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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.

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.

One Org Making Good On Covid Era Diversity Commitments

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A number of arts organizations made strong commitments to diversify their offerings and the composition of their staffs and performers as they emerged from Covid restrictions. Recently there was a story on Artsjournal.com about the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s (PNB) new dancer roster which is younger and 50% composed of persons of color.

The organization had already begun moving in that direction, including the composition of people whose works they were choosing to dance, but their efforts have accelerated since venues were allowed to reopen. The article cites a woman who wasn’t entirely comfortable being in the company in the pre-Covid era who is more engaged with the organizational culture now.

In addition to changing the face of who is dancing and whose works are being danced to, the company has also addressed the body type and costuming issues which have been a somewhat controversial element of ballet.

Even when PNB performs full-length classical ballets like Swan Lake and Nutcracker, the rows of tutu-clad swans or snowflakes on stage are no longer made up of identical white dancers with long necks, narrow hips and flat chests.

Now dancers wear shoes and tights that match their skin tones, and sometimes Black dancers free their hair from the tight buns that have been de rigueur for ballerinas.

Going into the article, I was looking to see if there was any mention of audience growth or diversity. I was partially thinking of the post I made about Dallas Black Dance Theatre which has thrived since the Covid shutdowns. While anecdotal evidence, if PNB also saw an increase in audiences, it might be a sign there was an undertapped, unmet need that was finally be recognized. I was interested to see the article’s authors didn’t just depend on PNB’s claims about a more diverse audience, but spoke to a media outlet that serves the local Black community.

TraeAnna Holiday of Converge Media, an outlet that covers Seattle’s Black community, wrote in an email that while it has yet to be a major topic of community-wide discussion, she’s seen more diverse audiences at PNB performances.

“People are noticing this shift in diverse representation,” Holiday wrote. “PNB is setting a precedent in the industry; it’s impressive and notable.”

There was paragraph in the article that jumped out at me which I wasn’t entirely sure how to interpret:

To an outsider, PNB seems to be evolving into a contemporary ballet troupe, but Boal politely declines that moniker. “We’re a company that moves, a company that can dance,” he says.

I wondered if the term “contemporary” was being used as a qualifier to suggest PNB isn’t a “real” ballet organization. I am sure there are purists who might say that regardless of the terminology, but those couple sentences made me question if the internal politics of the dance world employed labels like that to signal acceptable boundaries.

Symphony Was Heading Into Trouble, But Apparently No One Told The Musicians

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I have been reading about the closure of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony in Ontario, Canada and some of the stories are pretty heartbreaking. The concertmaster was in a moving van driving from Montreal to start with the symphony when she received word on September 16 that the 2023-2024 season was cancelled. A few days later, the organization declared bankruptcy.

One thing that caught my eye was a quote from one of the percussionists:

“No one saw it coming — I think that’s pretty clear,” adds percussionist Ron Brown, who had been looking forward to his 50th year with the symphony.

“We were told this just a few hours before the season actually started. The word I use is ‘blindsided.’ ”

I read that to mean, no one had been communicating with the musicians because as you read further in the article, it is clear that plenty of people knew the organization was in trouble. The board chair is quoted as saying the symphony had 8,000 subscribers pre-pandemic and now only had 2,000. She is also quoted acknowledging the operational environment for performing arts in North America and orchestras in particular.

It was clear the board knew they were in trouble and that donors felt the organization needed to be restructured, but it doesn’t sound like anyone told the musicians about where things stood:

“We had gone into the line of credit, which was established to support the orchestra, because we were bankrupt,” said Smith-Spencer before the boom came down.

“We had no money in the bank. We were continuing to have conversations with our federal representatives about a grant request, and our five local MPs were not able to get any clarity. We were counting on that money to allow us to essentially start up the season and move forward.”

Desperate, they approached the same donors who had bailed them out in the past, hoping for a last-minute reprieve.

“I will be very blunt,” says Smith-Spencer.

“These are people who care deeply: past board chairs, people who have contributed so much in the past, people who were even part of the ‘Save Our Symphony’ campaign 17 years ago.

“But they had all come to the conclusion that the orchestra, as it is currently structured, is not viable.”

Another article said management just negotiated a 3% salary increase with the musicians in August which makes me wonder if management was engaging in wishful thinking about being able to raise enough money or weren’t accurately projecting costs.

In any case, in the course of negotiations the musicians should have been made aware of the financial status of the symphony. The possibility of the season being cancelled at the very least shouldn’t have blindsided the musicians, but in two different news articles different musicians state they never saw this coming.

Studies Indicate Arts Degrees May Be Worth It

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Recently on the NEA Quick Study podcast Sunil Iyengar, Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts shared data that indicated getting an arts degree can be worth it for artists.   For the purpose of these studies, arts industries were defined as “motion picture, video industries, sound recording, architecture, design services, performing arts and related industries, museums, art galleries, historical sites and similar institutions.”

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the most recent employment data (from mid-Covid 2021) showed that people with undergraduate degrees in the arts had an unemployment rate of 7.5% vs the 4.3% rate for general undergraduate degree holders.

However, those who had arts degrees fared better than artists who didn’t have specialized arts degrees in both employment and earnings. (my emphasis)

“…artists who lack a college degree are more likely to be unemployed than those who do not. Also, artists without college degrees have lower average incomes than non-degree holders. Again, not surprising. We know that education is highly correlated with income for most types of worker. But then Woronkowicz finds that artists who have arts degrees have higher incomes on average than those with a non-arts bachelor’s degree. She also finds that artists with arts degrees are more likely than non-arts degree holders to work in an arts industry. This tells us perhaps that when it comes to occupations and industries, the arts are very similar to other fields of specialized knowledge in at least this respect. The pursuit of a degree in an arts field improves on average the career prospects of those who want to take a job in an arts industry and stick with it.

It should be noted that the data for these findings came from pre-Covid period of 2015-2019.

What I really found interesting were the results of interviews with early, mid, and late stage artists regarding how their network of relationships that helped advance their career opportunities fared during the pandemic. Most artists worked on maintaining existing relationships during the pandemic rather than working on developing new connections. What caught my eye was that early and late career artists indicated having problems maintaining or developing their connections.

My theory is that colleagues of those in the early stages hadn’t yet developed foundational relationships that were useful to themselves and others. Late career artists may have relationships with people who were retiring or leaving their positions resulting in a loss of a useful relationship for an artist.

Reading the following from the podcast transcript emphasized the importance of networking and resource sharing is to developing a career in the arts.

But as Skaggs observes, there were different implications of these findings across different career stages. She describes early career artists, those in their 20s, as being socially adrift during year one of the pandemic. They were finding a hard time building new connections with others in their field and even struggling to maintain their current professional relationships. They also tended to gravitate to social media and online communities to access resources that could solve real world problems like financial difficulties. But those connections didn’t seem to help necessarily in advancing their artistic careers as a whole.

More established artists, meanwhile, in their 30s through 50s, were generally better connected than were early career artists, and often use these long-standing ties to, quote, gather in person or discuss art, network and socialize. Not only were these artists better able to draw upon their networks for support and for progress in their careers, they also reciprocated the support by sharing resources within their own social and professional networks.

…and then late career artists, here defined as in their 60s or 70s, felt largely isolated in their work and personal lives, even though they seemed adept at using social media during the pandemic, according to Skaggs. They expressed concern about losing touch with their professional ties during the pandemic, yet they persisted in their careers and interestingly, Jo, this is the only age group the researchers found where the artists said they were, in her words, losing touch with existing professional connections that they had before the pandemic.

Just As I Was Wondering About How Things Turned Out

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Last week I was flying into to Indianapolis to attend the Midwest Arts Xpo conference and I idly wondered how things had turned out at Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields after their job posting controversy back in 2021.

If you don’t recall/weren’t aware, the job description said the museum was ““…seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience.’”

The implication that diversity efforts would be limited to activities that didn’t alienate the existing white audience was not well received by the greater arts and cultural community.

Coincidentally to my musing, last week the museum announced that Belinda Tate who had served as executive director Kalamazoo Institute of Arts since 2014 would be the new director starting in November.

According to the article, even after the 2021 controversy saw the resignation and replacement of the CEO & President, an uncomfortable culture remained which hopefully Tate and current CEO/President Colette Pierce Burnette, who started in August 2022, can successfully work together on shifting.

Since Venable’s departure, Newfields has also faced allegations that it had facilitated a “toxic” and discriminatory work culture at the museum, according to an open letter from Kelli Morgan, its former associate curator of American art. In the letter, Morgan described a “racist rant” from one board museum member.

Tate must contend with the legacy of Venable’s polarizing vision for the museum’s programming which, according to his critics, prioritized blockbuster exhibitions. Oft-cited examples include a show devoted to Bugatti cars and the Winterlights festival, which involved stringing flora in the garden with colorful lights during holiday time and charging $25 for entry.

Stuff You Don’t Think About – Relation Between Insurance And Ability To Hang Art

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Lately I have been seeing articles in The Guardian that are calling attention to overlooked aspects of creative practice that have big impacts if conditions start to change. A couple weeks ago it was the impact the dwindling number of piano tuners and technicians can have on the ability to present live performance. More recently, I saw an article about how changes in policies by Australian insurer, QBE, may limit and prohibit visual artists from painting murals and even hanging art in galleries.

This is a subject you don’t normally think about in relation to creative practice, but it seems pretty obvious that artists probably want to be protected from injury when they climb into a scissor lift or scale scaffolding.  I don’t know anything about Australian law so there may be stricter requirements to have the insurance than residents in other countries may imagine.

The article notes that in the last decade that the  National Association for the Visual Arts has been providing the policies through the insurer QBE, there haven’t been any public liability claims related to working at heights.

QBE will no longer cover artists working at heights of more than five metres, and those working at lower heights face extra premiums of up to $600 per annum.

The carve-outs would effectively prevent artists doing public art and mural projects or installing their own work in galleries, according to Penelope Benton from the National Association for the Visual Arts (Nava).

[…]

The carve-outs would also affect professional art installers, and emerging artists and curators, who generally install their own work.

I would be interested to know if anyone sees the possibility of a similar situation emerging in their country.

Bad Enough Having Computers Making Hiring Decisions, Are Grants Awards Next?

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A couple weeks ago Vu Le wrote about how useful AI can potentially be in the process of writing grants. So often granting organizations essentially ask for the same information, with some variation in what they want answered when and the word/character limits they have set for each response.

Given that grant awards can tend to favor organizations with the resources to employ a professional grant writer who knows how to employ terminology and language that funders seek, under resourced groups and those who are not comfortable or facile at employing the preferred vernacular could benefit from the use of AI.

Unfortunately, Le notes, some funders are using AI to detect if an organization is using AI to write their grants. Le writes:

“Grants are not college essays or news articles, where it matters who actually does the writing. Grants are a tedious mechanism for delivering answers about an organization and its work. AI just makes it less tedious. Punishing nonprofits for using AI is petty and paternalistic.”

He also says some funders are moving toward having AI evaluate the grant proposals which is even worse for a number of reasons.

“Funders who use AI to write grant RFPs, read proposals, eliminate applications, come up with a list of grant finalists, or whatever, should be aware that AI engines, which are mostly designed by white dudes, will likely favor white-coded proposals. It will be interesting to see the dynamics between AI-generated grant proposals and AI-supported grant review and selection. To keep it from reinforcing inequity, both funders and nonprofits need to be aware of biases that are built into these tools.”

For years there have been conversations about the job seeking process and how dispiriting it is to have a computer program evaluate your resume and cover letter before summarily rejecting those materials before a human ever gets to see them. Many have discovered how to game the system by using keywords in their materials, sometimes resulting in stilted or nonsensical content which nonetheless sees their application advance.

The grant application process is bad enough as it is without incentivizing cynical attempts to game the system. What would it say if an AI awarded a grant to an AI constructed application that no one ever seriously evaluated over an impassioned application written by a human? Should funding for homeless projects be determined solely by algorithms conversing with each other?

If funders are trying to detect grants written by AI out of concern about possible fraud, that is certainly valid. But that is also an indication that funding decisions should never be entirely made on the basis of polished prose. Vu Le suggests that just as AI can free applicants up to concentrate on delivering their core services, so too can it free funders up to focus on more directly interacting with those they fund to learn more about the work they do. Likewise, they can work on re-evaluating the criteria and processes they employ as part of their funding decisions.

There is an opportunity to double check the AI. Are its recommendations poor to middling in quality? Are those it rejects doing a better job than the AI indicates?  AI can certainly be useful in removing some of the subjectivity a person brings to information, but for every example of how it is better than humans, there are examples of gaps, some times so glaring a five year old would have avoided them that AI fails to fill.

More Reasons Not To Use Contextomy

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I recently saw an article in The Guardian about a controversy that arose from misrepresenting reviews of a book by Jordan Peterson through the use of selective editing.

The Times columnist James Marriott tweeted an image of the cover featuring a quote from his review that appears to endorse the work. In the now deleted tweet, he wrote: “Incredible work from Jordan Peterson’s publisher. My review of this mad book was probably the most negative thing I have ever written.”

The quote attributed to Marriott read: “A philosophy of the meaning of life … the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written.” The actual phrase from Marriott’s review is: “one of the most sensitive and lucid passages of prose he has written”, a description specifically about one chapter in an otherwise almost entirely negative review.

Other reviewers were likewise quoted out of context. The issue is causing one publisher to create a best practices document for their staff.

Nicola Solomon, chief executive of the SoA (Society of Authors), said that “quoting lines out of context isn’t clever marketing”, calling the practice “morally questionable”. Readers and authors “deserve honest, fair marketing from publishers. We can’t get that by undermining and misrepresenting one writer to boost the sales of another. It puts off reviewers from reviewing and readers from buying,” she told the Bookseller.

Solomon is later quoted as noting that this sort of editing of quotes likely qualifies as a criminal act under an English consumer protection regulation from 2008.

It may still be the case, but at one time this sort of creative omission was widespread in relation to movie reviews. I wrote a post about the practice, which is called contextomy, back in 2007. I basically wrote along the same lines as Nicola Solomon that the practice undermines confidence.

It also occurred to me that the growing push to use marketing language focused on the audience experience and needs is another reason to avoid using out of context reviewer quotes…or reviewer quotes at all. Quoting reviews that focus on the excellence of the artist and their achievements is often less helpful in making a decision to participate than customer focused language.

In the process of searching for my post on contextomy, I came across a 2006 post I made about how an obsessive focus on perfection can create an environment where anything less is viewed as a failure.

In there I quote a Juilliard professor:

“…an average graduate of law school or medical school can still have a decent career. But it is not possible, he said, for a successful artist to be only average.”

Shortly after, I quote Artful Manager author Andrew Taylor about the language used in arts marketing materials and grant reports:

Perfection, triumph, success, and positive spin. Their performances are always exceptional. Their audiences are always ecstatic. Their reviews are always resounding (or mysteriously missing from the packet). Their communities are always connected and enthralled. In short, they are superhuman, disconnected, and insincere.

In 2006 arts professionals were saying this sort of language comes across as disconnected and insincere, but it took another 10-15 years before this concept was embraced and repeated often enough for it to gain traction. Hindsight being what it is, that is nearly a decade of what could have been constructive marketing messaging that has been lost.

Though to be fair, social media platforms which are so useful in disseminating these conversations only became publicly available around 2006 (Twitter & Facebook) Linkedin was 2004 but wasn’t really hosting these conversations then.

The Bell Works, But It Needs You

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A couple weeks ago, I caught a story on NPR about a temporary monument exhibit that has been placed on the National Mall in Washington, DC.  While a little more permanent than a pop-up exhibit, it is only meant to appear on the Mall for a limited time.   The project, Beyond Granite, was initiated by Monument Lab which commissioned six artists “.…to think about histories that haven’t been commemorated by the Mall and to look to moments when the Mall was charged by people, not statues.”

One of the pieces is a playground inspired by a picture of a Baltimore playground taken a few days after it was segregated showing black and white children playing together. Young visitors are able to play on the equipment which comprises the piece.

Another is a piece commemorating Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Day concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after she was prohibited from performing in Constitution Hall because she was Black.

The piece that caught my ear was “Let Freedom Ring,” that plays “My Country Tis of Thee,” a song Anderson sang in her concert. The installation plays all but the last note leaving a bystander to step forward and pull a lever to complete the song.

“The piece is simply saying, America is not America without you as an active citizen,” Ramírez Jonas says. “It needs you in some way.”

Doing a little more research, I discovered the sculptor, Paul Ramírez Jonas, is chair of the Art Department at Cornell University. An article on Cornell’s website provided more information on the philosophy behind the piece and the bystander’s role.

Before participants pull the lever to ring the last bell measuring more than two feet tall and wide, Ramírez Jonas asks them to declare why they are doing it: Are they celebrating “freedom to” do something, or “freedom from” something? They can preserve their choice in a graphite rubbing of one of those two prompts, inscribed on opposite sides of the bell.

“I’m not telling you what your idea of freedom is,” Ramírez Jonas said. “I’m just suggesting that there’s flexibility, that there’s room for inserting yourself.”

Another inscription shows the song’s first verse with selected words missing, inviting participants to modify the lyrics – as Anderson did when she sang “our country” instead of “my country,” and “we sing” instead of “I sing.”

The process of “pulling together,” Ramírez Jonas said, occurs through awareness of others’ expressions of freedom and a sense of collective responsibility. Reflecting a bias toward optimism, Ramírez Jonas said, he never contemplated a design that might have rendered “America” unable to be completed.

“The bell works,” he said, “but it needs you.”

Reading a Bloomberg article on the project, I became aware of another piece by Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke (Crow) artist. It features an enlarged version of the artist’s thumbprint encased in glass and outlined in red soil. The names of 50 Crow leaders who signed agreements with the US government, often by using their thumbprints. The name of the piece, “The Soil You See…” comes from the words of one of the few survivors of Battle of Little Bighorn

“The soil you see is not ordinary soil — it is the dust of the blood, the flesh and bones of our ancestors. . . . You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature’s earth as the upper portion is Crow.”

Strip Club Dancers Return To Work With Actors’ Equity Representation

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Last September I made a post about strippers working at a club in Los Angeles who were approaching Actors’ Equity Association to help them unionize their workplace. Today I saw on CNN.com that they had indeed held a successful unionization vote under the auspices of Equity last May (NPR story).

While the setting of the strike may add a salacious air to the story, the basic details of the effort are pretty common across all unionization fights. The dancers forming the union were contesting their categorization as contractors rather then employees, seeking better working conditions, and better assurances of their safety and security. There were lock outs, picketing, suits contesting the dancers’ right to form a union.

It appears they don’t have a contract yet, but the dancers returned to work at the end of August in a gesture of mutual trust based on physical improvements that had been made during renovations as well as changes in policy and practice.

Actors’ Equity suggests that the legal rulings that lead to this may set a precedent for other workers in the beauty and entertainment industries to be categorized as employees rather than contractors.

Strength Of Intent To Return May Be Stronger Predictor Of Return Than Even Enjoyment Of Experience

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I recently received an email which directed me to a 2021 study funded by the Wallace Foundation called, What They Say And What They Do which essentially looked at whether people who say they will return to a venue actually do.

Bottom line is yes, the more strongly people express a desire to return, the more likely they are to return. However, as with everything, there are some interesting nuances.

A couple disclaimers, most of which appear right at the start of the presentation. First, this research was conducted pre-Covid. Second, the three organizations that participated were “large, well-established in their discipline and predominantly white.” (Goodman Theatre, Lyric Opera, both in Chicago and Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle.) So your mileage may vary.

The study was conducted across the 2014-2019 seasons. Single ticket buyers were surveyed about their interest in returning and then the organizations cross referenced that data with whether the people actually purchased again. The presentation also notes that people who fill out surveys are already engaged with the organization and therefore more inclined to return. Certainly there were many who didn’t fill out the survey that may have returned. I also wondered how many may have returned where a different family member purchased the tickets and used a different email or mailing address that might have been missed.

The finding was that the stronger people expressed their interest in returning on a Likert scale, the more likely they were to return – 49% of single ticket buyers responding as “definitely” and 31% responding “probably” returned within two years. Interestingly, while enjoyment and overall experience were also associated with an actual return, these factors weren’t as strong a predictor of return as stated intent to return.

Based on these responses, the Goodman Theater focused more expensive marketing efforts on those responding they would definitely return and experienced a higher return with that group.

While those 65 and older had slightly higher rates of return, the relation between strength of stated intent to return with an actual return held true across all age groups.

What I really found interesting was that what people said they did or didn’t like was the same whether they returned or not.  The presentation has charts which show responses to enjoyment of the performance and quality of  experience don’t vary a lot between those who do and don’t return. But the word clouds generated from the comments really illustrate how little difference positive and negative elements factored in to whether people returned or not.

I have seen a number of studies saying if you can only ask one question on a survey, it should be whether you would recommend an experience to a friend. Whether you will return yourself seems closely related to that question. While this data is definitely limited, there are hints that stated willingness to return may be a strong indicator that someone will.

Another Effort At Efficiently Crunching 990 Data

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Thanks to the Non-Profit Law Blog’s weekly curated link list, I learned that there is a new collaborative working on a way to provide a clearinghouse for raw, clean, and standardized nonprofit tax data gathered from Form 990 filings.

While that may not sound like it is relevant to your daily life at all, being able to easily access that day will make researching non-profits much easier, hopefully resulting in data which will support better decision making.

Drew McManus painstakingly extracted data from 990 filings from 2005 to 2022 for his annual Orchestra Compensation Report project on Adaptistration. He would frequently grumble about the fact that the data was not available in a machine readable format that would make that data so much easier to process and shift through. If I recall correctly, his go to source was the Pro Publica Non Profit Explorer which is contributing their data to this new clearinghouse.

Having good data about things like compensation can help advance equity and inclusion goals. The Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) is engaged in an Art Compensation Project for some of these very reasons.

Better data crunching capabilities can also facilitate the study of differences by region and discipline for revenues, expenses, impact of private vs. public & government based grant making, etc.

Given that there have been so many groups who have attempted to serve as a clearinghouse for 990 data, the biggest question perhaps is whether this new collaboration can make it work better than in the past.

You’re Not Hiring Them To Fit In

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There was a short piece in Fast Company today that discusses hiring employees in similar terms to what is required to broaden and diversify audiences – You have to hire for the company culture you want rather than hiring someone to fit existing work culture.  Basically, you can’t expect the changes you want to happen by forcing new hires to conform and fit in. Effort needs to be made to support and acknowledge the change new hires are bringing to the organization. (my emphasis)

I’ve found that companies genuinely committed to improving their workplace cultures also have another set of priorities. They look for candidates with a proven record of curiosity, innovation, and making change inside organizations.

[…]

To attract changemakers, organizations should demonstrate a genuine commitment to fostering this kind of internal innovation. In company events and full staff meetings, highlight employees who have called out problems, suggested solutions, and improved how the organization operates. One company even rewards employees for making new and interesting mistakes, showing that it supports employees taking risks and trying out new things.

Committing to changing organizational culture needs full investment because it is the right thing to do rather than the thing people expect the organization to do. It has been noted that a lot of the diversity and equity leader hires that occurred in the wave after the George Floyd protests have started to disappear, frequently due to the lack of internal support and delegated authority provided to those hired. Companies would loudly announce their commitment to change, but because there was no accountability, layoffs and resignations followed.

August Wilson Biography Causing Some Buzz

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The Atlantic recently ran a piece by Imani Perry reviewing a biography of playwright August Wilson by Patti Hartigan. The book has been getting a lot of notice over the last few weeks. This is one of many reviews.

To some extent Wilson’s story is not unexpected or surprising. A child voracious for knowledge who is poorly served by the education system. A playwright who struggles to get his work seen because audiences aren’t interested in the stories he wants to tell. When he does become successful, he feels the conflict between staying true versus selling out and is criticized for making white audiences feel uncomfortable, but not pushing so far as to cause them not to see his plays.

It was interesting to read that Wilson and his collaborators may have among the first to pioneer using regional theaters to develop works before moving them to Broadway.

Not least, Richards took on the challenge of attracting a producer. “Serious plays concerning minorities … are not considered a good risk,” he observed,…Together, Richards and Wilson came up with an unusual strategy, and in the process helped inaugurate a new and closer relationship between commercial and nonprofit theater in America. Work was first staged in regional theaters, which were free of Broadway’s commercial pressures and able to take chances, and Wilson got the kind of “long development process” he knew he needed, revising tirelessly in rehearsals and in reaction to performances.

His 1987 play, Fences, was the one he liked the least and felt he had compromised on to please audiences and critics. It was Robert Brustein who was among those who criticized Wislon most strongly and suggested Wilson was being too polite with audiences.

“Brustein implied that Wilson’s work in general was calibrated to elicit white guilt without jeopardizing white acceptance. Any Black artist who has acquired a modicum of mainstream acclaim while sustaining a sincere interest in Black life knows this kind of criticism intimately. Wilson’s experience is an aching reminder that no amount of professional stature insulates one from it. In fact, quite the contrary.”

Fewer Non-Profits Engaging In Lobbying Advocacy Than 20 Years Ago

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According to a story on the Associated Press, fewer non-profits are engaging in lobbying efforts than 20 years ago. The Independent Sector had commissioned a study that found less than 1/3 of organizations engaged in lobbying over the last five years versus nearly 3/4  of organizations in 2000. Given that there was a lot of advocacy for Covid funding, these results make me wonder if more people weren’t engaged in lobbying in the last five years and didn’t consider what they were doing to be lobbying or if fewer entities did a lot of the heavy lifting versus twenty years ago.

The survey results do seem to indicate organizations are unaware of lobbying rules or uncomfortable with engaging in lobbying and lack the resources to participate.

And even though nonprofits work on a range of issues that are affected by policy choices, such as funding for the arts and science and policies on hot-button issues like abortion and gun control, less than one-third of nonprofits said they were well-versed in how to legally conduct advocacy campaigns and how much lobbying they were permitted to do. Twenty years ago more than half knew the rules, the survey found.

[…]

Holding nonprofits back, Watkins said, was a lack of money to hire full-time staff with policy expertise and fear that taking part in debates on policy matters or providing voters with nonpartisan voting guides would put their nonprofit status in jeopardy.

Independent Sector plans to conduct studies to dig deeper into the reasons for the decline, but experts said many nonprofits don’t have the money to engage in policy debates. And some organizations may fear taking public stances on issues, given the heated political environment.

Sticking their necks out could make them targets of political opponents, they said.

 

A number of survey responses seemed to indicate people were concerned about running afoul IRS rules that prohibit investing a substantial amount of time and resources into lobbying. Substantial is apparently a much higher bar than people realize, though obviously the term leaves a considerable amount of gray area open to interpretation.

While Gorovitz allowed that the IRS regulations on nonprofit advocacy can be confusing, the guidance provided by the agency, he said, is often misunderstood.

“It does not mean ‘don’t lobby,’” he said. “It means lobby. It’s an express invitation in the tax code that says you can lobby.”

Broadway Books Babysitters To Bolster Attendance

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Ken Davenport recently posted that the Broadway Production of Here Lies Love was working on lowering barriers to attendance by offering babysitting during four upcoming performances.

“Here Lies Love” has teamed up with the Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL), Broadway Babysitters and Open Jar Studios to offer free childcare services at the Sept. 23 matinée as well as three additional dates to be announced. Any ticket holder for the Sept. 23 performance is eligible to sign up for the complimentary benefit.

[…]

“After years of partnering with Off-Broadway and regional theaters to offer caregiver support, the historical significance of ‘Here Lies Love’ being the first Broadway show to offer ethical, accessible childcare to their caregiver theater patrons is not only incredibly exciting, but long awaited by our team,” said a representative of Broadway Babysitters in a statement.

As you may have noted in the quote above, other venues had been partnering with Broadway Babysitters, which is based in and around NYC and Chicago, to provide childcare in conjunction with performances. The PAAL website notes the off-Broadway show, “Mary Gets Hers” will be offering babysitting for the September 30 performance.

This reminded me of a post I did in 2009 on a company called Sitters Studio which employed performing and visual artists to provide childcare in a manner similar to Broadway Babysitters. I received a database error when trying to visit their website so I am not sure if they are still in business or suffering technical difficulties.

Will Dwindling Supply Of Trained Piano Tuners Also Threaten Arts Orgs

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Caught a timely article from The Guardian about the dwindling number of piano tuners in Australia. I am fairly certain arts and cultural organizations in other countries are having a similar experience when trying to schedule piano tuners. Personally, I have been in a situation where we had a choice of two-three tuners which dwindled to one that lives a two hour drive away and covers a large geographic area.

I am not sure what the situation is in the US and other countries, but people interviewed for the article note that there aren’t a lot of training programs in the country and a lack of effort to make people aware that training opportunities exist. It isn’t a profession that is entered lightly.

“People think, ‘I’ll learn to tune a piano, I’ll do it in a year and that’s it’, but no, it takes 10 years to learn how to tune a piano, and 20 years to master it,” Kinney says.

The training takes even longer for piano technicians who do broader work on repairing and refurbishing pianos. Tuning can only do so much before the instrument needs a major overhaul.

By “good tuners”, Kinney means piano technicians. These are people who have undergone a year of training as piano tuners before developing their skills at international piano factories or with mentors, learning action regulation, voicing, diagnosis and complex problem solving.

[…]

When Scott Davie, an Australian concert pianist, has toured through Australia, he’s played regional shows where the pianos had been tuned but not properly maintained. When this is the case, he must work hard to alter the way he plays to finish the show.

“I’d be remembering which notes are going out of tune and which notes are really badly out of tune, and leaving them out of chords or trying to play them so softly that you couldn’t hear them,” he says. “But it gets to a point where it sounds horrible, if a piano is really starting to break down.”

This article made me think–we are hearing about all the arts organizations that are closing or having a difficult time, but there are other elements of the infrastructure that are probably being overlooked that may cause on going issues as well.

Give A Kid A Culture Voucher And They Buy Books As Well As Experiences

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I have been keeping an eye on the cultural voucher programs various European countries employ to encourage young people to get out and engage in different experiences. The program differ in detail. There are some that provide rail passes to allow people to explore different geographic areas, including outside their own countries. Others are focused on arts and cultural experiences within the country.  I have written about Germany’s KulturPass before, but I recently caught a story about the most recent round of the program.

According to a recent article, as of August 9, in terms of units purchased since this year’s KulturPass program began on June 14, books and other printed materials have lead the way by far.  Then cinema tickets, concerts and theater, museums and parks, musical instruments, audio media and then sheet music.  In all, about 200,000 units have been purchased in the last two months. About 136,000 German 18 year olds have activated the passes worth €200 (US$219)

In terms of amount spent, concerts and theater lead the way given the greater cost. “….at something around or above €12 million (US$13.2); books follow with so €11 million (US$12.7 million); and cinema tickets follow in third place with €461,000 or more (US$505,900).”

Lest you think Germans are particularly bookish with 49% of voucher funds being used to purchase tomes, Italy has seen similar results with their pass.

“…Italy’s corresponding “18App”—the original “culture voucher” for young citizens in Europe. There, in 2021 specifically, the publishers association reported that 18-year-old Italians were spending 80 percent of their €500 vouchers on books during January and February of that year.”

Obviously, there may be differences in the design and implementation of the pass in Italy that encouraged larger purchases of books. The fact these numbers come from a period 10 months into the Covid pandemic when there were reduced opportunities for other activities likely influences the numbers as well. However, these programs are good examples of a tool to provide bottom up funding to provide a little stimulation to arts and culture organizations.

When Trying To Break Boundaries Threatens To Break Your Spirit

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Last week on the Association of Performing Arts Professional’s (APAP) podcast, Emily Isaacson of Classical Uprising talked about some of the frustrating experiences she has had trying to advance her goal of changing the context through which classical music is viewed and experienced.

One of the biggest impediments she has experienced was the view that she isn’t a serious artists because she is a woman and a mother. She shared, apparently for the first time publicly, that a family friend whom she had known since she was a child asked her to partner on creating a music festival, but when they got together to plan their second season, he dismissed her efforts and professionalism.

“He started to call me randomly to tell me that I would never be taken seriously as a musician that because I was a mom, I was distracted that if I thought that my degrees were worth anything, I was kidding myself because real musicians don’t care about degrees,. That I made, I was making a fool of myself on the podium.”

She said the conversation got a lot worse from there. She said she has run up against similar sentiments regarding other programming she has done:

So people wanna label me as a woman conductor, and that’s my whole soapbox. The other thing is they say, “Oh, well, the fact that she wants to do, you know, Hayden’s creation in a park must mean that she’s really not that sophisticated a musician. She’s doing it differently because she can’t hang with the big boys and the old club and you know, this, that, and the other thing.”

Or like, “Oh, isn’t it cute that she wants to do things that are not just four kids, but intergenerational because she’s a mom and so focused on being a mommy and mommy music”, …

I’m advocating for a different way of presenting and producing classical music, so that it is more social and more interactive and more casual, in the way that actually it was originally conceived.

The other thing she says she runs into is the echo chamber type thinking among different organizations. She talks about how when she attended the 2023 APAP conference, she struck up a conversation with the representative of an organization promoting a Breaking Boundaries series. She was somewhat disappointed to learn that their concept of breaking boundaries was presenting works by female composers one year and works by minority composers the next year. This essentially mirrored what so many other orchestra organizations were doing.

I’m good quick on my feet, so I pivoted and I was like, “Another way that you could think about like pushing boundaries, is by thinking about like who we’re performing for, how we’re performing and what, what are the things that we include in the performance that make people feel either included to be there or more connected to the music than they did before?” And I start giving examples from my programs about, doing Flight of the Bumble Beer where you do music flights alongside five-ounce pours of beer or doing Bach Bends Yoga.

Like really, here’s some like con this is not lofty ideas. Here’s some concrete ideas and this person could just not understand what I was talking about. That was so frustrating for me because it made me realize that the national conversation and the conversation that I’m trying to have is just ships passing in the night…

You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript to learn more. Isaacson starts the episode so her story is easy to find.

Is Bottom Up Funding Of The Arts The Next Business Model?

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There was another editorial about how the arts should be funded that is getting a lot of notice this week. You may recall I had posted about Isaac Butler’s editorial in the NY Times a couple weeks ago calling for greater public funding of the arts.  This week novelist, playwright and screenwriter Monica Byrne advocated for a bottom up funding model in the Washington Post.

She notes that the artists often get short shrift when it comes to attention and funding. When organizations get funded, it is often administrators and buildings which benefit before the artists do. She doesn’t specifically call for increased federal funding. Given that the culture wars of the 80s basically ended NEA funding of individual artists, that is probably a non-starter. Instead, she is advocating for the creation of works to be driven by artists who decide where to site their performances rather than the venue deciding what they want to do and then contracting artists.

For theater, as we know it, to have any future at all, a new economic model must take its place, founded on a simple principle: fund artists directly. Then let the artists produce their own work, rent their own venues and pay their own collaborators.

[…]

It’s true that scaling down would mean prioritizing certain kinds of theater over others. But this is the case in every era: Some aesthetics thrive while others die out. Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine, imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts. Art that is fresh, fluid, immediate, accessible and affordable — to make and to see — all because we collectively decided to fund the artists directly.

Is there any place for existing nonprofit theaters in this model? Sure. Reshape them into direct granting agencies and public resources somewhat like libraries, offering artists and companies production slots on a lottery basis…It would also mean that existing artistic directors understand that, not only are they not the ordained curators of culture, they are only useful to the art form insofar they serve artists — the creators of the form.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? The idea of turning theaters into public resources like libraries is interesting on paper. If non-profits were in a place to provide advice and support about audience cultivation and marketing practices attuned to the local conditions, that could be a valuable resource. Though my concern would be that we might end up having the same conversations we currently are about funders having priorities that are out of synch with the changing needs of the operating environment. It may not start out that way, but I could see things creeping toward “arts need to be run like a business” as staff turned over, etc.

What Donors Want Vs. Org Capacity To Provide

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Today Margy Waller posted a link to an opinion piece from the Chronicle of Philanthropy with that comment that the piece was not satire. While the piece was apparently posted in June, a version of it appeared in print last week.  Yesterday Vu Le made a post that was indeed satire as it poked fun at the opinion piece without naming it directly. I just happened to see both pieces within minutes of each other.

In the original, Why I Stopped Donating to Your Organization Theodore Wagenaar makes various criticisms about how slowly organizations respond and acknowledge donations. In one case, he suggests an email immediately upon receipt. He also says groups are slow to respond when asked about how money will be used.

In his post, Why I’m no longer donating to your no-good, very bad nonprofit, Vu Le basically says given the lack of resources and personnel, effectively delivering services to those in need and handling donor communications and paperwork are close to mutually exclusive.

I have been very disappointed to say the least. Some nonprofits don’t respond at all. Some wait excessively long periods of time before getting back to me. One time I had to wait a whole month like an animal for a handwritten thank-you note. Another organization received a huge grant from another donor, and I expected them to know immediately how that money would affect their operations, and more importantly, how it would affect me.

[…]

Be prompt in your responses: Whenever you get a donation, make sure to immediately stop whatever you’re doing, such as helping a child find food during the summer or saving democracy or whatever your mission is, and make sure the donor feel properly thanked.

[…]

Be transparent how you use donations: Every donor has a right to know down to the penny how and when their money was used and toward what end. What percentage of my donation was used on electricity? Did some of this money go to staff pay? If so, which staff, how much, and what did they spend this portion of their wages on? I hope it’s not caviar or fancy CD players, because I don’t want my money going to those things.

That first paragraph above was in response to the following in Wagenaar’s piece:

For example, one of the organizations I support received a multimillion-dollar donation from MacKenzie Scott. I expected some information about the award and how the organization would use it. I wanted to know if I should redirect or reduce my contribution to ensure it did the most good or went where the need was greater, but nothing materialized. I contacted the director but never heard back.

Six months later, I shared my disappointment with the director and said I would temporarily stop donating. That led to a discussion about the reasons for the delay, why it was important to share this information with donors, and a resumption of my support. Had I not followed up, I would have likely stopped donating.

The next few parts of Le’s post that I quoted seem aligned with this:

Be transparent about where donations go. Donors want to hear how their funds will be used. Share immediate plans for the donation when it’s received, and later explain where it ended up and the impact it had. This might include information such as the number of meals delivered, types of assistance provided, how many schools received funding, and more…

I fund several college scholarships for low-income students. I want to know who received the scholarships and the amounts. I don’t want my donation to displace financial aid that the college would have already given. I’d rather my money provided additional aid beyond what the school allots, and I’ll donate more to scholarships that do that. I cannot, however, make that decision if the colleges don’t supply the relevant data.

Clearly, Wagenaar is deeply invested and engaged in making sure the funds he provides are being used to degree he feels is effective. He wants a degree of granularity that other people would flip past in an annual report. Some of his concerns have some validity. A lot of state lotteries were sold to citizens as supporting education, but the reality turned out to be that the lottery funds replaced what the state legislature was providing rather than being on top of state funding. He seems to have similar concerns regarding scholarships. Similarly, some non-profits are really organized in sending out their appeals on time, but aren’t as diligent with the follow up communications, even after a significant time has past.

But as Vu Le suggests, organizations don’t often know exactly how they will employ funds the moment they come in and often have a broader view of how the funds can best advance the organization’s work than donors do. As a student, yes I would have loved to have more scholarship money on top of what the school was providing. But the school can see an opportunity to provide funding for an additional person they couldn’t have before.

Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

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There was an interesting and rather lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week about the puppetry program at West Virginia University. It is apparently one of the few degree programs in puppetry in the country. As you might imagine, it is in danger of being shutdown.

The article notes that while puppetry is held in high regard in many cultures, it is considered low culture and content for children in the U.S.

In Indonesia, wayang kulit, or shadow-puppet shows, would stretch from night until dawn, illuminated by oil lamps. In Japan’s Bunraku theater, which originated in the 17th century, apprentices toiled for 10 years to master manipulating just the feet of dignified puppets.

Yet is appears in more sophisticated content evoking delight from mass audiences:

That perception has staying power, even in the midst of a multidecade renaissance. The Lion King and its dazzling animal puppets became the highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time. The internet erupted when it first saw Baby Yoda, who is brought to life in the television series The Mandalorian, in part, by a puppet.

[…]

Puppetry abounds. And yet it remains peripheral. Puppet theater has “never fully established a fixed role for itself in contemporary American society,” writes John Bell, a prolific puppet scholar, in his 2000 book Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History. It “has had to constantly reinvent itself in order to survive.”

Of course there is also the recent production of Life of Pi that also uses life sized puppetry rather effectively. I saw this video of a lecture using the tiger puppet from the production on Reddit a few months ago. In some respects it is a more effective illustration of the work that went into the show than some of the promotional videos the production put out. Even though people can clearly see the three people manipulating the puppet within arm’s reach, the coordination and motion study the team invested sends people scurrying back.

California Politicians Ask T. Swift To Postpone Shows In Solidarity With Union Strike

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Via the CityLab newsletter, Politico recently reported that the Lt. Governor of California, Eleni Kounalakis, was among a number of politicians calling upon Taylor Swift to postpone her shows in Los Angeles to stand in solidarity with hotel workers who are striking for better pay and working conditions.

In the open letter to Swift, Kounalakis and the others wrote that the tour makes area hotels lots of money — with Los Angeles area businesses “doubling and tripling what they charge because you are coming.”

At the same time, the group wrote, many hotel housekeepers and other workers in the region can’t afford to live close to their jobs and some sleep in their cars and risk losing their homes.

“Hotel workers are fighting for their lives. They are fighting for a living wage. They have gone on strike. Now, they are asking for your support,” they wrote. “Speak Now! Stand with hotel workers and postpone your concerts.”

I have a lot of mixed thoughts about this just in terms of how responsive politicians are when the arts and culture sector lobbies for their support. How big and influential you need to be for politicians to pay attention to you. I also wonder how serious the politicians may be in making this request. Are they just posturing to make political points or are they really resolved to bear the consequences if Swift does decide to postpone the shows, potentially raising the ire of fans, but also other workers and companies that stand to benefit economically from the concerts. Apparently the tour has been paying out bonuses to the tour crew.

I am not saying that the striking hotel workers aren’t worthy of support.  It would definitely have a huge impact on behalf of the union and draw attention to their cause. It just feels like a cynical attempt to score points given that it is pretty safe bet that the shows will go on regardless of how loudly they request their postponement.

NYC TKTS Booth Turns 50

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On June 25, the TKTS booth in Times Square turned 50. I have written about some precursors to the discount ticketing booth The whole history is pretty fascinating, especially if you view it in the continuum of online ticket resellers.

The AP ran a story about the history of the booth. The recent $18 million renovation in 2008 resulted in the slick, glass enclosed booth with the amphitheater like seating area. However, the original booth was an abandoned trailer donated by NYC Parks Department placed with the goal of stabilizing the seedy neighborhood. I remember that original booth…and the seedy neighborhood.

Mayers and Schiff were given just $5,000 for the capital budget, and they rented scaffolding to go around the booth. They wove a translucent plastic fabric with the iconic logo among the bars and clamped spotlights on the frame.

[…]

They thought it would stay up for a year or two, at best. Instead, it won design awards and lasted decades. Their influence can be seen in the abbreviated, vowel-less apps and company titles of today — Flickr to Unbxd and DNCE.

I get a kick out of the idea that this cobbled together structure won design awards.

If you have been to Times Square recently you know it is the riotous center of activity with costumed characters available for paid selfies and people urging you to buy tickets to specific shows. The atmosphere can tend to be a little off-putting. However, the TKTS staff are not permitted to advocate for a specific show, but instead can make recommendations of multiple shows based on the genre of show you might like to see. Or you can ask other folks in line for recommendations since it can take up to 45 minutes to get through the line.

Do You Remember Your First Concert Experience?

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Last week Washington Post contributor Theodore Johnson reflected back on the first concert he saw when he was 9 years old (The Fat Boys). He noted that due to Covid restrictions, this summer would a delayed first concert experience for a lot of young people.

Lest you think that my posts advocate for some niche arts and culture insider philosophy, Johnson, a retired naval officer and adviser to the New America think tank, writes much the same as I regarding the value of shared, in-person experiences.  He cites studies that have shown how people value collective experience concerts provide which is all the more reason to lean into those themes in marketing messaging.

And aside from how technologically advanced a major concert is now, I’m most struck by the diversity of the crowds. Maybe there is some social and civic magic to be found in our return to shared, in-person experiences.

Social scientists have identified four themes that help explain the attraction of concerts and the significance of attendance. The most prominent is the experience, followed by the engagement, the novelty and, lastly, the practical reasons.

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Engagement matters. Ours is a society that requires frequent positive community participation if it’s to be resilient against the forces pulling us apart. Scholars have explored the impact of attending concerts, and they’ve found such benefits as an increased sense of belonging and improved well-being. Concert audiences “experienced feelings of togetherness,” researchers report. Sharing a love for something facilitates a path to connection.

Bad News As Portland Announces Withdrawl From Regional Arts Group

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Some disappointing news out of Oregon. Portland is withdrawing support and participation from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), an independent organization that handles granting and arts education activities in Portland and three surrounding counties. I had written about RACC and Portland’s support of arts and culture before. RACC had been strongly encouraging groups to work toward diversifying their boards, staff and audiences years before it became more of a national focus.

The city has been developing their own arts office which will take up much of the work RACC had done. According to the article, the relationship between the city and RACC had been strained for some time now.

Over the years the city has displayed unrest over the regional approach, with complaints from the city auditor’s office and some city council members that RACC wasn’t providing them with sufficient financial information.

[..]

What will the breakup mean for the city and its metropolitan neighbors? It comes at a time when the tri-county area is in the midst of developing a long-term strategy, called Our Creative Future, for regional arts: Presumably, that strategy-in-the-making will have to take a sharp turn.

Writing for Oregon Artswatch, Bob Hicks suggests the timing of this announcement introduces less stability to the already shaky operating environment arts and cultural organizations in the Portland are experiencing as they try to navigate a post-Covid losses, inflation and audience reluctance to return.

How Will The New Albright-Know Be Received By Buffalo’s Working Class

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Bloomberg had an article about the renovated Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, now rebranded Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Prior to the renovation, the director said people would frequently tell him the museum was meant for the elites.  The post-renovation goal is to have the working class residents of the city feel comfortable visiting the space.

It was interesting to read that the director was insistent that the town square plaza not become a lobby. There will be play areas with Legos rather than admission desks and coat checks. They also looked at 12 other cold climate cities and took inspiration from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s glass enclosed atrium to design a glass enclosed space that  will act “…as a kind of snow collector when it’s cold enough and a place to watch the rain pour down when it’s not.” They engaged the community in focus groups to get ideas about how the space should be used when the museum opens again.

I was a little concerned about how well-thought out their efforts at connecting with the working class might turn out when I read that recent programming included a gamelan and Wayang puppetry dance. But in fact, Buffalo is apparently a center of gamelan and other Indonesian arts.

The crystal sculptural elements of the Town Square space are also a favored space for selfies:

Visitors gravitated to the base of “Common Sky,” and few resisted the urge to open up the cameras on their smartphones after looking up at the mirrored panels along what is now Buffalo’s hottest selfie spot. Giving it a run for its money is Lucas Samaras’s “Mirrored Room” (1966), one of the museum’s most beloved, aptly named pieces, which has been fully restored and given pride of place in a new (free) gallery space all to itself in the Knox Building.

The Bloomberg article acknowledged some of the troubles that the museum world in general is facing by wondering aloud if this public gathering space may provide a convenient locale for protests:

Buffalo is deeply segregated by race and class, while its destination art museum is run by a nonprofit institution dependent on the support of the region’s elites. How will the museum react if a protest of a board member takes place inside Town Square? Or a rally in support of staff unionization?

More Funding, But For Status Quo Or Difficult Change?

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There was a lot of chatter on the Twittersphere last week (which I guess is the X Corp-sphere now?) over a NY Times editorial that Isaac Butler wrote advocating for the federal government to do a big bail out of theater in the face of so many theater organizations failing.

While a lot of the comments on the NY Times article basically said theater is boring, too expensive and good riddance, folks who are more inside the arts either praised Butler’s proposal or suggested propping up a flawed business model would just perpetuate a bad situation. There were many such threads. Here is one:

 

Somewhat loudest among those opposing perpetuating the business model was Scott Walters whose thoughts you can see in that thread. He also wrote a piece on Substack expounding on his thoughts. While I don’t agree with everything Scott says, it will come as no surprise I do fall into the camp of feeling that arts organizations need to do a much better job of listening and cultivating better relationships with a broader segment of their communities. Scott suggests money be put into researching a variety of new business models, but there probably also needs to be a corresponding long term marketing campaign to normalize those approaches so that inertia doesn’t keep the non-profit model as the only acceptable one size fits all default in the minds of donors and possible funding sources.

Similarly, there should probably also be funding for consultants, partnerships, etc., which facilitate cultivating better community ties. Again that would need to be varied in application. In the last community in which I worked, funding would be useful in one way, but in the community in which I currently work, it would be better used strengthening an organization with good connections, but few resources. The stronger they got, the better position they would be in to facilitate the conversations and relationships I need to have with the community.

All that takes a lot of funding so obviously I am with Butler in calling for greater amounts of funding for the arts in general. I didn’t particularly like his comparison the funding levels in England because I have seen so many stories about that becoming increasingly restrictive over the years. I saw a tweet over the weekend from someone suggesting while England was funded the arts at a higher level than the US, it was a bad example because their per capita funding practices were pitiful compared to the rest of Europe. Butler replied that he felt he had to use England as an example because no one would believe him if he cited Germany’s numbers.

Covid Era Virtual Programming Continues To Be Successful For Some Arts Orgs

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Amid all the stories of arts organizations closing and scaling back, I saw a piece about a dance company in Dallas that has seen their situation improve with virtual and live programming during and after the worst of the Covid shutdowns. Public radio station KERA posted a story about the steps Dallas Black Dance Theatre took that increased their exposure and reach.

While many arts organizations – particularly those that serve communities of color – shut down or lost revenue during the pandemic, Dallas Black Dance Theatre Executive Director Zenetta Drew said the organization made $100,000 in net ticket sales in 2020 from online programming.

[…]

Drew said the theatre’s programming has continued to net six figures each year and has also brought in new audiences from across the world. Since 2020, DBDT has reached 38 states and 35 countries outside the U.S. with paid virtual content.

[…]

While virtual and in-person arts programming have been viewed as alternatives, Drew said it doesn’t have to be either-or. Instead, she said virtual programming “gives you a chance to really whet the appetite of folks to want to have that in-person experience.”

The proof? Demand for the company’s touring engagements has quadrupled since 2019. Drew said the increased exposure to art markets across the country led to paid gigs in spaces they’d never been before, such as Yale University and Seattle.

I heard that many performing arts companies scaled back on virtual offerings once live performances were permitted again. Perhaps the dance company’s approach of using virtual and live to complement each other and the framework of their content has been beneficial to them. They may have also hit a sweet spot with audiences who wanted/were interested in seeing people like themselves in performance.

Will Airline Fraud Provide Impetus For Google To Stamp Out Clone Ticketing Sites?

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About a month ago, I wrote about the Fix the Tix Coalition which is advocating for laws to change exploitative ticket practices. Among the practices they were trying to change is websites masquerading as the official ticketing site of different venues.

Speaking from personal experience, the venue I run has a ticketing service that took out a Google ad smack in the middle of our venue listing on the Google results page.  Even though there is a button labeled for our website, we have tons of people that follow the fake link, buy tickets for many times the list price and swear up and down they bought them from us.

Well it seems scammers are doing a similar thing with the Google results for major airlines. According to an NBC News story, scammers have managed to change to list different telephone numbers for the airlines.  When people call to make or change reservations, they end up giving their credit card number and personal information to a thief.

Instead of reaching a Delta employee, Evers said he spoke to a man with a thick accent who hung up and called him back from a different number. That man then asked for payment to book a rescheduled flight. Evers recognized it as a scam and scrapped his trip.

He then went on to document six other airlines, including American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Air France, that had incorrect numbers served up by Google.

[…]

A Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company does “not tolerate this misleading activity.”

“Our teams have already begun reverting the inaccuracies, suspending the malicious accounts involved, and applying additional protections to prevent further abuse,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson refused to address questions about how long the problem persisted, how many airlines were successfully impersonated, or why there weren’t better protections in place for major companies like the airlines.

Google has struggled to counter scammers who have learned how to get fake contact information to show up when users look up a company on Google Search or Maps.

While I would hope Google would take steps to eliminate ticketing fraud when they find a way to effectively stamp out the efforts of the folks masquerading as airlines given that they can see what a big problem it is, I suspect performance venues are too small an industry and the ad venue too enticing to inspire them to implement similar measures.

Quotas For Low Value Degrees

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This morning Arts Emergency, a UK based organization which advocates for the arts & humanities and puts a lot of effort into finding mentors for young creatives, post the following on Twitter:

“Hands up who took a ‘low value degree’ & wouldn’t be where you are without it. Hands up who thinks EVERY young person should have the opportunity to do the same. Hands up who thinks higher education shouldn’t be reduced to ‘produces high earners’.”

This was in response to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s proposal that cap the number of students universities can accept into “low value” degree programs according to The Guardian.

Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday.

[…]

The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.

Critics of the move say that it effectively penalises universities and courses with a high proportion of working-class students, who have fewer financial resources or family support and so are more likely to drop out.

“This will effectively act as a red flag to students. Who wants to apply to a ‘low value’ course?” said one vice-chancellor, who added that universities might also become more cautious over admitting students who might be less likely to graduate or want professional careers.

I don’t know if it was the enthusiasm for the topic or the low level of traffic on Twitter, but my feed was solidly filled by this topic with only a smattering of posts on other topics. It was hard to believe this wasn’t listed as trending.  After scrolling and scrolling I was surprised to see I saw still on posts from seven hours prior. I began to worry I would hit the 600 post limit recently announced for people who didn’t pay to be verified before I got to the original post that started it all.

There were a lot of great responses and I probably missed some of the deeper words of wisdom in the mix, but a very clear, obvious response from Milo Harries caught my eye:

I obviously have a ton of thoughts on this, but really they boil down to:

Does anyone that has ever met me really think I’d have added more value to the world if I’d based my career decisions on money?

If you haven’t seen it already, a similar conversation is bouncing around in the US and I suspect other countries around the world. So it is something to which to pay attention.

Will Lunch Conversations & Bespoke Experiences Replace Fundraising Galas

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A post by Jason Lewis who writes The Butterfly Effect on substack suggests taking a donor to lunch is going to be a much better investment of time and resources when it comes to doing a better job fundraising than taking a webinar on the topic.

If you really want to understand why giving is down, instead of signing up for a webinar promising an in-depth analysis by a panel of fundraising wizards, how about taking a lapsed donor out to lunch? If doing that is all but impossible because you’re too afraid to pick up the phone, you’re overwhelmed with the amount of data you’d have to sift through to identify that donor, or your boss has you panicked about tablecloths and wine for the fall gala, anything you’re going to hear in that webinar isn’t going to help.

What Lewis essentially says is that like arts and culture audiences, donors are less interested in taking a passive role with their giving and want to be more interactively engaged. An increasing number of people don’t view themselves as socialites who attend big galas and would instead like to have a closer view and relationship with the causes they are being asked to support.

The effect is an irrevocable shift from a broadcast model in which a relative few control the message to a democratized model where the message is co-created. Shirky’s insights about what it means to live in the twenty-first century is why we encourage our clients not to see themselves as master technicians attempting to manipulate and control their donor’s experience and, instead, engage their donors in ways that allow them to play active roles in creating meaningful experiences for themselves.

[…]

Our donors want to play an active role in determining what their giving experiences are; and they, more so than anyone else, are best qualified to explain to us what those experiences might look like. Arguably, the lunch table is one of the best places for having these kinds of conversations.

Based on the plug at the bottom of the post, it appears Jason Lewis is a member of a company that promotes responsive fundraising which presumably advocates for this sort of approach as part of their consulting practice.

Will Irish Artists Sleep Better With A Guaranteed Basic Income

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I have written before about Ireland’s plan to provide a guaranteed basic income for artists. A couple weeks ago, NBC News posted a story about the program on their website. In all, 2000 artists, including architects and circus professionals, were chosen from 8000 applicants to receive €325 ($326) a week unconditionally for three years.

There is a breakdown of artists’ disciplines and where they live in a press release the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and the Media put out in September 2022.

What caught my attention in the NBC article was the type of data the Ministry was collecting on artists who were selected and not selected for the program.

Participants have to complete a survey every six months, which asks them about their artistic output and working hours, as well as their sleeping habits and the state of their mental health. The survey also asks about their societal participation, which can include activities like volunteering and caring for relatives. A control group of artists who did not receive funding will also be surveyed and tracked to compare results of those of received funding against those who didn’t.

I would be interested to learn more about what they find from this trail program. Hopefully it will come back on my radar again in 2025-2026 when the pilot is over.

You Can’t Measure The Value Of Arts In Dollars, But Not Having It Will Cost You

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A couple weeks ago in The Globe & Mail, Max Wyman wrote an opinion piece declaring the value of art and culture in Canada shouldn’t just be measured by economic standards. Long time readers know this argument is a particular interest of mine.

Wyman writes:

Typically, if you can’t value the outcome in dollars, it doesn’t count. And it’s hard to show the value of art and culture on a cost-benefit graph. Even when they do come up with more cash, it’s usually for economic reasons. Just recently, for instance, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a new investment of £50-billion ($84-billion) to “grow the creative industries,” in the name of adding a million extra jobs in the country’s cultural sector by 2030.

He goes on to note that arts and cultural organizations are becoming more adept at discussing related benefits such as making communities desirable places to live and contributing to physical and mental health and well-being.

He goes on to cite a study that asked nearly 2000 visitors to 11 U.S. museums to place a value on the contribution to their well-being the museum visit had made. While they got an interesting result, it is somewhat unfortunately couched in economic terms.

…to assess the way their museum experiences improved their well-being in four categories – personal, intellectual, social and physical – and to put a price on those benefits on a sliding scale from US$0 to US$1,000. They came up with an average cash value, per individual visit, of US$905. When the study’s authors extrapolated this information on a national scale, they calculated an annual economic value of US$52-billion in public well-being for museum visitors.

I know, I know: small sample, based on entirely personal valuations. But in an interview with The Art Newspaper, Will Cary, the chief operating officer of the Barnes Foundation (which took part in the study), said the research gives funders and policy makers “a compelling, quantitative argument that thriving, well-supported cultural institutions are not ‘nice-to-haves,’ they are ‘need-to-haves’ and that the return on their investment is significant and multifaceted.”

As something of a supplement to this article, I was listening to a Wisconsin Public Radio story, (probably saw it on Artsjournal.com) where a caller (~11:45) said a company was visiting their village to determine whether they would site their company there or in NC. The caller, who said he served on the village council, said the company rep said his wife was into arts and the community and she will never live here. The caller said they basically lost a company that was going to employ 250 because they lacked an arts and culture infrastructure.

You Wanna Be Where Everybody Know Your Name

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I am not sure when Culturebot fell off my daily reading list, but the last time I referenced a post was 2014. Thankfully Artsjournal.com linked to a piece by Andy Horowitz this week so the blog is back on my radar.  Andy wrote a relatively long piece about the need to focus on audience need and experience. While he has a TL;DNR summary at the beginning, the really good stuff is buried in the expanded version.

The broad strokes won’t be new to long time readers. Horowitz notes that despite the wake up call of Covid and all the money funders have provided for engagement and innovation, a lot of theaters are still focusing on legacy audiences and providing the same type of audience experiences as they had in the past.

He says arts and culture organizations need to be creating a sense of belonging and connection for new audiences. He uses a couple of personal examples. In the first, he talks about arriving in NYC and wanting to be a part of what was happening at P.S. 122, (now known as Performance Space New York), because so much great work was happening. But he couldn’t figure out a way in. Everybody already seemed to know everyone else. He started getting involved with other organizations and projects until he eventually cultivated the right relationships and started working at P.S. 122.

In another part of his piece, he raises a similar example of his 4.5 year old son changing pre-schools mid-year:

 It was a bumpy transition since at midyear all the other kids knew each other; some had started “going to school” together during the pandemic. …His teachers said he might not feel comfortable onstage and might prefer to sit with us; he came home from school telling us how he wasn’t able to learn the songs or the choreography because the other kids already knew it, things like that. As the day approached, we were filled with trepidation and uncertainty. But lo and behold, when graduation day came, our little guy sat with his class, walked onstage with his class, sang the songs, did the choreography, and behaved perfectly the whole time!! I have never been more invested in a performance in my life.

He talks about how brave people need to be to take chances in so many respects, including learning new things and trying to integrate into social settings in which we don’t feel we belong.  Horowitz reiterates what I have written before about creating an environment in which people can see themselves and their stories depicted and spend time with family and friends. Something I have overlooked is working to provide the sense you are among friends even if you didn’t know anyone when you arrived. (his emphasis)

I think that this is what every audience everywhere wants when they come to the theater. We want to feel like we are meeting up with friends. We want to see people we know in the lobby, we want to see people we know onstage, we want to know the person that works in the box office and the ushers, we want to know the people seated next to us and across the room in another section so we can wave to them and meet them at intermission for a drink. There is nothing worse than feeling like a stranger milling around with other strangers awkwardly avoiding eye contact, worrying about if you belong. If you run a theater and you aren’t trying to create that sense of welcome, belonging and inclusion with your audience, then you are failing them, it doesn’t matter what you put onstage.

As someone whose name is on an alcohol license, I am a little wary about encouraging people to literally replicate this exact scenario, but one experience Horowitz touts as bringing people together was a scheme in which an event made ordering a single beer as expensive as ordering a beer for 10 people. The result was that strangers organized themselves into groups to get the cheapest possible drinks they could:

I don’t remember the exact amount but a single beer was, I think, $10 and 10 beers was maybe $1? Like that. So as soon as someone got to the front of the line they immediately started talking to the people around them to get enough drink orders together to get the cheaper drinks. Never have I ever seen a group of strangers connecting and laughing and cooperating so quickly and joyfully as I did that night. I’m pretty sure that the bar was itself an art project.

Perhaps it was a lesson the TV show Cheers was teaching us back in the 80s and we just weren’t paying close enough attention.

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