Arts & Culture Orgs Still Important, The Basic Requisite Skills Have Changed

Seth Godin recently wrote that while many professions are just as important as they were 30-50 years ago, the basic skills required for those professions have changed.  Pharmacists no longer have to mix their own medicines, opticians no longer have to grind lens, lawyers have templates from which to generate documents, graphic designers aren’t required to be skilled in drawing by hand.

He concludes with:

In your work, are you fighting the change or leading it?

It’s hard to see us going back.

I attended a webinar Ruth Hartt was delivering today where she made a similar point about audience expectations, noting that while everyone acknowledges audiences for arts and cultural activities are shrinking, programming and marketing still tends to center the tastes of the older, diminishing audience and donor base.

To some extent, while it is important to have programming that reflects a broader segment of the community you wish to serve, Aubrey Bergauer has often spoken about audience feedback that focused more on the language, images, and experiences being focused on the arts organization and their needs vs. externally focused externally on audience expectations and needs. She has mentioned very few comments are about the programming, compared to comments about promotional language “reading like inside baseball.”

These observations are much in-line with Ruth Hartt’s discussion of Clayton Christensen’s research indicating consumers respond best to language and images that tells them how the product fulfills a need they have or aligns with what is important to them.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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