Arts Advocacy Breakfast

I'm going to keep this breif, because I'm starting to lose my temper a little bit, and i've got a tour to book.

Went to the breakfast in the park that Johnathan West organized. There's going to be another one of these in two weeks, and i intend to go to that one too.

From my experience studying and participating in political action, i offer the following reccomendations.

There is one thing that will make this work: combined forces.

Here's how to combine forces successfully:

1. Connect with the remnants of past efforts.
2. Balance the present individual acute problem with broader future efforts.
3. devise two transparent processes one to develop actionable responses to acute problems and one to develop and strengthen a proactive long term presense.
4. hold frequent real life meetings that produce results.

More details on these things.

1. It was very good to see people from MARN and Arts Inc there. This kind of action is cyclical, if you're not building on the efforts of previous advocates, then you're spinning your wheels and going nowhere. MARN seems like it used to do more agressive advocacy (brenner) and now it's more network focused. This is a good thing, cuz MARN's failures in advocacy probably came from too limited a network. This is an opportunity to bring performing artists into MARN, and use the resources they've already built to pursue advocacy.

2. Skylight cannot hyjack the proceedings. Before the next meeting the aggreived members of Skylight ought to develop and two things to present the larger group: first, a consise report on exactly what happened and why. Second, an action plan, what they'd like the broader community to do to support them. It is then essential that Skylight people participate in, make room for and listen to other greivances as well. I'm only using Skylight as an example here because it is the current acute problem, not because i think musical theatre actors are self-dramatizing divas with short attention spans.

3. the first process has to start with what i just described above. The group needs to establish a lean, effective standard proceedure for raising issues, and recommending action. We can't spend the whole meeting time brainstorming ideas, the ideas should be prepared ahead of time and presented. To some degree, the right process was already happening today, but if we have twice or three times as big a group in two weeks, it's gotta happen more to make things effective.

The second process also already started today, some very goal oriented stuff was discussed, both short term and long term goals. Paula mentioned building enough clout to get a seat at the table for artists when the big fancy people are meeting behind their closed doors, she also mentioned influencing elections. These are good ideas. Prioritize them and develop them into either actions (volunteering for arts friendly politicians) or demands ("Hey GMC! if you want any of these 4000 artists to help realize your fancy-pants creative development plan, you've gotta save a seat for us at your meetings from now on, and you've gotta let us elect the person who sits in that seat").

4. If something like these reccomendations are followed, and actions are employed, this group can get results. If the procedures and discussions are made public, then this will grow.

These are my reccomendations, as a scholar of political activism, not my personal feelings (i'm not really a fan of political activism). My personal feelings are: let the 38 people who don't know each other on the board of the skylight pay half attention while eric dillner burns the company down, and then sing and dance in the ashes. Form new companies, use new models, skip that 501c3 bullshit. But, my personal feelings aren't very useful to people who wanna do showtunes, so in the meantime, i'll help you guys do your best to empower artists within the old models.

I am more excited about this than any of the other milwaukee artist community stuff that's been going on. This art advocacy is different than the coalition's, the CA's or the GMC's. This is transparent, personal and grassroots. When Johnathan says "arts advocacy" he seems to mean something more like "artist advocacy". This distinction is important, "arts advocacy" tends to be much more careful, shallow and empty, advocating the arts as an idea, which can perversely undermine art by empowering arts administrators who have no respect for artists. Creative coalition stuff strikes me as a bunch of meetings where people decide who should talk about making plans on how to create the outline of a map for doing things in a way that makes sure they'll not fail, cuz that might make the GMC look bad. Johnathan's is grassroots, transparent, unafraid of getting dirty, and puts the artists first.

More bitching about the local art scene...

I'm begining to think i need to stop paying attention to the intractable problems of Miwlaukee's art scene. I've rode a couple times through the mutually reinforcing cycle of ineffectual organizations that ignore artists and a defeatist artist community that complains about their entitlement to support and their beleif that the work they do feeds our society's soul. I know i've got better things to do with my time.

But, i've always been drawn to apparently impossible challenges. The more intractable the problem seems the more excited i get about confronting it! Unfortunately, this enthusiasm for challenges has created a distraction from the work i've got to do (and there's lots of that: booking a tour, rehearsing for tour, workshopping King Lear, promoting the CCC show, writing essays, printing new merch, editing Ulysses Crewmen, etc etc).

Anyway, i've already followed the current manifestation (or infestation) of art world whinery (an especially infantile discussion started here, about this seemingly irrelevant blog and written the following response, so i might as well say it out loud.

I really really don't think Emily Thomas should be brought into the art community's airing of public greivances. I do appreciate Mike's using her blog post as an example, but i see it more as an example MAM's failure in it's role as a gateway to get the millions of people like her and her children invovled in art. Should our focus now be on this one individual art-viewer, or would our time be better spent looking at the art curator who has many many interactions of this kind daily? Sure, she's much easier to attack than MAM (who are probably either ignoring this conversation or fretting about how to make it go away, depending on how paranoid they are. At any rate, i highly doubt we're going to hear from them) but what good does attacking her do?

Seems to me what Mike's post illustrates is that we're in the present situation (underfunded arts and art-education programs) because MAM and others have failed in their responsibility as gateway to the art world. This failure happened in the past. Perhaps MAM and other orgs coulda done more and better (probably) but perhaps even if if they had, this kind of failure was unavoidable (probably).

I don't care all that much about that, i'm concerned with the present situation: the gateway is broken, from the perspective of the millions of Emily Thomas's, the art world is an insular cluster of increasingly irrelevant and inexplicable artists and curators, doing offensive pornography. The questions we should be asking are not: who is this one individual woman, how did she come to her views on art, how can we change her mind. If we spend ten minutes thinking about it, take an honest look at the art world, it's not hard to infer the answers, and to even sympathize with Thomas. Oh, and liscensing parentage is not only an absurd joke, it's also offensive and stupid because it focuses on regulating and controlling "them" rather than on what "we" can do to change things.

Yes, the questions should be directed at us, at artists. MAM etc failed in the past and now we're in a situation that MAM and the NEA and the CA and the GMC and the great HOPE we just elected president CANNOT fix, even if they tried (and i'm sure they are trying, however muddleheadedly). Now we can either bitch at them while it remains broken, or WE can try to fix it.

Seems to me the question we ought to be asking is: we are YOU doing as an artist to connect with the non-art community, or accross artistic disciplines? If each individual artist can answer that question with a few successful projects, then the ineffectuality of the CA, GMC, MAM, NEA etc etc etc becomes irrelevant.

Or maybe not... maybe i'm a naive optimist. Maybe groups like hotcakes, Theatre X, etc etc did successfully reach accross disciplines and to a non-art audience for a couple years (or decades) and then failed anyway due to lack of community and institutional support. Well, actually... that is what happened. Looks like my efforts are really just repeating their failures. Then, I am a naive optimist, but I guess i'd rather be optimistic about my and my neighbors' ability to change things than pin false hopes on organizations and institutions that i know ain't ever gonna change.

Cultural Summit Progress

Hello,

The cultural summit (aka the MKE Kre8Kamp) has happened, they've documented it on their blog (above) and Jonathan West over at Artsy Schmartsy is spazzing out about spreading the word about all the great work they did.

You all should take a look at all of it and make your own judgements. Jonathan's post is a good place to start. My opinion can be found in various comments on the posts.

Cultural Alliance Invitation

A few weeks back i worked myself up into one of my spastic little tizzies about a local art organization in Milwaukee (the cultural alliance). Apparently this outbusrt was articulate enough to get the attention of someone other than anonymous posters armed with childish insults, though I did get some of that too.

Anyway, seems like some interesting discussions followed, publically and privately. My conclusion is that there's a viscious cycle in the Milwaukee community (and probably most American communities) where big well funded arts organizations overlook many committed valuable artists, then the artists get bitter and defeated, start drinking and stop producing much art, then the big orgs see this and feel justified in continuing to ignore artists, which bolsters the artist's victimization complex and alchoholism, which feeds back into the big arts organizations isolation, etc. etc. It's a mutually reinforcing cycle of useless shittyness.

People have tried to break this cycle (most notably Mike Brenner and the other founders of MARN, but also so many others). Unfortunately, these people get sucked into the cycle, or get burned out fighting against it. If we're going to ever defeat this cycle, anyone who wants Milwaukee to be a thriving, growing art community needs to jump at whatever opportunities come about that might break a crack in it.

One such opportunity is fast approaching. The GMC, Cultural Alliance and UWM are holding a "Cultural NonProfit Forum on Creative Community" later this month. Perhaps inspired by some of the above mentioned discussions, this is an attempt to open February's "Creative Summit" to a broader selection of voices, including yours. I met with Christine Harris last week and I beleive that at least she is genuinely interested in getting representatives of all parts of the Milwaukee creative community at the table for this Summit. The dumb assholes who think Milwaukee's problems will be solved by simply eliminating the bottom third of all arts orgs will be at the summit. If the bottom third doesn't show up at this Forum cuz we're too depressed, or lazy, or hung over, then there's not going to be anyone at the Summit to counter that argument.

Here's the details, sign up ASAP! Be there! I hear there will also be one the day after (27th) in the evening, for those of us who have day jobs and use up all our vacation time touring the D I Y punk circuit. Go to one of these forums, if you don't, then the terrorists- i mean... the corporate art beaurocrats win!

THE INVITATION

On behalf of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Cultural Alliance of Greater Milwaukee and the UWM Center for Urban Initiatives and Research, you are invited to participate in a dialogue with other nonprofit cultural leaders about the future of the creative community in southeastern Wisconsin.

Monday, January 26, 2009
7:45 registration
8:15AM – 11:45AM session
Italian Community Center, 631 E. Chicago St.
Free

This dialogue is designed as an open Forum in anticipation of the Greater Milwaukee Committee's Creative Summit, which will be held in early February, 2009. The purpose of the GMC's Creative Summit is to outline a vision for our region's creative community across the nonprofit and for-profit sectors of the economy, along with creating a roadmap to guide the way. The GMC Summit is intended to initiate a dedicated and community-wide process of fostering a stronger creative region. Invitations to the Summit will be going out from the GMC in early January. For more information on the background for the Summit, please read the GMC's Cultural Asset Inventory of the Milwaukee 7 Region as reported by the Cultural Alliance at www.gmconline.org.

The Forum will be open to the first 120 registrants who can attend the entire event. The purpose of the Forum is to ensure that those participating in the Creative Summit will have a richer and deeper understanding of the unique and powerful contributions of the nonprofit cultural arts community in a broader creative economy. The input gathered in this Forum will be directly utilized by the Summit gathering. After a brief introduction to the Summit process, Forum participants will engage in roundtable discussions around a selected list of questions along with general discussion. All information gathered at the Forum will be attributed anonymously, and will be collated for distribution at the Summit.

Please Note: This invitation is intended for the recipient only. If you cannot attend and have a strong recommendation on who should take your place, please contact the Cultural Alliance at dlubotsky@culturalalliancemke.org.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Thanks for the work you do in serving our community.

Christine

The Art Community as an Immanent Shipwreck.

Jon Mueller, an amazing musician and very positive voice for the arts and innovative businesses in this city recently held an economic group therepy session for artists and small businesses. I was unable to attend, due to rehearsals, but he sent out an email with a PDF by Diane E. Ragsdale, called Surviving the Culture Change (google it). This has a lot of good advice for big non-profit arts organizations, even some things that i can use. It also had this anecdote:

"About 3 years ago, I attended a retreat with leaders of a dozen orchestras, at which one lamented, likely reflecting the sentiments of more than a few in the room, "I feel like I'm the Captain of the Titanic, and there's an iceberg ahead, but rather than being on top steering the ship I'm in the bowels shoving coal in the furnace. I'm afraid if I stop shoveling coal we'll run out of steam, but I know
that if I don't start steering the ship soon we're going to hit an iceberg."

I like this metaphor, it seems appropriate. If the art community (either locally or nationally) is the Titanic with these people at the helm, then i think it's too late to dodge the iceberg without breaking the ship to peices anyway. So, I'm up on the deck building a lifeboat, or maybe even a pirate ship, to come pick through the ruins after the crash. I'm also shouting at the crew of the ship to stop following the captain's commands and help build lifeboats with me.

This puts me in a weird place. For example, I'm one of the only people willing to publically mouth off at the Cultural Alliance (read my last post and the comments) because I don't want their money. Mary Louise Schumacher, and Jonathan West are trying desperately to get other artists who might have more of a stake in the Cultural Alliance's offerings to join the conversation, and so are even the folks at the CA and the Greater Milwaukee Committee.

Unfortunately, most of those artists are hangin out in bar getting shitfaced most nights cuz they've already given up. If you want to prove me wrong, Milwaukee artists, if you're not just a bunch of lazy drunken whiners, READ THE REPORT HERE NOW watch the videos on GMC's site, and comment! Join the fucking conversation, even if it's just to throw verbal stones at the out-of-touch sycophants.

This is really frustrating, i think the elitist attitudes of the funders and the funding orgs have reinforced the defeatist attitudes of the small artists, which then reinforce the elitist attitudes of the funders. It's going to take a long time and a lot of work to break that mutually reinforcing system up, work that should've been started years ago, before the artists gave up.

I'd like to take an active role in this, watch all the CA videos, and read all the commentary and blog posts, rant for days on end, even though i suspect very few people are listening, but I'm aweful busy over here building my lifeboat, and i'm pretty sure this lifeboat is going to carry me out of Milwaukee (i know, i know, i've heard it before: "good riddance, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out"). At any rate, if i don't get to work booking and promoting the winter tour, my lifeboat will never be seaworthy.

Milwaukee Cultural Alliance

I think the Milwaukee Cultural Alliance is a prime example of why Milwaukee will fail to become a genuine "Art City".

Jonathan West's discussion of this topic got me interested. To summarize: it seems that donors are giving money to the cultural alliance, who are doing nothing with it ("The Cultural Alliance folks talked about how in their initial impact as an organization could be characterized as inert.") Then the donors aren't giving to other more active artist-led groups like MARN, leading to Mike Brenner's great frustration and eventual "retirement".

This creates an environment of inaccessibility for new artists and organizations. New groups or individuals are unlikely to connect with a viable support structure when The Alliance has a monopoly on what is considered "legitimate professional art". If the Cultural Alliance groups were making art, this wouldn't be such a problem, but what they produce is generally more of a bourgeois status symbol than a meaningful artistic expression, a mirror for our society, or a currently relevant cultural object or experience.

That these groups are the only ones getting funding leads me (and others) to believe that the donor base in Milwaukee do not actually support or beleive in art, they only want to look like they do. As a result, the big organizations live in a very inefficient closed loop, where donors give them the money needed to maintain the appearance of legitimacy, they waste most of the money on administration and fancy new buildings and occasionally squirt out incredibly safe inoffensive art. It's like a feedback loop for crap, and the press dutifully plays their part.

When a city has this sort of self-perpetuating deadly arrangement sitting on top of its art scene, that city's audience, talent, and entire art community are negatively impacted. This kind of feedback loop for crap reinforces the anti-art mentality in audiences, who then reject all art or any cultural event because they associate it with the snobbishness that accompanies bourgeois status symbols. It stunts the growth of new art organizations who are unable to access support from philanthopists because they've already given to do-nothings. It also encourages artists to leave Milwaukee in droves, and those who stay, stay with very limited expectations, and with a tendency to spend more time drinking than art-making. Which drives me crazy.

I need to point out that I'm not whining here. I know that the responsibility for fixing this problem is mine, Mike's and everyone else's in the art community. We need to do a better job of inspiring people to look through the smoky alchoholic haze of the bars, past the Cultural Alliance's deadly offerings, and focus on the talented artists who are producing worthwhile challenging work. I'm not asking the Cultural Alliance to do better, or even for the bourgeois donors to get real. I'm encouraging the people who are real, who are genuinely interested in supporting art to not let their donations be lumped in with all the frauds and fakers who support the Cultural Alliance, UPAF and similar groups.

Maybe the best way i can do that is to get out of the way and leave the job up to others who are more charasmatic, positive, friendly, tolerant and otherwise just plain more attractive than Mike and I. People like Peggi Taylor, MIGA, or Cedar Block. If Milwaukee is going to become an Art City it will be through the efforts of those kinds of groups, not the Cultural Alliance.

But, i happen to think that every movement needs an uncompromising asshole to demand more and tell it like it is, regardless of toes stepped on, or bridges burned. I seem to fit this role naturally because when i look at things like the Cultural Alliance, i get really angry, and i'm no good at hiding it.

But more important than my anger, or my sanity (at least to anyone but me) is the future economic health of the City of Milwaukee. Which brings me to the subject i really want to talk about: The Cultural Alliance's report on Milwaukee's cultural assets. This report doesn't say anything new or unexpected, but there are some indications here of just how far the Cultural Alliance's heads are up their asses.

Somebody somewhere convinced Milwaukeans that we should want to be an Art City. This should be a good thing. Unfortunately when the task of actually becoming an art city is trusted to organizations that run like The Cultural Alliance (or UPAF, or MAM, or Visit Milwaukee, or The Journal Sentinal) the project is doomed to be a boondoggle.

The Cultural Alliance's report is an excellent example of this. It discusses the importance of the creative sector to economic growth, but it completely misunderstands what it's talking about. The leading voice for "creative class cities" is Richard Florida. If Milwaukee genuinely wants to be an Art City, and genuinely wants to attract the economic benefits of a thriving art scene, we need to look closer at what Florida has to say.

The creative class can be thought of in two different ways. A broadly defined creative sector and a "super radical core" of the creative class. The broadly defined creative sector includes, to quote the Cultural Alliance's source "* The core creative industries include R&D, publishing, software, TV/radio, design, music, film, toys/games, advertising, arts, museums, architecture, crafts, video games, fashion. Source: John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas, 2001." These people are highly valued, have lucrative jobs, and create much economic growth. The super radical core, is a much more limited group of more purely creative people, that is: artists. Artists are starving, scraping by, working day jobs, living under the radar and not making money from their art. As such, they do not directly create economic growth.

The goal according to Florida is to attract the broadly defined creative sector to your city. This is where the super radical core comes in, the best means of attracting innovation and growth-causing creatives is to encourage the super radical core to cultivate a "street level culture". To put it simply, punk rock bands and starving artists don't make economic growth, but they do attract good software designers who do make economic growth.

The most important cultural assets to look at for Milwaukee's art city growth are assets creating "street level culture" and this is where the Cultural Alliance drops the ball. When their report says "In depth surveys... including the largest and best known... as well as medium- and small-sized nonprofits" they are totally out of touch with the meaning of the word "small". I know Milwaukee theatre better than other cultural areas, and the smallest theatre companies on the list of those surveyed by the Cultural Alliance are Chamber and the now defunct Milwaukee Shakespeare. From my perspective, those are two of the biggest theatre companies in this city. If you're standing on the "street level" The Rep and Skylight are giants. Chamber, Mke Shakes and other UPAF members are "big" companies. Groups like The Boulevard, Off the Wall, and Windfall are "medium sized", and folks like the Alchemist, Pink Banana, Insurgent Theatre, and Dead Man's Carnival are "small". The Cultural Alliance is unable to recognize the value of even medium sized companies, let alone the small ones, and it's the medium and small companies who produce the most street level culture, who are most likely to attract anyone other than retiree's to Milwaukee.

Now, i personally have a problem with Florida's ideas, he's encouraging cities and communities to use starving artists and punk rockers as bait for creative sell-outs who are more willing to be exploited by corporations. But that's a tangent. The more important point is: The Cultural Alliance, whose job it is to "strengthen, advance and represent the arts and culture sector as an essential asset for growing a vibrant, attractive region" is either unwilling to challenge Milwaukee's obsolete establishment or else they aren't even aware of how the creative class relates to economic growth. They focus all their attention on UPAF members and big organizations, as though these are the only existing relevant cultural assets, when, in reality from the creative class perspective, they are the least relevant.