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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.

What Other Dwindling Skillsets Threaten Arts and Culture?

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Last August, I called attention to the dwindling number of qualified piano tuners posing a threat to arts organizations’ ability to host concerts.  Along those same lines, Artsjournal.com posted a story last week about the shortage of engineers posing a threat to the continued operation of public radio stations. Where radio stations used to have 4-5 engineers in their employ, now they are lucky to have more than one according to Dave Edwards, the author of the piece.

The United States is projected to require 5,100 broadcast engineers over the next decade due to the retirement of 6,200 existing professionals. This anticipated shortage is particularly pronounced in the RF (Radio Frequency) knowledge domain. Factors contributing to the absence of new entrants include:

  • The allure of competing technical fields offers higher pay and more straightforward work conditions.
  • Broadcast engineering requires a broad knowledge base.
  • There is a need for more awareness among major stakeholders.

Among the things Edwards suggests are breaking out the skillsets required into more specialized areas. For example, making Radio Frequency (RF) engineering, Internet Broadcast engineering, and Office Internet Engineering into separate roles versus seeking someone versed in Radio and Broadcast Internet or Broadcast and Office Internet to fulfill a single role. Separating these broadens the pool of qualified people and ensuring people don’t get burned out trying to juggle too many tasks. Likewise, some of tasks can be outsourced while leaving internal staff to concentrate on crucial work only someone who knows broadcast regulations and troubleshooting specialized equipment can perform.

Reading stories about diminishing numbers of piano tuners and broadcast engineers makes me wonder what other important, but overlooked skillsets readers have identified as threatened?  Many of these roles don’t seem replaceable by AI. In some cases, these are the guys making sure the AI is functioning.

Pay Attention To New Spam Policies Going Into Effect This Month

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Last month Drew McManus posted on ArtsHacker warning about changes that Yahoo and Gmail are implementing this month that will shunt a greater number of emails to spam folders unless you take steps to mitigate the issue.

Any users in your database and mailing lists with addresses ending in @gmail.com or @yahoo.com require the following:

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) authentication: if you don’t already have

[…]

Keep Spam Rate Under 0.3%: Maintain a pristine reputation, experts recommend aiming for below 0.1%! 0.1%-0.3% is the warning zone: hover in that range too long and you still risk having your messages blocked.

[…]

Double-Check Your DNS: Confirm your digital addresses match your domain, like matching your website and email platforms.

[…]

If your organization sends more than 5,000 messages per day, you’ll encounter some additional requirements:

[…]
If your organization gets flagged, it means ALL of your messages, regardless the source, coming from an email address with your primary domain will get blocked by Google and Yahoo with no potential to reverse the decision.

Obviously, I chopped out a lot. Drew provides a fair bit of additional detail, but if you don’t know what SPF and DKIM are already, I am not sure his explanation will help. I looked those terms up and still didn’t know if we were compliant or not.

Fortunately, my marketing team was on it. When I forwarded the post link to them, they let me know our bulk email service provider has been warning about this for awhile and they had made the appropriate adjustments. Unfortunately, I was so relieved I forgot that I wanted to post about this issue a couple weeks ago to let more folks know.

Definitely take the time to read Drew’s post and investigate whether you need to take action to avoid problems, including cleaning up your lists and revamping your emailing practices.

New (And Critical) Email Deliverability Changes For Gmail & Yahoo

Music To Your Beers

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I was kinda thrilled to hear the melodious voice of conductor Bill Eddins on the Marketplace Morning Report this morning. Bill had written the Sticks and Drones blog here on Inside the Arts alongside Ron Spigelman for a number of years.

Bill was on Marketplace talking about MetroNOME, the brewery he started in St. Paul, MN. Their goal is to funnel proceeds from sales into local music education programs.

Eddins and his co-founder, Matt Engstrom, aspire to grow their business to the size of a small regional brewery. When their goal is realized, they plan to filter funding from the brewery toward local music education programs.

“We believe that we would be able to funnel as much as half a million or even maybe a million dollars a year into the local music education programs here in the Twin Cities metro,” said Eddins.

MetroNOME has already racked up close to 400 performances at their brewery, including a concert with jazz legend Wynton Marsalis. True to his music education philosophy, Eddins recruited a trio young musicians, two of whom were too young to drink his product, to play with Marsalis.

Eddins admits he and his partner don’t necessarily have the acumen and experience to take the organization to the level it needs to in order to generate the funds required to support local music education, but he believes there are people in the Twin Cities area that can help make it happen.

They do, however, have a secret ingredient that provides a competitive advantage. I encourage everyone to watch the video on their homepage. It starts out looking like a typical brewery video, but it takes an entertaining turn. My thanks to Drew McManus for nudging me to watch the video.

Enrolled In Ones Work

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Yesterday I cited a Seth Godin post about rethinking how we measure work productivity.  Around the same time he made a post along the same lines noting that while strictly following instructions might have been valuable in an economy that was focused on industrial manufacturing, the current economic model requires employees to be more autonomous and employ their own judgement.

He notes that when you did follow instructions, you were properly subordinate, but if you didn’t you were considered insubordinate. But obviously we don’t want to label people who are self-directed as insubordinate.

Complete subordination might have been the goal in an industrial setting. But now, it’s dangerous, expensive and inefficent. Because people close to the work know exactly what needs to be done.

The opposite of insubordination is now enrollment.

Someone who is enrolled in the journey doesn’t have to be told exactly what to do. Instead, given the goals, the tools and the culture, they will figure it out.

We have been seeing that those working in arts and culture have different expectations of their work environment. Some places have seen strikes, but many organizations started adjusting their work and rehearsal hours of their own accord. One of the most welcome developments of late was the revamping of apprenticeship and internship programs to add better payment terms and other benefits.

But there is still work to be done in the arts and culture work environment so Godin enjoining us to think in terms of enrollment can help reframe how the work of employees and contractors are perceived and treated.

The Measurement Used Can Alter The Impact Of Your Work

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Long time readers know that I resist the use of economic impact as a measure of value for arts and culture for many reasons. The late potter-philosopher Carter Gillies was really effective in calling attention to the myriad ways in which using inappropriate measures of value would result in meaningless data and incorrect beliefs and assumptions.

Seth Godin recently made a post that illustrated that the measure you use shapes how you perceive the impact and value of the work you do. This brings the concept that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean the result is meaningful to a more personal, relatable level.

Godin observes that we have long been indoctrinated to believe that completion of a task is a measure of productivity.  But, he asks, if “I did all my homework” is a measure of productivity, what has the practice of completing your homework ever done for you?

The actual measures of productivity that might be useful range quite a bit:

• I did enough to not get fired.
• I did enough to get promoted.
• I did enough to get hired by a better firm.
• I solved a problem for a customer who was frustrated.
• I changed the system and now my peers are far more productive.
• I invented something that creates new possibilities and new problems.
• I created new assets that I can use (and others can as well).
• I didn’t waste today.

Pick your measurement and the impact of your chores will change.

Just because you can measure productivity in terms of work completed, it doesn’t necessarily yield results that are meaningful–except perhaps to whomever is selling the work you have completed. But there are other measurements of value that can be applied to your work, some of them far more meaningful than others. The impact of that meaning could have–and I use this term intentionally–immeasurably more value than just units of work completed over time.

Will Congestion Pricing Further Depress Broadway Attendance From NYC Suburbs?

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Just before Christmas Broadway producer Ken Davenport called attention to an issue which may or may not impact Broadway attendance starting later this year. Starting this Spring, congestion pricing will be implemented for Lower Manhattan before 9 pm. The cost will be $15, more if heavier traffic is expected and even more if you don’t have EZ Pass electronic toll payment set up. (Though most people who regularly drive within a 50 mile radius of NYC already have EZ Pass since there are so many other toll roads that use it.)

Davenport had noted in a separate post that Broadway attendance by people living in the suburbs across the bridges and tunnels from NYC has been down significantly since the return from COVID so there is a concern that these fees may reduce attendance even more.

Davenport suggests that while $15 more factored into all the other costs associated with attending a Broadway show may not provide a significant disincentive, nobody should be operating on that assumption. Instead there should be an effort to increase the perceived value of the experience:

But congestion pricing is here. And it’s not going anywhere. Bloomberg wanted it years ago and people thought it was a ridiculous idea. (I wonder what he’s saying now?)

So we can’t just sit around and talk about how terrible it might be.

What we need to do is figure out how to increase the experience and value of seeing a Broadway show that an extra $15 feels like a bargain for what they are getting.

It occurs to me though that London implemented congestion pricing in 2003 and the West End theaters appear to be right in the center of the zone. I wonder if anyone did any research into the impact on attendance to those shows. They may not have been as worried given differences in time (not after a pandemic dip), production funding models, and other factors.

Artists, They Aren’t Making The Community Any Worse

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Title of the post today is intentionally leveraging a statement in a study conducted by Jennifer Novak-Leonard and Rachel Skaggs for the National Endowment for the Arts of public perception of the arts during Covid. It was the topic of an interview/post with Sunil Iyengar who heads up research and analysis at the NEA.

The full quote is:

Nearly two out of three respondents shared the opinion that, quote, “Artists who work or live in their area make it better to live,” and roughly one third affirmed that it doesn’t necessarily make communities better, but artists certainly don’t make them worse.

The encouraging takeaway is that people have a positive view of the artists across all demographics:

In 2022, however, over half of adults expressed the perception that artists uniquely contribute to U.S. communities healing and recovery from the pandemic. Fifty three percent in open-ended responses offered specific ways that artists promote that healing and recovery. I will say, Jo, that one of the surprises of the study to me is that it found virtually zero differences in social or demographic characteristics as playing a factor in the likelihood of respondents to identify positively with artists.

As the authors say, quote, “Most adults in the United States across its many socio demographic groups and perceptions of artists, roles, and communities view artists as being able to contribute to the healing and recovery of communities directly and positively from the pandemic.”

Another interesting takeaway from the research is that people are equally likely to view artists as hobbyists (30%) as they are to perceive them as wage earners (27%). I may have to seek the report out to discover what the perceptions of the other 43% are. Perhaps a combination of some hybrid perception and/or not having any opinion on the matter.

Hiring A Fun Coach Like A Physical Trainer

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Last week, NPR Reporter Andrew Limbong interviewed Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. Limbong observed that while he has the impulse to roll his eyes at the news people are hiring party coaches and fun coaches, he can see that these roles maybe akin to people hiring physical trainers. Basically, people find they need to carve out time to focus on fun and need external assistance in accomplishing that goal.

Price says there are three conditions required to have true fun- playfulness, connection and flow. You will notice her definition of connection especially aligns with the conditions people seek from arts and cultural experiences:

A lot of adults get very nervous when you use the word “playfulness,” so I like to say you don’t have to necessarily be silly or childish. It’s really just more about having a lighthearted attitude towards life and towards yourself.

Connection refers to this feeling of having a special shared experience with other people. And then flow is active and engaged. And really importantly, flow requires you to be present. So if you’re distracted at all, you can’t be in flow and you can’t have fun.

She observes in all the stories about fun she has collected from different countries and cultures around the world, very few involve spending money or traveling anywhere. This reminded me of Jaime Bennett’s TED Talk from ten years ago where he observed that people think that art is something someone else does rather than something they have the capacity to do.  In this case, it is the idea that you can only have fun in a time or space dedicated to that purpose rather than to make it part and parcel of your daily activity.

Limbong picks up on Price’s mention of being present and asks if social media may have an impact on people having fun. He observed that the fun he is having with nieces and nephews can often be interrupted by someone wanting them to stop and memorialize the instant with a posed picture.  Price expounds upon the idea that fun has to have an authentic flow because it spoils so easily.

I think it’s really messed us up because one of the requirements for fun is that you be completely present and that your inner critic is silent. And if you’re performing, then you’re not fully present and you probably have your inner critic on in some capacity. That kills fun. Fun is very fragile. It’s like a sensitive flower.

Supermarket Self-Checkout And Loyalty

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I came across a study conducted by researchers at Drexel University , (well one is an alum that teaches at University of San Diego), on whether using the self-checkout lane at a supermarket results in less loyalty than using the lane where the employee processes purchases.

I was curious to see if there are any lessons to be learned for arts ticketing in terms of online purchasing vs. in person purchasing. Even though a large portion of tickets are sold online, something I have noticed over the last five years or so is that greatest concentration of ticket sales in a period of time tends to generally be during the hours the ticket office is open.  I was hoping to get some insight into whether there might be a trend toward people wanting more personal contact during the purchase experience.   In the context of increasing conversations about loneliness, it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine a shift away from interacting only with machines.

The researchers conducted studies with five slightly different designs to try to control for things like what people were accustomed to doing at the supermarket, whether people felt rewarded for the choice of check out, number of items being purchased, and intentionally priming participants mindset by reading different texts before going shopping.

Basically, while people who felt they were being rewarded for using self-check out, whether it was due to some benefit or being primed by a reading passage, tended to feel more loyalty and satisfaction as a result, the biggest factor was actually number of items being purchased.  The more people exceeded approximately 15 items, the less satisfied and supported they felt by the supermarket while using the self-check lane.

That seems pretty logical given the small amount of space you are provided to bag and stage groceries in a self-check out lane. The more items one purchases, the greater opportunity to encounter errors. I imagine this is even more likely when trying to ring up produce which may not have been effectively labeled or indexed for look up. Often there is only one person monitoring 10-15 checkout stations and you have to wait while the staff member assists others.

The researchers note there is a lot more research about self-check out that needs to be done since there are many factors in play. Some researchers have looked into issues like perception that you are contributing to the loss of jobs by doing self-checkout. Then there is the related question about why you aren’t getting any incentive to do an employee’s job. I have seen some great videos for clothing self checkouts where people experienced a great deal of frustration removing the anti-theft tags on top of having to remove hangers, fold and bag.

Probably the clearest lesson here for arts organizations is that people need assistance the more complicated their transactions become so you always need to provide an opportunity for purchasers to speak to a live person.  Certainly it is frequently impractical to provide live assistance 24 hours a day, but having the availability of live help posted clearly and repeatedly can help people feel supported.

This may sound blatantly obvious, but in the last few months I was in a conversation in which someone commented that venues in some countries have completely ended staffed box office hours outside of performances. I may be misremembering slightly and the phones were staffed and there are no walk up interactions.  Certainly, other countries have different cultural expectations  about customer service.

Cleveland Ballet Issues Turned Out To Be Much Bigger Than Initially Suspected

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Back in November, I had written about allegations of harassment by the administration of the Cleveland Ballet of one of their teachers due to body weight issues. I thought that would more or less be the last time I wrote about that particular accusation. However, the results of the investigation by the ballet board has turned into a lesson about boards exercising better organizational oversight.

According to a recent news story, the CEO, Michael Krasnyansky, was essentially forced to resign when the board investigation started and credible accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching emerged stretching back over the course of years.

His wife and artistic director, Gladisa Guadalupe, was just fired after the investigation by the law firm Jones Day uncovered a culture of intimidation and retribution that aimed to obstruct the investigation and a wide range of issues related to financial impropriety and self-dealing.

From the Jones Day report:

-Description by Ms. Guadalupe of complaining dancers as “moles” or “troublemakers” and stating that once the investigation was over, “we will handle the troublemakers.”
-Proposal to lay off employees suspected of communicating with news media.
-Altering Nutcracker cast assignments to the detriment of dancers suspected of cooperating with the investigation.
-Dismissing from the Cleveland School of Dance faculty dancers who cooperated with the investigation.

[…]

-Commingling of funds of Ballet and Cleveland School of Dance, which are separate entities.
-Cleveland School of Dance expenses improperly paid by the Ballet.
-Ballet funds used to pay for personal expenses of Mr. Krasnyansky or Ms. Guadalupe, including personal car insurance, travel, meals, and lodging.
-Restricted donations used to pay for current operating expenses rather than the restricted purpose designated by the donor.
-Significant amounts of endowment donations used for current operating expenses but booked as expenses for the 2023 endowment campaign event

To add a degree of insult to injury, when the the interim artistic director who stepped in when Krasnyansky and Guadalupe were suspended in November was accused of plagiarizing the choreography for the Ballet’s Nutcracker production and ultimately stepped down herself.

When thinking about how this situation could have been avoided, you run into the question of balancing micromanagement by the board with the board exercising appropriate oversight. I suspect that on paper, policies and procedures were in place to avoid the misuse of funds, but the culture of intimidation magnified by the top leadership being married may have made staff reluctant or unable to enforce them.

Similarly, it sounds like it would have been difficult to conduct an investigation or even regular check-in conversations with the dancers about their perceptions of the work environment in the face of the pressure to keep quiet that was being brought to bear.

By no means am I excusing what happened. I am just observing that in hindsight, it is easy to say the board should have been paying more attention. It is difficult to identify what measures they could have put in place which would have provided them with accurate, honest reporting about the state of the the organization given the effort of obfuscate. The Jones Day report said despite all they discovered, they had repeatedly been denied access to most of the materials and records they requested so there are likely other issues which have remained uncovered.

Guaranteed Basic Income Programs Seem To Benefit Those With Concrete Goals

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Long time readers know I tend to pay attention to news about guaranteed basic income programs, particularly those that have artists as a target group. Thanks to a CityLab link to a story on Los Angeles’ recent foray into providing guaranteed basic income, there is more data about what approaches are most effective. This program didn’t target artists as a group, but it has some good insights.

Like most stories on the subject, there were many heartening stories about the successes people had and continued to experience after the program ended. However, this article also mentioned those who were doing well while they were receiving the $1,000 month funds, but once the program ended found themselves faced with living in their cars. Anecdotally, at least those who had problems after the funding ended weren’t spending that much differently than those who continued to thrive. (i.e. the biggest spurge spending was on rather modest once a week meals)

What seems to be the differentiating factor is whether people had concrete goals they wanted to achieve prior to receiving the monthly payment:

Participants that do achieve a measure of economic mobility, she said, are those who already had concrete goals or plans.

“What happens with guaranteed income is that it smooths that income volatility … and it creates predictability,” Castro said. “When you have that floor, that scarcity starts to go away. And we know that it calms the mind, it calms the spirit, and it creates space for people to re-imagine an alternative future, or to maybe take steps toward a goal that they’ve always had but have not been able to actualize.”

Abigail Marquez, general manager of L.A.’s Community Investment for Families Department, which ran BIG:LEAP, called guaranteed income “one effective strategy” for ending generational poverty in L.A. Such programs must be paired with workforce development, economic development and housing strategies, she said.

Knowing this, one concern I would have is that guaranteed basic income programs not gradually evolve guidelines similar to foundation grant programs where candidates for receiving the money have to provide evidence of having goals they are pursuing and just need a little bit of help gaining stability. Unfortunately, it is easy to imagine this happening because the folks putting up the money want to hear success stories and know their funds are being used effectively. Little by little, the unrestricted use nature of guaranteed basic income can become a little more restricted.

On the other hand, I feel like guaranteed basic income for artists becomes an even better idea since artists generally always have projects in mind they want to pursue. Though I am sure there are some who would say some of those projects aren’t as practical as the goals people in the L.A. Times story were working on.

It Ain’t Easy Being Public Art

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I think Art in Public Places staff for any community have one of the most difficult jobs in the arts, particularly when it comes to public perception of the job they do.  While everyone accepts that not every work of art will be appreciated, the fact that public art installations are visible for years in places hundreds, if not thousands, of people pass each day makes them the subject of daily comment, often repeatedly by the same people.

Not to mention there are birds pooping on them, too

While some pieces become the source of enormous pride, local identity, and tourism (i.e. Cloud Gate in Chicago), and others generate a mixture of pride and bemusement (here’s to you, Blucifer), in some cases it seems you can’t win for trying.

That seems to be the case in Annapolis, MD where all three options for a traffic circle the Art in Public Places folks posted for feedback got panned.   Maybe it is the location that is cursed or the local residents who are particularly critical. The new sculpture is meant to replace one installed in 2011 that fell prey to termites.

…meant to evoke the ribs of a ship in a nautical town. Even [artist] Donovan admitted it could also be compared to whale bones on a beach or a brontosaurus-sized rack of barbecued ribs.

Among the comments people made for the submissions included noting that two of the options looked like hand of people coming out of graves. (Apparently, there are some cemeteries in the vicinity). Another said one of them looked like drowning people reaching for a lifeline. One commenter said one piece looked like it belonged at the entrance of a retirement village in Boca Raton. One piece was likened to a condom.

There were also the inevitable comments about the whole endeavor being a waste of money.

There is a rule in surveying that you should never ask for feedback if you aren’t prepared to act upon the responses. So the question is what the public places art commission intends to do with the comments they received. One option is to reject the finalist pieces and go back back with a solicitation for proposals. Another option is to ask the artists to make changes to their work in response to the comments.

A former commission member addressed the latter option:

“If you take a public comment to reconstruct an artist’s vision, then you are basically attacking the integrity of their art,” said Genevieve Torri, a former commission chair who represents the area around the circle. “It’s up to the artists. This is their vision.”

Kids Making Modern Art Less Intimidating For Adults

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I came across a link to a post on the Alliance of American Art Museums website about the Clyfford Still Museum’s efforts to make their facility a welcoming option for bringing kids as young as toddler age.  (I think credit goes to Ruth Hartt for liking a Linkedin post) The post was written by the museum’s Director of Education and an associate curator who recount how they have approached making a modern art museum approachable for young children.

When I wrote my post on Monday about organizations focused on community engagement entering dialogue with their constituents and making changes based on the feedback they received, I wasn’t envisioning using toddlers as focus groups. But that is pretty much the approach the museum employed based on research data about children’s art preferences.

We met with our infant co-curators over Zoom and observed their teachers presenting them with two reproductions of Still’s paintings that prominently featured black, white, and red. Our pre-verbal co-curators showed us their preferences through pointing, vocalizing, grabbing, and extended looking. We tracked and tallied each of these expressions of preference, and the most popular works of art overall went on the checklist. For another gallery about pattern, we watched how three- to five-year-olds interacted with predetermined provocations (materials to spark open-ended exploration) to design an interactive experience. For that same gallery, five- and six-year-olds from a different school virtually “placed” drawings selected by three- and four-year-olds into a pattern arrangement on the gallery wall using our virtual planning software.

I actually thought it was pretty ingenious to leverage the bold colors and swaths of color often found in modern art, (and in Still’s work in particular), in a way that aligned with what appeals most strongly to infants. It sort of recognizes that when people make the dismissive statement that their kids could “draw that,” they are acknowledging that there are elements present in the work that are appealing to kids. In some respects, the kids may find the work more accessible than their parents who are seeking to discern some sort of meaning in the work.

In fact, the museum saw an opportunity to change adult perceptions about who has the ability/authority to understand modern art, by letting them experience it through the eyes of their kids:

We wanted to challenge the idea that you need specialized expertise to meaningfully engage with abstraction and expand adults’ appreciation for what young children teach us. To do this, we integrated photos and videos of our young curators from the exhibition development process in the gallery design to show their contributions and palpable interest in our collection..

…This helped children (literally) see themselves in the museum and modeled their intuitive understanding of Still’s work to adults who feel uncomfortable engaging with abstract art (If comments about megalodons and hungry scary monsters are ok, then so are my perspectives!).

The museum shared some lessons learned about making the museum more welcoming to families with infants. When your Arts Crawl literally involves crawling, some of the traditional rules about touching; the role, appearance, and demeanor of gallery attendants/security need to be changed, along with other elements of the experience and environment.

Many Moving Pieces Means Many Opportunities To Remove Friction

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One thing I like about Broadway producer Ken Davenport is that he is constantly trying to identify barriers to attending shows on Broadway. Not just his, but any show. He has the rising tide raises all boats perspective. Recently, he wrote about how he started a conversation with group sales agents and buyers who arrange tickets for groups attending Broadway shows to figure out what problems they face when it comes getting those butts into seats.

Some of the issues had relatively easy fixes. Groups like to book shows about six months in advance, but tickets aren’t on sale that far out. Okay, Davenport says, we can start selling tickets nine months in advance. Another issue was that every theater owner has a different payment policies in terms of when deposits and balances are due. Davenport figured he would need to work on getting the owners of the different chains to agree on a uniform policy.

While that might be a tough task, the third impediment that came up was a little more tricky. Group sales agents said that it is hard to sell a new show as it is, but without images, videos, it becomes even harder. But as Davenport notes, with new shows the content may not even exist because the show hasn’t been cast and some of the show elements may still be in development. But he wants to figure out a way to make it happen.

What videos, photos, etc, tell the potential buyer who/what we are before we’re up in front of an audience? Movies use trailers. What can we do . . . and what can we do to make sure it’s available those 9 months prior to when that group comes?

In the process of discussing these problems, he noted that he was able to answer the demand for meet and greets with Broadway casts on the shows A Beautiful Noise and Harmony which he produced. Apparently people are willing to pay a fair bit for the opportunity. There isn’t a price list on the Harmony page I linked to, but for A Beautiful Noise, they charge between $1500 and $3500 for groups up to 50 to meet in the theater or rehearsal room for up to 30 minutes. Pizza and soft drinks are available for an additional $500.

For $7500, they will rent a room in a nearby restaurant for a meet and greet with up to 50 people with wine, beer and appetizers provided.

I know a lot of readers are probably wishing they were in a position to have people pay a few thousand dollars for a meet and greet. There may be some places outside of Broadway operating in an environment that creates a sense of occasion that could pull it off.

Depending on how many groups take them up on the last option, that is sure to make the production a lot of allies among local restaurants. If they weren’t already talking up the production to customers, they would probably start.

This particularly resonated with me because in some communities in which I have worked, I have regularly emailed all the area restaurants to make them aware when ticket sales were good for shows in the upcoming week so that they could bring more staff on. Even with that, there were occasions where some restaurants had to close early because enthusiastic crowds ate and drank them dry.

Recently, some art galleries told me they see a surge in visitors when we have shows. While I don’t believe it results in immediate sales, (I haven’t see anyone come to a performance with paintings tucked under their arms), hopefully it will result in something down the road.

Audience Engagement & Community Engagement Aren’t The Same Thing

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In a recent episode of Quick Study, Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), notes that the arts community, including the NEA, toss around the term “social and civic engagement” as a benefit of the arts, but many arts and cultural organizations aren’t necessarily doing the work to achieve that. (h/t Artsjournal.com for the link)

He points to recent research by Marie Kim (George Mason University) and Jodi Benenson (University of Nebraska Omaha) which differentiate between audience engagement, community engagement, and civic engagement.

Iyengar says civic engagement is:

It’s all the political and nonpolitical processes that individuals invoke to improve the quality of lives of their communities or neighborhoods: you know, voting, volunteering, taking part in community meetings or activities designed to advance a public outcome.

Currently, it seems like the terms audience engagement and community engagement are used interchangeably, but the researchers say a significant difference is that community engagement is more of a two way conversation where the arts and cultural organization will effect changes to reflect the needs of the community.

“‘Audience engagement focuses on having members of the public experience a relationship with the arts as created and/or presented by the artist or organization, while community engagement seeks to develop relationships that potentially transform both the arts and individuals who come to enjoy the arts.’ So they add that to be a hub for truly community-engaged activity, the organization must invite open and honest two-way communication between itself and its audiences. An organization adopting this approach must be willing to change, I think that’s key, based on the needs voiced by the community.”

In a survey Kim and Benenson conducted of executive directors or equivalents, many organizations expressed a commitment to community engagement, but few were taking the steps to achieve it in terms of things like surveys and involving the community in planning:

“So the survey results showed that while most nonprofit arts and cultural organizations said they developed programs, quote, “Relevant for local community members,” and they offered, quote, “participatory programs,” they were not often very active in collecting data on audience preferences or in– this is important– or in involving audiences and visitors in program planning. They also found separately that when they asked executive directors to rate the importance of civic or social issues for their organization, half of them deemed such issues as extremely or very important, but nearly one-third of these organizations expressed ambivalence about this importance, and roughly one out of ten said such issues were not important for arts and cultural organizations.”

In terms of how this all relates back to civic engagement, Iyengar says Kim and Benenson found that when an organization increases their efforts at audience engagement, civic engagement in the community shows a corresponding increase. However, there is a much greater increase in civic engagement when the organization increases their efforts in community engagement.

Iyengar says some of the findings of this study dovetail with research goals of a national survey of arts agencies the NEA is conducting and form the basis for the ArtsHere grant program which seeks to “strengthen the organization’s capacity to sustain meaningful community engagement and increase arts participation for underserved groups/communities.”

A Flip Of A Coin Is More Likely To Correctly Identify Your Org As A Non-Profit Than A Recent Visitor

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Another post I wanted to make to get people thinking and doing things differently for 2024 is based again on research Collen Dilenschneider and the IMPACTS team have done. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, they provide a lot of worthwhile data.

As with yesterday, this topic deals with how your organization is perceived by the community. In this case, it is people’s ability to correctly identify your organization as a non-profit to which they might donate.

While you might already acknowledge that not everyone knows your organization is a non-profit, it might surprise you to learn just how few people are aware your organization is a non-profit.  According to Dilenschneider, even those organizations enjoying the highest level of awareness don’t break 50% (subscription required).

Overall, only 38.6% of US adults believe that nonprofit exhibit-based organizations are nonprofits. This number considers visitors and non-visitors alike and the weighted attendance distribution of each organization type in the US.

Nonprofit performing arts organizations are in a similar situation: Fewer than half of recent patrons correctly identify them as nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit live theaters and live theater organizations are least likely to be accurately perceived as nonprofit organizations, and nonprofit orchestras are most likely to be perceived accurately as nonprofit organizations.

What is actually successful according to Dilenschneider, is emphasizing your organizational mission. She cites data that people who are unable to discern an organization is non-profit are frequently “cannot name a single meaningful achievement associated with the organization in question, despite being aware of or perhaps even visiting that organization.” She says making people aware of “unique meaningful achievements and missions” increases the likelihood that people can correctly identify an organization as a non-profit. Instead of continuing to mention that you are a non-profit, she advises emphasizing the “perceived values and impactful initiatives that an organization brings to its respective communities and constituencies.”

I go into a little more detail in my ArtsHacker post from October. If that piques your interest, check out Dilenschneider’s original post for more charts and data.

 

No One Knows You’re A Non-Profit (Sometimes Even After You Tell Them)

You And Your Audience Don’t Agree On What It Means To Be Entertaining

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Okay, to start 2024 off with something to ponder for the whole year, I want to direct you to a piece I wrote on ArtsHacker a couple weeks ago about how your definition of entertaining as an arts professional may not match your audience and community’s definition.

All credit to Colleen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS Experience whose research showed (subscription required) that the most entertaining exhibit based entities in the world are Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial followed by the Gettysburg National Military Park and then The Louvre.

You may be thinking, “yeah this doesn’t surprise me, I have seen those pictures of people taking flirty selfies at concentration camps, this just reinforces that people have no sense of decorum and are just centering themselves.”

But that isn’t what the IMPACTS research is indicating at all. While some arts organizations and professionals may see the term entertaining as roughly synonymous with Superficial, Trivial, and Frivolous experiences, the top adjectives people use to describe places like Normandy and Gettysburg in open ended questions are Inspiring, Beautiful, Meaningful, Powerful, and Moving. As Dilenschneider writes, people associate entertainment with meaningful experiences, not meaningless ones.

Often, the context and setting contribute to the sense that an experience is entertaining. So the solemnity and scope of cemeteries and battlefields tend to create meaning for an experience. Similarly, arts districts and famous neighborhoods lends a heightened sense to experiences.

From Dilenschneider’s piece:

People believe the Sydney Opera House to be the most entertaining performance-based organization in the world, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that every single performance presented within its walls is reliably and equally entertaining. Instead, this location may be most strongly cited because the art, architecture, and iconic nature of this space extends beyond individual performances. Similarly, seeing a performance “on Broadway” contributes to higher entertainment scores

Now not everybody operates in an iconic venue or district and that is fine. As I wrote in my ArtsHacker piece:

….when asked what entertaining mean in the context of cultural organizations, “something you want to share” and “unique” followed terms like “inspiring, engaging, meaningful, relevant, and fun”. It is absolutely possible to create experiences which are meaningful, relevant, unique and something people want to share within the context of a smaller organization in a manner that larger organizations are entirely unable.

Take a look at the ArtsHacker piece for more info and consider subscribing to Dilenschneider’s page. She and the IMPACTS team have consistently provided some great data interpretation, particularly during the Covid pandemic. I barely touched on all the content and commentary they provided on this subject.

 

War Cemeteries Are The Most Entertaining Places In The World, Just Not In The Way You Define It

Dayton Live’s Fun Beyond The Scenes Videos

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You probably aren’t searching the Interwebs for trenchant observations on arts administration the day after Christmas. But still, you can learn a little something from some entertaining videos colleagues have created over the last year.

So allow me to give a shout-out to Dayton Live’s Chief Creativity Officer, Gary Minyard for the audience etiquette video he and his team, (and dog), created for younger folks planning a trip to the theatres:

I wanted to see what else they may have put out during the year and found a compilation of “Tiny Dressing Room” concerts that the casts of touring shows sang. Obviously a take off on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, but no less fun:

Minyard had also done a video about all the venues Dayton Live runs in an informative, engaging manner. This video from August was probably something of necessity because the organization held a big re-branding announcement in March 2020…basically the day before everything shutdown for Covid. Once things were up and running again, they probably saw the need make another effort to introduce people to the organization and its spaces.

Always Good To Vet Before Giving And Be Wary Of Stolen Non-Profit Identity

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As we move through the middle of the holiday season, it seems like a good opportunity to remind people to do a little due diligence so they don’t fall prey to some charity scams.  Back in September For Purpose Law Group posted about a case of stolen non-profit identity that was exploited to make a lot of money.  PetCo Park in San Diego, like many athletic venues around the country, allows charities to staff concession stands in return for a cut of the revenue.

When a group known as “Chula Vista Fast Pitch” wound down their operations and filed a dissolution notice with the state, two guys basically assumed the organization’s identity and applied to participate in the charity food service program at PetCo Park and then subsequently at other athletic venues.

While it was something of an open secret that the charity didn’t really exist, it was able to continue operating for years, reapplying to the program multiple times. It took reporting by the non-profit news organization, Voice of San Diego, to finally close the whole scam down.

Something else that doesn’t seem to exist at our baseball stadium is any meaningful vetting process for organizations applying (or reapplying each year) to participate in this coveted program. See Monday’s VOSD article along with: The Fake Charity at Petco Park Has Also Been Working at Snapdragon Stadium  (August 29, 2023); Fallout Over Fake Nonprofit Continues at Snapdragon Stadium and Petco Park (August 30, 2023); and More on that Fake Charity that’s Been Raking in Cash at Petco (August 31, 2023).

It was a years-long lucrative fraud perpetrated in plain sight. But it was exposed and shut down in less than a week.

[….]

“At Petco,” Will Huntsberry points out, “Chula Vista Fast Pitch brought in $3.7 million in net sales over a five-month period earlier this year, according to receipts obtained by Voice. Charities generally get roughly 10 percent of their net sales at Petco. Ten percent of $3.7 million is $370,000.”

Extrapolating these figures over nine full years, at multiple venues, and including special events, Chula Vista Fast Pitch likely took in huge sums of money that should have gone to a local charity in good standing and operating for the benefit of the community.

Everybody wants to operate on good faith and believe that charitable organizations are benefiting worthy causes. Scams like this place a greater burden on other charities who operate legitimately and have to make additional efforts to prove it to funders. There are tools out there like Pro Publica’s Non-Profit Explorer potential donors can use to do some preliminary vetting of non-profits to which they intend to donate.

NPR’s Fortunes Changed By Billions And Billions Sold

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Last month there was an interesting story in the Washington Post about the $220 million bequest left to NPR 20 years ago by Joan Kroc, widow of former McDonalds CEO Ray Kroc.  What I found interesting was that while the money helped to expand NPR’s capacity in a very real way, it has also been something of a double edged sword when it comes to additional fundraising.

NPR spent some of the money, but put about $194 million into an endowment from which they have drawing off the interest. However, because NPR constantly expresses their gratitude for a gift which significantly impacted the direction of their organization, 20 years later people think Kroc is continuing to give money and there is no reason to make a donate themselves. Similarly, Congress cites the gift, questioning why NPR continues to need money.

“Kroc’s bequest has also periodically been invoked by congressional Republicans and conservatives intent on cutting the federal government’s annual outlay to public radio and TV. Most of those funds go to member stations; NPR receives almost no direct federal support. But that nine-figure gift from a multibillionaire remains a politically potent talking point.”

It raises something of a quandary about how do you appropriately acknowledge the generosity of a large, but one time gift, without dissuading others to donate as years pass. Perhaps somewhat ironically, Joan Kroc herself could have potentially been dissuaded from making her gift if she learned another had made a significant donation because she shared a common confusion about NPR’s identity.

Ken Stern, a veteran public radio executive who once served as NPR’s chief executive, wrote in 2013. Joan Kroc, he wrote, “frequently confused NPR (as many people do) with other public media organizations ranging from PBS to BBC to other public radio producers.”

Indeed, Kroc had apparently intended to make a donation to PBS, but her staff couldn’t ever get someone on the phone so she instructed them to move on.

As you might imagine, the NPR staff thought fondly of McDonald for a time after receiving the gift. The last line of the Post article says they enjoyed Big Macs on the day they announced receipt of Joan Kroc’s gift back in 2003.

Somethings Are Down, But Overall Broadway Is Looking Up

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Broadway Producer Ken Davenport posted last week about The Broadway League’s attendance report for the 2022-2023 season.  The 2022-2023 season was the first period in which a full season of shows was able to run so being able to compare it against the 2018-2019 benchmark season is valuable. Overall, the numbers are pretty good. Compared with the record breaking 2018-2019 season, however, things are still down.

There were  12.3 million admissions in 2022-2023 compared with 14.8 million in 2018-2019. Attendance by NYC audiences is up percentage-wise, but there is a corresponding decrease in attendance by people living in the surrounding suburbs. Similarly, international attendance is down, though attendance by Canadian and European visitors was up.

On the positive side, the average age of attendees dropped to 40.4 years, the lowest it has been in about twenty years. Though the report acknowledges that this is partially attributable to the fact that attendance by those 65+ dropped significantly.

One area where things are up without a drop in a corresponding demographic was audience diversity. Broadway League President Charlotte Martin attributed that to outreach efforts, but largely to the increase in productions written/created and performed by casts that were diverse in terms of race and gender identity. Essentially, people are seeing themselves and their stories on stage.

One stat of interest to readers may be that the ticket purchase window has decreased from 47 days in 2018-2019 to 34 days. While this may be a concern to many theater operators who bite their nails as performance dates approach and tickets haven’t sold to the level of expectation, Davenport says this situation is great for those who use variable pricing because it means per ticket revenue will be higher due to people waiting (my emphasis):

Not good, but not surprising.  After every major “event” – from 9/11 to the 2008 financial crisis – the buying window shortens.  People don’t want to take the risk, because they wonder if it’ll happen.  Also, just about every show has tickets (especially since variable pricing was incorporated – shows don’t WANT to sell out too far in advance anymore for fear of leaving money on the table!)  What we need is a megahit and everyone’s windows will lengthen again.

A Good Communications Staff May Be Costly, But Not Having One Can Be Even More Expensive

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At various times I, and others like Drew McManus have written about the importance of having a good crisis communication plan.  The marketing department should be focused on more than just trying to engage the community in participating in events with which you are involved, but also thinking about how they will go about communicating other information about the organization. The pandemic showed a lot of arts organizations the importance of how you message on topics like cancelled shows, refunds, masking, social distancing, etc.

But it is just as important to have developed a certain level of engagement with the community so that they are paying some attention to communications about more mundane topics like traffic and parking diversions due to construction and parades, or perhaps the growing plague of web sites masquerading as your venue and selling tickets at obscenely high prices.

The Communications Division of my city shared a presentation they put together a number of years back for the city council when they were making the case for having themselves established as a standalone office rather than a sub-department of the city manager’s office.

I think it does a good job of illustrating all the problems that can result from not having a good ongoing communications process and infrastructure. While some of them may sound specific to municipalities, it isn’t a terribly big jump to the concerns of community members engaging with an arts organization.

Ouch! Non-Profit Board Structure Being Used As An Example Of What Not To Do

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Tyler Cowen, the economist who write the Marginal Revolution blog linked to an interesting paper from 2014, Corporate Governance Without Shareholders: A Cautionary Lesson from Non-Profit Organizations Lesson from Non-Profit Organizations . The article basically says, as bad as some corporate board are, non-profit boards are worse.

The author, George W. Dent uses the example of non-profit boards to argue against corporate board governance models in which the board of directors is strong and the shareholder power is weak. As much as corporate boards of directors may prefer it if they weren’t beholden to shareholders, it is actually the shareholders holding the board accountable which ensures better governance.

But let me tell you, even though everything Dent says about the problems with non-profit boards has long been acknowledged, it is tough reading.

Under the theory of director primacy that pressure from short-termist shareholders wreaks havoc with long-term corporate planning, NPO boards (which are free of that pressure) should be models of prudent, far-sighted leadership. However, according to a virtually unanimous consensus of experts, this is not the case at all. NPO directors are generally uninformed and disengaged. “[B]oard members . . . are faulted for not knowing what is going on in their organizations and for not demonstrating much desire to find out.

Attendance at board meetings is often spotty and participation perfunctory.” The insignificance of the directors is even touted as a benefit of the job. “[S]ome boards actually encourage the disengagement they later lament: They promise prospective board members that there will be little work to do, in the hope that low expectations will attract more prospective board members.”

In analyzing why corporate board structure is better, Dent analyzes and discards corporate board members being paid and holding stock in the company as reasons why they perform better. He also notes that while non-profit boards fiduciary responsibility is only accountable to secretaries of state, corporate board members are very infrequently sued for improperly exercising their fiduciary responsibilities.

Ultimately, Dent settles on the fact that despite the hurdles they may face in doing so, corporate shareholders are able to exert influence over boards of directors to change policy. With non-profit organizations, the absence of shareholders means there is no possibility of doing so. He admits there are a lot of flaws with corporate forms of governance, but that the non-profit model “It does show, however, that freeing directors from shareholder control leads not to optimal governance, but to dysfunction.”

Now all this being said, I have seen bylaws for non-profits which have memberships where the members elect people to the board so there are some non-profit board structures which do have boards accountable to a larger group comparable to shareholders. I would be interested to know if anyone analyzed the effectiveness of non-profit boards elected by members vs. boards which are entirely self-perpetuating.

News Of Their Retirement Has Been Greatly Exaggerated. AARP Doesn’t Care

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I had to cackle when I saw this post by jazz critic and music historian, Ted Gioia:

For those for whom the image isn’t populating, he writes”

I’m not sure whether I’m depressed by the AARP sponsoring the Stones, or applaud it as the obvious move.

But whether you love it or hate it, this is one more sign of the music culture’s obsession with what’s old and aging.

I am mostly submitting this for everyone’s general entertainment rather than to make an attempt at any sort of meaningful statement. I don’t have any strong thoughts on music culture’s obsession with what’s old and aging. I do think there is a degree of irony in the fact the the Rolling Stones clearly haven’t retired in the spirit of Mark Twain’s statement that reports of his death was greatly exaggerated.

Since Twain arranged his estate so that his autobiography wouldn’t be released until 100 years after his death and other papers until 400 years after his death, I wouldn’t have put it past him to disseminate news of his death as a publicity stunt similar to how the Rolling Stones have announced their retirement from touring at least a couple times now. It turns out though that Twain had a cousin in London who was seriously ill with whom the author had been confused.

Competition Among Donor Advised Funds Is Constricting Charitable Giving

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I am always interested in news about how donor advised funds (DAF) are operating. On the whole, their use hasn’t gone as intended and they have reduced, rather than increased or incentivized charitable giving.   A few weeks ago Vu Le linked to an article that examined how the differences in the way DAFs are promoted is an indicator of whether they are distributing or sequestering funds. (emphasis original)

National sponsors that spend more time talking about donor benefits on their websites have more assets, take in a much higher proportion of noncash contributions, and pay out grants at much lower rates than sponsors that spend more time talking about charitable giving.

[…]

But our analysis predicts that a hypothetical national sponsor with a strong emphasis on charitable grantmaking on their website would pay out at 53 percent, while a hypothetical national sponsor with a strong emphasis on donor benefits would pay out at just 2 percent. And those lower payout rates have ripple effects when it comes to the buildup of assets: Our model predicts that the highly charity-focused sponsor would have assets of just $34 million, whereas the highly donor-focused sponsor would have assets of $2.7 billion.

Something to note is that the analysis focuses on national sponsors of DAFs rather than regional and local sponsors. The author of the piece, Helen Flannery, notes that since national sponsors tend not to have the specific focus, whether it be geographic region or cause, they often need to work harder to make a case for people to arrange their giving through them. Flannery seems to suggest that the those that tout financial benefits to the donor are able to make a more compelling case than a more charitably focused sponsor without a specific focus.

Flannery calls for a more specific evaluation and regulation of DAFs on an individual basis rather than looking at the aggregate giving of sponsors since the really generous ones tend to make the parsimonious ones look better due to averaging.

The analysis we present in our paper quantifies this phenomenon. It measures the degree to which sponsors have financialized what was originally intended to be a nonprofit instrument, and it measures just how intense the competition has become among the very largest DAF sponsors in this country.

Music Preference And Morals – Do Evil Geniuses Really Love Classical Music?

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When I saw a link on Artsjournal.com to a research study on PLOS One exploring the link between music and morality, I was half expecting to discover that evil people do prefer classical music, bolstering the stereotype of movie villains who apparently love playing that music to accompany their nefarious scheming.

Alas, the researchers didn’t specifically address that highly relevant question. I did learn that there has been a lot more research into the connections between music preference and personality types than I imagined. The literature/previous research review at the start of the research findings discuss those findings if that sounds interesting.

Rather than plotting on a good/evil axis which would require judgment calls, the researchers categorized different ends of the moral spectrum as:

“Individualising (Care and Fairness), indicative of a more liberal perspective, and Binding (Purity, Authority and Loyalty), indicative of a more conservative outlook.”

Looking at everything from lyrics, timbre, and audio elements. In the results section of the study they note the following correlations:

From the perspective of the lyrics’ linguistic cues, we saw that people who value more foundations related to Care and Fairness (Individualising values) prefer artists whose songs’ textual content is about care and joy. Those concerned more about Loyalty, Authority and Purity (Binding or ingroup) foundations tend to choose artists whose songs’ lyrics talk about fairness, sanctity, and love.

Also, individuals with strong ingroup values tend to prefer artists whose lyrics have positive sentiments and talk about dominance. This is intelligible as individuals who value Binding and their social groups tend to engage in group activities such as sports, religious events, and political gatherings, which often make use of music to promote messages of power, unity, and victory (e.g. sports chants, church choirs, etc.). On the other hand, participants with high Binding scores tend to dislike songs with negative valence, violent narratives and songs that resonate with sadness, fear, and disgust.

From an audio perspective, we saw that participants with Binding values preferred more artists whose songs are danceable, loud and with more positive sounds. In contrast, participants with Individualising values chose more artists whose songs are smooth, acoustic and have less dynamic sounds

In terms of timbre, people oriented to Care and Fairness preferred smoother to louder. Binding oriented people preferred the loud, but only conventional rhythmic songs. Binding oriented individuals disliked loud, distorted, rebellious songs that aligned with timbres common in “hard rock, metal indie, pop, and electronic music.”

Like me, you may be wondering where people who enjoy loud, hard music with lyrics about struggle or darker themes. Reading through the study, it wasn’t really clear to me what sort of moral alignment those folks might have. I will confess that I didn’t quite understand some of the technical references to to things like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and what fell into those classifications.

One thing that amused me was the lengthy discussion of how preferred lyrics reflected moral value. As we all know, a lot of times people aren’t paying close attention to the lyrics and if they are, they may be getting some of them hilariously wrong. It may be that on the whole, lyrics and morals do track closely, but there have been a number of instances in the last few years where people loudly proclaim that an artist has betrayed the moral values they when they were popular 10-20 years ago and the general public cackles, “Were you paying attention to the lyrics?”

There is specific mention in the article about the choice of music at political rallies in the U.S. and how that often aligns with the general moral outlook of each group.

Wait, NZ Arts & Culture Sector GDP Grew At Nearly Twice The Rate Of The Whole Economy?

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A couple weeks ago, New Zealand’s Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage (MCH) proudly announced that the GDP growth for the Arts and Creativity Sector was nearly double that of the economy as a whole for a 12 month period ending March 2022.  “The GDP of $14.9b is a 12-month increase of 10% – compared to total economy GDP growth of 5.3%.”

Some of the highlights from the report:

  • There are more than 115,000 people whose primary employment is in the arts and creativity – that’s a 3.8% increase from March 2021 to March 2022.
  • There are almost 36,000 businesses in the sector
  • Over 10,000 Māori hold primary employment in the Arts and Creative Sector
  • The Māori arts and creative sector contributed more than $1.3 billion to GDP in Aotearoa

As I wrote back in 2017, Maori intellectual property rights has been a point of tension, because as has been the case with many indigenous cultures, there have been differences of understanding both in the wording of treaties and with the concepts of property ownerships.

I am not sure how the ministry categorizes what falls under art and what falls under creativity, but the arts alone account for a much smaller slice of that GDP number (.8%) according to the article summarizing the report. However, that part of the sector is still seeing pretty good growth with employment at 2.8% compared with the 3% for the country as a whole. While arts workers are far more likely to be self-employed than people in other parts of the economy, it is apparently a growth area.

I was pleased to read that most New Zealanders working in the arts sector were considered to be performing highly skilled work, especially in comparison with the rest of the occupations in the country.

In news that will come as no surprise to many, the Arts Sector has 11,641 self-employed workers – accounting for 42% of the sector’s workforce and more than double the total NZ self-employment rate (16.2%).

Interestingly, that rate has increased by 8.1% over the past 15 years compared to the overall self-employment rate in New Zealand which has decreased by 0.9%.

80.7% of the Arts sector workforce are employed in what is described as highly-skilled occupations. This is higher than for all occupations in New Zealand (38.4%).

That number doesn’t look set to drop – Infometrics estimates that between 2023-2028, there will be 10,091 total job openings in the Arts sector (30.3% expected to be new job growth) with three-quarters of those positions likely to be highly-skilled jobs.

More Ballet And Body Weight Related Legal Action

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Apropos to my post yesterday about Richmond Ballet dancers suing the organization for exerting so much pressure about their weight, there was another story a couple weeks ago that I forgot where the Executive Director and Artistic Director of the Cleveland Ballet were suspended after they chose not to renew the contract of a dancer who was hired to teach outreach classes at the Boys and Girls Club due to her weight.  After advocating to retain the dancer, the Outreach Director was told his contract would not be renewed either.

The events that led up to learning that news from Becker started at a School of Cleveland Ballet staff meeting on Aug.  1, where Guadalupe saw a photo of Harris teaching the tendu movement that was included in Becker’s outreach newsletter.

“[Gladisa] told me that she could not release the newsletter I had been working on, that the mockup was no good. She simply said, ‘the tendu picture,’ and I knew what she was gunning for at that point,” Becker said.  “I even asked the Artistic Director, ‘It seems like you’re insinuating that someone’s size or body weight would somehow be able to disqualify them,’ and before I could even finish my sentence, she’s just nodding. I was told that this fine teacher did not have the physical aesthetic required to teach tendu and pliés to the Boys and Girls Club children.”

[…]

Two days later, Becker wrote down what happened at the meeting and hand-delivered his account in a letter to Lilia Shtarkman in the Cleveland Ballet’s human resources department, but he never received a reply. He also tried but failed to meet with their HR consultant, Lana Krasnyansky Sokolinsky — who is Michael Krasnyansky’s daughter and Guadalupe’s step-daughter — before Becker was told his own contract would not be renewed as manager of the outreach program.

The news article goes on to note that while Cleveland Ballet has a policy of not discriminating against people who are members of protected classes, body size is not a protected class. Still the Ballet board conducted an internal investigation and engaged outside counsel to also investigate. Ultimately, the board decided to suspend the artistic and executive director pending the results of that investigation.

Ballet Dancers Sue After Pressure Leads To Eating Disorders And Health Impact

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Last week Artsjournal.com linked to an article that may represent a significant continuation in the discussion about body weight expectations in ballet and dance in general.  Two Richmond Ballet dancers are suing the company for exerting so much pressure regarding their body weight that harmed their health and lead to them developing eating disorders.

According to the Axios article:

One of the dancers attended Richmond Ballet’s school from ages 6 to 15, per court filings. A second was a member of the ballet’s trainee program for adult dancers pursuing a professional career.

The lawsuits allege the ballet’s artistic staff set an “optimum Body Mass Index” for each trainee upon entering the program and that staff reserves the right to terminate trainees if they are unable to maintain that BMI.

[…]

Also, staff warned dancers who gained weight after being cast in roles that they would be replaced if they didn’t lose weight, and students as young as 10 who didn’t meet the ballet’s “skinny body” standard received what were commonly referred to as “fat letters,” the lawsuits allege.

In the ballet’s response, they noted that actors are often asked to lose weight for roles. While it may be true that not all actors are expected to have a certain body type and weight from the moment they walk in the door to start their training, there is some truth to weight, height and other elements of physical appearance being significant criteria by which actors, especially women, are judged and factor into career success.

Unfortunately, the Ballet made some rather cavalier statements abrogating responsibility for the emotional health of their students and trainees.

The ballet has denied all of the above allegations and has argued that, even if they were true, the conduct described wouldn’t violate state law.

During a hearing earlier this month, the ballet’s lawyer, Lindsey Lewis, argued that the ballet setting weight requirements for a role is “no different than an actor being asked to undergo a body transformation.”

The ballet argues it had no legal duty to provide for the dancers’ emotional wellbeing and happiness, noting the trainee was an adult and the minor student was under the care of her parents.

Isn’t It Better To Be Damned If You Do Try

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Chad Bauman, Executive Director at Milwaukee Rep made a post on LinkedIn today where he acknowledged that making a change in a business model can threaten the existence of an organization, but that changing times and expectations often leave you no choice.  While he is talking about the current challenges performing arts organizations face, he cites a series of decisions Milwaukee Rep faced in its early years that nearly saw the end of the theater.

Milwaukee Rep had a similar crisis nearly a decade after its founding. In its earliest years, it built a large audience based on the star system bringing big stars to Milwaukee to perform. In 1961, the star system was abruptly ended and a resident acting company was founded. In less than a year, the theater lost 60,000 patrons, or two-thirds of its audience. It took seven years for the theater to rebuild its audience and it nearly went bankrupt on multiple occasions. The decision was a correct one as the theater would eventually grow to more than 150,000 patrons, but it almost collapsed along the way.

The star system was common practice in theater in the late 19th century that waned rather than something Milwaukee Rep specifically was doing and decided to end. While the star system is most frequently associated with film studios, they adopted it from theater which apparently borrowed the concept from P.T. Barnum.

I have seen stories similar to this in which arts organizations made decisions 10-15 years ago to make changes in their business models or change their programming mix to include segments of their community which were underrepresented in their audience and casting. They too came to the brink of closing.

There is obviously a bit of survivorship bias to some of these cases. Those that didn’t succeed in the shift weren’t around to talk about it later. With all the closures, downgrading, layoffs, etc that arts organizations are undergoing, we are hearing of many more stories of arts organizations who are having difficulty continuing their existence than we did 10-15 years ago. Some of them were in the middle of trying to effect change, others were trying to stick with what worked in the past so there is no clear indication about which approach may be better in these times.

Some that haven’t closed completely may reorganize and continue on as Milwaukee Rep did. I am sure no one wants to be faced with the prospect of it taking seven years and several brushes with bankruptcy to make a successful transition.   From one perspective though, it might be better to fail while trying to do better for your community rather than attempting to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.

Public Comment Praise Takeover Helps Renew Denver Guaranteed Basic Income Program

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Long time readers will be aware that I have been keeping an eye on guaranteed basic income programs in different communities, especially those that are designed to benefit artists.

Recently Denver agreed to renew their program for a second year to benefit unhoused groups. The pilot program had provided funding in different increments to people as part of an attempt to study what approaches were most effective.  I am unclear about whether they have settled on a standard amount to distribute as they move into the second year.

What caught my eye in a Vice article on the topic was the discussion of how the different advocacy groups went about lobbying for the continuation of the program, reversing the new mayor’s rejection of a proposal to renew the program.  Other groups looking to advocate for basic income programs, whether specifically for artists or not, may be able to learn from the Denver groups’ approach.

A coalition of about 20 groups advocated for the funding, including SEIU Local 105, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC), Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and Center for People With Disabilities. Advocates attended weekly city council meetings for 12 weeks wearing the color green (for money) and using the public comment period to praise the program.

“The Denver Guaranteed Income Coalition worked together to rally outside the Colorado state capitol, execute a 40-person public comment takeover at a city council meeting, send hundreds of emails to newly elected Mayor Johnston and city council members, and phone bank which resulted in over 2000 calls to Denver residents and subsequently dozens of calls to city council members,”

Apparently Work Still Required At Newfields Museum

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Well apparently my optimism about the direction of the Indianapolis Museum at Newfields was a little premature. In late September I wrote about how the museum had just hired. Belinda Tate, a new director who it was hoped would help the museum move past the controversy surround a job posting in 2021 which said they were ““…seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience.’”

Tate was joining CEO/President Colette Pierce Burnette, who had replaced previous CEO who resigned due to the controversy. Unfortunately, as of about 10 days ago,  Burnette resigned after about 15 months in her position and was joined by three board members.

While neither Burnette or the museum discussed the specifics of her departure, Adrienne Sims, the latest board member to resign wrote in her resignation that:

“As a seasoned HR executive, I believe in the importance of strong HR practices, collaborative decision-making and adherence to proper governance procedures for the well-being of the organization. Recent leadership decisions were not made in an inclusive and consultative manner, which has been disheartening,” she said.

“I hope that in the future, decisions of this nature will be approached with integrity and demonstrate a commitment to diversity, inclusion and respect for all.”

Further,

Julie Goodman, president and CEO of Indy Arts Council, weighed in on Burnette’s departure in a Facebook post following the museum’s announcement demanding transparency and calling out what she said was “callous and cold communication fueling a cycle of trauma and harm.”

So it appears that there was at least some awareness that elements of the museum’s internal culture still required attention in order for the organization to move forward.

A number of Indianapolis based Black organizations issued a statement calling for clarity about Burnette’s departure and “..the Indiana Black Expo and Indianapolis Urban League announced they have brought their partnerships with Newfields “to a complete halt” due to the sudden departure of the museum’s CEO.”

Who Knew You Could Organize So Much Activity Around A Show About Writing Letters

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I usually don’t advocate for specific shows on the blog here, but I recently presented a group whose format really lends itself to a variety of audience engagement opportunities you may dream up. The group is called Letters Aloud. They basically read letters written to and by famous and less famous individuals, often organized around a theme, with the letters and images of the subject projected on a screen and accompanied by accordion theme music.

Last weekend we hosted, Thanks, But No Thanks–Best Rejection Letters Ever. My concept was that Thanksgiving time was a good opportunity to reflect on preserving past rejection and being grateful for the lucky breaks or assistance from family and friends that helped us along the way.

The show includes letters from Sidney Poitier to President Franklin Roosevelt asking to borrow $100 so he can return to Jamaica; John Cleese telling a fan that he doesn’t have a fan club because Michael Palin’s fan club killed them off, and then Palin and Eric Idle writing follow up letters channeling elements from the Monty Python Holy Grail movie; Muhammad Ali’s letter opposing being drafted to serve in Vietnam; a student rejected from Duke University, rejecting the rejection and insisting she was showing up for Fall semester.

While many of the letters had the audience roaring with delight, others had them applauding in support of the strength of character people exhibited.

The format allows for engagement opportunities from many points of view. We had people posting on social media bemoaning the fact kids can’t read cursive and letter writing is becoming a lost art. The group actually has a school outreach program with a lot of resources and curriculum materials called, Be The Change, that schools can use in advance of a visit (or a virtual Zoom session) that explores letter writing and features letters written by young people.  It isn’t really an attempt to revive writing letters on paper as much as it is advocacy of writing as a powerful form of expression.

Taking some inspiration from Nina Simon’s invitation to people to bring artifacts from bad relationships for a pop-up exhibit in a bar, we asked people to bring stories or objects representing rejection to the show. I not only got our volunteers involved in helping make a promotional video for the lobby exhibit, they also shared stories from their own experiences with rejection and wore labels with some of those phrases for promotional photos that we also used to seed our lobby display.

Then on the night of the show, volunteers wore those labels again to create an ambiance for the show. We had forms audience members could fill out with their own stories. Letters Aloud has a form on their website that allows people to submit their stories, but no one had in advance of the show so they read some of the contributions to our display from the stage after intermission.

Additionally, the production has an opportunity for people from the community to read letters during the show. We recruited three people, the mayor, city poet laureate, and a member of the city cultural services board as readers. The production provided 10 letters for them to choose from a couple weeks in advance of the show so they could become familiar with the short pieces and then had a brief orientation before the show so the readers knew what to expect.

So overall there were a lot of avenues to create a sense of connection to the show for the audience and community. If there was a letter or story with a resonance to a particular community, I imagine they would be open to integrating it in to the show to create a greater sense of relevance.   Similarly, it is also relatively easy for the presenting venue to create some imaginative promotional materials.

Certainly, there are other shows and projects out there with a degree of inherent flexibility of topic and structure that lends themselves to similar promotional and engagement opportunities. I encourage people to keep their eyes open and their imaginations churning.

Creativity To Change How We Experience Health Care

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If you missed it last week, NPR reported on a recently published book about the need to inject creativity to make the practice and interaction with medicine a more empathetic experience.  Among the examples cited are artist collectives who raised money to pay medical bills and forgive medical debt by creating works of art out of medical bills which they sold, (or in at least one case, immolated).  The piece also mentioned design changes like creating gentler sounds for medical devices so that patients weren’t constantly jarred by harsh beeps around them.

The author of the book Emily Peters mentioned that while it seems like medical professionals are very much in control of their environment, they actually feel quite powerless.

 Physicians and surgeons and health care administrators and people who, to me, seem very, very powerful, [they] feel very powerless. And so the book came about as thinking about power and change. And then I realized that artists have this unique intersection where they are very powerful, they bring a lot of the things that were missing in health care, trying to build a better future.

She cited a couple examples of color choices in medicine which may seem like long established traditions or having emerged from research, but are really just arbitrary decisions someone made that caught on. Peters assumed the white coat ceremony had roots that extended back to the medieval period but was really the result of a Chicago doctor deciding in 1989 that students weren’t dressing professionally enough.

Same thing with the advent of the medical green, [the ubiquitous color of medical supplies]]. There’s a spinach green that came from a surgeon here in San Francisco, just working to try to reduce eyestrain, but that became very standard in medicine. And then there’s also a minty green, that a color theorist in Chicago just decided that that was the color for health care, that minty green was going to save us all and was going to look so beautiful.

When people were asked what colors they wanted to see in hospitals, they responded with neon purples, reds and oranges rather than the assumed soothing pastels. Peters suggests that LED lights would allow the colors of spaces to be customized to suit those occupying them. She also discusses a chapter in the book about how puppetry is being used to train medical students.

As I read the article, I was hoping there would be more recognition/initiatives to involve creative folks in the design of medical environment. I haven’t spent much time in hospitals, but there are a lot of repetitive sounds that get on my nerves so anything that mitigates things like that and improves other environmental factors and interactions would be welcome. More than that, it would be good to have the contributions of creatives to health and medicine recognized beyond just treatment and therapy for the sick and infirm.

Not A Can Of Whoop-Ass, Opening A Jar Of Artistic Experience To Forge Comradeship

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Artsjournal.com linked to a Washington Post story about a Boston based project call “The Jar” whose “goal is forging comradeship via conversations about artistic experiences among groups that otherwise find few opportunities to commingle.” The project seems to start from the premise that it is going to be difficult to diversify audiences and experiences if people continue to participate with those who share the same general demographic profile as themselves.

The approach of The Jar is to intentionally shape the composition of the audience and setting. They start by getting people of diverse backgrounds agreeing to be conveners for some sort of event. Each of these conveners agrees to invite five others to the event at $10 a person with the goal of having a maximum of 96 people in attendance.

Here is where their recipe for assembling an audience comes into play:

One invitee in each “jar” of six people is an intimate of the convener; two are “usuals” — friends or colleagues. But two others must be “unusuals,” people the convener barely or only incidentally knows. Or as Ben-Aharon put it, “people who you wouldn’t normally experience culture with — two people who may not look like you, love like you, pray like you.”

[…]

“Let’s say you go to church, and you’re a White gay man, and you go to this church with your husband, and your normal circle is White gay men — why wouldn’t that be? That’s just the way society dictates we live.

“But suddenly you’re invited to The Jar and you have to think of who are the two ‘unusuals,’ and you invite a Black lesbian couple from that church. And suddenly you create a friendship with them. Suddenly you create a bond — and this actually happened, by the way.”

I don’t know if the quality of the artists is always as high as the pairing of Yo-Yo Ma and New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly, but if it is, I would guess that might be a factor in overcoming reticence in accepting an invitation to an event from people you barely know. The pairings of artists are also intentionally unexpected. Ma played cello in response to questions from the facilitator while Donnelly sketches of Ma and the audience were projected on a screen.

The project is funded by a $750,000 multi-year grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation if you are wondering how they can afford artists of this caliber hosting events that are intentionally designed to generally a maximum of $960. They apparently don’t have any problem gathering audiences in these days of increasing social disconnection. However, given the design of the events where intimate experiences are the point, they are having difficulty with scaling it to transfer to other cities and garnering the funding required to accomplish that.

As you may suspect, conversation is an important element of the experience rather than just passively observing.

Rob Orchard, formerly founding managing director of American Repertory Theatre…attends Jar happenings. “It’s unusual, using the arts as the catalyst for understanding differences. You hear people who experience the same piece as you, and you get to appreciate how their response to it is totally different from yours.”

While there is definitely an element of self-selection inherent to the project – inviting people with whom you have an incidental or tangential relationship means that you and they travel in the same general orbits and the willingness to accept the invitation means they are generally open to having the experience. However, the design of the program still requires one to stretch slightly past their comfort zone to make or accept the invitation, which is an obvious important first step toward opening oneself to new experiences, new conversations and new relationships.

Creating Connections With Inside Jokes Shared By 6 Million People

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I believe it was Artsjournal.com that shared a story a week or so ago about the Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempt to increase subscriptions and engage a younger audience with an ad campaign that makes inside jokes about life in and around the city.

The article put me in mind of the idea that while sharing in inside information creates a sense of belonging, for arts organizations the idea that there are rules you need to know in order to not stick out creates a sense of alienation. Though there are obvious benefits to citing insider knowledge shared by 6 million people living in the greater Philadelphia area. Arts and cultural organizations might tap into a similar situation on a smaller scale in their own communities in order to build a greater sense of connection and identity.

The Inquirer campaign employs the repetition of the simple phrase, “Unsubscribe from…, subscribe to…” So for example, “Unsubscribe from one-bell city, Subscribe to Nobel-winning city,” referring to two University of Pennsylvania scientists recent win of a Nobel prize and, of course, the Liberty Bell.”

Another does a call out to the mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, “Unsubscribe from Philly is gritty, Subscribe to Gritty is Philly.” And other references the city’s iconic LOVE sculpture and Greek translation of the city’s name as “city of brotherly love:” “Unsubscribe from I heart NYC, subscribe to Philly love.”

As you might imagine, people are coming up with their own ideas for couplets following the same pattern.

There isn’t any clear indication about how much the campaign may have increased subscriptions, but with 85,000 digital subscribers, they are within striking distance of their goal to get 90,000 by the end of the year.

Experiences More Valuable Than Material Goods When It Comes to Happiness and Social Cohesion

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Sunil Iyengar who directs the research arm of the National Endowment for the Arts recently posted on the idea of arts experiences as one way for individuals to create connections with others. He points to two studies conducted in 2020 where people received a text every few hours and were asked to respond about a purchase they had made within that period of time.

Study subjects were asked whether they had made a material (furniture, clothing, jewelry, electronic goods, etc) or experiential (concert tickets, trips, restaurant meals, going to sporting events) purchase.

In both studies, experiential purchases were associated with significantly greater self-reported happiness than were material purchases. Also, because the data collection methods enabled participants to respond within an hour of each transaction, the reports of happiness can be described as “in-the-moment” returns from these experiential investments, the authors suggest.

“People’s experiential purchases, in other words, live on longer and are likely to provide more active, moment-to-moment happiness as they lead people to feel better about themselves and connect more with others,” Kumar et al. write. Stressing the implications of these findings for social connectedness, the authors add that “because experiences also lend themselves more to re-living and sharing memories with others, individuals can also advance their momentary happiness through these types of extended consumption as well.”

Long time readers know that I am wary about any prescriptive claims about the arts curing social ills, raising test scores, boosting economies, etc., so I was pleased to see that Iyengar wasn’t making any claims that carved out special benefits attributable to arts and cultural activities but instead implied they were part of the mix. Certainly, we all recognize that there are many moving pieces that contribute to people having an enjoyable experience, including restaurants, traffic, parking, babysitters, etc.

Enjoyable changes don’t occur in a vacuum where they are attributable to one cause. Last night I idly started to look at Google Streetview in the neighborhoods around where I live and work, flipping back to pictures from 10-15 years ago and it became clear how different decisions by governments, businesses, and developers contributed to the attractiveness of these places and increased availability of local resources as well as the closure of some businesses and increased traffic.

In the same respect, arts and culture contribute to, cultivate, preserve, social connection and cohesion, but aren’t the sole product to be applied to solve issues that face communities.

Sometimes You Can Renovate Your Way Out Of An Audience

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So as much as we may think that we need to find new strategies and tactics to engage with audiences, a lot of times we are reinventing or rediscovering approaches that were ignored in favor of the newest theories on audience development/marketing. For a few years now I have been talking about the importance of letting people see themselves in the programming, audience, etc.

The theater I am currently running celebrated its centennial in 2020 (so the real party happened in 2022 as Covid restrictions abated.) An historic booklet was put together with an array of news articles, pictures, etc celebrating the theater’s early existence as a movie and vaudeville house.

One section talks about one of the renovations and quotes the manager who has become something of a local icon.

“Surprisingly, attendance dropped after the remodel.

According to Ted Thompson, ‘…we made it so fancy the farm boys and other workers who came in their overalls on Friday and Saturday for the western movies, quit.  When it finally dawned on me what was happening, we filled the lobby with baled hay, dressed the usherettes in gingham dresses and me in Levis and everything was o.k again.”

If you hadn’t surmised from the references to usherettes in gingham dresses, this was quite a few years back –in 1941.

While it might have been a bit more difficult to get into town to see movies back then, it still says something that attendance dropped due to installation of a new carpet and art deco design choices given that movie theaters were much more central to entertainment, news and social life at the time.

It seems to be a pretty strong testament to how physical surroundings can make people feel that a place isn’t for them. These are people who had presumably attended movies at the theater before and felt welcome. Westerns were still being shown on Friday and Saturdays to serve them as an audience, just like before. But the environment shifted and felt too refined for their comfort, so they stopped coming.

Unisex Restrooms Look A Little More Attractive When You’re Waiting On A Long Line

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A couple weeks ago, Rainer Glaap posted a link to a news story about people in Germany advocating for unisex restrooms.  It wasn’t so much about wanting to provide spaces for people identifying with differing genders, but because the lines for the women’s room at public events are too dang long! (Article in German so you’ll have to run it through a translator if you browser doesn’t have one built in)

The waiting women agree: “It’s annoying, but what do you want to do? Well, you could make unisex toilets,” says one. “It’s not just at concerts – the women’s toilet is always full,” says another. “Personally, it wouldn’t bother me if everyone used one toilet because I notice that it’s quicker, especially in men’s toilets, and I think: Why can’t I just go to the other one?” asks another.

[…]

If women didn’t always have to go past the urinals, many people in the queue would simply go to where something was free anyway. “As far as I’m concerned, you could just have gender-neutral, shared toilets. That would be fine for me,” says a waiting woman, or: “We’ve already gone into the men’s toilet. What are we left with? A solution would be more toilets.” “I would also like unisex toilets, I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

Other than the obvious observation that this issue seems to be near universal since I have posted similar stories from England as well as a history of women’s lounges, what was somewhat interesting about this story was the suggestion that the number of restrooms is limited to the official regulations for insurance reasons.

According to the regulation, for example, there must be twelve toilets for 1,000 women. However, eight toilets and twelve urinals are required for 1,000 men. So there are more sanitary installations for men in the same space.

[…]

Meeting places such as theaters or concert halls are free to build more toilets than required, but for insurance reasons they always build as closely as possible to the DIN standard and the regulation, says Illing-Moritz. The building regulations therefore urgently need to be adapted. It has long been scientifically proven that women have a greater need for toilets. With the third gender category “diverse”, an adjustment would also be needed there.

I am not quite sure what sort of hazard a venue might be flirting with by adding more toilets. I am sure many attendees would suggest there is a greater risk associated with not being able to get to a stall in a timely manner. The article also notes that people spend so much time standing online, they don’t have an opportunity to buy drinks and other things which would enhance revenue.

I would also observe that there is an increased chance these days that people will observe it is a lot easier to get into their restroom at home and stay there instead of venturing out to a performance venue. So if the opportunity presents itself to add some more accommodations to restrooms, some venues may decide it outweighs whatever issues insurance might present.

Better Dubs For Your Favorite Anime May Be Just Around The Corner

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The China Project recently spotlighted Taylor Swift’s amazing fluency in speaking Mandarin Chinese. It is amazing to think she is able to gain this level of proficiency while attending to her billion dollar business empire.  Except that she can’t speak Chinese that well and the video of her, and others, doing so in the China Project piece were actually accomplished by a sophisticated piece of deepfake AI software which is impressively adept that mimicking a speaker’s natural voice and lip movements.

HeyGen’s “Video Translate” tool, which created the Swift deepfakes, is capable of translating footage into 14 different languages — including Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic — and can clone the speaker’s voice and sync the person’s lips in an “authentic speaking style,” according to the company’s website.

[…]

On Weibo, fans of the tool praised it for its exciting potential to improve dubbing in foreign films, as it is able to match the movements of an actor’s mouth with their translated speech in Chinese. Others also pointed out that it could be an AI-powered solution to revolutionize Chinese ecommerce brands, which have found it difficult to reach global audiences due to a lack of dual-lingual livestreamers.

Others had the obvious concerns about the technology being used as a propaganda tool or to generate false content with which to accuse people of all sorts of wrong doing. The article reports that by moving to the US,

“…HeyGen is no longer subject to China’s deepfake rules, which went into effect in January. As one of the first governments to regulate hyper-realistic, AI-generated media, Beijing requires companies to obtain consent from individuals whose likenesses are being manipulated; deepfakes need to be labeled as such on the internet, and can’t be used for purposes deemed harmful (vaguely defined) to national security or the economy.

Similar rules regarding the use of AI to create content like this without some detectable markers or disclaimers indicating the content is fake is being contemplated in the US. An executive order along those lines were issued today.

But as the article suggests, tools like these could be a boon for arts organizations seeking to increase accessibility. Especially if they are able to work in real time to provide captioning and translations for performances, concerts, and lectures which may not have a formal script or translate notes and commentary in galleries (or whatever the tour guide is saying)

People may be more open to watching foreign films (or anime as I suggest in the title of this post) if the dubbing looks and sounds convincing. Though it will probably be bad news for the voice actors who currently make a living doing anime dubs.

Covid Restrictions May Have Resulted In Increased Social Inertia

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I recently saw a link on a CityLab story noting that since the end of Covid restrictions, people appear to be less willing to venture outside of familiar neighborhoods and locales.

As of late 2021, people remained less likely to engage in social exploration, which the study authors define as the likelihood of visiting a new place where they earn significantly more or less than than the general population. Instead, they just returned to familiar destinations.

[…]

Fewer people are visiting attractions like museums, restaurants or parks that are outside their immediate mobility radius, and they’re spending less time among residents at different socioeconomic levels.

Outside of the concerns operators of arts organizations, restaurants, parks and other attractions may have about a drop in attendance and purchases, this has implications for the overall social cohesion in the US. While most cities studied experienced this drop of mobility, places that had fewer restrictions on public assembly and in-person office work saw a smaller decrease in relation to how much people were willing to circulate to unfamiliar locations.

If the narrowed social mobility habits of residents endure, policymakers will have to contend with an extended loss in income-diverse encounters — a trend likely to further exacerbate political polarization and diminish social capital.

Yabe said the research could help decision-makers get a better sense of the trade-offs as they try to strike a balance between safety and social cohesion.

It should be noted that while this report came out in 2023, it appears the most recent data was from the end of 2021 when people were still a little wary about moving around. While this situation may not exist to the same extent as late 2021, the implications still bear attention.

Don’t Break Up With Volunteers Over Email

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I recently saw an article about the Portland Art Museum essentially firing all their volunteer docents by email in favor of paid students with a suggestion that the docents weren’t diverse enough. I felt a sense of deja vu and couldn’t figure out why until I saw a brief mention of the Art Institute of Chicago doing something similar.  Sure enough, I had linked to posts Drew McManus and Lee Rosenbaum had made in November 2021 about the Art Institute’s firing of docents by email in favor of paid staff due to the docents not being as diverse as the organization wanted.

Drew suggested the Art Institute had created a PR crisis by fumbling the process pretty soundly. I haven’t seen a similar uproar about Portland’s decision to do the same thing. The media landscape has certainly changed in many ways since November 2021.

While working aggressively to achieve diversity goals are absolutely laudable, as Drew pointed out the Art Institute had established qualifications for docents that pretty much only wealthy, older individuals could fulfill. It appeared they both jettisoned the structure of the docent program and the participants without any thought of a gradual integration or transition to a new model that would parlay their experienced volunteers.

“Once the news went public, there was a good bit of blow back, especially after the docent group’s spokesperson said the organization’s membership supports reaching diversity goals. What they wanted to know is why they were tossed to the curb without a replacement program ready to implement nor a plan to aggressively diversify over the period of a few years.

Given that volunteers were required to maintain eighteen months of twice-a-week training to qualify as a docent and five additional years of continual research along with a laundry list of other requirements, it’s not difficult to see why there would be concern.”

The Portland docents are being encouraged to join a new program where they can act as educators, greeters and coat-check helpers. Some of the docents had already had a sense that this was going to be the direction of things and feel a bit betrayed by how the transition was being handled.

One former docent, who declined to be named, didn’t feel blindsided like Dacklin did by changes to the council. Based on what happened to the docents in Chicago and all the equity consultants PAM brought in, she had felt the “foreboding” for a couple of years. She laughed at the idea of going back to PAM as a volunteer educator: “They burned their bridge.”

Dacklin feels similarly alienated. “I’m heartbroken,” she says, her voice brimming with emotion. “Will I go back to the museum and volunteer? I don’t know anyone that’s going to do it. But I don’t know everyone.”

They Are Having More Fun In The Movie Screening Next Door

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Recently I have been seeing articles heralding the Taylor Swift and Beyonce concert movies as the recipe for financial success for struggling movie theaters—turn movie attendance into an event.

Except that those articles might have gotten ahead of themselves because attendees of those events are expressing disappointment about their experiences. Essentially, its a matter of FOMO – fear of missing out- colliding with the one thing performance venues have been heralding as the biggest benefit of live events over recordings —every experience is different.

As a recent Slate article stated, the grass seemed greener at the screening the next theater over.  Some attendees to the Taylor Swift Eras tour concert screening felt other people were having a rowdier experience than they were. Others felt like their screening was way too rowdy and they couldn’t hear Taylor.  There were inevitable articles and social media posts about proper movie attendance etiquette.

Some of this hype came from Swift herself—when she announced the concert film in August, her social media statement included the line, “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged.” At real tour dates, fans have taken to dressing up and exchanging hand-beaded friendship bracelets, as well as vigorously singing and dancing along to the music, so Swift was setting the tone for the movie’s rollout, telling fans that they should feel free to pretend they were attending the genuine article.

[…]

But not everyone was happy about these situations: Some of the videos depicting fans having semi-religious experiences at the movie were accompanied by posts like this one, where a user complained, “I’m at the worst screening ever cant even hear taylor :)”

[…]

A writer for the A.V. Club shared of her moviegoing experience, “[S]eeing all those weeping fans onscreen in a silent, mostly empty theater with not even an AMC-branded friendship bracelet in sight rang especially hollow.” But she went through the grass-is-greener phenomenon in real time, going on to write, “While no one was in costume in my theater, I did take a pee break halfway through, which revealed an entirely different crowd from an earlier screening that had just let out.” The other audience had “more pink, more rhinestones, more souvenir popcorn buckets, and at least two limited edition folklore cardigans, so the vibe might have been totally different.”

Among the suggestions floated in the article were akin to the practice of scheduling accessible or sensory friendly shows. In this case there would be a choice between quiet and raucous.

FTC Proposing Transparency Rules For Ticketing Fees

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A couple hours after I made my post about an article addressing the problem with “drip fees” in the UK and the psychology that reinforces their use, I saw that the FTC is proposing new rules to address junk fees, which are the same as drip fees in the UK.

FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that “by hiding the total price, these junk fees make it harder for consumers to shop for the best product or service and punish businesses who are honest upfront.

[…]

A new rule with more precise language can do a better job with specifics, the agency argues:

It is an unfair and deceptive practice and a violation of this part for any Business to offer, display, or advertise an amount a consumer may pay without Clearly and Conspicuously disclosing the Total Price.
[…]

….and now this new proposed FTC rule could force other businesses in different industries, from airlines to hotels, to follow suit

If successful, the new rule could put an end to bait-and-switch tactics, which consumers have told the FTC that they’re constantly experiencing. Consumers have also said they often don’t know what certain fees are for.

Other articles about the proposed rule include examples of some of the arcane abbreviations associated with added fees that people couldn’t decipher. It was noted that the rule wouldn’t get rid of all the added fees resulting in cheaper prices, but it would force businesses like concert venues, hotels, and airlines to disclose full prices upfront.

As I mentioned in my post last week, the rule will need to be written well to eliminate loopholes which will allow for the addition of fees not covered by the rule. It should also be noted that hospitals have been required to provide transparent pricing for common procedures since 2021, but a recent study revealed only about 1/3 of hospitals are in compliance. So there needs to be real enforcement of the rules as well.

Artists Need High Quality, Accessible Marketing Resources

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Last week, my regional booking consortium organized its first Zoom conversation for marketing staff to share questions, ideas and just generally converse. I lurked around for most of the conversation with my camera off, popping in to comment on occasion. One of the topics of conversation was around marketing and promotional assets that artists provide.  The quality of video and images is an increasingly important topic given the role social media plays with both show promotion and associated sharing.

When I was at a booking conference last month, a panelist mentioned that they look at two things when evaluating whether to book an artist. The first was whether the tech rider was within the capacity and the second was the quality of their promotional assets.  While there was some people in the Zoom meeting last week who said their every use of promotional materials was being closely scrutinized by a tour, far more others complained by the dearth of quality images and video.  Many artists have video which is poor lighting, framing and sound quality.  Still images and logos are often small and can’t be resized without severely bitmapping.

Someone on the call shared an article from Capacity Interactive about how to make static key art more engaging  by adding some subtle animation, using the animation to do some storytelling and provide information.  Obviously, you need to get permission from a performer before adding any animated elements, but I thought that this was a good way to cope with the lack of good materials and catch some attention.

Later in the afternoon, the venue managers and programmers met and some of my enthusiasm deflated a little. One of the topics of conversation was some accessibility legislation that is set to roll out in Colorado in summer 2024. Under those rules we need to pay attention to things like how accessible our websites and ticketing systems are for screen readers. This will mean making sure images have robust descriptions for alt text and videos have captioning. One venue manager said they are already telling renters that logos are not sufficient to represent their shows given the amount of detailed description the law will require.  In this context, I realized the animated key art idea might not pass muster.

While they might not entirely encompass current 2023 standards, Drew McManus did a whole series on web accessibility on ArtsHacker in 2019 which will provide a good start. Bonus: A post on all the lawsuits and accessibility plug-in scams to watch out for.

Sunk Cost Psychology Reinforces Added Hidden Ticket Fees

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A survey found that in the UK, 93% of event ticketers add “drip fees” on to transactions.  As you probably suspect, those are the undisclosed added fees that pop up as you go through the purchasing process.  They appear in more than just event ticket transactions. Though in the UK, event ticketers had added the fees at double the national average.

Drip pricing occurs when consumers are shown an initial price for a good/service (known as the base price) while additional fees are revealed (or “dripped”) later in the checkout process. These “dripped” fees can either be mandatory (e.g., booking fees) or optional (e.g., seat reservation on a flight). This practice means that consumers may be “baited” into choosing a product because of its (low) base price, yet possibly have to pay a much higher price to complete the purchase as consumers do not become aware of dripped fees until they have already started the checkout process.

As the article notes, one of the challenges to getting rid of the fees is that no one wants to be the first to provide the honest total price up front for fear of losing out to their competitors. If you see a flight for $99 and another for $250, the psychology of sunk cost will keep many people from abandoning a transaction in favor of the more honest airline after realizing the $99 ticket is $300 after fees because they have already spent a fair bit of time choosing seats, putting in address and credit card information.

Seeing that there is little benefit to being honest about the cost up front, many companies will resort to advertising a low price and then having add on fees for every choice you make.

Essentially what is required are rules to force people to reveal fees up front, or no one will do it. The danger is that unless the rules are particularly well-written, there are always opportunities label added fees in a way that slips through the cracks and then the whole practice starts over again.

Frank Lloyd Wright Didn’t Want A/C In Dallas Theater He Designed

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I came across an interesting story about the only theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The 400 seat Kalita Humphreys Theater, constructed in 1959,  is one of the Dallas Theater Center‘s spaces, apparently one they primarily used prior to the 2009 completion of Dee & Charles Wyly Theater about two miles away.   The Kalita, as it is referred to in the story, is in need of some major repairs, many of which are outlined in the story.

The parts of the article which are most interesting to me are the influences, both good and bad, the famed architect had on the space. Tommie Ethington, who wrote the piece marvels at the intimacy of the space where you no more than 13 rows from the stage and the optical illusions created by windows, lack of right angles, and curve of the stairs.

Wright’s vision:

It involved eschewing the traditional setup, with a proscenium stage—in which audiences stare straight ahead with a single, framed view—and instead creating a circular, revolving stage that joined the actors and audience in a more unified space.

However, his vision was not always conducive to easily operating a theater. Wright would apparently have rather have staff move things by hand and audiences sweat than to install elevators and A/C.

Wright wanted windows at the back of the auditorium, but Baker worried they would interfere with stage lighting. Wright vehemently opposed a freight elevator, insisting that sets and props be wheeled up subterranean ramps (an elevator was secretly installed without Wright’s knowledge). Wright even went so far as to suggest no air-conditioning, a thought immediately dismissed by Texans who knew better.

According to his daughter Robyn Flatt, the first time Baker saw the plans for the theater, he told Wright they simply would not work. “Wright was furious,” she says. “He threw my dad out of [Wright’s home] Taliesin West and told him he could walk back to town.”

The city of Dallas technically owns the Kalita so funding for renovations will require their involvement to some extent. Political will is also involved in other respects in the form of Texas’ Drag Ban which is both noted in this article and in a Washington Post article that suggests Dallas Theater Center’s makes the mounting of the Rocky Horror Show at The Kalita a political act.

Babysitters For Artist As Well As Audience

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Back in August I mentioned a partnership of organizations working with the Broadway production of Here Lies Love to offer babysitting services to people attending select performances.  What I hadn’t dug deeper into, but an NPR reporter did, was that one of the organizations, Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL), was started as a way to offer childcare services to artists.

PAAL founder Rachel Junqueira Spencer Hewitt characterizes the organization as essentially being staffed by artists for artists and says it started partially out of her own need for childcare.

Hewitt had struggled to balance an acting career with her growing family. She had to hide her pregnancy at auditions; once her child was born, she had to turn down work because the contracts paid less than a babysitter would cost.

“I saw my path to my career blocked because of the lack of support,” she said. “And I know that every industry has this dilemma of — if the child care costs more than my job’s able to pay, how can I still do this?”

PAAL advocates for parents in all sorts of ways, including giving grants for fertility costs to artists and presenting a Black Motherhood and Parenting New Plays Festival. But helping people in theater take care of their children is part of their core mission — an early initiative was hiring babysitters to watch children at auditions.

I had noted back in August that PAAL was opening chapters in other cities. From the NPR story, their expansion plans are based in facilitating the participation of both creators and attendees of different arts disciplines. (my emphasis)

Eventually, she would like to see the concept spread to orchestras, operas — even museums. She says it’s good for the organizations, who may see increased loyalty and gain new audiences; it’s good for the parent-artists who are supported; and it’s good for people who’d like to see an art exhibit or a play but can’t because child care is so expensive.

“People who appreciate the arts are engaged in the realities of life,” Hewitt said. “You say, ‘Gosh, I wish they would come to my show,’ without understanding, where are they right now? They’re in the car. They’re in the pick-up line [at school]. They’re listening to your ad promoting your gorgeous exhibit while they’re trying to schedule the soccer game.“

How The Red Scare Led to Ren Faires

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The Smithsonian Magazine just published a pretty interesting story about how the proliferation of Renaissance Faires (RenFaire) in the US got their start due to artists being blacklisted during the Red Scare period of the late 50s and early 1960s. The first Faire in the US occurred in Los Angeles in 1963, by a mix of artists and educators who found themselves black/graylisted for various reasons, including refusing to take loyalty oaths.

The first faire was the brainchild of educator Phyllis Patterson who tapped into the talents of many out of work artists.

“That whole [anti-communist hysteria] helped guide what I did next,” Phyllis later told Rubin. “What happened to their lives and mine intertwined.” According to Rubin, Phyllis was “emphatic in her conviction that the Renaissance fair was able to flourish thanks to the Hollywood blacklist, [which] had the effect of making gifted and skilled people … available to lend their talents.”

The Smithsonian piece is rather long and detailed with videos and pictures from the first event and some of the early faires that followed. Things came together for the first event as a mix of pleas and luck with people going on the radio to ask for help building the Elizabethan village and loans of surplus materials out of warehouses. Subsequent events were a little more formally organized, but there was attention to detail right from the first one with Patterson coaching “performers in improvisation, English accents, Elizabethan vernacular and street cries.”

Perhaps most importantly, the aesthetic of community participation by attendees which is a hallmark of Renaissance Faires today was a cornerstone of the founders’ philosophy right from the beginning.

The original faire organization actually grew to encompass other events and expanded to present Victorian Christmas faires as well.

I suspect many readers here have participated in RenFairses in some capacity, (I worked at one for five summers as a kid), and will have an interest in reading more about their history in this article.

One Of The Last Un-Unionized Groups Of Broadway Workers Looks To Organize

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Last week I saw that production assistants (PA) on Broadway shows were seeking to unionize under the auspices of Actors Equity Association, which represents actors and stage managers.

What really surprised me was that production assistants weren’t part of a union when pretty much every other group that staffs Broadway houses, including the ushers, ticket takers and doormen, are unionized.

Reading the description of what they do and how hard they work, it seems like there would have been a natural fit either in IATSE, the stage hands union, or Actors Equity, and they would have unionized long ago.

PAs, the union says, are hourly employees who work as part of stage management teams “from pre-production through opening night, doing everything from preparing rehearsal materials to ensuring decisions made during rehearsals are recorded to being extra sets of hands and eyes during complicated technical rehearsals to efficiently running errands that keep the rehearsal productive.”

[…]

The unionization would cover PAs who work as part of stage management teams on Broadway and sit-down productions produced by members of The Broadway League.

I strongly suspect there was some sort of politics or bias that prevented production assistants from being courted/allowed to join a union and something has changed. I would love it if someone had any insight.

One thing that may have changed is that Equity has shifted their approach to membership in the last couple years, broadening the scope of those they are willing to represent. I wrote in 2021 about how they adjusted the standards that would allow performers to apply for union membership. As I recently wrote, Equity also successfully unionized dancers at a strip club rather than nudging them toward AGMA, the union representing cabaret performers, or SEIU who had represented dancers at another strip club ~25 years ago.

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