Arts Vibrancy & What It Can Do for You

What do you mean by the "arts"?

Before exploring the impact of the industry, let's briefly breakdown "arts" and "culture".

What comes to your mind when I say the "arts"?

Maybe you thought of museums with white walls and expensive, abstract paintings. Maybe you thought of Michelangelo's statue of David, da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and other greats of the Western cannon. Perhaps a concert hall filled with the music of an orchestra? What about your favorite novel?

I'm including all of those when I talk about the arts.

According to Ellen Rosewall, "the arts are generally defined as a set of activities involving human creativity, divided into various disciplines such as visual arts, music, literature, and dance." You might be thinking of a socially-constructed distinction between "fine" or "high" arts, typically comprised of "classical" visual art, Shakespeare theatre, and symphonic music, in contrast to folk & traditional arts, craft arts, and mass-produced products like movies, television, and popular music. Or, maybe this is all news to you and you thought that arts just meant visual art.¹

Those distinctions may have had more meaning in the past, but today these categories overlap and intersect with one another.

In their 2011 report, Beyond Attendance, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) expanded the scope of its research to acknowledge patterns of arts participation and to reflect how art forms are changing in response to technology, the integration of diverse cultural traditions, and waning divisions between artistic disciplines.² The report also acknowledged that arts participation has spread beyond concert halls and museums into community halls, city streets, and bookstores. The report defines arts participation as “occurring in multiple modes, sometimes overlapping; arts attendance, personal creation and performance, and participation in the arts through electronic media.”

In support of the above trends, for the following discussion, the "arts" will be used in a relatively broad sense.

What about "culture"?

For many people, "culture" may not have an immediate association with art, so why use it here?

Things that constitute culture can include clothes, traditions, history, and food. Culture can also refer to the norms of a group passed down through generations, communicated through song, dance, literature, and visual art. All of these things inform and affect creative expression, which is where the relation to the arts comes in.³

The arts industry has increasingly used the term "arts and culture" to describe creative activity. The addition of "culture" acknowledges that the arts are essential to what makes use human, and uplifts that the diverse and different cultures that make up our community have valued traditions and creative expression to be communicated.⁴

I will be using the "arts" and "arts & culture" interchangeably to refer to the non-profit arts industry.

1. Ellen Rosewall, Arts Management: Uniting Arts and Audiences in the 21st Century, 2nd ed., New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.
2. Jennifer L. Novak-Leonard and Alan S. Brown, Beyond Attendance: A Multi-modal Understanding of Arts Participation (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2011), 14. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2008-SPPA-BeyondAttendance.pdf. Retrieved December 6, 2023.
3. Ellen Rosewall, Arts Management: Uniting Arts and Audiences in the 21st Century, 2nd ed., New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.
4. Ellen Rosewall, Arts Management: Uniting Arts and Audiences in the 21st Century, 2nd ed., New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.