Sunday, May 31, 2009

Issues with Quantification

In the email that Ian Moss (Createquity) sent me, he raised one of the obvious problems with quantifying the arts health of the community: how to analyze the data sets. How much does it mean if there's $x or n number of festivals in a city?

Using the process of the Thriving Arts report that I keep banging on about, another problem with that arises. The data can reflect the existence of an arts community, but it doesn't seem nearly as easy to reflect the potential for an arts community.

My original reason for investigating was to come up with something that would let the <100k Project analyze which communities to select for its project--after all, there are plenty of <100k communities in the country: some (like Laguna Beach, or Tracy, MN from the report) already have a thriving arts community; others may have nothing at all to speak of. If there was a way to evaluate candidate towns statistically, it would be easier to use them.

But as I looked at the Thriving Arts Report, the benchmarks they put forward of "background factors" for a potential arts community are even harder to measure than, for instance, the benchmarks under "emerging development. The following are their community-related benchmarks for "background factors":
  • Valuing arts for young people
  • Valuing history and sense of place
  • Tradition of arts activity
  • Artistic expression in spiritual life
This is separate from a number of individual and catalytic events that also qualify.

In my attempt to brainstorm some quantifiable benchmarks for those background factors, it quickly became apparent that the presence of institutions that represent these factors come later in the process. A community can value history long before it creates a Historical Society and before it attracts the money to create a surplus of museums (both of which are listed as later on benchmarks).

What this means that, from the perspective of quantification, it is easier to tell the difference between an undeveloped and developed arts community, but difficult to tell the difference between a high potential community and low potential community. To return to my pet example of Irvine, where I am currently locating, long before we could ever hope to develop an artistic community, there would have to be a lot of work just to create those initial benchmarks. On the other hand, some towns in the early days of development might not have a lot, in terms of institutions, to measure with. In such a case, you'd have to measure with more like census data--trying to isolate informal, unestablished data points.

A Sense Of Place

The Thriving Arts: Thriving Small Communities report that <100k led me to has a number of interesting assertions.

One of the ones that was more surprising to me, inasmuch as I hadn't thought of it, is the necessity of a "sense of place" to a community.

In part, this is because my personal experience left me a little bereft of that as I was growing up. At the age of three months I emigrated from Israel to the United States, and although I can't profess that I felt alienated from America, there also was at least a certain sense of not-belonging, of aloofness from the environment.

The point of my arrival was not helpful to this. I arrived in the middle of Southern California's suburbian wasteland. The community my family lives in now, Irvine, has no "sense of place." There is no center to the city; it has no downtown. It is a chain of disconnected housing developments. It is the epitome of car culture. Most of the city was developed thirty years ago, and there is a complete and utter absence of history.

As a result, people come and settle in Irvine, and their children leave. There are very few families who are ingrained in the community; most are only staying for a while, taking advantage of good jobs and good education.

Nearby, there is a very different small town. Its an arts community named Laguna Beach (all of you reality TV folks know this town). It was founded in the 1930s by a colony of landscape painters. And in the 1960s it became the local hippy hub. Why did it become a hippy hub? Well, because of the artists who were already living there.

The people who live in Laguna Beach tend to be more invested in the arts. There are a lot more galleries, theaters, and amateur programs like amateur theater and an amateur choir.

Why is Laguna Beach so different from Irvine? Well, Thriving Arts: Thriving Small Communities points its fingers toward a number of things I can point to in Laguna Beach (one of the other ones is the fact that Laguna Beach, trapped amongst a series of bluffs, is forced to be built around a central main street right on the beach; another is the fact that the beach itself is an "environmental draw for tourism"). But I think that the original founding in the 1930s created a sense of place for the town--after all, it was landscape painters, and if landscape painters would like to be credited with creating anything, it's a sense of place.

Why is a sense of place important, though? How does it link up?

Last fall I went to the Czech Republic, which is a place that has a sense of PLACE. In fact, the history and the culture has become a generalized excuse for everything, and created an incredibly anti-cultural immobility, but that's a story for another day. While I was there, I had an excellent professor, Jan Urban. Jan Urban was the head of the Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution, working closely with Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus, the first two Presidents of the Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic.

For Jan Urban, all of the big problems came from a sense of identity. He looked at Nationalism as an extension of a search for identity in 1800s Europe, Nationality being identity based on language spoken. For him, a hugely influential piece of reading is Robert J. Lifton's Thought Reform, which broke down Chinese Re-education methods into a 12 step plan, mostly around the idea of breaking down a subject's sense of identity and rebuilding it along the lines you wish.

He applied those principles when he was in Mozambique, attempting to deprogram child-soldiers from their civil war. His method there was to use soccer to reform their militaristic identity, using the parts of their identity that are already beneficial (team mentality, competitive nature) and stripping away the parts of their identity that don't work in society (mindlessness and violence). We also applied those principles to come up with a way of tackling the PTSD and economic isolation of returning veterans.

If Jan Urban's hypothesis is true (which I strongly believe it is), and a sense of identity is at the center of how we interact with ourselves and our society, than building a sense of place is a large chunk of a sense of identity. And according the report, building that sense of identity is central to building a value of the arts.

This means that at the core of shifting values is shifting the sense of place. Los Angeles, for instance, is a place that is plagued with an extreme lack of a sense of place, and the solution to tackle that was a downtown redesign--which so far has not had any effect on the sense of place of the residents (probably because downtown is not where they live).

If that's the case, then in the next few weeks I intend to examine how the 12-Steps could be used to influence the sense of place of a community.

Quantifying The Health Of Arts Communities

Sparked on by the report that <100K posted, I've been interested in putting together a method of quantifying the arts community. At the time I assumed it was a tall order because I'm not an urban studies major, or a sociologist, or anything that would give me the academic background necessary. But of course, the only way to really get that background is just to JUMP IN, feet first.

So I did, beginning with a little tweet to the world, asking if anyone else was involved in this.

Ian David Moss, over at, informs me that I'm a little late to the game, because there is a lot of raw research to look at. But there's still a lot of work to be done, and the final quantitative analysis (he called it the "holy grail") is still elusive.

He was very helpful and tossed me a number of resources, so my next step will be analyzing not only the report from <100k, but also the sources he gave me, and of course the groundbreaking work by Richard Florida on the Creative Class. I will, of course, share as much of my realization here as is possible.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Theory of Change I

Mission Paradox blog asks:

What's your theory of change?

How does your presence, or your organization's presence, in the arts somehow make the arts different from what they were before?

How does your presence move your art form forward?

I'm currently working on a more elaborate theory of change, taking into account a report I recently read about how small communities build thriving arts programs. ( ) The points that I've so far been working on are such:

1) An artists' association with the place he's in.
2) An artists' association with the audience he interacts with
3) An artists' association with the other artists in his community
5) An artists' association with seemingly unrelated arts associations (food appreciation groups, amateur science clubs, church groups, etc.)
6) An artists' association with figures and institutions of power and influence (banks, corporations, political bodies)
7) An artists' association with education and how the future of culture is formed

As of right now, I'm working on exactly HOW those associations spark change, but at the moment, it seems like if you're an artist and you're looking to change those things, those are the associations you need to build.

Association with other artists and with your own audience are very clear to most artists, but I wonder how aware most arts groups are about the importance of the rest.


In the comments section of <100k, Chris Ashworth says:

Moreover, I find myself increasingly uninterested in duking it out over the NEA. (Jotted down a few thoughts about this back in March.) The NEA fight feels like it’s burning a lot of energy that could be channeled much more efficiently into other, fresher ideas. Like, say, the <100K project.

To which I responded:

Indeed. Thinking about Beran's article, and Chris' response about whether we should care to reform the NEA, and I'm starting to wonder whether the NEA should keep it's top-down approach and WHO-SICE should take a bottom-up approach.

One model of supporting the arts (the one currently taken by a lot of arts communities) is helping to support the big, safe, consistent hitters. If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, or consider the Public Broadcasting System, you see a big, old institution that has some degree of public contribution, to keep a historic institution alive. That's not a very progressive thing for government to be doing, but it isn't necessarily an unimportant one--a Caretaker of the Arts. An inherently conservative approach to arts support.

The other model is something like the <100k that works from the bottom up. The report on developing arts communities seemed to place a lot more emphasis on the bottom-up approach. A Small Business Administration for the Arts, an Arts Developer. An inherently progressive approach to arts support.


Via >100k, NRO's Michael Knox Beran has an interesting op-ed about the NEA. Read the article. It's not very long, and it's written in the simplistic tone of voice that the NRO brings to most of the subjects.

Aside from a slight overdose of contempt, there's actually an important kernel of truth in the article. The following is the reaction as I posted in the comments section:

I wonder if the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement is going to steal Rocco’s thunder of any reform for the NEA. I mean, if you’d have asked me a month ago what the NEA shoould be doing, I’d have said finding innovative new approaches to bringing creativity to communities and funding them in their early years, but if WHO-SICE (I pronounce it “Whose Is?”) takes on that role, then the NEA will become more of a caretaker of big, established venues.

The core point that I agree with is that the NEA has become a very unimaginative body, which is why Obama has to create a whole separate office to deal with “innovation.” The bold and imaginative direction that he[Beran] sees it going is in restoring the civic focal point–which in the report by the Minnesota Regional Arts Council is an important arts developmental point.

I guess where I would differ with Beran is on the capacity of the NEA to change. I think rather than a structural problem, what Beran is pointing to is a problem of administrative culture. What remains to be seen is whether a new Administration and a new appointed head can shift the culture far enough to change its behavior.

UPDATED: Looking back on this post now I realize I conflated the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation with the rebranding of the White House Office of Public Engagement. I leave the error simply because I wish it had been called WHO-ISCE, so I could imagine a grumpy longshoreman musing as to the identity of a person he's never met before and only just noticed.

Returning to the Field

So, I let this blog lapse for a while because it seemed extremely purpose-less and rambly, I would just make bitter commentary about politics and theater with no particular knitting theme except they interested me, and they have to do with culture. But now I'm picking this blog up with a new mission. Recently, I've become interested again in how we, as artistic citizens, can return the civic-artistic culture to strength.

My attention to this subject has in the past ebbed and flowed--at one point I was inspired by the concept of "Artistic Literacy" as propounded by Augusto Boal, and by the introductory arts classes at NYU where I study, to think about how a new arts curriculum could be designed to interest young children in the arts. I think most art classes today focus too much on the instructive, skills-based approach (teaching how to play the violin, teaching how to draw an accurate person) without giving enough of the reason to play (music appreciation, an appreciation of color and form). Instilling the concept of art as a method of communication is important to me, because I feel like when art goes wrong is when it forgets that it's a conversation.

So this thread of my life lapsed as I got involved in my own, smaller world of study, the theater company I'm working on starting, the publishing company I'm working on starting, my actual full-time job during the week, and silly things like family and my social life.

A few months back I stumbled across the >100k Project. You really ought to read his description of the project for yourself, but the thrust of it is using funding models to create sustainable, independent theater (and other arts) in small rural and exurban communities.

Lately, I've become really inspired by it, especially with this week's announcement of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement that finally has assured me that President Obama takes this as seriously as I do. The >100k project and WHO-SICE (I pronounce it "Whose Is?" for fun) seem like a match made in heaven, and the NEA grant that >100k has already won makes it look like reality.

So now I'm going to be thinking about this a lot more. I'm doing research, trying to put together my own statistical models (I'm not a statistician but my mother and father have both studied some in undergraduate and graduate schools so we'll be working together). I'm hoping that with the new website and the general power of the internet, I'll be able to do enough research to really contribute some new knowledge.

Part of my goal is based around the work Richard Florida has done in trying to quantify the "Creative Class" as he calls it. The Cultural Economy is a subset of the Creative Class, and I think I want to figure out what our role is in it. I've just bought "The Rise Of The Creative Class" so this is my dumping ground for ideas related to it, and to the topics that >100k tosses my way.

I will probably still blog about other things as well, all theater and politics related, but with that clear focus in mind, I think I really can make this blog a regular and useful resource.