Arts & the Economy Transcript
Participants:
William Busta
Independent Curator
Kathleen Cerveny
Senior Program Officer, Arts & Culture, The Cleveland Foundation
Art Falco
President, Playhouse Square Foundation
Joe Frolik
Plain Dealer reporter (moderator)
Peter Lawson Jones
Commissioner, Cuyahoga County
Thomas Schorgl
President & CEO, Community Partnership for Arts & Culture
Jerry Sue Thornton
President, Cuyahoga Community College
MR. FROLIK: Thank you for joining us. Let me start with a very general question. When I mentioned to some of my colleagues and friends that we were going to do our next Quiet Crisis on the arts and economic development, I got sort of some looks of what are you talking about, what are the arts have to do with economic development, isn't that sort of a desert when we're sort of worried about what the entree is going to be for Northeast Ohio over the next ten or twenty years? Tom Schorgl, your organization has done some research into this. What is the economic impact? How big if you were to look at the arts and cultural institutions as an economic entity, what are we talking about in Northeast Ohio?
MR. SCHORGL: In terms of direct and indirect expenditures, based on had the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is a source that we always look at very carefully because it's a source that other types of businesses use to gauge economic impact, it's 1.3 billion dollars annually. The other things that are important about this is that, this week I was looking at Crain's magazine and in the back of Crain's magazine it had a listing of the top ten or twenty manufacturers in the region. Ford Motor Company was at the top, at 10,000 jobs. Then, employment dropped down to about 4,500 jobs from, I can't even remember the name of the company, but there are 3,700 full time jobs in the arts and cultural industry.
Now, they aren't looking at the not-for-profit sector, so that wasn't recorded, but that means a tremendous revenue base. And it's a group of workers that go beyond just the not for profit arts and cultural organization. There's at least 6,000 individual artists in the region, and then there are the union jobs that take place in terms of stagehand unions which comes to about another 4,000 job. So, it's a huge diverse source of income, family supporting jobs and it brings money into this region.
MS. CERVENY: You also don't want to forget the musicians union and actors union, which are also very much a part of that whole environment.
MR. FROLIK: Why do you think that the impact is perhaps not realized because there's no one The Arts Company of Cleveland, of Northeast Ohio so that you can say, wow, look at the size of this or.
MS. CERVENY: I think that certainly is a factor, Joe. There hasn't been a unified voice for the arts. We have an amazing number of very high quality arts institutions in this community. They're all very much about the business of promoting themselves, helping the public understand what each of them individually does. And there isn't a single entity, arts round table group, if you will, that speaks for the industry as a whole. I think that has been an important missing factor in our community for many years and it's one that exists in other communities.
MS. THORNTON: It's also a mind set when you think about it. And you have sons and daughters in college or in a university and when you talk about what they're going to major in, often parents will say major in something where you can get a job, particularly when that son or daughter wants to major in something in the arts and is very talented, maybe very gifted. But often there's a mindset and a misconception that maybe there won't be great careers with good paying salaries in the arts and that's just not so.
MS. CERVENY: Starving artists.
MS. THORNTON: Yeah, the starving artists.
MR. BUSTA: I think that when we think about artists, we think about an individual who might have an aspiration in their career to make a living selling paintings or selling individual items, but I think it's also important to remember that virtually everything we touch, everything we see, from the ties we're wearing, to the glasses on the table, to the design of the wood grain that we're looking at, everything we touch is designed by somebody who had arts training, and that the manufacturing companies that we go to that make things that have the things that they made have to have designers.
So the arts are really integrated into the manufacturing process. And if you even go beyond that and you look at the national economic, what the United States as a whole is moving towards is, our export to the world is no longer manufactured goods, it's intellectual and cultural property. It's the movies, it's the literature, it's the science rather than the hard goods. So this is what the future is.
MR. SCHORGL: Knowledge based workers that's what we're trying attract towards Northeast Ohio, and Cleveland, and Cuyahoga County. And when you look at the arts and cultural community, that's what they build their livelihoods on is this knowledge based area. The other thing that I would say about the jobs that exist in the arts and cultural community. As you pointed out, it's not seen as one big industry, and that may be an advantage because there are several different organizations. And so, if you have a problem such as we have seen in other types of industries where a company closes down and you lose thousands of jobs, with the arts and cultural community, a company or an organization closing down doesn't necessarily have that effect in terms of the labor force, and it is labor intensive. You can not do Mozart with one person, you can't do it well.
MR. FROLIK: We do have this tendency to treat the arts as a frill. In education, the first thing when a school levy is defeated or a budget gets tight is we're going to cut the arts.
MS. THORNTON: Exactly, and that is the unfortunate part because the arts really do teach discipline to young people in particular. When we think of K through 12 and the number of schools that don't have arts available for young people within the curriculum. It really is a tragedy because there are many lessons to be learned from engagement in the cultural arts and certainly the expansion of ones own life, you know, beyond the work world. And so, I think we're going to have to reconsider how we're thinking about spending dollars. Because ultimately, when we talk about work force training, when people describe what this wanted, the ability to read, write, communicate, problem solve, think critically, the arts teach us all that.
MR. JONES: You know it's interesting, Joe, just the other day I was reminded of how important the arts is an attraction to get students to be at school. On Sunday night, the family went out with the my mother to celebrate Mother's Day. My daughter was feeling a little bit ill and wasn't able to accompany us, so we all were concerned that the next day she wouldn't feel well enough to go to school. And in the morning when my wife asked her, "Lee, are you going to school today"? She said, "sure, I'm feeling a little better, but we have art today, so I wanted to make sure that I'm there for art class." .
And the fact is that art, whether as an extracurricular, as a core curriculum, oftentimes is an attraction to keep students in school. Sometimes it's not, the math doesn't engage them, the social studies doesn't engage them, but it might be an arts related class that's what keeps them engaged in what's happening in school and what brings them back. And when we look at the high dropout rate in our Cleveland Public Schools and even in some of our suburban schools, it's so clear that we need to use everything that we can, every asset to keep students in school, to keep them excited about the process, excited about learning. I think arts clearly has the capacity, the demonstrating capacity to do so.
MS. THORNTON: I would just mention a recent study that came out of Washington, D.C., as a matter of fact, looking at retention and what will keep students in school and engagement in the arts as Peter is saying has been now verified. Music, if a young person gets engaged in music, he or she wants to do that terribly and will do whatever is necessary, staying in school, studying, being present. So it is really a draw in terms of retention for young people in school.
MR. JONES: And we recognize that for sports, in terms of students bearing down and doing better when it comes to their academic performance in order to stay on the football team or in order to stay on the basketball team. It's shocking and indeed tragically ironic that we don't recognize the value of the arts as something that keeps kids coming back to school each and everyday.
MR. FALCO: I'm curios, too. Aren't test scores -- don't the students do better, you know, if they have been involved with the arts? Generally, their test scores, even in math, will improve.
MS. THORNTON: Exactly. Even more so than participation in intercollegiate athletics. The research is showing that participation in the arts, music, drama, painting, whatever it is, that it's that discipline that is needed in the arts and also the whole enlightenment for a person that really causes them to stay with it, to have a persistence, a tenacity that they otherwise wouldn't have. And that's surprising to most people because you would assume intercollegiate athletics or intramural athletics would do that, but it really is the arts.
MR. SCHORGL: In fact, SAT scores which we all sweated over at one time in our life regardless of social economic background. If arts is a part of the core curriculum in high schools, again, regardless of social economic background, recent studies show that those students will score 83 points higher on SAT tests. And we have a perfect example in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Cleveland School for the Arts, 9th grade proficiency tests, math and reading, those 9th graders are at the top of the scoring scale. What is a better way to learn math, geometry? Sitting down doing the theorems or learning it in terms of quilt making. One way you retain information is because you do it. Another way, it's spoken to you, and hopefully, you'll remember it. Doing what is taught, I think, is a much better way.
MS. CERVENY: And there are so many students, we have learned so much about the different learning styles of children. Some children, some people, learn by reading, others learn by listening, others learn by doing and the physical act, they learn through their bodies, and the arts are one of the greatest ways to open up those styles of learning. And, if we don't have them available for students, many more of our students are going to fail because we haven't reached them the way they know how to learn. I would like to go back for just a second to one of the things that Jerry Sue said about parents not seeing the arts as a viable profession. I wonder if there are schools anywhere, you know, you have career days and the fireman comes in. From elementary on up through high school the firemen comes in, the steelworker comes in, and all of those professions come in. Lawyers come in, do artists ever come in and talk about what their life is like in the theater as a set designer or choreographer, I wonder. And it seems to me that having children and their parents see the arts and see artists as viable workers in the community would be a big step forward.
MR. FALCO: And to your point, what people don't realize is that the arts are a very important and complicated business, you know. So you have the administrative side, the selling of tickets and whatever, which is a very challenging profession. You also have the technical side. Those performers that are going to be on the stages and behind the scenes and whatever. And they all take special skills and because most of the arts organizations are non for profit organizations, you know there's that extra complication of having to deal with multiple missions. Because with for profit companies, it's what is the bottom line, what is the return to my investors. However, with the arts, it is what is my return to the community? How do I balance my budget? All very complicated and it takes some special people.
MR. JONES: Arts is big business, but it's big business with a unique twist because it touches the soul and spirit in ways that perhaps other endeavors don't.
MS. CERVENY: It's entirely about quality of the product. It's not how can we make this cheaper and more of them. It's how we can make them more unique and best that it possibly can be.
MR. FROLIK: On the topic of quality, you mentioned ticket sales and marketing. There was a lot of discussion at the recent Art Summit, at some of the breakout sessions about developing awareness, both within this community but beyond the immediate area. Let's start outside and maybe we'll go inside. There's clearly some really fabulous assets here, cultural assets. The various programs at Playhouse Square, the orchestra, the art museum, other things that are really of national, even world caliber.
How do we get that word out that Cleveland gets recognized as an art center of the United States and perhaps then translates into looking at economic development as perhaps arts tourism where people would come here seeing this is a destination to come and indulge for a weekend or a week in the arts.
MR. BUSTA: One of the most important things to get the word out is to make a deliberate decision to participate in the International World of the Arts instead of just doing what we do well, to have what we do here intentionally be part of the international dialogue of ideas. We have been, I think, too satisfied and too complacent in serving our immediate audience rather than looking beyond that and saying, okay, we are interested in what's happening elsewhere in the world and we want the rest of the world to be interested in what is happening here.
MR. SCHORGL: And we entered the global village probably ten years ago and we need to continue to focus on that. One thing in particular, in yesterday's Plain Dealer there was an article about the International Piano Competition. It is a great competition but it's visibility is not as high as it could be. Now, the Cleveland Orchestra is collaborating with the international Piano Competition and with that collaboration it will ratchet up its visibility, where our International Piano Competition will, in fact, start to get international recognition. We should do that with a number of different arts and cultural festivals that take place in this region.
And when you look at places like Indianapolis, Indianapolis know now that the 500 is a great branding but it's not the only branding. The city of Indianapolis, Lilly Endowment, which is this little foundation in Indianapolis and the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Indianapolis, have put 10 million dollars into a mass marketing campaign to brand Indianapolis as an arts and cultural center in the midwest. We're in competition with Indianapolis and we should be doing some of those same strategies.
Cleveland Today, which no longer exists, one of the things that certainly we need to reinvestigate, is how they went about using the marketing experts in this community for think tanks, and the arts and cultural sector should go back to that and see how do we put together a campaign on a local, regional, national and international level. We have at least three international arts and cultural organizations. I'm not going to name them because I would get in lots trouble. We have at least 10 national arts and cultural organizations and we have maybe 20 or 30 regionally recognized arts and cultural organizations. By my estimates, we only have three nationally recognized sports teams.
MS. THORNTON: You know, coming here ten years ago from Saint Paul, Minneapolis, where the arts were viewed as important within the Twin Cities, I was pleasantly surprised, really, when I arrived here, not knowing Cleveland, not knowing anything about Cleveland, what quality arts we have. And I was just so excited about moving here. I think tourists discover that when they come to our city and they leave talking about what a wonderful arts community we have and how enjoyable it is. And they become a marketing tool, in essence for us, when they go back to their communities.
But I agree that I think we ought to have far more of a concerted effort and campaign in marketing that, not only in the midwest, but beyond the midwest because it's here. It exists.
MS. CERVENY: And I happen to see some literature that was produced, I think it was a combined effort of the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati about towering through Ohio via those cities and it was a cultural tour, and I looked at the information, the photographs, the maps, the organizations for Cincinnati and for Columbus. There was this very exciting visual, lots of organizations.
And I look at the one for Cleveland, there were maybe three organizations mentioned and the map identified four or five organizations and with the list that Tom just gave us with who is really here and how many of them are. I wonder, who is marketing the arts in our community?
MR. JONES: I agree with everyone in their sentiment that we need to take what we have that's unique and special and superior, locally in the arts and culture and make sure that the entire region and state and world knows about it, but I think some of our best ambassadors can be those who reside right here in Cuyahoga County and we have to do a better job of letting our own residents know what's available in the arts so they can help spread the word and the gospel about the great things we're doing here in the arts and in culture. I think to that extent we have to find creative ways to engage the private sector and also to engage the public sector.
You and I were having a conversation a few days ago and came to the agreement that if we had more exhibits in public spaces, in public places here, then we open up access to the arts much larger than it would have been, so people can become aware of some of the great things that are offered here. And certainly, there's no reason why it happens from time to time, more of our private sector counterparts can't have art exhibits or performances at the their own facility and headquarters. I think this is a way that you begin to build an Army of people who are much more familiar with and conversing on what's happening on the art scene and the cultural scene and they share that with their friends, both here and abroad about the great things we're doing.
MR. SCHORGL: Commissioner Jones makes a splendid point and that splendid point is, without a tremendous amount of infusion of dollars through utilizing visual, performing and literary arts through percent per arts programs in terms of public works, you can brand this community by using its creative artists and arts and cultural institutions.
Seattle is a good example. Seattle's percent per art program defines that community. There is this Seattle Sewer Systems, and when that ordinance was originally passed in Seattle about 25 years ago, the city counsel got a little upset because the first public works project was about the sewer systems. The counsel people were saying, we're going to have paintings down in the sewers? The Seattle Arts Commission working with the City Council developed a protocol still in use today.
Let's identify an artist and have that artist work with the city planners, the city engineers, the architects, the plumbing contractor, whoever is going to be involved in that public works program to come up with a concept, the concept in terms of Seattle's first work was they identified a Native American artist who was a totem pole carver. He worked with this group of this team of architects, designers and engineers, and if you go to Downtown Seattle, every one of the manhole covers is a Bahia relief sculpture.
Didn't cost any more money, gotta have those manhole covers or people will fall into the street but each one of those manhole covers is one of those Native American totem images in Bahia relief. You can see people in Seattle streets doing rubbings on rice paper of manhole covers. That's important.
MR. FROLIK: Art, you were saying.
MR. FALCO: Just to follow on one of Tom's earlier points and that is, it's all communication. You have to communicate what is being offered and that takes money, without question that takes money. And many of the arts organizations and individual artists have their own budgets and whatever and collaborating and pulling it all together is something that is missing in this community, that, because everyone is working very hard at selling their own attractions, but, some entity, some person, whatever, to pull it all together and really to develop these packages to draw.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau in Toronto, ten years ago, did a wonderful job of branding, come to Toronto and see Phantom of the Opera. Phantom of the Opera happened to be a very commercial success, but the fact of the matter is, they spent a lot of money in the Great Lakes States, particularly in Northeast Ohio. Fifteen percent of their audience came from Northeast Ohio. So, all of those dollars from Northeast Ohio were going up to Toronto. And certainly, if they're going to Toronto, they're going to spend a weekend and partake in other types of activities. So the key is, how do we communicate it and what type of funding vehicle is in place to help develop these packages, because we have as much if not more than Toronto to offer.
MR. FROLIK: Is the putting together of something like that, is that up to the existing arts organizations to the Convention and Visitors Bureau growth? Is it some new entity we haven't yet created? Who should be doing that?
MS. CERVENY: I think it is the latter but also in collaboration with all of the others you mentioned. In more cities there's a local arts counsel that is the representative and advocate for and it can be the umbrella that that can speak for the arts and work as a partner with the Convention and Visitors Bureau with the Growth Association and all those others. It's something that we have been missing in this community and I think, at this point in time, Tom stands for that right now.
MR. SCHORGL: We do.
MS. CERVENY: And is doing what he can but doesn't have the funding mechanism, the stream of dollars that really let's him capitalize on what he's built so far.
MR. SCHORGL: Twenty-five percent of my staff is with you today. But having said that, we worked for 30 months with support from the Cleveland and George Gund Foundation to create a regional arts and cultural plan, which is seen by other communities as a model strategic plan, and it identifies different ways to address some of the issues that we've talked about.
One of the things that I think we have to always bring to bear in terms of Cleveland, is we have got this great cultural asset but when we look at other regional communities that invest at a local level, public sector support, the top ten communities and in Quiet Crisis, when we were doing other articles, you mentioned a number of those top ten communities: Seattle, Austin, Portland, those top ten communities invest about ten dollars per capita on average. In Northeast Ohio, our region, its about 64 cents per capita. We have got to catch up because it's a revenue stream that hinders us. We don't have it.
MR. FROLIK: We're going to get to the funding question in a bit. I want to get back to the process that you folks did in With the Partnership. When he was here on the panel back in January, David Burkholz really thought that that was, he commented on it as a model for involvement of communities regionally in terms of planning and defining what we want to do. From your experience and the thousands of people that were involved in that, do you have a sense, do folks in Northeast Ohio, is there a recognition of the quality and quantity of culture and artistic assets here?
MR. SCHORGL: Absolutely. We were expecting sort of a 75 percent approval rating, because nationally, when you look at the national statistics on a community basis, about 75 percent of the community understands that their arts and cultural organizations exist and they are good to excellent quality. The research using the same sort of protocol was 96 percent of the respondents feel that arts and cultural organizations rank at excellent to good, which is one of the highest.
In fact, the company that did this said they had never seen a higher rate. I think there is, I think there is a serious reason behind that. I think and I have been here for five years, there's a great passion in terms of people that live in Northeast Ohio about the assets that they have. Everybody loves the Cleveland Indians. Obviously, everybody loved the Browns because they came back over overwhelming odds. The Cavaliers, the same thing we saw, again, we looked at Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and the region, is that there's a great sense of pride in the arts and cultural organizations.
People who have never attended the Cleveland Orchestra or who have never gone through the doors of the Playhouse Square, who have never been in Karamu House, all know that their out there and they know that they're one of the best in the world. So, there's a pride there and that's good. That's community spirit.
MS. THORNTON: But I think, Tom, that community spirit has to be translated into an economic development.
MR. SCHORGL: Absolutely.
MS. THORNTON: Motivation to participate, to be part of it, to attend, to get engaged and to be in a way, in whatever way possible, a contributor. I don't think the contributions, the donations, the participation has to be only by the wealthy. I think, in any community, the support for the arts is widespread. And certainly, I think, in our community that's an encouragement that we need to continue making, so that people feel that they too own the arts in our community. And I think that is part of a campaign that we're going to have to help to initiate.
MR. FALCO: You're absolutely right, Jerry Sue. For many, many years the arts were considered elites, at least on a perception basis. And the reality today is it's less to attend a Tri-C Jazzfest than to attend a Cavaliers game or a Browns game or whatever. And that's not to say anything negative about a sports team, but many times there are more seats, I believe, that are more expensive at sports events than any of the arts, performing arts, visual arts, whatever. And so, it's a perception issue.
MR. BUSTA: It's interesting, the perception of arts as an elites. If you go to a gathering of artists and dancers and writers and tell them that they're elites while they're struggling to imagine what it might mean to have a beer budget, it's not that way at all. If you actually talk to the arts professionals, the people who are participants in the arts, you find they come from all walks of life, from all sorts of cultural backgrounds with extraordinary differences.
Commissioner Jones mentioned something earlier about the arts and I would like to expand on it a little bit because it's an economic impact that we haven't touched on enough, and that is, he said, he used the word touched, that the arts touched the spirit. I contest that a little bit, they don't touch the spirit, they drive the spirit. They become the thing that helps us to establish who we are, to explore what it means to be who we are and drives us to reach for new ideas, different heights, new ventures.
MR. JONES: Bill, I will accept that friendly amendment.
MS. THORNTON: Going back though, Bill, I think the perception that the arts may be for the elite. I think that's a legacy of the past because much of the donation, contribution and support of the arts were with people who were of means. I don't think that's the reality today. And I think that's what we have to dispel is the myth of the legacy and that it really is for everyone.
MS. CERVENY: And how do you do that? It seems to me that demystifying who the artist is, who is this musician that plays in the Cleveland Orchestra, who is this dancer that performs at Playhouse Square, what is their life like? These are real people just like you and me, and they're out doing something with a great passion. I think we don't understand enough about who these people are?
MR. JONES: I think you're absolutely right. If you improve access to the performer, the artist, and improve access to the actual artistic event. One again, returning to the concept of better utilizing our public places and even some of the private sector venues in order to help enable better access to the arts. I think that can make a difference. It can certainly address the issue of that being in the sole purview of the wealthy and the affluent.
MS. THORNTON: I don't want to lose the point of philanthropy as well. I want to hold on to the philanthropy part because even if I have a small amount of money, but I want to donate that, that's going to be appreciated. It's going along way in our community to share the arts with others. So, I don't want to lose the insight or idea of philanthropy for the common person.
MR. BUSTA: Well the movement of the arts in the last several decades from being more of an elite to more of an activity that serves the general public didn't happen by accident. It happened because of public funding of the arts, that the National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Arts Counsel have from their inception focused upon that broad, the idea of broadening the reach of the arts and that's an objective that by and large has been reached and continues to reach further.
MS. CERVENY: You know, I would like to build on what Bill was saying, though. It's one of the things, one of the reasons that the arts are still perceived as elite here, because up until now and still there is only private support for the arts by and large. It is the foundations that provide that support, it is the individual patrons and philanthropists. Many of these institutions were formed with a notion of being elite in the best sense of that word, you know, world class, the best that we can possibly do. And they were founded with, many of them, with significant endowments so that they are sustainable over the long run. They didn't necessarily have a public mandate.
And it is with the beginning of the National Endowment and the State Arts Counsel money certainly that flow and at the local level, the local public dollars, that really mandate that the arts need to be accessible and open to the general public. And it's something that we need to fix here in this community.
MR. SCHORGL: That accessibility is growing. The arts and organizations are investing about 5 million annually in portable arts programs, another word for it is Outreach. These are low cost or no cost programs that go out into the community. A good example is a little baroque orchestra called Apollo's Fire.
Apollo's Fire doesn't have a residency. Apollo's Fire goes from church to church to church to synagogue to temple throughout Northeast Ohio. In other words, they're bringing a high quality arts program to the people. They are familiar, they go in and they say we want to perform in your backyard. The orchestra, all of the arts and cultural organizations have educational programs. Art is in the process of being, one of the wonderful arts education, well, I don't want to take your thunder Art.
MR. FALCO: It's a 40,000 square foot arts and education center that will have studios, dance studios, classrooms so that we can bring more students to Playhouse Square Center. In addition, we can actually teach them, and actually teach the teachers. Because one of the fall outs of arts leaving a lot of the curriculums of schools over the last 20 years is a lot of those students are now teachers and have never been brought up with the arts in their curriculum. They don't understand it, so we are acting as a resource to help those teachers develop their curriculum.
And so you're absolutely right, this is going to be state of the art and we hope to add some other very exciting pieces to this arts education center that may go into video and whatever.
MR. SCHORGL: Not only great arts education but it's developing the future audiences of Northeast Ohio.
MS. CERVENY: That is one of the subterranean aspects in the nonprofit arts community. There are enormous numbers of outreach programs and education programs that do go out into the communities, delivered in libraries and neighborhood centers. But, it's difficult to communicate that. It's tough enough for some of these organizations to put together these wonderful programs, let alone market them effectively so that people know about them.
MR. FROLIK: That really does need to get out. I'm think back to last summer when the Western Reserve Historical Society folks brought their case for their museum to City Council and then Councilman Bill Patmon, basically, had some very tough questions about, he represents the Glenville area, he said he had gotten redistrict in University Circle with the institution. He said, frankly, to many of his constituents those were totally irrelevant, those seemed like those were an island that they weren't, not necessarily they didn't feel welcome at, but the felt like no one had ever invited them. If they had gotten in, they might have felt welcome.
MR. JONES: That's the purpose of the outreach.
MR. SCHORGL: I think the Western Historical Reserve and other arts and cultural organizations had some additional revenue streams the communication of the Afro-American Festival that takes place every year at that particular facility would be known by more people. So, there are programs that are making those connections, but we need to do a much better job of communicating those to a larger populous.
MR. JONES: Tom, it's almost a chicken and egg question, because without the outreach it's kind of hard to generate the kind of widespread public enthusiasm that permeates ever demographic group which then creates an atmosphere in which public bodies are willing to expend more as well as individuals. So, we have to attack one of the issues first, without too much delay.
And I think when the opportunities exist for outreach, they have to be done because I think, ultimately that rule down to the benefit of the entire arts community by generating more public enthusiasm to financial support.
MS. CERVENY: The dilemma is complicated by the fact that while these organizations do produce wonderful outreach program and education programs, their main business is in a facility and they have to keep doing that and that is where the art form is delivered at its highest level. And so, the education and the outreach programs are additional things they have to do above and beyond their core mission.
They have to make some very tough decisions sometimes about where the dollars are going to come from. Are they going to advance their core mission, you know, mount the best exhibition they possibly can, create the new ballet or theater or do they do another outreach program that they have to try and find the money to support.
MR. FROLIK: Let's move on to the funding because obviously you're all champing at the bit to get to that and it certainly underlies everything.
A little bit historically, and maybe, Kathleen, you might want to talk about this, how has the funding structure in the Cleveland arts changed maybe in the last 10 or 20 years since we lost a number of the Fortune 500 corporations? I can remember when BP was one of the prime funders of arts and what are now philanthropically-supported organizations. It was what was the good housekeeping seal of approval along with the Cleveland Foundation. How has the role of corporate support changed?
MS. CERVENY: Yeah. It's changed a lot. I would actually like to go back a little bit in advance of that because there have been -- you know, it's a cyclic thing to some extent.
At the time when the National Endowment for the Arts was founded, corporations also began to look at the arts as a good citizenship kind of activity that they would engage in and we saw at that point in time a significant rise in corporate support and corporate support for the core of what organizations needed and did, providing operating support and so forth.
And there was this period of time through the '60s and '70s when there was really a very significant amount of support from the corporate sector, from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well, and the state arts councils and local art councils were founded at that point in time. So it was this wonderful heyday, if you will, of both public and private support for the arts.
As recessions came and times got tougher, we began to see both challenges to the public dollars, many challenges to the National Endowment for the Arts and the state arts funding, but we also saw corporations begin to rethink the use of their philanthropic dollars. And we saw in the late '80s and early '90s a significant shift in a couple of areas. One, they needed to use their philanthropic dollars for marketing support. They needed to advertise, to market their own businesses and so they looked to arts activities that would give them more bang for the buck, if you will. And so instead of an annual operating grant to an organization, they would underwrite a high profile production and there would be some competition for that because everybody would want that one thing. And so the dollars were drawn away from the operating side of it, in addition to which the dollars started to come out more from the marketing budgets and they were smaller.
The other thing that we saw happen in the '80s and '90s is that being a headquarters city was not necessarily a feather in your cap if you were an arts organization. Usually those dollars went into the headquarter cities and the arts organizations there. Corporations began to realize that they do business all over the country or all over the world and so there may not be fewer dollars being spent on the arts, but they were spread out in all the communities and cities where they were doing business.
So it's not that BP's $3 million that it gave to the arts disappeared. It went across the country instead of all staying in Cleveland as it had for a period of time. So that's some of the big shifts that we began to see. And we also saw, as corporations were looking to support the arts as a marketing tool for them, they tended to identify the biggest organizations in the community, the ones that had national level visibility or international visibility as the ones where they wanted to invest their dollars more than in some of the smaller local organizations.
MR. SCHORGL: It's called market-based philanthropy.
MS. CERVENY: And we saw a lot of that. The other piece, though, that is coming that is very interesting, it sort of goes to the private philanthropy piece Jerry Sue was talking about earlier is that we are now starting to see with the great growth in personal wealth that happened also through the '90s in particular, we're seeing a lot of individuals setting up their own foundations, working with community foundations to create donor-advised funds, and so we're seeing an incredible boom in individual philanthropic potential in the community and that's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out.
MS. THORNTON: I think, Joe, too, we're going to have to be more creative in the arts just as in business and industry and as thing are changing in our city away from the thinking that it's only the large corporations that can fund things, that it's spread among many organizations, many people, many foundations. We were talking not too long ago about the wonderful tapestry in the atrium of the City -- the new City Club and how that was funded by WPA money.
I think we're going to have to start thinking about a lot of ways in funding the arts, particularly public arts, particularly arts that is delivered in the community or neighborhood as well as in the institutions. So we're going to see a lot of creativity and a lot of inclusiveness.
MR. FROLIK: Tom, when you talk about the level of public funding in other cities, how -- what is the typical mechanism by which they go about raising that? Is it an add-on to a sales tax or some other sort of fee? Is it some sort of broad based part of a regional income tax?
MR. SCHORGL: There's a variety of ways and some of the communities that we're in competition with have developed, for instance, in St. Louis part of their public sector support comes from a property tax, a small percentage of a millage in terms of St. Louis goes into operating support dollars for arts and cultural organizations throughout St. Louis.
In Pittsburgh, they have a regional tax that comes from sales. Dayton, Ohio, little Montgomery County, they added a, let's see, 25 percent increase in terms of their sales tax and out of that they funded new housing projects and economic development initiatives and in that economic development initiative, a set of dollars were earmarked for operating support and project support for the arts and cultural organizations as well as any not-for-profit organizations. The community college receives money for arts projects through this fund to be used in terms of an economic engine. And one of the thing, they went through a ten-year cycle where there was about a million dollars being spent in that area.
Just recently they did an analysis and they decided that the impact was so great that they wanted to bump it up to another $2.5 million. In I think it's Tucson, there is a tax on all the public golf courses and a part of that tax goes to arts and cultural organizations. The hotel/motel tax is one of the largest and most significant ways that most of the communities that we see in terms of size and the same sort of quality, although its -- I would say Cleveland's quality is always higher in terms of its arts and cultural assets than just about 99 percent of the communities. There is some argument around New York, but other than New York, which also provides public sector funding for the arts, there is, there's a users tax in terms of people who come into the community and arts and culture is a tourism draw.
In fact, tourists, arts and cultural tourists on average spend about $216 per person. The average for most tourists is a little bit below that. So hotel/motel, sin tax, sin tax being cigarettes and alcohol, parking tax. There's a number of ways to generate that type of revenue.
MR. FALCO: Tom, what about Denver?
MR. SCHORGL: Denver has an interesting model where six counties are working together in terms of a property tax and it's based on three levels, the major institutions, the medium-sized institutions and then each of the counties have a pool of money, and they generate each year about $42 million annually for arts and culture.
One of the things that we did in our research was to try and index some of the needs in terms of the arts and cultural organizations and needs in terms of investment, and the national average, for instance, for cash reserves for any not for profit is about 25 percent. Aggregately speaking, in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, the arts and cultural organizations only have about 14 percent cash reserves which means they have a very thin margin if something doesn't go well. If a particular snow storm comes in and you can't make box office, you can find yourself in a deficit situation.
That 11 percent difference is about $30 million a year, and as I recall, looking at millage right now, I think 1 mill is about $28 million. So I better stop there.
MR. FROLIK: Without going into how you -- the precise type of tax, what would be sort of the things that would have to be do you think -- Peter, you are the politician at the table -- to sell something like this to the voters? What are the kinds of things, as it comes to your mind, what are the questions that they would have that would have to be answered? How would you structure this in terms of convincing people, yes, this is something that is worth taking some of our public revenues and investing in?
MR. JONES: First, let me just point out that there is public funding for the arts but it occurs fairly much on a discretionary or ad hoc basis. You do on the state level have over $32 million that has gone in the last several budget cycles to the Ohio Arts Council. You have a number of different capital appropriations that are made. As a matter of fact, when I was on the general assembly as a Democrat on the House Finance and Appropriations Committee, I was able to personally get I think it was about $60,000 to the Cleveland Public Theater to assist it.
So on the County level, there have been discretionary grants of approximately $1 million, when you also include money that was appropriated for the Cleveland Film Society or Film Commission, so there has been some support. But again, it's been on a pretty much ad hoc basis.
I think that in order to sell to the public the idea that they should commit through property taxes or through increasing a sales tax, and I should point out that some mechanisms would require State authority. The State would have to authorize and empower local government to increase, for example, in Cuyahoga County, the sales tax, we already have the highest in the state or to raise funds through other means might require action by the general assembly first.
The case that you have to make is a pretty basic and straightforward one, essentially the same that you have to make when you are trying to sell any levy. But the difficulty is is this would be something new, something novel. And we're looking at a time right now when many school districts are still having trouble passing their own levies and where next year, at least at the County level, I would expect there's going to be a rather significant health and human service levy and also at a time when there are many agencies and organizations that wish to have their own levies.
The Mental Health Board is trying to test the waters to determine whether or not the public would be amenable to a levy, the funds that would be generated that would go to support mental health activities here in the County. But in trying to sell an arts and culture-related levy, the one thing one would have to do is mobilize the arts community, and to the extent that the arts community is dispersed throughout the county, that actually creates an opportunity because you will have pockets of support virtually everywhere for such a concept.
Again, you have to paint the clear picture of the economic benefits that are derived by the arts, what we already experience in the way of direct and indirect spending that occurs as a consequence of salaries that are paid to those who are involved in the business of arts and the business of culture. And I think one could do that. You also have to talk about the importance of the arts and persuasively and compellingly as something that draws to our community the young, the gifted and the fairly affluent. Paint that and portray the arts as an important magnet in bringing to the community the kinds of individuals that help to revitalize, would help revitalize the City, this County and this region. I think that the pitch could be made.
I think it could be made successfully. The only concern that I would have, as in most things, timing is essential, an important component, and the question is given at least over the next foreseeable future with a number of very important levies, the fundamental one on health and human services, whether another levy specifically dedicated to the arts could succeed. But I also want to point out you can also kind of expand any particular levy to also include some funding for the arts, for health and human services and perhaps even for a convention center. I mean, we have all of these kinds of ideas that are percolating. It's a matter of packaging them well and getting communities that have an investment in their success to all work quite diligently to sell and market the idea.
MR. FROLIK: Tom, in the research that was done for the Partnership, I believe the poll service said roughly two-thirds of people said that they would pay higher taxes to support the arts.
MR. SCHORGL: Right.
MR. FROLIK: Yet when a millage was put in the Summit County ballot in 2000, I think it went down about 2 to 1. Without getting into the specifics of that campaign, what kind of lessons did you perhaps learn from that if something were to go on the ballot either in Cuyahoga County or regionally ?
MR. SCHORGL: One of the things that took place in terms of Summit County is the time, the time that was available for the political leadership, the elected leadership to move this particular item to the ballots and then put together an informational campaign that was deep and broad. They had about 30 days to do that. So in terms of their ability to get the message out, the timing, as you pointed out earlier, was very, very weak.
The other thing is I think there was, there wasn't a whole lot of information about how the dollars would be spent. And I went to one of the evening speeches, the stump speeches that all the elected officials were doing at libraries. I went to the one in Peninsula, and they -- the people that were supporting this levy were there and they gave a very good presentation and then it was time for questions. And so as the hands came up, I thought, well, I know what the questions are going to be, not another new tax. I was very surprised.
The question that came back over and over again, how are these dollars going to be distributed? What is going to be the mechanism? I think people are not so much concerned about public sector support with their dollars, but is it done in a fair and equitable manner that is based on the quality of the product, the community impact, broad community impact and the accountability, the organizations receiving those investments or the artists receiving those investments to spend it wisely. So the mechanism, if you will, is as important to understand as the levy.
MS. THORNTON: Beyond the local taxes, whether it's the City or County or northeast Ohio, I think we're going to have to work harder in getting a greater return of our federal tax dollars back to Ohio, particularly for the arts. As I look at the distribution of dollars that are going to other states in relation to the federal dollars that are available, they're often greater than what we're seeing in Ohio. So I think we're going to have to work collectively much more closely with our elected representatives who are in Washington to encourage a return to Ohio, particularly northeast Ohio, of dollars that could support the arts. I think that's another funding source for us.
MR. JONES: You know, Jerry Sue, that is an interesting comment. You're absolutely right, but, unfortunately, we find ourselves more and more at a disadvantage in terms of getting the federal government to pay more attention. We continue to, relative to the rest of the country, lose a population, at least in terms of population growth, so we have fewer members of congress here in northeast Ohio. When we look on the State level, we have lost a seat in the Ohio House.
Given the partisan makeup of the General Assembly in comparison and in contrast to the partisan makeup of the Cuyahoga County Delegation, we tend to be at a disadvantage. So just at a time when we, in this northeastern Ohio region, deserve to and seek to have more federal support and more state support, we seem to be increasingly at a competitively disadvantage.
MS. THORNTON: Peter they're not asking us to pay fewer dollars .
MR. JONES: That's for sure. Your point is well taken. I agree.
MR. SCHORGL: The reliance, though, on the federal support and the state support still leaves open the lack of local public sector support. You have got to have those three revenue streams to nurture and sustain an asset, and our concern is the fact that we're seeing evidence that the arts and cultural asset is going into atrophy, and if it atrophies, then how much more is it going to take us to rebuild that strength.
I know that when I don't run for awhile during the winter, it's very difficult to get back in shape again and so I want to run. I want to make sure that the arts and cultural community has all of the tools to move this community forward. And not at the periphery but right at the center of community development, like the community college, like a number of social service agencies. We know the impact, so let's move those arts and cultural organizations to the table, which happened yesterday with the Cleveland City Council Arts and Cultural Summit.
MR. JONES: You know, Tom, I think Joe Cimperman, what he did convening the Arts Summit was so important in that effort to create the kind of environment in the public and sensitivity in the public that ultimately will lead to greater public support for the arts, and not just because you're sitting across from me, but what you have been doing in terms of getting the business community and getting labor and a number of very important players. Anytime you talk about public support or a levy or a campaign of a certain nature, getting them to talk and be on the same page and be unified in their support of a particular mission, in this case expansion of the arts, it's important for the arts I think as a very key component and will ultimately lay the foundation so that there could be a successful political effort in a concerted fashion to specifically help fund the arts here in northeast Ohio.
MS. CERVENY: And the arts organizations and the individual artists in this community are going to have to get comfortable I think for the first time being engaged in the political realm. They are going to have to come out and help the campaign. They are going to have to be willing to stand up and be counted, if you will, and work hard for this effort. We have not asked them to do that before.
MR. SCHORGL: Performance-based outcomes. If you are going to receive public sector support, that's the game.
MR. CERVENY: It's the accountability piece that actually public dollars can make happen more than private dollars do.
MR. FROLIK: A number of you have been involved with grant writing to the various national and state arts councils. Tom, you ran the Indiana Arts Council for a number of years. Peter, in the legislature. What would be sort of the safeguards you have to build into this to avoid the public sense that either this is Welfare for artists or that it's a subsidy for either elitism or some people say it's a subsidy for mediocrity.
MR. SCHORGL: It should be public investment. It shouldn't be public entitlement. The arts and cultural community needs to and can show that with public sector support, it is an economic force. It does bring dollars into the community. It makes a higher quality of place. Many times we say, well, it's better quality of life. I have kind of tended to go away from that because I'm not that presumptuous that I know what all of my friends feel in terms of quality of life, but I surely understand that quality of place will make my quality of life better and then education.
So it's about jobs. It's about bringing new companies in, and if we put the same type of investment that we put into other types of for-profit ventures, which we should, Browns Stadium, Gund Arena, Jacobs Field, for-profit companies receiving public subsidy, public investment. Why not use some of those dollars to do the same thing for another asset? And again, how are those dollars distributed? Behind closed doors? No. It should be a public process with criteria. It should be something that we use, as Kathleen said earlier, to demystify what this asset is about.
One of the big issues that I have had with the NEA for a long time, the NEA, not the National Educators Association but the National Endowment for the Arts, is that their adjudication of these grants takes place behind closed doors. Why not put that on C-SPAN? I mean, the stuff I see on C-SPAN puts me to sleep. Why not put the adjudication, the investment in the arts and cultural community -- it's not a frivolous thing. It's a hard decision-making process.
The Ohio Arts Council, through the leadership of Commissioner Jones when he was state representative, they have an open process. Why not do that on a local level?
MR. JONES: I think also when you talk about the process which will determine how funds are distributed is also going to be important for voters ultimately to know that not all the money or the vast majority of the money will not go to those institutions that are already well supported and well endowed. It will also have to be clearly demonstrated, it will have to be the feeling that the moneys will be distributed to a diverse group of institutions so that the neighborhood theater that you attend will receive some support as a consequence.
MS. THORNTON: I would like to see us also think about arts incubator centers the way we think about business incubator centers for other industries. That really is about manufacturing. It really is about the sale of product. We are a manufacturing community and part of that, and it's not negative to think of that in relation to the arts and the products that could be developed in our arts community.
Just like an artist's community or neighborhood in the greater Cleveland area, I would love to see us begin to focus on small business development around the arts and ways in which we could grow through incubator centers our arts.
MR. FROLIK: I was reading in the preparation for the Summit and for this conversation that in Seattle there's an effort to do that, to set up an arts incubator and to treat individual artists, offer them gallery spaces, a grant so they can actual focus, young promising artists can focus on their art for a year, or whatever the life of the grant is, and as in an incubator, shared administrative things bring in things to help them think about themselves as small businesses.
Bill, you have worked a lot with artists over the years. Is that something -- especially individual artists. Is that something, one, that would be appealing to them and do they feel when they hear this discussion about arts, you hear arts organizations as the recipient, where does that lone eagle artist, where does he or she fit in?
MR. BUSTA: That is always an interesting question, where does arts money go to. You know, it pays the guy who gets the coal out of the ground that fuels the electric plant than it helps the individual artist. You know, part of what you are just discussing, how will the people perceive the funding and that, you know, it always seems the individual artist is a lightening rod, that somebody can come up with one particular artist that did something that other people are offended by. And a lot of that is -- I think part of the problem is the arts community because instead of talking about all the different artists that do things, we rush to the defense of the one artist that did something that even we think is sort of obnoxious but we want to defend their right to do it.
I'm reminded in the newspaper a few weeks ago there was a little item about a tax watchdog group that said that the federal government paid some money to help support a million dollars to help fund restoration of a statue made for the 1904 World's Fair in Alabama, and they left it at that. But what they didn't say is that the statue was a Vulcan and that the statue of the Vulcan was a symbol of the steel-making heritage of the city and that it was the symbol of the city and it was a way that the people would collectively express the identity of place.
You know, with the individual artists, there's -- when I think of Cleveland, I want to give just a very specific example. There was an artist, Laurence Channing, who is known for his charcoal drawings of Cleveland and he had a very distinguished career in graphic arts but he spent five or six years working every morning on his drawing without showing it to the public, and it was actually an Ohio Arts Council fellowship that gave hip the confidence to show that work to the public.
And if people have seen his work, whether in his one person show at the Center for Contemporary Art or Oswell in Cleveland, the difference that he makes is nobody who sees that work in Cleveland can see light in the city the same way that they ever have before. He has taught us something about how we see ourselves and how we can project ourselves to the rest of the world that nobody else can. And that's part of what the individual artist's message can be.
The funding for the arts, we mentioned the organizations here, but the primary funding for the arts has always been the artists themselves, their spouses and families, that they have largely subsidized the public performance, they have subsidized the training, they've subsidized with two or three different careers, those moments of time in which they present to the public. And, you know, probably funding artists directly, if you want bang for the buck, it delivers more out there to the community than possibly any other sort of investment we can do.
MR. SCHORGL: How much does a third string pulling guard make and how much does a first string cellist make? Big difference in terms of salary. That's fine, but we need to investment in both of those individuals.
We, in the United States, do a great job of providing fellowships to doctors, to engineers, to scientists. Why aren't we providing fellowships nationwide in terms of our arts and cultural entrepreneurs, our arts and cultural scientists?
MR. JONES: That takes us back to the original question that was asked in terms of why is it that we, as a society, tend to undervalue artistry the way we undervalue teaching in comparison to who, again, the third string shooting guard or pulling guard, depending on what sport we're talking about.
MR. SCHORGL: I think that Jerry Sue brought up earlier the WPA program is a good example. There were hundreds of thousands of artists that were employed throughout the United States during that period of time where there was an investment in those artists toss create a body of work, a body of work that is still with us today in terms of visual arts, theater, music. We can certainly look at that as a model and continue to do that.
The question I think comes down to are we valuing arts and culture in the same manner that we value other assets, and I think when we start to do that, you'll see very little, if any, opposition. Will there be opposition in terms of content? Yes. But I'm concerned about the Crusader tank that is going to being made for $11 billion that the president doesn't want. That is offensive to me, but I'm going to support that because I'm a taxpayer. $11 billion to the arts and cultural community? That would be pretty good.
MR. FROLIK: We mentioned the artists as entrepreneur. Another part certainly I think of economic development when you look at a city like Cleveland or Akron, sort of our older inner cities, is the artist as urban pioneer, and the artists have been very critical in terms of reviving areas.
Kathleen, you were a potter at one point in the building across the street from the Plain Dealer which is about to turn into a very nice place.
MS. CERVENY: To be honest with you, I think I was probably one of the last artists in that building before it was condemned. Tower Press Building as it's called. Artists have been place makers and place finders and place restorers for a long time in this community. There's a story that I like to tell that is -- maybe it's urban legend now because I don't know that it's written down anywhere and it's mostly in my memory and a few other artists.
The One Playhouse Square Building was squatted in by an organization called A Space and P Space long before Playhouse Square was even a notion in anybody's head.
A Space because, for artists space and performers space -- A Space became Spaces. When the redevelopment started to take place at Playhouse Square, it got too expensive for the teeny arts organization to continue to pay rent there, so Spaces moved to the Bradley Building in the Warehouse District which was a rundown, totally unused, disregarded part of the City, set up shop there, started to attract people to what was happening there. Rent got too expensive. Spaces had to move out and now they're practically in Ohio City at the end of the Detroit/Superior Bridge and in their own building finally because they didn't want to get kicked out again.
So artists have discovered -- artists have preserved Murray Hill. It's a thriving arts district because artists have staked out little claims there and made it a vibrant part of our community. Look at Tremont. Look what is happening at Tremont. It's artists that brought attention back to that neighborhood and vitality and investment and young professionals now that want to move there because of the creative verve and vibrancy that the artists bring to that.
So one of the things that we have missed doing here is recognizing what artists can bring to the sense of place and helping keep that there. I mean, it's too bad that they have to move out so that others can move in and you lose something in that process. Think of what Playhouse Square would be -- I mean there's efforts to bring galleries and so forth. What if Spaces was still there? Spaces is now one of the most prominent artist run organizations in the country. They get grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation. They are recognized nationally and now they are sitting at the end of the Detroit/Superior bridge instead of being in Playhouse Square. T
hat's nobody's fault, Art. It's just one of the examples of how artists find the interesting places and spaces in a community and make them more so and we don't embrace that.
MS. THORNTON: Well, in Pittsburgh, for example, the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild has made a difference in a really low-end come community and created the interest in other organizations moving into that area which is a wonderful combination of not only the arts but work force training together as a partner.
So I think there are many good examples around the country and in our own community where we can uplift the community with the arts.
MR. BUSTA: The role of artists not only as place maker but also as place holders as existing in that time between where there's no other economic use for a building and when it can be redeveloped. The Bradley Building in the Warehouse District was one of those examples where it was on the edge of being torn down and the income from renting the space to artists for studios filled in the gap that somewhat justified to the person who owned the building, maybe I shouldn't tear it down right now. Maybe there is a use for it.
But, also, I have often thought, if you look at artists, been in their homes in all areas of the City of Cleveland and frequently you see people with incomes that are on the poverty line living in quite elegant homes, quite well designed with the selection of furniture, the selection of items with upgrading through their sweat equity. And I think that maybe there is at some point a way that we can teach this, that they can be used as teachers to do renovation on no budget whatsoever but just on creativity and hutzspah.
MR. SCHORGL: Providence is a good example of a different model. It's not only putting forward an opportunity for building owners and developers to get tax abatements when they develop artists studio space and working with artists but in Providence, after a very, very intense planning process with individual artists, building owners and developers, retail merchants, city government leaders, state government leaders, they have created what sort of equates to a duty-free cultural zone in Downtown Providence. And that duty-free cultural zone provides the tax abatements as we usually know in terms of buildings not for five years but for ten years starting at 90 percent and de-escalating to 10 percent.
In terms of the individual artists, if you work as an individual artist, if you pioneer this part of Providence which was absolutely abandoned by the entire community, downtown Providence, any of the sale of your work as a performing artist or visual artist or literary artist is not subject, is not subject to state income tax. And then the third area -- so you have got the building owners, you have got the producers, the entrepreneurs, the artists. The third are the consumers, and if you purchase artwork, go to an event there, in fact, go to dinner there, go buy a book in this particular zone, you pay no sales tax.
So that's another way to provide investment is creating these particular zones that then become magnets for the creative spirit as well as the retail spirit.
MS. CERVENY: You know, we were talking actually before this conversation started about where the creative individuals and the supporters of creative artists live and we noted that many of them happen to live in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. What if we made a home for the artists downtown, the musicians in the orchestra, the performers at Playhouse Square and our theater companies? What if we made it possible and comfortable and exciting for them to live downtown? What would that do to the vibrancy of the city? What would that do to the street life of the city if we made some sort of accommodation for that happening?
MR. JONES: Actually, I thought that there was some consideration being given to that by the City of Cleveland right now. There are some members of Council who championed just such a thing. It's kind of interesting, this discussion. I believe it was only a couple of weeks ago I read where a prominent real estate developer said that one of the things that we lacked in Cleveland was a greater sense of Bohemia, in the positive sense of the word, and that if we had this, once again, that the vitality, the vibrancy, the excitement Of a downtown community that generally accompanies those who are Bohemian, again in the best sense of the word, would create a new excitement and a new milieu that would be attractive to, once again, the kinds of individuals that we need in our community to see us, again, grow and revitalize.
MS. CERVENY: Imagine what Euclid Avenue would be like or Prospect or Superior or any of the streets in the downtown area if artists were living there, they had their studios there, people would come and visit them, they had unique shops selling unique items. Art galleries, certainly, but jewelry and pottery and we have many clothing designers in our community instead of another Gap, you know and another, you know, chain store like every other city or community has. People would come here to have an arts district right in the downtown area connected with the theater district.
MR. SCHORGL: We are turning out high quality artists. We look at the Community College, we look at Case, Cleveland State University. There are graduating students that are coming out as great musicians, as great visual artists, as dancers who are at the top of their game and theater people. In fact, we have two institutions. One is the Cleveland Institute for the Arts that is dedicated to the visual arts and the other one is the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Are we retaining those graduates or are those graduates leaving, especially the higher end of those graduates?
MS. CERVENY: We are attracting them from elsewhere. They come here to study, but we don't make a place for them to stay.
MR. FROLIK: And that was part of the Providence, Rhode Island School of Design. They saw these outstanding people coming, spending four, five years, getting their degrees and then leaving.
MR. FALCO: You wonder whether there couldn't be some sort of funding formula where the building owners would actually get some sort of tax benefit as incentive, absolutely incentive to have artists that are on those first floors. Because you are absolutely right, Kathleen, Euclid Avenue, if we had artists and artist studios and whatever up and down Euclid Avenue, how much different Euclid would look today. It would be incredible.
MR. BUSTA: There's possibly nothing that no type of business that sells less per square foot than an art gallery in terms of retail sales. And on the other hand, there's few types of businesses that give more to the street. So as we develop not only just people coming in there but people gathering around the doors, opening nights on Murray Hill Road with crowds of people standing not only inside but standing outside smoking cigarettes and trying to avoid the heat of the lights, going to the restaurants afterwards, the point is that because an art gallery is not going to be able to afford high-end retail space, but on the other hand, they can help create a neighborhood that makes all sorts of other uses possible.
Instead of the first floors being abandoned, perhaps we can create a mechanism where it will happen. I know that the plans for Playhouse Square years ago showed art galleries there, but nobody ever figured out how do you make the space that we designate for those art galleries affordable to those businesses.
MR. FROLIK: I'm curious to the idea of the attraction that artists seem to have to the discussion we have had at this table with other panels in the past about the need to attract the young, bright creative minds in other areas, in information technology and biomedical research and basically anything that you can think of. The knowledge workers, artists you mentioned earlier, artists are themselves knowledge workers.
Talk a little bit, if you will, about how artists act as a draw to other people to come to a community which again gets very much to that how do we grow the economy and how do we grow sort of a new economy in Cleveland.
MS. CERVENY: Artists stay up late, they drink a lot of coffee. Many of them still smoke cigarettes. They like to be in physical environments that are unique and interesting, and I think if you would do a profile of some of the young, high tech entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs in almost any field, they are looking for that same kind of environment.
MR. SCHORGL: I would say those characteristics, but I think there's another characteristic that is equally important in that artists are individuals by virtue of what they do, whether it's writing a play, whether it's trying to compose, whether it's trying to sculpt, figure out a dance is they take risks. They have to take risks. There's no formula. Sure you can learn a scale, you can learn how to do a certain style and technique, but artists are constantly trying to discover something, trying to move their work forward, and if you look at other knowledge-based businesses, they're doing the same thing. We wouldn't have the computer chips today if everybody thought that the typewriter was the ultimate form of communication.
So I think there is a characteristic when it comes to creativity and you don't necessarily have to be a painter to be creative. You can be a computer designer to be creative, but you want to be in an environment where that type of creativity is supported and goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
MR. BUSTA: What the individual artist does is generate ideas and who knows what happens to those ideas. A lot of them nothing happens to, but the creative knowledge workers that are attracted to any place, they want to be in places where ideas are generated. They don't know what is going to help them, what is not going to help them. They want as much excitement in their off-work hours as their on-work hours. They are always looking for where is the place that the action is.
And you take a place like Seattle in the 1980s and into the 1990s and here was a place where high tech and grunge were very, very happy together.
MS. CERVENY: Who thinks outside of the box more than artists do? And what do entrepreneurs do? Constantly think outside of the box.
MS. THORNTON: I think there's also an attraction that when you have an artists community, it attracts other artists to that community. They feel comfortable with each other and there is a sense that there's going to be a support for that art, for that craft. And so I think if, in fact, if we in Cleveland continue to build our image that this is a place that is supportive of artists, that artists want to come here, I think we're going to see that just expand and grow. We're going to see more superstar artists who want to come here as well as people who are just beginning to get into an art form. So it behooves us again to encourage that kind of environment.
MR. JONES: And ultimately those who are not artists want to be in environments in which there's the excitement that artists create and want to be somewhere that is culturally vibrant and want to be somewhere where institutions are inviting because there's a lot happening, a lot taking place. There's action. And ultimately if we want to retain and to attract those who can help build this community for the future, those kinds of institutions, those kinds of communities need to exist right here.
MR. SCHORGL: It's cultural diversity. The knowledge base worker is not tied to one certain art form. They're omnivores. They want the best of Bach and they want the best of BB King.
MR. FROLIK: I was struck by one of the charts in your report, Tom, that if you look at the cities that are high in public support for the arts, you find San Jose, you find Seattle, you find Austin, you find these places who economically we say we would like to in some way perhaps emulate in terms of their success if not their precise formula.
Let me ask about an idea that I heard a lot of at the Art Summit. People talk about an arts festival, that this would be the kind of thing that maybe gets back to the whole marketing idea and that would cut across the lines of the various thing that we have here. When that is discussed, how would that -- what is the mechanism for that? How would that work? How would that help, if you think it would, how would that help put Cleveland more on the map as an arts center?
MR. BUSTA: In order to have the type of impact that I think people are really looking for, we would really have to have an arts festival like the Spoleto Festival in Charleston that actively seeks the national or international audience and that takes a lot of investment across the board with public money but by existing cultural institutions.
MS. CERVENY: We have pieces and parts of what could be a fabulous arts festival already happening in this community. Certainly the Tri-C Jazz festival. It is the premier educational Jazz festival. There's no reason that it can't take the next step and become the top ranking Jazz festivals in the country. So there's a piece of that happening.
I know that art every year brings together a showcase opportunity for the cultural performing arts institutions in our community and there's now a community component to that which is really very exciting, auditions and so forth and performances.
There is Parade The Circle. If we could get that thing downtown and instead of the 40,000 people that it draws, which is not an insignificant number, there could be 400,000 and it could kick off a week-long arts festival that happens here.
MR. SCHORGL: Like in Columbus, Ohio.
MS. CERVENY: That's right, Tom.
MR. SCHORGL: Like in Cincinnati.
MS. CERVENY: That's right. But I think what Jerry Sue indicated and Bill, we need to shoot for what is the quality event for this community which I would agree is a cut or two above what we see and what is unique to Cleveland.
MR. FALCO: And it will take resources. It will take financial resources and it will take human resources. It will take an entity to actually put it together and that's what this community doesn't have at this time.
MS. CERVENY: And to cooperate with all of the other entities that need to be a piece of that. The Convention and Visitors Bureau, for example, and the Growth Association.
MR. BUSTA: If you look at Pittsburgh, every three or four years the entire international visual arts community focuses their eyes on Pittsburgh for Carnegie International. Probably the most important international survey of art in the hemisphere. And I'm only mentioning that because you can say, well, it has to be on the East Coast or it has to be in a world capital. No; it doesn't. It's something that can be done here.
MR. SCHORGL: And the investment in that, it takes money, but the investment as compared to other types of world class like a superbowl in terms of football, the investment is so much smaller but you get a huge return. The Spoleto Festival generates hundred of millions of dollars for Charleston every year, and there's no reason why we can't do something similar to that because we have the material. We have the artists. We have the arts and cultural organizations.
MR. FROLIK: Well, great. I think this has been a very, very interesting discussion and I appreciate your participation.
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