Art(ist) Education

Embracing The Feedback Loop

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A few months back, Seattle based artist Clayton Weller, wrote a piece addressing what he feels is a self-limiting outlook held by many artists that theatre is dying and there is no money out there. He confesses to having embraced the same outlook until he worked for a start up company.

Now he advocates for every artist to work for a start up in order to adopt their more nimble outlook. (my emphasis)

When you say the word “business” to someone, especially an artist, they automatically assume you’re talking about something stuffy, rigid, uncompromising, and [insert horrible adjective].

You say “business” but they hear “bureaucracy.” THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING!…

To eschew something because it can be done poorly, is a disservice to yourself, and might rival einsteins famous definition of insanity (look it up plebes!).

[…]

Talking directly to people, iterating ideas before execution, creating a feedback loop with measurable data; it all makes perfect sense.

By doing this you create a real connection with your customer (audience) and develop a product (art) people will not only tolerate, but will clamor for. In terms that an artist would use: your art becomes relevant.

That’s a big deal.

The average artist does NONE of these things. Not only that, they intentionally avoid them. They lock themselves away to pursue their secret “vision.” When they receive negative criticism, they blame their audience (customer). WHAT?!?

For me this addresses some age old debates about artists being more business minded and selling out vs. thinking you know what audiences/customers should like. (the most negative extremes of the spectrum)

Obviously, I like his point about not dismissing options because other people don’t do it well.

I think the complicating factor is the fear is that you too won’t do it well and the process will dominate your time and take you away from your creative work. Or worse, make you resent your creative work for making it necessary to become involved in the business side. For some it may not be a wholly irrational fear.

Still, I think regardless of your fears and regardless of your views about what constitutes selling out and remaining true to your art, the feedback loop Weller mentions is a useful process.

Failure and missteps are things you will face, especially when you are working in the arts. Proper feedback can help minimize this over time. If nothing else, the process can help you identify the proper people to solicit for feedback.

If you start a flow chart from the simple proposition that you want to support yourself with your art. You can ask, do people say nice things about my art? If the answer is yes but they don’t pay for it, you either need to find other people to get feedback from or figure out a different way to monetize your art from the people giving you feedback.

Likewise, if there are a lot of people who criticize your work, but still won’t buy it after you make the changes to the areas in which they say you fell short, then you may need to find other people to solicit feedback from.

Obviously it isn’t as completely clear cut as that. The problem may lie in your execution not being very good. My point is that you can’t depend entirely on your family and friends or trolls for feedback. It is necessary to identify people with the level of discernment you seek whose feedback you can trust and work from there.

You just need to recognize and own the potential implications of appealing to 1,000 versus 100,000. You can make a lot of money from those 1,000, but you need to be producing to a certain standard. Meeting the expectations of 1,000 can be just as burdensome as that of 100,000.

Have A Fulfilling Experience Being An Artist

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Earlier this week, Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group listed an artist residency program that really appealed to me.

Only Australians are eligible to apply, but I just really liked the way the Asialink program at the University of Melbourne listed the expectations for their program.

You can’t use the residency for research or academic study. Instead, (my emphasis)

Each resident is offered a specific amount of funding and initial contacts in the host country. It is then up to the individual to make as much of the experience as possible and to plan and manage their own program.

Key attributes are the ability to cope with sometimes unusual or difficult situations, and to work successfully in a challenging environment while maintaining good working relationships.

That is basically it. The criteria is to have a plan, take advantage of the opportunity, be able to cope with strange situations you may encounter. You have to show that you worked on your project when you return and submit an accounting about how the money is used.

Coming from a higher education environment which emphasizes research and publishing in order to keep your job and an arts environment which has lengthy grant proposal and reporting requirements, this is refreshingly brief and liberating.

Applying will take some work and preparation, and certainly the opportunity isn’t for everyone, but the process doesn’t seem terribly onerous.

I am sure there are other grant programs like this, but I have come across few which state they expect you to have a fulfilling experience.

It makes me a little envious and wish I lived in Australia since the program includes Arts Management experiences.

I offer this in hopes it will inspire others to emulate them. And if some entity is offering something similar and Americans are eligible, I hope someone tells me about it!

What To Expect In Arts Administration Class

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Last week in response to my call for suggestions of topics to discuss, commenter Samara asked,

“I am attending Bellarmine University this fall as a freshman and am the only student as an Arts Administration Undergrad with music being my emphasis. What should I expect in my Arts Admin classes? Besides the fact that I’ll be alone and don’t get a studio until spring semester haha!”

I took a look at the Bellarmine Arts Admin program and the course requirements for the music focus and generated the following response for Samara.

[hr]

Samara-

In terms of exactly what sort of experience to expect, I obviously can’t tell you because every arts administration program is different, even from year to year.

What I can tell you is what to expect from yourself and what expect from your instructors, internship supervisors and other colleagues.

I apologize right from the start there is probably going to be a tinge of condescension in some of what I have to say. It can’t be helped when you are trying to offer general advice to someone you don’t really know.

The first thing to be aware of that you are being taught the skills you will need to be a successful arts administrator, but you are not being taught how to be a successful arts administrator.

Ken Robinson said it best a few years ago when he talked about how schools creativity.  He notes that we never know now what students will need to know decades down the road so the best thing we can do for students today is teach them to be creative, think critically and teach themselves new skills.

Twenty some odd years ago when you were born the world was just being introduced to dial up internet, and 14.4k at that. I remember a guy in 1994 telling me I should use the Macs in a different computer lab because they had this new thing called a web browser which let you see the internet with colors.

No one really had cellphones, cable or wireless modems. We could imagine a time when we would have cellphones, faster internet connections and maybe something like iPods, but social media, texting, Kickstarter campaigns, global warming, American Idol and so many other things that are common today weren’t really on anyone’s radar.

But in the three-four years between 1994 and 1997/1998 we went from web browsers just beginning to appear to everyone expecting that any worthwhile business would have a website and I was learning HTML.

No one really knows what the future will demand of arts administrators even four years down the road so they can’t give you the secret formula for success upon graduation. What they can do is equip you with the skills to discover that formula for whatever company/organization you work for or establish. Every company is different in terms of the goals they have and the customers/constituencies they seek to serve.

What you should expect from your degree program is a lot of opportunities to discuss problems facing the arts and possible solutions. By the time you are ready to graduate, I guarantee there will be entirely new problems to discuss.

You will need to read and talk a lot about challenges, trends and techniques outside of the arts which may be applicable to the arts.  You will have to discern which are likely flash in the pan trends that just have good PR behind them but won’t amount to much and which trends have staying power.

You will be a good arts administrator when you graduate if you are practiced at looking at new situations, generating and evaluating possible solutions and then implementing them.

Note that you may not be a successful arts administrator by many measures because you can certainly still make mistakes, especially when trying something new. But if you have the capacity to evolve ideas rather than fall back on old practices, you will be in good shape.

Given that times are changing quickly,  I won’t assume you will end up working for an arts organization. You could easily be a manager at an online gaming company.

One of the things I am really pleased to see about your degree program is that there are a lot of interdisciplinary seminars. (Though not surprising since Roberto Bellarmino was a Jesuit and the school had a close association with Thomas Merton.)

My hope is that you will be in those seminars with business, science and liberal arts students so that there are opportunities to exchange multiple views. There can be a lot of dangerous insularity in the fine arts.

I see from the degree requirements you will be participating in classes that engage in discussions and field visits to local arts organizations. You will also have a couple semesters of internships.

Take the opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions realizing, that you are going to make some really dumb suggestions. That is just part of the process of learning. It can be painful, but can’t be avoided.

I only stopped saying dumb things six months ago…..

Some of your suggestions will actually be good but the people in charge are afraid of implementing them. You have to be humble enough to accept being told no because you won’t be experienced enough to really discern what really isn’t viable and what people are afraid to consider.

Always assuming that people are too timid to take chances will just make you miserable. Make a list of your ideas and come back to them later. Throw away the ones that were bad and propose or keep the good ones. Repeat.

Or try implementing your ideas yourself on a smaller scale.  The times increasingly offer greater resources that allow people to accomplish thing on their own.

In terms of your internships. Everyone has to make copies and coffee when they are interns. That shouldn’t be the whole of your job though. Talk to people who have interned before to make sure the internship coordinator is ensuring the internships are valuable experiences.

The easiest way to make sure you will have a good internship experience is to know before you go that your internship coordinator actively monitors the environment and is on the look out for your best interests.

Even if you are asked to do a lot of menial work, you can turn it into a learning experience. Interning in the days before email attachments were so easy was both a blessing and a curse. I may have had to run a lot of errands, but many times it was to the lawyers’ office. I knew enough not to talk about it with others, but no one said I shouldn’t read the documents I was couriering while waiting at the red lights…

In terms of useful skills, I would encourage you to pay very close attention in the accounting, finance and law classes. A person who can understand contracts as well as maintain and properly interpret balance sheets and cash flow statements will be valued pretty much anywhere.

The same with the writing classes and communication classes. There are so many channels of communication from email to 140 character texts to image sharing and probably more still on the way. The more that emerge, the more valuable a person who is able to quickly and clearly engage the viewer/reader.

Finally, I would stress the leadership/management and philosophy classes. Effective leadership has more to do with a good understanding of philosophy than with the analytics found in other business courses in my mind.

Ultimately, it is up to you decide what you want to invest and reap from each of your classes.  Worry more about what you are getting out of the class than obsessing about your grades. When I was an undergrad, I was content to get a B or C in a class I enjoyed because I felt like I gained something valuable. The grade was only a measure of my progress at the moment, but the interest the class engendered in the subject matter inspired me to continue to learn more about it.

Good luck.

What Should I Talk About?

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Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.