The Arts Policy Diaries: Reflections on the Chicago Arts Symposium

On Tuesday June 7th I had the pleasure of spending the day in Chicago where I participated in Future of the City: The Arts Symposium – a joint venture between the Cultural Policy Centre at the University of Chicago and the National Endowment of the Arts. The event showcased leading thinkers interested in enhancing the relationship between the arts and cities, helping to shape a conversation about what Chicago should be doing to enhance its reputation as a vibrant cultural capital.

The invited audience of civic, business and cultural leaders provided a dynamic mix of experience and perspective. And the discussion was timely, maybe even strategic, given the newly elected local government. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel recently appointed Michelle Boone – a long time member of the local arts community – as the new cultural commissioner. Under Emmanuel, Boone will help guide cultural policy and programming for the city and thankfully comes equipped with a depth of knowledge about the local arts scene – not always a given when it comes to political appointments. It seems that, like Toronto, Chicago will begin developing a culture plan as a first order of business of the new administration. Emmanuel has been working with a transition team on arts and culture to help bring him up to speed on the portfolio.

The symposium opened with a keynote address by John Holden, formerly a leading researcher from the UK-based policy think tank DEMOS and now a visiting professor in Cultural Policy and Management at City University in London. Holden has done exceptional research in cultural value, culture and class, and democratic culture. His ideas were among the most insightful of the day. He began with the notion that a city without the arts is doomed to economic, social and political failure – though he explains that the meaning of ‘arts’ and ‘culture’ need to be rethought in current discourse. He suggests three categories of arts – funded, commercial and homemade – as a framework for talking about cultural participation and explains how each has its own defining qualities. They are different, though undeniably intertwined. Funded art is defined through practice. What’s funded is funded culture. Commercial art places the consumer in the position of arbiter and success is market driven. In both of these cases, artists have to overcome obstacles to get their work seen by an audience. Homemade art, however, has low barriers to entry and constitutes a much wider group.

He offers that an old mode of thinking about the arts would have us dismiss commercial art as mere entertainment and homemade art as amateur. But in the new model, these three are intertwined and we move fluidly between them as cultural participants. We define ourselves by our choices within these spheres, not by our choices between them and cities are well advised to assess the larger landscape when considering policy and investment decisions. Where he recommends cities give attention is in the area of inter-connectivity. “Attract brilliant people, then connect them. Inter-connectivity builds human capital.” Holden illustrates how this is an essential underpinning of the creative economy and shares a model of how to talk about the different kinds of value that the arts bring to cities and communities as a way of building understanding among stakeholders and decision-makers. This model includes three interconnected viewpoints through which to consider the value of an arts experience – intrinsic, instrumental and institutional. Instrumental is objective – a tool or instrument to achieve another aim. For example, art stimulates economic activity, improves educational performance or lowers crime rates. Instrumental value can be easily quantified and measured. Intrinsic value is about what cannot be easily measured. It is the impact of an arts experience on an individual, as defined by that individual. This value is always subjective and a major motivator for personal arts engagement. The last value is institutional value and is defined by the ways in which cultural organizations behave. It’s not so much about what they do, but how they do it, which impacts our collective perception of trust, civility, equality and sense of social well-being. These values as Holden has defined them can provide shared terms of reference in articulating the value of the arts to citizens.

Other notable speakers included principle economist Allan Freeman who works for the Greater London Authority, responsible for Cultural and Creative Industries, the Living Wage and benchmarking World Cities. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Manitoba. In his remarks, Freeman stressed that we must give more attention to pinpointing motivations for cultural engagement as an important metric that informs policy and practice. Sunil Iyengar, Research Director at the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) spoke about how the NEA is reassessing current methods of measuring impact, including finding ways to measure arts impact on other areas of life such as prosperity and social health.

In Philadelphia, Mark J. Stern, Professor of Social Welfare and coordinator of Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania has been a principal investigator for the Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) since 1994. SIAP has focused on developing methods for measuring how arts and cultural engagement influence urban communities. He presented compelling data that illustrated a strong relationship between social good and cultural resources in Philadelphia neighbourhoods. According to his research, art plays a significant role in social well-being, in particular on levels of stress, poverty and social inclusion within neighbourhoods. Notably, the highest rates of racial and ethnic harassment are found not in especially diverse neighbourhoods, but in neighbourhoods experiencing ethnic change. Where greater levels of cultural resources are available, diversity can persist more harmoniously amid ethnic and demographic shifts.

Over lunch, symposium participants were treated to an informal session with Wendell Pierce and David Simon from the popular HBO TV series The Wire. Admittedly, I’ve never seen this show, but there were definitely some fans in the crowd! Pierce reflected on the role of the artist as activist. He affirmed that art provides a place and a forum where we reflect on who we are and offer solutions to life’s challenges. In this sense, art is more than reflection alone. It is action. Though he laments that today there are many expectations of artists, and jokes that not only do we have to make art that entertains and transcends (without offending), but it also has to be cathartic, solve social problems, create jobs and help the Mayor fix the budget! Simon mused on the rise of the Internet as a tool that has democratized the creation and distribution of culture, while simultaneous brutalizing the notion of copyright and the value of the professional artist.

The latter part of the day focused on arts engagement and was animated by people who offered great examples and ideas on making creative connections between art and people. Maria Rosario Jackson, Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute spoke about bringing the arts to where under-participants are. She gave great examples of artists working in non-traditional distributions modes, such as ‘Dinner on the L-train’, and suggested that the system (policies and investment) needs to catch up in order to support the diversity of forms of distribution and arts participation. She also introduced us to the idea of the ‘cultural kitchen’, explaining that while diversity is a key ingredient for cultural vitality, a communal space is needed – a space where we prepare something to bring. Audience engagement guru Alan Brown of WolfBrown Consulting spoke of the challenges of assessing how people are transformed by artistic experiences. He notes that we make a lot of assumptions about how people and communities ascribe value to our work and that we need to take the time to talk to our audiences in order to better understand value from their perspective.

Another memorable speaker for me was Theastre Gates, an artist and policy researcher (like me!) and Director of Arts Program Development at the University of Chicago. Gates spoke on the closing panel about how artists need more allies to their practices. Artists need to simply know more policy-makers so that there is a stronger exchange between those engaged in the practice and those decision-makers that govern the ‘system’. “We can marry our skills to make things happen… creatively engage one another to achieve innovation.”

Overall, the Chicago Arts Symposium was a great success, leaving participants’ minds percolating with new ideas and perspectives. More conversations like these, along with ongoing, meaningful research and active partnerships between the cultural sector and local planners and policy-makers will help reinforce the ways in which the arts can play a leading role in making cities great places to live, work and play. It’s refreshing to see that more and more, civic and business leaders are giving credence to the role of the creative economy and how the arts enrich the quality of our communities and neighbourhoods, inspire civic engagement, attract talent, and drive economic growth. With all of the right ingredients, Chicago is certainly on its way to becoming a world-class cultural capital.

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