UALR magazine
Fall/Winter 2007 • Vol. 3 No. 2
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The Dollars and Sense of Culture
By Linda Holzer
Photography by Dero Sanford, Kelly Quinn, & George Chambers
View larger slideshow with descriptionsWhile most Americans would agree that the arts enhance our lives, many people still haven’t connected the dots between culture and the pocketbook.
In recent years, however, analysts who study municipal trends — city and regional planners, sociologists, and economists — have found the connection. They are seeing a dollar value in luring young, smart, creative people to communities as a way to attract business to the region. Local governments are becoming aware that their area’s future economic development depends on developing the right environment where creative people want to live and work. In other words, when the arts flourish, communities flourish.
Cities such as Boston, Santa Fe, Asheville, and Austin have figured out that fostering a strong arts scene, a lively nightlife, and an engaged metropolitan university contribute to the city’s economic prosperity.
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This comes as no surprise to professionals in nonprofit arts organizations. A 2007 study by the Americans for the Arts, Arts & Economic Prosperity III, found that the nonprofit arts industry nationally generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year, resulting in $29.6 billion in federal, state, and local tax revenues.
“This study is a myth buster,” said Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts. “Most Americans understand that the arts improve our quality of life. This study demonstrates that the arts are an industry that stimulates the economy in cities and towns across the country. A vibrant arts and culture industry helps local businesses thrive.”
The nation’s nonprofit arts and culture industry has grown steadily since the first analysis by Americans for the Arts, expanding at a rate greater than inflation. Between studies conducted in 2000 and 2005, spending by organizations and their audiences grew 24 percent. The growth spurred a significant national impact, generating 5.7 million full-time jobs.
Little Rock has embraced this phenomenon, with its expanding development along the Arkansas River — the River Market, galleries, libraries, and museums. Many of the city’s arts organizations, including the Arkansas Arts Center, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, and the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, have grown well beyond local appeal.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock, with programs in visual art, music, theater, dance, and creative writing, provides a hub of activity for the arts in the capital city. The University offers both professional training and personal enrichment study for amateurs, and enrollments in these programs have grown steadily during the past 10 years. UALR collaborates with nonprofit arts organizations and school programs in central Arkansas to provide a wealth of cultural resources for amateurs, professionals, students, collectors, and patrons of the arts to help satisfy a variety of tastes.
The ripple effect of these community arts programs goes beyond state lines. The Arkansas Arts Center’s vision of being a major regional art museum is not different from the vision of other nonprofit arts organizations in Little Rock that are in a growth mode. Ranked by attendance among peer institutions, the Arkansas Arts Center is 56 out of 141.
“I think that fits hand-in-glove with Little Rock’s ambition to be a major city in the Mid-South,” said Nan Plummer, the center’s executive director.
“When I first moved to Arkansas from Canada, I was unaware of just how vibrant the arts culture was in Little Rock,” said Kira Keating, UALR voice professor who is married to Bevan Keating, director the UALR Community Chorus. “I had researched enough to know that there were programs at the Symphony and the museums and the Art Center, but I hadn’t had a chance to explore beyond that. In our first week in Little Rock, we were extended the warmest of welcomes, from dinners and coffee to tours around the city. Being given tickets to see Kiri Takanewa in concert was the clincher, though. The singing of course was world-class, and the packed audience was savvy and appreciative. If this is what we experienced the first week in our new home city, I knew the rest of our years would be just fine.”
Richard Florida, author of ”The Rise of the Creative Class,” explains that in the modern age of high technology, there is a special symbiotic relationship between the workforce and the cultural community.
Florida’s idea of the Creative Class is comprised of people in information technology, science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose work involves creating new ideas, new technology, and new creative content. The class includes a broader group of professionals in fields such as law, health care, business, and finance, who are counted upon to do complex problem-solving in work that requires significant exercise of independent judgment.
To attract these professionals, Florida asserts that a community in the 21st century must offer a diverse, significant cultural environment that bolsters entrepreneurial thinkers. He holds up Austin, Texas, the “live music capital of the world,” as a model city that gets it right in striking a balance and sustaining creative diversity for economic growth. Austin is a capital city in which philanthropic entities, government, and the campus of the University of Texas-Austin (UT) have been tireless in experimenting with new programs for cultural outreach. The latest initiative is Austin Live Music Academy, a commercial music program that opened in September for post-secondary musicians. The faculty is a combination of local world-class musicians and graduate students at UT. Students will be exposed to a wide array of “real world” tutelage, along with a strong technical and theoretical experience. After finishing the two-semester program, students receive the Walker Certificate, presented by the Tried and True Foundation and named after legendary Austin musician Jerry Jeff Walker.
The enterprise is expected to do very well in the city known for the famous musical showcase television program ”Austin City Limits,” produced by Austin’s public television station, KLRU. The Austin Museum of Art-Laguna Gloria hosts the innovative Austin Responds, an educational program designed to spotlight Austin-area artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and performers and provide bridges to other disciplines and art experiences.
Farther west of Little Rock, another notable arts community is Santa Fe, N.M., which set out to develop a strategy in 2002 to diversify and strengthen the local economy. The result was Creative Santa Fe, a nonprofit grassroots organization. In promoting the city’s creative industries, Creative Santa Fe explains, “From cabaret singers to woodworkers, the creative economy is comprised of diverse professions, spanning ethnicities. Together they create an innovative and diverse cultural economy, based in Santa Fe’s past and poised to position its future… When an 800-seat theater hosts a capacity audience for a Nobel-prize poet or Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist, you have all the proof you need that Santa Fe has a vibrant and varied literary scene.”
It isn’t any wonder that governors have gotten the economic message. During a 2001 National Governors Association meeting on the role of the arts in economic development, participants issued this statement: “Cultural activities attract tourists and spur the creation of ancillary facilities such as restaurants, hotels, and the services needed to support them. Cultural facilities and events enhance property values, tax resources, and overall profitability for communities. In doing so, the arts become a direct contributor to urban and rural revitalization.”
The analysts are trumped, however, by the ancient Romans who took the long view:
Tempis fugit; ars longa—Time flies; art endures.
As much as accountants and governors and even arts professionals try, it’s difficult to put a dollar value on art. Until you’ve heard Professor Bevan Keating conduct a cast of 150 singers and instrumentalists in a stunning performance by the UALR Community Chorus of Mozart’s ”Requiem,” been wowed by the Picasso exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center, or been privileged to see ”A Chorus Line” at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, you can’t begin to understand what the Romans were talking about or what it feels like to be an artist.
Priceless.
Dr. Linda Holzer is a concert pianist and associate professor of music at UALR. Her duo “Mariposa” is on the Arkansas Arts Council touring roster. An active soloist and chamber musician, she has performed in more than 20 states, as well as abroad in Europe and Asia. Holzer has been heard in concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, New York public radio station WNYC-FM, and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in San Francisco. In 2001 she was named College Teacher of the Year by the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association. She is featured on Podsafe Music Network.