Thinking Outside the Cubicle? Does the 501(c)(3) Box Stifle Creativity in the Dot-com Era?

"There’s Nothing Informal About It: Participatory Arts Within the Cultural Ecology of Silicon Valley" by Maribel Alvarez (San Jose, Calif.: Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley, 2005. Order this book (or download it) at http://www.ci-sv.org

In this smart and eye-opening book Maribel Alvarez sheds light on the largely invisible world of “informal arts” in Silicon Valley, and reveals similarities it shares with the entrepreneurial high-tech industries that flourish around it. (I’ll talk about the chicken and the egg later.) She shows how these serious creative endeavors – described as “expansive, entrepreneurial, resilient, and adaptive” – flourish outside the framework of the nonprofit “501(c)(3) world” – the formal or incorporated arts. Moreover, Alvarez provides a penetrating look at how traditional arts structures and cultural policy are failing to serve contemporary multi-ethnic reality, the needs and interests of the creative economy and the social patterns and preferences of a majority of the population.

This book is must reading for anyone concerned with cultural policy, arts philanthropy, community-based arts or the creative economy. Published by the nonprofit Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley, headed by long-time Bay Area arts funder John Kreidler, it’s the most recent in a series of studies of arts and culture and their relationships to that Northern California community.

Together with research assistant Lisa van Diggelen, Alvarez collected stories and painted a picture of a robust world of artistic production parallel to – but largely overshadowed by – the established nonprofit arts and their standard operating procedures. They build on earlier work by Alaka Wali on informal arts in Chicago and by Pia Moriarty on immigrant participatory arts in Silicon Valley, among others.

Alvarez bases her findings on ethnographic research, but it’s her interpretation, contextualization and conclusions that make this book important. In a sometimes academic but delightful writing style, she examines the ethos of idiosyncratic entrepreneurs and the massive high-tech industries they built. Her book contrasts the nature of these entrepreneurs and the informal arts to formal arts structures and patterns of civic investment in culture in Silicon Valley. In doing so she makes a compelling argument that government and philanthropic resources are profoundly misdirected. In the alternative she suggests some ways informal or participatory forms can be nourished. Alvarez has made a huge leap in redefining “art” in relation to cultural policy.

A High Cultural Output Region?

“Silicon Valley is a region that continues to see itself, even post-dot-com bust, as a frontier of creativity, and as such,” Alvarez writes, “is a particularly interesting place to examine the ideologies and social dynamics of a changing art paradigm.” I couldn’t agree more. However, Alvarez portrays this entrepreneurial corporate culture as unique, a parochial view I would challenge. In so doing, I would assert that her examination has widespread relevance far beyond Silicon Valley.

I’ve been visiting San Jose regularly for the past three years and had begun to pigeon-hole it, and the surrounding Silicon Valley, as a cultural importer – a wealthy arts backwater that has spent lavishly to have traditional western or Eurocentric-style concert halls, theaters, museums – the venues that interpret and remount works from the western canons, in Eurocentric-style and settings.

For a city of nearly one million people and the self-professed "Capital of Silicon Valley," San Jose has only scattered evidence of an active artist community making new work, experimenting and connecting its multicultural richness. In no way can it compare to the smaller yet far more famous city to the north – San Francisco. As do so many others, I assumed that young or “serious” artists leave the South Bay for the stimulation of San Francisco and East Bay. But I wasn’t looking under the surface as Alvarez has done.

On the other hand, I was willing to acknowledge software developers as artists – engineers of culture, modern-day artisans hard at work creating new modes of self and group expression and vehicles for transference of knowledge and values and sharing of rituals. Still, I couldn’t see where the creative energy that fuels innovation was coming from – except perhaps San Francisco, an hour or more to the north.

Alvarez uncovers vast micro-networks of creativity and cultural regeneration, among and including the people who make the substantial “cultural exports” – the computer and communications hardware, software and dot-com constructs. These, like all products and works of art, are infused with the energy and values of their makers, and in ways that make them unique, innovative and effective. Companies based there include eBay, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Google, Cisco, Intel and scads of small entrepreneurs. Their output is truly reshaping the culture of the world in unfathomable ways.

The Research Process

Alvarez describes her ethnographic approach as one that “lets the phenomenon under study become illuminated, understood, and felt from the point of view of those who are the subjects of the study.” Conclusions, she says, are “deeply informed, and modified when necessary, based on what the ethnographer observes, hears, documents, and generally gathers from the people he or she meets personally, and gets to know meaningfully.”

She provides wonderful stories of low riders or “tricked-out cars that glide low and slow,” activities at a commercial ceramic studio, workshops at an arts-and-crafts chain store, music at an espresso café, sociopolitical responses of a ritual/folk dance group, exhibits at a design studio, impromptu monthly art happenings, a hip-hop collective and a women’s poetry group. Her scans included a wide variety of gathering places and nontraditional cultural groups.

Her study set out to ask what makes the informal/participatory artistic experiences meaningful for their practitioners and communities; what organizational mechanisms and dynamics are involved, and what is the relationship of this independent field of art-making to the predominant mode of artistic delivery, namely nonprofit organizations.

She settled on the term "informal arts" after considering a variety of labels, including participatory, amateur, self-taught, outsider, folk, community or unincorporated arts, and she uses "participatory" alternately. She defines informal arts as “artistic activities in which people engage more as direct producers of art, rather than as audience members of professional arts programs, or consumers of products.” She describes their work as produced by “self-authorized communities of interest that may or may not mind how art-trained connoisseurs would judge or assign value.”

Some practitioners, she found, toy with the idea of becoming 501(c)(3) nonprofits, as they perceive it could provide a sense of stability and access to funding. Others, she says, explicitly reject the nonprofit model. They perceive it as “constraining and antagonistic to the democratic, participatory thrust of their artistic practices.”

Alvarez positions the informal arts outside other forms including classical music, paintings exhibited in museums and canonical literature. In one of her most incisive comments, she describes them as forms “that by virtue of their hegemonic positions and histories can make claims of universal worth in the public sphere regardless of how ‘subcultural’ their own production and circulation may be empirically.”

Unprecedented Creativity?

Are Silicon Valley’s high-tech industries and instantaneous, interactive modes so pervasive that they have profoundly altered that community’s cultural and social patterns – and soon the world’s? Alvarez typifies Silicon Valley’s creative workers as “daVinci type arts practitioners who fancy themselves as ‘artists’ behind cubicle walls,” and describes them as “difficult to enroll as conventional arts audiences through traditional mainstream arts practices.”

“It is fair to say that creative activities in relation to high technology remain at the center of the Valley’s culture and economic strength,” she writes, going on to assert that “the cutting-edge frontiers of high technology have been havens for idiosyncratic creators, who, in spite of their reputations as math and science ‘nerds,’ found opportunities for unprecedented creativity.”

Rapidly changing media-consumption habits might be best exemplified by the proliferation of frighteningly realistic video games. However, they include the widely used document and photo manipulation tools from Adobe, the veritable iPod revolution that is in the process of integrating user-directed music, video, telephone, email and web technology into a portable device, and the finger-tip global information and product search-and-buy capacities from Google and eBay. Such technologies, Alvarez says, “engage participants in a distinctively self-directed mode of aesthetic relationship and appeal to a rather ‘unruly’ subcultural creative ethos.”

In a statement that in a few years might seem absurdly self-evident, she says, “As a matter of principle, these new modes of artistic engagement – video games and other forms of self-directed personalized artistic technologies – run against the grain of traditional artistic and social infrastructures.”

She found that “informal and participatory modes of artistic engagement represent a door that grants access to a sense of enjoyment and purpose.”

A New Cultural Paradigm?

Whether Silicon Valley was created by – or has created – a culture of individualized choice and active engagement is hard to know. In any event that culture represents significant change.

“The data gathered suggests that informal arts practitioners in Silicon Valley pick up ideologies emanating from the Valley’s corporate discourse, and refashion them into proposals for individual and collective participation in the arts that are not always favorable to the institutionalized formats of the nonprofit arts system,” Alvarez writes.

“Formal arts organizations are relatively irrelevant to the social transactions and conversations that connect people with participatory art-making,” she claims. “They are just not the kinds of places to which people who want to act, sing, play an instrument, dance or paint gravitate when they are seeking avocational arts experiences.”

She contends that “unprecedented support for the arts has accrued from Silicon Valley wealth,” and optimistically claims that “The efforts of the high-tech intelligentsia in realigning the cultural priorities of the art-world’s patrician circles had been preceded a decade earlier by sociological studies on community-building and civic engagement (and by their desire) to overcome a perceived sense of fracture in the American social contract.”

She writes, “The high-tech class of creative ‘nerds’ generally showed little interest in joining the boards of large museums and symphony orchestras, and focused instead on questions of inclusivity and pluralism for individual creators and innovators.”

“In other words,” she continues, “the very same ethos that makes the corporate culture of Silicon Valley maverick, informal, entrepreneurial, and independent, sits oddly with the efforts to sustain an arts-establishment in the likes of ‘old’ social systems, such as the patrician efforts that created symphonies and museum towards the end of the 19th century.”

A long-time proponent and supporter of artists, Alvarez portrays the entrepreneur in a singularly positive light. However, in a civil society the auteur cannot exist in a vacuum or dictate cultural or any other norms. Social and civic institutions that negotiate interests and bring stability to civil society also have an essential role to play. That is not to say that new institutional models aren’t needed.

“Even in an era of pluralism in arts practice, when particular attention is paid to community input and community buy-in, the core belief in the artist as sender and the public as receiver remains solidly in place,” Alvarez states. She refers to the “hierarchical view (that) sets up a mental framework of reference on how participation ought to flow – i.e. from arts organizations who stage/present ‘good’ arts products to a public in need of these redeeming aesthetic experiences.”

Alvarez sees this phenomenon as representing nothing short of a fundamental paradigm shift – a reversing of the direction of creative or cultural flow. If established institutions are not offering the kinds of experience this new audience requires, what is the nature of that experience, and is it possible they could?

Rarely is what she calls the “flow of aesthetic knowledge” reversed, “from the public’s reservoir of vernacular everyday aesthetic knowledge to the artists’ interpretation and final product, or to the arts organizations (and their) choices.” She instead postulates a paradigm in which “…widespread public participation as the source for the creation of new work would, in effect, alter the very definition of what an arts organization is supposed to do…”

With the proliferation of interactive media in museum exhibits, some of those institutions are beginning to see themselves as more parallel to a video game than to a movie. “The larger and more visible arts institutions eventually see the wisdom in finding a way to work with some of these grassroots interventions,” says Alvarez, “but only to advance their already firm parameters of participation: to ‘cultivate more meaningful dialog with younger lovers of art as well as the art collector of tomorrow,’” she quotes from a San Jose Museum of Art press release.

Terms such as "reaching," "educating," "developing" and "cultivating" audiences and public support, she points out, are euphemisms for cultural colonization for one-way flow. “The general public does not tend to perceive itself in need of education and convincing of the value of the arts,” she writes. “People don’t want to be merely an audience, or worse yet, … they may be somewhat hostile or negatively predisposed to the efforts to be turned into such.”

As if the picture were not difficult enough for formal arts organizations, Alvarez adds, “Because pleas for engagement from the nonprofit arts sectors are perceived by the public as self-serving, the dissonance between the perception of art-making among the people interviewed in this study and the conventional wisdom of arts-speak among arts advocates cannot be bridged simply by doing better outreach.”

Taking this to the level of public investment, Alvarez observes that many of the smaller municipalities in Silicon Valley have a variety of facilities such as a public-access or civic gallery open to amateur artists. The much larger City of San Jose, however, does not. She sees the substantial investment by that city in arts facilities as having been driven by formal arts organizations. “In other words,” she says, “the majority of dollars allocated for the construction of arts facilities in the area has gone to arts organizations with defined rules of inclusion and exclusion.”

Which Came First?

I’ve come to think of Silicon Valley as a cultural exporter of similar or even greater significance than New York or Los Angeles. These cities’ empires of image making, storytelling and marketing have dominated the past century or more and have had profound impact worldwide. These city-regions have developed massive machinery that supports and renews their cultural outputs: vast numbers of artists and craftspeople, layer upon layer of galleries, museum and theaters and high-caliber schools that train creative and technical personnel. On the surface, Silicon Valley appears rather thinly equipped in that regard.

Economist Ann Markusen, in “The Artistic Dividend,” has examined the relationship between a vibrant arts community and a thriving economic region. Her thesis is that a community’s business success comes as a result of dynamic indigenous creativity, which she sees as typified by a large community of professional artists. This is in contrast to the more common assumption that a healthy arts community is a by-product of and dependent on a successful business community.

Is this still true in a highly mobile, global corporate environment like Silicon Valley? While San Francisco is nearby and Stanford University in the heart of the Valley, it’s hard to say whether creative-class workers were there in force before the take-off of this high-tech behemoth or whether they were attracted to work there – or both. What Alvarez chronicles is how that community and that workforce bubbles over with creativity and insists on creating its own avenues and vehicles for sharing, experimenting and creating.

“We heard repeatedly a correlation of ‘attitudes’ between corporate innovation goals and individual creativity goals, as if the raw material that enables independent thinking in one arena were the same organic ingredient that feeds a similar singularity in the other field,” she writes.

In settings from corporate hallways to Asian restaurants, she chronicles creativity oozing from the seams of a tightly constructed economic cruise ship. This seepage – this between-the-cracks creative juice – many would argue is the fuel of innovation. In Markusen’s view, it’s not an output of that ship; it’s the sea in which it floats. She argues that this juice is not a residue or by-product of older industry or culture, but that it’s the seeds, the sparks of new and more innovative industry and culture – ones that are more relevant to the contemporary world. Alvarez similarly makes a case that this creative juice does not come from the institutions of old and that there are ways to support its generation, both inside and outside formal structures.

A Hundred Years Earlier…

Alvarez claims, “Silicon Valley companies and their executives have, for the most part, departed from the patterns of behavior of the early American industrialists and philanthropists.” She cites employee art programs, grants to local nonprofit organizations and the acquisition of original works of art to display in corporate offices, as special attributes. They sound awfully familiar to me.

Arguably, Silicon Valley is an incredibly significant and dynamic region that is re-shaping communications, entertainment, retailing and business management, turning them into global, interactive and instantaneous activities. It is not, however, the first to have such profound impacts or to have a pioneering approach to cultural and civic investment.

Looking at Minneapolis-St. Paul, another entrepreneurial and culturally active region, we can see many similarities. Some would argue that the combination of socialist-leaning Scandinavians and the collectivist culture of Native Americans had great impact on Minnesota’s late 19th Century entrepreneurs. Along with inventing new and more efficient methods of milling flour and processing a variety of agricultural products, they too invested heavily in innovative institutions for culture, learning, recreation and civic participation.

Well into the 20th Century Minneapolis’ food-processing and retail giants continued to exert a huge transformative impact on the culture largely through the household kitchen and the people who populate them. In turn, this transformed family and domestic life and the role of women: from cake mixes, to frozen vegetables and “TV dinners” in the 1950s and 60s, to frozen pizzas, easy-bake rolls and Hamburger Helper in the '70s, and to granola bars and a plethora of instant meals in the '80s and '90s. Innovation continues as the agricultural and food-processing, retailing and bio-tech industries continue to thrive there, fueled – some would argue – by the remarkably vibrant arts community of the Twin Cities. Two major philanthropies established by founders of the multiproduct manufacturer 3M, mirrored the culture of innovation within that corporate giant by establishing generous artist fellowship programs still unparalleled in the U.S.

“Beyond arts programs, strictly speaking, the notion of creativity has become an important and central postulate among Silicon Valley’s leading thinkers and opinion framers,” writes Alvarez. “The lore expressed in a simple story: if these companies can alter the course of history by being ingenious creators, so can we (local governmental entities and regional planning bodies) invent ourselves a new modality of civic social relations. In the context of this idealized vision, the arts constitute a fundamental societal good.”

Silicon Valley is not the first city-region to stumble on these values. Anthropologist Jack Weatherford, in looking at 10,000 years of innovation, cites the key ingredients of “collisions of cultures” and “aesthetic curiosity” – forces clearly still at work in the land of high technology. Urbanist and economist Jane Jacobs tracks successful city-regions around the world. She similarly cites “aesthetic appreciation” as central ingredient, and asserts that more innovations throughout history came from jewelry making than from the manufacture of weapons.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Indeed, Alvarez shows that Silicon Valley provides an environment far richer in cultural foment than one might think based on the old-world art institutions and the apparent lack of “professional artists.” Her examination employs a new lens to bring into focus multiple layers of creative people and activity. The meaning she uncovers is profound for all our communities and our ways of understanding culture, creativity and art.

In practical terms this book makes a compelling case for the value and importance of artists and organizations that embrace informal or community-based art practices. It shows how off-kilter cultural policy has been, in a way that sounds alarms beyond progressive social and cultural change circles. Civic and business leaders can grab hold of these ideas to understand how cultural inclusion and participation serve their efforts to engage citizens and keep the fires of innovation burning.

She concludes that, “any policy intervention designed to foster informal participatory arts will do well to begin by seeding those junctures in which nonprofit organizations already cultivate extensive networks and relationships with informal art practices and practitioners.” These most certainly include the network of community-based cultural centers as well as programs operated by social service, recreation and educational institutions. But they shouldn’t stop there.

She also singles out the importance of “a sort of public intellectual or ‘knowledge worker’ who can speak to the semantics and protocols that the informal arts encompass vis-à-vis the established dominant arts infrastructure. Often, individuals cast in these roles of leadership must act as translators between the language of the community of practitioners and the language of the world of arts, granting, and administration.”

Alvarez makes only three broad recommendations. Her report is not a detailed prescription but an insightful analysis that begins the conversation. She calls on civic leaders to:

1. Convene a participatory arts learning community
2. Codify (or map) participatory art practices and sites
3. Capitalize select participatory projects

She recommends directing attention “to those points of intersections in which two seemingly opposed systems of meaning converge…supporting those nodes of cultural production in the nonprofit infrastructure where professional and amateur arts overlap, and can fruitfully cross-pollinate to strengthen each other.”

These junctures or points of intersection are not examined in any depth by this study. They should be the subject of the next investigation to examine how they function and what values and assumptions allow them to succeed.

Maribel Alvarez has been involved in the Chicano arts movement for over 20 years as a curator, activist, writer and administrator. She is now assistant professor in the English Department and a research social scientist at the Southwest Center, both at the University of Arizona. She co-founded and was executive director of MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana) in San Jose from 1996 to 2002. She holds a master's degree in political theory from California State University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona.

Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley is a nonprofit founded to advance the vitality of Silicon Valley through broad cultural participation. It works with a network of public and private agencies and organizations to provide resources and leadership to arts education programs in public schools, to develop participatory arts in neighborhoods and to encourage business and civic leaders to visibly support the region’s cultural development. In addition to Alvarez’ study, the organization has produced other ground breaking reports during the past few years including a report by Pia Moriarty on Immigrant Participatory Arts in 2005 and two Creative Community Indexes, the first in 2001, the second in 2005.

Tom Borrup is a consultant, writer and educator based in Minneapolis. He has written many articles for publications in the arts, city planning and philanthropy. He was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2002, a multidisciplinary urban arts center. He consults with nonprofits, foundations and public agencies nationally and specializes in strategic planning and program evaluation with organizations that bring creativity and the arts together with community and economic development. His book, "The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook" will be released in 2006 by Fieldstone Alliance (formerly Wilder Publishing).

Order this book (or download it) at http://www.ci-sv.org.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2006