A majority of Americans
nowadays have little knowledge of, or interest in, let alone
enthusiasm for, what are called "fine arts." So why
should they support something they care nothing about?
This is a hard question that arises whenever the subject of
public support for the arts or other cultural projects comes
up. And it's a good question to ask, if you're a
practical-minded citizen concerned about how government spends
your tax dollars. A good question deserves a good
answer. So try this one:
Fine arts are a magnet
for talent and brains.
That's the short answer,
but it requires some explanation for fuller understanding.
After all, what good are artists' talent and brains, when what
we really need are talent and brains for business and
government? As it turns out, the two are connected in a
very businesslike "supply-and-demand" relationship.
Communities—be they business or government, be
they local, state, national, or global—function best when led
by the best leaders and innovators available, particularly
those with the special knack of understanding individual
projects in relation to a "big picture" scheme of things in
general. For this particular mix of talent and brains,
we need the most talented, the most liberally educated, the
most critically thinking, and the most broadly experienced
people available. What attracts such leaders and
innovators?
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Money: Obviously, it attracts most people.
But it isn't very discriminating; money attracts not only
the best of the best but also the worst of the worst, and a
lot in between. But other attractions are more
targeted.
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Challenge: Some administrators like the idea
of starting with an already successful model that they can
refine and improve upon, while others savor the challenge of
starting, either from scratch or with a rough example,
and using their ingenuity to raise it to a superior level.
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Living environment: It's probably a safe bet
that most world-class leaders and innovators don't relish
the idea of immersing themselves and their families in an
undeveloped or even degraded backwater. They've
invested considerable time, effort, and money to become
educated and experienced, and they'd prefer that these
investments be rewarded, not penalized, by their chosen
habitat. The ideal environment is devoid of corruption
and crime. It has sound infrastructure. It's
conducive to honest and fair business practices. It's
stable, but open to prudent innovation. It's clean and
healthful for its inhabitants. It provides good
general education, facilities for recreation, and care for
the indigent. No real-world environment is ideal, but
so long as opportunities exist for remedying any
deficiencies, the outlook is satisfactory.
For leaders and innovators of superior talent,
education, experience, and vision, money is just one of
several attractions, and by no means the overriding one.
The outstanding individuals we seek are primarily those well
rounded enough to consider challenge or environment more
meaningful and rewarding than enormous income. Indeed,
there's one facet of the living environment that we haven't
yet mentioned: arts. Arts are a form of recreation, and
they appeal to just about everyone, and just about everyone
can participate in them in some measure. (To paraphrase
the wry observation of one critic, "If you can't sing well,
you can sing loudly; and if you can't sing at all, you can
always scream." As evidence of this in today's world, it
would appear that screaming—or its equivalent in the visual
arts—has a hugely marketable mass appeal.)
But the fine arts are something more.
They demand of the artist a substantive level of innate
talent, extensive training in both mechanical precision and
aesthetic nuance, a rigorous personal vision of perfection,
and an obsessive desire to transform the first two of these
into the third. Fine arts are a melding of aesthetics
and intellect, a connection to world culture and history, an
awareness of potential and an inspiration of vision. No,
one needn't be a genius to enjoy a Mendelssohn concerto or a
Botticelli painting; such works are beautiful and majestic and
just plain fun to experience on a purely superficial level,
even for small children; mature intellectual involvement
and worldliness simply broaden and intensify the interest. As such,
fine arts have a special appeal to the very sort of
extraordinarily talented, brainy, and worldly
individuals we need to undertake the major conceptual and
decision-making tasks of strategic leadership and innovation.
For, in the course of developing and refining their talents,
many of these big-picture thinkers have acquired a strong love
and appreciation of the arts through upbringing, through
education, or simply through cultural or even accidental exposure to elegant
artistry worlds beyond the commonplace. It's an
exceptional artistry to which they find themselves intensely
attuned, and which, once so attuned, they'd be loath to do
without. In business terms, they provide a market demand
for fine arts. And the obvious suppliers for that market
are high-grade artists and art institutions.
We see the results of (mostly) superior
leadership in prominent American cities like Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Pittsburgh,
Buffalo-Rochester, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago,
Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, Seattle, and San Francisco,
which have the advantage of this extraordinary investment in
arts and are on par with major cities in Europe, eastern Asia,
and Australia. No, they surely didn't become prosperous
solely because of their arts; there are many other
contributing factors, most involving the creation and
investment of wealth. But it's virtually certain that
otherwise comparable communities are less prosperous without
an active fine arts base. If you doubt this claim,
compare the aforementioned cities to other American cities
without strong fine arts institutions, as in the Deep South or
the Great Plains, and draw your own conclusions.
Granted, world-class arts institutions are
enormously human-intensive, and therefore often so expensive
that they can't generate enough revenue through ticket sales
to pay directly for their own operation, and must in addition
rely on outside support. There's nothing new about this;
fine arts have had major support from the public sector for
centuries—initially from priests, kings, and other noble
patrons, and later in the post-monarchic environment from the
increasingly educated and affluent entrepreneur, merchant, and professional
classes. In the 19th and 20th
centuries, fine arts received additional support from both
private philanthropy and government endowment, justified by
the arts' importance in preserving cultural identity,
heritage, and national prestige. Today, lofty visions of
culture, heritage, and prestige have faded in the American
psyche, and the fine arts are valued in more pragmatic terms.
Though often too costly for self-maintenance, they're well
worth their cost in terms of the indirect benefits to which
they contribute by attracting a superior brand of leadership:
wise planning, prudent innovation, ethical vision, a homing
instinct for
prosperity, a concern for general well-being, a sense of
sustainable balance between liberty and responsibility, and
acknowledgement of the necessity of a safety valve of artful
socio-political commentary and criticism of the very powers
that support them.
What it boils down to is
our initial claim: An accomplished and thriving fine arts
community is a magnet for talent and brains, both from within
the arts and also from other fields in which the appeal of the
arts is strong enough to be felt as a necessary condition of
civilized life. Fine arts draw others with special
talents, to transform a mediocre community into a first-rate
one. A community with art museums, professional theater,
a symphony orchestra, an opera or ballet company, and perhaps
a school of fine arts might seem gross extravagance to many.
But the bottom line is that such a community will get the pick
of the crop when it comes to attracting intelligent, well
educated, and worldly wise professionals and global leaders of
government and business, the top-notch of whom are wise enough
to attach great importance and value to things besides money.
Some would even gladly forego the prospect of huge salaries in
order to live and work in a community with an active
professional fine arts tradition. Granted, the
existence of a fine arts community doesn't guarantee superior
leadership, but it significantly improves the odds of it, with
the quality of leadership and the arts working with and
reinforcing each other.
In other words, fine arts programs have value
to a community, not because everyone enjoys them, but because
they attract a high quality of thinking from which everyone
benefits. Thus, even if fine arts programs can't
directly raise enough revenue to support themselves, it's
still in everyone's practical interest that they be supported
and sustained. For if fine arts languish, the attraction
to the most talented, educated, experienced, and capable
leaders will fade. They'll eventually abandon what they
increasingly perceive as a cultural wasteland, and migrate to
wherever the environment is more favorable to their interests,
taking their talent and brains with them. A community
devoid of fine arts must be satisfied with the dregs of
leadership. Instead of capable and broadly visionary
humanitarian planners, it will likely have to put up with
tunnel-vision schemers at best and blind bunglers at worst.
Fine arts, like good education and public health, are an
investment that forward-looking communities make in
themselves, an investment that pays off for everyone in the
long run.
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