Americans for the Arts

Three years before writing Future Shock in 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler first wrote The Art of Measuring the Arts, and noted, "A cultural data system is needed to provide information for rational policy-making in the cultural field and to assist those outside the field in understanding their impact on it."

This week, Americans for the Arts released the 2012 National Arts Index report, which delivers a 2010 score of the health and vitality of the arts in the U.S.

From its low point in 2009, the Index rose slightly from 96.3 to 96.7 in 2010.

This year’s report bears witness to how the arts sector fared during the Great Recession—and the losses were swift and measurable.

In 2010, half of the 83 indicators measured increased, which is equivalent to pre-recession, 2007 levels. In comparison, only one-third of the indicators were up in 2008 and in 2009, just one-quarter increased.

Here are just a few top-level findings from the 2012 National Arts Index:

1. There has been significant growth in the number of nonprofit arts organizations: In the past decade, the number of nonprofit arts organizations grew 49 percent (76,000 to 113,000), a greater rate than all nonprofit organizations (32 percent). Or to look at it another way, from 2003-2010, a new nonprofit arts organization was created every three hours in the U.S.

Leslie Donaldson

Driving around Greater Lansing, MI, commuters may be surprised to discover 672-square-foot works of art on area billboards that normally carry advertising.

These artful billboards can be found in the sky along the highways leading into Michigan’s capitol city, near highly trafficked shopping centers, and outside local neighborhoods, all transforming traditional advertising spaces into an artful visual display.

These billboards, which were all launched as an initiative to bring art to the masses via the medium of outdoor advertising, is made possible through a program called Art In The Sky, a unique partnership between the Arts Council of Greater Lansing and local advertising company, Adams Outdoor Advertising, highlighting the local arts community.

Debuting in March 2011, Art In The Sky billboards have been installed in various locations around the Greater Lansing region. To date, Adams Outdoor has donated space to local artists, each of whom have received an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Greater Lansing. A panel of peer reviewers selected the artists’ respective applications to receive funding for a specific arts project with a local public component. Grantees were selected on artistic merit and the potential impact of their public project upon the community.

Hannah Jacobson

Delight or die; this is the new paradigm set forth by Steve Denning to adapt to the new creative economy.

In a particularly fickle consumer-centric universe, the increased focus on services as opposed to goods, he says, creates a need for “continuous innovation” and what he terms “radical management.”

This new economy will be David versus the Goliath of the outgoing manufacturing economy, and we all know who ultimately wins that battle---but it will require smarts, innovation, flexibility, a great survival instinct, and a lot of new energy.

Yet for the arts, how “radical” is it really to be focused on services, to continuously innovate to survive, and, perhaps most importantly, to delight audiences? If nothing else, the arts community provides a masterful example of survival in any economy---creative or otherwise.

So the idea of the “creative economy,” a concept that has more disparate definitions than can realistically be explored here---think about the spectrum of understandings that would arise from places as distinct as the United States, Norway, England, Australia, and far beyond---might be relatively new, but creativity in the economy and even creativity as a driver of the economy are functions that the arts have long recognized.

Wayne Andrews

Where we live is important to each of us. It is a key part of our identity. It's a source of pride, even if our hometown is the punch line to a joke.

Is it really the good schools, parks, and access to shopping centers that make us live where we live? Many people find a fulfilling sense of community in smaller towns and rural regions that do not have all the advantages of larger communities.

Maybe it is not the measurable elements that give a place a sense of community but rather those intangible qualities that create the feeling. Could it be that working with your neighbors to build a park is more important to the sense of community than the actual park? The arts have always been one of the focal points around that help to build a sense of community.

Town festivals, cultural events, and celebrations are often the most visible signs of a community working together. Each pumpkin festival, summer concert series on the town square, or art sale pulls together diverse elements of the community.

An example of this can be seen in Oxford, MS, which has worked to define itself as an arts community. Numerous programs have been launched in partnership between various segments of the community.

Last year working with local business owners, artists, and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, a monthly art crawl was launched to highlight the visual artists in the region.

Max Donner

Los Angeles took a cue from the success of Art Miami and scheduled six art shows in the space of one week last month. These six shows featured the most popular collecting categories--fine art, photography, prints and posters, modern art, contemporary art, and “affordable art.”

A fortunate coincidence put these excellent art exhibitions directly next to two large commercial trade shows that demonstrated the value of artistic talent in America’s economy. These were the California Gift Show and the Insignia Sportswear Show.

These shows provided hundreds of examples of the economic value of art by showing how quality art and design can transform a five dollar piece of canvas into a fifty dollar giclee print or a five hundred dollar oilskin for elite yacht racing syndicates.

The commercial trade shows also demonstrated the important role that applied art plays in supporting the development of leading edge technology and the creation of good jobs that support local economies.

An overview of the exhibitions at the California Gift Show and the Insignia Sportswear Show quickly showed that commodity-like, undecorated consumer goods like umbrellas, picture frames, sports team uniforms, and caps do not cost much to make and do not generate much quality employment. The same products converted into upscale or luxury consumer products with original art and sophisticated artistic customization command attention of trade show visitors and quickly fill order books.

Max Donner

Dozens of new records were set at the historic auction of the Elizabeth Taylor Collection December 13-17. This crowned two years of historic new price records for all types of art, all around the world.

The momentum began with the auction of Alberto Giacommetti’s "Walking Man I" for $104 million at Sothebys-London in February 2010. The sale remains the highest auction price for sculpture, but a new record for art at auction was reached just three months later with the sale of Picasso’s painting “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.”

New artist and category records have continued to impress the art world almost daily ever since.

Research indicates that art market prices will continue to increase for several years and that art organizations need to plan ahead for this.

One important trend is “White Glove Auctions.” These are auctions at which every single work offered for sale is sold. While they used to be rare, this phenomenon accelerated at the auctions of photographs by Richard Avedon in Paris in November 2010 and drawings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt in December 2010.

Wayne Andrews

Competition is hard. In the business world market share, loss leaders, and incentives are used to drive product loyalty. This does not work in the creative economy.

You can’t coupon a radio listener into supporting your local songwriter’s organization, or celebrate that the ballet has gained market share over the orchestra.

The arts are one of the few business models where we don’t celebrate growth by one organization over another. Never have we heard the Opera Generation is involved in an art war with New Ballet.

There are a host of incentives and promotions arts groups utilize to entice people to try the ballet or opera. Every arts group has tried a “pay what you can night” or “free tickets promotions” hoping to expand their audience.

Still I don’t care that a prune is a dried plum because to many people it is still a prune. Just as opera is opera or modern art is confusing. Most products realize once the discounted price, coupon, or gimmick that lured the consumers to buy their brand of soap is gone, and so is the customer.

How will art groups build a new audience? By merging more than marketing efforts, but by merging their programs.

Max Donner

Art is more than beautiful. It is profitable.

Challenging economic times have sent financial experts back to the drawing boards. Impressive results from centers of excellence in the creative economy offer a vision for sustainable economic growth.

Arts administrators who need to convince their supporters and their communities to advance the programs that make creative economies work also need to understand what works best and why. These success stories can invigorate this dialogue.

While much daily businesses news is bad news, firms that have chosen art as a core competence and engaged many artists and designers continue achieve impressive profits and growth:

1. Swiss timepiece and design firm Swatch Group reported this summer that annual sales increased 11% and profits grew by 22% over the same period in 2010. Swatch introduced its first “Art Special” at the Pompidou Centre in 1985. Since then, it has continued to commission innovative art by leading contemporary artists such as French painter Grems and sculptor Ted Scapa. The Swatch corporate strategy of building a company on a foundation of artistic talent has also built expertise in art business, for example, using sophisticated models to calculate limited edition amounts.

2. BMW employs more artists than all other auto manufacturers combined. The results speak for themselves. While General Motors and Chrysler have experienced chaotic bankruptcies and Toyota reported its first losses in decades, BMW sales and profits have continued double digit growth. This summer the company launched the BMW Guggenheim Lab together with curators from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to learn more about the foundations of the creative economy. BMW also reported record financial results: annual sales increased 17% while net profits nearly doubled to $2.5 billion for the spring quarter, the equivalent of $10 billion a year.

John Eger

Picasso once complained: “Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds?”

He once is alleged to say he would’ve been a writer but he’s not; he’s a painter, so don’t ask him to explain anything about his work.

What an artist does, what a painting or sculpture says, is not something most artists want to explain in any great detail. The work speaks for itself.

What arts role is in society, however, is a little easier for the artist to do. Talking about the relationship art has to economic prowess is not so easy. Not for the artist. Not for the business executive.

Yet, the future of business is art some say.

At least that’s what The Conference Board said when it released Ready to Innovate, a study which states, "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." And IBM, after interviewing 1500 CEO’s said creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking.

Krista Lang Blackwood

How often do we artists walk into a company supportive of the arts and ask, “What can we do for you?”

Do I hear crickets?

Yep. Those are definitely crickets.

Here’s how it usually happens; we walk in and immediately start defending our existence, and then we ask for money. We tell companies what kind of a public relations boon it will be to give to the arts, outline how we’ll use the logo in our materials, talk about wording for sponsorship, and then wait for them to write the check.

If they don’t write the check, we grumble about how they just don’t understand. Then we come back in a couple of months and try again.

What we should do is find a way to serve the businesses who serve us with sponsorships. The former mayor of Kansas City, where I live, commenting on nonprofit/city government partnerships, said, “I love nonprofits and think they deserve city support. But only if they provide a service better than the city can.”

So how can we provide a service? And if we start to think along those lines, will we lose our art?

Neil McKenzie

Our economic growth is stuck at a snail’s pace and at the same time our federal government seems unable or unwilling to find any meaningful solutions. States and local governments across the nation are scrambling to develop their own economic development plans and strategies to fill this void.

In the past, local economic development usually had a large public expenditure component that involved raising money (taxes) to build public works projects such as roads, bridges, and public venues. Many of these efforts were also based on subsidizing new businesses through tax incentives or direct subsidies. The problem now is that public money is in short supply and using these methods are limited if nonexistent.

While most businesses have experienced less demand for their products and services and have reduced their workforces, there are many companies that are expanding. There has been a fundamental shift in the goods and services we produce as the world has become flatter through international trade and new technologies.

Many of these companies are part of what has become to be known as the “creative economy.” The creative economy is characterized by companies whose products and services have a high content of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Arts and culture can play an important role in attracting companies in the creative economy to a local area.

Christine Harris

For much of our recent history, the arts have been considered a ‘nice to have,’ a quality of life amenity that certainly helps make a difference in the community, but expendable when there are tough budget or resource choices.

We are painfully aware of being excluded as serious priority from the public funding and the arts education conversations. But, there is a new table that we can join with a strong and purposeful voice -- and that is the ‘economic development’ table.

I’m not just talking about economic impact (which many development specialists eschew), or community/quality of life, but measured, quantifiable economic development in the same manner as biotech, healthcare, or construction industries.

While many in the arts community believe that anything connecting us with the same tools to business somehow ‘taints’ our value or impact or role, the truth is -- if you are not at the economic development table these days, you are just not part of the conversation -- period -- like it or not.

But the reality today is that we can demonstrate the value of being seated at that table, perhaps for the very first time.

Brendon Greaves

I just returned from several days in Wilson, NC, where I am assisting with the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park Project. This ambitious project involves conserving twenty-nine of local artist Vollis Simpson’s monumental wind-powered kinetic sculptures and relocating them from a field outside his repair shop at a crossroads in rural Lucama to an expressly designed downtown sculpture park in nearby Wilson.

This weekend was the annual Whirligig Festival, a street fair inspired by the community’s affection for Mr. Simpson’s artworks, which already adorn several public locations downtown, providing an aesthetic identity and metereological indicator for Wilsonians.

Despite enthusiastic sanction and financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, ArtPlace, the Educational Foundation of America, the North Carolina Arts Council, and many others, the true power of this remarkable placemaking project resides in its grassroots foundation.

The concept of using vernacular art to leverage investment in the community for the goal of cultural tourism and arts-driven economic development originated with local stakeholders concerned about both Mr. Simpson’s legacy (he is 92 and can no longer climb the 55-foot sculptures to grease bearings and repaint rusting surfaces) and the economic future of Wilson in a post-tobacco economy (Wilson once boasted the title of the world’s largest tobacco market).

Tom Borrup (center) and friends

I’m writing this post on the return flight to Minneapolis from Seoul, South Korea following a whirlwind three days after speaking at an international symposium billed as: Artist, Enterprise, and Industrial Complex.

This half-day symposium was part of a larger effort by the mayor of Seoul to transform old industrial spaces into creative engines of innovation, to cross-pollinate urban regeneration, technological innovation, and the emergence of a new Korean culture.

Known as Seoul Art Space, this network of nine centers serve as catalysts to bring a growing and changing city and its emerging creative economy onto a world stage. As part of its charge, Seoul Art Space works to forge productive dialogues across sectors and constituencies--largely among people who have seen no need to converse, and who barely have a language to do so.

During the day before the symposium, I traveled with my interpreter and guide Kyuwan (pronounced, he said, like the letter Q and number one) via subway and bus across the vast city. He warned me that Koreans are always in a hurry and not to take it personally if someone pushed me on the subway. I saw the characteristic playing out at multiple levels.

Mark Slavkin

As advocates for arts education, we try to stay flexible and timely in our rationale and arguments. We want to be current and relevant about the latest studies and trends.

If “21st century skills” are in vogue, we can show the relevance of arts learning. If the talk is about the primacy of science, technology, engineering, and math, we are quick to suggest we add the arts and make STEM become STEAM. And if the focus is on the economy and jobs, we stand ready to make the case for how learning in the arts prepares young people for a wealth of future job opportunities.

I worry that our advocacy and rhetoric may get ahead of the reality of our practice. Are we really delivering on all the benefits we promise?

While advocacy is essential, I wish we devoted as much time to sharing with each other about the nuts and bolts of classroom practice. Perhaps we could even display some humility about what we can deliver and what is not quite ready for prime time.

This brings me to the topic of careers in the arts. Our advocacy often refers to an economic imperative for arts education. Here in California we talk about the direct application of skills learned in arts education to jobs in the arts and the broader creative economy.

We also suggest that arts education cultivates a range of skills that will be valuable across all economic sectors, such as creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

Rob Schultz

I have this sneaking suspicion that if you ask a typical high school student to tell you what career choices exist in the arts, they would give “artist,” and “art teacher” as their two, and possibly only two, examples. Unfortunately, I think that too many young people are unaware of the myriad career options that center on the arts.

So, here’s a plug for enlightenment.

In my own experience, I’d never considered such a career until my bachelor’s degree days. A full-time student in need of multiple part-time jobs, I found a “student assistant” position in the office of my university’s art department helping professors and the dean, answering phones, handling routine administrative tasks, and doing word processing on a primitive, mid-1980s computer platform.

This initial foray led to a lengthy and satisfying career in arts administration.

This career has benefitted me in many ways, not the least of which comes from wonderful opportunities to work and interact with a wide variety of arts professionals. Many of these jobs I never dreamed existed back in my school days.

Take government work, for starters.

Downtown Niagara Falls

After our amazing visit to Cooperstown, my family headed farther upstate to Auburn, NY. (We also stopped in Elmira to see where Mark Twain wrote most of his books.)

When we arrived in Auburn, we headed for the Seward House. The Seward house was the home of William Seward who was Governor of New York, a U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State to Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. In addition to serving as the family home, it was also a stop for the underground railroad.

The house has been perfectly preserved as the family kept everything, including receipts for many of their purchases. The Seward family resided in the house until the late 1950s when it was made into a museum.

The next day, I was lucky enough to meet with representatives from a few of Cayuga County’s arts and history organizations, along with the economic development director, the director of the Cayuga County Office of Tourism, and the head of economic development for the county. We discussed cultural tourism in the county and how they might enhance the visitor experience by developing a cultural district in downtown Auburn.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Well it’s the end of August and I have just returned from a very American vacation where I traveled throughout upstate New York.

The trip was mainly designed around visiting one main attraction -- an iconic American museum. None like it anywhere else in the world and attracts thousands of visitors every day! Have you guessed it yet?

It’s located in little Cooperstown New York.

Yep, it’s the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum!

It was really an experience to visit this amazing place full of history about our national pastime. There was a feeling of reverence and silent worship around the exhibits as people starred at all these players and their magnificent abilities. I was in awe at how many people talked in hushed, respectful voices about their favorite players. It was like Valhalla for so many visitors, including my family.

Blair Cromwell

Surreal is a good word to describe how I feel working for the Bentonville Convention and Visitors Bureau these days.

Why you ask? Well, in just five short months I will be just blocks away from the works of Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Wyeth, Asher B. Duran, and John Singer Sargent to name a few.

These are the guys that I fell in love with in my Art History 101 class my freshman year in college, and now, some of the actual paintings printed in my college text book will be feet away from me as I stroll through the galleries of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

On November 11, 2011, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will open its doors to the public, changing the face of Bentonville and the state of Arkansas forever.

A sketch of Jean by blog post author Hoong Yee.

I love listening to smart women and being surrounded by many of them this weekend at the Americans for the Arts Convention in San Diego. There are ballrooms filled with people who are committed to working in the arts and with the arts to make life better.

Of course we know how the arts affect how we live together in this world. We are the arts people. However, I often forget that sometimes we need to think of ourselves as creative industries and creative exports especially when working in a global mindset.

After I stumbled out of the sunlight, properly caffeinated and ready to begin my conference blogging for the day, I  found myself in a session entitled, "Building Bridges: International Cultural Exchange" featuring two innovators, Jean A. Bonilla and Stephanie A. Madden.