Higher Ground: Informal Arts, Cultural Policy and the Evolving Role of Nonprofits

This text is from a presentation at the Americans for the Arts convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, June 1, 2007. Tom Borrup spoke on a panel with Maribel Alvarez, Roberto Bedoya and Tamara Alvarado.

I’d like to build off the informal and participatory-arts research that Maribel Alvarez and others have done, and specifically from Maribel’s book, “There’s Nothing Informal About It,” in which she asserts that the nonprofit cultural sector, researchers and public policy (including public and private resource allocation) have slighted art forms and programs that are based in diverse cultural traditions and that encourage more active forms of participation. These include informal and commercially based creative activities and traditional practices taking place in homes and neighborhoods and community, social or religious settings – or even in public places.

These active forms of participation and the parallel development of “agency” – or the capacity to take action – are considered beneficial in multiple realms or sectors. Arguments have often been made that diverse cultural practices can advance social justice as well as educational goals. More recently similar arguments have come from a civic-engagement perspective, as in “animating democracy” or engaging people in dialogue around issues of import. We can now add the advancement of enterprise, innovation and the ability of our communities to thrive economically as additional reasons why diverse and more active forms of cultural participation are beneficial.

To dig further into this assertion, we need to ask what is “active” versus “passive” cultural participation – because there are different ideas about that. And this is something that has become even more complicated in the face of globalization and Web-based and interactive-technology-based cultural forms. All this is especially interesting and urgent in an environment like Silicon Valley where old and new forms, established population diversity and of a lot of global thinking all reside.

First the idea of “agency” is important to explore. A computer-game designer was quoted on The Artful Manager blog in early 2007, as saying: “Stories are about empathy, and games are about agency.” In this light, one could conclude that older generations in the U.S. have likely produced a lot of empathetic people steeped in stories where they learn to feel someone else’s pain or joy. This is primarily what “formal” arts organizations and media have done: literature, theater, opera, films, music, etc. They’re based on stories that appeal to sympathies, and they strive to evoke deep, emotional responses.

But how is “agency” taught? Do schools, cultural institutions, the media infuse us equally with the appreciation that we have the capacity to act, to affect the world? Do old and new modes of interactivity and participation really teach agency – the power to act and make an impact? Some writers and others – like the game designer and Maribel – advocate that new technologies along with some older under-recognized cultural practices teach agency. It’s yet to be fully understood, but the notion is intriguing.

As for the idea of participation that is “active” versus “passive,” I assert definitions whereby sitting quietly in any audience is “passive.” Some claim that good art and an appreciative audience member have an active relationship – that the mind is actively engaged in creating meaning from the work and is therefore not passive. Some even assert that the audience member is a “co-creator” in essentially completing the work through the process of interpretation. For the purpose of consistency in the definition of terms, I assert that active participation includes actions that affect the artwork in physical terms or in terms of what others perceive. In other words, the activity has to take place outside the head of the audience member and have direct impact on the physical world and/or on other human beings.

Singing, dancing, drawing or working on a MySpace page – regardless of where you do it – is “active.” Public policy, funding and pedagogy have favored institutions, programs, facilities and practices that promote professionally driven “passive” forms. Constructive citizenship and the Creative Economy require a population that actively engages, creates and takes initiative. Policy and funding should instead favor individual and collective making and sharing of art and culture. It’s like teaching reading without teaching writing. Constructive citizenship requires both, and so does the economy.

Urban Institute’s 2006 publication, “Cultural Vitality in Communities,” the latest in its cultural-indicators program, recognized the same thing: “It’s still too often assumed, both inside and outside the professional cultural sector, that cultural participation means viewing or purchasing professional arts.” In the process of defining community cultural vitality and the indicators communities can use to assess vitality, Urban Institute first had to “expand the conventional paradigm of what counts as arts and culture in a way that makes it more consistent with, and inclusive of, the demographic realities of our nation.”

The Urban Institute publication goes on to say that this broader definition “can be threatening to historically privileged and subsidized forms of cultural participation because it expands the range of stakeholders in the arts to include people who are not ‘experts’ or professionals.”

Steven Tepper, Bill Ivey and others have pointed out that the predominant mode of 20th Century cultural participation – which involves sitting quietly as part of an audience consuming work created and presented by a discrete class of professional artists, managers and technicians – may be a historic anomaly. Not that these forms will disappear, nor should they. However, they will – or already have – ceased to be the predominant avenue for cultural participation. Ivey has suggested we are returning to earlier, more popular ways of experiencing and participating in culture. The once dominant Big 3 TV networks have shrunk in both real numbers and percentage of viewers because of the proliferation of other TV providers, DVDs, computerized games and person-to-person interaction on the Internet. In the same way, what have been called the SOBs (Symphonies, Operas, Ballets – the big 3 in the arts) are likewise no longer dominant – except perhaps in the absorption of philanthropic and public resources devoted to culture.

Nowhere are “active” and diverse forms of cultural participation more evident – and increasingly so – than in Internet-based activities and high-tech games, prevalent among young people. It has been estimated that more people under 35 now play electronic sports games than view sports programming on television.

In everything from Second Life to MySpace, FaceBook and YouTube, people are creating and sharing their own stories and images while forming social networks and making decisions about things they’re going to do in the real world. Gamers are using Wii and Guitar Hero, moving their limbs and exercising physical skills to interact with games and with others. Little League and soccer have not disappeared, they just have new competition. What are called “exergames” are increasingly used in high-tech gyms, and even in homes. The April 30 New York Times featured a story on the use of the video game Dance Dance Revolution in the gymnastics classes of several hundred U.S. schools. PE teachers report great success in getting kids to move where they couldn’t before.

Will these interactive games really change behaviors and create more “agency?” Or do they just make us more enslaved to the machine? Is the practice of logging on and defining one’s self and one’s own community – one’s own culture – a participatory act?

What we’ve experienced in the U.S. is that the lion’s share of subsidy for culture and the arts – from local, state and federal governments and private philanthropy – has supported platforms for “passive” forms of participation. Huge investments in building, restoring, programming and operating large venues with fixed seating have been made. Such investments are particularly curious in places such as San Jose in which Eurocentric cultures – which generally call for such facilities and forms of participation – are in the minority, and have been for some time. Government, business and community leaders have been operating within an industrial-economy model where the workforce was required to complete repetitive tasks and conform to behaviors that were consistent. The rise of the “creative class” has done more than redefine the economy and needs of cities, but has signaled the increasing value of engagement in creative activities in which the participant has a high degree of agency.

Major industries have increasingly searched the globe for the most creative and flexible work forces. More recently, many large companies have begun to aggressively seek product ideas and innovations from outside their own walls, from literally all corners of the world. Some of today’s leading companies are built around active consumer participation and collaboration on a mass scale.

The widely known Wikipedia – the phenomenon that emerged from nowhere the past couple years – is but the tip of the iceberg. Wiki’s and the concept of open source and user-generated product development are increasingly employed by all kinds of businesses. “Wikinomics,” a book on business cultures and strategies designed around principles of open source and mass collaboration, describes a variety of old and new companies that have adapted to or pioneered business models in which customers and suppliers become collaborators or “co-creators” of products who are providing content, innovative ideas and key elements of production. They go way beyond outsourcing. Proctor & Gamble, General Mills, Legos, Boeing, BMW are some companies that are reinventing themselves. And of course, Google, eBay, Amazon and many others thrive in this new environment.

Tapscott and Williams, authors of “Wikinomics,” call the multitudes of consumer-collaborators “prosumers” referring to their role in both producing and consuming. British thinker and writer Charles Leadbetter, in The Pro-Am Revolution, labels this group as “Pro-Ams,” short for professional-amateurs, who he says are showing up in all fields including the arts. Ledbetter cites a dramatic rise in serious amateurs who actively engage in, and are having an enormous impact on, a wide variety of professional fields.

Tapscott and Williams may be a bit optimistic about the present and future contributions of the young generation they dub “Net-Geners” who, they say, “inject a culture of openness, participation and interactivity into workplaces, markets and communities.” They go on, “(Net-Geners) typically can’t imagine a life where citizens didn’t have the tools to constantly think critically, exchange views, challenge, authenticate, verify, or debunk.” What’s commonly become known as “Web 2.0” Tapscott and Williams describe as “a shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on.” They go on about Net-Geners: “While their parents were passive consumers of media, youth today are active creators of media content and hungry for interaction.”

The Artful Manager in May 2007 cited research that said about 13 percent of all online users are content creators, with a larger percentage engaged in other tiers of activity, such as critics and collectors. While this may not be as high as some would like us to believe, it’s a higher number of active creators than we’d find in the 1950s model of cultural participation that still dominates the nonprofit cultural sector. Tapscott and Williams claim that 57 percent of teens that use the Web are content creators. This represents half of all teens between 12 and 17, or twelve million youth in the U.S. alone. They consider content creation to include creating a blog or personal Web page, sharing original content such as artwork, photos, stories or videos, or remixing content found online into new creations.

Maribel writes about how this generation of what she calls informal creators “may or may not see their own artistic interests in tandem with the arts infrastructure as currently existing in the nonprofit field.”

Human behavior or culture changes very slowly from generation to generation. Net-Geners just have different tools to work with. The point is, the environment in which they live is – in some ways – more like the one their great-grandparents experienced – before radio and TV where there was no dominant one-way form of media broadcasting information, but a multitude of “social halls” where people interacted and gathered information. These new social halls happen to be in virtual space and call on participants to make creative contributions to the space and the conversations taking place there.

“Not since the 19th Century have our systems of production endured such large and fundamental changes to their architecture,” the “Wikinomics” authors assert. These challenges are also facing the nonprofit cultural sector -- but differently.

A recent research project for California’s Irvine Foundation by AEA Consulting concluded that “The nonprofit arts and cultural sector is facing major, permanent, structural changes brought on by technological advances, globalization and shifting consumer behavior.” Increasingly, they say, nonprofit arts organizations are only one of the many elements in a growing and complex system of arts and culture. They report: “It appears that the era of the nonprofit arts organization’s preeminence in the American cultural landscape is coming to a close.”

What then is the role or purpose of nonprofits, if there is to be one?

If the market and technology have taken over significant aspects of the generation and dissemination of culture why should nonprofit managers want to go down with the ship or struggle against all odds to prop up obsolete institutions and ways of producing or delivering art and culture? There is an abundance of work to be done to advance broader goals of social, cultural and economic justice. Nonprofits should feel relieved to let go of some tasks when someone else, or some other force, has stepped in to carry the ball. Nimble nonprofits with their eyes on bigger horizons can always move to higher ground. One of the assets of most cultural nonprofits is some kind of physical space and relationship to a geographic place and the people in that place. This may be the ground to which they can move. Young people, who tend to grow older over time, spend time making contacts in virtual space. Among other things, arts centers can be meeting grounds for some communities that have formed virtually.

“Wikinomics” says, “The question every business leader in every sector should be asking is: How do I make my organization a platform for participation?” I love this idea: platforms for participation. They go on, “All companies need an evolving sense of where their core capabilities lie and an evolving map of how they relate to the constellation of knowledge and capabilities that exist within their ecosystem.”

If, as AEA suggests in their Irvine Report – and these are similar ideas to those suggested by others – successful for-profits and unincorporated groups are increasingly serving more and more cultural and niche interests and supplanting nonprofits, then nonprofits must reposition themselves. We must ask: What is at the root of our motivation? What is our larger purpose? What core competencies and assets do we have to work with? Those purposes are based in values and in efforts to guide and push the market and government toward higher ideals -- such as equity, democracy, intellectual rigor, building individual and group capacities for critical thinking and for collective action. This is the higher ground that many nonprofits are best suited to occupy.

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 most recent book, “The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook,” was published in 2006 by Fieldstone Alliance.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2007