Artsculture

A Tyee Series

Arts Groups: Surviving the Culture Change

Tight budgets, shifting audiences demand creative responses. Chew on these.

By Diane E. Ragsdale, 29 Jul 2009, TheTyee.ca

Diane Ragsdale

Diane Ragsdale: Relevance is never guaranteed.

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Also in this series:
Arts Groups: Surviving the Culture Change

[Editor's note: At a moment when B.C. arts groups are threatened with a 37 per cent cut in provincial government funding, surviving and evolving is ever more on the minds of those who work in the arts field. This article and two to follow are from a recent address by Diane Ragsdale to the Vancouver Arts Summit hosted by the Alliance for Arts & Culture and 2010 Legacies Now at the Vancouver Public Library. Ragsdale, an associate program officer for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation prefaced her remarks by saying her views "are personal" and not necessarily those of her employer; that she was offering a U.S. perspective "as that's the reality I know"; and that, having worked 15 years in arts groups, she has "extraordinary respect for the hardworking and resilient leaders and staffs of arts organizations".]

About three and half years ago, I attended a retreat with leaders of a dozen orchestras, at which one lamented, likely reflecting the sentiments of more than a few in the room, "I feel like I'm the captain of the Titanic, and there's an iceberg ahead. But rather than being on top steering the ship, I'm in the bowels shoving coal in the furnace. I'm afraid if I stop shoveling coal we'll run out of steam. But I know that if I don't start steering the ship soon we're going to hit an iceberg."

We'll come back to the coal shoveling later, but first I want to ask: What's this iceberg?

About 14 years ago I was teaching Intro to Theatre at a small public university and on the first day of class each term I would ask the 120 or so students to raise their hands if they had ever seen a professional theatre production.

About 10 hands would go up.

I would then say, "Raise your hand if you would like to see one." Fifteen or 20 hands would go up.

Remember, this was before podcasting, blogging, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and iPhones revolutionized communication and social networking.

So, I would ask of the remaining students, "Why wouldn't you want to go to the theatre?" The answer was generally something along the lines of, "I've gone this long without seeing a play, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything."

These students did not have direct personal experience with "The Theatre" or, for that matter, "The Opera" "The Symphony" or "The Ballet."

I won't be telling you anything that you have not observed first hand when I say that the fine arts are facing a society that is markedly different, and a consumer that is markedly different, from those faced 40 years ago. In the U.S. this is due to cuts in funding for the arts in K-12 education, generational shifts and economic divides, increasing diversity in cities and towns across the U.S., a trend towards anti-intellectualism, changing tastes and aesthetics, the culture wars, increased competition for people's leisure time (as a result of both many more direct and substitute competitors), urban sprawl, and the decline in the quality and quantity of arts coverage in the mainstream media.

And yes, on top of all of these forces and others, over the past decade plus, and at an ever-increasing clip, new media technologies have begun to shift the relationships between people, space and time, and change the ways that people create, consume, commune, and communicate.

This is the culture change to which I am referring. And what are the implications for the arts?

'Arts have become marginal'

Russell Willis Taylor of the Washington, D.C.-based National Arts Strategies said to me a few years ago, when I asked her what were her greatest concerns for the arts, that she was troubled by the fact that arts organizations in the U.S. can't easily explain to people why they matter.

This concern was echoed at the 2008 National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, Colorado, where more than 2,000 arts organizations participated in a 21st Century Town Hall Meeting for the Performing Arts. At the closing meeting, the following issue was identified as number one: "Our communities do not sufficiently perceive the value, benefits, and relevance of the arts, which makes advocacy and building public support for the arts a challenge at every level."

And in the August 2006 issue of Inside Arts, Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was quoted saying,

"...the primary issues facing the American arts at present are not financial. They are cultural and social. We have a society in which the arts have become marginal. We are not producing another generation of people who attend theatre opera, symphony, dance, jazz and other art forms. Most of these audiences have declined in the last decade, some of them precipitously."

For many organizations, this is the iceberg. So can we survive it?

Last summer, on the recommendation of a colleague, I read the book Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. Gonzales spent years trying to understand why some people survive harrowing circumstances -- like an avalanche -- and others do not. He tried to determine whether there are common characteristics of survivors.

Read Diane Ragsdale's Entire Address

And see her video interview with Chris Krug at the Alliance for Arts and Culture blog.

I was particularly interested in a chapter in which he examines how people get lost.

Gonzales explains that the way we navigate in life is by forming and following mental maps: literally pictures in our minds of particular areas or routes. Gonzales says you get lost when you "fail to update your mental map and then persist in following it even when the landscape," (the real world), "tries to tell you it's wrong."

Edward Cornell, one of the scientists Gonzales showcases in the book, gives an example of this. He says, "Whenever you start looking at your map and saying something like, 'Well, that lake could have dried up,' or 'That boulder could have moved,' a red light should go off. You're trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what's there. In the sport of orienteering, they call this 'bending the map.'"

Give up on being rescued

Gonzales describes five stages that a person goes through when lost, which correlate with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Gonzales says that the final stage -- acceptance -- is the one that separates those that survive from those that don't.

Here's how he describes it, "... as you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are." Not where you wish you were. "To survive," he says, "you must find yourself. Then it won't matter where you are."

He also says that one of the most difficult steps a survivor must take is to discard the hope of rescue.

A couple years ago, I interviewed a Stanford University professor named Jim Phills about his great book, Integrating Mission and Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations, and one of my questions was, "What advice would you give to a world-class orchestra whose audiences were declining and whose deficit was growing?"

He said, "If you are an orthodox orchestra, the reason you are losing audience members (from your viewpoint) could be that the world is not good enough for you.

"But," Phills asserted, "art really exists only in relation to audiences and their experience, particularly the performing arts. So if a symphony is seeing declining audiences, then the questions are: Would you sooner close your doors than change what you do? What is it that's important to you and why? You cannot, however, answer these questions without considering your need for audiences and/or enough people willing to subsidize you. And the fact is the number of people willing to subsidize something that is narrowly enjoyed may diminish over time. At which point, you will need to be prepared to go out of business."

He hastened to add, however, there is another option "there are organizations that are redefining their missions in relation to people."

In other words, they are rethinking who they are and why they exist.

See the world clearly

The late, great thinker Susan Sontag once wrote, "Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future."

I take particular note of the words, "precarious attainment of relevance." No organization can be granted relevance in perpetuity based on its laurels or the size of its endowment, or granted a pass to become static or stagnant because it is -- to use a Wall Street comparison -- "too big to fail." To exist, to thrive, to be artistically vibrant in the 21st century, arts organizations need to adapt to this culture change in order to attain, maintain, or regain, their relevancy.

As Laurence Gonzales says, "Those who avoid accidents are those who see the world clearly, see it changing, and change their behavior accordingly."

Tomorrow: Seven change-oriented ideas for arts groups wanting to survive and thrive in today's reality. [Tyee]

Diane Ragsdale is associate program Officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This article is part of a series drawn from her address to the Vancouver Arts Summit, an event presented by the Alliance for Arts and Culture and 2010 Legacies Now attended by administrators and supporters of arts and culture organizations.

18 Comments:

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  • appalbarry

    2 years ago

    Important American notes

    You can't really compare the American and Canadian arts funding climates.

    In my time in the US it became apparent that there were many more sources of funding, and the usual request was significantly larger than is possible in Canada.

    While in the US I became accustomed to writing funding proposals in the six figures. When back in Canada I immediately found that I needed to drop one zero from every budget.

    The real, significant difference is that American corporations and wealthy individuals see philanthropy as a part of what they do. If you have wealth, you accept that it is your responsibility to share it.

    In Canada that was an area handled by the various levels of government, so the tradition of personal and corporate philanthropy was never well developed.

    When government began chopping Arts support in the eighties and nineties it was predicated on the assumption that corporations and individuals would step up and fill the gap.

    That never happened, and Canadian arts organisations have suffered ever since.

  • gaulois

    2 years ago

    Applicable far beyound the Arts "scene"

    Great story! Just chewing...

  • Jeffrey J.

    2 years ago

    Music vs Military: Who Chooses

    Would Ms. Ragsdale modify her views if she contrasts the puny budget earmarked for art, music and all things creative, with the enormous funding for guns, weapons, tanks and aircraft? If it were about the public's view of relevance, art would be funded tenfold more. When asked, citizens are very clear what they want and what is relevant. But in quasi-democracies like the US and Canada, they're rarely asked and almost never answered.

    Canada's political and business elites control the direction of most of our resources, which go directly into banking, insurance, military and lowering taxes. As one of the richest countries in the world, we could have one of the most expressive, artistic cultures in history. But we don't. But that is not the fault of artists.

    While some people on the left like to chide artists and musicians for wishing to pursue these really important careers, they forget to chide the clamouring greed and sense of entitlement of the military, oil, banking, insurance and other welfare entities that could NEVER survive without handouts from Uncle Sam.

    But great reading.

  • wayfarer

    2 years ago

    "precarious attainment of relevance"

    ...over the past decade plus, and at an ever-increasing clip, new media technologies have begun to shift the relationships between people, space and time, and change the ways that people create, consume, commune, and communicate.

    This is among the most relevant points made in the article. It's a cliche to always cite McLuhan in this context, but the medium truly is the message.

    The arts community needs funding. Yes. Funding cuts are bad. Yes. But there needs to be a move away from this sense of entitlement - for entitlement's sake. If you can't fill seats, you need to find a way to fill those seats, find ways to meet that "precarious attainment of relevance" - and stop blaming lack of crowd support on a lack of funding.

    There are lots of venues within which to intellectualize over how this capitalist, consumerist culture is making its minions more and more artistically illiterate, and that's all very well and good, but you still need to fill the damn seats in some way. Art is a very dialectical process. Build it, they will come; and when they come, they will help you build it bigger or rebuild it. If you don't have the cash for building supplies, improvise, until they come. The job of art literacy should not always rest at the doorstep of government budgets and school arts programs. Maybe these cuts happen precisely due to a lack of relevancy. Maybe the lack relevancy results in bigger funding cuts. I happen to believe the two questions are inseparable.

  • Glen Murtz

    2 years ago

    No imagination!

    All the arts have to do to "survive" is monetize.

    I don't recall seeing any theatre in the last ten years that used product placement, or any art installation that utilized a coherent branding strategy.
    I see the VAG with it's "Dutch" show and wonder - "Why are there no "Brought to you by Royal Dutch Shell" adverts? Why can't the ballyhooed hipster art types use a Tim Hortons or a Home Depot in Whalley for an installation?
    Lack of imagination.

    Local orchestras could be conducted by whoever the hottest radio DJ on Z-95 is, Ballet BC could reenact famous moments in the Olympics, or a BC Lions player could be featured for Bard on the Beach - maybe a slotback could play a hunchback, say.
    Think Les Mis and L'Oreal - together again, or maybe Ballet BC against some Emily Carr types in a Mixed Martial Arts cage match.

    All it takes is superior creativity and getting onboard the commodification train - stop hiding in the rarified air of intellect, emotive dissembling and polysyllabic, full-of-s*** artist statements.
    Start wearing team jersey's, do some reality shows, do meat draws - but for God's sake - do SOMETHING!

    Let's Go Arts Scene!

  • gaulois

    2 years ago

    "precarious attainment of relevance": adapt -vs- anew

    “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller

  • Alvo Von Alvensleben

    2 years ago

    A new map...

    ...so true.

  • Chris Keam

    2 years ago

    monetize or die

    "All the arts have to do to "survive" is monetize."

    Most great art is eventually monetized (usually too late to feed the artist who made it). Unfortunately, great art is usually way ahead of it's time and too outre for the public appetite in the era in which it is made. Hence the need for rich and savvy patrons who can spot good work and finance the artist's existence and enable to do great things.

    I would suggest that gov't in Canada now plays the role of patron, but unfortunately does so unwillingly at best, and also, doesn't have the artistically-literate leaders necessary to understand the vital role of 'hard-to-understand-at-first' artistic works.

    The gimmicks suggested as a means of monetizing the work might be fine when one is looking to fill a cast of a much-loved classic piece of theatre, but it's pure poison for the more challenging works that will one day become classics. It's hard to imagine Save-On Food (for example) sponsoring a play or performance that questions some of the basic assumptions of the consumer society... yet you will find that topic and similar ones are very much on the minds of artists in this day and age. For government to abandon our artists just demonstrates the continuing danger of letting the power and money-fixated determine the direction and themes of the artistic world.

  • Chris Keam

    2 years ago

    I wish we got an edit

    I wish we got an edit function with this redesign. Please disregard the improperly apostrophed 'it's' in previous post.

    Measure twice, press post once CK!

  • jnewcomb

    2 years ago

    how about military AND arts?

    Sorry, hard to get too serious about funding more meat-dress projects or more Robert Mapplethorpe wanna-be's, especially with this warm weather. Put together the military AND performing arts and you got it - "Peanut Butter Jelly Time in Iraq":
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uezJfTG9ELI&feature=fvst

  • Glen Murtz

    2 years ago

    Getting closer..

    jnewcomb: though I find soldiers dancing to some unfathomably awful hip hop while mocking their superiors as funny as the next civilian, the video is quite awful.

    You may however have stumbled upon yet another technique for stirring the great Canadian zeitgeist into a frothy, bubbly concoction of art-loving patrons.

    Start having artists wear military uniforms. Make art the new "War on The Unartful". Write the anthem, run up a flag and cry with your hand over your heart. Send any piece from the Surrey Art Gallery in a casket to the VAG downtown and we can have a full, art-laden burial. Have people cry. Tell them the sacrifice was worth it.

    Look at the money we've poured into the military the last few years. Surely some of that could go to some art students "examination" of "inhabitable spaces offering a conjectured dichotomy on the patriarchal dialectic" or some such rot.

    We could offer awards based on "Best Obfuscation in an Artists Statement" because hey - God knows *that's* a skill we all need more of in our military and political life.

    Yes - the more I think of it, the more I believe art and the military should be getting it together.

    I'm literally exploding with ideas on combining art and the military.
    And don't we all love 'splosions?

  • Chris Keam

    2 years ago

    missing the point of the artist's statement

    "Best Obfuscation in an Artists Statement"

    Just because you can't figure it out doesn't make it nonsense. I've read thesis statements by my friends who are mathematics and biology PHDs and couldn't make head nor tails of them, but that doesn't mean it was 'obfuscation'. Simply that I didn't have the education and knowledge to parse the language.

    Of course, the military has for a long time used artists to record its history, so clearly generals understand the vital role of artists in our society, even if it's fashionable to sneer at those artists who take risks with their work. Invariably, the derision signifies ignorance and fear.

  • North of Hope

    2 years ago

    Read Between The Lines

    This item was in the Prince George Citizen. Although it is a bit off topic, I believe it is related.

    Read Between The Lines Tuesday, 28 July 2009

    Time to chuck another shoe at Gordon (Bloody) Campbell.
    B.C’s Voldemort of a premier is doing his level best to strangle every nickel and dime he can from the province’s social services just to hold up the lie of his mythical deficit. He’s not quite selling the family silver but he’s kicking one of his golden goals into the gutter.
    In what appears to be the latest in a slew of scurrilous acts - the HST, B.C. Rail e-mails in legal limbo, kicking the crutch out of from under the health care system - he now appears to be discarding one of his most cherished ideals: his wish to be the premier of the most literate jurisdiction in Canada.
    Really. How does cutting libraries serve that interest, Lord Voldemort?
    Now his courtiers would tell you that it’s only a game of silly buggers. Libraries haven’t gotten their current year’s funding, it’s been bogged down in the maelstrom of “today’s economy.”
    But the reality is $14M-$17M worth of library funding is now in jeopardy. Libraries in B.C. have done the work - Campbell, Victoria, is holding that money back.
    But it’s not just being tightfisted with dollars and cents - it’s squeezing the heartstrings of co-operation that stretches from the municipal to the provincial level. Promises between parties have been made and are now being broken.
    And, for a province that’s trying to become a knowledge economy, shuttering libraries is awfully stupid.
    Campbell’s cuts are destructive and unnecessarily malicious. With more people in B.C. than ever looking for answers to everything from "How do I find work?" to "Where do I go from here?", Campbell is glueing the pages shut on a critical public resource.
    Are you looking for people to beg, Mr. Campbell? Do you really want to hear people say, “Please, Mr. Premier, can we read a little more?”

    http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20090728204909/opinion/editorials/read-between-the-lines.html

  • Just me

    2 years ago

    When everyone is an artist

    Just as 'citizen journalism' is killing, or severely weakening, the professional model, so too are new media undercutting the notion of the artist as separate from everyone else.

    Why should 'the arts' have patrons, government, corporate or the patronage of old money, when every kid with a cell-phone is an art photographer, every kid with Garage Band a musician?

    Just why should the arts be subsidized when, say, immigrant healthcare workers are not? Surely the reward of making art is in its unbridled free expressiveness. Not many jobs offer that. And many pay worse than even the stipends we give to artists.

    The arts, as referred to in the article above, always have been the preserve of the rich, whether the patron was a Medici, a Rockefeller, the marketing arm of a tobacco company or, today, of a bank. Typically, if not always, they have reflected broadly the social and even political values of those patrons.

    The theatre may be dying, but indie film is not. Opera struggles but everyone knows someone who has cut their own CD. No one reads poetry but crowds turn out for spoken word slams, hip hop concerts, Bob Dylan, none of them supported by anyone but their audiences.

    Progressives decry the trillions spent bailing out banks and auto giants, the economy of the past. Yet perpetually they bemoan the lack of funding for 'the arts.' Meaning the arts of the past.

    The point of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can silkscreens was to show that art is everywhere. Punk and other DIY art movements have shown that we all make art.

    Why still the struggle to maintain that artists are in a class all by themselves?

  • leannej

    2 years ago

    But we are successful...

    for every dollar spent on funding the arts, we generate $1.38. That's a pretty good return on the investment. So we should be spending more to make more.

  • Glen Murtz

    2 years ago

    Whereupon Mr Keam gets "played" by sincerity.

    "Just because you can't figure it out doesn't make it nonsense."

    Indeed.
    Irony runs so very thick.

  • Chris Keam

    2 years ago

    artists

    "Why should 'the arts' have patrons, government, corporate or the patronage of old money, when every kid with a cell-phone is an art photographer, every kid with Garage Band a musician?"

    I have a hammer. It doesn't make me a carpenter.

  • Chris Keam

    2 years ago

    Glen

    I think your rebuttal may be too succinct. Can you expand on that thought and explain how I've been played by sincerity and what makes it ironic?

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