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The Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies was created by Stanley N. Katz and Paul DiMaggio in 1994 to address the serious and damaging deficit in the information and thinking available to inform the development and implementation of policies related to arts and culture.

 

As the 20th century comes to a close, the arts and humanities face an array of challenges. There is a "quiet crisis" (more audible each day) in financing arts and cultural institutions, especially mid-sized institutions in the major disciplines and most nonprofit cultural organizations that lie outside conventional disciplinary definitions. There is uncertainty as to the future and appropriate role of the federal presence in the arts and humanities, and there is also concern about the fiscal capacity of state and local governments to maintain their cultural budgets. Furthermore, the imminent union of digital multimedia and the "information highway" is redefining the relationship between nonprofit and for-profit cultural enterprises and changing the very categories we employ to think about the arts and humanities. The immediacy and significance of these challenges require private and public policy makers to be prepared to take rapid action. It is critical that when they do, their behaviors be informed by a shrewd understanding of both the current state of play and the systematic relationships between different parts of the arts and culture enterprise.



Unfortunately, the arts and humanities have been characterized by a chronic lack of the evidentiary and analytic resources that policy makers need in order to make informed decisions. One reason for this deficiency is the field's lack of human resources. For a variety of reasons, very few academic social scientists or policy analysts have been engaged in policy research in the arts and humanities. Nor has cultural policy emerged as a distinct area of public policy studies, alongside education, welfare, health policy, crime, or even science, in schools of public management or public affairs. We believe that no step is more important at this time than that of building a cadre of able researchers working in this area.



In addition, the sector faces a lack of dependable data resources. Policy makers in such fields as education, health, and social services have mountains of regularly collected statistics to inform their deliberations, and hundreds of studies to help them anticipate the results of the policies and programs they devise. Policy makers in the arts and humanities have few such resources.



In no area of policy are conversations so poorly informed by empirical evidence. In no area of policy are data resources so sporadic and poorly developed. Throughout the cultural sector, there has been a tremendous hunger for evidence and analysis that would permit more sophisticated conversations and more empirically informed policymaking and program design.



The lack of information is particularly damaging at the current moment because the arts and humanities are experiencing such dramatic and rapid institutional change. Without clear information about the parameters of this change, policy makers and scholars are likely to interpret contemporary challenges from within a set of assumptions that better characterized the world at mid-century than the world today. At that time, the arts and humanities conformed to a model developed by the cultural entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century--far-sighted patrons who recognized the capacity of the nonprofit form to provide a space in which great art and thinking could be nurtured and developed. These men and women created our great symphony orchestras, libraries and museums. In the ensuing years, other patrons drew on these models to build institutions devoted to opera, theater and the dance. Over several decades--roughly between 1880 and 1940-- Americans came to understand culture as coming in two varieties: popular entertainment distributed by profit-seeking commercial media, on the one hand, and high culture, presented by patron-supported nonprofit organizations, on the other. This model served as the framework for the efforts of private foundations to support culture in the 1950s and 1960s – the Ford Foundation’s theatre program was largely an effort to create a nonprofit stage on terms similar to those governing the nonprofit orchestras – and, by the late 1960s, for federal patronage through the National Endowment for the Arts, whose program areas neatly recapitulated the topology of the nonprofit arts industry.



Since the 1960s, all this has changed. The image of arts and culture as a nonprofit enclave in a sea of commerce, supported by the gifts of the community’s wealthiest members, no longer adequately describes the vast extent of cultural activity in America. Social, technological and economic changes fundamentally challenge the boundaries between high and popular culture, and between patronage and commerce. Three changes, in particular, are altering dramatically the institutional context that the arts and humanities will face in the coming century:



Orangeba.gif - 512 BytesNew relationships between cultural providers and local communities. Once it was possible to identify a community’s "cultural institutions" relatively easily. Before 1965, in most large cities, they consisted of an encylopaedic museum of art and history, and perhaps a specialized gallery of contemporary arts; a prominent public library; a symphony orchestra and perhaps a chamber group; one or two professional theaters; and, in larger metropolitan areas, an opera company, a ballet organization, and one or two other dance companies. Between 1965 and the l980s, cultural institutions experienced an explosion in numbers as well as a mutation in forms. A 1995 planning study for a national census of arts organizations, undertaken by the Princeton Center in cooperation with the NEA, found 309 nonprofit arts organizations in Philadelphia and 264 in Dallas/Fort Worth. Using a broader definition of arts provider – including amateurs and all organizations that present cultural programming to persons other than its own members – an earlier study found more than 1000 such providers in New Haven, Connecticut alone.



Change has occurred not just in numbers but in types of organizations and activities. Increasingly, cultural programming is undertaken by organizations connected to particular local communities, often minority communities, and by community service agencies or colleges whose primary mission is not in arts and culture. Today, there are more presenting organizations, more institutions devoted to forms like jazz or folk arts that span the commercial/nonprofit divide, more programs that bring professionals and amateurs together around common goals, and more partnership between nonprofit cultural providers and for-profit firms. Many of these same changes are taking place in such institutions as libraries, colleges and ethnic cultural centers. Yet this new world of activity has yet to be mapped. We know little about the role that culture plays in community life, or about the ways in which audiences are developed and the extent and forms of competition and synergy, respectively, between different types of cultural institutions. Nor do we understand the impact these changes are having on how talent is developed and how artists and writers build (or fail to build) careers.



Orangeba.gif - 512 BytesNew digital technologies and their impact on culture. The digital revolution is shaping the arts and humanities as much as any field. We are just beginning to fathom the implications of our capacity to convert every kind of artistic and intellectual expression to digital form and the accompanying opportunities for new forms of creativity and broader aesthetic experience. Nor do we have a strategy for dealing with confusion, created by some digital forms, between reproduction and original, and its dramatic impact on the nature and regulation of property rights to cultural works. Because these developments are breaking so quickly, they threaten the capacity of cultural philanthropists and policy makers to keep up with them. It is crucial that we understand how cultural institutions are using new technologies and how these will influence both their audience reach and the quality of the experience they provide.



Additionally, we must examine changes in control over artistic programming and access to artistic careers. Those who care about the arts must understand the economic implications of digitalization and the cultural impact of the legal frameworks that will allocate property rights in the new media. Moreover, it is critical to understand how the World Wide Web is organized, where the levers of control exist and what implications this has for the arts and humanities.



Orangeba.gif - 512 BytesChange in the intersectoral division of labor. Perhaps the most important developments influencing culture in the next century are those that will change the division of labor between the nonprofit, commercial and government sectors. The relationships between the sectors are growing closer in many cases, more distant in others. Changing business strategies lead commercial enterprises to cast off some functions that are no longer sufficiently profitable (for example, publishing significant books with audiences of only moderate size) with some of these functions being picked up by nonprofit organizations. Technological change enables for-profit institutions to undertake activities (for example, broadcasting arts programming by cable) that were once reserved for the nonprofit sector. At present, the cultural community, including philanthropists and policy makers, has little purchase over these changes. Ironically, far more attention has been lavished upon marginal changes in the grants budgets of public agencies than on fundamental structural changes that will shape arts and culture in the coming century.



In conclusion, two related dilemmas – inadequate human resources and inadequate information and analysis – define the challenges that the Princeton Center was designed to surmount. The problem is less a lack of funds for research support than it is a lack of research infrastructure: people to do the necessary research and regularly collected data that can be used to document change in the condition of the arts and humanities in the United States. Consequently, when urgent problems erupt – for example, debates over the value of public funding for the arts, or over censorship of controversial arts events – policy makers have found themselves flying blind in the face of powerful political passions. Ultimately, we can hope to improve this situation by training young scholars with a commitment to empirical research on cultural policy and an understanding of the issues at stake, by working (often in partnerships) to improve the quality and availability of baseline data on the arts and humanities, and by providing a model that scholars at other universities can emulate.



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