Ideas Summit: How the Arts Can Keep Up

At our recent Ideas Summit in New York City, CultureSource, in partnership with the Doris Duke Foundation, brought together a cross-section of thinkers from the arts, philanthropy, research, and policy sectors. Together, we explored how our field can keep pace with rapid change. In this reflection, I’m sharing some of the tensions and questions that surfaced—ones I believe are key to shaping what’s next.

Omari Rush,
Executive Director

Public tastes are changing rapidly, notably fueled by social media connectivity, and the rate of societal change itself is accelerating too (called “rapidification” by the late Pope Francis). In this environment, both the commercial and social impact arts sectors need more support in keeping up, operationally and artistically.

Social impact arts need to better understand supply and demand—especially as nonprofits operate in transactional marketplaces. Two things complicate this: the sector’s over-emphasis on supply (artists, producers/presenters, venues) and that the sector will not define what a sustainable, healthy ecosystem looks like—and is uncomfortable with the inherent exclusion that comes addressing those two items.

The arts still have difficulty with fundamental language describing who we are, what we do, and what our benefit is. Terms like artist, arts, culture, and creativity are used independently or in combination in inconsistent and unspecific ways. We need to better manage other people’s perceptions of arts work.

Our social impact sector is comfortable with creation (“births”) and uncomfortable with loss and dissolution (“deaths”). Research labs and program evaluations have positivity biases and people supported by philanthropy struggle to admit failure or weakness. We need more competency with letting go (and more understanding of resource realities of holding on long term).

Arts relationships are adversarial: artists vs. platforms, artists vs. nonprofits (especially in grantmaking contexts), commercial vs. nonprofit arts, “neighborhood” vs. institutional arts. We need to identify universal truths and shared pain in the arts—this could unlock progress. Simultaneously, we must see decentralization and difference as inherent to creativity, and we must increase education in basic economic principles shaping arts relationships involving money.

We need more respect for and acceptance of digital spaces—their art and mass audience engagement. As AI also challenges notions of who or what creates the art people want, professionals must wrestle with meeting people where they are at, moving with trends, and letting go of long-term investments in infrastructure, “collections,” and expertise.

The arts ecosystem needs to reckon with the impacts of philanthropic support, especially as individuals and organizations attempt to sell goods and services in contemporary marketplaces instead of operating as “charities.” Where is philanthropy a catalyst, crutch, or sustenance. (If the government subsidized the arts like it subsidizes agriculture, it would be named here too.)

We need to wrestle with the paradox of professionalism in the arts: on one hand it leaves a lot of people without access to jobs and opportunity, and on the other hand professional labels give helpful validation and reliability frames to workers (and providing those labels generates significant revenue for high education and business associations).

While conservatives like to dance, draw, and live artfully as much as anyone, their presence is increasingly absent from administrative and governance ranks of nonprofits, leaving those organizations—that are reliant on public donations and government tax exemptions—lopsided in their calibration to the public. We need more ideological diversity in social impact arts enterprises.

Cities need support identifying their specific cultural assets and investing in related infrastructure to become a unique hub—without trying to be everything to everyone or competing with radically different places. Artists also need more permission to have migratory careers in the arts, accepting relocation as a means to artistic prosperity. (Universities are microcosms of this dynamic.)

The arts sector historically relied on a robust journalism sector for information sharing and sense-making—why is this performance, artist, platform important were questions they interrogated ethically. Their field’s erosion and gradual replacement by a corps of influencers leaves a void that needs to be filled for conveying the societal value of the arts.

Summit Partner:

Doris Duke Foundation

2025 Ideas Summit Attendees: