Creative Ground has become the defacto warehouse being designated by the New England Foundation for the Arts as a registration destination for an artist's profile of availability. The Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) claims it "uses it to find artists for projects, including public art opportunities".
Creative Ground is a NEFA "project" which, as you can easily imagine, is a cluster-phuck of bad ideas shoehorned into a website that features a handy-dandy database of [Norm Macdonald voice] "the world".
By the "world", I'm euphemistically referring to every possible art related person, place, or thing in New England relating to art, humanities, education, health, child care, merchandise, or identity politic grift that they could identify. This is the short list, btw.
I was recently sent an email telling me to update my profile and I did. I already had one from years ago when I probably got a similar message to create a profile because it would ensure being seen by the state as an artist with work to sell.
You quickly find out that the completeness of your profile is used to rank your position in the sequence of search results that is returned to a user using the database. I'm being kind in calling it a database.
As of May 20, 2024, the database contains approximately 32053 database results.
Having spent my career working with developing and designing databases, I wanted to test the hypothesis that an architect from CT wanting to locate an artist who would qualify for the 1% arts money in a new construction. This, after all, is the pretense of the exercise.
Being a visual artist, I searched for "Painter". On the first page of 10 search results, there were 3 individual painters returned, 2 retail stores, and 5 professional associations. The next page returned 4 painters and 6 associations of painters. Subsequent pages devolve into community organizers and dancers who "work with painters", and dross.
To make a long story short, this database is worthless when it comes to locating, say, a fine arts painter whose work might satisfy decorating the walls of a University Humanities building. An architect or arts associate would need to slog through pages of search results whose ranking is not based on relevance but on a misguided completeness metric. And although these search results yield a link to a fairly attractive looking profile page, the lack of uniformity of content is maddening.
The search problems are both in the database design and the parsing of search material. And root cause analysis goes even deeper to reveal that the problem is in the people creating the database specifications.
The NEFA administrators are unqualified to design databases, they are infected with the woke mind virus , and they subscribe to institutional arts special interest kickbacks.
The largest group represented in Professional Discipline is Visual/Crafts a category that NEFA provides no grants or funding for individual artists. Yet fine art and crafts are not the same thing at all. Yes, a cohort of Contemporary Art individuals do their best to entangle the categories this adds no value to a database that is intended to be used by individuals to identify very specific requirements.
The 32053 search results number is a drop in the bucket. In the Visual Arts/Crafts category, over 49% of the individual profiles are tightly coupled to teaching. Furthermore, of the 159 profiles, only 20% are men. In other words, NEFA's database is virtually devoid of any kind of regional visual arts representation at all. And those who are represented are an ingrown cohort of educators who as a profession are largely women.
Why the gender bigotry? And why is this database, assuming it imported all of each New England's State's individual databases of artists, so sparsely populated?
As this database scales, if it ever does, the interface will become impossible to navigate or make sense of. imagine being an artist on page 30 of the ranked search result? Or page 130? Today, the database is a fool's enterprise meant to distract artists from the misrepresentation NEFA inflicts on visual artists. It is an expensive graveyard of misguided arts administration.
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