arts & business council

MetLife National Arts Forums Series

Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts
04/06/2005

Introductions:

• Mark Weinstein, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council
• Sarah Tambucci, Arts Education Collaborative
• Kevin McMahon, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
• Marilyn Coleman, ProArts

Presentation by Dr. Laura Zakaras, Communications Director, RAND Institute for Civil Justice

Panelists:

• Henry S. Beukema, Executive Director, McCune Foundation
• Rebecca Flora, Executive Director, Green Building Alliance
• Thomas Sokolowski, Director, Andy Warhol Museum

Commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, the RAND Corporation published a study in 2005 that examines the way the arts community has positioned its benefits, particularly in the context of making the case for funding support. ProArts invited Laura Zakaras, one of the authors of Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts, to speak about this research.

Zakaras made the case that, while both instrumental benefits (e.g., improved test scores or community improvement) and intrinsic benefits (e.g., captivation or creation of social bonds) make a contribution to the public welfare, intrinsic benefits play the central role in generating all of the results. Rather than espousing more finely tuned marketing efforts such as economic development and community stabilization, the RAND study focuses on the importance of arts education. What is needed to produce the effects is extended exposure and participation, integrated with other elements of the educational process.

This is understood clearly by Pittsburgh’s Arts Education Collaborative; however, they find there is fierce competition not only for financial resources within the schools but also for time to focus on anything but the basic, measurable, learning goals.

The arts community never fully embraced bottom-line arguments, even though that has been “the argument we’ve been forced to make,” according to ProArts’ Marilyn Coleman. But yanking the arts community’s most readily quantifiable pitch doesn’t really help, either, for fear of undermining a key argument that has been most effective with legislators.

Hank Beukema, executive director of the McCune Foundation, noted that the report was “giving us pause.” Beukema worked with John Heinz during the development of Pittsburgh’s Cultural District, an initiative to use the arts to revitalize a neighborhood. He said he would encourage his trustees to consider taking a new focus on cultivating audiences.