One of the biggest and most popular mistakes being made by politicians and education bureaucrats today is the elimination of arts as an educational 'frill' in order to preserve the 'important' parts of the curriculum, viz., skills training, science, and technology. My post-secondary education is in mathematics, computer science, and economics. I have a hard time drawing a straight line with a ruler, and I'm more commonly known for my views of how technology is going to affect the future of education than for my stand on the arts.
But it is clear to me that people who have not yet thought things through are about to make a balls-up of re-structuring the curricula taught, and the way we allocate funds for education. You see, the future occupations of many of our current students will lie in the arts, and by depriving them of arts training, we are creating future unemployment. Moreover, even those who are artistically inept (like me) will need and benefit from arts training.
To see this, it is necessary to consider what is happening with technology, because it is technology that is going to lead to a renaissance in the arts, and an explosion in the artistic professions.
Ask anyone who manages money for education how important the Internet is in education, and you get an immediate, almost knee-jerk reaction that it is very important. Why? Because it is going to allow people to communicate over great distances, research and collaborate on work with distant partners, provide services to people around the globe, and sell their products and services to a global marketplace. And it is these very things that will lead to an artistic renaissance.
An experimental poet or dance company, even in a major urban centre, will starve because there are not enough people within physical reach to support them. Yet the same poet or dance company (or singer, theatre company, painter, etc.) will be able to sell their wares to a global audience through the Internet. If only one person in a thousand finds our hypothetical artist's poetry interesting enough to pay a dime for it, then in a city of, say, 10 million people, the poet has a revenue potential of $1,000 for that poem. But in an Internet community of 1 billion people, that 10¢ sale to one in a thousand produces $100,000 per poem.
Now look at what's been happening in the entertainment industry, most notably television. We have seen an explosion of entertainment alternatives, and specialty channels of all sorts (a golf channel, a cooking channel, and so forth) have blossomed forth. This is merely the thin edge of the wedge; within a few years we will be talking about not just a 500 channel universe, but a 50 million channel universe. In five years high-definition television will start to spread. Within 10 years it will be the norm, and three-dimensional television (using HDTV) will be starting to appear. Within 15 years, anyone with a video camera and a telephone will be able to be a television broadcaster, and the broadcast quality will be far superior to anything we have now. This means that suddenly, the quality of reproduction of the clumsy and imperfect medium we now call television will be dramatically improved.
So where is all the content for this explosion of choices and channels going to come from? Increasingly, it is going to be driven (a) by the public's demands for new and different fare, much as the demand for new and exotic foods is now exploding; and (b) the artistic community's ability to invent new expressions for their arts in the technology-assisted new media that are emerging. In other words, the implications of technology are that interest in art will explode.
Of course, there will be more competition between artists than ever before, so artists had better plan on learning business and marketing, too. And profit margins will be razor thin except for those who become media superstars. But that potential will be within the reach of more and more artists as the means of production and distribution will allow a steadily increasing number to do what Canadian singer Loreena McKinnett has done: create their own success.
So much for the 'uselessness' of art education for artists. But what about the rest of the population? Well, increasingly, each of us are going to have to package and market ourselves, and in so doing, the ability to communicate in interesting, inventive, and appealing ways will be crucial. Let me use myself as an example, for I'm self-employed, work hard at marketing myself, and am, shall we say, artistically challenged.
I speak to something like 20,000 people a year, mostly about things like technology, demographics, the global economy, even education. Nobody warned me, when I was in school, that I was going to need to know something about graphic arts, costuming, dramatic presentation, the use of appropriate music to create a proper mood, stage lighting, sound systems, and crowd psychology. I was a math and computer weenie, for goodness sake. Why would I be interested in that kind of stuff in high school or university? But those things have become as important to my ability to make a living as my understanding of computers and economics.
And this is the way it will be: even those people who are not artists, and have no interest in art will need to understand some of the fundamentals of art, not as a frill, but as a core subject that will put bread on the table for them and their families. They will need the arts to help them market and sell themselves to best effect. Art will, in many cases, be the difference between success and failure.
So eliminating art as a 'frill' means putting our children at a severe disadvantage in a global marketplace, for the future of the arts is bright, indeed.
© Copyright, IF Research, December 1999.
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