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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.

Maps Upon Maps, Soon Useful Data Appears

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As part of developing the cultural masterplan for our community, people are being encouraged to contribute information to a cultural resource map. The goal is to not only map the active assets in the community, but the potential ones as well.

I have written about this aspect of crowdmapping before. You don’t only notate theatres, art galleries, murals, dance schools, historical markers, etc but shuttered movie houses, former community centers and places where things potentially might occur.

A beautiful fountain in the center of town? Good place for an impromptu concert. Empty lot overgrown with weeds? Our next community garden or maybe a pop-up sculpture park. Blank walls of an abandoned building? We see murals in our future.

In my post two years ago, I used an example which talked about using paper and colored stickers, but as you might imagine there are apps available for this sort of thing as well.

The executive director of the local arts alliance is taking classes in GIS mapping. The goal is to integrate the cultural asset maps with an overlay of every bit of data the county collects and maps. Not only will we (and local government officials) be able to see which neighborhoods lack cultural assets, we will be able to see where public transportation does and doesn’t run thereby limiting access to assets around the county. Likewise, they can cross reference things like frequency of events with trashcan placement in order to better deploy waste disposal.

There is already an app for reporting problems like potholes, broken streetlights, erosion to the county so there are likely to be all sorts of interesting correlations that emerge over time as more data gets added.

There is potential for all sorts of different analysis, including planning and zoning of hotels, housing, supermarkets, parking meters and the like. I think most people are excited by the idea that they will be able to cross reference data they haven’t even anticipated needing yet.

Here is the form we in Macon, GA are using to collect data. The mapping is still in its earliest stages so very few assets have been added yet. (I plead guilty to not doing my part.) There is a plan to cross reference this map with organizations , buildings, historical markers, etc already listed in different databases in order to populate the map with the lower hanging fruit.

Even if you don’t have access to map overlays, the simple paper and sticker process can be an important step toward a constructive conversation. As I noted in my post from a couple years ago, the process

… can go a long way toward solving the problem of involving people who are most impacted by decisions but may not show up to formal meetings. People who don’t feel like they are represented or have their voices heard can gain a measure of confidence that their contributions matter when they are made responsible for imagining/suggesting what a neighborhood might become.

This can especially be true for online submission tools. If you enter the hidden gem attraction at the end of your cul-de-sac and see it appear on the map a couple days later, you can gain the sense that you can contribute in a way that makes a visible difference. There is also an ability to bring recognition to often overlooked information preserved in a neighborhood, but not widely known in the community.  The grave marker of a civil rights advocate at the edge of what is now a cornfield, for example.

Though obviously, this only works if the serving as gatekeepers of the maps are prompt in approving the additions and responsive to the needs of the participants. I’m sure I am not the only one that had to jump through hoops to get Google Maps to correctly reflect closed streets and a change to one way traffic flow.

This Is Not The Show I Auditioned For. How The Heck Did I Get Here?

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So if it isn’t bad enough that actors auditioning for a part are being evaluated on the social media following they have cultivated along with their looks and talent, they are now being asked to record and submit their own auditions.

Actor Melissa Errico wrote a piece for the New York Times about how possessing home recording studio and the requisite mastery to use it (or a friend with the aforementioned space, equipment and skills) is now increasingly required to audition for the stage.

The self-tape is the latest torturous incarnation of the ancient abusive art of the audition, the primal act of our craft. And the rules of engagement, even in suburban basements, are formal and strict:

You are expected to perform your lines in good lighting, framed horizontally, in medium close-up, with a microphone.

You are often asked to produce two extra pieces of audition material, the first, a “slate” in which you stand in front of the camera, showing your full body, and introduce yourself by name, height and role you are auditioning for.

You may also be asked to sign a Trumpian nondisclosure agreement and pose with it, your face holding a paper contract just under your chin.

Auditioning has always been a torturous affair and the article raises the point about whether it is better to be summarily dismissed in person after waiting for hours to audition, or at a distance by someone reviewing a video it took you 20 minutes to make.

There is a split on both sides of the casting desk. Some directors feel it is too impersonal and commodifies actors. Others feel that self-taped submission opens the field of potential actors to the entire world.

Some actors feel less anxiety with the tape, others feel it is too detached, impersonal and lacks even a hint of feedback necessary to improve.

Raul Esparza, a Tony-nominated Broadway actor and the star of “Law and Order,” acknowledged that he often self-tapes to get work, even as the process edges toward absurdity.

Auditioning for a superhero movie, “I wasn’t told the name of the film, role or the plot, and was asked to tape a scene from ‘Good Will Hunting.’” The feedback was, “Listen, they loved you, but you weren’t exactly right for it.”

What wasn’t he right for? “Good Will Hunting”? Or an unknown hero in an unseen script?

Errico writes she discovered she got cast based on one of her videos, but has no idea how it happened.

That week, I got a text that I was cast in a Sofia Coppola film that I had never heard of, in a role I had never read for and have no idea how I got. Though I was utterly delighted to get the part, the process baffled me.

The lack of transparency may be the biggest issue with this process. Money could be exchanging hands just to be placed in a pile of videos to be considered. You would never know you were immediately out of the running because your thumb drive should have discreetly wrapped in a $100 bill when you handed it to the assistant to the assistant.

Judging from the lack of details provided the two actors quote above, someone could inadvertently find themselves associated with an objectionable company, individual or project.

People with the money to pay for better lighting, make up, digital enhancements to voice and face will have an advantage over others.

Just as the push for more diversity in casting is seeing results, an obscure process and criteria may erode any progress that had been made. The old process really did nothing to advance equitable casting in itself, but having everyone audition in the same room with the same equipment, whittling it down and doing callbacks with people in a similar condition is an equalizer by comparison. (Instead of complaint being everyone is using the same audition piece this year, it will be about the use of the same video filter and green screen background.)

The director could be watching videos on a big screen in the quiet and comfort of her house and the choreographer could be watching on her phone sitting in the middle seat of a five hour flight. You’d never know you didn’t get the part because the in-seat charger wasn’t working and the phone went dead before the choreographer got to you.

As I end this entry, thinking back to the social media following requirement –I am sure I am not the first to say it, but it occurs to me that there is a contradiction in wanting your performers to have a strong social media following so that they can help promote the shows, and then forbidding those followers from taking pictures/video of their favored person when they come to see the show.

[NB: Entry edited 5 min after initial publication to add mention that lack of transparency about process could find people associated with objectionable projects for which they wouldn’t have auditioned.]

A Pulse Just Means The Person Is Alive, Not That It Is Healthy or Happy

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Joi Ito who serves on the boards of both the Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation wrote a piece for Wired on the importance of finding the right metrics for measuring non-profit effectiveness.

He notes that if you use circulation as a measure, public libraries have been failing for years given that circulation has been continually falling.

But if you only looked at that figure, you’d miss the fascinating transformation public libraries have undergone in recent years. They’ve taken advantage of grants to become makerspaces, classrooms, research labs for kids, and trusted public spaces in every way possible…If we had focused our funding to increase just the number of books people were borrowing, we would have missed the opportunity to fund and witness these positive changes.

As I have quoted/paraphrased Carter Gillies many times, including just last week, just because you can measure it doesn’t mean the result is relevant or useful to you.

Ito writes that identifying relevant metrics is difficult and there is a tendency to default to what is easiest to measure.

The problem is that one pretty much never deals with an issue that is not part of a complex, complicated system. Indications of that problem being addressed successfully is not an indication that everything is running well.

He uses the example of iron levels as a measure of health. While iron is important as a measure of anemia, it can’t tell you about the health of a body by itself. All the medical tests you can conduct can’t tell you about the happiness of the person. (I daresay being subjected to all the tests will be detrimental to the happiness of the person.)

Ito goes on, (my emphasis)

…simple metrics often aren’t enough when it comes to quantifying success. They typically are easier to measure, and they’re not unimportant.

[…]

Similarly, while I believe rigor and best practices are important and support the innovation and thinking going into these metrics when it comes to all types of philanthropy, I think we risk oversimplifying problems and thus having the false sense of clarity that quantitative metrics tend to create.

One of the reasons philanthropists sometimes fail to measure what really matters is that the global political economy primarily seeks what is efficient and scalable. Unfortunately, efficiency and scalability are not the same as a healthy system.

As an example of the breadth and long term vision and planning that is perhaps necessary to employ, Ito cites the 1300 Ise Shrine in Japan which is completely rebuilt by craftsman every 20 years, supported by a supply chain management plan operating on a scope of 200 years. The measure of success of the shrine is entirely opposite the expectations of growth and scalability placed on most non-profit entities today.

The lumber mostly comes from the shrine’s forest managed in 200 year time scales as part of a national afforestation plan dating back centuries. The number of people working at Ise Shrine isn’t growing, the shrine isn’t trying to expand its business, and its workers are happy and healthy—the shrine is flourishing. Their primary concern is the resilience of the forest, rivers, and natural environment around the shrine. How would we measure their success and what can we learn from their flourishing as we try to manage our society and our planet?

Is The Violence And Sorrow Of The World Too Strong For Art?

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Somewhat apropos of the whole value of arts theme of my posts this week, novelist Michael Chabon had a letter titled “What’s the Point,” printed in The Paris Review announcing that he would be stepping down after 9 years as Chairman of the Board at the MacDowell Colony.

When he starts out, he basically sounds defeated, observing that despite overcoming his introverted tendencies to advance the slogan that, “MacDowell makes a place in the world for artists, because art makes the world a better place,” the world is much worse now than 9 years ago.

Or, I wonder if it’s possible that I was wrong, that I’ve always been wrong, that art has no power at all over the world and its brutalities, over the minds that conceive them and the systems that institutionalize them.

[,,,]

Maybe the world in its violent turning is too strong for art. Maybe art is a kind of winning streak, a hot hand at the table, articulating a vision of truth and possibility that, while real, simply cannot endure. Over time, the odds grind you down, and in the end the house always wins.

Or maybe the purpose of art, the blessing of art, has nothing to do with improvement, with amelioration, with making this heartbreaking world, this savage and dopey nation, a better place.

As he goes on, his tone shifts:

All the world’s power over us lies in its ability to persuade us that we are powerless to understand each other, to feel and see and love each other, and that therefore it is pointless for us to try. Art knows better, which is why the world tries so hard to make art impossible, to immiserate artists, to ban their work, silence their voices, and why it’s so important for all of us to, quite simply, make art possible.

The metaphors he uses defending the value of art revolve around the personal experience and connection. This dovetails with the concept raised in yesterday’s post that people don’t believe in the value of arts and culture in their lives unless they or a loved or a loved one has a direct experience.

I don’t know why, but there was something about his prose that put me in mind of the “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus” letter. My inner monologue commented, “Yes, but the situation is much darker and more cynical than back then.”

I looked up the Yes, Virginia letter and found it had a lot of parallels to my recent posts.

I forgot the letter started out referencing, “the skepticism of a skeptical age.”  And maybe I subliminally made a connection with the idea of people only giving credence to things they personally experienced because Francis Church continues, “They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”

And then of course, the passage that pretty much describes the aspirations of those in the arts, culture and creative field:

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

I have to say, I didn’t start out to write an optimistic post. I actually felt Chabon moved to feel-good sentimentality out of a sense of obligation to end on a higher note.

That his letter evoked memories of another letter I was moved to seek out and I was delighted to find alignment in everything I talked about this week sort of proves Chabon’s point I guess.

Not Words, But Deeds

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Last week Doug Borwick wrote a blog post saying it wasn’t enough to tell people that the arts have value in their lives.

As I started reading his post, I agreed with this sentiment because we have long acknowledged the argument that the arts are good for you isn’t really that compelling for people. I have talked about how the arts shouldn’t be viewed as a solution to all sorts of problems a number of times before.

But there is also the basic experience we all have growing up being told that food/medicine/classes/experiences are good for us. We roil when forced to consume such things under the eye of parents and authority figures and often happily reject them when provided the freedom of choice. Sometimes we come back to them with appreciation, but other times the bias is so ingrained, we resist any opportunity presented to engage with these things again.

As Borwick’s post continued though, the situation became a little more complicated in my eyes. He quotes the former CEO of National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Jonathan Katz about how little stock people put in empirical evidence about art.

“Neither professionals [or community leaders] in the relevant disciplines nor the general public put sufficient stock in . . . studies to alter policy. This disinclination to believe is rooted in unexamined assumptions that the arts do not touch the lives of more than a select few.“

Borwick continues, (his emphasis)

In other words, people do not believe the stories or the studies because they don’t believe they can be true. For many, the arts are so inconsequential, so void of impact on their own lives, any proof of their power is literally unbelievable.

So whether you are trying to convince people of the merit of the arts or the value of your organization or you are simply trying to get them to attend your events, there is a profound chasm of disbelief to be overcome. The way across this divide is not by words. It is action alone that will work. Being perceived as valuable must be earned by doing things that make us so. If we have to tell people we are valuable, we’re not to them.

Now to echo my friend Carter Gillies, just because you can measure something doesn’t mean what you have measured is relevant. We all know that the amount of revenue something garners has no relationship to the artistic value or quality of that thing.

But what Borwick is saying means that regardless of whether you are providing accurate data derived of the most rigorous methodology possible or not, people won’t believe the evidence if it doesn’t align with their personal experience. (Which granted, doesn’t just apply to the arts and also contributes to things like the current political divide in the U.S.)

So in the end, it is actions that enter someone’s experience, including that of individuals they value, that will serve as proof of the value of arts/culture/creativity.

Knitting Needles Over Netflix

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So via Georgia Council for the Arts’ social media is a study on Artsy finding that many Americans would rather do something creative than watch TV or surf the net.

I initially wondered if there might be a bias to the study seeing it was commissioned by “Bluprint, NBCUniversal’s subscription service for online creative learning,” even though I am pretty sure NBCUniversal probably wouldn’t want to advertise the fact people would rather not be watching tv or streaming content.

The study was conducted by IPSOS with over 2000 randomly selected people so the results are probably relatively dependable. They asked participants about their creative hobby which was defined as “anything from drawing and painting to knitting, baking, making music, beer brewing, or journaling.”

What the study found was pretty interesting (my emphasis):

Americans have creative hobbies, but they’re hungry for more creative stimulation.

  • 75 percent of participants reported having at least one creative hobby.
  • The most popular activities were baking, gardening, cooking (beyond everyday meals), home decor, and DIY crafting.
  • 68 percent said that they are eager to use their creativity more often.

Participants with creative hobbies reported that making things by hand brings them joy.

  • 79 percent said they “love the process of creating something from scratch.”
  • 88 percent agreed with the statement: “Successfully finishing a creative project brings me joy.”
  • 75 percent reported that they “make mistakes along the way,” but that doesn’t lessen their “enjoyment.”

Some would sacrifice streaming TV and movies for their creative hobbies.

  • Of those who have Netflix, 77 percent would rather give up their subscription than give up their creative hobby.

Parents want their children to have ample opportunities for creativity.

  • 77 percent agreed with the statement “I want my child(ren) to be more creative than I got the opportunity to be when I was a child.”
  • 61 percent agreed that “public education doesn’t focus enough on creative arts.”
  • 72 percent agreed that “standardized test scores are prioritized more than creative thinking in schools.”
  • 79 percent of parents would prefer that their children “make just enough to get by in a creative job that they love,” rather than “make lots of money in a job they aren’t passionate about.”

Those findings I bolded really jumped out at me. I was interesting to me that they asked about mistakes and failures being a disincentive to continuing their hobby. It made me feel like the survey creators understood some of the underlying concepts behind creative expression. (Versus a sense that only something that is marketable has value.)

The bit about giving up Netflix before their hobby probably runs counter to a lot of the assumptions we all make about how people prefer to spend their free time.

I was also surprised that nearly 80% of parents wanted their kids to achieve just enough in their careers to support their creative pursuits rather than make a lot of money. Honestly, I wondered if it was the way the question was phrased or if people knew what answer they were ideally supposed to chose rather than what they would push their kids toward in practice.

My cynicism aside though, it was good to read something outside the circle of content I regularly consume specifically mentioning that people are recognizing that they have the capacity for creative expression and have begun to exercise it.

If Creative Industries Have Such Great Economic Impact, Why Ain’t I Paid More?

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On Monday I wrote a post in which I mentioned an observation a person made about how having their state arts council organized under their state’s business development division made it difficult to disentangle the economic impact numbers of creative activities in advocacy efforts.

Artsjournal.com featured an article from Prospect Magazine (UK) that runs along similar lines, positing that an emphasis on the economic benefit of creative industries runs counter to artist’s best interests by valuing marketability over creative risk taking.

Whereas before artists and cultural practitioners could engage in art for art’s sake, now they are judged, ranked and scored on how much private investment they can secure. So film students are taught how to budget at the expense of how to create a mise-en-scène. Sculptors learn about the cost efficiency of materials rather than the work of da Vinci. Children do art classes because they are seen as investments in their future career rather than simply nurturing their well-being.

The article’s author, Oli Mould, also mentions the re-classification of creative industries to encompass a greater scope of activities in order to bolster economic output numbers.

For example, the “software” subsector—which consisted mainly of accountancy and administration staff—was augmented in 2005 which added £4.7bn to the creative industries’ overall contribution overnight.

Mould points out that despite all this economic impact artists and cultural practitioners apparently bring to the table, it hasn’t improved the collective bargaining power of these people. They are still being paid low wages or being asked to donate their goods and services for exposure.

(Slight aside: It will probably come as no surprise to many that a couple weeks ago someone at a meeting I attended mentioned a company which had recently completed a multi-million dollar wing to their corporate HQ was asking artists to donate art for their walls. )

A few weeks ago I listened to an interview Erik Gensler at Capacity Interactive conducted with Diane Ragsdale. Gensler made repeated reference to the negative impacts of neo-liberalism and capitalism on the arts. At the time,  I thought he was strangely fixated on neo-liberalism.

It took me a couple of weeks to recognize bringing up the term wasn’t that strange at all.  I often take issue in my posts with the utilitarian view of arts and culture as a solution to problems. That utilitarian view is a by-product of neo-liberalism.  Mould links to an article on neo-liberalism and the arts as applied to the UK in the Prospect piece.

ROI of Classical Music Training

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Over on The Baffler, Kate Wagner, takes a look at the tenuous state in which classically trained musicians operate in the face of income threatening conditions like the lock-out/strike currently occurring at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

I came across the link on Arts and Letter Daily which introduced it with, “Classical music is a high-water mark for culture. Being a classical musician, however, is a job — a crappy job.”

Reading Wagner’s account, I would have to agree. In addition to the cost of formal training with private instructors, universities and conservatories, she also lists the myriad other costs involved including summer intensives, festivals, competitions, internships, memberships, certifications and the choice of buying or renting instruments.

Last week Drew McManus pointed out the rising cost of strings his wife buys and analyzed the lifetime cost of maintaining a string instrument. His broader analysis of instrument costs, with nifty infographics, is worth a look. It is something to whip out when people say musicians shouldn’t be paid to do something they love.

Wagner had initially trained to be a violinist and she expresses some bitterness upon realizing that the ability to access the brand name training experiences that will provide access to the next tier of prestigious training was out reach of her family’s finances. She expresses anger at being encouraged onward and further into debt by teachers who knew that the path to an orchestra didn’t lay through the training she received.

One composer who currently works as an adjunct professor at a small Midwestern college decried classical music’s entrenched reputational economy. “I feel like we’re witnessing the development . . . of a two-tiered system,” he said, “with musicians who went to non-famous and poorly endowed schools on the bottom, with musicians who went to the Ivy Leagues of music on top…. What’s more, he argued, this uneven system of class and reputational privilege leads to more and more exploitation:

There’s a very strong sense of identity shame for a lot of musicians who went to non-famous schools, who got perfectly wonderful educations, but who didn’t have the grace of some famous asshole to notarize their work. Basically, it creates opportunities for exploitation. Students are told to go to these famous places to get a good degree. They live beyond their means . . . they open themselves up to labor, sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, depending on which monster they’re assigned to work with.

She mentions another colleague teaching middle school in Texas who has felt her opportunities have been limited because she doesn’t have the resources to gain the imprimatur accorded by participation in Drum Corps International competitions and workshops.

She notes that in this environment, it is pretty difficult to bring greater diversity to the industry, even with scholarships facilitating the process, due to the high debt one will accrue and low wages pretty much everyone will receive upon securing a performance position.

She ends the piece with a bit of solidarity for the striking musicians.

Sure, I may have been a failure in classical music, but as my colleagues and comrades schlep their instruments around in substitute gigs from orchestra to orchestra, unable to get a full-time job, teaching their students, paying off their debts with poverty wages from performing or adjuncting, and walking the picket line, the least I can do is write about it.

Tell Your Tales of Advocacy

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Question for readers- Have you ever attended an arts advocacy day at your state capital or Washington, DC?

Actually, for those readers outside the US, I would be interested in hearing about your experience as well.

I recently attended a meeting where the topic of arts advocacy day attendance came up and the experiences people related were something of a mixed bag.

I realized that while I have often been to meetings where people have been encouraged to participate in an advocacy day, I have seldom heard people discuss their perceptions of the efficacy of those experiences. This seems strange given that I have heard/read plenty of people’s thoughts on the good, bad and ugly of attending conferences.

In terms of good experiences, one person at the meeting I attended talked about participating in arts advocacy activities organized in Washington DC by Americans for the Arts where there was a type of advocacy boot camp one night and then visits to legislators the next day. Even in those meetings that were only attended by a staffer, there was a feeling of things being accomplished.

In terms of experiences that felt less than productive, people talked about attending events where no one of significance attended and no office visits had been organized. Another spoke of events that were a lot of exciting pageantry, but didn’t feel like they did anything to move the needle in a positive way.

One person brought up a situation that I hadn’t considered. Because their state arts council is organized under an economic development division, the contribution of arts and culture alone wasn’t touted separately from hotels, sports and gambling during their state’s big event.

It all made me curious about other people’s experiences collectively advocating for arts and culture at a seat of government on defined day(s).

Who does it well and why? Who could do it better?

If I get some good responses, maybe I will turn it into an ArtsHacker.com post (or arrange for someone to make a guest post.)

Fine Line Between Collaboration And Exploitation

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There was an interesting article in The Atlantic this past July about how the Navy was working on crewing ships with a few generalists who would handle many jobs rather than many experts focusing on a narrower range of functions.

At first, when they were talking about everyone being cross-trained to fill a number of different functions, I started thinking it was a good example for a post about eliminating siloed job functions in arts organizations. Basically the idea that everyone has some role in promoting shows, interacting with audiences and donors, etc., rather operating as if these things were solely marketing, front of house and development department jobs.

But as I looked at some of the examples they were providing, I realized there was a pretty thin line between eliminating silos and trying to get fewer employees to juggle more responsibility.

The article mentions Zappos

…famously did away with job titles a few years back, employees are encouraged to take on multiple roles by joining “circles” that tackle different responsibilities.

Which sounded to me like an attempt to cross-train people and eliminate silos. But in the same paragraph used the example of SkyWest airlines:

…looking for “cross utilized agents” capable of ticketing, marshaling and servicing aircraft, and handling luggage.

Which sounds more like trying to hire one person to do four jobs. Granted, Zappos may be doing the exact same thing and just found better framing language to describe it.

This is not to say there isn’t some validity for this to increasingly become a model for employment in the future, whether it feels collaborative or exploitative. The article notes that automation is causing the list of what skills are important for future employees to acquire to be revised at increasingly shorter intervals.

Testing conducted by the Navy seemed to indicate that people who were able to quickly notice a change in situation and re-prioritize tasks were better suited for their plan to crew ships with generalists than people who contentiously completed their tasks.

This group, Hambrick found, was high in “conscientiousness”—a trait that’s normally an overwhelming predictor of positive job performance. We like conscientious people because they can be trusted to show up early, double-check the math, fill the gap in the presentation, … What struck Hambrick as counterintuitive and interesting was that conscientiousness here seemed to correlate with poor performance.

[…]

The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.” To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.

High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future? If that’s the case, some important implications would arise.

The concept that short attention spans and lack of follow through are a winning combination for employability may depress a lot of readers. You may be interested to learn that quite a bit of stuff broke down on Navy ships that were crewed in this manner, requiring repairs by civilian contractors or adding about 20 people to the ship crews.

However, this doesn’t mean that the idea is unworkable. There is a good chance the concept will become viable with a revised design of the ship operating environments and crew training.

What is interesting about the article is that it presents adaptability and contentiousness as complementary skillsets, at least for the moment. Which is good because our mental capacity to juggle distinct streams of information and make decisions diminishes as we age.

We Love Our Shows, And It Shows

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about American Theatre’s reporting in May on a Wallace Foundation supported audience building effort at Opera Theatre St. Louis.  American Theatre just published another piece about a different Wallace Foundation supported effort at Portland Center Stage (PCS).

As I wrote in my earlier post, one of the things I value about these Wallace case studies is that they discuss all the unexpected outcomes, both successes and failures.

Among the insights that caught my attention was PCS’s realization that in order to achieve their goal of diversifying their audience, they should target by age rather than some definition of diversity. .

“But it became clearer and clearer to me that we should target age.” At the time, in 2013, Portland had seen a huge influx of transplants between the ages of 25 and 45, and this population was now the most diverse age group in the city. Targeting them, Fuhrman reasoned, was a way to kill two birds with one stone, “tapping the most diverse population of the city while focusing on the age group.”

Most of the efforts discussed in the article are those focused on connecting with this age group. In surveying 25-45 year old current and lapsed audience members as well as non-attendees whom they identified as being inclined to attend, they collected some good information about where and how to advertise shows.

They also made an effort to provide all sorts of pre- and post-show events in an effort to enhance attendee experience in every possible way. Managing Director Cynthia Fuhrman says, “The theory was that the value add would deepen people’s commitment to return.”

However, they ended up discovering that less is more.

But interestingly, feedback from the focus groups actually led PCS to reduce the number of engagement programs in the grant’s second year. “We thought we had to do something every night,” says Furhman, which proved “exhausting on staff. But when we pulled back on programming, the numbers actually went up. It was deeper engagement. Quality of the program was more important than quantity.”

Another discovery they made that ran counter to their expectations was that people didn’t necessarily want to see stories set in the Northwest or written by playwrights in the region, despite the fact these were the best attended shows.

Interestingly, market research from the Wallace Foundation grant found that audiences in Portland were in fact not inherently more interested in plays set in the Northwest or written by Northwest playwrights, despite the fact they brought in larger audiences. Results like this, that disconfirm expectations, call for critical analysis. PCS hypothesized that perhaps the greater turnout had to do with better marketing, which might reflect their own internal investment in these shows more than audiences’ enthusiasm, but there is as yet no solid conclusion about why they outperformed.

Personally, I would credit internal investment in an event as being a stronger factor in the success of shows than we imagine it is. Which is not to say that shows we really adore won’t be flops. The subject matter may not resonate with the community at large or we may speak of the event in terms that aren’t relevant to people outside our profession.

On the other hand, I am sure we can all identify events that suffered due to our lack of enthusiasm or succeeded despite our worst efforts. Love isn’t the only ingredient in the success of a show, but advocacy sounds a lot more organic when there is authentic enthusiasm behind it.

The fate of PCS’s loyalty program provides something of a lesson about making sure technology will be compatible before investing a lot of time and money into development and implementation.

PCS hired a web developer to create an online loyalty portal which would allow members to earn rewards by attending shows and interacting with PCS online. But, while its launch attracted 3,500 sign-ups, PCS recently put the portal on hiatus, as the program did not integrate with the ticketing platform Tessitura. Because the loyalty app and the database couldn’t talk to each other, it became unwieldy for audience members to use and staff to manage. Fuhrman and the portal developers still hope that integration might be possible in the future.

As I have written before, I really appreciate the fact that the Wallace Foundation provided grantees with the funding and permission to try things out and make mistakes that provide valuable insights to both the grantees and the rest of the arts and culture community.

The Hunger That Propels Through Bad Weather And Troubles

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Last week I was in Minneapolis for the Arts Midwest conference. (Minnesota Orchestra, what was that party at your place Friday night? It looked and sounded awesome.)

The conference was marked by the transition of Arts Midwest’s leadership from David Fraher’s 35+ year tenure to that of Torrie Allen, as the new President and CEO. I was initially worried about how Allen was going to fill David’s shoes, but from the moment he opened his mouth it was apparent he was quite comfortable in his own shoes.

Mary Anne Carter, current chair of the National Endowment of the Arts spoke of David’s career at Arts Midwest which spanned the tenure of nine  National Endowment for the Arts chairpersons. (Former chair Jane Chu sent video congratulations.)

You can read a transcript of his farewell address, but it doesn’t quite capture the emotion in his voice the way the recording does.

The one part that really touched me was when he enjoined the audience to think about a time you passed on the gift of a creative experience to someone and it lit a fire within them. He goes on to relate his own story at a performance of Death of A Salesman in a high school gym.

Nearly 40 years ago, I sat in a high school gymnasium in Pinedale, Wyoming and watched as maybe two hundred people… ranchers and oilmen, their spouses, and their children…arrived out of a cold and storming night. They came into the gym, shook thick snow off their hats and jackets, put blankets and cushions on the bleachers, drank coffee and hot chocolate from thermoses, chatted with their neighbors, and waited.

[…]

And while I was there to gather data for a site visit report, what I realized and understood in the end was much more powerful than any data point.

Those families had driven 50, 75, even 100 miles in a hard, early spring snowstorm. They were likely worried about their cattle and their sheep, their finances and their unavoidable drive back through the valley and the night. But for those two and a half hours, they were mesmerized by a stunning performance, by amazing actors, in a school gymnasium. And at the end of the play, they stood and hollered and clapped. Many…myself included…wept. And then they gathered their blankets and coats and said quick goodbyes to their neighbors and friends and drove home in the dark with the actors’ voices still echoing in their heads

The thing that touched me most about this passage was the acknowledgement of the worries and concerns of the audience members. Often when we talk about how people were affected by seeing a performance, there is a recognition that something has changed for people due to their experience. Seldom is there an acknowledgment of what audiences are bringing with them to a performance.

People these days may have so many options available to them that they aren’t hungry enough for an experience that they will drive 100 miles through a snow storm to see a play. Even if they are coming a shorter distance in better weather, they aren’t arriving as a blank slate upon which the memories of a great experience may be written or even as a jumbled slate which will be straightened by the impact of the experience.  They may forget their worries for a time or may be fortunate enough to have their perspective about their lives changed. The burden they bear may feel lighter for having the experience, especially for having shared the experience with family and friends, but it is still there.

He may not have intended it, but the organization of thoughts in his address resonated with my belief that the value of the arts is not prescriptive. The experience in the high school may have had a lasting impact upon them, one they will recall to this day 40 years later, but there was an underlying sense it didn’t cure the problems of their lives.

Still, even if people aren’t driving 100 miles in a snowstorm, toting their own snacks and seat cushions, to see a performance, the hunger needing to be satiated is still as great.

Revisiting Deliberate Practice

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Last Tuesday I wrote a post on some recent research about the value of deliberate practice. Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to read a little more on the recent study. Come to find out, this recent bit of research (Macnamara & Maitra) was an attempt to replicate the a study about deliberate practice conducted in Germany in 1993 (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer). I mention this because some of the posts I made about deliberate practice in the past was based on Ericsson, et. al research.

Macnamara & Maitra were unable to replicate all the results of Ericsson study, finding that deliberate practice only accounted for a 26% variance in the difference in ability between violinists versus the 48% difference reported in 1993. They say:

26% of performance variance is not an inconsequential amount. However, this amount does not support the claim that performance levels can ‘largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice’

The most recent research attributes this to bias built into the design of the 1993 research as well as inconsistent definitions of deliberate practice. As a result, in their conclusion they say deliberate practice alone can’t account for the differences of expertise between elite performers .

However, they do suggest that the training regimen of violinists today might also be a factor in the smaller variance. In the 1993 group, many had never entered a competition. The best violinists had entered about 3 competitions; good ones about 1; and less accomplished around 0.

Compare to those in the most recent study where the best entered about 13; good around 8-9; and least accomplished about 3.  The worst in the most current study might be evaluated higher than some of those in the 1993 study.

As I was looking through my blog feed over the weekend, it just so happened that Marginal Revolution linked to a post on Cal Newport’s blog where he reprints a letter from a pianist responding to an earlier post Newport made about deliberate practice.

One of the things the pianist discusses is the value of variety in pursuit of mastery:

Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder.
“Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”

In the post the pianist was responding to, Newport wrote:

To summarize these results:

  • The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
  • but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
  • and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

Both these posts were made in 2011 and Newport was citing the 1993 Ericsson, et. al study. However, the most recent study by Macnamara & Maitra found something very similar.

…we found no statistically significant differences in accumulated practice alone to age 18 between the best and good violinists. In fact, the majority of the best violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the average amount of the good violinists.

I should note that the research tracks practice from age 4 to 20 so the subjects are all students whose level of proficiency is determined around 18-20 years old. My read of Macnamara & Maitra is that they see this as evidence of inherent talent making up for less practice rather than the quality of that lesser amount of practice was much higher.

If you are thinking that perhaps those evaluated as having more skill had better teachers, the most recent research found:

Simply put, there is no evidence to suggest that teacher-designed practice activities are more relevant to improving performance than practice activities designed by the performer.

Granted, this doesn’t diminish the value of a better teacher. Presumably any self-designed routine of an 18 year old is going to be heavily informed by their teacher even if they are aren’t strictly following a dictated practice regimen. You may chalk it up to talent, either on the part of the performer or teacher, being able to identify and implement what is needed to obtain greater proficiency makes the difference between quantity and quality.

A World, And Its Participants, Continues To Grow

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Last year I wrote about a live roleplay drama loosely based on Dungeons and Dragons/Pathfinder roleplaying game mechanics that a guy was experimenting with.  This year he was back at it again. Apparently he felt like it was moving in a good direction and quit his job in order to focus on more fully developing his product with an eye to doing residencies at universities and performing arts centers.

As I mentioned last year, what the creator, Martin Noyes, does is work with a core group of people for about a week developing characters for a story in a fantasy setting. When asked if the story I was seeing was set in the same world as last year, he pulled out a map and pointed out three-four other continents/landmasses where future stories will take place.

They had about 8 performances over two weeks, all improvised based on character goals/motivations and dice rolls. Each performance started where the last one left off, providing some incentive to attend on multiple days. Noyes is adept at gauging how to balance allowing the actors time to develop their character through active interactions and poignant silences against moving the action along with a narrative framework that keeps things from dragging and devolving.

He has done a fair bit of work since last year in terms of streamlining the mechanics to make things move along faster. As a result, he has been able to involve the audience much more than last year both in terms of rolling dice to determine the outcome of encounters and as participants in the action. There were a number of audience members who came in costume and got integrated into the action.

Not only were audiences three times as large as last year, there were a greater number of people returning from performance to performance.

I suspect the fact they offered a discounted pass for multiple performances might have contributed to the repetition. More likely was the fact that you could roll a 10 sided dice at the door to determine what amount between $1 and $10 you would pay for admission.

An important element I didn’t mention last year that I think contributes to the success of the project is the pre- and post-show interactions between the audience and performers. The show is performed in a blackbox space. When you enter, the actors are chatting among themselves and with the audience about everything from other roleplaying games they play; how the foam weapons were constructed; how the weapon or costume piece contributes to the character development; what happened in previous performances; what their character was thinking during a tense moment or what their motivation was at that point.

When the director calls for the show to start, everyone takes their places. When it is over, actors and audience members mingle again on the playing area to discuss whatever interests them at the moment.

Due to the way the event is structured, the quality of performance and storytelling isn’t at a very high level. (Though much better than you might expect.) But the conceptual separation of the audience and performer that results from a more formal format doesn’t manifest either.

I am hoping Noyes has the opportunity to bring us the stories of the other landmasses over the next few years. I am interested to see how this approach continues to evolve. I am just hoping he doesn’t get so many bookings that he debuts new stories from other landmasses in other places first.

Even More Important That Panels & Post-Show Discussions Be About Audience Experience

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Today I had a post appear on ArtsHacker where I point out some general tips for organizing panel discussions. This covers everything from pre- and post-show chats to conference panels.

Essentially, the tips follow the same philosophy generally espoused for any sort of arts and culture event — make the environment about enriching the attendee experience  rather than celebrating how awesome the people on the panel are. People are intentionally present at this conversation in the hopes of becoming better informed so the goal should be on removing any impediments to that. (And, after all, even those of us that produce and present events are audience members at some point, too. We are seeking the same enrichment.)

For discussions oriented on performances, it is all about facilitating meaningful conversations for the audience and then getting out of the way. One person I cite mentions that having performers present can inhibit a free flow conversation because people tend to censor themselves or focus on the performer rather than the performance. He suggests ways to involve performers so they don’t become the focus.

A dramaturg I quote suggests some questions that focus on the audience experience which can prevent audience members from feeling they are obligated to ask a question and resort to “How do you remember all those lines/notes/movements?”

For discussions that are the event rather than the complement to the event, the concept is very much the same. Don’t spend half the allotted time reading panelist bios and allowing them to make increasingly lengthy opening statements – keep introductions short and get right into a discussion between panelists that have real things to say to one another.

The panelists don’t have to be so diametrically opposed to each other that you need a security guard prepared to tackle them, but no one walks away with something new to consider if everyone is nodding in agreement with everyone else.

By the way, many of the same guidelines for panelists are suggested for questioners from the audience- run a disciplined Q&A with a strict time limit and ground rules stated in advance to prevent an escalating series of lengthy rants.

I am sure frequent conference attendees probably silently pray that most of these guidelines were applied to the sessions they attend.

Panels And Post Show Discussions

Deliberate Practice Better Than A lot of Practice

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The Guardian recently had a story about a study debunking the idea that it took 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. I have written a number of posts on the subject over the last few years, but feel it is important to revisit it often given our cultural predilection for valuing quantity over quality.

…there was little to separate the good from the best musicians, with each logging an average of about 11,000 hours. In all, the number of hours spent practising accounted for about a quarter of the skills difference across the three groups, according to the study published in Royal Society Open Science.

Macnamara believes practice is less of a driver. “Once you get to the highly skilled groups, practice stops accounting for the difference. Everyone has practised a lot and other factors are at play in determining who goes on to that super-elite level,” she said.

“The factors depend on the skill being learned: in chess it could be intelligence or working memory, in sport it may be how efficiently a person uses oxygen. To complicate matters further, one factor can drive another. A child who enjoys playing the violin, for example, may be happy to practise and be focused on the task because they do not see it as a chore.”

That last bit about the value of enjoyment is really one of the key elements. This is enjoyment in terms of being engaged by the practice, not necessarily being happy about the callouses, aches and frustrating lack of progress. (In fact Nina Simon just posted about a torturous experience whose ridiculous sadism she feels helps her prepare for the adversity life throws at us.)

If your practice is based on pushing yourself to do 5 minutes more than yesterday, then your focus will be on the clock rather than on improving.  The result is that you can play longer, but not that much better.

There is a lot of evidence that variety and deliberate practice helps much more than consistently practicing in the same way. Teaching others a skill is often very valuable to improving your own practice. Even if you don’t feel you are a particularly good teacher or enjoy teaching, the act of teaching any skill at all, even washing dishes, can instill the patience and tolerance of yourself useful for your own practice.

Since we can often be harder on ourselves than others, learning not to obsess about our mistakes might be one of the most valuable assets in practice that no one ever teaches us. A focus on achieving “not wrong” is not equivalent to achieving greater mastery. At a certain point needing to redeem the poor job you did yesterday or deriding yourself for doing better yesterday than today becomes an obstacle rather than path to growth.

As the researchers imply, there can be other factors outside of your control which limit greater mastery. But you never know if that limitation is permanent or a temporary factor associated with your current method of pursuit. Mental healthwise, it may be better to assume the latter and examine alternative approaches.

 

A Place That Is Green

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You may recall that two years ago the number one cultural activity people indicated they engaged in, according to the 2017 Culture Track survey, was going to the park.

Last week the Washington Post discussed a survey conducted by the University of Vermont which suggested that going to the park, and even the anticipation of going to the park, created

“a jolt of euphoria one might get on Christmas morning.

What’s more, they found, people’s moods started to improve just from the anticipation of a park outing, and the afterglow of increased happiness subsisted several hours afterward. They also found that while any sort of outdoor public gathering space boosted people’s happiness, large parks with lots of vegetation seemed to provide the biggest benefit.”

The researchers geo-tagged Twitter posts in San Francisco over the course of three months. This allowed them to figure out where people were posting from. They analyzed the word choice of the tweets by assigning words with emotional values and found the greatest positivity expressed while at the park and increased positivity before and after visits as compared to other places.

The Washington Post article has a lot of disclaimers about the limits of sentiment-analysis tools like the one used by researchers, but apparently the tools are effective when applied to large amounts of text.

Ultimately, the reason I choose to call attention to the article is to provide a bit of support for the performance in the park programs many arts and cultural organizations conduct around this time of year. Since groups are doing it anyway, they probably don’t need rigorous, unimpeachable survey results to convince them to continue.

If you pondering doing events away from your home facility, the combined data of the University of Vermont study and Culture Track survey, make a park with lush greenery a smart choice.

Tonight We Have Paired The Seared Scallops With Wine And An Aria

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Back in May, American Theatre had an article about audience building efforts Opera Theatre St. Louis (OTSL) undertook with funding from the Wallace Foundation.  In my experience, there is always something to learn from these projects funded by the Wallace Foundation, especially since the case study reports tend to be honest about what things didn’t go well. So it is worth the time to read this short article.

One of OTSL’s efforts that drew my attention was their Opera Tastings project where they would pair tastings of food and wine with short opera performances. What I really appreciated about their effort here was that they took the program a fair distance from their home rather than concentrating on the St. Louis city limits. (my emphasis)

Hosted in a local restaurant or venue, the evening pairs 11 samples of food or drink with 11 operatic excerpts. The evenings have taken place all over St. Louis: in predominantly Black neighborhoods, in Chinatown, in Southern Illinois, or as far away as Columbia and Fayetteville, Mo. (120 miles and 145 miles, respectively).

“If the intent is to draw people in who surround you, then most of our organizations are finding that they have to be more present in the community,” says Ramos. “It’s how you build relevance. It’s how you show the work.”

[…]

Newcomers, in other words, discover what type of opera they enjoy, instead of being told why they should enjoy opera. More than three-quarters of Opera Tasting attendees are new-to-file (i.e., first time patrons), and every attendee gets $10 in “opera bucks” to redeem for a ticket to an upcoming show.

As I mentioned before, an aspect of these programs I have valued is the fact they were open about what went wrong. This type of reflection is a core part of Wallace Foundation’s ethic of “continuous learning” according to the article.

There was enough of an upside, despite the cost, to make the Opera Tastings worth retaining and refining. (my emphasis)

A lot of those opera bucks get redeemed: Right now an average of 42 percent of Opera Tastings attendees go on to buy tickets. What’s more, audience members who come to OTSL through Opera Tastings tend to buy more expensive tickets and become donors at a faster rate than expected.

One caveat: The tastings are costly to produce, costing $7,100 per tasting in 2018. And the true cost of audience recruitment may be obscured by the subsidies covered by opera bucks as well as discounted ticket prices

“It’s an expensive way to acquire new audience members,” admits Timothy O’Leary, general director of Opera Theatre from 2008 to 2018. And the majority of people who attend, 58 percent, never buy a ticket. The challenge now is to see how the tastings might be sustainable without Wallace support.

The article also talks about other programs like their Young Friends program which they estimate has a $16,000-$17,000 impact and their Opera Kids Camp for children to attend while their parents are at the opera. Take a look to learn more.

Is Artistic Authority Being Eroded?

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I was glancing at an interview with Arti Prashar on Arts Professional UK site as she departs her position at Spare Tyre Theatre Company. I had come for the title of the article, “Exit interview: ‘We’re asked to follow a business model that just doesn’t work'” but it was something else that really caught my attention.

She says,

“…I began to observe, slowly but surely, that the authority of artists was being eroded. I wasn’t having that, so I negotiated becoming the Artistic Director and CEO.”

It struck me that she felt she needed to become CEO in order to retain authority. (Her first 8 years at Spare Tyre was as Artistic Director.) It made me wonder if this was the case globally outside of the UK. I suspect it is.

I have discussed the problems with the sentiment that “arts should be run more like a business,” in a number of blog posts over the years. I wonder now if that concept, combined with the sense that artists should be more business minded might be contributing to the erosion of artists’ authority.

Artists should definitely be knowledgeable enough to monitor the health of their own careers so that their work is not exploited by others. But if an artist is not perceived as possessing authority in their own realm independent of their business acumen, that is troubling.

Prashar doesn’t give specific examples of how she felt artists’ authority was being eroded. As I thought about how this problem might manifest, I began to wonder if this was actually related to the question of why we value art.

If an artist doesn’t feel they have the authority to say a work has value on its own, but needs to cite relevance in connection with social and political movements to convince others it has value, that may be just as problematic as economic impact and ability to raise test scores being the only rationale for granting funding.

You may be thinking that these elements are all important for getting people to participate in an event or other opportunity. People need to either perceive something is relevant to them or is worth their time and money as part of their decision to be present.

But can an artist walk into a room and say this thing is important and worth doing and be believed simply based on their authority as an artist? If not, why?

Is it because we have come to doubt or suspect their authority to make that statement despite 15 years of practice?

If I walk in and say the same thing is important and worth doing because 1000 people will pay $50, do you doubt my authority to make that statement? Do you think to inquire how much experience I have in making these predictions if I am waving a spreadsheet around instead of a violin bow?

Seeing Our Stories Told: The Hero At The End of Your Story Is The Victim At The Start of Mine

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I saw a movie this weekend which embodied so much of what we talk about when we discuss empowering people to tell their stories and prominently displaying their stories.

In documentary Liyana, South African storyteller Gcina Mhlophe works with orphans in Swaziland to create a story as a way to help them process their trauma. As they go to work on creating the story, it is depicted in a gorgeous storybook illustration/animation. (Much to my surprise, there isn’t a print book. They are working on turning into a graphic novel.)

The film cuts back and forth between the animation, the orphans working with the storyteller, and telling Liyana’s story to interviewers. It is difficult to say which is more animated since the children (looking to be between 6-9 years old) narrate the action of the story with expansive gestures and vocalized sound effects.

The storyteller guides the children through a process that one might use in a U.S. classroom as part of a multi-disciplinary approach to instruction. (Unfortunately, a school in the U.S. would have to use “multi-disciplinary” as a rationale for engaging in such a time intensive project.)

Once they decide to name their hero Liyana, they assemble a picture of her from a collection of magazines. The children create animals out of mud (with much greater skill than I did as a kid) to represent the bull that accompanies Liyana on her quest to retrieve her twin brothers and the hyenas and crocodiles which threaten them on their journey. The illustration of the imaginary final monster closely resembles something they created from discarded metal found near the orphanage.

Unfortunately, Liyana’s life is a reflection of that of the orphans. Her father beats her mother and then both parents die of complications of the HIV virus, leaving her and her twin brothers in the care of their grandmother. We are told that of the 1.2 million people living in Swaziland, 200,000 are infected with HIV. Later we see the orphans being tested for the virus at a clinic.

Near the end, the children talk about how real life does not have a happy ending like many stories do. Part of me was hoping they had been coached to say that or things had been edited in that manner but I suspect that was a lesson they had already learned too well in their young lives.

Earlier in the movie, the storyteller asks them to decide why Liyana must leave her grandmother to make a journey. The first suggestion was that grandmother was sick and Liyana had to get medicine but the vote ultimately favored robbers came and kidnapped her twin brothers. I was wondering why they would choose the more severe of the two options when we learned the orphanage had recently been the target of a violent robbery. There were audible gasps and groans in the theater as the orphans calmly talked about how the robbers came in, held Liyana down and abused her.

It was a beautiful example of storytelling and story making. In addition to the more traumatic elements the process was meant to help the orphans deal with, you could easily identify the association between elements of the story and their lives.

Liyana is accompanied on her quest by a noble bull because the orphans care for cows and chickens. A grove of mango trees represented a life of ease that tempted Liyana from completing her quest because the orphans reveled in climbing mango trees and letting the juice run down their faces. It was the voice of a peacock sounding like Liyana’s grandmother that got her back on task.

I don’t want to give it away, but if there was anything that illustrated the value of people telling and seeing their own stories, it was the ending. For the children and the audience, it was a happy ending because it reflected an idealized vision of lives they could lead.

But in the U.S. the same basic scenario is synonymous with misery and is the starting point of many stories that the hero seeks to overcome. If the same storytelling program was run with orphans in the U.S. there would be a very different ending.

 

Wherein I Compare Creative Placemaking To Spaghetti Sauce

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I don’t remember how I came across it, but a few weeks ago I bookmarked an interview Michael Rohd, a faculty member at Arizona State University, conducted with Roberto Bedoya, City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Manager; Jamie Bennett, Executive Director of ArtPlace America; and Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, a professor at Arizona State University.

They were discussing the process of creative placemaking and how it should be applied in the future in order to acknowledge and honor the needs and concerns of the communities impacted by creative placemaking efforts.

The prologue to the interview mentions the term creative placemaking has been criticized for:

1) suggesting that the people and cultures rooted in a place had not already made it; 2) initially lacking a clear statement of values regarding who was meant to benefit from the community development of which the arts and culture were a part.

In response, people have started using the term creative placekeeping instead. I have heard this come up at a number of conferences I have attended. However, Bedoya notes that while there are legitimate concerns about gentrification and displacement– or replacement, especially in the eyes of communities of color, there is a need to be cautious with the term placekeeping as well.

The trap around place-keeping is sentimentality — “I want the old days” — and it’s not thoughtful. What are we trying to keep, and how, so it stays fresh and new? I think the future of creative placemaking is people not as intensely problematizing it, but trying to figure out the actions associated with placemaking or keeping, to create agency and a notion of civic commitment.

I found this idea of examining how to bring freshness to the elements we are trying to “keep” very intriguing. If you fear the loss of front stoops/porches in your neighborhood, what it is that will be lost? Is it the safe place for kids to play away from the streets? It is the socialization found in waving to neighbors as they pass or inviting them to mount the steps to chat? Is there a way to maintain that somewhere or someway else?

Though as I continued to play my example out in my head, I would think it would almost be preferable that porches and stoops replace a central gathering place that is being repurposed than to lose the stoops and send everyone to gather in a central place.

Another section I that caught my attention was Bennett’s comments about the scope of vision needed for implementing placemaking/placekeeping plans so that it encompasses all potential benefits and consequences. (my emphasis)

How do you figure out if your actions contributed toward healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities? Professor Andrew Taylor at American University reminded me that the first rule of systems thinking is that there is no such thing as side effects, there are only effects. If you are experiencing something as a side effect, it means you haven’t drawn the boundaries of your system widely enough. Many people say, “I’m making an economic development play, and there is an unfortunate side effect that people are displaced or replaced,” to borrow from Roberto. We need to draw the boundaries of our system wide enough that we understand that those are not unrelated or accidental, but part of one system.

At first I thought about how difficult it is to anticipate all the effects a plan might have. But as I considered longer, I realized if you are paying attention to what is happening in other communities that are implementing similar efforts, it isn’t difficult to become aware of the potential positive and negative impacts. Using the term “side effect” in these instances seems like an attempt to minimize the importance of these problems. Acknowledging it as an effect of a plan is to take responsibility for the problems it may cause.

If someone tells you one of the side effects of eating spaghetti sauce is a 80% chance you will have a sleepless night of heartburn, that really isn’t a small issue to you. If that is something you face, you consume the marinara sauce fully aware that any difficulty sleeping is a consequence of your decision and no one else. Likewise, if you are serving spaghetti and offer no other options, you should be aware that it is possible your choice will cause discomfort for some guests.

Museum 2.0 Gets Writer/Convenor 2.0

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Hey all – You may or may not know that some months back Nina Simon, writer of Museum 2.0 blog, announced she was leaving her position at Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) to devote herself more exclusively to OF/BY/FOR ALL which strives to “make community organizations.”

What does this mean? It means that if you want to be FOR your whole community, you have to be representative OF them and co-created BY them. If people don’t see themselves as part of your work, they won’t see your work as an essential part of their lives.

Putting up a “welcome” sign is not enough. To involve people in meaningful, sustainable ways, you can’t just make programs FOR them. You have to involve them in their creation. And that means becoming OF and BY them too.

Nina recently made her final post on Museum 2.0 saying she was handing the blog over to Seema Rao. Rao had actually done a few guest posts back in July. By quirk of the feed I use to read blogs, I caught her first few posts and, not realizing it wasn’t Nina, wondered how the heck Nina had had the time to visit all these museums she was talking about AND run MAH AND be hitting the speaking circuit so much.

Since I was already intrigued by what Rao was writing under a mistaken identity, needless to say I think the blog is being left in good hands. I look forward to seeing what she posts.

In her final post, Nina reflects on her 13 years of blogging and how conflicted she was with her sense of obligation to the blog and readers. Then how she came to accept the trade-offs of going to a more infrequent, but perhaps more satisfying publishing schedule.

I can relate with her feelings on the subject having had many of the same thoughts myself throughout the years. Like her, I have often regarded blogging as a way to “think out loud” and organize my thoughts on different subjects. When I go back through the archives, I can certainly see how both my personal philosophy and the collective mind of the arts and cultural industry have evolved over the last decades.

I write this post as a tribute to the difficult and thoughtful work Nina has done over the years, providing leadership for many of us in the arts community as she is likely to increasingly do in the future. I am also writing to encourage people to pay attention to Museum 2.0 as a blog because Nina’s choice to transition it to a new writer is really a manifestation of the philosophy and intent she has long espoused:

Nina writes:

1. Museum 2.0 is about participation, but I never fully succeeded in making it participatory. Because I’d built the blog originally to do my own writing and learning, I rarely invited guest writers. I never experimented here with models for collective writing. … I wished Museum 2.0 could break free of me and become more dialogic, led by a strong writer AND online convenor. I believe Seema Rao is this person and I hope you’ll join me in reading and participating as Museum 2.0 grows. There will be new experiments and approaches – alongside the archive of what we’ve built thus far.

Arts Not An Indulgence When So Many Social Justice Issues Need Attention

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Apparently Vu Le of Nonprofit AF blog spoke at Association of California Symphony Orchestras last week. (those lucky dogs) In his post this week, he addresses the question about whether arts and culture have value when there are so many health and social justice problems that need to be attention. As the executive director of a social justice non-profit, he knows very well just how much organizations like his need funding and attention.

He says yes, arts and culture definitely play an important role in society and helping to address the problems we face. He mentions that as an immigrant from Vietnam, both music and art saved his life and made him feel valuable when he was doing poorly in school due to his lack of English literacy.

“I began to look forward to the art projects. For so long I had sucked at everything that required English, including gym (I could not understand the rules of various activities, like volleyball). With art, I felt competent and respected and sure of myself. My being good at something changed the way the other kids saw me. Art motivated me to continue to learn, to explore. It gave me confidence. It kept me in school.”

In blog posts throughout the years, I have often pointed out that people turn to art, music, theater, etc to help them cope with tragedy and difficulty in their lives. But of course, as a person in the arts, I am predisposed to look for those connections. So I was happy to read that Le had observed similar situations.

He is definitely aware of all the places arts and cultural organizations fall short of serving all segments of their communities. But he disputes the argument that the arts are indulgent in when there is such need in the world and expresses gratitude for the work arts practitioners do.  As long as the following excerpt is, a number of his expressions of gratitude are edited out so it is worth reading the whole post just for that.

I’m telling you these stories because when there is so much going on, so many problems to solve, sometimes we think of art and music as indulgent. Who has time for singing and dancing and stained-glass snowflakes when kids are starving or locked in cages? By thinking this way, we forget about art and music’s power to heal, mobilize, build community, and so much more.

[…]

Art and music are critical in our work for social justice, as frequently they are the only things that can reach people, that can provide comfort or generate the visceral, raw emotions needed for social change. After the election in 2016, when many families and children were terrified, Families of Color Seattle gathered the kids and used art—having the kids draw themselves as superheroes, for example—to help them process their feelings. And this year protesters in Hong Kong, are singing “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Miserables as they do a sit-in at the airport.

Yes, there are plenty of things to improve on. Art and music are not always accessible to marginalized communities. Resources are not equitably distributed to artists of color, artists with disability, LGBTQ artists. And in public schools, art and music programs are always the first to get cut, and the schools with the most low-income kids and kids of color are disproportionately affected. Symphonies, orchestras, ballets, and other art forms continue to struggle with diversity and community engagement.

While we work on those challenges, though, let’s take a moment to appreciate the organizations and professionals who are creating art and music, whose skills and dedication bring beauty and hope and happiness to a world sorely in need of it.

IMPORTANT: Changes To Music Licensing May Impact Any Performance At Your Venue

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Some important information about changes to music performance rights came to my attention today and I wanted to share it with readers.

Apparently the consent decrees under which ASCAP & BMI operate are up for review by the Department of Justice. The public comment phase is ending on Friday, August 9.  You can find out more about the consent decrees on the MIC Coalition website.

Basically, because ASCAP & BMI operate akin to monopolies, they and other performing rights organizations (PRO) are limited as to what they are able to do when licensing performing rights. They want these limits loosened. You can provide feedback to the Department of Justice here.

Even with these limits, dealing with these companies is often confusing and criteria seems inconsistent. Many have felt they were forced into purchasing broader licenses than they needed.

Today I received a huge flurry of emails urging myself and others to oppose the loosening. I was confused about why there was this sudden urgency when the public comment phase opened at the start of June. I started to wonder if there was an effort to create a huge sense of urgency by rallying support at a late date. Especially since there were initially few details provided about why one should voice their opposition.

Come to find out, the reason is that a large number of organizations across the country received revised licensing agreements from BMI this week containing some alarming changes. There is some suspicion they timed the mailing to hit toward the end of the public comment phase.

Here is a page of the agreement that is causing the biggest uproar.

In section 1 (g), terminology has been changed from “Gross Ticket Revenue” to “Gross Revenue.”  According to the new definition, in addition to ticket sales, calculation of a fee will now be based upon revenue from sales on the secondary ticket market, service charges, handling charges, VIP packages, advertising revenue, box suites, sponsorships, merchandise, concessions and parking.

So essentially, if you have a sponsor for your show; sell VIP packages, merchandise, food, and charge for parking, all that gets factored in to what you pay BMI rather than just ticket sales as was the case in the past.

From what I am told, the definition of “licensee” has been expanded to include a wider range of activities.

For events without an admission charge, the definition of what is included in the fee calculation has been expanded from a flat fee based on seating capacity to one based on entertainment expenses like room, board and transportation costs for the artist.

There are other problematic issues which are a little difficult to explain in a blog post and might not apply widely to many venues. I suspect there are problems that people have yet to discover.  If you do any sort of licensing with folks like BMI and ASCAP or if you have been trying to fly under the radar, you want to pay attention to this.

If you don’t think this applies to you at all, but you have live music performance, you may find that it does. That band that plays at your museum during First Fridays is probably subject to music licensing.

With more opportunities for revenue available, especially if the strictures of the consent decrees are loosened, there is more incentive find the places that have been trying to slide under the radar.

If you have concerns, check out the MIC Coalition website to learn more or provide feedback to the DOJ.  Also –read any new licensing agreements you get very, very carefully.

 

What Is Your Arts Employees Rights Policy?

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Barry Hessenius recently wrote a post about Arts Employees Rights. Given the amount of conversation and news stories about sexual harassment and other unwelcome activities throughout the creative industries, this seems a very timely subject. I see the topic appearing with increasing frequency on the schedule of arts and culture conference panels.

In addition to issues of safety, Hessenius discusses the need to examine pretty much every category heading of an employee manual. It occurred to me that while I have seen many of these topics discussed separately in posts, I can’t recall many “this is everything that should be in your employee handbook” posts.

I don’t know that we should necessarily take it for granted that every arts organization has an formal employee handbook much less that people have a complete sense of what should be included in the document.

Since equal compensation is a focus of broad conversation these days, it is no surprise that concept straddles a number of his category headings. (Which include Safety, Support, Equality, Compensation & Benefits, Termination, and Career Trajectory.)

He asks many of the difficult questions facing non-profits (this is only a smidge):

Should that minimum wage for full time employees be a living wage – defined as sufficient enough to cover minimal living expenses of room, food, transportation, et. al. for the cost of living of a given area?  (So someone working in Silicon Valley or New York City would need greater revenue that someone living in Fresno or Buffalo).  But can small and mid-sized arts organizations afford such a suggested requirement?  What would have to change to make that a reality?   Should all arts organization employees be provided a minimal level of health insurance?  Is that affordable?  What about retirement benefits or contributions by the employer?  Is that possible?

These are difficult questions for many arts organizations. The better you treat your employees, the fewer you may be able to employ, especially in the face of declining philanthropy.

You may recall about three years ago the Department of Labor was preparing to implement rules that would raise the salary criteria for non-exempt employees, meaning that many, many more non-profit employees would have been eligible for overtime pay than before.

I wrote about an Atlantic article that noted that this placed many non-profits in a strange position ‘“…between the values that many nonprofits hold and the way they treat their own staffs.”

Basically, non-profits work hard advocating for better pay and working conditions for people in general, but find themselves opposing that for their staffs due to lack of funding for operations.

More recently, the CEO of a Goodwill in Illinois tried to shame the governor into vetoing a minimum wage hike by laying off people with disabilities the organization employed, blaming it on the increased costs.

Hessenius acknowledges providing people with appropriate compensation is difficult, but challenges arts organizations not to discard it as a topic of serious discussion. It is easy to say the revenue stream will never support our ideals about compensation so it is futile to even discuss the question. He says there is a need for a conversation about how compensation fit holistically into the organization policy and philosophy on  employee rights.

 

We Will Accompany Them On The Beaches, On The Playgrounds, In The Parks And At The Opera!

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After I posted last week about how English towns installation of chat benches aligned with other stories I had covered about organizations trying to create personal connections between strangers, one of my neighbors, Regina Sweeney messaged me on LinkedIn about a study about buddy benches conducted in elementary schools. (I think this is the first time I have had someone I see on a fairly regular basis read my blog and send me a link.)

A number of schools use buddy benches to help kids make connections. If you are lonely at recess, you sit there and other kids are supposed to come over and invite you to play. There hadn’t been a lot of research done on the effectiveness of these benches so a group set out to conduct one at a school in Utah.

They found that introducing the benches reduced the number of solitary students. As part of the study, they removed the benches for a couple weeks and then returned them to the playground. When they were removed, the number of solitary students started to return to the baseline number observed before the benches were introduced. When the benches were reintroduced, the number of solitary students decreased.

While you can’t necessarily make assumptions about adults from the observation of a small group of elementary school kids, this result seemed to point to the usefulness of some sort of mechanism to facilitate connecting people. Providing people with a way to signal their willingness and desire to connect was useful.

There were kids that abused the benches. Some kids would sit on the bench and then rebuff all overtures to play. Teachers observed that kids who were normally very social seemed to sit on the bench to call attention to themselves. There were also those who made fun of those sitting on the bench.

Many students thought the benches were a good idea, but for other people.

“It appears that while students liked the idea of a buddy bench at their school, many may have thought of it as an intervention to help other students and not necessarily themselves.”

Kids in the upper grades (4th-6th) thought it was only useful for kids in the lower grades. Some students felt that they were introduced too late in the school year after cliques had been formed.

I imagine these general perceptions about the utility of benches might be more deeply entrenched in adults. Though I would also say adults might be more apt to resolve to participate in one role or the other if they knew the goal was to reverse a trend toward social isolation.

One take away from the study that I think is applicable for people of any age is the necessity to consistently make people aware of the program. Every teacher prepared their students for the introduction of the buddy benches and the benches were placed outside 100% of the time during the intervention stage. However, the principal reported only encouraging their use in morning announcements 80% of the time and the teachers monitoring the playground were often too preoccupied with other playground activities to seek out solitary students to encourage them to use the benches.

Those conducting the study felt these situations kept the project from being as successful as it might have been.

I would think the necessity of repeatedly communicating the availability of chatting/buddy programs would even be greater for arts organizations given that the attendees change for every event and they aren’t being exposed the availability of these initiatives everyday the way kids at school are.

I had written about the buddy seating program I had created at my previous theater which paired people in the audience chamber. As I read this study, I wondered if it might be good to have “meet someone new” seating in a public place like the lobby as well. People probably aren’t going to arrive alone at an event seeking a companion, but people new to the experience might welcome the opportunity to chat with those who are equally clueless about what to do or with someone who can offer some advice. Having a bench or row of chairs specifically to that purpose might be useful.

While this seems obvious in retrospect, it only occurred to me as I was re-reading the study and saw a line about the buddy benches being useful as”…a reinforcement by giving students a place to gather should they feel intimidated when seeking out play activities on their own.” This resonated with my recollection of a post Holly Mulcahy made yesterday about people who ruin the concert experience for newbies by enforcing a behavioral orthodoxy.

It wouldn’t eliminate the glares at clapping in the wrong place, but a buddy bench would give people a place to ask “Sooooo…I what’s the deal with not clapping at the end of some songs, but jumping to your feet at the end of other songs?”

If you are involved with education and want to bring buddy benches to your school, you need to read the study because I didn’t touch upon even 10% of what was involved and what they felt needed more rigorous study.

Data You Need To Believe Over Your Gut

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I so frequently tell my readers that Collen Dilenschneider has made an awesome post on her blog that it makes it difficult to convey the increased urgency to read one of her pieces when she has made an even awesomer post.

Despite this impediment, believe me when I say she recently made a post that is even more awesome than her usually awesome posts. Last week she wrote about how research results often contradict our gut feelings about a situation, despite being true. She confesses that as much as she deals with data every day, there are some instances where she asks the experts to revisit it just to be sure.

She goes on to list five data points that even she and her co-workers really wanted to believe were untrue.

Let me just say, I have seen some of this data before but part of what makes her post so great is this “contradicts our gut” framework she employs. As much as I read and write about arts administration, there are a fair number of instances where I raise mental walls against information I come across. It is useful to be constantly reminded that we need to take a deep breath and open our minds.

1) Local audiences have negatively skewed perceptions of the organizations in their area 

IMPACTS tracked 118 visitor-serving organizations and found that on average, people living within 25 miles of the organization indicate value-for-cost perceptions that are 14% less than those of regional visitors living between 25 and 101-150 miles away. In other words, locals believe their experience is less worthy of the admission cost they paid compared to the perceptions of those living further away. Interestingly, locals paid 20% less for admission, on average, than non-local visitors thanks to local discounts and promotions! They are also much less satisfied with their experiences than non-local visitors.

Even if this is influenced by a sense of sunk cost where long distance visitors arrive with a firmer conviction than local residents they will enjoy an experience given that they have already invested so much more time and money in planning and execution, it is important to recognize this dynamic is operating for different visitor segments.

2) An average visitor attends a cultural organization type only once every 27 months – and the average member returns to take advantage of free admission only once per year.

The average person who visits an art museum will not visit another for 28 months, on average. The average person who visits a history museum will not visit another for 32 months, on average. In total, the average visitation cycle for organization types that we monitor is 27 months. Here’s more on that data and what it means.

[…]

Subscription-based organizations such as theaters and symphonies: You’ve got it a bit better. Your members visit twice each year, on average.

I had actually written about this idea around 8 years ago. In the research presented at that time, it wasn’t that people felt they had enough of the organization and were going to wait a few years to go again, it was that people were so emotionally connected with the organization, they would swear they had just been there within the last year when it had been about two or more years.

Don’t immediately delete people from your mailing list if they don’t buy tickets to return, give it 3-5 years before you decide they are disengaged. (This assumes annual/semi-annual mailings vs. more frequent ones.)

3) Millennials are not “aging into” caring about arts and culture

Oooh, pay attention to this one!

This isn’t surprising to me and we have so much on this we’re getting into a “ridiculous” data volume category here, but this shocks other folks, so it’s making this list!

Millennials are not “aging into” caring about arts and culture as a natural function of getting older. Millennials also are not “aging into” other things some entities are banking on, like the belief that dolphins should be kept in captivity.

[…]

Millennials are a very important group for cultural organizations to engage. The take-away of these findings is critical: “Let’s just wait for people to think we’re important” is a failing engagement strategy.

Here is another point to be particularly mindful of–

4) On average, attendance goes back to baseline 5 years after a major expansion (but operation costs tend to be increased forever).

In a nutshell, attendance decreases in the years prior to a major building project as folks defer their visits until after the expansion opens. When an expansion opens, attendance certainly increases – 19.6% compared to the ten years prior! But that increase gradually decreases until attendance levels retreat to the baseline of the ten years prior after only 5 years. And the increased building space also means more staff members, more programming, more electricity, and more ongoing maintenance.

[…]

If you’re fundraising for or undertaking a major building expansion, make sure that you are clear on your goals and objectives – and that your expectations for long-term attendance and ongoing maintenance are grounded in reality.

And finally… (note the distinction she makes between mobile web and mobile apps)

5) Mobile applications do not significantly increase visitor satisfaction

Interestingly, people who use social media onsite in a way that relates to their visit report 7% greater visitor satisfaction scores than people who do not use social media in relation to their visit. Mobile web users experience a 6% bump in satisfaction. Even though all three of these methods (mobile applications, social media, and mobile web) take place on a mobile phone during a cultural organization visit, social media and the web significantly contribute to the visitor experience. Mobile applications do not reliably do this. One explanation for this may be that social media and mobile web “meet audiences where they are” and are examples of onsite technology facilitating the experience. Mobile applications, on the other hand, can be examples of technological intervention in which a visitor must interrupt the experience to figure out how to engage with the technology, or download it in the first place.

As much as I have quoted here, it is only about 1/3 of the data and rationale she presents in her post so check it out in order to get a more complete picture of things.

Waiting For A Nice Chat

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I came across an article about English towns that are installing  “chat benches” with signs saying, “The ‘Happy to Chat’ Bench: Sit Here If You Don’t Mind Someone Stopping To Say Hello.”

If this sounds vaguely familiar, you may recall that four years ago, I posted about a bus company in Brazil that reserved seats on buses and provided conversation prompts for people who wanted to meet someone new.

I actually used that as an inspiration for a program at my last venue to match up individuals wanting to see show who didn’t have anyone with whom to attend. ArtsMidwest picked up on it and apparently are still talking about as part of their Creating Connections program because people keep telling me they heard about the idea at one of their seminars.

Birch Coffee in NYC had a policy of not turning on the Wifi until 5 pm and providing conversation prompts at their tables. (A look at their website and social media presence couldn’t confirm if they still hold to this).  Their goal was to create a greater sense of community than was possible with people constantly looking at their screens.

The intent of the bench project in England is combat loneliness among senior citizens, though they encourage everyone to have a seat.

Burnham-On-Sea police community support officer Tracey Grobbeler told Burnham-On-Sea.com, “Simply stopping to say ‘hello’ to someone at the Chat Bench could make a huge difference to the vulnerable people in our communities and help to make life a little better for them.”

The initiative was launched to coincide with United Nations World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. According to a recent poll, more than a third of seniors reported feeling a lack of companionship at least some of the time, while 27 percent said they feel isolated some of the time or more often. While the project was conceived with the elderly population in mind, the Burnham-On-Sea police department encourages residents of all ages to use the chat benches.

Something I wonder about all these projects is whether the initial intention is fully realized. Clearly you can’t just set up a bench somewhere and expect conversations to happen organically. A framework was set up for each of these efforts. At the same time, as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. People may not behave in a way that conforms to your ideals.

Just as with my search of Birch Coffee’s web and social media presence sites (as well as some media reports) didn’t have any mention of the no-Wifi policy, I haven’t really been able to discover whether the Brazilian bus company had success getting people to strike up conversations or if the seats were monopolized by the same people who refuse to cede their seats to the elderly on public transport worldwide.

I would be interested to know if anyone has come across projects with similar intentions and had a sense of their success. My hope is that if things diverged from the original intent, the results were even better than the creators envisioned. It would be great to know how any sort of successful outcome emerged or if important insight was derived from disappointing results.

In an attempt to become regarded as more of a community asset, I am sure a lot of arts organizations would be pleased to learn about moderate successes. Everything doesn’t have to be about racking up huge numbers for grant reports.

If there was a case where an arts organization said, “well we invested a little bit of time and money for six months up front and now there is a consistent presence of 10-15 people hanging out, chatting all day in our lobby or sidewalk where no one had been before,” there is a low level, but consistent good-will benefit accruing for the organization.

This Is Not The World We Planned For

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When the topic of strategic plans is discussed, there is often an admonishment actively reference the planning documents throughout the plan period rather than drop it on the shelf until it is time to create a new strategic plan.  The organization is supposed to be measuring itself and its success against the plan.

I recently read a piece on Medium that suggested an organization should scrap parts, if not the entire plan, and create a new one if the operating environment has changed so much that assumptions upon which the plan is based are no longer valid.

Laura Weidman Powers, writes that when she was CEO of Code2040, the organization sat down during the early part of 2016 and underwent a pretty comprehensive process to develop a strategic plan.

And then Donald Trump was elected president. Our core communities (Black and Latinx people) were and felt threatened and silenced as white supremacists were emboldened. Tech companies who had been publicly pro-diversity in the Obama years clamped up. And as the winds continued to shift, my heart sank.

We had created a beautiful, functional, coherent, inclusive, actionable strategic plan — for a world we no longer lived in.

She writes that they knew there would be a need to make some course corrections throughout the life of the strategic plan, but had no sense that things would change so quickly and radically and moot most of their strategic plan.

In hindsight, she says she would have made sure that the assumptions upon which the plan was based were specified in the plan. If those environmental factors no longer existed, it would be time to scrap the plan and start over again. She is careful to specify that constantly challenging a strategic plan can lead to organizational paralysis. At the same time, if the ground beneath your feet is no longer stable, efforts to make progress become increasingly futile.

If I were doing it again, I would have had a section up front that enumerated the 2–3 key assumptions that needed to hold true for this plan to be valid. I would have kept an eye on those and empowered anyone on the team to throw up a flag if they thought they had evidence that the assumptions were no longer holding. Outside of that, our goal would have been to execute against the strategy as written.

Delivering Social Services At Libraries

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Hat tip to Artsjournal.com which posted an NPR story about libraries that are bringing social workers on staff. The main reason is that libraries are serving the role as a community resource beyond a source of books. Libraries are increasingly a place for classes, after school activities, meetings as well as providing daytime shelter for homeless and unfortunately, those with drug addictions.

I served on the board of a library until about a year ago and there were frequent conversations regarding concerns about used needles and blood splatters in the restrooms. There were also debates about whether to stock Narcan and what the library’s liability might be if doses were administered. Just before I left the board, we were discussing signing a letter of agreement with social service agencies to provide services at some of the library branches.

The NPR story touches on these same issues facing the social workers at the libraries they profile. One of the benefits of having a social worker in a library is that it changes the dynamics of the traditional relationship people have with social services. Instead of people going to a government run office and waiting to petition for assistance, the social worker circulates among patrons, discusses services that are available and helps them connect with those services.

“I walk around and try to talk to people who might be experiencing homelessness. We never ask them directly, but I would just come up to them and say, ‘I don’t know if you’re aware there’s a social worker and there are social services here,’ ” she says. “Because of my role as a professional, clinical social worker, I can do assessments and determine if I need to provide extra support by linking them with community services such as clinics or mental health or for them to see a doctor.”

[…]

But Esguerra says the idea of bringing social workers into libraries isn’t just meant to help librarians; it encourages people in need to take advantage of the services the library-based social workers offer.

“Coming to the library is not attached with any stigma, unlike coming to, like, you know, other traditional settings,” she explains. “So public libraries really are the best places to reach out to the population and be effective at it.”

While not every arts organization serves groups that need this type of social service support, there may be other social support activities they can make available.  In some instances, they key may be to take the same approach as the social worker in the library. Instead of saying come here to receive these services with an eye to attracting larger groups of people, just have the services available in a low key way for those that do arrive.

During the summer there are a lot of free plays and concerts offered across the country. There may be people who show up whom an experienced eye could identify as potentially having a need for everything from food and medicine to help registering for school and getting school supplies. I am sure I am thinking too narrowly in terms of the type of support arts organizations might offer.

Then there is the approach from the other direction where arts organizations are present at social service and medical facilities. One of my favorite stories the project that put pop up art stations at a health clinic in Minneapolis.

 

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ VR Headsets

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On Saturday, the Knight Foundation will be issuing a call “for ideas exploring how arts institutions can present immersive experiences to engage audiences” (disclosure: Knight Foundation has funded projects for my day job and supports tons of stuff in my community.)

In the announcement, Knight Foundation staffer Chris Barr writes about how virtual and augmented reality is already being used by arts organizations on an experimental basis.

From digital overlays of  museum spaces and VR interpretations of surreal landscapes, to artistic interpretations of climate change and digital recreations of fragile Cuban sculpture, artists, museums and other arts institutions are experimenting with these emerging technologies.

What they are looking for is projects in which technologists, companies and artists will partner with museums and performing arts organizations to explore some of the following ideas:

We hope to find innovative uses for this technology, new approaches for moving audiences through these experiences, and opportunities to engage new and diverse audiences.

How can these technologies help us reach new people? How do we make the experience before, during and after putting on a headset delightful? How do we service these experiences efficiently? How should these experiences be distributed and exhibited? How can this new form of storytelling be used for more inclusive stories? How can we use immersive tech to expand the reach of the arts beyond physical locations?

One thing I appreciated was that in asking how to make the experience before, during and after delightful,  they seem to understand that it is the entire experience and not just the technology that provides value.

As much as many of us, myself included, might resent the way the growing prevalence of technology/media is encroaching upon and competing with our practice, this is an opportunity to proactively be part of a conversation and effort at the genesis of the concept and application. The alternative is the current situation where you react to the emergence of a technology or trend.

Which is not to say that anything one might contribute to won’t quickly evolve and be used in a manner you hadn’t intended or conceived. How many of us knew a boxy cellphone would evolve to the point it replaced a watch, iPod, television and even voice conversations are moving to the margins.

When I saw the mention of “putting on a headset” in the passage I cited above, I chuckled because I suspect (and hope) that people will blow the concept of headset based delivery out of the water with the ideas they have.

If you are looking for some context or jumping off points for your own ideas, I have written about a number of projects associated with augmented reality in the past couple years, as well as projects in the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund

If you have an idea germinating,  guidelines will be posted on the Knight Foundation website on July 27. You can sign up for the July 30 informational webinar now.

When Mozart=P-Funk – Metadata Ain’t Worth Much Without Good Search Functions

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Via the Marginal Revolution blog, I caught this link to an interesting Financial Times article (registration required) discussing how classical music is at a disadvantage on streaming services due to lack of metadata.

In short, most music produced today is organized by the artist performing it rather than on the artist composing it. If you hear funk for the first time and discover you are listening to Parliament-Funkadelic, you can go to Spotify, conduct a search and find more content from the group.

If you hear a classical music piece and are told you are listening to Mozart, if you go to Spotify and search, you will get a list of every recording of Mozart performed by every group of every size and quality, starting with the most recent recording.

The article says it is difficult to filter by composer “performance, time of recording, location or conductor” on Spotify.

“…for classical music this is an existential problem — detailed metadata are not just a means of organising content so people are paid, but is also is crucial to help discover it. IDAGIO, unsurprisingly, is trying to address this issue.

It is no wonder then that classical music buyers still revert to compact discs — where they can guarantee to find their favourite performances, when it comes to consuming the genre.

[…]

The lack of available metadata on Spotify, and the other main streaming platforms, also has another detrimental effect on classical music: it becomes a genre which exists as a means, rather than an end.

Take this Guardian article from earlier this year, titled “Young people are turning to classical music to escape ‘noise of modern life'”.

While the article speaks breathlessly of a new-found life for classical music among young listeners, the stated reason is clear. No longer is classical music a genre with competing styles and sounds — varying from some of the most abrasive music ever written to some of the sappiest — but a sonic type which acts as a countermeasure to the chaos of modernity.

The reference to efforts by IDAGIO comes from a study sponsored by the streaming service that came out last month. The study surveyed 8000 people in five European countries, South Korea, Mexico and the US, learning the different habits people have for consuming classical music. (A section header summarizes it thus: “South Koreans most likely to have specific Classical listening sessions while speaker-based listening key in nordics and continental Europe.”)

The study authors take a bit more of an optimistic view than the author of the Financial Times piece. So many people responded with “relaxing piano music” as a genre they listen to that it now constitutes a distinct category of music.  The study authors see this as a potential entry point where the FT author seemed to feel this indicated a trend toward pieces being regarded as indistinguishable from each other.

In the introductory paragraph to the concluding section, the study authors say “We will discover how ‘relaxing piano music’ has become a significant way to bring, new, younger listeners into classical,…” but that is the last time they mention that group.

Other than improving metadata on streaming services so that the playlists suggested to listeners are more consistent in content and quality, I wasn’t sure how they envisioned people making the transition. (Granted, this is a US-centric view, opportunities for conversion may be better in other surveyed countries)

Though, as I note, the authors of both the FT piece and the IDAGIO sponsored study feel that the listening experience will improve with the addition of better metadata.

I Don’t Know, The DMV Line Is Usually At Least Novella

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I saw a really cool story via Americans for the Arts in May about a partnership between the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. They worked together to place kiosks that delivered short stories in a motor vehicles branch. People standing on line to conduct business can select, print out and read one of the short stories.  The library sees this as an opportunity to serve their community outside of their branches.

The stories are printed on demand and scroll out of the kiosk somewhat like a register receipt.

The story kiosk has a library of more than 8,500 short stories, varying in length. Stories are free, and readers can choose between selections for kids or content for all ages. Short Edition has also made the machine earth-friendly with eco-friendly paper that is FSC- and BPA-free.

I took a look at the website of the French company that makes the kiosks. Even though they talk about the printers being useful for business where people have to wait for service, I noticed some of the accompany pictures depict the stories being read at leisure in uncrowded cafes.

This made me wonder if there might be a use for the technology to deliver supplementary material at performances or perhaps only the parts of the playbill you are interested in. If you don’t care about the bios but want the program notes, you might choose to only print those and save on paper. Granted, this may not please those who paid to have their logos placed in the program, but perhaps they can be included on the print out on an ongoing basis.

Being able to see what types of material people are printing on demand might provide the organization with a better sense of what information to provide people in promotional materials to help them make the decision to attend. Likewise, it could be used to shape the programming and attendance experience to reflect these interests/needs.

How Many Times Can You Cut The Budget And Still Claim To Be World-Class?

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If you don’t already read Drew McManus’ blog Adaptistration, you may want to take a look some of his recent posts as well as the conversation on Facebook that ensued.

Drew started out yesterday linking to an article on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that suggested the drop in people auditioning for the Pittsburgh Symphony might be a consequence of the pay cuts musicians agreed to after a strike in 2016.

The article in and of itself is interesting in terms of considering if musicians are factoring this in a decision not to audition versus those that are just eager to gain some relatively stable employment, regardless of past labor negotiations. While I was reading it, I wondered if there might be a similar drop in applicants and auditioners in states whose governments have enacted laws and rules artists and administrators deem problematic.

Drew goes on to mention the “orchestra caste system” providing some insight into the dynamics between orchestras.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: those who earn less and work in organizations with smaller budgets must defer to those who earn more or work at larger budget groups because the latter are “better” than the former.

…For example, if musicians from an orchestra like Minnesota are on strike or locked out, it is assumed they have carte blanche when it comes to offers of substitute work at a smaller budget orchestra, like Grand Rapids. They won’t be expected to go through any formal substitute hiring process and existing subs will get booted in order to make room.

But if the situation were reversed, you’re far less likely to see a group at the level of Minnesota extending the same degree of latitude. Instead, you’ll see positive thoughts and well-wishes and by the way, we have this substitute hiring policy and you’ll to go through that before we can offer you any work.

He goes on to talk about how standards are established and enforced in orchestras. That is the part that has turned into a lengthy conversation on Facebook that gets into the standards being enforced, who is enforcing them, if others can override, people taking leadership about standards and so on.

The conversation got so involved, when last I looked, there was a suggestion that a few conductors, musicians and Drew get together and videotape a discussion of the issues.

Even if you aren’t involved in the classical music/opera scene, check the conversation out because some version of this situation probably exists in your field, just with different players wielding the power and influence, but also preferring to skirt similarly difficult conversations.

Posted by Drew McManus on Monday, July 15, 2019

Ripples Moving Fish In Other Ponds

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When I caught the name, “Penis Monologues” out of the corner of my eye, I felt a moment of trepidation that some men’s rights group was mounting a show as an aggressive counter to the Vagina Monologues. However, it turned out that the show is actually an attempt to combat the culture of “dominant male temperament” in China, a  term which is somewhat analogous to the English term, “toxic masculinity.” The show was created by a noted sexologist in China, Fang Gang.  (It should be noted that the title in Chinese doesn’t use the word “penis.” The articles doesn’t indicate what the actual title is.)

It was interesting to read how other cultures are experiencing the global conversations about gender roles. (China has had its own spate of #MeToo stories.) Many male participants in Fang’s project really had to overcome their reticence. Given that a number had never performed before, and unlike the generally empowering tone of the Vagina Monologues, the show dealt with some pretty negative subject matter, their reluctance is understandable.

But the play’s subject matter hasn’t made it easy for Tao to find willing actors. Most men she approached declined after reading monologue titles like “Penis Size,” “Domestic Abuser,” and “Erectile Dysfunction.” “They are afraid of being mocked or judged by the public,” she tells Sixth Tone.

When 42-year-old business owner Yu Lei read the play for the first time, he was shocked that it so boldly addressed taboo subjects. But after attending one of Fang’s sex-ed public lectures and seeing members of the audience calmly taking notes, he decided to join the troupe, despite never having acted before.

Tao assigned Yu to the play’s first monologue, “Date Rape,” which tells the story of a male college student forcing his girlfriend to have sex with him in a hotel room. Yu was so nervous about performing that he told his wife he was taking part in a charity event organized by White Ribbon, the advocacy organization launched by Fang in 2013 to end violence perpetrated by men against women. But he needn’t have worried: His performance wins thunderous applause from the 90 or so people in the audience, though Yu later confesses to Sixth Tone that he slightly regrets doing it. “I’m afraid people might think it was my own story,” he says.

According to article, in addition to challenging audiences to question the societal norms that men need to be dominant in their careers and relationships with women, the show also addresses some pretty ingrained binary definitions of gender.

That pain is familiar to Ye Chuyang, a queer actor portraying their own experiences in the monologue “Gender Queer.” “I don’t agree with binary gender divisions, because it limits people’s possibilities,” Ye tells Sixth Tone. “Most people think men are supposed to be macho, decisive, and strong. They don’t appreciate feminine or delicate men. Though my parents appreciate the sensitive and gentle side of me, they prefer me to be strong and tough just like other boys.”

Ye thinks the play is a chance to both educate people about sexual diversity and help more men understand the experiences of women. “If men could break the rules and speak out, women would feel encouraged and less lonely in this battle,” he says.

In addition to illustrating the power of arts and culture to facilitate conversations on difficult topics, for me this story represents the degree to which the world is becoming metaphorically smaller. We may be frustrated by lack of progress in our own local spheres, but the motion of a movement can create ripples that begins to bring resonant changes in other parts of the world.

Isn’t Everyone Creating A Museum In Their Basement?

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There was an article in Forbes last month about the glut of empty museums in China. While many museums in the United States have larger collections than they can possibly display, storing the majority in basement vaults, museums in China have the opposite problem in that there is more museum space than objects to display.

Part of the problem, according to Forbes is rooted in the way commercial property development is handled,

According to Johnson, what has fueled China’s museum building boom has been a strategy where a local government will grant a developer a prime parcel of commercial construction land on the contingency that they also build and operate a museum (or an opera house, library, etc). In this way, a city can obtain their iconic public buildings while having someone else pick up the tab.

…After receiving accolades for building a world-class landmark, the developers often find themselves in more unfamiliar territory: actually running a museum.

“That isn’t to say that they can’t hire someone to be the curator to develop content, but at the end they don’t really care,” Johnson proclaimed. “They’re building it because they want to build the tower on the site adjacent to it to make their money.”

It light of this, it was somewhat ironic that on my recent trip to China, I found myself touring an extensive display depicting the Ancient Tea-Horse Road and elements of the Naxi ethnic minority in the basement of a family owned hotel in Lijiang. The owner and her father had created a 120 meter long diorama showing each stage of the journey in the tea-horse trade. (Though they currently only have room to display 80 meters.)

The floor of the basement are reverse frosted plexiglass with pictographs of the Dongba script once used by the Naxi along with the corresponding Chinese hanzi and English translation. The owner described how she, her husband and a friend created each panel.

The owner and her father spent a great deal of time and money both personally and hiring scholars and artists to assist in creating the diorama and floor displays. Clearly a labor of love and a testament to their pride in regional history and Naxi culture. But it is only accessible to guests of the hotel who are personally accompanied by the owner.

My sister and I just happened to choose the hotel from those that were available and then noticed the reviews mentioned that there was an amazing display in the basement.

I didn’t really press the owner to learn why her family continues to invest so much effort in a project so few people will ever see. Judging from the superior service and hospitality ethic she exhibited during our stay, it may just be rooted in the idea that pursuit of excellence brings it own rewards independent of external recognition.

 

A Harvest of Performers

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My summer vacation this year took me back to China. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet with China arts administrators on this trip, though I did try to secure some introductions and arrangements.

One arts related thing that struck me this time was the Impressions: Lijiang performance I attended. The show is directed by Zhang Yimou (Raise The Red Lantern, Hero, 2008 Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies) and was the second of seven shows he and his collaborators created for scenic places around China.  The show in Lijiang is performed in full daylight in a 2000 seat open amphitheater on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang.

There are about 500 performers and 100 horses in the show. As you will see from some of the pictures below, some of the performance happens in the aisles and the horses gallop around the entire rim of the amphitheater.

The interesting thing about this production is that all the performers have been cast from the local farmers, representing about 10 different ethnic minorities that live in the region, (including the Muoso, one of the few matrilineal societies in the world). So the cast is telling the story of their people who have lived there for generations. Historically, the people of Lijiang and Yunnan province in which the city is located have participated in the Ancient Horse-Tea Road trading route, thus the significant presence of horses in the show.

As far as I have been able to tell from what I can find in promotional content about the other six “Impressions” productions, it appears this show may be the only one that is performed by “amateurs.” I put the term in quotes because that is how many information sources about the show refer to them.

However, because everyone kept mentioning they were farmers, I asked if the show needed to be scaled back or cancelled during harvest and planting time to allow the performers to return home to help their families.  I was told performing was their full time job now and was assured they were making better money than if they were still living on the farm. As best I can tell the amateur term is likely a translation of the idea the performers haven’t received formal training rather than a reference to lack of skill or salary.

I wondered if the casting of farmers was intentional in order to help stimulate the economy by increasing the income of residents or was a practical matter due to the difficulty of finding 500+ trained performers in southwestern China, (though they likely didn’t need to be trained to handle and ride horses), or a combination of both. Given the way things operate in China, all the shows in the Impressions series were likely instigated by, and receive significant support from, the government. As much as I would love to use this as an example of government support for minority cultures, it wasn’t all that long ago that official policy was to suppress the cultural practices of these same ethnic minorities.

As you may have surmised from my pictures, it was raining the day we saw the show so the spectacular majesty of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the background is not apparent. Check out the video below which was taken during better weather.

Just To Take The Edge Off

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A couple weeks back, Slate had a long form article on people using beta-blockers to help with nervousness and stage fright. Just seeing the title, I immediately recalled a piece Drew McManus wrote 15 years ago wondering if the use of beta blockers among orchestra musicians was akin to athletes using performance enhancing drugs.

The Slate article made me wonder about the pressures orchestra musicians face because both performing artists quoted in the article were orchestra musicians. One was a performance psychologist on faculty at Juilliard who was against their use. The other was a cellist who actually founded a company that provides online consultations with doctors to help people access medicines. He is a frequent user of beta-blockers.

A 2015 study the Slate article links to shows that 72% of musicians have tried beta-blockers. 92% of responses indicated beta-blockers were most effective at dealing with nervousness (91% indicated experience was most effective). All those surveyed were orchestra/chamber/opera musicians since the survey was an update of a 1987 survey for International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians.

Use of beta-blockers is growing according to the commentary on the 2015 survey,

With regard to beta-blockers, the study shows that 72% of ICSOM musicians have tried using beta blockers for performance anxiety. Out of that group, 90% said they would consider using them for auditions, 74% would consider them for solo or featured performances, and 36% would consider them for orchestra performances. By comparison, in 1987 a reported 27% of ICSOM musicians had tried beta-blockers, representing a significant uptick (45%) over the last 28 years. Also in 1987 of those who’d tried beta-blockers 72% said they would use them for auditions while only 4% would use them for orchestra performances compared to today’s 36%.

While there has been an increase in the number of those who have or intend to use beta blockers, on a positive note, musicians have increased efforts at lead healthy lifestyles and pursue alternatives,

Today’s classical musician also reported better than average health and there was major increase in physical exercise as a method to address performance anxiety. In 1987 61% of musicians reported regular exercise and in 2015, 68% reported regular exercise. As a means for addressing performance anxiety, however, exercise was used by 17% in 1987 and 74% in 2015, a striking increase.

In both Drew’s 2004 piece and the recent Slate piece, there are people who swear beta-blockers are the best thing in the world and pretty much survive day to day by using them.

There are two big issues, however. The first is the obvious point that the pills are just masking the effects so that the root cause of stage fright/anxiety is never addressed so it is no wonder that people feel they need to continue to use them.

The second, and perhaps bigger problem is that the FDA has not approved the use of beta blockers for anxiety. They were created to address chest pain and heart arrhythmias. Taking them incorrectly or if you have a medical condition you are unaware of could result in everything from fainting from low blood pressure to heart attacks.

Going off them abruptly—say, if you took them for a string of presentations, then stopped—is dangerous, too, because blood pressure can spike in response, argues LeRoy.

This is a topic that bubbles up every few years that bears paying some attention. Since there are so many musicians using beta-blockers with apparently no ill-effects, (unless there are unreported incidents at auditions and performances), I imagine people will continue to use and swear by the pills. But this focuses on the symptoms without questioning the causes.

Perhaps the easiest place to start investigating is the training process itself to see if that might be engendering anxiety. The 2015 report asked the age people experienced their first performance anxiety and the largest response was approximately 33% between 11-15 years old. Approximately 25%-28% between 16-20 years old and 15% of respondents between 5-10 years old.

Bring Your Trash To My Open House

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This will be the last retrospective post of the series covering the time I am on vacation. I should be back at the helm Monday, hopefully with pictures and thoughts to share.

I am writing this post two days before I go on vacation but I am wishing I saw this old entry sooner.

The day before I am going on vacation, we are having an open house at my theater. A number of people haven’t seen the space since the most recent renovation in the Fall so we want to provide an opportunity to get in and look around. For those that have been to a show since then, we wanted to provide an opportunity to look around and ask questions without the pressure of getting to your seat in time for a performance.

We will be offering snacks, refreshments and such. However, I just came across an old post I made that suggested we encourage people to bring stuff to us, too.

In a post titled, Destroy Your Way To New Audiences, I had a brief moment of inspiration where I suggested renting a mobile paper shredder and inviting people to check out your organization and bring their boxes of documents that were too sensitive to just throw away.

Nowadays, another option might be to bring computers and phones to be recycled.

It struck me that this is the type of community service an organization could offer that will NEVER in a million years show up on a survey as something you could do to help the community. It is one of those things people need but don’t realize they need when asked.

This is also the sort of thing that breaks down barriers to attendance. You advertise an open house barbecue picnic at your organization and as someone who has never been to an arts organization, I might figure the only difference between the picnic and attending a performance is good ribs. Faced with the prospect of being the only person there who doesn’t know how to speak theatre/ballet/classical music/visual art, there may still be a high anxiety factor even if I don’t have to go into the building.

A shredder truck in the parking lot on the other hand is a service I can actually use. While I am there, maybe I grab some hamburgers and look around a little. If things get a little uncomfortable, the shredder provides my excuse as I notice the line is getting shorter, excuse myself and go over there. Heck, there isn’t much danger in bringing the kids either. Even if the arts stuff doesn’t appeal to them, watching papers get consumed by a giant machine is always interesting.

Signs Of When Seeds Were Planted

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So 2009 was long before ArtsMidwest started their Creating Connection initiative and before I started my correspondence with Carter Gillies regarding the value of the arts, but I found a blog post that made me think the underlying philosophy behind Creating Connect was already entering the collective unconscious.

Writing on a blog post by The Nonprofiteer (which unfortunately does not exist any longer, it appears a consultancy has her URL), I quoted part of her post,

Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

Given that support of public funding education has begun to flag, or is at least less stable than it was a decade ago, it is probably good that Creating Connection evokes the grassroots movement to ban smoking in public places as a model for building public will for the arts.

The idea that exposure to the arts will improve us as a society is a core part of Creating Connection which cites researching finding:

…people believe that the benefits of engaging in or experiencing creative expression are related to their quality of life: increased happiness, reduced stress, improved health, and more time spent with family and friends.

When asked what would be different if we had more opportunity to express or experience culture in our lives, respondents indicated a range of personal benefits that span concepts around growth, voice, well-being, and happiness.

One of things I like about doing these retrospective posts is discovering that these ideas had occurred to me long before I began regularly voicing them. (my emphasis today)

While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.

We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness.

The Arts Aren’t The Cherry, They Are The Yeast

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Apparently I watched a lot of TED Talks in 2009 as this seemed to be recurring element in my retrospective posts these couple of weeks. However, this is one I have remembered clearly for the last decade.

Mallika Sarabhai talks about using artistic expression to teach as well as deal with sensitive topics like justice and injustice. She starts out her talk telling a story about a monkey who witnesses a rape by the god Indra noting that the way Indra expiates the offense leaves the monkey confused. She says she has told that story around the world more than 550 times at schools and black tie events and has been able to discuss a rape due to the framework of the story.

Now, if I were to go into the same crowd and say, “I want to lecture you about justice and injustice,” they would say, “Thank you very much, we have other things to do.” And that is the astonishing power of art.

The part of her talk that has stuck with me for 10 years though is when she relates the health of people has been improved thanks to a performance that teaches people in villages to use a piece of cloth folded 8 times as a water filter. I think it is the practicality and survival element that has lead me to remember it.

All of these examples lead up to her very memorable policy statement about arts and culture:

What I need to say to the planners of the world, the governments, the strategists is, “You have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake. It needs to be the yeast.”

Art Is STILL Infecting My Brain

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Over 9 years ago I wrote about a TED Talk given by Golan Levin where he was demonstrating technology that being used to generate images based on sound input. The things he was doing was fun to watch because it was so interactive for the individual. Now 10 years on, we might be a little more blase about it all.

The one part of his talk that caught my attention was a visualization they had created of Jaap Blonk performing Kurt Schwitters’ tone poem The Ursonate.

At the time I wrote,

Much to my surprise, the cadence of Blonk’s recitation ran around in my head for a few days after. I don’t know if it qualifies as an ear worm since I couldn’t tell you a single word. Though I could spout nonsense syllables in an approximation of Blonk’s performance.

The thing is, it is 10 years later and as soon as I read this entry, Blonk’s recitation started bouncing around in my head. I started trying to recite what I remembered. I want to say I did a good job of recreating what I recalled. It is hard to know what the standards for accurately reciting nonsense sounds are.

In the interests of infecting you, watch the TED Talk (Blonk’s piece starts around 6:30) or watch the full recording of Blonk below.

I keep using the term “infected”, but it will probably evoke the pleasure you experienced as a kid playing with blurting out a made-up language.

I wrote back in 2009,

“Listening to Blonk’s and some of Schwitters’ recitations today, I recognize just how fun language can be. (I haven’t listened to all the different recordings.) Blonk especially seems like he enjoys playing with the sounds, luxuriating in the pleasure of pronunciation and takes joy in the enthusiastic exclamations.”

There have been times when I realized I got yelled at for doing stuff as a kid that is deemed artistic when done by adults. A lot people post Picasso’s quote, ““Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” It seems to me that the appellation “Artist” is the reward you get for reconnecting with the what you got punished for doing when you were a kid.

There Are No Small Theaters, Just Theaters Who Think They Are Small

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I wrote last week about how small nuances that alter our perception of a situation can make a big difference.  Back in 2009 I wrote another post along the same lines featuring a TED talk by Rory Sutherland.

At the time I felt the following bit Sutherland imparted was worth consideration for arts organizations. I wrote,

….at the end of his talk where he cites a quote “Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new.” Though in the case of the arts and current attendance trends, the familiar may be an entirely new experience.

He says it isn’t a bad definition of what advertising people’s job is: “To help people appreciate what is unfamiliar. But also to gain a greater appreciation and place a far higher value on those things that are already existing.”

Now that I have gone back and watched the video again, along with two other similar TED Talks he gave, I have a slightly different perspective. If you have been reading my blog recently, you may have seen my post about the importance of the physical environment surrounding an arts experience.

The challenge for a lot of arts organizations is that they may be operating out of older buildings that don’t have the newest technology and amenities. In his talks, Sutherland emphasizes that it is often more important to fix the perception rather than the problem.

He mentions that people were more satisfied with their experience in subways when digital displays of the next train’s arrival time were installed. It didn’t make the trains arrive any faster, but it removed the sense of uncertainty about how long one might have to wait.

In the UK, Sutherland says, the post office had a 98% rate of delivering first class mail by the next day and nearly destroyed themselves trying to improve that rate. The worst part is, when asked people guessed the next day delivery success rate averaged at about 50%-60%. Sutherland says it would have been cheaper and more effective to just tell people that the rate was 98%–especially if framed in reference to Germany.

“…tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the UK than in Germany, because generally, in Britain, if you want to make us happy about something, just tell us we do it better than the Germans.”

In other example, he show the elevator buttons in the Lydmar hotel in Stockholm which allows you to choose your elevator music. He suggests that an expensive renovation of your hotel room won’t distinguish it enough from any other room in a high-end hotel in your eyes, but the novelty of those buttons will make a lasting impression for a fraction of the cost.

Amusing distractions won’t make up for the fact that your restroom facilities are too small to accommodate the your entire audience during intermission. However, if they are sufficient, the most effective response to complaints about the wait is likely to be less expensive than a renovation to enlarge the restrooms.  The primary concern for the audience member isn’t whether they will be able to use the restroom, it is whether they will be able to use the restroom and perhaps get a drink before intermission ends.

Wow, “Run Arts Like A Business” Has Been A Thing For Awhile

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As I was looking back in the archives for content to post on while on vacation, I was surprised to see that I was writing back the dangers of the sentiment that “arts organizations should be run like a business” a decade ago.

I cited a piece in The New Republic discussing that manufacturing in the US began to decline when leadership started to be drawn from people focused on finance rather than operations.

“Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background….But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”

At the time, I expressed my concerns that leadership of arts organizations might become increasingly divorced from the metaphorical manufacturing process if those making decisions had never deeply engaged in creative pursuits.

I linked to a post I made in 2004 about observations that the back office at an orchestra was seemingly disassociated from the performances.

Thoughts on whether this situation has gotten better or worse in the last 10-15 years?

Is it a good sign that in the last couple months, you can’t turn around without seeing an article praising what California Symphony Executive Director, Aubrey Bergauer, a tuba player, has accomplished? Or is she just an outlier?

It’s Still Not Ann Margaret

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I am going on vacation for a couple weeks so the blog will be featuring some interesting posts from the archives.

Back in 2009 I wrote a lengthy article about a Mad Men episode where the ad agency reproduced the opening of Ann Margaret singing Bye, Bye Birdie, in order to sell Pepsi’s new Patio diet soda. Even though it was exactly what they asked for, the client felt there was something wrong. When they leave, one of the ad men points out what was wrong was that it wasn’t Ann Margaret singing the song.

One of the points I made at the time was that people often try to copy or adopt something that has emerged as wildly successful in the assumption that they will be able to cash in on that popularity. The problem is that they don’t comprehend the nuanced elements that made the original so successful.

What made this old post more timely is that last week, there was a similar illustration of the “its not Ann Margaret” effect. The recent release of a video game based on the Avengers: Endgame movie was widely panned because few of the characters in the video resembled the actors who had portrayed the heroes in movies over the last decade or so.

A somewhat different perspective on anticipating and managing expectations.

Many have pointed out that the console versions of their favourite characters do not resemble the Marvel Cinematic Universe superheroes. Custom playable identities have instead been created, meaning Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark, Chris Evans’ Captain America and more are nowhere to be seen.

“Wow, the new Avengers game looks… really bad,” wrote one fan on Twitter. Another said: “They can’t even use the Avenger’s theme song? Like WTF.”

Education vs Learning

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Seth Godin had a post recently where he made the distinction between education and learning. The way he differentiated the two was that education is  based in compliance and authority–you were able to memorize information or perform in an approved manner in order to pass a test measuring your mastery of content on a certain day.

Learning, by his definition, is part of an ongoing process.

Learning that embraces doing. The doing of speaking up, reviewing and be reviewed. The learning of relevant projects and peer engagement. Learning and doing together, at the same time, each producing the other.

While there is some degree of compliance and submission to authority associated with training in arts disciplines, (some to a greater degree than others), there is a large component of practical doing involved as well.

In the process, one gains many of the tools and skills required for evaluation. Whether one uses those tools to reinforce compliance and authority or to enact self-reflective change is another matter.

It occurred to me that there is some irony to the fact that skillsets that are a result of education with little practical content is frequently more highly valued than an education that has a high degree of practice.

Basically, a person who graduates with a dance degree likely has a lot more experience in real life application of their skills than a graduate with an accounting degree, but which is valued more?

Certainly, not all practical experience is valued, regardless of how good you are at it.  Even the best shepherd in the world is going to have a difficult time finding a job in the US.

What Godin says is needed is engaging in the boring, methodical work of self-assessment, data analysis, etc that helps you learn about yourself and what works.

Of course, there is always something we don’t know so we do need to get instruction from somewhere. But there is no seminar or workshop that will provide all the magical answers, it will just point you to the place to start asking questions.

 

15 Years Later, An Arts Criticism Model Where Open Access Is Assumed

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If you didn’t happen to see it rolling around social media or on Artsjournal.com last week, Carolina Performing Arts’ festival, The Commons, experimented with a new model of criticism.  Their reflections on the process appeared under the attention getting title of, “Uh, We Sort of Made an Arts-Criticism Utopia? Here’s What We Learned.”

What they did was pretty simple, but more resource and labor intensive than most media outlets have invested. They assigned two critics to a show, one who was embedded for the entire creation process, and another who only saw the final product.

The premise was that critical documentation is at once changing in form, diminishing in frequency, and urgently needed. And it’s not just documentation of performances that is needed, but also of the work and conversation that surrounds and sustains them.

My read on their process was that since the traditional media sources for arts criticism were divesting themselves of the practice, there is room to re-imagine what it means to discuss the merits of an event/performance/work. Part of the re-imagining seems to be examining what the critic, artists, and readership are really looking for from a critique. In the process, a lot of old rules are ripe for being broken.

The Commons Crit was designed to test several hypotheses, which we raised again at the start of the roundtable: that criticism should not always be beholden to a coverage model; that critics should have the space and freedom to experiment; that critics and artists are allies, not adversaries; that artistic process deserves as much attention as the final product; and that artists have legitimate ideas about who can authentically represent the cultural perspective of their work.

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In journalism, it’s a no-no to let an artist pick their reviewer, but in The Commons, to a large extent, we did. At least, we consulted the writers about what sort of person would be an apt conduit for their cultural perspective. For example, Victoria and Stephanie—accomplished writers, but not performance critics—were selected for their fluency in Spanish and border issues, while Chris and Michaela built upon longstanding relationships with Justin. For Eb. Brown, a male African-American embedded writer was essential, but it would take the perspective of a female African-American writer (Danielle Purifoy) to round out the performance’s meaning.

The thing is, in my very first blog post over 15 years ago I linked to an opinion piece by Chris Lavin, “Why Arts Coverage Should Be More Like Sports,”  where he basically calls for exactly the rule breaking relationship the Carolina Performing Arts Festival has engaged in.

And, in my experience, many arts critics see themselves as critics first, story-tellers second. Some actually keep a distance from the performers, directors and theater executives to “”preserve their objectivity.” Getting the full range of stories that capture the drama of making art is difficult even if the arts organizations were interested in seeing that full-range of stories. I’m not sure they really are.

When compared to the open access a sports franchise allows, most arts organizations look like a cross between the Kremlin and the Vatican. Casting is closed. Practices closed. Interviews with actors and actresses limited and guarded. An athlete who refuses to do interviews can get fined. An actor or actress or director or composer who can’t find time for the media is not uncommon. How would a director take to a theater critic watching practice and asking for his/her early analysis of the challenges this cast faces with the material — the relatively strengths and weaknesses of the lead actor, the tendencies of the play write to resist rewriting?

I will confess that one of my first thoughts was whether this model could be sustainable –until, of course, I remembered this was one of the very first topics I wrote about on the blog and many places have found a way to sustain their sports reporting.

I think what would help make it sustainable is writers who are adept at the storytelling aspect of the job. Audiences are ready to accept the opinions of people on social media whom they have never met so the value of a certified objective opinion has greatly diminished.

When it comes to sports, people are more than ready to identify with a good story and argue its merits with their neighbors without worrying overly much about the objective truths of the matter. The arts are much more about storytelling than sports. There are no statistics about a dancer’s range of motion at the matinee versus the evening performance to bog the conversation down.

You can read the reviews on The Commons Crit page. One of the things that is somewhat confusing for the first time visitor is that there is no clear delineation between what appears to be preview pieces and the the reviews. The reviews have both the thoughts of the embedded writer and one-time writer in one place, but there are also other stories by the embedded writer about that same event. (Here is another such pairing.) If you are coming to the site to figure out what your experience might be, it can be difficult to determine, but that is an easy matter of labeling.

 

Baumol Effect Is A Blessing, Not A Disease

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Economist Alex Tabarrok recently made an interesting post on Baumol’s cost disease.  The concept usually explained by noting that since it doesn’t take any less time to perform a string quartet than it did when Beethoven wrote it, orchestras have no way to save money by taking advantage of advances in productivity and efficiency.

Tabarrok comes at it from the perspective that it is only more expensive to perform a string quartet now because productivity has increased in other industries.

The Baumol effect is easy to explain but difficult to grasp.

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Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising implication: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive. In 1826, the average wage of $1.14 meant that the 2.66 hours needed to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 had an opportunity cost of just $3.02. At a wage of $26.44, the 2.66 hours of labor in music production had an opportunity cost of $70.33. Thus, in 2010 it was 23 times (70.33/3.02) more expensive to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 than in 1826.

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The focus on relative prices tells us that the cost disease is misnamed. The cost disease is not a disease but a blessing. To be sure, it would be better if productivity increased in all industries, but that is just to say that more is better. There is nothing negative about productivity growth, even if it is unbalanced.

If that is a little hard to understand, he uses a more relatable example to point out that “…over time prices have very little connection to affordability.”

If the price of the same can of soup is higher at Wegmans than at Walmart we understand that soup is more affordable at Walmart. But if the price of the same can of soup is higher today than in the past it doesn’t imply that soup was more affordable in the past, even if we have done all the right corrections for inflation.

So just because a ticket costs more than it did years ago, doesn’t mean it is necessarily less affordable. Granted, it may still be a bit more difficult to get the funds together than in the past. I have had people tell me they were able to see Broadway shows for $15 at one time. While I suspect they may be mis-remembering how much of their weekly salary that $15 represented, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that tickets today are a greater portion of the weekly salary for that same job today. The production values are likely a lot higher than people saw when they were paying $15 so the ratio of value to money spent is probably fairly good.

Based on Tabarrok’s explanation, the concept that certain artistic expressions are fated to be an increasing burden on society because they can’t be executed with greater efficiency is not valid. Productivity growth in other areas provides the capacity to support those artistic expressions.

When Ignoring “Show, Don’t Tell” Is The Best Option

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Hat tip to Artsjournal.com who listed an article from The Conversation about how your phone can interrupt a concert experience. Author Christine Van Winkle discusses research she and her team conducted at outdoor summer music festivals over the course of five years.

Because the research was conducted at festivals, the detrimental effects of using a phone at a concert was more focused on the quality of the user experience rather than the impact on those around the person. With factors like heat, cold, rain, bugs and people bumping into you, the glow of a phone screen isn’t as big a distraction to others as it can be in a concert hall.

As a result, the research is potentially more effective at persuading people not to use phones because the message is about why they aren’t having the best experience rather than that they are causing others to have a poor experience.

As you might imagine, some of those participating in the study intentionally left their phones at home and didn’t miss them. Others were discomforted without their phones or by the failure of the phone battery.

It is interesting to note that the anti-social behavior of peering over your phone in a group can create social pressure on others to use their phone in a similar manner:

Festival goers described sitting with friends who were texting or searching on their phones and suddenly they felt compelled to use their phone as well. This mirroring behaviour is a well known response people have in social situations.

The idea that phone use is “infectious” may provide some incentive to arts entities to prohibit the use of phone. But it isn’t just the performers and venues which may be dissatisfied with this type of phone use, the practice can lead to disappointment for the phone user as well.

The research shows that when we decide to use our phones to check work email, to check up on the kids or any other activities that have nothing to do with the festival, our satisfaction with the experience goes down.

However, Van Winkle’s research shows using the phone for activities related to the experience doesn’t impact satisfaction either positively or negatively. While the outcome is currently neutral, it may be worthwhile for artists and organizations to think about creating content that augments the experience. The lack of a positive sense of satisfaction may just reflect the fact that most activity related content mentioned in the study is of neutral value like schedules and maps.

When we do use our devices at festivals it doesn’t affect our satisfaction with the event if we are using our phones for festival-related activities like looking at the festival schedule, the venue map or even texting to meet up with friends who are joining us.

Van Winkle offers some tips for phone use, most of which involve limiting your interactions with the phone and the amount of content you receive from others. What was most interesting to me was her suggestion that offering too much information can actually diminish the number of opportunities you have to relate your experience to others. Essentially, contrary to all prior storytelling advice, this would be the one time to tell, don’t show. (my emphasis)

Wait to post. It’s fun to share your experience with your extended network but consider waiting until you return home. Sharing the memories captured on your phone after the experience gives you an opportunity to reflect on the day and prevents you from being distracted by other people’s posts while you are at the event.

Consider not posting any images of your experience to social media at all — you might find it leads to more conversations with people when they ask about your weekend or summer. Often, once people have seen your post they assume they already know how your weekend was, robbing you of the opportunity to share your experience with them.

Why (And How) Are You Apologizing?

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Seth Godin recently wrote a lengthy post on the subject of apologies.  He addresses the issue of entities providing insufficient apologies but also the expectation of restitution which is out of proportion with the offense.  Since good customer service is one of the primary attributes that contribute to the success of non-profit arts organizations, it is obviously worth considering what he has to say.

We can start by asking, “what is this apology for?” What does the person need from us?

  • To be seen
  • Compensation
  • Punishment for the transgressor
  • Stopping the damage

The first category is the one that most demands humanity, and it’s also the most common. A form letter from a company does not make us feel seen. Neither does an automated text from an airline when a plane is late. One reason that malpractice victims sue is that surgeons sometimes have trouble with a genuine apology.

He says when people don’t feel they have been seen, it leads to demands for the other three elements: Compensation to make good on a real or perceived loss; Punishment which allows the victim to feel the transgressor has also suffered; Stopping the damage so that no one else suffers the same harm in the future.

These other three categories can be executed in a constructive manner, though it is easy for punishment to turn into a recurring cycle of damage.

However, Godin says some psychological and social expectations related to compensation, punishment and stopping the damage can have a destructive result.

Compounding these totally different sorts of apologies is the very industrial idea of winning. Victims have been sold that it’s not enough that your compensation is merely helpful, but it has to be the most. That you won the biggest judgment in history. That the transgressor isn’t simply going to jail, but is going to jail forever, far away, in solitary confinement. We’ve all ended up in a place where one of the ways to feel seen is to also feel like you came in first place compared to others.

Though it may not prevent someone who seeks to win to the detriment of others, Godin says the best way for an organization to address damage is to train and empower front line staff to provide an empathetic response.

The challenge that organizations have is that they haven’t trained, rewarded or permitted their frontline employees to exert emotional labor to create human connection when it’s most needed.

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The alternative is to choose to contribute to connection by actually apologizing. Apologizing not to make the person go away, but because they have feelings, and you can do something for them. Apologizing with time and direct contact, and following it up by actually changing the defective systems that caused the problem.

“Yikes, I’m sorry you missed your flight–I really wish that hadn’t happened. The next flight is in an hour, but that’s probably going to ruin your entire trip. Are you headed on vacation?”

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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