There’s no reason to be so defensive about KC’s Open Spaces public art experiment

Thirty years ago, Austin’s South by Southwest wasn’t the cultural event it later grew into.

A wire service report from 1987, the year it was born, noted that “Austin’s recent music business symposium, ‘South by Southwest,’ brought a swarm of talent scouts to town looking for the next big thing. Over 700 registrants signed up for the three-day event. One-hundred fifty bands showcased for the convention at various local clubs, and by the end of the weekend several groups were being talked up.” Maybe the secret was starting small.

This year, in any case, the festival’s economic impact on the Austin economy was $350.6 million. It brought in 161,000 participants for its music festival, 72,872 for film, and 75,098 for the unified conference.

This fall’s ambitious inaugural Open Spaces public art experiment in Kansas City also brought in a lot of talent and got some national attention, too. Maybe it did, as city officials have said, change long-held perceptions about the area surrounding Swope Park, where many of the events were held.

But first heat and then storms definitely hurt attendance at the nine-week event, held from late August through October.

There’s no reason for the city to be defensive about the $500,000 taxpayers spent on it, or to proclaim it the unalloyed success that it clearly was not.

And there have got to be better metrics than this for assessing whether the city got its money’s worth: “While there are many ways to measure success, the most important is simply staging this two-month arts experience for our residents,” said City Hall spokesman Chris Hernandez.

Saying that just trying something difficult and aspirational is by definition a success raises questions about whether the full financial analysis of Open Spaces that’s due in late January is going to be even worse than expected.

We hope the city won’t try to dress up that report, or present the first effort as more of a victory than it was. Officials should not award themselves an “everybody wins” participation trophy for making the effort. And please, stop behaving as though someone said your baby was ugly every time low attendance comes up.

Better to just show what happened, and to the extent it’s possible, why. If this does turn out to be the first in a series of biennial events, we need to know what might be done differently next time.

“It’s still too early for all the data to be reconciled and analyzed, but I’m proud of our city’s commitment to support artists and their work by hosting an event of such expansive vision and scope,” said Kansas City Mayor Sly James.

We are, too. But let’s complete the “review and debrief” James has called for and see if trying again makes sense. And if that’s the case, let’s consider how to do this better.

This story was originally published December 26, 2018 at 4:23 PM.