Over the last three decades, the term “arts participation” has essentially been understood as arts attendance within the non-profit arts field. The field’s key indicator of arts participation over this time has been attendance at any of the seven “benchmark” arts events: performances of ballet, musical and nonmusical theater, jazz, classical music, opera, and visiting an art museum—at least once a year as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

But in this century, rates of attendance at benchmark arts events in California have steadily declined. Even attendance at a wider range of arts events, extending beyond the benchmark arts, fell 10 percentage points between 2002 and 2012 in California.

Equally worrying, “benchmark” arts audiences do not resemble the population of the state; they are drawn disproportionately from those with higher incomes. In 2012 in California, 49 percent of arts attendees had household incomes of $75,000 or more—eight percentage points higher than the 41 percent of total California households earning that much. Arts attendees in California also had higher education levels; in 2012, 41 percent of them had at least a college degree, compared to 31 percent of the state’s population as a whole. Despite the fact that Hispanics have surpassed non-Hispanic whites as the largest portion of the state’s population, adult arts audiences remain 55 percent non-Hispanic white, even though this group comprises only 43 percent of the state’s total adult population. (These statistics draw from the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and more about them is available here.)

Despite such statistics, there is considerable evidence of deep interest in the arts among California’s highly diverse population. What does a more complete picture look like?

Two years ago, I led an effort, supported by The James Irvine Foundation, that used a more inclusive lens for looking at the landscape of artistic and cultural expression and experience in California. What we saw was profound, and involves the very meaning of arts and culture, and thus raises all kinds of questions about the future of the arts, of participation, and of the state itself. Detailed findings are available in two reports, A Closer Look at Arts Engagement in California and The Cultural Lives of Californians; here I highlight some key findings.

Arts participation today isn’t only about sitting in a concert hall or pondering a painting in a museum. Bikers light up a night ride in Santa Cruz in 2015. Photo courtesy of Richard Masoner/Flickr.

Across many different cultural contexts, two themes often appeared: choice and control.

For example, using the NEA’s 2012 survey we found that the most popular venue for California adults to attend arts was in a park or open-air facility. Approximately one in four California adults attended an art museum, craft fair or visual arts festival, historic park or monument, or outdoor performing arts festival.

These are all types of cultural events that tend to offer people control and choice over their own experience. They allow each person to handpick what to see and do, and afford degrees of flexibility as to when to arrive and depart, or whether or not to engage in different aspects of the event. Events that were less well-attended, according to the survey, were ones that tended to offer less control; they were activities that usually had precise starting and ending times, and that adhered to a set program.

Geography also influenced choice. Even after accounting for socioeconomic and demographic differences among regions, we found that adults living in the state’s large urban areas were more likely to attend arts events in general. These regions also tend to have the highest densities of non-profit arts organizations, suggesting that issues of access also may be affecting rates of participation. Attendance rates are significantly higher for California adults living in the state’s urban regions, compared to those living outside of those areas, specifically for visiting art museums, touring historic parks or monuments, and attending musical plays, classical music, and jazz performances. Urbanites also were more likely to create visual arts (although those living outside of these areas are more likely to make textile-based art, such as weaving, crocheting, quilting, needlepoint, knitting, or sewing).

There were other disparities in arts participation: Whites reported participating in art at the highest rates. But we found that educational attainment, age, income, immigrant status, and living in metropolitan areas are more important factors in determining arts participation than race or ethnicity. Indeed, the differences in participation among racial and ethnic groups could be largely explained by differences in education, household income, and an individual’s immigrant identity.

Most strikingly, one’s level of education was the strongest explanatory factor for differences in rates across all arts participation measures. Having at least a college degree was the single strongest predictor of whether one participates in the arts.

Can the digital revolution, a shift led by many California companies and institutions, change this? Trying to answer that question led to more questions.

We found that the most common form of arts participation among California adults, as measured in the NEA’s 2012 survey, was consuming arts through electronic media, including television, radio, computers, or handheld or mobile devices. Seventy-seven percent of adults accessed arts electronically. Back then, the rate of consuming arts was almost 1.5 times the rate at which California adults attend live arts events (53 percent) or make art (54 percent).

But five years ago is a long time. And the ways in which we describe and understand digital technologies as new means of consuming, interacting with, and creating art are evolving as technology changes. The ability to choose when and how to participate is central to the digital word. And that choice is in turn changing the definition of cultural participation, while enabling new forms of art. Platforms such as online gaming, crowdsourced art, writing and posting fan fiction, and sharing YouTube content (either self-created or otherwise) are forms of online cultural and arts participation.

And digital is only one force changing the meaning of arts participation. As attendance at benchmark events declines, arts participation through the making of art and creative expression is palpable. In 2012, 54 percent of California adults engaged in art making. The most commonly reported art making activity in California was social dancing (African Americans had the highest participation rates in social dance compared to any other activity measured in the NEA’s 2012 survey).

The range of artistic activities and forms of creative and cultural expression that are meaningful to Californians – and to people across the U.S. – demands that the term “arts participation” become more elastic. We must consider the many ways that people engage with art and artistic forms. For example, there are a large number and variety of folk arts in which people take part, though they have not traditionally been captured in arts participation studies. These activities often are passed along through family heritage. For example, an important part of traditional Hmong cultural activity, among Southeast Asian immigrants in the San Joaquin Valley, is a private home ceremony that involves playing the qeej, a bamboo mouth organ. (More about widening the aperture for what is considered arts participation is available here).

Not long ago, I conducted a study with Chinese and Chinese Americans in Chicago’s Chinatown who had reported low levels of arts participation in standard surveys. But in interviews for the study, they revealed their participation in a great variety of artistic and creative activities. For example, an interviewee shared that he had attended an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy at a library, but that he was not sure whether that could be counted and reported when he was asked a survey question about whether he had visited an art museum or gallery.

The gap between survey responses and the reality of our interviewee’s activities highlights the need for terms and research tools that better reflect what is happening in today’s society. The distinctions between artistic genres are blending and blurring over time. Art creators do not necessarily assign themselves to a genre or even a precise artistic form, and classifications are seemingly less relevant for audiences as other dimensions of arts experiences—particularly having more control and flexibility over arts activities and experiences—come to the fore.

This shift in the meaning and measurement of arts and culture is of course not just an issue for California. A UNESCO report in 2012 found:

“We are currently observing big changes and the rise of new cultural paradigms and behavior, armed with a set of research tools elaborated in the last century and adapted to analyze social life through a well-defined taxonomy that is every year less adequate for helping our understanding.”

Californians and California organizations could lead a fundamental reconceptualization of culture—in its forms, modes of interaction, sites of engagement, actors, and the roles it plays in community matters across California. This is a critical moment for posing new and fundamental questions that have the potential to shift traditional paradigms. We need to ask ourselves: What are the many artistic, creative and aesthetic forms that people engage in? And how can we describe and understand the multiple dimensions and variations in the experiences, settings, contexts, motivations, and benefits of individual engagement in this broad domain of activity that we used to call “the arts?”

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Can the arts save California?

On every public policy challenge other than climate change regulations, the state seems stuck. We can’t transform our underfunded and underperforming education system to meet the needs of our diverse people, expand our universities to prepare for future economic requirements, or build nearly enough affordable housing. Silicon Valley, which still bills itself as savior of California and the world, has revealed itself to be more interested in grabbing our data and selling us ads than in making society better. And the vast majority of Californians don’t even bother to vote, much less engage in civic and neighborhood life. Too many of us are lonely and disconnected.

The state’s arts sector is wrestling with all these same challenges: invasive technology, diversifying demography, fading engagement, stagnant education, scarce public resources, economic inequality. Over the past 18 months (after being assigned to edit a series on arts and society), I stepped out of my usual civic-governmental comfort zone to embark on a crash course in how arts organizations are trying to engage us not only with the arts, but also with each other as citizens and community members.

The experience has left me uncharacteristically optimistic. While the arts can sometimes mirror the state’s larger dysfunction, the arts also may be the sector of California best positioned to lead us out of this dark time.

Today, the arts—both in practice and institutionally—retain credibility that other human pursuits such as mass media, politics, medicine, and big business have lost. In surveys, the biggest complaint that Californians voice about the arts is that they don’t have time to enjoy all their state’s many artistic offerings. And the arts are a particular California strength, given that they combine our people’s deep interests in self-expression and self-improvement. What’s more, the arts are vital institutions even in our smaller cities: Visalia has its own smart symphony and risk-taking opera, and Modesto has California’s best community band. (Don’t believe me? Check out its Thursday night performance next week at the Mancini Bowl).

And while technology can leave us feeling isolated in our separate virtual realities, the arts connect us, and give us a sense of meaning, accomplishment, and even happiness. Researchers have shown that people who participate in arts and culture are more likely to vote, belong to social and civic organizations, know their neighbors, and do charitable work.

Eastside Community Festival with Self Help Graphics. Photo courtesy of the Riverside Art Museum.

The arts, in other words, encourage us to be sociable. And sociability is becoming a lost (and thus more valuable) art in itself, given how our lives are dominated by screens.

In fact, I’d like to propose that the arts could be the secret sauce of a revival in California’s civic culture. If participating in politics gets you down (and it does), why not skip that city council meeting to take in a local concert or paint with your neighbors? Those are activities that offer the opportunity to exercise creativity, imagination, and empathy—all of which we’ll need to solve society’s most complicated problems.

What’s the secret of the success of the arts?

I’ve been struck by just how much healthy self-criticism there is in the arts. Talk to arts leaders or read the reports they produce, and you’ll hear all kinds of talk about failures—especially about the gap between the level of service the public needs from the arts and what our arts organizations currently give. Part of that shortfall is about money: Everyone fears becoming a “zombie organization,” whose only real mission is to scrounge up enough money to survive. But part is about a lack of ambition and imagination; more arts organizations, especially those that are tax-exempt non-profits, should be putting service to the public over their own institutional needs.

California, however, is fortunate: Across our state, you can find ambitious efforts to use the arts to serve community. Our arts organizations experiment and take chances to tell local stories, and many have figured out how to be a space for tackling polarizing political issues in a sophisticated way. Take the Cornerstone Theater’s six-year series of nine plays on food and equity, The Hunger Cycle. Or witness the Oakland Museum of California’s exhibit “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” which risked criticism both of cultural appropriation and of celebrating a movement associated with violence and separatism. (The bet paid off, as the exhibition drew an unexpectedly large—and young—audience.)

California is home to many powerful experiments in breaking down walls between the arts and people. The Riverside Art Museum sends staffers to all kinds of community events, from block parties to neighborhood festivals, curating work it supports and conducting surveys on local arts needs. Inside the museum, Riverside makes room for local people to make and display their own work, collaborates with community groups on exhibitions and events, and engaged University of Redlands students to put together an online map of community artists.

The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History has prioritized the work of “social bridging”—intentionally bringing together people from different races, classes, ages, and walks of life. The museum’s executive director, Nina Simon, a leading voice nationally on arts engagement, writes that this involves matching “unlikely partners—opera singers and ukulele players, welders and knitters, Guggenheim winners and backyard artists. Our goal in doing this work is to bring people together across differences and build a more cohesive community.”

When is the last time you saw institutions outside the arts promote that kind of outreach?

These days, businesses, unions, pressure groups, and politicians rarely try to make converts–they instead focus their resources on developing repeat customers, turning out their core supporters, and monetizing every single contact they have. But many of California’s top arts institutions make their events and exhibits free, especially for kids. (Our pro sports teams and theme parks can’t say the same.)

And the arts could do even more for California.

So many industries and organizations are trying to reach the young. But the arts actually do it; when it comes to the making of art, 18- to 24-year-olds are the age cohort most likely to participate. And, amidst a stressful deluge of digital distractions, arts organizations are models of how to filter, so that we see what deserves attention. (It helps that you have to silence your cellphone and resist texting while attending a play or an indoor jazz concert, at least for a couple hours.) Infusing more arts into politics could revive the latter, possibly convincing more young Californians to actually vote in local elections.

The arts also could be an antidote to the antisocial attitudes of Silicon Valley that have trickled into governance. The arts are a case study in the importance of giving people what they need, and the folly of giving them what they want. Scholars have shown how technology and sophisticated audience research can be self-defeating; web sites that give us what we want give us too much of the same thing, thus constraining creativity and artistry, and ultimately disappointing audiences. The arts stand as a direct rebuttal to this data obsession because great art, and the feelings it inspires in us, can’t be quantified, or justified, by audience numbers or by dollar-for-dollar economic studies—even in those cities that chase art as an economic development strategy.

All this is an awful lot to ask of the arts, particularly at a moment when arts funding is hard to come by in California and the Trump administration is trying to zero out the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. But our arts organizations provide us with one of the few hopeful templates for pulling together broad networks of people and imagining very different realities in California. Which is why we need the arts now, more than ever.

The post The Arts Can Do for California What Politics and Big Business Can’t appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the time I applied for the job, I was a graduate student in the master of fine arts program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Like my peers, I thought I’d make my way as a photographer by teaching.

But then one day I stumbled on an ad in Artweek for an editorial assistant opening at the Friends of Photography, a nonprofit organization that Ansel founded in 1967 to present exhibitions, publications, and educational workshops in fine art photography. Jobs like that didn’t come around often. From my vantage point as a student, a paying job of any sort in the arts seemed a rarity, but one with a living legend was unimaginable.

Figuring it was a long shot, I put a letter and resume in the mail. To my surprise, I was called to an interview—and I got the job. I packed my newly minted graduate degree and few possessions in a small U-Haul truck, hitched my old powder-blue VW wagon to the back, then descended from the Sandia Mountains, straight-lined it across Arizona and the Mojave, and arrived at the sleepy seaside town of Carmel, California.

Carmel was socked in fog, and cold. And this was in May. The sun didn’t really come out until October. I remember driving around the peninsula both day and night, headlights bouncing wildly through the fog, pine trees looming in and out of focus. Bundled in sweaters, I had arrived in a new and different world.

The world I’d left behind in New Mexico was as different aesthetically as it was in terms of terrain. My graduate program was recognized nationally as a lab for visual experimentation. We were about breaking rules, not observing them.

And yet, here I was, working for the man who wrote the rule book on photography. Ansel is famous for having invented the Zone System, a mechanical process for reading light and exposing and developing black-and-white photographs. He published several definitive volumes on photographic techniques—depth of field, the use of filters, and the chemistry of film processing.

It wasn’t where I expected to find myself. In fact, when Jim Alinder, the Friends’ charismatic director, asked me in the job interview what I thought about Ansel’s work, I hadn’t known what to say. I think I mumbled something that must have been passable, but only barely, I’m sure.

In Albuquerque, we referred to Ansel and his peers, with some superiority, as the “rocks and roots” school of photography. Such hubris. As if we were capable of producing anything that could begin to match Ansel’s visual elegance and technical proficiency. Ha!

It brought me up short to meet Mr. Rocks and Roots himself. I was expecting someone formal and aloof. Ansel was anything but. He was big, warm, erudite, and funny. With his bola ties and crooked nose—a souvenir of a tumble he took as a small boy in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—he was utterly unintimidating. Until he started to talk photography.

Ansel was equal parts artist and scientist. Visiting him in the darkroom after viewing his prints felt like meeting the wizard behind the curtain—except in this case, what was behind the curtain was a huge, state-of-the art-laboratory, in pristine order. The darkroom stood as a sleek counterpart to the rugged business of his hauling photographic equipment out into the landscape where, with infinite patience and a precise combination of lenses and filters, he captured his famous images.

The darkrooms I’d frequented as a graduate student were reasonably well equipped, but my approach to developing photographs had been a bit slapdash, happily accommodating accidents, and always looking for shortcuts. Ansel’s photographs were not just the result of his having caught a moment in time, but of his having interpreted and expressed that moment later, in subtle gradations of silver. Ansel used to say that the negative is the score, and the print is the performance. I could hum a tune. He was conducting an orchestra.

A collection of Ansel’s exquisitely meticulous photographs is on view now until July 20 at the Getty Center. “In Focus: Ansel Adams” includes prints that were originally purchased by Leonard and Marjorie Vernon, prominent collectors who played an important role in the stewardship of the Friends of Photography. Their daughter, Carol Vernon, and her husband, Robert Turbin, recently donated the set to the Getty.

The Vernons were kind, wonderful people who were fixtures in Carmel, even though their home was in Los Angeles. Leonard was a successful industrial developer who loaned his keen business expertise to the Friends’ board. Together, he and Marjorie also shared a passion for photography, and collecting.

The Museum Set on display at the Getty spans several decades of Ansel’s career; nearly all of the photographs were taken long before I worked at the Friends. They are drawn from some of the 70 photographs that Ansel selected as the best from among his thousands to be part of this collectors’ set. Production of the Museum Set began in the late 1970s, and was still underway when I was in Carmel in the early 1980s.

I spent three-plus years at the Friends. I don’t know whether the half-dozen of us 20-somethings on staff were seen as energetic minds, cheap labor, or both. In any case, it proved to be a work-hard, play-hard chapter in all of our lives, filled with gallery openings, workshops, the publishing of monographs, and visits from a constant stream of famous people. I learned as much about gallery lighting as I did about book publishing and archival print handling.

After a year or so, I was given the privilege of running the summer workshops with guest faculty that included amazing artists like Annie Leibovitz, Roy DeCarava, and Mary Ellen Mark. Ansel and his staff took participants on field trips to Point Lobos to photograph the rock pools, surf, and cypress trees. At day’s end, we adjourned to Ansel’s magnificent home in the Carmel Highlands. Martinis were served while we gazed at the Pacific, hoping for a glimpse of the “green flash” at sunset, one of Ansel’s favorite pastimes.

Ansel and his wife, Virginia, were gracious hosts who loved to open their home to guests. Their house was magnificent: high-ceilinged, with huge picture windows, and Virginia’s orchid collection silhouetted against the coastal view. There was a massive stone fireplace with an ancient Chinese drum mounted on the wall above it, and a grand piano, which Ansel—trained as a classical pianist before turning to photography—often played. Among his regular visitors were accomplished musicians—the most famous being piano virtuoso Vladimir Ashkenazy.

One of my favorite memories is of Ansel’s 80th birthday party in February 1982. There were three exhibitions of Ansel’s photographs on display that month in and around Carmel—at the Friends of Photography, the Weston Gallery, and the Monterey Museum of Art. On the night of the big bash, Ansel attended each opening, crossing the peninsula in his white Cadillac, with its “Zone V” vanity license plate. He was serenaded by an 80-piece marching band from Salinas High School and presented with the Medal of the French Legion of Honor. One hundred guests from all over the world flew in for a sit-down dinner. A chef presented an enormous cake that was supposed to represent Half Dome—except the chef had never actually seen Half Dome, so you might have mistaken it for Space Mountain, or maybe Vesuvius. Ansel loved it all.

Ansel was an ardent environmentalist—not just as a photographer, but also as an outspoken activist. He met with three presidents: Carter, Ford, and Reagan. After his visit with Reagan in July 1983, Ansel returned to Carmel fuming about James Watt, Reagan’s controversial secretary of the interior, who advocated for the deauthorization of national parks and oil drilling in wilderness areas.

All this will be on my mind when I gather with other museum visitors to gaze at the impossibly perfect images of “Moon and Half Dome” or “Dogwood Blossoms in Yosemite National Park” at the Getty. I will think of Ansel’s articulate, statesmanly defense of our natural resources. I will think of his alchemy in the darkroom, teasing silver gelatin into an exquisite luminescence. I will think of him holding court in his living room, telling the story of how he captured the sun streaking over those boulders at Mt. Williamson, in Manzanar. And I will revel in the memory of being a young person in Ansel’s orbit during that heady time. We learned from Ansel the importance of looking closely, very closely, at the world. And, though few of us would get it right, that preserving the wonder and beauty around us is a worthy goal, and in its way, a sacred pursuit.

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