Aspen Updates: The Importance of the Arts

For the second year in a row, I attended the Aspen Ideas Festival and participated in a panel discussion about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. The theme of this year’s Ideas Festival was “Imagining 2024.” One of the featured “tracks” of programming is about creativity, and the role that it will play in shaping our future. As part of that larger discussion, I talked with Anna Deavere Smith about the arts, and the role that media can play in strengthening our engagement with the arts. I feel strongly that as leaders, we must ensure that all Americans have access to the power and promise of the arts.

Through art, our cultural values are celebrated and challenged. In its seemingly limitless forms, art nourishes the spirit and strengthens the intellect. It connects us with our inner selves as well as to each other. And it elevates us individually and collectively as a nation. At no time in our history has there been a greater need than now to restore and reinvigorate public engagement with the arts.

This is directly related to our economy, and the future of our labor markets. As Richard Florida has written, in a world where technology and trade have transformed our planet into one massive labor market, Americans must offer new skills to compete. Skills that can’t be downsized, automated, or outsourced. Skills like creativity, originality, and inventiveness. In other words: The skills of an artist.

According to research conducted by Americans for the Arts, nonprofit arts organizations and their audiences generate almost $170 billion in economic activity annually, support 5.7 million jobs, and return almost $30 billion in revenue to the government every year. But the arts do so much more than is reflected in these direct measurements of their impact.

Exposure to the arts increases creativity and innovation and fosters civic engagement. The arts bring people together and help break down barriers in language, geography, culture, and ideology – and promote an appreciation for diverse traditions. The arts transport and transform us. They open us up to new worlds and new ways of thinking. They excite, inspire and move us.

Does this mean we must become a nation of painters, musicians, crafters? No. It does mean, however, that Americans must begin thinking more like artists. We must build up our creative economy, and tap the rich well of inspiration and innovation that’s in our country’s DNA.

There is great creative work happening in every part of this country. In public television we believe we can play an important role in making some of this work accessible to all regardless of geography or economic means. Everyone can have a front row seat and, in fact, last year over a hundred million people tuned in during the nearly 500 hours of arts and cultural programming on PBS.

But public television can’t do it alone. The time for more investment in the arts is now to ensure that we do not allow the arts to fade from our lives. We must band together to bring the arts to the forefront of American life. It’s time that we invest in ourselves and the future, by investing in the arts.