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This piece is provided by Dr. Eric Maisel. To comment on it, please drop Dr. Maisel an email at ericmaisel@hotmail.com.
CREATIVE TOURISM: WHAT’S IN IT FOR ARTISTS?
Artists know better than anyone that places hold meaning. That’s why they hunger for Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, and the other stops, small and large, on the International Bohemian Highway. They contrive to spend a year in London or Tokyo because those places hold special meaning. Yet most artists do not consider that the visitors who come to where they live are also hungry, also hoping to be stirred, and also looking for an experience that has nothing to do with room service breakfasts and garish souvenirs.
Because so many artists are in survival mode, struggling to make ends meet, because they are squirreled away in their studios painting, writing, or practicing their instruments, because, like everyone, they are over-busy and over-anxious, and because they tend not to think about the visitors to their community as potential audience members, they rarely connect with these fellow human beings who are themselves looking for some meaning. This is a shame, as visitors are primed and ready. In the movement that I’m about to describe, artists who live in locations that attract visitors – that attract tourists, conventioneers, and people passing through—would pay new and special attention to these readily available and always changing audience members.
How can the artists who live in a given place increase their connection to the visitors who come to that place? Let’s say that you are a writer, actor, musician, craftsperson, visual artist or some other creative individual. You live in your neighborhood, possibly far from the tourist haunts; across town, a million annual visitors pass through your city taking in the customary sites. They know that they must visit three churches, two museums, and that famous shopping street—but what else? Is there a way for you to be that “what else?” Is there a way for you to make some useful contact with these visitors, contact that serves both of your ends?
First of all, who would have a say in making such contact happen? Naturally, you, the artist, would have the first say. Unless narrowing the gap that currently exists between you and the people who visit your locale interests you, nothing will happen. That opportunity falls squarely on your shoulders. Visitors, too, will have their say: if they do not show up at the event you plan, if they show up but leave immediately, or if they show up and stay but feel no connection to what you are offering, not much will have changed. This is the age-old dynamic: the artist not only must make a Herculean effort to create but must also seduce or convince her audience to pay attention to what she is offering.
There are five other constituencies who have a vested interest in seeing this gap bridged. Government officials, whose help artists will want to enlist, will also have their say, because they have the power to announce upcoming events, the power to support artists’ initiatives, and also the power to prevent the use of public spaces. Also involved are tourist industry professionals, who can trumpet the fact that artists are transforming their city into a creative hotbed or who can ignore those efforts. Also in the mix are local businessmen and women, the hotel managers, restaurant owners, and the like, who count on tourist dollars and who want to see tourism increase. Another constituency is made up of art industry professionals: gallery owners, theater directors, museum officials, publishers, and so on. Last but not least are a locale’s residents: the other people who live in your community and who may benefit or who may be harmed by the activities of visitors—and by your activities as well.
These, then, are the seven groups who have a stake in the matter: artists, visitors, government officials, tourist industry professionals, business owners, art marketplace players, and local residents. The goal of this chat is to paint a picture of how these seven groups can be simultaneously served. Each group will have to stretch a bit in order for the changes I have in mind to occur, but no group will be bent completely out of shape. I think that, if presented well, this stretching will make sense to all seven groups, who will see how they can benefit from artists and visitors beginning to interact in new, small-scale, personal ways. But first let me begin with a few observations.
Observation 1. Artists are currently not content.
I’ve heard personally from thousands of creative and performing artists over the past several years. More than 2000 of them have come forward to receive the free creativity coaching that I offer when I train new creativity coaches. I know exactly to what extent artists are having trouble meeting the emotional and practical challenges of a life in the arts. Depression, anxiety, and addiction are among their regular struggles. Artists do not earn enough, they experience a significant amount of angst related both to the difficulties associated with producing good work and the difficulties associated with selling their work, and they tend to feel isolated from their peers, from marketplace players, and from their audience.
That this discontent exists is not a good thing. But it does mean that artists are primed to make changes, because they know that they need things to be both different and better. If they were a class of fat cats, they would have no reason to step out of their comfort zone and meet visitors in new ways. If everything they created turned to gold, they could go on vacation and not worry about transforming tourists into fans. If they got so much out of their current social interactions that they felt no lack of human warmth, they would find themselves that much less motivated to reach out to strangers. But as it is, artists need their landscape to change for the better. Therefore they are primed to make the changes that I intend to suggest—if, and maybe only if, all of the stakeholders involved come on board to help.
Observation 2. Artists function as renewable resources.
That geyser that brought visitors to your area may begin to dry up. That church that millions throng to may have to close for repairs. The roads that the tour buses chew up likewise may need repair and cost enormous sums to keep up. But artists renew themselves. They paint a mural; and then they want to paint another one. They write a short story; and then they want to write another one. They love what they do and need to do what they do and this very devotion can be enlisted, if they are helped to make the connection, as motivational energy that will drive them to interact with visitors.
The matter of renewable resources and sustainable tourism are big issues in the tourism, cultural tourism, and creative tourism fields. Not every resource can be renewed and not every site can be sustained. Writing tongue-in-cheek in a piece called “Cultural Tourism: Between Authenticity and Globalization,” Frans Schouten explained, “At a conference in Africa recently someone involved in a cultural tourism development project in a tribal community announced that he had included in the village tour a visit to a ritual circumcision of a boy. Such an announcement raises many questions, the first of many being, Might they run out of boys in the peak season, or how many times can you circumcise someone?”
Even in the peak season, you can’t run out of an artist’s creativity. This is a very important point for the various stakeholders to consider and appreciate. If you run a small barbecue joint, you close your doors when the barbecue runs out. If you run a small city, you feel threatened when your revenues dwindle. If you’re a tourist industry professional and see that all flights to a certain destination have been filled, you can’t book more passengers. The barbecue, revenue, and seats are finite. But Pete Seeger can extend his concert set simply by singing another folk song. Van Gogh can turn every blank canvas in his vicinity into something memorable. As long as they live—and as long as they feel motivated—artists can turn the lead of everyday existence into the gold of art.
Observation 3. Visitors enjoy “small” experiences at least as much as they enjoy the “large” cultural experiences of museums and monuments.
Human things appeal to human beings. These “human things” are often called “authentic experiences” in the cultural tourism and creative tourism literature. A tourist may well not even know that he is hungering for a small human experience from his visit to your place and may suppose that he is coming for the shopping, the museums, and the restaurants. But in fact what he wants is to have his heart stirred for a moment.
If he is landlocked at home, he wants to feel the breeze off the ocean hit his face. If his town is pitch-dark by nine in the evening, he wants to see city lights and human beings still reveling at midnight. To repeat, he may not know that he wants these things—and all the constituencies I named at the outset need to help him understand that he does—but he surely does want and need these small, human-sized experiences. He will treasure them; and he will return to your city again and again simply because he holds a fondness for what happened there.
Visitors will crawl through the exhibits of even the greatest museum as much because it is an obligation to do so as it is a pleasure. But if they encounter Mongolian chanters or Andean flute players in the open space in front of the museum, they will stop and listen with real pleasure. That will be the memory they take home and the reason they return. You can pour millions into your museums; or, for free, you can create an environment such that Mongolian chanters and Andean flute players arrive, make music, and create memories.
Experiences of this sort—turning the corner and happening upon a local string quartet that has just set up in the street—are sometimes called “accidental authentic experiences.” These accidental authentic experiences do not even have to be perfectly pleasant in order for them to become an important memory in a person’s life. We do not have to like the street music that we encounter; we do not have to agree with the values being expressed in the street theater we happen upon; in fact, these accidental authentic experiences may remind us why we prefer our homes. But because we were transfixed for a few moments, we leave with a lasting memory.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Many years ago my wife and I showed up at a small Irish town in the vicinity of Cork to return a horse and caravan that we had rented. What we happened upon was a closed town and a funeral procession snaking through its streets. This is a paradigmatic example of an “accidental cultural experience”; and indeed it was a memorable one, as, for an hour or two, we got to experience a life we do not live and—this is important—one that we do not want to live, the rural village life of neighborly enmeshments and entanglements. We did not want that life; but still we cherished that experience.
This was, to repeat, an “authentic experience,” not one contrived by the locals for our benefit, not a staged re-enactment of a “romantic funeral procession of old,” not a stop on an itinerary where, as soon as the tour bus leaves, the players put down the casket and have a good laugh. It was simply life as it is lived by some group of people and as witnessed by some strangers who happened to be wandering through. To complete the experience, we all ended up, local and stranger alike, at the village pub where we drank our whiskeys and stout. How could such an experience not produce a lasting memory?
Here’s a second example of the sort of experience that visitors crave without even knowing that they crave them. Many years before the funeral experience that I just described, I found myself hitchhiking through Ireland from music festival to music festival. One afternoon a friend and I dropped into the local pub. Congregated in the pub were locals and festival performers engaged in a beautiful and startling ceremony. Someone had taken on the job of master of ceremonies; he would point to the pub patrons one by one and each patron would sing, play his instrument, or both. Not a single person in the pub couldn’t sing or wouldn’t sing. It was astounding to experience a pub-full of people participating beautifully and at a high level in the making of art.
This was a very different experience from the Lawrence Welk-ization of Celtic music that we are currently seeing on public television. A rebel song sung in a village pub is a different experience for everyone concerned from the same rebel song performed on a big stage for a well-heeled audience. In the latter case it just isn’t a rebel song any longer. A funeral procession performed for tourists is not a funeral procession: it is a parade with a casket substituted for a float. It is true that right now, at this moment in time, most visitors look to prefer the pre-digested, reproduced event to the real one. But this reality sits side-by-side with a contradictory reality, that what visitors actually remember is the small authentic thing and not the big contrived thing.
I suggest that we consider the tourist not only as he is but as he might become if he were presented with the right opportunities. As he is, he seems to want only shallow, simple, distracting experiences—nothing authentic, please. Those who cater to him often see as their goal, as described in an article called “The Fakelore of Hawaii,” to “mystify the mundane, amplify the exotic, minimize the misery, rationalize the disquietude, and romanticize the strange.” They believe that they ought to provide as safe and cocooned an experience as possible. This may be one truth; but side-by-side with this truth is the contradictory truth that what tourists find most memorable are the human sights and sounds of the places they visit: the aroma of freshly-baked bread, the lilt of a spontaneous song—the human things.
This observation, that visitors actually crave, often without knowing it, small, intimate, human-sized experiences, the kinds of experience that artists involved in the movement could provide, connects with the following observation. Observation number 4 is that residents and visitors alike both love street life.
There is a vast difference between bustling downtown streets filled with life and an overrun tourist attraction clogged with tour buses. In the raging debate about how much tourism is good for a place, it is important to make a distinction between adding life to the streets and adding visitors to the main tourist attractions. Residents may well balk if they experience their everyday life overwhelmed by tourists who are visiting local attractions. But they love and embrace street life and are happy to share that street life with visitors. Residents love and need their street fairs, their open-air markets, their band concerts, and their people-watching exactly as much as visitors do. Both love the same things; and with respect to this bustling street life, residents do not mind that visitors share the wealth.
There is a great lesson to be learned from the failure of the urban redevelopment movement of several decades ago. It is the lesson that human beings need human life around them and want their environment to be built and lived on a human scale. We should remember that great pioneer Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities made a brilliant case against inhuman urban development and who spent her life advocating for the humanization of cities. With fierce eloquence, she announced back in the 60s that the ideas promoted by urban planners to save cities were destroying those cities and that urban planners, out of ignorance, an obsession with theory, partisan politics, ties to corporate money, and other unfortunate reasons, were doing their constituents a disservice by not looking at, honoring and replicating what actually worked in cities.
Jane Jacobs prided herself on looking around her and seeing why things worked in cities or why they didn’t work. She argued, for instance, that if you lived on a very long block you would be much less inclined to know or care about what happened on the long blocks parallel to you, since you would rarely visit them. On the other hand, if your neighborhood was made up of short streets, and especially of short streets that intersected each other at interesting angles, you got street life and vitality built on the fact that you enjoyed wandering those streets. The tangled streets of Greenwich Village promoted life, she argued; the endless east-west boulevards of midtown Manhattan promoted isolation.
She made observation after observation of this sort, noting for instance a fact that should have been obvious to anyone: people like to look at one another. When you get right down to it, people who are attracted to visiting cities are attracted primarily because they get a par excellence opportunity to people-watch. Denizens of cities are themselves made happy by well-used parks, rather than empty ones, by bustling common areas, rather than deserted ones, and by people coming and going on their own two feet, rather than driving by in cars belching exhaust fumes.
Jane wrote: “The activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for food or drink, is itself an attraction to still other people. This last point, that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere.
“This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where the street is divided by a narrow central mall, right in the middle of traffic. At the cross-street intersections of this long north-south mall, benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are filled with people watching the pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy sidewalks, and watching each other.”
In short, we enjoy places more when they have some life to them. We want life, motion, music, sights, energy, color, the things that stir us, cause us to dream, cause us to smile, and make us feel connected. If we don’t get them, we experience alienation, if it is one sort of empty place, and danger, if it is another. Isn’t that a large part of the allure of any great European city, where people walk, shop, and sit out?—the allure of just watching, just being part of the swirl day and night, from as early as you like until as late as you can stay awake?
So much goes into making this “simple thing” happen. You need serious population density and also the right kind of density that combines human-sized architecture and decent economic conditions. The density created by five-story apartment buildings on every Parisian street, buildings in which reside people who are making money, is not the same thing as the density created by twenty-story tenements in the suburbs of Paris filled with the working poor and the unemployed. Similarly, a tall office building brings density to a site, but who finds any life there in the evening when it empties and the area around it becomes deserted; or even during the day, when the people exist in great numbers but are trapped in their cubicles?
Street life is crucial to the vitality of a place and artists can add to the street life of their cities—and, in turn, to the culture of their cities—by taking their creative efforts public, by engaging visitors and residents in small-scale, street corner-sized activities and events, and by imagining the street as an extension of their studio. Street fairs and bandstand concerts are wonderful and valuable, but such events do not need to represent the sum total of public culture. Where people go—along the boulevards, into restaurants, waiting in hotel lobbies, gathering in train stations, standing in line at a great museum, strolling in parks—that’s where artists should also be.
Observation 5. Visitors want safe, sanctioned experiences
A very small percentage of travelers are genuinely adventurous. Virtually no traveler wants to court actual danger. Visitors want safe experiences, experiences that they know or feel are sanctioned by someone they can trust, whether that someone is a government official, a tourism professional, a hotel concierge, or an art gallery director. A tourist would probably not even consider attending a street performance happening in an edgy Manhattan or Berlin neighborhood, even if he found the description of the event intriguing, unless someone he trusted vouched for the performance and the neighborhood. Visitors will almost always opt for safety first.
If, however, he reads about the event in a publication he picks up at the tourist office, he will be that much more likely to attend it. If he sees a flyer for it at each of the galleries he visits along gallery row, flyers not dropped on the floor but presented in such a way that it is clear that the galleries are standing behind the event, he will be that much more likely to go. If he hears about it at the travel office back home—if it is one of those things he is told that he “must do” when he gets to Manhattan or Berlin—he will be that much more likely to go. If it is announced on the scroll in the lobby of the hotel where he is staying, he will be that much more likely to go. The more that these small, intimate, street corner-sized events are publicized and sanctioned by the various players in the tourism industry, the more likely it will be that a visitor will feel comfortable trying them out.
This leads to my last observation, observation 6, that government officials, tourist industry professionals, local business owners, and marketplace players, all of whom appreciate the value to their community’s creative assets, nevertheless are not accustomed to promoting those efforts and not particularly adept at working with artists.
There are many reasons why this is so. Government tourist bureaus are likely to find it hard enough just promoting the annual festival their place is known for, keeping up with the everyday demands of tourists for city maps and basic information, and dealing with supporting the big sights in town, the museums, concert halls, shopping districts, and so on. Local business owners are hard-pressed just to keep their businesses going: a restaurant owner is much more worried about keeping his customers happy and his doors open than connecting with local artists. Players in the art marketplace, many of whom are operating on the tightest of profit margins, are much more likely to feel the need to focus their attention on gaining Internet customers or promoting their stable of artists than on supporting local artist-created events that thy see as unlikely to drive customers to their establishments.
What this means is that the constituencies who need to be enlisted do not see themselves as being in much of a position to help. What would transform this picture and bring these constituencies on board, as overburdened as they already are, is the following. These constituencies—artists, visitors, local government, tourism professionals, local businesses, art marketplace players, and residents—need a simple model to hang their hat on. When you have a simple model that is understood by all the players involved, conversations and cooperation are possible. For example, everybody knows what a “library system” is and when you call a meeting about whether to close a given library branch or to keep its doors open, everyone knows what the debate is going to be about and what the stakes are. The same is wanted here, such that when a creative tourism meeting is called, everyone knows what the meeting will be about.
For creative tourism to really work, local officials, local businesses, tourism professionals and art marketplace players support these small, human-sized activities by promoting them and legitimizing them. Tourists and other visitors are helped to understand the value of engaging in such interactions by virtue of the fact that the materials they pick up at tourist offices, the materials they find in hotel lobbies, the materials they encounter in the art galleries they frequent, and the information they receive from tourist industry professionals all support and reinforce the idea that there is value and joy in “interacting with local artists.”
Artists begin to collaborate with local businesses and local government. For example, an artist makes an appointment with a hotel manager and describes an idea she has for how they might collaborate. She explains that if the hotel provides her with a hospitality suite one Friday evening a month, she will perform her magic act there for free. All she asks is that the hotel provide the space, set it up, and begin to announce her presence – that is, begin to announce that she is an attraction. She, in turn, will be permitted to announce her other magic workshops, sell her magic videos, and invite the audience to her other magic gigs around town. For almost no cost, the hotel gets an attraction that no other hotel in town has – a resident magician – and the magician gets a regular venue and a platform from which to build her business.
Artists who would never think of venturing out into their community with their wares, artists like writers or actors for example, would now have a model to spark their imagination and help them create new public opportunities for themselves. A writer might approach the person in local government designated to handle such requests and be given a verbal go-ahead to set up in a local park, read from his current novel, facilitate a discussion, and sell copies of his book. Rather than being restricted to formal bookstore readings, writers might come out – and be encouraged by local government to come out – and do park readings, mall readings, town square readings, and street corner readings.
Actors, too, might give this a go. In addition to handing out playbills for their current play, actors, with permission from local government, might set up in a very public, well-trafficked spot and perform ten minutes from their current play; and then, to make the experience interactive, invite a volunteer to come up and play one of the roles. The actors would in effect produce a mini acting workshop right in the middle of their city’s daily life. What visitor wouldn’t love this?—and what local wouldn’t stop his or her rushing for fifteen minutes and cherish it as well?
This model is a simple one: artists, local government, local businesses, tourism professionals, and art marketplace players enter into new collaborations that make it easier for artists to interact in public with visitors and residents. “Public” here is construed in the broadest sense possible: small parks and large parks, inside a hotel or outside on a street corner, inside a restaurant or outside by the beach, inside a shop or outside in front of a church. Wherever people go, artists would go, supported and encouraged by the many constituents who gain when a city is full of life, activity, and creativity.
“Visitor,” too, is construed broadly. If a person lives in one part of town and ventures across town for some reason, he is a visitor there. If he must leave his neighborhood and go downtown on business, he is a visitor there. If he comes in from the suburbs for the day, he is a visitor. If he is just out and about, enjoying a spare hour, he fits the profile of the person we intend to reach: someone available for an art experience. I think you can see why “visitor” is the right term here, rather than “tourist” or “traveler” or any other term. Once we leave our homes, even if it is just to shop three blocks away, we are visitors to that part of town, out and about and ready to be wooed by an enterprising artist.
Naturally there is a very close affinity between this model and the community arts model, that is, with the model of the artist working in her community and for the sake of that community. Thousands of artists are already engaged in the community arts model in disciplines like dance, literature, narrative, media arts, music, public art, theater, performance, and the visual arts. Some of the social contexts in which they work are activism, community development, corrections, cultural democracy, education, environment and health. These groups and projects have names like The Community Arts Corps, the Prison Creative Arts Project, Culture for Development, and the Art for Healing Foundation.
The main difference between the community arts model and the creative tourism model is that in the community arts model activism is the key. In the creative tourism model, interaction is the key. Individual artists design activities and events that promote interactions in public spaces with the people who pass through that space or who show up because they have heard that something is happening. The community arts model is more frankly social and political; the creative tourism model includes social and political work but also includes anything an artist may dream up, from the political satire of the San Francisco Mime Troupe to open air watercolor workshops.
Here is one example of the model in action. Patrice, a visual artist in Honolulu, described her efforts at connecting with Hawaii’s tourist trade. She explained:
“I live and paint in Honolulu and create most of my watercolor paintings in public by demonstrating at two hotel gallery/shops in Waikiki. The work I do is of interest to the visitors passing me as I paint and we often have interesting conversations about painting, life in the islands, and their visits here. People of all ages love to watch me work and there is a certain magic in watching a painting come to life, because only the artist has any idea of what might happen next.
“When visitors tell me that they like to draw or paint I ask them to tell me what they like to create. When they bemoan the fact that they're not as good as I am, I tell the children that I'm older, and I tell everyone that I have been painting a lot longer than they have. When they tell me I make it look so easy, I explain that that's my job. I encourage everyone to keep painting and drawing and I tell them that the more they do, the better they will get. Who knew that old adage was really true?
“I also offer 2-hour private watercolor classes to people of all ages. During that time, we discuss color as they fill in a color wheel and mix colors by combining complementaries. They paint their own painting, whatever subject matter they choose, and take their matted painting home with them, ready to be framed. I give them a folder of information including everything we've discussed; it's enough information for them to be able to continue to paint once they get home. Some of them keep in touch, sending photos or digital images of what they've created. One of my students lives in England and calls twice a year to keep me posted on his progress.
“My classes are titled, ‘Be a Creative Traveler.’ I publicize them with rack cards and on the back of my business cards. Obviously I'm fortunate to be living in such a wonderful tourist destination. But wherever we live, it behooves artists to reach out to the public. We can create relationships with those who feel they have no talent but who appreciate art. We can educate others as to what it means to be an artist. When we make ourselves visible and known, we can begin to raise the awareness of what it means to actually live life as an artist in society today.”
Here are some other possibilities:
1. A playwright photocopies a scene from his current play, gathers an audience at a tourist site, and invites them to act out the scene. Then he discusses the play, facilitates a conversation, and invites the audience to come see the play at its current run. Naturally, he hopes to create customers from this foray; but the event itself is bound to prove eye-opening and memorable, both for the playwright and for the gathered visitors.
2. Nonfiction authors who live in a given neighborhood can each give a weekly chat at some unlikely venue, like the neighborhood Laundromat, to an audience of locals doing their laundry and to visitors who have heard about the series and have come to listen. The chat can be followed by a conversation, a conversation that unfolds as audience members fold their clothes. As unlikely as this possibility sounds, exactly such a lecture series has been run successfully at a Laundromat in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where I recently lived. The series attracted many well-known authors and many interested audience members.
3. Filmmakers with films to show, faced by the massive problem of finding distribution for their films and venues for showing their films, might take their films out into the community and create a film series that uses the walls of schools as screens. As odd and outlandish as this might sound, exactly such a film series is a successful annual event in the same Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco that I just mentioned. Hundreds of residents and visitors pay to sit in schoolyards under the stars and watch films projected onto school walls. Naturally, these filmmakers are also submitting their films to festivals and looking for other venues and other marketing opportunities, but as they wait they are making money and making some useful connections by showing their films in this public way.
4. Scientists, scholars, entrepreneurs and other residents with ideas and information to share might begin to present what they know in personal, informal, public-oriented ways. City government or local business could set up a well-advertised, well-situated speakers’ corner where “knowledge workers” come to speak about the things they love: the latest particle accelerator, new archaeological finds, our current understanding of how memory works, and so on. There is no reason to reserve these subjects for professional conferences, formal lectures, and the halls of academe. In a creative city, ideas might be presented in parks, on street corners, or wherever visitors and residents gather.
Among the many things that I do, one is running a cyberspace “artist bridge” group made up of creative and performing artists who live in locales worldwide. I give them assignments to try out and ask them to report on their efforts. The following is one of the assignments that I gave the group. I asked them to consider the following: “Imagine that an event like a convention is coming to your locale. It doesn’t matter how small your locale actually is—for this mind experiment imagine that there is some attraction in your area that is drawing people and that a group is coming. Picture some number of people, whether 20 or 2000, arriving in your locale. In what new ways might you connect with them? Generate a list of several of these new ideas.” Then I asked them to do the following. “Take one of your ideas and translate it into a series of steps that you actually take to connect with people, visitors or locals, in your area. Take the first step this week and report on your efforts.”
Here is a sampling of the responses that I got. Katrina, a playwright in Berlin, explained, “I think I will try the following. I will develop a talk that I give in front of an audience that involves people from the audience coming on to the stage and developing story ideas right on the spot. I might do this with theater groups and performers to help them hone their improvisational skills or I might do this with visitors to Berlin to provide them with a unique, mind-opening experience. I would also like to develop a stand, like a lemonade stand, out in a public, well-trafficked space, where I use game-like story elements and have people stop and play, as another way to help ordinary people understand that they, too, can be story-makers.”
Victoria, a media artist, musician and poet in Hamilton, Ontario, came up with the following plan. “The first thing I’ll do is talk to the convention bureau here in my city, which has a population 500,000. I would find out who is coming and pick three or four conferences to focus on. Then I’d talk to the conference organizers about having me deliver a workshop-like event that would focus on exploring the local environment while creating art. It would be experiential tourism in action -- people building skills and having a good time while they do it. And of course I would work with the conference planners to make sure I get good promo in their conference program to maximize visits to my website, increase the chances of getting hired for more workshops, and sell some of my art.”
Mary, a visual artist in Toronto, explained: “Recently a new farmer's market formed in my neighborhood. Before finding this out, I had wanted to create an art/community event in this underutilized park to showcase some of the creativity that exists in this neighborhood. I knew that the manager, who seemed open to imaginative programming, had indicated that interactive art might be a great addition to the market, especially because of the large number of children who come with their parents. With this exercise as a prompt, I decided to approach him.
“At our meeting I proposed doing art workshops that tied into what the market was advocating, namely greenbelt local produce, and extending that idea into an art form that created linkage among the ideas of creativity, agriculture, community and support. It struck me that this would allow me the chance to gain more experience in facilitating workshops and working with children. I would also be putting myself out to my community as an artist whose art life included supporting local industry and who practiced sustainable art by using recycled materials and by incorporating planting as art. I proposed the workshops, they were accepted, and we’ve already begun creating market banners hand-painted on canvas. I’m not 100% certain yet what this means to my artwork or my business, but I feel that this is a good personality fit and a great way to gain facilitation experience.”
Vivian, a writer in Madrid, had the following idea. “The Madrid Book Fair is coming up, so naturally I can use that as an opportunity to connect with a potential audience. As a performing storyteller, I can offer a show and tell some of my stories. But this exercise has provoked me to think a little differently. I think that my friends and I, instead of reading or performing our stories, might read excerpts from our uncompleted novels. Then the audience could vote on what they'd want to happen next, or how they think the story line should unfold. It might give us some excellent ideas and create an entirely different experience for the audience. Actually, I think this is a great idea and I’m going to approach some of my writer friends and the fair organizers and get this rolling.”
Christina, a visual artist in Shanghai, explained: “The art installations that I make are not readily accessible to people who are not conversant with contemporary art, so at first I couldn’t think of any ‘convention’ that I would want to connect with. But then I realized that there were two art events in Shanghai that actually do bring in ‘my’ audience: the Shanghai Biennale & the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. This audience of ‘tourists’ from inside the culture industry would be interested in spending time in Shanghai in ways that are not necessarily easily available to them through traditional tours. Some of these tourists are artists themselves, others are interested in the creative process and how it is manifested here in Shanghai. So I quickly generated the following list of ideas.
“I can create tours for visiting artists to the markets from which they might buy inspiring materials: the fabric market, the notions market, the hardware market, etc., and also take them to places off the beaten track that would be inspiring, like the bird and flower market, the backstreets of the old city, the tinsmiths, my studio building, and the propaganda museum. I could include a play date in my studio where visitors get to make a handmade souvenir, maybe a simple artist’s book incorporating the local materials they just purchased. An extension of this might be having them rent a piece of my studio for the length of their stay so that each day they could interpret what they’d seen. This could include coaching on my part about how one interprets one’s experience of a place in order to imbue experience with meaning.
“Now I need to get started turning some of these ideas into reality! First, I’ll approach several tour guides I know who do unusual custom tours and ask them to consider me as option. Then I’ll approach concierges at some of the high end, trendy hotels. Next I’ll find out who does the marketing for these two events and get my new tour information to them. Fourth, I’ll create a website whose name comes up when you google variations on artist studio, Shanghai, and creative tours. Fifth, I’ll place a listing in all the ex-pat magazines, as newcomers to Shanghai might also love to know about this possibility. Okay, I see how this might work!”
The point to take away from these five examples is not that they are spectacularly innovative but rather that the artists involved had never dreamed of doing such things and would not have attempted them without encouragement. An artist in her studio is thinking about the painting in front of her or about gallery representation; she is not musing about what efforts she might make to connect with the thousand conventioneers on the other side of town. In order for a thought like that to pop into her head, and in order for her to follow through on that thought, she needs this creative tourism model and she needs to feel supported by the entities she must deal with, whether they are convention organizers, city officials, or the people who run her local farmers’ market.
In order for the model to work, the following must happen: all seven groups of stakeholders need to stretch. Artists need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of going public. It is virtually another art form to lead a public discussion or to present an interactive workshop and most artists do not see themselves as talented in these ways. They need to be helped to understand that there is a learning curve involved, that their first efforts may fall flat, and that trusting the process is everything, just as it is in the art-making they engage in daily. Here is a place where city government and tourism professionals could be of great help, by sponsoring workshops that teach artists how to go public with their efforts.
Visitors need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of participation. Most visitors to a place are looking for service, sights, and peace. It is well known in tourism circles that only a small percentage of travelers are actively adventurous or genuinely curious. Most tend to prefer staged performances to reality and the safety of observation to the perceived risks of participation. A concerted effort by government, local businesses, tourism professionals, and art marketplace representatives to present participation as a great way to make memories can help enormously in this regard. Every outlet—hotel lobby, restaurant, art gallery, bookstore—could have a “Meet Our Artists!” brochure on hand, a brochure created at the national or local level to explain to visitors the value of participation, to train them in the art of participation, and to reduce their anxiety about interacting with artists.
Government officials need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of supporting artists who want to go public by providing them with easy access to venues like public parks and tourist sites, by providing them with workshops and trainings on how to effectively go public, by encouraging rather discouraging their efforts to bring their creativity into public view, and, as a top priority, by announcing their activities with as much energy and enthusiasm as they announce annual festivals, great museums, and other large cultural attractions. Every local government should have a “Meet Our Artists!” link on their tourist-oriented web pages that is kept up-to-date and that does a good job of directing visitors to such events. Likewise, they should create a “Meet Our Artists!” brochure that helps visitors understand that, as part of the creative cities movement, their city supports visitor-artist interactions. And they should announce and promote such events with passion and zeal.
Tourist industry professionals need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of adding “creative tourism products” to the products they tout and sell. Every tourist industry professional knows to tout sea breezes, free breakfasts, and three nights for the price of two. They know the allure of high-end shopping, fine dining, and world-class theater. Now they need to be encouraged to point out that certain destinations come with this added allure, that artists from all the disciplines provide public activities there. Aspen is not just its music festival; it is the scores of impromptu concerts that those gathered music students provide on every corner and in every square. As a tourist industry professional, you can sell Aspen’s skiing, its dining, its galleries, its festival, its mountain beauty, and its cachet as a popular watering hole. But you can also sell it as a “creative paradise” where art happens everywhere. This is the central message of the model and movement: that art happens everywhere. As this movement takes hold, tourism professionals will want to keep pace and begin to tout this new “tourist product.”
Local business owners with a stake in the matter need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of standing open to artists’ ideas, to hear artists out when they suggest, for instance, that they might be given space in the hotel lobby to interact with guests. This is a natural extension of what business owners already know to be true, that hanging an artist’s show is good for their café and that allowing a mariachi band to play is good for their restaurant. This is the logical next step for local business owners, to see these new interactive arts activities as good for business, to support artists’ initiatives, and to actively seek out artist collaborations and partnerships.
Art marketplace players need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of thinking outside the box of gallery, crafts shop, theater, concert hall and bookstore by inviting the artists they interact with and represent to go public. A painter will often ask the gallery owner who represents him, “What can I do to help?” Gallery owners typically have no idea how to respond beyond “Send people to the gallery.” Now, as active participants in the creative tourism movement, a gallery owner can say, “Do a public workshop – I’ll help you arrange it.” A publisher can say, “Publicly interact with your readers – here are some ideas for doing that.” Art marketplace players can learn to support this movement and, by doing so, increase their bottom line with no added costs.
Residents need to be encouraged to stretch in the direction of attending the activities made available to them, including the new creative tourism activities that creative and performing artists dream up. They need to be coaxed out from in front of their television sets, charmed into attending what may seem like unusual and even edgy activities, and informed about the events happening down the street and across town. When residents experience these new activities as pluses and come to anticipate them and enjoy them, that will help temper the natural ambivalence they feel toward the visitors who flock to their place.
This, then, has been a very brief overview of a new way of bridging the artist-tourist gap, making cities and towns genuinely more creative, better employing the talents of creative and performing artists, and better serving both the vacation needs and the existential needs of visitors. I stand ready to consult with individual artists, arts organizations, city governments, and other constituencies on how to turn this model into a robust reality. And I stand ready to facilitate discussions among artists, art marketplace players, local businesses, tourism professionals, and city government that lead to real initiatives and new public activities.
Millions of artists are available to interact with the hundreds of millions of people who travel for business and pleasure. Artists have both personal and professional reasons for wanting to connect to these travelers. On a personal level, it helps counteract the isolation they often feel and creates the warmth that only comes from human contact. On a professional level, it builds the artist’s audience and forces the artist to better articulate what it is that he or she is doing. An artist could work in her studio, create paintings, and look for gallery representation: that is the traditional model. Or she could work in her studio, create paintings, look for gallery representation AND take her paints, her spirit, and her expertise into the sunlight and interact with other human beings. That is the creative tourism model.
What we are really talking about is: what makes for civilization? Millions of artists would love to contribute more, earn a better living, and play a bigger role in the fabric of culture. We have a great opportunity to make the places that we live more vibrant, more interesting, and more humane by virtue of the simple fact that the creative and performing artists who live there are available to fill the streets with their talent and their expertise. Let us help them do exactly that. Let us support this new creative tourism model and encourage artists and visitors to interact in all of our public spaces. Everyone involved will have to stretch in order for this to happen—but if they do, we will have given a brand new meaning to the term “creative city.”
© Eric Maisel, 2008
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