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Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

What Do You Recommend We Do?

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As ever, I am paying attention to data on various trends, one of which is the level of perceived trust of cultural organizations. Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience have reported that trust in cultural organizations has increased, particularly since the end of the pandemic.

Last week they released some findings about perceptions during the first quarter of 2025. In general they found that trust of museums has held steady and trust in performing arts organizations has seen an uptick. But they warn that it would be a mistake to assume this trend will continue. (emphasis original)

On average, Americans trust cultural entities more than the daily newspaper, other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), state agencies, and federal agencies – and this has not changed since the administration changed and attendant new policies were issued!

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It is also not reasonable to infer that trust perceptions will continue to increase or remain unchanged. We are looking at national perceptual changes on a short timeline (i.e., one quarter of a year). The American public may still be watching cultural organizations’ reactions closely, or they are trusting that these entities will remain true to their previously stated missions and values.

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One of the aspects most valued in cultural organization is being mission-driven. Dilenschneider and company had reported on this about a year ago and I summarized a bit in a blog post then. At the time they warned not to assume younger audiences valued the mission focused elements of an organization more than other generations because they were deeply invested in the mission of organizations. Rather, IMPACTS suggested it may just be that they haven’t been marketed to for as long as previous generations.

In any case, they recommend organization continue to focus on and communicate their mission as they tackle challenges they may face as they move into the future.

What particularly caught my eye in this latest bit of data analysis is that the survey data reflected a belief that organizations should recommend behavior. This is certainly something to think about.

Generally speaking, Americans do not love being told what to do. However, a majority of Americans “agree” or “strongly agree” that exhibit-based and performing arts organizations should suggest or recommend certain behaviors or ways for the public to support its causes and mission…

Even now, Americans generally expect cultural organizations to recommend behaviors to help elevate their communities as it relates to their missions. Depending on your organization, this may mean suggesting ways to further art education, keep the ocean clean, protect endangered species, cultivate native plants, advocate for theater, bring music to emerging audiences, make science-based decisions, or any number of things. And these action items may range from signing up for a program, to becoming a member, to donating, to attending an event, to telling folks about an organization’s important work.

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How Long Have Communities Been Yearning For An Outcomes Focused Experience?

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Ruth Hartt made a post yesterday that is getting a fair number of responses from folks in the arts community, including somewhat gratifyingly, board members who need to be invested in the goals for which she advocates.

She discusses the need for cultural organizations to align their programming, practices, and operations toward meeting outcomes desired by audiences/participants/community members. She provides some practical examples of organizations around the world who have achieved this by doing everything from publishing a children’s book, sending postcards to children, offering wellness classes, and centering activities around a decommissioned fire truck.

These support her proposal on how to shift organizational business models:

Shift the value proposition from showcasing artistic product to delivering audience outcomes (e.g., wellness, belonging, inspiration, emotional restoration).

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Expand resource allocation to include different talent, tools, and partnerships—especially those outside the arts sector (e.g., wellness practitioners, educators, social service orgs).

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Reframe success metrics to measure what matters to your audiences, not just what matters to insiders or funders (e.g., social connection, personal growth, first-time participation).

Rebuild your value network by cultivating funders, partners, and press outlets that validate outcomes instead of just prestige, tradition, or aesthetics.

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Something she wrote at the beginning of her piece coalesced a lot of disparate concepts for me:

Historically, the arts have been one of the few avenues for accessing beauty, intellect, and high-status cultural capital. The product itself was scarce, revered, and gatekept.

But since the early 2000s, the digital revolution has shifted power to the consumer—creating a world where people expect personalized, on-demand experiences that deliver clear value and meaningful outcomes. Shaped by pre-digital norms, the arts sector has struggled to respond.

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It occurred to me that it may not be entirely true that the shift started in the early 2000s. I have always attributed my feeling that I have had permission to access cultural experiences to the fact my parents would take us to performances, museums, and historical sites when I was younger.

But my lifetime has seen increased access to experiences. I have gone from three channel over the air television to cable to VCR to video rental stores to dial-up internet to high speed internet to video on demand (including YouTube) to streaming content.

The practice of gatekeeping experiences has always seemed silly to me. Now I wonder if it was shaped in part by the increasingly accessible world (even though neighbors had color tv, cable, and HBO years before I did.)

I suspect that even if others did not have the same perspective and experiences with cultural opportunities that I did, their expectations of accessibility were being shaped in a similar way.

In other words, I think it is perhaps a mistake to believe this shift of expectations began with generations whose first experiences with technology began in the 2000s. There has probably been a subconscious awareness of unmet need and expectations far longer than that.

Therefore it would be a mistake to think what Ruth proposes is targeted to engage and increase the participation of younger generations.

Progress In Community Lives Can’t Be Standardized

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Kyle Bowen piqued my attention today in the Museums as Progress newsletter where he discussed Goodhart’s Law.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Long time readers know that subscribe to the idea that just because you can measure something, it doesn’t mean the result is meaningful. Bowen illustrates this by pointing out that having goals to increase participation among people who meet certain demographic characteristics doesn’t advance your understanding of why they are there, how you can make them feel welcome, and make it easy to decide to return.

For a lot of organizations the answers to those questions are central to their mission and vision.

Goodhart’s Law reminds us that mirroring demographic ratios in museum content is not an end in itself because ratios have little relationship to a museum’s ability to fulfill a role in a city or region.

What counts isn’t who people are on paper, but what progress they’re trying to make in their lives. Demographics might tell you something about who is in your space, but they reveal nothing about why they came or what they hoped to achieve.

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Bowen admits that it is possible for progress in their lives can fall victim to becoming a meaningless target, it is is more difficult to do. What everyone needs to achieve their goal is differs from person to person even if they have the same goal. Thus it is tough to focus on providing a standard solution to everyone. And because what everyone feels they need is specific to them, organizations have to engage in more direct and active listening to provide the outcomes community members seek. (emphasis original)

Supporting a community goal like “helping parents cultivate their child’s curiosity” requires understanding the diverse approaches people take in pursuing that goal and the alternatives people in a particular place might turn to as they seek to achieve their goal. You can’t reduce it to a single number. Second, progress metrics require ongoing listening rather than predetermined solutions. When you focus on supporting goals, you have to constantly validate whether your approaches are working, creating a natural correction mechanism.

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Ubiquity And Connection Can Be Better Promotion Than Scarcity

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Seth Godin had a recent post on the “knock, knock” promotional business model. The way he describes it put me in mind of the Field of Dreams “if you build it, they will come,” approach to advertising. Godin says this model works in cases where a movie or book is announced featuring a famous actor (or by a famous author).

The level of high anticipation creates a tension you can use to sell the product. You don’t have to share much of the content because people have already sold themselves on the idea.

However, he says there are offerings like those from cultural organizations that succeed better with a different approach.

Mass media was the way creators could spread the tension and announce their work. You’re waiting for “who’s there!”

It’s worth distinguishing these knock knock offerings from cultural organizations, communities, and tools. In these cases, you can tell the whole story, give away the entire idea, and the IP is worth more, not less.

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He goes on to cite movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or songs that become anthems which only gain in influence as more people become familiar with them. He discusses the value of focusing on abundance and connection rather than scarcity. He admits it is a difficult process and perhaps not as well supported by research and evidence as people may like.

Many of the creators I’ve worked with over the years feel this tension and then fall into a gap. They have a fine knock knock on offer, but promotion is grating, endless and feels demeaning. Hustle isn’t the solution, not any longer. The best way for this sort of work to become popular is for people who have engaged with it to tell their friends (see the Blair Witch Project for an example). But “getting the word out” has never been more frustrating or difficult than it is now. The web is not TV.

We need this sort of thoughtful, long-form scholarship, but the business model for it is shaky indeed. The breakthroughs happen via peer-to-peer promotion, not hustle.

At the same time, it’s never been more productive to build tools and communities. And it helps to do it with intent.

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Lower Rates For Loyal Customers? How Novel!

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A couple days ago, Sam Reich, CEO of Dropout TV announced an $1/month increase in the subscription rate for the service. However, he made it very clear that this increase was for new and returning subscribers.

“Charging more for existing subscribers? Who do you think we are? Netflix, Apple, Disney, Amazon, Peacock?”

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He basically goes right to the heart of a big pet peeve of mine. Even though he cites current streaming sites, the practice of offering lower introductory rates to new subscribers goes back decades. All through my youth I would hear pitches from long distance phone services, cell phone carries, cable companies, cable channels like HBO, Showtime, etc., which would offer discounted rates to new users while maintaining higher rates for loyal long term users. The message was clearly that your loyalty wasn’t valued.

In the two minute video, Reich spends over half emphatically reinforcing the fact that they haven’t raised the price in three years and that this increased price only applies to new and returning subscribers. Since the new rates don’t go into effect until May, interested folks have a month to become classified as an existing subscriber. Meanwhile, he reminds viewers that the cost of their Netflix subscription has jumped twice in the time it took to watch the video.

The rest of the video he discusses that Dropout has increased their spending sixfold in the last three years to create more product, that the increase will help pay the staff a fair wage, and that as the CEO he does not own a boat.

While I first assumed he was implying he did not receive an exorbitant salary I later realized he might want to buy a boat. (Given that Dropout is comedy content the intended message may be both.)

So in this spirit, I will close by suggesting folks might want to consider using the analytics function of their ticketing system to identify people who have regularly attended over the last 3-5 years and send them a coupon code for a discount or some other benefit to thank them for their loyalty.

To Thine Own Tactics Be True

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Seth Godin recently made a post warning people against adopting the tactics of those you view as successful as your own.

The problem is simple. You don’t have a tactics problem. You have a strategy problem.

Borrowing tactics from someone with a useful strategy isn’t going to help because it’s their strategy that’s better, not their tactics.

And using tactics from someone who got lucky isn’t going to help either. Someone needs to get lucky, and it was them. It’s not their tactics that made it happen. Going to the same bank as Charlize Theron isn’t going to make you a movie star.

When in doubt, focus on your strategy. The tactics will follow.

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This reminded me of a quote from Joseph Campbell about the Knights of the Round Table embarking on the Grail quest

“‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”

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Apparently this quote has stuck with me for awhile. In searching for the 2007 post I originally used this quote in I found at least two more instances I used this quote, including in conjunction with another of Godin’s posts.

Perhaps I have used it so much because this is sentiment comes up often in relation to things like copying bylaws from other non-profits or using the same marketing and advertising techniques.

Every organization and community is different with different relationship dynamics. At one point in our lives I am sure we all realized that we couldn’t have the same close relationship with a friend that they seemed to have with another person in their social circle. On paper there may be no difference between you and that third person, but for some intangible reason your friend and they seem to share a significant affinity for one another.

The same is true to a greater or lesser degree on a community scale except some individuals may feel a stronger affinity than others. As Godin says, in relation toa collective you are targeting your tactics need to emerge and be informed by your strategy rather than borrowed. Otherwise the disconnect between the two will feel inorganic and inhibit the relationships you seek to develop.

Oregon Arts Commission Making Grants Easy For All

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A professional grant writer had a piece on the Oregon ArtsWatch website where she expressed her disbelief at the Oregon Arts Commission’s (OAC) new grant guidelines.

But it was all in a good way. Claire Willett writes that not only did they make the process simpler, they also made the use of the money flexible and unrestricted. For years now there have been calls for funders to support operational and administrative expenses rather than excluding them as permitted areas. Oregon Arts Commission is allowing funds to be used for that or pretty much anything else.

OAC also simplified the process significantly. Willett said she would typically write 7-10 pages of narrative for her clients. This year OAC’s goal is to make the application process simple and accessible for organizations who don’t have the capacity to hire a grant writer.

Apparently they made great progress in this direction:

….the week the new system went online, a friend texted me, “Um, I just logged in to look at the new OAC streamlined process and instead I just filled it out and submitted it in less than ten minutes???” 

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They also eliminated grant review panels. The grant staff at OAC Willett spoke to said that they instructed panelists to focus on the quality of work being done rather than the quality of writing, but they were concerned an unconscious bias toward those who could afford a professional grant writer might exist.

They also eliminated the long narrative sections from the application. (Personally, I was excited to learn they had allowed 5000 characters given most applications ask for a comprehensive review and allow 500 characters. But on the other hand, not having to write a comprehensive review in the first place is awesome.)

Three narrative blocks of five thousand characters each is an intimidating hurdle for applicants facing barriers of education, language, literacy, or simply lack of experience in this specific form of writing, which could mean that really exciting artistic work wasn’t getting taken seriously. The shift, then, was twofold: simplifying the form itself to something anybody can do without professional assistance, and moving the decision-making process in-house to focus on strengthening relationships between the OAC and the organizations they fund. 

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The OAC sees many of the changes they have made as moving toward the goal of developing and strengthening trust with groups throughout the state. They have even removed the requirement to operate two years as a non-profit from the eligibility criteria for a smaller grant program in recognition of how lengthy the IRS non-profit application process can be.

Patience For Ticket Purchase Experience Is Wearing Thin

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Yesterday I received an email letting me know that Colleen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS Experience had released a new post titled Ticket Purchasing Frustrations Are On the Rise. (subscription required) I knew this would be a topic I wanted to write on.

An hour later, I get an email from someone who knows I have a subscription asking if I had read the piece. In turn, people had emailed him knowing of his interest in the topic asking if he read it.

Clearly I needed to address this post sooner than later, but I had a lot of meetings and wasn’t able to digest the piece. I don’t usually post on Thursdays, so here is a bonus post for you all.

The second paragraph of the piece reads:

Think twice before assuming that this article merely points out areas for independent ticketing systems to improve! These hassles may in fact be the fault of cultural organizations themselves.

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That is pretty much what the research has found. Some of the issues are due to the design of the ticketing system, but a lot of the problems originate with organizational policies and procedures.

As usual, the data is broken down between exhibit based and performance based arts and cultural organizations. While the frustration is rising for both groups, the negative attitudes have increased most for exhibit based organizations – especially those with timed entry tickets.

According to the data Dilenschneider and IMPACTS present, reported barriers related to the ticket purchasing experience between 2015 and 2018 were pretty low and stable. Once the pandemic hit, ticket purchasing moved toward the forefront as an issue.

The barrier value of “Hard to purchase/transact” skyrocketed…That’s an increase of 146%! In this span of years, we experienced many more potential visitors saying that it was just too hard, complicated, confusing, or inconvenient to purchase a ticket to make it worth the effort.

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But you’ll notice another alarming jump in “difficult to purchase or transact” as a driving barrier just last year! Today, this barrier is approaching the 100 index value threshold wherein the sector risks losing attendance and people are choosing to do something else because of ticketing-related issues…

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Timed entry is an additional frustrating factor for visitors to exhibit based entities. Attendees would rather enter when they are ready rather than during a specific window. There is also a concern about committing and then having kids get sick, scheduling conflicts pop up, being delayed by other factors.

Obviously, these are concerns people have when attending performing arts events too, but it seems that since the requirement to show up at a specific date and time has long been part of the process, it isn’t as big a barrier. Though it does still present a barrier as people are increasingly able to have the experience they want on their schedule.

While being difficult to purchase or transact certainly remains a modest barrier to attendance, it’s not a prohibitive barrier for many performing arts organizations. At the end of the day, performing arts programs have long been date and time specific. As a result, guests are habituated to selecting a timed and dated ticket.

Also, as performing arts leaders know well, some programs and performances secure more patrons than others. Attendance to performing arts organizations is especially dependent on how interested folks are in the specific programming. Therefore, it may come as no surprise that far greater barriers to attendance for performing arts institutions are simply preferring an alternative leisure activity.

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One thing that plagues both exhibit based and performing arts entities roughly equally is the data entry burden. People don’t like to have to enter all their information in a number of boxes. If they have to hit next to go to a new page rather than fill everyone out on one screen that adds to the frustration.

If they have to fill out a marketing questionnaire as part of the process that can present a deterrent. (my emphasis)

As explained above for exhibit-based organizations, it’s not uncommon for some institutions to “throw in another question to collect data, while we’re at it!” From additional questions ranging from how someone heard about the organization, to their length of stay in the city, to asking if they’d like at attend or qualify for an additional event, to any number of additional queries requiring a response or even a “next” click, organizations benefit by contemplating the potential negative impact of holding up the transaction. It may seem quick and easy to add on an additional question or two (with internal benefit, no doubt) from the view of a staff member, but these are a rapidly growing annoyance for potential patrons.

The takeaway isn’t to avoid collecting helpful information from patrons, but to consider how doing so may impact the transaction experience.

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They point out that many consumers are used to doing a one click purchase on Amazon which allows them to skip entering information into different fields…and leaves the customer feedback survey until after the transaction is complete.

As I always write in connection with these posts based on data IMPACTS has crunched I am only summarizing part of the whole. They also cover factors like pricing confusion that can be associated with packages, discount eligibility, and dynamic pricing; availability of payment types; digital ticketing; and purchasing interface on desktop vs mobile.

Causes of Churn Common Across All Business Types

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There was an article on Fast Company this week that discusses customer churn. For the most part the piece is written from the perspective of being a company that has sold another business a product/service that they choose not to renew. Some of that part of the article can be view in parallel with subscription renewal, but there is a fair portion of their advice which applies to single ticket sales as well.

The article notes that the decision not to renew is often made six months prior vs. in the last 30 days or so before the renewal discussions are scheduled.One of the issue identified in the article is the onboarding not matching the promise of the sale pitch. Clearly that can be an issue for customers of arts and cultural organizations when they find their experience isn’t what they expected based on the promotional messaging.

Satisfaction surveys are problematic in that they only measure satisfaction at a specific point in time rather then over an entire span and they don’t record the subtle signs that a decision to disengage has been made. The author of the Fast Company piece, Ron Carlson, suggests being proactive and interactive with the process of collecting feedback from customers, both current and past.

Instead of relying on static surveys, consider having real conversations with both current and past customers to uncover what’s actually happening. What you’re likely to hear in these conversations will shock you.

  • Customers Don’t Feel Heard: “We raised concerns, but nothing changed.”
  • The Real Pain Points Were Missed: “We didn’t leave because of price—we left because we weren’t seeing value.”
  • Your Biggest Risks Are Invisible: “We made the renewal decision months ago.”

Instead of simply sitting around waiting for a renewal conversation, take active steps to retain your clients:

Listen To Lost Customers: Post-churn interviews reveal patterns you won’t see in dashboards.

Map The Customer Journey: Identify weak points before they become churn risks.

Have Regular Check-ins: Not just to “touch base,” but to understand evolving needs.

Ask Why Customers Stay: Understanding what’s working helps reinforce those behaviors.

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Issues like not feeling heard and decision to leave being based on value rather than price are factors I have discussed across a number of posts in the past. Likewise, identifying weak points which might include external issues like parking, dining and safety as well as the ticket purchase and staff/volunteer interactions are also topics I have raised.

I think it is also important to pay attention to that last point -analyzing what is working is just as important as identifying problems. It is easy to view anything people aren’t complaining about neutrally. But it is just as important to catalogue what people say they value as assets and invest in reinforcing what is great about those aspects of the experience.

Go Get My Guitar

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There is a lot of conversation among arts organizations these days about the need to create connection and show the value of arts organizations to the community. I worked with an artist this weekend who really exemplified this aesthetic.

We presented the Masters of Hawaiian Music which is typically George Kahumoku and a rotating roster of 2-3 other notable musicians from Hawaii. In this case it was Herb Ohta, Jr. and Sonny Lim. Kahumoku has been hosting the Maui Slack Key show for over 20 years and has been a musician for far longer than that. He was trained as a visual artist, but is also a farmer, cook, writer in addition to being a sculptor and printmaker. Definitely a renaissance man.

When I initially contracted the show, the local museum was planning having a quilt exhibition around the same time that was going to have 2 out of 20-30 quilts from Hawaii. Over the course of the year that evolved to 100% Hawaiian quilts. I arranged for Uncle George Kahumoku to speak about quilt making the night before the performance and then join the members of a local organization for a potluck and mini-cultural exchange.

The local organization said there would be 15-20 from their group at the talk and potluck and the museum didn’t know how many would attend from their mailing list.

We got to the museum and there were already 40-50 people gathered in the gallery. Uncle George turned around and told me to go back to his hotel room to get his guitar. He really enjoyed the experience because he had never seen so many Hawaiian quilts in one place. He would watch his grandmother and her friends make quilts for every newborn, but he had never seen one placed on a bed and used because they were treated as heirlooms.

He joked when he inherited his father’s quilt, his dad let him look at it and then closed the chest up a few minutes later and told him to never open it again. He didn’t mention if he gave his son the same instructions when he passed it on.

Later at the potluck, upon learning some students of hula came an hour to hear the museum talk, he made everyone move the tables and told them to dance while he played familiar songs on his guitar.

The next night, before the show he was out in the lobby greeting audience members and handing out slips to fill out to “win stuff.” The slips were obviously a way for him to collect address so he could contact people in different parts of the country to attend his shows when he was in the area. But he was also very much making himself available to the audience to chat with him rather than delegating this job to subordinates. (Okay, so he pressed me into helping him so maybe there was a little subordination going on.)

He was back out in the lobby at intermission with Ohta and Lim chatting with the audience. (I had to nudge them back on stage.) Then they were back immediately after the show until everyone left.

It is difficult to communicate the vibe and dynamic via text. His agent may have explained it best when she mentioned his instinct leans toward creating connections and socialization. She mentioned he was likely in his happy place at the museum talk and potluck more than even at the concert.

As much as he was trying to gather people’s contact information, his goal wasn’t to optimize that process. He started drawing names to give things away as soon as I introduced him rather than waiting until the end of the show and taking the opportunity to gather more names at intermission.

Also at some point he managed to collect the names of every staff member and volunteer in the building and acknowledged them all before the performance started. The morning after the public show, I got a long text from Uncle George telling me how much being able to see the quilts meant to him and how he would write about the experience in his memoirs. Again he praised our staff.

I knew by then that he was an exemplar of the level of sincerity and investment that arts organizations need to manifest in their interactions with their community.

Still Trusted, But Some Perceptual Barriers to Overcome

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In my post yesterday I briefly referenced research Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience have released showing that arts and cultural organizations have gained an increased perception of trust since the relaxing of pandemic restrictions.

Last month they released some updated data collected around the end of 2024 about the perceptions working with and against 11 different types of arts and cultural organizations.(subscription required)

They used the criteria of perception of being entertaining (recall audience definition is not your definition), educational, primarily for adults, welcoming to people like me, likelihood to recommend, being an asset to the community.

Generally, exhibit based organizations (zoos, botanical gardens, museums) are regarded as being entertaining. That isn’t as true for performance based organizations. (my emphasis)

Other than live theater, performing arts organizations are on the whole perceived to be less entertaining than exhibit-based organizations.

But before you panic, symphonies/orchestras and other performing arts organizations, remember that these data represent market research, which includes perceptions from people who both do and do not attend these types of organizations. Those who visit with regularity tend to rate the entertainment value more highly … This finding may represent one of those perceptual mismatches between “insiders” and the broader market, where regular attendees who are more familiar with the type of experience offered will likely find it more engaging than those who do not know what to expect…Seeking out opportunities to increase relevance and help potential attendees engage with experiences may offer a potential pathway forward for creative performing arts leaders.

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There is a similar result in terms of perceptions of being welcoming to people like me and likelihood to recommend. Live theater is perceived as being more welcoming and have a higher tendency to be recommended than orchestras and other performing arts organizations.

Interestingly, when it comes to perceptions of being assets to the community, live theater and orchestras are about on par with each other with other performing arts organizations trailing slightly. They attribute this to a mix of high level of trust performing arts and exhibit based organizations enjoy, perception of being educational, and existence as a venerable community institution (for longer established orgs, naturally.)

I am skipping over an immense amount of content they provide. I have almost completely omitted data for exhibit based organizations and probably could have written an entry three times as long based on the performing arts data alone. Additionally, after they provide a macro level view of these trends they drill down on each of the 11 organization types with a short description and infographic summarizing the perceptions that act as headwinds and tailwinds for each.

Communicating What You Are Good For Rather Than Good At More Important Than Ever

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Last month, Forbes website hosted an article “6 Things That Arts Leaders Should Do Right Now” It is written in the context of all the funding cuts and policy changes being promulgated on the federal level.

Except for the suggestion to emphasize the economic impact of your work in the community to garner the support of local businesses and community leaders, the advice is generally to move away from transactional relationships with the community and focus on your core cause and role in society.

Identify the role that your organization has in society.

Magladry, who advises a number of museums, recounted how many museum directors are reviewing the various role that museums can play in communities (e.g., truthteller, protagonist, convener) and how their institutions can act in these roles. This strategizing might require more collaboration between managers and board members as well as artists and community members.

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Many of these recommendations are echoed in Alex Sarian’s book, The Audacity of Relevance, … Sarian argues that arts leaders must ask themselves: What are we good for? rather than What are we good at? In order to answer those questions, arts organizations should have a viable value proposition that tells people why they might engage with the organization and choose its goods and services over other institutions in a clear expression of its plans to address their wants and needs.

Karen Brooks Hopkins, formerly president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, suggests that arts organizations need to move away from thinking in terms of only philanthropy to thinking in terms of investment. “When communities that have a density of arts organizations are successful – economically, socially, and of course, artistically – then there is a reason for cities and municipalities of all kinds to make an ongoing financial commitment to them,”

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This recalls the research by Collen Dilenschneider and IMPACTS Experience that trust in cultural organizations has been growing since the Covid pandemic and underscores the value of positioning your organization as a community resource.

The also article emphasizes the importance of changing the internal culture and structure of the organization to be less siloed so that everyone is working collaboratively to achieve these goals.

Break down siloed work environments.

Adapting to new challenges will require more internal collaboration between departments and more partnerships with other organizations in finding ways to serve audiences and communities. Reaching out and being open to new ideas and approaches may result in finding new funding sources and new audiences for your work.

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The Customer Is Always Right…

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I have been seeing a number of claims that the full quote ends with “…in matters of taste.” As much as I would love that to be true given that retailers have been bludgeoned with the phrase over the years, it apparently is not. While Harry Selfridge is credited with creating The Customer is always right, there is no record of him completing it with a sentiment about taste.

Reinforces the idea that you always need to research such things before taking them at face value. Which is apt because according to wikipedia, the saying was used to create a sense of confidence in people at a time when caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, was the maxim of the day because malpresentation was so rampant.

While the phrase is attributed to various people, the intent was to assure customers in the early 1900s that the merchant would work to guarantee their satisfaction.

About 10-15 years later, various people were already observing that customers were taking advantage of the saying to bully merchants and engaging in a little misrepresentation of their own. So it has continued for over a century as witnessed by the fact that people are trying to append a few more words to the saying to create a counternarrative.

Certainly, more than a century later there is also plenty of misrepresentation coming at us through various media to warrant the use of caveat emptor as well.

Perhaps it is time for a new saying that both tempers customer demands and urges a degree of discernment before purchasing.

Understanding Barriers To Entry By Visiting Stores That Cause You Discomfort

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Nina Simon posted that she had been interviewed on Kyle Thiermann’s podcast (also on YouTube if you want view a video of them talking.)

They talk for awhile about Nina’s transition from running Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) to writing murder mysteries while taking care of her mother as she dealt with an advanced cancer diagnosis.

Around the 40 minute mark, Nina starts to talk about how she came to be the executive director at MAH. I have written a fair number of entries over the years about Nina’s thoughts on creating an accessible environment for communities at arts and cultural organizations. One of the things she has talked about is creating figurative (though sometimes literal) new doors for people to enter to engage with the organization.

In this podcast episode she touches a little on the empathy that an organization’s staff needs to have to understand the barriers to participation people experience. She says she has gone to conferences and challenged people to go downtown and enter stores that make them feel uncomfortable and pay attention to what it is that causes that. Is it the decor? The way people dress? Rituals and practices you are unfamiliar with?

This resonated with me because I have had that experience and had the same thought about understanding how new audiences can feel ill at ease entering arts and cultural spaces. I have had the experience going to speak to social groups who have traditional practices they enact, but also going into an unfamiliar restaurant and not knowing where and how to order.

As I think about it, I have probably felt more comfortable navigating a new to me performing arts venue than some restaurants.

Nina mentions that you can put out all the messaging you want about people being welcome and how they should feel comfortable wearing what they want, but if the behavior of the other people they encounter sends a contradictory message your efforts may come to naught.

She says even if all elements align to reinforce the welcoming message you hope to convey, people aren’t going to trust your organization as much as they trust their friend’s rock band or knitting circle. Forging alliances and relationships with affinity groups in the community can help cultivate that trust.

Nina also mentioned that it was pretty humbling to realize no matter how much effort they put into creating welcoming environment and programming, it would never increase the engagement with the museum as much as the presence of a good coffee shop and bar in the food hall that was developed next to the MAH.

Take a listen for these and other insights. Also, check out her book on engaging audiences, The Art of Relevance. I just bought my fifth copy — I gave two as gifts, but two other copies I lent out never came back to me.

More Room For Customer Focused Info On Book Covers?

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In a case of insiders recognizing that stuff they think is important isn’t really viewed as valuable to consumers, the publisher of Simon and Schuster books announced their writers will no longer be required to solicit blurbs from other writers.

If you are wondering what blurbs are, you aren’t alone. In a totally non-scientific survey at a book seller the NY Times article writer conducted, 18 out of 20 people responded they didn’t know what it was. Once they were told, they said blurbs didn’t impact their buying choices as much as the summary of the story on the book jacket/cover. Those that buy books online said they place more importance on what other buyers have written about the book.

And in fact, there is no data that the blurbs help to sell books at all. Like their customers, shop owners interviewed for the story said that other than some really recognizable names, they hadn’t seen customers pay attention to blurbs.

Blurbs are basically words of praise that other authors have given to a book. Most authors don’t like soliciting those blurbs because it is time consuming and potentially humiliating if someone you admire refuses you. Not to mention the whole process cultivates a bit of an incestuous quid pro quo environment.

In his statement, Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster said:

Trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time,” Manning wrote. He commended “the collegiality of authors,” but pointed out that “favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.”

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A number of authors are issuing sighs of relief while others are hoping this practice becomes more widespread.

This story resonated with me because about six hours before I saw it I had picked up a book related to arts management and after scanning the nearly two dozen blurbs, muttered that none of those giving blurbs really had any relevance for me. If I was thinking that as an arts insider, it was a lesson to me to consider how little things I did think were important might mean to audience members.

Why You Should Be Expanding Your Audience, By The Numbers

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Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience laid out some interesting data about audience sustainability for different types of cultural organizations. (subscription required) They look at negative substitution trends as well as the engagement cycle for different types of cultural entitites.

If you are asking, “Okay, so what is negative substitution,” IMPACTS explains it like this:

Negative substitution is a phenomenon wherein the number of people who profile as active visitors leaving the market (i.e., by way of death, relocation, or migration) outpaces the number of people who profile as active visitors entering the market (i.e., by way of birth, relocation, or immigration). Essentially, people who fit the profile of a cultural visitor are leaving the market faster than cultural entities have been able to replace them by expanding their audiences. The result is a shrinking visitor base.

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Engagement cycle is how the average time between when a person first visits an organization and when they return. For exhibit based organizations, this is an average of 24.7 months. However broken down by different disciplines it varies. For aquariums it is 23.8 months; art museums it is 24.1; Children’s museums it is 29.7 months.

Similarly, for performing arts organizations the engagement cycle is 28.5 months, but for symphonies it is 28.7 months and for theaters it is 25.8 months.

They break down these rates for 11 different organization types in the article. These examples are just a sample.

Negative substitution rates vary for each of the 11 types as well. For aquariums the substitution rate is .991; art museums is .955, children’s museums is .92; symphonies is .907 and theater is .946.

As an example of how these two numbers come together in a relevant way, here is an example using the general exhibit based substitution rate of .982 and engagement cycle of 24.7 months:

An organization welcoming 1,000,000 visitors per year may be engaging their current audiences effectively (via marketing, exhibits, etc.) and yet they could reasonably expect to engage only 982,000 visitors 24.7 months after that, and 964,300 visitors 24.7 months after that. Every visitation cycle leads to progressively fewer visitors, even though our hypothetical organization is doing everything right by their current audiences!

Because this organization is not actively working to expand its audience profile, it is losing attendance over time simply due to shifts in the population.

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They provide a similar breakdown for each of the 11 organizations if you want to see the trends for your particular corner of the cultural landscape. Some of the numbers become a little sobering. For example, an orchestra serving 1 million people in 2025 might expect to be serving 822,600 people at the end of the second cycle in 66.2 months.

Getting People To Reveal The Boxes They Want Checked

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Seth Godin recently made a post that set off all sorts of thoughts in my brain.

I was going to say it checked a lot of boxes for me, but that is the title of his post and it felt a little repetitive.

The simplest way forward is to see which boxes your target market has and then check all of them.

Unfortunately #1: The audience doesn’t publish their actual list of boxes, they conceal many of them.

Unfortunately #2: They don’t all have the same boxes.

Unfortunately #3: If it were that straightforward, your competition would have done it all already.

Great work finds emotions, stories and possibility. Great work invents new boxes.

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His first point about audiences not making it easy to learn what boxes they need checked reminded me of an Arts Hacker post I made which mentioned the “5 Whys” technique often required to drill down to discover root causes and motivations. This is because the first answer you often receive often just reflects a surface understanding.

The first why might elicit a response that someone values the symphony for live performance. Asking why live performance is important might get an answer of extraordinary experience. Why does that matter? Makes me a better person. Why is it important to be a better person? Creates a sense of inner harmony.

Freeman says if you only asked Why once or twice, you will end up focused on product features and benefits and not really learn about what people see is a value of the experience to them as a person.

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Godin’s point about everyone not having the same boxes and that great work finds emotions, stories and possibilities dovetails with a lot of what Ruth Hartt espouses for marketing the arts in a way that responds to audience needs. Many of the marketing message examples she uses resonate with a desire to de-stress, have a sense of harmony, spend time with family and friends, and other things people may want out of an experience.

Among the most effective ways to communicate that you offer those sort of benefits is through messaging and images that tell stories and evoke emotions. To some extent using this type of messaging may help audiences create new boxes to check–or rather validate that their root needs from an experience are worth verbalizing more frequently rather than concealing.

Reducing The Crowd Doesn’t Increase Satisfaction By Itself

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Last week The Guardian had an article about people being so dissatisfied with their attendance experience at The Louvre, they were determined never to visit again.

It isn’t just the crowds, but also poor signage, flow of attendees and long waits despite holding timed admission tickets which upset people.

On Monday, a 74-year-old clinical psychologist from Paris, who said she had been a regular visitor to the Louvre for 40 years, exited the popular temporary exhibition, Figures of the Fool, feeling battered.

“I’m leaving in a state of extreme fatigue and I’ve vowed never to visit again,” she said, declining to give her name. “The noise is so unbearable under the glass pyramid; it’s like a public swimming pool. Even with a timed ticket, there’s an hour to wait outside. I can’t do it anymore. Museums are supposed to be fun, but it’s no fun anymore. There’s no pleasure in coming here anymore.

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A day earlier I had seen a piece on the NBC News site where French President Emmanuel Macron announced a major renovation to the aging museum facility which would include moving the Mona Lisa to a space “accessible independently of the rest of the museum.”

I am not sure if that means it would be permanently located in a separate space or if it is only temporary for the term of the renovation. Given that many people only visit The Louvre with the express intent of viewing the Mona Lisa and leaving, it may be wise to maintain that arrangement.

As I was reading these stories, I recalled that I had written a post about organizations discovering during the pandemic that visitor satisfaction increased when capacity restrictions were in place. I had remembered that Disney had decided to limit park attendance rather than go back to pre-pandemic levels in an attempt to preserve that level of customer satisfaction.

I had forgotten that the article I cited also mentioned the Louvre was scaling back admissions from 45,000/day to 30,000/day for the same reason. I had wondered if they had reverted to admitting larger numbers again, but upon re-reading the NBC News piece, apparently they had maintained the lower capacity numbers.

In 2021, des Cars became the first woman to head the Louvre, a symbol of French culture around the world. Since then, she has introduced several measures to make the museum more accessible, including a cap on visitors in 2023 to reduce overcrowding, extending opening hours, and pushing for the creation of a second main entrance.

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If they are admitting fewer people, have an additional entrance, and longer operating hours, I wonder if the dissatisfaction is more a matter of their timed ticketing being out of synch with the flow of people into and through the museum. Perhaps they aren’t spreading admissions out over a long enough period of time. (They may have extended hours, but people are still buying admission tickets during a super concentrated period of time and later hours are fairly easy to get.) Or perhaps as people say, the signage and directions are so poor, people are taking longer to move through the galleries once they are admitted and things get backed up.

When Where You Say You Are Is Who You Are For

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Colorado Public Radio has a weekly Q&A feature they run. A recent question about why some sports teams are named for Denver and others for Colorado even though they are all based out of metro Denver reflects the ways in which technology and connectedness change our perceptions.

Reporter Ben Marcus noted that older teams like the Denver Nuggets and Broncos are generally named after cities because many cities in the state had teams which would play against each other. In that situation there was value in emphasizing associations with the city.

As cable television helped distribute games to larger audiences, team owners recognized there was value in creating broader geographic associations. Marcus cites the examples of the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies baseball teams.

Not to mention there was financial benefit in appealing to a broader geographic base. Apparently the residents of Denver rejected a tax increase to support building a stadium for the Rockies. However, voters in the adjacent cities of the Denver metropolitan area approved the tax measure and the stadium got built.

And the Rockies draw attendees from throughout the state, a situation the executive director of the Colorado Baseball Commission attributes, in part, to the name.

Success off the field, however, is undeniable. Despite being one of the worst teams in baseball last season, an average of 31,361 fans attended games.

“A lot of the attendance at Rockies games even now are people coming from other parts of the state,” said Macey. “Grand Junction and Lamar and also from a lot of the surrounding states. So having Colorado as the name is kind of all-encompassing, and helps attract all of those people to games.”

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I bring up this story to inspire some thought among arts organizations about whether there are elements of their name and branding which creates psychological and perceptional limits about who they geographically serve which is in conflict with the organizational vision of who they serve.

I know there are a number of arts organizations who effected a name change to encompass a larger geographic area. The first that comes to mind is the Honolulu Symphony becoming the Hawaii Symphony about 10-15 years ago.

But before anyone makes that change, you may want to consider the bit of insight shared at the end of the Colorado Public Radio piece which suggests streaming technology is increasing the geographic region of people which might form a relationship with an organization:

Jason Hanson, the historian, said the rise of the internet and streaming services means team owners may one day think globally, well beyond cities and states.

“You could easily imagine some kind of shake-up in the NFL, where a team moves, and as their new name picks you know the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific coast or something that would be bigger, that would have sort of more meaning in other parts of the world.”

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Getting An Early Start On The Show

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League of American Orchestra’s Symphony.org site had an interesting piece on concert start times recently. It wasn’t really surprising to learn that organizations were experimenting with different start times to better suit the needs of their audiences.

I was, however, surprised to learn that in 2006 and perhaps even more recently, there were classical music recitals starting at 10:30 pm and selling out. (Though perhaps to be expected given they were in the city that never sleeps)

In 2006, a New York Times critic reported that the Mostly Mozart Festival’s “A Little Night Music” concerts, held at 10:30pm, were “almost always sold out,” and raised a question: “Why should cabaret acts and jazz sets be able to start late, but not classical recitals?”

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The general theme of the article is that people’s expectations have changed, especially post-pandemic. The Houston Symphony apparently tried an earlier start time about a decade ago only to revert back to their regular time when the change proved unpopular. However, they have recently shifted to 7:30 pm to 8 pm and not only was it well received, surveys are showing a trending preference for a 7 pm start.

To some degree they credit the increase in people who are working from home who don’t have the commute from office to the theater with perhaps a trip home and dinner in the mix. Though other organizations report complaints that earlier start times don’t provide enough leeway between work and the performance so there isn’t one standard best time for all communities.

In some places they are finding that matinees are better attended than evening performances. In my own experience I am seeing that trend with renters who specialize in choral and operatic genres as well as recitals by dance schools. This probably isn’t news to many since the core audiences for both types of shows tend to want to be home earlier.

The article quotes Gwen Pappas, vice president of communications and public relations at the Minnesota Orchestra, referencing the fact that people are used to being able to access their experiences on demand.

There are many ways in which a communal performing arts experience can’t be individually curated but where we are able to give people options. They really seem to appreciate it.”

In 2023, the Minnesota Orchestra moved its Saturday night concerts to 7pm and introduced 2pm concerts on select Saturdays. Some subscription programs come with any of four different time options over a week: 11am, 2pm, 7pm and 8 pm.

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My first thought is that with so many different options for concerts to start, there might be some headaches communicating the different times to inattentive single ticket buyers. The last concert they attended started at 8 pm, now they are late for the 7 pm concert or vice versa. You might be arriving for what you thought was a 2 pm matinee only to find everyone leaving from the 11 am event. I suspect they have found some good ways to address that issue, though there will always be a few people who overlook the reminders, etc.

There Will Always Be A Few Successfully Operating At An Elite Level. As For The Rest?

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Seth Godin made a post about elite vs. elitism a couple months ago. His argument is that people can operate on an elite level (i.e. Olympic athletes, surgeons, teachers, etc) but that this doesn’t automatically result in elitism.

Elitism is a barrier, where we use a label to decide who gets to contribute and who is offered dignity. A law firm that only hires from a few law schools is elitist–they have no data to confirm that these recruits are more likely to contribute than others, they’re simply artificially limiting the pool they draw from.

Opening our filters and seeking a diversity of experience undermines elitist insecurity and creates the possibility for even better solutions and connection.

[…]

The scientific method isn’t elitist, nor is a stopwatch used to record the 100 meter dash. Seeking coherent arguments, logical approaches and a contribution that leads to better outcomes isn’t elitist, in fact, it’s precisely the opposite.

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I need to make my usual observation that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean the number you arrive at has validity to a claim you are making. Sports fans will happily speak for hours on the fact that a high scoring game or high win record doesn’t mean a team is operating at an elite level if they have been facing weak opponents.

Generally his thoughts align with a general conversation among cultural organizations in terms of removing the filters of tradition and past practice to explore other options. Similarly, there is a lot of conversation around making data driven decisions.

As Godin says, elitism often results from limiting the pool from which you draw after defining those pools as the source of the best product. That is one of the challenges arts and cultural organizations face today. There is a self-reinforcing definition of what is superior, but not a lot of evidence gathering about whether the product they offer has any perceived value in the community.

For a time during the pandemic I would see a number of videos of farriers shoeing horses. It was fascinating and somewhat satisfying to watch horses have their hooves cleaned and repaired so they could move about more comfortably. Many of these farriers are among the elite in their trade, but most people don’t keep horses these days so the market for their skills is fairly small. Fortunately, the supply of good farriers probably reflects demand.

A similar thing is happening with piano tuners. As I wrote in 2023, there is definitely an unmet need for piano tuners among arts organizations and the lack threatens performing arts organizations’ ability to host concerts. At the same time, people can’t give pianos away and many are ending up in the dump.

Much of this is due to changing lifestyles and expectations. So while it is likely that there will always be some arts and cultural organizations operating in traditional ways which will always find they are in high demand, the number of organizations are likely to dwindle if they are not responding to the changing lifestyles and expectations.

Heist, Jailbreak, Ambush, Heartbreak, Revenge All In One Concerto

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I got to see a performance of The Rose of Sonora this weekend. It is a concerto in five scenes performed by Holly Mulcahy and composed by George S. Clinton.  I had first written about it around 3 years ago. 

One of the things that piqued my interest was that the piece tells the story of a heist, jail break, ambush, and revenge carried out by a female outlaw in 19th Century Territory of Arizona and had its own narrative and images meant to accompany the performance.

I was a little disappointed that the images weren’t used as part of the performance. That is likely because the composer was there to read each part live.

The composer did an interview with Symphony of the Rockies conductor, Devin Patrick Hughes, about his career. Brief explanation of Rose on Tiktok and longer interview here.

The Rose of Sonora was the last piece performed by the Symphony of the Rockies as part of a whole night of Western themed music. The program included music from The Magnificent Seven and The Good, The Bad, The Ugly; William Tell Overture, and “Hoedown” from Rodeo.

The whole orchestra was dressed in Western themed clothes. At one point 2/3 of the violin section was wearing their bandanas over their mouths. The conductor made a production of drawing his baton from a holster.

It should be noted that the concert was occurring in Denver on the night the Great Western Stock Show started. So it was all very much in theme.

It also bears mentioning that Holly grew up in greater Denver and got paid to perform with the Symphony of the Rockies as a teenager. During the Q&A after the concert a young violinist asked how Holly remained so calm and poised. Holly told her she would let us know in 20 years because not only did she perform before her friends and family, many of her teachers and mentors were in the audience that night so she felt a lot of pressure.

I overheard a lot of positive comments from people around me during Holly’s performance that weren’t made during the rest of the night so the piece seemed well-received.  During the Q&A I really wished there were a way to have gotten up and ask attendees what their thoughts were on having a bit of narration between movements since that doesn’t generally happen during orchestra performances.

The conductor had made some comments at the beginning of the evening suggesting Rose of Sonora would provide an opportunity to create a story in our minds. With the one-two sentence prompts provided at the start of each chapter, I wonder how vividly the story unfolded in each person’s mind’s eye as they listened to the music.

About a year ago Holly performed the Rose of Sonora on the other side of the state in Grand Junction, CO and apparently word of mouth saw a line around the block for the second night of performances.

As I drove home Saturday, I was wondering if that was a reaction to the quality of the piece or that the imagery/narration and topic made the experience accessible. Basically, was the audience for the second day aficionados or people who really want to try the orchestra experience but were intimidated and heard a great deal of the mystery was removed in this piece?

Thinking back to the post I made on Monday about storytelling notes next to visual art works helping people focus better on the work before them, would providing similar storytelling prompts with orchestra pieces help people enjoy the music more if they are able to provide their own mental video accompaniment? Many symphonies have started using video in conjunction with performances. But I wonder if people will feel the music is more relatable if they are creating their own narrative in response to an evocative prompt.

Should You Read The Gallery Labels?

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As a supplement to yesterday’s post regarding how children interact with museum labels, there was a second short piece on The Conversation website about whether it is important to read the labels next to artworks.

Noor Gillani, Digital Culture Editor, at The Conversation interviewed five experts at different Australian universities to get their take. Three of the five said it wasn’t important.

Interestingly, two of the responds cited label content focused on children.

Kit Messham-Muir, a professor at Curtin University voted No, but said:

Curators can spend many hours writing the “why”. Some explanations are great, some are not. Those aimed at kids are usually better. Either way, I’d argue you have all the information you need from the who, what and when.

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Naomi Zouwer, at the University of Canberra, voted Yes and wrote primarily with children in mind. She cited different eye motion studies of how adults and children interact with visual art works than I wrote about yesterday.

When an artwork does grab a kid’s attention, they’ll usually want to know more about it. And my experience shows they’ll likely want to know what it’s about more than other details such as the medium or when it was created (unless it’s really, really old, in which case there’s a “wow” factor).

[..]

However, it’s not one size fits all. My advice is to ask the kid what they want to know and approach it that way. While the label may not answer all their questions, it might help start a different conversation. That’s the great thing about art: it creates opportunities for deeper thinking.

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Other experts focused on the capacity of people to understand the labels as the basis for their response. How long visitors typically engage with a work and the label before moving on factored into their opinion on the value of labels.

Chari Larsson at Griffith University, voted Yes and put the responsibility on the museum to provide meaningful content

Labels should be able to “speak” to a broad range of audiences: from a casual and curious visitor through to a subject-matter expert. Turgid “art jargon” is notoriously difficult to decipher and can negatively impact the visitor’s experience. This is a breach in the museum’s responsibility to their audiences.

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Cherine Fahd at University of Technology Sydney, voted No for similar reasons. Poorly written labels get in the way of understanding the work in front of the visitor. She encourages people to look at the art before the label.

Many artists want viewers to bring themselves to the work, to freely interpret and be active participants. The problem is we aren’t taught how to do that with art. We expect meaning to be handed over and the didactic label sets up this expectation.

Perhaps this is an Australian condition, wherein art is often dismissed as impenetrable, or something to grow out of, or something a “five year old could have made”.

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Storytelling Approach Bolsters Focus And Engagement

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Some research how adults and children focus on visual art pieces in different ways provides some insight into how to write and present introductory and educational information to children. Not only for visual art pieces but things to call attention to with performances and other types of experience.

In an article Francesco Walker, Assistant Professor in Psychology, Leiden University, wrote for The Conversation, he talks about using eye tracking technology to see what children focus on when given different types of descriptions/prompts in advance.

Walker cites some past research which had found that children tend to focus on bright colors and bold shapes in paintings. While adults viewing the same work will call upon existing knowledge and information and orient on other elements like brush strokes.

Walker and his colleagues conducted their study tracking eye motions around three works at Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. They watched how children age 10-12 interacted with the paintings after they had been provided with existing adult oriented explanatory labels, playful storytelling labels, or no labels at all.

What they found was that children who had been provided adult oriented labels interacted with the paintings in the same way as children who had not been provided any labels at all. Whereas children provided with the playful spent more time engaging with the work and were focused on specific areas.

The children provided with child-focused, narrative-driven labels engaged with the artworks in ways we did not see at all with those who read adult-focused descriptions. They directed their gaze towards key elements of the paintings highlighted by the playful descriptions, and spent more time examining them.

In contrast, the children who received adult-oriented explanations behaved in the same way as children who received no information at all. Their attention was scattered and unfocused.

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An example of the adult text:

The high vantage point of this painting turns it into a sampler of human – and animal – activity during a harsh winter. Hundreds of people are out on the ice, most of them for pleasure, others working out of dire necessity. Avercamp did not shy away from grim details: in the left foreground crows and a dog feast on the carcass of a horse that has frozen to death.

The child oriented text for the same painting

He could have painted me anywhere, but where am I? Right in the middle of the picture, with my snout on the ice! The spot where everyone can see me. A man in blue pants almost trips over me. Two girls next to me giggle at my clumsiness. But I won’t give up. I’ll get back on my feet and keep going. Before winter is over, I’ll be skating like a pro!

The article provides heat maps showing where attention focused based on the three content scenarios.

Walker suggests the results of their study suggest that art education classes should shift from textbook based classroom lessons toward a more storytelling mode. He notes that art history students find it difficult to connect with the art when the information is transmitted in lectures or via text book.

And by the way, the two studies I linked to in the previous sentence were studies conducted with undergraduate students, not grade school students so a storytelling approach can positively impact everyone’s experience and engagement

United States Of Arts Participation

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In October the National Endowment for the Arts Quick Study podcast (transcript available) took a look at how arts participation broke down across the United States via data collected in 2022 by the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

What I found most interesting was how participation and attendance of different arts and cultural activities varied from state to state. While we might think of places like NYC as being a cultural center in the US, that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, New York State’s numbers were lower than one might expect though NEA Director of Research and Analysis Sunil Iyengar partially attributed that to the fact there were still Covid restrictions on Broadway productions during 2022.

According to Iyengar,

…higher than average attendance was clocked by seven states. Utah, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Per capita, Washington DC also drew more arts participation than most states

Utah, Vermont, and Nebraska vastly outstripped the national average for attending at least one live performance. Massachusetts exceeded the national average for art museum attendance and Vermont and DC exceeded the national average for overall museum attendance.

Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Montana had higher levels of people attending stage plays or musicals (school based performances were not counted). South Dakotans attended dance in higher levels than the rest of the nation.

When it came to music, Massachusetts was on top for classical music, DC turned out for jazz, New Mexico was triple the US average for Latin, Spanish, and salsa concerts.

Iyengar said the survey didn’t drill down on every performing arts discipline and used some catch-all categories. Indiana topped attendance in that category.

“…types we do not ask about on the survey, these may have been rock or pop concerts, rap or hip hop, or even comedy shows, circuses, or magic shows. That’s a kind of lump all category. We find that 37% of Indiana residents went to one of these types of events in the last year compared to 21% of adults in general. In Michigan, another Midwestern state, the rate was also high, 34%. And out East in Delaware, it was 35%.

Of course, someone has to generate all that creative content and the survey measured that as well:

…the states that did particularly well in terms of arts creation were Wisconsin, Maine, Montana, Vermont, Nebraska, Utah, Oregon, Washington State and Ohio. All these states had above average shares of residents who personally created or performed art…. Wisconsin, where the rate of arts creation in the course of a year was 73%, versus 52% of the U.S. as a whole. Wisconsin had an especially strong showing with people doing dance, taking photographs for artistic purposes and making visual art in general. And Maine, where 71% of people made their own art, included a lot of folks working with textiles, weaving, crocheting, quilting or doing needlepoint, knitting or sewing.

The full report, 50 States of Arts Participation: 2022, can be found on the National Endowment for the Arts website. There is a quick drop down menu to show some highlights for each state, but the report does a much better job of providing specific detail.

One of the things I take from the survey is the suspicion that many people down really perceive themselves as participating in artistic and creative practice. When I see that Hawaii pretty significantly is below the national average for participation in social or artistic dancing and playing a musical instrument, it doesn’t correspond with my experience living there where everyone seemed to at least dabble a little in both if not regularly perform or take instruction.

NEA Starts Surveying About Loneliness & Social Support In Relation To Arts Participation

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The National Endowment for the Arts recently released the arts related results of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Unlike the Survey on Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) which asks people about their behavior across the previous 12 months, the Pulse Survey asks about people’s behavior in the previous 30 days. They say this provides greater detail of the rate at which people are engaging with arts related activities post-Covid. The Pulse survey was conducted between April – July 2024.

There is both a summary press release and a more detailed report available.

In addition to asking people how often they engaged in arts attendance and arts creation and their perception of the availability of arts and cultural amenities in their community, the Pulse Survey specifically asked new questions related to loneliness and social connection. The data shows the response of attendees, creators, non-attendees, and non-creators to questions about participation in social clubs/activities, phone conversations with family and friends, and spending time with family and friends.

I was somewhat perplexed that they did not address how age and other demographic factors may have impacted whether people spoke on the phone with family and friends as they did with other categories. They only broke down the results in terms of attendees vs non-attendees and creators vs. non-creators.

In terms of loneliness and social support, for the most part those that attended events experienced less loneliness than non-attendees and creators experienced it less than non-creators. Similarly, those who perceived themselves as having access to arts activities also felt loneliness less than those who perceived themselves as having low or no access.

However, there was a noted exception in the creator category:

Adults who created art were more likely to report experiencing loneliness “sometimes” or “rarely” (31.9 and 34.7 percent, respectively) than were those who had not created art (27.2 and 32.2 percent, respectively). However, at least some level of loneliness proved more familiar to creators of art than to non-creators. That is, 18.4 percent of those who created art in the last month reported “never” experiencing loneliness, versus 27.3 percent of those who did not create art.

There were somewhat similar results related to feeling social and emotional support. Those who attended or created art or those who felt they had high access to arts resources felt a greater level of support than those who didn’t attend, create or have access to resources.

Again there was a difference on the absolute end of the scale among creatives (my emphasis)

Adults who created art were more likely to say they usually received social support than those who did not create art (38.8 percent compared to 30.2 percent for non-creators “usually” receiving support). Arts creators were also less likely to say they never received support (4.1 percent versus 10.1 percent of non-creators). However, non-creators were more likely to say they “always” receive social and emotional support than were arts creators (28.8 percent of creators versus 24.6 percent of non-creators).

While I have some theories bumping around my head, I am not exactly sure what all the implications of that might be. On a very basically level of course, the creative act will always require a degree of loneliness associated with it. Even if you are in a large orchestra, there is a lot of time spent practicing alone. Even in a small music group the folks writing the words and lyrics may feel isolated from other members of the group. And the creative who hasn’t felt they don’t have social and emotional support for their endeavors are few indeed.

Numeracy Is An Important Skill In Data Driven Decision Making

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Museums As Progress sponsored a talk with John Falk today on a chapter from his upcoming book Leaning Into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum.

The chapter  addressed the value of data to museums, but I was obviously approaching it from the perspective of the value of data for all sorts of organizations. Falk mentioned many museums aren’t really clear about what to measure. They often don’t understand what data points matter most to their organization.

He acknowledged most institutions don’t have the resources to have a data focused team on staff or engage an entity to help them collect and manage their data. He felt there must be a collective effort through some of the larger museum service and advocacy institutions to collect some of this data. Though at the same time, individual entities must work on collecting data that is specifically relevant to their communities.

A person attending the session asked how organizations can survive and thrive executive leadership transitions. Falk’s response was that middle managers needed to identify the data that is most persuasive to leadership, not just colleagues and one’s self. He noted that the financial bottom line is often the most persuasive factor for executive leadership so you often have to show how your ideas and data will advance that concern.

This suggestion gave me a little pause because it felt like it reinforces short term goals over long term changes to culture that will have impact. One of the real issues facing both commercial and non-profit entities is the adoption of the flavor of the week. This also seemed to advocate for catering to the HiPPO in room (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

I am not sure that Falk was advocating for catering to the highest paid person’s opinion because the conversation soon turned to the need to break down internal organizational silos. People mentioned that often data is difficult to acquire because internal parties gatekeep access to it. Falk said that leadership is responsible for opening access to data across the organization both in the direction of top down, from the bottom up, and internal to each department pressing to de-silo that information. There is a need to share data and understand each other’s data.

When asked what the most desirable qualities of a museum leader were, Falk said it was a degree of numeracy. He said people didn’t need to be statisticians or a data wonk, but needed to at least appreciate the value of data in decision making. Ideally they should have some ability to analyze and employ data. Discussing an example from his book where someone thought the most important knowledge set for a museum executive was art history, Falk said you can hire people who know art history but as an executive leader you need to know how to work with data.

He also felt it was important for a leader to have the capacity and judgment to hire staff who possessed the people skills to serve an audience. Museum success is all about people after all so you need a staff which is adept at creating a welcoming environment for attendees.

As much as the conversation for the session revolved around data, Falk emphasized the value of co-creation with the community. He said you can build an exhibition designed to achieve certain learning objectives and it might meet those objectives. However, it is far, far, far better to go to the community and say we can create an exhibition around X subject or concept, what would you want this exhibit to help you learn about this subject? While this is much more time and labor intensive, Falk felt that the outcomes are far greater when the end user is involved with the co-creation.

I felt like this really dovetailed well with my post yesterday about the length and content of labels in museum exhibits. One of the final passages I quoted from the article mentioned that museum staff would observe how people interacted with labels and question them about whether they derived the information they wanted from the labels. I think that is probably a good practice regardless, but it might not be necessary to revise the labels so much if some of the target audience had provided input about desired outcomes of an exhibition.

It’s Not The Length Of The Label, Its The Quality Of The Content

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Ruth Hartt had reposted an Observer debating what sort of information and how much makes for a good museum label. It immediately occurred to me that this can be a tall order based on the fact that museum visitors may have different agenda every time they enter the doors. Thinking about the types of museum attendees discussed by John Falk, people may be coming to explore one day, facilitate friends and family another day, approach the experience through a more professional lens the next time, or just want to unwind and recharge.

My thoughts went to the Axios.com site which uses Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Go Deeper sub-heads in many of their articles. I thought that might be a good format so that people could decide how much detail they wanted about an object. However, there were people interviewed for the Observer article who not only thought less is more, in some cases they advocated that nothing is more.

 Ours is a literate culture rather than a visual one, and “there is a comfort in reading a label,” Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, told Observer. “You are offered facts that are very relatable, whereas artworks themselves aren’t so easily contained. Labels are a left-brain experience, while art is experiential and not a test of knowledge. In my world, people wouldn’t need the damn label at all.”

[…]

“Every year, I take my students to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which doesn’t provide any labels for artworks on display,” James Pawelski, director of education at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, told Observer. “There is no intermediary between the viewer and the art, so students have to deal directly with the art.” He is not opposed to labels per se, but like many others, Pawleski has something to say about the many museum placards he sees. “You don’t want the label to take away the mystery of the artwork, what makes it interesting and inspiring. That’s why I prefer labels that help people become immersed in a work of art.”

Some of those that do use labels engage in a lengthy creation and editing process that spans different departments, acknowledging that museum professionals are so close to their work they often use insider terminology or emphasize aspects that appeal to professionals rather than the lay person.

At Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, labels originate with a curator, “written with the assistance of curatorial research associates,” and are then passed to the Department of Museum Interpretation for a review of “clarity of narrative and messaging, tone of voice, reading level and word count,” Mekala Krishnan, the museum’s associate director of museum interpretation, told Observer. But they’re not done yet. “There is usually some back and forth between the curatorial and interpretation departments before it then gets passed to our editor, who is the final gatekeeper for formatting, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as well as for overall clarity….

Some institutions keep working on their labels even after they are installed, with staffers watching visitors as they move through galleries, timing how long they stand in front of any object and watching their eyes to see if they are reading more than looking. Visitors may be questioned about what they saw: “What did you take away from this exhibition?” or “What do you know now that you didn’t know before?” This is quite labor-intensive and expensive, but it may be the only way to know for certain if the label did its job.

The article goes much deeper into the nuance and considerations that factor into label design. There is a fair bit of overlap between the philosophy of what to include on museum labels and performer bios and performance notes for live events…not to mention promotional materials. It is worth reading the article even if you aren’t in the exhibit based world in order to gain something of a disinterested perspective you can apply to experiences you may offer to audiences.

Art On The Farm

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It has been a few years since I posted anything about the Wormfarm Institute  so I was happy to read a Hyperallergic post via Artsjournal.com about Wormfarm’s annual Farm/Art D’tour which occurred a couple weeks ago.

People can drive around the farm land of Wisconsin to see various art installations and performances staged in the fields. The whole circuit is about 50 miles. Among the performances this year were the Hay Rake Ballet choreographing the movements of three tractors. There is video in the Hyperallergic article. It appears there may have been a line dancing component involved as well based on a call for participants on the Wormfarm site.

According to the choreographer Sarah Butler,

“It’s not every day that these farmers are driving and doing pirouettes with the tractors,” said Butler in an interview with Hyperallergic. “But nothing I was asking them to do was something they don’t do every day. It was really cool to see these three guys who are total masters of their craft being celebrated by their own community, as well as people visiting who are coming to see the DTour … for things they do every day that are oftentimes not really recognized as art.”

The concept behind Farm/Art D’tour is to raise awareness of the process by which food reaches people’s table and diminish perceptions that farmers and farming are disconnected from art. Based on the experience of one of the farmers participating in Hay Rake Ballet, he and some of his friends and neighbors are beginning to see that connection:

While some farmers refused to take part and one even backed out during rehearsals, Enge said he and his two fellow performers were exhilarated. “Seeing the joy in the other drivers and in the crowd … it really touched me.” On the drive home one of the other farmers told Enge, “Hey, if they’re going to do it again, count me in.”

There are some good images of some of the other projects in the Hyperallergic piece and on Wormfarm’s Facebook page.

Now May Be The Best Time For A Story Circle

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At one of my previous positions, I had started a conversation with a local storytelling group about partnering on a curated storytelling series. This conversation happened a month before the outbreak of the pandemic. The series went on more or less as planned, albeit in a much larger space that allowed for social distancing. I credit that series with helping to breakdown perceptual barriers about our venue and who it as for and contributing to the further development of a relationship between under served segments of our community.

A couple weeks ago, Arts Midwest posted a piece about facilitating story circles by Ben Fink. I have written about Fink and the work he did at Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY a few years back. The Arts Midwest piece contains a guide for hosting a story circle, including a link to download the materials. In my former position, we hadn’t used the story circle format, but according to Fink the community can experience similar outcomes.

There are a number of rules for participation he outlines, but one of those appears to be key to the experience is:

And finally (this is important) everyone is asked not to share the story they think of when they hear the initial prompt (more on prompts below), but to listen carefully to the stories that come before theirs, and then to share a story that complements, complicates, contradicts, or otherwise responds to the stories they’ve heard so far.

Near the end Fink provides the following insight from his decade experience participating in story circles:

In a story circle, people who tend to dominate discussions learn to listen, knowing they’ll have their turn to speak and be heard; and people who tend to hold back find themselves speaking up, knowing that no one will interrupt or talk over them. At the end, when the group reflects together about the stories they’ve just heard, they inevitably discover elements of a “story in the center of the circle”–a story that they find, to their surprise, they all somehow share.

The rules and guidelines – and the facilitation guide makes a distinction between the two – are designed to achieve this sort of result where the garrulous listen and the introverted are allowed the space to speak.

90 Years Of Cultivating Community Around Flowers

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Last month, the Bloemencorso Zundert, caught my attention. It is the largest flower parade in the world held in Zundert, Netherlands. Twenty hamlets compete to have their parade float judged as the best. Apparently, they only use dahlias are used in the Zundert parade and six of the nearly eight million flowers are cultivated in Zundert. The parade started in 1936 with 17 hamlets. The other three have joined more recently.

The entire effort appears to be volunteer run from the cultivation of the flowers, to the design, to the assembly of the flowers just days before the parade. Not to mention the movement – the floats tend to be human powered. If you look closely at some of the videos below, you can see the feet of the people acting as the internal engines. The webpage for the event translates relatively well into English.

Being a Tolkien fan, a video of the Khazad-Dum float is what had initially caught my attention and led me to do some further investigation of the event.

However, that wasn’t the winner. It appears it didn’t rank well with the official judges, but took 2nd place in a vote for audience favorite.

This is the one that won:

Here are a few more that caught my eye.

Kickstarter CEO Say More Needs To Be Done To Support Participation In Arts

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The National Endowment for the Arts asked a number of different people to respond to the 2022 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

One of those asked to respond was Everette Taylor, CEO of Kickstarter, a site that has essentially become the alternative to foundations, governments, and institutional funders as a funding source for creative projects.

He says a partnership with Skoll Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Creative Capital to provide $700,000 in funding to 600 BIPOC creators helping them raise $11.7 million.

“In recent research, still unpublished, Kickstarter creators report earning $5.15 in additional revenue from each dollar raised on Kickstarter. That places the total estimated economic impact of the $700,000 fund at close to $70,000,000, a 100x return on that cultural investment.”

That data comes from one of his recommendations about making funding to creatives more accessible, especially for smaller scale projects. Part of that includes making it easier for people to apply with fewer strings and follow up reporting burden attached.

His second recommendation is about strengthening community among art makers by providing some infrastructure for creating networks and sharing work, and encouraging cross-pollination and collaboration.

His third recommendation referenced changing the definition of art making, including who gets to participate in making art. He lists all the projects that have been funded by Kickstarter highlighting the expansive storytelling techniques facilitated by books, tabletop games, roleplaying games receiving support. He points to these games as something of an underdeveloped framework for allowing more people to participate in a creative process.

He warns that AI is in a position to marginalize and supplant many of the burgeoning creatives who have only just begun to realize success through opportunities for funding that platforms like Kickstarter provides. There is something of an implication that as much as Kickstarter has done to help these artists, their capacity is still comparatively too narrow to provide the support and resources the creative community needs to succeed.

People Are Reading Less AND Barnes & Noble Is Opening More Stores Than Ever

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The National Endowment for the Arts recently released data showing that the number of adults and children (most of the data from surveys of 9 and 13 year olds) has been decreasing over the last decade.

 …according to its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 48.5 percent of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year, compared with 52.7 percent five years earlier, and 54.6 percent ten years earlier. Meanwhile, in 2022, just 37.6 percent reported reading a novel or short story, compared with 41.8 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012. As we said at the time, the fiction-reading rate was the lowest in the history of the SPPA, a survey that goes back more than three decades.

[…]

….the share of 13-year-olds who reported reading for fun “almost every day.” In 2023, the figure was 14 percent, down from 17 percent in 2020 and 27 percent in 2012. The share of 13-year-olds who fell into this reading category in 2023 was lower than in any previous test year, …

[…]

For decades, more than half of all nine-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day.” In 2012, that figure was 53 percent. In 2020, it dropped to 42 percent, and in 2022 (the most recent year for which data are available), 39 percent. Also in 2022, the share of nine-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for fun was at its highest: 16 percent.

Since these trends existed prior to the pandemic, we can’t blame it on Covid. I was harboring some hope that being cooped up at home might have led more people to pick up reading as a habit.

On the other hand, Barnes and Noble is planning on opening 58 stores in 2024, more stores in a year than they have since 2009. In some cases, they are re-occupying buildings they left years ago. From what I have been reading over the last year, some of their success seems to be attributable to the corporate office giving the individual stores more license to customize their spaces to the communities in which they are located and aim for a more independent bookstore vibe. The company recently bought a local bookstore chain in CO with the intent of operating under the local name rather than Barnes and Noble which seems to reinforce their local flavor strategy.

The BN store near me seems to always be hopping despite the dwindling fortunes of the mall surrounding it. It has appeared to be a third place gathering space for a lot of tweens to interact in a way that makes me secretly grateful. I have seen articles claiming there is a resurgence of reading among Gen Z thanks to the BookTok trend on Tiktok.

But I think both the decline of reading and Barnes and Noble’s growing success can be true. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Barnes and Noble is increasingly finding success selling non-book products, services, and programs. It all bears watching and considering.

Doing The STEM Strut

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h/t to my friend Tonja Khabir for linking to a CNN piece about Yamilée Toussaint, the founder of STEM for Dance, a program which integrates dance with STEM subjects to encourage girls of color to pursue careers in STEM fields.

If you are thinking this sounds familiar, I had written a couple of blog posts about Philadelphia based DanceLogic, a program that is also designed to encourage girls of color to enter STEM fields.

For Toussaint, the germ of STEM for Dance started when she was studying mechanical engineering at MIT and was one of two women of color in her major. The article says the organization has programs in nine cities. It appears the activities are a mix of school clubs and camps in which the girls can participate.

The organization’s school and summer programs typically attract girls who identify as dancers but are hesitant about STEM. Through the supportive community and hands-on projects, the girls begin to see themselves as programmers, engineers, and innovators.

[…]

Rather than teach dance and STEM separately, the program combines the two. Working in small groups, the girls choreograph dance routines that include STEM elements, such as LED light strips that they code to light up with the music. The girls also create songs through computer science that they incorporate into their performance.

President Carter & The Arts

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In honor of former President Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, I thought I would share a piece that appeared in ArtsATL about Carter’s interaction and appreciation for the arts.

The article initially caught my attention due to its focus on Carter’s interactions with musicians who lived in Macon, GA where I had lived for a time:

In that interview, Carter mentioned that when he became governor, he got to know some of the people at Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia — among them Otis Redding.

“It was they who began to meld the White and Black music industries, and that was quite a sociological change for the region. So as I began to travel around Georgia I made contact a few days every month or so with Capitol Records, just to stay in touch with people in the state, and got to know all the Allman Brothers, Dickey Betts and others. Later on, I met Charlie Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band.” As time went on, Carter realized the importance of the arts and music to bringing people together, says Paige Alexander, CEO of the Carter Center.

Not everything he did as governor of Georgia was always pro-arts. During his tenure the State Arts Commission was eliminated and arts funding severely cut. Though by the end of his term in 1975, the funding increased from $128,000 to $183,000 ($1,069,256 today).

In 1973, apparently in the wake of the success of the movie Deliverance, he created the State Motion Picture & Television Advisory Commission in an effort to tout Georgia as a filming location. Not quite the movie I would be promoting as a good representation of the people and locations available in the state. But the state has become a very active filming location, especially in recent years.

Carter himself became interested in woodworking and painting when he was in the Navy and took it up more actively after his term as president. And, of course, he was active in wood working of another sort via Habitat for Humanity.

Adults Find Joy Returning To Ballet Without A Lot Of The Baggage

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Over the last decade or so, I have been pleased to periodically read articles about people taking up dance classes as adults. As someone who advocates for people to recognize they have the capacity to be creative, it is always encouraging to read that people are connecting to that aspect of themselves.

Though I feel like it is rare to see articles about people taking up their instruments, singing, acting, or visual arts practice again. We know it is happening, but maybe it isn’t deemed as news worthy?

In any case, the LA Times recently ran a piece about the trend of people returning to or picking up ballet in a pretty significant way.

Interest in adult ballet has increased by 75% over the last three to five years, according to Patti Ashby, U.S. National Director of Royal Academy of Dance, the primary ballet organization in the country that trains teachers and tracks national engagement with ballet. And the number of adult ballet summer intensive programs have nearly doubled since the pandemic, according to the weekly online ballet-centric magazine Pointe.

And as you might expect, there is an “adult ballet” TikTok trend which probably both reflects and cultivates this.

The trend is also alive and well on TikTok, where the popular hashtag “adult ballet” retrieves countless videos of women documenting their progress in the dance form. Professional ballerinas such as Mary Helen Bowers, with half a million followers on Instagram (@balletbeautiful), stream ballet-inspired workouts that focus on feeling beautiful while building strength.

An encouraging positive aspect accompanying this return to dance is that many participants aren’t experiencing the focus on ideal body standards associated with the dance form. Some of those interviewed expressed they had some anxiety in that regard prior to starting classes. Finding that the old stereotypes didn’t exist in these classes, they were free to enjoy the experience and focus on their practice.

Gorgeous Mountain Vista Costs A Couple Hours Of Heavy Climbing

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Seth Godin recently made a post in which he stated the following:

The end of the trail is usually difficult, but without the long and winding approach, there isn’t much of a mountain.

The greatest hits reel and the stunning photographs leave out most of the hard work.

This aligns with a theme of many posts I have made over the years that creative expression is part of a lengthy development process rather than a lightning bolt moment–something that even artists themselves forget.

About a week ago, Haydn Corrodus posted this fun video from the Beamish Museum on LinkedIn

I appreciated Haydn making the following comment which acknowledges it takes time to achieve a level of virality, especially when employing modern slang with a deadpan delivery:

From looking at their page briefly, it seems like it was only a matter of time before one of their videos went viral.

They consistently post and get decent views.

@beamishmuseum

This is slay #genz #slay #demure #fyp #viral #genzlife #sweet

♬ original sound – Beamish Museum

MN Guaranteed Income For Artists Pilot Phase Winds Down

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Hyperallergic wrote about the ending of the pilot phase of Springboard for the Arts’ Guaranteed Basic Income project last month.  I have been following the project since it was launched in 2021 as well as other efforts like it around the world.

Apparently I wasn’t paying close enough attention because I didn’t realize they have had more than one cohort of artists participating in separate 18 month phases. The groups in urban and rural Minnesota received $500/month to do with however they chose. All told, $675,000 was distributed through the program. This month Springboard for the Arts will host an art show compromised of the work of those supported by the project. The artists chosen for the show have received an additional $5000 to create a piece for the show.

There are teams from  Guaranteed Income Pilots Dashboard (GIPD) run by the Stanford Basic Income Lab, the University of Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research, and the University of Tennessee who have been tracking what the artists have been spending the money on to get a better sense of how funds were being used. The funds were distributed via pre-paid debt cards which facilitated the tracking.

The GIPD studied Springboard’s guaranteed income program and found that artists used the cash primarily on retail purchases (35.94%), food and groceries (30.26%), and housing and utilities (10.04%).

According to figures Springboard provided to Hyperallergic, 70% of recipients were BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), LGBTQ+, artists from rural areas, or artists with disabilities.

I will be interested to see if there is additional insight that emerges as they analyze and collect feedback about the pilot program. The value of these funds to the artists seemed best expressed in an article I quoted in an October 2021 blog entry during the pandemic (my emphasis):

Most importantly, the artists say, they feel valued after an incredibly difficult pandemic year. “I feel like people just don’t understand how hard [the pandemic] has hit artists — the arts just went away for over a year,” says Gamble. “It almost feels like a luxury to feel valued, because it usually feels like there’s never enough funds for artists.”

Immersive Art Experiences Require Expansion Of Capacity And Vision

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ArtNews had a piece last month examining the world of Immersive Art shows.  You may have seen ads for these events which animate the works of Van Gogh or Monet and project them on the walls of a large space. To my surprise, those shows represent a small and decreasing share of the market compared to shows that animate the works of living artists or long term installation such experiences like those offered by companies such as Meow Wolf.

Immersive shows for Van Gogh and Monet are somewhat controversial based on the manipulation of artists’ work and the perception that the shows are lightweight and sort of dumb down the art viewing experience.

Museums that are interested in providing these sort of programs run up against capacity issues, both in terms of personnel and physical space:

Adapting or acquiring, and then equipping large amounts of space is one clear constraint. Size matters here. Small spaces simply do not have the same experiential impact. To compete with the big players, a museum will need to build out or otherwise secure several thousand square meters of floor space. Quality projection-based art often requires a 10-meter or even higher ceiling. These are halls that many existing institutions don’t have or can’t justify surrendering for extended periods.

Up next, new skills are needed. Creating an immersive art experience is akin to developing a branded consumer product. It relies on a multidisciplinary team to develop a single large-scale work…

On the other hand, Felix Barber, who authored the ArtNews piece suggests that the immersive art show can be taken out of the museum space to reach new audiences where they live. He cites collaborations in France where ” Grand Palais Immersif, in turn, joined forces with the Opera National de Paris to create an immersive space inside the Opera Bastille.” But also points out that other spaces like warehouses, empty spaces in shopping malls, and churches can provide the requisite physical space for these shows:

To find the space, a museum may not have to build at its existing high-cost, city-center location. Instead, it can look for a more affordable solution, while potentially engaging a new audience where they live. Many immersive studios work with real estate partners that are seeking to invigorate shopping centers and struggling urban areas. Others take over disused industrial premises. Culturespaces in Baux de Provence operates in an old quarry. Eonarium uses churches.

Ultimately those Barber interviews suggest that while museums in the current form will likely always be attractive, more options are becoming available to consumers who may prefer an experiential interaction versus standing in front of a work and reading a plaque.

In the end, it all comes back to the quality of the art. What will unlock museums’ interest in immersive experience is work that embodies beauty and meaning, presented at scale with a powerful sensory flourish.

[…]

Even so, and no matter what, art museums now face new competitors. Sitting back and watching them capture audiences is not a promising option. Museums have to respond. One size will not fit all.

Providing Assurances Can Do 80% Of The Heavy Lift In Marketing

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Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn where Ruth Hartt was reinforcing the idea that people purchase the outcomes they desire rather than things.

In response, commenter Jay Gerhart wrote:

Reminds me of our first JTBD work with Bob Moesta when we simply showed a digital ad for virtual care with a person enjoying an event with their friends. We didn’t have to show them obtaining health care – we showed the result of it. 40% increase!

It happens that the night before, I started re-reading Peter Drucker’s Managing The Non-Profit Organization

On the second page of the first chapter, Drucker essentially says that nonprofit mission statements need to be focused on outcomes. He relates the story of helping an emergency room of a hospital create a mission statement for itself. He says it took them a long time to arrive at a mission statement and when they did, people felt it was ridiculously obvious – “to give assurance to the afflicted.”

And, much to the surprise of the physicians and nurses, it turned out that in a good emergency room, the function is to tell eight out of ten people there is nothing wrong that a good night’s sleep won’t take care of. You’ve been shaken up. Or the baby has the flu. All right, it’s got convulsions, but there is nothing seriously wrong with the child.’ The doctors and nurses give assurances.

…Yet translating that mission statement into action meant that everybody who comes in is now seen…in less than a minute….Some people are immediately rushed to intensive care, others get a lot of tests, and yet others are told ‘Go back home, go to sleep, take an aspirin, and don’t worry…But the first objective is to see everybody almost immediately–because that is the only way to give assurance.”

Framing an audience’s desired goals for an experience in terms of medical outcomes helped further develop my understanding of the concept Hartt has been espousing.  Given the choice, very few people would prefer to undergo a medical procedure vs. just going about daily life. While knowing you will enjoy competent care is important, what people really want to know as Jay Gerhart suggests, is that they will come out the other side with as minimal an impact on their daily enjoyment as possible.

Obviously the stakes aren’t as high when attending an arts and cultural experience (one hopes), but there can still be a related anxiety regarding whether the experience will be an enjoyable one. Focusing on how the experience will solve a problem like providing an escape from stress of the work week or providing an opportunity to spend time with family and friends.

I often cite this Lexus commercial as a good example. The parents continue to drive until the kids say they no longer have a cell signal and then the parents stop driving. The voice over says “…and feel what it is like to truly connect.” You aren’t buying a luxury vehicle, you are buying a method to reconnect with your family.

But it isn’t just enough to communicate that message. As Drucker says, it has to be operationalized in some way. But translating it into action isn’t necessarily complicated just as providing assurance in Drucker’s example meant a commitment to making an assessment in a short period of time.

 

Libraries Serve The Huddled Masses Yearning For Wifi Access

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In another refutation of the argument that we should stop funding libraries because no one reads books, on Friday there was a public radio piece from Marketplace illustrating the increased role libraries play in communities.

In this particular story, they featured a library in Taylorsville, KY where not a lot of people have internet access due to the sparse population and difficult terrain. The director of the library noted that the use of the library computers has decreased over time, but the use of their wifi has increased significantly due to people using their own devices.

Director Debra Lawson said that while those computers are used less frequently lately —patrons typically bring in their own devices — the Wi-Fi usage is “through the roof.”

“We leave our Wi-Fi up 24/7,” Lawson said. “So sometimes … I come in the next morning, check on the camera, and there’ll be people outside in 35 degrees in sleeping bags using the internet.”

The main focus of the story is that federal infrastructure bills are providing better internet to places like Tayorsville as well as helping underwrite 70% of the $9000/year bill the library will have when they get fiber optic internet in the near future.

But the value of the internet service to the community can be measured in those people sitting outside the building in 35 degree weather using the service. During Covid, many libraries re-positioned their wifi equipment to provide a signal into their parking lots so that students who didn’t have internet at home could do their homework while building access was denied them. Even as the buildings re-opened, libraries have continued to offer that service for students and the unhoused population. When I go to my local library, there are signs on the exterior of the building with the wifi information so that people can log in.

Libraries provide a good example of a non-profit/government service that is constantly revising the way they offer their services to help meet the needs of the community. In many ways, they are much more responsive and nimble than many other cultural non-profits or government services.

Prioritizing Hospitality And Accessibility In The Face Of Fear

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You may have heard that museums in Vienna, Austria offered free admission to Taylor Swift fans who were faced with the cancellation of the concerts due to terroristic threats.

My one quibble with this is their claim that admission is so expensive for young people —who paid the equivalent of $750 plus travel to see the concert (though apparently ticket prices dropped to about $250 in the weeks before the concerts).  There is an element to this situation where people saying things are too expensive really mean they prioritize spending much more on some experiences versus others. (There is also the fact that it says something about concert ticket prices in the US that even at $750 a ticket it was cheaper for US residents to fly to Vienna than to see a show in their own country where ticket prices are in the thousands. But that is another post.)

Otherwise, I appreciated that many of the museums took steps that reflected the interests of their audience like adding more English language tours and switching out the classical music tracks played in the galleries.

The museum also switched the soundtracks playing its in 20 historical staterooms from classical music to Taylor Swift albums, prompting several large singalongs that went viral on TikTok.

“I love classical music, I love Mozart, I love Beethoven, I love all these classical artists, but it was really nice to have a Taylor Swift singalong more or less in the state rooms that normally stand for something else,” Eisterer said, noting she had worked for The Albertina for eight years.

While I would personally prefer a different music choice, I have noted for years that not everything an arts organization does is meant for everyone. One museum went from having 2000 visitors on weekend days to an average of 5000 people a day from Thursday-Sunday. Another saw a 100% increase over regular attendance.

While theses institutions gave up admission revenue, they did see a surge in sales in their stores and cafes which helped to make up for the loss.

Revenue considerations aside, the museums saw the cancelled concerts as an opportunity to advance the perception of accessibility, relevance, and welcoming among a younger demographic. Not only for themselves, but the city as well.  This is the sort of approach that helps engender trust and engagement in arts and cultural organizations that I have discussed in some recent posts.  (I am still holding to my general philosophy about free admission though)

While the initiative may have been a temporary hit to museum revenues from entry fees, museum staff told ARTnews there were far more benefits, including merchandise sales, publicity, and greater accessibility to younger visitors.

“We didn’t think about the money or the losing the money at all,” Eisterer said, noting that its entry fees can be very expensive for young people. “It was, for us, important to set like a sign for this concert that had been canceled because of this horrible reason, and to give somehow a bit of hope and say to people, ‘Hey, we know it’s devastating. You can’t go to the concert, but hey, you can enjoy a bit of of art in Vienna, that’s what we can offer you’.”

“It’s helpful for our reputation,” Posch said. “it pays into the reputation of the city of Vienna, being friendly, being generous, being hospitable. And that is worth more, in the end, than not generating these few euros in ticket sales.”

Defined Plan For Change –Including The Accusations

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Interesting story via Artsjournal.com that might provide a rough roadmap for arts organizations looking to change the programming mix they offer the community.  The public broadcaster of Norway( NRK) received survey results indicating that climate change was not getting enough coverage.  There was a reluctance to cover these sort of stories for fear of being accused of having too strong a political bent. (Recall Norway is one of the top five exporters of oil and natural gas in the world so climate change touches on a cornerstone of the national economy.)  An interesting aspect of this story is that the staff of the broadcaster pretty much managed upward in order to get executive leadership invested in making these changes.

The parallel to arts and cultural organizations I saw is that staff and board members are often concerned that instigating a shift in programming and experiences will alienate long time supporters and perhaps also garner accusations of making political statements with the choices.

After agreeing that NRK needed to produce better climate journalism, senior leadership, along with a group of journalists who weren’t climate specialists, decided to figure out what better climate coverage would look like.

Initial conversations covered everything from where the broadcaster drew the line between activism and journalism, to which editorial tone would balance fear and hope, to which audiences to focus on and where to put resources.

[…]

That has helped the broadcaster deal with claims that coverage of climate is politically motivated, and prevented such blowback from shaping the broadcaster’s climate strategy.

Part of the challenge has been to produce stories that don’t prioritize “running after whatever people get angry about, or that triggers some deep-rooted emotion,” says Cosson-Eide, “but instead looking for stories that are relatable, but also say something meaningful about what’s at stake and what we have to do as a society.”

I appreciated that they didn’t just say we are committed to more climate coverage but also created parameters about what that coverage would look like that was shared with everyone. In terms of the arts and culture realm, the decision might be made to commit to a course of action, but the artistic staff might decide what that looks like among themselves which leaves everyone else to speculate and opine that things are going too far or not far enough toward meeting the organizational commitment. Or perhaps the rest of the staff is in the dark about how decisions are connecting with the overall goals.

Based on the article, the creation of a clearly defined policy has allowed NRK to provide a consistent quality of coverage that other news outlets have struggled to maintain in the face of multiple crises like Covid, Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc.

I especially appreciated NRK’s decision to resist catering to the passions and controversies of the moment and stick with the core tenets of their climate coverage plan. It is a challenging thing to do for both news organizations and arts/cultural entities which seek to provide content and experiences which reflect the interests of the communities they serve. It sounds like NRK addressed the general topic in a relatable way, but tried to avoid placing it in the framework of whatever might have people riled up.

This approach seems like a good lesson for arts organizations looking to formulate a shift in type of programs and experiences.

Trust In Non-Profits Is Up, But Unsurprisingly Politics Color That Trust

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Last month I pointed to research by Colleen Dilenschenider that indicated trust in cultural non-profits has grown since around 2019. Non-profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a short article about similar findings by the Independent Sector showing that trust in non-profits in general was higher than government, business, media, philanthropies, and foundations.

From the NPQ article:

The latest Independent Sector report breaks down five key findings:

After four years of decline, trust in nonprofits has rebounded by 5 points to 57%.
Trust in philanthropy remains steady at 33%, lower than trust in nonprofits.
Americans trust nonprofits to reduce national divisions more than they trust corporations, government, or media.
Americans have less trust in nonprofits to advocate for public policies and conduct nonpartisan voter engagement.
There are clear pathways for nonprofits to increase public trust in the sector

I was curious to know more about what the pathways to public trust might be so I took a closer look at the report issued by the Independent Sector. The measures survey respondents indicated would increase their level of trust was largely related to a commitment to ethical behavior and transparency.

62% of respondents would trust an organization more if it passed a course or certification for ethics in its operations

61% of respondents would increase their trust if the organization committed to a set of guidelines and ethical principles for its operations

79% of respondents said their previous volunteering experience made their views of nonprofit organizations more favorable

I was pleased to see that volunteering helped people feel more favorable about non-profit organizations.

After I read some of the comments individual respondents provided, I was a little skeptical about the statements that third party ethics certification would help raise confidence in non-profits. Regardless of political identity, people’s perceptions were that many non-profits were intentionally enflaming divisions or perpetuating the problems in order to justify their existence. Certification that what had been perceived to be corrupt practices by a non-profit was actually well within ethnical practice may result in people deciding the third party certification is untrustworthy.

Mistake Of Viewing Culture As An Industry

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Via Artsjournal.com, a thought provoking interview with Professor Justin O’Connor, author of the book, Culture Is Not An Industry.

His basic premise is that if culture was an industry, decisions about it would play a bigger role in international policy and relations.

If we treat culture as a real industry, in the classical sense of the word, a very different picture would emerge. It would involve competing with big players on a global level, making decisions about investing large amounts of money into key areas. You would need to focus on geographical concentrations, drive innovation, maximise profits and exports, and talk about industrial policy in the same way you would about electric vehicles, wine, or dairy industries. However, this is not the same as talking about culture and art.

He uses the example of South Korea’s focus since the 1990s to make music and television dramas into global products.

He says that the misclassification of cultural as an industry has created multiple problems and generally seen funding directed toward a few universities and think-tank groups which reinforce this state.

…the last forty years have shown that the reducing culture to an industry has led to the marginalisation of culture on policy agendas and scrapping it away from transformative policies. The ‘culture-as-an-industry’ discourse has worsened working conditions in the cultural sector pushed to spend increasingly more effort and time on quantifying its impact.

[…]

The beneficiaries of the creative industry narrative include various clusters and consortia centred around universities, research agencies, consultancies, and similar entities. These groups often have more influence on governments than artists and cultural workers.

O’Connor tends to be against speaking about culture in economic terms, but instead as an important element in achieving a livable society. The problem is, that narrative can be in conflict with the goals of governments and business.

Cultural life is an integral part of social and political life, essential in defining citizenship. Culture, therefore, deserves to be considered one of the foundational services that contribute to creating a livable society.

[…]

However, if the conversation shifts to viewing culture as part of the public service sector, as a right, or as a sustainable development goal, large corporations may not find it as appealing to be grouped with culture and the arts. It’s no surprise that the United States has resisted including culture as a sustainable development goal on the UN agenda.

Perhaps most interesting to me is his assertion at the end of the article that the cultural sector not speak in terms of intrinsic value of culture:

Then the distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and social and economic is itself a product of neoliberal economics. Separating out the ‘intrinsic’ is actually a form of neoclassical economic modelling where individual good is purely a matter of the individual and her credit card. It also acts as an oubliette into which art is dropped as policy makers hurry on to the economic value…Art and cultural value are actually established and shared socially, and the individual judgement of a particular piece of art (song, video game, film) is part of our ongoing conversation about what we value as a society.

The world of culture is about the production and distribution of what we call art and culture: highly symbolic things, such as songs, plays, films, books, games, and paintings. The responsibility of the cultural sector is to take care of this world of symbolic things that has historically proven to be highly valuable to societies, and to support the people who create these symbolic things.

This gives me a lot to think about. My instinct is that what O’Connor is proposing is the next phase of my understanding about why we shouldn’t use economic value as a measure of the value of arts and culture. This deepens my understanding of why this argument is problematic. I regret that my old friend Carter Gilles is no longer alive to help me sort through these implications.

Free Admission Isn’t An Audience Building Strategy

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Thinking that free or discounted tickets will increase accessibility and loyalty is something of a pet peeve of mine. Yesterday I commented on a post Sean Kelly of Vatic made on LinkedIn where he noted that people who didn’t want to use dynamic pricing for their events that were selling well would willingly discount or comp tickets to a show that was selling poorly. The connection I saw in that statement is that any pricing change you implement in response to perceived level of demand was essentially dynamic pricing.

In that context, I wanted to point to a recent post Colleen Dilenschneider and colleagues made about the connection between price and perception of value for different types of arts and cultural organizations.  The post has 35 charts and goes into a lot of detail which I am not going to even try to reflect.

There were a couple of statements made in their data analysis about pricing, satisfaction, access, and free admission to which I wanted to call attention. First of all, in general, they found that just because someone perceives something to be expensive, it doesn’t mean they feel the experience wasn’t worth the cost. People understand that a quality experience costs money.

In fact, lower cost experiences often receive lower satisfaction scores for various reasons, including the obvious fact that not charging a lot means you have less capacity to offer a quality experience:

Free and low-cost cultural entities generally have lower guest satisfaction rates, intentions to revisit, and willingness to return. Again, this is because people generally “pay for what they value and value what they pay for,” and it is consistent with ongoing research we continue to collect regarding perceptions of free vs. paid-admission organizations.

Also, it’s likely that at least some free and low-cost museums really do have lesser guest experiences! After all, they are likely reliant on another source of revenue than the gate and they may be more cash-strapped than other cultural entities that have alternative funding sources.

What really caught my attention was their admonition against equating diverse audiences and affordable access audiences:

However, diverse audiences and affordable access audiences are not the same. Indeed, it can be very problematic to assume that diverse audiences and affordable access audiences comprise the same groups of people. (More directly: It is dangerous and incorrect to associate the idea of diversity with the idea of affordable access.)

I suspect part of what they consider problematic is equating being low-income with being a person of color. One of the data points presented from the research was that the belief that an organization is “for people like me” was lowest among those perceived to be least expensive which already starts to cast some doubts on using free admission to diversify attendance. In part this may be related to low revenue meaning you may lack the funds to support efforts to make a broader segment of the community feel welcome.

But from the analysis provided by Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS it may also be that many of these entities aren’t really making any efforts beyond just offering free admission:

Being free is not the same as being welcoming. Some free and low-admission organizations treat their admission strategy as the near-entirety of their audience expansion efforts. However, free admission organizations do not have notably different audiences than paid-admission organizations. Just because something is free doesn’t mean people who don’t have interest (perhaps because they feel unwelcome) will do it. We see time and time again that free admission is not a foolproof audience expansion strategy with reliably positive impacts on welcoming perceptions. Being perceived as welcoming requires strategy, effort, thoughtful programing, prioritization and – often – investment. It’s not as simple as putting a “free” sign on the door.

Return To In Person Date Searches Presents An Opportunity

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Bloomberg had an article on a trend that presents an opportunity for arts and cultural organizations. In some respects it could be considered rather mundane news – Gen Z Is abandoning dating apps in favor of in person singles events. Arts and cultural organizations have the opportunity to create specific experiences for this group either internally or in partnership with nearby businesses (bars, restaurants, etc.)

Though if there is a group in the community already organizing singles events it would probably be best to work with them to discover what sort of experience is most appealing to their participants.

It’s not formally conventional places, like bars or coffee shops, where Gen Zers are looking for potential matches. Think interest-based functions, such as the popular running group Venice Run Club, where new members have to state if they’re single as part of their introduction, or even a late-night chess club.

LA Chess Club, which runs every Thursday night from 8 p.m. to midnight, has become a recent hotspot for singles in Los Angeles in their early to mid-30s….But after the success of a speed dating event Kong hosted on Valentine’s Day in an attempt to get more girls to come, the club morphed into a space singles gravitated toward.

[…]

Pitch-A-Friend Philly, a monthly event series in Philadelphia inspired by Pitch-A-Friend Seattle, encourages participants to share a roughly 5-minute PowerPoint presentation about their single friends to help them find a potential partner.

According to some of those interviewed for the article, the appeal of singles events organized around board games, movie screenings, dinners, brunches and other activities, is the opportunity to interact with people with shared interests in an environment that differs from the bar/coffee house/nightclub nightclub scene where you might be bothered by overly insistent people when you might want to be left alone.

Those are among the considerations that arts and cultural organizations might need to factor into any attempt to design singles experiences.

After Nearly Six Decades It Is Time To Stop Striving And Start Doing

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American Theatre recently published a “Confidential Plan” written by Zelda Fichandler, founding artistic director of Arena Stage in 1968. Initially a memo written to the Arena Stage board about integrating both the acting company and audience. A revision of the memo was published more publicly. The notes on the article say that Fichhandler was initially unsuccessful and had to rework her plan. The fact she labeled it confidential is likely a reflection of that fact she knew her proposal would not be well-received if made public.

As you read her thoughts, it is somewhat depressing to think that observations she made about audiences in 1968 are still true today. After noting that the population of D.C. was 63% Black and yet there are no Black actors in the Arena Stage company she states (my emphasis):

The Negro’s struggle for power—economic power, business power, political, intellectual, psychological, human power—foundationally affects his relationships with other Negroes, with whites, and with himself. This struggle reverberates through contemporary American life. Each of us feels its vibrations every day. And yet we come into our theatre at night as if into an unreal world: A white audience sits around a stage upon which a white company tells “sad tales of the death of kings.” Surely we are in the wrong place!

Then later, in discussing the composition of audiences and her vision for increasing representation both on stage and in the seats:

Homogeneous audiences, who connect with a play in a predictably uniform way, with one pervading attitude, are anathema to the pulse of a living art. It isn’t coincidental that, in all its years of history, Arena seemed most alive while we were playing The Great White Hope and Blood Knot this year, both with interracial casts, both drawing an audience more diverse than usual with regard to race, income level, age, education, occupation, human experience, preoccupations and interests, patterns of entertainment, and expectations about theatre and life in general.

She makes other thought provoking statements and observations in the sections excerpted in American Theatre. However, some of the more general ones like those above remain as ideals arts organizations strive to achieve 56 years later.  She says the theater was never so alive as when the programming and performers were most inclusive, yet that is still a goal everyone says they want to chase.

Many non-profit arts organizations have made statements committing to a better job diversifying representation in programming, performers and audiences.  Hopefully those commitments are sustained and endure. There were many commercial enterprises that made similar promises in response to social pressure in 2020 after the deaths of people like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery but have eliminated much of  the staffing and funding that supported those initiatives.

Making The Experience About More Than Just The Art

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I caught an interview on a National Endowment for the Arts’ podcast  with Tyler Blackwell Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Blackwell talks about how he is working to increase representation for race and gender identity through his work at the museum.

What caught my ear was the museum’s plan to open a sculpture park that seems more focused on providing a green space to the community 24 hours a day than on encouraging residents to enter the museum. Blackwell says that they accept that people may linger outside by never enter.

…a sculpture park that sort of encircles the museum, is going to be a very significant green space in a part of Louisville that does not have a lot of public space for being outside, and so that is sort of one way. That’s a very basic and foundational way that folks might just be outside without ever coming into the museum, and they’re surrounded by art and they can gather and they can sit with their families or they can come with their friends and just sit on the grass.

Additionally, Blackwell mentions how the museum will be working to change the dynamics in their buildings to facilitate gatherings and conversations:

Then another way that the Speed is thinking about its openness, and again, trying to make itself a gathering place, is simply by incorporating more seating in the galleries, and that sounds so basic, but it is not so much about adding a more single benches here and there, but rather creating little pockets of comfortable seating that is so you can come into the museum. Perhaps you’re students at the adjacent University of Louisville and you are coming to study, you’re coming to read, and you know that there’s this one space in the museum that is usually pretty quiet and you are surrounded by amazing, amazing artworks from all over the world and you have the most comfortable chair you’ve ever sat in, and so simply by, again, creating more space and more invitations for sitting, gathering, talking perhaps. Museums do not have to be this quiet place that we also consider as being, you know, I often see people shushing other folks in the galleries.

This resonates with some of the posts I made last week. In one about the Wallace Foundation audience building initiative I included quotes from groups who found audiences wanted a more wholistic social experience. About a week before, I made a post on perceptions of crime in urban areas deterring attendance at urban based arts organizations and that one possible way to shift that perception was to frame the experience in the context of the surrounding environment which might include restaurants, riverside walks, exploring historic districts, etc.

The Best Laid Audience Development Plans Oft Go Astray

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Continuing from yesterday’s post about the Wallace Foundation’s evaluation of their five year audience building and sustainability initiative, In Search of the Magic Bullet, the best summary of the findings was report author Francie Ostrower’s statement:

…our analyses highlight that expanding audiences may happen, but not necessarily on the organization’s original terms. An overarching message to emerge from our findings: If organizations want to change audience engagement with them, then organizations need to be open to changing themselves.

One of the biggest assumptions the organizations participating in the initiative had was that audiences for the special audience development programs they created would eventually migrate to their central program offerings and that simply wasn’t the case.

“A symphony orchestra developed a new genre-crossing series where orchestra musicians played with indie artists, in the hopes that millennials would attend and then go on to attend main season programs. As one interviewee said, “We really thought this was going to be a gateway drug for millennials to come to . . . some more core product. . . . That really didn’t happen.”

Nor did the efforts seem to result in new audience members increasing their attendance frequency and eventually become donors.

“By the end of the initiative, however, at least a few participants were questioning what one called “this old myth of the long slow escalator.”

To the credit of most of the organizations, it doesn’t appear any expected their audience development efforts to result in the sort of increased attendance that would guarantee financial stability. They were pretty realistic about the fact that audience building was going to require long term effort beyond the five years of the initiative.

In fact,

“Another organization wants “to experiment with unshackling audience growth from earned revenue growth.”

Among some of the interesting results that came from reviewing the efforts of the initiative participants came from those who recognized that their expectations that target audiences would shift from the special programming series to the core series were erroneous. Some decided continuing the special programs was at odds with their core mission and discontinued their efforts.

Other organizations embraced the outcome: (my emphasis)

“Instead of deeming the program a failure because it did not yield crossover, the organization changed its idea of success—and did so because through surveys and other feedback they heard from people, “We love this stuff.” When organizational staff would encourage series attendees to buy a main season subscription they said, “Why would we do that? We like this stuff.” The organization decided it was important to continue the series but doing so requires them to raise money to subsidize it because, in their view, it will never pay for itself…

Others found that the new programming wasn’t gaining traction with their target audiences, but their core audiences loved the expanded offerings:

Another interviewee said: “If you go to our [latenight contemporary music series] . . . it’s not all young people. It’s plenty of older people. But edgier older people.” And, as it turns out, the age profile of most of the target group was not as young as initially anticipated.

[…]

The arts presenter found that the adventurous programming proved unexpectedly attractive to the organization’s core audience of regular attendees. As one put it, “The biggest ah-ha was actually seeing . . . ‘reverse crossover.’” Our analyses are consistent with that conclusion: While season subscribers comprised 16.1 percent of main season bookers, they accounted for fully 25.2 percent of special series bookers. This dovetails with our earlier finding that more frequent attendees are more likely to venture to new and less familiar work.

Another response I appreciated came from organizations that decided to target geographic locations experiencing vibrancy rather than a specific age or racial demographic. I liked the fact they were taking a different perspective from some of the other participants and were making an effort to study the audience there. I don’t know that many arts organizations are particularly adept at studying audiences so honing that skillset on a readily available group made sense.

Explaining their reasoning, one interviewee said: Why wouldn’t we want to study the audience, which is on our doorstep? And we know that the people who live downtown . . . that they’re skewed a little bit higher in terms of income, that they’re skewed towards financial, towards cultural entertainment and participation. That’s why people move downtown. So why wouldn’t we want to engage with those people?

The organization anticipated that the downtown area would include a younger audience but chose not to define their target in age-based terms.

One interviewee said, “Most organizations want to focus on the young audiences because. . . that’s the solution to filling in the gap left by the aging outpart of the audience. But I think that wasn’t as interesting to us as the idea of . . . dynamic new growth that was happening [here].”

Finally, I really appreciated this statement about arts and cultural organization needing to move beyond assumptions and internal focus to genuinely listen to audiences and reflect on what they are saying:

Further, as one dance company interviewee said, “It’s very easy to make incorrect assumptions that are consistent with your building, your time, the staff available time.”

An overarching implication of the BAS organizations’ experience is that these assumptions exist, and they need to be examined and addressed. Otherwise, arts organizations risk talking past, rather than speaking with, those they want to reach. That said, this may be a stance that does not come easily to large, established nonprofit arts organizations that have in the past, perhaps, been more able to take their prestige for granted or rely on a steady stream of subscribers willing to commit to a season program curated by the organization.

One interviewee said with some exasperation:

There’s a mentality in the arts that if we build it, they will come. There’s a mentality that we know better than the audiences what they should like. . . . “You need to sit in the seats and love what we do.” There are people who give great speeches about how, just trust that the audiences that like what you like will find you. I mean it’s like, I just want to throttle those people.

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