Aligning the Incentives for Artmaking
How Investments in Arts and Culture Make Better Societies
The following is an excerpt from Art and Survival, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting one theatre-loving boy’s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here.
This week: an editorial on how economic incentives can align to support artmaking in a market economy (with a brief aside on gentrification).
WASHINGTON—President Johnson asked Congress today for Federal aid to stimulate and encourage drama, dance, painting, music, literature, history and other cultural activities in the United States.
“No government can call artistic excellence into existence,” Mr. Johnson said in a message that accompanied the bill to Capitol Hill. But it can, he declared, “seek to create conditions” under which the artist and scholar can flourish.
“Pursuit of artistic achievement, and making the fruits of that achievement available to all its people, is also among the hallmarks of a great society.”
–The New York Times. Front page, 10th March 1995.
With the words above and coordinated with Congressional action, Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This was the first time that the United States had made a concerted effort to fund the arts since the Depression (the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project is a story for another time). Today, according to a 1999 study by the NEA, the US invests about $6 per person in the arts when one accounts for the budgets of the NEA and NEH, public investment in arts buildings, and state and municipal spending on local arts programs.
This investment pales in comparison with per capita arts funding in Europe. The same NEA study compared the US figure with Germany’s (a country with comparable GDP), where the public sector spends $85 per person on arts and culture. However, it’s important to note that funding for the arts also comes from the private sector in the US – from charitable foundations and individuals.
It is possible to create spaces where art thrives in the United States, but the incentives for major players in the market need to be aligned so that these parties with assets recognize that their investments in the arts increase the value of their assets overall.
In other words, just as for-profit companies have to grow to appease shareholders, arts leaders have to convince shareholders that substantial investment in the arts leads to long-term returns. When the public invests in arts spaces and activities created and programmed in partnership with a neighborhood, that cultural production can enrich and deepen the lives of those living in that place.
I know you don’t want to hear about this – about shareholders, and incentives, and capital. I know you want to make work, and hear about work. And yet, “these webs [creative works] – are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in” (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own). We have to understand the ecosystem we create within in order to learn how to construct truly safe spaces that protect complete freedom of imagination.
Let’s look at a place where the desires of an asset-holding family have aligned to support substantial investment in artistic development that has in turn uplifted a community.
There’s a neighborhood in my city that has blown up over the past decade. What was once a place filled with warehouses has transformed into a miniature metropolis, filled with high rises where remote workers thrive. Though it’s far from the city center, it’s still connected to the central business district via transit.
In this neighborhood, an arts center emerged, and a good deal of work has been developed there over the past 8ish years, in a space generously donated by a family who owns a lot of land in the area. This family knows that having a place where people can go to view visual art, to attend concerts, and to experience theatre shows creates an attractive culture in the neighborhood. Someone who works remotely for Amazon in a high rise with big floor-to-ceiling windows can boast to friends and colleagues that they live in a neighborhood where cool sh*t is happening. This attracts more nobility to this “cool” neighborhood, and increases the value of the property there.
The family who owns property in the area, and who donated and invests in the space that houses the arts center gets real economic value out of their investment in culture. The cool-ification (*gentrification) of the neighborhood means a substantial increase in income for the family in the long term. A wealthy family has been incentivized to support arts and culture by the forces governing real estate. Their investment in an arts space – which is in part an investment in property in the area – is also an investment artists benefit from.
Now, this discussion about arts and culture changing neighborhoods would be incomplete without a discussion of gentrification. Artists – because of their low mean income – tend to move to lower income neighborhoods when they move to large cities. That’s what they can afford. With the right constellation of social factors, this leads to the creation of a trendy neighborhood, and rental prices increase from there. Researchers have long identified four distinct stages of gentrification, as discussed by Peter Moskowitz in his book, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.
The first [stage] is when the artists, so-called hipsters, and other individuals move into a low-income neighborhood and start repairing its often vacant structures. The fourth is when gentrification is mostly carried out by developer conversions and an influx of business or managerial middle class.
Moskowitz also argues that there’s a stage zero, when city governments open themselves up to gentrification, by creating tax breaks that incentivize developers to displace local families. So, those truly to blame for the displacing effects of gentrification are developers and government actors who consciously look to price locals out of their home neighborhoods. By engaging directly with the community, artists – who by default tend to socialize only with other artists – can tie their work inextricably to the people and needs of that community, and refuse to use their work to promote spaces of gentrifications (like white-owned galleries in neighborhoods that are predominantly Black or Latino).
We’ll need to think more deeply about this together to find solutions that work best. Let me know if you have any other ideas about the role artists play in gentrification and how we can protect our communities through activism and cultural practice.
Outside of cities, arts programs can create value for rural/periphery places too. Double Edge Theatre, a physical theatre in central Massachusetts, has become, over its 25+ years in Ashfield, the kind of place that attracts artists and audiences from across the world. When these practitioners and spectators come to Ashfield, they uplift the couple of restaurants in the area, and provide local bed and breakfast establishments with guests to stay there. The seasonal rhythms of the outdoor theatre have become part of the seasonal economy of the town they’re in, and because Double Edge’s practices are aligned with exploding imagination and highlighting indigenous voices and wisdom, their work has brought justice, joy, and a means to survive to hundreds of people.
Sadly, some programs outside of cities do not see the same success. SPACE on Ryder Farm, a nonprofit residency program that has supported hundreds of theatre artists – ranging from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to Dave Malloy to Young Jean Lee and more – recently announced that they’re ceasing their current operations. In a statement posted to the organization’s website, board member Lee Seymour wrote:
The plain truth is that we are not immune to the same funding drought that is crippling the broader arts sector. And though the board and staff worked endlessly to fill the gap, we simply couldn’t generate enough funds to support operations through the summer. If anything, I hope that SPACE can inspire others to rethink the way America supports its arts and cultural institutions, and make them more sustainable.
I have experienced amazing art spaces in the United States. Their existence is possible – Double Edge Theatre is proof, as is the Unnamed Arts Center in That Neighborhood in my city – especially when passionate arts leaders step up and help convince others that support for the arts is support of a greater version of society. It’s up to us to use our precious breath to spread the idea that the arts are worth individual investment – not only because arts and culture generate financial returns for the investor, but also because they also reflect an investment towards imagining a world worth living in.