Beyond Richard Florida: A Cultural Sector of Our Own, cont.	2/3

2. The cultural sector needs to focus on infrastructure

What's a grantmaker to do?

That's what program officers are asking themselves these days. I spoke with one such funder, from a small private foundation, not too long ago. She talked about working to stay "ahead of the curve," trying to anticipate what artists need in order to make their art. "How," she asked, "do we get cash in their hands?"

Traditionally, cash-in-hand has been the default method for supporting artists in the process of making art. Off in the soft-focus distance, say 40 years ago, a $5,000 grant made a life-changing difference for an artist. But as the economy, politics, and social life in America have transformed themselves in the interim, the amount of available cash-in-hand for artists has dwindled into the realm of the negligible. For one thing, the current competition for funding is fierce. The number of people making their living as artists, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quadrupled from roughly one-half million in 1965 to about two million in 2003. For another, costs–of living, of making art–have skyrocketed. Cash-in-hand one project at a time just doesn't scale any more.

What if, instead of focusing on cash, we think value? How can government, corporate, community, and other private funding build infrastructure to help whole communities of artists instead of offering pocket money to one artist or program at a time? It's a very old, and effective strategy, teaching a person to fish, rather than handing her/him a fish.

Artists are exhausting themselves, endeavoring to make their art and patch up their arts community at the same time. They are trying to fill the vacuum of failed local service organizations. They are trying to respond to funder demands for institutional capacity-building without any support for general operations. They are trying to mentor their young colleagues.

If we really want artists to make art, then let's relieve them of the burdens of overhauling a weak infrastructure.

This movement is clearly afoot, with the impetus of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) and its 2003 study (conducted by the Urban Institute), "Investing in Creativity." There are so many ways that we can deliver value to artists: small business loans, microloans, health/life/disability/retirement insurance, subsidized studio/housing, mentoring programs, tax credits, and arts incubators.

Investment is the linchpin here, replacing the old (unspoken) notion of payout. But the shift will not likely be easy. Project grantmaking is seductive, because it is a pretty safe, low-risk practice with dependable short-term deliverables (a concert, an exhibit, a book, etc.). There is a tangible outcome, which can be photographed and described in the next annual report. Building infrastructure, while it promises to yield much larger returns, for more people over a longer period of time, resists easy assessment. Funders' internal challenge will be to measure infrastructure effectiveness and its impact on an entire community over the long term.

Despite this challenge, the shift toward investment and infrastructure is inevitable. As goes institution-building, so goes project-driven funding.

3. The cultural sector needs to think and act systematically

As the cultural sector's renewed commitment to artists gains momentum, I worry that it will be a replacement for, rather than a complement to, the existing commitment to organizational programming. And that it will provide a convenient, if justifiable, rallying cry for the foreseeable future, at the expense of the big picture and the long view. Remember when the focus was on community, and on audience engagement? Now people are asking, "What about the artists?" It's a great and important question, but it's not the only question. And in the meantime, what happens to the audiences, communities, programs, organizations, and case-making? Not to mention the students, avocational artists, teachers, scholars and critics, galleries and museums, schools, presses, presenters, and the rest of the sector? I've just gotten wind that arts education is no longer pushing the "Mozart makes our children smarter in math" campaign. Apparently, we're back to arguing "arts for art's sake." Why does it have to be either-or? And why does it sound like we're just trying to convince ourselves?

The cultural sector has yet to raise its sightlines high enough to take in the entire view. Organizations are not mutually exclusive of artists, who are not mutually exclusive of the public. When the trend is to focus on only a part of the entire system, we run the risk of unintended damage. In order to truly develop our field in the long term, we need to take the time to understand not just that we exist in a complex, interdependent system, but even more so how that system works. Only then can we make effective interventions.

Furthermore, we need to understand that the cultural sector is itself part of larger systems. We do not act out of our intentions alone. We cannot effect change through sheer force of will. There are driving forces in our collective life that we ignore at risk of marginalizing ourselves: social, economic, scientific/technological, political, and environmental drivers. The cultural sector's efforts to improve our country's well-being are shared by workers in such areas as community development, health care, public safety, social justice, public housing, religion, transportation services, economic development, unions, and education. We are also part of a much larger non-profit universe. And how much longer can we ignore our intimate connection–or lack thereof–to the commercial arts and to the unincorporated arts? At the largest level, we are embedded within political, social, economic, and ideological systems that afford and constrain our options.

The irony is, all the many pieces of this puzzle are being examined. They're just being examined by discrete, single-focus disciplines. It's no wonder that our thinking is atomistic, when that is how we have organized ourselves as a community. I try to attend a broad cross-section of conferences, and I am always struck by how distant they are from each other, in terms of concerns, methods, and membership. I see almost no overlap among the agency staffers at the Americans for the Arts conventions, the academics at the Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts conferences, and the artists at Dance/USA. Each defines culture in a different way and circumscribes its values and needs accordingly.

The cultural sector is not a natural category, and its boundaries are permeable, and shifting. Richard Florida demonstrated as much. If we can imagine culture in its larger contexts, and with more complexity, then we can harness energy within and beyond ourselves to create a system that is fluid, synergistic, and productive.

4. The cultural sector needs to anticipate the future strategically

Once we understand the cultural sector as a dynamic system interacting with other dynamic systems, then it's possible to improve our effectiveness. Instead of being buffeted by the travails of the market or the whims of politicians, we can anticipate emerging conditions–the bright spots as well as the rough spots. We can leave the knee-jerk rhetoric (think "creative class") behind. We can begin to operationalize reports like the Rand's on the performing and now visual arts by extending them into larger discourses beyond the borders of "the arts."

Otherwise, we'll remain as vulnerable as we were during the "culture wars" two decades ago. The problem wasn't simply that we could not make a case in our own defense. The larger problem was that we were surprised when the blows landed. Reactivity permeates the sector:

• Many an organization finds itself unprepared for the pullout of a long-time sponsor. The question is not if a patron will move on; the question is when a patron will move on. What planning is done by organizations to cultivate an ongoing stream of sponsorship?
• People are spending more of their leisure time at home (consider Netflix) or in activities with flexible schedules (like clubs or museums). What planning are the live arts undertaking to adapt?
• American demographics are shifting radically. In Texas, for example, the Hispanic population will soon be the statistical majority. What planning is the sector doing to serve all its public?
• Local performing arts centers count upon touring Broadway blockbusters for dependable ticket sales. But those shows may now be considering a run in Las Vegas rather than a national tour. What planning are presenters doing to take up the slack in revenue?

Just because the cultural sector is underfunded doesn't mean that it is powerless, limited to reactive behavior. Conversely, we must be all the more attuned to the changing environment, in order to make decisions that are informed by the future rather than the past.