The Visual Arts Ecosystem: East Bay, CA
No word is more prominent in the discussion of arts support than "ecosystem". It generally refers to the environment in which artists, arts organizations and art owners operate to do what they do on a plausible, supported, repeatable basis.
But to really come to grips with that, it is usually necessary to distinguish the economy from the ecology.
Arguably, the inherent potential output of art-making populations is as much an economic phenomenon as a cultural one, because, like all manufacturing, art-making uses time and labor to transform materials, so the supply of all three is existentially critical.
But presuming that supply exists, there is the matter of what supports the permanence and possession of anything made -- making it clear that environmental demand constrains the appetite and tolerance for what gets made and lasts, and why.
Archestra Research has taken most conventional notions of "economic impact of the arts" and set them aside as an explanation for whether survival prospects are high or low for the arts in their environment. The Archestra model presumes that the "ecosystem" is a relevant perspective when the means, motive, and opportunity for continual art-making are factors that systemically renew each other.
The system model for this integrated self-renewal is a closed loop of influences that (a.) are cultivated for synergy and (b.) define success as a utilitarian return on investments.
The magic wand part is that individuals and organizations would commit their missions and tactics to collaboratively implementing the system in mutually predictable ways.
This makes the system both an incubator and a cultivator, which becomes the singular perspective on what constitutes an "ecosystem". The goal is not to achieve any predefined scope and scale. The goal is to make it organically autonomous in a way that always attracts greater participation and resiliency against the volatility of larger-scale economic systems, the planning of which it historically cannot strategically influence enough. (The primary evidence of that is the ongoing sudden dissolution of funding sources, organizations or businesses, and legacy community demographics operating without a dafety net.)
Archestra -- with empirical research at the federal, state, county and city levels -- has published a pair of research documents that articulate the dynamics and participation in its new ecosystem model. The documents also explicitly interrogate recent economic studies of the arts commissioned by the state of California and separately by a leading East Bay non-profit arts coalition (neither of which generated the Archestra model).
The purpose of a model is not to script development. It is a demonstration of concept. A model presents a logically valid set of entities and relationships that account for the functional identity and structural coherence of a larger entity or phenomenon. This new model additionally includes ecosystem architecture and collaborative governance.
See the more conventional recent studies by the state and regional effort here:
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