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THE HIDDEN IMPACT
As I've posted a couple of times before, I've been re-reading speeches and essays I've written in the past. This one was written and delivered to Portland's City Club some 14 years ago this month when I was President of Oregon Advocates for the Arts.
I hope you enjoy it, but more, I hope you can take away something useful.
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As you can tell from my introduction, I'm here as an advocate for the arts. Nothing would please me more than to be able to leave this room knowing that I had converted the whole lot of to my persuasion. I would like to think that you would accept my words on faith. But as Wilson Mizner said, "I respect faith, but it's doubt that gets you an education." So I expect that you’ll scrutinize my remarks—At least those of you who are Oregonians will.
You know, there are a lot of people who just dread the whole idea of someone standing up and talking about the importance of the arts. That's not without good reason. Those of us who do these kinds of speeches have a reputation. For taking ourselves just a teensy-weensy bit too serious.
Kind of like the old story about the actor who testified in court. The prosecuting attorney says to the actor on the stand, "Sir, who is the greatest actor of all time?" The actor responded, "Me." The attorney said, "Isn't that a bit egotistical?" The actor says, "Perhaps...But I'm under oath."
Well, folks. I'm under oath here as well.
I hope that what I have to say will not only inform, but reveal. Informing is easy. Revealing is hard. I don't think that I would be exaggerating to say that those of us who love the arts—volunteers, audiences, artists, technicians, and arts managers—believe that the most precious gift which the arts make to people happens at a profoundly personal—maybe even spiritual level.
So as my Uncle T once said to me, "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
I am particularly grateful to be here today because the arts community needs and values opportunities to speak to the leadership of our communities. There is no doubt in my mind that among those of you who are listening is an important part of this community's and this state's leadership.
I think that ArtsPlan 2000 is an example of the vision and the movement that leadership can bring. There's no question that it's a leadership document. ArtsPlan 2000 explores the need for diversity. It explores and it articulates how important the arts are to building community, and it rightfully places an emphasis on arts education.
I remember when Bill Bulick called me initially during his consultant search about his belief that AP 2000 was needed and I must confess that I thought, "My God, that's a big job and a big vision. I commend the City of Portland, the Metropolitan Arts Council, the Business Committee for the Arts, Commissioner Mike Lindberg and the hundreds of volunteers, arts professionals, artists, and professional arts administrators from Portland's resident arts community that made Arts Plan 2000 happen. That is indeed an important step.
And I think that funding by the City of Portland is a statement—not just to Portland and Oregon but to the whole nation—about how important the arts are. It a statement that is a sign of vision, commitment, and leadership.
There are many requirements and responsibilities of leadership. Chief among them is the task of dragging ourselves out of the day-to-day muck to look at the big picture and the long term. We simply must ponder strategic issues and we've got to take a look at where today's decisions are leading us.
Another leadership challenge is to be able to tease apart information that's interesting from information that's meaningful—and information that can be acted upon. Today, I intend to move you to action.
What I will speak about today are three critical ways that the arts in Oregon will help shape the future:
• Economically
• Educationally
• And most of all—Personally
The place I'd like to begin is with a statement one wag made— "The future ain't what it used to be."
As a boy growing up in the Big Horn Basin at the foot of Wyoming's Rocky Mountains, like many of you I imagined a future that never happened. I believed that the future would look like the present—only better. That's the American way—"Only Better." It never occurred to me that my little hometown would find itself struggling to survive.
I never would have dreamed that towns like Cody, Wyoming or cities like Portland Oregon, let alone whole states would one day find themselves in competition with other towns, cities, and states to shore up the prosperity of their people. To build a legacy for their children and grandchildren with strategies for economic development and diversification.
I know now that I was naive as a boy. Competition for business and industry has been part and parcel of the development of this country since it was founded.
And now as I look back, I can see crucial moments in the history of places where I've lived where people who had vision and gumption made decisions that echo on and on. I'd like to pause and focus on a word—gumption. I like that word—gumption.
We need to exercise more gumption today. It's a rightful part of our heritage.
The people who braved the Oregon Trail to come here to build their communities, to make lives for themselves and their children, had the courage to confront their fear of the unknown. They had faith in their ability to create a life for themselves. Bottom line they had gumption.
It is the legacy of those people's vision that we're living today. We are sustaining the communities they built. Our farmer cousins are turning and planting the soil they cleared. Our children are climbing the same trees they planted.
The fabric of our lives is woven with the thread of their ancestral vision. It is upon the bedrock of their sweat and dogged determination that our communities are built.
Those people, through their commitment to building our communities, provided for the rest of us. Now, I'm not saying that mistakes weren't made, or that there weren't selfish interests involved now and then, but by and large, they were able to unscramble the complexities of the present's relationship to the future enough to move things along.
We used to call that kind of movement "progress." The word "progress" has kind of a bad rap these days. It smacks of smokestacks and slaughterhouses, of the acrid odor of asphalt replacing the sweet breath of fir trees, of exhaustbelching bulldozers. For all of us who love Oregon's natural beauty, those diesel battering rams of destruction symbolize for us the devastation that we're all afraid that "progress" may bring.
Oregon's been better at fending off that particular brand of progress than many places. We've labored to bring prosperity here, but not at any price. I like to think that we strive for balance in achieving our particular brand of progress. One of the things we need to think about is the kind of progress we really want and what we're prepared to pay for it.
One thing that we've all learned is that progress, as we've known it, is accompanied by problems. Oregon, like the rest of the world, faces enormous challenges.
Times have changed. The land is no longer the wilderness it once was. Today, we confront a different wilderness—no less perilous or forbidding than the one confronted by our ancestors. A wilderness of apathy, disconnection, greed, and cruelty. Our communities are at risk—imperiled by the forces of fear, alienation, and poverty.
There are 7.2 million people out of work today in this nation. We have the highest unemployment rate we've had in years. I think we need to look at why we have that unemployment rate. That's what I'm here to talk about today.
Do we believe in the possibility of a future worth working toward? Or is the promise of tomorrow a more polluted, rancid version of yesterday?
So here we are—trying to address problems in an economy, a state, and a nation that are all undergoing a massive restructuring at the political, economic, and social levels. The volume of change is enormous. The issues are complex. What I want to talk with you about is how we fit into the issues.
How, you might ask, in the face of these and other challenges, in the midst of tumultuous times, can public funding of the arts be justified? Why should Oregonians make public funding of the arts a priority?
Oregon is wrestling with tough choices. Don't kid yourselves. There will be lasting consequences as a result of those choices. But I believe we can't afford to overlook the arts. We need every advantage when it comes to bolstering Oregon's competitive position among rival states and rival nations. Chief among the advantages we require is a superior work force.
In the short term, we need to replace every lost job with a new job. That means incubating and attracting new employers. But short term strategies won't do for the long term. We need to concern ourselves with preparing and recruiting a highly-skilled, creative work force to run those businesses. We need to make sure that Oregon's mix of recreational, cultural, social, and educational services and amenities propel us toward our long term goals.
We can't afford not to make the arts a priority. In fact, we need to go further than we've heretofore gone. We need to go further. I would also maintain that we need to refocus. We need to rethink our support—what that support looks like, and what that support pays for. A strong arts sector is strategically important to Oregon's economic and social future.
The arts are a strategy for the research and development of human beings.
It has been said that great scientists are artists practicing science.
That simple observation speaks volumes about the costs of not addressing the whole person in our educational polices and the strategies that grow from them.
Oregon's arts community is a key component in Oregon's overall future. Yet, it's been the exception rather than the rule that the arts have been a player at the table when economic development strategies and educational policies have been developed.
Why is that?
We're perceived by many as luxuries—as toe shoes and tutus. We've been cast as frills. There is little doubt in my mind that we frankly and honestly—have contributed more to the problem than we have to the solution. Nobody has been guiltier than we have been in trivializing our own role by separating art from the culture at large.
We've been our own worst enemy.
We've cloistered art in an ivory tower far from the gritty hands of common experience. We have made art an object, not a fountainhead from which the creative impulse of the speaker quickens the spirit of the listener.
But things are changing and ArtsPlan 2000, if you read it and look at it, is a prime example of how they're changing. We're taking what we're doing to the people. We're getting out of our offices and concert halls and into the fray.
Fortunately, things are changing. We're making real progress in reaching the everyday person in Oregon by improving and balancing program offerings. By developing education and outreach programs in schools, community centers, senior centers. By developing ticket subsidy programs for low-income families. These are good changes. They're the kinds of changes we've needed to make to be accountable. But there is more work to do.
The arts are not a frill.
Believe me—nothing could be further from the truth. Not for Oregon. Not for the nation.
Arts and entertainment are the third largest export product of the United States of America. They make a real contribution to this nation's balance of trade. However, their importance to the future of the nation and to Oregon reaches far beyond their pure capital or entertainment value. The arts are pivotally important to our future—they're key to fueling innovation and to developing the capital of the next century—creativity.
For just a moment, let's look at facts and figures related to Oregon's arts community.
• The arts make a big bang for the buck. Oregon's arts community leveraged the State's $1 million investment into $49.2 million in income in 1989. I'm not talking economic development mumbo jumbo here, I'm talking real dollars, real spending. For every 2¢ the State of Oregon puts into the arts community, we return a dollar.
• There are 6,800 arts-related jobs in Oregon. Those 6,800 jobs are sprinkled throughout Oregon in places like Joseph, Klamath Falls, Hood River, John Day, Eugene, and of course right here in Portland.
• The Oregon Arts Commission makes the arts accessible to all Oregonians, not just to those who live in Oregon's urban areas or to those who can afford it.
• On average, Oregon gets a bigger bang for its arts buck than the rest of the nation. We leverage a dollar for every 2 pennies of public money we get. The rest of the nation needs 9¢ to generate its buck.
• Our $49.2 million translates into $138 million in economic impact.
We can't and shouldn't ignore or dismantle a sector of our economy that delivers results like this.
But we've just cracked the door. There is a lot more at stake.
The central message I'm here to talk with you about today is the fundamental change by which wealth and power are created and defined—a change that brings an abundance of opportunities to those who understand the dynamics of economics and power. Like the rest of the nation, Oregon's economy—the way we will create wealth—is in transition.
Where wealth was once created largely by converting natural resources to marketable products through manufacturing and distribution, wealth is now created through value-added strategies. Global competition and technological parity have changed the rules of the game. And today's preeminent valueadded strategy, as business guru Tom Peters attests, is to add value through information.
In a global business system where everyone has access to the same suppliers of materials—steel, rubber, bolts, memory chips, leather, and plastics it's the quality of thinking that differentiates products and services today. Poor quality thinking is a lot more expensive than good quality thinking. Either way—you pay. Engineering, design, inventory management, production techniques, marketing, advertising—these are the arenas where value is being added.
The so-called information economy doesn't diminish the importance of Oregon's natural resources nor of our manufacturing sector. Not by any means. But today, developing a product and getting it out there is just table stakes. It's what's required to get into the game. What's required to stay in the game is a much more complex challenge.
How we differentiate products and services—how we position them in the mind of the consumer and how the consumer constructs a self image based on using a product or service is of greater importance. Products are no longer just products. They're our companions in life. We're no longer after just market share we're after mind share.
We've learned how to add value to products. We're doing it with information. We're making better cars by making smarter cars. We're making better coffee makers by making smarter coffee makers. They'll grind your beans, measure your coffee, and turn themselves on and off. We're making smarter clothes dryers. They turn themselves off when clothes are dry.
The bottom line is that ratio of information to mass in products is increasing dramatically. Information-enriched products and services are no longer surprises to consumers—they're expected.
Competition is so fierce for the consumer dollar that value in all its various incarnations—has overwhelmed price as a meaningful point of differentiation. Thus, adding value and communicating value are key to creating and positioning products and services.
But there is an emerging paradigm. We're grappling with bigger stakes. We know about adding value through information. It's, to some extent, where we've been already. The new challenge, the emerging paradigm of competition goes one step further: How do we add value to ideas? How do we turbocharge our thinking? How do we make our mistakes faster? How do we create learning organizations?
These questions are being answered by today's marketplace hero—the knowledge worker. And as Alvin Toffler says in his new book, Powershift, this shift in wealth-creation is compelling a fundamental change in the ways companies' assets are measured and reported.
These shifts are already transforming the processes by which securities analysts determine the viability of companies and the value of their stock. Indeed, the ability to assemble a corps of knowledge workers—in terms of intellectual and creative capital—will make or break businesses. And by making or breaking businesses, it's gonna make or break Oregon.
There is a fascinating and challenging paradox in this change in the ratio of information to mass. As products have become more sophisticated and as the heat of competition has intensified, the ability of consumers to judge products has diminished. A lot of the value now being added is literally invisible to the consumer.
You can't assess the quality of a computer chip by looking at a computer's exterior. You can't appraise the quality of a television set's tuning apparatus by looking at that television set on the shelf. Engineering quality is difficult, if not impossible, to discern by looking at a car.
Information is mostly invisible.
So marketers have to manage the evidence of quality. They must develop strategies that use what the consumer can appraise to manage the evidence of overall quality. How, you might ask, do they do that?
Through design. Through aesthetics. Through image. By creating products and product images that attract the consumers for whom products are developed and to whom they are marketed, the evidence of excellence and quality are managed. Aesthetic design is a highly-sophisticated set of information that combine to communicate a product's character—its essence of quality.
An attractive product is a salable product. Four of our nation's fiercest competitors—West Germany, France, Italy, and Japan—all recognize the importance of aesthetics in the design and advertising of products.
Italy's reputation for industrial and fashion design is enviable. Have you bought an Italian tie lately? It's not uncommon to see a $75 or a $100 price tag. Is the silk any better? Is the thread any stronger? Is the shipping any more expensive? No. It's the information—more specifically the quality of the aesthetic information—that differentiates this entire nation's approach to creating, manufacturing, and marketing their products.
Let's take a look at Scandinavian furniture. Does it have better pine? Does the pine even come from Scandinavia? The pine comes from Poland and Russia. Is the leather any better? The leather doesn't come from Scandinavia, it comes from Poland and Russia. Is the steel any better? Not really. The only thing that happens in Scandinavia with respect to Scandinavian furniture is the design, marketing, and management of their furniture industry. Everything else is global.
What's for sale, what's unique, what's of value—is the design and the image. These are aesthetic—artistic—matters. This is an important example of what's going on today. This is such an important issue economically. It explains why France's arts budget is in its national defense budget. European countries that have long suffered the effects of nationalism and intense competition all understand that a strong cultural identity and a strong cultural and aesthetic literacy is literally a matter of survival. We can't push the arts into the margins, anymore. It will hit us where we live.
Can we make a case that Oregonians are as aesthetically literate as Italians?
It's interesting to observe that the one period in this country's auto manufacturing history when American cars were highly sought after in international markets was when they had—fins.
Fins. Not exactly functional. They certainly didn't improve mileage or performance standards. Fins were purely an aesthetic element. As nonengineered and as whimsical as they were, they added value to American cars. Do you think that a designer could make a case for something like fins today? This is a wonderful example of what Albert Einstein meant when he said that, "Imagination is more important than intelligence."
There are emerging questions with this emerging paradigm. How will we weave innovation into the daily fabric of the workplace? How will we create an organizational capacity for the disruption that accompanies an innovating organization?
Basically, the question we're asking is, "How are we, as a Puritanically-derived culture, going to tolerate more creativity?" I'd like you all to take a look at your tie or scarf and ask yourself, "How much more color can you really stand?"
The truth is that we already have a mechanism in place for teaching people how to productively manage the creative process. The arts are a laboratory for the study and facilitation of innovation.
The arts are a strategy for the research and development of human beings.
Now, there are a lot of people, who, when they make speeches about this sort of thing have to call their friends and associates from all over the world to find examples, stories, or anecdotes about how the arts have changed people's lives. I don't have to do that because I was a kid from a little town in Wyoming with sagebrush and horse manure in my backyard and I don't have to ask other people what an arts education means. How it awakens and quickens the spirit. I don't have to ask other people what it means to be in a troubled family where parents divorce, where a person looks for something to hang onto for survival. Because I've lived it and I see it every day at the Hult Center.
I see it in an at-risk sixteen year-old boy who came to a modern dance performance in Eugene, a person that our community calls a "mall rat"—Isn't that charitable? With punk hair, dirty clothes, dressed all in black he told us, "In two years, I'm going to dance with this company. The mall's always been my first home, this is my new home." I don't have to look for examples of social redemption. I don't have to scrounge around to find people who have literally been taken out of peril by the arts. I've lived it as a kid and I live it now.
And let me tell you something else. The truth is—we need everybody we've got. And the minute we forget that—each of us is forgotten.
As I mentioned earlier, cities and states are becoming just like products. They have to be positioned and marketed—just like products. This begs several questions.
"How will Oregon position itself for the future?"
"What will Oregon's key point of differentiation be?"
"What are Oregon's value added strategies?"
We need to empower our children's and our state's future through arts education. That education should cultivate a capacity for creativity and innovation—as well as develop a solid base of skills.
Arts education can help us do that.
Plus, we need to be able to attract knowledge workers to Oregon, and we've got to hang on to the ones that are already here. A whole raft of studies conclusively prove that arts in a community isn't just important. It's a make-or-break consideration in recruiting and keeping the highly mobile, highly independent knowledge sector that can frankly name its own price and go wherever it wants.
These people simply will not live in a cultural desert.
Thus, a dynamic cultural life should be as much a part of the Oregon scene as are the mountains and the coast. If we want to create new jobs by attracting new employers and keeping our corporate sector robust, we must be prepared to pass the quality-of life test.
If we can't provide a competitive work force to our business community, can we reasonably expect to build or even keep our corporate base intact?
Oregon's positioning should simply be that:
• Oregon offers more than a pristine, lush, and beautiful environment.
• Oregon offers more than a proximity to Pacific Rim trading partners.
• Oregon offers its corporate and professional sectors the best-skilled and most creative work force anywhere and the richest quality of life in the United States.
That's how we're going to make Oregon a great state. That's how we're going to manage the transition from a natural resource-based economy to a diversified, balanced economy that's flexible, resourceful, and poised for our particular brand of progress. We don't have to settle for progress at any price.
In light of emergence of the importance of creative capital and of innovation, it's troubling that the arts are not considered basic to education in Oregon. Moreover, Measure 5 has hamstrung communities throughout the state in their ability to offer arts education to Oregon's young people.
Those young people, who are being deprived of a powerful means of developing their whole selves—of realizing their potential—are not the only ones who'll pay. You and I and the rest of Oregon will pay as well.
We have not attended ourselves to the quality and the strength of the creative impulse. We have few vehicles as powerful as the artist's process for cultivating the creative impulse.
Perhaps the most overlooked benefit in the rigors of an artistic education is the teaching of mastery.
Sometimes people ask me what it was like to be a professional concert artist. It was eight hours in the practice room each day. It was two hours of scales. It was hours of slur exercises and hours of musical score study and memorization.
It wasn't just occasionally. It was every day. My entire life was organized around just one thing—improvement. How many people can honestly say today, as you look at your employees, as you look at your peer workers, and even at yourselves, that we concern ourselves fanatically with mastery, with improvement—every day.
Mastery. That is one of the key characteristics of Japanese management. Japanese workers are expected to concern themselves at least f fifty percent of the time with improving their product. That's what mastery's all about. That's what the arts are all about.
Mastery, in the arts and in everything else, is the willingness to assume the beginner's mind. It's about loving and practicing rudiments. Mastery liberates through discipline. That's what mastery is all about. Mastery is what the arts have to offer business, government, education, and people.
We simply can't be competitive in any arena without a grasp and an understanding of mastery.
Speaking of intelligence, during the last decade, some fascinating research has been done regarding human intelligence. We're learning that the human being and that human intelligence is far more complex than we'd previously realized.
At some time in our lives, I think each of us have suspected that the "talents" or "gifts" we've seen in ourselves and other people are, in fact, separate types of intelligence. I know that each of my children excel in some areas and struggle in others. To suggest that struggling in one subject is a sign of comprehensive stupidity or that excelling is a sign of comprehensive brilliance is counterintuitive. It flies in the face of common sense and common experience.
In 1983, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner through his work on Project Zero published a theory which argues that the mind is composed of a number of semiautonomous intelligences.
These intelligences operate somewhat independently of other skills and intelligences.
Just two of the intelligences Gardner had identified through his neuropsychological research at Boston's Veterans Administration can be assessed by the IQ test—linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences. That measurement is incomplete at best.
The other fivc spatial, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal—can't be measured by this test.
You might ask, "Why just seven intelligences?" In Gardner's book, Frames of Mind, he actually hints that there may be a great many more. Some researchers have identified literally over a hundred semiautonomous intelligences.
In any event, Gardner's work has developed a far more expansive and pluralistic model of intelligence than is commonly considered. His model reframes the question:
How smart is she? to How is she smart?
Recently, there has been a great deal of concern among policy makers and the national business community that the educational standards and educational achievements of our young people have been eroding. The United States has not, by a long shot, been producing the highest test scores, the best qualified professional school candidates, or even the highest rate of literacy. Our concerns are justified. Our strategies for dealing with our concerns are over-simplified and they're short-sighted.
Our response has been to drum up a "back-to-the-basics," "no nonsense" approach that concentrates exclusively on developing math, science, and language skills—"Readin',Writin', and"Rithmetic."
There's nothing wrong with developing math, science, and language skills. There is something terribly wrong with stopping there.
It would appear that this educational strategy falls far short of any reasonable chance of addressing any individual's potential. It concentrates on just two aspects of intelligence and ignores at least five others.
This is a grievous mistake. In our love affair with math and science and the scientific method, we have overlooked a monumentally important, and profoundly simple concept—that the most important scientific act is the formation of the hypothesis. The asking of the question. This is a creative, intuitive act.
Leonardo da Vinci created the hypothesis and designed the helicopter in the fifteenth century. It took our mathematicians, scientists, and engineers six hundred years to execute his idea. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we do need to concentrate more on these things.
This approach will turn off a lot of kids whose gifts are elsewhere, and who—like you and mc dream of making something of themselves. Of making their families proud. Of making a difference in the world. We don't need any more disaffected children. Not in Oregon. Not in America.
I think we need to look at what we believe in as a people.
• Equality
• Justice
• Fairness.
Educational policy which penalizes people for having other gifts is hardly fair. Hardly just. Worse, the creative capital—which these young people represent—is being squandered.
As a fair and just society, we have an obligation to promote social and educational policy that meets the needs of all our people. Of each and every individual. If we do, we'll be rewarded by a richer, more diverse work force, and we’ll be better positioned for the future.
Think about yourself for a minute. Think about how you were born alone and how you're going to die alone. We forget that we're individuals.
We live in a society where the institution has displaced the individual in importance and in priority. Institutions are literally masquerading as individuals. When individuals get concerned, the first thing they do is go out and form an organization—an institution. Yes, we pay a lot of lip service to the importance of the individual, but what we listen to and pay attention to are institutions.
The most important constituencies of government and industry seem to be institutions.
That's unfortunate. At least in a political sense. Because what the arts have to offer an institution is far less meaningful and far less powerful than what we have to offer individuals. At least at first glance.
Yes, the arts powerfully impact economies. Yes, the arts can powerfully impact business and industry. But as I've mentioned previously, the arts have more to offer.
For our impact to be truly powerful, Oregon must reaffirm its commitment to creating fulfilled and masterful people who then create organizations, corporations, and businesses whose greatest asset is the intellectual and creative capital of their people. Our culture must realign its values and ways of operating. Since the arts are a research and development strategy for human beings, they are also a research and development strategy for our institutions. But first things first. People first.
In spite of assertions to the contrary made by the rhetoricians of business industry, and government—there is no such thing as institutional memory. Memory, like faith, is a human quality. Institutions will never remember the value of art. They will not argue nor long for it.
So let me make something perfectly clear:
What I'm saying today is not intended for your institution. This message is for you.
Institutions cannot show courage. You can show courage.
Institutions cannot summon faith. Faith wells up from the soul of a human being.
We must have faith in our community. We must believe that our communities are capable of not only surviving self-examination and conflict, but that in fact they will grow from the experience.
In his book, "What are People For?" Wendell Berry writes "No community can survive that cannot survive the worst. Tragic drama attests to the community's need to survive the worst that it knows, or imagines." The arts offer our communities experiences that permit the ritual exploration of the evils and tragedies that confront community life.
It has been said that the unexamined life is not worth living. That is as true for communities as it is for people. Communities must occasionally revisit their communal values, their opinions, and their processes if they are to make sure that these things are still working in their best interests. The arts, through a community development-model, can facilitate these value
sojourns.
Most importantly—the arts are a beeline to our own hearts. They're a way for us to search out and identify our own feelings. The self-knowledge and self-awareness that a meaningful arts experience can evoke for each of us one human being at a time is a promising remedy for an all too pervasive dehumanizing experience of day-to-day life in a society where it seems everybody is an addict—sexaholic, chocoholic, alcoholic, workaholic— artaholic.
If you're following psychological and sociological literature of the day, you're seeing a lot being said about "addiction." Our society is frequently described as "an addictive society." Psychologists maintain that addiction is a product of spiritual bankruptcy. It seems we have some healing to do in our persons, our families, and our communities. I believe the arts can help.
The time has come for leadership that fully appreciates the value and crucial importance of the arts in society. We need leadership that does not measure the value of everything in terms of the almighty dollar.
Creative capital is at least as valuable as financial capital. It is time that we admit to ourselves that a healthy economy does not produce social justice as a side benefit. If we want social justice, we need to provide for it—
One person at a time.
As a society, we have never evidenced a greater need for vision or for action either, for that matter. Our need for imaginative and innovative solutions to future problems can only increase. The qualities of imagination, creativity, and vision are as required of political leaders, scientists, and medical researchers as they are required of artists.
We can imagine, in human terms, the consequences of the artistic process on learning and problem-solving. Intuition tells us that the more creative the individual is in approaching a problem, the more likely it is that the problem will be solved.
The person who discovers or creates the cure for AIDS or for cancer may have had their creative impulse awakened by the arts. That individual may have learned discipline and concentration from the rigors of artistic study.
We can no longer afford to overlook the importance of the arts. We can no longer afford to trivialize their role in education.
The arts in Oregon need your support. Write the Governor and let her know that you support the arts. Let your state senator and state representative hear from you that the arts are a priority.
The arts in America need your support. Let Senators Hatfield and Packwood know where you stand. Let the candidates of your choice know that you believe in what we're all about.
The most important action you can take is to BREAK YOUR SILENCE.
A new Harris poll came out a couple of weeks ago. It tells us that a majority of Americans support public funding of the arts—with no content restrictions. In this time of incredible economic exigency where families are struggling to feed their kids, a majority of Americans said they would be willing to spend $15 to support the arts. They're paying pennies now. Pennies! Now I ask you. Is our educational policy and our arts policy really a product of the will of the American people? Or is it the preserve of sanctimonious demigogues who practice, or try to practice on the rest of us mind control. I would submit that if a majority of Americans favor public support of the arts that that ought to happen.
I know that there are a lot of you who are with us. The problem is—our elected officials don't know how much support there is out here. By and large, Oregon's delegation has been supportive, but I'd be misleading you if I didn't tell you that they're nervous about voicing their support too loudly. Their position will be determined to some extent by your support or lack thereof. They need to hear gumption in your tone of voice.
We must not let our institutions nor our leadership relegate all things to the balance sheet or the bottom line. Some things are worth paying for.
As I said earlier—as far as I'm concerned leadership is among us in this room.
John W. Gardiner said, "A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive." Where are the leaders who will keep hope alive for the arts? For Oregon?
I'm here because I believe that each of us as citizens have within us the potential to lead—stand up. To speak out. To create change. To be stewards of our communities, states, and nations. To understand the importance of the individual human being and the creativity that that human being represents.
It's easier, perhaps, in a political season to appreciate that we must not always look to government to lead. We must have the gumption to be leaders ourselves.
So, where are those leaders who will keep hope alive? Look around this room. Hope is alive because we are here. So long as we keep participating, keep showing up, as each of us have today, leadership will emerge and hope will thrive.
Yes, Mr. Gardiner, leaders are important, but so is the quality and commitment of those who follow. Here in Oregon, we know how to do both. Hope thrives here because community thrives here. Hope in Oregon is very much alive.
Posted on April 11, 2006 09:23 PM | Permalink
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