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Month: March 2013

Good Reason To Create Art Isn’t Always To Create Good Art

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We are often warned that art, and solutions in general, created by committee isn’t any good and doesn’t please anyone. But I wonder, if everyone involved feels ownership in what is produced and it strengthens the community, does it necessarily have to be of high quality aesthetically?

The wide gazing eyes of Thomas Cott fell upon a project sponsored in Mexico by the Scribe paper company. The company attached a small apartment to a billboard to house the artist who would be painting an advertisement for the company.

Over the course of 10 days the artist took suggestions about what to paint submitted over Twitter. The result may never be hailed as a work of genius, but the project garnered a lot of attention for Scribe. (You can see section details here) I am guessing it also strengthened the company’s relationship with a good segment of their customer base.

I am not sure what sort of guidance the artist was given by Scribe about integrating suggestions into her work, but apparently about 50 were used on the billboard.

Let’s pursue art for art sake and strive for excellence always. But for as much as we talk about connecting with our communities, it can often have the subtext of “but only on our own terms.” As Howard Sherman pointed out, there is a lot of disdain for anything tinged as low populism community theatre.

The primary goal of a community theatre production may have less to do with creating good art than spending time accomplishing something in cooperation with your neighbors. Heck, most guys who go fishing don’t want to actually catch something, they want to drink beer with their buddies.

So we may talk about how the arts need to connect with their community, but are we really ready to produce art for community sake, rather than art for art sake, and run the risk of creating really bad art that results in people feeling more connected with each other?

It likely takes starting from a place where you put community connections first and the pride and ego of the organization second. Scribe could have ended up in a situation where they had their name attached to a really ugly billboard in a prominent spot and they had to figure out what was the minimum amount of time they had to leave it up before they could paint it over.

It takes courage to cede control in a very public way. Just as not every masterful artist has the ability to teach what they know to others, not every artist and arts organization has the ability to lead a project like this to a good outcome.

Is It Against The Law To Pay Me More?

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You may have heard about Dan Palotta’s recent TED Talk about how judging charities on concepts like administrative overhead ratios is hobbling their ability to solve huge problems.

He makes some persuasive points, though some of the concerns I had with his proposals when they appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog three years ago still remain.

Gene Takagi picked up on the talk and addressed legal considerations which would prevent non-profits from operating in the manner Palotta suggests. (Just to be clear, Palotta never suggests charities cleave to non-profit status.)

Takagi notes that charity pay scales are limited by laws governing 501 c 3s and so can’t compete well on salary if supporters show tolerance for doing so to attract the best talent. Expenditures are limited in much the same manner,

“If a for-profit spends 90 cents to make $1, it may be a perfectly acceptable profit margin, but if a charity spends 90 cents to make $1, it would be widely viewed as a terrible waste. As a result, many charities fail to properly report their fundraising expenses, and the IRS has raised the possibility of utilizing the controversial commensurate test, which addresses whether a charity is using its resource in line with its charitable mission…But this can’t be judged strictly on percentages, and charities should be allowed to experiment so if an honest fundraising and mission awareness-raising campaign fails, the charity isn’t slaughtered for it. The problem, however, is not the law, but the misguided public ideology of which Dan spoke.”

Charities are also often limited and discouraged from pursuing new revenue ideas by federal and state laws as well as popular sentiment.

I think the biggest question that this whole discussion raises for me is whether social attitudes are such that a for-profit company raising money for social issues will be tolerated. Given that people will give money to projects via things like Kickstarter without much consideration about whether it is non-profit or not, is the idea that non-profits do things that companies won’t due to lack of profitability and governments can’t/won’t due to lack of political will and expertise, over?

Currently I think there is a capricious element to Kickstarter campaigns that make it an unsuitable model for garnering long term support. However the very existence of such mechanisms may be shifting mindsets to a place where worthiness and overhead ratios are not mutually exclusive.

What About Artists On Corporate Boards?

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A posting by Alex Tabarrok today on Marginal Revolution inspired some “what’s good for the goose…” thinking for me today. He links to a study showing that academics on corporate boards tend to keep the company healthy.

I am not going to suggest putting arts and culture people on corporate boards will automatically help a corporation any more than encouraging them to settle in a city will make the area more economically prosperous. However, many of the impacts the study finds academics (both professors and administrators) have on companies appear to be ones that arts professionals might bring as well.

First, academic directors are outside directors with relatively strong reputations and a tradition of independent thinking. They are trained to be critical thinkers with their own opinions and judgments, and they are less influenced by others and can be tough when necessary (Jiang and Murphy, 2007)…Fama (1980) and Fama and Jensen (1983) argue that outside directors have incentives to monitor management because they want to protect their reputation as effective, independent decision makers. Thus, the monitoring theory indicates that academic directors would be important monitors of management.

Obviously, not all professors would make good directors, nor would all arts people. However, arts people have that tradition of independent thinking and an almost inborn fear of being labeled a sell-out which can motivate them to speak their concerns.

Third, academic directors’ primary areas of expertise are academic in nature. They tend to think through problems differently than nonacademics and can provide different perspectives in the boardroom, which adds to the board’s diversity. Prior studies find that board diversity (such as occupational diversity, social diversity, gender diversity, and ethnic diversity) is an important factor that influences board efficacy and firm performance

If arts people don’t bring a different perspective to things, I don’t know who will.

The area the study found that academics contributed most to a company was in relation to oversight. As I read the following, it seemed that non-profit board meetings and the attendant committee meetings, something that is at the center of both a professor and an arts administrator’s life, might actually be an asset.

“We find that academic directors are more likely to attend board meetings than other outside directors. In addition, academic directors hold more outstanding committee memberships than other outside directors. Specifically, academic directors are more likely to sit on monitoring-related committees, such as auditing committees and corporate governance committees, than nonacademic outside directors. The results on the director attendance behavior and committee assignments indicate that academic directors are better at board governance than other outside directors.”

Other benefits to oversight the study found was that CEO turnover was more closely tied with company performance and the financial operations were run in such a way there were fewer Securities and Exchange Commission investigations of the top executives when academics sat on the board. Companies with academics on the board also tended to be more innovative.

Now, of course, the disclaimers. Not all types of companies had academics on the boards and the study finds that different types of companies benefited from different board compositions.

Business professors were the most effective board members. Other types of academic fields mentioned were technology and law. This is not to say that arts people wouldn’t be effective because it doesn’t appear that too many liberal arts professors were asked to serve. It is something of an unknown quality.

If corporations are valuing creativity and critical thinking from employees, especially recent college graduates, they could presumably benefit from tapping those who teach them.

Likewise, they could benefit from arts people who are not only creative, critical thinkers, but are constantly cobbling together coalitions to pursue projects.

But the potentially biggest impediment to effective service on a for-profit board for both academics and arts people is whether they are dependent on the corporation upon whose board they serve for support.

“Furthermore, some academic directors hold administrative positions and thus may have connections to companies through university endowments or other fundraising relationships, which may make them less independent than inside managers.”

Still, it is interesting to think about the potential benefits to a corporation to have an arts person serve on the board.

In wondering why it doesn’t happen more often, I came to the not inconsiderable or illogical conclusion that corporations may not view those who ask them for money as equal to the task of helping them make money.

Rememberances of Lost Opportunities

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Via You’ve Cott Mail comes a NewMusicBox article on how the Mondavi Center is using Google Hangouts as a way to connect with audiences and perhaps as an update of the traditional concert talk.

Author Dustin Soiseth starts out talking about the ill-fated Concert Companion and the resistance to its use which helped to keep it from spreading.

In the context of my post yesterday decrying how social media was allowing people to escape from boredom and uncomfortable situations yesterday, when I read the article I thought, “now this is social media I can support.”

I know it can seem hypocritical to be against using social media devices unless people are reading what I want them to read, but having them semi-engaged is preferable to being entirely disengaged.

I mean, if you are on a first date with a person, if they are going to be surreptitiously using their devices instead of giving you their full attention, better they be looking up information on Neutral Milk Hotel so they can pretend to be a fan and try to make a connection with you than have them looking up cat videos on YouTube. (Not that I am speaking from experience.)

As I acknowledged at the end of my post yesterday, there is an inevitability to social media’s appearance/participation in arts events so it is important to find a way to make the experience constructive.

Soiseth points out much the same thing.

The use of supertitles in opera, while commonplace now, was quite controversial when it began in America in the 1980s. When Beverly Sills introduced them at the New York City Opera in 1983, she was called a “philistine” in The New York Times. In 1985, James Levine famously replied “Over my dead body” when asked about the possibility of supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera, and yet ten years later there they were, Met Titles in the back of every seat, and in standing room, too.

Concert Companion was rebuffed and now the technology is manifesting itself in performance halls in forms the arts organization doesn’t control. Though that opportunity was lost, other opportunities are presenting themselves.

Even though the Google Hangouts Soiseth attended/researched weren’t well attended, there appears to be some potential in the model the Mondavi Center is using. Some of the difficulties they seemed to face appeared to be related to awareness and lack of familiarity with the experience.

Organizations might even be able to replicate the Concert Companion experience by putting QR codes in their program books that people can scan at the change of each scene or movement in order to access notes on the performance at each juncture. After the performance, people can scan other codes for supplemental videos, discussion fora and the like.

We all know that even without an iPhone in hand, people are going to get bored and turn their attention elsewhere, look at their neighbors, read the program book, clean their fingernails, etc. It is okay to be bored.

Given that people are likely to become disengaged at some point and given that the presence of social media devices are only likely to increase, the prudent thing to do might be to provide an outlet for people’s impulse to grab their phones in the middle of the show.

Take the approach of: we would prefer you don’t pull out your phone, but if you feel you must, here is some interesting material to look at rather than to text your friends about going to the beach tomorrow. That said, this material isn’t going anywhere and you can look at it during intermission or tomorrow morning.

I can foresee that people may use hashtags or chat environments generated by the arts organization to discuss the performance during the show. My sentiment about that is the same as yesterday–encouraging audiences it some time to percolate in their brains and discuss it later.

Not to mention, the audience at large may potentially be upset by people spread throughout the theatre giggling as they try to outdo each other insulting the actors’ costumes.

On the other hand, that interaction may provide the arts organization more feedback about their show than they have ever gotten on a survey.

If you are feeling like I am flip flopping on this topic, I have to answer by saying it is a really difficult thing to address in an objective way. I don’t think the sentiments I expressed yesterday are at all unreasonable. I am concerned about what it means for society at large when people are afraid to be alone with their own thoughts.

But I also know that using a social media device during a performance and honestly facing the truths of one’s life are not mutually exclusive and room must be made for both.

Can’t It Wait?

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This weekend I was listening to Sherry Turkle’s 2012 TED Talk where she essentially reversed a position she held in 1996 about all the benefits technology would bring to our lives.

It isn’t really news to anyone that people are using technology to essentially mediate their interaction with their environment. However, the more I watched her talk, the more concerned I got about the implications about society at large and the more wary I got about the value of tweet seats in live performances. (my emphasis)

People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting. People explain to me that it’s hard, but that it can be done.
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I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

When I ask people “What’s wrong with having a conversation?” People say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” So that’s the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right.

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.

There is a lot more I initially quoted from her talk, but I felt like I had to trim it down a bit for brevity sake. Which is actually related to her point, I suppose.

At one point she talks about people viewing boredom and solitude as a problem that needs to be a solved with some sort of contact and so every red light and check out line is a potential cause of anxiety.

I am concerned about giving people tacit approval to shift focus to their cell phones instead of making an effort to engage with whatever is in front of them. Many shows have content that challenges audiences and makes them uncomfortable. It would be good if people didn’t have an excuse to avoid the conversation. I am not talking about in your face statements about social inequality and the inhumanity we visit upon each other, though they are worthy of discussion. I am thinking also of the disillusion faced by Willy Loman.

I guess the response is that 1- Not everyone will choose to tweet about something other than the event and may move the conversation to a larger audience and 2- You won’t have any problem if you give them something compelling to tweet about.

But the fact is, often your immediate and gut reaction to something isn’t all there is. Your response can at least wait until the end. Often you won’t know how you really feel about it until you have had a day or two to digest your experience. You may come to ruefully realize you were masterfully manipulated or that your disappointment wasn’t due to what you initially attributed it to.

I know a complete resistance by outlawing social media devices is not going to be practical. And there are likely many very constructive ways an art organization can cultivate and guide the conversation to create a larger discussion that results in people valuing their presence, even if they never attend an event.

But again, I come back to the question, can’t it wait?

Trying New Things With No Apparent Benefit

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Something a former employer has started doing has reminded me to always keep your options and mind open even if the potential value is unclear.

I used to coordinate the operations for the Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival. A few years ago, one of the board members, (now executive director), had the idea to offer a 25 mile bike ride on the festival day. I believe this year will be the third year they are doing it.

Because the festival is outdoors in a rural area, having a bike ride does fit the vibe of the event and the lifestyle of many of those who attend. But I gotta tell you, it would have never occurred to me that people would be up for a 25 mile ride followed by a full day attending an arts and music festival.

Just thinking about it is exhausting to me. Also, most of the audience does not live in the immediate area. Will people really want to haul their bikes to south Jersey to do this ride and attend the festival?

Just based on my experience living where I do now, I know there are enough bike enthusiasts who won’t hesitate to answer yes to all of the above. 10 years ago, I would have discounted the idea. And in fact, maybe all the elements weren’t in place to make it an attractive option back then.

As the guy responsible for all the logistics for the event, there are details related to adding the ride that would have concerned me and made me resist it. But there was a good volunteer corps that supported the festival so none of the details would have been too troubling in the end.

I applaud them for making the initial investment of time and energy to try it out. It is easy to advocate for experimenting and trying new things, but there are always practical considerations. The festival is a big event and to add something new diverts attention away from the core activity.

It may sound simple to gather a bunch of people on bikes, send them on a ride and make sure to have water and snacks available at the planned rest stops. There is still a lot of planning and tracking involved with the ride and I imagine the festival staff and volunteers make it look a lot easier than it is.

I think that it can sometimes be easier to diverge from the core mission of the organization in order to chase funding and grant money, but more difficult to add activities which complement existing programs but do not have a clear potential for financial gain.

I am not saying this was the case with the bike ride. They may have seen the opportunity to add 50 new attendees for all I know. I am just observing what is a potential paradox of just about any business. It is easy to get sidetracked by the prospect of new opportunities to the detriment of enhancing the value of existing conditions.

People may think that doing something with no apparent benefit is the cornerstone of a non-profit organization’s existence, but living and working under that philosophy doesn’t make the decisions any easier–especially when you are frequently enjoined to act more like a business.

Respect To The Loyal User

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So it appears that Google is phasing out its Reader service. This is rather annoying because it is the way I follow the vast majority of blogs. Given that it appears they are also phasing out Feedburner, it looks like the writing is on the wall that Google is no longer interested in helping people follow blogs.

So if you are subscribing to this blog via Feedburner, I encourage you to subscribe to my blog directly by using the subscribe by email field to the right——>

I have seen a fair bit of annoyance and anger over the impending disappearance of Google Reader. The strongest came from Maria Popova:

(The language is a little strong so I am placing it after the fold)

Read more

Toward Better Organizational Self-Evaluation

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I have been thinking a bit more on my post about when you get your first hint that things aren’t going well for your organization. I haven’t thought up any more interesting warning signs, but I have been thinking about the “after action” conversations between staff members I mentioned.

It isn’t necessarily a sign that things are going downhill, but I do think at least a semi-formal post mortem discussion that leads to action is necessary for the health of the organization. If people gather around the water cooler, talk about how great the show was, sigh “if only more people were in the audience” and then go back to their desks leaving it to the marketing department to fix or hoping things are better next time around, that isn’t really constructive.

I have worked for companies where a post mortem discussion focused on the technical issues that needed to be fixed/learned from the next time around, but I have come to realize that development, marketing and audience services need to be given equal time. And they need to be at the same meeting with the technicians.

I will be the first to admit I don’t do this to the extent I am envisioning it should be done as I write this.

There may be smaller meetings prior to the post mortem where each department collects their thoughts so they can summarize their victories and challenges and keep the meeting short. But if you are going to embrace the idea that responsibility for marketing and development are shared across the organization, then every department probably needs to be largely present.

It is too easy otherwise for those who are not present to feel disconnected and uninvested in the central goals of the organization, inhibiting long term progress.

It can be easy to address concrete technical problems like broken equipment and missed cues. It is more difficult to figure out intangible things like how to attract audiences and motivate volunteers. When the decision is made to have a cabaret in the lobby prior shows in order to engage audiences as they arrive, it is better that the tech people were in on that entire discussion and know the motivation rather than being told they now needs to support a cabaret before every show.

Probably annually there should be a discussion about whether what the organization is doing is working. The ultimate decision will be up to the board, but the staff are all experts in their respective fields. They may be best positioned to say whether what the organization is doing is working. If the season is programmed out of a sense of obligation (seven shows, Shakespeare in the Fall, Musical in the Spring) rather than as an acknowledgement of the current operating environment and community, then the impetus for change and the supporting evidence may need to come from the organization’s staff.

Admittedly, it is difficult to move against the inertia of an organization’s history and business model for both staff and board. I don’t know that a staff would initiate a radical change. On the other hand, if they were regularly involved with providing feedback and saw it was often acted up, who know what people might feel empowered to suggest.

The impetus for this post came not only from thinking about the warning signs post from last month, but also thinking about a post I did from a year about about founding arts organizations with planned expiration dates. Though I thought expiration dates are a great idea, I wondered if anyone would have the fortitude to do it.

From there my thoughts turned to the concept that any business should always strive to do things a little better the next time around. I figure there is a better chance of arts organizations putting a self-evaluation process in place than planning for their own demise. Given that, I started thinking about what practices need to be in place to allow an arts organization to be responsive to changing times?

What I would really be interested in is knowing if anyone works for any sort of organization or business that has institutionalized a really effective self-reflective process like this. What about the corporate/organizational culture has made it so effective?

People will avoid the mechanical imposition of this sort of structure so there needs to be some whole hearted investment by the employees. I would bet that any organization that does a good job examining themselves also has a highly effective personnel review process.

Be The Propaganda You Wish To See

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Last Monday was March 4, according to my grandmother, the most commanding day of the year. (March Forth!). I am guessing other people’s grandmothers must have used the same line because last Monday there were a lot of hits on the post I did nine years earlier called The Most Commanding Day of the Year.

My grandmother had a lot of funny turns of phrase that she used to entertain and trick her grandkids. She was also very proud of being Irish (though she was second or third generation in the U.S.).

Now I have more German than Irish in my background from grandparents on both sides, but I didn’t realize that until I was much older thanks to my grandmother’s constant propaganda about how wonderful the Irish are and how wonderful it was that we were Irish.

I never recognized how much influence that had over my life. I have never been rabidly Irish, even on St. Patrick’s Day. However, two weeks ago I was listening to a Deutsche Welle report on how successful Ireland has been at achieving their goals while holding the European Union presidency. I felt a this sense of pride in Ireland’s accomplishment even though I only have a vague idea of how the EU presidency works.

I have generally been cynical about the effectiveness of constantly telling kids that they are smartest and most talented because reality tends to rear its ugly head a vast majority of the time and they realize they don’t measure up to the billing.

My recognition of my reaction to the Ireland story gave me some insight into the power of reinforcing ideas for kids as the grow up. It has started me thinking about the long term benefits of encouragement absent of specific value, consistently telling kids they can be artistic and creative without necessarily saying they are the most creative in class or specifying what being a successful artist looks like.

I know this sounds very vague and touchie-feelie and I will be the first to admit that I have no data to back this up.

I do know that many experts encourage parents to praise the process rather than the result– praise the hard work that went into preparing for a test rather than telling a kid they are smart for scoring so high. That way there is a sense of cause and effect behind a failure and how it might be resolved rather than a total sense of loss and bewilderment when the natural ability you have been told you possess seems to have abandoned you.

The idea that exposing and involving kids in the arts at a young age is important is barely news to any of us. My purpose in writing this post is to point to just how subtle and pervasive cultivating part a person’s identity as a child can be.

In terms of my Irishness, my grandmother’s influence was reinforced by the fact I lived an hour outside of NYC, one of the great bastions of Irish identity in the U.S.

But though my grandmother has been dead over a decade now, my immediate family, uncles and cousins inevitably bond over obscure “holidays” like March 4. My mother and I talked about it on March 3 and though neither of us spoke to my sister, she emailed out about the most commanding day of the year to my siblings and cousins on March 4.

If you think about it, there is probably some equally peculiar element from your own upbringing that influences you to this day. Considering all this, it may be helpful over the long term to include phrases like “what do you like to do?,” “what have you created lately?” in every day conversation with kids of all ages.

(By the way, I haven’t appropriated the saying commonly attributed to Gandhi for my title. There is no evidence he said it. But as with all evidence debunking misattributions, the research is pretty interesting.)

Brush Up Your Suetonius

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The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace recently commissioned a study about the value placed on higher education by employers.

I initially only scanned the article, but listening to the Marketplace report on the radio on the way home brought me back to read it again when I heard the president of a technology company talk about how they make their new hires read Cato the Elder and Suetonius. He mentioned they were looking for people who could talk about the process of putting an idea forward, supporting it and problem solving.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.”

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how college students need to focus on practical majors like business and STEM fields rather than wasting their time on Liberal Arts. But businesses keep saying they need well rounded problem solvers, not just people with technical knowledge.

Yet that technical knowledge and specific experience is becoming ever more important, predominantly in the form of internships. The Chronicle of Higher Education addresses that specifically in a separate section of their report. What I really liked about it is that it starts by relating a story about a student failing in her internship and learning from it. I think that is a hallmark of a good internship experience.

What I was a little taken aback by was the fact this woman had six internships. My concern is based on the fact that it takes considerable resources to support oneself while they are participating in an internship. Cost of college and the necessity of attending is certainly revealing the gap between the wealthy and those with fewer means. Now to learn that incurring the cost of internships is increasingly important for employment and to see that one woman has worked six of them presumably to make herself more marketable, is somewhat disheartening to someone like myself whose family didn’t have a lot.

I have written about internships a fair bit over the course of this blog discussing the laws that apply to them as well as some interesting ideas for giving arts majors more practical skills through the design of their training programs.

As I read and listened to the sections of this report, it occurred to me that arts training programs need to insure their education and internship opportunities are providing is relevant and valuable. But it also occurred to me that arts organizations offering the internship opportunities would benefit by marketing them to students outside the arts.

The interns from other disciplines can gain the practical experience and educational “leavening” they need to become more well-rounded. The arts organization can benefit in turn by having someone with a non-arts perspective working for their company.

True, this may reduce the number of internships available for people pursuing arts careers, but those students can also benefit from working for a non-arts company to become well rounded in other areas and pick up skills they can bring back to the arts.

Let me tell you, I wouldn’t have thought doing semi-farm work as a teenager would have translated into anything useful for the arts until it came time to drive a farm tractor around while setting up the grounds for an outdoor arts and music festival.

The Chronicle article mentions much the same thing:

Such exercises don’t always ensure connections, at least at first. Jacquelyn M. Lomp, who graduated from UConn last May with a B.A. in English, initially wasn’t sure how her internship, in which she wrote newsletters for the university’s pharmacy department, related to her studies. “I’d go from dissecting different pharmaceutical research,” she says, “to studying Norse mythology.”

Only after college did she come to recognize that both her academic work and her internship required intense focus and the ability to analyze language for deeper meaning.

The title of this post, inspired of course, by the song from Kiss Me Kate:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ&w=420&h=315]

Don’t Blame Arcane Terminology and Practice

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Andrew Taylor touches upon a little of what I was thinking about this weekend in his post today. He quotes a recent piece by Marian Godfrey where she talks about how the language used by arts managers and grant makers is alienating and soul sucking.

…like any professional jargon, it puts up barriers and makes people who are unfamiliar with our dialect feel like outsiders, including the very people we are trying to support — artists and engaged people in our communities. I believe we need more humane language to describe ourselves and our visions: words and meanings that are shared by artists, administrators, and the public.

I had been thinking about the specialized language and terminologies used in the arts this weekend. I believe Godfrey was referring to the institutional and general language used to discuss the benefits of the arts as a whole, (I read the whole piece as Andrew Taylor enjoined his readers to do), whereas I was thinking about the terms specific to each arts discipline. As such, I don’t know that I can say I directly disagree with what Godfrey says.

The conclusion I came to this weekend is that while there is quite a bit of vocabulary one must learn in order to comfortably participate in a conversation about a discipline, I don’t think the need to learn a complex set of terms really comprises a significant impediment to becoming an participant or spectator. I think it is just a convenient excuse.

There are plenty of instances where people willingly engage in the time consuming process of learning special terminology. Take MMORPGs like W.O.W. where people will be exposed to terms like: tank, buff/debuff, AoE, aggro, autoloot, cooldown, PvE, PvP, grinding, griefing, among thousands of others. Players are expected to master the terminology, understand the role their character fills and how to use their abilities alongside others to achieve a goal.

Thousands of people happily undertake this challenge every day.

You might argue that people playing online games gain a sense of personal accomplishment that motivates them. But watching sports is often just as passive an activity as watching a performance, (okay, granted you can’t jump up and yell at a ballerina the moment the spirit moves you like you can with an athlete), and requires learning all sorts of arcane rules specific to each game. Often the rules are a little different for each level of play.

People learn these rules and terms because they want to. If they don’t know them, they can seek help from friends or go online to look up the information.

To illustrate this, I intentionally didn’t link to any resource with the gaming terms. Did you look them up or think about looking them up if you didn’t know what they were?

Sometimes this information is collated by the company/team/organization providing the activity. Often these days, people sharing a common interest join together to contribute information to a wiki which exists independently of the organization or activity it covers.

So when people express trepidation about learning the vocabulary and rituals of the performing and visual arts, I think the question really should be why this is so? My impulse is to respond that it is because there are not enough people they are acquainted with either personally or virtually providing a message that it is worth the trouble to learn about it.

I also don’t think there are enough informational resources out there to make it easy for people to learn if they so desire. I just did a Google search for the term “first position” because I can never remember the feet placement for the different positions. I couldn’t find it until I searched for the term “second position.” (Though I did discover A LOT of dance schools are named First Position.)

This is not to say that there aren’t many wikis and specialized dictionaries online which cover arts terminology. American Ballet Theatre has a pretty good dictionary of dance terms. It is just a coincidence that first position doesn’t appear there.

You would have to know to look there though because everyone’s go to source, Wikipedia, only has about 24 terms on it and there isn’t a good dance wiki that I could find. Information sources on theatre terminology are only slightly better.

As much as people say television shows like Glee, Smash and Bunheads don’t reflect reality, they do serve to disseminate the message that singing, theatre and dance are things people should be interested in learning more about.

Like I said, the idea that there isn’t enough of a visible trend and readily available information was something of a primary impression I had. I’d be happy to hear other theories.

While I think some of the terminology and practices might need a change, I do feel fairly strongly that people’s reticence to learn more about arts disciplines can’t be laid primarily at the feet of specialized vocabulary and unfamiliar practices.

People take the necessity of doing this in stride if they are motivated to learn something. Simplifying the language and altering the practices isn’t going to result in a sudden deluge of attendees because the initial motivating impulse will be absent.

Caring, Rather Than Money, Makes The World Go Round

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There was a Slate article today covering research on motivating employees that seemed well-aligned with the non-profit work environment. The research essentially verifies the importance of providing recognition and a sense of meaning to employees.

Researchers found that small gifts, rather than money, motivated people to work harder. They told one group of workers they would receive 7 euros more in pay than they had been promised when they were recruited. Another group was given a gift wrapped water bottle worth 7 euros and the control group was given no bonus. The cash bonus didn’t inspire any improvement, but those receiving the bottle were 25% more productive than those in the other two groups. The article notes that this increase in productivity more than paid for the 7 euro expenditure.

(my emphasis)

It’s not that the workers particularly loved their bottles—in fact, in a separate experiment in which catalogers were offered the choice between a bottle versus 7 euros, 80 percent took the cash (and still worked a lot harder). Rather, it was the thought that counted, and simply handing out a few more euros hardly takes much thought. Even offering the option of a gift showed that the employer cared.

An intriguing final version of the experiment underscored the importance, in the eyes of the employees, of the thought and effort bosses put into their gifts. This time, the cash was delivered as a 5-euro note folded into an origami shirt and a 2-euro coin with a smiley face painted on it. The origami money-gift generated the highest increase in productivity of all…

The study isn’t without its limitations. It’s hard to imagine that the average Wall Street trader would work harder for a pink Cadillac than a six-figure bonus. The motivational effects of cash surely become more important when the stakes get higher, and gifts probably work best when tailored to the particular set of employees. That’s how you really show you care.

And that, more than gifts versus cash, is really the study’s takeaway. Many employees toiling away in stores, factories, and cubicles are desperate for a sense of meaning in their work lives. Even the smallest gesture of kindness that shows they’re part of an organization that actually cares can give them purpose—and that leads to motivation.

It is widely recognized that people who work in non-profits do so because they valued the purpose and meaning they find in their work. Invoking the obvious disclaimer that it shouldn’t be a substitute for paying people a living wage, a boss providing some validation that what motivates that employee is valued and recognized can keep that person energized.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that the gifts that exhibited the most effort on the bosses’ part elicited the strongest effort on the employees’ part. For all the technology that may separate us, the work environment is still a communal experience and each person wants to know that the others are expending effort and thought on their behalf.

In many respects, this goes back to the post I made last week about the early warning signs that things are amiss with your company. When the board, upper management and lower echelons are each convinced the others are invested and working hard to keep the organization viable, that knowledge permeates that whole organization without anyone giving voice to that fact.

And the absence of that unity will begin to manifest itself in some intangible way as well.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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