Arts Advocacy Wrap Up

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Wow, we had some really fantastic bloggers for Arts Advocacy Month.

We started out with a bang with Will Maitland Weiss from The Arts & Business Council of New York [ABC/NY], who gave us some important tips on dealing with our city and state representatives and helped us craft our message when communicating with those representatives.

Next Adam Huttler, Executive Director of Fractured Atlas told us that our community can be a powerful special interest group.

Norma P. Munn, Steering Committee Member for the One Percent for Culture Campaign and Chair of the NY City Arts Coalition covered the basics of Arts Advocacy 101.

 

And our key note blogger, Paul Nagle, Executive Director for Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability (ICSCS) covered some important changes in international arts policy that we should all be aware of. He also shared some of the platforms and programs that ICSCS is developing that surrounds some of those policy changes.

There was also a lot of feedback from our community, who left some really good questions and comments.

Thank you all for contributing and we hope to be able to continue these important discussions.

Some Advocacy Items to be aware of:

•  You can still email to your elected officials about the city and state budgets (or consider sending a letter)
• American Alliance for Theatre & Education's Awareness project that asks us all to help spread the word about Theatre In Our Schools Month
• The NEA's recently released Survey of Public Participation in the Arts 
• National Arts Advocacy Day April 4–5, 2011 
• Check to see if your performance venue would qualify for the Tax Abatement proposal and help us gather some important information to help that move on to the next step

In honor of World Theatre Day (March 27th) we are dedicating March to the International Theatre community. We have some great bloggers lined up.  Please stop by, ask questions and share your thoughts about how the OOB/Indie theatre community can be a part of the international theatre community. And check out the NYC World Theatre Day blog.

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Useful News from Across the Pond

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Paul Nagle.

In yesterday’s post, I spoke about the need for our cultural community to participate in international cultural policy discussions.  And today, ICSCS received an email from Dr. David O’Brien of the Department of Culture Media and Sport in the United Kingdom, expressing interest in our work (news travels fast - gotta love the internet!) and bringing our attention to a recent report that his agency produced on strategies for dealing with the quandary of valuing the benefits of the arts Measuring the value of culture: A report to the Department for Culture Media and Sport . 

He also sent along a link for a 1/31/2011 news story, published in a London School of Economics blog called British Politics and Policy at LSE, which I have excerpted below.  It not only illustrates the fact that arts workers around the world have a common struggle, but it points out that we have something to learn from other sectors as well, in this case the environmental movement, which has come up with imperfect, but workable valuations for benefits derived from a healthy ecology. Read…

The arts and cultural sector faces ‘apocalyptic’ cuts in austere Britain. But new ways of looking at economic value can help to make the case for culture
“The prospects for the arts and cultural sector have been described in apocalyptic terms, with cuts to national and local funding for the arts coming at a time when private sector funding and individual philanthropy is dwindling. The reduction of state support has been described by Sir Nicholas Serota as a potential ‘Blizkrieg’ on the traditional mixed economy of arts and cultural funding, and requires rethinking the way arts and cultural funding is valued.”

Lessons from the Green Movement
A recent report by Missions Model Money encourages the sector abandon their suspicions of economics and embrace microeconomic valuation techniques. The Green Movement has taken this approach by developing the field of environmental economics. Running alongside the development of scientific consensus on major environmental issues, environmental economics has made aspects of our natural world that we wouldn’t usually associate with price and money visible in governmental cost benefit analysis. This isn’t to say that all decisions are sensible, or that they reflect the advice of environmental science. But at least the Green Movement now has a way to talk to central government in its own language.

The arts and culture sector can tread the same path as the environmentalists but it will take a bit of a leap of faith. After being told, regular as clockwork since the early 1990s, that the arts and cultural sector needs a new way of ‘proving’ its worth, there’s a danger that a comment like ‘learn to speak economics’ will be greeted with a resigned shrug and seen as another box to be ticked, with another consultant’s fee to be paid. Another issue is that the language of economics isn’t easy: techniques like ‘willingness to pay’ surveys or ‘subjective well-being income compensations’ require expertise to carry out and interpret so they make sense. But they add another layer to the arts and cultural sector’s answer to the economic question.”

So now, through these blogs, I have established some fundamentals for our principles of inquiry.  We at ICSCS believe that in order to create a new and more effective narrative of culture’s critical importance to human society, we need to conduct multiple lines of inquiry:  We need to look beyond our borders; we need to look beyond our sector; we need all sorts of streams of research and data: literature reviews, data assembly, surveys, discussions, ethnography and artistic interpretation, even though we can’t see at this moment how they might all eventually be synthesized into a cohesive argument for the arts.  The first task is to open our minds to possibilities beyond those we have already thought of.  The next task is  to use our talents as artists, our ability to think in non-linear ways, to imagine what does not yet exist and to make visible what is known but not yet seen, in order to decipher together the meanings and applications of all the new ideas we will be discovering together. 

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Make U.S. Arts Policy an International Discussion

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Paul Nagle.

I like to think of myself as an internationalist, and in that role, I have been speaking to my (mostly European) cultural counterparts for years.  Until recently, I have generally hit a brick wall in trying to discuss U.S. Cultural Policy with them.  Their reaction was always the same.  “It is useless to discuss arts funding with you, because it is apples and oranges.  We have always had support for the arts and we will never lose that patrimony.  It’s just too different.”  Hmmm. 

Suddenly, this September, when I was in Berlin, I started hearing a different tune.  Italy’s cultural budget has been obliterated by Berlusconi and Cameron cut the British Council’s budget by 40% shortly after taking office in the U.K.  The Netherlands now has a right-wing coalition government slashing the cultural budget.  (For a take on the situation in the Netherlands, go to our blogsite where ICSCS Associate Director Lise Brenner has posted “Leftist Hobbies (or does the Dutch voter really hate art, Greenpeace, and their local squat café?)”.

So now our European counterparts seem more willing to discuss “Why are artists under attack and how do we respond?” It’s an opening for expanded international engagement, and a reason for artists around the world to work together.  As an example, we were contacted last week by The Internationalists, a coalition of theater directors from around the globe, regarding "Theatre Uncut in New York," a solidarity event in support of Reclaim Productions’ call for a "National Theatre Uprising" which has brought together seven of the UK's leading playwrights in response to the unprecedented public spending cuts in the UK.  On Thursday, March 3rd at 8pm, the 5th Annual NoPe Conference: Global Change in Performance, NoPassport, and The Internationalists in association with INTAR will present an evening of short play readings at INTAR. This event is both in solidarity with UK artists and celebrates the potential of civic responsibility by artists everywhere. It is one among many efforts by hundreds of theatre companies, universities, artists and global supporters who will be staging these shorts throughout March.

But it’s not all about funding.  We are working with Jared Akama Ondieki and CEPACET in Kenya, who is engaging artists in a campaign to peace-build during the upcoming elections.  We are looking for a sister city project in Arizona to pair U.S. and Kenyan artists engaged in promoting civility during election cycles.  Wouldn’t it be great to have the two campaigns helping each other and comparing notes?   We are also working with Shalom Neuman , visual artist, in the Czech Republic, who is converting a 10^th century basilica in Bohemia into a cultural center celebrating all of the ethnic communities that have called the region home. The center will be a locus for understanding as two towns create a repatriation campaign for Jews and Germans who lost their properties or were driven out as a result of World War II.  And we are working with Todd Lester of freeDimensional an organization that has created a network of arts facilities around the world that work to provide short and long-term safe haven to artists who have become political refugees (which happens way more often than it should).

As funding paradigms are collapsing globally under the crush of the baby boomer numbers, and as people around the world gain new understanding of how arts and culture can lift conversations about global challenges, we have new openings for international cultural policy discussions.  Exposure to ideas from around the world will strengthen all our investigations, and spur expanded thinking on what is possible anywhere. The time for provincial thinking on cultural policy has passed.

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The Basic Arts Advocacy Platform of ICSCS

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Paul Nagle.

 It’s great to be in the Guest Blogger clean-up position.  I’ve read all of the ITF guest blogs for advocacy month and each one has had very valid things to say.  If, as we know, the arts are critically important to communities, and if we have such smart people in the forefront of the charge advocating for the arts, why do we feel like the proverbial hamster in the wheel about all of this?  How do we keep coming back to fighting for tiny restorations to tiny budget allocations that bear no real relationship to the current impact numbers (by far too low anyway in my opinion) that represent the benefits that the arts bestow on society?  At ICSCS (The Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability), we believe there are two key issues:  that the arts are undercounted and isolated.

 

Some great work has been done in the last few years, particularly by Randy Bourscheidt and the studies he produced through the Alliance for the Arts.  But the arts remain undercounted.  Economic metrics, at their best a partial and inferior measure of art’s value, still fail to take into account the employment of many many individual artists and freelance creative workers.  We do not have a sufficient method to account for the intangible benefits of the arts.  Valuing doesn’t take into account value of mission, or value of service to the community.  We don’t have an effective way to present the macroeconomic benefits of the arts, even though we know that urban centers cannot be competitive these days without a healthy cultural sector.    

 

Quantifying these deeper values of the arts has been elusive and hard, but that thinking, that new knowledge is out there.  It’s really at the tip of our fingertips.   How do we get at it? How do we achieve that needed innovation that ties it all together into a cohesive but expansive narrative? Open up the conversation; both who is in on the discussion, and the range of topics to be considered. Culture is a broad topic and it deserves broad complex consideration.   New technologies that are highly interactive with maximum efficiencies can facilitate discussions and inquiry involving the entire cultural community.  There is a lot of untapped expertise out there in the trenches. 

 

But even if we achieve that expanded grassroots discussion within the cultural community, the arts could remain isolated.  For some reason, we have been repeating many of the same rhetorical mistakes for 40 years now.  The political discussion has moved very little in real terms and is presently moving backward again.  At ICSCS, we believe that part of our mistake has been sitting in a room full of arts people, telling ourselves how special and important we are.  That doesn’t necessarily fly so well with the greater community, especially once you leave the cultural cocoon of New York City. 

 

In fact, most of the problems we face are not so different than those of most of our neighbors.  And the really big issues like climate change and worldwide recessions affect us even though, not because, we are artists.  It must become clear to the greater community that the health of the cultural sector and the health of the community are interdependent, not because we say it is, but because they see that it is so.

 

That is why ICSCS will concentrate on creating conversations and initiatives between artists and advocates from other sectors over the value of art and the role of artists in addressing shared issues of sustainability.  There are networks all over the globe of people who are not artists, and yet who understand the deep relationships between art and culture and a sustainable life.  It’s a matter of creating the synapses of good will and unity of purpose that will make the connections among these networks. 

 

We are artists in trouble, in a world full of trouble.  We are artists with new ideas in a world full of new ideas.  If we can open up the conversation, not only within the cultural community, but beyond its borders, then we can tie our fate as artists to the fate of the greater community.  If we can have these conversations not only with our friends in New York City, but with our allies across the country and in Berlin and Poland and Kenya, then for arts advocacy, I believe it is a game-changing moment of opportunity.

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Guest Blogger: Paul Nagle

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We would like to thank Norma P. Munn for blogging for us last week, especially in the middle of the busiest arts advocacy week of the year here in New York State.

We are very happy to have our friend Paul Nagle blogging for us this week.

Paul Nagle serves as Executive Director of ICSCS – Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability.  The ICSCS mission is to support policy that articulates and strengthens art’s central role in civic life and enhances cultural, community and environmental sustainability.  Previous to this position, as Director of Cultural Policy for NYC Councilmember Alan J. Gerson (2002-2010), Paul crafted strategies to preserve the arts in Lower Manhattan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  He convened the Arts Advisors to the Select Committee, a consortium of 30 downtown arts leaders, which developed a strategic community-based plan to guide the Councilmember’s policies and investments in Lower Manhattan’s cultural redevelopment. Paul served as ombudsman for all external grants made by the office to 501c3 organizations and was deeply involved with several major cultural capital building projects. Paul has been a produced playwright and presenter.  He was the Founding Executive Director of All Out Arts and the Executive Producer for its first five festivals.  He also served as managing director and interim executive director of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center.  He holds a B.A. in Arts Administration and an MA in Cultural Policy, both from the Gallatin School at New York University.

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