Americans for the Arts

Michael Wilkerson

Sometimes big ideas grow from small experiences.

One of my first encounters with corporate sponsorship was at an artists’ retreat, Ragdale, near Chicago. Located in a wealthy suburb, Ragdale occupied beautiful grounds that everyone wanted to see. We had standards. We didn’t do weddings and we didn’t allow private parties.

But at one point, I thought I had convinced a bank to sponsor an artistic event for us. As the planning grew more and more out of control and became the kind of loud corporate overdressed networking thing that would prevent artists and poets from ever believing they could create quietly at our “retreat,” I told the bank to scale it back, that it would not help us. “We need to sponsor organizations that will help our clients,” was the response.

The partnership ended.

Years later, as chair of a theatre company, I knew we had great plays, in the hands of a remarkable artistic director, on the horizon. Already we had been invited to take our one-acts to a Vaclav Havel Festival in New York; other literary and dramatic powerhouses were in the works, including a new play by a famous contemporary writer.

What a great look into the future of the arts and business partnerships!

Thanks to our bloggers Neil McKenzie, Bruce Whitacre, Tom Tresser, John Eger, Krista Lang Blackwood, Donald Brinkman, Kelly Lamb Pollock, Christine Harris, Mary Wright, Janet Brown, Jim Sparrow, Nancy Glaze, Michael Gold, Michelle Mann, Giovanni Schiuma, Michael Wilkerson, Sahar Javedani, and Emily Peck for writing such thoughtful and provocative pieces!

Thanks are also due to all the other commentators, Tweeters, and Facebook friends.

There were so many insightful blogs this week.

Bruce Whitacre

In this economic climate, reaching out to high-net-worth individuals, or the companies that seek to engage them, can be a touchy subject for the arts.

The fact is, income inequality and the incredible wealth accumulated by a small percentage of our population have created great opportunities in terms of prospects and their passions. But we must temper our pursuit of these individuals with an appreciation of our broader public purpose. It can be challenging to face these facts and see an opportunity in them without losing our focus.

First, the facts: arts audiences are substantially wealthier, more influential, and better educated than the population as a whole.

At the recent Innovators Forum, organized by the National Corporate Theatre Fund (NCTF) and The Nederlander Organization for theatre marketers and corporate relations staffs, we heard from two experts in the luxury marketing field, the incredible Jim Taylor of The Harrison Group and Greg Furman, founder and president of the Luxury Marketing Council.

We sought their views on the perspective of the affluent on theatre, and their observations were quite insightful.

The Conference Board's "Ready to Innovate" report.

A few years ago, The Conference Board, an international non-profit business research organization, released Ready to Innovate, a study that unequivocally says, "U.S. employers rate creativity and innovation among the top five skills that will increase in importance over the next five years, and rank it among the top challenges facing CEOs."

But as The Conference Board cautioned, “educators and executives must be aligned” and that is happening much too slowly. I think what the study was suggesting was that somebody has to take the lead.

So who’s going to align the educators and the executives and how? Where is the leadership?

The problem, I fear, is with businessmen and women…and with the educators, and the artists too, who are best suited to play the lead.

John Hagel III, co-author, along with John Seely Brown, of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, made a rather telling observation that business recruiters are always looking for creative people. Then noted that they look again at these creative people on their “exit interview.” So be it for too many corporations.

Michael Gold

Art is language. It expresses dimensions of human sentience that words cannot.

But the language of art and the language of spoken word co-exist in a dialectic -- they both influence and change one another.

The languages of the arts are much more sensitive to change than spoken language, but both the language of art and the language of words are tremendously impacted by technology.

Virtual communications technology has the capacity to radically alter the rich nuance of connective qualities that spoken language has garnered from the language of art and vice versa over millennia. Look, for example, at how quickly language is being transmogrified by young people who engage in a constant flow of multiple conversations 12 hours a day through texting devices.

Technology will profoundly affect the artistic landscape in the coming decades. And debating the intrinsic value of a work of art will become even more critical as a means of combating the attention deficit that comes with digital society. But will the notion of “arts for art sake” mean the same thing that it did in the past in a culture structured by virtual reality? And, if not, what will arts for art sake possibly mean?

Michael Gold

As an arts-based practitioner I have participated in events sponsored and promoted by The Arts and Business Councils of both New York City and Chicago.

Over the past decade these civic organizations have partnered with interested corporations like Metropolitan Life and McGraw Hill to present examples of arts-based learning for business that were open to the public.

The impact was palpable especially in the nature of questions asked by participants in the Q&A portion of the program.

People immediately grasped the relevance. They asked questions about trust, ambiguity, autonomy and empathy- all aspects that fall outside the “dehydrated language” (thank you Nancy Adler) of the corporate boardroom culture.