Episode Notes:
Value is never simply discovered by markets—it's decided, together, by what a society chooses to fund, protect, and imagine into being. And too often, culture is treated as decoration rather than infrastructure.
In this episode, we travel to Whitechapel Gallery in London to speak with Mariana Mazzucato, Whitechapel Economist in Residence and a professor at University College London; artist Alvaro Barrington; and Bridgespan partner Darren Isom, in conversation chaired by Gilane Tawadros, director at Whitechapel Gallery, as part of the gallery's Art Futures series on the value of culture.
Together, they explore why culture has been pushed to the periphery of economic and political life, and what it might mean to place it back at the center. Mariana opens with a provocation on rethinking value itself, before the conversation turns to public funding, philanthropy, imagination, and what institutions owe the communities they serve.
Transcript:
Darren Isom:
Welcome back to Dreaming in Color LIVE, a special series within the Dreaming in Color universe. The series is rooted in our belief that the equitable future we seek requires celebrating the genius of today's leaders of color, and creating space for their brilliance, lived experience, and imagination to shape how we think about our impact. Dreaming in Color LIVE is a live conversation and convening series, small rooms and shared tables where bold questions, creative spirits, and community energy meet. Each gathering brings artists, funders, thinkers, and community builders together to explore the ideas shaping a more just and more beautiful world. I'm your host, Darren Isom. Welcome to Dreaming in Color LIVE.
Gilane Tawadros:
Good evening, everyone, and a very warm welcome to Whitechapel Gallery. My name is Gilane Tawadros. I'm director of the gallery. And it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all to our latest Whitechapel Art Futures discussion on the value of culture.
It comes as no surprise when I say there are enormous social, cultural, economic, and ecological challenges facing us today from the rise of the far right to creaking public infrastructure. In response to these crises and to mark the gallery's 125th anniversary, Art Futures is a series designed to look at the role of public art institutions bringing together audiences with artists, writers, academics, and policymakers to imagine alternative visions. We want this to be a space in which we openly and honestly critique the current situation facing the cultural sector and collectively explore how we can ensure culture thrives as an essential part of our democracy.
Tonight's discussion focuses on the economic dimensions of contemporary culture, including public funding for the arts and the role of private philanthropic support. Above all, we'll be thinking about the value of culture, how that value is measured, articulated, and understood, and what different definitions of the value of culture might mean for this sector and for our democracy as a whole.
I'm thrilled to have a brilliant group of people with me tonight to think about these critical questions, each bringing their distinctive experience and expertise. Mariana Mazzucato is professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London, where she's founding director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Mariana has received an extraordinary range of international honors for her pioneering work as an economist and public intellectual. And we're delighted to announce an exciting new title for her, Economist in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, the first economist in residence at Whitechapel. And over the next three years, she'll be working with staff, artists, audiences, and other collaborators to make the gallery a testing ground for the development of new ideas about the economics of arts and culture.
Alvaro Barrington joins us from his studio on Whitechapel High Street, having hot footed it here tonight from Venice. He's an artist working across a wide range of media whose work has been shown around the world. Many of you will have seen his commissions and exhibitions in London at Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, and South London Gallery, and we're delighted that Alvaro will be part of the program for this summer's backyard biennial at Whitechapel.
Darren Isom joins us from San Francisco, a truly global panel you can see, where he is partner of the Bridgespan Group. Darren advises mission-driven organizations and philanthropic foundations in support of equity and justice. He's also the host of the podcast, Dreaming in Color, which offers leaders of color space to share how they have utilized their unique assets and abilities to make change.
In terms of the format for this evening, Mariana will start the discussion with a short provocation drawing on ideas from her forthcoming book, The Common Good Economy. So without further ado, please welcome Mariana Mazzucato.
Mariana Mazzucato:
Thank you so much, Gilane, and what an honor to be on this great panel. And when I just met Darren, Alvaro and I are old friends. He said, "What a power move to bring an economist in residence." And I think what you meant, but you didn't say, is that usually you have artists who are like the token person in the bank or in the finance ministry, so the artists in residence, right? Where they don't really care about the art, but it kind of makes them look good. So I'm the economist in residence and we've transformed that tokenism to be around the economist. And hopefully that's not what I'll do. Hopefully what we'll do is bring really new economic thinking to how to put culture at the center that need to reimagine what kind of economy do we actually want? Who are we? How can we relate to each other in a different way?
And what does that mean for the economic structures? And especially to put culture at the center and not far away in the periphery in the ministry of culture. And that's why actually as a first slide, I have Celso Furtado here. He was not only an amazing development economist in Latin America alongside others who were really rethinking development and underdevelopment, but he was a minister of culture. And in Brazil, that was seen as an upgrade from being the minister of economy and planning in the '60s. So he became, this was seen as something better than being a minister of planning. So minister of culture. Why? Because he, in fact, in his theory of development said culture and how we value each other ultimately as at the center of how we can actually have a better economy. And very specifically, he said culture is not a sector of development. It is the very foundation of development.
And this is really kind of the point that I want to make tonight, but also that I hope the residency brings out. And culture, climate, health, these are always far away from the center. That's where the fun stuff happens in the ministry of culture with people like yourselves in the ministry of health thinking about how are we going to be more prepared next time for the next pandemic in the ministry of the environment? All sorts of great discussions about the ecological transition, but they're far away. At the center, there's the economists making their great economic models, thinking about finance, and those are where the serious conferences are. So this shows that we do not actually understand climate, health, culture. They are very much at the periphery and we don't actually understand what does it mean to actually create an economy that's founded on healthy populations, wellbeing at the center, allegria, as I'll talk about when we talk about Carnival in a minute.
But also we know that in all these different areas I just mentioned, the cost of not acting is so much greater than the cost of acting. So yes, it shouldn't be seen as a cost. We should be thinking about these areas, investing, not just the spend in cultural ecosystems, but even if we want to talk about the cost, even if we want to stick to these static economic models, it's quite extraordinary that we have ignored all the different evidence that shows both around health, around culture, and around climate, that the cost of not investing is actually so much greater. What does it mean to actually put culture at the center, especially given that, again, there are these incredible studies that have simply been ignored, that actually culture, re-imagining how we want to live together, all the different investments in arts, in theaters, in carnival that we'll get to in a minute, actually have huge effects on our health, on our wellbeing, on our mental health, social cohesion, community building. But again, absolutely ignored.
What would it mean to actually create a completely different narrative, framing, theory, and talk to those finance ministers about why we actually have to center this discussion about the public value of arts and culture and how we rebuild an economy? For me, this has very much been a journey about rethinking the state. The state not as fixing markets, not as filling the gap for something that the private sector doesn't do, but actually should be, doesn't, be shaping the economy to really deliver for people and planet underpinned by a different theory of value. Value is collectively created as long as we think of just the entrepreneurs are creating value and these public entities are facilitating, enabling, fixing market failures. It's not surprising that we get policies that are really not fit for purpose. And I'm so glad that we're going to have a discussion also about philanthropy, Darren, because I'm not a big fan of going back to the Middle Ages where we need the patrons and the benefactors to be funding the really important things, whether it's health, climate, or culture.
And really important, Darren's work about talking about good philanthropy, but really also revealing who these different actors are. I already mentioned public and private. There's civil society organizations, there's NGOs, there's philanthropists, there's consultants. It sometimes becomes a very noisy, noisy space. For me, this is very much about rethinking the common good. The public good sounds good in economics. There's two words. One is good. But as long as it's just the theory of what the private sector's not doing, then it will always just be filling the gap and reactive.
The common good and political philosophy, think of Aristotle, but also Michael Sandel today. That was an objective, the telos of Aristotle and the police, not the police, but the police, the community is the how, how we actually work together. And that idea that actually the how the different relationships are structured matters as much as what we're trying to do is something that I think is incredibly important in thinking about rethinking about arts and culture.
And again, Darren, in the two minutes we talked, you also said we need to bring imagination back. And so again, in this short little manifesto, which is really at the center of some of the discussions we're having with artists, with government officials, architects and designers in this working group, I kind of divided it up into these three areas. How can we, again, with this mission of bringing culture at the center and not far away in the ministry of culture, put it at the center, one of how we reimagine literally what kind of economy and society we need. What is an ecological transition? What is a new deal? All these words that are often used. How do we make sure that our recovery plans after a financial crisis or a recession isn't just building back better with the old materials, the old relationships, but really re-imagining what is possible and arts and culture at the center of that.
Second, how do we bring culture at the center of any policy? Think of a green industrial strategy. What does it mean not just for energy, not just for transport, but also really putting culture at the center of even redefining what we mean by green, but also bringing citizen voices at the center of that. We had a really interesting conversation in Camden, which is where I live with the Camden Renewal Commission where we worked across 10 housing estates in Camden to really also think about what is often meant by the green transition and why does it mean very little to you? And one of the things that people talked about was the need for ownership, real deliberation, getting dignity back, transforming food banks into green cooperatives. Anyway, so that whole idea of actually bringing culture, not just to cultural policy, but at the center, whether it's about a blue economy, a greener economy, a more healthy economy, what is the role of culture?
And third, how do we move away from valuing culture through static metrics, cost benefit analysis, net present value, and really understand its dynamic value? So now I'm just going to give you examples of these and why I think they're really important. First, how can arts and culture help reimagine societal outcomes in the direction of economic growth? Why is this important? Because growth has not just a rate, which is what everyone worries about. The rate of growth. Is it falling? Is it growing? Is it falling three times in a row, which means a recession is turning into a depression? Or what does it mean actually to put at the center this idea that the direction of growth is really the big issue? Even just before the financial crisis, there was plenty of growth. It was just financialized. The fact that we have lots of, well, we have global warming, that's a particular type of growth that got us there.
So this need to really reimagine that direction, there have been moments in the past. There was the work Progress Administration when Roosevelt, after the great crash, brought artists, designers, theater folks, singers really to the center of that need to reimagine, which by the way, you'll know that we got big national parks out of that national re-imagination. But the fact that he brought artists to the center of the civil service was interesting. There's a group here in the UK called Public Practice, which I always forget the exact numbers, but something like the statistic is that in the 1970s, 70% of architects and designers worked for the city council, for the cities, for the public service. Today it's less than 1%. So it was both about re-imagining with culture and arts at the center, but also bringing these people who can help us reimagine into the civil service.
So really putting this idea that actually we need to be more creative if we actually want to reimagine that ecological transition. Policy design and industrial strategy, how should we nurture cultural ecosystems and embed them in policy design to deliver societal goals? So you'll know that often we have industrial strategies that just talk about the key sectors, right? The creative economy, the pharmaceutical, life science industry, automotive, aerospace, the financial sector. So these are just sectors, right? What is actually the goal for an economy?
I've been writing for some time that the point of industrial strategy should actually be about solving missions, goals that are as bold as going to the moon and back in a short amount of time, but on earth. What does it mean to have a mission orientation that actually addresses the big challenge we have today, which is an unhealthy planet in crisis, and have a mission as bold as the one that Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, has set her own government to become a clean and beautiful large ocean state, not a small island state, championing sustainable development locally and globally with the goal of domestic activities becoming 100% sustainable by 2035.
What is the role of culture in that? What is the role of housing in that? What is the role of energy in that? So that idea of having an inter-sectoral transformation, going to the moon was not just aerospace. It was materials, electronics, food, they had to solve all these problems along the way. So that idea of a problem-solving economy and really also having culture be at the center defining what these problems are, the artistic and cultural expression and a new type of discussion in terms of re-imagination, that first point, and even helping us to vocalize and also to render contested what these missions are. So what's been interesting in Barbados actually is that they both had culture across all their different missions, not surprising given that the prime minister today used to be the culture minister, but also one of the missions is explicitly about culture itself, to transform Barbados into a country of active, involved citizens where all Bajans will feel empowered and engaged in the social, economic and cultural development of the country as confident, creative, compassionate, and entrepreneurial citizens. Imagine that.
So again, moving it away from at best a multiplier to a discussion about what does it mean to actually feel valued, especially she often says in a country that was at the center of the slave trade. She says when she goes into schools and young people look at her and say, "Hello, prime minister." She says, "Look at me, you have value." And she says, "That's the first step in actually transforming a country." How do we move from valuing arts and culture through static metrics at best ticket sales to actually measuring their dynamic public value?
And in some conversations I've been having with Francis Morris, who you know used to be the head of the Tate Modern, and she used to say to me, "Look, the things I'm really proud of that I did was bring people into the museum that had literally never stepped into a museum and showcase artists that are often excluded from the elite museums." And I did that, she said, "Notwithstanding that what the metrics were telling me to do was literally just do blockbuster shows, this kind of blockbusterization of our theaters, of our museums and so on." So really the question, well, what might the metrics look like that actually reward and nurture this amazing targets that she actually had set her self instead of doing it, notwithstanding the fact that the treasury, the finance ministries are pressuring in the opposite direction.
And this also built on some work that we did at the Institute for Innovation on Public Purpose with the BBC, which public broadcaster, is it just filling the gap of what the private sector's not doing, high quality documentaries about giraffes, high quality news, and let the others do the fun stuff. Or no matter what format it has, it's embarking on soap operas, talk shows, documentaries, high quality news. What does it mean to really transform that landscape? To reimagine it again, as Darren encourages us to do, and really thinking of public value as a summation of individual value, societal value. So showing women's football, which today is finally popular, but that was through active engagement of the BBC, having soap operas, not just of the rich and famous Dallas and Dynasty, they don't know what I'm talking about, but East Enders, soap operas of the working class societal value and industry value by actually shaping these markets, it benefited businesses.
It actually created a new landscape that ultimately crowded in. Think of BBC iPlayer, the BBC microcomputer. But this is done again, notwithstanding the metrics that are often used. So this was a very interesting discussion we had with the BBC on public value. And of course, coming back now to Whitechapel, what does this then mean if we actually took this really seriously and started plotting out not just the ticket sales, but the huge value that arts and cultural institutions have had and will have as long as they can be liberated from these static economic metrics, whether it's back in the 1930s here at the Whitechapel where Pablo Picaso's Guernica was shown and Stepney Trade Unions actually got people to come, the civil community to come and to bring their boots, to bring a pair of boots for the Civil War in Spain, or this amazing initiative that I'm sure you'll talk about tonight with the Backyard Biennial, which is very much about community engagement in the arts process.
The BNA East, we've been talking to them with Gus and Lizzie. This is a list that Lizzie made, who's the head of the programs at BNA East. And she says, look, the measurable value, we know what it is, right? Number, demographics of visitors, how much they spent, reasons for their visit. We've also started to look at that wider impact, tourism, creative industries, wellbeing and health. What we haven't been looking at are these deep experiential areas that, again, Francis was alluding to, that sense of connection, a shift in perspective, moments of quiet, how do you feel? An expansion of what you think the possibilities are in your own life, influence and inspiration, a shared unifying experience for everyone.
Darren Isom:
We're going to leave Mariana's talk at this point and pick up with the panel that followed.
Gilane Tawadros:
Wow. Thank you, Mariana, for taking us on a whistle-stop tour through your amazing research and thinking. And it's really just at the beginning. And I want to come back to some of the very important questions and provocations that you raised. But I want to start first by bringing Darren and Alvaro into the conversation. And my first question is for you, Darren. Tonight's event is being broadcast as part of your fabulous dreaming in color series. And you described the series as small intentional gatherings designed to explore how culture, leadership and capital shape one another. And it's built, you say, on the premise that imagination is not ornamental to strategy, but central to it. And I think this relates very much to what Mariana was saying. Could you perhaps explain a bit more about what you mean when you say that imagination is not ornamental to strategy, but central to it?
Darren Isom:
Yeah, of course. And so thanks again for having me. So wonderful. Normally I'm in California. It's great to be in London, and I'm glad that the weather cooperated as well. It's been a beautiful trip. So real excited about the conversation. I think that for me, so much of my work is really understanding what beauty exists in the world and making sure that we're taking advantage of it and really using it to push things forward. The podcast itself is all about, I took black and brown leaders in the States. They have these wonderful skills and ways of thinking about the world that are very often under-looked and overlooked and undervalued. And I joke how very often if you ask all these folks in these great positions, what the training that they have, they'll give you their. We've all done great schools, schooling. So give you their schooling, they'll give you their intellectual and kind of academic pedigree.
But the stories that they don't tell you about are the ones that are actually the most important. And so I'm reminded of Andre Leon Talley, former go-getter and great man. He talks about all the time about how someone asked him in one of his interviews, where did he learn about fashion? And this is a guy who literally, I mean, worked for Vogue, worked W Magazine, worked across the states in his wonderful positions was a muse of Andy Warhol. And he says, "I learned everything I need to know about fashion, watching my grandmother get dressed for church in rural North Carolina as a child." And so I think that so often we think of arts and culture as being this thing that wealthy people do on a Friday night if you have extra time and money. We don't realize that actually people of color, communities all around the world, arts and culture is how they live the life. It's how they navigate the world. So it becomes a really exhaustible resource that we don't really take advantage of and don't really appreciate.
I think with that as well, I think what's really important as we think about this work and think about success is really not only appreciating arts and culture, but also appreciating the role that arts and culture makers have in the sector and the space as well. And so I think that right now in Black America, 20, 30 years ago, all of our leaders came from the church. They were all Reverend something another, from Reverend King to Reverend Jackson. Now they all come from the arts community. And so there's something really powerful about watching artists who are given an opportunity to really shape what we're doing and where we're going and imagine a new world. I think that we talked about this earlier, this idea that we live in a world where the technocracy is really appreciated and everyone's trying to figure out how do we keep the trains moving and on schedule and whatnot.
Where are those trains going? Where are the effective and wonderfully running trains going? And I think that we're living through a period where there's a need for real true imagination for us to imagine a new world. And I think the arts and culture is the only way we get at that. Clearly the systems that we have now are not working, but there's a famine of imagination. We can't even imagine a different world. I joke that in many ways, one of my biggest assets to black professionals, we're really good at looking at broken systems and navigating around them. And at some point you realize that you're enabling the system to stay broken. And so how do we, as the world falls apart to some degree, what are we building in its place? And how do we use arts and culture to really center that conversation, but also give us the space to dream?
Gilane Tawadros:
This picks up on the lovely quote you had about the foundational nature of culture. Alvaro, you have a wonderful artist statement, which is replete with all these wonderful statements. And one of them that I particularly liked was, and apologies to those who are fundraisers in the room. I don't believe in fundraisers. I believe in systemic and cultural changes. So what does that look like, Alvaro? And if we appointed you to be Secretary of State for culture, what systemic and cultural change would you be demanding be implemented?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think about that a lot because I think. I guess maybe I'll start backwards. I think we've stopped believing that we live in a democracy. And there's ways in which you can measure how we stop believing in a democracy. When somebody goes, and I said this the other day and somebody walked up and was super upset with me, but I was like, this kind of proves a point. When somebody goes, Trump's not my president. And as an American, he is my president. And I think we've stopped believing somehow, oh, we just got to wait till the Democrats come in.
And then when the Democrats come in, well, you can't criticize the Democrats because now you're going to get the other side. But the people who do believe in democracies are like Elon Musk. They really believe that they have a right to get what they think that the system owes them. And I think we have to start believing that the system owes us a quality of life. The long way to get to your answer is that first thing, we own the government. The government owes us. It's our tax money. It's us. And so we have to change the system in getting really mad at our government for not delivering what we should deserve. So I think we have to change systemically what the government owes us. And the government owes us great art. I really fundamentally believe that because art is how we have conversations with the world that we live in.
And especially today, and I say this because it's really crude, but it's also very true. If you can't have an exhibition that deals with sex, for example, because it may offend someone, that seven-year-old kid that you have is probably learning about sex on the internet. And so unless you invest in institutions that allow you to say, "Oh, I'm going to bring my kid to watch this movie, to watch an exhibition about whatever, and therefore I can be a parent and actually have conversations." But instead what you'll have is parents saying, "Oh, this optional thing of bringing my kid to a museum might offend me, so therefore I don't want it to be seen." And then the kid goes and learns about it on the internet. And so I think we have to start owning spaces because this is the opportunity to have these things. When Elon talks about Twitter, he always talks about it as a public space. And so this is a public space.
Gilane Tawadros:
There's so much in what you said, Alvaro. I want to pick up perhaps on this idea of private space, of a tech space platform being seen as being defined as a public space. And what I think you're saying, which is that actually it's spaces like this, cultural institutions like that, which are truly public democratic spaces where conversations can happen, where different ideas or ideas that challenge how you see the world, and also ideas that might help you negotiate those relationships, whether they be familial or political or other, also have the opportunity to be participated in.
Mariana, I wonder if I could turn to you on this about this question because you talked about the private and the public and a very narrow view of what the relationship between private and public. But now we're seeing a kind of inversion of that situation where the private space is being redefined in a way as the public good. And this is certainly true of big tech. And artificial intelligence, which everyone tells us is where we must go frequent growth and wellbeing. But perhaps you choose-
Mariana Mazzucato:
Sure. I mean, one thing I guess, and you are the experts on arts and culture, is I don't think we should folklorize or assume that cultural institutions are all fulfilling the ambitions that you just said.
Alvaro Barrington:
Noted.
Mariana Mazzucato:
Probably many are not. Exactly. So this space is great, but there's lots of spaces that aren't. And that's exactly what we heard also again in Brazil where we visited the carnival in Rio, in Bahia and Salvador, and talked to also the people who are running it in the Seafin. And when I mentioned that they talked about carnival apartheid, that's about how you govern a space. And the fact that there's all these camarotes where the VIPs look down on carnival, the corderos, the cords that keep some people away. How we govern organizations to be truly inclusive, and then you can add lots of other adjectives that we're interested in, sustainable and so on, that is about governance. And we need to, again, reimagine both where we want to go, where the trains are going, but also how we're building the trains because infrastructure isn't just infrastructure.
How we build that infrastructure then reveals these problems. And I think the biggest problem in AI, by the way, that I don't think enough people talk about is that because the rents, and I call it rents, not profits of these five companies, the largest AI companies are so high after surfing huge amounts of public funding. LLMs, so large language models, speech recognition was actually all funded back in the '70s and '80s by government. These companies now have benefited from that, are obviously spending their own research and development, but they have also in this trajectory avoided tax, been super financialized. Think of Amazon also exploited labor, so on and so forth. So they've accumulated through certain business practices, these trillions, not billions, trillions that now they're using to pay really high salaries to university researchers and people that used to work in government. So our ability to govern AI for good in a more ethical way requires that knowledge also to sit within government and it's not there anymore.
You might think that government's always been incapable. It ain't true. I mean, again, so many huge changes have actually happened through government funding and this hemorrhaging of talent from public spaces, public universities, public labs, and so on. It's just something that I just want to put it out there because I really have heard very little discussion about that. But ultimately, I think, I just want to come back to something you said, which is crucial. Where did the money go? So you talked about trillions having gone somewhere. Even when it goes in specific places that we can trace, think of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US with Biden, trillions of dollars having been spent on an economic recovery that also had a green direction. Most of that money actually went to red states, so Trump voting states.
And the people voting in those states that did benefit, there's lots of good economic stats out there. Biden's policies did work economically. They did not vote for Biden. Why? If you've been literally left behind for decades economically, you can't just have an economic solution. It can't just be, it's the economy, stupid. We want jobs, we want higher wages, so on and so forth. But if the process through which that happens continues to undervalue, to be really condescending, to be done at people instead of with them actually sourcing the incredible knowledge in the lived experience that people have to design concrete policies better, then it ain't going to work. I come back to that point in Camden of going from food banks to food cooperatives. Another really interesting thing we did in Camden around these missions was instead of just saying a mission on adult social care, we said, who's going to inform us on that policy? The people who've experienced it, the carers, the people providing the care, and the people who've been cared for who have not benefited from a good care system, get them to design the policy.
And I think that's also an area, right? The lived experience, listening to each other, empathy. Just think of all the poetry, the books, the theater, the arts that also affected, as Lizzie talks about from the VNAEs, kind of opening or sense of understanding someone else's perspective through our empathy, not sympathy, seeing life through someone else's eyes. That's what arts and culture has done for humanity. So I think that idea of actually designing and as an economist, I say the economy with people, for people to be better, to serve, as you said, government for, but also with the people. That has to be done in very concrete ways with very different institutional designs, but especially participatory processes. And until we do that, you can do all the great economic policies you want. You won't win the vote of people who are just sick and tired of not feeling valued.
Gilane Tawadros:
Thank you. Darren, can we talk a bit about private investment and philanthropy and where that sits in relation to government investment? I mean, in the US, not just cultural institutions, but foundations that have funded really amazing cultural practice are under scrutiny at best and under fire at worst and legal suits as well. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about in a new landscape where what little government funding there was has gone. Is there a role for private investment and philanthropy to center culture in the way that Mariana has been talking?
Darren Isom:
100%. And so I could talk about that all day. I get really excited about that. I think that we're living through ... I'm an optimist as well. I always joke, I'm the last optimist. I kind of feel like generational privilege when you're a Black American and you've had to search for light, generationally speaking from the ship, you learn how to look for light in all places and find it. And so I think that we're actually in a very powerful moment. I think that we talk about all the things that are happening in the world right now and the level of chaos that exists, but it's a beautiful moment to create new things, to reimagine the world. I think this is the moment actually when artists shine, when art shines, when art institutions really step into their role. And so it's very exciting for me to be here in this moment.
And I see that as a Gen Xer and the generational transitions that are happening, I joke that as a Gen Xer, we are in many ways kind of the, we were a generation integration. And particularly from an American perspective, I'm from New Orleans, as you know. My family's been in New Orleans now for nine generations. I'm a seventh generation New Orleans native. My family came to New Orleans from Sandovang, so Haiti before it was Haiti. And of those nine generations in the city, I'm the only generation that went to integrated schools. They were legally segregated before me and de facto desegregated after me. But I think all the time, and I appreciate the fact that I had this integrated world where my parents pulled me out of the black Catholic prep school that's educated generations of middle class and upwardly mobile Black Americans in New Orleans from kindergarten to first grade, go to the integrated school.
And I think about all of the narratives that were created to normalize that experience. So from the school itself, I went to the Willow School, which says everything about the school itself, literally named after the tree, to Mr. Rogers and PBS and NPR and Sesame Street and 321 Contact. There were all these things happening to normalize this work in this space. And at some point I remember there's a Florida politician. I was like, "He cannot be my age. How could he be a Gen Xer? Did he not watch Sesame Street growing up? How could he say this?" And you realize that you were actually the one in the Truman Show and American was off doing what America does. And so all that to say, I think that there is a unique opportunity in the moment. I think that the philanthropic space plays a very important role in this moment as well.
And so the role of good philanthropy is to see powerful ideas that the government can scale. No one can scale like the government. There's no intention of philanthropy replacing the government. It doesn't make sense at all. But I think at its best, philanthropy plays the role of nomenclator in both its senses. So nomenclature's standard sense is a nomenclator names things. A nomenclature in a pharmaceutical company name the products. It's why they all kind of, healthianic, whatnot and so forth. And it's not like heaven. A nomenclator within a foundation, they name portfolios of work in a way that really normalizes that work and makes the community grounded. And so that role of the philanthropy and naming things, naming areas that we should care about, that we should see as serious and important and ways that are also community grounded becomes extremely important. How do you use your privilege to name things and to really change with the conversations that are happening.
The second definition, which is just as important, which is used more rarely, is in historical times, which I shouldn't talk to remote English folks about this, but historical times there was a nomenclature existed in the King's Court and you'd hand your calling cards to the nomenclature and he would announce you to the room. And I think philanthropy plays that role as well. It's like, I don't necessarily know what the answer is, but here are the people that I trust to bring us the answer. And so I think that idea of both thinking about what are the topics that we should be focused on, but also here are the people that we should trust in those conversations. So introducing an economist to an arts institution, introducing an artist to democracy conversation, introducing a cultural worker to environmental conversation, that's a role that philanthropy can play. And also funding that work in a way that's meaningful and powerful is really important as well.
I think another role and a very important one is thinking about philanthropy as a force of permanence. And so we're living through a period where there's extreme precarity and things are falling apart all around us. Interestingly enough, in this moment, it's easier to fundraise for five years out or 10 years out than it is to fundraise for two months out. Funders get the idea. I'm not quite sure what you're doing, but I know you need to be around in 10 years. So let me make sure that you're steady in this moment. Let me endow you because you need to be around in five, 10 years. And I think that the philanthropic world's ability to really think about what are the investments, how do you protect your investments, but also who are the people that can drive that work is really important itself. And we were talking earlier about how good philanthropy has shifted to some degree.
I say that historically 10, 15 years ago, you were a billionaire. You started a foundation. And the goal of that foundation was three parts, flippantly and seriously. So the first part was to use your business acumen. So the skills that you developed in a massive a billion dollars to give away a billion dollars and solve the world's problems. It's a little bit of a God complex, right? The second was to, it was a flex. It was a flex of wealth. It was a way of positioning yourself as a philanthropist. It's a title of prestige. And the third, which we don't talk about as often, it's a quick play to get into heaven before you die. So I've done some harm. Let me try to give this money away and get into heaven. I think that with time, we've seen that clearly all the skills you developed in amassing a billion dollars are not transferable and giving it away.
I think we realized that actually in some ways they're counter. The skills that actually developed in amassing billions is the exact opposite of the skills I need to give away a billion dollars. And you have a new generation of philanthropy, Gen Xers, which is not new. We're old at this point, middle-aged folks. But it's like how much harm did grandpa do to the world in amassing a billion dollars? And how do I use my philanthropy to repair that harm?
And so with that, in some ways, wealth becomes less of flex and almost a symptom of culpability in the systems that we've had from a cultural perspective. What that means is the rise of spend down philanthropy. Here's $800 million I want to get rid of in five, six years. That requires a very different approach for institutions. Let's think about the work. You have to be able to position yourself as not just a program, but really a vision. You're thinking about how the world's going to change and people have to bet on you as a winner in that space itself.
So I think philanthropy plays a really important role in really shaping how we think about the world or how we can think about the world, but also nominating, if you will, folks that we think about as being the stewards of the world that we're trying to create. And so the final point with that in mind, and I'll throw myself under the bus to talk about good consulting. I work for a consulting group. We do wonderful work working with funders and philanthropists and whatnot around social strategy, which is very different consulting and private sector. But I joke that if any of you work with nonprofit consultants, that one of the things that we develop is like this theory of change. It's literally how the world works.
And they're beautiful documents. I've created some very beautiful documents I'm very proud of. And these documents have beautiful boxes on them of all the different outcomes you want to achieve. And historically, foundations have thought of their theory of changes as the answer. And they've looked to nonprofits as vendors for their strategies. I'm like, "This is what I think the answer is. Can you bring this into fruition?" And I think that good philanthropy recognizes that actually it's the nonprofits, the thinkers, the strategists, the artists that should have their own theory of changes and theory of actions. And they act as supporters and funders of that space. And so I think that's a big shift. It's a different positioning, but your role is different, just as powerful and important, but it's actually in a servant's position, a servant's role.
Gilane Tawadros:
And in a way, maybe that's what government funding's role should also be.
Darren Isom:
I mean, I would argue that government funding, and so this goes back to ... I think that this idea of holding government accountable, right? I think that we have a lot going on in the States right now, which I prefer to talk about over cocktails. But I think that one of the biggest things that we're seeing is that a government that's not accountable to anyone except the oligarchy. Capitalism is capitalism. You don't need support in making a million dollars. It's capitalism. The system is designed for you to make money. I think where we need support is really thinking about how do we make sure that our government works for everyone, particularly those that have been historically overlooked. Billionaires and millionaires of the world don't need government to look out for them. They're fine. I think that that's where we have to think about how do you hold government accountable to make sure that it's there for everyone, particularly those that historically been overlooked.
And so this idea of the common good. I remember many years ago I did some work in Memphis and I was working for an arts institution there that was trying to understand why as an institution, they weren't able to get black and brown folks to visit. Massive organization, huge endowment, great work. And so I remember doing some focus groups in the city and visiting a neighborhood. And usually when you do that type of work, you hear one of three answers. One, you're too far away. So geographically it's an issue. Secondly, you are too expensive. So cost is an issue. And the third is I'm not quite sure what you do programming wise. And for each of those, there's a solution. And I remember interviewing this grandmother and black grandmother in South Memphis and she offered a fourth. And she said, "Oh, that place isn't really for us." And that I as Black American understood.
It was literally an institution that until the '70s, Blacks could only attend one night a week. The thing is that when you feel like a place is for you, that it's your place, you hold it to a different bar. You hold it to a different set of accountability. And if that place is for you, it could be too far away. It could be too expensive. You don't even have to like what's going on there. You're going to go there. It's the way that Black Americans leave their neighborhood and go back to their community church for years. It's too far away, I don't even like the pastor, I don't even know what he's saying, but it's my church. I have to go there every weekend and critique it, right?
And so then we created a political discourse in which people don't feel like the government is for them. And so they don't hold it accountable. They have no sense of belonging. If something happens here and there that they benefit from, well, that's great. But so how do we recreate systems in which people see the government as actually theirs? It's there for their support. It's there for their success. And how do we focus on those things that make that happen?
We'll leave it there for now. This conversation about the value of culture was too good to fit into one sitting. So in part two, we're going to keep it going with Alvaro on what's really shaped him as an artist, a Q&A with our audience, and close out with everyone's reflections on what we owe to art. So stick around. Part two's coming up next.
