Joe Patti

About a month ago, I talked about some changes proposed for the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Conference which the organizers hope will provide the members with the opportunities they need to do business.

Last week, WAA posted the results of Key Person’s Interviews they had conducted on the discussion board of their website. The discussion board is password protected for members only, but I have received permission to reference the results here. I offer this information to my readership at large more or less as information about trends rather than specifically offering a lot of opinion and analysis (though I will offer some!)

Artists agents/Managers and Presenters were interviewed and the results really begin to illustrate, at least for me, why WAA felt the need to change the format. In certain areas there really exists a fairly large gulf between the two groups. Some of it can never be fixed because as a member of one group, you have priorities that you can’t share with the other group and still do your job.

In other areas there is room for coming together.

One of the main goals of attendance for presenters is networking with other presenters-

“While exhibitors come to the conference with presenters as leads/prospects/targets, presenters come to the conference first and foremost for peer-to-peer interaction with other presenters.
“…opportunities for casual, relaxed, and face-to-face conversations with colleagues, including ‘deep discussions about art,’ seem to be very high on the list of presenter priorities at the conference.
” Face-to-face networking is one of the most significant factors in the curatorial process (III)…Comments to the effect of ‘�WAA should be about relationship building’ were very common.”

Artists/Managers/Agents however feel they are in an adversarial position in some instances with presenters. Many felt that presenters didn’t understand the economics of being an exhibitor as well as the artist/agents understood the economics of being a presenter. There are also mentions of a “cliquey” nature of the conference contributing to the Us vs Them atmosphere.

Others commented that they felt the presenters attending were viewing the conference as a vacation rather than a place of serious business. I wonder how moving it to Los Angeles from places like Albuquerque and Spokane will impact this feeling. There was a comment that presenters at APAP in NYC are much more business like, but I wonder if that is just because there are so many in attendance, no one notices if people have wandered off to go shopping or see a Broadway show.

On the other hand, maybe they weren’t attending WAA to conduct business but rather just scouting. There was another group of responses that exhibitors felt the people from presenting organizations in attendance weren’t empowered to make decisions.

Even more distressing perhaps for the artists/managers, among the results of the survey of presenters was that there was little relationship between showcasing and deciding to contract performers. I wonder how many people will showcase next year knowing that presenters aren’t necessarily making booking decisions as a result.

One thing both sides could agree upon was the despairing lack of ethics some presenters were exhibiting, particularly in terms of breaking contracts and agreements. Of course, no one considers themselves unethical so the last two conference sessions I have attended on ethics have been sparsely attended.

Some interesting state of the arts type results from the interviews, some of which will surprise few people.

” Presenters are moving toward more conservative programming choices because the ‘bottom line’ is factoring into programming in a much more significant way than prior to 9/11…

o Exhibitors seem concerned, even resentful, that presenters seem to be booking more pragmatically these days…

o Many exhibitors perceive presenters, particularly those in the West, are making a shift to more thematic programming and programming that is more intricately tied to arts education programs and/or arts programs within presenters’ host institutions.

I actually wrote about an aspect of this last trend right after I returned from the WAA conference. Ironically, all the schools mentioned in the article are on the East Coast so if it isn’t a trend they are noticing there yet, they will quite soon.

One last bit to mention before I am done. I have saved the best for last. There was one bit of feedback from artist/manager/agents that knocked my socks off and I wonder what it portends.

“Many exhibitors believe that the business has not changed for them, although they see it changing around them. Most exhibitors had a clear idea of their mission or vision. They’ve been doing what they’ve been doing, their niche, their network of peers and presenters, etc. were all slowly evolving.”

I really wonder what this means. It can’t be that everyone else is changing but them. Are they simply too close to the changes they are going through to notice. Or perhaps it is true that their niche is changing and they aren’t and they are feeling the adverse effects of deciding to resist the change but don’t feel they have the skills to compete in the changing world. Instead of admitting things are changing, they hold the belief it is not for them because in that scenario, they continue to be successful.

There were some additional results that might bear this out.

“A few younger exhibitors/firms clearly were aggressively seeking a continued path of growth and evolution. It was this group of exhibitors who articulated the desire to be part of WAA but not the need to be part of WAA. These are the ‘change agents’ of the industry, typified by gaining their experience at larger agencies, going out on their own and aggressively sticking to their business plan, or constantly re-aligning their business plan to respond to outside pressures/dynamics. They are agile, fearless and most like their contemporaries in other industries.

So young folks, seeing the direction things are going, leave a big agency they have worked at for years and start their own business with an eye for responding to the ebb and flow of the shifting marketplace.

Of course, there are the other guys–

“The antithesis to these ‘change agents’ were the ‘old school’: [the] impression is that some don’t see/feel the need to change their small, niche business even while they are keenly aware of how small the marketplace is for their art form and how much economic pressure the presenters are facing.

It seems of late that Andrew Taylor’s writing on Artful Manager has been been inspiring me to connect ideas he presents with those I found in other articles. My entry yesterday is one recent example.

Usually I feel elated and proud of myself for seeing connections between ideas from different places. Some thoughts his writings evoked yesterday were rather disturbing though. I started thinking about subjects everyone wants to think they are on the right side of, but if they make an honest assessment, find they share a burden of blame.

I was reading Andrew Taylor’s Measuring Value keynote speech delivered to the NJ Theatre Alliance. It is mostly a discussion of how any institution or individual that is providing funding to a non-profit concern wants to track the value of the non-profit’s operations on the community. People and institutions are interested in a return on their investment be it serving greater numbers, how effectively these numbers are being served or any other criteria.

He goes on to note that as time goes by, it is the measures that define arts organizations rather than the mission and the elements of the organization that make it unique.

Nothing terrible about this to be sure. But it was a couple sentences he quoted that elicted some memories of other articles. The first is from psychologist Kenneth Kenniston:

“We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up.”

The second is from two attendees at the conference at which Andrew spoke:

“Said one participant, “we’re constantly trying to fit ourselves into what others want us to be.” Said one funder on a panel discussion, “We’re moving away from relationship-based philanthropy,” toward funding based on matrices and aligned with corporate brand.”

I recently read two articles where school focus on what type of graduates they were producing lead to some discomforting results.

The first was Jonathan Kozol’s article in the September issue of Harper’s magazine, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid.” Among the educational disparities he notes, (and as you imagine, there are many) is that at affluent schools, students have choice of electives like journalism and computer graphics while the poorer schools had vocational courses like multiple levels of hair dressing and sewing.

Essentially, there is an expectation about the jobs students at each school will fill when they graduate regardless of their achievements or aspirations.

I mention this as something of a counterpoint to another recent article, this one from the New Yorker, “Getting In- The social logic of Ivy League admissions.” by Malcolm Gladwell. He basically talks about how the Ivy League schools shifted from merit based admissions to other criteria in order to keep their student body a predominantly WASP demographic.

Among the criteria, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen, which Gladwell quotes, were manliness –

“The admissions committee viewed evidence of ‘manliness’ with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him…”

Things that kept people out of the Ivy League were equally intangible-

“…they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.”

The Ivys’ focus shifted from merit

“to a ‘best graduates’ approach to admissions…The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance.”

True, academic success doesn’t equal success in the real world.(Witness Harvard grads and C students, George W. Bush and John Kerry.) This is another example though of how measuring the success of schools by the type of human being they promote can have negative results for certain groups.

I am not saying the No Child Left Behind measures are good. I actually slogged through writing all this to make the following suggestion–if this sort of institutionalization of expectations happens from middle schools all the way up to Ivy League, is it occuring in our arts organizations as well?

The Ivys are doing this sort of thing, Gladwell says, to protect the perception of their brand.

In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, “In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain.

He also uses the following anecdote:

“I once had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his client’s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brand’s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable.”

Though this example has a tinge of racism, this is a real concern for any brand–“Sometimes when companies try to create more of a mass market, a lot of the early adopters feel the brand is being bastardized,..”(from Entrepeneur.com)

So reading these different articles this week got me thinking. Are arts organizations trying to protect their brand either consciously or unconsciously by keeping the bulk of the perceived undesirables out and just letting a token few in? We talk about needing to diversify our audiences and perform outreach to different communities. But do we really want them showing up?

The Kozol article cites schools claiming “rich variations in ethnic background” but in actuality had 2,800 black and Hispanic students, 1 Asian and 3 whites. When arts organizations are claiming to have diverse audiences, are they basing it on similarly tilted numbers? Are they only expending energy and resources to maintain a ratio at which they feel comfortable using the “ethnically diverse audience” tag.

I am not saying it is intentional or maliciously done. I am just asking people to honestly examine the situation the arts are in and figure out if the system is placing limits on who our organizations can appeal to.

If as, I quoted in Andrew Taylor’s article, arts orgs are feeling pressure to conform to a corporate brand or be what other people want us to be (ie people with money), what about feeling pressure to maintain a certain aura for individual patrons? There are certain types of people who give lots of money who essentially keep our doors open. Are we afraid they will stop giving if they feel our ballet/symphony/theatre loses its cachet?

When we read in Kozol’s article or hear on the news that in New Orleans the affluent moved to the suburbs leaving the poor in the city, can it help but enter our subconscious that if the affluent leave us, those left won’t have the means to regularly buy enough tickets or donate enough money?

I am sure there was similar hand wringing at some point over whether offically telling people not to worry about dressing up, it is okay to come in jeans, was going to destroy the brand. That hasn’t driven too many people away. But with the whole controversy over the inconsiderate patrons who come in late and talk on their cell phones or to their friends, there is already additional erosion to the brand transpiring. Can arts organizations afford to risk further potential damage to their public image?

You may damn me for being so politically incorrect and posing these insensitive questions. I am partially playing devil’s advocate, but partially serious. You may think your company is enlightened and doesn’t have any of this taint upon them. But really, unless you are wholly independent of private, foundation or government funding, I feel safe in saying you ain’t as pure as you think. I am certainly not making that claim and I live in a place where I am in the ethnic minority.

When I talked about arts organizations bearing some of the blame at the beginning of this entry, I was essentially referring to a situation I have talked about before where organizations say they aren’t elitist, but don’t make an effort to alter that perception either. I think all these questions I have posed about fear of brand erosion contributing factors to this reluctance to act. (That an some are elitist.)

But at the same time, as I noted, arts organizations are in a sort of trap of expectations. We can resolve to honestly change our programming and really go about cultivating a new audience over the long term and making our offerings accessible to them. There are foundations out there who will be thrilled to underwrite it in return for…you know it…reporting measurable results.

It is a lot tougher to change audiences and donors. Many of the decisions they make are beyond an organization’s scope of control. If they want a Cadillac and they feel you are offering an Elantra, they may leave. When they leave, the Cadillac dealer and the real estate company that specialize in multi-million dollar homes who both underwrite your shows each year may decide to leave as well. (I have seen the ad the bank puts in my playbill and the one they put in the symphony’s playbill. Its pretty clear whose money they value more.)

Then maybe some of your board members leave because they no longer have the opportunity to socialize with the people they want to network. Your fundraising capacity suffers a little more because now you no longer have the matching funds for foundation grant proposals.

In the face of such possible outcomes, is it any wonder an arts institution might feel they were making their organizational identity subservient to measurable outcomes and brand identity? Is it any wonder they keep desperately catering to a segment of the population that is quickly dying off? (And not just for their $10 billion in bequests!)

From the “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” file.

Last week, Artsjournal.com linked to a Backstage story about a Republican proposal in the House of Representatives to get rid of funding for the NEA, NEH and PBS. Looking at donation rates from 2001, they concluded that “The funding could easily be funded by private donations.”

The proposal was part of the Republican Study Committee’s “Operation Offset” report which looks for ways cut the federal budget to pay for the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Now there are many arguements one may make against this certainly. But what inspired my entry today was the recollection of an entry on the Artful Manager a month ago about the delay in the Senate’s vote to repeal the estate tax.

The Artful Manager quotes an article by the American Arts Alliance that noted:

A 2004 Congressional Budget Office study reported that eliminating the estate tax would result in an estimated 22% decline in charitable bequests. A report issued by the Brookings Institution indicates that a repeal of the estate tax would result in a total loss of about $10 billion in charitable giving each year.

The amount the Republican Study Committee says the private sector contributed to non-profit arts in 2001–$11.5 billion. So that leaves 1.5 billion for everyone to fight over, eh?

Well actually, that is comparing apples and oranges. The 10 billion probably includes bequests to hospitals, churches, United Way, Red Cross along with arts organizations. The RSC’s $11.5 billion probably includes direct giving in fundraising campaigns as well as bequests.

The point is though, the House members are projecting private giving can make up for the loss of the NEA at the same time the Senate is considering a move which will remove the incentive for a segment of private giving. Even if the arts only get $2 billion of the annual bequests, that is still huge and there are some who will lose big.

If both efforts succeed, it will be a devestating blow from two directions for some organizations.

The vote to repeal was delayed according to Senate Finance Chair Charles Grassley, “It would appear “unseemly” for Congress to push through a repeal of the estate tax while also coping with the hurricane disaster in the Gulf” (nod to Artful Manager for the link)

What to do? Well again I must bow in deference to His Artfulness who links to the following discussion on the Western States Arts Federation website which examines it all better than I can.

I was just perusing some websites I hadn’t looked at in a bit and came across the Panel on the Non-Profit Sector website. The panel was convened by The Independent Sector, a coalition of about 500 charities, foundations and corporate giving programs.

Back in June, the Panel on the Non-Profit Sector submitted recommendations to Congress regarding issues facing non-profit organizations. On September 30, they finished soliciting comments on a draft of supplemental recommendations they will make to Congress in October.

Their recommendations should be of interest to anyone involved with a non-profit organization. They not only outline steps Congress and the IRS should and shouldn’t take, but those that organizations themselves should enact.

The document includes proposals on Federal and State oversight of non-profits (there should be more and better coordination between state and federal level); Better Standards for Reporting to the IRS; More Stringent and Frequent Reviews of Tax Exempt Status; and Abusive Tax Shelters and Charitable Organizations, Amended Rules for Non-Cash Contributions

There are a couple areas I haven’t mentioned and the standards for different size organizations vary so the report bears reading if you have concerns in any area related to these subjects.

The sections that seemed particularly pertinent to current events were those dealing with excessive travel expenditures and compensation for Board Members and Executive Officers. Essentially, they suggest stricter standards, tougher penalties and greater transparency on Form 990-

Compensation reports on the Forms should clearly distinguish between base salary, benefits, bonuses, long-term incentive compensation, deferred compensation, and other financial arrangements or transactions treated as compensation (for example, interest-free loans or payment of a spouse’s travelexpenses) to the individual

.

There are also suggestions on the size, structure and composition of Boards. The panel cites the problem of:

Failures by boards of directors in fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities may arise when a board leaves governing responsibility to a small number of people, some of whom may have conflicts of interest that can mar their judgment. Other problems emerge when a board disperses responsibility among many people, thereby lessening the obligations of each and by default, increasing the authority of the chief executive officer.

Many board members do not have the training or information necessary to understand adequately their fiduciary responsibilities or common practices for the boards of charitable organizations.

Other sections deal with the related issues of conflicts of interest and audit committees.

The Independent Sector has a statement of their commitment to accountability and transparency right on their main page so the nature of the suggestions, which essentially embrace these concepts, should come as no surprise to anyone.

Since this is also obviously an attempt to take a proactive stance and provide guidance to non-profits before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act starts to be applied to that sector, it will be interesting to see what steps Congress takes.

A very interesting discussion is transpiring across three theatre blogs in the last two weeks that really starts to give a peek at the potential blogs have for people in the arts to participate in an exchange and development of great ideas outside of a collegiate setting. There has been a lot of theoretic talk about the potential, but this is a good illustration.

Actually, I should qualify this further by saying an exchange on original topics. A couple of these blogs have a raging debate over whether Shakespeare really wrote his stuff, but that debate predates the internet.

Anyhow, the postings are on the topic of “Regionalitis,” a term coined by YS at Mirror Up To Nature in a recent entry referring to:

Regionalitis is the peculiar malady suffered by mediocre efforts of excellent playwrights. Usually regionalitis is caused by the continued and incessant performing of a play by regional and smaller theatres, having the interesting effect of perpetuating a undeserved reputation of greatness while at the same time building up an incredible expectation of the casts and directors

.

He makes this comment after seeing Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, in Boston essentially saying it was good, but not great enough to deserve all the performances it is getting across the country accompanied by the hype that surrounds a show that gets produced so much.

Spearbearer Down Left comments on his blog that when he saw The Real Thing at A.C.T. in San Francisco, it was “pitch perfect.” He does conceed that there may be a lot of “me-too-ism” in theatre’s and expand upon it further in a later entry saying:

…but sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion that some plays are done because they’re terrific, but sometimes they’re done because all the cool kids are doing them. I noticed a long time ago that no one really wants to discover new voices. Some do, but to truly discover one involves too big a risk. Better to almost, sort-of discover someone who’s a really hot property but not quite a theatrical household name yet.

A third blogger, Scott Walters, on Theatre Ideas throws his own hat in the ring but expands on the idea a bit himself. He feels that the repeated performances of the same plays across the country deprives people of the opportunity to see shows that speak to their place in the world.

He says that mass media has created the illusion that we are a homogeneous culture watching the same TV show and movies and reading the same books. However, he offers some observations that this might not be the case. He notes that while he lives in Asheville, NC and knows he is the same person who once lived in the middle of NYC,

I have appreciated totally different things depending on where I have lived. For instance, in NYC, rap music “made sense,” it reflected my surroundings; here in Asheville, a small city of 100,000 surrounded by the incredible natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it seems jarring and incongruous. It seems to me that NYC people are focused much more on their inner life — their aesthetic responses, their intellectual and emotional lives; Asheville people are more tuned into the environment that surrounds them, and their souls resonate to the things they see and hear around them. A novel like The Hours drove me crazy when I read it a few months ago; in NYC, I may have thought it absolutely brilliant.

Regionalitis treats every part of the country the same ignoring this differences in life focus. (Perhaps this is why the guy in San Francisco thought the Stoppard play was great but it didn’t resonate with the guy in Boston.) He points out as another example that The Kentucky Cycle was well received regionally all over the country and won a Pultizer Prize, but did poorly in NYC. He posits that it was due to the pacing and subject did not synch with the urban vibe.

He expounds upon this idea in a later entry and later clarifies his ideas after some criticism of them.

The whole process this went through really fires up my idealism gene. One guy coins a phrase, another expands upon his idea looking at it from the vantage of artistic integrity and choices, a third guy looks at it with an eye toward tuning works to regional nuances and I summarize and regurgitate it all.

I didn’t just pull this all together simply because actually watching an idea develop over blogs excited me. It was the whole discussion that got me thinking.

It is no surprise to me that different genres of performances appeal to regions and locales in varying degrees. The idea that mass media is shaping what we do and don’t watch and listen to is nothing new to me either, especially in these days of media consolidation into the hands of a few corporations.

It never occurred to me though that what they were promoting might not, as Scott Walters puts it, make sense for all regions of the country. I always just accepted, (probably due to the media) that the new stuff was just a logical evolution from what came before. New Wave of the 80s gave way to grunge of the 90s gave way to hiphop of the 00s.

Even though I should have known better, it always seemed like popular entertainment companies were reacting to trends rather than shaping them. To a greater degree pop entertainment does. However, once a trend reaches a certain saturation point, companies jump on it and promote it to everyone. They count on a desire to be part of the in crowd to overwhelm any sense that it was incongruous to one’s lifestyle.

That is what this whole regionalitis thread is all about. Arts organizations jumping on a bandwagon and urging audiences to join all the rest of the smart people across the country in enjoying the show.

Arts organizations aren’t as successful as the major media because they don’t have as much money to throw around to convince people to join their fellow citizens. They also can’t guarantee the same experience as everyone else in the country. The AMC movie theatres in Philadelphia offer screen sizes and surround sound systems pretty comparable to those in other cities around the country.

However, the talents of actors and musicians at the theatres and symphonies in Philly aren’t the same as those in theatres elsewhere, nor are the spaces they perform in. Seeing Dali in the Philadelphia Museum of Art isn’t the same as seeing the same works in the Dali Museum in St. Petersburgh, FL.

Nor is there the sense of a collective experience when a book, CD, movie is released on the same day for everyone present when performances transpire in different seasons, months or even years.

And then there are differences in ticket prices, economic conditions, education level and a half dozen other demographic elements.

This makes something of an argument for resisting regionalitis and taking an honest look at what programming and vibe is right for your community instead of trying to ride the coattails of the successes experienced by other people in other places at other times.

Heck with a man not being able to jump into the same river twice. Regionalitis can be like trying to jump into the same river from 1,500 miles away while in the middle of a drought.

So I had a bit of a problem while I was at the WAA conference last week–or as some might say, an “opportunity to learn.”

An agent pulls me aside and tells me–“You know that show you booked? The one you were smart enough to recognize the talent in while your compatriots on the other islands spurned it?”

“Well, to further validate your good taste–the show was a smash at the Edinburgh Fringe and a bunch of big name producers want to have the show on the West End.”

At the same time it is supposed to be in my theatre.

Well honestly, I have to say I am thrilled for the show. But at the same time, my brochures just went out and people are buying tickets at a nice clip right now. But the show isn’t until the Spring so it is good to find out now when I have the time to announce the change. It will be good PR to have to announce the show will have to be rescheduled because it burned up Edinburgh and is going to the West End.

But my theatre is also pretty much booked up until next August at the moment between my shows and rentals so I don’t know when I will reschedule. And before the college will send out a deposit check to an artist, I have to sign a statement saying I will personally reimburse them if a group doesn’t perform.

Guess what got mailed out the day I flew to Alburquerque.

So while the agent is trying to find out if this is a sure thing, I attend round table discussions. One I want to attend is being delayed so I stick my nose in on an session about ethics. I wasn’t going to attend because the same topic was covered last year, but it ended up the panel on this one did a better job.

One of the first questions was if anyone had ever faced an artist cancelling.

I raise my hand and say funny you should mention it and tell my story.

One of the panel members says that he takes that in stride because it happens often when performers in his cabaret series end up getting a contract for a Broadway show. He knows where he stands in the pecking order. He prints up an alteration, explains why the switch is occuring and offers refunds to those who might want it.

Be that as it may, my problem is that: 1- He is talking about a secondary series being affected, not his primary audience attracter. 2- His facility has enough prestige he can easily attract an equally talented performer who is eager to appear.

In many theatres in the region, the person appearing in his secondary series is often the primary attraction for that organization and are difficult to replace.

The roundtable discussion covered the fact that artists/agents/presenters who are new to the process (and some old hands who are just clueless) need to realize the reprecussions of cancellations.

For the presenter, a cancellation can mean upset ticket buyers, an upset board who mandated certain numbers and certain types of performances, loss of revenue and a loss of prestige and credibility with the community.

For the artists, a cancellation can mean loss of income; depending on the timing, mean they are stranded between points A & B with nowhere to sleep; result in a loss of credibility with the public and perhaps with the presenters before and after the cancelling venue because they need to ask those venues for more money in order to meet expenses that week.

For agents, it means a loss of credibility with the artists and/or presenters.

Since the arts community, even nationwide, is fairly small and members tend to meet each other often, an agent/presenter/artist can find themselves increasingly ostracized for problematic behavior.

But of course, this depends on the power and influence of any of these players. Sometimes you have to bite your tongue and do business with these folks in order to please your clients/patrons and just hope they don’t decide to screw you this time around.

The end of my story, fortunately, turned out well. A day after getting the potential bad news, I am told that the West End theatres the London producers wanted weren’t available during that time so they are looking for other dates.

So I get to have my performance AND claim it burned up Edinburgh and perhaps mention it will be going to London shortly after it appears here.

“In the guidelines you wrote up for the Lab Theatre this summer, did you list sex acts as prohibited?” asked the head of the drama department in a phone call to me this morning.

The form he was referring to was one my staff and I made up after students took advantage of the informal agreement we made with them about the lab theatre’s use this summer. After their disappointing behavior, we published an official policy with the usual prohibitions against smoking and drinking in university buildings.

The reason he was asking about sex acts is something else altogether. The drama director had asked to use the lab space for a production of edgy plays by former students and other noted up and comers in the local community.

We had already issued warnings about language and adult situations in our press about the shows but things went a little farther than expected last night. Apparently while the professor was watching the rehearsal that was going pretty well and showing promise up to the point the actors stripped down, got under a sheet and apparently left both little to the imagination and a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t acting.

I don’t mention this so much to titillate and air dirty laundry. It is quite a serious subject and one that will be monitored closely. The drama professor was previously requiring students to see the production and now, even with the changes he is insisting on, has made it completely voluntary lest students accuse him of forcing them to watch obscene material.

I thought the incident was quite apropos and timely in reference to the Camille Pagila interview I cited yesterday in which she says:

The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, “We’re avant-garde.” The avante-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell’s Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avante-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avante-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, “Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.”

She goes on to blame this approach as a strong factor in the loss of funding for arts programs across the country. I don’t necessarily agree. Serrano and Mapplethorpe were an excuse to rally support, but not the initial reason.

I do think that there are a lot of performers who go to nudity as a way to prove they are hip and avant garde because it is the easiest thing to do to provoke shock in people. It is actually quite similar to how beginning acting students often choose to employ shouting and violent gestures in their scenes because anger is easy and doesn’t require vulnerability.

As the drama professor said to me, art is more powerful when it leaves something unsaid and allows the imagination to run wild with its own projected assumptions. The acting space is barely 20×20 with only two-three rows of chairs around. The physical proximity of the audience and the circumstances that lead up to the actors getting into bed together are going to make people uncomfortable enough as it is.

Choosing not to bring the lights down at the end and instead graphically playing it out crosses the line for people and the fidelity of the play. Instead of being memorable for examining the forces that drew these people into bed together, (and believe me, they are controversial in their own right), the scene becomes all about the sex at the end. Instead of leaving thinking about the awful and repellent choices the characters made, people leave thinking about the nudity and whether what happened at the end was real.

Of course, nudity sells tickets. This has been discussed in many articles for the last twenty some odd years debating whether all the nudity that seemed to be creeping into every show on Broadway was a necessary part of the story or whether it was there for sensationalism to draw a crowd. And everyone is an artistic devotee and offended at the suggestion they are pandering just to sell some tickets.

Especially if the ticket sales are doing well.

The Washington National Opera is advertising for a Priority Services Coordinator. This is bad, oh so very bad.

There has been a lot of discussion about the arts being elitist for many years and lately people have been talking in specifics. This week there was a lot of commentary on Camille Pagila’s interview in The Morning News. (There is a portion quoted on Spearbearer Down Left that sums up her theme.) In the interview, she essentially says the says arts and literature has to examine what they are presenting and the context within which they are presenting it.

Elsewhere, The Playgoer lifts a quote of the day from a Guardian article on the backlash against classical music in the UK.

So amidst this environment, imagine how I cringed when I saw the Washington National Opera advertising for a Priority Services Coordinator who “is accountable for the ticketing, fulfillment, and tactics targeted toward specific segments including high-level individual and corporate donors, artists, and other VIPs.”

I don’t have a problem with the job per se. I mean, the opera is located in DC where you have congressman, lobbyists, ambassadors, etc., running around needing cultural experiences. From the size and titles of their development staff, they look to be dealing with a large number of donors too. Having a person dedicated to their needs makes good sense.

What I object to is the title of the position. Even if you are giving people preferential treatment, you aren’t dispelling the perception of elistism by announcing to the public that you if you aren’t dealing with this person, serving you is not a priority for the opera.

It is just an ill considered choice of titles I think. However, they are in DC, performing in the Kennedy Center and despite the claim of being “Your National Opera,” they are probably a little too insulated from the reality of operating an arts organization in the rest of the country to realize how poorly this reflects on the rest of us.

One of the metaphors that has always made me nervous as an arts professional is releated to the need to correctly define what your company does. If you say you make horse drawn carriages rather than that you are in the transportation industry, you will probably go out of business when the automobile rolls around.

In a world where the arts just sort of seem to be lucky to prove their relevance from moment to moment, I think it is understandable if I might wonder if I am working in a horse and buggy industry. The dying industry is usually blind and living in denial about its fate after all so it is hard to tell.

I heard a gentleman speak today at the college’s convocation (I forgot to bring the flyer home so I could credit him. Come back tomorrow for the name.) He was discussing the use of technology in the classroom. I started filing much of what he said away in my brain against the day that I get back in to teaching again.

But he also presented some metaphors which were comforting. One of the things he pointed out was that in the 1800s, ice harvesting in New England was big business sending ice all over the world. However, due to the costs, people in the southern part of the US developed a way to manufacture ice. However, the demand for ice actually increased so much, the New England harvesters actually increased production. In time, of course, refrigeration overtook ice production and yet there is still a need for ice production today (though granted, not through harvesting.)

Okay, so now I just have to worry about not being in an ice harvesting business. Given that the entertainment industry is comprised of movies, cable television, DVDs, etc., it is possible that live arts experiences are the ice harvesting of today. Plenty of demand for many, but not all entertainment forms.

The speaker also referenced the fact that at one time radio was king and then television came along and many of the radio shows were now on television. Instead of withering away, radio changed and started offering something different.

So, okay, this is no big revelation. Changing with changing times is the talk of the industry these days no matter where you go. Blogs talk about it (it was actually one of my first entries), convention speakers talk about it, everyone is saying we should do it.

Question is, how will that happen? Lots of speakers and bloggers have lengthy suggestions about that. However, thinking about things like radio and ice harvesting helps to make a confusing, overwhelming problem seem a little simpler and easy to start tackling. It also gives a point of reference so we can assess in a general way how radio stations successfully made the transition and what sort of thinking lead to the closing of thoses that failed to do so.

Edit: Gentleman in question was Paul Bowers, Asst. Prof. Mass Communications, Director of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Buena Vista University.

Two articles shared the same webpage over a Artsjournal.com today. The first is one talking about Pittsburgh Ballet’s decision to perform to recorded music to save money. The decision was made to preserve the ballet’s budget. They aren’t the first ballet company to go this route and according to the article, they probably won’t be the last.

The move has Drew McManus worried that this is not only a harbinger of the rise of recorded accompaniment, but that mission statements will be used to justify gutting artistic value for economic reasons.

Which leads me to the second article I mentioned earlier. It seems our brethern in Australia are also facing the necessity of making A Better Case for the Arts, as discussed on Artsjournal.com earlier this year in response to a recent Rand report. (I have discussed this before.)

An excerpt from a speech Prof. David Throsby made in the last couple days was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Throsby’s speech sounds much the same as the discussion on Artsjournal.com and the points the Rand report makes:

More and more do arts organisations feel they have to demonstrate their financial rather than their artistic prowess as a means of obtaining funds to support their existence. Arts festivals big and small commission economic impact studies to trumpet their success in creating employment, raising local incomes and encouraging tourism; understanding their cultural impacts often seems to take second place.

Actually, he cites the Rand report right after he cites a similar report made by a British policy group, Demos, titled Capturing Cultural Value.

…John Holden, takes up these arguments, writing that “the value of culture cannot be expressed only with statistics. Audience numbers give us a poor picture of how culture enriches us.” He goes on to argue for a reshaping of the way in which public funding of culture is undertaken. He suggests the need for a language capable of reflecting, recognising and capturing the full range of values expressed through culture, drawing on ideas from anthropology, environmentalism and the debate about “public value” in the field of public sector management.

I wouldn’t be surprised if similar articles started to appear in Germany, France, Spain, et.al. (Or perhaps it is the English speakers’ epidemic.) Looks like everyone is facing the same dilemmia about how to resolve artistic sensibilities with capitalist ones at about the same time.

There is a really fascinating article in the Gotham Gazette this month (It came to my attention via Artsjournal.com)about the arts funding process in NYC.

What makes it fascinating is the history of politics that must be behind the process to have it turn out the way it does.

There are 34 institutions that are guaranteed to share 80% of the funding year after year (ranging from $750,000 to $2 mil). Then there are 175 line item organizations that appear year after year by name that get a smaller piece of the money ($22,000 to $115,000 at this point).

Then there are about 200 groups chosen by city council members to receive money this year with no promise of money next year.

Whatever money remains is available via the Cultural Development Fund. Organizations must fill out a 25 page form that is subject to a peer review panel.

What is really strange though is who are the haves and who are the have nots. The Metropolitian Museum is among the 34 who are guaranteed large amounts of funding ($22 mil this year), the Metropolitian Opera, with a similar budget and high regard, is not (they get $134,000).

The Bronx County Historical Society is among the 34 guaranteed. The historical societies of the other boroughs are not. The Vivian Beaumont in Lincoln Center has as many visitors in a week as the Bronx Historical Society has in a year and the society gets $200,000 to the Beaumont’s $17,000.

The answers to many of these puzzles is politics. According to one commentator, the difference in the classifications is that someone lobbied 25 years ago to be numbered among the 34 and others did not.

There are other elements that come together in this situation that I haven’t mentioned and there are attempts by some to overhaul the system (apparently some defunct groups were awarded money because they were on the automatic funding list).

The whole article is worth reading. I can’t imagine that New York City is alone in this sort of arrangement. It may be educational for people to realize the power of politicking, as demeaning and smarmy as it may feel, could yield funding for life.