The Business of State Arts Agencies
Plenary Session Opening Statement by Jonathan Katz
NASAA Annual Meeting
Charleston, South Carolina
December 5, 2003
Now that I’ve prepared this presentation on trends and implications I can tell you the trend part is
easier than the implications part. Here’s a trend. I spent the first half of my professional life
learning as much as I could in order to say something worthwhile in 30 hours that my audience
could write 20 pages about and act on over the next 40 years. Now I’m spending the second half
of my professional life learning as much as I can in order to say something worthwhile in ten
minutes that my audience can write two sentences about and act on during the next 30 days. Now
one implication of this trend could be that when I’m 105, I can speak for only a few seconds and
my audience will take immediate action. Another implication could be that I’ll have little to say
about something they took action on twenty years before. This implications stuff isn’t easy.
I’m going to focus on one complex trend and then imagine just a few of its implications.
This is a trend in arts attendance and it’s complex enough to have some news that appears good
and some news that appears, as we say, challenging.
Here’s the good news. More American adults report attending arts activities than ever before.
“More than 80 million Americans report attending arts activities in 2002, up five million from
1992.” Those 81 million people represent almost 40% of adults in the United States.
Here’s where it gets complex.
That five-million-person increase over the 76 million attendees in 1992 is 6.6 percent. But,
between 1992 and the 2000 census, only 8 years, the adult population increased 8.8%. For the
decade from 1992 to 2002 it was probably 10% or more. See what that means? While the
attenders increased 5 million, the non-attenders increased about 14 million and the fraction of
Americans attending actually dropped. In 50 years, at this rate, we get 28 million more attenders
and 97 million more non-attenders. The percentage of American attenders drops from 40% to
one out of three. Let’s remind ourselves what a non-attender—the increasingly typical
American—is. It’s a person over 18 who has not been to a play, or a musical, or a ballet, or an
opera, or a symphony, or a jazz performance, not to any kind of museum, even once in a whole
year.
So we now have the observation that the attenders of a very substantial portion of the current
grantees of state arts agencies are not keeping up with population growth.
But why should we care if, in fact, millions more are attending? Well, the real problems are in
the worlds of public and private decision making. How will the arts be maintained as a core
subject in schools if those who know them well shrink as a percentage of the community? Who
will speak up for hiring and training art teachers? How can we get a majority to vote for the
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candidates who support the cultural life of their communities and states? What would the
consequences be if the percentage of corporate and foundation funders, and individual donors,
who attend the performing arts shrinks? And let’s consider that the greatest population growth is
now in the suburbs where lots of new performing arts venues are being built, so our hopes that
population increase will help increase the percent of each house filled in performing arts venues
may not be realized.
There are trends in our favor. We have the experience of doubling state arts agency
appropriations during the decade of the 1990s. We have more and more research that
demonstrates the public value of the arts in economic development, in education, in cultural
tourism, in providing positive choices for at-risk youth, and in strengthening community life.
Three-quarters of state arts agency directors responding to a recent NASAA poll share the
impression that during the current economic downturn their agency has fared as well or better
than other agencies of state government. NASAA’s ability to gather, analyze, package, and
deliver the collective wisdom of members to the membership is drawn upon increasingly. And
those people who actively advocate for the arts in public and private resource development are
still a very small percentage of those who benefit from arts activities, so the potential is great.
Even so, the attendance trends I cited imply that the public value of arts support will be greater if
state arts agencies do some things differently in the future than we have in the past.
My purpose in these initial remarks is to put some possible courses of action out on the table for
your deliberation:
1. Attenders at professional performances are a limited portion of those who participate in the
arts. One implication of attendance trends is that state arts agencies should consider ways to
serve and claim as constituents the broadest body of those who create and perform the arts as
well as attend them. The largest portion of creators and performers are amateurs. Most of our
country’s public and foundation arts investment has been in professional work. However,
tens of millions of Americans sing in choruses, dance socially, play musical instruments, sew
creatively, write poems and otherwise create art because they love it. In many cases, they are
organized locally and linked nationally by associations and by publications. If state arts
agencies and the artists and arts groups they fund were (a) more purposeful and (b) more
visible in serving them, amateur artists have the potential to move public support for the arts
to new levels.
2. Perhaps one implication of the attendance trend is that we should consider whether there are
more effective strategies for advancing arts education than we are now employing. Education
in the arts enables people to create and perform art and also prepares them to attend, actively
appreciate and criticize the arts. We have already developed and documented an enormous
number of model projects and invested broadly in school-community learning partnerships.
What we’ve learned from the study entitled Gaining the Arts Advantage is that a key factor
linked to a strong commitment to arts education by school districts is the presence of a
community group that engages actively in the politics and instruction of the arts in the school
system. As well as supporting working relationships between schools and community arts
resources, this kind of advocacy group leads to the hiring of arts-savvy administrators and
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teachers, and influences adherence to standards-based, assessed and benchmarked arts
education. Are we adapting our arts education activities to take advantage of what we are
learning?
Another very basic strategy is to map the status of arts learning so that the value of various
investments can be realistically assessed. The Kennedy Center has produced A Community
Audit for Arts Education. This audit tool guides a community group to determine how
informed key leaders in the educational system are about the value of the arts, to clarify the
educational content of your school’s arts curriculum, and to identify the extent of connection
between the school system and the arts community. If this auditing process is done
effectively, key decision makers get involved and the role of the arts in the school system can
be advanced significantly. In fact, the Kennedy Center now has a report on the success
achieved in five communities by using this audit process. Are we sufficiently employing
audit tools? And are we mapping baseline participation in K-12 arts learning so that we’ll
know which of our strategies to promote more and better arts education are working?
3. The for-profit sector connects large numbers of people to participation in the arts. There
seem to be many more ways that state arts agencies could relate to galleries, bookstores,
movie houses, music venues, instrument and art supply manufacturers and other for-profit
arts and entertainment vendors than they do. Policy initiatives such as New England’s
Creative Economy effort as well as cultural tourism collaborations—which highlight the
roles of the for-profit hospitality, travel and tourism industries in broadening arts
participation—offer some good models. More consideration might be given to the public
sector role in advancing the various design industries (industrial fashion, architectural,
environmental, software, publication, etc.) that employ artists, engage huge audiences and
markets in artistic activities, and offer far-reaching public benefits.
I want to emphasize that the strategies I think are implied by the attendance trends of our current
grantees are reinforced by other environmental factors such as tight state government budgets,
the imperative to identify agency performance measures and to demonstrate public value in those
terms, and, ultimately, by our collective goal to enable and encourage every individual, family
and community to enrich their life through the arts. Our very mandates imply we never stop
striving to increase the public benefits we provide.
And, as you all know, there are lots of programmatic and operational things to consider as state
arts agencies seek to advance their missions and adapt to their changing environments, many
more than one can even name in opening remarks. Our mandates imply we continually choose
among strategies to foster local cultural planning, cultural districts and local arts agencies; to
assist artists and arts organizations to interpret arts experiences more meaningfully, to market
and distribute the arts more efficiently, and to organize advocacy more effectively are all useful
to consider.
I also want to emphasize that I believe that the strengths of our current grantees in (a) providing
transforming arts experiences, (b) reaching broad audiences in cost-effective ways, and (c)
providing the most committed core of advocacy for public support of the arts make them our first
circle of partners. The strategies that offer our constituent artists and arts organizations the
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clearest incentives to adjust activities and forge new partnerships will be the most effective in
broadening participation and increasing the public value of the arts over time. Obviously,
collaborative planning, visioning and problem solving are implied.
In concluding my remarks, I ask that when you thank Bill Pound for being with us here today
and sharing his insights, which are extremely valuable to us, you also thank him for his yearround support of our partnership and for the ongoing service of Mandy Rafool, program
principal for NCSL’s Economic Development, Trade and Cultural Affairs Committee, as a
member of our Board of Directors. Thank you.
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