arts & business council

MetLife National Arts Forums Series

Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund
Atlanta, Georgia

Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefit of the Arts
09/26/2005

Presentation by Lucas Held, Communications Director, The Wallace Foundation

Panelists:

• Stephanie Hughley, Executive Director, National Black Arts Festival
• Tommy Hills, Chief Financial Officer, Office of the Governor for the State of Georgia

The Wallace Foundation has worked for over a decade in partnership with arts organizations, community foundations, and state arts agencies to attract new audiences to the arts. The idea behind the Rand Report was to foster an improved understanding of the benefits of the arts that would allow both arts administrators and other civic leaders to make informed choices about whether—and in what ways—to support greater participation in the arts.

RAND began their study by looking closely at the evidence on traditional instrumental values, such as such cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral gains for children and social capital and economic gains for the community, as well as the intrinsic values such as captivation, pleasure, expanded capacity for empathy, cognitive growth, creation of social bonds, and expression of communal meaning. The new approach towards making the case for the arts, as espoused by the Gifts of the Muse report, “links intrinsic and instrumental benefits, and connect the private and public value of the arts.”

Stephanie Hughley, executive director of the National Black Arts Festival, recommended sending the report to Atlanta’s government and corporate leaders and providing translation from Wallace. She agreed that the field is always talking about the economic impact but finds it difficult to articulate the importance of the instrumental benefits. Arts organizations are responding to a call from funders solely for economic data and this is not beneficial—it is key for them to reframe the debate around the intrinsic values. At the same time she raised questions about the intrinsic values of art and values as human beings asking “which values of art?” and “for whom is art created?” She asked about how we understand what the value systems are. She concluded with a call to engage communities in the process of championing intrinsic values, specifically citing the need to bring “three generations to the table” and to “engage communities at their level.”

In his current role as chief financial officer in the Office of the Governor for the state of Georgia, Tommy Hills noted that there is not a lot of dialogue and very little consensus around the issue of the value of the arts. “If you want to move the agenda, it’s going to take a concerted effort.” When the government looks at education, it looks at workforce development and it looks at SAT scores—not the value of arts. For the arts to be on the state’s agenda, there must be a consistent, broad coalition speaking en masse and on message with a loud voice. Currently the message is fragmented.

One audience member asked why environmentalists have succeeded where arts advocates have not. Why have they done a better job promoting the intrinsic value of greenspace? Lucas Held responded that the government acts in order to compensate for market failure and asked, “What is the market failure of the arts? Arts can’t survive on earned income alone.” Tommy Hills added that the state perceives that it has a role in preserving water supply and the land around water. The comparison between art advocacy and the environmental movement proved to be a resonant topic, showing up in comments for the rest of the evening.

The issue that had the most currency with the audience was that of presenting a clear, organized, and consistent message to the community. Audience members called for the arts community to emulate the well-organized, well-funded, and always-on-message campaign to brand Atlanta (called “Brand Atlanta”) in interfacing with the government, corporate funders, and the community as a whole. Tommy Hills ended the evening by saying, “The Gifts of the Muse report gives the community something to coalesce around, a broader picture.”