Kickstarting Entrepreneurial Learning

Posted on February 21, 2011 by lindaessig

I met last week with Cindy Au of kickstarter.com, the crowd-sourced financing site for creative projects.  In talking with her about kickstarter’s approach to project selection, I realized that the site is more than just a way for arts entrepreneurs (and others) to finance their projects, but is actually a way to teach entrepreneurial habits of mind, most specifically specificity of focus, initiative, community (market) awareness, and persistence.

To be successful on kickstarter, creators need to have a laser beam specificity not only on their product but on the specific phases of the project for which they seek funding.  Further, one need not only post their project on kickstarter (or any other crowd-sourced funding site) and lie in wait.  To be successful, the creator needs to take the initiative to advance their cause within their own communities – mom is often the first contributor.  But the savvy proposer will extend their community connections well beyond family to friends, co-workers,  and, of course, the target audience for their product, whatever it might be.  Finally, if at first you don’t success, figure out why and try again; there is no harm in doing so.

I’ve written here and elsewhere previously about the importance of experiential learning in an arts entrepreneurship curriculum.  If there’s a real project, seeking real funding provides a level of experiential learning one can’t garner within the confines of one’s campus.  And, while I would not propose that student entrepreneurs use such sites just for experience, when they’re ready to have that first REAL experience, they can do so knowing that even if they don’t make their funding goal, they will still gain from it.

(As an aside I note by way of follow-up to a series of postings about public arts funding that crowd-sourced financing is just one of many public and private sources that artists and arts entrepreneurs can and should have access to in order to find support for their innovative work.)

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American Shame

Posted on February 19, 2011 by lindaessig

I was planning to write this week about a productive meeting I had Monday with Cindy Au of kickstarter.com and about how using kickstarter.com and other crowd-sourced financing options “teach” entrepreneurial habits of mind.  But with cuts to the NEA likely to be even deeper than expected, friends in Wisconsin speaking out about their right to sit at a negotiating table, and Bahranian “security forces” shooting at their own citizens, that topic will have to wait.

Instead, I call your attention to an Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times by Charles Blow.  Using data publicly available from our own government and elsewhere, Blow graphically displays what he calls “American Shame.”  With a Gini index of 45, the U.S. has the highest income disparity in the IMF’s 33 “advanced economies” with the exception of Hong Kong and Singapore.  This is not just slightly worse than our next nearest competitor, Portugal — it is a full 6.5 points higher than Portugal and in the same range as Mozambique, Cameroon, and Mexico, none of which make it to the IMF’s list. Not surprising when the government extends tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans at a cost of $690 billion (that’s billion with a B). We have the HIGHEST level of food insecurity among the 33 IMF countries, MORE THAN DOUBLE the incarceration rate of any of the other countries, and the lowest math scale score.  Perhaps if we could commit to spending more on education than prisons, that trend would be reversed.

I share Blow’s graphic here (click to enlarge):

I turned on the radio Thursday morning to a story about “workers protesting in the capitol city” thinking I was hearing about the news of my teacher friends in Wisconsin.  It took me a few minutes to realize the story was about Cairo.

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Arts Policy: Oranges and Pomegranates

Posted on February 13, 2011 by lindaessig

The arts policy conversation was fueled last week by an announcement from the governor of Kansas that the state’s arts commission would cease to be a state agency and by Texas Governor Perry’s statement that the Texas arts commission was not mission critical so should be cut (this statement has not yet been actualized).  This leaves many of us in the blogosphere, most notably Arlene Goldbard and Ian David Moss, pondering the role of state arts agencies.  My own ideas in this regard are nascent at best, but the beauty of blogging is that I can put some ideas out there, get reaction, do some more research, and then refine those ideas in what I hope will be a long-term iterative project of both formal theorizing and informal activism. So, if you’re willing to accept my disclaimer, read on…

The news of the Kansas Arts Commission’s demise followed close on the heels of a blog-based debate on the supply/demand equation as it applies to nonprofit arts orgs.  The two topics are related in some ways, but in fundamental ways are different.  One is an argument about arts organization and the second about the arts themselves and more fundamentally, government intervention in a specific cultural and/or economic sector. As others have noted, what it’s not about is the actual dollars — they are negligible to the budget scheme at the state or federal levels.

Since Kennedy’s day, advocates have used a public goods argument to justify public support for the arts.  Even Paul Samuelson, in defining public goods in a series of articles in 1954 and 1955, cited cultural performance (specifically an open-air circus) as an example of a public good. Open an introductory economics text and one is likely to find a definition of public goods as those goods and services that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous or, stated another way, goods that are available to all and which use by one person is not precluded by use by another.  This definition makes a strong argument for support of the arts (as well as other social goods, such as protection of the environment).   Many in the US would prefer that government not interfere in a market-based economic sector.  The issue here as Goldbard implies, although she doesn’t put it in quite these economic terms, is that much of what we think of as participation in and production of arts are non-market goods.  While there is a market for some art (e.g. a painting for sale in a gallery, a ticket to the symphony) there is no market incentive to produce art for which there is not yet a market even if there may be a market in the future (consider that there was little or no market for Van Gogh’s paintings while he was alive).  Similarly, there is no direct market incentive for participation in the arts, despite the positive externalities of culture, democracy, and “creative class” infrastructure such participation engenders.

I see, therefore, two reasons for government to intervene: to seed innovation and to provide equitable access to participation.  One of the fundamental problems with government funding for the arts is, as Goldbard notes, “most of these [state arts] agencies channel a disproportionate amount of funding to largely white, red-carpet organizations…” These are organizations that maintain the status quo of arts production.  While preservation is an important mission, it should not be the sole –or even primary – focus of arts policy.  Here, we can return to the question raised by Landesman about the supply of arts organizations.  Is there a way for arts policy (read funding) to be targeted at artists rather than arts organizations so that artists can actually innovate?  (Keep in mind that right now, the most impactful policy tool in terms of dollars supporting the arts is the tax deduction for charitable giving which targets neither artists nor arts organizations, but the elite deduction-itemizing affluent taxpayer.)  The second justification for intervention is to seed participation – to ameliorate the inequities in participation in the arts caused by geography, economy, and sheer bias.

I haven’t yet listed the most often-articulated justification for government intervention: the arts builds creative economies, supports jobs, etc etc because that argument clearly is not working!  Perhaps it’s not working because it’s a market-based argument for a non-market good and you can’t get oranges from a pomegranate tree.  When we can make a valid public value argument that is not solely based on economic growth, we may be able to make some progress.

Anne Schneider and Helen Ingraham write that pluralist democracy depends on “citizens who pay enough attention to politics that they can mobilize when their interests are threatened.”  What has been heartening about the conversation over the last several weeks is the very fact that we are having it.  Unfortunately, we are only having it amongst ourselves.  Go out and tell your legislators that art doesn’t just “work,” it “matters;” it is an essential part of who we are as humans and as Americans.

(I have a related post on the symbolic capital of state arts agencies)

photo by Dinah Hughes.

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Dream + Action = ?

Posted on February 8, 2011 by lindaessig

There has been a lively online conversation over the past twelve days since Rocco Landesman’s comments about the supply/demand equation for arts organizations.  I’ve read economic arguments from both the left and the right, a reminder of the dearth of healthcare option for artists, and an especially thoughtful piece on the potential commoditization of children that results from thinking of arts ed as a means to grow audience.  Early on, I wrote here about the possibility of transforming supply through innovation, rather than reducing it.  Avid twitterer and blogger Kira Campo picked up on the notion of innovation and pondered what innovation means in the arts.  Meanwhile, Lane Wallace on James Fallows’ The Atlantic blog wrote:

Innovation experts and consultants stress repeatedly that innovation isn’t a matter of subject knowledge. It’s about thinking in flexible, integrative, and multidisciplinary ways, across many fields and types of knowledge. It’s about being able to synthesize and integrate different perspectives and models; of understanding and taking into account different human, cultural and economic needs, desires, values, and factors and, from all that, glimpsing a new way forward that nobody else managed to see.

In the midst of this, a student in my arts entrepreneurship class reminded me of a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” It is the ability and willingness to dream things that never were that leads to innovation, be it innovation in the arts or in science and technology.  (John M. Eger reminded us on his blog that the divide between science and art is fairly recent).  The dream, of course, is not enough.  That dream must be accompanied by ACTION to lead to innovation.  Artists, as creative thinkers, are good at dreaming.  And artists, as makers, tend to be good at action – we en-act, re-act, and act-ivate.  Finally, if that innovation – that en-acted dream – has value (defined broadly and measured multi-dimensionally) it can have lasting impact on our communities and our disciplines.

The conversation has been and continues to be rich and thought-provoking — keep it coming!

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Jaime’s Elephant

Posted on February 3, 2011 by lindaessig

In the midst of the blogosphere’s reaction to Rocco Landesman’s remarks about supply and demand, Jaime Dempsey of the Arizona Commission on the Arts opened the door on an important issue for artists that is too often ignored.  With her permission, I excerpt large portions of her open letter to Chairman Landesman here:

…. I for one take serious comfort in the uncomfortable conversations. It is high time the American arts sector takes steps to shape and direct its destiny, rather than waiting for external forces to decide its fate.

Still two of your assertions gave me pause. [Only one of them is excerpted here. For the full post, click here.]

Regarding “examining our arts infrastructure”:

Your post stated that we’ve got “5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists.” I’ve already seen these figures making the rounds in blogs and comments. … I find these figures to be intensely troubling, for several reasons.

The first of which is that, while the idea of outsized bureaucracies at the expense of populist opportunity in any sector causes a lot of political and social excitement, in this context, it is misleading at best. There are several factors contributing to the lopsided administrators vs. artists ratio which are widespread and broadly accepted. These factors, more than the figures themselves, require deeper consideration by arts leaders and policymakers.

Studies of arts sector jobs tend to broadly count arts workers and narrowly count artists. “Arts workers” counts often include architects, advertising professionals, graphic designers – certainly artists in their own rights but definitely not administrators of nonprofit arts programs, people who presumably we’re talking about when considering the nonprofit arts infrastructure and the potential redistribution of the arts dollar.

….I suspect most American artists don’t derive their primary income from their creative pursuits, and I strongly suppose most people do refer to the source of their primary income when asked about their careers. … I suspect many of the 5.7 million arts administrators are themselves artists who derive their primary income from work in the nonprofit arts sector. Or even more likely, that any census of professional employment is full of artists whose primary income is derived from other sectors entirely.

…None of these individuals would list “artist” as their primary occupation, yet all contribute greatly to what Bill Ivey is calling the “expressive lives” of their communities. There just aren’t enough opportunities, or enough demand, you might say, in Arizona communities – and I think in most communities – to make a living wage with reasonable safety nets as an artist at this time.

And still we have to talk about the elephant in the room: access to affordable health care and some modicum of professional security can now literally mean the difference between life and death, for artists and everyone else. One only has to look to the issues currently facing states’ public healthcare rolls to get a sense of what can happen to friends and neighbors who find themselves ill and out of work.

Art works, yes, but if you are an artist with relationships – anyone depending on you – or you aren’t blessed with good health for the entirety of your life, and you need a life that works, you must have access to the safety nets often only accessible through an employer. (Thank heavens for Fractured Atlas and all of the resources they provide related to this issue.) If affordable health care were in greater supply in this country, I suspect the number of Americans who would choose “artist” as their primary profession would increase substantially.

Inside and outside of the arts, policymakers are unwise to underestimate the ways that an absence of affordable health care prevents Americans from engaging in creative, entrepreneurial risk – in a time when we need the leadership of creative entrepreneurs most.

Thank you for opening the doors to this conversation.

Jaime Dempsey
Deputy Director
Arizona Commission on the Arts

Jaime’s elephant, that the self-employed entrepreneur, be they artist or inventor, does not have access to affordable healthcare is an infrastructure lacuna that negatively affects all of us, both within and without the arts sector.

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Dear Mr. Donenberg

Posted on February 1, 2011 by lindaessig

Dear Mr. Donenberg:

Thank you for using my blog to offer your critique of Rocco Landesman and his recent comments about supply and demand.  I am not going to defend Mr. Landesman here; he’s a big boy and can do that himself.  I will note, however, that it does not take a PhD in economics to understand the supply and demand curve (see below).  Nor does it take a PhD in statistics to understand the graphs in the NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.  In general, the data shows an increase in participation in 1992 over 1982, an increase in 2002 over 1992, and then a decline in 2008 in all areas except in the number and percent of adults who watched or listened to a recorded performance.  What does this tell us? Given the impact of the economic meltdown that occurred in 2008, it might only tell us that people didn’t have as much money to spend on arts-going.  Or, it could tell us that attendance is declining, or it could tell us that arts participation is moving from a communal public activity to a solitary private one, or it could tell us to look again in two years to see if the trend continues.  I advocate for the last before drawing any conclusions.

Your comments did not directly reply to my post (I believe you posted the same remarks on several other blogs), but I will reply directly to yours.  I am deeply troubled, Mr. Donenberg, by your closing comments:

The amount of art we have is perfect. The sizes of our audiences are perfect and can evolve. Let’s focus on getting great art into the hearts of as many Americans possible and get the NEA back on its mandated track.

If the amount of art we have is “perfect,” why make more?  We need more art. We need more art because the world is imperfect and art helps us see those imperfections and in seeing them, correct them.  The size of the audience is not perfect.  We need more audience – not to help pay the bills (although that would be nice), but because people are imperfect and art helps that audience see those imperfections and improve on them.  And yes, we need great art that touches the hearts of as many Americans as possible, but to do that we need art that is of, by, and for as many Americans as possible.  I hope that you and the other members of the National Council of the Arts in partnership with Mr. Landesman,  the NEA, the state arts councils, private foundations, educators, audience members, and artists of all kinds can help make that happen.

Yours Sincerely,

Linda Essig

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Supply, Demand, and Rocco Landesman

Posted on January 29, 2011 by lindaessig

Robin Pogrebin reported in the Arts Beat column today and online yesterday on NEA chairman Rocco Landesman’s remarks at Arena stage earlier in the week.  He “addressed the problem of struggling theaters. “You can either increase demand or decrease supply,” he said. “Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.””  Ouch!  Pogrebin goes on to report on some typically but understandably defensive responses from theatre professionals.  Public Choice economist Tyler Cowen, whose research is funded by the Koch brothers and their various pro-market foundations, posted an excerpt on his blog, inciting a flurry of sarcastic remarks deriding the very concept of public funding for the arts, my own comment excepted.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the full text of Landesman’s remarks, but arts managers would be foolish not to consider them seriously, and not only because he heads the NEA.  What Landesman doesn’t consider in the excerpted comments is that reducing supply is only one way to think about balancing the supply and demand equation.  Another is not to shrink the supply, but rather to alter it, to transform it in order to maintain or grow demand.  What if, for example, new play development focused on innovative forms that would tap into an audience that doesn’t currently go to new plays?  What if new play development focused on plays that speak to audiences that don’t have a voice in the traditional resident theatre? What if the traditional resident theater organization could be radically adapted to be more fluid in structure to support a more flexible supply of plays, and other live performance forms?

For years, the NEA focused on providing “access to excellence” — to getting a more diverse audience into traditional arts venues.  Instead, maybe the NEA can be part of President Obama’s plan to “win the future” by “encouraging American innovation.”  Unfortunately, the president did not stress – OK he didn’t even mention – the importance of arts and culture to that future, but the focus on innovation can and should extend to the arts and culture sector, and not only because of jobs in the creative industries.  The NEA is now requiring that consortium grants demonstrate that projects will meet the NEA definition of innovation.  What we need, however, is “investment” in innovative artists, as well as in arts organizations.  As the president noted, its not always profitable for a company to invest in R&D, so the government has to intervene by directly “investing” in the development of innovative ideas like, for example, the internet.  Similarly, government investment is needed to seed innovative ideas in arts and culture.  Then, we may have a supply of artworks for which there is more than an adequate share of demand.

(you can follow Linda on twitter @LindaInPhoenix)

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The Symbolic Capital of Arts Commissions

Posted on January 24, 2011 by lindaessig

I learned late last week that Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s budget proposal zeroes out the general appropriations line for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a cut of approximately $665,000, as part of her cost-cutting plan. The plan also includes moving 280,000 people off of the state’s Medicaid program whose eligibility was gained by popular vote a decade or so ago — but I digress.   Fortunately, she is only cutting 8% out of the Arizona Arts Trust Fund, which is forecast to generate $1.4M for granting, programming and operating expenses of the commission, so the commission itself will continue. Arizona is one of 44 states with a structural budget deficit, according to a statistic in the New York Times, and arts commissions are perennially likely candidates for cuts.  The Kansas Arts Commission is being hit even harder than AZ (see What’s the Matter with Kansas).   Like Kansas’, several other state commissions are literally on the chopping block.

Does it matter? Nonprofit arts institutions receive, to use a broad aggregate statistic, only about 5% of their total revenue from government grants.  Could these institutions absorb a 5% cut? Maybe.  But the value of that 5% of funding is so much more than its dollar amount.  State arts commissions, like the National Endowment for the Arts that funds block grants to most of them, provide symbolic capital – and a good thing to, since their financial capital is so small.  Having a state arts commission is a signal that the arts MATTER, or, to use the National Endowment’s new catch-phrase, that the arts WORK.  Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as “any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural, or social) which is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value.”* The existence of government arts agencies provides an imprimatur to the field we call “the arts.” When that symbolic capital, as embodied in our federal, state, and local arts agencies is reduced away, the cultural capital it supports will dissipate as well.

*Bourdieu, P. (1994). Rethinking the state: Genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field (L. Wacquant & S. Farage, Trans). Sociological Theory, 12, p.8

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Half Full or Half Empty

Posted on January 21, 2011 by lindaessig

photo by jespis

 

NEA research director Suyin Iyengar posted an interesting report today.  It’s really a “report on a report” by the Arts Council England about online engagement with arts and culture.  The report indicates that 53% of people online “used the Internet to engage with the arts and cultural sector.”  Iyengar points to a very similar result from an earlier NEA report that found that “53 percent of all American adults participated in the arts through electronic or digital media.”  This means that a higher percentage of Americans participate in arts and culture through electronic or digital media than voted in the 2010 elections, which had approximately a 42% turnout.

I’m not sure (yet) what this means, but I have a feeling it’s important for more democratic participation in the arts.  Iyengar notes that “people use digital media primarily as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, the live arts experience.”  Yet, only 15% of that online audience also attended a live event.  That means the vast majority were in the privacy of the homes or offices listening to or watching audio or video streams.  As more “live” art becomes available online, will it mean that people are even less likely to leave the house to attend the live event?  By extension, does it mean that people will participate less in other social interactions, such as voting?  For now, it looks like the glass is half full at 53%, but it may instead be half empty.

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My Head in the Cloud

Posted on January 19, 2011 by lindaessig

There’s a fabulous grad student working with me on the logistics of the upcoming p.a.v.e. symposium on entrepreneurship and the arts.  He has experience organizing festivals and events and so I trust his judgment about the value of using cloud computing to help us manage people, printing, catering, and scheduling.   Using , he has created a planning calendar, a place for us to share documents, and a task list with deadlines and priorities.  Although this is my first experience with Google Sites, I’ve used Google Docs before, primarily for file sharing with colleagues at ASU.

Cloud computing is an obvious and often-used means for artistic collaboration, especially when a team is geographically dispersed.  But, as I recall the glitches we faced setting up our symposium sharing site, I wonder what we are giving up by putting our information “out into the ether?”  One concedes a certain amount of control in doing so.  In using Google Sites and Google Docs, we are putting our trust in an infrastructure that is privately owned, largely unregulated, and free.  While the latter makes it a boon to struggling arts organizations that can’t invest in their own server space, the private ownership and lack of public oversight are potentially worrisome.  Should the cloud – at least the ones that are put out there for all to use – be considered “common pool resources?”*  Optimistically, as more and more users put their data out there, perhaps those users will develop the kind of self-governing, self-regulating institutions Elinor Ostrom describes and envisions for environmental common pool resources. On the other hand, it’s probably not a bad idea to be both skeptical and cautious, to back up our data, and to watch out for breaches of information privacy.

* (there’s an earlier post that imagines donor dollars as a common pool resource)

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