Phhsst! You Think You Are As Good As Me?

Often when the concept of Professional-Amateurs or the capability of everyone to be creative comes up, there is a feeling of resistance that rises up among arts professionals. The study on creating public will for arts and culture that I have been citing this week addresses that a little.

Finally, our research found A POTENTIAL FOR PUSH-BACK FROM EXISTING CONSTITUENCIES for arts and culture (e.g., some arts leaders, working artists, arts educators, and arts and culture enthusiasts). Here, some respondents expressed concern that a focus on creative expression represents a dumbing down of the conversation about the value of arts and culture. Some artists, for example, chafe at the notion that “amateurs” and “hobbyists” might be lumped into the same category as those who have dedicated years of study, practice, and exploration to their art.

…Rather, the question of framing the subject is not either “creative expression” or “arts and culture,” but both/and. To those ends, our research suggests that framing the discussion in terms of creative expression is an entry point through which more people are receptive, increasing and diversifying the audience for whom the conversation has relevance.

Getting more people engaging in a conversation about arts and culture is a good thing. One of the benefits to people becoming more interested and invested in their hobby or area of interest is that the more they learn, the more they realize what they don’t know.

The only problem is that people are often satisfied with what they already know and don’t seek to learn more. As involved in the arts as I am, when I saw the “I Could Do That” video I included in a post last week, I had new respect for Piet Mondrian’s Tableau I. I wasn’t aware how difficult it is to execute using oil paint.

While I have never been dismissive of the work, I could have gone my whole life unaware of the technical skills necessary to create it.

But it can be valuable to remember that the arts aren’t the only arena in which people underestimate the degree of skill required.

Every year millions of kids around the world play baseball. It is a game that is easy for amateurs to participate in. Everyone understands, however, that only a select few have the skill to hit a baseball traveling in excess of 90 MPH…except for thousands of fans jeering at the ineptitude of the losing team.

Sports are still better served by having leagues of people of various ages, abilities and degrees of organization participating rather than athletes feeling threatened by the idea that people are being encouraged to think they have athletic ability.

It bears noting that participation in sports is waning both among those interested in playing and audiences. There may be a growing opportunity to engage people in creative expression as an alternative pursuit…or this may be a sign of a decreasing trend in participation in all types of activities.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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6 thoughts on “Phhsst! You Think You Are As Good As Me?”

  1. Joe, I’m not sure of the data suggesting a decline in participation and audiences for sport. Maybe that is something general? I do know that sports like soccer are flourishing in some places around the globe, and kids’ participation and interest here in the US seems to be burgeoning if anything. I think you are right that conditions in sports may lead to greater affinity for the arts, but perhaps not as filling the gaps vacated by diminishing sports interest so much as encouraged by a culture of participation. Perhaps we can use the model of things like soccer for how best to connect with aspiring participants and audiences. You want to get involved? Try art!

    From what I heard, the women’s World Cup was one of the more watched events this summer. Most of my friends’ kids are out kicking a ball in the Fall if not throughout the year. Adult pickup games and leagues are packed with participants. The television rights for the English Premiership League and teams’ sponsorship deals are breaking records at every turn…… In soccer, at least, there seems to be a healthy ecosystem. Perhaps we should do more to emulate that example? The foundation of professionals plying their trade as soccer athletes is built on a strong foundation of active participation through communities and all stages of life. If there are ‘soccer moms’ why can’t there be ‘art moms’? But I guess there are. We just don’t do as good a job of getting that message out…….

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  2. Actually, I would take NONE of these articles as indicating a decline in sport. Each case being made is a study of organized versions of sports or specific types of participation (TV viewership). That Slate article, in fact, is making the point that organized little league has actually made a mess of things and that it SHOULD be abandoned in favor of ” just screwing around in a vacant lot.” The author ends by stating “In contrast, the most fun I had in childhood was with ad hoc games with other kids from my neighborhood: basketball on my driveway until dark, baseball with maybe four other kids in a vacant lot. Spontaneous play is better than organized play. The two can coexist, of course. But spontaneous play allows children to be in charge of their worlds for a while, to set and explore their own rules and boundaries, to exercise their imaginations in addition to their bodies. So who cares whether youth baseball really is waning in Newburgh? As long as they can play pickup games, the town’s children will be fine.”

    And this is perhaps exactly the problem we in the arts have in looking at participation issues. The measure of participation viewed only through the lens of some officially sanctioned organized version tells us so little about the actual role of art in people’s lives. If we are honest we can admit that in some cases we don’t really care about the unofficial participation and that all we are interested in is the sanctioned version. And maybe the health of the sanctioned version does have little or nothing to do with how many folks find it meaningful unofficially, do their own versions in dark corners, participate in rag tag non-institutional formats. There is so much art being done in the ‘sand lots’, and we ignore it conspicuously, and fail to encourage it routinely…..

    The question for me comes down to why art (and sport) are important. Are they important because they are represented by some thriving official industry at the top of the participatory pyramid, or because the base is strong, self determined, and fertile? In an ideal world we would have both. They CAN coexist. But if we had to choose would we rather have 10,000 thriving professional theaters and no one else interested in doing it outside these venues, or only a handful of recognized professional venues and millions upon millions of independent pop up, ad hoc, and amateur versions?

    Its not wrong to worry about TV viewership and perhaps even little league participation, but these are specific issues and do not necessarily reflect any wider relevance. If art (and sport) is an ecosystem, then you measure the health not by one branch on one tree but by the interplay and interdependence of the many different factors and participants included in the wide community. And the hard truth is that some things die so that others may flourish. What exactly is our picture of a healthy ecosystem? A well fed top of the food chain living in a dessert or a lush forest and no dominant predators? Maybe both are fine, given necessities of their circumstances, but do we have incentives to turn forests into desserts?

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    • Well you can’t necessarily take anecdotal observation around your community as a sign that sport participation is alive and well.

      Participation in organized sports like organized arts is often a sign of cultural and social vibrancy through the connections they forge. It is a pity when it is executed poorly, especially in a place like Newburgh which has suffered under a negative reputation since I was a kid. (I grew up nearby.) It can use all the positive life experiences it can muster.

      People aren’t necessarily gathering for informal pick up games. There was a Washington Post article on the decline of baseball I didn’t originally include because it seems redundant one of the observations it makes is that kids aren’t being socialized to play sports. Parents aren’t playing catch in the backyard. Kids don’t have a bat or glove of their own, etc.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/baseballs-trouble-with-the-youth-curve–and-what-that-means-for-the-game/2015/04/05/2da36dca-d7e8-11e4-8103-fa84725dbf9d_story.html

      Across all youth sports, there is a fall off in participation in many leagues except for specialized traveling teams. Consolidation of leagues and the cost of participating in those teams is seeing a lot of kids excluded, especially among lower-income families.

      Not only is this mentioned in the Post article, but it describes exactly what happened with one of my nephew’s soccer teams. Both the cost and the increased competition from consolidation threatened to exclude him.

      This is pretty much the same conversation that occurs in the arts regarding education, socialization/modeling by parents and peers, cost and access.

      Without some of these things present in their lives, people are a lot less likely to spontaneously form pick up games even with highly flexible rulesets.

      I played pick up games of baseball because I had a glove and bat to fool around with at home. I had recess and gym class where we played. I was taken to games.

      I have never spontaneously participated in rugby, cricket or lacrosse, among others because I was never introduced to any element of these sports and there were few people around me to provide instruction.

      I could certainly pretend to play rugby based on what i see on TV and Youtube and have fun at it. But it would probably come out of a desire to roughhouse around rather than anything else and at that point calling it rugby is just a conceit.

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  3. That was a good article! And I agree that participation in organized sports at least indicates *something* about general participation. And as you say, “education, socialization/modeling by parents and peers, cost and access” all influence how much and how enthusiastically we participate in both the arts and sports.

    One of the factors I found interesting in the article was summed up as follows:

    “What’s distinctive about baseball’s decline is that kids leave the sport at a younger age than they fall away from basketball or football, though the dropoff is even steeper for soccer. A primary reason for kids switching out of baseball is rising pressure on youths to specialize in one sport.

    (….)

    But some coaches, parents and researchers say the trend toward specialization has disproportionately hurt baseball. David Ogden, a University of Nebraska at Omaha researcher who focuses on youth baseball, says selective teams produce better-trained players for high school and college teams but diminish baseball’s appeal to the casual player.”

    ——————————————-

    The first point I can make would be that the decline in baseball often merely signifies a shift to other sports/activities. SPORT isn’t losing out, just baseball. So you wonder whether the surveys from sporting goods shops simply indicate fewer *participants* in all sports or just a different distribution where perhaps even more people are playing some kind of sport but with fewer multi-sport participants each individual sport itself seems diminished. [If 100 kids each play one specialized sport out of 5 sports, and 50 kids each play three sports out of 5, the fists scenario has more people playing but fewer per sport while the latter has half the number playing but averages out to half again as many per sport.] That seems like something very interesting to consider! Is there a parallel specialization within the arts?

    The second point I would make from that quote is that perhaps the thing that most suffers is the casual participation. By asking us to be more serious about participation fewer may be inclined to take the chance. That too seems very important. I wonder how many families put on their own plays anymore? Write, cast, assemble costumes, set decorations, and stage purely for their own amusement and benefit? I assume from anecdotes that this was not uncommon in affluent and modest households back in Victorian times. Perhaps there too as theater became more professionalized fewer and fewer families had the desire for informal presentations of their own?

    When I teach pottery, almost every adult student is willing to proclaim somewhat embarrassedly “I am not an artist”, as if that title only belonged to the professionals. In other words, unless you had specialized enough, taken it seriously enough, to make a living as an artist you could at best only pretend. Your words paint this picture ominously: “I could certainly pretend to play rugby based on what i see on TV and Youtube and have fun at it. But it would probably come out of a desire to roughhouse around rather than anything else and at that point calling it rugby is just a conceit.” We tend to think of any dabbling at our own artistic expression as a conceit. As if there were such well defined rules for being an artist that you had to do it only a certain way or you’d be doing it wrong….

    One of the greatest hurdles I have as an instructor is helping students access the PERMISSION they feel they need to express themselves creatively. As if they are not supposed to be doing it but need someone to tell them that in this one instance “Its okay”. Most of them seem to feel “Art is something other people do”….. And maybe if we give them a strict diet of the specialized professionalized version of art it certainly looks that way.

    Remember when Michael Jordon quit basketball to play baseball? Remember when Bjorn Borg quit tennis to play ice hockey? Shocking at the time! It was almost as if these great athletes did not have permission to play these other sports. They were breaking the unwritten rules in setting aside a large hollow ball and hoop for a smaller solid one and a bat, a racket and bouncy ball for a stick and a hard plastic puck. What sort of message did/does that have for kids, I wonder?

    Isn’t it obvious that one of the things holding back both sport and the arts is taking it so seriously? Sometimes it needs to be taken seriously, yes, but we seem to have traded out all our other more casual appreciation for it, sacrificed the joyful abandon of doing it for its own sake, for the need to be *good* at it and the rewards of a professionalized participatory arc. Families putting on plays for their own enjoyment may be the single greatest loss for the theater…. Just as kids hacking away at their father’s curve balls out behind the house is for baseball….

    These are GOOD conversations to have, right?

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  4. Hi Joe! Great discussions: there are useful comparisons here.

    Generally speaking (as I always do), I believe that the most inspiring art is the one we ourselves feel we create– with the exception that an experienced professional MAY inspire more with their power, timing and a lifetime of actually inspiring others. I say MAY because if the hobbiest is not there to witness it, it is wasted inspiration. (This is why I insist on putting symphonic music where people don’t expect to encounter it.)

    There are two major sociological issues at work here that generally go unaddressed:
    First, the world is in transition (still) from societies valuing honor codes to ones valuing the inherent dignity of everyone. Today we don’t flourish by our good reputation so much as a good reputation is assumed. Consequently, we tend to believe ourselves to be equal even to those with power, money, European-genes and professional experience. (Overconfidence lives with self-doubt to be sure.)

    Second, as all cultures are available in just about every large city, cultural fragmentation (or gentrification) naturally occurs as more people enjoy assimilating non-native habits. The middle-class in America is empowered to grind down the walls that separate east and west, north and south, pro-art and my-own-creativity. It is either a do-something-like-it-yourself-age, or a watch-someone-else-do-it-differently age. Either way, there’s less imperative to participate in the ways established art, music and even sports.

    Now, what are we gonna do with all this SAND?

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