Close Read: State Arts Policy: Trends and Future Prospects

So... let's say you're an enterprising young lad or lass interested in arts advocacy and the State of the Union vis-a-vis the arts in this country.  Well, as you may or may not know, there are quite a lot of studies, white papers and other policy bits and bobs out there for your digestion.  Last week for a writing project, I was looking into economic impact studies on the arts in America and urban planning and I thought you know, this stuff is interesting, and I think my readers will dig it. But rather than just link to the studies, I thought we could make our way through them, digest and discuss and react to the implications of them etc.

Our first study comes from the good folks at the RAND Corporation.  They have a whole branch dedicated to studying the arts, and many of the studies we'll be reading will almost certainly come from them. The first is State Arts Policy: Trends and Future Prospects.  You can download it here (PDF).

Away we go.

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ix-xii.

This is actually the fourth of RAND's State Arts Policy analyses.  The other ones focused on who is served by State Arts Agencies, how they interact with other areas of government (they don't) and how they can play a role in creating the next generation of audiences through comprehensive arts education.  This study is about the future of State Arts Agencies, how they're changing and why.

ix-xii:

In the summary Julia F. Lowell lays out some key points that she returns to again and again.  Basically, times are changing, what we need from SAA's is changing, and they are changing to meet these new needs by embracing three key strategies:

1. Expanding their missions to include more state residents
2. Strengthening their position within state government
3. widening their portfolio of policy tools beyond grantmaking

She then lays out RAND's vision of the future of SAA's.  That they will, essentially, move beyond grantmaking and funding arts as their primary objective (while still doing some funding) and instead work to "connect networks of individuals and organizations organized around issues relevant to the arts," including building political and social coalitions, gathering and distributing information, identifying opportunities for artists etc.  In other words, they will become less about $$$ and more about information distribution, artist services and social organizing.

(I have to admit, when I read this-- it's laid out right there in the first paragraph-- my reaction was.. uh oh, this does not sound good. But it gets a little more complicated than that, and so I'll return to my response in a bit)

Why should SAAs move beyond arts subsidies?  Lowell lays out two main problems with arts subsidies as they currently work: first, not that many people go to see the arts that SAAs are subsidizing, and most of those are white, wealthy and well-educated.  Second, the number of organizations and people clamoring for grants has expanded much faster than SAAs budgets has (later on they also make the point that the number of arts organizations has expanded beyond audience demand as well, but that's actually the topic of a different study).

Lowell states that SAAs are moving beyond the "if you build it, they will come" attitude that marked their first forty years of existence.  This is a good thing. But I would hesitate to call what SAAs have built over the last forty years a failure.  If anything, it looks quite a bit like success, albeit of a limited kind. I know this is just an issue of framing, but the fact of the matter is this: government support for the arts has helped create a large number of arts organizations where there weren't any before.  That's a good thing.  In fact, they've been successful enough that demand for SAA resources is outpacing SAA growth. That's also a good thing.

The problem at this point is that the audiences served by SAA-supported arts organizations is limited (primarily white, wealthy, well-educated) and shrinking.  So what's necessary here are to take the next steps to correct that problem and continue building forward.  In other words, I don't think that the last 40 years of SAA activity are a failure built on faulty assumptions but rather that times and community needs have changed and its (well past) time for SAAs to change with them. We took some good first steps, and then got stuck and its time to move again.

Lowell goes on to say that SAAs are meeting this challenge by expanding their mission to look at ways to increase participation in the arts. We'll get to those in a bit.

The second strategy is forging closer ties within government.  This is definitely very much a good thing.  SAAs are moving towards trying to get their mission accomplished via other agencies, integrating arts support into other areas of government etc. This is also one of the core values of Obama's Arts Policy, and if I may just briefly exposit on it: There are other agencies better suited to fund the arts in particular ways that the NEA or SAAs.  HUD is better equipped to fund arts-based real estate (capital campaigns etc.), the Department of Education is more suited to funding arts education programs etc.  SAAs are moving towards a more setting-of-policy / coordination role.  I think that paradigm shift is going to lead to real breakthroughs in arts support in this country.

The third strategy is using non-grant-making tools.  And here is where the uh-oh comes up again, so let me explain.  SAAs have to use non-grantmaking tools, its a change built out of necessity because they are underfunded.  Lowell points out that even if they had increased budgets, they would still be inadequate to funding the sheer huge amount of arts organizations out there, writing:

 "tools such as convening, matchmaking, advocating, and information gathering are often better suited to achieving statewide goals in areas such as arts education and development of the creative economy, where the ability to form broad-based partnerships and leverage resources is essential"

To which I can only ask... really?  Matchmaking between an arts org and other groups is better suited to achieving statewide goals in, say, arts education than just going ahead and having the state fund some arts education?  I think the answer is clearly "no".  The issue goes back to pragmatic realities... it's not that matchmaking and information gathering are "better suited' period but rather than they are "better suited" given that SAA budgets are likely to remain meager for the forseeable future and that even if their budgets are increased, if they're increased following RAND's vision for the future their grantmaking capabilities will not increase at the same pace. I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing, and it actually gets to something that doesn't really get mentioned a lot in the study thus far: the Federal Government's role in all of this.  If SAAs want to move their missions away from grantmaking and funding, but there's no increased Federal Government support to make up for the gap, they'll be creating the next generation of audiences while arts organizations and venues are going out of business all around them.  

I am definitely open to the idea that SAAs should move away from funding, that they may be better suited to accomplish other goals, but absent increased subsidies for the arts elsewhere, it might cause a whole mess of trouble.

These are the other goals RAND envisions SAAs pursuing (this is all quoted from the study, their quotes are in bold, my commentary is after in regular type):

- Increasing their support for individuals and organizations that work in areas aligned with state government priorities, such as youth arts education and development of the creative economy

Wow. This is a tricky one.  I guess as artists we can't expect the government to give us money and not prioritize its own goals and interests.  In fact, our insistence that the gov't just hand over the cash and let us do what we want with it may be one of the reasons that SAAs and the NEA seem so distant and irrelevant to the rest of the government that they're a part of.  At the same time, I get twitchy when I read stuff like this.  Youth arts education isn't art, it's arts education. Development of the creative economy isn't art, it's economic development.  Many SAAs and the NEA were set up to fund the making and showing of art not the teaching of art or the usage of art for economic development.  Again, as I wrote earlier, there are other organizations better suited to funding this stuff, and SAAs and the NEA should be involved in designing those programs, but I'm not sure they should be doing them themselves. 

- intensifying their efforts to expand arts participation

Great.

- becoming advocates and information resources for the arts community on such broad policy issues as health insurance

Also great.

- leveraging their resources by participating in statewide networks of individuals and organizations addressing particular issues

This one is really vague and I have no idea what it means. I think it means something like acting like a statewide community organizer for artists when necessary. But I'm really not sure. 

- streamlining their grantmaking process and reducing their financial support for selected organizations and activities

Well, if they're going to do all of the above and their budgets aren't changing, this will be necessary.  But I also wonder... is there a way to make the grants offered more effective?  I think about the people in theatre I talk to who bitch about large institutions gobbling up all of the arts subsidy money, for example.  A $50,000 grant to MTC and a $50,000 grant to The Civilians, for example, have completely different effects because of the size of the organization. I'm not arguing that the government should stop subsidizing large arts organizations, but there might be some way to rethink how they're doled out.

On the last page of the summary, Lowell lays out that there's serious risk in what she's advocating: "Some long-standing grantees may find their SAA grants reduced or eliminated... these grantees may no longer be willing to support their SAAs before their state legislatures".  This seems weird to me, tell me here if I'm being bonkers.  The risk involved in SAAs cutting funding to their usual grantees is that those grantees might get pissed and not support the SAA when the SAA needs it.  To me, this reveals an underlying problem with the report.  The purpose of SAAs is to support the arts and encourage participation in them, but as this sentence reveals, this study is (at least at times) more concerned with the interests/needs of SAAs than the artists they support. The problem with the SAAs cutting funding for longstanding grant recipients is that the longstanding grant recipients may face increased financial trouble as a result not that they might throw a hissy fit and withdraw their support for state arts funding. But the former problem isn't mentioned at all in the summary.  

Now obviously its a bit more complicated than that. If SAAs are eliminated entirely, it doesn't serve artists' needs at all etc. etc. and so forth. I'm just saying that at times in this study, there's a lack of concern for the very thing that SAAs are supposed to be supporting. Even if you make the argument (which I actually think is more accurate) that SAAs are there to support the general citizenry via the arts (in other words using the arts as a way of enriching the lives of the public, be it culturally, economically, educationally etc.) it would still be like talking about the Department of Education and ignoring the interests of teachers.

That's it for today. Tomorrow we'll tackle pgs. 5-10: Strategy 1: Expanded Mission!

Comments

[Andrew]

Thanks, Isaac--this is very interesting and important stuff, and I would never have found/read it on my own.

[RLewis]

I agree that this is terrific info’ to make available, but I do worry about this one opinion, “I guess as artists we can't expect the government to give us money and not prioritize its own goals and interests.” I mean, I’m all for prioritizing, but if we put education and economy at the top of the list, do we end up with only social-service theater?

Why not discuss a meaningful, decent and varied quality of life as a priority? Why not discuss the propaganda of theater that makes any city known to all as a great place to live and/or visit? Why isn’t the opportunity that theater provides for self-reflection and identification a priority? Why aren’t the many, many cultural forums for illuminating community issues and national debate through live performance a priority? Why isn’t the intrinsic value of art as a tool for understanding and identification of common pursuit a priority? As we become more and more disconnected in realtime, isn’t just seeing basic humanity live before us a priority?

I could continue this list of really important priorities that, though maybe less test-able or measurable, are vehemently aligned with city, state and fed’ priorities; so why all the talk about education and social services that are already covered in other govt’ agencies and already receive the bulk of govt’ funding? Have we just given up on making our case for art-for-art’s-sake? I know, we’ve been all through this before, and before, and before, but I just couldn’t let this go unquestioned.

[Parabasis]

Richard,

I agree with what you're saying here, but I do think that a successful argument for the arts (from a practical perspective here) involves both an intrinsic benefits and a secondary benefits argument. RAND has another study on that called GIFTS OF THE MUSE which I'll hopefully get around to blogging my way through later.