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Art(ist) Education

Do You Love Opera For It’s Economic Impact?

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In addition to responding to comments he makes on the blog, I have had some email exchanges with artist Carter Gillies. Many times in the course of our correspondence, he will say “I think we are talking about the same thing, just in different words.” I am not always sure that we are, but I often get the impression he is operating a few steps ahead of me.

That feeling of disconnect is actually a central feature of a guest post he wrote nearly a month ago for Diane Ragsdale’s Jumper blog.

Since it was a long piece, I bookmarked it for later reading. I am somewhat embarrassed it has taken me close to a month to read it, but I encourage everyone to do so, even if it means coming back to your bookmark a couple months hence. Having read it, a lot of what he was trying to get at in our correspondence became clearer to me.

What Carter does is take a really deep look into the way we define the value of the arts. In doing so, he bolsters the argument that we should avoid talking about the value of the arts in relation to economic, social, educational, developmental etc., benefits.

To heavily summarize what he says, he notes that people in the arts have a clear sense of the value of the arts. People who are not aware of this value and even perceive the arts as valueless, do not share the same language and metrics for evaluating the arts. Communicating the value is therefore as difficult as the challenge of describing a color to a person who in unable to perceive that color. (my emphasis)

The way we mostly talk to these people is we have found that our ends, the things we value in themselves, can be the means to their own ends. They value the economy? Well, the arts are good for the economy! They think that cognitive development is important? Well, the arts are good for cognitive development! We make our own ends the means to their ends.

But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient. That’s never only what they are to us. Sometimes we just have to make the case for a lesser value as the expedient means to secure funding or policy decisions. It’s better than not making any sense at all.

I don’t wake up excited to go to work to stimulate the economy. I am not eager to go to a museum opening so I can have my cognitive abilities developed. In this context, it almost sounds ridiculous.

This illustrates the disconnect between shared metrics and terminology. As an arts person, I can understand the argument that I need to pay taxes to help stimulate the economy and contribute to the cognitive development of others, but I can’t convince the government to provide funding for the arts based on why I value the arts. I get them, but they don’t get me. I need to talk about economy and cognitive development to be able to receive that tax money.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to the arts. When we talk about why we love our parents and siblings, we may talk about how well they treat us but that doesn’t truly explain why we love them. The reasons are just external metrics we know others can understand and identify. The real reasons are ineffable. There will be people with whom you become romantically involved who may treat you much better by those same standards than your family ever did, but you will never love them the way you love your bratty sibling.

Citing Archimedes famous quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world,” Carter notes:

In the arts we have thrown facts together, constructing the longest possible lever, but have seemingly forgotten we also need somewhere to place it. Those facts need to rest on values that can act as a fulcrum. The facts without value, or the wrong value, will simply have no leverage. They will fail to motivate.

He suggests what is needed is a change of perspective rather than trying to change minds. While this might be accomplished via the proposal to create public will for the arts that I often cite, Carter also notes that the arts community needs to change its perspective as well.

The confusion we are mired in is thinking that our difficulty is practical when in fact the impediment is structural. We need to better understand this to make appreciable headway. We can celebrate both the good art does and the good art is, a structural difference, the lever and the fulcrum. That is the value of intrinsic value for the arts.

I should note, whether you agree with the practice or not, use of taxes for economic development and education weren’t foregone conclusions. It required a change in perspective to implement both.

When The Tenors Are Sixers At Best

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My interest was recently piqued when I read a piece in The Economist which reported that two opera conservatories in Sweden declined to admit male singers because they were not up to standard.

The conservatory decided that even though it would make for skewed student productions, it could not admit male singers on the grounds of gender alone. The Gothenburg University College of Opera has found itself in a similar position. Of the 45 singers who auditioned this year, nine were men, but as the Dean of Studies Monica Danielsson tells Prospero, “none of them reached the level of admission”. Consequently, none of them won a place.

As a comparison, the article cited Indiana University Jacobs School of Music which,

…receives a similar ratio of female to male applicants. But unlike Swedish conservatories, the school admits a weighted student body. In effect, sopranos have to score much higher marks to gain admission. “We have to strive for a balance between the voice parts,” explains Professor Mary Ann Hart, chair of the school’s voice department. “You can teach singers repertoire but at an opera school, at some point, they have to act on stage.”

It should be noted that there is no mention about whether the men admitted to Indiana are up to standard or not, only that there is much more competition among women than men due to the ratio of applicants.

I have never really viewed myself as much of an activist when it comes to the subject of the gender imbalance in arts job opportunities. But I feel that whether what is happening in Sweden is isolated or indicative of a trend, it bears attention.

When the argument a male is more highly qualified evaporates and the criteria for admitting or casting a male is based on a piece written hundreds of years ago needing one, it is probably past time to start creating new works with more roles for women.

When it comes to the performing arts, I am always going to lean toward high level of skill as a criteria. Arts careers are difficult to pursue so if someone only has the capacity to be mediocre at the end of their training, they shouldn’t be lead to believe they can compete at a high level. If the guys can’t meet an objective measure of this ability, then it may be for the best if they are cut.

Is it fair to women who entered the conservatory at 8 striving to raise their proficiency 9 if they are forced to perform beside a man who operates at 6 and was admitted so that a performance could be mounted?

Admittedly this is a tricky question. Working alongside others who force you to bring your best everyday is important. Yet as the professor at Indiana says, practical experience, not theory, is the ultimate goal of the training. Right now the male voice is needed for that purpose when it comes to opera.

This isn’t just an issue with opera, musical theater and acting programs, with some exceptions, face a similar ratio of female to male applicants.

I have seen training programs where there are 300 theater majors and you are lucky if you get on stage once in all the years you are there. That type of arrangement sucks. What would be worse is if there were a similar situation where you would be lucky to perform before you graduated if you were female, but averaged a role every other semester if you were male.

If it was just a matter of more women applying to programs than men, that would be one thing, but if there is a large number of very highly skilled women applying to programs (or even just auditioning based on the skill they have been able to cultivate), then there is a demand for challenging roles to suit them.

Ideally, there would be more roles written with built in flexibility so that choosing to produce a good show didn’t have added baggage of the gender mix. I suspect currently there would be a tendency to cast men rather than women in those roles. I can’t see how a blind audition process like orchestras use could be devised that would mask gender and still accurately evaluate ability in singing and acting.

Artistic Ability Is As Much A Birthright As Language Ability

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Jason Gots, editor and creative producer over at Big Think recently wrote about “The Upside of Amateurism.” He is troubled by the perception that so much value is being placed on expertise that it is stifling curiosity and creativity, a concern shared by many in the arts, business and education world, among others.

…I fear that the present day is a place/time where expertise is so valued and specialties so specialized that people are shamed out of experimentation and curiosity, the only two impulses other than love that (as far as I’m concerned) make life worth living. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin could be a printer, fiction writer, inventor, scientist, and statesman and end up a hero of the age. Today he’d be an eccentric dilettante with branding problems.

Let’s take the example of music. The Japanese educator Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998), creator of the world-famous Suzuki method of music instruction, believed that we do violence to children when we teach them that music is a “gift” you’re either born with or not. We ought to be teaching music, he believed, the same way we teach language — as a birthright.

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But we don’t teach kids to worry about whether or not they’re “talented” in their native language. Or to give it up by adulthood if they haven’t yet won a scholarship. Yet how many adults do you know who play, sing, or write music on a regular basis? If it’s more than a handful, you and your friends are a cultural anomaly. And that’s a real shame, isn’t it?

I have often heard about the Suzuki Method, but I really wasn’t aware of the philosophy before reading this article.

When Gots pointed out that we don’t worry about whether kids are talented in their native language, (grammar and spelling criticisms on social media notwithstanding), it immediately reminded me of Stephen McCraine’s “Be Friends With Failure” webcomic I wrote about a few years ago.

In one of the panels of that comic, McCraine says we don’t tell kids to give up if they don’t master language immediately so we shouldn’t tell ourselves to give up if we don’t master some artistic form within a short time.

I was also reminded of Jaime Bennett’s TEDx talk where he notes that we easily identify ourselves as tennis players and golfers, but not as having artistic talent.

“why we can so easily see ourselves on a continuum with Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, but we don’t think anything we do has anything in common with Sandy Duncan.”

This all ties back to the general effort by organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to disseminate a message that everyone has the capacity to be creative. In the case of the NEA, one of the steps they have taken toward this is widening the definition and scope of what constitutes participation in an artistic experience.

To a degree, the idea there is too much focus on expertise ties into the Hewlett Foundation study I wrote about yesterday that reported there was a concern that the professionalization of the arts management field may be narrowing access to those jobs.

Got Stagefright?

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In the process of trying to convince people of the value of attending a live event, performing arts people will often cite the opportunity for chaos. They will say something along the lines of a recording will be the same every time, but in a live performance, anything can happen.

I wonder if this is really fair to the performers and crew that worked on the show because it essentially tells the audience they should be rooting, just a little, for something to go wrong.

It may seem relatively harmless, especially if you aren’t out there loudly proclaiming the certain death of the lion tamer or acrobat who operates without a net. There are a lot of performers out there who (mostly) quietly suffer from stage fright and even just a little hype can exacerbate their anxiety.

A book review in the New Yorker last August recounts some of the more famous/infamous instances of stage fright suffered by Daniel Day-Lewis,  Laurence Olivier and Glenn Gould, among others. It talks about the different things that weigh on performer’s minds, no matter how hard they try, including whether they can live up to the legend that has been attached to them.

The audience rooting against them or judging them is among the anxieties they suffer:

Some performers displace this cruelty onto the audience. The pianist Charles Rosen believed that the spectators were out there waiting for the performer to slip up: “The silence of the audience is not that of a public that listens but of one that watches—like the dead hush that accompanies the unsteady movement of the tightrope walker poised over his perilous space.”

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Baryshnikov believes that it is the feeling of obligation to the audience that triggers stagefright: “Suddenly the morality kicks in. These people bought a ticket to your show.”

The problem of stage fright may be more widespread than we are generally aware. In addition to silently coping with the problem, the New Yorker article notes that many artists use beta-blockers to help them deal with their fear. This is not without some controversy.

Some people said they resulted in “phoned in” performances. Some raised the ethical question, asking whether the use of beta-blockers by pianists was any different from the use of steroids by athletes. (There is an important distinction, though. Steroids add to the body, increasing muscle mass in order to improve performance. Beta-blockers remove something from the body—the flutist’s lip tremors, the cellist’s hand tremors—in order to permit the person to produce the kind of performance he has already shown himself capable of, outside the auditorium.)

This reminded me that Drew McManus had written about the issue of “performance enhancing drugs” for musicians a dozen years ago for The Partial Observer.

I briefly thought that a more constructive use of the “anything can happen” phrase might be to associate it with idea that you may see a breakthrough performance or a moment of inspiration and synchronicity that transcends the normal experience.

I quickly realized this approach may increase the anxiety for the audience. “Am I witnessing a transcendent moment? How do I really know? I wasn’t really bowled over, but maybe I missed it. I should probably join the standing ovation just to be sure, right?”

The truth is, live performance has the potential for witnessing some crises and participating in moments of transcendence. To ignore that these opportunities exist does a disservice to the experience. Regardless of whether these factors are mentioned, performers are still going to experience stage fright and audiences are still going to wonder if they are missing something everyone else seems to get.

Not to mention, these experiences aren’t unique to the performing arts. Athletes fear they will lose the edge that makes them great and many spectators find themselves unable to figure out what is going on or why anyone gets excited by the sport in the first place.

While it is generally acknowledged that the arts have to be sensitive to the barriers that may exist for audiences, the same isn’t really true for the performers.

In many other fields of employment there are coaches, counselors and human resource personnel available. Granted, many of these resources are less than perfect. A highly paid athlete is going to get a lot more support and guidance from the team’s infrastructure if they fall into rut than a fast food worker will from their company.

How many theater companies, dance companies and orchestras have a program in place to provide coaching for a performer who has lost their edge? (Actually, the dance company practice of having regular classes might count as that.) Or acknowledge that people might have debilitating stage fright, much less provide help for people who are experiencing it?

I am left wondering how prevalent it is since it isn’t often discussed. Given that seven people, (a fairly large number for that column), commenting on Drew’s Partial Observer admitted to using a drug to deal with anxiety, I suspect it is more prevalent than we imagine.

Becoming Queen of Classical Music Culture

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I was listening to an interview with Chattanooga Symphony and Opera Concertmaster Holly Mulcahy today and there were a couple things said that jumped out at me.

(Not the least of which was interviewer Hugh Sung declaring her “Queen of Classical Music Culture.” Tireless dedication, seeking out exciting new works, blogging, awesome themed dinner parties, she has earned the title)

But seriously, when she was talking about the perennial question about what to wear to the symphony, she made me realize just printing “Whatever you are comfortable wearing” on websites and in program books doesn’t really assuage anxieties people have about that subject. She suggests that people who are making an effort to put themselves out and experiment with a new experience may do everything they can to insure they don’t stand out. They really want to know what everyone else is going to be wearing.

Holly has written more detailed guide that still emphasizes “wear what you want,” but goes on to say “but if you are still worried about what everyone else is wearing…”

As she also points out in the podcast interview, often people view attending an event like a symphony performance as an opportunity to strut out in clothes they don’t often get to wear. Telling them jeans are okay is too low a bar in their eyes.

Back in January, Drew McManus posted about a video a woman created showing how she and her friends made an occasion of attending the symphony.

[vimeo 127883928 w=500 h=281]

Holly also talks about the role of the concert master (around the 16:30 mark). I was aware of some of the things she talked about already, but when she mentioned sometimes she had to make up for a lack of numbers in the string section by playing to create a fuller sound, I wanted to know why. Is the lack due to budget cuts? Could they not find enough available substitutes to fill out their numbers?

One of the more compelling things she talks about is why she walked away from a full time position with one orchestra, turned down a similar position with another orchestra and gave up playing for two months, in part due to the unhealthy environment that she experienced. (~34:00). People thought she was crazy for doing so since competition for any position is so fierce, gaining one is akin to a miracle. Giving one up is akin to apostasy.

These are stories that we seldom hear that we need to hear more of in the arts. Nothing is ever wrong unless contentious contract negotiations go public.

There has been more self-examination in the arts of late which I partially attribute to the fact that the Internet allows people to get their stories out, allows others to realize their experience isn’t unique and allows people to have a conversation about it all. There needs to be more conversation and examination. I expect there will be.

One of the stories Holly told that was most interesting to me was how she got her violin. (~46:00) Since violins are often passed down over centuries, they tend to gather interesting tales around themselves. In her case, she had about given up on finding an instrument that suited her when she happened to run into Eugene Fodor at a violin shop as he was coming in to sell some of his violins.

She describes how Fodor urged her to play Brahms on it and then paced between a couple rooms shouting corrections to her. I think I would have been a wreck, but she loved the instrument and walked away satisfied she had purchased the right violin.

The Secret Magic Power Called Repetition

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While I driving around recently, I heard an interview with This American Life creator, Ira Glass, talking about the early days of his career (from about 16:00-20:00 minutes)

The main thrust of that segment was a combination of the brief comments he made in 2009 on storytelling and creativity and the myth that people are essentially born proficient geniuses that I have addressed before.

As in his comments from 2009 (illustrated below in kinetic typography), Glass says when he was first starting out his working at NPR HQ in Washington, DC, the quality of what he was producing was bad to adequate.

As he looked around, he felt like everyone around him had some magical power to know exactly what was needed to make something good- emphasize a point here, edit something out there, etc. He didn’t think he would ever learn that skill. He even resorted to paying people around the office at NPR $50 to look at his work, figuring it was cheaper than going to graduate school.

Ultimately, he realized that obtaining proficiency was a largely a matter of experience, logging the hours and making mistakes.

It may require making mistakes for a long time. In the same 2009 segment that the kinetic type video above is excerpted from, Glass plays a piece he wrote in his eighth year of reporting and critiques it. He admits he doesn’t even understand what his point was and then gives a one sentence description of the situation which is interesting and comprehensible.

I bring up this idea periodically on my blog because I think it is important to be reminded that just because something/someone amazing seems to pop out of nowhere, that success may have been decades in the making.

The interviewer at WOUB was of the same mind. He specifically prefaces his request that Ira Glass talk about this experience “because we have a lot of students that listen…” Glass agrees noting that whenever you see a movie about an artist, they are always depicted as being great and inspired from the beginning, but that isn’t true to life.

In an early part of the interview, Glass notes that they kill around 50% of the stories at This American Life–not the ideas, the actual stories they are in the process of working on or have completed. So even as acclaimed as he and his team are, they are regularly making mistakes or producing work that falls short. Glass says their success is as much attributable to being ruthless about cutting as it is to being capable story tellers.

The idea that you shouldn’t become so emotionally involved with your work that you can’t let it go is not a new one, but it is a lesson that is worth revisiting from slightly different perspectives.

Stuff A Computer Programmer In Your Arts Hole

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Possible evidence of what I suggested yesterday regarding the need to discuss all the career paths available to arts grads comes in a post last week by Alex Tabbarok Marginal Revolution blog.

Tabbarok opens by reviewing graduation data he used in a book he published showing more students graduated with a bachelor’s degree in visual and performing arts in 2009 than in “in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined.”

So what has happened since 2009? The good news is that enrollment in STEM fields has increased dramatically. The number of graduates with computer science degrees, for example, has increased by 34%, chemical engineering degrees are up by a whopping 49.5% and math and statistics degrees have increased by 32%.

The bad news is that we are still graduating more students in the visual and performing arts than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined. As I said in Launching nothing wrong with the visual and performing arts but those are degrees which are unlikely to generate spillovers to society.

In the comments section there is a lot of discussion about the relative usefulness of different majors. The following observations about the mix of proficiencies one needs to create a successful product in computer science caught my eye.

Floccina February 4, 2016 at 10:04 am

The CS majors could be made easier. There are hard programming tasks and easy programmings task, there IMO are even programming where less intelligent people can do a better job by making interface that is easier to understand. Some programing task require less intelligence and more art. So perhaps there should be an easy Computer programming major. And perhaps it would make us all better off by increasing total production.

Fill disclosure I am a programmer who not so smart. When I have a difficult algorithm to write that I cannot look up I get help from a smart person.

Andy February 4, 2016 at 11:09 am

I agree. I’m a liberal arts major in English and Information Studies (not programming), and lucked out by finding a job that trained me in administrative computing. CS majors are really needed for software engineering but for programming for basic business processes they can really screw things up, often because their communication skills aren’t that great. The setup we have at my university – train liberal arts majors in computing – has worked well because they draw smart people from areas and occupations that emphasize communication and critical thinking. I’m always hearing horror stories of young CS majors who overengineered systems to the point of unmaintainability and can’t be reasoned with.

An inch below that, someone comments that Apple was able to produce a successful product because Steve Wozinak was a genius at writing effective code and Steve Jobs knew that the user interface needed to be simple and attractive to users.

The problem with Tabbarok’s view, which is generally shared, is that it assumes a computer science major gets plugged into a computer science job hole and a psychology major gets plugged into a psychology job hole and if there are no corresponding jobs needing to be plugged into, then those majors are useless.

This ignores the fact that the value of computer programs, chemicals, medicine, etc., don’t become self-evident upon creation. Like it or not, marketing, advertising and design communicate something that draws attention and causes people to value those items. Whether that thing deserves to be valued is another conversation altogether.

Would you have even known of the existence of the original Macintosh 128k, much less wanted to buy the boxy thing if it weren’t for the iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad? Why did VHS trump Beta when the latter was the superior format? Acai berries always had the same nutritional qualities so why were they miracle berries one year and barely mentioned the next?

The value of something isn’t completely dependent or proportionate to its usefulness.

From a certain point of view, the computer science, chemistry and biology degree really only has value because the creative team at a marketing firm has made the software, artificial sweetener or drug important. Even then, the product may fail for intangible and unexpected reasons just as high budget movies do.

To some degree, more computer science jobs create more creative jobs and creative jobs help create more computer science jobs. This sort of interdependence is illustrated by the success of Amazon, Google and Facebook. Nobody would be hired in one group of jobs if the other area was deficient. (Lord knows, whoever keeps updating the TOS for Facebook has nearly screwed things up a number of times.)

This gets back to what I was saying yesterday. Everyone is done a disservice when they are told actors can only act, violinists can only be in an orchestra, psychologists can only get jobs in clinical, counseling and school psychology.

God help us if a tuba player starts a technology company!

This isn’t to say that there is no value in pursuing a discipline toward a highly specialized end. There is a lot of training, study and practice behind orchestra musicians, surgeons, major league baseball players, ballet dancers, etc. It is widely acknowledged that there are only a few such slots available to the tens to hundreds of thousands of practitioners (except surgeons, of course, I hope there aren’t that many people practicing surgery for fun).

Those who don’t have the ability and will to operate at an elite level shouldn’t have other options closed off to them by a siloing mentality if they have skills that overlap well into other areas.

A Real Artist Wouldn’t…

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Throughout my life I have frequently seen articles about all the careers you can pursue with X major. Some of the options seemed a little far fetched and based on individual outlier examples. (Though philosophy majors have racked up some interesting achievements so perhaps it is I whose vision is limited.)

Over the last few months it occurred to me that when it comes to arts careers, the “if you are not suffering, you are selling out” philosophy might be influencing mentors and educators when it comes to providing advice to young students and practitioners. More accurately, it may be less about starving as purity of practice.

I haven’t assembled enough examples to really support this thesis, but I thought I would toss the idea out there to spur some thought and draw attention to how career options are being communicated, including in one’s personal practice.

I started thinking along these lines last Fall when I was attending the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education SAEE conference. One of the research presentations found that music conservatory graduates felt they hadn’t been prepared for anything but a career as a member of an orchestra or as a soloist.

This isn’t necessarily groundbreaking news. It has long been observed by both faculty and students of all disciplines, including arts, science, business and law, that more people are being graduated than there are open positions. One of the goals of SAEE is to find ways to train students to better manage their careers and make their own opportunities. It is still a fledgling effort, though.

A little more recently, I was listening to faculty from the video game design program at my university on a video conference talking about the program and career opportunities. It wasn’t until a prospective student asked what other career options existed for the degree that the faculty members mentioned there were some graduates that had gone into medical imaging and simulation and were actually making quite a bit more money than those who went into the gaming industry.

I was surprised to learn that there were good options in the medical field. It had never occurred to me that such opportunities existed. I don’t think they were intentionally hiding that fact, especially with all the other things they needed to talk about. Still, there was something in the way they spoke about the medical field careers that made it sound like the less preferential option versus the core focus of the program. Given that the program is pretty competitive and rigorous, it could only raise the profile if they touted a range of career options.

It is natural that we are all biased toward what we perceive to be the pure practice of our discipline. The question remains, are we telling the broadest, best and most interesting range of stories about the opportunities our disciplines afford?

It isn’t enough to convince people that what the arts and culture represent and create have resonance and meaning in their lives with an eye to making them consumers. There is also a need to mention the diverse ways these skills can be manifested and practiced even if they lack some elemental of idealized purity. Or if we feel some practitioners are bastardizing and demeaning an art form with lack of skill and discipline.

At the very least this would create a growing awareness of all the ways artistic vocations are practiced and improve the perception of the arts as a career path.

The Water Balloon War Final Exam

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I was listening to some Big Think videos this weekend when I was struck with an insight about educational philosophy. I am pretty sure it isn’t a new insight, but the metaphor that occurred to me might help a little bit with the conception of the problem.

At the tail end of an interview with psychologist Laurence Steinberg, he says that there is no problem with teaching to the test if the test is measuring something that you want kids to achieve.

Sir Ken Robinson and others have pointed out that our goals for education are based in Industrial Revolution thinking where education was meant to create a competent workforce. (Robinson’s words are entertainingly illustrated in the Zen Pencils cartoon I shared last week.)

As Robinson has pointed out elsewhere, we barely know what the world will look like in five years time, much less what skills will be needed in 15-20 years time when students being educated today start to enter the job market.

The thing that struck me, perhaps influenced by the Super Bowl this weekend, was that our current education system is akin to having the evaluation of effectiveness measured by success in a football game at the end of the year.

People complain that the approach is brutal, damaging, favors certain genders, races and physical types (or learning styles in the case of education), and doesn’t really confer the skills required for employment or even college.

The counter example that occurred to me was having a water balloon fight as the end of year evaluation. Even though both football game and a water balloon fight would be informed by history lessons in battle tactics, geometry and physics, a water balloon fight lends itself more widely, creatively and easily.

There are many more lessons to be learned preparing for a water balloon fight about the use of terrain and technology in battles that would bring history alive. With options of hand throwing, catapults, slingshots to launch water balloons, geometry and physics have to be factored in constantly by participants.

Chemistry class can be devoted to investigation of whether adding gelatin changes the ballistic properties of the balloons and whether the stickiness upon explosion will be sufficient to gum up the works of enemy weaponry and thwart hand launching attempts.

Biology class can include investigation of using biodegradable materials for balloons so the battle doesn’t ruin the environment. Literature classes would study speeches, poems and stories that inspired people to great feats from Beowulf to Shakespeare to Martin Luther King.

On the whole, a water balloon fight final exam promotes greater creativity and inquiry, exactly the type of skills we want to engender in students. It is fun and engaging and doesn’t heavily favor gender, ethnicity, physical or mental ability.

If you haven’t guessed by now, water balloons in this metaphor are arts and creativity in the classroom.

The reason why, literally and figuratively, few school districts would move from a football final to a water balloon final despite the exciting opportunities it affords, is because no one views water balloon fighting skills as marketable but football skills are viewed as such.

As we know, the same perception exists for education today. Even though few people can be employed solely based on their football skills/K12 education, those skills are still the main focus because there are a handful of people that achieve great renown.

Just as it is easier to cut arts programs than sports programs in schools, politically it is very difficult to shift away from teaching what is quantitatively measurable to what is qualitatively measurable.

Yet we still know what the results are. When students enter universities, even if they don’t require remediation, effort is still required to move students from regurgitation of facts to an inquiry mode of thinking.

Even upon graduation from university, businesses are saying their biggest need from employees is the creativity to help their companies move forward.

Integrating creativity into the classroom and returning arts classes to schools won’t solve all the issues with the education system any more than a water balloon fight is automatically superior to a football game.

Though really, wouldn’t you be more excited to learn if you knew it was connected with the Great Water Balloon Fight?

Like the water balloon fight, the inclusion and advocacy of arts and creativity has the potential to change the dynamics of the learning environment, level the playing field and increase accessibility for a wider range of people.

The reality is, there is nothing idealized, impractical, theoretical or metaphorical about my water balloon example. Winter weather aside, you could use water balloons tomorrow in connection with different subject areas in the ways I have suggested and see a lot of investment from students.

Do I Really Need A Degree For That?

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Dan Pink called attention to publisher Penguin Random House’s recent decision to no longer require job applicants to have a university degree. From what I see in corroborating stories, the little catch is that this seems to be limited to the publisher’s UK operations.

The firm wants to have a more varied intake of staff and suggests there is no clear link between holding a degree and performance in a job.

[…]

Last autumn, professional services firm Deloitte changed its selection process so recruiters did not know where candidates went to school or university.

Ernst and Young has scrapped a requirement for school leavers to have the equivalent of three B grades at A-level or graduates to have an upper second class degree.

The accountancy firm is removing all academic and education details from its application process.

PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this year also announced that it would stop using A-levels grades as a threshold for selecting graduate recruits.

As you might imagine from the references to A-levels, these decisions all appear to be limited to the UK operations of these companies.

Still, it got me wondering with all the recent conversation about the legality and morality of unpaid internship practices in the U.S., as well as data showing that arts internships appear to benefit people with higher socio-economic status, should this be the sort of practice the arts should be considering?

My thinking here is that while you don’t need to have a degree or be enrolled to do an internship, internship plus degree tends to have better job prospects which represent a larger financial investment. I’d venture to guess many of the jobs college degree holders are getting can be accomplished by someone with a high school degree and an internship/short training period.

There are definitely different philosophical approaches to job training between the U.S. and the UK. For example, the school leaver program for Deloitte and Ernst and Young make not going to university appear preferable to attending and promises a rigorous 5 year training program. These are typical choices for students in the UK. A quick search for school leaver programs shows similar ones at IBM, Rolls Royce, Pret A Manger and others.

Two years ago I wrote about the UK’s National Skills Academy apprenticeship training programs for creative industries.

These sort of training options are not as widely available in the U.S. The closest we have are co-op programs, which are few and far between and barely promoted as an option.

But while the method of delivering training may be different, the question about whether a university degree best provides that training still remains, regardless of which country we are talking about.

One observation made in the story about Penguin’s decision resonates pretty strongly in relation to the challenges faced by the arts. (my emphasis)

Neil Morrison, human resources director, says they want talented staff “regardless of background”.

“This is the starting point for our concerted action to make publishing far, far more inclusive than it has been to date,” says Mr Morrison.

“We believe this is critical to our future – to publish the best books that appeal to readers everywhere, we need to have people from different backgrounds with different perspectives and a workforce that truly reflects today’s society.”

There is already a conversation about how paid internships help to open up opportunities to people from a wider socio-economic range. Perhaps the next aspect of the conversation needs to include an examination into whether a degree really is absolutely necessary to success in the job or not.

The arts are frequently accused of being irrelevant because people don’t see themselves and their stories being portrayed. Penguin saw requiring a university degree as literally inhibiting their ability to do just that.

Arts Need A Standardized Curriculum To Combat Patron Anxiety

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Last summer Vox had a post, Everyone can be an opera buff. Here are 7 steps to get started.

It got me thinking that creating page like this on an arts organization’s website could be a much more constructive approach to engaging audiences than the “How To Act When You Visit” lists found on many arts organizations’ webpages.

While a number of arts orgs have very entertaining and humorous approaches to such lists, a page like Vox’s can serve multiple purposes. For example, while answering the question about seats, Vox includes a picture of the audience with most people wearing tuxes and dresses, but also features a young woman in a football jersey and someone taking pictures with their camera.

This image provides a clearer sense of what people might expect when attending a performance. The website may say it is okay to wear jeans, but the reality may be, if the venue doesn’t manipulate the photo shoot to reflect their aspirations, most people in the orchestra section aren’t wearing jeans.

What I appreciated about the Vox article was the way the advice about approaching opera was given. One of my initial thoughts was that a venue could appeal to younger audiences by creating a page that replicated the feel a Buzzfeed listicle with its animated GIFs.

What the Buzzfeed format lacks, however, is the additional depth of an informational article.

The first suggestion takes an entirely practical approach, for example:

1) Pick your first opera for maximum fun, not for what the curriculum says

Picking your first opera can be paralyzing, but don’t just choose one from the canon. When you take a kid to her first movie, you’d opt for a kids’ movie rather than jumping into Citizen Kane. Same here. You don’t need to earn a PhD, you need to get your money’s worth — and that means picking a show you might like.

Since your opera options depend on where you live, look at what’s offered and get some advice. “Call the company,” Plotkin suggests. He says the box office will be happy to simply tell you which opera in a season is best for a neophyte…

Also, see if there’s something you have a natural affinity for. To take one example, this season the Washington Opera is premiering a revised version of Philip Glass’s Appomattox. You won’t find that on any Wikipedia lists of classic operas — but if you’re obsessed with the progression of civil rights or the sound of Philip Glass, it’s probably a better first opera than a classic like Carmen.

and from the Third suggestion (my emphasis):

3) Listen to the music and Wikipedia the plot

Avoiding spoilers is the wrong approach for opera. Often, operas are in another language, so you want the plot in your mind already. That will help you appreciate the performances, setting, and spectacle instead of trying to parse who’s actually talking. Your program book will have a summary, too, but it’s best to just glance online the night before you go.

We’re trained to expect prestige entertainment to have emotional nuance, challenging intellectual themes, and difficult narratives. Opera doesn’t have that. It’s like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen, so just don’t sweat the plot and enjoy everything else. People who like opera can make their enthusiasm seem pretentious, but opera isn’t pretentious at all. It’s literally screaming for you to love it.

I have been debating for awhile whether to tackle this subject as a post here or on ArtsHacker as an idea people might try. I decided to post here because it occurred to me that the idea could do with a little more development before it is used.

Specifically, it might be good if each arts discipline develop some standard concepts they wanted reinforced so that no matter what website people visited, they would receive the same underlying message. So there might be five standard concepts an arts organization would intersperse with 3-4 localized tips that draw attention to some feature of the physical setting or program enhancement.

I guess what I am suggesting is almost akin to standardized education curriculum, without the baggage that subject seems to have acquired. Everyone wouldn’t use the same content since every locale and organization has its own character. They would make an effort to include messaging on the chosen topics.

It would really just be a matter of addressing discipline wide anxieties people may have. Many arts organizations do a pretty good job of addressing the concern about what to wear, but aren’t as effective with questions about enjoyment and comprehension. Uniform guidelines and sharing suggestions may help change that.

The Vox article about opera deals with those questions indirectly when it advocates reading and listening ahead of time; urges not worrying about spoilers; saying opera is “like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen”; and “Appreciate the things that make opera like a Broadway show on steroids.”

It is smart to handle these ideas indirectly. It is one thing to be direct when answering a question about what to wear, but it can be incredibly easy to come off as condescending and offensive when directly answering “What if I don’t understand it or enjoy it?”

Of course providing a webpage isn’t the only option available. There are some great video resources as well like the one on visiting a museum I noted last month.

So let it percolate in your mind. What are the basic issues your discipline needs to address? What are effective direct/indirect ways of getting that message across?

What To Unlearn To Be More Creative

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Dan Pink tweeted a story by Art Markman on the Inc magazine site, “4 Things You Learned in School That Make You Less Creative.”

I often talk about how artists and arts organizations can exhibit their value to the business community by providing training in various areas like conflict resolution and creativity. As I was reading this article, I recognized that it provided a good basis for conducting a training session. The content can be useful to either to overtly say, these things you learned as a kid run counter to what we are trying to achieve or just to help a trainer understand some of the socialization and training people have received which makes it difficult to embrace the creative process.

One of the things that really ought to be acknowledged is that there is a degree of “do as I say, not as I do” when it comes to arts classes. The assessment structure in most school classrooms (versus classes you might take at the local arts center) impose expectations that actually run counter to, and may impede, the creative process. Students are told creativity is a gradual process by which you learn from your mistakes–so hurry up and make sure it happens by the time grades are due.

Even people with formal arts degrees need to keep some of these points in mind so they don’t pressure themselves with unrealistic expectations.

The first lesson Markman lists is, There is an answer. Find it and move on. He makes the point that creativity is about finding answers to questions no one has thought to ask and that there are many potential solutions to a problem.

This is probably the one lesson that runs entirely counter to life experience. There is rarely a single answer to a problem in life. Even if there appears to be, you can’t discard it the moment you have used it. At the very least, you have to have a sense of what to do when your go-to solution fails.

Markham notes that schools teach us to be risk/mistake averse. Basically, the fewer mistakes you make on a test, the more successful you are regarded as being. Risk taking is frequently mentioned these days as an crucial element of the creative process so it may not come as news that this important for people to embrace.

Markham also mentions the class room lessons of Study what is going to be on the exam and Make steady progress. Both are intertwined with the previous two lessons. Schools value being able to perform with few mistakes on demand, but don’t emphasize retention of information and skills as strongly. Not only is retention not highly valued, but applying knowledge in a novel manner is barely encouraged at all. Yet that is considered the very definition of creativity.

Accepting mistakes requires that you accept that your progress won’t be steady. Even when you aren’t making perceptible mistakes or experiencing setbacks, creativity requires patience with status quo long enough for your mind to make the leap to another of the many potential solutions.

When I write about creativity, I often emphasize this last point about creativity requiring time and patience. The tools we may use like brain storming sessions, free play, improv, change of venue, etc are merely ways to carve out time and brain processing power for creative endeavors. They don’t guarantee a creative outcome of themselves.

Being open to making mistakes and accepting slow progress may be the most difficult elements of creative practice to teach because minimize mistakes and making steady progress are two lessons that are rewarded in life. If you produce work quickly without many mistakes at your job, you can set yourself up to receive a promotion and more challenging projects.

What Does It Take To Do Your Job?

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So here we are on the crux of a new year. People start toying with the idea of changing their lives and perhaps their careers.

What would you tell someone who wanted to enter your career about your job?

Yes, in many disciplines supply outstrips demand and there may not be a lot of respect for artists so the first thing many people would say is either have a high tolerance for disappointment and poverty or find some other line.

At the same time, one of the reasons why there isn’t a lot of respect for artists is that people don’t understand what the job requires. People in the arts industry aren’t particularly adept at talking about their career path. The general public really only perceives instant successes when someone emerges on the scene and not the 10 years of mistakes and experimentation.

That said, when you think about the answers to the following, think of it in terms of minimum qualifications for anyone, not the qualifications you hold.

What educational background is required/expected?
Where are good places to get that education?

What kind of experience is required/expected?
Where are good places to get that experience?

Where are the jobs? Who does the hiring?

Will there be jobs in this field in 5 years? 15 years?
Should I be pursuing skills in those areas instead or concurrently with skills for today’s jobs?

What are the “big names” in the field?
Who are the people I should be using as role models if they aren’t the same people or are not suited to my goals.

What personal characteristics are needed for success in this field?
Include mental, emotional and spiritual if necessary. Does one need to work well in a team
or tolerate long periods of working alone in a studio under their own motivation?

What physical characteristics are needed for success in this field?
Are there are any people who have achieved success without those characteristics? (dancer’s body, pianist’s fingers, etc)

What are common misconceptions about this job/field and what it takes to be successful?

Any other questions you would suggest? Any answers you want to offer that may run counter to common expectations?

When You Hit The Sculpture, Break Right Past The Expressionists

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I am traveling to see family for the holidays so I have a couple retrospective posts scheduled to cover my absence.

If you are traveling or just have a little time off over the holidays, maybe you might want to try something new like visiting a museum or visiting a museum you haven’t been to before.

Back in 2007 I posted an entry that contained links to posts that Tyler Cowen and Donald Pittenger had written about how to walk through an art museum.

About a 18 months ago, The Art Assignment made a video about visiting art museums.

The primary content of each is interesting, but there is some really great stuff in the comments sector of each, especially The Art Assignment video.

If you ever wanted proof that how people enjoy art is dependent upon their relationship with the idea of art and the people with whom they are experiencing it, it is all there.

Everyone has a different rules for themselves when entering a gallery, but it is clear that the social rules they set for themselves also influence their enjoyment.

One person writes that because his style and that of his significant other differ, he spends a lot of time waiting for her at the portal to the next gallery. Another person says their rule is not to accompany or wait for each other at all other than to rendezvous at an agreed upon time.

After reading all the content, I started to think that anyone who says viewing art is a passive experience is a prisoner of their own rules and expectations because there are plenty of options available. (One of the more extreme essentially advocated a zone defense of whatever you were looking at to prevent others from encroaching) May those options need to be promoted more widely.

Internships, The Paid and The Unpaid

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I recently got around to reading the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) special report on internships in arts fields.

There is a lot of interesting findings in the 23 page report, including the (to me) dismaying news that 87% of those who did at least one arts administration internship were unpaid. That is the highest rate of unpaid internships in any of the categories.

What I was most interested in learning was the reality of the claim that the ability to participate in an internship was dependent on receiving support from families. Sure enough, even though there was negligible difference in the amount of debt accrued by students who did an internship and those who did not, those who could depend on support from families more frequently participated in an internship.

Sixty-seven percent of recent alumni who did not intern while enrolled in school indicated that parents or family helped pay for their education; the figure is 8% higher (75%) among alumni who did intern.

The gap in family support is similar between recent alumni who had unpaid internships and those who did not; 75% of former unpaid interns indicated they received such support, compared to only 67% for alumni who did not undertake an unpaid internship.

Gender, race and socioeconomic status also were factors in choosing to do an internship and whether it was paid or unpaid.

Women were more likely than men to have undertaken an internship during their undergraduate education (56% compared to 51%). While women and men were equally likely to ever have done paid internships, women were much more likely to have been unpaid interns (57% compared to 46% for men).

Black and Hispanic/Latino alumni were less likely to have done internships than their White and Asian counterparts. Black and Hispanic/Latino graduates were also slightly less likely to have done paid internships and more likely than White alumni to have done unpaid internships.

First-generation college graduates were less likely than non-first-generation college graduates to have been interns while enrolled in school (51% compared to 56%) as well as before or after graduation (paid or unpaid)…

SNAAP data are consistent with many commentators’ concerns about the intern economy in that women, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and first-generation college graduate arts alumni all appear to have held a disproportionate number of unpaid internships—which, as will be considered below, are tied to significantly weaker career payoffs than paid internships. However, one possible explanation for this over representation might be that these demographic groups tend to cluster in majors in which unpaid internships are more common than paid ones. For this reason, to further investigate the findings above, our study considered the subsample of recent design alumni

The report authors note that in the design sub-sample, the demographic trends are even more pronounced than within the general sample. (Page 9 if you want more detail.)

Most interestingly was their finding that paid internships were more valuable than unpaid internships when it came to finding jobs. Those who did an internship were more successful at finding a job than those who did not (66% vs 57% four months after graduation, 86% vs 77% one year after graduation.)

However, the authors,

“…find that paid internships are even more closely related to finding a job than unpaid internships.

[…]

Figure 6 shows that having an unpaid internship does not appear to be related to finding a job more quickly after graduation. Conversely, having a paid internship has consistently been related to finding a job more quickly after graduation. Recent graduates (2009–2013) who have done paid internships, during school or outside of school, have fared especially well compared to alumni who have never been paid interns, with 89% of the former finding work within one year of graduation compared to 77% for the latter.

Simply securing a paid internship doesn’t necessarily guarantee a job. The authors note that ambitious, talented internship seekers who secure a paid position may apply those same traits to a job search.

They may also be securing the paid internships thanks to family connections and a familiarity and ability to navigate social interactions and systems that first generation students and other demographic groups don’t possess or are comfortable with.

There is a lot of interesting data in the report. If nothing else, you can get a sense of what percentage of undergraduates in your discipline intern and what the paid versus unpaid numbers look like.

With the current conversation about inequity and exploitation related to internships, it can be easy to overlook the finding that those who participate in internships report a higher satisfaction with their training and education experience than those who don’t participate.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t be that much more satisfied if they were paid and treated a little better.

Not As Simple As Subtracting The iPhones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about it-

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

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

Tell Stories For Thanksgiving

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

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

Just to give some examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Moment of Congruence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For All Your(e) Worth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arts Make For Good Medicine

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is screenshot of the comments:

guardian snip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do We Mean When We Say Entrepreneur?

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

The Terms We Use Matter

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

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

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

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

Mentoring Is Local and Global

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous Thoughts And Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Question That Is Going To Take Awhile To Answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Arts Students Entrepreneurial Skills, It Has Begun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Receptive Arts Audience May Be Behind Bars

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Plague (Of Phones) On Both Your Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving The Artistic Palate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoilers To Help You Enjoy The Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

Phhsst! You Think You Are As Good As Me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arts and Culture Bad, Creativity Good

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

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

Building Public Will For Arts and Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arts and Culture Are Poison

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

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

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

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

Personal Health, Not the Economy

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

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

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

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

Not Everyone Who Values The Experience Is Attending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could You Really Do That? Maybe You Could

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You Might Learn In That Stupid Arts Requirement Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. – German Comparative Fundraising Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lightly Stoking The Sense of Wonder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Museum Price Is Right

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While socializing post-reception for a show that opened at the local art museum, I got into a conversation with the directors about the type of information you include on the cards/plaques next to each piece.

Things got a little spirited when the executive director suggested that the cost of a piece be listed. His reasoning was that people are interested in knowing this information due to shows like Antique Roadshow.  His thought was that by including this information, you might appeal to an audience that wasn’t currently being reached.

The artistic director was against this idea. She was concerned that if the prices appeared on the cards, people would orient to that information rather than reading about the importance of the artist to a movement, what inspired the piece, notes that draw attention to technique, etc.  For those works that are for sale, she has price booklets available at the entrance of the gallery.

I tended to agree with the artistic director. I pointed out that people might start to equate price with the importance of a work or its intrinsic value. If something cost more, it must be a better quality work or the best exemplar of the movement.

On the other end of the spectrum, I thought it might serve to more deeply entrench the poor impression people had about art. If you are of the opinion that a 5th grader could produce a similar product, what are you going to think when you learn that it is worth $6 million when a piece you like is only worth $20,000?

We also addressed the issue that all pricing is not created equal. Some prices will be what the artist set for them. Others will be market value which may be absurdly inflated thanks to any number of factors.   I have seen shows where the artists are required to put prices on their works and don’t have the option to list it as not for sale so they will assign a price that guarantees no one will buy it.

This debate went on for quite awhile and suddenly we hit upon a bit of inspiration that we thought might serve both sides. It is still in the brainstorming stage and it is really more applicable to an educational program for a school or as a fun alternative in a lecture series rather than answering the question of what to put on the display cards.

The idea is essentially an art museum version of The Price is Right where you call people down to try to guess the cost of a piece of art. However, instead of just having them take random, uninformed guesses, you provide some of the background you would on a display card or in a lecture.

The general concept at this point is that you show a slide of a work and talk about many of the particulars: This work is from X who was an important figure in the Y period. The use of A, B, C techniques was impressive to people at the time. It was purchased by Mr. Jones for his collection and given to his daughter for her wedding. It was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum but has been lent to these museums in England, France and Hungary.

Talking about the provenance of an artwork can be nearly identical to the way the hosts on Antiques Roadshow talk about pieces people bring in for examination.

While the price does get mentioned, the opportunity to note that is what was paid in 1810 or at auction, etc allows it to be put in perspective. While this format doesn’t  allow for the depth and continuity you might get on a lecture about a movement that spanned decades, it can help spur an interest in learning more.

By controlling the release of information, you can get people to focus on elements that might contribute to why it is valued as it is before unveiling the actual price. This can create an environment where a conversation can occur about how unpredictable and illogical market prices can be when few of these elements seem to factor into multi-million dollar auction bids.

As I said, this is still in brainstorming stage and there have been little consideration given to audience, timing, subject matter, appropriateness, logistics and other related questions.  It will be at least 4-5 months before it happens, if they decide to go ahead with it.

If anyone has any feedback, thoughts, ideas, let me know.  I would be especially interested if someone could see a way to do something similar with the performing arts.

I am not sure we could really address price in the context of other factors in as interesting a format.  If you see some other game that might be played to make mysterious aspects of the performing arts more accessible to audiences, I would be interested in hearing your ideas

Prepare For The Swarm

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Since I did a post on ideas that must go earlier this week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to draw attention to a document the Independent Sector put out on Nine Trends Affecting the Charitable Sector.

The document is only 6 pages long so it is a quick read, but the point that caught my attention was #4, “Swarms of individuals connecting with Institutions.”

Individuals will be more strongly aligned with causes and less to the organizations that advance them. As they become increasingly sophisticated at swarming, individuals will often sidestep organizations that are not equipped to partner with them. At home and abroad, swarms will direct their efforts at addressing market and government failures in new ways, with solutions that seek to either fill in the gaps where infrastructure is lacking or provide alternatives to existing services.

…Institutions will need to become agile in a variety of new ways: by listening deeply, responding in real time, providing platforms that enable and accelerate existing swarms, and by leading swarms themselves. In parallel, part of the sophistication that swarms may gain is a far greater ability to draw on institutional capabilities, which could be instrumental for sustaining their impact over time. Associations will face particularly strong pressure as technology makes it easier to connect with peers and access new information and resources with minimal overhead, both at a distance and in person.

As a result, the dominant culture of leadership across society will continue to gradually shift from central control towards broad episodic engagement; being adaptive, facilitative, transparent, and inspirational will be increasingly valued. Particularly in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, leaders will continue to use formal authority as an essential tool, but many will emerge whose power is drawn from informal influence.

While the Independent Sector document couches their predictions in terms that seem applicable to groups seeking change in social, legislative and public health areas, the same expectations may end up applied to the arts once people begin to realize success in these other arenas and begin to expand their ambitions.

The most obvious manifestation might be if professional-amateurs (Pro-Ams) wanting to share their work in a live interactive setting approach an existing arts institution looking for a venue at which to base their project and find that the organization is unable/unwilling to assist them. In that case, the Pro-Ams may develop an alternative method and bypass established entities.

Even though bloggers like myself often write about the arts field as if it is stuck in a rut and afraid of innovation, I actually feel that as a field we actually have a leg up on other types of organizations in the non-profit sector when it comes to being open to either helping someone realize their vision or partnering with them on a small scale to make it happen.

Maybe not on big stuff requiring major investment, but on things like experimental, site specific works in the local park (or parking garage).

The inflexible element will be one arts entities run into  perennially  – the spirit is willing, but the bank account is weak. The answer may be: “Yes, but next year when we can muster resources,” when the swarm members want to accomplish something with more immediacy.

There is no easy answer to that because you can’t just hold money aside on the off chance that someone is going to pop in with a proposal that matches what you can bring to the table. On the positive side, the swarm may be able to rally the necessary support for this one project.

The Independent Sector mentions the episodic nature of these efforts to mobilize so you wouldn’t be able to count on regular support, but the fact you were flexible enough to participate/partner may generate the informally based influence they talk about at the end there. That may be enough to allow you to solicit support from sources whose radar you had never been on before.

Who knows, maybe a local swarm will “direct their efforts at addressing market and government failures” in the arts.

Diego Rivera and the Paintbrush of Destiny

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As part of our website revamp, I am in the process of adding content about the various murals located around the building. One of the best pieces is a little removed from the lobby and spans a couple floors so I have made a video and map to help guide people to it.

So it was with great interest that I read a recent piece on NPR about the rights visual artists, especially muralists, can exert to determine the disposition of the buildings in/on which they are painted.

As I started reading, I began to worry that more people might refuse to allow murals to appear on the sides of their buildings if they were aware of these issues. However, the story notes that Philadelphia, which has a robust, formal mural program, has found ways to strike a balance and work with both the artist and building owner to find some sort of accommodation. They are likely a good source for advice on these matters.

Only works created after 1990 enjoy this protection under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). So Diego Rivera’s paintbrush technically hasn’t altered the destiny of any buildings as far as the Act is concerned.

This piece from the National Endowment for the Arts and this one from the Arts & Business Council of Greater Philadelphia do a pretty good job of explaining various aspects of the law.

One thing I think bears emphasizing since many of the commenters on the NPR story get it wrong is that while works for hire are not covered under the VARA, that does not mean that only works created for free are covered. If you are commissioned to create a work as an independent contractor and get paid for it, your work is covered. This is clearly stated in the Arts and Business Council flyer, but I wanted to reinforce that.

The reason I think it is particularly important to be aware of this law is because so many communities are utilizing murals to help spruce up the neighborhood. Often these murals are on abandoned buildings that are good candidates for destruction should those murals generate the the desired positive ambiance and attract new residents and businesses.

Since the rights are retained until the death of the last surviving creator, it might be good to form a general agreement that the work is being created with the expectation (and perhaps hope) that someone will eventually destroy it.

The other thing to note is that the VARA deals with the artist’s moral rights to the work which can never be given away. The artist can transfer ownership, but can’t give up their moral rights. Per the NEA Office of General Counsel article:

“VARA restricts the exercise of the rights of attribution and integrity to the author or joint authors of the artwork, regardless of whether he/they hold title either to the copyright or the artwork itself. Thus while both copyright and physical ownership are property rights which may be transferred, moral rights may not be transferred. Moral rights may, however, be waived. The waiver instrument must be very specific: the creator must consent in a written and signed instrument specifically identifying the artwork, the uses of that work, and with a clause limiting the waiver to both aspects.”

So even if a mural was presented as a birthday present to someone, the next owner of the building can’t immediately bulldoze it as the new owner of the mural. Notice of 90 days must provided to the artist(s) during which period of time they can take whatever action they decide is necessary from a final visit to take pictures before it is destroyed to seeking a court injunction against the demolition.

The one issue that isn’t really addressed is what protections exist for art that someone produces uninvited. People go out and paint over unwanted graffiti everyday….unless it is a Banksy in which case they may chisel out the section of the wall and sell it at auction.

If someone cares enough to chisel it out and keep it, aren’t they admitting it is valuable and not a nuance? So if Banksy (or Banksy’s lawyer) shows up and says the art is site specific (which many clearly are) and may not be moved/destroyed/defaced per VARA, who has the right to determine what happens with the work?

Who Are The Must Reads In The Field…..

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…and how do you know?

I frequently promote ideas Seth Godin posits on his blog and show how they connect with the arts.

I do it so frequently, you may be astonished to learn this ain’t one of those times.

And really, someone probably isn’t worth reading if your thought processes always align.

Last month he made a post essentially calling people out for not being aware of the leading voices in their area of endeavor.

He ends the post with:

The line between an amateur and professional keeps blurring, but for me, the posture of understanding both the pioneers and the state of the art is essential. An economist doesn’t have to agree with Keynes, but she better know who he is.

If you don’t know who the must-reads in your field are, find out before your customers and competitors do.

Too much doing, not enough knowing.

While I am secure in the knowledge that I am undoubtedly one of the must-reads in my field and need only listen to the voices in my head if I wish to be enlightened, even I have to ask who the heck has the time to identify and follow all the must-reads in their field.

Twenty years ago, it was possible but now there are so many insightful minds expressing themselves I have a hard enough time keeping abreast of everyone I follow. I often discover to my chagrin that the people I thought I had included in my Twitter and news feeds aren’t in there.

I would agree with the general concept that arts professionals could do a better job staying abreast of new ideas and trends that will help them work smarter over shorter hours.  I will also concede that my ability to read a lot of material and distill it into blog posts is partially attributable to the fact I, (by way of metaphor), have a small lawn to mow and I don’t devote a lot of time weeding my flowerbeds.

I don’t know how the rest of you manage.

There are two main problems with institutionalizing the concept of must-reads.

One that is significant for the arts is the attitude of “how could you not know about X?” which has, fairly or unfairly, contributed to the image of the arts as elitist.  (Do such people exist in great numbers? While I have often been intimidated by the idea of their disapproval, I have rarely encountered them outside of the “no clapping between movements” crowd.)

The second problem is that when you create a list of must-reads, you inevitably omit a worthy or include an unworthy, the focus turns to the validity of the list and it ceases to be useful as a guide.

For most people, the must-reads are going to be those who direct you to other interesting thought leaders. While I am eschewing list making, I think everyone can agree that my blog You’ve Cott Mail fits this description of a must-read and is a good place to start seeking people to follow.

 

How Many Agents Have You Broken Up With?

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Everyday I get a flurry of emails from the agents of performing artists letting me know when the performers are available cross the course of the next year or two.  Often I notice that artists with whom I am familiar have moved under the representation of a different agent.

After my post yesterday about the evolving career prospects for non-profit executive directors, I idly wondered if anyone studied the reasons why artists change representation.

I know there is the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) study which looks at the employment experiences of graduates of arts degree programs. However, I don’t think it really examines interactions with agents.

Of course, the larger issue is that not every practicing artist graduated from a degree program and wouldn’t be included in the survey.

The two major reasons artists and agents part company are either the artist doesn’t feel the agent is able to represent them well due to lack of initiative or contacts, or the agent doesn’t feel they can provide the artist with the support they need.

From conversations I have had with agents, I know that latter case can often include essentially firing the artist as a client due to feedback the agent receives about their personality or lack of organization. There are some agents who have painstakingly tried to instill good personal and business practices in their clients to no avail.

The idea that artists need to be cognizant of at least some aspects of the business side of their practice, if not take an entrepreneurial approach, has been bandied about to some degree for at least a couple decades now.

I think it would be helpful for all those involve if there was a clear picture of what leads to an artist and agent parting ways and that can be prevented or make the relationship more constructive.

A study may find that artists are choosing the wrong agent for them or vice versa and suggest steps that lead to a more enduring relationship. It may find that artists need better coaching and training at certain milestones in their career.

Agents can be a good resource for artists because they know a great deal about the employment environment and provide advice customized to the individual. (versus general advice on websites/books).

On the other hand, because agents are in competition with each other, there isn’t a lot of incentive for them to collaborate on a uniform process. (Though many certainly have worked together to establish strong standards of behavior for the industry.)

To a certain degree, this study would be about how to increase employment opportunities for artists. There have been many studies about why audiences aren’t attending performances and how to fix that. There aren’t really any studies I can think of that look at why artists aren’t being hired and how to fix that.

Its not entirely a direct result of lack of audiences because there are some performers who are getting more offers than they can accept and they aren’t all super marquee names.

My suspicion is that just as there are studies saying foundations need to change their funding philosophies to reflect the realities faced by non-profit organizations, such a study would reveal a need for presenters, casting agents, gallery directors etc., to change their approaches as well.

One of the things I would be curious to know is the comparative rates of turn over in artist-agent relationships for stage actors, screen actors, visual artists, instrumental soloists, dance companies, music ensembles, etc. I would bet there is a wide variety in the range with the standard for some being a matter of a couple years whereas others being measured in decades.

What I Learned Today About The Benefits of the Arts

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I apologize for missing my posting schedule yesterday. I was involved with an activity that I need to keep confidential. It kept me busy all day and required a bit of driving to return from. However, I can say it was related to my job and I got paid with a big bucket of candy.

I am taking the time to tell you this by way of celebrating the type of opportunities those of us in the arts have in the course of our jobs. It is an amusingly enigmatic, but absolutely true, description of what transpired.

Another of those enjoyable opportunities presented itself again today when people from our state arts council came down to do a site visit for a project we are participating in October. In addition to showing them around my facility, I also took them around town to look at our floodwall murals, our children’s theater and the local museum.

Since we are at one of the most remote parts of the state (I look at the hills of KY across the Ohio River from my office) I wanted to provide a little advocacy for the arts in our community.

Some of what I learned in the process brought to light issues which I suspect are being seen nationwide.

Something the people at the museum noticed in the arts classes and summer camp activities they conduct is that they are having to spend more time working on basic eye-hand coordination exercises with kids than they used to. There is a circus/gymnastics school under the museum’s organizational umbrella and they are having the same issues with coordination and with kids feeling comfortable about throwing their bodies around.

They see this as a result of the reduction of arts classes and recess in schools and the simple fact that kids are more often in front of screens rather than just running around wildly.

So when we talk about the benefits of the arts, we can probably lay claim to improving very elementary abilities like eye-hand coordination and gross and fine motor skills. It probably sounds ridiculous to even consider saying such a thing since it is essentially slightly above walking as part of natural development, but it may not be long before we start hearing about the consequences of people lacking these abilities.

Everywhere I have worked, I frequently hear something along the lines of “X have lived here all their whole lives, but this was the first time they were in this/a arts building.”

In the experience of the museum folks, the things they are having the kids do like making mbira with cigar boxes and wire coat hangers are often among the first projects involving trial and error problem solving the kids have worked on with material objects. (As opposed to solving puzzles, etc on a screen.)

It makes me glad I am supplying my nephews with boxes of Legos. Again, this may eventually become an area in which the arts can claim the provide a notable benefit.

The last thing I learned that made an impression on me was that the circus program, which has a Cirque du Soleil type focus on acrobatics, has been really effective at cutting across social and economic strata. Because physical work is so dependent on body type and weight, students get paired up on this basis rather than with whom they are friends.

Some parents may be rolling coins to allow their kids to participate, but in the practice rooms the value of one person relative to another is all about physical strength and ability to safely counterbalance you. Economic means doesn’t really factor into whether you can trust someone act as your partner.

This is not a claim all arts disciplines can make. In some social background does enable you to progress further. In others, you aren’t necessarily required to depend so entirely on a partner.

That being said, there are ways most of the arts disciplines can structure their instruction to draw attention to the fact that social and economic background doesn’t have any bearing on one’s ability to demonstrate excellence. (Probably best accomplished by drawing as little attention to any differences as possible.)

Yes granted, ability to afford advanced training and internships is tied to economic background, but in the early stages of training especially, it is often clear that background is not a determinant of basic ability. (Though it may determine how inhibited someone is about exhibiting their ability.)

So even though the arts have been branded as elitist, they can be a powerful tool for socialization that de-emphasizes distinctions.

Stinky, Cramped Dorms Made Me The Arts Administrator I Am Today

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The dean of arts and sciences of the university and I were talking briefly about strategies to attract more students to performances.

One of the hypothesis that occurred to us was that the student housing situation might make it too easy for students to avoid becoming involved with any sort of campus activity. Not only that, it didn’t provide the opportunities of cross pollination of ideas that once existed.

I know, it sounds a little strange to say that the problem in K-12 schools is not enough arts classes, but the problem with colleges is the dorms.

When I was in college, there was one or two pay phones on the dorm floor for three wings of guys and everyone used the same showers. You got to know about 40-50 guys between knocking on their doors to tell them someone was calling or when you bugged them to hurry up in the shower.

Or you know, when someone pulls the fire alarm and you are all standing outside grousing at 2 am during the winter.

Our rooms were small 20×20 cells with bunk beds, two desks, two wardrobes and two sets of drawers. There was a lot of incentive to get out and do stuff elsewhere. I got a call to help hang lights and didn’t see the inside of that dorm room much over the next few months. (Which was not necessarily a good thing for all my classes.)

There was always someone blasting some music. Disgusted with my lack of classic rock knowledge, my first room mate would quiz me on whatever was on the radio or in the cassette deck.

I had about 10 different room mates between undergraduate and graduate school and I credit all of them for expanding my musical taste since each one’s varied.

Now students live in more comfortable apartments, with cable, internet and their own phones. There is less incentive to go out and do something.

If you are living with 4-6 other people as I did my senior year, that can be okay because there is still good opportunity for bonding. Except that since everyone has their own headphones, they can listen to whatever they want without bothering—or indirectly influencing anyone else.

While you may chalk up my sentimental recollections of mildewy dorm rooms as something from the past that can’t be returned to again, recall that Steve Jobs famously tried to recreate just this situation at Pixar by putting all the bathrooms and mailroom in a central hub so that people had to see and interact with each other.

In that same article where I talk about Jobs’ efforts at Pixar, I cite some studies from Richard Florida that look at cities across the country where creatives are segregated from the rest of the population and other places where things were more homogenous.

Thinking about how people isolate themselves from each other, I wonder if there is any discernible benefit to living in a homogenous community over a segregated one. If you live in close proximity to creative geniuses but never have any interaction with them, you might as well be living 10 miles away for all the benefits you accrue.

The one good thing about artists is that they tend to misbehave. They paint their mailboxes strangely and put sculptures in their yard. They practice on instruments and sometimes don’t use mutes or plug in earphones. They sing in stairwells and pace back and forth muttering lines to themselves.

People may dismiss them as weird, but they are hard to miss.

The problem is that everyone else tends to stay in their cocoons. People aren’t exposed to as many unknown influences and they may not have their own characteristic tastes confirmed or challenged unless they are confident enough to share it on social media.

I am not as concerned about people orienting to the same crappy music as everyone else so as not to stand out as I am about the missed opportunity to validate personal taste and every person’s basic ability to create and participate in the arts

I am not sure how to change the dynamics for housing to encourage people to interact more with each other and whatever is intruding on the environment.

One solution that does occur to me is to actively encourage students in Fine Arts classes, especially non-majors, to share pictures, videos and audio files of whatever personal projects they are working on with each other. Things that are totally outside the scope of the assigned class projects.

Students may be reluctant to share something that is deeply personal to them or only half way done. Maybe they don’t ever share with each other, but just the act of frequently implying that they have the ability to create something worthwhile may have a cumulative positive effect.

Some arts classes require mandatory attendance at some sort of arts event. My thought is that without the influence of peers visibly exhibiting an affinity for different artistic forms, that experience occurs in a much larger vacuum than when I was a student. There is a chance that what students are learning becomes solely associated as something old people over 30 value.

I am not necessarily suggesting to get rid of that requirement so much as to place a much greater emphasis on the validity of an individual’s ability to create.

[N.B. For some reason this thought disappeared from my mind when it came time to write it- Part of my thoughts about having people bring in examples of their personal work was the opportunity to use it as the basis of in class work.

A student brings in gorgeous pictures of the Grand Canyon, the writing class uses it as the basis of an assignment. Someone writes a story, it is used as the basis of a dance piece.

Again, just that sense of reinforcing the sense everyone has artistic ability and providing a little cross pollination of ideas at the peer level.]

Are Program Bios Adding Value To The Experience?

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Earlier this week Samantha Teter had a piece on ArtsHacker about writing bios. She does a good job pointing out many important elements that should be part of a bio (including proofreading) and that one should use a different bio for different purposes.

However, recently I have been wondering if bios in a performance playbill are really effective anymore. Performers have been using the same basic format with the same basic content for decades now, but as we all know, audiences have changed during that time.

So among my questions are: Do audiences read bios any more? Is the content relevant to them? Has anyone thought to ask?

What are the purposes of bios? Do they serve the artists by providing recognition to individuals? Do they serve to strengthen a relationship with the audience? Are they effective at doing either?

Over the last decade I have often read suggestions regarding press releases and marketing content for the arts. One of the things most often criticized is the inclusion of long listings of accolades that the public has no way to judge the relevance of.

People know what the Tony Awards are, but nearly anything else is a mystery. While foreign sounding names like the Zhege Dongxi Prize and studying with Pierre Lapin at Le Jardin de M.A. Gregoire sound somewhat impressive, no one who is not an insider has any idea if this is a mark of excellence or something someone made up.

There is also the distinct possibility that even regular audience members may lack the connection to the arts field that past audiences did and do not recognize the prestige of names like Jacob’s Pillow, Tanglewood, and Stratford Festival.

If one actor lists a dozen shows they were in and another just lists a short handful, is the former more experienced than the latter? It could easily be the case that the former is just starting out and listing everything they have been in since high school and the latter is so experienced, it isn’t worth listing more than the last couple shows.

Does it help the audience feel more engaged in the event to know that the performer lives with their husband, kids and two dogs, Misty and Pepper?

I am not suggesting that bios be scrapped so that the organization can save on printing bills and relegate performers to a simple listing. Yes, I know some unions require the inclusion of bios.

Nor am I saying that all bios are useless. I spent part of today reading bios of the speakers slated for the Americans for the Arts conference in Chicago.

I am just asking, outside of tradition, do we know why we still do this? If we do, then could we do it better?

If we want audiences to be excited by our organizations and what we do, would it be better to have a big color picture in the program of the artists conducting a workshop or in rehearsals, instead of pages of text?

Perhaps QR codes with the names of the individual artists could be placed around the margins of the image so that people could scan them and learn much more than 50 words about the artist by visiting their social media page packed with images and videos.

If the purpose of listing bios is to provide artists with recognition that they wouldn’t otherwise receive and it has to be done in the traditional format, then are there any changes of content people might suggest?

Think about it this way. Everybody gets their name in the credits at the end of a movie, but even if people stay and try to pay attention to the list, it is nearly impossible to pick individual names out even if there is someone you are looking for.  Someone working on the movie probably has a better chance of being recognized as people scroll down on the IMDB listing than they will in the movie theater.

Teaser trailers at the end of Marvel movies keep people in the theater, but they probably don’t help improve an artist’s exposure and recognition.  By making  considered changes to program books, arts organizations might actually have the ability to raise the profile of artists, if only by a smidgen and provide a more meaningful experience for audiences.

I am just not quite sure what those changes might be. Something to consider, though.

It’s Just Something I Was Trying

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A few weeks ago I posted about an orchestra in Bremen, Germany which is based out of an elementary school. The situation has been something both the students and musicians have found to be constructive and enjoyable. In addition, the partnership has helped improve the reputation of that part of town.

In reaction to this story, there were a few “we should do that here” type of comments made in a handful of places. Recently, I was pleased to learn that a somewhat similar program exists in Cleveland where some music students of the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement home.

The arrangement was born out of a lack of housing at the Cleveland Institute but has grown into a more formalized program. Students from the institute perform for, and occasionally with, residents of the retirement home. The students take their meals and interact with the other residents. On the whole, the arrangement seems to have had a positive and somewhat therapeutic impact on the lives of the regular residents.

So this is great! Music students will gain a better understanding of potential audiences!

At least that was my initial reactions until I recognized, as we often joke/bemoan, residents of a retirement community are the main demographic attending symphony halls and chamber concerts.

While these students may potentially develop insights and skills for better interacting with potential audiences, the truth is arts students live, work and play with those on the lower end of the coveted “young people” age range in university dorms and apartment complexes for years at a time and don’t necessarily develop these skills.

To a greater or lesser extent, we all live among members of our target demographics, but it doesn’t guarantee we will learn to relate with these groups and talk about our work in a way that interests and engages them.

Perhaps part of what is required is to take a page from Bremen and Cleveland and just go out and practice in plain sight.

I say practice because a performance in the park, flash mob in a train station or shopping center can have enough formality associated with it to prevent people from approaching you lest they disturb you. While being a familiar figure frequently visible in the park or other common area, pausing and restarting your practicing, can incite some curiosity and conversation.

The years one is in school probably provide the best opportunities an artist has to understand how to present themselves and interact with their peers.

Operating within the context of an educational environment may give both the performer and the observer the most permission they will ever have to ask stupid questions and give awkward answers. In other words, both get to learn to talk about the arts.

There is a lot of conversation about the need to teach arts students to be entrepreneurs, but I am thinking an important part of that might be requiring students to spend X amount of time each month practicing their discipline outside of rehearsal studios and practice rooms in places like dorm quads, university center lounges, sidewalks, green spaces etc.

During this time, they should be departing from discipline and orthodoxy of the classroom to play along with music on a boombox, create an impromptu soundtrack for actors performing a scene, paint/sketch an interpretation of the music/dance/acting piece being performed.

You know, essentially embodying the cliched movie plot of the kid who has the skills to be great, but wastes their talent rebelling and involving themselves in some expression of pop culture.

Except this time, it is instructor approved effort in experimentation, collaboration and conversation.

After a few minutes of playing with an idea, they can turn to any spectators and ask “what do you think?”

That can be the start of a conversation that can gradually contribute to the development of both performer and spectator. If the spectator says, “I don’t know,” and the performers says “I don’t know either, it was just something I was trying,” that is perfectly fine because it gives everyone involved permission to be imperfect in execution and understanding.

If spectators jump in to participate in some way, that is great because it provides the basis of a conversation between people who have a connection to the performance/interaction.

There is always the possibility that a spectator will launch into a scathing critique in an attempt to humiliate the students practicing. That is something else all artists need to learn to deal with.

Chances are, the face to face encounter won’t be as harsh as a criticism on social media. Though instructors need to recognize the potential for their students to be recorded and belittled on social media.

Really, unless they are trying something extremely ambitious, kids wiping out on their skateboards or while attempting a parkour move are much more interesting fodder for a video of Epic Fails.

Even if no great, incisive conversations ever develop from an arts student’s efforts, just the fact that it made seeing an artist perform/create as normal as seeing a skateboarder can have a long term positive effect.

There may even be a greater impact if it is a high school/college age peer performing/creating masterfully. After all, a teenage skateboarder is a lot cooler and impressive than a 45 year old skateboarder (Tony Hawk notwithstanding.)

Arts and Survival

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This article on CNN about the role music is playing in the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal caught my eye. There were similar stories and videos after the 2010 Haitian earthquake of people creating a bond of community through singing and music.

The singing isn’t getting anyone fed, clothed or sheltered, neglecting the very bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of need. But it does help with the next step up by providing a sense of love and belonging.

Though no one wants to see disasters like this happen, the fact that people’s basic instinct is to turn to music and dance to create community illustrates that the arts are not a frivolous luxury. They are an essential part of our identity.

Being able to participate with a group provides you membership in a culture. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be your birth culture. Insisting people speak English and be able to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” using the correct signifiers may seem overbearingly chauvinistic, but it also identifies what songs provide you entree to a community.

The other thing it illustrates is that not only does everyone have the ability to participate and practice an artistic discipline, it is important that they be able to do so. To a degree it is a basic survival tool mentally, spiritually and perhaps even physically if the sense of community it generates gains you food and shelter.

In a less dire circumstance, we had Garrison Keillor do his solo show about a month ago. He had the audience singing at the beginning and end of his performance. While I have read some criticism of his singing voice, it was sufficient to get everyone started. As the show was drawing to an end, I wondered if someone would be able to do the same thing in 20-30 years. With the ability to choose between disparate channels of information, there may be fewer common cultural touchstones in the next few decades.

Potentially it may be good for international relations if people thousands of miles apart can find 10 points of common ground. It may be less beneficial to local relations if neighbors can only find 10 points of common ground.

How Long Before Elementary Schools Need To Turn A Profit?

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Non-Profit Quarterly recently posted a story by Beth Gazley examining how private donations are increasingly being used to subsidize public services as government funding is cut.

One finding arts organizations should perhaps be sensitive to relates to school funding. According to the article, support of schools often exacerbates existing inequities in school funding where wealthier areas tend to provide more private funding to schools that are well supported by public funding.

My own research, with my colleague Ashlyn Aiko Nelson, suggests that DonorsChoose.org is something of an anomaly. Most of the philanthropy directed at public schools is local, meaning that wealthy school districts enjoy a philanthropic advantage and few people are paying attention to fairness and balance. And, indeed, we found clear evidence that across the nation private philanthropy for public schools exacerbates rather than eliminates budgetary inequities across school districts. Specifically, although most school funding still comes from taxpayers, we found that wealthy school districts are able to provide more dollars per pupil overall through this philanthropic “bonus.”8 Simply put, DonorsChoose.org’s successful efforts at raising $80 million in 2014 do not come close to balancing the inequitable impact of the other $880 million raised in 2010 by local PTOs, school foundations, and booster clubs.

Arts organizations are already well aware that arts entities serving wealthier communities tend to receive larger donations than those serving poorer communities. If they are really dedicated to bringing the arts to under served schools, they may have to make an effort to reach further beyond their immediate geographic vicinity.

Speaking from experience, I can attest that this can be difficult because schools that perform poorly are often under more pressure than normal to focus on testing and worry about anything that might distract from that goal.

I could find some pleasure in schools outsourcing arts education to non-profits, but unfortunately that doesn’t generally happen.

The other issue is the question about whether arts organizations are giving a community what they need or what the arts organization thinks they need.

Questions about whether you may be exhibiting this bias plagues every introspective arts organization. This can especially be the case when an organization serving a wealthy clientele reaches out to a far less affluent demographic.

An observation made in the NPQ article that “the narrow focus on school fundraising saps community energy and possibly distracts parents from other forms of political engagement—such as advocating for more public spending overall on public schools in order to end the reliance on fundraising altogether,” resonated with me.

First, because arts organizations have long faced the challenge of shrinking public funding and it is disturbing to me that a core public service like education may end up similarly regarded as something that a private community support should be responsible for.

Second, because that can result in an increasingly insular view by individuals about how education should be funded, shifting it from being beneficial to the commons to have an educated population to being a benefit only to those who can afford it. You can’t entirely blame people if, after putting a lot of effort into raising money for their own school to close a funding gap, they feel that other PTOs ought to do the same for their schools.

People often say arts organizations need to be self supporting and only present shows that can make the profit. I fear that the same sentiments may end up being applied to education.

Share Your Locker With A Bassoonist

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If you remember your Grimm Brothers fairy tales, you will recall the story of the Bremen Town Musicians, animals who drove criminals out of a house.

Well according to the BBC, a group of musicians in Bremen is helping to prevent crime by also taking up residence– in this case, in a neighborhood known for crime and poverty. More specifically, taking up residence in a school.

Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen shares space in a public school. When the philharmonic was looking for a new space, the city made sure the rooms in the new school they were building had excellent acoustics and set up the dual residency in the single building.

Initially, the musicians were disappointed they weren’t getting an iconic building and the teachers didn’t want to have students diverted from learning core subjects to interact with musicians.

The school and the orchestra devised a series of projects to bring musicians and students together. Musicians would visit classes to talk to pupils and once a year the musicians would help pupils and residents of Tenever to write and perform an opera.

But what makes the partnership unique is the sheer volume of interactions between musicians and pupils. Whenever they are not playing, the musicians are based in the school.

They sit with pupils over lunch and talk to them about their lives. Pupils are allowed to watch the orchestra rehearse, sitting between the musicians rather than in front of them as an audience.

Ms Rueggeberg says: “Normally you only see an orchestra dressed up for a concert, but the kids mostly see them running around in jeans and find them very approachable. It has broken down the barriers.”

As you might expect, test scores have gone up and problem behavior has decreased. Having the orchestra based there has also apparently reduced the negative stigma associated with the neighborhood.

If you want to combat the idea that “the arts are not for someone like me” there is probably no better way than having students eat lunch with artists and sit next to them during rehearsals.

If you notice at the end of the BBC piece, the musicians feel they are benefiting both in a growing understanding of their audience and development of their own skills.

“When the children sit between us at rehearsals, our concentration is better. We can actually see their eyes grow wide with excitement when we play certain chords or play quickly.

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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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