Thank you for registering for our round-table: The Fourth Turning - What Comes Next for Arts & Culture?
I’ve recorded a short video for you to watch before you join. It takes about five minutes and covers the idea behind the conversation, so we can all arrive in the same place and use the hour for discussion.
Below, you’ll also find some brief notes to help you prepare: a short summary of the Fourth Turning and why it matters for arts and culture right now. If you only have a few minutes, they give you everything you need to join the conversation.
I’m looking forward to the roundtable, and to hearing how this lands for you and your organization.
Jill Robinson
CEO, TRG Arts
In the 1990s, generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe argued that history moves in cycles of roughly 80 to 100 years, about the length of a long human life. Each cycle has four turnings of around 20 years:
The High: institutions are strong and trusted, and people pull together to build.
The Awakening: people push back against those institutions.
The Unraveling: trust erodes, and the individual comes before the collective.
The Crisis (the Fourth Turning): the old order can’t hold. A period of upheaval ends with society rebuilding around new institutions, and a new High begins.
The last Fourth Turning ran through the Great Depression and the Second World War. Howe dates the current one from the financial crash of 2008 and expects it to resolve in the early 2030s.
If he’s right, we’re late in the crisis, but not through it. The theory’s signs of a crisis will sound familiar: a widening wealth gap, deep polarization, falling trust in institutions, economic uncertainty and disruptive new technology.
Much of the arts and cultural world we lead today was built in the last High: regional theaters, performing arts centers, the growth of orchestras and museums, and the funding systems behind them.
They were built for a society that trusted institutions and gathered in them. In recent decades, audiences have changed how they commit, loyalty habits like subscription and membership have changed shape, and income has become harder to predict.
The theory also says what comes after a crisis: people come back together, and institutions earn trust again. So Thursday’s question is which organizations will rebuild for that moment, and which will wait for things to settle.
It’s a debated theory, so we’re using it as a lens, not a prophecy.
Which parts of your organization were built for a world that no longer exists?
Chad Bauman (Milwaukee Rep),
Tinashe Kajese-Bolden (Alliance Theatre),
Ben Cameron (retired foundation president),
David Schmitz (Amplify Leadership Advisors and American Conservatory Theater),
Jamie Herlich (Zach Theater
Gideon Arthurs (Harbourfront Centre).