100 Years Ago

In the introduction to Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life, former NEA chair and current interim Chair Bill Ivey writes about piano sales in 1909: 364,545, “an impressive total in a country with a population of less than 100 million.” By 1934, “sales had plunged to just over 34,000 instruments.” Yes, you read that correctly: over a 90% drop in sales in twenty-five years. What had happened? Phonographs, radios and movies. “Through much of the nineteenth century,” Ivey writes, “the piano had served as the nation’s archetypal cultural hearth, and images of a family sing or an informal after-dinner performance of a classical piece by a young music student were staples of American domesticity. Then, the ability to sing or play music and, for that matter, drawing and the writing and recitation of poetry were considered everyday skills, integrated into family life as thoroughly as sewing or the canning of autumn garden produce.”

Music education embraced this trend, “following the rush toward cultural consumption by shifting its attention away from teaching young people to make music, mostly through ensemble singing, toward an alternative that could best be described as the intelligent enjoyment of music — that is, what came to me known as music (or art for that matter) appreciation….Henceforth, the requirement to draw, sing, act, recite, play, or otherwise perform in the arts would be replaced by some form of consumption… If we think of our expressive life as divided between culture we create and culture we take in, the commoditization of art pumped up consumption — the taking in or art — while simultaneously undermining art making.”

Patrick Overton describes this shift as being from “art as process, citizen as participant” to “art as product, citizen as patron,” and he calls for a reversal of this trend. I agree wholeheartedly. The <100K Project is not about creating arts organizations to provide events for small and rural communities (a sort of artistic Wal-Mart), but rather to reinvigorate the DIY spirit that once permeated our society. The emphasis on buying our art and entertainment from “specialists” has led to dependence and passivity. It’s led to just about everybody giving up the creative process because “I can’t sing,” or “I can’t draw,” or “I can’t read out loud.” It has removed the personal element from the creative act, the “gift” (to use Lewis Hyde’s term) that makes something “special” (to use Ellen Dissanayake’s term). Instead, what we have is a transaction between strangers. If you are looking for evidence that we are uneasy with this transaction between strangers, one need look no further than the magazine stand in the supermarket checkout line, where we are bombarded with entire magazines devoted to making us feel as if we actually know the “celebrities” from whom we buy our art. We’ve never met Brad Pitt, but thanks to People magazine, we think we know him. It is a poor substitute.

Likewise, arts appreciation is a poor educational substitute for hands-on experience. In the first chapter of Engaging Arts, co-editor Steven Tepper  examines the effects of demographics, educational level, geography, and hands-on arts education as they affect both arts attendance and arts participation. Of all of those factors, the most important by far for both attendance and participation is hands-on arts education. By far. And yet educators, myself included, continue to de-emphasize making art in favor of arts appreciation, arts literacy. And we’re upfront about this: we use as a one of the outcomes of these courses, which are ubiquitous throughout American universities, that students will be more likely to buy a ticket to an arts event. We are trying to create passive, dependent consumers, not creative citizens!

Why this is not only damaging to the arts (remember, experiential arts education increases attendance as well as participation) but to our society in general is described by Ivey: “Creativity, the handmaiden of hands-on arts participation, is now touted as the likely engine of America’s postindustrial,m postinformation economy. According to Daniel Pink, editor-at-large of Wired magazine [and author of A Whole New Mind], we are today entering a new age and a new economy, one that supercedes both the industrial age and the era of tech-enabled information. For Pink, leaders of the new economy will succeed through high concept and high touch, employing ‘the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention….”  New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman…agrees [in The World Is Flat], arguing that if one is to be a worker in the new global economy, you must ‘nurture your right-brain skills…’” Ivey concludes, “Old-fashioned, nineteenth century-style arts participation is a powerful incubator of creativity.”

If you have been following the reports coming from the National Endowment for the Arts, you will see data that seems to suggest that arts participation in the traditional, “benchmark” arts (classical music and jazz, theatre, dance, literature, visual art) is weakening, especially in the case of younger people. However, as Ivey writes, “If we center a new commitment to arts participation in everyday art making, creativity, and quality of life, we will not only restoire the lifelong pleasure of homemade art but will likely also seed a new generation of enthusiasts who will support America’s signature nonprofit cultural institutions well into the future.”

The <100K Project puts this commitment at the center of its mission. The leaders of the arts organizations that will be built must be interested not only in their own creative expression, but in facilitating and encouraging the creative expression of their fellow community-members, adults and children. This means a change inin the way these arts leaders are educated, creating a balance between development of their own artistic skills and development of the skills of faciltation and teaching. These leaders must make arts education a priority and not wait for the government to make a commitment to arts education in the schools — with No Child Left Behind, this has become increasingly unlikely (although President Obama seems to have a commitment to increasing arts education…but he has an awful lot on his plate at the moment). The future of the arts rests on our commitment to this part of our mission.

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Knowing the Numbers

I’ve been reading John Wood’s fascinating book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children. It is a book about how Wood, an important member of the Microsoft management team, resigned to start Room to Read, a non-profit that builds schools and libraries for poor areas in Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and other countries. I’d like to quote from the chapter “Building the ‘Microsoft of Nonprofits’,” in which Wood discusses the things he learned from Microsoft leader Steve Ballmer. He writes:

“A third aspect of Microsoft that I wanted to emulate was…being data-driven. The belief that everything should be measured, and that every business manager should study every bit of data available about his or her business, permeated Microsoft. It was not enough to know how your Windows NT sales were tracking against budget. You also had to know how they compared to last year, and the year before that, and be able to recite your YOY (year-on-year) growth rate off the top of your head. You had to know how your revenue compared to every one of your competitors’, and you were also expected to be able to benchmark yourself against other Microsoft subsidiaries. My team could have had a barn burner of a year, but when we then compared ourselves to Microsoft  Switzerland’s growth rate, we realized that we could do better still.

Many late nights were therefore spent studying the numbers.”

He then goes on to illustrate the point by describing a meeting between Ballmer, himself, and Paul the country manager for Thailand. Paul had mentioned that they had arranged to have all Windows NT certification exams translated into the Thai Language, which he said had dramatically improved the pass rate. The conversation went like this:

Steve: “So, what are the numbers? What percent of people passed the new Thai version of the test?”

Paul: Silence.

John: “It actually improved the pass rate to eighty percent.”

Steve: “So what? Is that good or bad? I don’t know, because I don’t know the worldwide pass rate, so I have no basis of comparison.”

John: “The worldwide pass rate is fifty-two percent. So in six months we’ve gone from one of the worst pass rates in the world to having one of the highest and being twenty-eight points above the worldwide average. The result is that we’ve gone from less than a hundred people in all of Thailand being certified on Windows NT to over a thousand.”

Steve smiled at me. He nodded to Paul. That was his signal to go on.”

Wood summarizes:

“Although Steve’s quizzes on the numbers could be tough, I knew that he did it for a reason. He wanted to test how much the managers cared about their business. If they were not passionate enough to have studied every facet of their operations, to such a degree that the numbers were seared into their brains, then these managers were not going to make it in Steve’s data- and performance-driven world. [italics mine]

Most arts people don’t know their numbers. They haven’t studied the research that has been prepared by agencies like the Wallace Foundation or the NEA, much less the reports prepared about the community in which they make a living. They don’t know the basics of population, demographics, geography, business climate, local governmental offices, statewide agencies, service organizations, religious organizations (see the book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life to find out why this is relevant), school arts instruction, and any number of other data that would help them make decisions. They operate mostly from intuition, faith in the value of what they are doing, and a vague sense of their own organization’s budget. As a result, when they stand in front of civic leaders, or local businessmen, or funders, or legislators, or congress and they make an argument about the social value of their work, it is mostly testaments of fervent belief peppered with a few vague anecdotes and a few “facts” from a couple poorly-designed studies of the arts. And the Steve Ballmer’s of the world listen to them as if they were listening to their own adorable children: aren’t they cute? and they want it so bad! Sure, we’ll raise your allowance a little.

It is time to get serious. We need to know the numbers backwards and forwards. We need to master the data. We need to be bilingual, speaking not only arts-speak, but also data-speak. If you “don’t do math,” as all-too-many arts majors whine as they face even the most basic math class, then get out of the way and let somebody else lead — you’re a drag on the field. If you find research reports “boring and tedious,” then step aside and let somebody lead who takes their field seriously. Until artists begin behaving like adults who run a business, they will be treated like children who have a hobby.

As a starting point, we need to pull this data together in one place. As part of the <100K Project, I intend to create a website with links to available information on the web. But I can’t do this on my own. I need volunteers — people willing to search for reports and provide basic summaries, people who will scour bibliographies to identify studies, people who will seek out books and magazine articles that pertain to rural arts. Once we have gathered this material, the next step is to create a curriculum that will utilize that material, and that must be learned backwards and forwards by those who wish to lead an arts organization for the <100K Project. Furthermore, a research report must be prepared before a single dollar is spent on a new project that will evaluate a community and gather the necessary data to assure the need and map out a path. In the business world, this is called “due diligence.”

Time to get serious about what we do.

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Value 1: The Focus is on Small and Rural Communities

“I guess in all my years, what I heard more than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.”

Sam Walton

To start off this post with a quote from Sam Walton, the King of Wal-Mart, is something I am loathe to do. As readers of my old blog, Theatre Ideas, know three of my most-read posts were called “The Wal-Marting of the American Theatre Part 1, 2, and 3,” in which I use Wal-Mart as a metaphor for everything that is wrong with the theatre. Nevertheless, Sam Walton’s battle is our own.

Conventional wisdom told Walton that a discount store in a small community wouldn’t be financially viable, and he proved them wrong. He did so by examining the business model and creating one that worked. Yes, part of that involved low wages and no benefits, but truth be told rural stores had been following that business model for decades on a small scale. No, what Walton did was lower prices by centralizing purchasing and leveraging the power of bulk buying, and devising a shipping system that kept his stores well-stocked with a wide variety of goods.

Similarly, conventional wisdom in the arts seems to be that in order to survive economically, arts organizations need to be in cities. An examiniation of the professional theatres in the Theatre Communications Group database, for instance,  show that nearly 60% of all TCG member theatres are in counties over 500,000, while 96% of American counties have populations of fewer than 500,000.  This urbanization of the arts has many negative effects, not the least of which is the lack of support for the National Endowment for the Arts. Most Americans value the arts, but most Americans have little access to them!

This project is focused on small and rural communities. When I initially submitted the grant to the NEA, I used communities with less 100,000 as the cutting-off point (thus, <100K Project). However, the longer I work on these ideas, the more I think that number needs to be lowered even further.

The business model I am developing rests on an arts organization being deeply embedded in the community, with roots in personal connections and broad involvement. While I will go into greater detail in later posts about the business model, the question in my mind that pertains to this post is at what point a community becomes too large for that sort of connection to be developed by a small staff. I don’t want to rely on advertising, but rather personal connection and word-of-mouth. That requires face-to-face communication.

One way to approach this might be to reverse conventional wisdom: start in the smaller communities to develop the model, and then gradually expand to larger communities. Perhaps start by choosing as protoypes communities under 25,000 and go from there.

In invite input, but I suspect that a real solid discussion will be enhanced by more detail about the business model. That will come next.

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