So during a recent walk down Doom and Gloom Blvd, my girlfriend advised me to write down what my ideal day would look like, if I was really using my time at peak efficiency. This sounded like such a simple and useful exercise, I was astonished I hadn’t heard anyone suggest it before. So what would this ideal day look like?

• 7:30 – 8:30: Wake up. Work out.
• 8:30 – 9:30: Shower, breakfast, etc.
• 9:30 – 10:30: Check news and email.
• 10:30 – 12:30: Research, writing.
• 12:30 – 1:30: Lunch. Read something new.
• 1:30 – 3:30: Research, writing.
• 3:30 – 4:30: Get ready for night job.
• 4:30 – 10:30: Work at night job.
• 10:30 – 11:30: Decompress. Blog something.
• 11:30 – 7:30: Sleep.

Now, usually I wake up around 8:00 or 8:30, and I spend at least 90 minutes goofing off on the internet, which means I don’t get started with my research until almost 11:00 am, which is a good three hours later than a normal person starts their job. But by that time, I’m already thinking about lunch, which usually means I delay my work until after I’ve eaten, which could be as late as 1:00 in the afternoon. So half my day is already down the toilet before I’ve even done anything remotely productive.

I think waking up early (well, 7:30) and working out right away is key. If I can get one productive thing under my belt before I even have breakfast, it would be great for setting a precedent and getting the working momentum going.

I also greatly enjoyed Karenjit Clare’s (Univ of Cambridge) paper about gendered social networks. It’s almost common knowledge that social networks help people advance in their careers, and this is especially true in the creative industries (“it’s all about who you know”). But Clare wanted to look at the ways that male social networks differ from female social networks, and if the differences between these networks produced different degrees of career advancement. A great exercise in problematizing popular notions of common knowledge.

11:45a I had just a few minutes to peruse the phone boo – er, program – and settle on a session about Gentrification. I needed to walk to the Sheraton hotel, but I wasn’t sure just where to go. All of the hotels in Copley Place are connected by a network of shopping mall corridors and arcades. It’s easy to get lost, so I asked a mall security guard how to find the Sheraton. He replied… in a gloriously stereotypical Boston accent. I mean, I know there’s lots of people around here who talk that way, but still. When somebody opens their mouth and lets loose with a perfectly molded Boston accent, it’s pretty sweet. It makes me wonder if I sound “funny” to him. Freakin’ midwestern tourists.

12:10p I found the room at the Sheraton, which is about as far as you can get from Copley Place and still be considered in Copley Place. The session almost began when the presenter’s PowerPoint decided to bonk. As they were trying to deal with technical difficulties, I took the opportunity to browse through the program and – wouldn’t you know it – there’s another session about the Creative Economy going on at that exact moment. It’s being held in the Westin hotel, which is completely on the other side of Copley Place, but I decide to go for it. It didn’t look like the computer problems were going to get solved anytime soon.

12:40p Getting from the Sheraton to the Westin took longer than I thought. I skipped breakfast earlier, so decided to stop off for a bagel at Dunkin Donuts on the way. I know, a bagel at Dunkin Donuts. Sacrilege. Anyway, I opened the door and poked my head into the Creative Economy session and had one of those moments where everyone turns and looks at you simultaneously to see who’s being late/rude/clueless. Yeesh.

3:15pm Met up with another grad in baggage claim and so the four of us went to lunch at the Legal C Bar and Grill in Logan Airport. Had a tuna burger. It was pretty good.

5:00pm Lauren’s directions from the airport to the hotel via the T were flawless. Checked into my room at the Holiday Inn Brookline. Nice digs. I think it used to be an older, privately owned, perhaps more distinguished hotel that got purchased and renovated by Holiday Inn several years ago. At least, that’s what I gather based on the layout of the lobby, which feels kind of old and stodgy.

9:00pm Met the other grads for dinner at Douzo, a sushi restaurant. Very posh. Very tasty.

Total spent on food today: $60.00

It turns out my affinity for the law was just a phase, but I still greatly admire Mr. Lessig and his work. (I confess I even emulate his presentation style when crafting my own PowerPoint lectures.) He recently gave his last Free Culture lecture at Stanford and, thankfully, someone recorded it for posterity. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I admire and respect the fact that you want to improve. If you’re following the guidelines on Carmen for writing a good review, then you’re on the right track.

Writing in a professional tone will greatly help your grade. While we are looking for original opinions in your critique, it shouldn’t be full of personal anecdotes written in a casual tone. We do grade for grammar and spelling, so if you have a lot of little mistakes, they’ll count against you. Be sure to proofread your writing or have a friend proofread it before handing it in.

Critical thinking skills are also important in your critique. Use the article you reviewed as the basis for a thought experiment, and try playing out a “what if” scenario in your mind. We love to see students who not only elaborate on the article, but exhibit some original thoughts of their own.

After all that, you might get an A-.

Getting an A is admittedly difficult. It’s not enough to hit all the notes. At that level, we’re looking for the kind of writing that really “sings”. It’s a subjective evaluation based on how effective your writing is. It has to be clear, concise, and convincing. Or to put it another way, it’s gonna have to rock my world a little bit.

I’m happy to look over a rough draft and offer suggestions before Wednesday. I also encourage you to use the OSU Writing Center. It’s a great resource that’s easy to use and totally free. Let me know if you have any other questions. I’m looking forward to reading your next review.

Bill Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (1998-2001) and now director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, at first seems to position himself clearly in his essay “America Needs a New System for Supporting the Arts,” published in February in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He seems to say, in essence, that the problem of underfunded nonprofit organizations, such as theatres, cannot be solved by hoping for new donors or by making new, stronger arguments for government appropriations.

“If I had titled it,” Ivey says, “I would have called it ‘It’s Time for America to Reassess Its Approach to Intervening in the Cultural System,’ and I use the word ‘intervene’ rather than ‘fund’ because I don’t know that all questions involving the vitality of America’s cultural landscape are all about money.”

In fact, he says, the problems of the arts in America are not all money-related. “In the past,” he says, “there has been an automatic assumption that if an organization is small that it is less excellent. This allows those who care about culture to use an institution’s size as shorthand for quality. I think there’s also a point at which, given the array of possible destinations for philanthropy or public money, you bump up against the maximum level of sympathy and support your sector can generate. When institutions compete for limited resources, you end up scaling back operations to ensure survival, which makes it hard to create or be adventurous.”

He is especially worried that as fiscal pressures on the arts have grabbed most of the headlines in recent years, signal events on the political and legislative fronts have remained relatively underexplored by the arts community. In his essay, he notes how “the 1996 Telecommunications Act laid the groundwork for the consolidation of radio stations” and how “the Digital Millennium Copyright Act toughened criminal penalties on unauthorized duplication of recordings, films, and software code, and extended the penalties’ reach into the homes of average citizens.” Both measures, Ivey fears, may undermine the ability of artists and arts organizations to foster creativity.

He also states in his essay that he has been made “slightly queasy” by the “disconnect between the priorities of the cultural sector and the reality of the arts system” and therefore asks this question: “Had those of us who cared about the health of America’s system for supporting the arts, by concentrating narrowly on cultural nonprofit groups and the agencies and nongovernmental organizations that help them, overlooked the policy interventions that were really shifting our cultural landscape?” It’s not that Ivey doesn’t applaud the growth in the nonprofit arts during the last 40 years—from 7,700 groups in 1965 to over 40,000 today. It’s that those statistics are deceptive: “Financial gains associated with early growth in the nonprofit world have flattened over the past decade.” Thus, as the sector has grown, it has not grown richer, and therein is the problem.

“Again, I think there’s a point when you use up your moral claim on the public and private wallet,” Ivey repeats, “and that’s true whether you fund programs for the homeless, for global HIV/AIDS relief, or culture. I think the limit is reached more quickly with culture, though, because in our society especially, cultural concerns are seen as secondary or tertiary. [Americans for the Arts president and CEO] Bob Lynch would say the fallout from the dot-com bust has hurt culture funding and that when the economy gets its legs, we’ll expand once more. I’m not so sure.” Far healthier, he writes, would be for the arts not just to devise “new tactics for pumping up venerable nonprofit revenue streams,” but to “stop thinking that the potential for societal support for the current nonprofit arts agenda is limitless, constrained only by our inability to craft the ‘right’ argument or motivate the ‘right’ financial partners.” While we’re thinking about minimizing “the erosion of our gains,” we should also “draw a bigger, more inclusive map of America’s arts system.”

Arts Policy and Political Action

What does he mean by “more inclusive?” Ivey often emphasizes, with little prompting, that the current political atmosphere demands such an attitude change. After all, this is an America in which “what passes for cultural policy is focused almost exclusively on the agenda of cultural nonprofits, while copyright legislation, media ownership deregulation, and the question of the value of cultural diplomacy—things that transform the cultural landscape as much as $50 million or $100 million here or there—have not been addressed.” In so doing, “we’ve let the horse out of the barn. We need to be at the table when such policies are discussed so the interests of artists and arts organizations are preserved. To me, the biggest looming threat is tax reform. When I see the White House appointing a commission to restructure and simplify the tax code, I’m concerned that the cultural community, in an era of fiscal constraint, will not be perceived as providing a public service, thus undermining the value of the ability to make tax-deductible contributions.”

Perhaps more audaciously, Ivey is also calling on corporations to think more deeply about their responsibility to society and for the nonprofit arts sector, in turn, to study examples from the commercial realm for innovative new models to consider: “When Goddard Lieberson was president of Columbia Records, he viewed a record label as a public trust: He knew it would always have a vibrant classical division even if it didn’t contribute to the bottom line, because it didn’t operate as a subset of a subset of a multinational corporation. Today, with boards of directors harassed by shareholders each quarter, they don’t have the flexibility to take risks that produce great art.” HBO, by contrasting example, “sells subscriptions and produces content that generates buzz and a perception of quality, which is how you get ‘Angels in America,’ certainly one of the most important TV events of the last 24 months.” Should it prove unable or unwilling to study new models, the arts will be “ignoring the fact that both the nonprofit and commercial business models make it very tough to make creative decisions. Among nonprofits, it’s budget constraints, the inability to grow new revenue streams. Among for-profits, it’s parent companies chasing stock prices and the inability to think of artists’ development over the long haul.” Neither of which, he says, are healthy for our culture.

Similarly unhealthy is the notion that if we can just convince government officials of the great economic and societal benefits of the arts, an attitude adjustment will begin at the top: “In some ways I wish [the Bush administration] cared so much as to discuss the arts. But I don’t think this administration is significantly different from any other since the Kennedy years, when the NEA was just a gleam in some people’s eyes. What you basically have is a government defining cultural stuff as marginal, without any pushback from the American people. I’ve used the example from time to time that the connection between the NEA and the president is always the first lady. Hillary Clinton’s office recruited me for the NEA. Last year, Laura Bush’s office pushed for an $18 million funding increase for the agency. Back in the ’70s, Joan Mondale—’Joan of Art,’ as she was known—was the great one in the Carter administration. The problem is culture is not perceived as real public policy.”

Is there any area of the arts already well-poised for innovation? Curiously, he says it’s the theatre: “It’s the only institutionalized form that really has exact mirror images in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Look at record companies—they’re almost all for-profit. Museums are almost all nonprofit. Theatre is unusual because some institutions are in one world and some are in another, and that makes you wonder about the value of nonprofit status. Some parts of the arts system—like design, architecture, and, for the most part, book publishing and fashion—lack much of a nonprofit presence yet are vigorous parts of the cultural landscape, which they retain without getting grants. So it would be interesting to back up and look at the system without the old assumptions.”

Smartly done, he says, such an attitude change could eventually lead to more pro-arts policies and legislation: “I recently read a New York Times piece about the importance of ‘Law & Order’ to the vitality of the New York acting community. If ‘Law & Order’ and soap operas underpin the New York acting scene, we need to know that because there may be policy implications. So let’s take a look and see if we need a different set of interventions in the arts. And if we do, let’s start adding them in.”

Austin’s remarkable growth in the 1990’s was a model of sorts for Florida’s incipient creative class thesis. In turn, the thesis came to have sway over the direction of local policy. Through a series of interviews with local residents, McCann describes a political arena dominated by high-tech firms demanding new suburban office parks, anti-sprawl environmentalists, and residents of inner-city neighborhoods. It created a dynamic pitting economic growth against a newly implemented “smart growth” strategy that sought to curb suburban sprawl by gentrifying urban neighborhoods, making them more palatable to high-tech firms wishing to locate in Austin. This would increase the urban tax base while simultaneously protecting one of the region’s most important recreational amenities, the rough and hilly central Texas countryside.

Politicians attempted to enact change at the regional scale by focusing on the neighborhood scale, demonstrating that a “complex and contingent urban political geography” (p. 192) underscores the concept of city-regionalism. McCann emphasizes that, in this political environment, socio-economic inequality became a crucial aspect of the contested definition of “livability”. He laments that Florida offers no policy recommendations for closing this persistent wealth gap, but highlights that livability in the city-region is yet again the prescribed solution, further reinforcing the fusion of discourses.

This paper is topical because of its application of Florida’s creative class thesis to the concept of the city-region. McCann asserts that city-regionalism has gained even more traction and support in policy discourses because of the very popularity of the creative class thesis. It becomes, then, a process of reinforcing and reproducing the conceptualization of the city as a region. Additionally, McCann takes aim at the homogenizing and essentializing tendencies of the creative class thesis, particularly in the way in which it identifies economic development with the presence of high concentrations of creative capital. Rather than evisioning the city-region as a heterogeneous place with multiple identities and a diverse array of citizens from multiple socio-economic backgrounds, the creative class thesis re-imagines the city-region as a site of entertainment and amenity consumption by an elite class of talented, self-actualized, mobile, and atomized individuals.

Indeed, for all its self-promotion as a city of unique amenities that appeal to young professionals, McCann shows that Austin’s economic success is rooted in an economic development plan originating in the 1950′s. This plan emphasized a local economy based on white-collar jobs, a low cost of living, the presence of state government institutions, and the proximity to a large public research university. These attributes are strikingly comparable to the commonly conceived strengths of Columbus’ own local economy, which has enjoyed similar increases in population and economic growth in the face of a struggling state economy.

Austin’s development strategy is, on its face, quite admirable. Attempting to reduce sprawl by limiting exurban development even when such development is demanded by coveted high-tech firms takes enormous restraint on the part of local politicians and business elites. In terms of the creative city-region, this protects the environment and its recreational amenities while filling in the economically depressed and “underutilized” neighborhoods of the urban core. However, gentrification remains a highly contentious issue for impoverished urban residents who have spent decades creating lifestyles and homes for themselves in the otherwise neglected urban core. The neoliberal stance of Florida’s thesis does not make room for these marginalized classes of the working poor. Rather, it merely claims that their creative potential remains untapped, and that the means of upward mobility is a matter of pulling themselves up by their own creative bootstraps.

McCann forces us to consider the very nature of livability. Is measured in terms of the ability of the creative class to access certain recreational amenities, or the ability of a broad range of local residents to access quality education, healthcare, and job opportunities? These latter issues are effectively beyond the power of the city governments to effect change, dependent upon policies enacted at the state or federal level. But if the city-region is, in fact, engaged in a process of “hollowing out” the national state, then city governments are capable of focusing their attention away from the accumulation of creative capital from elsewhere and toward the distribution of essential public services to indigenous residents. In the process, such cities may unwittingly increase the quantity and quality of local creative capital, finding it to be uncharacteristically loyal to and rooted in the local culture.

Reference

McCann, E. (2007). “Inequality and Politics in the Creative City-Region: Questions of Livability and State Strategy.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31 (1): 188-196.