Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
What makes a city a center of creativity? Probably not panel discussions….
For an event that purported to be about imaginative thinking, the 2010 Creative Voices Summit held Monday at Cleveland, Ohio’s downtown Idea Center was a thoroughly left-brain kind of exercise.
A panel of experts opined, dissected, compared and contrasted. The moderator probed. The audience queried and deduced. And everybody analyzed.
The final score? Statistics cited: 7. Problems rehashed: 26. Models examined: 832. Original ideas: zip. As panel results go, not surprising , but still profoundly frustrating for anyone who had dared to hope that a big roomful of city arts, education, design and urban-planning whizzes would produce the kind of radically inventive brainstorming that everyone in attendance seemed to believe troubled cities need.
If such a hopeful person had stared at the crowd a bit more shrewdly, he/she might have realized that the summiteers were nearly all heads or staff members of traditional institutions such as universities and schools, government bodies and nonprofit arts organizations: in other words, bureaucracies. What do bureaucracies famously do best? Rely on safe precedent. Construct microscopically detailed, obstructive rules and processes that generally cause at least as many problems as they solve. Exhaust people of vision and initiative by miring them in tar pits of technicalities and other senseless requirements. Thwart creativity.
Yet leaders of bureaucracies are the ones who routinely get called up for committees and task forces and and civic discussions dedicated to effective problem-solving. And what do they do when they get there? Talk in buzz phrases such as “human-capital development” and “right-sizing” and “paradigm change” about what the problems are and what models have been successful in other places.
Is there really anybody left who doesn’t know what the problems are? Some hibernating moles who haven’t heard the circular litany of joblessness, poverty, horrific schools, crime, empty/decaying buildings and homes, lead poisoning, brownfields, strapped governments, failing or fleeing corporations, brain drain, joblessness … ? Anyone in the Rust Belt who hasn’t heard that Austin/Seattle/Providence/Philly/Chicago/anywhere but here has a creative solution that our pathetic burgs need to borrow and replicate?
Does it make us creative to borrow someone else’s idea?
To be fair: As panels go, this summit’s was well intentioned and rather better than usual. It featured Terry Schwarz of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and Mayor Donald Plusquellic of Akron — two of Northeast Ohio’ s more adventurous and witty civic activists — as well as Carol Coletta of CEOS for Cities and the National Public Radio show Smart City, and Ronald Berkman, the new president of Cleveland State University. Edward Hill, CSU’s lively and peripatetic dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs, moderated the event, which was presented by the CSU Center for Arts and Innovation and ideastream.
“Around” the summit topic — as bureaucrats currently love to say — of what it means to be a creative city, a few tangy quips were made. During a lengthy debate about the possible inherent snobbishness of Richard Florida’s “creative class” phrase and whether it implies that those not belonging to it are perforce part of an “uncreative” class, Plusquellic joked, “We do have an ‘uncreative class.’ They listen to Rush Limbaugh.” Schwarz compared the current “authenticity” fad (the conviction that unique old buildings, independent shops and restaurants, homegrown talents and a city’s own heritage are de facto better and more desirable than chain enterprises, cookie-cutter office parks, etc.) to middle school, where everybody absurdly obsesses about being cool. She also delivered the best line of the whole event in an exchange with the notoriously out-of-the-box Plusquellic, serenely noting, “I believe in recklessness as an aspect of public policy.”
But in spite those two, the Creative Voices Summit resulted mostly in the kinds of self-defeating contradictions with which Cleveland has become synonymous. The impulse to encourage toleration of new ideas and enlist the creativity of the entire community ran up against the conventional wisdom about playing to the area’s strengths, a policy that has so far encouraged Northeast Ohio leaders to put all their financial eggs in the basket of bio- and Internet technology, much as they did with the basket of steel 100 years ago. The recognition that improved education is a must for creativity and economic success got tangled up with the notion that other cities have succeeded creatively in spite of terrible school systems. The idea that creativity works best when it isn’t forced to be product-driven disappeared in a wave of enthusiasm about timely commercialization.
So even though the panel learnedly and entertainingly re-revealed all the problems that Rust Belters know they need to creatively address, not a single imaginative solution – not one original, takeable step — was suggested by anybody. Well, maybe this will count: Instead of holding panel discussions, why not convene local artists, scientists, engineers and philosophers in a room, give them a specific problem to solve and 24 hours in which to do it? For the cost of some box lunches and a bottomless coffee urn, you’d probably get some real — and really creative – solutions.
Creative people in search of access
A bunch of us Clevelanders had an interesting discussion last night down by the Cuyahoga River.
A crowd of artists and other creative-community members gathered at SPACES, a nonprofit gallery, to hear a panel of local arts journalists talk about how they do their jobs, how the processes and constraints of those jobs have changed in the digital age and the current economy, and what arts people can and should do to get their news and work before the reading/watching/listening public. Sponsored by the COSE Arts Network, the panel included Ideastream (WCPN/90.3 FM NPR) “Around Noon” producer Dave DeOreo; Scene magazine arts editor Michael Gill; Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt; and me.
Eventually, the podcast will be available and I’ll provide a link so you can experience the whole wide-ranging discussion. But what interested me the most about it was this sort of collective epiphany the group seemed to have – the realization that, even with the Internet putting public access in reach of anyone with a website, an e-mail account or a social network, it’s clear that gatekeepers still control whose creative work gets widely seen or heard. And that there will always be gatekeepers of some kind, as long as humans have mass communication. And that that, believe it or not, is a good thing.
These days, many of those choosing the information to disseminate are self-appointed. Individuals with little or no training in communications, they blog, they tweet, they post stuff on their personal sites and Facebook pages in a breathtaking and clamorous display of free speech. It’s a heady feeling for all of us to sense that we can reach the entire human race with a few clicks and keystrokes.
But even if every one of us on the planet ends up with a blog someday, most of us likely still won’t have real access to the public. That’s because access comes through influence, and influence comes from the ability to reach a consistently large number of people. And what consistently draws a large number of people?
Expertise and useful, reliable, entertaining content.
What came out during the discussion was that artists and others still want and need the validation of their work that comes from being covered by a reporter, host or critic who really knows something about a field and commands wide public respect because of it. Which means, in most cases, that media professionals, not citizens journalists, are going to continue to be the people who decide what gets written or talked about in the media, no matter what form the media take in future.
This is not to imply in any way that there aren’t a lot of knowledgeable, talented individuals out there whose blogs and tweets are informative and worth reading. But unless they can build and keep a sizable amount of public influence, theirs will still be single voices among billions of others on the planet, all vying for attention and each drawing only a handful of followers.
Getting reviewed or featured by one of these communicators won’t get anybody much traction with the general population. Who among the general population has time to search through a billion different amateur or near-amateur news outlets?
The fact remains that, just as people want trained teachers in their classrooms rather than random residents of the community, so humanity needs and wants professional critics and news people to separate the worthwhile from the endless amount of mediocrity we have no time to sift through for ourselves. Creative people and those interested in creative work will, as always, often disagree with what gets chosen. They will also always have the right – and, increasingly, the means - to seek out for themselves what they consider excellent. But to reach the largest number of news consumers who understand and care about their work, artists and arts communities can’t do better than to work with successful professional media.
Let’s hope some of those media survive.