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 was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. 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.

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Media Using The Masses

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It appears as if the mainstream media has gone from glaring at bloggers to embracing some user generated content, perhaps at the expense of their employees. I am beginning to suspect some outlets have realized they could tap in to people’s desire for 15 minutes of fame as long as things ran through an editor for quality control. About a year ago, I started seeing the press releases I sent to the arts editor appearing verbatim in the neighbor specific inserts of the newspaper. I would still get a calendar or photo listing in the paper proper and maybe even a feature story if I was lucky. I have had my releases appear verbatim in smaller weekly papers, but this was the first time it was happening in a major daily.

A little later a mechanism appeared on the newspaper website encouraging people to submit stories of their own. Then a heck of a lot of people were laid off at the paper. I don’t know if there was a casual relationship or not, but I began to wonder if my attempts at promoting my events was contributing to pink slips being issued.

Last night I saw a promo on television announcing a new program the station news department was starting involving citizen contributions. There was nothing on the website despite their encouragement to check it out for more information. I think it had something to do with weather. I wouldn’t be surprised if some point in the next five years they started soliciting people to submit video reports.

Last month Salon.com started Open Salon where they will actually pay people for creating content.

What does this mean for you?

Well first, people may expect more opportunities to interact and contribute in your events.

Second, you may never know when the newspaper critic is coming because it could be anyone in the audience and a totally different person from last time. On the other hand, if you have a popular show you may hear from 10 people who intend to review your show for the newspaper and want free tickets (and still have an unknown 11th person’s critique printed).

I also imagine that some artists will anticipate expectations and you may find the type of shows they create/offer for performance at your venue beginning to evolve. I have spoken about how people may not be content with the passive experience sitting quietly in a dark room watching a show any longer. As much as I expect audiences to demand more, I also expect artists to start to provide more. As always, some will do it better than others.

In the short term though the implications of media outlets using exactly what you send them are that you better be making a compelling case for attendance. No longer are you trying to convince a writer your event is worthy of a feature story or review and depending on them to conduct interviews and recast your event in an interesting manner. Now what you write has to do both these things. You may not have the alternative of writing two releases, one for the editor and one for publication as is. I have had an editor take a single press release, assign a reporter to follow up to generate a story and forward it to be printed verbatim by the newspaper. It happened at least three times last year.

If you don’t know how to start writing compelling entries, you may want to check out my entry here. Because Artsjournal.com has changed the way they address their archives, those links to Greg Sandow’s blog don’t work any more. However, if you go to the May 25 -June 15, 2005 entries on his blog, you can probably find them without too much effort.

What Can NCLB Do For The Arts?

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It occurs to me that there is a lot of talk about how No Child Left Behind is eroding the arts in schools. Field trips and outreach programs are curtailed or eliminated. Arts classes disappear in favor of more instruction in test subjects. Recess time is likewise dwindling. (If you are wondering about the connection, I got my first black eye in 5th grade when we recreated the rumble scene from West Side Story. Kids still recreate cool scenes from musical theatre during recess don’t they?)

But it got me thinking, to be fair do the arts gain anything from NCLB? Lets face it, the arts were getting the short shrift in schools for a long time before NCLB. We claim that music classes help kids with math. Does math in turn help kids with music. Does a good foundation in math help visual artists understand scale, ratio and proportion better?

In terms of reading and writing, obviously the arts can benefit from people who have a high level of comprehension and ability to express themselves well. We can hope these things provide basis to transition from reading well to being well read and possessed of critical and analytical thinking skills. Trading out social and hard sciences to make room for more math, reading and writing may make these skills harder to acquire. If NCLB does cultivate higher quality students then it would certainly be a pleasure to see students enter college without the need for remediation.

There are a lot of people who don’t feel NCLB is going to produce a generally higher quality student which bodes poorly for every industry in the future. If you were going to fight to get the law changed, how would it be improved to benefit the arts? More arts exposure is a given, but what else do you fight for? An excellent artist really can’t develop in a vacuum only experiencing arts classes. And what if you are told arts classes are definitely off the table in this new law? How do you salvage things and make sure students gain the knowledge and discernment they need to be artists via other avenues? What’s more, artists shouldn’t have to operate in a vacuum either, what do you advocate for that will help students become appreciators and consumers of art as they proceed through life?

What Value The Compact Disc?

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Occasionally it is healthy to revisit daily rituals and practices to evaluate if they are still pertinent. For example, every time I go on a trip I clean all my CDs out of car and leave the little door on the CD holder open to show that there are no CDs in my car. It recently struck me that in the time since I bought the car several years ago, the value of CD as a format has dropped so precipitously that no one really wants to break into my car to grab them. In fact, they probably didn’t want to when I bought the car either but the iPod has gone from competing to almost default format in that time.

Realizations like this make me re-examine stuff in my professional life including policies we have set for ticket purchases/exchanges, seating, volunteers, rentals and whatever else comes up. Because we have always done it can’t be the default excuse for continuing to do something. In many cases, because we did it last year might not be valid either as behaviors and values change so quickly.

On the other hand, just as there are still people desperate enough for the few bucks they might get for my CDs at the local record exchange, the cost of someone abusing the lack of a policy might still outweigh the benefit of eliminating it.

No Lack of Power Had They Lacked Power

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I hadn’t intended to watch the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics but then I saw the footage of the rehearsals Korean television “leaked.” I was so intrigued, I got up at 2:00 am hoping to watch the ceremony streamed live. Unfortunately, NBC chose not to do so. I would have been happy to watch it with commercials inserted. Nor could I find any other source, including China’s CCTV that didn’t forbid me due to my geography. Instead I had to wait 18 hours.

I am glad I rushed home from work to watch it Friday night. I was flabbergasted at the scope and pageantry. What surprised and impressed me the most was the precision execution of things like the drums in the opening segment and the taiji players who formed perfect concentric circles without any spike marks on the floor. What left me agape was the movement of the printing blocks. I thought they were computerized hydraulics or some such until I noticed there were legs under there as the cubes rose. This was a good 2-3 minutes before they revealed that fact. There are some great still photos here.

I imagine that the London Olympic Committee was gulping at the thought of having to follow that. I have to admit the torch lighting was pretty anti-climatic in comparison with the rest of the opening ceremony. I was expecting a dragon or a phoenix to emerge to ignite it. (I have since read that the IOC requires an athlete to do the honors.)

What I liked most about the Opening Ceremony as an arts professional was that the focus was so much on the abilities of the performers. If the projections on the side of the building, the LED screen scroll on the floor and the computer enhancement of the fireworks had failed, it would have still been a superlative performance. If all the power went out so that they flying couldn’t happen, the fou drums were darkened and the globe couldn’t rise from the floor, it would have still been impressive.

I have worked in technical theatre where they are fond of pointing out that without them, the actors would be flailing around and speaking into the darkness. The truth is, if China decided to start at 8:00 am instead of 8:00 pm and planned on using natural light people would still have been wowed by the performance. (The sun was rising at 4:30 am when I was there so they would have had a fair bit to work with if the stadium walls were open in the right place.)

To my mind, China did the arts world a great service by emphasizing the power of live performance and exhibited what can be accomplished in that format. (Though granted thanks to a whole lot of money.) The reality was that even with all the rehearsals and training that made such precision possible, people still got injured. That too is a hazard of live performance and as much as we may like to sell the idea of the possibility of danger at our shows, it isn’t something we actually wish upon our performers. It is easy to blame China’s low safety standards. I might have done so except that I heard something similar nearly happened this weekend because someone neglected to secure unused equipment.

My blog is about the arts and though it might get me more readers, I stay away from politics and other matters. The controversies surrounding these Olympics loom too large not to at least acknowledge they exist. The optimist in me hopes for China it is just a matter of making up lost ground. Two days before the 1932 Summer Games in L.A. the U.S. Army conducted a bayonet charge on their own WW I veterans backed by tanks and didn’t have a very good record on the treatment of minorities. That same year, China was dealing with Mao in one part of the country and Japanese occupation in another. The US emerged from the Depression and gradually moved forward on social fronts. For China there were impediments to progress from within and without.

For the sake of all the wonderful people I met in China, my hope was that the opening ceremony was a grand declaration that the country had finished regrouping and was embarking on a campaign to be regarded once again as a giant of culture, learning and invention.