Arts in an Age of Technology

It looks like Amazon has decided since they have gone to the trouble of putting together a sophisticated purchasing system to sell goods, they might as well make money giving people access to their system and computing capacity.

According to Non-profit Tech blog, Amazon’s offer of access to their Flexible Payment System can be a boon to non-profits. As a person who is familiar with these types of systems, Allan at Non-Profit Tech Blog clearly sees more possibilities than do I. I suspect that the opportunities I see are too grounded in what is already being done rather than what is possible.

The benefits I can immediately see are that the system they offer uses their already familiar interface. If a person has an account with Amazon, they can use the credit card on file to purchase from you.

Because of all the options and conditions you can impose upon sales, it appears as if it would be easy to create all sorts of discount packages based on innumerable combinations of things people ordered. Helpful for subscription ticket packages as well as museum gift shops.

From what I can tell it would be a great tool to use with donors who want to spread their donation out across many months because it allows you to automatically charge people on a regular basis.

The people I think it might be a real valuable tool for are central arts councils in rural or suburban areas that fundraise for member organizations who don’t have the resources to do their own development. The Amazon tool allows for the transfer of money from one person straight to a third party.

So a donor could visit the arts council website and have their donation go into Small Town Historical Society’s bank account. The arts council can choose to have a percentage removed to help pay the IT person who keeps the donor system running if they like.

If you have a savvy IT person on staff or on your board of directors, it might be worth having them look at the entry and Amazon’s page to determine what the other possibilities might be.

Due to an errant keystroke and my uncharacteristic failure to save periodically, my entry for yesterday was swallowed by the abyss. I am not sure if I have faithfully recreated my thought process but hopefully this will inspire some pondering just the same.

I was listening to the radio on Wednesday as they talked about the death of Hilly Kristal, the owner of the club CBGB and I was struck by how this man owed the success of the club to the flexibility of his expectations. For those of you who don’t know, CBGB stands for Country, Blue Grass, Blues, which were Kristal’s favorite music styles and what he expected to present in his club

Instead the club ended up as the launching pad for punk and new wave bands such as the Ramones and Talking Heads. One of Kristal’s main rules for performing at CBGB was that the bands had to play original material and not cover anyone. Part of the audio NPR played for their story included his advice that bands not seek success in copying another group’s sound.

Given that the average lifespan of a club is about 2-3 years, I wonder if CBGB owed it’s longevity to being on the leading edge of music styles (though the income from merchandising didn’t hurt.) If not for a disagreement last year with the landlord over a rent increase, the club would still be open.

I am hesitant, however, to advocate that arts organizations emulate nightclubs and change with the latest trends. Clubs are structured to take advantage of the latest trend, not to serve the community. When tastes change and business wanes, they fold up shop and often reopen after a renovation that positions them to conform to whatever is en vogue.

Even the iconic Studio 54, for all its popularity faded away as tastes changed. Though the case could be made that it owes its existence to flexibly changing with the times. The building used to be a theatre, then it was a television studio for CBS, then it was the famous nightclub and now it has come full circle as a venue for Roundabout Theatre (though it does have 2 full service bars, some things are too valuable to get rid of!)

Arts organizations trying to respond to the latest trends might change their programming from a classical focus to a contemporary one or vice versa. I can’t see too many closing their doors to renovate a black box theatre into a proscenium set up as tastes move in that direction. Or rather, those who can afford to do so probably have the resources to weather the shift until it moves back toward their configuration again.

The decision to change the focus of an organization to accommodate the latest tastes and thinking is certainly based in the environment and situation. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre with its 56,000 subscribers (yes, that’s right) probably isn’t going to consider changing the way they do things any time soon.

There is growing sentiment in various discussions about the state of the arts that the current economic model the arts follow is no longer suitable and a change is needed. It may come to pass that arts organizations end up with a life span of a couple years and only those agile enough to reinvent and restructure their public manifestation will endure.

As cynical as it may sound, you can only serve a community as long as they value being served in the manner you offer. I honestly believe that people can tell when a company is catering to their latest whims and when the company is in it for the long haul. I believe they won’t give much thought to abandoning the first when they have grown bored and will show more loyalty to the second. However, I also believe that as life moves ever faster, that the effective lifespan of even the most sincere arts organization is going to shorten. Some companies like the Walnut Street may command intense loyalty forever but the dynamics of other communities may result in greater rates of change.

In closing, I will repeat the sentiment I have stated many times before–like Hilly says, play your own stuff and don’t look for success being derivative of other groups. Yes, I linked to a seminar where the Walnut Street folks will tell you what they did to go from 0 to 56,000 subscribers in 25 years. More power to ’em, but they can’t guarantee you can do the same in your community. Believe me, no one wishes they could more than me. It would simplify things a great deal. On the other hand, I am pretty sure a good portion of what they have to say would be of some value so I would be ducking in to check them out and figure what I could use and what I couldn’t.

Second Life is getting a lot of buzz these days as the medium through which people will interact and perhaps get their entertainment in the future. Political candidates have offices and give speeches there. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will give the opening concert of their season there next month motivated by the desire to be the first to do so.

But I heard something today that is motivating me to keep my eyes and ears open for some other alternatives. A student who has had a long association with the theatre came in today and announced she was going to move to Spokane, WA in January to work for Cyan Worlds, creators of the Myst games.

She has been playing Myst Online for sometime now and decided she was going to visit the company this summer. She apparently told them she was coming, when she got there she announced she was going to work for them. Judging from the number of pictures she got with the founder and other employees, they did nothing to dissuade her ambitions. (It also doesn’t hurt that they are advertising for the job she wants.)

I was mostly amused as she talked about her visit. (“The woman in this picture doesn’t know it yet, but she is going to hire me.”) But my ears really perked up when she mentioned that the reason she liked the game was that it was like theatre and performance art. Every month a new chapter in the story is introduced by the game staff to drive the plot forward similar to a TV series. In the interim, the players work together to perform tasks and solve the puzzles for which the Myst games are famous.

I won’t pretend to know much more about the game beyond what I have read online. A couple things I did come across got me thinking that the dynamics of the game might have some lessons for the future of performing arts.

First of all, while players will have the ability to influence the storyline and submit created content, the game administration still retains control of how things proceed. This is in contrast with games like World of Warcraft where there is almost no attention paid to the plot. Second Life allows people a great deal of control over the environment to the point where people are developing and selling real estate in the virtual world. However, that control also equates to the ability to vandalize and destroy property which has been purchased in real dollars at some point in the process.

User created content may be all the rage, but as Andrew Taylor pointed out back in May, there are a lot more people are watching the content rather than creating it. At this point there is still a large majority who want to see well made content (or at least videos of people making fools of themselves) and don’t necessarily crave a high degree of control from the experience.

Live performance in the future may come to mean interacting with virtual avatars of performers. Acting may regress a little. Since appearance will be a function of good design and rendering, the most highly paid actors might be those who have good voices and improvisation/acting skills necessary to interact with people rather than those who look good.

It would be a sort of reversal of the emergence of talking films where people who looked good but had bad speaking voices found themselves out of a job. You have to look no further than Tony Jay who wasn’t a bad looking guy but had a gorgeous voice. He got a lot more work as a voice over artist for cartoons and video games than for his physical presence so it is not tough to see that the real money for performance may soon be in having a good voice and a sense of drama.

Back when I first started my blog I frequently sought out arts related blogs and had a hard time of it. Lately, much to my pleasure, I have noticed more and more arts blogs appearing on the blogrolls of a number of sites I visit.

I was rather delighted to come across the Theatreforte blog last week. Working out of a secret bunker in Columbus, OH, the folks at Theatreforte host a rather large number of theatre blog feeds as well as create entries of their own. They break down the blogs by region which is helpful if you are looking for like minded souls nearby.

They have the largest number of feeds I have seen since ArtsFeed shut down for renovations a couple years ago and never reopened. If you have a blog whose feed you think they should host, send them an email. There is still a need for more good arts bloggers, especially since a couple theatre bloggers got a little burned out and signed off last month.

I also wanted to acknowledge that the Forte site looks to be a labor of love attached to another labor of love, Available light [theatre]. Amazing how many things love can power these days.