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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.

Oh Please Let Someone Start Singing Ode To Joy In The Produce Aisle

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On my Twitter feed I got a link to an announcement that a documentary on Knight Foundation’s Random Act of Culture program won a regional Emmy. As I watched the first brief video where Dennis Scholl talks about first getting the idea from a pop up opera performance in Valencia, Spain where they ended by holding a sign saying “So You Don’t Think You Like Opera?,” two questions came to mind.

The first is I wondered why people reacted so positively to having performers throw off their “mundane” identities and burst into action in public spaces, but will pass by Joshua Bell or Tasmin Little in street clothes playing in a railway station.

I am on record expressing disdain for the way the Joshua Bell situation was set up because it seemed positioned to allow the journalist to call out people as uncultured philistines. I wrote about a great three part podcast (which alas has disappeared) where the contributors discussed how important setting and context are to creating a receptive mindset in people and how these things are not present in rail stations.

But people aren’t naturally placed in this mindset in shopping malls and supermarkets either. People may be less harried than when they are rushing to work or to connect to another form of transportation, but they generally aren’t going shopping secretly hoping the crowd will burst into “Ode To Joy.” Yet people are immediately delighted when it happens. Why is that?

The difference may be the scale. Walking up on a busker or group of performers on the street is a different experience from having the people around you start to participate in something. You have more permission to enjoy yourself if 40 people standing around you start singing versus seeing the 40 people nearby stride with determination past buskers.

There is also a different sort of theatricality involved with flash performances than busker setting up an open instrument case. If Joshua Bell had flung off his jacket with a flourish and dove into a lively piece as he descended the escalator at the Metro station, it might have engaged the curiosity of more people.

The second question that occurred to me was the one posed at the end of the performance in Valencia about not liking opera. It probably is easy to be open to liking opera in a 5-10 minute segment when everyone around you seems to be participating. It may not seem as enjoyable to go to an opera house and try to follow the plot of an entire opera in a foreign language. Heck, it may not seem enjoyable if a group did a pop up performance of the entire opera, blocking the aisles for two hours while you were trying to buy groceries for your family.

This isn’t a criticism of the Random Acts of Culture program. Inciting curiosity and showing people they have the capacity to enjoy opera, dance, etc., is an asset to the arts.

We just can’t acclaim that particular tactic as the answer to getting new audiences hooked. It’s no more the solution than the idea that people only need to see our work once before they are hooked.

In fact, it may be less so. For people who are not frequent attendees, the experience of going to the opera after seeing a pop up performance may seem like a bait and switch. For people who work in the field, it can be difficult to imagine how stark the contrast may seem to them.

Thankfully, many in the field are able to imagine that performance attendance experience may be losing its relevance for today’s audiences and there is a fair bit of conversation occurring about what alternatives are possible.

On the other side of the equation, when arts practitioners advocate for taking art and culture to people where they live, it should be remembered that these experiences are only a delight because they are unexpected, infrequent and in small doses. Too much of it and you are an unwelcome intrusion on people where they live.

It would be better if arts practitioners could find a place nearby where people could gather and be delighted that doesn’t interfere with the daily flow of life.

Oh wait, there are already a bunch of those. They are the places nobody under the age of 60 seems to want to go to have an arts experience.

Clearly, there has to be a medium between the two environments and it is going to take some work to determine what it is exactly.

One of the things I suspect, but I would be interested to see a study confirm, is that the pop up performances like those in the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture may make spectators more confident in their own ability to be creative. Even though the person standing next to them who started singing may have many years of training and rehearsed for five hours in order to make everything look effortless, the illusion is there that the average John or Jane has the potential for excellence. A concept that is reinforced by shows like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.

Since we are seeing signs that the concept of personal creativity is more appealing than the concept of art and culture, pop up performances could be one of many tools used to encourage people toward participation in creative endeavors. That can’t be the only tactic used and the execution has to come off more organic than just planting performers in the audience.

To whit:

Companies No Longer Want To Sponsor Simply For The Exposure

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The most recent issue of Arts Management Newsletter has a translation of a piece written by Wolfgang Lamprecht about the death of corporate sponsorship.

Citing the number of corporations disengaging from their support of a host of international venues and events, Lamprecht says the days of sponsorship as publicity is past. The value of sponsorships to a corporation needs to be framed in different terms.

Just as many artists are rebuking job opportunities that provide “exposure” as the only stated benefit, so too are companies no longer interested in arrangements that simply puts their logo in front of eyeballs.

Here’s the thing: today, entrepreneurial cultural engagement is less about image or about customer loyalty than it is about the central asset of trust. Our current crisis of confidence cannot be overcome with programs for the needy, nor by logo placements.

[…]

Art and culture have the particular advantage that, on the most part, they generate a basic element of trust. Trust and confidence are crucial for securing the stability and legitimacy of the economic system, but they must be produced discursively. The disadvantage of culture lies in the fact that art and culture are viewed as being marginally important and therefore have to fight for their social relevance.

Lamprecht notes that as the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has gained currency, it has expanded to encompass the concept of Corporate Cultural Responsibility (CCR). He takes pains to emphasize that “CCR is therefore part of the social (= societal, not charitable) responsibility of a company.” So conversations soliciting support should focus more on social good and responsibility versus charity and tax benefits.

Of course, this also means that the organization soliciting the support needs to make sure they present an image that embodies cultural asset.

In short, cultural engagement of a company has to follow the belief that the support of arts and culture is not simple fun and communicatively truly brings all that which impact research and marketing departments have so eagerly argued for in the past (image, customer loyalty, employee motivation, etc.). Above all, it is an important contribution to social responsibility that a company should, if not must, provide to maintain a balanced and civilized society, as well to the long-term sustainability of its own success.

[…]

The goal remains the same: against the backdrop of a massive lack of trust through saturated markets and products that are similar, corporations are, in the competition for clients, forced to approach their stakeholders differently than by common means. CCR presupposes the desire to stand out from the competition and, particularly in the field of corporate communication, to secure confidence, competitive advantages and verifiable income. The following measures have been defined for CCR: corporate sponsoring, corporate giving, corporate secondments / corporate volunteering, events, cultural commissioning, product-/image placement, cause-related marketing, public private partnerships, impact investments.

My only concern with this approach is that it starts to smack of artwashing/culturewashing and greenwashing. An arts organization can damage their image long term by having an association or accepting a gift from an unsavory individual or company. It would be worse if they were perceived as openly courting anyone who wanted to remove a blemish on their reputation.

Something Lamprecht wrote seemed to suggest this approach should be used with individuals as well as companies.

“…a key advantage of the model described here is no longer the need to decline and perpetuate the terminologically worn demarcations (CCR measures) between sponsorship, patronage, donations, etc. as a prerequisite for entrepreneurial legitimacy of individual cultural support measures.”

If individuals are not widely solicited for support in Austria, I may be misreading this to suggest that the idea of social responsibility should be applied to all efforts to garner support, including individuals. I know from reading other pieces in the Arts Management Newsletter that fundraising in Germany is conducted in a different manner than in the US. It may be similar in Austria where Lamprecht works.

But it is interesting to consider that rather than saying individuals donate and corporations sponsor, a single term and rationale for giving might be used.

Is there any benefit to trying to recast the rationale for why an individual in the US should donate? My impression is that different people are motivated to donate by different arguments. But if you change the message from donate to help a poor child experience art (charity) to donate to help a child develop into a better cultural citizen (social responsibility), is that better?

My suspicion is that “cultural citizen” will work with foundations and governments whereas “charity for the under served” is more compelling to an individual. But maybe I haven’t thought of the right terms yet.

Best Effort Yet And I Missed It

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I didn’t know about NBC’s recent live broadcast of The Wiz until it was over, and that worries me.

It isn’t because I necessarily really wanted to see it. It’s the idea that if a company with the resources of NBC couldn’t make a person in the arts like myself aware that the show was going on, what hope do I, with my comparatively minuscule advertising budget and resources, have of reaching members of my community?

I haven’t had a television for about 5 years now and I don’t watch or rent video through Netflix or Hulu. If I did, maybe I would have seen something if NBC promoted it there.

As it was, I had no inkling NBC had even chosen to do The Wiz as their next project, much less when it would air. In all the blogs I read, all the webpages I visit, all the Twitter posts I read in the course of the day, I saw no mention of it until a bunch of people started gushing about how great it was during and after the performance. If there were banner ads on webpages I visited, I missed them.

I should mention, I did notice ads for a performance of Phantom of the Opera at some place in South Carolina. I wondered why I was getting what appeared to be retargeted ads since I am so far away geographically and never visited their webpage. There is a good chance I would have noticed something similar for The Wiz.

This challenge of reaching audiences as so many disparate channels of communication proliferate isn’t a new one. It has been the subject of discussion for a long time and many blogs and articles offer tips for using social media and other strategies to reach audiences.

While my experience (or inattention) isn’t necessarily indicative of a nation trend, as I say the fact that The Wiz broadcast went entirely under my radar caused me great concern. I guess for as engaged in the conversations of the arts field as I am, I am still joining the legions of the disengaged.

Cultural Promissory Notes

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I was reading about a woman who put her San Francisco home up for sale at 2005 prices with the condition that the buyer sign a “cultural promissory note.”

Finally, they had to offer a 10-year “cultural promissory note”: a legally binding, decade long commitment to provide something of cultural value—theater tickets, writing lessons, organic produce from “your uncle’s farm in Salinas”—to the community or Lee herself.

San Francisco being San Francisco, the seller received bids from prospective buyers who promised to put in a decade of volunteer journalism for El Tecolote or donate 30 bottles of wine a year to a nonprofit organization. In other words, value: Buyers were promising their time, skills, assets, or donations in kind in place of cash up front.

I just love the opportunities the term “cultural promissory note” hints at.

Separate from any sort of real estate dealings, I wondered if there were any advantage to arts organizations providing an option to sign some sort of similar cultural promissory note or be a potential beneficiary of a cultural promise.

For example, in addition to requiring someone to help with administrative and maintenance work in exchange for studio space or access to resources, have people submit a proposal stating what other contribution they will make to the organization or general community.

By the way, the winning bid on the San Francisco condo included:

…a yearly free writing conference at Modern Times bookstore; a “bestseller visionary” membership to Litquake; tickets to cultural events of Lee’s choosing to the tune of $660 a year; a course at Stanford Continuing Studies, where Watrous teaches; and a donation to La Cocina, a Mission nonprofit that helps low-income women open food businesses.”

As a way to offer rewards/incentive for committing to a cultural note, perhaps people would get guaranteed orchestra section seats for back row prices, access to classes or rehearsal space, etc in return for a significant commitment to serve the interests of an arts council, cultural trust, arts district. So instead of a corporation or individual getting donor benefits at one place, they receive something for advancing the interests of multiple organizations.

I think this is probably thinking too conventionally compared to the possibilities people could come up with on their own. The people who ultimately purchased the SF condo probably put together a more varied and interesting bid than the seller might have proposed. It was also more appropriate to their abilities and general availability than anything the seller might have asked them to do.

A cooperative approach to receiving/delivering on a promissory note might be attractive to large business like a law firm that commits to working on zoning issues, property acquisition or lobbying for the creation of a cultural district. The families of their employees will have varied interests and will likely find the offerings of multiple organizations more appealing than a single entity.

The approach could also be focused on a more individual scale. For example, perhaps an incentive the Boys & Girls Club uses to hire a new director is tickets/membership donated by an arts facility. If the Boys & Girls Club is already paying to attend shows or take classes from the arts entity, those tickets/memberships may help over the long run as budgets get tighter and a decision needs to be made about what activities to cut.

Even if there isn’t an active relationship between the two organizations, that membership helps to start getting the new director invested in the community, perhaps even before they make the move and start their job.

As I say, given time and more minds, there are certainly many more intriguing possibilities that exist. The concept of “cultural promissory note” seems replete with so much potential that different places could easily create entirely different definitions of what one entails.

What would it mean to you?

Dozen-ish Views On Etiquette

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Audiences today, they just don’t know how to behave!

You have probably seen a lot of conversation on this subject crop up whenever something egregious occurs and makes the news or social media rounds.

UK based What’s On Stage decided to tackle the subject of etiquette from all angles over the last week.  There is a full index of all the articles on their site.  It can be worth taking a look through because while they have the usual perspectives from actors, annoyed audience members and the obligatory post about how things only got staid and passive during the Victorian era, there are some voices that aren’t commonly heard.

For example, an usher writes how they and their compatriots are the public face of the theater and bear the heaviest expectation to enforce the rules but don’t receive the support necessary to carry out their charge.

What the usher has to say probably isn’t news, but is a reminder to examine whether we are providing our front line staff/volunteers with sufficient support.

A theater manager writes:

I do think audience behaviour has changed recently. People feel they know their rights more and don’t necessarily have to think about other people. It’s all about them: ‘this is ridiculous, I shouldn’t have to queue’. There is a sense of entitlement. It always seems to be: ‘I’m traumatised now, and what are you going to give me?’

People are angry when they get disrupted by phones, but it also works the other way. The person on the phone says: ‘What’s your problem? It’s my phone and I am busy.’ There’s no sense of being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes.

He/she notes that so often a balance has to be struck, especially when it comes to assessing whether dealing with a disruption will cause a bigger disruption than is already occurring.

Then there are those who like their audience rowdy and involved and a woman who was dismayed that the audience at a performance at Mamma Mia! was so polite, she couldn’t manage to get them to sing along with the performers.

If nothing else, the series is a good reminder that the question of etiquette is one encompasses an entire range of people, not just those in close proximity in a single moment.

Not As Simple As Subtracting The iPhones

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I was really interested to read how a coffee house in NYC was using conversational prompts in an effort to get customers talking with each other. It seemed quite similar to the program a Brazilian bus company created to get people on their buses chatting with each other and inspired me to try something similar at my performing arts center.

It was only when I read the story a little closer that I realized the reason the prompts exist is part of a philosophy which also involves keeping the Wifi off until 5 pm. Turning the Wifi off helps the coffee house serve more customers because fewer people are camping out at the tables all day, but it is also about creating a communal space.

“We truly believe that coffee shops were created for people to engage with one another, and meet new people, and be community hubs,” says Birch Coffee co-founder Jeremy Lyman. “When everybody has their face in their laptop, that can’t happen. We’re trying to create a way for people to be a little more vulnerable.”

Initially I thought to write something about how every time I encounter another anecdote about personal electronic devices causing people to disengage from normal interactions, it offsets arguments about the benefits of allowing their use. Sure they may tell their friends about their experience or research upcoming shows, but is short term economic benefit worth the erosion of social interactions?

But as I re-read the quote above about coffee houses being community hubs where people engage with and meet new people, it occurred to me that this is often the same language arts and cultural organizations use when touting their benefits. This made me question, if the primary format being offered is sitting quietly in a dark room, is there a lot going on that is staving off the erosion of social interactions?

Sure, the fact people have come out and are in physical proximity with strangers rather than at home watching Netflix is fast approaching the point where it will be considered a major victory. Is it really raising the bar and setting a new standard for enabling community involvement and interaction? Subtracting iPhones doesn’t automatically increase a participant’s engagement in an event.

Granted, the primary purpose of a cultural organization is not to stimulate social interactions. Then again, nor is it the primary goal of coffee shops. If it is a value you embrace or claim to bring, it needs to part of the planning.

Recent studies have started to suggest that the term “creative expression” is viewed more favorably than “arts” so arts groups may need to offer more opportunities for interaction and creativity. This is not to say that current practices needs to be abandoned. Rather alternatives will need to be provided if group are going to claim they are a community resource and bemoan the decline of social interactions.

One example that pops to mind (or more accurately, my salivary glands) is the Bach, Bacon and Biscuit event in Chattanooga that Holly Mulcahy recently wrote about.

Think about it-

-Free samples of a new biscuit?
-With BACON!?
-Free Concerto Concert?
-With BACH-ON?

What’s not to like? f that isn’t a recipe for bringing people together and getting them to interact…

Tell Stories For Thanksgiving

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When you are eating Thanksgiving dinner with your family and you get asked when you are going to get a real job, or something to that effect, instead of trying to justify yourself with logical arguments and statistics from studies on the value of the arts, simply try telling stories that illustrate why you love what you do.

Maybe it isn’t even related to your discipline and maybe the one incident you talk about isn’t significant enough to convince people your life devoid of career prospects is worthwhile.  The one thing arts people do well, but need to learn to do better outside of their preferred circumstances, is tell stories.

Just to give some examples.

-In the last 12 months, we have had some great shows and offered great experiences at our performing arts center. Among the highlights were a great stage combat workshop that seamlessly involved 25ish people from 10 year olds to college sophomores.

-Last March there was a terrible snow storm that forced us to cancel a performance. Fortunately, the group was willing to perform the next day. While they were waiting, they wandered around town. The owner of the coffee shop still tells me how charming they were.

-The three year old grandson of one of our patrons has to walk by the performing arts center a couple times a week on his way to and from daycare and still asks if he can go inside and see the Tuvan throat singers that performed here over a month ago.

-A couple weeks ago I went to the local museum to listen to an artist demonstrate how she created the effect on her work using encaustic. It was a lot of fun, especially when she started to debate the relative merits of hair dryers, heat guns and embossing tools as part of the fusing method. Afterward many of us went to a local rib place and had dinner.

I kept these examples brief and left out many of the compelling details in the interest of holding a reader’s attention. As a subject of conversation the last story about the encaustic workshop might be the best simply because I am not a visual artist and know as little with about the discipline as those with whom I am having dinner. There is less danger of using language or focusing on minutiae relevant only to insiders. (Though you probably had to be there to understand the heat gun v. hair dryer v. embossing tool conversation.)

I think relatives around a dining table can relate to stories about: artists skilled enough to involve participants of all ages; artists who are committed to seeing a performance happen and have positive interactions with community members; strange, unfamiliar singing styles from other countries that even excite little kids; visual artists who are accessible in the explanation of their work and as potential dining partners.

Even if you don’t do the best job telling your stories and your relatives don’t quite get it, you can simply say you are thankful that you have been able to provide opportunities where people learned interesting things and enjoyed themselves. If they are interested, you would be able to involve them in the future.

This Post Did Not Emerge Fully Formed Like Athena From My Skull

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A topic I frequently like to write about is the misconception that artistic inspiration is the result of a lightning bolt moment rather than the product of long term effort.

In the past, the examples I have given have focused on how creative people subscribe to this notion. However, Howard Sherman retweeted an article today that pointed out how society at large reinforces this belief.

In the article Rebecca Atkinson-Lord draws attention to the language used when describing playwright Katherine Soper’s winning the Bruntwood Prize for Playwrighting. Like many people in the arts, Soper has a second job she works in order to provide financial support for her writing efforts. Many media outlets described her as a “shop assistant,” “perfume seller,” and “first time writer.” (She is a trained playwright and this isn’t her first effort.)

Atkinson-Lord writes,

By perpetuating this myth of the ‘Big Break’, our media culture teaches those outside the arts world that to be a successful artist is easy, that there’s no need to aim for excellence, no need to push yourself harder, to educate yourself and develop key skills to be the very best you can be. It makes the arts look easy. And easy is cheap.

In turn that undermines the case for proper funding of the arts – if anyone can make excellent art, then there’s no need to pay artists competitively or fund its development. Presenting Katherine as (just) a shop assistant also conceals the stark reality that most theatre makers have to do ‘money jobs’ to survive while disguising the systemic flaws in how the arts are funded and theatre makers are employed.

She goes on to note that the headlines also make subtle class assumptions about a shop assistant’s capability to create award winning art work and certainly that is another factor at play here.

According to the article, Soper mentioned on social media that included her second job in her bio as a way to emphasize that artists are balancing multiple roles. It appears that got turned around a bit on her.

While media channels really need to be more responsible about researching and honestly reporting on a creative person’s existence and career before their big break, it isn’t likely to happen. The romance of the humble origins in a garage is just too compelling a story, even if it isn’t true.

birth athena

Thankfully, We Don’t Have To Settle

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Over on ArtsHacker, the contributors talk about what they are thankful for as arts managers.  Often the spoken or unspoken source of gratitude is the fact that we still have jobs and that people continue to be interested enough in what we do to support our work.

There was a post on Vox.com by Dennis Perkins, a guy who, until recently, worked for a video store in Portland, ME. Yes, apparently there are still some around, though fewer every day.  The store lasted as long as it had thanks to the exceptionally knowledgeable, curatorial and customer service practices of the owner and staff.

Perkins offers some sobering insights that may be instructive for the future of  performing and visual arts organizations.

1) Video stores are about investment
The enemy of video stores was convenience. The victim of convenience is conscious choice.

[..]

If you’re actually in a video store, the stakes are different. You’re engaged. You’re on a mission to find a movie — the right movie. You had to get out of bed, get dressed, and go to a store. You had to think about what you want, why this movie looks good and not that one, perhaps even seeking guidance or advice….Before the film even starts playing, you’ve begun a relationship with it. You’re curious. Whether you’ve chosen well or poorly, you’ve made a choice, and you’re in it for the duration.

With online streaming, we don’t decide — we settle. And when we aren’t grabbed immediately, we move on. That means folks are less likely to engage with a film on a deep level; worse, it means people stop taking chances on challenging films

Similarly, attending an event is an investment and involves a relationship that the attendee has begun to develop. This isn’t news. There has long been a conversation about eliminating barriers to making that choice since it can also involve arranging for a babysitter, eating a meal and finding parking.

In some respects, the “settling” behavior represents a deepening manifestation of having 500 channels and finding nothing on,  because it continues to normalize having low expectations.  (And settling is pretty common, Mashable satirized it.) This situation is worse because it couples low expectations with the perception there is no alternative.

When it was just 500 cable channels, you had the option of going to a video store and getting recommendations. As Perkins notes, an algorithm suggesting new options can’t replace a human. Even if it isn’t just factoring in your “settling” choices and tosses in unexpected options to push you in new directions, an algorithm doesn’t exert the influence/peer pressure of another human being. It doesn’t care if you choose to settle.

Turns out, those snarky, smug video and record store clerks who looked down on your choices provided a valuable service.

Perhaps most disheartening about Perkins’ piece is his assertion that excellent customer service, high customer loyalty and efforts to reach people via social media won’t save you.

Videoport had loyal customers, customers who didn’t abandon us, even at the end. Sensing the air of growing unease at the thinning lines at the store made some regulars come in even more, sometimes dragging friends along and extolling our virtues. There was an elderly couple who loved my recommendations so much I’m genuinely worried they’re just staring at a blank screen right now. But video stores — like bookstores, record stores, and arthouse theaters—have died as the lure of online convenience overcomes even the most stalwart patrons

[…]

I started a weekly blog/newsletter for the store. I intended it to be a place for customers and staff to continue the ongoing movie conversation through movie reviews, debates, and think pieces about the store and movies in general. In theory it was, apart from being a chance for me to exercise my brain and writing skills, a way to bind customers to the store by giving them a sense of ownership in the place. In practice, as the customers drifted away, it became more like a running, increasingly desperate 10-year argument as to why our video store deserved to exist, written by me.

Now my intention isn’t to be a downer as we move into the holiday season. One of the significant differences between performing and visual arts organizations and video stores is that the former has the ability to change the way customers experience their product where video stores can’t.

Watching a DVD is always going to be the same experience, but seeing a performance can happen in a performance hall, a coffee house, a park,  a shopping center, an airport, etc. It can involve a high level of interaction or barely any at all. After the central activity is over, you can meet the creators/performers if you haven’t already and the opportunity to hang out at a bar exists if the parties are willing.

A DVD or streamed program does have the benefit of being experienced on one’s own schedule and can be stopped and started according to the vagaries of life. An arts event has the potential of becoming one of those vagaries of life you hit pause to participate in.

The conversation about making an arts experience more participatory rather than passive has been going on for awhile now. As we start to move into the new year and planning the next season, it might help to start thinking about our ability to provide a participatory experience as the competitive advantage we possess rather than focusing on all the ways a live experience doesn’t allow for the flexibility of recorded content.

In that sense, Perkins’ piece isn’t necessarily a sobering warning about the future of the visual and performing arts, it is a caution against offering an experience that isn’t discernibly different from watching a movie.

 

When A Top Tier Performing Position Isn’t The Goal of Your Education

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Last month I pondered if there was any worth in giving up a little time in the conservatory/university training of arts students in favor of providing instruction/experiences in career management. Instead of graduating and then seeking out instruction in accounting, contracting and self promotion, etc., they would have a base in those skills but may need to seek out “finishing” training in their discipline.

The benefit to this is that given their lengthy training within their discipline, they would have the tools to identify and assess the value of educational opportunities and resources. Whereas, they might not have ability to assess the value of instruction in accounting, contracts, marketing services, etc if their conservatory training didn’t include it.

The other benefit is that once graduates are out in the world and can better understand where their interests lay, they can complete their education in a way that is appropriate to those pursuits and market demand.

About a week after that post, you may have seen an article in Cosmo that was getting a lot of circulation throughout the arts social media community. The story was about Lisa Mara, who had a strong affinity for dance,  hadn’t pursued formal university/conservatory training, but still felt a need for dance as part of her life and ended up starting two dance companies for like-minded individuals.

Her story is something of an intersection between the idea I state above and emergence of the professional-amateur.  Lisa Mara never wanted to be a professional dancer.

I danced about five hours a week and still did all of my studies. I still knew that I did not want to be a professional dancer. I wanted to pursue a career in something that I thought would have a better trajectory of business and job security. Being a dancer, you need to have an awareness of “Are you good enough?” And I don’t think I was good enough. The dancers who pursue dance as a full-time career should be the top 10 percent. Otherwise, you’re going to just get the door slammed in your face at auditions time after time.

Yet she loved dancing enough that she got a spot as a back up dancer for Brittany Spears, she auditioned as a dancer for the Washington Wizards and Boston Celtics basketball teams. Even though she never became a dancer for either team, she eventually utilized the business management experiences she picked up in the other jobs she held to plan and incorporate her first dance company in Boston.

I wanted to create a dance company for young professionals who were just like me. The target audience I was reaching was high-caliber dancers who wanted to continue dancing and choreographing into their adult lives. Many of our dancers have full-time jobs. Many of our dancers are dance teachers, but this is their opportunity to dance for themselves.

The success of that company spurred the creation of a second company with the same philosophy in NYC.

I don’t think there is anything in her story that implies the dancers in her schools could replace those who have focused their training on dance as a career.  I do think it is a good illustration that deferring some training in an artistic discipline doesn’t automatically make you unemployable.

Granted, just as not everyone will be cast on Broadway, secure a position in a top tier symphony or ballet company, not everyone is going to be able to create the opportunities for themselves at Lisa Mara has.

Opportunities do exist outside of the conventional career paths. If Lisa Mara’s experience is any indication, there may be a large unmet need of adult enthusiasts looking for a creative outlet.

A Moment of Congruence

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Hat tip to Carter Gillies who spotted a wonderful congruence between the posts both I and artist Whitney Smith made yesterday.

Reading Whitney’s post, it almost feels like she wrote it to provide practical illustrations for my ponderings about how the arts community views worth and entitlement.

Where I end my post with a quote from Seth Godin about sharing your work, Whitney mentions it right from the start in the title of her post.

Sharing art work can be weird. Last weekend, when I had a party and sale at my studio, I put all the paintings I’ve been doing on the wall. I didn’t put prices on them because I told myself that I just wanted to show them. But the truth is I didn’t want to put prices on them because I was afraid if I did that, people would feel sorry for me because obviously the paintings are awful and it’s just a little pathetic that I actually thought I could sell them.

She goes on to talk about how she personally likes her “awful” paintings and really enjoyed executing them. As it turned out, some people did want to buy them which put her in a tough spot trying to decide on a price.

I guess this is a lesson to always have a sense of your work’s worth in case people are actually willing to pay you for it. This isn’t really a nudge at Whitney. It happens all the time.

Not more than a month ago I was at a gallery opening where one artist expressed his exasperation that one of the people showing wasn’t prepared to provide a price for his work. Of course this raises questions about whether the guy was really prepared to part with it.

Just as I talked about how sharing and impacting the community is cornerstone of arts philosophy, Whitney echos the idea. (I debate whether I even need to state and give an example of something that is so well known, but there are worse ideas gaining traction through repetition.)

Sharing is part of the artistic process. I believe art is there to give something to humanity– something to think about, a new idea, a connection, a moment of beauty, even a moment of transcendence. If the art isn’t shown, it can’t do its final job of changing people’s hearts and minds. If your art is just for one person– for yourself– maybe there is a good reason for that. But I don’t know what that would be.

Selling is another thing. I don’t think art has to be sold, but there is something to be said for moving it along…

So often the debate about the value of a work of visual art is conducted in the context of a gallery, museum or auction. Rarely, at least in the places I frequent, do we read an artist’s internal debate about the value of their work, when it is considered “done,” when to sell it and what to sell it for.

For All Your(e) Worth

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Seth Godin had a post on entitlement versus worthiness a couple weeks ago. There was a lot in there to unpack and I am not sure I have wrapped my head around it enough to know if what he posits is entirely true or not, but I thought I would toss it out there for general discussion.

There is a lot in the post that is applicable to the arts. Perhaps most obvious is the following:

Both entitlement and unworthiness are the work of the resistance. The twin narratives make us bitter, encourage us to be ungenerous, keep us stuck. Divas are divas because they’ve tricked themselves into believing both narratives–that they’re not getting what they’re entitled to, and, perversely, that they’re not worth what they’re getting.

At first I wondered if it were really true that divas felt like they weren’t worth what they were getting. Then I thought about all the conflicting narratives associated with art.

On the one hand you have the entitlement ideas: the prescriptive view that arts are good for everyone; if people just saw our work once, they would be hooked; arts participation as a sign of maturity and culture; one’s practice being “true” art versus that of others.

Compare that with the sense of worth associated with the arts: low pay; suffer for your art; making money=selling out; arts education isn’t important in schools; arts careers are dead ends.

In that context, it is easier to see why you can feel both entitled to more, but worth less, than you are getting.

Godin continues with some concepts that have likely passed through the minds of many in the arts on more than one occasion. (emphasis mine)

The entitled yet frightened voice says, “What’s the point of contributing if those people aren’t going to appreciate it sufficiently?” And the defensive unworthy voice says, “What’s the point of shipping the work if I don’t think I’m worthy of being paid attention to…”

The universe, it turns out, owes each of us very little indeed. Hard work and the dangerous commitment to doing something that matters doesn’t get us a guaranteed wheelbarrow of prizes… but what it does do is help us understand our worth. That worth, over time, can become an obligation, the chance to do our best work and to contribute to communities we care about.

When the work is worth it, make more of it, because you can, and because you’re generous enough to share it.

Those last couple sentences about contributing to communities and making more because you’re generous to share it are essential cornerstone sentiments of the non-profit arts.

Where I pause is at the question of, “are you generous enough to share it” for free? There is a lot of debate in the arts about working “for the exposure” that Godin’s post brushes up against.

While his stressing the that hard work does help us understand our worth does imply that one should be receiving their worth, the way he ends his post doesn’t definitively settle the question about whether you should hold out for what you are worth.

“I’m not worthy,” isn’t a useful way to respond to success. And neither is, “that’s it?”

It might be better if we were just a bit better at saying, “thank you.”

This Is Not The Ticketing Site You Were Looking For

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As the holiday season approaches, I am remind of the less than altruistic truth that others are eager to make money off your success..even if you don’t perceive yourself as successful.

Close to two years ago I wrote about a compliant I was called to the box office to address which turned out to be the result of another ticketing site masquerading as ours.

In the last day Thomas Cott tweeted a similar story about the Colorado Ballet’s Nutcracker tickets being bought up and sold at up to $1,100 for $155 tickets. In this particular instance, with tacked on fees, two tickets cost $3,000.

Even though the Ballet has received its money, the problem, as the Ballet’s ticketing manager says, is one of access.

Part of the problem comes when audiences can’t afford overinflated ticket prices and then stop considering going to the ballet altogether.

“We love supporting our community and we have our ticket prices set so that… every family that wants to come see The Nutcracker can,” Clark said.

This article was particularly timely because I recently noticed that the top Google results for our theater was a site with the pattern “theatrename.box-officetickets.com.” They are selling some of our events at 4.5 times the face value.

It isn’t just us. I did a little more searching with common theater names and Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Fox Theatre in Detroit and Bijou Theater in Knoxville all have sites with the same URL pattern that show up.

Lest you think that only big productions at famous venues are vulnerable, my theater is located in a rural area and the show in question two years ago was an Elvis impersonator. There was a good crowd scheduled to show up, but it was hardly the most heavily in demand event.

It doesn’t take much effort to check the Google results for the search terms including your theater name and location and see what shows up as selling your tickets. In addition to the theatername.box-officetickets.com address, I have also seen theatername.ticketofficesales.com as a common site names. I am sure there are others.

It can be good to remind potential and existing customers of the official ticket outlets. The fact that these are not the official websites are quickly apparent to many people, but to those not accustomed to navigating the internet and purchasing things online, it isn’t as clear.

At the prices some of these places are charging, all it takes is just a couple of people making purchases to make it worth their while.

N.B. In the comments, Marc Fleming shares a link to a video the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust created to combat this issue.

I Love The Smell Of Bach In The Morning

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This month’s New Yorker has a story about researchers who have discovered how interdependent our senses are when it comes to enjoying an experience. (h/t Tyler Cowen)

For example, people’s perception of how crispy potato chips are when they eat them is dependent on what type of sound they are listening to. People will perceive foods as more bitter, sweet or satiating depending on the color, shape, texture, weight of the vessels they are consuming them from even if the product doesn’t change.

…Spence asked people to sample a dark Welsh ale: one sip while listening to a light, tinkling xylophone composition, and the second to the sound of a deep, mellifluous organ. When the second piece of music stopped, the audience had fallen silent.

“Wow,” a girl near me in a vintage houndstooth dress said. I knew this particular trick of Spence’s—I had watched him perform it multiple times—but it still worked on me. With only a change in the background music, the deep-brown beer had gone from creamy and sweet to mouth-dryingly bitter.

While these techniques have been used to help market food and other products, they can also be used to promote healthier eating.

He noted that other researchers have shown that the elderly, when eating tomato soup, must add more than twice as much salt as a young person does in order to achieve the same taste. Why not mitigate that increased salt consumption, and its attendant health hazards, by presenting the soup in a blue container, a color that Spence has shown can make food seem significantly saltier?…The effect could be used similarly, Spence said, to design soundtracks that replace some of the lost flavor of food for the elderly.

[…]

This year, he began working with a children’s cancer center in Spain, to experiment with plating, lighting, and acoustic tweaks that could counter the pervasive metallic taste and nausea that are common side effects of chemotherapy.

Since performing and visual arts are a sensory experience, the article got me wondering what the benefit would be in engaging a fuller range of senses at performances, museums, galleries, etc.

Most specifically, I wondered what might be helpful in making the experience more welcoming and less anxiety inducing for new attendees. My first thought was the subtle smell of chocolate chip cookies or homemade bread wafting from somewhere.

Beyond that I can’t think of too many other specific examples of sights, sounds and textures that would be conducive to an experience. (Although according to Holly Mulcahy, in Chattanooga, Maple Street Biscuits are hands down the way to go.)

Many arts venues will often have music playing and the lights adjusted to create a specific mood for visitors and attendees. Artists are already plugged into the impact of color, light, sound, and sometimes smell, as tools and possess a little insight in this regard. But often this insight is focused on the impact of the presentation on the viewer rather than the viewer’s total experience.

Clearly, you can go mad trying to determine if the curve of the arm rests on your seats best enhances the experience of Shakespeare or Arthur Miller. It could be helpful to keep this research in the back of your mind and think about what obvious opportunities to engage a fuller range of senses might exist. It may involve changing default lighting schemes or soundtracks in favor of more suitable ones.

Positive Signs For Reimbursement Of Overhead Costs

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You may remember back in January that I wrote about the new rules promulgated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requiring that any entity receiving federal funds much cover at least 10% of a non-profit’s overhead costs.

Don’t worry, its okay if you don’t remember. But this is relatively important and bears repeating.

One of the concerns at the time was that state and local governments and other funders might pressure non-profits with whom they contract or provide grants to waive a their right to receive overhead costs. The OMB rules prohibit this, but if a non-profit isn’t aware of the rules or are afraid to advocate for themselves, the problem may continue.

Given this context, it was a positive sign when the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OMB guidelines and to write a letter to the state government to do the same.

It may not seem significant for a governing body to agree to adhere to the conditions under which federal funding was allocated, but as Non-Profit Quarterly notes there are “rob Peter to pay Paul” concerns about how funding may be manipulated.

Rules do not implement themselves without strong nonprofit monitoring and oversight—hopefully, as in this case, in partnership with government authorities. In this case, not only are the supervisors talking to state officials, but they will also be developing an implementation strategy in consultation with Los Angeles nonprofits, which we presume, based on what we have seen as policy statements from CalNonprofits, ought to address how to ensure that higher indirect cost reimbursements do not occur at the cost of lessening service delivery.

As I had noted in my earlier post, the National Council of Non Profits created a guide to educate organizations about the rules and provide responses to assertions from funding entities that the rules don’t apply.

One thing I had mentioned was that arts organizations should note that these rules likely apply to the funding you receive through your state or regional arts organization:

One- it doesn’t matter whether it is called a contract or grant or any other term, the rules are based on the substance of the transaction.

Two – Sub-recipient non-profits who are required to acknowledge part of the funding is received from the federal government are covered under these rules.

Arts Make For Good Medicine

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There is a recent article in the Boston Globe about Harvard Medical School requiring its students to take arts courses that bears reading. (h/t Thomas Cott)

The Yale School of Medicine, for instance, requires students to scrutinize paintings in a museum to improve their skills at observation and empathy — a program that has been replicated around the country, including at Harvard and Brown. At Columbia, incoming medical students are required to complete a six-week narrative medicine course.

[…]

They are “a tool to help doctors understand people and their conditions.” They help doctors see beyond the disease, the “narrow biological aspect,” to the illness, which includes anxiety, fear, and the whole human experience of being sick, he said.

If there were ever a good illustration of the benefit of arts participation and practice to society, helping doctors be more effective diagnosticians, communicators and bring more empathy to anxiety inducing interactions with patients is pretty compelling.

And if it can do this for highly trained medical professionals who work under extremely stressful environments, well then it can probably provide similar benefits to elementary and high school kids as well.

I am not making an unwarranted leap of logic when I say this. The med student quotes in the articles could as easily be attributed to a high school learning environment. Insert the term high school in the following sentence and you can probably find something similar in an interview with a high school student.

“Medical school is so intense,” she said. “There’s a lot you have to suppress in yourself.” The more students learn to express their feelings through the arts, she said, “the less traumatized you will be.”

I was especially struck by a piece about the Comics and Medicine course at Penn State College of Medicine linked to in the Globe article.  I had never thought about the use of graphic novels to help doctors to understand the point of view of their patients, but also as a medium to tell their own stories.

Now they are registering based on recommendations from other students. Trey Banbury, a fourth-year medical student at Penn State who took Green’s course, said he was surprised when a comic helped him understand what mania looks and feels like for psychiatric patients.

“The graphic novels we were asked to read were simply incredible,” he said. “There are many things that cannot be said, but have to be shown.”

Students in Green’s class are required to do two things: read graphic novels and talk about them, and create their own graphic narrative. “What I help them do is take a story from their med school experience and turn it into a comic,” Green said.

Expert designers and artists are brought in to help students craft their comics. Like many in the course, Banbury had no prior experience in drawing. His comic, Perspective, shows how med students struggle with the stressors of medical school.

There are many layers to the benefits here. First, the doctors gain insight into what their patients are experiencing from reading graphic novels. Then they have to deal with the challenge of explaining themselves to an another person who will execute their comic, much as a patient has difficulty communicating their problems to a person who is not experiencing them.

As the large Baby Boomer generation ages, the type of skills these exercises develop in doctors will become increasingly important.

Are You Running Your Arts Org According To A 19th Century Social Movement?

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Last month Non-Profit Quarterly had a piece on four impulses that shape non-profits. These impulses often contradict each other to some extent which results in the internal philosophical conflicts those of us in the non-profit arts often experience.

While the results are familiar to many of us, you may not be aware of some of the underlying causes and historical movements which have shaped general perceptions and expectations of non-profits.

The four impulses author Lester Salamon identifies are voluntarism, professionalism, civic activism, and commercialism. He describes tensions between them as this:

“They are not-for-profit organizations required to operate in a profit-oriented market economy. They draw heavily on voluntary contributions of time and money, yet are expected to meet professional standards of performance and efficiency. They are part of the private sector, yet serve important public purposes.”

On occasion it is noted that the 501 (c) (3) section of the tax code doesn’t mention the arts at all. The stated purpose is for “religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or for testing for public safety, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”

When Salamon discusses the historical precedents of the four impulses, most of the examples revolve around the charitable care of medical, mental health and economic problems. In the context of this history the reason why the tax code might primarily focuses on caring for social issues and doesn’t mention the arts becomes a little clearer.

The end result is that the arts have essentially inherited the political and social expectations of the entire sector. For example, Salamon notes that conservatives idealize non-profits as charity performed by passionate volunteers supported by private donations rather than government support. Liberals, he says, focus on the limitations of non-profit effectiveness to call for more government involvement.

Salamon provides an extensive chart mapping out how the four impulses manifest in areas like objectives, strategies, operating & management styles, and organizational structure. Even though non-profits have proven to be very resilient, you can see how trying to serve the different impulses can result in a hodgepodge approach that may rob the organization of its effectiveness.

For example, in terms of management styles. When working with volunteers who are donating their time, there is a need to be informal and flexible. However, to address legal and fiduciary requirements, a level of professionalism is needed which involves formal rules and processes. Yet in the arts especially, people want to arrive at decisions collaboratively by group consent (civic activism). But then there is an expectation of commercial viability (run like a business) which can demand a tight, disciplined structure that can respond to a changing operating environment.

I can think of some examples of commercial entities who have managed to be successful about adopting the positive outcomes described above, but I can’t think of a non-profit arts organization that has been able to do all of those things well. The general consensus is probably that non-profit arts organizations fall short of having the discipline to adapt to changing environments and maintain commercial success.

Though to be fair, that describes a great number of commercial businesses as well. Many non-profit arts orgs never really aspire to economic success. Often increased funding/revenue means the ability to expand access while maintaining the same profit/loss balance (or defraying some of the existing deficit). That is an outgrowth of the four impulses.

I am not necessarily advocating that non-profits decide which impulse(s) they need to jettison in order to operate more realistically. Though it may be valuable to at least engage in some examination and consideration. Knowing the history that influences the philosophy of non-profit operations can help you recognize if you are saddling yourself with expectations that really aren’t valid to your particular endeavor.

Essentially, now that you know that they grew out of 19th century social service theory that has no relation to what your organization is all about, are you perpetuating some unproductive practices because you thought that is what good non-profits are supposed to do?

Can You Care In An Unreasonable Way?

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Seth Godin says he figures Apple computers reached their peak about three years ago.

Since then, we’ve seen:

Operating systems that aren’t faster or more reliable at running key apps, merely more like the iPhone…

Geniuses at the Genius Bar who are trained to use a manual and to triage, not to actually make things work better…

Software like Keynote, iMovie and iTunes that doesn’t get consistently better, but instead, serves other corporate goals. We don’t know the names of the people behind these products, because there isn’t a public, connected leader behind each of them, they’re anonymous bits of a corporate whole.

Compare this approach to the one taken by Nisus, the makers of my favorite word processor. An organization with a single-minded focus on making something that works, keeping a promise to users, not investors.

Mostly, a brand’s products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way.

If you are nodding your head in agreement upon recognizing that Apple’s achievements have sort of leveled out, stop a second and think about whether you are running things to make them better or just to triage and serve organizational goals.

When I read the sentence about the software not getting better but serving other corporate goals, Trevor O’Donnell’s posts about marketing reinforcing the arts organization’s image of themselves, rather than reinforcing the customer’s image of themselves having a good time, came to mind.

Obviously there is more involved with offering consistently better experiences to those who participate in the events and services you provide than good marketing. Good service, good marketing, good environment are all interdependent.

It is difficult to recognize issues that exist when you are close and involved with them which is why the Apple example is so useful. When we realize that some elements of a highly successful company have leveled off, it becomes a little easier to perceive parallels in our own operations.

The real challenge comes in the last sentence of Godin’s I quoted. What are the areas in which you and your staff can care in unreasonable ways?

What does that mean? What does it look like for your organization? Your customers can probably give you a hint if you ask (they may be already telling you, emphatically and unsolicited).

There may be people in your organization already invested in something with an unreasonable degree of care who are assets to your organization. It may not be necessary for everyone in your organization to all care about the same thing in order for you to be successful.

Given the number of hats worn by people in non-profit arts organizations, it would be a blessing if you had even a few employees that exhibited unreasonable care in different areas in a manner that was balanced within the organization and within themselves. (Trying to channel unreasonable care into all your areas of responsibility is likely to drive you crazy).

You Want To Do Better, But Aren’t Sure How

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A week ago I wrapped up my final post about the arts entrepreneurship training programs being developed in colleges and universities by pointing out that there was still the unmet need of artists who had already embarked on their careers.

I think the challenge faced by artists is summed up pretty well in the comments section of an article in The Guardian titled “Creating wealth: how artists can become inventive entrepreneurs”

Here is screenshot of the comments:

guardian snip

While there is a constant refrain that artists and arts organizations need to handle themselves in a more business-like manner, there aren’t a lot of sources of information and training that is tailored to the needs of creatives.

Wendy McLean’s comment is a reaction to the fact the story was framed as coming from members of the Guardian’s Small Business Network group, but when she went to sign up, the questions asked gave the impression it wasn’t really suited to her at all.

As the second commenter OddBodkin points out, any time you spend trying to distill lessons from generic information sources in order to discern what might be applicable to your situation, that is time you aren’t spending on your core creative focus.

It can be difficult to create a training program that is suited to artists. A regular schedule of classes may not work well for people with varying rehearsal and performance commitments that have them traveling all over a region or for artists who get so focused on creating they don’t look up until 11:00 pm.

Online resources that one can consult at their own pace can be very helpful, but guidance and clarification from a live person is just as valuable. Networks of colleagues can solve this problem, but frequently you simply don’t know what you don’t know.

I don’t have any clear cut solutions to suggest. You know I will share them when I find them.

There are good resources like Fractured Atlas that are revved and ready to help creative folks develop their careers.

I also want to put a plug in for ArtsHacker. (As you may know I am a contributor there.) While the site offers tips generated by the writers, it also solicits questions and problems readers for which readers would like solutions.

When the site opened about 11 months ago, I thought we would be fielding bunches of questions before long but there haven’t been too many. I know you all have burning questions you want answered, so get asking!

Throw A Big Fat Fake Wedding

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A few weeks ago I read an article about how a company in Argentina is doing good business throwing fake weddings. Apparently most young people aren’t getting married or are only having civil ceremonies. Feeling that they missed out on participating in a big flashy wedding, people pay about $50 to attend a fake wedding.

The fake wedding company, Falsa Boda, contracts with real wedding locations, caterers and DJs to throw an all night party interspersed with dramatic vignettes.

If you think this sounds familiar, there is a popular environmental/interactive theater piece called Tony and Tina’s Wedding set at an Italian wedding and reception.

As the Argentina percolated in my mind, I realized this is a good general framework for arts organizations to engage the public in any number of activities. One of the things recent surveys conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest found was that people are interested in actively participating and creating rather than sitting statically in a dark room.

There is a lot of opportunity in a wedding scenario to have people create things like the invitations, dresses, centerpieces, flower arrangements, etc. Ceramics classes can make plates, vases, etc. You can get people to vote on meal choices, DJs, brides maid dresses, etc.

Some of these provide an opportunity to partner with local businesses. When you ask people to vote on meal choices, you could get caterers, restaurants and wineries together to create a tasting event that people pay to attend.

Awareness of these businesses is raised at a fun social occasion which creates a buzz for the culminating wedding event. It probably wouldn’t hurt if a result was thatbusiness owners viewed the arts organization as a valuable asset in the community.

To create additional buzz, many other preliminary events can be staged in the preceding months. For example, the “dress fitting” can be scheduled a month or so ahead of time at a local dress shop. The bride, family and bridesmaids introduce some plot points which continue at other preliminary events like the bachelor(ette) parties and don’t get resolved until the wedding. The public can show up at these events and watch the drama unfold (perhaps an ex-boyfriend comes to the fitting and declares his love…or the groom’s ex-girlfriend comes and denounces the bride).

While attendance at these preliminary events are free and open, it might be smart to schedule them at inconvenient times (Wednesday 4pm versus Saturday 4pm), in places with low capacity for spectators, or at unannounced pop-up occurrences (fight in the mall food court or diner) so that people have to query their friends on social media about what happened and swap theories about what might happen next.

Finally, a big plus is that the subject matter and format would definitely appeal to a younger audiences.

Taken at its most ambitious, this idea could take a lot of time, effort and money to plan. But it could also involve a collaboration between multiple arts organizations of different genres which could provide operational staff support and sites for plot points. (Bride and groom pick out music at a chamber orchestra concert. Contentious bidding for a piece of art at a museum or gallery for a wedding gift.)

A less ambitious itinerary could be pulled off by a smaller group with much of the drama unfolding on social media (hmm, when she said she is making pesto, is that the actor talking about her personal life or should I keep an eye on this tonight to see if a romantic dinner unfolds for her character?)

There is are a lot of possibilities to this general framework. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a wedding. You could have a spy drama unfold the same way and encourage the community to report any “secret” meetings they observed. Or you could dramatize the life of the newlyweds annually with a sped up timeline seeing their kids and grandkids grow up and get married over 15-20 years.

Whenever I read about how people want to participate rather than to sit quietly as a spectator, I always think about all the performing arts facilities that are essentially designed at great expense for people to sit and observe. The need to utilize the very expensive facility in the manner it was designed creates a disincentive to create interactions that stray too far from that situation.

What I like about this idea is that it provides for a main event (the wedding) to occur in a physical space where people sit and watch, but it isn’t necessary that it does. Meanwhile, people have had the opportunity to contribute and participate actively and will have a strong sense of ownership in the final outcome.

Where Arts And Creativity Have Been Part Of Long Term Solutions

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I have recently started to become a little more vocal about one of my pet peeves about how the arts are viewed. It is no news to anyone that most career paths that involves pursuing a creative endeavor are dismissed out of hand in favor of a real job with real prospects.

I don’t have any illusions about arts careers being a difficult path to take. If anyone wants someone to help them combat fanciful notions people have about how they are different and will succeed where others have failed, I will be happy to help talk about the realities and the importance of the entrepreneurial mindset about which I spent all of last week writing.

What annoys me is that there is so little recognition by those who dismiss a creative career path that the group they dismiss are the first people called when a disaster strikes and there is a need to encourage people to donate to a relief effort. A couple weeks ago, This American Life had an ad agency suggest getting Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to do a TV ad to help offset the negative associations people have with Volkswagen.

All this being said, I think it is only fair to acknowledge that there are a lot of people out there that recognize the power of the arts to address social problems and make a long term commitment to embracing arts and creativity as part of their solution.

Last week on CityLab, Brentin Mock pointed out that a reduction in violence in the Bronx and New Orleans 40+ years ago were a result of people competing through creativity rather than physical force.

The subtitle of the piece reads, “Hip-hop dialed down street violence in the Bronx. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indian gangs made peace through craft. Why is culture such an underrated civic tool?”

The article doesn’t really address the reasons behind why culture is an underrated civic tool. It focuses more on how a peace meeting in the Bronx helped give rise to hop-hop culture and a similar effort inspired fanatical devotion to outdoing other groups in Mardi Gras parades resulting in more fingers stabbed by sewing needles than people stabbed with knives.

Essentially the article points out that it is the problems, not the enduring solutions that end up getting money. Despite the success of these programs in keeping the peace, little funding is directed to improve the communities in which they originated.

Another article I came across earlier this month in FastCompany drew attention to an artist who shutdown a freeway in Akron, OH and served dinner down the middle of the road to 500 people in an effort to bring the people of the city together.

When the freeway was originally built, it divided neighborhoods. Now the road is used less frequently and plans are to tear it down. The dinner was an effort to mobilize people to influence what will replace the space left vacated by the freeway.

“They’re shutting it down to traffic next year and opening it up to development, but there’s no concrete idea of what it will be—if it will be a park or whatever,” says Franks. “So this seemed like a very unique opportunity to help people reimagine this space.”

As people ate, they talked about the future of the area. They also just got to know people they otherwise may have never met. Franks spent a year working with volunteers from each neighborhood to plan the event and to bring 10 people from each neighborhood. The plates at the meal, designed to go home with each guest, were printed with favorite recipes from neighbors.

Granted, not really a solution that has been used long term, but it does seek to take advantage of a change to ameliorate what has long been an impediment.

The meal was a kick off event for the project which will continue by giving people toolkits to help them plan similar meals in their own communities. And lest you be skeptical about whether that many people might do it, there is already a sense of growing community in the city. Akron is the site of the PorchRokr Festival where homeowners give over their porches and front yards to concerts.

What Do We Mean When We Say Entrepreneur?

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Final day of observations on last weekend’s Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE)  conference.

The Terms We Use Matter

Some of the best observations about teaching students entrepreneurship were made by Jeffrey Nytch from the University of Colorado-Boulder. There is a lot of conversation going on about how students need to be taught to be entrepreneurial with attendant ideas of what that means, but Nytch’s observations provide some grounding for that discussion.

He noted that what entrepreneurship is not, is pounding the pavement and marketing one self.  Entrepreneurship is creating value and implementing solutions to meet needs, which by definition is not primarily focused on getting yourself employed, but serving others. Among the other characteristics he listed were recognizing opportunity, customer focus, flexibility/adaptability, risk assessment (taking calculated risks), resourcefulness and an ability at storytelling.

He also emphasized that teaching entrepreneurship  has to focus on being strategic rather than providing prescriptive solutions like this is how to do marketing, this is how to apply for grants, this is how you get non-profit status etc.

When talking about teaching students to be entrepreneurs, it is probably important to be clear about what outcomes you are envisioning when you use that term. As a result of Nytch’s presentation, I have been careful to use phrases like “entrepreneurial mindset” and “teach students entrepreneurial skills” in previous posts in an attempt to delineate these activities from a engaging in a full entrepreneurial venture.

Mentoring Is Local and Global

There was another conversation about using mentoring to transition students to entrepreneurship.  A good deal of the focus was on helping people after they graduated.

Something that came up often during the conference was that university career service offices have a hard time working with arts students because their career path is so nebulous. It is easy to direct students with business, education, science, teaching, pre-law and pre-med degrees because career progression is fairly well understood.

In much the same way, it can be difficult for career services to provide support to entrepreneurs because by definition they seek to walk the road less traveled.

Among the suggestions that were made, most of them by a recent graduate, was using social media to create connections between entrepreneur programs across the country. One could easily find their ideal team members living elsewhere and you don’t necessarily all have to be located in the same geographic area to be productive.

Along the same lines was a suggestion for providing some basic support and access to graduates of partner programs. A person may graduate in one place but move elsewhere to start their venture so it would be good to be able to tap into the list of local mentors another program had identified. (Imagine how great it would be to be recognized for bolstering the local economy by “stealing” graduates of other programs from those communities thanks to your mentor and incubator network.)

It was also suggested that students be invited to the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conferences so they can share their experiences with the assembled educators. Especially in terms of what aspects of their training did and did not prove valuable to avoid reinventing the wheel or replicating the same mistakes as someone else.

Miscellaneous Thoughts And Resources

Michael Bills who directs the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Ohio State University said they were only offering entrepreneurship as a minor at the undergraduate level because they felt that entrepreneurship is a graduate level pursuit. (I should note this is a university wide program out of their business school rather specific to an arts entrepreneurship program.)

This is based on the concept of the T shaped skills. Briefly, the vertical bar of the T represents the depth of your skills, the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines. Their thought is that you develop your depth as an undergrad and then really focus on your ability to collaborate as a graduate.

I have heard similar philosophies about fine arts disciplines and know there are some universities that won’t teach arts administration as an undergraduate major based on the same concept.

DePauw University recently created a site called 21CM.org (21st Century Musician) as a resource and place for conversations among musicians about developing an entrepreneurial mindset. It is intentionally devoid of any mention of DePauw other than the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. The About section makes no mention of the school and the conference presenters pointed out the site doesn’t bear DePauw’s colors.

The school took the same approach in establishing a public music space for “courageous music making” in their hometown of Greencastle, IN. The space isn’t branded with DePauw’s name or colors (it actually appears to use the 21CM.org colors) though the website uses DePauw’s domain.

In both cases, the goal is for the community of participants to take ownership of the respective resources.

That is generally the extent of my notes from the conference that fit into the general theme of these three posts. It will be interesting to see how SAEE grows as an organization and how the whole concept of artist as entrepreneur (and how best to teach those skills) evolves over time.

Even as there is a need to introduce this type of instruction in undergraduate/graduate/conservatory training, there is also the obvious unmet need to train people who have passed that stage, may have some career experience and wish to acquire additional skills or engage in a venture of their own.

The Question That Is Going To Take Awhile To Answer

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As promised yesterday, today I am going to continue discussing my observations from attending the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conference this weekend.

I think it bears pointing out that the organization and its efforts are very new. This is only the second conference they have held. There are a lot of questions to answer and to date there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to do research and have these conversations.

I preface my observations with this because the one question I really wanted to see discussed was how to carve out time in an arts training program to teach students entrepreneurial skills. With few exceptions, it seemed like most of the courses in this area were being offered as an option rather than part of the core part of the training. Unfortunately, due to time constraints this question never came up as a main topic.

The conversation during closing plenary which I thought would be the most opportune forum to discuss this issue was tightly controlled and focused heavily on questions of research. (Again, I know there are a lot of questions still to be asked, and I didn’t expect a definitive answer. This is the danger when you get too many academics in the same room! 😉 )

One person who did indirectly address the subject was Emily Ondracek-Peterson from Metropolitan State University in Denver. She presented the results of a survey conducted with conservatory graduates asking what parts of their training had prepared them well for pursuing a career and which areas they felt their conservatory preparation had fallen short.

The pool she drew from for her interviews and surveys were string players from five top tier music conservatories that had graduated since 1995 so other people’s experiences may vary.

She covered a lot of ground so my notes are probably lacking regarding some of her results.  To summarize, she essentially found the focus was on preparing students to perform at a high level in orchestras and as soloists. There wasn’t a lot of instruction on how to teach or establish a studio even though nearly every music conservatory graduate ends up teaching to some degree, regardless of whether they get a place in an orchestra or not.

Respondents were dissatisfied with the lack of training in other genres, improvisation and collaboration with musicians of other genres or artists of other disciplines.  Respondents also found that they spent a lot of time in the support work related to performing – contracting, doing taxes, accounting, self-promotion, etc., but that the necessity of gaining these skills was rarely discussed during training.

As she spoke about conservatories training first tier musicians, I wondered if there was any benefit to teaching students to be second tier musicians in order to make room for training in career management skills. They would have a high level of excellence, but would be prepared in other areas. My suspicion is that conservatories would say that sort of approaching is okay for other schools, but would be a waste of their time and the time of their highly talented students.

I am surely not the first to have this thought. People who have attended a conservatory for music, dance, theater or visual arts can better attest whether some of the instruction they receive is better dropped in favor of different type of training. Regardless of how much instruction you receive in school, there are always going to be skills you will need to acquire and grow after graduation.

The question is, what do divert focus from during your formal training that you may need to make up for after graduation? Some students may prefer to be prepared to manage their career so that they have a better idea of how to support their pursuit of technical training after graduation.

Given the level of competition in their field, how will they have to adjust their ambitions as a result of this decision?

I had more to say on this subject than I expected so one more post on a variety of shorter thoughts tomorrow.  It will tie back to this entry because the answer to how a graduate might adjust their ambitions might be found in entrepreneurial pursuits.

I do want to note before I finish today that despite reading so often how music schools are doing a disservice to their students by not preparing them with career management skills, it seemed like the discipline most highly represented at the SAEE conference was music. There wasn’t anyone from the very top tier music conservatories at the conference that I saw, but it did seem that people from the music field are beginning to take some action to address these concerns.

Teaching Arts Students Entrepreneurial Skills, It Has Begun

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This weekend I attended the annual conference of the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) at Ohio State University. Even though my university doesn’t have arts entrepreneurship or management classes, I wanted to attend because there has been a lot of conversation recently on the topic of training artists to have a more entrepreneurial mindset.

I took many notes on the sessions I attended. I expect there will be at least two posts this week covering what I learned.

What made one of the greatest impressions on me was learning about the Arts Entrepreneurship program at Millikin University. The heart of their program is a series of student run ventures in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

There is actually another venture not listed on their website that just started to get going in the last couple weeks.

You might expect this many student run ventures at large universities with established programs like Ohio State and Southern Methodist University. The fact that Millikin has so many with an enrollment of about 2100 says something about what can be accomplished with the buy-in of faculty and administration.

Given there is a greater expectation that universities better prepare students with practical career skills in their fields of study, Millikin may end up being a good model for smaller schools seeking to meet those expectations. Which is not to say there aren’t other great programs out there. OSU seems to be on a very promising track–but they have a lot of resources which isn’t the case everywhere.

If this sounds intriguing, you may want to attend the SAEE conference next October because it will be hosted by Millikin University.

The faculty which advise the courses/ventures that run the theater space, retail art gallery and poetry printing press were at the conference. One of the common threads that ran through discussions of their respective endeavors was that they allow the students to fail quickly and often–and the students are held accountable for the results and to each other.

Currently, the theater venture, Pipe Dreams Studio Theatre is running into some revenue problems due to decisions they made about how they were going to handle ticket sales. Even though the first production appears as if it may lose money, the instructor Sarah Theis, says the venture usually ends up comfortably in the black.

Which is good because they apparently don’t get bailed out by the school. The course is repeatable and the requirement to be on the management team is to take the course for three semesters. This tends to engender some accountability since the decisions made earlier impact what resources a student has to work with when they end up on the management team.

Julienne Shields, who supervises the downtown retail art space, Blue Connection, spoke of the panic and conflict that inevitably occurs during the initial stages. She turns these occurrences into learning opportunities.

I am not sure what the mix of majors in the other student run ventures are, but the art retail space is a mix of arts students and business students, both of whom express misgivings about why they need to take the class at all. Both groups basically embody their respective stereotypes. Just having them learn to understand and work with each other almost justifies the reason for the class by itself.

Shields said the arts students will get inspired and want to start working at midnight while the business students are more aligned with the 9 to 5 schedule. The business students will happily grab the numbers the arts students are struggling with and help make sense of them, but they won’t understand the story behind the numbers.

While the arts students are initially happy to have the numbers taken out of their hands, because the class structure forces the students to ultimately be accountable to one another, they can’t avoid dealing with the numbers forever. In the end, the business students have a better understanding of the story behind the numbers and the arts students can see how the financial elements align with the story of the art.

Since all these endeavors are essentially group projects, the biggest challenge for the instructors is to create a grading rubric that accurately evaluates whether everyone is pulling their own weight. There was some brief discussion of this and from what I derived, the focus really is on the success of the group rather than parsing precise degrees of credit and blame. After all, in real life if the company fails, it doesn’t matter who only gave 60% effort, everyone is out of a job.

Tomorrow I intend to cover the challenges faced by art entrepreneurship programs that conference attendees identified. One of the biggest being that the effort is really just in the infancy stage.

Making Ticket Refundability The Customer’s Choice

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When conversations about demand based pricing for the performing arts comes up, there is often a comparison made to the airlines and the way they factor in dozens of variables when they price their seats. One airline practice that doesn’t get mentioned is the refundable fare where you pay more in return for the right to cancel the ticket.

The right to exchange, and sometimes even get a refund for tickets, has long been a benefit extended to performance subscribers. Now that subscription sales are fading, perhaps it is time to think about applying it to single tickets?

The thought came to me when I was reading an story on a Microsoft blog about Jet.com The company is heavy into dynamic pricing to the point where the price of an item changes while it is in your shopping cart as variables are factored.

One of the ways people can lower the price of an item is to agree not to return it.

At checkout, customers can waive the right to return certain items, driving the cost down further; choosing one credit card over another — or paying directly from a checking account — takes dollars off, too. The system also suggests purchasing combinations that can save customers money.

With greater control over these variables, shoppers can strike their own personal balance between cost and convenience, something Lore’s team saw as missing in the industry. “The whole concept of Jet is to make transparent all of the costs that go into an e-commerce transaction, and then empower consumers to pull out costs as they see fit.

So what if you offer the opportunity to return tickets for an extra $5-$10 per ticket charge?

Generally the motivation for not allowing returns is fear of not being able to resell a ticket. There are also the labor costs and credit card transaction fees associated with processing a refund. Having different pricing makes the economics of all this more transparent and shifts some control to the purchaser.

If you do decide to allow a refund on a ticket sold as non-refundable, the rationale for a fee is clear. I know some performing arts organization charge an exchange fee which can seem punitive. In the context of this type of discount program, it can seem less so since the customer was offered the choice and the price difference has already been discussed.

I am not advocating this as a new source of income. There are social and emotional transactions that occur during the refund process, the results of which may not be directly correlated to whether a full refund was granted or not. It is better when the subject never comes up, regardless of whether you are generating any income from the exchange.

Still, it is something to think about. Especially if the choice of a discount in exchange for waiving the ability to make a return becomes more widespread and familiar.

If such an approach is implemented, it would definitely need to be handled at the time of sale from the positive perspective of “All our tickets are refundable, but you can get an additional discount if you don’t think you will want to exchange/refund,” rather than a more negative, “it will be an additional $10 if you want to be allowed to get a refund.”

Airlines handle it in the latter manner. Just think how much happier you would be if the $500 ticket were only $300 if you waived the right to a refund.

Airlines can’t really it that way because people initially hunt for the lowest price. They gain advantage from advertising the lowest price and adding costs as you choose options.

Price hunting doesn’t factor as much into the decision about which production to see so arts organizations have a little more flexibility in that respect.

I would be curious to see if a higher level of satisfaction might result from implementing this type of pricing. Would people feel more satisfaction secure in the knowledge they can either get a refund at any time or having gotten a great discount to something they fully intended to see anyway?

I imagine it would depend on the demographics of the community. Younger people and families might appreciate the low risk flexibility. More established audiences might view the unorthodox approach and additional level of pricing as confusing.

Just Pray Your Grandma Doesn’t Run Against You For Homecoming Queen

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Recently I have been seeing more stories about shared use of public buildings. In Bremen, Germany, the city philharmonic is sharing space with students in a local school building. In Cleveland, music students from the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement community.

Now I see a Massachusetts school near Boston was shares space with the local senior citizen center.

But during the early phases of planning, as his team met with officials, they realized that the needs of the town’s elderly overlapped quite neatly with those of its teenagers. At the time, the senior center was using a small Victorian house that fell far short of accessibility standards.

The senior center had a strong dance program, Poinelli recalls learning. “We said, ‘Well, we have a dance room in the high school.’ In the winter, they took seniors in a bus to a local shopping center to walk—I said, ‘Well, we have this huge field house, you could use that.’ There was so much overlap, and it just seemed to make sense.”

[…]

Members of a knitting circle taught several students to knit, for example, and high-school sports teams give presentations to the senior men’s group, sharing their strategy for the upcoming season. Kids in need of community-service hours help serve lunch at the senior center, and veterans have been asked to talk to students about their service. The senior center gets 25 free tickets to every high-school performing arts event, and last year, the seniors’ dance team performed at the high-school talent show.

I was immediately struck by how this arrangement helps keep arts in the schools. It increases the demand for, and use of, arts facilities which helps justify their expense.

Even more importantly, it connects the interests and political clout of the largest generation as they retire to those of public education.

There is likely to be less grumbling about property taxes and not having any kids in school if people have an emotional connection to the students. They may also be more likely to advocate on behalf of the students. If retirees are using the same facilities as students, I suspect they will be better maintained.

If there is frequent contact between students and retirees, there may be subtle positive impacts on behavior and attendance thanks to the socialization.

Ah! The Problem Is Your Show Is Like A Chicken Sandwich With Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

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The first segment of this week’s This American Life episode offers proof that marketing departments everywhere run up against the same challenges, regardless of whether they are in the for or not-for profit world, whether they are selling art and culture experiences or hamburgers.

How many times have you said, this is a really great product/experience, but I don’t think there is a market for it?

That is what the marketing team for Hardee’s says about a mashed potato, gravy and chicken sandwich they are sampling from the company’s test kitchen. The taste and texture are really great, they think anyone who bought it would really like it, but they don’t think there are enough people who will make that initial decision to buy a sandwich with mash potatoes on it.

This is exact conversation that occurs when many arts events and performances are first conceived or proposed. It’s great. Anyone who experienced it would like it. Is there enough to it to impel people to that choice?

Really folks confess, how many of you have made a sandwich that included mashed potatoes at some point during the holidays? It was good wasn’t it? You might not want to order it in public though.

Here is a picture by the way.

Source
Source

 

My guess is the arts run into the same issue to some degree. People are curious or have experimented creating something similar themselves, but are reluctant to  be seen publicly participating.

What correspondent Zoe Chace says the Hardee’s team has to do is figure out the story they are going to tell that makes all the weirdness make sense.

They offer some interesting insight into customer psyche, at least in terms of food. The Hardee’s marketing team says that a macaroni and cheese burger is an easier sell than the chicken sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy because it only adds one unfamiliar element-macaroni. People are used to cheese on their burgers.  Their gut tells them that Mashed Potatoes AND Gravy on a chicken sandwich may be too far a leap.  (That said, from what I can find it appears they market tested the mashed potato sandwich but not the macaroni and cheese burger.)

I am not sure if that offers anything that can be applied to the arts, but it might bear paying attention to how many variations from an expected norm an event that sells well has versus one that that doesn’t sell well.

Another thing the Hardee’s team talks about is the importance of naming to the image you are trying to project. They discuss how they tried selling a burger with pulled pork on it three times. It wasn’t until they included the term “Memphis Barbeque” that it started selling well, they assume it’s thanks to the cachet Memphis has as a source of good barbeque.

I can completely relate to that. Once I presented a performance that was extremely high quality. The challenge was that it was a collaboration of artists from different disciplines, in a format that was unfamiliar to audiences. This made the show difficult to quickly explain and the title of the event didn’t help matters.

About a year later, I saw the show advertised elsewhere with a title that was much more representative of the content. I contacted the manager and asked if it was the same show with the same principal artists. I assumed one of them had left and so the show couldn’t be advertised in the same way.

It turned out it was the same exact show and they hadn’t been particularly invested in the title they had been using. They were happy to call it whatever helped sell it best.

Ninety-five percent of productions, the title is an immutable part of the brand identity.  At least once a year since learning a performer was flexible about the event name, I have been able to negotiate some minor alterations on the name or description of a show to make it sound more appealing and accessible specifically to my local audience.  It never hurts to ask.

In the third segment of the podcast, This American Life asks advertising agencies how Volkswagen can extract themselves from their current difficulties. While many say VW is in trouble because it broke faith with its customers, everyone they asked had sentimental feelings for VW based on the company’s past ad campaigns.

There is something to be said for generating good will.

One company suggested a documentary style self-examination. Another suggested VW appeal directly to the consumer, saying their focus was on what they thought over any governmental or industry investigation–essentially throwing themselves at the mercy of the Internet.

A third suggested building a plant in Detroit to bolster jobs there and have Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton do a TV ad in the style of their Broadway show (mixing hip hop and Constitutional themes). It is a little strange to listen to the audio of their sample ad as they transition from lyrics drawn from the Constitution to mentioning the importance of environmental stewardship.

The thought that annoyed me though, and this has nothing directly to do with the podcast, is that the arts are dismissed as a viable career path—until it comes time to rally goodwill around a billion dollar international company or some other tragedy.

This isn’t a direct criticism of VW or ad agencies, both of which know the value of creative artists. I just feel like I need to call attention to these situations as a bit of counter messaging.

The Most Receptive Arts Audience May Be Behind Bars

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Over the last few days you may have read about how the inmates at New York’s Eastern Correctional Facility beat Harvard University’s top ranked debate team.

It caught my attention because that is the prison in which I learned to play chess.

 

 

Yeah, I let that hang there a minute, but it is absolutely true that when I was around 9 or 10 years old, an inmate named Fat Cal with three life sentences for murder taught me to play chess. My parents took us to visit prisoners from the time I was 8 until the time I was about 17. Later, my mother ended up teaching in prisons.

To be honest, my siblings and I thought it was pretty boring because there wasn’t a lot for us to do while our parents talked to the inmates. I can’t say the experience made a deep enough impression on us to keep us out of trouble, but it did prepare us for the hassle of current airport security.

I have written about arts in prisons before. In fact, my last post involved the guard union at Eastern Correctional Facility blocking a theater performance at their prison.

After reading the recent articles about how successful the prison debate team was, it occurred to me that prisons are a good venue for arts organizations that seek to make an impact in a receptive community. As the Wall Street Journal article notes, inmates live a life where few distractions are permitted. As a result, they invest a lot of focus in whatever interests them.

In my previous entry, there were people quoted as saying the inmates should be focusing on developing trade and technical skills which will serve them upon their release. However, a Salon piece discussing the success of the inmate’s debate team notes,

In an oddly backhanded way, the success of these programs reveals the importance of the humanities—those “useless” subjects such as literature, philosophy, and history–which educate the whole person instead of training a worker. For some inmates, Sax writes, their situation may compel them “to think about things more intensely than most people. A crisis like going to prison can move people to question everything in their lives.” As for providing a liberal arts education to inmates, he posits the question: “Are we doing it for the prisoners or for society? Both, but helping the prisoners is a more tangible and immediate goal.”

As for the value of this type of education, the Salon article also notes that the in Bard College program which coached and developed the inmate debate team,

Out of 300 men who graduated from Bard’s program, fewer than 2 percent returned to custody within three years; and Hudson Link’s rates are at 3 percent. Without education, 40 percent of prisoners end up incarcerated again.

Similar statistics are also cited in a Daily Kos piece on the story.

What is really interesting to me is that both time and education were cited as key factors in arts participation by the study I cited in Monday’s entry. The researchers in that study hypothesized that highly educated people who were not highly wealthy had higher rates of participation because they had the time to do so, much as the inmates’ success is partially attributed to having the time to devote an undivided focus on their arguments.

As a couple of the articles point out, despite lack of wealth remaining a factor for most inmates upon release, an earned education appears to be diminishing recidivism. Even though there is a lot of debate about the costs and value of higher education, providing a good education appears to contribute to the general good of society.

It isn’t really appropriate to make facile conclusions about the contributions liberal arts can make to criminal reformation, but clearly it can have an important impact. Nor do I want to make statements about education, rather than wealth or a lack thereof, being a key factor in deterring crime. It is pretty clear wealth and class strongly influence whether you will be incarcerated.

Efforts at introducing arts and education to at-risk communities can certainly also assist in preventing people from ending up in prison. Unfortunately, there are myriad environmental factors which may distract people from achieving the necessary focus that is subsequently forced upon them in prison.

For those who long to make an impact in their community and society, it may be worth considering how well working with inmates might help you achieve your goals.

I am sure there is a lesson in all this about how excellence requires more time and focus than we allow ourselves.

A Plague (Of Phones) On Both Your Houses

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Back in July I came across a blog post titled, “When the Audience Phones It In,” which bemoaned all the recent incidents of audience members using phones and other electronic devices at performances employing the recurring phrase, “Why Are You Here?”

Every time I see the post title in my bookmarks, I keep thinking it applies to a different article from the Wall Street Journal about the problem of performers, directors and conductors using cell phones during auditions, rehearsals and backstage during performances.

Given that the phrase “phoning it in” is often used to refer to performers and the phrase “why are you here” could just as easily be applied to people who purport to be passionate and dedicated to what they are doing, that first blog post wouldn’t need many changes in order to address the issues raised in the WSJ article.

It is a little disingenuous to get indignant at audiences without acknowledging the issue exists backstage as well. Just because there isn’t a perfect silence and twilight ambiance of a performance for the errant glow or ringtone to disturb doesn’t mean artists shouldn’t be held to a similar, if not higher standard, as audiences.

The dynamics of a performing ensemble are as important to the success of a performance as establishing a rapport with the audience.

In musical theater, filling downtime on a device instead of watching co-workers rehearse can limit the cohesiveness of an ensemble, said Broadway choreographer Josh Rhodes, most recently of “It Shoulda Been You,” who has banned phones and starts rehearsals with a speech.

“I tell the actors I would rather have to stop them from talking, laughing and bonding, than from texting. I would rather they annoy each other, talk about me behind my back, fix the show in private,” he said. “Anything that links them together is better than checking Facebook during rehearsal.”

Theater director and Shakespeare expert Michael Sexton agrees. “Whenever there is a 10-minute break, everyone retreats to their phone,” he said. “There is this silent room as opposed to gossip and getting to know each other.”

The change can limit professional and social bonds, said Mr. Sexton: “In theater, you are often in rooms with people you don’t really know and the only time the details of peoples’ lives come out is in breaks.”

I hate to be the crotchety old guy muttering “in my day…,” but I think it says something when a director expresses a tolerance for public disturbances, fomenting discord and insubordination if it helps the ensemble bond and keeps them from retreating to their cellphones.

WSJ acknowledges the constructive uses of cellphones and other devices in preparing for a role and helping to promote the show on social media. There is still a certain element to all this that requires one to get one’s own house in order before criticizing others.

Offenses by audience members are highly visible, clearly apparent and violate established social rules so they are easy to deride.

Backstage/rehearsal use is less visible and the rules are more varied and vague. Not to mention there can be power dynamics that inhibit comment when conductors and directors are the primary offenders.

The WSJ article doesn’t even get into the impact of allowing yourself to be distracted during a performance. There are the obvious things like missed cues. Having a fight with a significant other before heading to a performance can have an adverse effect on one’s performance. Having a fight via text/Facetime three minutes before going on stage ratchets things up quite a bit more.

Arts Participation Tied To Education, Not Wealth

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Some encouraging news coming from Pacific Standard in support of the growing trend to focus on participatory arts experiences over simple attendance. According to the results of a new study conducted in England,

“…most forms of arts participation are strongly correlated not with class, but rather with education. To his surprise, he found that in a large sample of the English population, those with higher incomes were actually less likely to be active participants in the arts.”

Let’s get it out of the way right at the beginning and acknowledge that arts participation may be more integral to the English education experience than the U.S. so this finding may not be completely applicable to the U.S.

Still, it is a factor to pay attention to when looking at the demographics of the people you are engaging and trying to engage. The findings are pretty captivating.

In other words, a certain percentage of people go to the opera in order to be seen, to impress their bosses (or in-laws), or because it’s what their friends and neighbors expect them to do. But if you are actually a member of the opera chorus, it’s probably because it feeds your soul.

[…]

Reeves found that “arts participation, unlike arts consumption and cultural engagement generally, is not closely associated with either social class or social status.”

Indeed, “those with higher incomes are less likely to be arts participants,” he writes, adding that this finding is unexpected and difficult to interpret. Perhaps, he speculates, those at the top tend to work longer hours, and have less free time to devote to creative pursuits.

However, Reeves found education was “a strong predictor of the likelihood of being an arts participant.” After adjusting for the influence of family background, he found that, compared to people who did not participate in higher education, those who had earned a degree were four to five times more likely to play a musical instrument, or be involved in painting, photography, or dance.

It is intriguing to think, even if just speculation, that the practice of providing art to be consumed may have been heavily influenced by the fact that those with the most money only had time to attend. Those who are highly educated, but not as affluent may have an interest in consuming, yet they have a stronger interest and availability in participation, but may feel convenient opportunities are lacking.

If you are in a community where everyone sings in a choir, but few attend a concert by touring artists, you may be witnessing this dynamic in action.

There has long been a criticism of a one size fits all approach to marketing, programming, development, etc., especially in terms of trying to replicate what another organization is doing. Now one needs to consider if an art for consumption model may be incompatible with their community as well.

Then there is this statement to think about:

In any event, the findings can serve as a rejoinder to those who argue the arts are strictly of interest to the elite—an assertion that implies the rich can fund these organizations themselves rather than asking taxpayers to help do so.

Despite the exciting prospects represented by this statement, what is still going to be a million dollar mystery question for most arts organizations is if you shift to providing a more participatory mode of arts experience, is there enough interest to support the organization?

Even though there is potentially a much wider scope of people to which to appeal, the knowledge really affluent people are most interested in arts consumption may deter change.

Advisory Board Functionality

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I was curious to know how many people out there have advisory boards/committees that are not part of the governing board. If you have one, what has your experience been?

The reason I ask is because when I was at the recent Arts Midwest conference, a speaker advised that organizations not have a separate standing advisory committee for the simple reason that they will expect their advice to be implemented.

His general idea was that the governing board is in charge of the organization. They are (or should be) aware and responsible for all the repercussions of decisions that are made. An advisory board focuses on ideal outcomes but has no responsibility for what is involved in achieving those outcomes.  They are not likely to be aware of how their suggestions will tax the resources of the organization.

Yet, by providing them with an official seeming role that is called upon periodically, you create expectations about the influence the group will wield. Better that you solicit feedback from individuals at performances,  Rotary meetings, board meetings for other organization, at football games, etc.

If there is a need for a formal focus group or brainstorming session, the group should be assembled to apply their expertise to a specific topic (meeting state education standards, reaching under served communities) and then disbanded.

You might still contact any one you consult individually as follow up advice or to establish partnerships, etc.  It would be surprising if you didn’t. Most organizational challenges can’t be solved in a few afternoon meetings or on the buffet line.  There just shouldn’t be a standing group independent of the governing board.

It was also suggested that the temporary focus group be picked by the organization’s administration rather than by the governing board in order to avoid having an agenda or existing conflict within the board transferred to the group.

I know that some organizations use the Advisory Committee concept as a way to bolster their prestige, curry favor and funding by appointing celebrities, government officials and other notables to the committee. My impression is, this is largely a vanity appointment and few of these committees ever meet as a group.

Which is not to say that these individuals can’t offer valuable advice. Many certainly have great insight to offer and valuable connections which can benefit the organization. It’s just that they are probably solicited on an individual basis, much like as has been suggested.

Again, as this is a topic that doesn’t get discussed very often. I am curious to know how people have used this structure and if the groups, as a group, have proven to be an asset.

Improving The Artistic Palate

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This past summer there was an article on Vice.com about award-winning chefs who have been interning or volunteering at other restaurants, farms and with food scientists in order to pick up new skills and deepen an understanding of their craft.

My first thoughts relating it to the arts was the ongoing debate about artists working for free for the exposure and experience and whether that is valuable or just exploitation. I held off writing about the article because I didn’t want to wade into that well-trodden subject.

I also thought about the fact that a fair number of established artists will continue to take classes to keep their skills fresh; will take on lower paying roles in order to stretch themselves; and will work with masters of related disciplines in order to pick up new skills. (Then there are those who only semi-willingly gain myriad skills by taking dozens of jobs that provide the flexibility to allow their artistic pursuits.)

There were a few concepts and ideas in the Vice article that could have relevance in instigating change in the arts.

The first is understanding and empathy for how the different parts of the business work. Says the chef interning at a bar with a plan to open one himself:

“I think I’d be a total hypocrite, not to mention foolish, to open a place that wasn’t indicative of my skillset. Also, how can you manage a place, manage personalities, if you don’t understand the product, the job, the work?” Paulin said.

“…I will surely be hiring people when I do open a bar … but nobody respects a boss that doesn’t understand the job.”

One idea that doesn’t get discussed directly right now is whether it is valuable for arts managers to have had experience in the disciplines they are overseeing.

In years past, organizations were founded by artists and others intimately involved in the creation of work for the organization before they became a leader. Today it is more common to have people with arts administration degrees who may or may not have practical experience in that discipline. Frequently, people from outside the arts field and non-profits in general, are brought in to lead organizations.

Has more been lost than gained in this practice? Can the contentious rounds of contract negotiations many orchestras have faced be related to these developments? I am not sure if anyone is tracking the career arcs of current arts leaders, but it would be interesting to know how the demographics have changed over the last 30+ years.

Then there is the opposite dynamic that has been getting some conversation lately–practitioners getting experience in the business side as administrators and entrepreneurs.

Despite all emphasis about practicing artists developing these skills, there aren’t too many training programs that include it in their curriculum, though that situation is improving.

I am also not aware of more than a handful (though I am sure more exist) of arts organizations that provide any sort of classes/workshops where associated artists who don’t intend to enter arts management can gain these skills.

The Vice article mentioned a two week intensive where chefs learn to strengthen their communication skills:

Cooknscribble.com is an online resource of food writing courses founded by O’Neill. “Chefs frequently enroll in these classes with a book, a blog or even merely menu- and press-release- writing in mind,” she said….

In the summers, O’Neill offers a two-week residential immersion course in Rensselaerville, New York. In this two week course, the scholars are basically thrown into a fast-paced editorial office. They write every day. They get instruction in recipe writing, food blogging, memoir, creative non-fiction, food news reporting—with additional emphasis placed in photography, videography, oral history and reporting skills.

“Chefs in particular respond to our mentor-style teaching model, our hands-on approach and the reality-based ‘action plans’ that we insist upon,” O’Neill said.

That sounds like a good model for an arts related training program.

Couple sentences later in the article talks about a chef who is losing his physical capacity to cook who wants to develop a way to communicate his knowledge and expertise. In the same sense, there is untapped capacity in retired arts professions that can be utilized to provide guidance through face to face and online interactions.

Granted, there has been an expected great exodus of non-profit executive directors for 10 years now that hasn’t emerged so maybe there aren’t as many retired administrators as I think. Not to mention, performing and visual artists never seem to stop creating. Still, I am sure more can be done that isn’t being done.

Is Anyone Really Reading This? Three Foundations Want To Know

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A guest post today. Barry Hessenius asked if I would spread the word about study being conducted by the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and WESTAF who are looking into the ways in which the non-profit arts field communicates.

They are seeking answers to many of the basic questions we all ask like, “Is anyone really reading any of this and is it useful to them?”

Those who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for an Apple Watch and a separate drawing for a $500 cash award to your organization. Read on to learn more.

The Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and WESTAF are sponsoring a preliminary study on Communications within the nonprofit arts field, and have invited our members to join them by taking a brief national survey.

They want to make absolutely sure that the grantmaking community within our field is adequately represented in this survey.

This study seeks to gain valuable information on:

• How we communicate internally with each other
• How we communicate externally within the sector
• How we manage the growth in all communications
• What the impact is on our organizations of that growth in communications.

No one disputes that communication is at the core of every business, including the arts nonprofit sector. If we don’t communicate effectively success is problematic.

Oddly enough there has never been any comprehensive survey of how we in the nonprofit arts field communicate – internally or externally.

As a field, we have virtually no data at all as to:

• which means and methods we prefer to use to communicate,
• whether or not the means we do choose are effective,
• how we manage our communications
• where we get our information from, and
• which sources we trust.

Moreover, we have no information as to how we are coping with the dramatically increased information that flows from, and to, us on a daily basis.

Do you know if people read the reports, studies, and just general information you send them? Do they scan it or read it all, or do they ignore it if you are not one of their trusted sources?

Do you know if your staff considers the onslaught of information a positive or a negative in doing their jobs?

Do you know how many emails your staff deals with each day and how many hours a week they spend on different types of communications?

They have designed a basic, simple online survey that will give us all some base information on our communications behaviors, habits and perceptions.

The survey is 100% check off answers, with no open ended, narrative responses required or asked for.

It is completely anonymous and designed to take less than 20 minutes to complete.

While they cannot pay a fee nor provide a premium to every person / organization that takes the survey, they will, at the request of each survey responder, enter their name into a random drawing for an Apple Watch. We will also enter the name of the responder’s organization into a separate random drawing for a $500 cash award payable to that organization.

The survey seeks to establish a base line of data and information about communications within our sector, on which can be built further research. The aim is to
gain knowledge that will help us all to communicate more effectively, more efficiently and with a greater awareness of the issues and challenges inherent in all our communications decisions.

To that end they will disseminate as widely as possible the analysis of the results of the survey.
Here is the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Knight-Hewlett-Survey

The survey is open from September 28th to October 16th.

If A Scientist Can Be Creative, So Can A Normal Person

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There was a recent post on the Priceonomics blog about the creative and artistic practice of scientists. According to a recent research study,

It seems avocational creativity discoveries of professional scientists go hand in hand: the more accomplished a scientist is, the more likely they are to have an artistic hobby.

The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society — elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries — are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby.

[…]

The paper’s authors also compared these values to the rates of artistic or crafty hobbies among the U.S. general population. The “average scientist” as measured by the Sigma Xi survey wasn’t any more likely than the general population to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But they were much more likely to be a musician or a photographer than the general population, and also less likely to be writers, visual artists, or performance or theater artists.

That distribution is different among more accomplished scientists. Nobel winners, for example, are 12 times more likely to be writers than scientists in general are.

The charts that accompany the post are pretty amazing in their depiction of how much more likely a Nobel winner, as a percentage of the population, is to have an artistic avocation than the general public.

The post discusses the contributions the mythical combination of right-brain/left brain thinking in the success of the scientists.

I would really love to know if that same mix linear and associative thinking contributes to creative excellence. Except I think the effects would be harder to measure given the differences in the way success is assessed.

Nobel prizes in science are generally awarded for work that is measurable, possesses reproducible results and the where stated benefits are clear and verifiable. Prizes to artists are based on much more subjective, wildly varied criteria.

Excellence in creative fields is not always fairly rewarded. There are most certainly a good number of scientists who might claim the same.

The findings of this study is hardly earth shattering. The artistic habits of many prominent scientists like Albert Eisenstein and Richard Feynman are often mentioned.

It is just that now I have a slightly different perspective in light of the study I posted about last week which found that citing how the arts have a positive impact on academic achievement does not resonate with the public at large. So there may not be any benefit to lauding creative hobbies as crucial to scientists’ ability to achieve great things.

However, since people often perceive art and science at opposite ends of a continuum, scientists can provide proof that anyone is capable of creative expression. Something the study I cited last week said can be important to emphasize. The idea that non-artsy people like scientists can enjoy doing artsy things may convince those who self-identify as regular folks that they may have the ability to create as well.

Really, even suggesting an approach along those lines sounds pretty condescending to me. The actual execution of the message needs to be a little more subtle than, “Hey if logical, dispassionate scientists can be artsy, so can you.” Still it wouldn’t surprise me if some people were encouraged by the image of austere, detached scientists being creative and gradually became more open to the idea that they could be as well.

If evoking that concept actually did set people at least, it would be a testament to just how intimidating the idea of the arts are to people that they would think there might be hope for them if a scientist could be creative.

Not to mention scientists have an image problem if people envision them solely involved with pragmatic, empirical practices.

If there is one thing that arts and science have in common, (other than enabling scientists to kick their problem solving skills up a notch), it is a shared stereotypes of intimidating inscrutability to contend with.

Potentially the danger in seeing art and science at the incomprehensible extreme ends of a continuum makes scientists as much an “other” as creatives. Any sort of messaging that connected the two groups might only solidify the concept that art was something that “other” people did.

Thinking About The Implications Of Local News

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Arts organizations, and really any business, need to be cognizant of different environmental factors that may impact them. It is relatively easy to predict (or blame) the impact of the economy or local unemployment on earned and unearned revenue.

It can be a little more difficult to discern what effect zoning changes in different parts of your city might bring or if the adoption of Common Core standards by local schools is going to good or bad for the local arts over the long term.

Another thing that might not really be on your radar as a potential threat or opportunity is the availability and affordability of real estate in your community. An article predicting a worsening of the rental market on the Atlantic website says the number of people paying between 30%-50% of their income is expected to rise over the next decade.

The researchers estimate that the current rental crunch—the one where vacancies are around 7 percent, about half of renters spend more than 30 percent of their salaries on housing, and one quarter spend 50 percent or more—is only going to get worse over the next decade. Even if housing prices and income rise as quickly as inflation (about 2 percent annually) the number of severely rent-burdened Americans (those paying 50 percent or more) would increase by 11 percent over the decade, to over 13 million people in 2025.

[…]

According to their estimates, the current trend—where fewer Americans opt for homeownership—will continue. And that could be bad news for household finances, since a greater number of Americans will wind up using a major chunk of their income just to pay for housing.

When it is put in these terms, it doesn’t take much effort to understand that there will be less disposable income floating around with so much of it is going into housing. If you are paying 50% of your income for rent, there is that much more motivation to stay at home and get your entertainment bingeing on Netflix series.

Unless you have a lot of housing developers and public policy makers on your board that you can advocate to, there isn’t much an arts organization can do to directly impact this reality. If you see this sort of thing on the horizon for your city, you could be proactive in your next couple 5 year strategic plans to prepare for and lower economic barriers for residents who are challenged by rising rents.

Spoilers To Help You Enjoy The Show

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Slate had an article last month about schools in North Carolina that were flipping the museum field trip.

This is based on the concept of a flipped classroom where you do all the reading, view video lectures, etc on your own. During the normal class meeting period, the instructor helps you apply that knowledge to problems in a similar manner to how students would be expected to demonstrate what they learned by doing homework.

Essentially the lectures are received at home and the work is performed in class instead of the typical mode of learning where this is reversed.

In the case of the museum visit, instead of visiting the museum and then applying what was experienced to classroom work, the classroom work and learning about the concepts preceded the museum visit. In many respects, the museum visit was an ending point confirming the reality of expectations rather than serving as a starting point for a project.

There were a lot of interesting elements of this project, including the pairing of rural and urban schools as partners, trading work and discussing ideas online with people they didn’t meet until both schools visited the museum at the same time.

As exciting as the project sounded, I wondered if the students, or really anyone, would go to the trouble of researching works or performances prior to attending. About the only categories of people I could think of who regularly prepare in advance of an event are attendees of operas and story ballets who want to understand the story being rendered in a language (or movement) they don’t clearly understand.

So while it sounded as if the advanced preparation the students did enhanced their enjoyment of the museum going experience, I couldn’t really think of an effective way to convince people that they take time out of their busy lives to do some preparatory web surfing.

It was only in the last few days that I remembered a research project from some years back which found that spoilers actually enhance your enjoyment of an experience.

In looking for links to include in this post, I found a post by psychologist Dr. Ali Mattu who argues against the study saying that if you have a high emotional investment in an event, (highly anticipating the experience for period of time), spoilers can ruin things for you.

However, he says in cases like literature and art, the study shows spoilers can remove some intellectual barriers and assist in processing the experience.

In non-academic speak, spoilers may help people understand stories. Knowing what’s going to happen might also make things more fun by giving you something to look forward to. This is supported by the research on rereading stories – most people enjoy a story as much, if not more, the second time they read it.

[…]

I also buy the argument that knowledge about a story can help people enjoy it more. As the researchers mention, this speaks to perceptual fluency – the easier it is to understand something, the more we enjoy it. Whenever I see a book to movie adaptation, I always enjoy the movie better if I’ve already read the book. Movie trailers also help me understand what a movie is about. The same is true of non-story experiences – I like museum exhibits better when I already know about the artists and their artwork.

This got me wondering if there is any value to labeling a link on webpages and email blast “Spoilers To Help You Enjoy The Show.” Would that be intriguing enough to get people to investigate in advance. If so, then it is just a matter of discerning whether a Buzzfeed-esque mix of text, gifs and videos is more valuable to your potential audience or if something they can download for future reference would be more useful.

Phhsst! You Think You Are As Good As Me?

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Often when the concept of Professional-Amateurs or the capability of everyone to be creative comes up, there is a feeling of resistance that rises up among arts professionals. The study on creating public will for arts and culture that I have been citing this week addresses that a little.

Finally, our research found A POTENTIAL FOR PUSH-BACK FROM EXISTING CONSTITUENCIES for arts and culture (e.g., some arts leaders, working artists, arts educators, and arts and culture enthusiasts). Here, some respondents expressed concern that a focus on creative expression represents a dumbing down of the conversation about the value of arts and culture. Some artists, for example, chafe at the notion that “amateurs” and “hobbyists” might be lumped into the same category as those who have dedicated years of study, practice, and exploration to their art.

…Rather, the question of framing the subject is not either “creative expression” or “arts and culture,” but both/and. To those ends, our research suggests that framing the discussion in terms of creative expression is an entry point through which more people are receptive, increasing and diversifying the audience for whom the conversation has relevance.

Getting more people engaging in a conversation about arts and culture is a good thing. One of the benefits to people becoming more interested and invested in their hobby or area of interest is that the more they learn, the more they realize what they don’t know.

The only problem is that people are often satisfied with what they already know and don’t seek to learn more. As involved in the arts as I am, when I saw the “I Could Do That” video I included in a post last week, I had new respect for Piet Mondrian’s Tableau I. I wasn’t aware how difficult it is to execute using oil paint.

While I have never been dismissive of the work, I could have gone my whole life unaware of the technical skills necessary to create it.

But it can be valuable to remember that the arts aren’t the only arena in which people underestimate the degree of skill required.

Every year millions of kids around the world play baseball. It is a game that is easy for amateurs to participate in. Everyone understands, however, that only a select few have the skill to hit a baseball traveling in excess of 90 MPH…except for thousands of fans jeering at the ineptitude of the losing team.

Sports are still better served by having leagues of people of various ages, abilities and degrees of organization participating rather than athletes feeling threatened by the idea that people are being encouraged to think they have athletic ability.

It bears noting that participation in sports is waning both among those interested in playing and audiences. There may be a growing opportunity to engage people in creative expression as an alternative pursuit…or this may be a sign of a decreasing trend in participation in all types of activities.

Authenticity In All Your Diverse Dealings

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Yesterday when discussing the Arts Midwest study that is the basis for the effort to build public will for arts and culture, I briefly referenced the finding that promoting authenticity of experience is better than citing cultural diversity.

According to the study:

However, the word “diversity” can be problematic in describing the benefit or outcome of experiencing the creative expression of other people and cultures. Some resist the notion that our communities are becoming more diverse, and others are concerned with the “tokenism” associated with diversity that satisfies itself with quotas or counting or the most rudimentary of contact while failing to connect authentically with other people or cultures.

A similar sentiment to the tokenism concern was expressed in a different, earlier Arts Midwest conference session on Engaging Diverse Communities, facilitated by Kaisha Johnson, Meera Dugal and Robin Hickman.

One of the first points raised in the session is that the focus of engaging diverse communities has been on how the arts/cultural organization can benefit from the inclusion. This can make the effort feel disingenuous and leave people feeling marginalized. Few organizations can say why engaging diverse audiences is meaningful beyond seeking to expand sources of revenue.

The first step then is to articulate why it is important and what the organization’s concept of diversity is given that the term can encompass cultural, ethnic, social, sexual and other affinity groupings.

In terms of identifying and engaging groups, if one didn’t already have a sense of where to start, the panel’s advice was to seek groups online and via social media. The panel suggested engaging people as fans of a particular group or genre first rather than as a potential seat filler.

Discovering why people are passionate about a genre or group can 1- provide an initial basis for making a personal connection and 2 – can provide insight into what fans value about that person (i.e. it isn’t just about good music, but the political message or perhaps the group’s dedication to other social and environmental causes.)

An convenient source for establishing connections may be your organization’s staff. The panel cautioned that you should allow people to self identify their connections rather than deciding what they are. (i.e. You are a Chinese, bisexual, Millennial so you know all about…)

Once you have established relationships with individuals from an affinity group, the panel advocated for involving them in the curatorial process. These individuals can also help you understand the cultural dynamics and context of performances as well as avoid any potential pitfalls.

Meera Dugal used the example of a Moroccan group she scheduled at Lincoln Center during Ramadan. Thanks to the advice of her contacts, she moved the concert to a time after sundown and had certain types of foods available for participants.

While I had heard suggestions along these general lines before, one idea that never occurred to me but seemed like a no-brainer in retrospect was to commit to using vendors from target communities. While it sounded like the panel was suggesting this in relation to just specific events, it seems constructive to engage in continual commerce with businesses run by members of the community with which you wish improve your relationship.

If the people you want aren’t paying you to enter your doors, pay them to enter your doors instead by ordering flowers, catering, dry cleaning, construction materials, etc.

We often think that the only way to reach people is through whatever our primary product is. You know, the old idea that once they see what we do, they will fall in love with it.

But every transaction provides an opportunity to have a conversation about what our organizations do— “We are using your stuff for X, you ought to come and see.”

Not to mention, it reinforces the sincerity of any other expressed desire to include the group in your activities. (a.k.a. putting your money where your mouth is).

Since the study I wrote about yesterday seems to indicate older, white men appear to be the least likely to be engaged in arts/creative expression, using commerce to cultivate relationships with other groups may be a prudent course toward sustainability.

Arts and Culture Bad, Creativity Good

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Last week I attended the Arts Midwest conference in Kansas City, MO. From what I saw of the city, it can still lay claim to the appellation, “Paris of the Plains.” The Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center left most attendees amazed and a little green with envy.

I ended up staying at the gorgeous Hotel Phillips which I was excited to learn has its own artist in residence.

Building Public Will For Arts and Culture

The conference session that unexpectedly grabbed my attention was Arts Midwest President David Fraher’s session on Building Public Will for Arts and Culture where he presented the results of the research findings on the subject.

If nothing else, the session reconfirmed the value of attending live performance over recorded because Fraher provided a good deal of insight and nuance that doesn’t come through when reading the report.

Essentially, building public will for arts and culture involves something of a reversal of the current focus in favor of grassroots efforts. As an example of what is envisioned being needed, Fraher and the report cite the way smoking bans emerged.

The Surgeon General never changed the advertising message that smoking and second hand smoke was bad for you, it was a grassroots desire not to have one’s health impacted by second hand smoke that brought about the change in laws. From the research results report:

For years, those seeking to reduce the incidence of smoking found themselves stymied. Facts and data about the harmful effects of smoking had motivated some to quit, but had failed to create fundamental change in social norms, systems, and policies. The facts were compelling, but they were overpowered by opponents who framed the issue in the context of individual freedom (i.e., “I have the right to smoke if I want to; I’m not hurting anybody.”).

Even the growing body of evidence around second-hand smoke had difficulty finding fertile ground until advocates realized they could reframe the same core argument to their own advantage (i.e., “I have the right to be protected from exposure to smoke.”). Co-opting the individual freedom value—backed by facts and data—allowed the sustainable changes in policies and systems that we experience today.

Fraher noted that currently, the arts and culture community generally put their effort into effecting one time change vis-a-vis staving off government policy decisions rather than long term, enduring change.

When you want to effect immediate change, you put 80% effort into advertising and 20% into grassroots. To effect long lasting change, it is reversed. 80% effort goes toward grassroots effort and 20% effort into advertising. Engaging in the latter course they are advocating will therefore require a shift of mindset and priorities in the arts and culture community.

One of the central precepts in this effort is a focus on community values. This means asking what do the arts have that align with community values rather than focusing on what the arts value and looking at what the community has that aligns with them.

Arts and Culture Are Poison

Among the findings that caused the biggest reaction in the conference session was that the term “arts and culture” is poison and turns people off, keeping them from entering the conversation. The perception is Art is something someone else does. Something to be watched passively that is inaccessible and intimidating. The search found that “creative expression” has a more positive association that opens the door to a conversation that eventually ends up at a discussion of art.

While they don’t suggest scrubbing every mention of art and culture from your conversations and literature, they do say it may be some years before the terminology trends back to a positive association.

People feel that creativity is part of who they are. They may not call themselves creative, but once they start to talk about what they do, they will admit they engage in creative expression. Even if people don’t feel they are creative, they apparently have an easier time envisioning themselves capable of creative expression than envisioning themselves creating art. (Again, the idea that art is something other people do.)

Another term that turned people off was “diversity.” It is better to promote an event as providing an authentic experience rather than providing/promoting cultural diversity.

Personal Health, Not the Economy

When talking about the benefits of an experience, mentioning that the arts improve the economy, make kids smarter and brings safety to communities are arguments that work with policy makers in government and foundations, but don’t really have resonance with individuals.

Generally people believe creativity makes them less stressed, happier, healthier and more connected with family and friends. (One thing Fraher emphasized was that family was family of choice rather than biological immediate family.) It probably comes as no surprise that despite the appearance of hyperconnectivity, research has found that there is currently a crisis of loneliness, perhaps the greatest in history. So promoting arts and culture in the context of health, relaxation and connectivity is more effective messaging.

The study cites the NEA’s finding that not having someone to attend with is a significant barrier to attendance. Fraher commented that they weren’t suggesting arts organizations start a dating service, but since I and others are experimenting with something along those lines, I would suggest not dismissing the idea too soon.

Survey and focus group respondents also had a strong, positive reaction to the idea that creativity helped one connect with oneself, but would back way from their initial enthusiasm out of apparent embarrassment that it made them sound self-centered. (Most frequently among parents with young children.) Appropriate subtlety and restraint may make this another effective approach to take.

Not Everyone Who Values The Experience Is Attending

As the effort to build public will for arts and culture moves forward, the key audiences it will focus on are women, young people and people of color. The study found strong interest among all these groups. Fraher joked that he felt bad for women because according to the study, men didn’t like to do anything. Men would respond that they valued spending time with their family, but when asked what they did with their family, they indicated Nothing in every category.

Fraher commented that there was a disconnect between the groups that say attendance is important and the groups that are currently actually attending. For example, there were a large number of responses in the under 40 category that said attendance at art performances, festivals, etc, were important to them but obviously the demographics found in arts venues track older. The lack of connection is due to familiar barriers of time, money, no one to attend with, etc.

One Message, But Not One Ad, To Rule Them All

The plan for the National Engagement phase for building public will is to develop a more unified message and create tool kits for groups to use. The expectation is that it will take at least 8-10 years before any type of measurable results begin to emerge.

Fraher mentioned a desire to be agile and share the messaging that works in one community with other communities. In what I felt was an indication that they understood what the research was telling them, he re-emphasized the focus on the grassroots nature of the effort saying that there wouldn’t be single national ad buys disseminating whatever the effective messaging might be.

While there was a lot in David Fraher’s presentation that doesn’t appear in the research results report, there are some interesting observations in the report that didn’t come out in the hour he had to talk about it. I am trying to decide whether I am going to do a second post on those parts of the report or not.

But don’t wait for me to decide, give it a look.

(When I originally posted, I identified KC as Paris of the Prairie rather than Paris of the Plains. Chicago and Saskatoon have both been called Paris of the Prairie.)

Get Back In There And Be Creative

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If you have been reading my blog for any span of time, you will know that I have a particular interest in stories that show, to paraphrase Edison, Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Recently, Pacific Standard had an article where researchers found that persistence is an important factor in achieving a creative break through.

“Researchers report that people consistently underestimate how many creative ideas they can come up with if they continue to work on a problem, rather than giving up in the wake of mediocre initial results.”

The article references two similar experiments where people were asked to brain storm ideas, had a break and were asked to brain storm more ideas. During the break, the participants were asked how many ideas they would come up with in the second brainstorming session. In both cases, the participants underestimated how many ideas they would come up with.

The most interesting thing was that in one case, the participants were all professional sketch comedy performers at a sketch comedy festival.

Remember, this is the sort of thing these people do for a living. And yet they, too, significantly underestimated the number of ideas they would come up with on their second attempt. “This speaks to the robustness of persistence undervaluation,” the researchers write, “and demonstrates that it is not limited to novices in novel domains.”

In a study that didn’t involve the sketch performers, outside evaluators rated the ideas that came from the post-break session as “significantly more original” than those that came from the first session.

Apparently the reason why people underestimate how creative they will be is due to a sense of doubt generated by their initial attempt. Perhaps one of the most important elements in obtaining creative success is a supportive, but firm friend who tells you to get your butt back in there and try again.

Creative thought is a trial-and-error process that generally produces a series of failed associations before a creative solution emerges,” the researchers note. It’s often difficult to know when you’re nearing a breakthrough; that “Aha!” moment may occur immediately following a period of deep frustration.

[…]

…As Thomas Edison said: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

Again we come back to the need to allow for failures in the process of pursuing creativity.

Could You Really Do That? Maybe You Could

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Apropos to my post last week about the value of college fine arts requirement classes, someone on my Twitter feed posted a link to a Huffington Post article about why you shouldn’t dismiss a work of visual art as something you or you kid could have done.

The article is actually based on on episode from PBS Digital’s series, The Art Assignment

Many of The Art Assignment episodes get people to go out and do or find things associated with their topic. However, some like the video above tackle how to relate and interact with art. As such, they provide a good starting point for novices, arts education programs and even arts educators seeking a way to communicate on these topics.

What is great is that everything comes back to the philosophy of experiential learning. So even though they say, yeah it isn’t as easy to do as you think, bub. They immediately follow with, but you should totally try to do it!

Among the videos I found that work along these lines are episodes on How to Critique, what works you can and can’t touch and why, and how (and why) to learn about Contemporary Art.

Recently it appears they have started to an effort to help people understand the work of specific artists in The Case for Mark Rothko and The Case for Andy Warhol.

This looks to be a good resource for visual arts organizations and something to keep an eye on as they continue to develop episodes.

The series leads to the inevitable question– can something this effective and humorous be created for theater, opera, dance, classical music? (Yes, of course it can.) I am sure there are some out there. Even some visual arts ones similar to the Arts Assignment episodes.

Heck, Thug Notes points out things in literature I didn’t catch when I was reading the works and is very entertaining.

So maybe someone is doing it right now and I don’t know about it. Let me know.

Maybe someone is thinking about doing something similar but is worried about the funding and should contact the Venture Arts Incubator.

Don’t Worry, No One Will Call You a Noob

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I just realized this week that one of the hurdles the arts needs to surmount to attract younger audiences may be steeper than assumed. One of the issues people identify as a point of anxiety is not knowing the rules of behavior at an arts event.

I have always equated that with awkwardly feeling out of place, but in the last day I wondered if younger audiences might equate that with the vulnerability one feels when being assailed by strangers online.

For older audiences a worst case scenario might be a few people around you looking askance at your faux pas.

For younger audiences, the worst case scenario might be a perception that EVERYBODY is aware of your mistake and are all preparing to declare their derision on social media. It may seem an illogical conclusion, but social fear generally is and the context for that fear is different for younger generations than older generations.

What brought this to mind was a conversation about explicit and implicit signalling of the rules of behavior at arts events occurring in the comments section of the post I made Monday. My thought is that the ideal is to provide frequent, varied experiences so that you can socialize audiences to the range of rules and move from explicit to implicit signalling.

The conversation we have been having on Monday’s post has been about how much explicit signalling is needed for new audiences unfamiliar with the rules.

As I was considering this last night, I got to thinking how at a certain level of detail communicating how to behave, even skilled practitioners of audience relations are going to sound condescending. Less skilled practitioners, which I will number myself among, are going to sound condescending long before that.

Another issue is that really detailed instructional signage and materials will end up reinforcing what we are trying to avoid, namely reinforcing a perceived division between experienced people and novices. I had the image of people in the know looking at all the explicit instructions for behavior and saying, “stupid noobs need to have their hands held.”

For a moment, it popped in my mind that there really aren’t any people at an arts event who are going to use the term “stupid noob.” Maybe arts organizations need to have a campaign slogan, “Nobody will call you noob” to assure people it was safer to make mistakes at an arts event than online. (Philistine, on the other hand…)

That is when I realized, that the psychological stakes some people associate with making a mistake may be much greater than we imagine. I would really be interested to know if anyone has studied any connection between depth of social media involvement and risk aversion.

All this adds another dimension to question of how much information needs to be delivered to allow people to navigate an arts event confidently and what the best channels of delivery are so as not to draw undue attention to the uninitiated.

Some people aren’t comfortable or aware of how to access information online while at an event. And besides, the hallmark of live experience we keep emphasizing is the whole live thing–being able to ask and answer questions in person should always be an option.

Even if the venue prepares online resources for a show, they can’t provide answers to all possible questions. You can go to a soccer match knowing nothing about the game and google information about the off-sides rule.

It isn’t as easy to get an answer if you type in “Why is the Shakespeare play I am watching set in the 1920s.” (Actually, I lied, while you can’t get a definitive answer using that search term, there are apparently a lot of adaptations of the Bard to the 1920s so articles are available about why the decision was made and how well it works.)

What You Might Learn In That Stupid Arts Requirement Class

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I guess because it is the beginning of the school year, a number of online media outlets are devoting some space to talking about the value of different college classes in one’s life. Slate has a whole, well slate, of stories queued up to address about 16 classes across the week.

A few of them address liberal arts classes so they are worth taking note for the perspective they bring to our little corner of existence.

Yesterday, Dan Check, Vice President of the Slate Group promoted Intro to Acting as a way to get you out of your comfort zone.

Throughout life, we all occasionally feel a lack of competence; college is a great time to practice that feeling, to proceed without mastery or certainty or even talent, and to realize both what effort can do, as well as what it cannot. In the technology world, we often talk about being unafraid to fail, and of failing fast, but very rarely do we find opportunities to practice—that is, to seriously try and seriously fail in a situation where the stakes are as low as a single grade in a single semester outside of one’s major.

This idea about permission to fail comes up relatively frequently in conversations among arts people (at least online). Often it is in terms of there not being enough wiggle room in budgets to allow failure.

It is good to be reminded that one of the things the arts can offer to other areas of endeavor is the experience of failing in a low-stakes environment that involves human interaction. I use this term in contrast to competitive environments like sports or individual efforts like learning a language or physical skill (surfing).

Succeeding and failing at each of these obviously have their benefits as well so people who are comfortable in arts situations like acting need to seek out corresponding experiences that take them out of their comfort zone.

In another piece this week, Mark Joseph Stern acknowledged the complexity of feelings involved when faced with people who don’t share the same degree of knowledge and appreciation of visual art. While he says it makes him feel sad when people dismiss a work of visual art at a glance when ignorance is so easily solved, he admits that encountering a work of visual art can be challenging when we are used to television and video explaining themselves to us.

I once saw a woman stop in front of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, scoff, then turn on her heels and walk away. At the time, I judged her. But in retrospect, I suspect she was simply overwhelmed by its skittering vibrancy—and rather than attempt to process her reaction, she got defensive and gave up.

Second, visual art demands analysis. Most movies and TV shows place plot before all else, allowing shallow, distracted viewing. You can watch, and enjoy, almost anything on TV today without thinking about cinematography or set design or most other visual elements. With paintings, you have to do a little more work, …Learning these skills takes practice—not much, but enough to scare away most museumgoers.

As I implied, these articles aren’t just appearing on Slate. On Quartz this week, Brendan Mathews, asserts that the most useful class you can take in college is a fiction workshop.

Before I began teaching, I worked in marketing, digital media and communications. I saw more than one dot-com boom go bust. And at every one of these jobs, I had to consider new ideas from my colleagues—business plans, market analyses, product prototypes, website redesigns—and provide cogent, meaningful feedback. Back then, I counted on a few simple rules that I learned in my own undergraduate creative writing workshops:

“I like it” and “I don’t like it” are equally worthless. When someone asks you to read a story that they’ve poured their heart and soul into, saying you like it or don’t like it tells them nothing….

No playing favorites. No story in a workshop gets a free pass simply because the writer is a senior and you a lowly sophomore. And no story gets shot down simply because the writer’s last story was a tragically ill-conceived mash-up of gothic horror and My Little Pony fan fiction….

No meanies. Students do not eviscerate each other’s stories for sport, nor do they bestow baskets full of rainbows and sunshine on each other. A good workshop teaches you to put your own issues aside and deliver your opinion—especially your highly critical opinion—with some degree of diplomacy…

And no hard feelings. On the flip side, sometimes you’re the one whose story gets a rough reception in workshop. You expected tears of sympathy; instead you got peals of laughter, or even worse, a shrug. What do you do? You take pride in the fact that you put your work out there, you don’t take it personally, and you vow to do better next time…

Like Dan Check’s piece on acting class, Mathews lays this out in the context everyone wants to know about today–how will this class help me get a job?

Yes, there is a need to emphasize art for art’s sake, but art doesn’t serve a single purpose in life or it wouldn’t have any value as a basic element of human identity. It conveys life skills, economic benefits, aesthetic appreciation and exists on its own merits. Articles like these provide tips on making the case we would just as soon be self-evident for art as it is for accounting, biology, finance, marketing, pre-med, etc.

Signalling Expectations

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Lately I have been seeing many uses of technology aimed at influencing people to drive more considerately and safely. There is a GPS system that will start to give directions in a child’s voice when the vehicle enters a school zone.

On his show, Crowd Control, Daniel Pink put pictures of people in wheelchairs below disabled parking signs and a non-profit in Russia created holograms of people in wheelchairs, both efforts to deter those who didn’t need the spots from parking there.

All these were attempts to use empathy to shape the decisions people made. A question that came to mind was whether technology has desensitized us to needs of others to the point where steps needed to be taken to reassert the need to take care.

Or is the frequency at which people break these rules roughly at the same point it was 20 years ago and this is a case where technology and clever ideas have advanced to the point they can be used to address violators?

As much as I would like to claim we are ceding ever greater amounts of our humanity to technology, I actually suspect in this case the latter is true.

I wanted to use this as a jumping off point to wonder how ideas like these could be used to instill empathy and good judgement in arts audiences. There have been a lot of stories and discussions about talking, texting and other intrusive behaviors in performances.

Two of the ongoing conversations on these matters that I have been following recently are Diane Ragsdale’s Jumper blog and Scott Walters on the Clyde Fitch Report.

One of Walters’ general themes is that the “churchification” of performing arts has made attendance a stale, boring experience.

I am a little wary about what might result from poorly conceived plans to change that, given that people’s online behavior reveals a willingness to do something outlandish to call attention to themselves if they perceive license to do so. But I can certainly see Scott’s point that some sort of social shift is going to be required.

Since every situation will require different degrees of comportment, cultivating a sense of empathy and good judgement in audiences as to what is required and developing a method for performers to signal what the dynamics of the event are, will likely be the crucial element that will make it all work.

Making a preshow announcement and printing the rules in the program book clearly isn’t working so additional methods, channels, whatever, are needed.

Of course, performing arts venues need to do their part by not always having the same rules for every event. First of all, it is difficult to experiment with different ways of communicating intent and expectations if there is no opportunity for practical application. Second, audiences are already probing the boundaries of those rules. Either the boundaries have to loosen from time to time or audiences may defer on entering the boundaries altogether.

Right now some of the more effective and clear methods of communicating that the usual boundaries are not in effect are when people make a curtain speech announcement that riffs on the traditional speech by emphasizing “We ask that you DO take as many pictures as you want. DO tell your friends about the show by making social media posts during the show…”

That is only effective as long as the archetypal announcement exists to riff on. The goal is to ultimately remove it as an archetype even if the rules are still applied in certain instances.

I would suggest that the need to make announcements of any kind will be the indicator that work still needs to be done. The majority of attendees at a classical music concert intrinsically “know” how to behave there just as attendees at a rock concert “know” different rules apply without being told.

When people can enter a room and pick up general clues about expectations from the way the staff and other attendees are interacting and perhaps a glance around for more formal signifiers to confirm, then we are seeing a measure of success.

If events unfold contrary to expectations, either the event host needs consider whether this means they need to do a better job of signalling expectations or they need to do a better job of heeding the audience’s signaled expectations.

Have You Gotten To The Point You Care When People Steal Your Work?

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You know how you are supposed to check the batteries in your smoke detectors every time we go on or off daylight savings time? It may be worth having a similar rule for checking your intellectual property licenses for your online presences. Maybe every time you renew your domain name?

There was a recent story about a photographer who had set his Creative Commons License to allow commercial use with attribution.

When a map company used his image on one of their publications giving him full attribution, he sued them for their use of the image and lost.

The tone of the article is that it was sort of silly of him to be protesting the use of his work in a way explicitly allowed.

But it occurred to me that it would be very easy for many artists and organizations to accidentally find themselves in a similar situation as their online presence evolved.

For example, maybe your website or blog just starts out as a source of information for people about what you are doing. You set your license to require people to quote you with attribution or a link. You aren’t trying to monetize anything and you would be happy if people quoted you all over the Internet.

Later, your organization starts a new exciting program where you are producing all sorts of interesting stuff (or if you are an individual, you take up a hobby/refine your skills and get really good).

You start putting images and examples of your work online, forgetting your license is so permissive and the next thing you know you are seeing your work appearing all over social media, people are selling tshirts and tote bags with your images and are using your video and audio tracks in their own videos.

If you have been publicizing/bragging about achievements and have realized ambitions much greater than when you first established your blog, website, Pinterest, Flickr, etc, presence you may want to go back and review how much permission people have to utilize the content of those pages.

A similar issue may arise if you are featuring other people’s work and their more stringent use requirements aren’t clearly discernible.

Upon review, you may be surprised by how lax your settings are. Or maybe you will despair that no one wants to steal your stuff despite how lax your settings are.

I’ll Love You Foreve…About A Month

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About two years ago, Non Profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a piece discussing the external influences on non-profit organizations.

There are quite a number of external forces that exert pressure on non-profits, but thanks to the ease of communication and dissemination of information, among the latest to emerge are: push for transparency and accountability; the ability of different stakeholder groups to mobilize and influence each other and social media’s ability to make a escalate local issues to national visibility.

While these are all very interesting, the one element that caught my eye dealt with the transitory nature of relationships.

There is much less reliance on cradle-to-grave relationships between people and institutions (no longer the standard). And more free agency and greater reach of communications technology require stronger and more consistently engaging attractors. Maybe a core image here is that of the contracted and relatively unprotected worker—the worker with multiple short-term jobs, or the employee who commutes remotely. Socially concerned people are replicating these shorter term, more tenuous relationships—taking their energy to a Habitat for Humanity construction project one month, a race against hunger the next, and participating in a campaign against constrictive web legislation in between. If you want to compete for people’s attention and money and names, you had better be giving them something that they can get very interested in and over which they can feel a sense of accomplishment and partial ownership. They do not always need to do the work themselves, but they do need to feel engaged at a spirit level.

This struck a chord with me because it illustrates a new stage in the relationship between arts and communities. We have gone from the ability to assume a relatively long and stable relationship that was the hallmark of Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now, to the need to gradual cultivate a relationship through a successive series of steps laid out in the book Waiting in the Wings to this current news that you are lucky if you can get someone to support you for a month.

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it is a little depressing to see it in print. As to what is to be done, I would say make a consistent effort to communicate what you are doing and why they should be excited and interested to keep yourself on people’s radar.

And be prepared for churn. We know it is more expensive to attract new audiences to performances than to retain existing ones. While it is definitely worth working to maintain the loyalty of existing audiences, churn is likely to be a growing issue and needs to be factored into budgets. From the NPQ piece, it needs to be part of unearned revenue projections as well as earned because that is likely to fluctuate as well.

A big rally of support like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of last summer can help you advance your cause and expand your service exponentially, but it may taper off just as quickly so be prepared. This month ALS researchers reported on how much progress the $100 million boost they received last summer benefited their efforts. There isn’t any mention about what percentage of those who gave last year continue to do so now.

(To be fair, the report and Ask Me Anything were delivered by the researchers, not the ALS charities)

Eliminated 50 Resumes Immediately? Maybe You Are The Bad Job Candidate

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Last week I wrote about the trend among employers to monetize the apparent happiness of employees. One of the examples I provided was a job listing requiring people to be passionate about cleaning buildings. I pointed out one of the ways this already impacted the arts is the belief employees didn’t need to be paid to perform their roles since they are doing something they love.

But even arts and non-profit administrators who are resolved to pay employees fairly in line with current market rates are apt to have expectations that exceed the reality of their work environment.

A couple months ago Seth Godin made a post regarding, “The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobs.”

“It’s unreasonable to expect extraordinary work from someone who isn’t trusted to create it.

It’s unreasonable to find someone truly talented to switch to your organization when your organization is optimized to hire and keep people who merely want the next job.

It’s unreasonable to expect that you’ll develop amazing people when you don’t give them room to change, grow and fail.

And most of all, it’s unreasonable to think you’ll find great people if you’re spending the minimum amount of time (and money) necessary to find people who are merely good enough.”

When I was writing my post last week, I had a vague recollection of reading a post about how too much focus is placed on formal credentials and education when hiring people. I searched around quite a bit trying to find the source. Fortunately, in his post today, Vu Le linked back to the very post he wrote in April I was thinking about.

In that post, he mentions lack of formal education, typos in resumes, short term vision and “grass is greener outside our field” thinking as short cuts employers use to eliminate applicants and make the resume review process easier.

In essence, like Godin, he says employers have high expectations of a process in which they invest minimal effort.

In addition to making the effort, Vu advocates:

Change the philosophy and definition of “qualification”: Qualification should be based on whether a person will do a good job or not in the position. Since we can’t know for sure if they will, we use proxy characteristics, such as formal education, as a predictor of performance. But formal education, as mentioned above, leaves behind a lot of people. Set it in the “Preferred” section if you have to use it. This opens up doors for people who have equivalent working experience.

He also encourages people to be hired based on their passion. That isn’t generally an issue in the arts where people are replete with passion. But he also adds the need to hire based on potential, a sentiment that is echoed in a Fast Company article from a year ago that recommends hiring on potential over experience.

While it’s easier to measure past performance, it’s also possible to evaluate potential, he says. Zehnder looks for indicators such as the right kind of motivation: great ambition to leave a mark in the pursuit of greater, unselfish goals. “High potentials … show deep personal humility and invest in getting better at everything they do,” he says.

Four other hallmarks of potential, he adds, are curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.

[…]

Businesses may focus on hiring someone with eight to 10 years of experience, Seville says, but sometimes that’s really “one year’s experience times eight.”

That emphasis is the article’s not mine. When I read it, my first thought was that it sounds like the description of a large segment of people who work in the non-profit arts. So if the corporate sector starts to orient more toward those qualities, there is a potential for a bigger talent drain away from the arts.

Arts Colleagues, Act More Miserable And Less Passionate!

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Most of us in the arts have probably heard the argument espoused by others that we shouldn’t care if we get paid a lot because we are doing what we love and apparently having fun.

After reading a recent article in the Atlantic, I started to wonder if businesses were trying to use the same psychology on a broader scale to keep employee pay low.

In one section, of the article, writer Bourree Lam interviews author Miya Tokumitsu who suggests employers are trying to monetize employee enjoyment. Essentially making customers feel good about the employees feeling good.

Tokumitsu: When I found that Craigslist posting [for cleaners who were passionate], I was super depressed. You’re demanding that this person—who is going to do really hard physical work for not a lot of money—do extra work. On top of having to scrub the floors and wash windows, they have to show that they’re passionate too? It’s absurd and it’s become so internalized that people don’t even think about it. People write these job ads, and of course they’re going to say they want a passionate worker. But they don’t even think about what that means and that maybe not everyone is passionate.

Later they mention McDonald’s recent Pay With Love effort to have employees and customers trade smiles, high-fives, hugs, dance, etc.

They say there is something of a subtext to all this that if you are theoretically passionate about your work, you shouldn’t be complaining to the boss.

As a contrast they offer the dynamic in Japan where your entire identity isn’t necessarily closely tied the job you do.

Tokumitsu: Japanese work culture is ridiculed in the U.S., [for example] the caricature of the soulless Japanese salary man. It’s not the answer to emulate any one country, but I feel like in Japan there’s a lot more respect for service workers: You do your job, and serve the public, and then you retreat to the private world. I also think there’s a sense of purpose in work that’s not based on achieving yellow smiley-face happiness. There’s a certain satisfaction to be taken from performing a certain role in society, whether you’re driving a taxi or working at a convenience store. “I’m doing something that other people are relying on,”—and that’s such a different way to regard work.

So should arts people bitch and moan a lot more about their jobs to emphasize just how much work it is?

To be honest, even without this article in the Atlantic, some sort of effort that underscored how much work went into the creation of a work was probably necessary. Some form of the “why do you want money, you are having fun,” sentiment has served as a common thread in recent orchestra contract negotiations.

But artists publicly grousing about how awful their jobs are isn’t really constructive for the arts sector.

Well, unless you are The Smiths…

Most people in the arts are genuinely pleased to do what they do. Regardless of whether they get paid a lot or not, they experience a high degree of emotional satisfaction while performing their jobs. There is little to be gained by telling them to pretend to be more miserable.

The fact they experience this emotional satisfaction is one reason people in the arts will accept lower pay than they should. But they are also increasingly realizing that the existence of  emotional satisfaction should have no bearing on their financial remuneration.

You generate your own damn feeling of satisfaction, not your employer. They don’t own it and it isn’t any of their business. They aren’t giving you an opportunity to feel emotionally satisfied by working for them. It comes independently of their involvement.

Being emotionally satisfied and being financially satisfied are two separate things and arts people need to recognize that and not confuse them.

All this being said, it still comes back to the issue that some sort of awareness raising effort is probably going to be required over time to combat the perception that it is all fun and no blisters and sacrifices.

I am not sure what the most constructive manifestations of that might be.

U.S. – German Comparative Fundraising Practices

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I subscribe to the Arts Management Newsletter which provides insights into international arts and cultural issues.

On page 14 of the most recent issue, is an article about the experience Laura Brower Hagood had during an exchange program in Germany as a Bosch Foundation Fellow.

Much to my disappointment, you need to be 40 or younger to apply because it sounds like an amazing opportunity.

Hagood offers some interesting perspectives on the differences between American and German cultural entities based on her five month long work placement with the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation.

Because the US vs. Europe cultural funding models are an ongoing topic of conversation, her observations on the different fundraising practices and capabilities were interesting:

For instance, whereas membership programs are managed in-house in the U.S., friends associations are external to their nonprofits in Germany. How do you develop a major giving program, if you don’t have access to your small donors’ information? How do you “share” donors and their information with another entity?

[…]

My German colleagues were interested in adapting U.S. fundraising practices, but were judicious and thoughtful about cultural differences. Many
conversations centered on what may or may not be effective in a Brandenburger setting. Galas at $10,000 a plate: probably not. Planned giving for individuals who wish to express their values after their death: maybe, yes. Donor interest in arts education: absolutely. This experience helped me distinguish between core, if not universal, fundraising principles, such as the benefits of philanthropic giving and the importance of building relationships, from specific fundraising strategies and tactics. I also came to appreciate that there are multiple pathways to the same optimal result.

In comparing the general operating environment, there wasn’t really anything she says to dispel the widely held perception that the grass is greener in Europe:

U.S. arts nonprofits draw only 9% of their funding from local, regional, and national government sources, which means that, on a day-to-day basis, organizations, audiences, funders, and board members are linked in a tight feedback loop. Most arts nonprofits must make artistic and programmatic decisions based on whether an audience exists to support their work, whether in the form of ticket purchases or private donations. This connection is of such significance to the organization’s sustainability that it must be directly relevant and intimately connected to its community of patrons in order to flourish.

[…]

In contrast, the German system of sustained government subsidies provides real reliability, allowing arts organizations to plan over the long-term and encouraging the production of art for art’s sake, a value rarely articulated in the U.S. The Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation has recently benefited from multi-year capital investment in its 33 palaces and 150 historic structures. As I visited Weimar, Dresden, and Berlin, I learned that Potsdam was only one of many cities restoring their cultural infrastructure with millions and millions of taxpayer Euros. This kind of sustained, long-term investment in culture is for all intents and purposes unheard of in the US and represented for me an exciting and reinvigorating perspective.

She does feel, though, that the necessity of paying close attention to the interests of the community makes American cultural organizations more responsive to their audiences.

However, the links between German organizations, their audiences, and even society at large were less clear, less convincing, than in the U.S. In museum after museum, with a few notable exceptions, I found outmoded display and interpretive techniques that ensured that only German nationals with an intimate familiarity with art history or European history would enjoy seeing them. Almost entirely funded through government subsidies, these institutions are often missing a key feedback loop that ensures responsiveness to their audiences’ needs and wants. And, while American organizations have fully embraced arts education as a vehicle for building diverse and multicultural audiences now and into the future, the German arts sector remains too tentative in realizing this potential.

Two questions that immediately came to mind after reading this were:

1- While American cultural organizations may be more responsive to audiences, are they receiving enough funding to effectively serve their communities? When there was more funding available in the past, arts organizations may have been more lazy about proactively serving their communities. But I would argue that businesses on the whole took customers for granted with the service they provided and the type of marketing and advertising they used.

Given the current business environment in the US, if arts and cultural organizations were better funded, I suspect they would still be working to better connect with their communities in the face of declining participation.

2- While I don’t doubt the museum displays in Germany need to be updated in order to better connect with foreign visitors as well as German nationals, I wondered if the difference in educational systems may have created different perceptions in the size of the gap that needs to be bridged.

Essentially, would an American museum educator go to a German museum and suggest that displays have a number of features and that certain educational programming be added based on an assumption that German visitors were as unaware as American museum visitors.

In turn, would a German museum professional enter an American museum and feel like the displays and programs were simplistic and patronizing based on the fact any German national would be aware of these details from their elementary level education?

Questions like this make me regret being a little too old to participate in the exchange program. One you dear readers needs to apply so I can live vicariously through you. (Though I am not quite clear if they are accepting another round of applications at this time.)

Lightly Stoking The Sense of Wonder

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Last month London’s Royal Opera House posted a video of two young brothers who are attending the opera for the first time and go from apathetic to excited over the course of the recording.

The title of the piece frames the boys’ wonder by quoting their question, “‘How do they hold a note for so long!?” You know from that question that the kids are engaged with the experience.

So why do actors and musicians roll their eyes at a Q&A when people ask how they can remember all those lines or all those notes?

I mean, sure it is cuter when kids say it, but aren’t adults expressing the same degree of wonder at the achievement?

The reason performers roll their eyes is because learning the words and notes is the default expectation for the job they are doing. An actor might be asked if they have any experience in classical acting styles, but no one is ever asked if they can memorize the lines.

There is more skill and technique involved in sustaining a note or doing a credible job portraying King Lear than there is in memorizing lines and notes.

(Though to be honest, there are a lot of different techniques you can use to memorize lines but no drama class teaches them. The actor is left to discover and create a method themselves. It would probably make actors’ lives easier if they did have coaching and a list of techniques to try.)

Three years ago, I highlighted a technique for dealing with the “how do you memorize..” question from a HowlRound piece Brant Russell wrote on post show discussions.  Russell suggests that “how do you memorize…” is essentially a first date type question. You don’t really care about the answer, you just want to get your date (or the actors) talking to you.

Having all be in a situation where we wanted to fill an awkward silence, I am sure we can all empathize with that impulse.

But looking at the Royal Opera House video, I have to consider if maybe the question isn’t also the manifestation of a 10 year old kid inside expressing his/her wonder. Is dismissing the question with a quick “its what we do” type comment stifling the sense of wonder we want to cultivate in audiences to keep them coming back?

Though it seems to have suffered a crisis of formatting, Brant Russell’s piece has some good suggestions of what to do when you are leading a discussion.

But if a question like this gets asked as you are exiting the stage door or some other informal setting and you feel like your process is unremarkable, it might be best to call upon the memory of your earliest effort or that of colleagues for an amusing anecdote.

Saying, “Well my current practice is pretty boring, but when I was starting out I used a tape recorder and this one time…” can keep the sense of interest and wonder alive for people of all ages—if it’s only to comment on how OLD you must be if you used a tape recorder.

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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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