Public pools

This story from Philadelphia is quite terrible:

Days before a Northeast Philadelphia day camp's membership at a private suburban swim club was rescinded, several of the campers said they had heard racial remarks about themselves at the pool.

Parents and staff members of Creative Steps Inc. day camp are considering legal action against the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, said Alethea Wright, the camp's executive director.

Sixty-five campers, kindergartners through seventh graders who are African American and Hispanic, arrived at the private swim club around 3:30 p.m. on June 29. It was their first visit to the club, but the camp had made arrangements for weekly trips on Mondays through Aug. 10.

While the campers were swimming, Wright said, three of them came up to her and said they had heard club members asking what African Americans were doing at the club.

Although the children were upset, Wright said, they stayed at the pool for an hour more to complete their session. She said that she approached club president John Duesler while events unfolded that day and that he seemed apologetic.

On July 3, Wright said, the camp's $1,950 check in membership fees to the swim club was refunded, meaning the children no longer had access to the pool. She said Duesler gave no reason for the refund except that the membership no longer wanted the children at the pool.

So, the country is not exactly "post-racial" quite yet.

But Digby raises another angle of the story:

The camp first contacted the club about membership after the New Frankford Community Y in the Frankford section of the city - where the children used to swim - closed last month because of lack of money. The club is about a 20-minute drive from the camp's location at Devereaux and Summerdale Avenues in Northeast Philadelphia.

I have posted on this issue before, and so my apologies for repeating myself: public swimming pools are valuable urban amenities, treated as pretty ordinary public expenditures in every other country in the world, that improve quality-of-life for large numbers of people. I regularly take my children to Bryan Park, and my casual amateur-sociologist observation is that the pool serves a more diverse socio-economic collection of people than any publicly-supported arts event I have ever attended in Bloomington.

Which is why it was so weird that pools were singled out as inappropriate local-government use of federal economic stimulus funds. Digby found this gem from our Vice-President:

Looking to strike fear and compliance in the hearts of local officials, Vice President Joe Biden warns that if they use money from the economic stimulus fund to build what he regards as the wrong kind of projects, “I’ll show up in your city and say this was a stupid idea.”

“No swimming pools!” he implored. “No tennis courts!” he begged. “No golf courses!” he pleaded. “No Frisbee parks!” he exhorted.

Soda or pop or coke

A long-running debate in the arts admin office: here is the map. Which does not show north of the 49th parallel, which is solid dark blue.

Should federal arts policy be centralized?

Earlier this week Michael Kaiser wrote:

There is frequent discussion about the validity of federal funding for the arts in this nation; most recently, the inclusion of $50 million for employment in the arts in the stimulus package was the source of heated debate.

What we really need is a debate over federal arts policy. Most people do not know that no fewer than nine government agencies provide support to arts in this nation. That is not a typo. In addition to the National Endowment for the Arts, the national Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, arts money is also granted by the Departments of Commerce, Education, State, Agriculture, Defense, and Transportation!

Those of us in the arts are grateful for the many opportunities presented for federal support. The problem is that there is literally no coordination between these agencies on their arts spending, nor is there any central governing philosophy or policy.

For example, grants for arts education are given by several agencies yet there is no effort to coordinate the educational programming of the arts organizations receiving federal funds. This cannot yield the most effective or efficient results. ...

Richard Kessler (Dewey 21C) weighs in:

At first blush it sounds good, I know. Who wouldn't want effective and efficient results? And coordinating arts education programming, as well as spending across federal agencies, sounds like a great idea too, doesn't it? Or does it?

Of course, that depends on the results you are after and whether the objectives/goals/standards can be developed in a way that makes great sense, not just a good start, up against the giant, always moving target of education, of which arts education is or should be more of a part than arts and culture. Let me say that in a slightly different way: K-12 arts education should be more connected to the field of education, than to arts. And of course, along with that comes the need to connect to the policy churn of K-12 education overall. Which by definition means that arts education policy will have to remain highly flexible and nimble, including related programming, etc. ...

Call me crazy or obtuse, but hey, I like the fact that there was an opportunity to apply to the United States Department of Justice for a grant to develop a mentoring program. I like that the USDOE arts education program is very different from that of the National Endowment for the Arts. When I was at the American Music Center, I liked the opportunity to apply to the United States Department of Transportation for a grant (we didn't get it...)

To me, there is beauty and opportunity in somewhat divergent, but well-crafted guidelines coming from a variety of federal agencies that hew more to the variety of approaches in arts education that what I fear would be the case under a more "effective and efficient" or more coordinated effort. ...

I'm with Mr Kessler on this: we do not necessarily gain from a unified policy and granting system. The exception would be cases where the lack of coordination is leading to obvious problems - unnecessary duplication, contrary goals.

But that's not clearly the case with US federal arts spending. Kaiser calls for "coordination" without really spelling out what aspect of arts policy needs to be coordinated. He says "we need someone in the administration, perhaps the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to provide leadership and coordination to ensure that all grants-making agencies are working in a common direction" but it isn't stated why we would think that different grant programs are working in contradictory directions.

Having multiple agencies allows greater experimentation, and makes the cost of an ill-advised policy decision in one agency much smaller.

Also, it's one thing to hope for a super-leader / coordinator / boss of the arts who will implement all the cultural policy that smart people like us* would really like to see, and another to recognize that the real, live human who will fill that post (1) might have different ideas than all of us smart people, and (2) will have to deal with the bargaining powers and interests of the various departments of government who presumably enjoy having some degree of independence and discretion regarding the arts-related programs they currently administer.

* I jest, of course, but a common-place fallacy is that because one has studied and thought about a set of policy-issues for a long time, anyone smart enough to get a powerful DC appointment must have come to identical conclusions about what constitutes an optimal policy direction.

Significant objects

Bookslut directs us to the Significant Objects project:

THE IDEA

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

THE PROJECT

1. The project’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3. Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

4. The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author. Authors retain all rights to their stories.

Regarding the pictured mule figurine, Matthew Sharpe begins:

This is the statue of the mule that I have sculpted by my hands, but if you are the serious person about the hand-sculpted statues, also serious when you are knowing how to feel the deep meaning in Life, then you will see that is not really the statue of the mule. I will not be able to say what the statue is truly because then I will be embarrassing and you will be embarrassing too if you are the serious person about it. “Not all of the things are to be talked about in the computer.” But the mule is also to show how I am having many nations that I am coming from in my family background.

I, the selling person, am Hans Mifune, Artist. What is the Artist? It is the ancient river running in the new bed. ...

Arts policy and the president

Nia-Malika Henderson writes at Politico:

In Barack Obama, the arts community believed it had found a kindred spirit — literary and urbane, a president who would restore culture to its proper national place after what many perceived as an eight-year exile under his predecessor.

Yet, for some in the art world, watching the Obama administration’s approach to the arts so far has been an exercise in keeping expectations in check and a game of wait and see.

It's a long-ish article, and yet in the end I'm struck by the vagueness of it all. What are those "expectations" that "some in the art world" are keeping in check?

Arts groups want “more money for the arts, more money for arts education and a more symbolic investment in the importance of the arts and using the arts to advertise America abroad. That’s what the arts community would like,” said John Rockwell, a former arts editor at The New York Times. “Obama hasn’t done anything dramatic or fabulous. But he’s only been president for 10 minutes, so for me it’s wait and see.”

So, more money, and...more money. It's not clear to me why this ought to be a federal government priority (unlike the economic stimulus package, which is a federal responsibility and did have a $50 million boost for the arts).

The only other policy I see mentioned is:

Arts groups also hope Obama will support allowing the NEA to return to giving grants to individual artists, which was at the heart of the controversy over the Mapplethorpe art and other controversial pieces. That ability was stripped from the NEA in 1996, when Republicans argued that the government shouldn’t be a direct patron of artists.

This question warrants a longer discussion, but I would say briefly that arts advocates ought to generate public support for individual artists' grants first - otherwise, the next "shocking" artist to get an NEA grant will take the whole thing back to square one, with the entire NEA budget in question.

You cannot just rely on the hope that people will be more tolerant of controversial art the next time around.

Tax incentives for film production

At the AIMAC conference last week I was asked to discuss "under-researched" topics in arts management and policy, and an example I gave was that I had yet to see serious empirical evaluation of state policies to attract film production. In the press we read about such-and-such a film shot on location, employing some locals, and being subsidized by state governments, but we don't see in-depth reporting on whether this is a kind of policy that is actually effective. For example, if the goal is to generate employment, do the film incentives increase total employment, or simply shift it from one sector to another? Do incentives for film production do a better job at stimulating employment (if they do at all) than incentives for other industries?

This article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the making of Public Enemies (reviews here - generally positive) in Wisconsin got my hopes up; it hints in the beginning at asking some serious questions about the policy. But then it devolves into what I think is at the core of the problem - locals blinded by what appears to be the glamour of film-making...how can a policy be inefficient if it brings Johnny Depp to town? Isn't it cool that they used our local bank, and we can see it on the big screen? And of course the film production companies know how to exploit this.

Saturday night

Happy 4th...

Eureka Springs

Out of the city, and now for a few days of vacation in the Ozarks. Eureka Springs, Arkansas is a great little town - a center for arts and crafts without being too ... forced about it. Interesting folk art, local restaurants, and just ordinary shops that make for a varied, surprising walking experience. A terrific, inexpensive system of trolley buses keeps the car traffic down. The natural setting helps too - lots of hills and windy streets and staircases leading from one elevation to another.

John R will be happy to help you count the steps.

Last night in Dallas

Tonight we had the conference dinner in the garden of the Nasher Sculpture Center. It is hard to pick favorites here - a great collection, inside and out.

For traditional sculptures, my votes go to Henri Matisse, "Standing Nude, Arms on Head" (pictured below, 1906) and Auguste Rodin, "Eve" (1881).



For an amazing experience, especially under a night sky, I must recommend James Turrell's "Tending, (Blue)" (2003). From the catalogue:

In the 1970s, James Turrell began a series of works that he describes generically as "skyspaces." These are enclosed spaces - rooms or free-standing structures - open to the sky through rectangular or circular apertures in the roof. While they appear to be architectural in nature, these spaces exist solely to create the light effects and perceptual events that constitute Turrell’s art. This skyspace, Tending, (Blue), was commissioned as a site-specific project for the Nasher Sculpture Center. To achieve his optical effects, Turrell coordinates a complex system of lights that run in concert with natural cycles of sunrise and sunset, and respond to constantly changing atmospheric conditions.

Nestled in a planted berm at the northern end of the sculpture garden Tending, (Blue) is housed in a structure of rough hewn black granite blocks and contains two independently functioning, yet related, components: the entrance vestibule and the skyspace.

Arts districts in the big city

Tracy writes in response to my critical remarks on Dallas' cultural district:

I don't really know about the way planning has been done for the Dallas downtown Arts District, but one thing I will say is that I have a lot of sympathy for them. The thing is that it is such an ingrained thing in that part of the country - the highways (which do actually have their own postmodernish music thing going on, even though it seems strange) dominate the landscape of the cities. I would say Dallas is the worst of this - even people in Oklahoma City refer to Dallas as a parking lot. People don't really hang out outside anywhere except their neighborhood (I'm sure you lived this experience in Atlanta? MR: Yes, I did).

But these little pockets of culture do spring up. I have a friend living in a really cool part of Dallas in a 1920s era apartment building - not far from downtown. I suppose that kind of hearkens back to the "natural cultural districts" article we talked about in your class. In OKC, there were little pockets of town you visited to get different kinds of cultural experiences.

OKC's arts district downtown is tied into a much cheesier tourism draw but it makes a lot of sense: play up the old buildings in that part of town, bring in cultural institutions and then hopefully some cool restaurants, cafes, bars, etc. to accommodate.

I never thought this would work in OKC but it actually is starting to work. I even had my wedding at a historic building close to downtown - and there is actually a culture of people going there now; before it was really just deserted at night.

So that was rambling, but I guess I would have to say it is neat they are trying, and that maybe the cafes, restaurants, etc. will follow the cultural institutions in the neighborhood. BUT, I must say that I wouldn't want the "pockets" of culture to vanish because everything moves downtown. With the way the city is so spread out, it would be a shame to have all neat cultural institutions in one place. When I was growing up some of the fun was finding places and returning to them with people you cared about and shared similar interests.

If you have time, you should drive over to Ft. Worth's downtown - they have a cool arts district; plus The Modern's building is quite interesting to experience.

AIMAC 2

Good day at the AIMAC conference. I began attending a session on pricing: two papers, one on the determinants of concert ticket prices for popular music (which was a good topic, although further work is forthcoming integrating the choice of venue into the model) and one on the pricing of music downloads.

Then we had our panel of journal editors: three from high profile business school journals - Academy of Management Journal; Journal of Consumer Research; International Journal of Research in Marketing - and, er, me. John Deighton from JCR made a good point: business journals, and maybe all social science journals, are looking for explanations of "phenomena", which he described as a situation where existing theory says that in such-and-such a situation we would expect to observe this, but instead we observe that. When you can provide a well-grounded explanation of why this happens, you have added to our base of knowledge.

I used my platform to (very quickly) discuss five areas of research where I thought much more could be done, where there are pockets of insights but much unknown territory:

• Pricing (although see above...there are a few papers here and there, but the literature is pretty thin)
• The impact of new technology on arts consumption (a major theme of Tyler Cowen's)
• New empirical research on non-profit "high art" - for example, has "cost disease" really manifested itself the way it was predicted in the 1960s when the theory was first developed?
• Arts consumption and subjective well-being - does arts education or arts consumption have real impact on happiness? If so, how?
• Serious empirical evaluation of arts policy - does chasing film production through tax credits "work" in the sense of actually generating higher total income? Does investment in the arts really lure the "creative class" to move into town, more so than other possible investments? What are the goals of arts council funding of nonprofit arts organizations, and which methods of funding lead to the best record in achieving those goals? Other areas of public policy - health care, education, social policy, criminal justice - seem much further along with good empirical program evaluation. There are excellent potential doctoral theses waiting to be picked up off this sidewalk...

In the afternoon, a session on performance indicators. Much booing and hissing.

Unfortunately I had to miss the paper presentation on indie music in Canada. And so to make amends...

Canada Day

And how are you all celebrating Canada Day? I'm not sure what the city of Dallas has planned.

Anyway, here's one to get your morning going (and lots of Vancouver scenery):

Journal of Cultural Economics

In my conference presentation this morning I will be part of a panel of editors of academic journals, discussing what we are looking for in new research in arts management and policy.

I'll talk about what I said (and its reception) after the panel, but for now, let me answer a question a few students have asked me - what does a journal editor do?

Well, here's how the Journal of Cultural Economics works. You can read the journal's contents here, and if you have an IU library card you should be able to read any of the articles. You can see we publish 4 issues per year, and each annual volume will contain around 16 papers and 8 book reviews. Most of the papers arrive unsolicited, but a few publications are keynote addresses to the conference of the Association for Cultural Economics International, which is affiliated with the JCE (although the journal itself is owned by the publisher, Springer).

We receive about 80 new papers each year, and in the end fewer than 20% will be published by us. When a new paper arrives, my co-editor Sam Cameron and I decide who will take primary responsibility for it, and whether it is worth sending out to referees - professors knowledgeable in the subject matter. If the paper seems out of the scope of what we normally publish, or simply too confused or elementary, then we just send it back to the author with our thanks-but-no-thanks.

We are looking for papers on some part of the arts or entertainment, high or low, that has an interesting economic angle, a new insight, or new data used to test an hypothesis about how we think the economy of the arts works.

When the referees' reports come back, they will either say "reject - this paper is wrong and/or uninteresting" or "revise - with some work this could be a publishable paper". Never do the referees say "accept as is"...to be an academic is to get used to critical comment, and to taking it seriously.

If the responsible co-editor is ready to make a decision - "reject" or "this paper has been revised, and the referees are now saying it is good for acceptance" - then the co-editors again confer as to what to do. I'm not sure how it is with other journals, but Sam and I never have major disagreements.

Accepted articles then go for typesetting, and the co-editors receive page proofs, and go through it line-by-line to make sure everything looks good. We set the order of publication for the issues, write a thank you note to the referees - the only return they get for what amounts to a lot of work for a careful review, and further review of revised drafts - and make an annual report to the association.

And we get the occasional invitation to address a conference on the state of the field, which is what I'm going to do today.

AIMAC 1

And so, my first day of the AIMAC conference at SMU in Dallas. The organizers have done a terrific job - the SMU student assistants are most helpful, the sessions of papers are well-designed, and they have arranged for us to get an inside look at the Dallas arts scene.

There was actually only one session of papers for me to attend this morning - I chose the one on museums, since that is where I get a higher marginal impact on my understanding. There are not links to the papers, so I can only report that I learned about (1) how craftsmen handle the experience of exhibitions, (2) public-private partnerships for financially-strapped public museums, (3) setting performance indicators (which referred to an article by the IMA's Max Anderson from 2004 that I will need to track down), and (4) legal issues for U.S. museums and ancient artifacts of questionable provenance.

Then an afternoon of arts consumption.

First to SMU's Meadows Museum of Art, which houses one of the finest collections of Spanish art in the U.S., and an exhibition of paintings from Diego Rivera's cubist period of 1913 to 1918. This was my favorite: Dos Mujeres (1914).



Then into town for a special performance by the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. A great organization, very cool performances...how am I supposed to write about dance, anyway? Just go see if you ever get a chance.

Then to the under-rapid-construction Dallas Center for the Performing Arts and the Arts District. We were in the 20-year old symphony hall, and could see through the windows the final stages of building for the opera house, theatre, and open park space. A tremendous amount of capital, space, and planning, and if the other buildings match the symphony hall it will be quite something.

But.

There are arts districts and there are arts districts. Dallas has great museums and big live performing arts. But walking around the "arts district", and then from there back to my hotel on Commerce Street, I see a deserted city. Skyscrapers, bank towers, a lot of people must show up here every day for work. But when I went out at 7 in the evening to find something to eat...nothing. No pedestrians, and with good reason - there is nowhere for them to go, no reason to come out.

It's an arts district of great high art venues, and parking garages and office towers. No shops to look in, no place to have a cup of coffee, none of the street life that you find in Barcelona or Buenos Aires or Montreal. And if that's the case, why have an arts district at all? In other words, why arrange to have the opera house close to the sculpture museum if the two audiences will never meet - opera patrons will drive to the opera, take their seats, watch the show, applaud, and drive home. There is great art inside the buildings, but outside there is no feel to it - nothing to beautify the streets, to make a stroll a pleasant thing, rather than a brisk walk from the museum to the hotel, the only music being the quiet roar of the surrounding freeways.

Lone star

It has been a blog-less few days - I'm on the road to Dallas for the Conference on Arts & Cultural Management at SMU. I've now arrived, my first time in the state of Texas, and will give reports on the sessions. But now to go learn what arts admin researchers are up to...