1.3 | Value Through the Ages

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Arts and Culture Strategy

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University of Pennsylvania

Arts and Culture Strategy

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Arts and culture leaders have a tough but rewarding task: creating and leading sustainable organizations that deliver real social value. There is a lot of competition out there. Being an effective leader means constantly adapting, cleverly using the best tools to reach as many people as possible. This course is designed to help leaders at any level do just that.

From the lesson

Arts and Culture - Value Then, Value Now, Value Tomorrow

We welcome you to this five-unit course with a brief history of the world relative to arts and culture and where we are now. What is the substance of value (objective/subjective) – to whom, for what? What are the essential and timeless issues facing us? How do we connect and interlock mission and value to be supportive, contingent and flexible?

1.1 | Welcome to Arts & Culture Strategy2:32

1.2 | Introduction to Unit One0:47

1.3 | Value Through the Ages7:18

1.4 | What Has Changed?9:21

1.5 | Mission & Value12:28

1.6 | Value Now9:11

1.7 | Value, Capacity & Support12:20

1.8 | Scope & Scale9:55

1.9 | Off the Record: Value Creation in the Arts1:31

Meet the Instructors

Peter Frumkin
Professor
Nonprofit Leadership Program, School of Social Policy & Practice
Mrs. Russell Willis Taylor
Lecturer, School of Social Policy & Practice; Past President & CEO, National Arts Strategies

[MUSIC]

Clearly, we do create value.

All around us, we see the evidence that the cultural sector.

Particularly, the non-profit cultural sector is of value to communities,

to audiences.

Evidence can include the buildings themselves,

past levels of capital investment.

High attendance figures for all art forms, for museums included.

Statistics on rapidly growing amateur participation in arts and culture.

And the growing levels of philanthropic support and sponsorship.

Just a sheer number of registered charities with cultural purposes.

All of these things demonstrate that we are creating value.

The transference of work of non profit cultural work into the commercial sector.

We even have some cultural organizations

getting into partnerships with the public education system.

But it seems that we're having difficulty capturing as much value in revenue,

fundraising, earned income, as we'd like to.

So we need to look at what value we're creating first.

There's a really irritating thing about value.

We don't get to decide what it is.

The tricky thing about value is someone else gets to determine it.

We decide price.

And sometimes, we're optimistic in assuming that our core values.

As an organization or even as an individual,

is somehow transferred to buyers, consumers, participants, audiences.

When they meet our price and they attend our events.

But value isn't something that we determine.

The consumer of that value determines the value.

Like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder.

And we're now at a point where there's a gap between

what we as insiders think that the value of culture is.

And what we want it to be in order to continue with business as usual.

So our views and our institutional needs don't seem to be quite in sync.

With how society at large values our work.

Value is always created in a context.

And given that we don't determine the value, someone else does.

Those who participate and who purchase our work.

They have a context in which they're operating.

The academician Daniel Pink outlines three societal ages in the last 150 years.

And they provide a useful sorting mechanism for

thinking about how the context for our work has actually changed.

The first age was the Industrial Age.

[SOUND] This was characterized by an increasing mechanization in the workplace.

And culture provided not only a strong educational function.

It provided a function of enriching life.

Something that was completely other in contrast to the working environment for

many people.

For wealthy people during this period,

cultural activity was an affirmation of their aesthetic sensibilities.

And of their privileged place in society.

It was both diversionary and affirming.

In general societal terms and spanning this age and the next.

There was a sense that culture and active participation in it were good for

us as humans.

That they helped develop the faculty of moral reasoning.

And therefore, they improved the mind and society as a whole.

And this type of thinking has its roots in Plato and Aristotle.

Goes all the way up to Alexis to Tocqueville and

even to John Dewey in the 1940s.

And this is the invisible platform on which the value proposition for arts and

culture was built until the 1970s.

And it remains the unspoken and inviolent value premise.

For many of our cultural institutions today, not all, but many.

So why do we need to know this, why should you care.

Well, as Amanda Priestly says to her hapless

assistant in the Devil Wears Prada.

You think you're making free choices But

you decide what to wear based on decisions that were made a long time ago.

By people you've never even met.

So knowing how our decisions and

the shape of our organizations are influenced by the past.

Helps us make good decisions in the future.

In the Information Age, the nature of work changed dramatically.

And we began to see the rise in importance of the knowledge worker.

One of the values that cultural participation offered to this growing

group was a creative outlet.

An intellectual companion to the need to process information quickly, efficiently.

The arts were a way of belonging to a particular tribe.

Experimental theatre, traditional art forms.

They form what Jonathan Seabrook called a rite of passage

into certain types of establishment enclaves.

The visual arts in particular became very popular because they were both

visually stimulating, and socially defining.

This is a period when we see a civic value

assigned to the arts that resulted in a building boom.

We're gonna talk more about that later.

But, if a town was good to live in, it had the arts on tap.

The relative uniformity of the public school and

higher education curriculum was still a lingering shadow.

So a large number of people relative to the number of arts organizations

that were around at the time.

Had a common mental context.

To anchor a lot of what was on offer.

Not everything but a lot.

Rebellion and experimentation became acceptable forms of art creation.

Thank Andy Warhol and the factory.

And partaking taking of those was also a way of defining your own interests.

Your own level of curiosity and

in the marketplace The visual arts began to be a really high priced commodity.

As did some long running Broadway shows that recordings made accessible.

And now we find ourselves in the conceptual age,

if you accept Daniel Pink's taxonomy.

This is an age of convergence, of creativity, of a strong and

commercially supported eesthetic.

Design aesthetic in markets, commercial markets.

And an age where the ability to rapidly synthesize a lot of information.

Gives individuals and organizations a competitive advantage.

We are besieged by information and by images everyday, all the time.

And one of the values.

That our cultural organizations create, is that they are what Thomas Campbell,

director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, calls.

The quiet cars of the modern age.

Creating, defining, and

communicating our value now, is the single biggest challenge for the field.

And for the leaders of cultural institutions.

[MUSIC]

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