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Month: December 2015

What Does It Take To Do Your Job?

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So here we are on the crux of a new year. People start toying with the idea of changing their lives and perhaps their careers.

What would you tell someone who wanted to enter your career about your job?

Yes, in many disciplines supply outstrips demand and there may not be a lot of respect for artists so the first thing many people would say is either have a high tolerance for disappointment and poverty or find some other line.

At the same time, one of the reasons why there isn’t a lot of respect for artists is that people don’t understand what the job requires. People in the arts industry aren’t particularly adept at talking about their career path. The general public really only perceives instant successes when someone emerges on the scene and not the 10 years of mistakes and experimentation.

That said, when you think about the answers to the following, think of it in terms of minimum qualifications for anyone, not the qualifications you hold.

What educational background is required/expected?
Where are good places to get that education?

What kind of experience is required/expected?
Where are good places to get that experience?

Where are the jobs? Who does the hiring?

Will there be jobs in this field in 5 years? 15 years?
Should I be pursuing skills in those areas instead or concurrently with skills for today’s jobs?

What are the “big names” in the field?
Who are the people I should be using as role models if they aren’t the same people or are not suited to my goals.

What personal characteristics are needed for success in this field?
Include mental, emotional and spiritual if necessary. Does one need to work well in a team
or tolerate long periods of working alone in a studio under their own motivation?

What physical characteristics are needed for success in this field?
Are there are any people who have achieved success without those characteristics? (dancer’s body, pianist’s fingers, etc)

What are common misconceptions about this job/field and what it takes to be successful?

Any other questions you would suggest? Any answers you want to offer that may run counter to common expectations?

Practical Aspect of Grail Quests

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Some years ago I wrote a “road less taken” entry encouraging people not to measure their worth against the progress others have made by quoting a passage from Joseph Campbell recounting a story about the start of the Holy Grail quest:

‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”

Much of what I said in that entry stands, but there is the practical side of me that says such idealism is all well and good, but hacking a new path through the forest is tough work. Who is doing the hacking? Has someone been hired to help? Who is paying, feeding and sheltering them? How are they supporting themselves?

Are villagers following them, donating to support their holy endeavor or are they scoffing at them for blazing a trail to places no one in the community is particularly interested in traveling?

Grail quests are fine when it comes to the individual but get increasingly complicated the more people you start to get involved.

The one advantage non-profit arts organizations have over the grail seekers is that there was only one goal for the latter to pursue. Arts organizations can choose from many grails and myriad paths to tread that others have not.

The lessons of my initial post still stand, however. When a quest is lead by a committee, it is easy to get bogged down with discussions about changing the focus of the quest and taking what appears to be an easier, well traveled, path given the wear and tear of the last few years on people and equipment and what supplies remain.

It is easy to be distracted (and almost seduced) by false representations of success if you don’t have people to keep you on track.

Resolve To Be More Respected in 2016

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As I was looking back in my archives for some content to post about, I came across Dan Gioia’s 2007 commencement address at Stanford.

He acknowledges there had been a little controversy about his choice as commencement speaker due to his lack of celebrity.

If you weren’t aware he was the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003-2009, you may have proven his point.

He notes that at one time, public figures came from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

[…]

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Gioia doesn’t entirely blame the fickle nature of the media and general public:

Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

It started me thinking that perhaps things have improved marginally since 2007 given that astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson has developed a profile as a public figure.

Now as we move into 2016, I was thinking that between the current thought that artists need to embrace more entrepreneurial practices and the fact that control of media and communication channels are so decentralized, it may be possible for a wider array of artists and intellectuals to realize success investing more effort increase their profile.

It may not necessarily be “themselves” that they need to put forth

Dali may have received recognition for his talent as a visual artist, but he also cultivated DALI! as a separate persona from Salvador Dali.

Similarly, there is the Lady Gaga who wears skirt steaks as a skirt who is slightly different from the Lady Gaga that sings Sinatra and duets with Tony Bennett who is different from Stefani Germanotta.

Granted, sustaining those persona takes a lot of will, energy and time and not everyone is interested in that. Nor do they necessarily need to.

For 2016 it will be enough to resolve to raise your personal profile among those who live around you. Raise awareness among those who don’t know you, let those who do, know you better.

When You Hit The Sculpture, Break Right Past The Expressionists

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I am traveling to see family for the holidays so I have a couple retrospective posts scheduled to cover my absence.

If you are traveling or just have a little time off over the holidays, maybe you might want to try something new like visiting a museum or visiting a museum you haven’t been to before.

Back in 2007 I posted an entry that contained links to posts that Tyler Cowen and Donald Pittenger had written about how to walk through an art museum.

About a 18 months ago, The Art Assignment made a video about visiting art museums.

The primary content of each is interesting, but there is some really great stuff in the comments sector of each, especially The Art Assignment video.

If you ever wanted proof that how people enjoy art is dependent upon their relationship with the idea of art and the people with whom they are experiencing it, it is all there.

Everyone has a different rules for themselves when entering a gallery, but it is clear that the social rules they set for themselves also influence their enjoyment.

One person writes that because his style and that of his significant other differ, he spends a lot of time waiting for her at the portal to the next gallery. Another person says their rule is not to accompany or wait for each other at all other than to rendezvous at an agreed upon time.

After reading all the content, I started to think that anyone who says viewing art is a passive experience is a prisoner of their own rules and expectations because there are plenty of options available. (One of the more extreme essentially advocated a zone defense of whatever you were looking at to prevent others from encroaching) May those options need to be promoted more widely.

I’m Selling Out!

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Erm, I mean, I am featured on Goldstar’s Selling Out blog. A post with an interview they did with me went up online yesterday.  I had a lot to say and I give them credit for including it all.

They contacted me with the request right after Thanksgiving so it is been hectic preparing for that, plus writing my own blog postings, doing Christmas shopping….

In addition, Barry Hessenius asked me to write a guest post about what I had learned over the course of my career for Barry’s Blog.

Keep your eyes open for it. My guess is that it will come out some time around the new year. I guess I still have a lot to say because there is only about three sentences overlap between the post I did for him and the Selling Out interview.

I will be heading off to visit family for the holidays starting tomorrow. Not to worry, I have prepared and scheduled posts to appear as normal.

Hope everyone has a great holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

It’s Not About Our Great Dark Ale

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About a week ago I was at a conference that was addressing creative placemaking and revitalizing communities. Mary Cusick from TourismOhio made a presentation on the new tourism campaign that is being worked on.

As she talked about marketing the state, I was interested to see how similar the attitudes research participants expressed about Ohio were to attitudes people express about the arts.

While people were generally neutral about Ohio, having no positive or negative associations about the state in general, they did feel there was a degree of tribalism. If you aren’t plugged in to the Ohio State University culture, erm I’m sorry, THE Ohio State University culture, you feel left out. In addition to the stress on THE, there is also the O-H—I-O cheer, among other identifiers that one can invoke at any occasion over a fairly large geographic area and receive a response.

We know that people have similar feelings about the arts with language, behavior and particular dress code which feel exclusive.

Another thing that Mary Cusick noted is that nearly every travel destination ad features the beauty and majesty of their outdoor attractions with people doing outdoorsy stuff.

However, research shows that people are aspirational in their responses about what they want to do on vacation. When you ask people about their plans, they talk about outdoors activities, but when you sit them down and ask what they actually have done and what the most important goal of a vacation is, the answers are a bit different.

And by sit them down, I mean literally. The tourism office research involved talking to people from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania in their living rooms. They showed us video excerpts of the interviews.

I had a sense that the responses on arts participation surveys may also be on the aspirational side and was a little depressed that there wasn’t funding to do deep research like TourismOhio did. (I will say that part of me suspects arts participation surveys have included that degree of deep surveying. It’s just that seeing even brief video of the process during a presentation made a deeper impression than being told 100 people were surveyed in their homes)

What was important to people when they traveled on vacation was that it was an opportunity to de-stress and connect with family and friends. These are exactly the reasons given by people surveyed about what they valued from participation in an arts or creative activity. (graphics on pages 10 & 13).

Cusick reinforced Trevor O’Donnell’s constant message about advertising focusing on the patron/participant/consumer experience when she talked about the philosophy behind the ad campaigns being developed. She said it wasn’t about the great roller coasters, microbreweries and awesome ice cream shops in the state. It is about getting scared out of your wits, sharing your darkest secrets with your best friend over a pint of dark ale, and ice cream mustaches on your kids’ faces.

The print and broadcast pieces she showed us were all right in line with that approach.

Interesting and valuable insights to think about moving forward.

If You Were Really Creative, You Would Already Be Embezzling From Me

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About a week ago, I think it was Dan Pink that tweeted a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article titled “Why Creative People Are More Likely to Be Dishonest.” I bookmarked it, but before I moved on I retweeted the link with a comment that this was an aspect of creativity we shouldn’t tout too frequently.

Creativity is getting a lot of attention these days. When I saw Tom Borrup speak yesterday, he mentioned that one of the few sectors not spending a lot of time researching creativity was arts and culture. Business, he said, sees creativity as an important asset in the effort to gain a competitive edge and is investing in studying it.

The researchers in the HBR article found that people who believed creativity was something only a few possessed were more likely to be dishonest than those who felt creativity was a talent everyone shared. The researchers said for the less honest people it appeared the idea they had a rare skill lead to a sense of entitlement that different standards applied to them.

In order to combat this, the researchers suggest companies should create a sense that creativity is something everyone shares and can tap into; focus on the team being a collective of creative individuals that succeed together; don’t give people special treatment and

Carefully define what creativity is and is not. Our results demonstrate that the definition of creativity is not fixed and can be changed. While creativity involves a certain degree of risk-taking, managers should make clear that taking risks does not mean ignoring the rules and moral guidelines.

I was pleased to see the idea that everyone can be creative being promulgated. If the arts and cultural sector is going to have a long term goal of disseminating this concept, it is helpful if the message is being spread by entities and in situations that are not perceived as being aligned with arts and culture organizations.

I emphasized the point of defining what creativity is and is not because it often feels like I read about businesses who equate creativity with the risk taking and out of the box thinking that is going to catapult them to the next stage or whatever. Most of the time creativity doesn’t really step out of the box at all but reinterprets the contents of the box to emphasize different elements.

Nearly every social media app can be described as providing the ability to share images, videos and short messages with friends. What separates Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pintrest, Snapchat etc from each other is what features each focuses on.

It is probably important to point out, as the people in the article’s comment section do, that not all creative people are dishonest and not all dishonest people exhibit creativity outside of being adept at masking their dishonesty. It is also easy for people to feel entitled for reasons unrelated to recognition of their creativity.

In a number of past posts, I have noted that there is no magic formula that will engender creativity in people and organizations over the course of a short seminar. Creativity is gained by practice over time, a sentiment echoed by HBR article commenter Linda Adams.

Raise your hand if you have had an experience that resembled the first sentence:

A lot of people think creativity is simply brainstorming a bunch of ideas and that’s it—that’s where writers get “I’ve got this great idea. You write it and I’ll split it 50-50.”

But creativity is far more than coming up with ideas. It’s executing them—which is a skill that can take years or decades to learn–and taking the dynamic leaps into the unknown to see if something works. It’s taking a risk because something that we try might not work at all, but trying itself is part of the creative process and a learning experience. But most people are not going to take that much effort, and those who try are sometimes surprised about how much hard work it is.

Humility In Service

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I was attending a creative industry conference today which gave me a lot to think about. One of the topics that came up was creative placemaking. Right now that is a big push for improving communities around the country. ArtPlace is one of the bigger efforts to this end.

However, one of the things keynote speaker Tom Borrup noted was that often placemaking has an element of placetaking.

It is widely acknowledged that gentrification displaces artists which planted the seeds for vibrancy within neighborhoods. The process of placemaking seeks to improve conditions in neighborhoods which may end up displacing a wider spectrum of residents beyond artists. Even if it doesn’t immediately displace them, the placemaking vision may implicitly be imposing a different type of art and culture than already exists there.

Borrup suggested one of the most important questions to ask is whose art and culture is being employed in the placemaking effort. Should there be an effort at placekeeping? That is, an intentional effort to determine what should be left in place rather than replaced.

This reminded me of the woman I wrote about two weeks ago who was selling a condo in San Francisco’s Mission District at below market rate. She was requiring the condo buyer to commit to a cultural promissory note to contribute to the community. One of the conditions I hadn’t mentioned was that she required the buyer not to complain about the Day of the Dead celebrations.

Whether that is a reasonable expectation of a property buyer or not, this shows a concern that the existing culture of the neighborhood not be disparaged or displaced by new residents.

Along the same lines, in another session Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo noted that arts people often talk about the necessity of going out into the community since the community doesn’t come to them. He said that he often approached that as if he was metaphorically riding out on his white horse to save the community.

He said after a time he learned that really first you needed to go out as a guest and ask to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc. which is a much more humble approach. I had visions of the electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes. Though I also suspect he may have meant being a true guest and not being the focus of attention at all the first few times out.

Similarly, in another session a panelist noted that after experiencing a lot of resistance from educators, they finally asked what they were doing wrong. They were told that generally arts organizations come along and ask the schools to participate in their programs rather than asking what initiatives the schools were pursuing that they could participate in. (I guess in some cases, arts organizations put schools into grants as program participants without even consulting with the schools.)

This general sentiment reminded me about the diversity panel I attended at the Arts Midwest conference this past Fall.  When I wrote about the session, I noted:

..the focus of engaging diverse communities has been on how the arts/cultural organization can benefit from the inclusion. This can make the effort feel disingenuous and leave people feeling marginalized. Few organizations can say why engaging diverse audiences is meaningful beyond seeking to expand sources of revenue.

The first step then is to articulate why it is important and what the organization’s concept of diversity is given that the term can encompass cultural, ethnic, social, sexual and other affinity groupings.

The Arts Midwest panel talked about consulting representatives of the segment that aligns with your concept and letting them tell you what is relevant to the community rather than engaging an artist or program and expecting/telling that segment they should find your offerings relevant to them.

If you think about what is required to do any of this, you realize that you need to take the approach of truly serving the community rather than doing things you think the community will like.

Internships, The Paid and The Unpaid

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I recently got around to reading the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) special report on internships in arts fields.

There is a lot of interesting findings in the 23 page report, including the (to me) dismaying news that 87% of those who did at least one arts administration internship were unpaid. That is the highest rate of unpaid internships in any of the categories.

What I was most interested in learning was the reality of the claim that the ability to participate in an internship was dependent on receiving support from families. Sure enough, even though there was negligible difference in the amount of debt accrued by students who did an internship and those who did not, those who could depend on support from families more frequently participated in an internship.

Sixty-seven percent of recent alumni who did not intern while enrolled in school indicated that parents or family helped pay for their education; the figure is 8% higher (75%) among alumni who did intern.

The gap in family support is similar between recent alumni who had unpaid internships and those who did not; 75% of former unpaid interns indicated they received such support, compared to only 67% for alumni who did not undertake an unpaid internship.

Gender, race and socioeconomic status also were factors in choosing to do an internship and whether it was paid or unpaid.

Women were more likely than men to have undertaken an internship during their undergraduate education (56% compared to 51%). While women and men were equally likely to ever have done paid internships, women were much more likely to have been unpaid interns (57% compared to 46% for men).

Black and Hispanic/Latino alumni were less likely to have done internships than their White and Asian counterparts. Black and Hispanic/Latino graduates were also slightly less likely to have done paid internships and more likely than White alumni to have done unpaid internships.

First-generation college graduates were less likely than non-first-generation college graduates to have been interns while enrolled in school (51% compared to 56%) as well as before or after graduation (paid or unpaid)…

SNAAP data are consistent with many commentators’ concerns about the intern economy in that women, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and first-generation college graduate arts alumni all appear to have held a disproportionate number of unpaid internships—which, as will be considered below, are tied to significantly weaker career payoffs than paid internships. However, one possible explanation for this over representation might be that these demographic groups tend to cluster in majors in which unpaid internships are more common than paid ones. For this reason, to further investigate the findings above, our study considered the subsample of recent design alumni

The report authors note that in the design sub-sample, the demographic trends are even more pronounced than within the general sample. (Page 9 if you want more detail.)

Most interestingly was their finding that paid internships were more valuable than unpaid internships when it came to finding jobs. Those who did an internship were more successful at finding a job than those who did not (66% vs 57% four months after graduation, 86% vs 77% one year after graduation.)

However, the authors,

“…find that paid internships are even more closely related to finding a job than unpaid internships.

[…]

Figure 6 shows that having an unpaid internship does not appear to be related to finding a job more quickly after graduation. Conversely, having a paid internship has consistently been related to finding a job more quickly after graduation. Recent graduates (2009–2013) who have done paid internships, during school or outside of school, have fared especially well compared to alumni who have never been paid interns, with 89% of the former finding work within one year of graduation compared to 77% for the latter.

Simply securing a paid internship doesn’t necessarily guarantee a job. The authors note that ambitious, talented internship seekers who secure a paid position may apply those same traits to a job search.

They may also be securing the paid internships thanks to family connections and a familiarity and ability to navigate social interactions and systems that first generation students and other demographic groups don’t possess or are comfortable with.

There is a lot of interesting data in the report. If nothing else, you can get a sense of what percentage of undergraduates in your discipline intern and what the paid versus unpaid numbers look like.

With the current conversation about inequity and exploitation related to internships, it can be easy to overlook the finding that those who participate in internships report a higher satisfaction with their training and education experience than those who don’t participate.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t be that much more satisfied if they were paid and treated a little better.

Oh Please Let Someone Start Singing Ode To Joy In The Produce Aisle

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On my Twitter feed I got a link to an announcement that a documentary on Knight Foundation’s Random Act of Culture program won a regional Emmy. As I watched the first brief video where Dennis Scholl talks about first getting the idea from a pop up opera performance in Valencia, Spain where they ended by holding a sign saying “So You Don’t Think You Like Opera?,” two questions came to mind.

The first is I wondered why people reacted so positively to having performers throw off their “mundane” identities and burst into action in public spaces, but will pass by Joshua Bell or Tasmin Little in street clothes playing in a railway station.

I am on record expressing disdain for the way the Joshua Bell situation was set up because it seemed positioned to allow the journalist to call out people as uncultured philistines. I wrote about a great three part podcast (which alas has disappeared) where the contributors discussed how important setting and context are to creating a receptive mindset in people and how these things are not present in rail stations.

But people aren’t naturally placed in this mindset in shopping malls and supermarkets either. People may be less harried than when they are rushing to work or to connect to another form of transportation, but they generally aren’t going shopping secretly hoping the crowd will burst into “Ode To Joy.” Yet people are immediately delighted when it happens. Why is that?

The difference may be the scale. Walking up on a busker or group of performers on the street is a different experience from having the people around you start to participate in something. You have more permission to enjoy yourself if 40 people standing around you start singing versus seeing the 40 people nearby stride with determination past buskers.

There is also a different sort of theatricality involved with flash performances than busker setting up an open instrument case. If Joshua Bell had flung off his jacket with a flourish and dove into a lively piece as he descended the escalator at the Metro station, it might have engaged the curiosity of more people.

The second question that occurred to me was the one posed at the end of the performance in Valencia about not liking opera. It probably is easy to be open to liking opera in a 5-10 minute segment when everyone around you seems to be participating. It may not seem as enjoyable to go to an opera house and try to follow the plot of an entire opera in a foreign language. Heck, it may not seem enjoyable if a group did a pop up performance of the entire opera, blocking the aisles for two hours while you were trying to buy groceries for your family.

This isn’t a criticism of the Random Acts of Culture program. Inciting curiosity and showing people they have the capacity to enjoy opera, dance, etc., is an asset to the arts.

We just can’t acclaim that particular tactic as the answer to getting new audiences hooked. It’s no more the solution than the idea that people only need to see our work once before they are hooked.

In fact, it may be less so. For people who are not frequent attendees, the experience of going to the opera after seeing a pop up performance may seem like a bait and switch. For people who work in the field, it can be difficult to imagine how stark the contrast may seem to them.

Thankfully, many in the field are able to imagine that performance attendance experience may be losing its relevance for today’s audiences and there is a fair bit of conversation occurring about what alternatives are possible.

On the other side of the equation, when arts practitioners advocate for taking art and culture to people where they live, it should be remembered that these experiences are only a delight because they are unexpected, infrequent and in small doses. Too much of it and you are an unwelcome intrusion on people where they live.

It would be better if arts practitioners could find a place nearby where people could gather and be delighted that doesn’t interfere with the daily flow of life.

Oh wait, there are already a bunch of those. They are the places nobody under the age of 60 seems to want to go to have an arts experience.

Clearly, there has to be a medium between the two environments and it is going to take some work to determine what it is exactly.

One of the things I suspect, but I would be interested to see a study confirm, is that the pop up performances like those in the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture may make spectators more confident in their own ability to be creative. Even though the person standing next to them who started singing may have many years of training and rehearsed for five hours in order to make everything look effortless, the illusion is there that the average John or Jane has the potential for excellence. A concept that is reinforced by shows like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.

Since we are seeing signs that the concept of personal creativity is more appealing than the concept of art and culture, pop up performances could be one of many tools used to encourage people toward participation in creative endeavors. That can’t be the only tactic used and the execution has to come off more organic than just planting performers in the audience.

To whit:

Companies No Longer Want To Sponsor Simply For The Exposure

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The most recent issue of Arts Management Newsletter has a translation of a piece written by Wolfgang Lamprecht about the death of corporate sponsorship.

Citing the number of corporations disengaging from their support of a host of international venues and events, Lamprecht says the days of sponsorship as publicity is past. The value of sponsorships to a corporation needs to be framed in different terms.

Just as many artists are rebuking job opportunities that provide “exposure” as the only stated benefit, so too are companies no longer interested in arrangements that simply puts their logo in front of eyeballs.

Here’s the thing: today, entrepreneurial cultural engagement is less about image or about customer loyalty than it is about the central asset of trust. Our current crisis of confidence cannot be overcome with programs for the needy, nor by logo placements.

[…]

Art and culture have the particular advantage that, on the most part, they generate a basic element of trust. Trust and confidence are crucial for securing the stability and legitimacy of the economic system, but they must be produced discursively. The disadvantage of culture lies in the fact that art and culture are viewed as being marginally important and therefore have to fight for their social relevance.

Lamprecht notes that as the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has gained currency, it has expanded to encompass the concept of Corporate Cultural Responsibility (CCR). He takes pains to emphasize that “CCR is therefore part of the social (= societal, not charitable) responsibility of a company.” So conversations soliciting support should focus more on social good and responsibility versus charity and tax benefits.

Of course, this also means that the organization soliciting the support needs to make sure they present an image that embodies cultural asset.

In short, cultural engagement of a company has to follow the belief that the support of arts and culture is not simple fun and communicatively truly brings all that which impact research and marketing departments have so eagerly argued for in the past (image, customer loyalty, employee motivation, etc.). Above all, it is an important contribution to social responsibility that a company should, if not must, provide to maintain a balanced and civilized society, as well to the long-term sustainability of its own success.

[…]

The goal remains the same: against the backdrop of a massive lack of trust through saturated markets and products that are similar, corporations are, in the competition for clients, forced to approach their stakeholders differently than by common means. CCR presupposes the desire to stand out from the competition and, particularly in the field of corporate communication, to secure confidence, competitive advantages and verifiable income. The following measures have been defined for CCR: corporate sponsoring, corporate giving, corporate secondments / corporate volunteering, events, cultural commissioning, product-/image placement, cause-related marketing, public private partnerships, impact investments.

My only concern with this approach is that it starts to smack of artwashing/culturewashing and greenwashing. An arts organization can damage their image long term by having an association or accepting a gift from an unsavory individual or company. It would be worse if they were perceived as openly courting anyone who wanted to remove a blemish on their reputation.

Something Lamprecht wrote seemed to suggest this approach should be used with individuals as well as companies.

“…a key advantage of the model described here is no longer the need to decline and perpetuate the terminologically worn demarcations (CCR measures) between sponsorship, patronage, donations, etc. as a prerequisite for entrepreneurial legitimacy of individual cultural support measures.”

If individuals are not widely solicited for support in Austria, I may be misreading this to suggest that the idea of social responsibility should be applied to all efforts to garner support, including individuals. I know from reading other pieces in the Arts Management Newsletter that fundraising in Germany is conducted in a different manner than in the US. It may be similar in Austria where Lamprecht works.

But it is interesting to consider that rather than saying individuals donate and corporations sponsor, a single term and rationale for giving might be used.

Is there any benefit to trying to recast the rationale for why an individual in the US should donate? My impression is that different people are motivated to donate by different arguments. But if you change the message from donate to help a poor child experience art (charity) to donate to help a child develop into a better cultural citizen (social responsibility), is that better?

My suspicion is that “cultural citizen” will work with foundations and governments whereas “charity for the under served” is more compelling to an individual. But maybe I haven’t thought of the right terms yet.

Best Effort Yet And I Missed It

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I didn’t know about NBC’s recent live broadcast of The Wiz until it was over, and that worries me.

It isn’t because I necessarily really wanted to see it. It’s the idea that if a company with the resources of NBC couldn’t make a person in the arts like myself aware that the show was going on, what hope do I, with my comparatively minuscule advertising budget and resources, have of reaching members of my community?

I haven’t had a television for about 5 years now and I don’t watch or rent video through Netflix or Hulu. If I did, maybe I would have seen something if NBC promoted it there.

As it was, I had no inkling NBC had even chosen to do The Wiz as their next project, much less when it would air. In all the blogs I read, all the webpages I visit, all the Twitter posts I read in the course of the day, I saw no mention of it until a bunch of people started gushing about how great it was during and after the performance. If there were banner ads on webpages I visited, I missed them.

I should mention, I did notice ads for a performance of Phantom of the Opera at some place in South Carolina. I wondered why I was getting what appeared to be retargeted ads since I am so far away geographically and never visited their webpage. There is a good chance I would have noticed something similar for The Wiz.

This challenge of reaching audiences as so many disparate channels of communication proliferate isn’t a new one. It has been the subject of discussion for a long time and many blogs and articles offer tips for using social media and other strategies to reach audiences.

While my experience (or inattention) isn’t necessarily indicative of a nation trend, as I say the fact that The Wiz broadcast went entirely under my radar caused me great concern. I guess for as engaged in the conversations of the arts field as I am, I am still joining the legions of the disengaged.

Cultural Promissory Notes

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I was reading about a woman who put her San Francisco home up for sale at 2005 prices with the condition that the buyer sign a “cultural promissory note.”

Finally, they had to offer a 10-year “cultural promissory note”: a legally binding, decade long commitment to provide something of cultural value—theater tickets, writing lessons, organic produce from “your uncle’s farm in Salinas”—to the community or Lee herself.

San Francisco being San Francisco, the seller received bids from prospective buyers who promised to put in a decade of volunteer journalism for El Tecolote or donate 30 bottles of wine a year to a nonprofit organization. In other words, value: Buyers were promising their time, skills, assets, or donations in kind in place of cash up front.

I just love the opportunities the term “cultural promissory note” hints at.

Separate from any sort of real estate dealings, I wondered if there were any advantage to arts organizations providing an option to sign some sort of similar cultural promissory note or be a potential beneficiary of a cultural promise.

For example, in addition to requiring someone to help with administrative and maintenance work in exchange for studio space or access to resources, have people submit a proposal stating what other contribution they will make to the organization or general community.

By the way, the winning bid on the San Francisco condo included:

…a yearly free writing conference at Modern Times bookstore; a “bestseller visionary” membership to Litquake; tickets to cultural events of Lee’s choosing to the tune of $660 a year; a course at Stanford Continuing Studies, where Watrous teaches; and a donation to La Cocina, a Mission nonprofit that helps low-income women open food businesses.”

As a way to offer rewards/incentive for committing to a cultural note, perhaps people would get guaranteed orchestra section seats for back row prices, access to classes or rehearsal space, etc in return for a significant commitment to serve the interests of an arts council, cultural trust, arts district. So instead of a corporation or individual getting donor benefits at one place, they receive something for advancing the interests of multiple organizations.

I think this is probably thinking too conventionally compared to the possibilities people could come up with on their own. The people who ultimately purchased the SF condo probably put together a more varied and interesting bid than the seller might have proposed. It was also more appropriate to their abilities and general availability than anything the seller might have asked them to do.

A cooperative approach to receiving/delivering on a promissory note might be attractive to large business like a law firm that commits to working on zoning issues, property acquisition or lobbying for the creation of a cultural district. The families of their employees will have varied interests and will likely find the offerings of multiple organizations more appealing than a single entity.

The approach could also be focused on a more individual scale. For example, perhaps an incentive the Boys & Girls Club uses to hire a new director is tickets/membership donated by an arts facility. If the Boys & Girls Club is already paying to attend shows or take classes from the arts entity, those tickets/memberships may help over the long run as budgets get tighter and a decision needs to be made about what activities to cut.

Even if there isn’t an active relationship between the two organizations, that membership helps to start getting the new director invested in the community, perhaps even before they make the move and start their job.

As I say, given time and more minds, there are certainly many more intriguing possibilities that exist. The concept of “cultural promissory note” seems replete with so much potential that different places could easily create entirely different definitions of what one entails.

What would it mean to you?

Dozen-ish Views On Etiquette

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Audiences today, they just don’t know how to behave!

You have probably seen a lot of conversation on this subject crop up whenever something egregious occurs and makes the news or social media rounds.

UK based What’s On Stage decided to tackle the subject of etiquette from all angles over the last week.  There is a full index of all the articles on their site.  It can be worth taking a look through because while they have the usual perspectives from actors, annoyed audience members and the obligatory post about how things only got staid and passive during the Victorian era, there are some voices that aren’t commonly heard.

For example, an usher writes how they and their compatriots are the public face of the theater and bear the heaviest expectation to enforce the rules but don’t receive the support necessary to carry out their charge.

What the usher has to say probably isn’t news, but is a reminder to examine whether we are providing our front line staff/volunteers with sufficient support.

A theater manager writes:

I do think audience behaviour has changed recently. People feel they know their rights more and don’t necessarily have to think about other people. It’s all about them: ‘this is ridiculous, I shouldn’t have to queue’. There is a sense of entitlement. It always seems to be: ‘I’m traumatised now, and what are you going to give me?’

People are angry when they get disrupted by phones, but it also works the other way. The person on the phone says: ‘What’s your problem? It’s my phone and I am busy.’ There’s no sense of being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes.

He/she notes that so often a balance has to be struck, especially when it comes to assessing whether dealing with a disruption will cause a bigger disruption than is already occurring.

Then there are those who like their audience rowdy and involved and a woman who was dismayed that the audience at a performance at Mamma Mia! was so polite, she couldn’t manage to get them to sing along with the performers.

If nothing else, the series is a good reminder that the question of etiquette is one encompasses an entire range of people, not just those in close proximity in a single moment.

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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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