PittsburghToday

A healthy region key to healthy cultural life (by Charlie Humphrey)

I have been talking arts indictors with John Craig and Rudy Weingartner the past two months, but it has occurred to me that the program is important for more than the data and polling it can develop on the region’s cultural life.  This piece that I wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette three and a half years ago goes directly to that point:

Forum: Money makes art (not vice versa)

Pittsburgh's cultural community must place regional economic development above its own short-term needs, says Charlie Humphrey, or face long-term collapse

Sunday, September 07, 2003

There's nothing like a five-day trip to Syracuse and Rochester, delivering kids to college, to make someone sit up and take note. If you want to see what Pittsburgh will look like, should the city's current budget crisis continue, then make that half-day drive. A $60 million deficit, as much that is, will be just the beginning.
 
For the past two years, the arts community has been hard hit by the downward shift in the economy. Nothing in this scary mess is unrelated. As the city goes, so too will go the arts.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgh remains a better place than upstate New York largely because it started off as a better place, with resources and assets that far exceeded those two towns, even in their salad days. But these assets will not remain in their present form forever. As a member of the so-called cultural community, I find it painfully clear that we have become trust-fund babies, bestowed with riches and advantages unlike any other city in America. And unless we work now to build opportunities like those that existed in Pittsburgh at the turn of the last century, we will squander this legacy of privilege.

We have been cruising on the strength of the foundation community and the profound vision of its creators. Extraordinary wealth was created here, greater than any seen before in the free world. Much of it stayed in the form of trusts and family legacies. And now, it is only through the contemporary vision of its current leaders that we have not become a cultural wasteland. By propping up the cultural community, the Heinz, Mellon, McCune, Hillman, Pittsburgh and other foundations, and more recently the Allegheny County Regional Asset District, have made this city inhabitable. More than inhabitable. They have sustained its proud legacy of culture. I, like many others, am grateful.

But here's the punch line, which will surely alienate me from family and friends: Civic resources should be primarily directed toward those things that will allow us to establish new industries which can carry the banner forward in the next century.

Art and culture are not really an industry, as much as we like to claim they are. The arts business is instead a byproduct of successful industries, made possible by those with a clear sense of responsibility to community, and the critical elements that distinguish one community from another. Sure, the arts create jobs, and they contribute to the local economy in ways both measurable and immeasurable. But art is not a core industrial value that will save us from ourselves.

Note, also, the distinction between the arts business and art itself. Where art flourishes, so too the arts business. And where art flourishes, so too does community development. But we can't rehabilitate an eroded economic infrastructure from the arts. The arts will thrive, in the long run as a business, when the rest of the region flourishes economically.

This is a simple cause-and-effect argument. You don't fix a flat tire by tuning the engine. Much of the arts-and-economy case is predicated on little more than butter-or-guns logic. When most arts organizations generate half or less of their budgets from earned sources, that means that contributed income does a significant portion of the heavy lifting. It's money that could be spent though any number of conduits.

Let me say again: I believe that this has been money well spent. Keep spending it. But remember that a significant amount of arts spending is actually philanthropic spending, in one form or another.

The arts will not be the answer to our region's economic or social problems. Neither will retail development. The Waterfront in Homestead, as successful as it is, simply trades money around that is already here. And as with sports teams, a great deal of that retail money ends up somewhere else. Just ask the business owners on Forbes and Murray avenues what they think. Flourishing retail, like the arts, should be the result of a healthy economy, not the engine that drives it.

This is heresy in the view of many of my colleagues, who somehow want to argue that the arts are more important than food and water. Art will happen, no matter what the economic circumstances. It won't necessarily flourish, and it won't be nearly so evident, but human nature is such that art will emerge no matter what happens.

Even in Syracuse. Look, we're way ahead of Syracuse. But if young people don't want to live here because they can't find a job, who's going to take advantage of what little art gets created?

I have argued, in this paper and elsewhere, that a healthy democracy and a healthy arts community are inextricably related. And I continue to believe that government has a specific responsibility to support the arts in a major way.

But in the triage of priorities, the vast majority of arts support will come from private sources. It's been true since the Medicis in Italy, and it is true now. If the private sector stumbles, the arts will falter.
   
The point here is that we, in the arts community, need to take bold stands for issues and initiatives that do not directly benefit our field. In fact, we should be spending a significant percentage our time helping to find innovative ways to strengthen the economic base of the region.

That means we need to be vigilant around issues like slot machines (bad idea), taxes other than the amusement tax (good idea) and public transportation (any idea?). It may very well mean that we have to tighten our belts for a few years, operate smaller or postpone capital projects, and make room for projects that will directly encourage regional economic growth. It may mean asking for less now, so that we may be in a position to ask for more later.

We have become accustomed to our own unwavering sense of entitlement, an attitude that exists in the elite halls of art as well as the provincial firehalls of labor. Like so many children living on a steady allowance from sources of vague paternity, we have failed to take responsibility for the family jewels. And we cannot will ourselves to success through regional branding, a kind of wishful thinking that suggests that if we all drink the same Kool-Aid, we will become what we think we should be.

Am I suggesting that we not fund the arts? Of course not. Am I suggesting that the arts, as a field, recognize where their long-term support will come from? Yep.

If that means less for the arts now, so that we can re-establish Pittsburgh as an economic powerhouse for the next several generations, then I say: hell, yes.

The arts will always exist and, frankly, must exist, through patronage. As this or that trendy issue forces arts administrators to contort themselves into a variety of things they are not, like economic development powerhouses or social engineers, the ideal of art-for-art's sake is diluted to something far less significant.

We live on the dole, and it shall always be thus. As an arts community, we need to take strong positions on issues that have little or no direct impact to our own bottom lines, for the future sake of our own bottom lines, and in the name of great art.

Charlie Humphrey is the executive director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers (charlieh@pghfilmmakers.org).

Pittsburghers, don’t underestimate the importance of the arts (by Rudolph H. Weingartner)

Before I moved to this city almost twenty years ago, a former Pittsburgher told me, "You will like it a lot in Pittsburgh.  Rosenblooms have the most wonderful corn bread and access to the arts of all kinds is very easy, because there are a great many arts organizations, relative to the modest size of the population." Well, those heavy round loaves are gone, together with those who baked them, but just as my friend told me, I found a lively arts scene when I came here and still find it so.

But my impressions are surely not the best evidence for what is actually the case. Accordingly, in order to override anecdotes and hunches with hard information, the Regional Indicators Consortium undertook a survey, in the fall of 2006, about how the folks of our region participate in the arts. That region is the Tri-State area of 22 counties, roughly speaking the cluster around Allegheny and Washington, which has felicitously been referred to as the city state of Pittsburgh. Comparisons of Pittsburgh with the country as a whole are possible, thanks to the fact that we patterned our survey after those done by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997 and 2006. But since the Pittsburgh survey used the methodology of the earlier of these, comparisons with the 1997 figures are more appropriate, in spite of the passage of years.

The research that was undertaken is very rich in detail; only some highlights can be singled out here. However, those interested in gaining more knowledge about the arts in our region are invited to peruse the information posted on the Consortium’s website, www.pittsburghtoday.org, where they should click on the moving panel labeled Arts.

Museum and gallery visits stand at the head of Pittsburghers’ attendance at arts events. Nearly 37% of those surveyed say that they made at least one such visit during the year. This Tri-State number is boosted significantly above the national level by the particularly avid participation of the residents of Allegheny County.

Indeed, arts attendance in Allegheny County is higher than in the Tri-State area as a whole – in attendance at musical and non-musical plays, at performances of jazz, opera, ballet, and other kinds of dance. It takes little imagination to guess that opportunity is at the root of this fact: more museums, galleries, and different performance groups are located there than in the rest of the region. This fact makes it all the more interesting that in the Ohio and West Virginia counties, the percentage of people who attend performances of classical music exceeds that of Allegheny County, while the entire Tri-State area easily trumps the national statistics.

Looking at the entire picture of arts attendance, the city state of Pittsburgh exceeds national norms, often by much, in all but two of the different arts events that were surveyed. The percentage of ballet goers in the nation and here is about the same–and very small. The percentage of those who attend other types of dance performances is considerably smaller in the Tri-State area than nationally. I have no explanation for that difference.

It is widely held that people who practice one or another art are more likely to pay heed to other artists in galleries or performances, although I know quite a few musicians who have no interest in attending the performances of their colleagues. On the assumption that these are exceptions, and even though the claim of a correlation of practice with attendance is largely speculative, it still says something about the artistic vitality of a place if we know what proportion of the population is in some way active in the arts. For that reason, like the National Endowment of the Arts, we looked at this dimension as well, both as to what percentage of people had had lessons in one or another art and what fraction are actual practitioners.

There is not enough room here to give an account of all the subdivisions, so let me focus on just two. Pittsburghers certainly aim to be musical folk. Distinctly over half of Tri-State residents are taking or have had instruction in classical music, on one instrument or another, including voice. This well exceeds the national statistics; and while Allegheny County is again in the vanguard, the percentages of each of the areas within Greater Pittsburgh are very hefty, indeed. As to training in the visual arts, Pittsburgh and the nation are essentially on a par at just under 30%.

When it comes to practice, the percentage of Pittsburghers performing classical music is reported to be only half of the national statistics. This disparity is so startling that one must suspect the research that produced it. The percentages of jazz performers are of course also small, with Pittsburghers plausibly somewhat ahead of the nation.

In the practice of painting and other graphic arts, Pittsburgh is surprisingly above the nation. With the Ohio and West Virginia counties well ahead in our region, at nearly 20%, our city state beats the country by a full five percent. This fact alone explains why the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh (consisting of nearly 500 visual artists in a 150 mile radius) has been thriving for nearly 100 years.

Pittsburgh has of course been long known as a sports city, one that is willing, moreover, to put its money where its sporty mouth is. Within thirty years, two sports sites were reduced to rubble, demolitions that emitted bursts of dollar signs, like the “stars” we see when bumped on the head. PNC Park and Heinz Field emerged from those ashes, soon to be joined by another Phoenix, to arise from the remains-to-be of the Mellon Arena.

And yet, Pittsburgh is even more arty than it is sporty – and that without such massive public support. Our survey shows that while in the Tri-State region nearly 41% had attended a sporting event during the year (virtually the same percentage as in the country as a whole), an impressive 58% had attended an arts event, compared to a national 51.6%. In part because of the greater accessibility of both arts and sports, Allegheny County had over 48% attend at least one sports event, while a whopping 65% enjoyed at least one communion with the arts.

For access to the Pittsburgh survey's summary tables, click here.

Rudolph Weingartner is the chair of the Arts Indicators Committee (rudywein@comcast.net)

Arts in Pittsburgh (by Rudolph H. Weingartner)

Additional data from the Pittsburgh arts survey are now available. These data reveal numerous facets of Pittsburghers’ relationship to the arts that are not particularly surprising, but there is a considerable difference between reliance on anecdotal evidence and guesstimates, on the one hand, and seeing statistics that are derived from surveys that have been undertaken with considerable care, on the other. To access the summary tables, click here.

But before turning to some of these not-so-surprising findings, here are a couple that might not have been anticipated by all observers. Pittsburghers attended more arts events than is the national norm. This makes the city known for its enthusiasm for sports also a center of the arts. Indeed, the citizenry of Pittsburgh’s attendance at sports events is about the same as that of the nation. More unexpectedly, however, Americans’ reputation as a nation of jocks may not be so well founded. Their turnout at sports events is actually lower than their attendance at arts events, with Pittsburgh quite close to the 1997 national figures.

It may surprise some but not others that in Pittsburgh, as well as nationally, more women are consumers of art than men, mostly in all varieties of art. It would be interesting to find out why that is the case. To a lesser degree—and not as consistently—women are also more likely to be practitioners of the arts than men. A guess has it that if we possessed statistics going back into history that this is a more recent trend. Perhaps at some future time, that famous 1988 article by Professor Linda Nochlin “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” will need to be rewritten.

On the other hand, when one looks at the ages at which people practice one or another of the arts, the older that people get, the less they do so, with probably a multiplicity of reasons for that decline. However, more predictably, in the Pittsburgh area as well as nationally, the age group in the middle—from 35 to 64—has the largest percentage attending arts events. There is one signal exception to this generalization: in Pittsburgh the over 65s have the largest percentage attending concerts of classical music.

When one looks at the effect of education on participation in the arts, the fact that attendance at art venues goes up with the amount of education these “consumers” have had is surely anticipated. But that the same is true in quite a few domains for the practice of art is not so predictable.

Well known to the people who run Pittsburgh’s art organizations is that relatively very few people actually subscribe to arts events. (This is undoubtedly true nationally; however, the NEH surveys did not inquire about subscriptions.) Operetta subscriptions—and they are not for many performances—are the highest at a meager 2.9%. Even museum memberships, nowhere near as costly as subscribing to a season’s worth of performances, comes to only 5%.

Finally, it is hardly a surprise that the larger a family’s income, the more likely they are to buy works of art. But just how widely is buying art regarded to be a luxury? It is noteworthy that nationally (taking the more comparable 1997 figures), a third of those with an income of less than $50,000 report that they have bought works of art. Although in Pittsburgh, only 14% of that income level report having purchased works of art.

(It should be noted that comments on racial differences in the relationship to the arts, if any, are inappropriate, since the number of respondents of African-Americans in the Pittsburgh survey is too small for the percentages to be significant.)

Posted by Rudolph H. Weingartner, Chair of the Regional Indicators Arts Committee.