A refusal to succeed

Fittingly, it was an education story that got me thinking about this.  The piece by Sam Dillon in yesterday’s New York Times was about Arne Duncan,  the Obama administration’s education secretary, wanting to push the reset button on failing schools by closing them down and starting them over – a tactic he used as CEO of the Chicago municipal school system.

The story ends with a quote from Bryan Hassel, an education consultant:

“A lot of these school turnarounds are going to fail because the work is so difficult,” Mr. Hassel said. “But as a nation, we’ll never have the capacity to do this work successfully until we make the commitment.”

Hassel’s words struck me, because I had never chanced to think of change in these terms before – that commitment is the heart of deliberate change.

And that’s the reason why so many people fail to be creative, because creativity is the result of deliberate change and deliberate change means hard, determined, don’t-give-up work.

It’s so easy to be inert. And fatalistic. And hopeless. It doesn’t demand anything of you except to stay slumped at your desk or on your couch and do as you’re told. Being inert also gives you permission to crab about what’s wrong as much as you want without actually trying to solve any of the problems that bug you. And if you ever go so far as to attempt a little creative change, inertia allows you to give up easily and say you knew all along it wouldn’t work.

I live in a city and state where inertia is the perpetual Zeitgeist. There are plenty of creative and committed individuals here, trying in their one- or few-person ways to transform the place into the vital, prosperous, exciting region they see in their dreams, but the prevailing mood is one of defeat.  We are resigned, here, to our loserhood. In fact – heresy alert! – I think we enjoy it.

Because it means we don’t actually have to collectively get up off our large butts and do something. What would be the point? We’re losers and nothing we do will ever change that. Loserhood is our brand and we’re perversely proud of it. We don’t demand the best of our leaders or schools or communities because we don’t want to ask the best of ourselves – which is to make hard decisions, stick with them and labor ceaselessly until we get the right results.

I guess we’re too scared and lazy to do that. So, apparently, Duncan and Obama are going to have to reinvent America without us. Well, so what? Every sturdy, beautiful, redone house needs a basement drain. We’ll be happy to take that role so we never ever have to climb the stairs.

You might say we’re so convinced we’ll fail that we’re … committed to it.

Photo by Kat

Ideas for rent

Few aspects of U.S. society need innovating more than the housing market. News about reckless subprime lending, bank failures and toxic assets has dominated the news for months now, but most of what we’ve heard has been focused on homeownership – who shouldn’t have been encouraged to try it, who has lost it and what to do with the thousands and thousands of foreclosed houses now unoccupied and decaying in every American city.

But another problem exists: the lack of affordable rentals for people who now can’t, or never could, consider owning a home.  Not only do we always have lots of people in need of better, safer, more convenient apartments, but now we also have big crowds of former homeowners in sudden need of places to lease … and local governments are tearing down dwellings as fast as they can.

Turns out the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation has already recognized the need to convert foreclosed houses and rundown properties into decent rental homes and has gotten creative about it. The foundation is funding projects that aim to preserve rentals while assisting displaced military personnel and the homeless, increasing energy efficiency and improving public transit to make rental home locations more usable and desirable. Twelve states and cities – Denver, Florida, Iowa, Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachussetts, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon/Portland, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington/Seattle - have received grants totaling $32.5 million, part of the foundation’s larger $150 million Window of Opportunity Initiative to preserve rental homes.

This sounds to me like an excellent opportunity to create an even bigger public-partnership between foundations and the federal government’s Job, Artists and green-job corps. Not only could our roads, bridges and other shared infrastructure be repaired and updated by the thousands of American workers in need of jobs, as the Obama administration has planned, but many distressed homes and apartment buildings could be, too. Construction, electricity and plumbing experts could make the dwellings solid and functional while artists of all kinds could make them and the lots they’re on safe and attractive through design and decoration.  

Maybe a sidecar program could allow the corps workers to coach new tenants on upkeep and repair of their improved abodes.  We sure need more efficient ways of creating a safer, better-housed and -employed nation – why not all three simultaneously?

Darwinism in arts and business

A story in the Akron Beacon Journal yesterday (which I found through a Crain’s Cleveland Business Morning Roundup e-mail), brought back to mind an arts-business issue that needs to be looked at squarely and often, but seldom is. It’s literally an issue of life or death. 

In the wake of the Carousel Dinner Theatre’s abrupt closing, reporter Kim Hone-McMahan talked to other Akron-area arts organizations about the drying up of their already-too-scarce financial resources. She quoted Mitchell Kahan, director and CEO of the Akron Art Museum, as noting that arts organizations in general are chronically undercapitalized.

That’s a comment I’ve heard other arts leaders make over the years and there’s no doubt that it’s true. Artists are known for struggling on with little more to work with than a bare room and their own ideas. It takes an almost miraculous simultaneity of luck and relentless, bruising effort for any individual artist or cultural group to be able to build a lasting business, whether for-profit or nonprofit.

Thousands of dedicated people all over the nation spend their lives trying to create or find dependable sources of money for the arts. And the fact is that, like any industry, the arts succeed or fail largely according to their artistic quality, business savvy and adaptibility to changing market conditions. But the assumption behind nonprofit arts, at least, has always been that their unique works and perspectives, including the cultural, intellectual and educational value of what they have to offer the community, should guarantee their survival even when they can’t support themselves.

The question this begs is: Does it endanger the whole herd to keep the weak ones alive?

In nature, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it’s the fittest – those with genetic advantages allowing them to reach food, procreate successfully and avoid being killed – who survive. Same thing in for-profit business, where everyone accepts that the market will kill off the companies that can’t compete.

But in the artistic world, which remains overwhelmingly nonprofit, it’s usual for companies not to be able to support themselves on their earnings alone. They constantly have to seek donations and grants to make up the difference – like deer who can’t get through the winter without food provided by animal lovers.

Deer fed by humans can live and continue to reproduce. Pretty soon, though, there are a lot of deer needing to share the food, not all of them strong or well-adapted to surviving the winter. Eventually, it becomes obvious that the animal lovers can’t provide enough nourishment to go around.

This is the point at which some communities hire sharpshooters to kill off a certain percentage of deer.  Many of us abhor this practice, but the only other choice is to limit the number of deer being born in the first place – which means not feeding the deer in the winter.

Either way, some deer are likely to perish.

If those of us who love the arts assume that growing numbers of arts and culture organizations are a good thing for a community – and we usually do – we’re going to have to confront this deer dilemma. And now would probably be a good time, because the deer chow we have left to give the herd isn’t going to last  through this bleak economic season. Some of our deer ones have already succumbed.

Should communities and private donors refuse to provide funding to new ventures that don’t partner and share services with other ventures, old or new? Should funders give only on condition that nonprofit arts groups develop lines of commercial products to sell in addition to their ars pro artis creations?  

Should we just assume, like the regular business world, that we’re better off losing the ones that die? Or should we keep dividing the sustenance we have into smaller and smaller portions, knowing that the whole arts population will weaken, maybe fatally? 

In the coming months, the new Obama administration may well pursue policies that affect arts group’s sustainability. Which direction do we want the future to go?