By: Connie Martinez, SVCREATES’ Chief Executive Officer
Several years ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with the futurist and founder of Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand. Something he shared that evening stuck with me. Whenever he travels to a new place, he focuses on discovering its Main Event — it’s what makes a place tick, defines its culture, economy, and helps explain almost everything about it.
The Main Event in Paris would be arts and culture, in Napa food and wine, in Nashville country music, and in Monterey the ocean. So if you’re at the Louvre, the French Laundry, the Grand Ole Opry or the Monterey Bay Aquarium, you are in service to the Main Event, with the wind at your back.
Many have witnessed the transition of our Valley’s Main Event from the orchards to technology and innovation. This transition has fueled an explosion of extreme wealth, greater diversity in our communities, and a scrappy start-up culture that has changed the world. Our Main Event may seem obvious, but its implications to the arts may not.
Our ethnically diverse, but mostly male and engineering dominated, persistent, start-up culture does not consume or invest in the arts the same way folks from Boston, Minneapolis and New York do. We are not a traditional “marketplace” for the arts.
Our evolving digital culture makes building audiences more complex, as they want to curate their own experiences. This is especially true for young people — think Burning Man, Maker Faire and YouTube. As demand for “experience” explodes, relevance trumps excellence….and while quality is always relevant, it is often relative.
Our culture of churn and our suburban development pattern weakens our sense of community and dissipates energy, while our breadth of diversity makes rallying around one specific culture or art form out of reach. Powerful forces physically divide us and culturally segment us.
This may all sound grim, but ecosystems either adjust to their environment or die, which is what our arts ecosystem has done and continues to do.
We have become a vast network of small, multicultural organizations and projects led largely by cultural entrepreneurs and volunteers. Those who survive embrace a business model that leans market, leverages scrappiness, and welcomes who we are in the broadest of terms. These nuanced characteristics provide some “wind” at our back in service to the Main Event.
I used to think that the arts in Silicon Valley were behind everyone else. I now believe we are ahead of the nation, not because we tried to be or even wanted to be, but because the forces of digital culture and shifting demographics emerged here first. And while we are small and undercapitalized, we are collaborative, entrepreneurial, and extremely relevant to the audiences we serve, albeit invisible to those who are not directly engaged…..much like the web.
Our challenge as a Silicon Valley community is to build the capacity of our arts sector, raise its value and visibility, and engage more people within the culture we have. Our pathway is from “scrappy good to scrappy great” that operates within a fundraising climate that leans global. (More on our fundraising climate in a future blog.)
I’m often asked why people should care about the arts and my answer is always the same: we should care about the arts because we care about humanity. Without the arts, we lose the very heart of who we are and who we can be. We lose touch with our Main Event.
