Approach III

Approach III for The Big Canvas Issue Guide
Build the Creative Economy

This choice argues that arts and culture are integral to a larger effort: the battle for the Philadelphia region’s economic survival. Arts and culture leaders should claim their rightful place in Philadelphia’s effort to become globally competitive in the “creative economy.”

“Creative economy” is the term for an array of brain-powered enterprises – from information technology to higher education to biotech to the arts themselves – that produce the bulk of new wealth and new jobs in 21st century America. A major point: “Creative economy” jobs are not just for PhD’s. This sector creates lots of family-supporting clerical, craft and support jobs as well. Such a focus also leads to a community where creativity and innovation become natural reflexes.

In this view, the linkage between the cultural sector and the health of the regional economy is clear. The links work on several levels. A vibrant arts sector makes a region more attractive to employers, helping them recruit talented employees. It helps the region curb “brain drain” and retain smart graduates from its many colleges. This young talent fuels innovation, which generates jobs. The arts also boost tourism, which brings in revenue while selling the region to the world. The arts themselves provide jobs, attracting creative people who make the region a more appealing place to live.

Assert these benefits without apology, advocates of this approach say, and use them to create common cause with other regional goals and constituencies. By itself, the arts and culture sector may lack the clout and grassroots appeal to win battles for scarce public funds. Seen rightly as a linchpin of a forward-looking economic strategy, the sector can make a strong case for stable public support. (Bucks County leaders, in allocating money to the arts from a hotel tax that funds economic development, showed an understanding of this.)

To make this approach work, of course, arts leaders will need to move beyond their narrow focus on their own institutions’ immediate needs.

In this view, city-suburb sniping is a major source of the region’s economic weakness. The arts and culture sector is an opportunity for the region to build on a shared asset, rather than quarrel over a shared failure. It’s a good place to start building the muscles and reflexes of regional cooperation.

HOW TO RAISE MONEY FOR THESE GOALS:
Start a regional “creative economy” initiative with a snappy, marketable name that speaks of innovation, creativity and jobs. Create a fund, fed by a mix of government, foundation and private-sector funding and directed by a regional entity. This agency should combine economic-development smarts with an appreciation of the value of arts, culture and higher education. It could be a new agency or a retooled version of something like Select Greater Philadelphia. Arts and culture would have to compete with other goals for support from this fund (as is the case in, for example, Denver) but the initiative’s DNA would include respect for the role that the arts play. They wouldn’t be a second-class citizen.

SUPPORTERS TEND TO FAVOR THESE ACTIONS:
■ Offer operating support on a competitive basis to the arts institutions that bolster the region’s reputation as an arts mecca. Help them concentrate on doing great things, less on making ends meet.
■ Give support to major capital projects, particular pieces of architecture that would give the region national or international attention (i.e. the Bilbao effect).
■ Help SEPTA rethink and revise its regional transit offerings to better connect suburban residents with city cultural venues, and other suburban ones. Pay special attention to the desires of new residents younger than 30, a transit-oriented group that could be SEPTA’s customer base of the future.
■ Create a regional arts planning entity to foster city-suburban communication. This would coordinate events; do joint marketing; and create a one-stop-shopping, Web 2.0 site to keep both local residents and national tourists up to speed on cultural offerings.
■ Push the region’s tourism agencies to do a better job of marketing ALL the region’s cultural offerings to the nation and encouraging city residents to sample suburban sites.
■ Initiate and promote several regional arts festivals with national reach. One might focus on traditional arts, on the order of Spoleto. One might zero in on newer, innovative art forms, a “Fringe Festival” on steroids. Try any idea, no matter how wacky, that might draw positive national attention to the region’s art assets.
■ Fund Philly-based contests or prizes of national reach to solicit multimedia works from young “pro-am” artists. The term refers to amateur artists who take advantage of new Web and digital tools to create works of professional quality. Make Philly a mecca of such activity.
■ Work even more aggressively with the region’s colleges to coax local students to sample the region’s cultural riches while on campus.
■ Make the region’s arts and culture assets a key part of every pitch to a potential employer.
■ Take a regional approach to challenging local corporations to enter into more ambitious partnerships with cultural organizations.
■ Create a regional volunteer bank for arts and culture, including a special effort to recruit people younger than 30.

ARGUMENTS FOR THIS APPROACH:
✓ The Philly region needs to take bold steps to give its cultural riches the national profile they deserve but don’t have.
✓ Bosses want to locate businesses where they themselves enjoy living – and arts and culture are a huge piece of that equation.
✓ “Creative economy” businesses need to recruit talent nationally, and a hot arts scene helps them do that.
✓ Philadelphia is developing an unaccustomed reputation as a hot arts scene for young people. It needs to capitalize on that opening and compete for young talent with the Bostons and Austins.
✓ Arts and culture can either claim their rightful place in the region’s economic strategy or wither on the sidelines.
✓ Arts and culture would benefit enormously from volunteering to be the first sector to build new reflexes of regional cooperation.
✓ Arts purists may chafe at what they see as subordination of art to the needs of commerce, but this is the best way to generate broad, stable public support.
✓ A community zeroed in on the “creative economy” is more likely to value the creativity and innovation that are the calling cards of the arts and culture sector.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST THIS APPROACH:
✗ In good times, people give lip service to the economic value of the arts, but when money gets tight (as it is now) the arts are always treated as a frill, the first thing to get cut.
✗ The term “creative economy” is vague, elitist and a turnoff to the vast majority of long-time local residents.
✗ The “creative economy” approach favors the well-educated newcomer over the long-time resident who values community art, but has neither the income nor the inclination to go to chic, costly events. It’s just a dressed-up version of “trickledown” economics. The region has enough inequality already, without adopting a regional strategy to worsen it.
✗ This approach turns art into a trendy commodity, denigrating its lasting spiritual and community benefits.
✗ This approach favors a few thousand well-off college students from elsewhere, while ignoring pressing needs of hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who grew up here and will always live here.
✗ The current economic climate, which is dampening tourism, couldn’t provide a worse time to launch a flashy arts festival. The region has plenty of arts events without pouring resources into some monster festival.
✗ In this region, any initiative labeled as “regional” is doomed to fail, no matter how fancily you dress it up.

(Illustration by Tim Ogline. Photos of The Kimmel Center, Philadelphia.)