Americans for the Arts has a great plan – now let’s expand it

Americans for the Arts has posted a new strategic plan. Based on the results of an ”environmental scan” – or survey of the organization’s constituents and stakeholders - it identifies issues of concern to artists, arts organizations and arts service groups that must shape how and for what results AFTA needs to work.

The top concern is money. No surprise there – finding or earning sufficient bucks has always been the arts’ worst chronic problem and now that the economy has gone deep south, money is everyone’s biggest worry, whether artist or Philistine. But AFTA’s new plan also codifies trends that have been changing the arts sector for at least a decade: the arts’ rising public reputation as an educational, economic and community-revitalization force; the move toward better business practices and leadership in the arts sector; the arts industry’s newfound political clout (based on its proved community impact) and its willingness and ability to use that clout; and the crucial interrelated needs to keep the arts thriving and further heighten public awareness of their value.

The arts – which have always been controversial in a nation founded by people who largely thought them either sinful or trivial - serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine of American social politics. Are we well off, relaxed, feeling indulgent about our liberties and other people’s welfare? We support the arts. Are we frightened, financially pinched, seeking control over a world full of random threats? We punish and suppress the arts. Their fate reveals the American Zeitgeist at any given moment.

Except for now. For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, the U.S. is in desperate circumstances and people aren’t using the arts as a whipping boy or a Salem witch on whom to vent their misplaced, panicky vengeance. Instead, communities across the country are turning to the arts as a solution for many ills from poor school attendance and test scores to falling property values and tourism rates.

This is beyond hopeful. In fact, it’s revolutionary and it shows that arts leaders’ patience and hard, often discouraging, work on behalf of their industry is at long last paying off. After decades of struggling to devise the means of measuring and proving the arts’ value, of persuading business and political leaders that arts mean better educations, better workers, healthier commerce, more jobs, more wealth, improved communities and happier, more fulfilled citizens (and voters), arts leaders have got the attention of the American public.

They must not ever lose it. An essential part of that perpetual task will be to demonstrate that the arts are not some freakishly different kind of activity, not an enclave of disturbing wackos or erudite elites, but simply the most vivid and freeing example of the creativity that belongs to all humans by biological heritage and that drives every field of endeavor. If you read the AFTA plan and substitute the word creativity for arts all the way through, you get a more accurate vision of the bigger goal we all have to help our nation achieve: a greater understanding, deeper appreciation and increased practice of creativity of every kind.    

The arts are of, by and for all of us because creativity is us. So with the arts as creativity’s ambassadors, let’s take the revolution beyond the realms of  music, image, performance and literature and change the U.S. even more profoundly, to a nation that sees and values the promise of creativity in all of its citizens, communities and pursuits.