Update on arts and the national stimulus package

Americans for the Arts had this to say about the reinstating of $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts in the federal stimulus package passed by the House of Representatives Friday and signed yesterday by President Obama (there’s a 2 p.m. EST webinar to sign up for, too):

Arts Recovery Funds Restored in Economic Stimulus Bill
February 13, 2009—Today the House of Representatives voted 246 to 183 to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The bill includes $50 million in direct support for arts jobs through the National Endowment for the Arts and language that would have prevented museums, theaters, and arts centers from receiving stimulus funds was removed.

“It was not politics as usual in Washington, as the Congressional conferees’ final version of the bill seized the opportunity to provide much-needed stimulus support for the nation’s creative workforce. The National Endowment for the Arts will distribute $50 million of the stimulus funds to arts projects in all 50 states which specifically preserve jobs in the nonprofit arts sector that have been most hurt by the economic downturn.  Additionally, the final version of the stimulus bill further recognized the role the arts play in the overall U.S. economy by removing the Senate ban on state and local governments from using any of the recovery funds to benefit museums, theaters, and art centers,” said Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts.

Americans for the Arts will hold a webinar on this topic on Wednesday, February 18 at 2 pm. Free for professional members, it will update arts organizations on the economic stimulus package and other federal sources of arts funding.

To register for today’s webinar, click here and scroll down to the end of the first news story, where you’ll see the registration link at the end of the webinar announcement.

Some facts about the arts’ effect on the economy

An interesting comment was posted here over the weekend. The writer said he used to work for a consulting firm that assisted the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. He observed, “Bureaucratically funded arts endeavors remove dollars from the economy they [sic] do not add tax revenue directly.”

Wow. Where to begin? Well first, a little back story: On Friday, I posted a press release from the office of U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, stating that  the Congressman planned to hold hearings this spring on the economic and educational value of the arts. Miller’s staff has promised to forward to the Congressman some questions I e-mailed that afternoon in regard to these hearings; in the interim, I’m guessing that Miller’s decision to hold the hearings may be a reaction to the apparent elimination of some arts- and culture-related businesses from the list of those to be supported by the national stimulus package currently being considered by the U. S. Senate. Perhaps he’s interested in giving citizens, or at least his fellow elected officials, an accurate picture of the effects that arts have on learning and the economic health of communities.

But even if his intent is something completely different from that, the fact remains that the arts do have measurable effects on both education and the economy. 

Perhaps the commenter doesn’t realize that not all arts businesses are nonprofit. Broadway productions, the popular-music industry, most of the film industry, art galleries and auction houses, publishing houses, commercial and journalistic photography, graphic design - all these and more are for-profit, and immensely profitable they are, too.  

Perhaps he also doesn’t realize that even nonprofit arts organizations have a tremendous effect on local, regional and national economies through both direct and indirect economic impact. Like for-profits, nonprofits employ people and buy local services and products. They generate tourism, drawing visitors who not only buy tickets and paintings, but also pay for hotel rooms, parking, meals, drinks, souvenirs and other goods. Local residents buy many of those same things because of the arts; they also hire babysitters. 

In addition, excellent arts and cultural amenities help cities attract new businesses and help established businesses attract new employees.  

In the Cleveland area of Ohio, arts and culture generate over $1 billion annually in direct and indirect economic impact.  (Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, Northeast Ohio Arts and Culture Plan, May 2000). Nationally, they generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs and create $30 billion in government revenue – and that’s just the nonprofits. For every $1 billion of that arts and culture spending, nearly 70,000 full-time-equivalent jobs result. (Americans for the Arts, Economic Recovery & The Arts). 

(The Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit organization. Think it has no effect on the local – and national - economy?)      

 I won’t even go into the educational benefits of the arts here, but I hinted at the basics in my Feb. 5 post about ways that President Obama can promote American creativity.    

As the purpose of the national economic-stimulus package is not solely to generate tax revenue, anyway, but to help fund obvious economic sine qua nons such as education and to keep operational industries that employ people and provide needed products and services, I find it pretty bizarre of anyone to assert that arts and culture have no place in it.

It’s one of the most deeply ingrained and egregiously wrong myths of American society that the arts are a burden on the economy. The truth is that the arts are a large and vital part of the economy on all levels and that they enhance the educations on which our success as a nation ultimately depends.

How Obama can help America create a better civilization

The most important word in that title? ”Create.” It’s the key to our success. And the United States needs to be more successful in many ways.

That’s why at this moment – with a president in office who embodies the nation’s new attitude toward difference and change – I think America is, at long last, ready to begin the creative revolution it must go through to become the thriving, peaceful, stimulating, wise, caring and accomplished society that its citizens have always hoped it would turn out to be. 

I call it a revolution because a culture of creativity will turn the U.S. completely around, away from narrow, outmoded perspectives and failed ways of operating and toward a broader view that encourages people in every field of endeavor to imagine and experiment, discuss and collaborate – and then innovate. When we can embrace fresh ideas and support each other’s efforts, we will be able to solve a lot more of our problems.

How can President Obama lead us through this fundamental makeover? Americans for the Arts has made official recommendations to the new administration; what follow are the suggestions of other arts leaders, as well as some of my own. 

Education. As with any lasting change, education matters most.  But our educational system itself – what it teaches and how it teaches - desperately needs the same transformation as the rest of our culture. So it must be both the agent and the subject of change.

Like the military-style, 19th-century factories and workforces on which they were modeled, U.S. public schools still aim to turn out masses of identical products through a rote process. They largely emphasize conformity and uniformity - children stand in line, sit in rows, raise their hands to speak and are made to repress their natural inclinations to move around, explore and question.  They generally learn identical lessons in large groups, take identical standardized tests and are often strongly discouraged from deviating in any way from a predetermined norm. 

That may have been effective learning in an age when most people ended up working on assembly lines for rigidly structured corporations, but it doesn’t prepare today’s students for the flexible and adventurous thinking demanded by our 21st-century’information and service economy, where competition requires constant  reinvention of complex processes and products.  Even more important, a tool-and-die schooling makes most people bored, restless and miserable.

Our system ignores “the fundamental truth about how young people learn,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  “Clearly, refocusing U.S. education around creativity and creative engagement is central” to improving educational results.  

Studies, including the RAND Corporation’s significant 2004 Gifts of the Muse report, have shown that creative teaching methods and creative subjects help people learn better, enjoy themselves more, stay in school longer and develop the creative skills they need to lead successful, productive lives including, but not limited to, better employment. Creative disciplines such as the arts can provide the inspiration, stimulus and opportunities for discovery and self-expression that students often miss in standard curricula. Arts-related teaching methods - movement, building, illustration, composition, acting a role – can also help students better understand the concepts of their academic subjects.

In just one example cited by the Cleveland-based Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), young people attending Cleveland’s School of the Arts  – part of an extremely troubled public-school system – last year scored higher than Ohio statewide averages in eight types of Ohio proficiency tests; 100 percent of them passed their Ohio graduation tests. (Full disclosure: I work with CPAC as a free-lance writer and editor.) 

America needs more arts in its schools and more creative teaching methods. We also need better teachers.  Here’s what Obama could do to help:

•  As Robert Lynch of Americans for the Arts suggests, create a Secretary of Arts and Culture position, or the equivalent, to oversee and coordinate U.S. arts and creativity policy and initiatives
• Direct that official to work with the U.S. Department of Education on a task force to develop what Tepper sees as needed curriculum standards for creative instruction, to give state education departments guidelines for what methods to use, what to achieve and how to measure success 
• Fund and foster teacher training in creative classroom methods through community consortiums of arts, science, technology and arts-education organizations similar to Cleveland’s annual Summer Teacher Institute  
• Encourage, through Department of Education funding for teacher salary enhancements, the abandonment of tenure and the adoption of merit-based pay determined by administrative, peer, parent and student review 
• Establish an Artists Corps, as Lynch recommends, to provide jobs and job-training to artists of all ages in the effort to improve America’s infrastructure – but make it one section of a permanent  Service Corps offering environmental, technological, educational and entrepreneurial services to communities, and jobs and job-training for retirees, students between high school graduation and college enrollment and adults in career or life transitions in need or desire of employment, new skills or contributing to society. Coordinate the different sections’ initiatives to encourage collaborative programs, such as having artists and environmental workers provide creative and green-practices training to businesses

Which brings us to the next area of change …

Organizational culture. Like our schools, our other organizations – from bureaus and agencies to companies and unions - tend be structured like the  Army: highly regimented, top-down outfits with their own strict class systems, ingrained operational methods and culture of absolute power at the top and absolute obedience everywhere else.

The Army is not known for its creativity. Neither is the Navy, where insiders describe their institution as “over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.”  But they have missions vastly different from civilian groups, which must use the imagination and knowledge resources of all their members or risk being ineffective, inefficient, outmoded and – in the case of business enterprises – uncompetitive and eventually bankrupt. 

If American education becomes more creative and sends more inventive, unrepressed people into the world, chances are that our other organizational structures will change, too. But with all this bailout money being handed to dangerously flawed corporations and the president reevaluating the usefulness of government entities and programs, now seems a good time for Obama to urge some new organizational creativity by:

• Making a bailout contingent on the internal restructuring of receiving companies, to allow greater employee input, eliminate reprisals against whistleblowers and create transparency in communications and reporting
• Ditto for government departments and agencies, which can be made more creative and open while being streamlined to reduce spending and waste 
• Making creativity a goal for all government departments by directing them to work with the new Secretary for Arts and Culture and/or an expanded National Endowment for the Arts on incorporating arts, design and cultural heritage components into U.S. transportation infrastructure, health and human services programs and education, as Americans for the Arts director Lynch and CPAC president Tom Schorgl recommend (for more on the NEA, see Matt Charboneau’s Geniocity blog)
• Capitalizing on the unions’ delight at being included in the national agenda once more by urging a creative modernization of their missions and rules, especially as regards teacher tenure and arts unions’ restrictions on the ways their members’ work can be used. Theater companies, for instance, would be able to support themselves more effectively if Actors Equity Association permitted to them record their own professional stage performances for sale as CDs and DVDs       

Which leads to a final creative area …

Entrepreneurship. This country will never get anywhere if creative individuals and their endeavors don’t get more support of all kinds. As things stand now, people with ideas that will innovate society and the economy face a desperate struggle to get noticed and encouraged with advice, seed money and start-up resources. Whether they’re one-person projects, nonprofit organizations or for-profits, smaller enterprises generate billions of dollars in economic impact, create jobs, provide needed services and products and inject fresh energy and ideas into communities. But only if they don’t die a-borning.

To help, Obama should:

• Encourage public-private partnerships among banks, credit unions, foundations, industry associations and private investors to seek out creatively promising individuals and embryonic projects and provide them with grants, loans, mentoring, resources or combinations of all four. These services should not be open to the high-growth-potential tech start-ups exclusively favored by venture capitalists and incubators (See Will Limkemann’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• Change any tax restrictions preventing nonprofits, including arts groups, from supporting themselves by selling products derived from, or related to, their own work and missions
• Support revisions to intellectual property law, especially copyrights, which can discourage creativity by preventing entrepreneurs, artists and others from sharing ideas and work, Tepper suggests (See Peter Friedman’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• And because creativity depends on the even bigger and wider flow of ideas that comes from intermixing peoples, Tepper says, change American immigration policy to permit greater freedom of cultural exchange and increase entrepreneurship

We and our president have a big job ahead of us, revolutionizing America. It’ll be hard. But because it’s creative, it’ll be fun, too.

NEA loses its head, but keeps its health

        Dana Gioia is going back to his poetry.

Jacobs/AP

The National Endowment for the Arts, which he led as chairman for five years, may thus go headless for a short time. But chances are, it won’t be gutted again any time soon.

The agency that Gioia took over in 2003 was an eviscerated mess. Fourteen years earlier, conservatives – famously led by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and other politicos interested in scoring points with members of their Bible-Belt base – had diverted public attention away from issues of real national importance such as  the Iran-Contra affair  and the growing national debt by staging a moral uproar over the NEA’s funding of what they deemed blasphemous and obscene art by such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

This overt and protracted challenge to the NEA’s ability to decide what art was important and excellent culminated in 1990, with the trial of the NEA Four - performance artists including Karen Finley who sued the NEA over grants for which they had been recommended by the agency’s own peer-review process, but were denied by then-NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer because of the controversial subject matter of their work. The case, National Endowment of the Arts v. Finley,  ultimately went to the Supreme Court, where artistic freedom lost in a ruling that supported Congress’s 1990 criteria that the NEA uphold ”decency and respect” in choosing art and artists to be funded.

Though the ACLU found the ruling to be “essentially meaningless,” it nonetheless resulted in the NEA getting out of the business of directly funding artists.

This was the mud- (and chocolate, if you know Karen Finley) spattered ring into which Gioia walked: in one corner,  the inflamed public, stirred up by politically powerful and self-righteous leaders making an easy moral target of art that most Americans had never even seen; and in the other, a bruised and disillusioned national arts community, their artistic honesty chilled to the bone by the NEA’s politicization by the right.

Artists had learned a hard lesson about public funding – that when public money is involved, limits on freedom of expression will be imposed. Gioia didn’t make the mistake of trying to persuade artists otherwise. Instead, the poet-businessman set about finding a role for the NEA that would still benefit the arts and artists without alarming taxpayers.

He discovered two: national promoter of arts education and supporter of state arts agencies. Gioia turned the NEA into a benign patron of public learning about nonthreatening classical art, creating touring programs and exhibitions on Shakespeare and American art treasures that no doubt seemed bland and compromised to the avant garde, but reassured citizens that an education in the arts was a good and valuable thing for their children.

By providing money to state arts agencies, Gioia safely distanced the NEA from the political dangers of directly selecting artists to fund and instead put the money into the hands of grassroots experts who could do the job more effectively because they knew best how to both honor, and gradually expand the boundaries of, taste and tolerance in their immediate communities.

It took wisdom, patience and subtle creativity to rebuild the NEA in an image that is both pleasing to the average American and quietly supportive of the nation’s artistic frontiers. Gioia did a good job. Because of him, the NEA has regained its health and may be able to serve the arts, artists and the country in more adventurous ways over the next four years. May he write in peace for many years.

Americans for the Arts working with Obama team on policy

Not just a place at the table, but an office in the halls of power.

Robert Lynch envisions this for the arts. For months, he has worked with Barack Obama’s transition team to pinpoint the ways in which arts and culture can help and be helped in the new president’s plan to rescue the economy.

He thinks change is coming.

 “I feel like we’ll be listened to, and we’re not going away,” said Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, a research and advocacy organization. “I’m very pleased with the access we’re getting. It gives me optimism.”  

Not groundbreaking, but “groundsaving” is how Lynch described the recommendations that he and his organization have made to the Obama team – a set of practical tactics that would stabilize and strengthen the arts and cultural sector while drawing on artists’ expertise to improve education and community life around the nation.

The nine recommendations aim to: provide community teaching and mentoring jobs for artists, as well as arts-job training, affordable health care and unemployment insurance; increase development grants for neighborhood cultural projects, art districts and cultural facilities; boost funding for federal cultural agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts that support local arts agencies and their grants and services for local artists; and encourage state transportation departments to work with state arts agencies on providing more artist commissions for creative design, public artworks and historic preservation-projects in transportation infrastructure.

The point of increasing government funding for arts and culture is not to make the sector more dependent on federal money, Lynch said, but to give it an important tool: the lever of official approval. Being deemed worthy of a grant by the government helps artists and cultural groups persuade audiences and private donors to support them, too.  

That’s not a new idea, but the last recommendation comes close. It calls for the creation of a senior-level post in the Obama administration for an arts official, someone who would coordinate arts and cultural policies and guide arts-related initiatives stemming from federal agencies that deal with such issues as tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property and broadband access.

To have for the first time a senior policy person in the White House “who can connect the dots … and truly represent the breadth and strength of the arts that is already there,” would be pretty close to groundbreaking, Lynch said.

Though he’s most concerned right now with restoring arts and culture to better health, Lynch does have an eye on the arts frontier. He sees new and creative ways for nonprofits to sustain themselves by being more entrepreneurial and blending their nonprofit mission with for-profit activities, as the Metropolitan Opera has by video-recording its performances to screen for paying audiences in local movie theaters.

He also sees an “explosion” of artworks that will take advantage of new technologies, and the development of new art forms based in folk culture and crafts that will increase the public’s consumption of art.

“I think that’s going to be what really helps the arts through this economic downturn,” Lynch said.

But a sympathetic president can’t hurt. Said Lynch of the transition team, “I’ve really been impressed with their receptiveness.”