About a month ago, I talked about some changes proposed for the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Conference which the organizers hope will provide the members with the opportunities they need to do business.

Last week, WAA posted the results of Key Person’s Interviews they had conducted on the discussion board of their website. The discussion board is password protected for members only, but I have received permission to reference the results here. I offer this information to my readership at large more or less as information about trends rather than specifically offering a lot of opinion and analysis (though I will offer some!)

Artists agents/Managers and Presenters were interviewed and the results really begin to illustrate, at least for me, why WAA felt the need to change the format. In certain areas there really exists a fairly large gulf between the two groups. Some of it can never be fixed because as a member of one group, you have priorities that you can’t share with the other group and still do your job.

In other areas there is room for coming together.

One of the main goals of attendance for presenters is networking with other presenters-

“While exhibitors come to the conference with presenters as leads/prospects/targets, presenters come to the conference first and foremost for peer-to-peer interaction with other presenters.
“…opportunities for casual, relaxed, and face-to-face conversations with colleagues, including ‘deep discussions about art,’ seem to be very high on the list of presenter priorities at the conference.
” Face-to-face networking is one of the most significant factors in the curatorial process (III)…Comments to the effect of ‘�WAA should be about relationship building’ were very common.”

Artists/Managers/Agents however feel they are in an adversarial position in some instances with presenters. Many felt that presenters didn’t understand the economics of being an exhibitor as well as the artist/agents understood the economics of being a presenter. There are also mentions of a “cliquey” nature of the conference contributing to the Us vs Them atmosphere.

Others commented that they felt the presenters attending were viewing the conference as a vacation rather than a place of serious business. I wonder how moving it to Los Angeles from places like Albuquerque and Spokane will impact this feeling. There was a comment that presenters at APAP in NYC are much more business like, but I wonder if that is just because there are so many in attendance, no one notices if people have wandered off to go shopping or see a Broadway show.

On the other hand, maybe they weren’t attending WAA to conduct business but rather just scouting. There was another group of responses that exhibitors felt the people from presenting organizations in attendance weren’t empowered to make decisions.

Even more distressing perhaps for the artists/managers, among the results of the survey of presenters was that there was little relationship between showcasing and deciding to contract performers. I wonder how many people will showcase next year knowing that presenters aren’t necessarily making booking decisions as a result.

One thing both sides could agree upon was the despairing lack of ethics some presenters were exhibiting, particularly in terms of breaking contracts and agreements. Of course, no one considers themselves unethical so the last two conference sessions I have attended on ethics have been sparsely attended.

Some interesting state of the arts type results from the interviews, some of which will surprise few people.

” Presenters are moving toward more conservative programming choices because the ‘bottom line’ is factoring into programming in a much more significant way than prior to 9/11…

o Exhibitors seem concerned, even resentful, that presenters seem to be booking more pragmatically these days…

o Many exhibitors perceive presenters, particularly those in the West, are making a shift to more thematic programming and programming that is more intricately tied to arts education programs and/or arts programs within presenters’ host institutions.

I actually wrote about an aspect of this last trend right after I returned from the WAA conference. Ironically, all the schools mentioned in the article are on the East Coast so if it isn’t a trend they are noticing there yet, they will quite soon.

One last bit to mention before I am done. I have saved the best for last. There was one bit of feedback from artist/manager/agents that knocked my socks off and I wonder what it portends.

“Many exhibitors believe that the business has not changed for them, although they see it changing around them. Most exhibitors had a clear idea of their mission or vision. They’ve been doing what they’ve been doing, their niche, their network of peers and presenters, etc. were all slowly evolving.”

I really wonder what this means. It can’t be that everyone else is changing but them. Are they simply too close to the changes they are going through to notice. Or perhaps it is true that their niche is changing and they aren’t and they are feeling the adverse effects of deciding to resist the change but don’t feel they have the skills to compete in the changing world. Instead of admitting things are changing, they hold the belief it is not for them because in that scenario, they continue to be successful.

There were some additional results that might bear this out.

“A few younger exhibitors/firms clearly were aggressively seeking a continued path of growth and evolution. It was this group of exhibitors who articulated the desire to be part of WAA but not the need to be part of WAA. These are the ‘change agents’ of the industry, typified by gaining their experience at larger agencies, going out on their own and aggressively sticking to their business plan, or constantly re-aligning their business plan to respond to outside pressures/dynamics. They are agile, fearless and most like their contemporaries in other industries.

So young folks, seeing the direction things are going, leave a big agency they have worked at for years and start their own business with an eye for responding to the ebb and flow of the shifting marketplace.

Of course, there are the other guys–

“The antithesis to these ‘change agents’ were the ‘old school’: [the] impression is that some don’t see/feel the need to change their small, niche business even while they are keenly aware of how small the marketplace is for their art form and how much economic pressure the presenters are facing.