This is my sixth and final post about the Grantmakers in the Arts 2010 conference, where I was invited to take part as a live blogger. It was tremendous fun: I got to write morning, noon, and night, which is my preferred type of ecstatic meditation. It was also a perfect antidote to the anxiety I sometimes feel when thrown into a sea of contacts and expected to network. Usually, the first time someone I’m talking to scans the room for a conversation-partner with more status, my heart sinks. This time, it was all just material. I’ve gotten lots of great response from readers already, a writer’s dream. Now I want to do it more, so if you’re planning a conference that needs up-to-the-minute blog commentary, let’s talk.

Some will tell you Some will tell you
Tell you what you really want ain’t on the menu
Don’t believe them Don’t believe them
Cook it up yourself and then prepare to Serve them
—”Jeremiah,” Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie opened the final plenary of the 2010 GIA conference with a recitation of these lyrics, then proceeded to practice what she preached. She alternately thanked the assembled funders for their support for artists, urged them to do more, and told edgy home truths:

• The music business is about music, not business; artists are there to pull the cart, to be milked for money.
• They say nobody wants war, but that’s not true: war is about money-laundering, not that this religion doesn’t like that religion.
• I’ve got more degrees and honorary degrees than you’ve had hot dinners. Colleges today are corporate vocational schools where corporations and the military go to recruit kids.
• When one has a billion and a billion have none, something is wrong.
• In North America, we have five major heavily funded colleges of war where a guy can go and spend his life getting advanced degrees in how to make war better. We don’t have one such college of that caliber and funding dedicated to alternative conflict resolution. How can a young person learn from Martin Luther King and Gandhi?

Everyone I talked to (not a scientific sample, of course) wished she’d spoken at the beginning of the conference rather than the end. It wasn’t that they disliked the earlier speakers; people enjoyed all the plenaries. It was that Buffy Sainte-Marie’s words, weaving a world that contained both hard realities and real hope, highlighted the intense contradictions of funding arts and culture in confusing, super-stressed times.

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On Tuesday, I attended a Grantmakers in the Arts conference presentation on “Participatory Arts and Community Health: Challenges and Opportunities,” organized by Amy Kitchener of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. It began with presentations on exemplary projects braiding art with individual and community well-being, offered by Maria Rosario Jackson of the Urban Institute, Beatriz Solis of The California Endowment; Josephine Ramirez of The James Irvine Foundation; Alaka Wali of The Field Museum; and Christine Dunford of Lookingglass Theatre and The Field Museum. They were so fiercely articulate that when I heard the Catalyst Quartet play Mu Kkubo Ery’Omusaalaba so beautifully at lunchtime, my mind skipped back to that group of women asserting art’s bond with well-being: different instruments, same story.

The discussion that followed their presentations turned to metrics, a word I can now barely stand to hear. The underlying question is important, though, as Maria Rosario Jackson phrased it: “What would it take to bring attention to this approach to arts and health, to validate it within and across sectors?”

People had a lot to say, clustering around two views.

Some are seeking ways to substantiate art’s role in well-being (or community development or any other area of public intervention) that slide easily into the existing systems of documentation and assessment used by other agencies. The underlying idea is that Health and Human Services (to pick a single example among many) can’t validate art as an integral part of its work unless art can be measured and described with instruments and language already familiar, comfortable, and compatible with HHS’ internal culture and vocabulary, its metrics. The hope is that if this translation can be accomplished, if HHS’ comfort zone can thus be breached and infiltrated, arts-based projects will eventually be accepted and supported.

Others doubt this will work (or suspect that blowback will distort the arts work rather than open up the agency), seeking instead to transform the standards of proof, so that stories, testimonies, interactions, and small-scale observations will coexist with what can validly be quantified. If what truly has most value can’t be conveyed by numbers, they argue, the systems of measurement have to adjust.

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Joi Ito, founder and CEO of Creative Commons, was the luncheon speaker at Monday’s GIA meeting. His relaxed and likable presence comes across as realness personified. His low-key style gives me a sort of internal headshake. By the time Ito’s presentation ended, I was buzzing with a frequency of intellectual excitement I’d normally associate with verbal pyrotechnics. How did he do it? Brilliance, originality, groundedness…. You had to be there: I wish you had been.

I thought about it all day, especially in the last session I attended in the afternoon, as I listened to a circle of artists, organizers, and funders take part in “Breaking out of a Bifurcated World: A Bridge Conversation on Philanthropy.” More about that below.

Ito began with a few stories relevant to his audience of artists and funders, such as serving on the first internet art jury for Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, fifteen years ago. That experience helped to define the internet as an art space. It also revealed a growing convergence of art and entrepreneurship, giving awards to people who identified as engineers or scientists, rather than as artists. It helped to create “a kind of community of artists that worked together with business people,” generating notable Web-based successes that twinned some aspect of art and enterprise. The best internet enterprises, Ito said, come from an arts background. Among others, he mentioned Kickstarter, as well as last.fm (long since sold for multimillions), his most lucrative Web investment as a venture capitalist.

Ito described how that first experience with Ars Electronica introduced him to the boundedness of the artworld, because some people got upset at the idea that the internet projects receiving awards should be called “art.” “You don’t know what art is,” they told him, “that’s design, it’s craft, not art.”

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The first plenary session of this Grantmakers in The Arts’ conference focused on the National Capitalization Project, a GIA initiative launched this past January. It was premised on the plain truth that arts organizations are often under-capitalized. A task force of funders and experts studied the literature, agreed on terms, and has just now published a “National Capitalization Project 2010 Summary,” summing up its findings. They are foregrounded in an extensive “Literature Review on Capitalization” issued last spring, (Both documents can be downloaded from this page.)

Especially in the stormy economic weather that has come to be the new normal, I wish there were enough funding available to accomplish the overarching goal of this project, giving every arts organization a rainy day fund to draw against for emergencies and temporary shortfalls.

If there were an adequate and steady funding supply, many of the observations and recommendations are logical and sound: make larger grants and multi-year grants to enable organizations to build up operating surpluses that can be held in reserve for emergencies or special expenditures. Provide general operating support instead of project grants that tend to create “mission drift,” as groups seek to satisfy funders’ aims instead of their own. Rather than seeking break-even budgets, let the existence of a surplus count on the positive side when making grants; don’t conclude that groups that have built up a cushion don’t need funding. Don’t just make grants: consider loans, program-related investments, and other initiatives that add to organizational capital.

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