Every City Needs a Chief Entertainment Officer — Especially Memphis

James Crane “Every city will eventually have a Chief Entertainment Officer

I saw a video recently that made a pretty simple argument: every city needs a Chief Entertainment Officer.

The idea was that entertainment has become an important part of how cities compete. People want restaurants, music, nightlife, festivals, attractions, interesting neighborhoods and things to do. These things attract visitors, but they also attract residents, businesses and talent. They affect whether people want to live somewhere and whether they want to stay.

I already believe that cities will be defined by their experiences.

But the more I thought about it, the more it led me somewhere else. I think we have a much bigger problem with the way we think about creativity and economic development in the first place.

I don't really think of myself as an artist

I've spent most of my life doing things that would probably qualify me as one.

I've made music. I've made films. I've produced large-scale public sculptures. I've worked in design and interactive media. I've produced events and worked with city governments on many different types of civic projects for decades.

I graduated from the arts program at Overton High School, and I earned a BA in design from Memphis College of Art. Still, I was never really comfortable with the term “artist.”

I think of myself as someone who has ideas—but even that doesn't quite describe it. Everybody has ideas. Ideas don't mean much unless you do something with them.

I have some talent and, after doing this for most of my life, a lot of experience. But the thing that has really driven my career has been taking an idea and figuring out how to make it real. Increasingly, I've also found myself thinking about what that idea can do beyond itself.

Can it bring people together? Can it create an opportunity for somebody? Can it solve a problem? Can it make a place better? Can it create something that didn't exist before and leave a community a little better because it exists?

Sometimes that means making music or a film. Other times, it means creating an event, building an organization, developing tools with technology, or simply looking at a problem in Memphis and thinking, there has to be a better way to do this.

I've never been particularly interested in making something simply because I wanted people to see my art. Usually, I wanted the thing I was making to do something.

I think that's the distinction for me. I'm less interested in creativity as an act of self-expression than I am in what an idea can do once you put it into the world.

We hear “creative” and think “arts”

That's where I think we get into trouble.

When cities talk about “the creative community,” we tend to picture painters, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, actors and other artists. Those people are certainly creative, but creativity is much bigger than the arts.

Creativity is the ability to imagine something and then figure out how to make it exist. It’s problem solving.

That might be a song or a film, but it could just as easily be a company, a technology, an app, a restaurant, a festival, neighborhood project, a new use for an old building, an attraction, a public space, or a solution to a civic problem.

That's why I've come to believe that creativity isn't a sector of the economy. It's a way of creating value.

Creativity creates value.

And if we understand it that way, our entire conversation about arts, entertainment and economic development starts to change.

Consider an empty building on an empty island

This is something I'm experiencing firsthand right now with BVO.

We looked at an empty building on Mud Island—the former Mississippi River Museum, sitting largely unused for years—and saw something different.

We saw possibility.

We're turning that space into an immersive attraction.

Is that art? Absolutely. Almost everything about it involves creativity. There is storytelling, music, filmmaking, design, technology, construction, fabrication, performance, sound, lighting, interactive media and worldbuilding. There’s also how we engage our community with events, education, and partnerships.

If you want to put it in the “arts” box, there's plenty of art there.

But calling it an arts project misses most of what is actually happening. It's an attraction and a business. It's creating jobs, bringing people to Mud Island, giving families and visitors something new to do, and putting an unused public asset back into productive use. It's creating opportunities for other creative people, contributing to the visitor economy, and demonstrating what can be done with a space that many people had essentially written off.

And maybe most importantly, it's showing what can happen when passionate people are given an opportunity to take an idea, try something innovative, and create something that hasn't existed here before.

There's civic pride in that, too. I want Memphians to be able to look at something created here and say to the rest of the world, “Hey, we did this.”

That has value. That is economic development.

The frustrating part is that when something is highly creative, people often see the creativity first and assume that means it belongs in the arts category. Then you have to spend time explaining that it isn't just art. It's creating jobs and economic activity, activating a place, attracting people, building intellectual property, creating experiences, and sometimes even solving problems.

It's creating value.

Memphis should understand this better than anyone

People here have been turning ideas into value for generations. Someone heard music differently or combined sounds that weren't supposed to go together. Someone opened a studio, a label or a club. Others started restaurants, festivals or films, or took a building people had overlooked and saw a whole new possibility.

Over time, those things became what the world recognizes as Memphis culture. But they didn't start out as cultural assets. They started as ideas and effort, often with very little money and no permission.

Tourism can tell that story beautifully, but first, somebody has to create the thing that we get to brag about.

This is where economic development needs to change

Traditionally, we've focused on the obvious parts of economic development: recruiting companies, developing property, creating jobs and offering incentives. All of that matters, and I'm not suggesting we stop doing any of it.

But there's another kind of economic development that starts with a question:

What could this become?

What could an empty building become? Could an island become a district with music and food every night? Could filmmakers build sustainable companies here? Could something we haven't even thought of yet give people a new reason to come to Memphis—or a new reason to stay?

Those are creative questions, but they're also economic-development questions.

If the answers lead to businesses, jobs, stronger neighborhoods and places people want to be, then we're creating value. And I think cities need people inside economic development whose job it is to recognize those possibilities and help people turn them into something real.

That's why the Chief Entertainment Officer idea makes sense

Which brings me back to that video.

I think every city probably does need someone whose job is to think seriously about entertainment. But this shouldn't be the city's party planner, and it shouldn't simply be another name for an arts administrator.

A Chief Entertainment Officer should be part of economic development.

That person should be thinking about music, film, nightlife, restaurants, venues, festivals, attractions, immersive experiences, gaming, creative businesses, public spaces and entertainment districts as interconnected parts of a city's economy.

Because there are really two systems operating at the same time: the entertainment industry, which is what a city makes, and the entertainment economy, which is what people experience.

The entertainment industry includes music, film, media, performance, design, experiences and intellectual property. The entertainment economy includes concerts, restaurants, bars, festivals, attractions, museums, nightlife, public spaces and events.

Those systems feed one another. Creative people make things. Those things create experiences. Experiences help create places people want to be. Those places support businesses and jobs, attract visitors and residents, and draw more talent.

Gradually, something much larger develops around all of it.

That's an economy.

Let art be art

There's another reason I think making this distinction is important.

Not everything creative needs an economic-development justification. Someone should be able to paint because they want to paint. A musician should be able to make strange music nobody wants to buy. A filmmaker should be able to make an experimental film.

Art does not need to prove its economic value to deserve to exist.

Let art be art.

That's where artists, nonprofits, foundations, museums, galleries and cultural organizations have an enormously important role. Government can support the conditions that allow those things to flourish, but I don't think government's job is to manufacture culture or decide what art deserves to exist.

People create culture.

What government should recognize is when creativity becomes part of the economic infrastructure of a city.

Music is an art, but a music industry is economic development. Film is an art, but a film industry is economic development. Design can be creative expression, but design businesses are economic development. An immersive attraction can be filled with art and still be economic development.

These things can be both.

We don't have to diminish their artistic value to recognize their economic value.

Tourism markets the destination. Entertainment develops it.

This also changes how I think about the relationship between entertainment and tourism.

Tourism asks, How do we get people to come to Memphis?

Entertainment development asks, What are they going to experience when they get here?

Those are different jobs, but they need each other.

Tourism can tell the world that Memphis has music. Economic development should be asking whether Memphis musicians can actually make a living here. Tourism can promote our nightlife while economic development asks whether independent venues can survive. Tourism can promote an attraction while economic development asks how we help someone create the next one.

And tourism can market our neighborhoods while economic development helps create the conditions that allow those neighborhoods to remain interesting.

Tourism markets the destination. Entertainment develops it.

And creative people create much of what there eventually is to market.

A city people want to be part of

Maybe this is ultimately what economic development should be trying to accomplish.

For a long time, cities competed by asking:

How do we get companies to locate here?

Increasingly, I think the better question is:

How do we create a city people want to be part of?

Because companies are made of people. So are our industries, neighborhoods and institutions. And people want more than employment.

They want experiences and community. They want interesting places and things to do. They want opportunities to create things themselves. They want to feel like something is happening around them.

That's where culture, entertainment, placemaking and economic development all begin to intersect.

And Memphis already possesses something incredibly valuable in that equation.

We have ideas.

We have creative people, history, music, places, buildings waiting for another life, and neighborhoods with identities that can't be manufactured. We have generations of people who have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to make something out of very little.

Maybe our economic-development strategy shouldn't simply ask how we can attract more things from somewhere else.

Maybe it should also ask:

What could the people who are already here create if we gave their ideas a real chance?

Because creativity isn't just about making art.

Creativity is how we imagine what could exist next.

And when those ideas create jobs, businesses, experiences, places, opportunities and stronger communities, we should stop treating them as something adjacent to economic development.

They are economic development.

Give ideas a chance

I've had a lot of ideas over the years. Some of them became real, and a lot of them didn't. Sometimes I couldn't find the resources. Sometimes I couldn't find the support. Sometimes I couldn't convince the right people that something was worth trying.

BVO may be the clearest example in my life of what can happen when an idea finally gets that chance. But even that didn't come easily. It took years. It took persistence. It took convincing people to see something that didn't exist yet, and it took people who were eventually willing to say, let's see what happens.

That's what I want more of for Memphis.

I don't think government needs to decide which ideas are good or tell creative people what they should make. But I do think we can get much better at creating opportunities for people to try. Give people access to spaces. Help remove barriers. Connect them to resources. Take their ideas seriously. And sometimes, take a chance on something simply because somebody can see a possibility that the rest of us can't see yet.

Not every idea will work. That's part of it. But if we only support the things whose value has already been proven, we'll spend our time celebrating what Memphis created yesterday instead of helping create what Memphis might become tomorrow.

There are people in this city right now with ideas that could become businesses, music, films, attractions, events, public spaces, new uses for old buildings, or things none of us have a name for yet.

They may not need us to tell them what to create.

They may just need a chance to create it.

That, to me, is the real opportunity.

And maybe that's what economic development should be about.

A Stronger Memphis Through Creativity

The Creative Economic Ecosphere