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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 is as Theater Manager at the Rialto in Loveland, CO 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.

Seats Are Open, But So Are The Doors For More Diverse Stories

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On Friday one of my colleagues at work is flying to NYC to see Springsteen on Broadway, the show that re-opened earlier than pretty much all the others. She purchased the tickets months ago when they first went on sale.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear most people share her level of optimism. A CNBC story reported that even the most popular titles are seeing very soft sales.

Although tickets have been on sale for months, neither “Wicked” nor “The Lion King” – the top two highest-grossing musicals in history – sold out their first week of performances. “Hamilton,” which historically sold out months of performances within minutes, also has plenty of opening week availability. Between September 14, 2021, and June 5, 2022, only one performance of “Hamilton″ is sold out.

A Forbes article projects some potential doom and gloom for the production of the show Pass Over, which has been getting a lot of great press. In fact, there is a suggestion in a couple articles that they moved up the date of their opening to last Sunday in order to take advantage of the the good press they have received.

This is somewhat unfortunate for the production of Pass Over because in addition to the high quality and expectations, there are a lot of good portents associated with the show. For one, it is the first show by a Black playwright to appear in the August Wilson Theatre since the venue was named for the esteemed Black playwright in 2005. (A lot of “about time” comments on social media noting that it took 15 years for that to happen).

According to a Reuters piece, Pass Over is among a number of upcoming shows which are being supported by first time Black investors.

However, seven new plays have been announced for this fall, all by Black writers. Some are being financed by first-time Broadway investors, including co-founder of television network BET, Sheila Johnson, who is putting money behind the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Johnson and celebrity chef Carla Hall are also investing in a new musical called “Grace” about Black culinary history.

Actor Blair Underwood and former basketball player Renee Montgomery are investing in the stage play “Pass Over”, a modern twist on “Waiting for Godot.”

“There is various new money that is coming into Broadway, and that money is extraordinarily helpful and it is also diverse money, which is also very interesting and new,” said Brian Moreland, producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” opening in October.

Whether we like it or not, money has a big influence in terms of what stories get told so this can be a positive indication for greater representation in whose stories get told and who is involved in telling those stories.

You Can Lead A Patron To The Door, But Only They Decide If They Feel Safe Stepping In

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As something of a dovetail to my post yesterday about Drew McManus’ effort to compile a database of performing arts venue vaccination policies, (Drew reported a surge of new entries to the database overnight which I am going to credit completely to my readers), Colleen Dilenschneider posted last week that performing arts and museum audiences are increasingly interested in returning to masking requirements. (emphasis original)

At our last published masking data update (July 2), IMPACTS Experience found that 43% of high-propensity visitors to cultural entities in the United States believed that organizations should require all visitors to wear a mask. That was down from 53% on June 18, 62% on June 4, and 67% on May 2. People were feeling more comfortable going maskless!

But the percentages are going back up again.

As of August 13, 61% of high-propensity visitors to museums and performing arts organizations in the US believe these entities should mandate masks when indoors for all visitors again.

In my post yesterday, I suggested the database being compiled by McManus could be useful in supporting a case people might want to make for the implementation of masking and vaccination requirements. As Dilenschneider notes in the beginning of her post, organizational and government policy statements don’t drive attendance in and of themselves. The individual makes their own determinations about their health and safety. (my emphasis this time)

While the research is clear that potential visitors across the country are generally desiring mask mandates again and those organizations that do not have them risk jeopardizing attendance, some regions of the US don’t allow organizations to require masks…We understand that this kind of market research could be even more difficult to digest for these entities – and we hear you. Oof. However, how comfortable – or uncomfortable – people feel visiting a cultural institution given its safety protocols doesn’t change just because an entity cannot take a certain action to keep visitors safe….

Remember: Cultural leaders don’t get to decide how guests feel about their own safety, and neither does the CDC. Potential guests decide for themselves what makes them feel comfortable.

Info You Can Use: Database of Performing Arts Venue Vax Policies

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Drew McManus has started a database of the different policies performing arts venues around the country have enacted.  He started it last Friday and announced the 100th entry this morning. If you follow the links, you can see both the database and a form with which you can provide information about your venue or venues in your community.

I immediately passed it around to members of my consortium as soon as I saw it last Friday. Probably the biggest value it has is providing guidance and a bit of moral support for performing arts organizations around the country so that if they are getting push back from boards and higher ups, they can point to other entities around the country and in their region who are taking certain steps.

For the venue I run, most of the self-sponsored shows on our schedule are happening in the Spring so we were just starting to formulate the beginnings of a policy when groups renting from us over the next three months contacted us to tell us what measures they would like to take. In one case we were surprised by how rigorous one group’s standards were because were concerned their audience was the type to vocally push back. It turned out their policies were heavily driven by the insistence of the artists who were scheduled to perform.

It has been a week since they made an announcement about their policies and it doesn’t appear they have had more than a couple people requesting refunds. It has shown us that everyone’s input has something to contribute to policy creation and not to make broad assumptions about how audiences will react.

Take a look at the database and add your information as you can.

 

Resource: Performing Arts Org Vax Policy Database

Considering Appropriateness of Funding Set-Aside Practices

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Washington Post reported an interesting development in the Washington, D.C. arts and cultural environment last week. The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities asked the D.C. Council to end the practice of setting aside approximately $7 million in guaranteed funding to a group of established city arts organizations.

That money, which averaged a bit more than $7 million a year, now goes into a general fund of more than $33 million — and anyone can compete for a piece of it. The more money there is at a community level, the more likely some of the city’s grass-roots talent will be discovered.

To their credit, the big-time beneficiaries of the old set-aside did not fight the change. Rather, they explained the economic rationale for bypassing the arts commission and lobbying the D.C. Council to give them special dispensation. They acknowledged that the funding program may have unintentionally added to arts funding disparities — with residents living east of the Anacostia River getting far less than Whites in more-affluent areas.

The article mentions this was a particularly productive development for the Commission on the Arts and Humanities which had been viewed as so dysfunctional over the past year, members of the DC Council overseeing the commission were considering whether it should be dissolved.

The article raises a good issue in raising awareness of set aside programs where many of the most affluent and prestigious arts organizations in a municipality or state are guaranteed a certain level of funding while all other arts organizations are forced to compete for the remaining funds. This isn’t on the case in the US, back in March I cited a work that discussed how powerful arts organizations were making an end run around the Australian Council for the Arts to secure their funding directly from the government.

I’d be interested to know what economic rationale the D.C. arts organizations cited to justify circumventing the arts commission and lobbying the DC Council directly. In any case, I suspect we may see more of these set aside arrangements come under scrutiny as possibly perpetuating  funding disparities within the greater community.

Searching For The Unforced Substitute

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Via Artsjournal.com is a FastCompany article by Amy Globus whose thesis is that Covid-19 gave the arts world the kick in the butt required to motivate it to think about how to leverage digital offerings to its benefit.

I will say from the outset that like many stories I have seen written on this theme, as much as they celebrate the success of efforts by organizations and the millions of view garnered, there is little acknowledgement of whether anyone was able to recoup the cost of producing/adapting content for the digital medium. Though Globus does acknowledge many won’t have the resources to create 3-D digital models or virtual/augmented reality experiences.

This being said and gotten out of the way, articles like this one seem to always be worthwhile reading because they offer insight into how different organizations are creating content which is either valued added or an alternative to just pointing a camera at real life works and posting it on the internet.

The truth is, the trial and error experimentation to find what works is likely to incur costs that will never be covered.  Seeing what others might be doing can be instructive and help shorten the development process. Though there is a chance arts organizations will develop offerings which distinctly resonate with the characteristics their communities and aren’t as successfully replicatible elsewhere. We could see, for example, museums emerge over the next decade whose experiences are markedly different from others.

Or it could be like a Tiktok trend where everyone does the same choreography to the same music and makes the same faces as everyone else.

To my mind, it will be the value added or alternative content rather than the digital substitution for the live experience which will provide the best course for arts organizations.

A couple examples from the FastCompany article:

Celebrated fashion designer Thom Browne launched his 2021 collection in a virtual 3D showroom—and while the experience was developed due to COVID-19 restrictions, it certainly doesn’t feel like a forced substitute. Never before have audiences at a runway show had such in-depth access to the details of Browne’s work. In this iteration, viewers can take their sweet time experiencing each piece in 360-degree, high-definition glory. Browne now intends to include a virtual element in future launches, as a valuable component alongside live showings.

[…]

…But organizations without the budget or resources for flashy experiences needn’t feel like they’re doomed to the “old normal.”

One of the biggest successes in digital experience innovations during COVID-19 was the Frick Collection’s Cocktails With a Curator series. Low-tech videos filmed inside curators’ homes generated millions of views, proving, as The New York Times observed, that “online audiences don’t expect a simulation of a gallery visit on-screen. They want a museum experience native to the web—and that can be a little faster, a little less polished, a little more direct.”

Oh Jellyfish, Where Is Thy Sting?

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Hat tip to Georgia Council for the Arts which posted a link to the Smithsonian article, Why Science Needs Art.  The article focuses largely on marine life, but the basic gist is that there is so much about science the general public doesn’t understand or have the equipment to experience that artistic execution is necessary to translate that into comprehensible terms.

One of the first examples given discusses how a student from the Maryland Institute College of Art working at the Smithsonian museum kept getting questions about how jellyfish sting.

She always got the same question from visitors, “how do jellyfish stings work?” She had the scientific answer for them but found it difficult to explain the microscopic stinging cells that fire like harpoons out of jelly tentacles without a clear visual.

That’s when a lightbulb went off in Payne’s mind. She could show visitors how jellyfish sting using art. Payne immediately got to work in the sculpture shop at her school, excited to bring the microscopic stinging cells into full view.

Payne built a 3D model of one of the stinging cells that line jelly tentacles—called a nematocyst—that visitors could touch and interact with. The model showed visitors a jelly’s stinging power and helped Payne explain how to take care of a jellyfish sting.

Later, a marine scientist discusses how she took up photography in order to capture animals in the natural habitat because they looked entirely different there than preserved in a museum.  And the merged scientific and artistic perspective have benefits toward greater application:

Her discoveries apply to fields beyond science, like technology. Right now, Osborn’s team is looking at how a spineless, free-swimming bristle worm called a Tomopteris moves to help the tech industry make better, lighter and more maneuverable robots.

But studying these and other midwater creatures takes a highly trained eye for discerning shapes. “I do illustrations, sketch and photograph the animal to understand its structure,” Osborn explained.

This ability to pay careful attention to patterns, shapes and spatial relationships helps scientists properly observe and discover—key pillars of the scientific process. It also helps them create clear visuals of the collected data. Graphs, figures and scientific illustrations are all more powerful when they have a touch of artistry.

Running An Intellectual Property Rights Grabbing Contest Isn’t A Good PR Move

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Laura Zabel, Executive Director of the awesome Springboard for the Arts posted a important Twitter thread on being mindful about the way you solicit creative work from the community.

Read the whole thread, it is short but she makes the important point that you may be asking creatives to do a lot of free labor on spec and if there is only a couple winners, most won’t see any sort of reimbursement for their time. She suggests that a request for proposals (RFP) might be more appropriate. She likewise reminds readers to make sure the planned remuneration, whether it is contest prize or fee for services, is appropriate for the level of effort people will need to invest in your project.

Perhaps most importantly, she urges people not to use any language which claims all the intellectual property rights for anything that is submitted. She notes that many templates have this language in it so even if it isn’t your intention, you could be making a “rights grab.”

Free Admission Wasn’t Useful But Will It Become Necessary?

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According to CityLab Berliners are returning to the city’s museums, with credit being given to free admission Sundays.  Sixty-seven museums are offering free admission which is part of a larger effort to explore ways in which people can assemble during the pandemic.

 

Participating museums are required to follow hygiene and distancing rules. Offering free entrance to the museums alone won’t bring back crowds to the city center — people need to feel it is safe to visit museums and public places again, said Klaus Lederer, Berlin’s Senator for Culture and Europe.

[…]

The Museum Sunday is also one of several cultural happenings in Berlin that has found a way to attract visitors amid a sustained global health crisis. Events like the Berlin Art Week, the open-air event Draussenstadt and the Clubculture reboot weekend, a pilot project to experiment how partying can work during a pandemic, are taking place in Berlin this summer.

The free admission Sundays were being planned prior to the pandemic as a way to attract a broader audience. In the US at least research has shown that free admission doesn’t really attract new visitors, but rather attract those who already visit the museum thereby delaying their next potential paid visit by a year or two. Hearing about a similar plan in Berlin made me wonder if the same held true for Germany or if there are are more nuanced dynamics at work there.

This being said, given that people have had 18+ months of not attending public events, a situation that may extend into the near future, it may be necessary to offer free admission to entice the return of those who would normally visit. What that portends for the future remains to be seen.

Is Economic Impact Declining As Most Important Measure of Value?

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As I go about arguing against using measures like economic impact and test scores for valuing the arts, I occasionally get push back from people who note that for better or for worse dollars and test score are quantifiable and compelling and therefore are what will matter most to policy makers, funders, and individual donors.

The thing is, we know that a lot of people value things that aren’t so easily measured but are deemed to be important. Scott Walters recently posted a reaction to a CNN story about the impact working from home has been having:

If your browser is blocking the image, it reads: “This obsession with “the economy” distorts the issue. Is working from home good for human beings? Is it good for the environment? Instead, we focus on latte consumption. Come on, @CNN, THINK https://t.co/qH4yKTVv2b ”

We know from research conducted by projects like Creating Connection that people view participation in arts events has having positive associations with interpersonal relationships, physical and mental health, social good, self-improvement along with other benefits.

With so much in the news about people rethinking their relationship with work and its place in their lives and stories of athletes asserting boundaries about the activities in which they are willing to participate, this is a time when people are recognizing that customary process and values may no longer be relevant. Or perhaps it is better said that people are questioning whether they continue subsuming their existing values of health and well-being to economic opportunity and test scores.

In this there is an opportunity to work on reframing the terms in which the arts are valued so that they resonate in empathy with the introspection and questioning about values and norms which is occurring.

The Logo May Be A Little Different, But The Brand Remains The Same

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I had a post appear on ArtsHacker this week that dealt with the concept of rebranding.  In the post I cite an article by Mark Ritson arguing for revitalization of a brand rather than rebranding. Ritson’s position is that unless legally required to engage in rebranding, there is more to lose than gain by rebranding. He uses the UK National Lottery as a case study to make his point. I am not going to go too much into his reasoning behind revitalization here. I encourage you to read my ArtsHacker piece and perhaps move on to Ritson’s article.

The part that really got me thinking was his statement that the secret to maintaining a consistent brand was flexibility and change. His point was that the value of a brand is more related to a promise being made and not proportionally related to the quality of advertising and graphics. (my emphasis)

Step three, don’t reproduce the executions and approaches of the past – despite their proven impact. Time has moved on. Instead, ask what these key words or imperatives demand of you in 2022. That question is crucial because, although you don’t change the DNA of a brand when you revitalise it, you do have to acknowledge one of the core paradoxes of branding: consistency demands change.

[…]

If your beauty brand is all about health and nature, plastic packaging with a picture of waterfall and a product packed full of parabens might have worked once upon a time. But wake up and smell the future! Doing the same thing, over a long period of time – ironically – often makes you ultimately inconsistent with your stated brand position.

As I comment in the ArtsHacker post, if the organization identifies a problem to be solved and suggested changes are countered with “that is what people want/the way we have always done it,” that is probably the exact area you should be evaluating. It may not be that your beloved holiday tradition needs to be scrapped, but how it is conducted may no longer feel as relevant to your community as it once did.

Take a look and think about it. The post-Covid world provides an opportunity to revitalize how you are perceived in the community.

Maintaining A Consistent Brand Requires Change

Four Centuries of Romans Can’t Be Wrong

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For Purpose Law Group made a post on their site advocating shared leadership models for non-profits.  They note that there is an increasing recognition that a hierarchical model with a sole leader in charge does not best serve the needs for the organization. They provide a brief list of resources people can consult to learn more about shared leadership governance, but their central thesis is that for over 400 years the Roman Empire was run on a co-leadership model which existed at every level from local magistrate to the consuls at the center of the Empire.

And apparently this structure didn’t rely on the partners getting along well with each other:

“In most analyses of co-leadership,” Professor Sally observes, “the analysis is on the personalities of the partners. Yet, this cannot be the whole story….” He explains: “The fact that the Roman Republic sustained co-leadership for more than four centuries means that there were structures, norms, and behaviors that supported an immense variety of personalities in consulship, quaestorship, and so on….”

I took a look at the article written by Professor Sally in which he describes 10 features of the Roman structure which made this work.

Right at the top is that the leaders assume and depart the office on the same day according to a fixed schedule. This prevented one person from accumulating more influence than the other. If one died prematurely of illness or in battle, they were not replaced. In terms of how this translates to the modern business world, if one person departs, the other remains in the position, but only until a new duo can be found to assume the office. The individual then moves on to a different position.

Now how this would work in a small organization where there aren’t many other positions is not addressed, though there are some good examples in the text of problems dual leaders have run into when trying to agree on an shared exit strategy.

Other features of the Roman system: Each leader would take on equivalent assignments so that neither would accumulate significantly more opportunities or glory.

There were two leaders, but one office. All perks and symbols of office were shared, including space. Sally notes in modern practice companies whose co-leaders are located in different geographic areas will have an additional office space for the partner, even if it sits empty for the bulk of the year.

There are a number of other rules the Romans followed. It is pretty fascinating to read how they were followed, the conflicts that sometimes arose in the course of trying to adhere to the model as well as the crises which emerged when decisions were made to break with the practices.

This article on the Roman practice provides a different lens through which to look at piece which advocate for businesses to consider shared leadership. So often it feels like shared leadership is an innovative approach, but in fact it is more akin to reinventing the wheel.

Little Bit Of Love For Intangible Benefits In Economic Reporting

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Being a big proponent of libraries a radio story by Marketplace on the value of libraries caught my attention. Being an economics focused show, their analysis initially focused on return on investment:

Farrell: Well, there’s this recent study — this one grabbed my attention — [by] three economists [from] Montana State University, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Miami University. And they calculate by some measures a healthy return on investment. So among their findings, library capital investment increases children’s attendance at library events by 18%, children’s checkout of items by 21% and total library visits by 21%. Now, OK, that’s interesting, but increases in library use translate into improved children’s test scores in nearby school districts.

Long time readers know that I am also a proponent of not couching the value of everything in terms of economics and test scores so I was pleased that the reporters followed with a longer discussion of the intangible contributions libraries make to social cohesion:

Brancaccio: So there are interesting, almost hard-to-quantify benefits as well?

Farrell: That’s right. And that’s, you know, really the thing that stands out to me is we’re living through an era where there’s a lack of trust in so many institutions and, you know, the sense that we have connections with each other, I mean, that’s splintering. Well, public libraries are still trustworthy, community institutions and most important, public libraries are open to everyone. It doesn’t matter your age, it doesn’t matter your race, ethnicity, social class and net worth.

[…]

Farrell: And this is why I think the return on investment, particularly as you’ve mentioned, the return on investment on the intangibles, is so important. So a lot more needs to be done to maintain buildings, update bathrooms, increase the number of hours that they’re open, and there’s a wonderful book by sociologist Eric Klinenberg, “Palaces for the People.” And you know, in that book, he persuasively argues that libraries, the people who work there, and the people who visit that they’re essential to our democracy, and to our community. So support your local library.

Moving Beyond Under-Served

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Something has been puzzling me lately and I haven’t come any closer to figuring out the answer. I appears to me that when there is discussion about populations which are under-served by the arts in the U.S. it seems to largely be in the context of race whereas when I see the same discussions going on in the UK, it seems to be in the context of class.

Earlier this month, The Conversation had an article about there being a class crisis in the arts, citing Welsh actor Michael Sheen. The authors of the piece were based at the University of Edinburgh and University of Sheffield and it was pretty clear that they were talking about the situation in the UK.

I have also seen a fair bit of social media discussion about a Guardian article on the subject. Much of the social media conversation is oriented on class:

I am not sure if it is a matter of demographics with Caucasians, which have for better or worse been defined as the norm, being 87% of the population in the UK versus 76% of the population in US, resulting in Britons  perceiveing degree of opportunity spread more along class lines.

Or if there has been such a history in the US of linking negative associations to race, including groups who later came to be regarded as “white,” that race has become the default lens through which to assess inequities in the US.

It is not that there hasn’t been recognition in the US that inequities are based in economics. Right now people are looking a little askance at how the wealthiest individuals and corporations are spending their money and paying their taxes. In the arts, there has been a recognition that people whose families can support them through unpaid internships are often more likely to succeed. Not to mention Martin Luther King was working to build a coalition of all poor Americans, was in Memphis to support all sanitation workers when he was assassinated, and was about to embark on the Poor People’s Campaign.

It strikes me that one of the ways the arts can work toward equity and inclusion is to decouple the concept of under-served from race based demographics. I am not sure what the most constructive terminology and frame might be. I can see the consequences of only using a single dimension like economic status allowing groups to hide the fact they are neglecting to serve people of different races and abilities.  You don’t want to adopt a position of “we don’t see differences, we serve people,” because differences do exist and need to be acknowledged in order to create a welcoming environment.

Probably the best approach would be if funders did not use measures or criteria which incentivize using race, economic status, ability, etc., as a definition of under-served. The problem is, funders can collect data about participation from these demographics to show they are paying attention and want organizations to work toward welcoming a greater range of their communities, but how do you combat the perception that the organization is being rewarded for reaching out to an “other” group?

It is also difficult as an arts organization seeking to perpetuate diversity, equity and inclusion to force funders to change their criteria even as they seek support from those funders. Obviously a small step is to write a grant proposal that doesn’t employ the term under-served at all, but applications and final reports are often formatted with a bias connecting under-served with race, ability and economic status.

Are NFTs The Answer To Ticket Scalping?

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An appreciative nod to Artsjournal which posted a piece by Shelly Palmer on how the use of non-fungible tokens (NFT) can enhance event ticketing security, improve the resale market, and potentially provide expanded marketing opportunities. You may be familiar with the use of NFTs as the basis of cryptocurrencies and as a result be under the impression they are something that is mined using energy intensive high powered computing. However, if you are only concerned with creating one that is unique, but not super rare, the cost and energy required to mint, rather than mine, an NFT is low and continues to fall.

Palmer outlines some of the ways in which NFTs can be employed to make event ticketing safer and more secure.

If your ownership of an NFT has been validated, a quick matching of public and private keys (using something as common as a barcode reader) would instantly verify that the person with the NFT in their digital wallet was the authentic owner of the ticket….

If someone sells their NFT ticket, that transaction can trigger royalty payments to the issuer as well as any other stakeholder – artists, sports leagues, athletes, sponsors, promoters, a charity, or literally anyone with a digital wallet. These business rules can be hard-coded into each NFT, and like all smart contracts, when a transaction occurs and the conditions are met, funds automatically change hands….

Bots, scalpers, bad actors, criminals, and 2nd-party sales on eBay or other auction sites are common. NFT tickets offer an easy way to gather actionable business intelligence about how and where your tickets are being sold and resold. You can find the exact moment of the transaction, the exact address of the digital wallets in use, the amount of the transaction, and much, much more.

Palmer goes on to discuss how NFTs can provide expanded opportunities to learn more about attendees and market to them. For example, if someone buys tickets for themselves and friends and family, you don’t know who those other people are. However, if everyone must provide a verified NFT upon entry, the digital ticket will need to be transferred to them which potentially allows any profile information associated with each person’s digital wallet to be collected. That information would conceivably allow you to promote similar events to them due to knowing they had been in attendance. Likewise, if you had some sort of loyalty program, they could be credited as having participated where they couldn’t have been before.

Also, just imagine how things would change if the artist and presenting venue were automatically getting a cut every time a ticket was resold for over face value. The way Palmer describes it, you may even be able to limit the amount at which a ticket can be resold. Though I can already envision a couple ways sellers could circumvent that.

As a more immediate and practical example – about two weeks ago we had a rental which had been postponed from Spring 2020 due to Covid. When it had gone on sale prior to the shutdown, it sold out very quickly. Based on some conversations the ticket office had, we know tickets ended up being resold and transferred. However, because we only had the contact information for the original purchaser, we were unable to communicate the rescheduled dates to those who currently held the tickets. As a result, we had about 200 unoccupied seats. Had we known who held the tickets now, we could have directed reminder communications to them instead.

Palmer says most major ticketing providers are already working on offering a NFT based ticketing service. It will be interesting to see what opportunities unfold as people recognize how to technology can be employed.  Given that competing standards will likely be appear before one emerges as the dominant format, I would caution arts organizations from signing up too early.

I also wouldn’t assume some of the dominant parties like Ticketmaster will end up running the table. Many of the big players are not focused on providing good customer relationship management tools. I suspect whomever can deliver a product that facilitates more authentic and accurate interactions with customers with ease and low expense will do well.

Barriers To Equity Admission Are Suddenly Dropped

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Big news today from Actors’ Equity Association  the union which represents stage actors and stage managers. The union basically immediately opened membership to anyone who has ever worked professionally as an actor or stage manager on production and ever will, along with members of associated sister unions like SAG-AFTRA, AGMA and AGVA. Anyone who currently in the member candidate program working toward their union card can immediately become a member with any fees already paid to the union counting toward their initiation dues.

It should be noted that the definition of working professionally seems to being paid any amount as long as you can provide a pay stub. The previous process was based on a certain number of hours worked on a production under a union contract.

The union says they are doing this as a step toward diversity and inclusion due to the high degree of self-selection that has existed in the hiring process:

But Equity theatres, like all entertainment industry employers, are disproportionately run by white people, and their programming and hiring decisions show that they often hold biases in favor of people from similar demographics. In fact, recent hiring studies demonstrate that Equity contracts are disproportionately offered to white people, and the majority of new members join via a contract.  Because our membership rules until now have left access to membership in employers’ hands, they have implicitly created a disproportionately high barrier to access for actors and stage managers of marginalized identities. We have inadvertently contributed to the systemic exclusion of people of color and people of other marginalized identities from the benefits of union membership.

In a Backstage article, Diep Tran quotes Equity President Kate Shindle as saying this is not a cash grab after the Covid shutdown:

But she is adamant that Open Access is not a “cash grab” to get more money into the union; Equity was affected in the last year when its members were unable to work because of COVID-19 and thus, pay into their union.

“I am telling you the God’s honest truth when I say that no part of this has felt like any kind of cash grab,” she says.

Shindle also admits that with this change, it may mean that auditions become “more crowded,” but she believes that overall, more members are a good thing: “We’re eager to look at the ways in which structural and systemic racism has permeated our industry and say, Okay, these are things we can just fix without anyone’s permission. We don’t have to have an industry summit in order to say it should be easier to join Equity if you want to join Equity.”

One of my colleague’s first reaction was to wonder if the influx of membership would help the union’s issues with health coverage. Back in April, actors were marching in protest against the union’s change in the number of weeks members had to work in order to receive health coverage, in addition to calling attention to racism, sexism, and unsafe work environments.

It will be interesting to see how this move plays out over the next few years. One of the biggest challenges will likely be broadening the appeal of union membership geographically. While it sounds like anyone who performed for a small stipend could become a member of Actors’ Equity, the restrictions on working on non-union shows may limit people’s opportunities to participate in local or regional productions.

For decades now the fact that acting opportunities were oriented in a few cities, particularly New York City, has been identified as a significant problem. (Call out to Scott Walters who often wrote on this subject.)  The joke about needing to move to NYC from Milwaukee in order to audition for a part in Milwaukee wasn’t far from the truth.

Equity is probably going to have to create new sets of rules that allow people to perform in myriad more circumstances than they currently are. The union was formed over 100 years ago to protect actors from exploitative situations and there are still many areas in which advocacy of a few broad basic work rules like the recent trend away from grueling rehearsal schedules can create new standards of practice.

 

There Will Be More Dancing In The Streets

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I saw an article on CityLab about some pretty successful Open Streets efforts that rose up during Covid.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept, Open Streets is a national effort to temporarily close streets down to traffic to allow for community use of the space.

Where I live, a local organization works to shut streets down a couple times a year in different neighborhoods around the city. Part of the local effort has been to perform different projects which help make the streets safer by making drivers slow down and become more aware of pedestrians.

I was surprised to read in the CityLab piece that one group successfully managed to shut down a 30 block span of a street in NYC for 12 hours every. single. day.  While technically that is a temporary shut down of the street, it is increasingly becoming a permanent feature.

Programming was paramount. Practically each day, there is something going on in the street. Salsa and the Colombian coin toss game of sapo on Tuesdays. Family bike rides on Friday. The avenue even has its own newsletter. “If you don’t activate the street, people won’t feel comfortable using it,” said Burke.

Alejandra Lopez, a local resident, had stopped by last week for a bike helmet, but they were all out. Instead, she found out about the English classes that are also held on the avenue, which brought her back today. The Open Street reminded Lopez of her hometown, Bogotá, and its famous weekly Ciclovía. “This is like the evolution of that,” she said, carrying a new helmet in one hand.

The daily effort is driven by 100 volunteers and is mostly funded by donations. Some of the people who teach the language and dance classes are paid a stipend, but most all the work is done by volunteers. The vision, however, is to turn it into a work training program.

The program could provide summer jobs for teens, or re-entry training for formerly incarcerated people, with transferable carpentry and landscaping skills. (Burke called for crossing guards to be hired from nearby communities.) To Maerowitz, the Open Street could be more than just a space to spread out: It could be a site where one’s community is strengthened.

“We can give neighbors ownership of the street through work,” she said.

The article talks about some of the issues and tensions that have emerged in different Open Streets projects around the country. There is always push back and anger from some drivers at having streets shutdown, but organizers have discovered some socio-economic forces at work as well. There has been criticism that Open Streets projects are often sited in wealthier neighborhoods, but some have observed that there is often resistance in poorer neighborhoods based in skepticism about broken promises of the past as well as lack of consultation and communication with residents.

Last year, the launch of Oakland’s Slow Streets program faced a barrage of criticism over lack of community input, with Black and low-income residents expressing far less enthusiasm for the traffic restrictions.

[…]

…in poorer areas, they hit resistance, highlighting disparities ingrained in traffic violence. If a neighbor in a marginalized community grumbles at a program meant to enhance safety, and the response is to scrap instead of fix, something else may be at play there.

“When you apply the layer of historical trauma that communities of color have experienced, it’s a reaction formation,” Logan said. “I’ve been so hurt from you that it’s easier to push you away than to collaborate and figure out a solution. The last time we talked about promises, you broke that.”

I Noticed You Checking Out Those Brush Strokes

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CityLab had an article about an art museum in Bologna, Italy which is using eye tracking to learn how visitors interact with works on display. In the process, the museum has learned unexpected things about their visitors.

Let me just get this out of the way and say that my cynical mind immediately saw this technology becoming the basis to optimize attendance, sales, and ultimately what sort of art gets created based on what seems most popular.

This being said, the technology can also provide feedback and opportunity to better inform, engage and lower barriers for visitors. Or perhaps, as suggested in the last paragraph below, curators may find that visitors don’t value the same things they do.

Part of me would be curious to see if they put this technology up in some place like the Louvre, are there works no one suspected was getting attention as people made their way to and from the Mona Lisa. Does something catch people’s eye that makes them pause a moment? Is there a minor, but significant flow, to other galleries that no one had observed?

Some of the researchers’ findings have been unexpected. Examining observer data from the two sides of a 14th-century diptych by Vitale degli Equi, data showed that “attention was immediately attracted to the ‘busier’ representation of Saint Peter’s blessing, to the right,” said Bologna Musei President Roberto Grandi. He was surprised to find that many visitors simply skipped the diptych’s left half.

The data could lead to changes in lighting, staging and placement of artworks in relation to one another, Grandi said, with findings suggesting that museums and galleries might want to rethink how to make some paintings and sculptures more visible and accessible.

The life-sized statue of Apollo of Veii, dating back to 510-500 B.C., is a case in point, the researchers said. Though the statue is one of the crown jewels at Rome’s National Etruscan Museum, a separate test of ShareArt showed that relatively few visitors give it the attention experts feel it deserves. Placement near the end of the collection, possibly chosen in a “best-for-last” approach, may be leading patrons to skip the artifact altogether, ENEA’s Marghella said.

Did Covid Suddenly Make You More Aware of Sidewalk Space?

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The Americans for the Arts blog had an interview with an arts group that was flexing their skills to solve problems in their community. They spoke with Yin Kong, one of the founders of Think Chinatown which started the initiative Assembly for Chinatown to provide outdoor dining for restaurants in New York City’s Chinatown.

While restaurants in other parts of the city were able to find ways to cope with Covid restrictions by setting up dining on sidewalks or in dedicated parking spaces on the street, Chinatown has narrower sidewalks and streets. Regulations frequently changed and violations earned a $1,000 fine. Outdoor dining really hadn’t been part of the business practice among Chinatown restaurants so between physical restrictions, legal hurdles, and custom there was little incentive for the financially ailing restaurants for that neighborhood to pursue outdoor dining options.

Think Chinatown collaborated with A+A+A Studio to write a guide on how to build affordable structures that met Department of Transportation guidelines. Artists worked with business owners to decorate the structures in colorful murals.

We removed the financial risk for these restaurants by covering the construction costs. We selected restaurants where we believed the impact could most be felt. For the most part, the project has helped bring attention to businesses and provide more space.

We are still connected with the restaurants who participate—we do not drop these and leave. We live in the neighborhood and are here to adjust. For some murals, it has been almost a year [since they were created], so we are repainting. We want them to continue to be colorful, delightful work.

The Assembly for Chinatown page mentions the project has helped 13 businesses at nine sites. In some cases, adjacent businesses got wrapped into the effort. In one case, a restaurant, cafe and florist had a structure constructed. In another, a restaurant and neighboring tea importer shared a space.

The interview is short, but it is clear that the perceptual, legal, and logistical hurdles they faced required a lot of time and effort to navigate before the first two pieces of wood were attached together. They provided access where it didn’t exist or seemed difficult to achieve and got people thinking of new possibilities for doing business in their neightborhood.

Headlines Writing Checks That The Body Text Ain’t Really Cashing

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Yesterday, economist Tyler Cowen addressed one of the dichotomies being recognized in the arts sector – the conflict between values of equity, fairness, diversity, etc., espoused in the arts world and the transactional nature of arts patronage. Discussions of how the arts are supported and funded are becoming an increasingly prevalent topic of conversation.

Cowen, who is most definitely an avowed supporter, consumer and advocate of the arts takes a bit of an academic analytical approach to the “wokeness” embodied in The Art Newspaper articles on visual art.

To put it bluntly, the art world is torn. In terms of demographics, the art world should lean fairly hard left, at least in the Anglo countries. It is highly educated, cosmopolitan, wealthy, and “aware” of the world. And many of the individuals operating in the art world do lean fairly strongly to the left. Yet the art world itself is based on principles fairly different from Woke and often directly opposed to Woke.

First and foremost, the art world is based on ownership of property. Most (by no means all) of those properties were created by dead white males, or perhaps by living white males.

Art markets typically are ruled by Power Laws and massive inequality, with most works going to zero value and a small percentage of the creators hitting it big…. Indeed, you earn status by showing how discriminating your eye is, which means by dumping on the works that aren’t going anywhere.

Textiles, which are arguably the “most female” genre in terms of their creators, are worth systematically much less in the marketplace…(…The same is true for some kinds of pottery as well….)

Some of the issues he addresses I was aware of but hadn’t thought of in the terms or context he expresses.

Part of the point of his post was illustrate there is a breadth of intellectual discourse about art & culture that doesn’t immediately gravitate toward the extremes of woke or anti-wokeness. Of The Art Newspaper he says, “It tries to incorporate Woke rhetoric into an essentially non-Woke and anti-Woke set of customs and incentives and property rights.”

You will have to read his analysis of how they achieve that balance in various articles he cites. Basically, he says the body of the articles turn out to be less controversial than the headlines suggest.

Some of the commenters to the post suggest that Cowen uses “woke” so frequently in the post because he is intentionally trying to beat all meaning and emotional associations out of the term.

It Turns Out Scooby-Doo Was Combating Unprincipled Gentrification

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Last week my organization was notified that we were being awarded funds for a grant we wrote to address the issue of blight in our community. The project was inspired by a comment a friend of the venue while indicating a house she felt was the place everything went wrong for her family.  We will be pulling stories together of houses that exist and no longer exist (demolished to create an industrial district that was in turn abandoned) to raise awareness that the solution to blight may not always be a bulldozer.

I say this to provide a little context for a story I saw in CityLab today that suggested that Scooby-Doo cartoons were responding in their own way to the widespread destruction of Victorian houses during the 1970s. The article notes that most of the stories in the cartoon were set in creepy Victorian era buildings, addressing a general perception of that style of architecture during that time.

Victorian neighborhoods fell prey to demolition during this period as urban renewal projects smashed through buildings that were often seen as musty, decrepit hangovers from a poorer, miserably car-less past.

San Francisco’s Fillmore District, for example, was substantially redeveloped, scattering its mainly African American residents to the East Bay, while the now celebrated Victorian district of Old Louisville saw over 600 buildings demolished between 1965 and 1971 alone. These losses didn’t go unnoticed, and the early 1970s was also a time when grassroots historical preservation societies fully ground into action,…

[…]

Indeed, the show sometimes tackles these issues directly. The classic Scooby-Doo villain is a developer or greedy landowner, scaring people away from their property by dressing as a ghost or monster, only to be unmasked and confess everything to the band of “pesky kids” just before each episode’s final curtain. Occasionally, even urban renewal itself crops up. In one episode a developer constructing new buildings in Seattle is also secretly plundering treasures from the subterranean street network built in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1889.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the cartoon was a reflection of the times. The Flintstones, also from Hanna-Barbera, was originally aired during prime time for an adult audience, and was not intended primarily for a younger demographic. As we have recognized in recent years, the content of comic books does not necessarily address non-serious themes.

Colorado And The Case Of The Hidden Salary

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I have noticed Drew McManus will get me riled up about an arts administration topic and then suggests I write an Arts Hacker post about it. Last week was no exception. Last Thursday he posted about how he had gone back to requiring employers posting positions on Arts Admin Jobs to include a salary range.  He had done so because there was a growing demand among job applicants and others within the non-profit world to have salaries included.

But that Drew also noticed an editorial on the Chronicle of Philanthropy (registration required) was making waves for suggesting that omitting the salary was in everyone’s best interest. And boy did that garner a spirited response from readers.

With good reason since part of the rationale seemed to be along the lines of someone being grossly underpaid at $40,000 would be too intimidated to apply for a job more appropriately paying $120,000, so it is better to keep the salary hidden….you know, for their sake.

There is a lot more to the effort than just some opinion pieces. As I note in my Arts Hacker post, Show The Salary started in the UK and is an international effort that probably extends even further than my research turned up.

There are definitely signs that there will be immense resistance by companies and organizations to list salary ranges. While there are a number of states and municipalities which have rules against requiring or discriminating against applicants who don’t provide their current salary, only Colorado requires employers to provide salary and benefits information in their employment listings.

As a result, a number of companies who allow employees to work remotely are specifically saying Colorado residents can not apply for open positions. Nike says residents will need to move from the state before performing any work.

Since there are a significant number of positions open in the arts right now, including at the executive level, there is an opportunity to create a strong precedent and expectation of listing salary ranges. Such a simple move is likely to exert a lasting influence and shift in the general work culture among arts organizations going forward.

There is more detail about the whole topic in my Arts Hacker post so check it out.

 

Time To Include #ShowTheSalary In The Hiring Process

 

We Are All Books In The Human Library

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Looking at some storytelling resources I came across a related project I was unaware of. The Human Library trains volunteers to be “books” you withdraw to learn something about some taboo/prejudice/discomforting feelings you may have about a topic.  The Human Library tagline is “Unjudge Someone.”

The videos I have found are much better at explaining the process than any written materials I managed to come across.  The project was started in 2000 in Denmark by Ronni Abergel whose TEDx video is the first below. They have spread the idea to 84+ countries. The library project collects human books on different topics ranging from religion, race, national origin, belief/philosophy, gender, appearance, sexual identity, body type, disabilities, experiences and myriad other categories.

Librarians have a list of books available to be taken out on any particular day. The reader(s) (the conversations may be one on one or small group) request a human book on a topic they want to learn more about and then they go off to have an encounter for about 30 minutes. Since the organizers want to ensure a safe space for everyone, my impression is they limit the physical borders in which the books may be read.  According to Abergel, if there is a question the human book wishes not to answer, they respond by saying something along the lines of “that page has not been published yet.”

I am sure there are other measures they must take to make sure people feel safe. Perhaps it is part of the training they do with their human books. Participation requires making yourself really vulnerable. Abergel says we often censor ourselves in public and don’t ask questions that are considered impolite, (i.e. Why are you so fat?), and this is an opportunity to ask those questions.

He also cites an example of a reader not believing a human book was Muslim because they didn’t conform to an image they held about Muslims. I wasn’t quite sure if the person recognized they had preconceptions or if they refused to believe the truth of the situation. Regardless, I am sure there are some people who will leave still holding the beliefs they entered with.  The Human Library organization is making a bet that people’s notions will change at some point, even if it isn’t immediately.

On the other hand, the organization also knows that we all have some aspect of ourselves which would qualify us to be one of their books–something that others see as a taboo topic or would be uncomfortable discussing–it might be as simple as experiencing the death of a loved one. If they can get participants to recognize that then there is an opportunity for greater empathy.

 

Interviews with participants at a Human Library sited at University of Albany (NY)

Keep Your Eyes Open For NEA American Rescue Plan Grant Webinars

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While everyone is waiting for their Shuttered Venue Operating Grant (SVOG) application to be processed, you should be taking a look at the National Endowment for the Arts American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding. The NEA just held a webinar today about it, but most states and regional arts organizations are having one for their members. Americans for the Arts is having one on July 6.

In a nutshell, the reason why you want to apply for this is because there are far fewer restrictions than usual on the program. The only broad categories that they won’t fund are capital improvements and project grants. Usually all they fund are projects. They still don’t provide funding to individual artists.

They will pay for operational costs like salaries and non-capital equipment.  You can apply even if you have an SVOG grant pending or have received funding from other programs like PPP or EIDL.  You just can’t apply for reimbursement of the same expenses covered by another program. So if other funding covers salaries until December 31, you would need to apply salaries from January 1 onward to the ARP grant. The funding can be applied across two years which allows some time to regain momentum lost during Covid.

They have a PDF prepared with all the information you will be expected to provide. Note that everyone has the deadline of August 12, 2021 to submit a short form application on Grants.gov, but then organizations whose legal identity begins with A-L will apply through the separate NEA applicant portal August 19-25 and those with names beginning M-Z will apply August 27-September 2.

My guess is that they are trying to avoid a lot of the snafus which plagued the SVOG program.

Take a look at the information and find a webinar to attend. As you might imagine there is a ton of interest in these programs. I received an email about 2-3 hours before the webinar started that they had reached capacity with registrations and keep trying to get in if you are initially blocked so I queued up 20 minutes early in the hopes of being admitted.

Art As A Medium For Teaching Coding

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In an illustration of how arts and science can be mutually supportive, NextCity had a piece about an effort to train art teachers to teach girls to code.  Code/Art was started by MIT grad Amy Renshaw in an attempt to make coding more interesting and accessible to girls.

Art as a way to pique girls’ curiosity makes sense to Renshaw—art skews female when it’s an elective, and there’s more flexibility in the curriculum. Research backs her up: Girls’ interest in computer science increases when the classroom environment reflects art and nature rather than stereotypical geeky decor, like Star Trek posters. Research also shows girls’ involvement with computer science should start before eighth grade, at which point cultural stereotypes are already taking root.

[…]

To create a comfortable learning atmosphere, facilitators are open about their own struggles and encourage the teachers to tap into each other’s knowledge and experience. They are assisted by college-age interns, who are then available to help in the classroom

Code/Art started out in Miami-Dade schools in 2019. As you might imagine, the pandemic put a damper on roll out to other cities as well as the level of participation among teachers in Miami. That said, one of the teachers interviewed, Nancy Mastronardi, credited involvement in the Code/Art curriculum with keeping her energized and helping her avoid the burn out many of her colleagues felt. Some of her students started meeting on Zoom independently of her class to continue working on their ideas.

Mastronardi also started an after school Code/Art club, as have other schools in the Miami-Dade school system. While club participation in the school system dropped during the pandemic, in a survey of club participants, “…52% said they plan to major or minor in computer science in college and 87% said their club motivated them to continue coding in the future.”

Really Don’t Want To Think Of Post-Covid Marketing As Online Dating

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Back in March Harvard Business Review (HBR) had a piece on how marketing will change post-Covid.  It is definitely geared toward commercial business and often oriented toward business to business sales rather than individuals, but there were some interesting observations, some of which have long been points of discussion in non-profit arts.

4. Old truth: Courting customers is just like dating.
New truth: Courting customers is just like online dating.

I mainly include this one because of the imagery this evokes. The article notes that marketing used to be a numbers game. Like dating, you would present yourself broadly in public at parties, bars, and other public places, using your best lines, seeing who might be interested. These days where people make split second decisions before swiping, they say the numbers game is algorithms and not chance and broad exposure. Essentially they say data driven decision making is going to be more valuable than trying to increase the frequency people see your face.

5. Old truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your marketing strategy.
New truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your customer journey.

…We have all called customer service and spoken to a call center rep or chatbot that was not operating with the same information as a retail location — and vice versa.

…Marketing must be viewed in the context of the full end-to-end journey and, where possible, work to connect the dots.

The idea that people would go from being first time attendees to subscribers to donors and perhaps volunteers or board members, across a span of years is a frequent subject discussed in the arts so this concept is not new.

What caught my attention was that they said the answer to making sure everyone in your organization was operating with the same information is not to consolidate all operations and communications through one location. Rather it is ensuring everything is aligned around the customer’s need. This certainly makes sense because you often have different types of customers. There aren’t only ticket buyers, subscribers, donors and groups, you might have operations that include renters, students, and other constituencies. The best point of contact for each of these is different, but it is definitely to your benefit if each area is aware of how the others interact with their specific group.

In other words, as I have said over the years–marketing is everybody’s job. The organization can’t run effectively by taking a siloed view as to what their role and interests are.

8. Old truth: Your brand should stand behind great products.
New truth: Your brand should stand behind great values.

[…]

In fact, key themes from EY research show that while quality, convenience, and price still very much matter to consumer choice, factors like sustainability, trust, ethical sourcing, and social responsibility are increasingly important to how consumers select their products and services. Marketing has an opportunity to educate the broader C-suite (and even the board) on the importance of brand values when it comes to differentiating in a post-pandemic marketplace where brand preferences have been upended.

If you have been working in the arts for any length of time, you know organizations have long espoused values about equity, inclusion and access, but it is no long sufficient to say these things, it is necessary to translate these values into action. The authors of the HBR article recognize that the impetus to change will not necessarily come from the top and it may require advocacy from staff to executives and board members to effect the change that is needed.

Maybe It’s Not The Performance That Should Be Streamed

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Covid forced a lot of conversations about the value of streaming content from performing arts venues and visual arts galleries.  As we emerge into more optimistic times, some groups are already planning to make streaming part of their programming mix while others are happy for the opportunity to jettison the practice.

I was reading an article in FastCompany today which discussed how video games were driving tourism to places like Ireland and Italy based on fictional depictions of the terrain, buildings and other features of those places. And the games were doing it with the encouragement and cooperation of the official tourism organizations of those places.

That called to mind the fact that movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have inspired people to travel to places in Ireland and New Zealand which served as settings in those movies. Organized tours of Game of Thrones locations will take you across multiple countries.

Then there is also the issue of the quest to visit Instagrammable places by thousands threatening the natural surroundings.

This made me reflect upon the idea that it isn’t the realistic depiction of a location, but rather the idealized or creative concept overlaid on the reality which is drawing people. Yes, that is sort of central to the description of television, movies and video games and that isn’t what live arts experiences are all about.

I will admit this isn’t a fully formed idea, but it occurred to me that maybe a focus on the performance experience isn’t the way to do. I can tell you from experience that trying to stream a live event without much of the equipment used in television and movie making present yields a disappointing product.  Not to mention, even if you remember the buffering issues YouTube frequently had, they have largely ironed those out. As a result, people expect the same smooth delivery experience from an image being delivered as it is being created as they receive from a video available in its entirety before you think to ask for it.

So instead of the performances which can’t meet the quality of movie and television production without a lot of money or removing the elements that make live experiences distinct from recorded experiences, are there other things that can be centered in live streamed content to encourage people to become engaged? Is there something about the exterior of the building? The surrounding town? The buzz and bustle of the audience in the lobby or in the neighborhood prior to a show? Does that activity orient around a unique feature of the lobby?

Basically, if someone wandered in accidentally, would they have a sense they were missing out on something great and can you stream that?

Likewise, is there some element of the experience that will fire the imagination even if it is overlaid with CGI  for a movie or rendered in a video game? Is there a way to make these things come to pass? While you don’t want to misrepresent what you are all about and have people feel you oversold or did a bait and switch, people are clearly interested in viewing the reality behind the fiction.

The term “Internet famous” is used to imply a certain niche appeal, but sometimes that is enough.

Every location and organization is going to be different in terms of what is available to be leveraged. As I mentioned, this is definitely throw it on the wall to see what sticks type of suggestion. I toss it out in the hopes of shifting thinking away from the idea that the live performance is the central thing that draws people to conceptualizing what else may be perceived as valuable.

This is highly unlikely to generate long lasting engagement and shouldn’t be viewed as a way to build future audiences and donor bases. (Unless there is a connection with an existing affinity group like Lord of the Rings fans.) Knowing there will be guaranteed churn, you don’t want to sink a ton of resources into this unless you discover it results in increased local/regional resonance that leads to return visits. But emerging from Covid, a surge of buzz and activity around you might be what is needed to jump start things again.

Has The Time Come For Digital Program Delivery?

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When I saw a story on CityLab about restaurants replacing their printed menus with digital ones, I began to read it eagerly. Staff at a couple of venues at which I have worked have long had conversations about the paper waste generated by discard or unused programs. (Even if I printed 200 fewer programs than we had people in attendance, I would inexplicably still have multiple boxes of unused programs left over.)

The trend away from program distribution due to Covid has seemed like a good opportunity to eliminate printed programs in favor of digital delivery by QR code or large lobby screens and by emailing copies to ticket purchasers in advance of a performance.

There is some great opportunity to be proactive with advance distribution of program content to provide additional materials to help people prepare for their experience. If people are inclined to peruse the program book file prior to attendance, they would probably welcome a short, clever explainer video the venue creates to enhance the upcoming experience.

As I read the CityLab piece, it became clearer that digital delivery, like all technology has the potential to be a double-edged sword. I was already aware that there was some psychology involved with pricing and placement on printed menus to direct people to certain dishes. I wasn’t as aware that alcohol distributors had been printing the beer/wine/spirits menus for bars and restaurants and using design tricks to steer people toward their own products. Though obviously that makes sense.

Likewise, digital menus format can be beneficial because you can swap between breakfast/lunch/dinner/brunch menus at the appropriate times while using the same QR code or screens. When you run out of an ingredient or product, it can be removed from the menu so people don’t try to order it only to be told you are out of that food.

On the negative side, digital menus can be adjusted so that people at one table are being charged more than people at the next table based on data compiled about their spending habits and interests. The article also points out that cameras on phones are built in eye tracking sensors which can help the restaurant learn a lot about its customers and what is getting noticed on the menu vs. what is being ordered.

In terms of arts venues, there is already capacity to use the data tracking integrated into ticketing and email software and Google Analytics to discover when people are viewing digital program book content on websites and what devices they are using. With just a little more sophistication in software tools added in, it is entirely possible to gain additional insight into audience interests and habits to assist with decision making. Really well developed tools can reveal a great deal more.

I feel like I am just scraping the surface of what is possible. Anyone see other possibilities?

Actually, it would be interesting to know who many people out there are considering shifting primarily to digital programs, outside of any content you have available for persons with disabilities.

Podcasting As The Next Wave Of Marketing Placement?

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Last week I saw an article reporting that podcasts have been a growing revenue source for NPR in recent years.

NPR podcasts reach more than 21 million people, and the most popular shows have over 5 million listeners every month. Moffet said NPR’s podcasting numbers are comparable to that of prime time television in terms of advertising reach for a brand.

Monthly, NPR has about 163 million users, and hosts seven of the top 20 podcasts in the United States.

I mentioned to a colleague we might want to look into whether our local stations offer any opportunities to insert promotional messages into podcasts on a regional basis. It seemed like a good opportunity to target specific demographics and affinity groups. According to the article, very few people skip the mid-program sponsor mention making that a prime placement location.

My colleague mentioned that one station she was aware of did insert promotional messaging into podcasts, though I didn’t think to clarify if that was for content produced locally at the stations or was in nationally distributed podcasts.

In any case, it seems like something to look into in order to put a little pressure on stations to considering offering that capacity. (I strongly suspect there are people already working on it.) It might also be an opportunity to nudge stations to carry and promote more locally/regionally based podcasts are part of their mix.

Or even better, arts organizations may want to cut out the middleman, research who is doing a locally/regionally based podcast, and arrange to sponsor their work. If you are looking to diversify your audience base and there is already someone reaching those demographics with podcasts, depending on the scale of their operation sponsorships can potentially help them expand their reach, buy better equipment, and reimburse them for what has been a labor of love. Cultivating a good relationship with them might yield better results than a broadcast radio program with comparable listeners.

Arts Incubators Can Offer A Different Type of Education

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An article from Oregon Arts Watch about an arts incubator program, Tulatin Valley Creates  rolled across my feed this week. The article inevitably talked about how the program helped artists apply for Covid relief from various entities across the span of the last year.

What I was interested to see was artists talking about how participation in the incubator helped them re-evaluate their work and employ a new approach.

Julian Saporiti who graduated from Berklee School of Music drew a distinction between the training received in degree programs and in the incubator:

“That’s different from education programs that focus on individual virtuosity,” he says. “The incubator classes were very much emboldening participants, with the aim being to spread that collaborative approach to the rest of the community.”

One artist, Emily Miller, said that conversations in the incubator lead her to broaden her approach.

“What I realized during the incubator and looking at it from different perspectives is that I had to keep redirecting conversations away from the same narrative we hear about ocean plastic — whose fault is it? How can we solve it? The incubator helped me get from that point to, ‘OK we understand this problem — now where are we going?’ I want people to focus on creative transformation, and how they can apply it in their own lives — even if they have nothing to do with ocean plastic.” The changes she’s making as a result broaden her project’s relevance to more people.”

Another participant, Jamie Cromier, went in planning to open a gallery but her thinking evolved after recognizing a number of factors:

“…she decided instead to partner with people in the community who were already working in that area, and to focus instead on what she was passionate about: not the administrative work of founding and running a gallery (while raising three children), but instead helping them make art that served mental health. She wound up creating art boxes that would go out to people with mental health issues who could use them to create art.”

I appreciated the fact that the incubator program has a process which is helping people think and reflect on their plans and practice. Hopefully there are other programs out there having similar outcomes.

Ten Pounds of Arts Funding Doesn’t Yield 20 Pounds of Peace

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So like me, you may have been driving home Monday night and heard an interview on NPR conducted by host Mary Louise Kelly with poet Tess Taylor discussing art as civic repair.  Taylor talks about how a plethora of festivals in Belfast have helped people to come together peacefully since the Good Friday Agreement brought about a general cessation of violence in Northern Ireland.  She draws some parallels to political division in the United States.

She tells a story about being assigned to write a travel story about Virginia shortly after the 2016 election. She arrives in Floyd, VA, a mecca of bluegrass and is torn between being upset at the election results and wanting to square dance.

KELLY: You write, (reading) I realized I could either be mad or I could dance, but I can’t do both, so I’m going to dance.

TAYLOR: There might have been so many people right then at that square dance with whom I really had nothing to say about politics. But while we’re doing this dance, we’re actually partaking in a community action that takes place with an old pattern, and people swing around, they have to change partners, nobody can be left out, everybody is called in, and I understood the square dance is a ritual meant to build community and meant also to be sure that people had some relationship with one another so that they were kind of agreeing, perhaps, in a rural, small community to care for each other in some way. But I also felt very amazed by the ability of the dance itself to make me feel more able to work with people around me and to feel as if somehow, in that moment, we had put aside our differences and come together into something bigger.

As the interview closed, it was mentioned that Taylor had written a longer piece on this subject for Harper’s this month so I sought the article out.

There was a great deal of nuance in Taylor’s piece which was careful to say while there were similarities between the friction in the U.S. and Northern Ireland, there were differences that made them, and thus the solutions, distinct.

What I really appreciated was just how much Taylor’s article paralleled my post yesterday about viewing the arts as a prescriptive solution for problems. While Taylor cited research that showed how arts activities can create bonds of friendship, empathy and cooperation, she also noted arts weren’t, and will likely never be, the totality of the solution for Belfast in and of themselves. (my emphasis)

…Artists knew that arts programming was an effective means of weaving people together; they had written many grants justifying projects in these terms, and some were tired of the process. Some expressed concern about instrumentalizing art. “It’s not as if you put in ten pounds of arts funding and get out twenty pounds of peace,” said Glenn Patterson.

…But Durrer is the first to say that investments in reconciliation are naturally hard to quantify: “It’s not as if you can count the number of Protestants and Catholics who sat next to one another in a theater and know anything about how well people are actually reconciling.” My friend Stephen Connolly, a poet, warned me that the festivalization of Belfast can at times feel like a “manufactured peace.” Others felt uneasy about looking to anything in Northern Ireland as a model. Everyone stressed that what had been achieved in the north of Ireland has since frayed and grown tender.

But FitzGibbon, who has collaborated with Boyd on outdoor performances and directed the Belfast Children’s Festival for thirteen years, also emphasized the giddy feeling of making interventions that seemed to result in collective delight.

There is a lot of thoughtful reflection in the Harper’s story and it bears looking at regardless of whether you are considering connecting the arts with social change.

The Arts Aren’t A Band-Aid

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Links to a study examining the validity of claims about the efficacy of the arts in solving issues of health and well-being came across my Twitter feed today.  The study authors, Stephen Clift, Kate Phillips, and Stephen Pritchard, examined research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and found there were problems with the methodology and relevance of previous studies that made claims about arts solving physical and mental health issues for different populations.

The authors cited earlier work by Munira Mirza and Eleonora Belfiore who in 2006 were skeptical about making claims about the instrumental benefits of the arts on health outcomes.

Among Belfiore’s concerns that the authors quote are:

Any form of participatory activity could have “an empowering effect, whether arts-based or not”.

Existing reviews have ignored details which suggest “negative” impacts from arts and cultural engagement. Lessons from experiences of “culture-led regeneration” suggest that “the arts can actually be socially divisive”.

Little attention given to whether cultural and arts initiatives “provide the most cost-effective means to tackling social exclusion, health problems” compared with “established practices within social and health services”.

Little attention to longer-term outcomes as opposed to short-term effects.

Little attention to the artistic or aesthetic quality of cultural and arts engagements in assessing outcomes.

A focus on the role of the arts and culture my serve “as a convenient means to divert attention from the real causes of today’s social problems and the tough solutions that might be needed to solve them”.

While these were criticisms of arts policy in the UK in 2006, the fact that the authors found nearly identical concerns in more recent research conducted both in the UK for DCMS and internationally by WHO, indicate that the problems are shared across borders.

I was particularly drawn to the discussion of the use of art as a band-aid to obfuscate the existence of larger problems. The authors cite businesses use of “art washing” projects to create goodwill and draw attention away from the business practices which create harm in the world. They also note that studies often credit arts programs for reducing anxiety and behavioral difficulties in children without fully recognizing the poverty, domestic abuse and violence in their lives. They suggest that by positioning arts programs as a fix for children’s behavior, the studies accept and normalize the terrible conditions responsible for these problems.

While it wasn’t a central topic of their research, the authors made reference to two studies from 2020, one which states Culture is bad for you, based on the way current practices and manifestations reinforce social inequities; and another that asks, “Can Music Make You Sick,” examining the price musicians pay to pursue their careers. This was actually a theme Drew McManus pursued across a number of podcast discussions with various stakeholders in music organizations.

Long time readers will know that for years now I have been concerned about various claims being made about the instrumental benefits/value of the arts to rectify every ill – health, social, economic, education, etc., as more research occurs debunking these claims, the arts community will be in a difficult place trying to justify their existence in these terms. Which is why it is important to change the narrative away from the arts as prescriptions for whatever ails you.

Cleaning Up Litter Never Looked So Cool

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Video came across my social media last month about the litter picking samurai of Tokyo.  These theater performers call attention to the trash dropped in the streets of the city to generate a sense of responsibility and pride in keeping things clean.  Some commenters to the video wonder if they set things up for the performance given the timing and spacing of some of their movements. That may have been the case to create some drama for some of the shots, but I found other videos of them cleaning and sorting the trash they collect before disposing of it so it appears they are committed to putting in a full effort.

During Covid the arts community has become thoughtful about ways in which they can contribute to change in the world. These folks in Japan seemed like a good example of how performance skills can be employed in informal settings, (as opposed to performance spaces), to model positive actions.

Additionally, since there is so much uncertainty and tentativeness regarding the status of events and the return of audiences, the format of these types of performances can help the arts remain relevant and visible in communities.

Not to mention emphasizing the fact that the arts can be used in efforts to solve problems.

 

 

Similar efforts can be intentionally employed to achieve a specific goal. Back in 2014 the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and Sojourn Theatre partnered on a project to call attention to the fact that crosswalk signals were timed too short to allow senior citizens to traverse intersections.

What Can Cotton Candy Teach Us About Sculpture?

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Among the biggest questions I have when it comes to creating a presence for my organization on a social media platform are: 1- Is it worth/appropriate for our organization to present in this space and 2 – How do we participate without appearing to be a clueless, self-promoting business trying to sell something.

Seema Rao over at Museum 2.0 addresses these questions in a post she made last week about lessons learned during Akron Art Museum’s three month foray on to Tiktok.  Rao is the Deputy Director and Chief Experience Officer at Akron Art Museum.

Her advice basically not to approach TikTok with the intent of disseminating a planned calendar of information about your brand, goods and services.  Instead go in planning to have fun and follow cues about what other users are interested in.

As soon as I saw what she and her team had been doing on their TikTok account it was so obviously the way museums could talk about art while not talking about themselves I kicked myself for not thinking of it before. Many of their posts amplify the work of other content creators while pointing out the technique being employed.

Additive sculpture with cotton candy, for instance:

@akronartmuseum

#duet with @feast24seven additive sculpture #arttiktok#arttok#museumtok#museumtiktok#edutok#learnontiktok

♬ The Simpsons – TV Hits

or use of lines:

@akronartmuseum

#duet with @fridacashflow line #arttiktok#edutok#learnontiktok#museumtok#museumtiktok

♬ original sound – ourfriendsonfacebook

There is also a really relatable Art Appreciation for the Average Person series of posts:

@akronartmuseum

#greenscreen #arthistory #artappreciation #eternals #contemporaryart #art #hats

♬ original sound – Akron Art Museum

Rao says their account is small in the context of all museum TikTok accounts, though two of their posts have been in the top 10 in terms of number of views of #museumtok posts. If you are considering starting an organizational account TikTok, read her post and watch some of their posts to get a sense of how to think about using the space.

A Grant Proposal Isn’t An Investment Pitch

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Last week Vu Le made a tweet that revealed a very troubling picture of corporations misunderstanding how non-profits operate and work that they do. This seems to be the “non-profits should be run like a business” taken to the extreme.

The goal of Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Mental Health grant program is to:

“…specifically addresses the lack of both private and public investment in children’s mental health and of effective ways to connect innovative ideas with capital.

The resulting systemic funding gap has only increased with the deepening crisis in children’s mental health due to COVID-19 and ongoing social injustice issues.”

That sounds like it is a mix of a venture capital opportunity and a grant program. They do specifically say they applicants can receive up to $100,000 in grants, but as Vu Le notes, they also have to spend six weeks working on their pitches:

Early October: Finalists announced; six-week program commences, during which finalists learn from industry experts, enhance their proposals and develop their pitches.

Which makes it sound like applicants will be judged on the slickness of presentation rather than on quality of their solutions.

I do think a lot of organizations suffer from not having access to a skilled grant writer and can benefit from help and coaching, but that isn’t a problem it takes six weeks to solve.

While the program acknowledges there is a “systemic funding gap,” since there is no guarantee of funding, the only groups that can afford to invest time in generating innovative approaches to mental health services and have staff attend six weeks of pitch coaching are those who are already well-resourced enough to absorb that cost. Those at the other end of the funding gap will have had to make a heroic superheroic effort and leap of faith just to submit to the first round.

I will say that despite all the focus on new, innovative ideas, I didn’t see anything that disqualified existing programs as Vu Le’s post suggests. There is a question about whether the program is a new pilot or an existing program, but immediately follows asking how it is innovative and transformative. Pretty much every other description of the ideas they are looking for indicates a bias toward brand new rather than under recognized and underfunded.

I could hold forth at length about all the problematic dynamics operating here, but want avoid having casual readers tune out and move on. A lot of the language from the commercial sector has been creeping into non-profits and this grant program is really replete with it. The fact there is so much money at stake is sure to influence the vocabulary used by non-profit organizations going forward.

A few months back I had tweeted about my discomfort with the use of “deliverables” in the non-profit because so much of the work done does not result in discrete commodities. I think it is even less appropriate to be applying that concept and attendant time lines to addressing mental health.

 

Low Wear And Tear Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing

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We ran into an unanticipated complication of the Covid epidemic last week.

You may have heard that cars are engineered to operate more efficiently at highway speeds because engines get hot enough for a long enough period to burn off impurities, etc. (Though certainly hybrids are well on the way to turning that situation around.)

Well apparently there is something similar at work with septic systems.

A combination of smaller audiences; new, low water use toilets; and the flushing of supposedly “disposable” wipes over the last year meant there was not enough water flow through the pipes to keep things clear. When one thing snagged and came to rest, there was insufficient pressure to ensure the next things through passed by.

And lest you think this is a problem experienced by older, historic buildings, the issue was exacerbated by plumbing installed during a renovation completed three years ago. As the guys who came to address the issue said, it was up to code but the people who installed it never had to service their own work.

My suspicion is that as many venues gear up to to return to capacity they will find that the low demands placed on their infrastructure during the last year hasn’t necessarily forestalled degradation and, in fact, may have resulted in new problems.

We were fortunate in that we were sensitive to some early warning signs and took some action to investigate, otherwise things may have backed up at the next large capacity event. Folks would do well to be a little paranoid about unfamiliar, but seemingly minor sights, smells and sounds as they prepare for the return of audiences. It may pay to take extra time to examine equipment and technology, especially if you assume there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it after so much inactivity.

No Need To Accept Gifts From Your Past Self

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Apropos to my post yesterday about giving yourself time to generate creative innovation Seth Godin made a post today about sunk cost fallacy, practice and creativity.  The point he makes is that if your interests and ambitions shift, one shouldn’t feel obligated to continue cultivating or practicing a skill simply because you have already invested time in developing that skillset.

The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do–it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.

We hold on to the old competencies and our hard-earned status roles far longer than we should.

He makes a statement about creativity being a generous act which made me think I had written about a similar statement he made along those lines. In that case, he had actually talked about leadership being a voluntary and creative act so there really isn’t far to leap to conceptualize creativity and even leadership as generous acts.

Creativity is the generous act of solving an interesting problem on behalf of someone else. It’s a chance to take emotional and intellectual risks with generosity.

Do that often enough and you can create a practice around it. It’s not about being gifted or touched by the muse. Instead, our creative practice (whether you’re a painter, a coach or a fundraiser) is a commitment to the problems in front of us and the people who will benefit from a useful solution to them.

Creativity Arrives Late To Meetings

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Daniel Pink posted a link on Twitter about a study performed by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University which revealed people have a misperception about when they are most creative.  Most people feel they are most creative at the beginning of a brainstorming session but in fact they tend to produce the highest quality ideas after spending a fair bit of time working on the task.

…participants incorrectly judged their later ideas as less creative—because, the researchers reasoned, those ideas were harder to access. Yet, as in the first study, the opposite was true: ideas that took longer to excavate were more likely to be truly innovative.

In another study, Nordgren and Lucas put the creative-cliff illusion to the test in a real-world setting. They recruited students and alumni of The Second City’s training program to participate in a New Yorker–style cartoon-caption contest …The online competition was judged by three professional comedians, who rated the 91 submissions for novelty and funniness (a proxy for creativity).

[…]

Those who believed good ideas come early submitted fewer jokes overall, the researchers found—and fewer of the jokes they submitted were rated as highly creative by the judges. In other words, the more people believed their funniness would fade over the 15-minute task, the less productive and funny they actually were.

People who did a lot of creative work were less apt to think that the best ideas came early because they perceived their creative level remained consistent throughout. However, that perception is only slightly better than the belief that creativity peaks early.

But participants with lots of creative experience didn’t make the same mistake. They predicted that creativity would remain relatively constant—a belief that is still overly pessimistic, but closer to correct than most other participants’ predictions. Experience helped them see the power of continuing to chip away at the problem.

“It’s really people who are in the trenches doing creative work that learn this lesson,” Nordgren says.

The researchers provide some important advice–don’t let your creative sessions be bound by your meeting schedule. (my emphasis)

“If you’re struggling, keep going,” he says. This and his earlier research on creativity reveal that “our intuitions about how this process works are wrong, and that our best ideas are there. They just require more digging.”

This may mean resisting the temptation to select an idea just because a meeting is ending—a temptation rooted in the false belief that future ideas will be worse. Instead, “maybe you say, ‘I think there are still some better ideas we haven’t explored. Let’s all commit individually to putting another hour into this and come back next week.’”

Your Tax Dollars At Art

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You may recall that back in 2010 the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) was permitted to put a property tax up for vote on an election ballot to ensure a source of financial support. In return for the property tax increase, which was $20 on a home valued at $200,000, residents of three counties around Detroit would be permitted various levels of access to DIA programming.

Hyperallergic has a follow up report of sorts from Salvador Salort-Pons, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Eugene Gargaro, Chairman of the Detroit Institute of Arts board of directors. Spoilers – In March 2020, residents of those three counties voted to extend the property tax rate to 2032.

The DIA advocated for this unorthodox approach because there were serious conversations in local government about selling off the institute’s artworks in order to generate sufficient financial support for the organization.

The Hyperallergic piece says DIA negotiated individually with each of the counties, but that generally they were providing the following services:

For each county, the DIA now offers free admission to all residents, free field trips with free bus transportation to all students, free weekly programs for seniors, including free transportation for groups, and a community partnership program where we work directly with non-profits in each county to jointly create programs and events that meet their communities’ specific needs, such as art-making experiences for veterans or those experiencing homelessness.

The article goes on to discuss DIA’s commitment to having the community set the agenda for what the museum should be:

Providing this level of service over an expansive geographic area is not easy, but the rewards extend well beyond the financial support we receive. By being accountable to the residents of our region, we have adapted our programs, exhibitions and even our operating structure to ensure we are giving our diverse communities what they want from their museum, not what we think they should have.

It is good that they state this commitment because a memory of recent criticisms of DIA came to mind as I was reading the article. A quick search and I found articles from March and April about accusations of Salort-Pons fostering a unhealthy work environment and engaging in some ethically questionable practices in regard to some artworks.

I also found a New York Times piece from August 2020 specifically asking if the DIA had lost touch with the predominantly Black residents of Detroit, citing a mixed record of decisions by Salort-Pons.

Given that Covid has allowed for a great deal of introspection and planning about how to move forward, it will be interesting to see if anything happens over the next 4-5 years to shift these perceptions.

Manspreading Of Buzzwords

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Apropos to Monday’s post on Jargon vs. Lingo, a link came across my social media feed yesterday featuring an interview with Anand Giridharadas by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at the University College of London on the topic of philanthropy .

There is a moment right around the 23:00 mark where Giridharadas refers to a situation where the “…manspreading of certain languages which render native speakers in various institutions illiterate.”

Basically what he says happens is that advisors or consultants come in and start challenging practices, wielding terms like “leveraging synergies” and “boiling the ocean” to make it seem like the shorthand language you use internally to accomplish things is not sufficient to achieve success.  Giridharadas says this allows people to come in from outside and make people feel inadequate in their familiar home environment. It shifts the power dynamic by establishing their expertise while positioning natives as no longer credible.

He points out that people who have achieved relatively high levels of success in industries like education, arts and aviation don’t tend to decide this expertise can be applied to other industries, but people in the commercial business world will feel they are qualified to direct the efforts in other realms. Giridharadas specifically mentions charities, non-profits and the arts as industries often feel their commercial skillsets will transfer to.

Now none of this is to say that non-profits and the arts don’t have issues like insularity and diversity, equity and inclusion, among others that need to be fixed. But with some exceptions, the solution to these problems can be achieved with plain speech and the native jargon of the organization without the necessity of introducing buzzwords.

Mazzucato also made an interesting point about the commercial world employing a paradigm adopted from a now outdated physics worldview. She says economics finds it convenient to employ Newtonian view of equilibrium to justify a laissez-faire policy–the idea governments shouldn’t interfere because the system will self-correct. However, she notes that physics has moved on to the quantum physics model where there are higher degrees of uncertainty and randomness. These are factors probably a more appropriate paradigm for economics since individuals, social structures and behaviors do not easily conform to the predictability of an equal and opposite reaction.

To be clear, she is not saying economics should look to the quantum model to figure everything out. She just makes the point that scientific models have shifted as observations about the world have been tested and economics seemed to glom on to a convenient metaphor/model that conformed to a desired outcome.

 

 

The “You Didn’t Pay Enough Last Time” Approach To Fundraising

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Nod to Artsjournal.com for posting David Rohde’s examination of how viewing new ticket buyers as donors immediately after their attendance experience is extremely detrimental to arts organizations. He specifically addresses how the Metropolitan Opera’s use of telemarketing in this manner is leading to its demise, but they are not the first or last arts organization to employ this approach.

There have been others who have written about what it says when I person who has just seen a production for the first time gets a call or email asking for a donation or to become a subscriber a day or two later. However, I don’t recall anyone invoking quite this perspective:

From the patron standpoint, the problem here is three-fold. First, name another product or service that announces after it’s won a new customer that they underbilled you and you’re not welcome back until you fork over more dough for the first time.

He goes on to say that Metropolitan Opera ought to be playing up the benefits it has over its Broadway neighbors:

The Met’s goal with any new patron should have been to get them to tell five friends about how exciting it was to attend the opera and bring them all the next time….

The seating in the theater is more comfortable than in the typical Broadway theater, where the audience rows are often jammed up against each other. There’s no chance of missing the story in an opera because of the English titles on the seatbacks in front of you, compared to Broadway’s blasting of amplification that often seems disconnected from whoever’s singing or speaking on stage.

And the opera intermissions are longer and can be more of a party, especially at the upper balcony/bar level that inevitably attracts a fun crowd on La Bohème nights, compared to the rushed crush of bodies in a Broadway intermission that always ends in a mad scramble back to the seats for Act 2.

Rodhe’s overarching point is that relationship building is what will enable organizations to endure through the next crisis that may emerge and telemarketers just aren’t equipped to create those relationships.

Out Or Just Not Interested In Getting In?

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Seth Godin made a short post last week about the difference between Jargon vs. Lingo. Its brevity seems to make a clear case, but it leaves a ton of important considerations unsaid.

Jargon is intentionally off putting, and lingo reminds us how connected we are.

They might look similar, but the intent is what matters. Jargon is a place to hide, a chance to show off, a way to disconnect. Lingo, on the other hand, allows us to feel included.

You may see right off that even if you say it is intent that matters, whether something is alienating or inclusive is highly subjective. The line between feeling connected to a group because you have mastered the subject specific terminology and feeling like a privileged insider for having mastered that terminology can be really thin.

Likewise from the other side there is a difference between feeling excluded because you aren’t being provided the patience and access to participation by members of a group and failing to recognize that becoming fully initiated as an insider takes time and effort.

These dynamics obviously exist in the world of arts and culture, but rather than drawing an example from there, let me cite online gaming culture.

As an old fart, I started online gaming with text MUDs  back before the modem screech was even a thing, much less broadband existed. It was only last Memorial Day weekend decided to make a foray into MMORPGs. And already you are seeing terms that can either come across as lingo or jargon based on your relationship with these things.

Knowing that some of the conversations on these games can get pretty heated and abusive, especially in Player vs. Player combat situation (PvP), I resolved to keep my head down, watch and listen as best I could from the fringes before getting more deeply involved.

Fortunately I picked a game and servers where the language doesn’t get that abusive despite there being a lot of competitive elements. At a certain point I realized I was far too comfortable hanging out at the fringes and needed to jump in and participate in these competitive and cooperative efforts.

Once I did, I came to realize as much as I had been lurking on the fringes keeping busy doing my own thing, it had actually been detrimental to the development of my characters and enjoyment of the game. The rewards for cooperative group play are much greater as achieved faster than solo play, including the sense of shared victory. But of course, it took and continues to take, effort to learn correct timing, techniques, and development processes to become more effective and extend my survivablity.

Online gaming is definitely a place where it is easy to find yourself intentionally excluded by insiders or excluded by your own lack of interest in working to understand the particular rules of the realm which you have chosen to enter. The dynamics of the jargon-lingo line are not very clear cut.

Man, Can That Wiggly Opera Quartet Sing

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Grateful hat tip to the Arts and Management Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University for calling attention to Blob Opera, a fun little experiment on Google Arts and Culture.

It introduces concepts about pitch, sung vowel sounds and the highest voice leading harmony in the quick tutorial where you drag blob figures that sing the bass, tenor, mezzo and soprano parts. From there you can play around, record, and share your own compositions.

There is a pre-recorded selection of Christmas carols you can play, but even those you can manipulate by taking control of the figures mid-concert, selectively muting different parts.

Even if your organization isn’t involved with opera, this can be something interesting to share in newsletters and on social media accounts to erode any sense of intimidation people may feel regarding creative arts.

Also, you may want to bookmark it and fool around with it yourself on occasion. Colorful blobs singing vowel sounds operatically has a soothing, therapeutic quality.

Hassle-Free Refunds And Disney Pays Ticketing Fees? We Could Get Used To This

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So it appears Howard Sherman gets first mention a second day in a row on my blog (not that he doesn’t deserve it). He called attention to the fact the production The Lion King on Broadway was not only offering free refunds and exchanges on ticket purchases, but Disney would be picking up the dreaded Ticketmaster service fees. Apparently Disney is doing the same for Aladdin through August 7, 2022

I actually went online to price tickets to see what they were charging and at the end of September I found third row orchestra seats for The Lion King at $125 which didn’t seem too bad. Though I don’t know what they were selling for in February 2020.

I was so amazed at this, I wondered to my co-workers if this might not turn into an industry trend that the public came to expect. I hadn’t thought to check if other shows were doing the same thing until I saw a tweet by journalist/critic Jonathan Mandell linking to the refund/exchange policy which applies to all Broadway theaters owned by the Nederlander Organization., including the Minskoff Theatre where Lion King is showing. I didn’t see any expiration date on this offer.

The Shubert Organization which owns the Telecharge ticketing service as well as some Broadway houses is offering free refunds and exchanges through January 17, 2022.

I didn’t see anything about refunds and exchanges on the Jujamcyn Theaters website, the company that owns a number of other Broadway Theaters. But it should be noted they also didn’t have tickets for any of their shows on sale either.

Getting back to the question of whether waiving ticket service fees might become a thing, this is something my staff and I have been discussing for a few years now. (Truth be told, the staffs of different theaters at which I have worked have been talking about it for about 10-15 years now.)

We have been trending toward including the fees in the advertised price of the tickets, however many of those who rent our venue have wanted it added on top at check out. Because it is different from the usual experience it occasionally elicits a “hey wait a minute…” response from some of our more frequent attendees.

You have to wonder if people come to see this as a normal experience based on their Broadway experience, will there be pressure to continue the practice indefinitely?

Of course, this doesn’t even mention the free, no questions asked exchange policy. There are restrictions as to number of times you can request an exchange and people who buy tickets from resale market or 3rd parties are probably going to have issues if their name and contact information aren’t associated with the tickets. But expectations may shift in toward hassle-free refunds, especially if the threat of Covid continues to loom in the background generally for some years to come.

Who You Calling Dormant?

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So much appreciation to Howard Sherman for his commentary on Twitter last week about a statement by the Broadway League that re-opening Broadway meant the return of a dormant industry.

In the tweets that followed the one above, Sherman notes that the 40 theaters that comprise Broadway are not the entire industry and that the artists and companies around the country have been far from dormant, expending a great deal of effort to reach out to communities with new approaches. Or by bringing renewed attention to underused formats like audio dramas.

The whole thread is only 10 tweets with a couple postscripts, but in case people were thinking of skipping it I wanted to call attention to his thoughts about the concept of “restart”:

Masks Still Matter A lot

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Last week Colleen Dilenschneider released recent findings compiled by her colleagues at IMPACTS Experience about audience willingness to return to cultural organizations. By and large, mask wearing still matters a great deal to potential audiences.

She offers the caveat that this data was collected during first quarter of 2021 so attitudes may shift as vaccination rates increase and the weather trends warmer. However, she points out that mask requirements became the top concern in their surveys last July and the number of people identifying that as a concern only increased. In this most recent survey, it averaged 7.9 out of 10 nationally for interactions with any public serving entity, not just cultural organizations. (If you haven’t seen her data before, it is organized regionally in terms of similarity of attitudes which doesn’t always align with geographic proximity.)

Pay particular attention to the last paragraph below:

Most potential visitors lean toward masks being “absolutely essential,” despite variance by region. Nationally (and including states not shown here), those who plan to attend visitor-serving entities say that mandatory masks are essential at a value of 7.9 on a 10.0 scale. On the whole, people who plan to visit any cultural organization in the next three months consider face coverings as essential to their safety.

[…]

Not requiring masks makes a meaningful number of people in every region uncomfortable. And here’s the kicker: Research suggests that not requiring masks will have a much greater negative impact on attendance than requiring them for the vast majority of organizations.

[…]

Not only that, the top issue contributing to onsite dissatisfaction for cultural organizations is still staff members neglecting to enforce mask mandates and social distancing rules. The safety of visitors is now identified as a primary role for staff members according to guests. It’s in our best interests to take that expectation seriously.

Stop Killing Kittens

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Last week Drew McManus encouraged arts marketers to break pre-Covid bad habits by renewed his plea to stop using cliched terms like “beloved.”  If you read his post closely you will notice he has been making the plea since 2014 when he created the hashtag #BanBeloved  (Which has probably be co-opted by those that oppose Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name.)

Drew asserts that every time an arts marketer uses the term “beloved,” a kitten dies.

So, you know if you won’t do it for the sake of your general community, think of the kittens.

Drew has identified a number of other objectionable adjectives, but others have reared their ugly heads and gotten over used in the interim. If you search your heart, you know what they are.

Earlier in April, Trevor O’Donnell made a similar plea about considering the language being used in marketing materials, encouraging people to focus on the audience and the shared experience.

Calling it a side-splitting, roll-in-the-aisles romp may be cute and catchy, and it may ring comfortingly familiar to older arts leaders, but it isn’t true and it’s not effective communication.

New audiences don’t respond to frivolous hyperbole. They want clear, honest, useful information that explains why your products matter to them. If what they’re looking for is a fun, stimulating way to create lasting memories with family, friends or loved ones, your job is to sell social experiences that offer lasting memories; i.e. if that memory is about sharing a funny play, you should probably say something like, “You’ll remember laughing together for a lifetime.”

O’Donnell attributes the use of hyperbole and focus on the organization vs. the audience to older arts administrators who are set in their ways. As I had noted a couple weeks back, there are a heck of a lot of advertisements for jobs at arts and culture organizations out there right now, particularly at the President/CEO/Vice-President level. It will be interesting if we see a significant shift in programming, promotional and operational practices over the next five years as a result of all this.

Is E-sports The Next Big College Degree?

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So here is something to keep on your radar and  consider the long term implications – Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest names in video gaming, donated $25 million to the University of Michigan to help them launch an esports team.  If you are not familiar with esports it is basically teams of people competing against each other on some of the marquee video game titles.   The competitors may be sitting down, but reflexes, timing, strategy, leadership and teamwork are significant determinants in success.

It is already fairly widespread and lucrative as hell which means it will inevitably continue to expand. Especially if Covid or other pandemics continues to be prevalent because the teams communicate over headsets and can therefore be easily isolated from each other.

So it is no surprise that universities are beginning to get on board. Not only is it an area of interest for students, some of them are already competing professionally.

Kotick’s enthusiasm to establish esports at Michigan is part of a bigger movement that has legitimized gaming as a path to a college degree and career.

There are nearly 200 colleges and universities nationwide with varsity esports programs and more than $16 million in scholarships is awarded to esports athletes each year.

The growth of collegiate esports allows institutions and their students to tap into a market that is expected to surpass $1.5 billion by 2023, per Esports Ecosystem Report.

Not only do video games present competition for live performance, (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said video gaming was a bigger source of worry for them than Disney & HBO streaming services), but also a potentially expanding source of employment for creatives.

The small university in southern Ohio at which I worked three years ago had long been recognized as a top 10 video game design program. It taught both programmers and artists and included classes in composing and designing sound/music for video games. There wasn’t an acting for video games class, but it did have a motion capture studio and independent companies in town were working on related technologies.

It is a lot more difficult to design and program for video games than most people imagine. Increasing demands for realism mean serious calculus for the physics and intense execution of detail in the art. As computing capacity and processing improves, it is only going to get worse–or better if you are a highly skilled creative being sought after by gaming companies.

After realizing their professors were right and enjoying playing video games does not translate into being able to create them, many students would change the focus of their majors. But they were still pretty adept and enthusiastic video gamers. And so 3-4 years ago, that small university in rural Ohio started an esports roster alongside their athletics teams.

Now there were other universities that started esports teams a few years ago as well, but the fact that a small university could have an organized a roster of ~50 competing on 6-7 game titles for years while the University of Michigan was operating at a recreational level provides some indication about the shifting dynamics of who is and can participate in esports.

Introspection and Funding Equity in NC

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Equity in funding decisions has become a hot topic of late.  Last week on the Americans for the Arts blog, Krista Terrell, Acting President for Arts & Science Council of Charlotte/Mecklenburg (ASC), the local arts agency for that North Carolina city and county, made a post discussing how an internal analysis of funding practices revealed just how lopsided distribution of funds had been in the period of 1991-2020. They found that

“…nine institutions each received more in operating support than all ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American) organizations combined.”

Terrell admits that fighting the inertia of status quo to effect change is going to take a lot of effort. She observed that in 1992 ASC fired the majority of its all-white board drawn from a core group of affluent ZIP codes in an attempt to diversify representation only to have the board gradually revert to an all-white membership again.

Likewise, there is institutional resistance to ASC’s desire to implement more equitable funding practices.

One president of a legacy organization told me, “I’m all for changing inequities as it relates to access,” but when I asked their thoughts about changing inequities related to funding, I was met with a long pause. If ASC wants its funding to go further, I was told, it should invest more in legacy organizations with existing infrastructure instead of grassroots organizations.

This is “the lie” at work. Think about what was said through the lens of equity. Equity is about everyone having the resources they need to move along together.

Another legacy organization wrote a Letter to the Editor. Some asked why I did not include the work they are doing and why they could not have been readers of the report and provide feedback. I was accused of not being inclusive.

This is not happening in a vacuum. Earlier this month, I saw a piece in the Charlotte Observer which reported the city of Charlotte was proposing to revamp the way the arts were funded, creating a different funding agency/board. There are indications across a number of news stories that existing funding methods were no longer sustainable.

It is unclear to me whether any of this is in response to ASC’s self study and therefore an attempt to make the process more inclusive or a reaction against that attempt. While the city is promising more money for the arts, the article says artists in Charlotte are skeptical and demanding greater transparency, equity and accountability in arts funding practices.

Meanwhile, the county of Mecklenburg says they have no intention of getting involved in doing the work they feel the Arts & Science Council is doing so well.

Time To Review – To Whom Are You Accountable?

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During the Covid pandemic there has been a fair bit of introspection and soul searching about arts and culture, the role they should have in people’s lives, and the medium through which the experience should be delivered.

Now that there is some optimism about a transition to a relatively better operational environment for businesses and other organizations,  (Yes, i am indeed taking pains not to use terms like “return to normal”), it is definitely time to think about how those theories will be manifested.

Vu Le linked to an important essay by Hildy Gottlieb addressing the question of to whom non-profits should be accountable. Her primary thesis is that it is illogical to view the organization as accountable to funders & donors. She dissects the illogic of the implications of a funder accountable position. Among her best examples is the following:

If organizations are primarily accountable to donors, and a donor dies, is the organization still accountable to that person? What if it’s been 30 years since they died, and the world has changed dramatically — are you still accountable to that person’s wishes? Or are you accountable to their heirs? What if the heirs don’t care about your mission — perhaps their mother was an animal lover, and they could never understand that part of her. Maybe they even hate your organization. Are you accountable to the second and third generations of a donor who loved you, even if her heirs do not?

Gottlieb says the organizational mission determines to whom you are accountable. If your mission is serving a certain group, but they take a backseat to funders, then you are not fulfilling your mission. She addresses the concept of there being no mission to execute without the money with the following anecdote:

I once found myself in conversation with board members from a federally funded health center, who all listed patient health as their highest priority. However, one board member kept insisting, “We can only prioritize patient care to the extent we have the money to do so.”

So I took a sheet of paper and wrote “Values Statement’ at the top. Then I wrote, “Our primary focus will always be the health of our patients, as long as we have the money to do so.” I asked if that is what they would like to post in their lobby.

Suddenly their sense of accountability shifted.

She also notes that in the United States the organization has tax-exempt status in return for providing a public service. The reason for being and accountability is the public service and not the money. The “good stewardship” of funds that results in underpaid staff who turn over at a high rate doesn’t help the organization to advance it’s mission.

“Focusing their primary accountability on the money, we see board members spend a huge percentage of their time discussing financial matters, and often zero time discussing what success would look like in their community”

Gottlieb also debunks the sense that fundraising is a result of relationship building, the oft voice sentiment “people give to people, not organizations.” She says no one is fooled that the relationship is more than a transactional one:

Here is what “fundraising is about relationships” really tells a donor:

If you give us money, we will be your friend.
If we think you will give us money, we will court you as our friend.
The more money you give us, the more friendly we will be.
If you fail to give us money, we will eventually stop calling you.

If we truly valued donors as people, we would stop categorizing them as LYBUNTs and SYBUNTs.

So much of what she writes can easily be applied to the way arts and cultural organizations approach donors/members/volunteers. While I often say it is worthwhile to read an article, I strongly emphasize the importance of reading this one and thinking about how the opportunity for a fresh start will change the way your organization operates moving forward.

I was considering putting such an emphatic statement at the beginning of this post, but considered that anyone who read this far would be more prepared to make the effort toward this goal.

I strongly suspect being more steadfast in prioritizing mission over money will make accomplishing progress in areas of equity and inclusion suddenly much easier than it was before.

Top Of Your Pyramid Is The Bottom Of Someone Else’s

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Hat tip to Vu Le at NonProfitAF for posting a link on social media to an essay on Medium comparing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need to the Blackfeet Nation’s similar concept.  Maslow had lived among the Blackfeet in Alberta, Canada for six weeks when he was developing his theories. If you read the article the question of whether he appropriated the concept without crediting the Blackfeet is a complicated one.

What immediately appealed to me was the point that while Maslow’s hierarchy ends with self-actualization, that is where the Blackfeet model begins.  To a great degree it is the difference between an individually focused society and a communal one. The assumption seems to be that the community will provide the food, shelter, clothing and safety needs that provide the base of Maslow’s model and therefore you start life working on the self-actualization part and then one moves on to contributing to the welfare and perpetuity of the culture.

The Blackfoot model describes the inverse of Maslow’s Hierarchy:

1. Self-actualization. Where Maslow’s hierarchy ends with self-actualization, the Blackfoot model begins here. In their view, we are each born into the world as a spark of divinity, with a great purpose embedded in us. That means that we arrive on earth self-actualized.
[..]

4. Community Actualization. In tending to our basic needs and safety, the tribe equips us to manifest our sacred purpose, designing a model of education that supports us in expressing our gifts. Community actualization describes the Blackfoot goal that each member of the tribe manifest their purpose and have their basic needs met.
5. Cultural Perpetuity. Each member of the tribe will one day be gone. So passing on their knowledge of how to achieve community actualization and harmony with the land and other peoples gives rise to an endurance of the Blackfoot way of life, or cultural perpetuity.

The big reason this appealed to me is that it aligns with a post I wrote last May, Creativity Is Not The Last Thing People Need

As I wrote then:

It should be noted that despite the popularity of this model, there is no scientific data to back it and studies have found that different cultures prioritize needs differently.

I mention these criticisms of Maslow’s hierarchy because it is easy to look at this pyramid and get the impression that creativity has to wait until all these other needs are met. This reinforces the idea that arts and culture are a luxury that should yield before all the necessities have been addressed. I think we all know there will always be something else that needs to be solved if you subscribe to that thinking.

When I wrote that post, I had linked to the Wikipedia article on Maslow’s hierarchy which notes the Blackfeet influence but I didn’t know enough about it at the time to understand the differences in world view to apply it.  I certainly can’t make any definitive statements about how expressions of creativity might be viewed and valued in a Blackfeet society, but from the little bit that discussed in the Medium article it seems it would be viewed as more integral to everyone’s basic identity and capacity vs. a gift bestowed/possessed by a chosen few.

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