Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

From the arts hearing: signs of progress and one epiphany

The numbers are grim. Artists suffering unemployment at twice the rate of other workers. Ten thousand nonprofit arts organizations nationwide in real danger of closing and taking 260,000 jobs with them. Arts and artists losing more of their tiny piece of the nation’s 40-percent-smaller philanthropic pie to other causes such as health, while ticket-sales drop, forcing severe cost reductions including lay-offs.

And yet, scary as the information was that emerged from yesterday’s  Labor Committee hearing" href="http://edworkforce.house.gov/">House Education & Labor Committee hearing on the impact of the arts on the economy and employment, it may not impress an American public that’s been listening to the sound of the world collapsing for months now. Bad news is everywhere – with banks failing, the stock market falling down a mine shaft, the newspaper industry dying and real estate worth about as much as Confederate dollars, the arts industry’s plight probably doesn’t seem any more important than the retailers’ or automakers’ or the airlines’. All of us are, or have friends, in trouble.

In fact, the American public may never fully understand just how stunning this hearing was – not because it revealed an arts industry in financial crisis, but because it revealed one with an economic, social and political clout that artists and their supporters could hardly have imagined even 10 years ago.

For generations – centuries, really - artists in the Western world have been despised as vagrants and low-order servants, shiftless eccentrics, dreamers, emotional basket cases and addicts, at best impractical and at worst morally dangerous. Their work may have been enjoyed, even prized, but they themselves seemed permanently marked as a kind of untouchable class by both the wealthy holders of power and the starchy keepers of bourgeois industry and respectability.

In 20th-century America, the public’s perception of artists as elite beggars, drains on the public and private coffers of prosaic, hard-working citizens, kept artists and their enterprises largely exiled from the circles of civic and economic influence – as generally disregarded as women by the bluff, tough, masculine money-makers and political power brokers.

And now? In the last decade or so, through the hard work of advocates, agencies and artists themselves, arts and culture  have begun to be more widely recognized as the vital economic and social forces they are. Giant money-generators and employers, irreplaceable educators, international ambassadors, community unifiers amd developers - the arts have been discovered to be all of these. And more: the key, along with all other creative professions, to our economic future.

How did they get to this point and how they should go on? The answer to both is education – not just the formal education of our children, which is indeed crucial, but the education of the public. Research, from RAND reports on the value of arts in schools to the economic-development studies of “The Rise of the Creative Class” author Richard Florida, has provided the tools; indefatigable public-awareness campaigns by leaders from Americans for the Arts down to local arts-council directors have provided the force. Slowly for a long time and now, at last, rapidly, they have been wearing away the blinders and barricades that have kept Americans from seeing the truth about the arts.

After perhaps a thousand years of advocates trying to persuade Western societies that art was valuable because it was good for the spirit, we’re seeing  two completely practical themes – the job-training benefits to children and the financial benefits to local economies - completely change how community leaders think about the arts.

Artists need not be afraid that positioning their work as a kind of grease for the wheels of capitalism will result in art losing its true value. Those capable of being moved by art always will be. But it’s absolutely essential that the very many who believe art has nothing whatever to do with them come to understand that art is, at least, important to their own prosperity. Their education must progress.

Luckily for advocates whose job it will be to continue that education, actor Tim Daly has discovered the next significant tool: technology.

America is in love with technology as an economic driver and as entertainment. And as Daly pointed out during his testimony at yesterday’s hearing,  ”Without art, there’s no iPod.”  It was a moment of head-smacking epiphany for some of us – what he meant was, without design, without artistic content, our beloved music players, computers, flat-screen TVs, CDs and DVDs would never have come about. No one would be scrambling to get cell phones with camera, game and internet entertainment functions or satellite radio with a zillion music stations or Wiis with their lifelike sports experiences or endless other products that those with artistic and creative skills have made more imaginative, exciting, effective, comfortable or beautiful.

Daly’s is a message that the American public – and American businesspeople and politicians - will understand: The arts create the cool, money-making products we want. Other ideas will likely emerge from the Education & Labor hearings this spring, but even if none did, this one might be powerful enough to take the arts movement to a whole new level.