Thursday, February 19, 2009

Economics vs culture: 21st c. boxing match.

We had a rousing good discussion in cultural policy class last night on the issue of globalization as it affects the arts. It's a tangled web of economic and governmental interests versus a variety of artists, local and small-country governments, and nonprofit arts advocates and managers, trying to negotiate terrain that gets more complicated every day as the digital capabilities of the world increase.

It comes down to money versus culture. Two interests speaking different languages. At present, there is no authority who decides. The World Trade Organization versus UNESCO. Just as the "culture wars" of the 80s and 90s were so much about women, sex, the gay movement, and religion under the guise of arguments about art, the "trade wars" of the 2010s might well be about big money vs little (and individual culture), under the guise of "free trade" versus "protectionism." There's a lot of work to be done -- advocacy, education, scholarship, negotiation, just plain thinking. Keep the artists at the center and much will be gained, not so much lost.

1 comment:

Lyle Daggett said...

Found your blog through the comment box in Ellen Kennedy Michel's blog ellenabella. (Ellen's father, Wally Kennedy, was one of my early poetry teachers.)

Your post here brought to mind an occasion some years back (sometime in the '90's) here in Minneapolis. Various local arts groups organized a series of public discussion meetings around the city (one in each City Council ward, held at the community buildings in various city parks), to talk about the role and place of the arts in the life of the city.

I live in a part of town with a fairly high concentration of artists and writers and the like, and the cross-section of people who turned out had a lot of insightful things to say. At one point, someone addressed the question of money, how arts fit into the economy.

One of the participants put it this way: suppose suddenly there were no arts, they were gone overnight, leaving no trace. Several things follow from this:

No music in the bars and nightclubs. No music on the radio. No art galleries. No photo labs, no camera stores, no picture framing businesses. No bookstores. (That would now also mean no Amazon.com etc.) No record stores (and, now, no downloading of music). No movie theaters, no video rental places. No libraries. No dancing (with or without music). No live theater. No statues in public places. No art supply stores, no businesses that sold musical instruments. No schools or teachers teaching any of these things.

It became clear from the list that without the contribution the arts make (both practitioners of arts and spectators or observers), the economy of the city -- we were limiting the discussion to Minneapolis in particular -- would be profoundly affected. The particular part of town where our meeting was occurring would be devastated.

In the follow-up report issued by one of the groups that organized the meetings, they addressed the economic role of the arts, and the report stated specifically that, in Minneapolis, the arts were responsible for generating more revenue in the city than professional sports were. (This in a city with, at that time, professional baseball, football and basketball teams.) In coming to this conclusion, the study took into account employment in arts-related occupations, the role of arts in drawing tourism to the city, tax revenue from arts-related spending by consumers, and so on.

My guess is that this would be the case in many of the large cities in the United States, as well as many smaller cities and towns all over the country.

At one point during the community discussion meeting, one of the organizers mentioned that in a previous meeting in another neighborhood, one of the participants was a retired official in the state Department of Corrections. She said that the man (from the Dept. of Corrections) spoke at one point very passionately about the importance of arts education, in maintaining the health of the society overall, and specifically in the context of rehabilitation of prison inmates. He put it bluntly: you can either spend the money now on arts education, or you'll be spending it later on prisons.

Hope I haven't been too long-winded here. Thanks for posting this.