlene dreams of takes off.  Again, far greater minds than mine will have to weigh in about how to make that happen.

I am very grateful to our four participants in this small experiment of Arlene's and mine and want to thank them and those who took time to comment for adding to the dialogue. I am humbled to be in their company. I especially want to thank Arlene.  I hope somehow we can figure out how to move this discussion forward on a larger stage than the isolated, piecemeal private conversations that pass as our attempt to develop some real policy on political power.  And I hope that somehow we can soon begin to answer the question; "How" - specifically how do we make some of these things happen?  


I will post Arlene Goldbard's final wrap up tomorrow.
Have a great week.

Don't Quit.
Barry