STP&A – history

The Origins of Brigadoon:
A History of the Social Theory, Politics and the Arts Conference

written by
Robert D. Leighninger Jr., PhD
Arizona State University

In the annals of social organization and social movements, the conference series known as Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts (STPA) is a strange creature.  It is over thirty years old, but it continues to exist without the usual ingredients of complex organization.  It has no bylaws, no written policies, no officers, no committees, no dues, no (501)C(3).  Its only figment of organization is a mailing list, and even that’s somewhat ephemeral.  By now, it should have achieved some kind of institutionalization, some hardening of the arteries. Instead, all that persists is a conviction in the consciousness of a number of individuals that it has to keep happening.  So it does.  Someone always comes forward to do the work, and not an insignificant amount of work either, to host it each year.

I like to think of it as Brigadoon.  It rises out of the mists, the singing and dancing start, the fights break out, and the community exists happily for a few days then sinks back into the mist, reappearing somewhere else next year.  Since we study the arts, we know that miracles may happen, but that the magic behind them requires a nudge.  There must be some back-stage managing, somebody to raise the curtain and cue the orchestra; but compared to any other 30-year-old organization you can name, this is surprisingly minimal.  How did it start?

Well, once upon a time there were two sociologist in upstate New York who studied the arts and had nobody to talk with about it.  They weren’t even sure there was anyone out there to talk with.  One of them had a colleague who had organized a conference on New Developments in Anthropological Theory.  And people actually attended.  They came from all over the country to Oswego, New York , a metropolis of perhaps 20,000 people whose main attraction was a bit of rocky shoreline on Lake Ontario and a reputation for an annual snowfall of 90 inches.  And they talked about anthropological theory as happily as if they were in San Francisco or Orlando.  The sociologist wondered if he might find colleagues as willing to hike into the boonies as these intrepid anthropologists.  He proposed the idea to his friend down the road in Fredonia, and they decided to give it a try.  If it worked in Oswego, they’d do it next year in Fredonia.  And so they did.

The first conference (1974) was called Sociology and the Arts.  It might as easily have been called Sociology of the Arts; but the organizers, perhaps influenced by the anti-colonial biases of their anthropologist friends, but more likely because they saw the relationship as two-way, opted for the simple conjunction.  They were convinced that sociology had important things to say about the arts, but were willing to entertain the idea that artists could tell them something about society.  In fact, one of them had written a dissertation about F. Scott Fitzgerald as a sociological theorist.

An attempt was made to make all papers available in advance to the registrants.  This would allow presentations to be limited to 10 minutes, maximizing discussion.  Since the participants were academics, who have trouble following directions and meeting deadlines, this was only partially successful.  Still, there was plenty of discussion.  Only one session had more than three papers, and in two sessions even more time was made available because a presenter cancelled.  There were no concurrent sessions, so all participants were together the entire time.  And one advantage of being in Oswego was that no one was tempted to skip out and see the sights or take in the nightlife.  They even passed up the Double Bubble Hour at the nearby Howard Johnson’s. It was an intense and happy experience, perhaps the birth of a community.

The tone of informality had one drawback.  William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review, was an unexpected attendee.  He asked me if I’d like him to say a “few words.”  I said: “Of course, we hope to have a lot of discussion.”  The next day he asked me again. Several sessions had already taken place and he hadn’t opened his mouth.  It finally dawned on me that he wanted an introduction, preferably with a drum roll.  I’m not sure I rose to the occasion, but I tried and he delivered a few words.  In general, however, the conferences proceeded without hierarchy.  By the second conference (Fredonia 1975), a number of well-known scholars were present–Howard S. Becker, Richard A. Peterson, Joseph Bensman, Kurt Wolff, and Peter Etzkorn, as well as several soon-to-be-well-known scholars, Jeffery Goldfarb and Barry Glassner–and none of them needed a drumroll.

The Fredonia conference brought a name change.  We remained interested in the contribution of the arts to the study of society and thought that might best be expressed as

“social theory.” So it became Social Theory and the Arts.  The “and” rather than the ”of” remained the connective of choice (with one exception) until the second name change in 1983.

In keeping with this spirit, the early programs involved at least one direct art experience. The dinner presentation at Oswego was by Jackie Skiles, a sociologist who was also a videotape artist.  There was a session built on a photographic exhibit at Fredonia.  At Albany (1976) we screened Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.  The New York magazine editor who had suggested the idea and was to preside, failed to show up, so one of the participants, Anson Rabinbach, provided very useful impromptu commentary.  There was also a performance of labor songs; a poetry reading; and a psychodrama, an important integration of art and science, directed by Richard Moreno, the son of the founder of psychodrama.  At Stockton (1977), Hans Haacke, an artist and critic, showed slides of his museum installations attacking curators and patrons. Dennis Brutus, a South African poet and activist, commented on literature and liberation.  The featured speaker was Kenneth Burke, himself an embodiment of the collaboration of art and social science. 

We celebrated his 80^th birthday.  Also on the program was Arthur Jardine, a young steel drum player from Jamaica.  Arthur Paris had persuaded him to provide a brief history of Jamaican steel bands.  He was not particularly comfortable in the scholar role and couldn’t help giggling at himself periodically. But soon he was playing his “pan,” and nothing else mattered.  At William Patterson College (1979) there was both a performance of classical Indian dance and a screening of a Lena Wertmiller film.  In St. Paul, we attended a broadcast of Prairie Home Companion.  Also in St. Paul (1981), Gary Fine organized a session on “Cooking as an Art Form,” but the actual participation in the art happened later at a restaurant that, alas, some of us couldn’t afford.

These direct art experiences haven’t entirely disappeared.   Howie Becker, a pianist, and Rob Faulkner, a trumpet player, both discussed and illustrated the importance of practice in the presumably spontaneous improvisation of jazz at the Nashville (1999) conference.  In Charleston (2002), dancer and choreographer Cleo Parker Robinson actually had us on our feet and dancing, sort of, after the lunch session.  But at some point, the attempt to schedule arts experiences as part of the program and artists as program presenters slackened or was put to the side.  A hesitation at artist participation is now more common.  Some of it is not so hesitant.  When asked about the lack of artists on the program in Columbus (2003), Kevin Mulcahy said emphatically: “No artists! They’re always trouble.” (footnote 1 ).  Indeed, artists are inclined to complain about us and tell us we don’t understand them, which is not good for morale.

Improvisation and informality prevailed through the first decade. When an entire panel of local arts administrators failed to appear in St. Paul, Howie Becker and Michael Joyce, a novelist and inventor of hypertext fiction, huddled for ten minutes and put together a session on narrative.  The next night small groups engaged in animated conversation while consuming our “banquet” of pizza in a lounge where the evening session on Works in Progress was to be held.  The time for the session arrived and the conversations were still going strong.  Derral Cheatwood, who was to chair the session, circulated through the room and soon discovered people were talking about their work in progress.  So he went to the center of the room, whistled loudly, and announced: “This is the session on Works in Progress.  Please continue your conversations.”

As the conference was nearing the end of its first decade, something was happening offstage.  A group of political scientists, including Milton Cummings, Richard Swaim, Kevin Mulcahy, and Larry Mankin, were trying to organize a conference on the arts within the American Political Science Association but finding it difficult in such a large organization.  Cummings had summarized the state of the field for political scientists and laid out its future research agenda in 1976 (footnote 2 ).  Swaim was the first political scientist to hold an internship at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Swaim later moved to the University of Baltimore, where conference co-founder Derral Cheatwood was now located  About the same time, Pete Peterson was working with the National Endowment for the Arts where he met Margaret Wyszomirski, another political scientist, who was serving the internship that Swaim had held earlier.  She was on the same campus with sociologist Judy Balfe, who had discovered the conference early but was unable to attend until the third round, whereupon she took on an increasingly important role in its perseverance.  Judy was married to a political scientist but did not know Margaret. Pete introduced them.  This convergence of political scientists reached critical mass in 1983 when Judy and Margaret joined forces to host the tenth anniversary conference at Rutgers and renamed the whole affair Social Theory, Politics, & the Arts.  At the same time, the conference was moved from spring to fall, which is why there was no 1982 event.

These scholars brought in a whole range of new concerns.  Earlier conferences had included sessions on politics, patronage, funding, and arts organization.  Now there was a much fuller consideration of arts policy.  This was also because there was a lot more arts policy to consider.  It had hardly existed when the conferences began.  There were now federal, state, and local agencies and organizations engaged in supporting the arts.  Older political scientists were slow to move from their traditional study of political institutions and processes into this new “applied” area, so STPA was a liberating experience for the policy scholars.  The political scientists even attracted more sociologists: Vera Zolberg met the APSA group through her husband, a political scientist.

 The world now needed “arts administrators”; and they, along with the people who arose to train them, found STPA a useful place to congregate. Arts educators soon followed.  Cultural economists like Mel Gray became regulars.  Librarians turned up from time to time to talk about conservation, copyright, and censorship issues.  Word of our existence reaches unusual places and new voices are always welcome.

About this time, our fortified ranks required concurrent sessions.  The experience of being with the same people for the entire conference was lost and our original sense of community with it.  Not surprisingly, the program usually scheduled an arts policy session alongside one involving more sociological concerns.  But there was some cross-over, and some of those most concerned with policy were also sociologists, e.g. Balfe, Peterson, and Joni Cherbo.  In the interdisciplinary diversity we learned new things and discovered new resonances.

The conference was gradually attracting international attention.  French sociologists Antoine Hennion and Jean Vignolle were present at Albany (1976).  Vera Zolberg chaired as session on French Sociology of the Arts at the Maryland conference (1984) which included Raymonde Moulin, the president of the French Sociological Association..  There were also participants from England, Hungary, and Finland.  Volker Kirchberg from Germany and Marit Bakke of Norway met Richard Swaim and Derral Cheatwood in Baltimore while in a Johns Hopkins fellowship program. They introduced both to STPA in 1989.  Kirchberg told other northern Europeans, including Stefan Toepler, host of the 2004 conference. By the mid-1990s there were repeat appearances by scholars from Germany, Israel, Norway, and the Netherlands.  The conference itself became international in 1989, going to York, Ontario.  Returning to Canada in 1996, the Montreal conference featured multi-lingual sessions. In 2006 we will cross the ocean to Vienna.

The influence of STPA discussions is often extended through publication. After the third conference, the organizers had thoughts of producing a book from the collected presentations.  It did not get very far.  But the organizers of the Rutgers meeting (1983) were much more proficient.  Two years later Art, Ideology, and Politics appeared.  John P. Robinson, organizer of the Maryland conference (1984) brought out a compilation of papers from that conference, Social Science and the Arts, the same year.  Arnold Foster, who attended the first conference and hosted the third at Albany (1976), had been part of the first ill-fated effort.  In 1989 he produced a reader filled with the work of earlier conference participants (footnote 3 ).

Other conference papers appeared individually or in special issues of the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society (JAMLS).  The journal began life as the Performing Arts Review, and became Journal of Arts Management and Law in 1982.  In 1984, it inaugurated a Special Section on Public Policy and the Arts with an article by Larry Mankin.  Judy Balfe assumed editorship in 1992 and the name was changed to the current JAMLS.  It has became a kind of house organ for STPA.  It is now edited by Valerie Morris, organizer of the Charleston conference (2002), and its editorial board continues to be heavily stocked with STPA regulars.

What brought these divergent folks together and keeps STPA going with an ever-changing cast?  It begins, as Peterson notes, with a passion for the arts.  But many people enjoy  the arts.  These people wanted to make the arts part of their scholarly lives as social scientists, educators, and administrators.  In the early years, this idea was not well received.  Sociologists who studied the arts put their promotion and tenure at risk  Political scientists faced similar disapproval for venturing into “applied” territory.  Members of emerging professions like arts administration may have felt similarly precarious and marginal.   At STPA they found people who understood and valued what they were doing.

Established sociologists like Becker and Peterson, who had made their reputations in traditional areas, brought legitimacy to studying the arts.  Having charted the career formation of physicians, Becker made the study of artists and Art Worlds an acceptable branch of occupational sociology.  Because his other area of expertise was the sociology of deviance, he knew that, despite the nineteenth-century Romantic stereotype of artists as crazy rebels, they were more likely ordinary citizens with families and mortgages.  It also gave him a better perspective on the true rebels and outsiders.  Peterson’s background in theory showed him the common institutional functions of religion, law, and art in the development and maintenance of symbol systems.  Art was co-equal with these other established areas of institutional sociology in the production of culture.  Over time the arts infiltrated the sociological establishment.  An attempt to organize a Visual Sociology section of the American Sociological Assn. in the 1970s failed, but the Sociology of Culture Section came along later and is thriving.  Its most recent chair was Barry Glassner, a participant in the second conference and host of the fifth at Syracuse (1978).

Political scientists were gradually legitimized by the institutionalization of the nonprofit arts infrastructure as part of the political process. By the 1980s there was enough of a track record of arts policymaking at the federal and state levels that political scientists had to start paying attention to it.  In fact, cultural policy became a legitimate career choice a lot faster than the sociology of culture did.  Milt Cummings, as a respected senior scholar, played an important role in legitimizing cultural policy studies, as Becker and Peterson had done for the sociologists.. Thus, policy became the preeminent feature of STPA.

Another attraction of STPA was that it offered genuine nurture and support for interdisciplinary scholarship.  Though interdisciplinary work is frequently paid lip service by university administrators, it was always perilous to venture too far from the disciplinary mainstream because it is the department, first and foremost, who promotes and tenures.  Being able to interact with others taking these risks reinforced both the intellectual and the political underpinnings of interdisciplinary work.  For example, Volker Kirchberg credits the encouragement he received from Swaim and Cheatwood with convincing him to proceed with his combination of urban sociology and arts policy which his more traditional German colleagues didn’t understand.  It is possible that arts policy research is more genuinely interdisciplinary than the sociology of culture; thus while some of our sociologists have returned to a now-expanded discipline, our political scientist still need to swim in the cross-disciplinary currents to maintain their vitality.

The arts administrators and educators are also by definition interdisciplinary creatures because they must respond to and try to influence the political and economic forces that define their work while staying in touch with the form and content of the arts that are their reason for existence.  The discussions at the STPA allow them to connect their daily struggles with more macro-social developments. 

All of us, whatever our disciplinary homes, are engaged in work unlike other forms of scholarship.  All scholarship engages not just the intellect, but also the senses.  That’s what empiricism means.  But the arts do strange, unpredictable and wonderful things with the senses that other fields do not.  Most sciences, including ours, try to avoid or control the weird and unpredictable.  But the arts, at least sometimes, embrace them.  So we exist on a slightly different plane from our colleagues.  It’s not the Romanticist world of contrived shock and feigned insanity, but it’s not the buttoned-down, 9 to 5 world either.  We need regularly to be in the company of others who are willing to believe that Brigadoon might pop up in the next glen.  I think STPA survival has something to do with this.

 With professional legitimacy came governmental attention.  Officials, including chairs, of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities made regular appearances.  A presidential advisor gave the keynote speech at the Washington, D.C. conference (2000).  Officials from the arts councils of Canada have attended STPA meetings in this country as well as the ones held on their own turf. 

A broad variety of university-based arts research centers and free-standing research and advocacy organizations blossomed in the 1990s and STPA became a meeting ground for them.  A number of government or foundation-sponsored conferences on arts policy were now being held, but most were special purpose and special topic events.  STPA has remained a wide-open forum for all disciplines, organizations, causes, and concerns.  This diversity is part of the explanation for both why it has eluded institutionalization and why it keeps going.  There is nothing else like it.

As we note how some groups have entered the STPA gravitational field and some have escaped it, it is interesting to think about how other likely participants have yet to appear in appreciable numbers.  Individual papers on popular culture were not unknown, but this field never became very important to STPA.  The likely answer is that there is a Popular Culture Association that holds burgeoning national and regional conferences.  Art historians are even rarer.  Perhaps the aristocratic associations of the field insulates them and their venues from the clash and clamor of policy analysis and interdisciplinary work.  Psychologists are also rarely sighted.  It may be that this field is large and diverse enough not to need interdisciplinary contacts.  It also has its own applied fields and policy concerns.  It is a large enough mass that few can or need to escape its gravity.

As noted earlier, understanding STPA through traditional organization analysis is difficult if not impossible.  A network approach might make more sense (footnote 4 ).  Becker was an early key figure because many earlier participants were students working with him at Northwestern.  Clinton Sanders and Eleanor Lyons attended the first conference. Two other early participants, Charles Stevens and Chandra Mukerji, went on to host their own conferences.  Another host was Michal McCall, whose dissertation Becker assisted.  He also brought in Pete Peterson, a regular presenter, future host, and the person who connected Margaret Wyzomirski with Judy Balfe.  Judy, as the connection between sociologists and political scientists, exerted continuing influence in lining up conference organizers until her death in 2002.  Margaret, as the nexis between political science, arts administration, and arts education, is now playing a similar role.  Richard Swaim and Derral Cheatwood recruited Volker Kirchberg and Marit Bakke, who brought in other Europeans. This network continued to branch until we now have a European host: Monika Mokre, president of the Austrian Society for Cultural Economics and Policy Studies.  All of these people not only saw the need to continue the conference but were able to inspire many others to share the load.  They have also carried on the tradition of informality, openness, and encouragement of discussion established by the two founders.

As the networks ramify, the content continues to change.  There are losses and gains.  The policy focus has necessitated concentration on the conditions that support the arts and has resulted in less attention to artists themselves, what they produce, and how we react to it.  In the Maryland meeting (1984) you could find names like Shostakovich, Kundera, and Marcuse and topics like Victorian literature, 19^th. c. French composers, surrealism, dada, rock, cinema of alienation, the Pension building, Black artists, movie stardom, the music of concentration camps, techniques of quantifying music, and pornography.  There were also six sessions (out of 24) plus a luncheon speaker devoted to arts policy (footnote 5 ).  In the 23 sessions of the George Mason conference (2004) there was one devoted to experimental music,  and individual papers on Israeli women painters, museum preservation dilemmas, and New Deal arts programs.  No specific artists, critics, or theorists were noticeable in the program by name.

Pete Peterson has said that “arts advocates and researchers share a passion for one or more of the arts that motivates their work.” (footnote 6 )  Indeed, some arts researchers are also artists. Becker and Faulkner are jazz musicians mentioned above, Balfe was a museum curator, Swaim is a metal sculptor, Cherbo is a painter, and Wyszomirski was choreographer for a dance company.  A complete poll would include many other practicing artists as well as committed arts consumers.  But one must wonder to what extent this passion has been diluted as we move to more macro-social problems of creating and maintaining infrastructure to support the arts and compile ever-larger and more abstract data bases about organizations, audiences, funders, budgets, and markets.

Wyszomirski and Cherbo, in their overview of the complex panoply of arts service organizations and arts interest groups, note that we know very little about how these entities behave, why they become politically active (or don’t), how they recruit new members, or how their leadership changes. (footnote 7 )  Perhaps arts scholars could not only rekindle their passions but also contribute to their research by becoming embedded, or re-embedded, at the tactical level.

Another aspect of the policy focus is its concentration on those arts most in need of support: local operas and orchestras, small theater and dance companies, museums, crafts people.  Is our scholarship becoming restricted to rescue and life support?  Hollywood and rock music don’t need an arts policy, they are 800 lb gorillas whose main policy concerns are piracy and censorship and who have legal departments to pursue this without our help.  Novelists and architects may need arts policy, but haven’t come to such a recognition yet. The for-profit arts were subjects of sociological study in early conferences.  They may not need us to ride to their rescue, but they merit continuing study nonetheless.  Surely political scientists have something to contribute here.

Because STPA is an organizational anomaly and seems admirably resistant to institutionalization, these concerns should not be taken too seriously.  Next year’s membership will include people who may change things completely.  The fact that STPA has never been dependent on university, government, or foundation subsidy also means that current trends toward a withdrawal of funding from arts policy organizations (footnote 8 ) should be no threat.  The philanthropic retrenchment first caused by the stock market crunch may imperil such organizations further as resources are redirected to the massive consequences of natural disasters.  In such an era, it is a great advantage to be accustomed to surviving on donated labor, a shoestring budget, and a mailing list.  Arts policy may be entering a phase described by Joni Cherbo as “static quandary.”  And the next meeting of STPA is the natural place to ponder this.

STPA is an organizational anomaly and STPA participants are people with a slightly skewed view of the world.  They have to try to blend science and art, integrate order and chaos and find a place to talk about doing it.  They know that reproducing Brigadoon requires both duct tape and magic. And so it continues to happen.

Footnotes