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Month: July 2024

Mistake Of Viewing Culture As An Industry

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Via Artsjournal.com, a thought provoking interview with Professor Justin O’Connor, author of the book, Culture Is Not An Industry.

His basic premise is that if culture was an industry, decisions about it would play a bigger role in international policy and relations.

If we treat culture as a real industry, in the classical sense of the word, a very different picture would emerge. It would involve competing with big players on a global level, making decisions about investing large amounts of money into key areas. You would need to focus on geographical concentrations, drive innovation, maximise profits and exports, and talk about industrial policy in the same way you would about electric vehicles, wine, or dairy industries. However, this is not the same as talking about culture and art.

He uses the example of South Korea’s focus since the 1990s to make music and television dramas into global products.

He says that the misclassification of cultural as an industry has created multiple problems and generally seen funding directed toward a few universities and think-tank groups which reinforce this state.

…the last forty years have shown that the reducing culture to an industry has led to the marginalisation of culture on policy agendas and scrapping it away from transformative policies. The ‘culture-as-an-industry’ discourse has worsened working conditions in the cultural sector pushed to spend increasingly more effort and time on quantifying its impact.

[…]

The beneficiaries of the creative industry narrative include various clusters and consortia centred around universities, research agencies, consultancies, and similar entities. These groups often have more influence on governments than artists and cultural workers.

O’Connor tends to be against speaking about culture in economic terms, but instead as an important element in achieving a livable society. The problem is, that narrative can be in conflict with the goals of governments and business.

Cultural life is an integral part of social and political life, essential in defining citizenship. Culture, therefore, deserves to be considered one of the foundational services that contribute to creating a livable society.

[…]

However, if the conversation shifts to viewing culture as part of the public service sector, as a right, or as a sustainable development goal, large corporations may not find it as appealing to be grouped with culture and the arts. It’s no surprise that the United States has resisted including culture as a sustainable development goal on the UN agenda.

Perhaps most interesting to me is his assertion at the end of the article that the cultural sector not speak in terms of intrinsic value of culture:

Then the distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and social and economic is itself a product of neoliberal economics. Separating out the ‘intrinsic’ is actually a form of neoclassical economic modelling where individual good is purely a matter of the individual and her credit card. It also acts as an oubliette into which art is dropped as policy makers hurry on to the economic value…Art and cultural value are actually established and shared socially, and the individual judgement of a particular piece of art (song, video game, film) is part of our ongoing conversation about what we value as a society.

The world of culture is about the production and distribution of what we call art and culture: highly symbolic things, such as songs, plays, films, books, games, and paintings. The responsibility of the cultural sector is to take care of this world of symbolic things that has historically proven to be highly valuable to societies, and to support the people who create these symbolic things.

This gives me a lot to think about. My instinct is that what O’Connor is proposing is the next phase of my understanding about why we shouldn’t use economic value as a measure of the value of arts and culture. This deepens my understanding of why this argument is problematic. I regret that my old friend Carter Gilles is no longer alive to help me sort through these implications.

Did Curiosity About Bugs As A Kid Inform Our Creative Talents As Adults

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Seth Godin made a post recently that speaks to the perception you either have innate talent or you can never be successful at something. This outlook seems to operate very strongly when it comes to creative activity.

The first error we often make is believing that someone (even us) will never be good at riding a bike, because riding a bike is so difficult. When we’re not good at it, it’s obvious to everyone.

The second error is coming to the conclusion that people who are good at it are talented, born with the ability to do it. They’re not, they have simply earned a skill that translates into momentum.

There’s a difference between, “This person is a terrible public speaker,” and “this person will never be good at public speaking.”

The older I get, the more I can appreciate Godin’s point about earning a skill that translates into momentum. I suspect that abilities whose development can’t necessarily be observed as a result of physical practice like athleticism and musical performance may be the result of perspective and philosophy about the world people have developed over time, perhaps even since childhood.

Abilities related to creativity, problem-solving, interpersonal relationships, etc., may be the result of 10,000 little instances like observations of clouds and bugs, paying attention to conversations and retaining information as important, attempts at reasoning things about the world that you come across. School, socialization, family, wealth, opportunity, reading books, etc., will certainly play a part, supported by some good genes and brain chemistry perhaps. There are likely millions of musings and conclusions that we have never reflected upon as being productive toward the development of a skillset, much less that anyone around us was aware were occurring. But in the end, as Godin says, we earned the results.

Abilities that manifest as a result of our physical capacity are certainly dependent on genetics. But again as I have gotten older and experience more aches and pains, I have begun to suspect that there are some physical skills that are a result of perceptions and decisions we made as children regarding things as simple as how to walk, run, and stop. One of the things I suspect is that we are all making different decisions about how much to shift our body weight and which muscles need to be tensed when going to the cupboard to get a can of soup. I have lived in apartments where I was surprised to realize the heavy footed one stomping around was the wife who was a foot shorter and probably more than 100 lbs. lighter than her husband.

Even having developed the confidence to act as a result of some combination of decisions, perspectives, musings, etc., over the course of decades, there are often years of deliberate practice required to sit on top of that to truly excel in an area.

While genetics and other opportunities and privilege certainly contribute to the ease in which someone may obtain mastery, the more I read on the subject of innate talent vs. practice, the more I suspect that there is a lot of conscious effect and decision which is invisible to others as well as ourselves that ends up as a foundation for the skills we exhibit later in life.

Economics Of Broadway Show Breaking Broadway Formula

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Freakanomics did a two part show about how the Broadway play Stereophonic came together. The first part is broadly about the 11 year creative process playwright David Adjmi went through to make the show. The second part focuses a bit more on the economics behind a Broadway show.

If you have been involved with the performing arts for any length of time, you can probably predict the process Adjmi underwent – cobbled together funds from two commissions and a grant, plus had two architects let him live in their house rent free for years while he wrote. He had to put some pressure on Playwrights Horizons to consider the show and the cost of over $1 million was a lot for an off-Broadway production.

But it became a hit based on essentially breaking the formula of Broadway shows – a straight play about music, but not a musical, no stars in the cast, and runs long at 3.25 hours. Apparently it has a strong appeal to men based on the observation the men’s restroom line is longer than the women’s.

There is a lot more to the story than that. The first episode is 70 minutes alone and the second about 55 minutes.

Being the arts management nerd I am, I was even more interested in the second episode which talked about the economics and decisions that were made. Everything from the cost of putting on a show in NY vs. London, who can and how to invest in shows in both cities, what the actors got paid off-Broadway vs. after the move to Broadway, decisions about pricing tickets, and the marketing mix they used.

In terms of the pricing tickets, the producers say they can now get up to $349 for a ticket though they re-evaluate their pricing three times a week, but they started out much lower during previews:

We had preview pricing that was $40, $80, $120 to start, for the month of April. But you have to catch up to it, because now we can get $229 for them. You kind of play a game of chicken with yourself and with your audience. For something like Stereophonic, because it’s an unknown title — obviously it’s getting more well-known — but two, it does not have a major mega-star in it. It has a group of incredible rising stars, but they’re not household names. The way that we get there is by getting people in the door, and really building to that moment.

Thanks to improved audience analytics tools, the producers have changed their marketing mix from what it once was as well:

Oh, it’s almost entirely all digital now. It’s all mobile. It’s all through Meta — it’s all through Instagram, Facebook. We do still take the traditional behavioral banner ads that follow you around the internet. We still do some prints, but not a ton. We have dabbled into television, but we’re taking specific ads. We’re not taking giant flights with multiple spots on Good Morning America or the Today Show, which was always your bread and butter.

[…]

The R.O.I. is much easier to figure out because you can actually track people. Our zip code reporting is way more sophisticated now than it was before, whereas you had to blanket the market with something and then you didn’t see a direct correlation. Now it’s less things, but you can still see how your wraps jump due to specific things of press, like a C.B.S. Sunday Morning piece, or if your stars are on Morning Joe. There are fewer things that give you that pop, but at least you know, “If I’m on Morning Joe, then we’re going to have a good day at the box office.”

If this sort of information interests you and you have the time, I recommend giving the pieces a listen. Host Stephen Dubner says they are working on a longer, more involved series on the economics of making theater so I am going to keep an eye out for that as well.

Smoke And Heat Becoming A Bigger Threat To Summer Theater Than Rain Storms

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American Theatre posted a really comprehensive article about the challenges summer theaters are facing.

In the wake of social unrest resulting from things like Covid, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter, many theaters have worked to provide better working conditions for staff. Some of the changes have included shorter work hours, better pay, and childcare.

However, as expenses have gone up and philanthropic support has declined, these changes are raising increasingly difficult questions for summer theaters. Not that theaters haven’t always had a multitude of challenges to address. Staying committed to fair pay and fair hours has meant doing fewer shows, scaling back on customer service, or in one case, back office staff stepping in to sell popcorn when concessions staff exceed their hours in a week. There are concerns about whether having shorter rehearsal hours will result in lower quality performances and disappoint audiences who may be paying more for tickets than in the past.

In response to this some theaters are re-packaging their offerings for audiences. For some destination theater festivals, this may result in better experiences for audiences who felt there was more going on than they were able to experience.

Covid has continued to create consequences for these theaters. Not only have many experienced professionals left the industry, but the pandemic interrupted the continuity of training for younger professionals.

Bahr agreed, adding that “the supply chain of welders or people doing lighting is gone,” and that in Utah, the issue is deepened by the festival’s reliance on local college students, who missed several years of in-person learning. As carpenters and other skilled workers explained to him, seniors used to teach the juniors and they’d teach the sophomores, and so on, but “it’s like they’ve got four years of freshmen now.”

Climate change has also increasingly posed a challenge for summer theaters. In addition to dodging snakes and bears passing through the natural environment in which the theaters operate, forest fires and heat are becoming a central concern.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Tim Bond noted that forest fires caused numerous cancellations in 2023:

“We had 10 cancellations last season,” he said, which is a serious financial hit. “We now have a ‘smoke team’ that monitors the smoke and the direction of the wind. They’ll know when the smoke will arrive, so sometimes we cancel even when audiences are seeing blue skies because we’ve gotten good at knowing when it will roll in.”

Utah Shakespearean Festival leadership said that smoke caused the cancellation of nine shows in 2022 resulting in a loss of $500,000.

American Theater Players in Spring Green, WI has had to cancel for heat and poor air quality and is having to budget to accommodate for increased number of refunds:

Young said that 2021 marked the first time American Players Theatre had to cancel outdoor productions in their 1,075-seat Hill Theatre for extreme heat. (Last year they lost performances due to poor air quality.) She said that while many audiences prefer matinees because they don’t want to drive at night, they increasingly have trouble sitting through them in extreme heat—weather that is also unsafe for actors. To compensate, APT is shifting outdoor matinees to late August, when it’s cooler in Wisconsin.

“We plan into our budget that we’re going to refund a certain number of tickets for weather,” she said, “but that number is getting higher, and we have to look at what it will be like in 10 years. Are we going to need a large indoor space to accommodate that shift?”

When Federal Funding Of Theater Equaled The Cost Of A Battleship

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Artsjournal.com posted an article from The Yale Review reviewing a book about the benefits the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) brought to Depression Era United States.  In addition to discussing these benefits the book’s author, James Shapiro, relates efforts to dismantle FTP by conservatives as an early manifestation of the culture war we experience today.

After reading about all the activity the FTP engaged in across the country, the reviewer Charlie Tyson notes that the budget was “less than 1% of the total funds allocated for federal work relief, or about the cost to build a battleship. Tyson notes that the cost to build an air craft carrier today is around $13 billion and challenges readers to think about what arts organizations and artists could do with that sort of money today.

What was most interesting was reading about the wide scope of activities the Federal Theater Project and the related Federal Dance Theater Project engaged in. If there was ever a time in the history of the US when artistic activity was viewed as populist rather than elitist, it was during the period of 1935 and 1939 when these projects were actively creating works. The works created weren’t just lighthearted fare. There were challenging pieces on topics like poverty, housing, racism, labor relations, and inequality.

The Living Newspaper program of the FTP addressed these topics and focused some criticism upon lawmakers by quoting statements made in the Congressional Record.  It is probably no surprise that legislators who were already opposed to FDR’s New Deal programs targeted works drawing a great amounts of attention to the uncomfortable issues of the day.

The funds distributed to artists through FTP provided for a significant amount of community engagement. To a certain extent there are probably lessons to be drawn today from the activities of artists 90 years ago.  One of the things cited by Tyson was how closely tailored to a target community some of the shows were:

“Unlike Hollywood, which delivered the same products to everyone, the Project was nimble, sensitive to local variation. For example, shows were staged in Spanish in Miami and Tampa and in Yiddish in New York. The Project gave directors license to adjust performances to satisfy local tastes; audiences in different cities might see differing versions of the same play.

A string of early successes established the Federal Theatre’s rep­utation. Its first hit was a production of Macbeth in Harlem, staged by one of the program’s so-called Negro Units. (The Federal Theatre was, at the time, Harlem’s largest employer.) To direct the production, the organization tapped Orson Welles, at that time a virtually unknown twenty-year-old actor with no professional directorial experience. The Harlem Macbeth—commonly known as the Voodoo Macbeth—traded Scottish gloom for Caribbean exot­icism. Set in nineteenth-century Haiti with a large all-Black cast and filled, in Shapiro’s words, with “drumming and spectacle,” the production was a sensation. It moved from Harlem to Broadway and then embarked on a national tour with stops in the Jim Crow South. The play reached roughly 120,000 people.

Many of the shows were performed for free. There are apparently pictures of thousands of people filling parks to watch performances. (Though I imagine many performances also occurred indoors). In total, it was estimated “…thirty million Americans—roughly a quarter of the population—attended Federal Theatre productions.”

Toward the end of the piece Tyson notes that there have been recent calls for more federal funding of non-profit theaters and cites a criticism that theaters have only themselves to blame for producing works with themes criticizing the social and political environment. But Tyson notes that theatrical performances have a long history of containing social messages from Victorian melodramas pointing out the plight of the poor to the social commentary of Federal Theater Project works through to today.

Accountability Leadership

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Back in June there was an article on the Harvard Business Review site about 3 Ways to Compassionately Hold Your Team accountable.  The authors of the piece approach the topic from the cognitive processes associated with accountability. What appealed to me about the piece was the contrasting of punitive approaches with those that views an assignment as an opportunity for growth and acknowledges that mistakes are a part of that process.

Since the creative process involves generating, refining, and building upon multiple iterations, this seems an appropriate approach to apply to management and leadership practices in arts and cultural organizations.

The authors categorize these perceptions of accountability as “threatening” vs. “worthy challenge.”

Leaders should strive for the second type of accountability, as there is now significant research suggesting that encouraging a growth mindset accelerates individual performance, learning and adaptability, and overall well-being. And because growth-oriented accountability rewards employees for taking risks and encourages a growth mindset, it has knock-on benefits for team culture. In particular, it compels people to find solutions to the mistakes others have made rather than blaming or shaming them.

The three accountability methods they identify are: Think Ahead, Own Your Commitments, and Anchor on Solutions.

Think Ahead involves envisioning and communicating what success looks like to staff, including any difficulties staff may encounter. The example given in the article is a client that often interrupts to ask questions, but similar situations occur in arts and cultural environments in terms of details known about attendees, groups, board members, etc. The challenge to Thinking Ahead is being able to empathize with the person(s) being assigned the task. Not only in terms of what questions they may have on details you take for granted, but anticipating that they may be intimidated by a situation that wouldn’t ruffle you.

Own Your Commitments is essentially holding yourself to the same standard as employees and modeling the behavior for them rather than taking a “do as I say, not as I do approach.” The authors point out that if employees are held accountable for meeting certain benchmarks but their leaders are allowed slack, the dichotomy can cause all sorts of issues.

An arts organization related example that immediately comes to mind are policies like ticket changes, rental refunds, etc. Often it does fall to a leader to bend policies to accommodate certain people and situations. In those situations it is important to confirm that staff made the right decision with their initial refusal rather than blaming them for not knowing they were dealing with an important person and should have made an exception. The other approach is to explain why the decision to bend policy was made and either empower employees to make that decision themselves within that context or give them permission to pass the decision up the chain without repercussions.

Finally, Anchor on Solutions is essentially the practice of acknowledging errors and problems are part of becoming more skilled and productive. It is about reflecting, discussing, and seeking solutions rather than focusing on assigning blame.

Anchoring on solutions means letting go of blame and working to make things better. It means debriefing deeply on both wins and failures, and constantly seeking creative ways of solving problems instead of reasons for failure. Like owning your commitments, anchoring on solutions is a learnable skill that is heavily influenced by the actions of others around us. Therefore, leaders need to be intentional about focusing on the way forward, not on finding out whose fault it is.

Rome Was Built In A Day. But What Day Was That?

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Seth Godin recently made a post that sort of wrapped the concepts of life long learning, creation being a process, and failure being part of any endeavor.

He starts by saying Rome WAS built in a day.

Rome was built in a day.

It wasn’t finished in a day. In fact, it’s still not finished.

But the day someone said, “this is Rome,” and announced the project, it was there.

Sometimes we get hung up on the beginning, unwilling to start Rome unless we’re sure we can finish it without incident.

I appreciate his suggestion that things come into being when they are acknowledged as existing and being named. Yet something can have an acknowledged existence and not be complete. In the process things are discarded and destroyed and other things remain just as there are parts of Rome which have endured as well as have gone from existence. Or like the Colosseum it both exists as a construction people visit, albeit in a partially destroyed state, but also has some of its constituent parts which were carted away contributing to other structures in the city.

Essentially a version of the Ship of Theseus where some discarded parts are recycled and others destroyed even as others have been added.

In that context as Godin says, we can’t go into the start of some endeavor with too much expectation about the form success will take lest we become paralyzed conceptualizing all of what will be required. That is as true about initiating a creative project as it is building a city or creating ourselves.

There was a day when you came into being. Was it the day of your birth or sometime later when your personality and personal philosophy developed? Are you still being built and who is doing the building?

 

Handling All Your Festival, Concert, And Theatrical Touring Needs

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Earlier this month a piece on The Conversation site called attention to the often unseen contributions roadies make to the success of festivals, concerts, and theatrical tours.  There is often a lot written about the artists performing, but scant content about the people who literally do the heavy listing. The article’s author, Gabrielle Kielich, has recently released a book road crew on tours.

One of the things she emphasizes is that the catch all term roadie tends to obfuscate the diversity of jobs touring crews perform and creates the impression they only contribute physical strength rather than a high degree of technical skill.

The size of a crew is determined by the scale of a tour and the needs of musicians, but they typically include the following: tour manager, production manager, instrument technicians, monitor engineer, front of house engineer, lighting technician and merchandise staff (known as “merch”).

[…]

The term “roadie” falsely suggests that crew members’ roles are interchangeable and undifferentiated. For this reason, although “roadie” was once the accepted term, it has generally fallen out of favour. Now, many crew members prefer a more specific occupational title.

The rejection of the term “roadie” also represents a wider shift in the culture and professionalism of live music and distances these workers from the stereotypes and cliches associated with the mythologising of rock music culture.

Free Admission Isn’t An Audience Building Strategy

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Thinking that free or discounted tickets will increase accessibility and loyalty is something of a pet peeve of mine. Yesterday I commented on a post Sean Kelly of Vatic made on LinkedIn where he noted that people who didn’t want to use dynamic pricing for their events that were selling well would willingly discount or comp tickets to a show that was selling poorly. The connection I saw in that statement is that any pricing change you implement in response to perceived level of demand was essentially dynamic pricing.

In that context, I wanted to point to a recent post Colleen Dilenschneider and colleagues made about the connection between price and perception of value for different types of arts and cultural organizations.  The post has 35 charts and goes into a lot of detail which I am not going to even try to reflect.

There were a couple of statements made in their data analysis about pricing, satisfaction, access, and free admission to which I wanted to call attention. First of all, in general, they found that just because someone perceives something to be expensive, it doesn’t mean they feel the experience wasn’t worth the cost. People understand that a quality experience costs money.

In fact, lower cost experiences often receive lower satisfaction scores for various reasons, including the obvious fact that not charging a lot means you have less capacity to offer a quality experience:

Free and low-cost cultural entities generally have lower guest satisfaction rates, intentions to revisit, and willingness to return. Again, this is because people generally “pay for what they value and value what they pay for,” and it is consistent with ongoing research we continue to collect regarding perceptions of free vs. paid-admission organizations.

Also, it’s likely that at least some free and low-cost museums really do have lesser guest experiences! After all, they are likely reliant on another source of revenue than the gate and they may be more cash-strapped than other cultural entities that have alternative funding sources.

What really caught my attention was their admonition against equating diverse audiences and affordable access audiences:

However, diverse audiences and affordable access audiences are not the same. Indeed, it can be very problematic to assume that diverse audiences and affordable access audiences comprise the same groups of people. (More directly: It is dangerous and incorrect to associate the idea of diversity with the idea of affordable access.)

I suspect part of what they consider problematic is equating being low-income with being a person of color. One of the data points presented from the research was that the belief that an organization is “for people like me” was lowest among those perceived to be least expensive which already starts to cast some doubts on using free admission to diversify attendance. In part this may be related to low revenue meaning you may lack the funds to support efforts to make a broader segment of the community feel welcome.

But from the analysis provided by Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS it may also be that many of these entities aren’t really making any efforts beyond just offering free admission:

Being free is not the same as being welcoming. Some free and low-admission organizations treat their admission strategy as the near-entirety of their audience expansion efforts. However, free admission organizations do not have notably different audiences than paid-admission organizations. Just because something is free doesn’t mean people who don’t have interest (perhaps because they feel unwelcome) will do it. We see time and time again that free admission is not a foolproof audience expansion strategy with reliably positive impacts on welcoming perceptions. Being perceived as welcoming requires strategy, effort, thoughtful programing, prioritization and – often – investment. It’s not as simple as putting a “free” sign on the door.

Trust In Cultural Organizations Continues To Grow

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A recent post from Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS analyzes survey data that shows trust in cultural organizations has grown since the pandemic.  Trust in cultural entities exceeds that of media sources, state and federal agencies and non-governmental organizations. Among the more interesting insights from the data is that from 2010 to 2019, the level of trust for cultural organizations held relatively steady with values indicating mild agreement with the concept of trust associated with these organizations. Since 2020 however, the values increased to the level of agree and strongly agree with being able to trust those types of organizations.

I usually make relatively lengthy posts when writing about research results from Dilenschneider and her colleagues, but today I am going to offer a single excerpt that stood out to me regarding the cause of this shift in sentiment: (my emphasis)

At the same time, many cultural organizations experienced business disruptions. Some were closed for weeks or months at a time and unable to deliver the usual “visit us today” messaging. Instead, many cultural institutions began offering online experiences like virtual curator talks and trips behind the scenes. They put on educational programs and developed materials for families and schools grappling with virtual learning. In short, they proved relevance beyond their walls. They weren’t only talking about being places anymore. They also proved they were community resources.

Last May I posted about research showing that communicating on organization mission resulted in return visitation for cultural organizations.

Readers will probably also note that by shifting from visit us messaging to delivering content to communities, the organizations were focusing externally rather than internally.  The organizations were trying to offer content they felt would entertain, educated, and engage people rather than primarily focus the artistic excellence of the organization and artists.

I saw a lot of organizations develop fun, clever, engaging voices for themselves through digital offerings during the pandemic. Much of the content was new information for me and I didn’t find it dumbed down. If anything, it often made me do some additional research.  I am thinking maybe I need to go back and see if they are  maintaining or expanded  on that voice after restrictions lifted or did they shift back to more internally focused visit us today approach.

WESTAF Celebrates 50 Years Developing Technology For Arts

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The Western Arts Federation (WESTAF), the regional arts organization serving the western portion of the US turns 50 this year. They put out a series of videos on the history of the organization. I started watching them out of idle curiosity.

Some of the history is as you might expect with the different social and political influences which lead to their formation. The first headquarters being in Santa Fe, NM but the operational considerations of sending touring artists out resulting in the decision to move to Denver which was a bigger airport hub. Though Salt Lake City was apparently also under consideration based on a newspaper clipping appearing in a video.

What was really interesting was the story about how they decided to focus on technology for the arts. I knew each of the regional arts organizations has a different focus, but I hadn’t known that WESTAF’s focus on technology was based in a desire to diversify the organization’s income stream so that they weren’t entirely dependent on grants and donations. Episodes two and three talk about all the different products they have developed over the last fifty years.

I have been aware of many of their current products like Go Smart, their grant making and administration software, ZAPP which helps art festivals and fairs manage applications, CaFE (Call for Entry) which is built for applying to other types of visual arts projects (i.e. public art, exhibitions, artist-in-residence), and Public Art Archive, which is a place to document all the public art installations around the country.

However, there were a number of services they offered which didn’t quite succeed or were very useful but were phased out as needs of the industry changed. One of their first endeavors as the World Wide Web emerged on the scene was Circuit Riders, the goal of which was to connect arts organizations with consultants who could help them integrate emerging technologies into their operations. There was also a phone line, 900Arts which you could call for advice. In the first year Circuit Riders was in operation, they completed 144 contracts, but after three years it was closed down due to budget and staffing constraints.

In 1998, the Arts Computer program, was created to provide computers and sophisticated software to arts organizations at a low cost. Apparently the approach was to lease the computers and software to arts organizations. That only lasted a year. One interviewee suggested that the program was difficult to administer and the narration suggests that the exploding availability and use of personal computers decreased the need for the service.

WESTAF saw more success with their online job board, Artjob.org which started as a monthly newsletter in 1991, was distributed by email in 1993, and became a website that ran from 1998 to 2015. The video also talks about Artist Register launched in 2001, which pre-Google searches was a place for visual artists to market themselves. Based on the success of that service, WESTAF created WritersRegister and PerformingArts Register to serve artists in those areas.

Current and former staff interviewed for the video series credit former WESTAF Anthony Radich with the vision to offer these services, accompanied by a supportive board who allowed space for some of the initiatives to fail.

There are currently three videos in the series with a short intro video and the promise of more to come. They videos are each only about 10-15 minutes long and are fun to watch. Not every product WESTAF created was an exercise in trying to anticipate an unmet need in the arts industry. ZAPP apparently was a response to Kodak discontinuing the carousel slide projectors that so many arts festivals depended on to jury artist submissions. (I am sure artists are immensely grateful they don’t have to mail off piles of slides any more.)

If You Are Apt To Overlook It, How Do You Know Enough To Track It?

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Seth Godin made a post a week or so ago about the need to track things that are really important, but invisible to us or transpire gradually. I sense there is something valuable for arts and cultural organizations in what he has to say, but I am having a difficult time trying to figure out how to accurately track these things. I am hoping readers may have some idea.

In his post he writes:

Gas-powered leaf blowers would disappear if the smoke they belched out was black instead of invisible.

And few people would start smoking if the deposits on their lungs ended up on their face instead.

We’re not very good at paying attention to invisible or gradual outputs.

The trick is simple: If it’s important, make it visible. If it happens over time, create a signal that brings the future into the present.

One of the first things that occurred to me as important, but may transpire gradually is employee or audience dissatisfaction. But how do you accurately track and signal this situation? How do you know whether a dozen individual complaints are related to each other or independent rumblings? In hindsight it is easier to see that comments made in a series of staff meetings over the course of a months culminated in the departure of multiple people, but at the time those comments may not have seemed to be related.

Obviously, it is good to have supervisors who are responsive and emotionally intelligent enough to head off these issues, but if the supervisors are only seeing what is happening in their area, they may not feel there is enough of an issue to report it to those with a more global view of the organization.

Conversely, you may notice a gradual increase in audience satisfaction with their experience, but may not be able to pinpoint why. Is it the new ticketing software? The receptions for audiences under 40? The advance emails telling people where to find parking? These are all great ideas and making people happy so let’s keep them and continue to make everyone happy!

Except what you didn’t know was that it was a front of house manager whose infectious enthusiasm and good training transferred through the staff to the audience. When their parents got sick, they moved back to their hometown. Gradually, that lack of leadership and energy seeps out of the experience and audiences aren’t as satisfied. Having no idea this is the cause, you try new innovative programs to which people may respond, but it isn’t quite like it was. Even if you recognize that the departed staff member was a valuable asset that had been lost, you may not realize their work sent imperceptible ripples through the organization.

Godin uses examples where the link between cause and effect is pretty well known. So there are ways to measure leaf blower exhaust that don’t depend on sight and you can monitor lung health in different ways. But there are other situations where there are multiple factors which may contribute to outputs so it is difficult to know which to make visible. What might be relevant in one community may not be in another. The social dynamic of one region of the country may enjoy the enthusiasm of the front of house manager, but it may come across as insincere and cloying in another part of the country.

But I may be overthinking this and/or coming at this from the belief that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it is meaningful. Some readers may immediately identify the type invisible or gradual issues Godin may be referencing that are associated with the arts and some relatively objective measures that can be used to track them.

Return To In Person Date Searches Presents An Opportunity

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Bloomberg had an article on a trend that presents an opportunity for arts and cultural organizations. In some respects it could be considered rather mundane news – Gen Z Is abandoning dating apps in favor of in person singles events. Arts and cultural organizations have the opportunity to create specific experiences for this group either internally or in partnership with nearby businesses (bars, restaurants, etc.)

Though if there is a group in the community already organizing singles events it would probably be best to work with them to discover what sort of experience is most appealing to their participants.

It’s not formally conventional places, like bars or coffee shops, where Gen Zers are looking for potential matches. Think interest-based functions, such as the popular running group Venice Run Club, where new members have to state if they’re single as part of their introduction, or even a late-night chess club.

LA Chess Club, which runs every Thursday night from 8 p.m. to midnight, has become a recent hotspot for singles in Los Angeles in their early to mid-30s….But after the success of a speed dating event Kong hosted on Valentine’s Day in an attempt to get more girls to come, the club morphed into a space singles gravitated toward.

[…]

Pitch-A-Friend Philly, a monthly event series in Philadelphia inspired by Pitch-A-Friend Seattle, encourages participants to share a roughly 5-minute PowerPoint presentation about their single friends to help them find a potential partner.

According to some of those interviewed for the article, the appeal of singles events organized around board games, movie screenings, dinners, brunches and other activities, is the opportunity to interact with people with shared interests in an environment that differs from the bar/coffee house/nightclub nightclub scene where you might be bothered by overly insistent people when you might want to be left alone.

Those are among the considerations that arts and cultural organizations might need to factor into any attempt to design singles experiences.

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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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