Creative Economy

For too long, our vision of “the arts” has been through a narrow lens that relegates creative endeavor to a rarified niche of academia, museums, galleries and performance halls. This vision not only is too narrow on the merits, it also risks the appearance of indifference to Mainers’ basic needs for education, employment, housing and healthcare—concerns which are magnified in today’s recessionary and stagnant economy.

In fact, the creative economy is not just about the production and consumption of visual and performing arts, it is about the unique and innovative ideas, technologies and output of virtually every sector of our economy, and it is the key to our future success. Why have we so long failed to put this engine to work in generating prosperity? It’s not for lack of good ideas; we have no need to reinvent the wheel, but only to act on what we already know. It is my intention to provide the leadership to make that happen.

THE CONTEXT

Over the last decade, a multitude of studies and papers generated by both public and private institutions have explored the creative economy in Maine with the aim of understanding the nature, impact and growth potential for arts, entertainment, recreation and technology, and how to foster them through education. Our current understanding of “creative economy” encompasses much more than the traditional mix of the visual and performing arts. It underpins virtually all we produce in Maine, where our unique quality of place rests on our culture of historic towns and their preservation; our unparalleled natural beauty and its conservation; and, our unique products—whether artistic, agricultural, aquatic or technological – and the creative workforce that it takes to produce them.

At the State level, the Maine Arts Commission has done excellent work that has been nationally recognized. The office of the governor initiated a Creative Economy Council, later supplanted by what is now the Quality of Place Council, on which sit representatives of various private and public sectors of our State economy. The Council’s aim is integrating the arts and the creative perspective into all approaches to community and commercial development. This approach has been explored and developed in at least three statewide conferences over the last few years, including Juice 2.0: Powering the Creative Economy (2009), building on the earlier 2007 conference of the same name, convened by Midcoast Magnet, in collaboration with the Maine Arts Commission. Yet another conference is scheduled to take place in 2012.

Many good ideas and “creative juices” have been stimulated by these Commissions and Councils, think pieces and conferences, but what has become of all these good ideas? The fact remains that our economy today—creative or otherwise, however we characterize or label it—is stagnant. We are providing neither the necessary impetus to grow more of what we have, nor the incentives to attract new investment. And this is just as true of our largest industry, tourism, as it is of our farming, fishing, lumber, paper and textile industries. When the new Administration takes office in January 2011, we will face a budget deficit of over a billion dollars. In lean times, the arts have traditionally suffered, perceived as an unaffordable frill. What will the future of our creative economy be?

THE OBJECTIVES AND TOOLS

The creative lens gives us an important perspective on Maine’s economic future, and a creative vision should drive our efforts in all areas. We will work to leverage Maine’s most valuable competitive assets–our unique people, our pristine natural environment and our creative and educational infrastructures–to help make Maine the comeback state of the decade. These are some of the strategies that we will pursue:

1. BRANDING THE MAINE PRODUCT: Whether it is our lobster, our blueberries, our native raised and spun wool and wool products, our Maine-built boats or our Maine-inspired and produced art, music and literature, we will aggressively build and promote a single unified Maine brand and strategically seek markets—an audience–for our unique and sustainable products across the globe.
2. PROMOTING YEAR-ROUND TOURISM: We will promote not only the year-round beauty and excitement of our natural environment and the traditional recreational and eco-tourism activities it offers –hiking, biking, boating, fishing, hunting, skiing, snowmobiling, sledding, golf, leaf-peeping, maple-sugaring, apple picking, whale watching—to name but a sample, but also will draw cultural tourists from January through December to our outstanding museums, galleries and places of historical interest, to our destination arts and food venues, to our local farms and farmers’ markets, and to our festivals and fairs.
3. PUBLIC SUPPORT OF THE ARTS: We will actively foster the creative communities and living conditions that attract and sustain artists and creative entrepreneurs by: a) establishing visible arts districts throughout the state; b) protecting affordable work spaces and housing; c) making available affordable individual healthcare coverage ; and, d) working with private partners, such as banks, credit unions and foundations, to assure favorable financing options for creative endeavors, including the bricks and mortar needed to house them.
4. EDUCATION AT BOTH THE HIGH SCHOOL AND POST-SECONDARY LEVEL: We will ensure that education powers the creative economy engine by providing an education in the arts, from pre-K through high school, and an education for the arts that produces the creative entrepreneurs—artists, performers, writers, designers, architects, boat builders, chefs, artisanal food producers, vintners, and the many other creative small business entrepreneurs who make Maine a magnet for year-round tourism, who create the products for our global markets, and whose rising tide will help lift the Maine-built boats of us all. Toward these ends, I will propose the creation of an arts magnet high school to do for the creative arts what the magnet school in Limestone is doing for science and technology education with such remarkable success. We will foster and encourage both public and private institutions of higher learning—the colleges and universities, but also the non-traditional schools such as, for example, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts—in their missions both to promote creative endeavor for its own sake, and to mobilize Maine’s arts, culture, creative entrepreneurs and institutions in service of economic development, without which none of us will prosper and thrive.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FULL PLAN [PDF].