Last week the Washington Post discussed a survey conducted by the University of Vermont which suggested that going to the park, and even the anticipation of going to the park, created
“a jolt of euphoria one might get on Christmas morning.
What’s more, they found, people’s moods started to improve just from the anticipation of a park outing, and the afterglow of increased happiness subsisted several hours afterward. They also found that while any sort of outdoor public gathering space boosted people’s happiness, large parks with lots of vegetation seemed to provide the biggest benefit.”
The researchers geo-tagged Twitter posts in San Francisco over the course of three months. This allowed them to figure out where people were posting from. They analyzed the word choice of the tweets by assigning words with emotional values and found the greatest positivity expressed while at the park and increased positivity before and after visits as compared to other places.
The Washington Post article has a lot of disclaimers about the limits of sentiment-analysis tools like the one used by researchers, but apparently the tools are effective when applied to large amounts of text.
Ultimately, the reason I choose to call attention to the article is to provide a bit of support for the performance in the park programs many arts and cultural organizations conduct around this time of year. Since groups are doing it anyway, they probably don’t need rigorous, unimpeachable survey results to convince them to continue.
If you pondering doing events away from your home facility, the combined data of the University of Vermont study and Culture Track survey, make a park with lush greenery a smart choice.
Back in May, American Theatre had an article about audience building efforts Opera Theatre St. Louis (OTSL) undertook with funding from the Wallace Foundation. In my experience, there is always something to learn from these projects funded by the Wallace Foundation, especially since the case study reports tend to be honest about what things didn’t go well. So it is worth the time to read this short article.
One of OTSL’s efforts that drew my attention was their Opera Tastings project where they would pair tastings of food and wine with short opera performances. What I really appreciated about their effort here was that they took the program a fair distance from their home rather than concentrating on the St. Louis city limits. (my emphasis)
Hosted in a local restaurant or venue, the evening pairs 11 samples of food or drink with 11 operatic excerpts. The evenings have taken place all over St. Louis: in predominantly Black neighborhoods, in Chinatown, in Southern Illinois, or as far away as Columbia and Fayetteville, Mo. (120 miles and 145 miles, respectively).
“If the intent is to draw people in who surround you, then most of our organizations are finding that they have to be more present in the community,” says Ramos. “It’s how you build relevance. It’s how you show the work.”
[…]
Newcomers, in other words, discover what type of opera they enjoy, instead of being told why they should enjoy opera. More than three-quarters of Opera Tasting attendees are new-to-file (i.e., first time patrons), and every attendee gets $10 in “opera bucks” to redeem for a ticket to an upcoming show.
As I mentioned before, an aspect of these programs I have valued is the fact they were open about what went wrong. This type of reflection is a core part of Wallace Foundation’s ethic of “continuous learning” according to the article.
There was enough of an upside, despite the cost, to make the Opera Tastings worth retaining and refining. (my emphasis)
A lot of those opera bucks get redeemed: Right now an average of 42 percent of Opera Tastings attendees go on to buy tickets. What’s more, audience members who come to OTSL through Opera Tastings tend to buy more expensive tickets and become donors at a faster rate than expected.
One caveat: The tastings are costly to produce, costing $7,100 per tasting in 2018. And the true cost of audience recruitment may be obscured by the subsidies covered by opera bucks as well as discounted ticket prices
“It’s an expensive way to acquire new audience members,” admits Timothy O’Leary, general director of Opera Theatre from 2008 to 2018. And the majority of people who attend, 58 percent, never buy a ticket. The challenge now is to see how the tastings might be sustainable without Wallace support.
The article also talks about other programs like their Young Friends program which they estimate has a $16,000-$17,000 impact and their Opera Kids Camp for children to attend while their parents are at the opera. Take a look to learn more.
I saw a movie this weekend which embodied so much of what we talk about when we discuss empowering people to tell their stories and prominently displaying their stories.
In documentary Liyana, South African storyteller Gcina Mhlophe works with orphans in Swaziland to create a story as a way to help them process their trauma. As they go to work on creating the story, it is depicted in a gorgeous storybook illustration/animation. (Much to my surprise, there isn’t a print book. They are working on turning into a graphic novel.)
The film cuts back and forth between the animation, the orphans working with the storyteller, and telling Liyana’s story to interviewers. It is difficult to say which is more animated since the children (looking to be between 6-9 years old) narrate the action of the story with expansive gestures and vocalized sound effects.
The storyteller guides the children through a process that one might use in a U.S. classroom as part of a multi-disciplinary approach to instruction. (Unfortunately, a school in the U.S. would have to use “multi-disciplinary” as a rationale for engaging in such a time intensive project.)
Once they decide to name their hero Liyana, they assemble a picture of her from a collection of magazines. The children create animals out of mud (with much greater skill than I did as a kid) to represent the bull that accompanies Liyana on her quest to retrieve her twin brothers and the hyenas and crocodiles which threaten them on their journey. The illustration of the imaginary final monster closely resembles something they created from discarded metal found near the orphanage.
Unfortunately, Liyana’s life is a reflection of that of the orphans. Her father beats her mother and then both parents die of complications of the HIV virus, leaving her and her twin brothers in the care of their grandmother. We are told that of the 1.2 million people living in Swaziland, 200,000 are infected with HIV. Later we see the orphans being tested for the virus at a clinic.
Near the end, the children talk about how real life does not have a happy ending like many stories do. Part of me was hoping they had been coached to say that or things had been edited in that manner but I suspect that was a lesson they had already learned too well in their young lives.
Earlier in the movie, the storyteller asks them to decide why Liyana must leave her grandmother to make a journey. The first suggestion was that grandmother was sick and Liyana had to get medicine but the vote ultimately favored robbers came and kidnapped her twin brothers. I was wondering why they would choose the more severe of the two options when we learned the orphanage had recently been the target of a violent robbery. There were audible gasps and groans in the theater as the orphans calmly talked about how the robbers came in, held Liyana down and abused her.
It was a beautiful example of storytelling and story making. In addition to the more traumatic elements the process was meant to help the orphans deal with, you could easily identify the association between elements of the story and their lives.
Liyana is accompanied on her quest by a noble bull because the orphans care for cows and chickens. A grove of mango trees represented a life of ease that tempted Liyana from completing her quest because the orphans reveled in climbing mango trees and letting the juice run down their faces. It was the voice of a peacock sounding like Liyana’s grandmother that got her back on task.
I don’t want to give it away, but if there was anything that illustrated the value of people telling and seeing their own stories, it was the ending. For the children and the audience, it was a happy ending because it reflected an idealized vision of lives they could lead.
But in the U.S. the same basic scenario is synonymous with misery and is the starting point of many stories that the hero seeks to overcome. If the same storytelling program was run with orphans in the U.S. there would be a very different ending.
Hey all – You may or may not know that some months back Nina Simon, writer of Museum 2.0 blog, announced she was leaving her position at Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) to devote herself more exclusively to OF/BY/FOR ALL which strives to “make community organizations.”
What does this mean? It means that if you want to be FOR your whole community, you have to be representative OF them and co-created BY them. If people don’t see themselves as part of your work, they won’t see your work as an essential part of their lives.
Putting up a “welcome” sign is not enough. To involve people in meaningful, sustainable ways, you can’t just make programs FOR them. You have to involve them in their creation. And that means becoming OF and BY them too.
Nina recently made her final post on Museum 2.0 saying she was handing the blog over to Seema Rao. Rao had actually done a few guest posts back in July. By quirk of the feed I use to read blogs, I caught her first few posts and, not realizing it wasn’t Nina, wondered how the heck Nina had had the time to visit all these museums she was talking about AND run MAH AND be hitting the speaking circuit so much.
Since I was already intrigued by what Rao was writing under a mistaken identity, needless to say I think the blog is being left in good hands. I look forward to seeing what she posts.
In her final post, Nina reflects on her 13 years of blogging and how conflicted she was with her sense of obligation to the blog and readers. Then how she came to accept the trade-offs of going to a more infrequent, but perhaps more satisfying publishing schedule.
I can relate with her feelings on the subject having had many of the same thoughts myself throughout the years. Like her, I have often regarded blogging as a way to “think out loud” and organize my thoughts on different subjects. When I go back through the archives, I can certainly see how both my personal philosophy and the collective mind of the arts and cultural industry have evolved over the last decades.
I write this post as a tribute to the difficult and thoughtful work Nina has done over the years, providing leadership for many of us in the arts community as she is likely to increasingly do in the future. I am also writing to encourage people to pay attention to Museum 2.0 as a blog because Nina’s choice to transition it to a new writer is really a manifestation of the philosophy and intent she has long espoused:
Nina writes:
1. Museum 2.0 is about participation, but I never fully succeeded in making it participatory. Because I’d built the blog originally to do my own writing and learning, I rarely invited guest writers. I never experimented here with models for collective writing. … I wished Museum 2.0 could break free of me and become more dialogic, led by a strong writer AND online convenor. I believe Seema Rao is this person and I hope you’ll join me in reading and participating as Museum 2.0 grows. There will be new experiments and approaches – alongside the archive of what we’ve built thus far.
After I posted last week about how English towns installation of chat benches aligned with other stories I had covered about organizations trying to create personal connections between strangers, one of my neighbors, Regina Sweeney messaged me on LinkedIn about a study about buddy benches conducted in elementary schools. (I think this is the first time I have had someone I see on a fairly regular basis read my blog and send me a link.)
A number of schools use buddy benches to help kids make connections. If you are lonely at recess, you sit there and other kids are supposed to come over and invite you to play. There hadn’t been a lot of research done on the effectiveness of these benches so a group set out to conduct one at a school in Utah.
They found that introducing the benches reduced the number of solitary students. As part of the study, they removed the benches for a couple weeks and then returned them to the playground. When they were removed, the number of solitary students started to return to the baseline number observed before the benches were introduced. When the benches were reintroduced, the number of solitary students decreased.
While you can’t necessarily make assumptions about adults from the observation of a small group of elementary school kids, this result seemed to point to the usefulness of some sort of mechanism to facilitate connecting people. Providing people with a way to signal their willingness and desire to connect was useful.
There were kids that abused the benches. Some kids would sit on the bench and then rebuff all overtures to play. Teachers observed that kids who were normally very social seemed to sit on the bench to call attention to themselves. There were also those who made fun of those sitting on the bench.
Many students thought the benches were a good idea, but for other people.
“It appears that while students liked the idea of a buddy bench at their school, many may have thought of it as an intervention to help other students and not necessarily themselves.”
Kids in the upper grades (4th-6th) thought it was only useful for kids in the lower grades. Some students felt that they were introduced too late in the school year after cliques had been formed.
I imagine these general perceptions about the utility of benches might be more deeply entrenched in adults. Though I would also say adults might be more apt to resolve to participate in one role or the other if they knew the goal was to reverse a trend toward social isolation.
One take away from the study that I think is applicable for people of any age is the necessity to consistently make people aware of the program. Every teacher prepared their students for the introduction of the buddy benches and the benches were placed outside 100% of the time during the intervention stage. However, the principal reported only encouraging their use in morning announcements 80% of the time and the teachers monitoring the playground were often too preoccupied with other playground activities to seek out solitary students to encourage them to use the benches.
Those conducting the study felt these situations kept the project from being as successful as it might have been.
I would think the necessity of repeatedly communicating the availability of chatting/buddy programs would even be greater for arts organizations given that the attendees change for every event and they aren’t being exposed the availability of these initiatives everyday the way kids at school are.
I had written about the buddy seating program I had created at my previous theater which paired people in the audience chamber. As I read this study, I wondered if it might be good to have “meet someone new” seating in a public place like the lobby as well. People probably aren’t going to arrive alone at an event seeking a companion, but people new to the experience might welcome the opportunity to chat with those who are equally clueless about what to do or with someone who can offer some advice. Having a bench or row of chairs specifically to that purpose might be useful.
While this seems obvious in retrospect, it only occurred to me as I was re-reading the study and saw a line about the buddy benches being useful as”…a reinforcement by giving students a place to gather should they feel intimidated when seeking out play activities on their own.” This resonated with my recollection of a post Holly Mulcahy made yesterday about people who ruin the concert experience for newbies by enforcing a behavioral orthodoxy.
It wouldn’t eliminate the glares at clapping in the wrong place, but a buddy bench would give people a place to ask “Sooooo…I what’s the deal with not clapping at the end of some songs, but jumping to your feet at the end of other songs?”
If you are involved with education and want to bring buddy benches to your school, you need to read the study because I didn’t touch upon even 10% of what was involved and what they felt needed more rigorous study.
In the announcement, Knight Foundation staffer Chris Barr writes about how virtual and augmented reality is already being used by arts organizations on an experimental basis.
What they are looking for is projects in which technologists, companies and artists will partner with museums and performing arts organizations to explore some of the following ideas:
We hope to find innovative uses for this technology, new approaches for moving audiences through these experiences, and opportunities to engage new and diverse audiences.
How can these technologies help us reach new people? How do we make the experience before, during and after putting on a headset delightful? How do we service these experiences efficiently? How should these experiences be distributed and exhibited? How can this new form of storytelling be used for more inclusive stories? How can we use immersive tech to expand the reach of the arts beyond physical locations?
One thing I appreciated was that in asking how to make the experience before, during and after delightful, they seem to understand that it is the entire experience and not just the technology that provides value.
As much as many of us, myself included, might resent the way the growing prevalence of technology/media is encroaching upon and competing with our practice, this is an opportunity to proactively be part of a conversation and effort at the genesis of the concept and application. The alternative is the current situation where you react to the emergence of a technology or trend.
Which is not to say that anything one might contribute to won’t quickly evolve and be used in a manner you hadn’t intended or conceived. How many of us knew a boxy cellphone would evolve to the point it replaced a watch, iPod, television and even voice conversations are moving to the margins.
When I saw the mention of “putting on a headset” in the passage I cited above, I chuckled because I suspect (and hope) that people will blow the concept of headset based delivery out of the water with the ideas they have.
Via the Marginal Revolution blog, I caught this link to an interesting Financial Times article (registration required) discussing how classical music is at a disadvantage on streaming services due to lack of metadata.
In short, most music produced today is organized by the artist performing it rather than on the artist composing it. If you hear funk for the first time and discover you are listening to Parliament-Funkadelic, you can go to Spotify, conduct a search and find more content from the group.
If you hear a classical music piece and are told you are listening to Mozart, if you go to Spotify and search, you will get a list of every recording of Mozart performed by every group of every size and quality, starting with the most recent recording.
The article says it is difficult to filter by composer “performance, time of recording, location or conductor” on Spotify.
“…for classical music this is an existential problem — detailed metadata are not just a means of organising content so people are paid, but is also is crucial to help discover it. IDAGIO, unsurprisingly, is trying to address this issue.
It is no wonder then that classical music buyers still revert to compact discs — where they can guarantee to find their favourite performances, when it comes to consuming the genre.
[…]
The lack of available metadata on Spotify, and the other main streaming platforms, also has another detrimental effect on classical music: it becomes a genre which exists as a means, rather than an end.
Take this Guardian article from earlier this year, titled “Young people are turning to classical music to escape ‘noise of modern life'”.
While the article speaks breathlessly of a new-found life for classical music among young listeners, the stated reason is clear. No longer is classical music a genre with competing styles and sounds — varying from some of the most abrasive music ever written to some of the sappiest — but a sonic type which acts as a countermeasure to the chaos of modernity.
The reference to efforts by IDAGIO comes from a study sponsored by the streaming service that came out last month. The study surveyed 8000 people in five European countries, South Korea, Mexico and the US, learning the different habits people have for consuming classical music. (A section header summarizes it thus: “South Koreans most likely to have specific Classical listening sessions while speaker-based listening key in nordics and continental Europe.”)
The study authors take a bit more of an optimistic view than the author of the Financial Times piece. So many people responded with “relaxing piano music” as a genre they listen to that it now constitutes a distinct category of music. The study authors see this as a potential entry point where the FT author seemed to feel this indicated a trend toward pieces being regarded as indistinguishable from each other.
In the introductory paragraph to the concluding section, the study authors say “We will discover how ‘relaxing piano music’ has become a significant way to bring, new, younger listeners into classical,…” but that is the last time they mention that group.
Other than improving metadata on streaming services so that the playlists suggested to listeners are more consistent in content and quality, I wasn’t sure how they envisioned people making the transition. (Granted, this is a US-centric view, opportunities for conversion may be better in other surveyed countries)
Though, as I note, the authors of both the FT piece and the IDAGIO sponsored study feel that the listening experience will improve with the addition of better metadata.
I saw a really cool story via Americans for the Arts in May about a partnership between the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. They worked together to place kiosks that delivered short stories in a motor vehicles branch. People standing on line to conduct business can select, print out and read one of the short stories. The library sees this as an opportunity to serve their community outside of their branches.
The stories are printed on demand and scroll out of the kiosk somewhat like a register receipt.
The story kiosk has a library of more than 8,500 short stories, varying in length. Stories are free, and readers can choose between selections for kids or content for all ages. Short Edition has also made the machine earth-friendly with eco-friendly paper that is FSC- and BPA-free.
I took a look at the website of the French company that makes the kiosks. Even though they talk about the printers being useful for business where people have to wait for service, I noticed some of the accompany pictures depict the stories being read at leisure in uncrowded cafes.
This made me wonder if there might be a use for the technology to deliver supplementary material at performances or perhaps only the parts of the playbill you are interested in. If you don’t care about the bios but want the program notes, you might choose to only print those and save on paper. Granted, this may not please those who paid to have their logos placed in the program, but perhaps they can be included on the print out on an ongoing basis.
Being able to see what types of material people are printing on demand might provide the organization with a better sense of what information to provide people in promotional materials to help them make the decision to attend. Likewise, it could be used to shape the programming and attendance experience to reflect these interests/needs.
There was an article in Forbes last month about the glut of empty museums in China. While many museums in the United States have larger collections than they can possibly display, storing the majority in basement vaults, museums in China have the opposite problem in that there is more museum space than objects to display.
Part of the problem, according to Forbes is rooted in the way commercial property development is handled,
According to Johnson, what has fueled China’s museum building boom has been a strategy where a local government will grant a developer a prime parcel of commercial construction land on the contingency that they also build and operate a museum (or an opera house, library, etc). In this way, a city can obtain their iconic public buildings while having someone else pick up the tab.
…After receiving accolades for building a world-class landmark, the developers often find themselves in more unfamiliar territory: actually running a museum.
“That isn’t to say that they can’t hire someone to be the curator to develop content, but at the end they don’t really care,” Johnson proclaimed. “They’re building it because they want to build the tower on the site adjacent to it to make their money.”
It light of this, it was somewhat ironic that on my recent trip to China, I found myself touring an extensive display depicting the Ancient Tea-Horse Road and elements of the Naxi ethnic minority in the basement of a family owned hotel in Lijiang. The owner and her father had created a 120 meter long diorama showing each stage of the journey in the tea-horse trade. (Though they currently only have room to display 80 meters.)
The floor of the basement are reverse frosted plexiglass with pictographs of the Dongba script once used by the Naxi along with the corresponding Chinese hanzi and English translation. The owner described how she, her husband and a friend created each panel.
The owner and her father spent a great deal of time and money both personally and hiring scholars and artists to assist in creating the diorama and floor displays. Clearly a labor of love and a testament to their pride in regional history and Naxi culture. But it is only accessible to guests of the hotel who are personally accompanied by the owner.
My sister and I just happened to choose the hotel from those that were available and then noticed the reviews mentioned that there was an amazing display in the basement.
I didn’t really press the owner to learn why her family continues to invest so much effort in a project so few people will ever see. Judging from the superior service and hospitality ethic she exhibited during our stay, it may just be rooted in the idea that pursuit of excellence brings it own rewards independent of external recognition.
So 2009 was long before ArtsMidwest started their Creating Connection initiative and before I started my correspondence with Carter Gillies regarding the value of the arts, but I found a blog post that made me think the underlying philosophy behind Creating Connect was already entering the collective unconscious.
Writing on a blog post by The Nonprofiteer (which unfortunately does not exist any longer, it appears a consultancy has her URL), I quoted part of her post,
Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.
In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.
Given that support of public funding education has begun to flag, or is at least less stable than it was a decade ago, it is probably good that Creating Connection evokes the grassroots movement to ban smoking in public places as a model for building public will for the arts.
The idea that exposure to the arts will improve us as a society is a core part of Creating Connection which cites researching finding:
…people believe that the benefits of engaging in or experiencing creative expression are related to their quality of life: increased happiness, reduced stress, improved health, and more time spent with family and friends.
When asked what would be different if we had more opportunity to express or experience culture in our lives, respondents indicated a range of personal benefits that span concepts around growth, voice, well-being, and happiness.
One of things I like about doing these retrospective posts is discovering that these ideas had occurred to me long before I began regularly voicing them. (my emphasis today)
While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.
We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness.
Apparently I watched a lot of TED Talks in 2009 as this seemed to be recurring element in my retrospective posts these couple of weeks. However, this is one I have remembered clearly for the last decade.
Mallika Sarabhai talks about using artistic expression to teach as well as deal with sensitive topics like justice and injustice. She starts out her talk telling a story about a monkey who witnesses a rape by the god Indra noting that the way Indra expiates the offense leaves the monkey confused. She says she has told that story around the world more than 550 times at schools and black tie events and has been able to discuss a rape due to the framework of the story.
Now, if I were to go into the same crowd and say, “I want to lecture you about justice and injustice,” they would say, “Thank you very much, we have other things to do.” And that is the astonishing power of art.
The part of her talk that has stuck with me for 10 years though is when she relates the health of people has been improved thanks to a performance that teaches people in villages to use a piece of cloth folded 8 times as a water filter. I think it is the practicality and survival element that has lead me to remember it.
All of these examples lead up to her very memorable policy statement about arts and culture:
What I need to say to the planners of the world, the governments, the strategists is, “You have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake. It needs to be the yeast.”
A confluence of events and information made me realize that it might be time to revisit the subject of one of my favorite posts.
Last week I was talking to one of my staff about who to include in our season announcement mailing list. I told her we should reach back at least 2-3 years and then cited the fact that people maintain an emotional investment with an arts organization for 2-4 years after a visit.
When I mentioned this, I was thinking about a talk given by Andrew McIntyre back in 2011 that I wrote about. He talked about a number of people in focus group conversations that gushed about the great experience they had at a show last year….except that it was 2+ years ago. In their minds, they were still connected with the organization and considered themselves frequent attendees and supporters.
When I was catching up on reading my backlog of blog posts by others this weekend, I saw that Colleen Dilenschneider recently covered the same topics in two recent posts.
In the first, she mentions this same idea about people re-engaging on a roughly two year cycle (her emphasis):
We at IMPACTS often encounter a myth among cultural executives: That audience retention means that people come back every year… and if they’re not coming annually, then you aren’t retaining them as visitors.
As it turns out, this is a high bar – and one that does not line up with actual visitor behavior.
Museums have members and performing arts organizations have subscribers who may visit specific organizations more than once per year. In reality, most people who visit cultural organizations do not visit another organization of that type in two or more years.
She goes on to talk about how there is a disconnect between thinking about attendance in annual terms and actual human behavior. This can be an important consideration in regard to efforts to increase inclusion and diversity. Measuring success on an annual basis may cause you to misinterpret flat attendance as failure. The fact may be that you have doubled the number of people who feel invested in the organization over a two year period– it is just that attendees from the first year may not have started to cycle back to the organization. Your efforts may not bear visible results for three or four years when people begin returning in larger numbers.
In her second post, she warns arts organizations not to assume that people who buy memberships but don’t use them are disengaged with their organization. For many of the most highly engaged people, purchasing a membership is viewed as one of the best ways to support their organization. They are motivated by their passion for the organization, not by the availability of membership benefits.
Not only are the infrequent visitors more likely to buy a more expensive membership than those who regularly attend, they are also more likely to renew.
This is turning into a video heavy week with my posts. With all my talk about helping people recognize their capacity for creative expression, this seemed to be a ready made example.
Every morning they will create intricate designs with rice flour near the thresholds of their homes. Foot/car traffic, weather, animals and birds wear it down/consume it over the day and they start again the next morning. (Though the materials seem remarkably resistant to smudging and dissipation as vehicles drive over it.)
There is a belief that the practice will bring protection on the household. One of the women interviewed says it is a great stress reliever for her. The women also see the designs they create as an expression of their inner selves.
The two women who are the primary focus of the video participate in a competition so you will definitely want to watch to video to get a sample of the broad array of designs the dozens of competitors have developed.
CityLab ran an article from The Atlantic today discussing how the availability of amenities like libraries and cafes within walking distance of your home bolstered civil society and personal well-being in that neighborhood.
A new study shows that living near community-oriented public and commercial spaces brings a host of social benefits such as increased trust, decreased loneliness, and stronger sense of attachment to where we live.
If this sounds interesting, read the whole piece because it offers much more detail about how this situation increases civic participation and trust in neighbors and local government.
These issues were on my mind Saturday as I was attending a block party in the nearby Pleasant Hill neighborhood here in Macon, GA. Pleasant Hill has been a historically black neighborhood since the professional class started building homes there in the 1870s. However, in the 1960s the neighborhood was bisected by the construction of I-75 and portion of those buried in the cemetery were disinterred. Conditions began to worsen as people moved out of the neighborhood.
Now with the widening of I-75 carving more of the neighborhood away there is attention and effort being paid to improving the conditions. A colleague of mine has been an energetic crusader in this regard and has been awarded a number of grants in support of her proposed projects.
The block party on Saturday was part of one of these projects. She and some others had gone door to door asking people what they would like to see happen with an abandoned community space. Five designs created based on that feedback were on display at the block party on Saturday. People were invited to vote for their favorite design by placing a colored dot on a poster board.
Since I know that there is often a lot of will behind building a space, but less support for operations, I was evaluating the plans for sustainability. All of them had some elements associated with artistic programming, but some emphasized the creation of community gardens. Another had some retail space with barber shops and nail salons. Another was oriented toward counseling services, study spaces and writing programs. Two of them were totally about artistic expression. There were dance studios; spaces for painting and drawing and performance spaces.
Most of the dots were ending up in the columns of these heavily arts spaces. I sighed inwardly. Those would be some great spaces, but they didn’t seem optimized for self-support. One of those designs might get built, but was there a plan to support it? (Good lord! This sounds just like the funder rational I often criticize. I have been infected!)
Besides, didn’t they already have activities like that at the much larger community center across the street?
No, actually they didn’t.
I walked across to see what was in the community center and it was quickly clear there hadn’t been any activities or staff of any kind in there for quite a few years.
This might be even more of an argument for a self-sufficient design, but it also possibly provided insight into the preferences of the voters.
People were drawn to the project designs that would provide them with what they didn’t have — a place to participate in some basic creative expression. Kids were congregating in front of the pictures of people taking dance and art classes because they didn’t have access to anything of the sort.
I was considering whether I wanted to write about this today as I walked back to my car on Saturday. The article on CityLab decided me because the idea that such places create stronger community bonds and a sense of identity aligned so strongly with what I felt I was observing.
As so often is the case, Seth Godin recently made a post many elements of which are often cited as mistakes arts organizations make.
It should be noted that the things Godin lists are not meant to apply specifically to arts organizations. As often as we talk about how it is not appropriate for non-profits to be run like businesses, it is important to remember that since we are both trying to appeal to human beings to use a product or service, there are still a whole lot of problems we have in common. The over arching philosophy and motivation which guide the responses to these challenges is what often differentiates non-profits from for-profit entities.
The fact the post is titled, “When your project isn’t making money,” doesn’t mean it is aligned to businesses with a profit motive. Non-profits need to make money to pay their expenses, after all.
Of the 16 or so issues he identifies under the “It might be that your costs of acquiring a new customer are more than that customer is worth” subheading, only about 4-5 aren’t directly applicable to non-profit operations, and it only takes the slightest bit of imagination to see parallels.
Here are some of the more significant issues he lists. You have probably seen many of them mentioned before.
Because there’s a mismatch between your story and the worldview of those you seek to serve.
Because the people you seek to serve don’t think they need you.
Because it costs too much to tell these people you exist.
Because the people you seek to serve don’t trust you.
[…]
Because you’re focusing on the wrong channels to tell your story.
(just because social media is fun to talk about doesn’t mean it works)
[…]
Because the people you seek to serve don’t talk about you, thus, you’re not remarkable.
Or the people you seek to serve don’t like to talk about anyone, and your efforts to be remarkable are wasted.
Because your product doesn’t earn traction with your customers, they wouldn’t miss you if you were gone–the substitutes are easy.
Because even though you’re trying hard, you’re being selfish, focusing on your needs instead of having empathy for those you seek to serve.
Issues of lack of awareness, lack of trust, selfishness, competing substitutes are all topics of discussion in the non-profit arts community.
In fact, you may not associate some of Godin’s points with for-profit businesses. Do you immediately associate empathy with those whom you seek to serve as a characteristic of a for-profit business?
If you think about it, when call a customer or tech support number with a sense of dread and get your problems solved within five minutes, you may have been dealing with a company employing empathy for those they seek to serve. (Or at least one making an effort to retain your loyalty)
Mahmood’s article immediately recalled Holmes to me thanks to the title, “A Seat at The Table.” Holmes had talked about how people in disinvested communities are often offered a small seat at the big table by other organizations when they actually own the entire table in their own communities. Mahmood’s article starts along much the same lines (my emphasis):
As a British Muslim woman of Pakistani heritage, I grew up with an intrinsic love of the arts, including qawwali, henna, calligraphy and poetry. It was therefore a surprise to be labelled as being part of a hard-to-reach community with low arts engagement, as I struggled to reconcile the reality of my lived experience with an inaccurate perception of my identity.
She was encouraged to apply for funding as an “emerging creative producer,” but says she was initially reluctant “to view myself as an arts professional.” I attribute this to her mention earlier in the piece that
“…a career in arts was not considered to be a proper job. This was despite spending much of my spare time running community arts projects as well as having a keen interest in visual arts and live performance.”
Throughout the rest of the article she mentions experiences which involved perceived tokenism and gatekeeping as well as instances when she felt she and others had license to express themselves on their own terms. If you take one thing away from this article, it should be her call for organizations to reflect on their own inaccessibility.
Paying lip service to diversity and only conversing with creatives of colour as though we exist as a monolith is hugely problematic. It is time that organisations committed to engaging hard-to-reach communities reflect on the reality of their own inaccessibility.
Along those lines, I have some reluctance in citing Ronia Holmes’ original piece as if it were a monolithic representation of the needs and sentiments of all communities, but I often return to it because it for its perception of all the dynamics motivating arts and cultural organizations.
I am always up for spreading around awesome ideas that people execute. I wanted to give a shout out to my old collaborators, at the Creative Cult. They have been involved with all sorts of cool stuff since I moved away from my previous job, but recently they did something I knew I needed to call attention to.
They partnered with a group who was showing, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the documentary film about Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to add a little something to the attendance experience.
In advance of the show, the Creative Cult sent out a call informing people that they would be building a cardboard castle in the spirit of Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make Believe.
Roger. Legends say of him that he wrote every show until his very last. He will be dearly missed. WE WILL BUILD THE…
And of course, they got people to help them build it and turned it into the primary entry point for entering the screening. Seeing stuff like this makes me ask, why haven’t I thought of something like that? Don’t tell them—I am definitely gonna steal the idea 😉
Hate the fact that your city will provide millions to fund an arena that only gets used 20 times a year but not arts organizations that each host hundreds of events a year?
Concerned that the availability of home entertainment systems with huge screens and gaming systems are keeping people at home rather than participating in cultural activities?
Well now your fears and concerns are combining to haunt you even more!
According to CityLab a $50 million eSports Arena is being constructed in Philadelphia. There are other eSports facilities around the country, but this will be the first standalone facility. Just to be clear, I am not sure if the local government has subsidized the construction of this arena. According to the article, it is being built by Comcast Spectror.
Some might see this as an unnecessary shrine to a niche subculture. But for fans of esports (or professional video-game competitions), this was an inevitable next step. An estimated 250 million people watch esports, although most do so from the comfort of their homes. Global revenue is slated to hit $1.1 billion this year, and the industry is growing into a more social, spectator sport.
This article didn’t catch my eye because I perceived eSports arenas as a threat to arts and cultural organizations. Actually, I see some potential in providing a venue for gaming.
I was at a meeting a couple months ago and someone said they had started hosting video game related activities in their facility. They identified people living within a certain radius of their facility who posted game walk-through videos on YouTube and Twitch and set up sessions where local residents could come in and play against them.
They were only charging about $5 a person, but the overhead was low and they also earned money from concessions. They saw getting a new group of people walking into the facility and feeling comfortable as a win. Plus they got an opportunity to get a sense of what the people might be looking for in terms of programming.
I have started talking to staff about trying to set up something in our facility. One of my tech crew is a professional gamer who travels around the country competing. We haven’t lined anything up yet. If anyone else has had success and has some tips, let me know.
People might be horrified that a performing arts space is being desecrated by such base activities as video game tournaments.
Many people were aghast at the thought of the competition in that space, but others felt that it was both relevant and fiscally responsible:
Liberal opinion leader Bektour Iskender disagreed in a January 21 Facebook post:
Hello?! A Dota tournament at the Opera and Ballet Theatre is one of the coolest ways of advertising opera and ballet. And its not as if you can just find 180,000 som (the total Beeline paid to rent out the building) lying on the ground.
Davenport’s motivation is to get as many kids involved in a production as possible. Everyone knows the larger cast you have on stage, the larger an audience you are likely to have as friends and family show up to support students. But he also notes that being involved in administrative roles opens people’s eyes to a much wider range of career opportunities than just actors and technicians. (his emphasis)
Because whether a student decides to pursue a career in the theater or decides to be a lawyer, I firmly believethat there is no endeavor in the world that teaches collaboration better than putting up a musical.
[…]
They’re probably the type that thinks putting on a musical is just a hobby. Because no one has told them any different. But you and I know it’s a business . . . just like any other. And that businesses need all sorts of talents to make a show a success.
He outlines the following as tasks students could pursue in the different roles. Davenport encourages everyone to pass the post link on to any high school teachers who might be interested in pursuing this. He says he will even write up the job description and list of duties so the teacher doesn’t have to.
The Producer would be in charge of overseeing the production, of course, as well as fundraising. Yep, give him or her a goal of raising $X and let them find a way to do it (car washes, bake sales, Kickstarter and more).
The General Manager would learn how to put a budget together for the show and keep everyone on a budget.
The Press Agent would try to get articles written in the newspapers, online, and even invite people like me to come tosee it.
The Advertising and Marketing Director would get the word out to sell tickets, get a logo designed, manage the social media, and more.
The Casting Directors would schedule the auditions, run them, put out the offers and maybe even convince the high school quarterback that he’d make a great Teyve.
I was half listening to a TED Talk given by Amanda Williams where she spoke about turning abandoned homes in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago into art. She would check the city’s register of houses slated to be demolished and then would descend upon them over the weekend, painting them in a bright monochrome to change a blighted building into a beacon of color in the neighborhood.
As her palette, she choose colors that had relevance to black residents of Chicago: Ultrasheen conditioner; Pink Oil Moisturizer; Harold’s Chicken Shack; Currency Exchange and Safe Passage signs; and Crown Royal bags.
I started paying somewhat closer attention when she talked about how a passerby thought the house painted in Crown Royal bag purple was a sign that Prince would be descending on the neighborhood to do a concert.
And though that block was almost all but erased, it was the idea that Prince could pop up in unexpected places and give free concerts in areas that the music industry and society had deemed were not valuable anymore. For him, the idea that just the image of this house was enough to bring Prince there meant that it was possible…And once I revealed that in fact this project had absolutely nothing to do with Prince, Eric nodded in seeming agreement, and as we parted ways and he drove off, he said, “But he could still come!”
He had assumed full ownership of this project and was not willing to relinquish it, even to me, its author. That, for me, was success.
I loved that Williams had this experience. It reminded me of the poem, “The Secret” by Denise Levertov which also mentions the viewer taking ownership of a work.
But I really perked up and paid attention to what Williams said next (my emphasis)
I wish I could tell you that this project transformed the neighborhood and all the indices that we like to rely on: increased jobs, reduced crime, no alcoholism — but in fact it’s more gray than that. “Color(ed) Theory” catalyzed new conversations about the value of blackness. “Color(ed) Theory” made unmistakably visible the uncomfortable questions that institutions and governments have to ask themselves about why they do what they do…. One of the neighborhood members and paint crew members said it best when he said, “This didn’t change the neighborhood, it changed people’s perceptions about what’s possible for their neighborhood,” in big and small ways.
The value of her artistic/creative/community building activity couldn’t be measured by any of those usual metrics. How can you measure the benefit of a splash of bright color that brings a moment of hope that someday Prince will come? Not to mention the secret hopes and joys that may have been kindled within the hearts of neighborhood residents that they would never admit on a survey?
I don’t mean to gloss over and skip quickly past the work that is going on in Michigan, but the second organization featured in the webinar, Mixed Blood Theater had some challenges rolling out a project that echoed my post yesterday.
Mixed Blood’s neighborhood in Minneapolis has a large Somali population. Like the Oakland Museum of California I spoke about yesterday, Mixed Blood has ambitious goals of improving the well-being of their community. They created an initiative they named Project 154 with a aim of:
“bridg[ing] cultural gaps between residents, health providers, promote preventative care, increase trust of health providers and promote personal narrative to boost personal confidence and increase community self-advocacy, using theatre as a core tool to achieve this.”
They had initially hoped to record 154 stories of residents discussing their health. They quickly realized that they didn’t have the degree of trust from the community required to achieve that.
They decided to move to story circles where they provided food, tea and a financial incentive to participants. While they had more people interested in participating than was practical if they wanted to limit the circle size, they ran into some cultural barriers. Women wouldn’t speak with men present, especially in regard to their health; younger people wouldn’t speak in the presence of elders; and interactions were somewhat burdened by the need for translation.
The next attempt at hosting story circles, they had the assistance of a Somali speaker recently hired as a project coordinator. He helped them better understand the cultural nuances of the neighborhood residents. These story circles were lead by a member of the community who had knowledge of the health care system. The circles were separated by gender and age. The groups were smaller and the conversations were more extensive. This allowed Mixed Blood to develop better relationships and trust with participants.
It was at this point they were able to move to the stage of recording the stories of community members. Their goal is 20 instead of 154. Mixed Blood shared these videos with healthcare providers to help them better understand the concerns and perceptions residents had about health care.
As you can see, there was a lot of work involved getting to the point where people would be willing to participate in a video recording. Ten of the 20 have been shot and Mixed Blood has only just recently had women agree to being recorded. All this is part of an ongoing effort much broader than I have described here.
Much as the Oakland Museum did in the article I referenced yesterday, Mixed Blood has identified a problem in the community and how they can contribute to solving it.
In some respects, what they have tried to accomplish has taken a similar amount of time and effort as developing a new performance piece from scratch, workshopping and revising it. The difference is that many of those participating in the many stages of development are generally invested in cooperating toward the same goal. Mixed Blood had to overcome a number of barriers to get to where they are today.
Webinar below. Michigan Council starts at about 8:45 mark, Mixed Blood Theatre around 30:30 mark.
One of the central identity problems non-profits face is generating statements of mission, goals, etc that are meaningful and alive for the organization. Creating these statements is seen as a necessary evil for strategic plans, grant applications, etc and are filed away until it comes time to revise them for the new strategic plan or copy it down on a grant application.
But people join non-profit organizations with the hope that they can make a difference. Even if it is contrary to whatever is written on the reference document gathering dust in the filing cabinet, every organization should have some aspirational statement of purpose they are telling new hires that actually aligns with the organizational practice. (Making enough money to meet payroll doesn’t count.)
Now, the thing that everyone thinks they are doing that keeps them coming to work every morning still may not be the most practical and realistic. That was the issue that Jones says the Oakland Museum quickly came to recognize. In 2017, they created a social impact statement that, “OMCA makes Oakland a more equitable and caring city.”
Focus groups asked whether a museum could really solve the problems contributing to the lack of equity and caring in the city. The museum’s internal stakeholders also questioned the viability of the statement.
The museum invited six experts on social impact to spend two days participating in convenings and museum activities. While these experts were excited and energized by the reach and inclusion of museum events, they too were skeptical about the social impact statement. They wondered how the museum could ever meet the myriad concepts people would have about what equity and caring looked like.
After a lot of work, conversation and introspection, Jones writes that they realized they didn’t actually need a social impact statement,
Rather, we simply needed to articulate the problem our community is facing that we are uniquely suited to address, the best solution we believe exists for that problem, and the concrete and tangible outcomes we’re going to measure that will demonstrate our positive social impact.
The problem we’re trying to solve is social fragmentation.
The community of Oakland is presently undergoing significant fallout from inequities within institutions, the state, and civil society resulting in a decline in social cohesion and an increase in social exclusion.
Our contribution is facilitating greater social cohesion.
[…]
We will know that we are achieving that impact–creating greater social cohesion–when our Museum visitors say that they:
feel welcome at OMCA
see their stories reflected at OMCA
connect with other people at OMCA, and
feel comfortable expressing their own ideas and are open to the ideas of others at OMCA
What I valued about this piece was the discussion of the process they went through to come to this realization. There are statements of purpose non-profit organizations are obligated to have. There are some statements/actions organizations may feel self-obligated to enact in order to adhere to trends or to remain relevant. But these may not be relevant or constructive to the developing organizational identity. I was glad to see they recognized that while it was valuable to enunciate a clear purpose, their statement didn’t necessarily need to conform to a specific definition.
There is a lot of conversation about the need for people to see themselves and their interests reflected in arts and cultural experiences if arts and cultural organizations were going to remain relevant. I saw an article on Arts Professional UK that gave examples of what organizations across the Pond were doing along these lines. Many of the observations about the challenges involved which are just as true in the US as the UK.
Tamsin Curror opens by citing, Glenn Jenkins, who has collaborated on projects with her organization,
“Imagine a scenario where all of the creative choices in your own home, the colour and style of the decor, the music you play and the films you watch were all up to somebody else to decide. This would be pretty disempowering, yet in our neighbourhoods or collective homes this is exactly how it is…”
This is the perception people can have when entities create a work purporting to reflect the experience of a group of people without the involvement and input of those who are/were part of the experience.
As much as we in the arts and cultural sector believe that what we offer contains a degree of universality with which everyone can identify, that may not be the perception in every community.
Project Director, Nancy Barrett, says: “A lot of touring work didn’t ‘speak’ to diverse urban communities and we needed to create something that would resonate with the intended audience.”
As I was reading that I wondered if this has always been the case and the greater arts and cultural community hasn’t recognized it because the focus of work has been so oriented toward a middle-class, Caucasian experience. Or if perhaps the isolating effect of social media has magnified the feeling that no one else shares your experience.
If you are only seeing the best selves of those around you rather than engaging in conversations about the boring, difficult situations they face, and therefore don’t feel you have much in common with your neighbor, it may be doubly difficult to discern shared universal themes in a creative work.
It isn’t saying anything new to observe that the time and energy required to build an authentic relationship with the communities with whom you wish to be involved in telling their stories is pretty prohibitive for most non-profit arts and cultural organizations. Added to that is something I hadn’t fully considered – the disconnect between relationship building and the funding cycle. (my emphasis)
“You need to build good relationships with people on a permanent basis, not just be pulling people in…. because if they think you’re just someone that comes in and then goes… you’re a one trick pony,” said a resident of Mereside Estate in Blackpool.
We’ve learnt that you can’t underestimate the time needed to really listen, facilitate and build mutual trust and respect. Being transparent and open about the process and budgets is also key. There’s got to be a genuine, long-term approach, and this raises questions about responsibility to the communities we work with and how to sustain this work over long periods within shorter-term funding contexts.
Four years ago, I wrote about how the government of India, in an attempt to end public defecation by 2019, was building over 1 million toilet facilities in households around the country. However, due to a general belief that it was healthier to defecate outdoors, most people receiving government constructed toilets were using them for storage or living spaces instead. India started sending out inspectors to ensure the toilets were being used for their intended purpose and encouraged people to report on their neighbors.
I used this situation as a metaphor for expecting people to participate in arts events just because they were being held or a facility existed. The benefits of the arts may seem just as self-evident to arts people as the benefits of a robust sanitation infrastructure, but social inertia can be difficult to overcome, even with mandatory education campaigns (i.e. arts in schools).
This idea has made “toilets in India” a short hand metaphor friend of the blog, Carter Gillies and I use when we discuss the ways in which the value of the arts are perceived and measured.
Because that article from 2015 is never far from my mind, I was interested to read about a private effort in Pune, India to transform old buses into public restrooms for women. In addition to public restrooms often being poorly maintained and/or unavailable, women in India are averse to using public restrooms due to the possibility of being assaulted when using them after dark and stigmas associated with menstruation and pregnancy.
The people behind the project confirm that it took months to reverse the common perception and convince people that public restrooms could be safe and sanitary. The mobile restrooms are definitely on the higher end of any portable toilet set up you would find in the US. They have video screens with personal health information, a cafe outside and an alarm button to alert a full-time attendant if you feel unsafe.
The project creators discovered there was a much larger unmet need than they expected.
“Our aim initially was to build toilets for mostly lower or middle-income groups, but the gap between the demand and the supply must be so huge that women from all classes are using them,” Sadalkar noted.
I still believe, as I did in 2015, that it isn’t enough to provide opportunities and space for arts and culture, assuming the benefits will be self-evident and people will change their behavior in accordance with that realization.
Now that I have become more involved with Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection effort to build public will for arts and culture, I can appreciate the need for a consistent, long term approach to shifting perceptions and attitudes such as the efforts of those behind the portable restrooms. Those involved with the portable restrooms couldn’t just talk about the benefits of a clean, well stocked place, they had to understand and address the perceptual and physical barriers that their demographics faced.
Seth Godin had an interesting post recently challenging the notion of passion preceding the decision to commit.
“Offer me something I’m passionate about and I’ll show up with all of my energy, effort and care.”
That’s a great way to hide.
Because nothing is good enough to earn your passion before you do it. Perhaps, in concept, it’s worthy, but as soon as you closely examine the details and the pitfalls, it’s easy to decide it’s better to wait for a better offer.
We see this sort of thing manifest in any attempt people make to invest themselves in something new whether it is volunteering or new job tasks; getting audiences engage with new experiences; or people wanting a thunderbolt, love at first sight moment before dating.
Godin suggests turning it around to a place where people seek an opportunity to contribute and then passion grows from doing the work.
Work before passion measures our craft in terms of contribution, not in an idealized model of perfection.
Passion comes from feeling needed, from approaching mastery, from doing work that matters.
While this is almost an appeal to the individual not to discount an opportunity as something you aren’t passionate about, the “don’t knock it until you tried it,” argument doesn’t have a high conversion rate.
In addition to how doing work that matters strongly motivates people to work for non-profits, what immediately popped into my mind was that this might be an argument for the value of providing an participatory experience to audiences.
Just as people think that creativity is a matter of momentary inspiration gifted by an outside source or inherent genius rather than developed over a long process, it is a pretty good bet that people believe their passion is an inherent quality of themselves rather than the end result of effort and attention invested over a long period of time.
That whole bit about doing something you are passionate about and you will never have to work a day in your life evokes a sense of effortlessness. That can certainly be true if that passion is a result of short bursts of exposure/effort every day over 10-20 years. Even if you decide to fervently devote yourself to a rekindled childhood interest, the joy and groundwork laid in years past buoys you even when you are sweating toward proficiency.
It is when we feel that adding anything new is a zero sum game, where something of a current selves must be sacrificed, that we use resonance with our passion as a filter. As Godin suggests, it makes it easy to say no based on an insufficient effort by others to get us excited.
Godin’s post is more a call to the individual to change their perspective than to organizations to offer more opportunities to become involved. However, once people start looking for ways to become involved in work they feel could develop into a passion, arts organizations need to be there with opportunities to offer.
Americans for the Arts had a post on their blog last week that hit a lot of the right buttons for me. Steve Sanner and his partners have the Jiffy Lube franchise for Indiana. He writes about how placing murals on their buildings and becoming involved with other mural projects has benefited and redefined their business approach.
He says from 1985-2015, he and his partners basically approached their marketing from the assumption that the advice of husbands, fathers and boyfriends were what motivated women to visit Jiffy Lube locations. Therefore most of their marketing was aligned toward men even though women comprised 50% of their customers.
In 2015, we made a conscious decision begin speaking directly to women about the virtues of Jiffy Lube. We wanted women to know they could trust us to handle their maintenance needs and that they wouldn’t be subjected to chauvinistic or condescending mechanics.
A chance encounter with an arts group put them on the road to placing murals on some of the 48 Jiffy Lube shops they own. The first three murals were designed as paint by numbers stencils so that community members could participate in their creation. A mural calling attention to mental illness involved flying a graphic novelist out from Seattle to hold panel discussions and resulted in a fundraising effort that benefited the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
The first three murals attracted the attention of the Arts Council of Indianapolis with whom they partnered on six murals in 2018 with another six planned for 2019.
Sanner says from a purely business perspective, this has been a smart move for them:
Vehicles are going longer between oil changes and many only need one or two oil changes per year. This makes it easy to forget about your neighborhood Jiffy Lube. In addition, sign ordinances have become stricter, making it hard to identify our locations easily. By painting these murals, we are giving people an organic reason to talk about and pay attention to our stores.
If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you know what he said next was the part I love the most (my emphasis):
Internally, we have been surprised at how many artists we have working for us. Our employees are now showing off their own talents through sketches, vehicle graphics, and tattoo designs. We are planning museum tours and art classes designed to help our people further develop their artistic skills, understanding that this will help drive creativity in our own business. Employee retention is a huge issue for many businesses these days, and we are no exception. People want to be proud of who they work with and they care more than ever about the mission and purpose of their employer.
Check out this visual storytelling piece on CityLab about the history of libraries in the US. As arts and cultural organizations struggle with the question of inclusion of under-represented communities in our spaces and on our boards, the efforts people to which people went to gain access to books may provide some insight into the issue. Especially given that the meaning and value of libraries today is no longer directly tied to books. (In fact, 150+ years ago the role of libraries was already expanding beyond a source of books.)
It is generally acknowledged that Ben Franklin started one of the first libraries in the United States, but it was privately funded and by invitation which excluded white women, blacks and poor people. According to the graphics in the CityLab piece, this just lead those groups to form their own clubs like the Phoenix Society of NY established to, (I love this phrase), “Establish Mental Feasts” and “Establish Circulating Libraries for the Use of People of Color on Very Moderate Pay.”
Women’s Clubs were established along the same lines, and when they excluded Jewish, black and working class women, those groups created their own clubs.
I think I may have mentioned before that I currently work in a historic theater that has the dubious distinction of possessing one of the best preserved Jim Crow balconies in the country. A few blocks away from us is a theater established by a black business man to serve the black community due to the lack of access in my building. Reading about a parallel history in libraries is pretty relevant to me.
Before Andrew Carnegie started to endow libraries across the country, many of these library projects were already embracing social issues like literacy, anti-lynching, and suffrage. Bookmobiles were bringing books to rural communities. Even with Carnegie’s funding and the expansion to public access, according to the graphic, it was women’s clubs that helped drive the construction of libraries to the point where having one was a staple of every community.
Even still, there was a lot of exclusion by race:
As I was reading through the CityLab piece, I saw echos of many of the questions arts and cultural organizations need to face regarding their identity.
For example, at one point the stated purpose of many libraries was to promote “desirable middle class values.” While this isn’t as explicitly stated by many arts organizations these days, it is present quite implicitly.
They were pretty particular about excluding someone with (perceived) expertise from the group as including such a person either led to people deferring to the person’s expertise or feeling too intimidated to contribute to the conversation. The researchers drew comparisons with book clubs, but encouraged arts organizations to facilitate the formation of such groups since people rarely organize themselves. (emphasis from original)
Deborah (DX): “It’s really nice to talk about it afterwards. Rather than just sort of taking it all home with you”.
Bridget (IKG/BCMG): “[…] at the contemporary music thing, it was quite nice to sit down at the end and talk with other people about the experience [agreement] because otherwise you sort of wander away with a couple of inane comments, and sort of forget about it. But sitting down with people is an interesting way of reflecting –” [Doris: “It can add to the experience.”]
This deepening of experience through conversation was also evident in the group discussions themselves, as participants wrestled with their own responses to an event and sought insight and reassurance from others in the group. They emphasised that the particular kind of discussion they had enjoyed in the audience exchange was not the same as the conversations with performers sometimes offered by theatre or concert providers, where Doris (IKG) felt she “would feel a bit intimidated about saying something not terribly deep and meaningful – but this doesn’t intimidate”.
Some of the commentary the researchers recorded was very interesting to learn. I was trying to figure out how an arts organization could go about capturing this data without being there. An obvious answer is to record it if that doesn’t impact what people are willing to say. Otherwise, asking someone to take notes. Among the comments the researchers recorded were ones about the marketing materials organizations were putting out.
Even while the new audience members struggled to find a vocabulary to talk about their response to a concert, some felt that the language being used by the arts organisation also failed to capture their experience, with too much of an emphasis on analysis and not enough on the emotional impact of the music:
Bryony (E360A): “For me that description of tonight doesn’t make it sound very exciting – it makes it sound a bit rubbish!” [laughs].
Adam (E360A): “Especially the Martinů one, like that was my favourite one, and it says it ‘exhibits the flute to great effect’ [laughter] but to me it was the violin that was really interesting, and the variations in the music”.
These sort of discussions can be helpful for new attendees because they can validate the reactions they have. Some of the discussions revolved around feelings of guilt about being bored or having one’s mind wander. Someone else in the group piped in defending her “’right to daydream’, expressing the view that if the music encouraged her into personal thoughts and memories, this was in itself a response to the performance and not one for which she should feel apologetic.”
Okay, so I promise I am not seeking out articles that discuss the problems with depending on quantitative metrics to determine effectiveness and value. They just keep falling into my lap. This one is via Dan Pink and is kinda fun to read thanks to some animations.
The piece in The Hustle has us follow the “career” of Otis has he moves from being a cashier to sales to online advertising to programming to surgery in order to illustrate how the use of quotas and efficiency metrics permeates every industry and every profession to incentivize gaming the system in order to generate the best appearance.
But Otis came to learn that metrics weren’t inherently bad — his bosses had just failed to grasp two important economic principles:
Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” and
Campbell’s Law: The more a metric is used, the more likely it is to “corrupt the process it is intended to monitor.”
He realized that when his performance was measured with a specific metric, he optimized everything to hit it, regardless of the consequences that arose. As a visiting professor at the London School of Economics told him, improper targets could:
Encourage “gaming” the system (e.g., bagging free groceries)
Incentivize the wrong aspects of work (e.g., writing trivial code)
Erode morale (e.g., writing clickbait)
Harm customers (e.g., turning away critical surgery patients)
And so, Otis decided to start his own company — a company where metrics would serve their true purpose: To motivate and align. Efficiency, Otis finally realized, isn’t just output; it is the value of what is produced.
If you think about the measures being applied to non-profit arts and cultural organizations like overhead ratio, economic impact, test scores, etc and pay attention to what organizations are doing in order to meet those metrics, you will probably start to see behaviors that conform to those listed above.
It could manifest as massaging numbers in financials and research; chasing funding that doesn’t align with mission and strains capacity; superficial efforts that check desired boxes; pursuit of a narrow segment of community rather than a focus on broader inclusion. I am sure readers can think of many examples from their own experiences.
In the last six months it seems like I have been coming across a lot of stories about how museums tours are presenting alternative contexts for collections. Back in May I was writing about Museum Hack which is providing tours through a somewhat pop culture lens.
Since then I have come across a number of stories about efforts in Philadelphia Museums to provide tours from a number of different perspectives, including those who have lived and played around the ruins of ancient civilizations.
Last week I saw a story in the NY Times about a pilot program University of Cambridge has launched that to provide an LGBTQ+ perspective on their collections. The university recruited Dan Vo who had already established himself as a figure in alternative museum tours to help them develop their series.
His Polar Museum tour highlighted artfully carved whale teeth known as scrimshaw — a way of occupying male whalers so that they didn’t have sex with each other, Mr. Vo said — and items from indigenous communities that showed how fluid gender roles were in some Arctic populations.
Tours like these are important for the future of museums, Mr. Vo said in an interview later. “It makes them relevant,” he said, “and people want to see themselves reflected in collections.”
The article quotes Alistair Brown, policy officer at the Museums Association who says museums
“are looking at radical ways of reappraising their collections,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re either inviting critical and diverse voices into the museum, or at least welcoming their presence if uninvited.”
Some of the tours aren’t as welcome as others. The NY Times also highlighted Uncomfortable Art tours given by Alice Procter which highlight the imperialism and colonialism underlying museum acquisitions. She has received death threats because promotional images on her website label Queen Elizabeth I as a slaver and Queen Victoria as a thief. The British Museum created a tour series of their own in response to Procter’s which highlights the specific provenance of objects in their collection.
Examples like these (including the ones I cited in earlier posts) can provide a real sense of the potential inherent in museum collections and the type of things people are curious to know. It also highlights the type of details arts organizations should know about their offerings whether it is museum objects or works being performed.
It has only just started to occur to me that this is a result of the development of Professional-Amateurs predicted 15 years ago and has become something that can both challenge and threaten arts organizations and greatly enhance the work they do.
In my post yesterday I referenced the difficulty non-profit arts organizations have with conducting outreach activities that have relevance to communities. I and others have also frequently written about the problems with the way arts organizations approach relations with underserved communities, especially communities of color.
The honest truth is, a lot of non-profit organizations find the work they are doing has poor resonance with the communities they hope to serve. I was reading a piece on CityLab today about an organization that is trying to plant trees in Detroit. You would think this is a pretty non-controversial endeavor, but many neighborhoods in Detroit had a narrative of distrust in which trees figured prominently.
But as I read the article, I felt like so many phrases and terminology were exactly the same ones that crop up in discussions about how arts organizations need to frame their approach and relationships with underserved communities.
For example,
Elliot Payne, described experiences where green groups “presumed to know what’s best” for communities of color without including them in the decision-making and planning processes.
“I think a lot of the times it stems from the approach of oh we just go out and offer tree plantings or engaging in an outdoor activity, and if we just reach out to them they will come,” Payne told Taylor.
Cut out the references to tree planting and outdoor activity and it immediately sounds like a conversation at an arts conference without even needing to insert arts terminology.
Then there was this passage:
However, from reading excerpts of Carmichael’s interviews with TGD staff members, it’s clear some of the tree planters thought they were doing these communities an environmental-justice solid. After all, who would turn down a free tree on their property, given all of the health and economic benefits that service affords? Perhaps these people just don’t get it. As one staff member told Carmichael in the study:
You’re dealing with a generation that has not been used to having trees, the people who remember the elms are getting older and older. Now we’ve got generations of people that have grown up without trees on their street, they don’t even know what they’re missing.
How many times have you been part of a conversation where those advocating for the value of the arts talk exactly along these lines? – People don’t understand the value of the arts and the benefits they afford. The younger generation isn’t used to attending/participating in arts experiences. They have grown up without arts educational classes or opportunities to attend performances, they don’t even know what they’re missing.
What was really interesting to read was how residents of neighborhoods and the city were operating from two different narratives about trees. A researcher was surprised to learn that nearly a quarter of the 7500 residents the tree planting organization approached rejected the trees. When the researcher spoke to residents, they told her about how the city cut down the elm trees that used to line the streets after the 1967 race rebellion so that it was easier for police to conduct helicopter surveillance. The city, on the other hand, said they cut down the trees and sprayed them with DDT from helicopters in order to stem the spread of Dutch Elm disease which threatened during that time.
It was this conflicting narrative that motivated residents to reject the trees. They were already well aware of the benefits of trees in providing shade, improving home values, filtering air pollution, etc., it was just that they didn’t trust the motivations of the city.
This made me wonder if people were more aware of the benefits of the arts than we believe and there are narratives that inform a sense of distrust. Ideas about what the arts are and who they are for may comprise a large part of that narrative.
There was also a far more practical consideration fueling the rejection. People felt someone else was deciding what should be planted and where without having any conversations with the people who would have to live with the trees —and rake the leaves and branches that fell. The city doesn’t have the resources to trim the trees or remove dead ones that threaten the fall so the residents would bear the consequences.
What I could really empathize with was that The Greening of Detroit, the organization planting the trees, probably felt like they were doing a lot to have conversations and involve the community in a discussion about the tree planting. In retrospect, there were missteps in their approach and they didn’t dedicate enough staff resources to outreach. However, they held community meetings and placed door hangers, both of which discussed their plans and their commitment to maintain the trees for three years following the planting.
Unfortunately, none of these things made the right connection with the residents but I could see a lot of arts organizations in similar circumstances feeling that making the investment to take those steps was doing a good job by residents.
It seems like the really, really retail, one-on-one interactions that were part of the researcher’s follow up was what was needed to make residents satisfied they were being heard.
One Detroit resident whom Carmichael interviewed for her study told her: “You know what, I really appreciate you today because that shows that someone is listening and someone is trying to find out what’s really going on in our thoughts, the way we feel, and I just appreciate you guys. And maybe next time they can do a survey and ask us, if they would like to have us have the trees.”
Unfortunately, her post came in the middle of the holiday production crunch so I only got around to reading it this week.
A couple of really interesting things that caught my attention in this latest post. First was the counter-intuitive value in leaving past events posted on the website. I always want to get the clutter of old information off my website so it is easy for potential attendees to find the information they want. While this is probably an important practice generally, for the California Symphony, leaving that information available helped bolster their credibility. She writes,
1) As the season progressed, this list got awkwardly short, especially for an orchestra like the California Symphony that doesn’t perform as frequently as our bigger-budget peers. Participants told us they couldn’t believe we didn’t perform more often, and it looked even worse when only a few concerts were on that list. 2) As they were trying to “get a sense of what we’re about,” as they said, they couldn’t really tell based on only a handful of upcoming shows
Another thing is that they started running digital ads in both English and Spanish. The Spanish ads have a link to a Spanish language landing page.
That pilot test did lead to a measurable increase in Latinx households, and so we decided to put some money behind developing the new site in both languages. Now, when we run ads in Spanish, we can link to landing pages in the same language, another step in making this important segment in our community feel invited and welcome here, as well as give them the information they need to join us.
This was not new information to me because Aubrey has been reporting her success attracting a broader audience segment on Twitter for a few weeks now.
While she didn’t report on the outcomes of the changes, her discussion of how they adjusted some of the website sections to be outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused gave me something to think about. For example, instead of “Education” as a navigation header they are using “Off Stage” with subheaders focused on kids, adults and artists. They also changed “Support Us” to the more outwardly oriented “Your Support.”
A lot of the work they did was in the area of providing background information both in their program book and website. Their program notes are more about the background of the artists and music than the technical details of the music. They have song clips and information drawn from Wikipedia available online for those who want to know more. They changed their writing style to short bullet points rather than paragraphs.
Aubrey provides the rationale behind these changes based both in research and user feedback so it is definitely worth while to read this recent post.
I recently experienced a confluence of reminders that not all experiences with arts and culture result in positive responses people anticipated. I am not talking about works of poor quality or offensive works. Friend of the blog Carter Gillies sent me a link to a National Institute of Health case study on Stendhal syndrome where people have averse reactions to cultural overload.
In this particular case, a man visited Florence, Italy and
…he experienced a panic attack and was also observed to have become disorientated in time. This lasted several minutes and was followed by florid persecutory ideation, involving him being monitored by international airlines, the bugging of his hotel room and multiple ideas of reference. These symptoms resolved gradually over the following 3 weeks.
Four years later, he revisited southern France, this time with no intention of returning to Florence. However, visiting this area reminded him of his trip to Florence and triggered another panic attack followed by persecutory beliefs, again involving monitoring by the airlines and which settled within a few days.
Prior to this I had heard of Paris Syndrome which is a similar experience, but seems to be particularly associated with Japanese visitors to Paris. I was likewise aware of Jerusalem Syndrome in which people have religious oriented obsessions when visiting that city.
In the process of reading about Stendhal syndrome, I came across Lisztomania which was an actual thing 200 years ago and not a catchy song politicians video taped themselves dancing to while in college. (As I said, it was strange coincidence to be planning to write about it and then see the song title pop up in the news related to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)
Lisztomania is described an hysterical reaction people had to listening to Liszt perform. If you read the Wikipedia article on it, people have gone to lengths to differentiate it from Beatlemania by noting that Lisztomania was seen to be more of a medical condition and considered contagious. Take from that what you want, but it is interesting to read the entry and the various implications people of the time made about their respective constitutions enabling them to resist the “disease.”
Finally, I wanted to point out an NPR story I heard on New Year’s Eve about the horror people feel when they experience the impulse to crush and destroy cute things. People studying this situation basically say it is the brain’s attempt to keep us from being overwhelmed by our reaction to cuteness.
The study found that for the entire group of participants, cuter creatures were associated with greater activity in brain areas involved in emotion. But the more cute aggression a person felt, the more activity the scientists saw in the brain’s reward system.
That suggests people who think about squishing puppies appear to be driven by two powerful forces in the brain. “It’s not just reward and it’s not just emotion,” Stavropoulos says. “Both systems in the brain are involved in this experience of cute aggression.”
The combination can be overwhelming. And scientists suspect that’s why the brain starts producing aggressive thoughts. The idea is that the appearance of these negative emotions helps people get control of the positive ones running amok.
With all these stories coming to me in a short period of time and seeing the commonalities, it occurred to me that people in the arts and culture industry need to be mindful that experiences we provide can be overwhelming. People with a long history of interactions with culture aren’t immune and perhaps aren’t any better suited to dealing with the feelings they experience. Deciding it is logically impossible that you are unable to process a negative reaction given your experience and expertise may create no less anxiety than for someone who is having their first interaction and is at a loss to understand what they are feeling.
NB – Meant to include the following learning points from the NIH case study near the end of the post:
It is well known that adverse life events can detrimentally affect mental health, but it is less appreciated that intense experiences, that would otherwise be considered positive, can have similar effects.
[…]
It seems that “pilgrimages,” be they religious or artistic, are particularly likely to induce such psychological reactions.
There has been a fair bit of evidence that people are not generally aware whether the place they are having their entertainment experience is a non-profit or for-profit business. An experience appeals to them and they participate. All those efforts invested in curating a balanced season of offerings may receive less recognition and appreciation than you think.
Leaders of cultural arts organizations tend to perceive an entertaining experience to be one that is simplified and dumbed down compared with the educational experience they offer. Participants have a much broader definition of what constitutes entertainment.
Surveying perceptions of memorial sites like USS Arizona Memorial, Arlington Cemetery, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the September 11 Memorial & Museum, Dilenschneider’s company, IMPACTS found that memorial sites,
Considered as a collective, they are generally viewed as entertaining! People find these sites relevant and meaningful – and thus find them entertaining. This is the opposite of what some internal industry leaders believe “entertaining” to mean!
In general, cultural organizations are seen as entertaining entities. That’s great news because entertainment value motivates visitation while education value tends to justify a visit. Moreover – as we’ve discussed – entertainment value is the single biggest contributor to overall visitor satisfaction.
If you recall my posts on the most recent CultureTrack study, one of the most consistent motivators to participation across all disciplines was to have fun. Dilenschneider has presented information before from other sources that reinforces this result as well.
Later in her post, she presents another chart showing
“Memorial sites are perceived as both educational and entertaining, again challenging the notion that “entertainment” is necessarily vapid, empty, or meaningless.”
and makes the following important observations:
1) “Entertainment” means engaging
A synonym of “entertainment” is “engaging.” The opposite of “entertainment” is disengagement. Why would cultural organizations be disappointed to learn that they are not disengaging? I posit it’s because we’ve created and promulgated the baseless cognitive bias within our industry that entertainment and education are opposing forces, and that one comes at the expense of the other. In reality, they must work together to lead a successful cultural organization.
[…]
2) “Entertainment” is not the opposite of “education”
As shown above, cultural organizations are generally seen as both educational and entertaining! An idea that one value necessarily comes at the expense of another is generally unfounded. If it were true, these numbers could not both be high at the same time – and yet they are!
[…]
Entertainment value and education value are not the same thing, but their relationship much more closely resembles that of partners than of enemies. They may benefit by being considered individually at times, but they do not necessarily function independently.
A great deal to think about in relation to how we frame our thinking about what we are doing.
One thing I misinterpreted was her assertion that “…entertainment value motivates visitation while education value tends to justify a visit.” I read that as something viewed as entertainment impels people to participate while something viewed as educational is seen as an obligation — you have to go to the opera because it is good for you.
But when I watched the accompanying video (below), I realized the perceived educational value aligns directly with the motivations found in the Creating Connection initiative. Desire to see and learn something new and different and wanting a child to learn/see something different are part of the perceived educational value.
After long correspondence (both in years and text length), I finally had an opportunity to meet with Carter Gillies over Thanksgiving weekend. On at least one occasion I dubbed Carter “potter-philosopher,” because he has studied and practiced both disciplines.
Carter has been a big proponent of measuring the value of the arts on their own terms rather than their instrumental value to stimulate economies, raise test scores, cure cancer and bring world peace.
We spoke and debated for many hours on these ideas. However, the really challenging conversation was the one I had with myself days later. It is a conversation that millions have had and never concluded satisfactorily.
Before I left Carter’s house, he took me back to his studio and told me to pick out whatever I wanted. I grabbed a bowl that caught my eye and Carter discussed why he liked the glaze he applied to it, pointing out the subtle golden flecks that dotted different places.
A few days later he wrote me thanking me for visiting and hoping I enjoyed eating out of the bowl.
I was mortified. How could I eat out of that bowl? It was a piece of art that represented the culmination of our relationship to this point. I had it prominently displayed on a table in front of my sofa.
But then when I thought about it, I have two mugs given to me by one of the directors of the art museum back where I previously lived in Ohio. I drink out of those all the time. In fact, I am drinking out of one of them right now, totally unplanned. To leave them in the cupboard and not use them would be a small betrayal of my relationship with her, implying they were not good enough to eat out of.
I have endowed both the bowl and mugs with value derived from my relationship with the makers. My conclusions about what the appropriate treatment of each are completely opposite and pretty illogical.
I am not even sure the question here is “what is art?”
Does mundane and common use diminish an object’s identity as art while preserving it in an untouched and stationary state except to dust it impart greater identity as an object d’art?
The makers are both in my mind and heart when I see and use these objects which is part of the value for me. Does sentimentality contribute or detract to the objective value of these items?
These are questions that can be addressed forever. But this also illustrates why it is so much easier to talk about the value of art in terms of instrumentality. Instrumental measures are things people can grasp on to much easier.
The big problem, however, as Carter points out is that we never really try to introduce the conversation with policy makers about why we value the arts. It can be really easy to talk in a passionate way about why you value the bowl on your coffee table and the mugs in your cupboard as well as the stuff hanging on your walls.
Yes, there is no facile way to empirically say the bowl is more valuable than the mug. There is a whole lot of complicated factors that contribute to record breaking auctions at Sotheby’s .
People value art and creativity in their lives for reasons that have nothing to do with what they can sell it for or enhancing their test scores.
The first step is opening your mouth to mention that the true value of a creative expression is divorced of these measures and potentially even divorced from another person’s perception of that creative expression.
While I was at the Arts Midwest conference in November, Joanna Taft, Executive Director of the Harrison Center for the Arts, spoke about the “porching” culture that had developed in Indianapolis and spread across Indiana.
Taft focuses on an active return to traditional uses of porches– just sitting outside and chatting with neighbors and passersby.
I will be honest when I first heard about this, I wondered if people were trying to turn hanging out on the porch into a thing by verbing a noun. According to Taft, the practice is outside the experience of so many people that she and her collaborators created step by step guides and videos to help people get organized.
What I did appreciate was that Taft and the Harrison Center recognized that porching on a weekly basis might end up excluding some neighbors for various reasons and made efforts to find solutions.
…it became evident as we monitored social media posts and attended neighborhood association meetings that many longtime residents were being left behind. The neighbors participating in #PorchPartyIndy were sorted by their financial ability and energy level to host a porch party. We wanted to make our porching initiative more inclusive.
…we realized the time had come to not only encourage residents to host their own parties, but for the Harrison Center to intervene and host porch parties for some of our neighbors.
[…]
Before the party, we organized a group of Harrison Center interns to visit the homes of residents we had met through neighborhood association meetings. At those meetings, we noticed that some of these neighbors expressed strong opinions and concern for their community and this convinced us that they had powerful stories to tell. We queried them about their favorite foods and colors to ensure we catered to their porching style.
For instance, we discovered that a neighbor named Miss Terri loves purple, so we arrived with a table for her front yard covered with a purple tablecloth, and served purple carrots, purple chips, and grapes. Miss Jimmie turned 101 and was tired of the same old cake, so we put candles in her favorite dessert, a pecan pie.
It is no news flash to even casual readers of the blog that I am involved with Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection program to build public will for arts and culture. Last week, they ran a webinar just to present the basic research and program. In recent months they have been featuring two case studies where people talk about how their organizations are putting the research and messaging into practice. This session was aimed at giving people more complete information about the program.
As much as I have been a fan boy cheer leading the program, what I really appreciated about the webinar last week was the number and type of questions people were asking of the presenters.
It was an indication of just how serious people were thinking about implementing the research that webinar attendees were questioning the research methodology. I think people in arts and culture field are wise to scrutinize whether a new approach to doing business is a popular fad soon to fade or has some rigorous thought behind it. They have little enough time and resources as it is and don’t want to waste it on initiatives lacking substance.
What I really appreciated was when one person, identified as Zi Li, asked about case studies on failed programs because they were interested to learn why those program failed. My friend Carter Gillies often mentions the problem of survivorship bias where you only study the successful cases rather than gaining insight from those that failed.
The music on the Awesome 80s radio station is always going to be better than the music today because you are comparing the cream that rose to the top and endured the last 30 years to all the music being performed today, both good and bad.
If you are new to the concept of Creating Connection or just want a refresher, take a look at the video from the webinar which includes all the questions and comments made that day.
A couple years ago I was serving on a grant panel which made me aware of an arts and culture organization that was running “breakfast raves,” for lack of a better word.
They were getting people together on Friday mornings around 5 am to have a dance party and breakfast before they ran off to work. I thought it was a great idea, especially for getting people who didn’t identify as night owls engaged and meeting new people in the community. Not only that, it was another way for performing arts organizations to use space that was usually only occupied at night. I thought it would make for a great study to see if people who attended morning raves were more productive and creative when they went to work that day.
In the past week I came across a story in CityLab about Daybreaker, a company that is doing much the same thing in cities around the world. The writer, Sarah Holder, attended a session in Washington DC that involved yoga and then a silent dance party (because they meet outdoors and can’t blare music in early morning hours.) Looking at the Daybreaker website, this is pretty typical – work out, followed by a dance party, followed by breakfast. Apparently they will also have performances.
They reach a pretty wide range of people:
….target cohort as “adventurous” people who “share the common interest of waking up at 6 a.m. to dance.” Most attendees are between 25 and 45 years old; a fact sheet provided by the Daybreaker team says the demographic breakdown is 68 percent women, 32 percent men, and “100 percent human.” Forty-seven percent are single.
The Daybreaker people also see themselves as an important conduit for building connection:
And they, like a surprising percentage of the crowd, were middle-aged: Kia was 42.
That’s significant, because, if loneliness is a nationwide epidemic, it’s particularly pronounced among older people, says Agrawal, based on observations she made on her book tour. Almost a third of Americans over 45 are socially isolated, according to AARP. “Many people in their 60s and 70s came to my book event to share their feeling of loneliness,” Agrawal said. “And how—to quote their words—invisible they feel.”
Of course, the sense of loneliness is shared across all generations so gatherings like these are great for everyone. Given that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s grew up on rock and other high energy music, there may be an unmet potential in programming morning dance parties aimed toward those demographics. I am thinking, in part, about the ubiquitous “dancing grannies” in China who are up at the crack of dawn participating in the activity for both exercise and socialization. (And often drawing the ire of younger people upset that their elders are blaring music at 5 am.)
When I first saw this story, I was interested in the concept as a way for arts and cultural organizations to diversify their offerings and help remove perceptual barriers about what it means to enter a creative space. However, one part of the article emphasized the fine line between sincere and insincere motivations for creating community when revenue is involved.
Note the bad association the word “community” has gotten.
But finding zen by paying to party with strangers on the roof of my office building (conveniently, I also work in the Watergate) seemed a little painful and inauthentic. Agrawal says she understands. “The word community has been kind of bastardized already,” she told me. “It’s just another word for ‘users’ by marketers.”
But with Daybreaker, she’s tried to cut through the bullshit. The “belonging” the brand creates isn’t a commodity, she says, nor is it a coincidence.
Seth Godin made a post earlier this week comparing Persistence with Consistent wherein he starts with the statement “Persistence is sort of annoying.”
He goes on to talk about the way in which consistent is the desirable opposite side of the coin,
Consistent with your statements, consistent in the content you create, consistent in the way you chip away at the problem you’re seeking to solve.
Persistence can be selfish, but consistency is generous.
And the best thing is that you only have to make the choice to be consistent once. After that, it’s simply a matter of keeping your promise.
In this context, persistence seems to be about performance of a specific action whereas consistent is policy. In this sense persistence is approaching a challenge in the same way until it is worn down to the point you can pass. Whereas consistent is more about dedication to finding a way past that obstruction.
While both approaches never falter in achieving a singular goal, the latter entertains options regarding the methods by which this can be accomplished. In fact, consistent may be better equipped to recognize that surmounting the barrier isn’t the goal but rather getting to the place beyond the barrier and therefore there may be no reason to engage with this particular barrier at all.
What actually drew my attention to Godin’s post was that last line about keeping a promise. Working in the non-profit arts sector is often such a struggle that we feel like we can only survive with dogged persistence. Perhaps what is really needed is a focus on consistency.
If our promise to the community we serve is to provide a certain experience, a persistent approach may keep you locked into executing an approach and methods which have decreasing relevance. A determination to offer a consistently valuable experience can lead you to place more importance on needs of those you intend to serve rather place importance on the methods by which you accomplish it.
Think about it this way. If you want to keep a promise to provide excellent customer service do you do the same thing today as you did five years ago? Do you use the same approach for small groups as large? Kids as for elderly? Film audiences as for Broadway musical audiences? 2500 seat theater as for 150 seat theater?
Sure you will still make bad choices, but a consistent approach to great customer service is likely better able to take the differences of time, place, environment and expectations into account than a persistent approach.
If you are like me, Emerson’s line, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” might have come to mind when you first saw the term. In that context consistency has a negative connotation. After reading and pondering Godin’s post I wondered if it might have been better said as “a foolish persistence.” Though I learn toward consistency is a better word choice.
It should also be noted, Emerson never mentions what the characteristics of wise or non-foolish consistency are. Consistency is not necessarily negative in and of itself. Persistence isn’t either, but it does have implications of a single-mindedness that can quickly become problematic.
You may have noticed I didn’t make definitive claims about persistent being one thing and consistent being another. Ultimately, of course it isn’t about what word you use as much as what practice you embody.
When I saw there was going to be a similar effort in Macon, I signed up to participate on my second day on the job here.
(Just a little disclaimer, the major funders of the local On The Table, the Knight Foundation and Community Foundation of Central Georgia, fund my organization.)
Instead of a discussion occurring in a single place at a set time, there were dozens of discussions occurring across the community with the first ones starting at 7:00 am and the last one beginning at 8:00 pm. The topics covered everything imaginable, including some which were specifically intended as forums with government officials. People agreed to act as hosts in parks, private homes, business offices, libraries, churches and community centers. In total, there were over 1500 seats available around the community.
While the general concept emerged from the idea that community bonds are forged over meals, the organizers were empathic that “It’s not about the food.” I imagine this was in part to prevent those who volunteered as hosts from feeling obligated to provide a gourmet experience for dozens of people. Also so that participants weren’t focused on attending the sessions with the best food choices versus the most engaging topics.
Other than wanting to be part of the basic experience, my motivation for participating was to get a sense of the community to which I had recently moved. The first session I attended was at the public library where the topic was “Preserving Ethnic History.”
Readers of this blog know that I often talk about people desiring to see their stories depicted by arts and cultural organizations. Since I helped Hawaiian artists tell their stories through performance, I wanted to learn if similar opportunities for partnerships might exist in this community.
As much as I was interested in the topic, I as concerned that the subject might have too much niche appeal to attract many participants. I need not have worried as the table quickly filled and needed to accommodate some chairs at the corners. The conversation that emerged was very interesting as the group had to tease out the differences between culture, ethnicity and identity before we could really define what it was exactly that was important to preserve.
A comment made by a woman who has taught manners and etiquette all her life cut across all subjects and seemed particularly applicable to arts and culture practice. She said her mother always emphasized that she and her siblings were to always consider themselves as sharing something rather than giving because both parties gained from sharing whereas one party always lost something in giving.
The second session I attended didn’t have an announced topic and instead employed some of the prompts provided by the On The Table organizers.
The third session was lead by a group that is trying to educate people about the state budget and how it is allocated. That conversation was focused largely on where the priorities of the society should be rather than talking specifically about the state budget. Those materials were available as hand outs to review at home.
Below is the prompt card from the session yesterday. If you were interested in doing something similar, you might check out the Chicago Community Trust On The Table website. I had read somewhere that they started the effort which has been replicated elsewhere. Certainly, you might want to search out the websites of the different communities that have hosted these events. Every community is different so some iterations may match your community better than Chicago’s.
I have been extremely busy preparing for the sponsor reception capping off a $3 million facility renovation at my day job. (It really well tonight, thankfully)
I wanted to briefly call attention to an article Michael Rushton cited about the literal prescriptive use of the arts. What caught my eye was the following sentence:
Doctors will each be able to assign up to 50 museum prescriptions over the course of the pilot project.
Rushton goes on to point out the problems inherent in making this comparison:
My problem with these sorts of stories, though, is not just the hyperbole. It’s about what it says about “art”. The story has not one single mention of any work of art these doctors’ patients might encounter at the MMFA (save for a photo indicating there is a Calder retrospective currently on exhibition). The actual works have no importance, it’s just “art”, or, as they say, whatever. The museum is a place with hallways and rooms that have framed pieces of canvas with paint on them hung from the walls.
And we can see why this is the approach, for what if we did pay attention to what art? What happens if researchers discover (as we know they ultimately will) that impressionist works increase the viewers’ levels of cortisol and serotonin more than do works of post-expressionism? That landscapes generate more hormone secretion than abstract works? Will doctors then start to advise the museum on its curatorial policies? Will the arts council?
[…]
…A part of the hidden, evil genius of “economic impact” studies was to embed the claim right from the start that the actual art itself doesn’t matter at all, so long as money is spent on it. But I don’t see how advocacy on health benefits, or empathy, or entrepreneurial creativity, would be able to get away with that.
I was recently listening to an episode of This American Life on church planting and found it a little strange to be listening to people use venture capitalist terminology to describe efforts to build new worship communities as “target the unchurched.”
Reporter Eric Mennel mentions attending a conference where the conversation is
“…about “kingdom return on investment.” Or “evangelistic networking” is one I’ve read, or “corporate renewal dynamics.”
“Launch” is a big word that they use in both worlds. They talk about “launch Sundays” and “launch budgets” in church planting. And the framing of what they’re doing is in business terms, right?
As I continued to listen, they started to mention that these efforts were heavily bankrolled by established churches,
So a lot of the startup capital comes from the biggest denominations. The Southern Baptists– they spend tens of millions of dollars a year on church planting. But a lot of church plants actually get their funding directly from megachurches– established churches that have thousands of members.
That got me thinking that you don’t see many large arts organizations doing something similar where they provide seed funding to enable more nimble arts organizations to go out to target the un-artsed.”
Perhaps I should have known there would be parallels with the arts because This American Life titled the episode, “If You Build It, Will They Come?” evoking the “Field of Dreams” mentality we have been urged to abandon.
However, what I really found fascinating was the parallels between the problems one church planter had with diversifying the demographics of church planting and those of arts organizations trying to do the same thing with their program participants.
This American Life (TAL) spoke to Watson Jones III who became really excited by the church planting model, but noticed that pretty much everyone at this church planting conferences was Caucasian. The TAL reporters confirmed that most church planting happens in gentrifying or affluent urban neighborhoods or suburbs.
Jones felt things were wide open for planting churches in urban neighborhoods for people of color. As I referenced before, there is some surprising infrastructure for church planters. Jones got training in budgeting, fundraising, creating a business plan and mission statement for his church, plus an 18 month residency at a church plant site. He ended up landing about $100,000/year funding for three years to support his planting efforts.
They ended up doing a lot of things arts organizations do when trying to attract new audiences– handing out flyers and candy on the streets trying to get people to attend gatherings at homes, coffee houses and other non-traditional venues.
While the non-traditional worship services at funky, cool locations are pretty much the core identity of the church planting process that helps attract new members, it had the opposite effect for communities of color.
Watson Jones
….And one lady told me– she said, you guys are a cult. You call me when you get a church. Especially, I think, among black people, the more out of the box or avant garde you are, the less likely you are to be trusted.
Theologically, we say all day long, the church is the people of God. The people in your city, in your neighborhood, does not understand church apart from a building, a preacher, a choir or a praise team, and something that looks like a church service, period.
[…]
AJ Smith
Yeah. I mean, we were going to be the people who were out there on the streets, pastors who were very much present with the people. And that’s how we’ll grow the church. That didn’t work.
As I am listening to all this, I can’t but help think about how this is literally out of Nina Simon’s TEDx Talk on the Art of Relevance.
I mean look at this still. If you can’t see the stenciled sign on the bottom of the slide she is showing, it says “House of Worship In A Den of Sin.”
Nina uses this picture to discuss how some people will see this as a welcoming place and others will see it as scary.
These guys trying to plant a church are running into a similar situation where the lack of a formal building and familiar experience was an impediment to people’s willingness to commit to this fledgling church. (Unfortunately, even when they did get a physical place in which to hold services, they had problems attracting a consistent group.)
This podcast provides many things to think about regarding the efforts of arts organizations to diversify the groups they serve. The foremost of which may be whether the design and execution of impromptu experiences in non-traditional spaces reflect affluent Caucasian ideals about what outreach efforts to those underserved by the arts looks like and subsequently serve to largely appeal to a similar demographic.
Carter Gillies shared the unabridgedversion of a piece he wrote for the Arts Professional UK on his website this weekend. As Carter is wont to do, he examined statements about quantifying and measuring the value of the arts made by Simon Mellor, the deputy chief executive for arts and culture at Arts Council England.
I was particularly drawn to Carter’s second entry where he addresses this statement by Mellor (my emphasis):
“At its heart, the Quality Metrics system is about enabling arts and cultural organisations to enter a structured conversation with audience members and peers about the quality of the work they are presenting. It allows them to capture valuable data that they can use to understand how their intentions for the work are aligning with the experiences of their audiences and peers and, hopefully, to use that information to plan future programmes and improve the quality of their work. It will also enable those organisations to provide more evidence to current and future funders about the quality of their work.
Let me first state that I don’t believe these metrics will really have any ability to measure the quality of the work done by the arts organisations. If you have read any of my previous posts on the matter you probably knew that already.
I was taken by the idea expressed in the bolded sentence above. One of the biggest challenges facing arts organizations in the last few years is the recognition that what they are doing might not align with the interests of the community. In surveys like Culture Track, people say they aren’t attending arts events because they don’t see themselves or their stories depicted on the stages, walls, and spaces. They don’t preceive what is happening in arts spaces to be relevant to them. Nina Simon wrote a whole book about making experiences relevant for people.
So if the Arts Council of England could actually deliver some real insight into how to make the experience more relevant for people, that would be a pretty valuable service.
However, as Carter points out later in that second entry, there are many examples of artists whose work was initially rejected before being lauded. Some died before others began to recognize the value in the work they missed before. We see this sort of thing happen all the time in our lives. Movies and shows that did poorly both critically and economically suddenly become cult classics.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show became immensely popular after it initially flopped. But it is also a good example of something whose value exploded after people were able to participate and take ownership of the experience.
Even if it is an accurate reflection of how people are receiving something, the research is only going to be valuable to a point.
The problem, however, with creating a metric is that often that metric becomes fetishized as the measure of value rather than one element among many that can help us understand how an art work and the experience surrounding it is received.
As Carter notes, quoting Oscar Wilde, even when we talk about a metric someone else is using, the meaning of that metric may not be shared by both parties. Thus the #NotMyMetric title of this post.
(my emphasis)
There is a reason bean counting number crunchers have so much authority in the arts, and mainly it is for the good. The arts are a business and need to function as such. But it is also important to not let that world view overreach itself. We need to be careful in not putting the cart before the horse. In many ways the arts are the exact opposite of what the counters are, and see, and value.
The ever impish and ironical Oscar Wilde understood this predicament:
“When Bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When Artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.”
There is a mutual interest, in other words, but neither does it mean a banker thinks of art as an artist does, values it for the same things in the same way, and equally true of artists’ attitude towards money, but especially that this does not mean they should be left in charge of one another’s concerns. A ‘dinner table’ acquaintance is insufficient for the real work that needs to be done.
I went to the Arts Midwest conference last week and I am still sorting out all the notes and brochures, etc that I picked up.
There were a couple general bits of observations I wanted to share.
Blake Potthoff, Executive Director of the Fairmont Opera House in Fairmont, MN gave me permission to share something he said in one of the professional development sessions. He opened his comments by expressing a problem totally opposite of the one the rest of us face–he wanted advice attracting older generation audiences to his shows, specifically those from Generation X. Apparently he isn’t having problems attracting millennials.
Later, he mentioned that one of the ways they evaluate how their shows were being received was by convening an advisory group every other month and asking them whether they felt a show in the season had been programmed for impact or for dollars.
In other words, once people have seen the show, the organization asks their advisory group if they felt the inclusion of the show in the season had been purely motivated by money or if they felt the show had been meant to have some impact on their lives.
What didn’t come up in the professional development discussion was the fact that the arts org can often lose more money on what people perceive to be a cash cow than on a lightly attended event.
Potthoff said these discussions have really impacted how the organization plans their season and experiences.
The approach was pretty intriguing for me. This isn’t a question we generally ask our audiences.
Usually, the rule is not to ask a question if you don’t intend to act on the answer. In this case, I am not sure what my response would be to the answers I would get.
If my goal is to have an impact on people’s lives, does it matter if people think a show has a commercial motivation and turn out in sufficient numbers to support it? If people answer that a show was impactful, but too few people show up to make it financially viable –well this situation is what we generally assume. Things that aren’t popular are still worth doing for the impact.
If people feel a show was both motivated by commercial success and feel the show was highly impactful for them, that might provide some direction, especially if I felt the show was mostly feel good fluff without much value. I just have to put my snobbery aside a little and explore what contributed to people feeling this way.
Then there is the final option where none of our expectations are met – what we intend to be impactful is viewed as commercial and what is intended to be a money maker is viewed as impactful. Some answers may lead you to place where you resent your audience for being out of tune with your intent.
In some respects, this may be a question that you ask not knowing exactly what you will do with the answer–except that you resolve to be open minded and not reflexively decide the answers are irrelevant.
Because you probably also need to ask, does your community care whether something is meant to be a money maker or impactful? Do they have negative associations with their concept of what the intent to make money entails?
When they perceive something was intended to be impactful, do they feel that it has improved their lives or that they viewed it like vegetables–they know they are supposed to consume it for its cultural value, but they really prefer something else.
Even beyond the question of profit vs. impact, it may be enlightening to generally ask people what they perceive our organizational motivations to be.
Apparently ideas like this occur and are developed somewhat in parallel because for the last two weekends, the theater department here at Mercer University has been using the basic framework of Dungeons and Dragons to create a heroic saga with the participation of audience members.
Martin Noyes of Savannah College of Art and Design had experimented with the idea on a smaller scale in the classroom, but this was the first time he employed the concept as a full production that unfolded across seven nights.
The experience was very intriguing to me because it both required creating a sophisticated framework of rules and allowing the performers (and audience) a lot of freedom to introduce unpredictable elements into the performance.
The technicians supporting the performance had to be prepared to create the appropriate ambience on the fly. In many cases, they had to be just as inventive and resourceful as the actors. It was quite telling that Noyes would often be surprised that they found an appropriate image to project or sound effect to use as part of the action. He wasn’t completely aware of what they had available in their repertoire.
In addition, there was a musician on violin accompanying the performance creating a soundscape on the fly as well.
The performance, called Vengeance and Veritas, was presented in a blackbox space. The set looked something like this:
As you might imagine, flexibility and imagination were employed more frequently than realistic set pieces.
The cast consisted of four main characters, plus four others that took on various roles and helped with some of the mechanics of the performance. Noyes acted as the game master and portrayed many of the allies and antagonists, providing direction or challenges to the main characters. Audience members were pulled up to be ancillary characters and with a few whispered notes from Noyes, were called upon to make decisions to either thwart or assist the central characters in their goals.
By the finale, there were about 12 audience members up on stage alongside the actors either manipulating the rudimentary puppets of one of two dragons or depicting female warrior-monks.
If that wasn’t enough uncertainty added to the proceedings, the 20 sided dice so iconic to Dungeons and Dragons were used to determine the outcomes of many decisions. Oversized dice were distributed throughout the audience. When called upon, they threw the dice into the performing area. Often multiple dice were thrown simultaneously forcing Noyes to indicate which die would rule as it skittered across the floor.
There was a lot I loved about the design of this production.
First, I loved that it developed into something larger than expected. Noyes apparently didn’t think things would develop as far as they did, forcing him to create more narrative guidelines between performance nights. In the heat of the action, he would often forget where on stage he put his notebook down, providing an amusing delay while he retrieved it to consult his notes.
The actors were free to make decisions about their involvement within the confines of the narrative. Noyes had a couple of out of character exclamations of “oh shit” when the actor portraying a vampire turned up deciding to be the hero, thwarting the plans of the villainous character Noyes was portraying.
At the same time the nigh unkillable vampire kept becoming a liability to his allies as the dice roll incited his bloodlust to attack wounded allies.
There were also times where well-reasoned character development and choices by the actor was allowed to trump the dice roll.
While a performance built within the framework of a game like Dungeons and Dragons does require you to have some degree of insider knowledge, unlike many arts experiences, the audience was often more knowledgeable than the creators. Noyes had to admonish the audience to silence as it became clear the actor portraying the vampire was about to make a decision that would benefit a regular person but is deadly to vampires.
This particular approach to creating dramatic narrative answers many of the objections people make about performing arts – it is never the same performance each night, the outcome is unpredictable, the audience is actively engaged and doesn’t have to be cajoled into participating.
Another great thing was that the episodic nature of the performance induced people to return to see the show again. (Anyone who performed got a little gift at the end of the night too) Where they may not have participated on the first night, a lot of people were ready to jump up and take part on subsequent nights.
Because the cast didn’t know how the performance would unfold every night, no one knew when the show would end each night either. Noyes had to judge a good cliffhanger point to stop at.
One conversation we had (my staff provides the ticketing for the performance) is that if this type of show is ever done again, we need to offer special multiple performance pricing to make it easier for people to attend as many nights as they like.
The process also provides artists and technicians with the opportunity to explore new approaches to story creation; become nimble and resourceful in executing complex tasks on the fly and evaluate what does and doesn’t work. There may be a number of practices in common with comedy improv performances, but there are a lot more moving parts involved.
Because of the performance environment, the unintentional pauses, rough edges and problems in the shows I attended only served to provide a greater sense of intimacy and connection for the audience. (How often do you see a director exclaim his pleasure when something is unfolding well or preface a performance by telling an audience how his ultimate goal is to destroy a good portion of what he labored so hard to create?)
In a different physical spaces, the expectations might be for a more polished product. In that case, the performers might have to run through a scenario a couple times before an audience encounters it—but still introduce a mechanism of unpredictability to keep things feeling exciting and fresh.
Since I didn’t expect to see roleplay driven storytelling manifest so quickly and in such a way, I am obviously excited to see what else might emerge.
I am going to be attending the Arts Midwest conference this week so I started scouring my archives for content for Wednesday’s entry. Instead, I came across an old post that is a bit more appropriate for Labor Day.
Back in 2009 I wrote about a New Republic piece that suggested one of the reasons manufacturing has diminished in the US is that business schools started focusing more on finance and consulting back in 1965. So while countries like Germany and Japan have constantly made advances in manufacturing, the US hadn’t been able to keep up.
“Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background….But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”
I made the following observation about how this situation was finding its way into the arts.
…realized that this describes exactly what people are afraid will happen if arts organizations are “run more like a business.” The fear is that decisions will rest entirely on return on investment and will be divorced from the manufacturing process as it were.
There was a time I would not have imagined that any arts organization would have a disconnect between the administration and the artists…
Nearly five years ago, I cited observations that orchestra administrations were disassociated from the performances and performers. Given all the conflicts and closures since then, I don’t think the overall environment has gotten any better since.
With the increased focus on STEM subjects, I wonder what this portends for the future. Will an emphasis on research and experimentation lead to more innovation in general and have an influence on the arts in the form of data based decision making and technology driven innovation?
Or will the value of the arts continue to be evaluated in terms of quantitative measures?
The fact that the arts community was pretty quick to start insisting that STEM become STEAM to include the arts makes me optimistic for the former scenario, but we need to pay attention to what areas our schools focus on.
What’s particularly noteworthy about voters approving this property tax is that Genesee County’s seat is Flint, MI.
When the topic if government support of the arts is discussed, the question often arises how you can justify support for arts and culture when there are so many other problems to be addressed. Flint, MI has been known for the social and economic challenges it faces in addition to some significant problems with the municipal drinking water supply.
Yet, voters saw some value in supporting a millage proposal that would enhance the arts and cultural environment in their county. Why is that?
Van Voorhis, who grew up in Flint, expresses confidence that the residents of Genesee County will find their quality of life improves as the financial support of the arts and cultural organizations continues over the next decade. She cites a study showing a similar effect in Cleveland when they passed taxes in support for arts an culture.
One of the insights and suggestions she pulls out of the Cleveland study will be familiar to those of you who have been reading my posts on Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection initiative to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture.
Insight #1: Long lasting change involves shifting the way people think
[…]
Try this
Work backwards. Go talk to the people you’re trying to influence and ask them what they care about. What are their biggest challenges? What changes are they trying to effect? Ask them if there are particular ways arts and culture could be helpful to them (or if they’ve even considered arts and culture as part of the equation). All of this information better positions you to illustrate how arts and culture can be woven into and make a difference in those things they care about. Ultimately, you’ll be better positioned to articulate exactly how investment in arts and culture will yield concrete benefits from an angle they already understand.
Creating Connection emphasizes that lasting change requires changing the way people think and that the effort to shift the thinking requires effort over the long term.
Note that Van Voorhis’ suggested approach starts with focusing on the community first rather than the organization. Consider and address their challenges first.
Earlier when I asked why it was that people voted for the millage proposal, what I suspect is the answer is that arts and culture connects with a deep need people have. That need transcends specific arts organizations so it is incumbent upon arts organizations to pay attention to serving that need.
There are more things from the study that she cites and what she cites is only a small segment of the whole study so if you are interested in making a similar case in your community, it may be worth taking a look.
I am in the process of moving so I am shifting in to “throwback” mode for a week or so.
I thought I would look back at a post I made about one of Ian David Moss’ contributions of a blog salon.
In his contribution Moss wrote took the view that arts education put children on the track to careers that the socioeconomic environment couldn’t support. (my emphasis)
Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 and 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital?
In my post at the time, I disagreed with the view writing,
Or rather, I don’t think operating on the assumption that not everyone will become an arts practitioner completely nefarious. No one expects every kid who participates in Little League, Pop Warner Football and various soccer leagues will go on to become a professional athlete after all the time they have invested in practicing. Though certainly a situation where a college athlete isn’t expected to devote themselves to their studies is not something to be emulated.
Your analogy to Little League sports is a good one. Sure, some of the participants dream of being professional football players, but most simply enjoy playing and the experiences they have with friends. For some reason, artists don’t recognize that this is the case for the arts as well. There are other reasons to do it than going pro — reasons that are just as fulfilling (I’d venture to say, in the current arts climate, oftentimes MORE fulfilling)… what an arts education promotes is a rich life that includes the possibility of creative expression as an end in itself, not a means to an end. This was the message of the “Gifts of the Muse” report, for instance: the INTRINSIC value of the arts. Lets not get lost in arts education as existing solely for the creation of professional artists or the creation of paying audience members. There is a more active and vibrant alternative to those roads.
In the intervening years, as I have begun to really think about the intrinsic value of art vs. the instrumental value, I have grown to appreciate Scott’s comments all the more. Reading this old post, I feel like this might have been a formative moment when I started thinking about arts education and making people aware of their capacity for creativity.
However, there is a lot of validity in Moss’ argument that universities and conservatories are taking the money of a lot of people with mediocre ability and preparing them for a traditional career path in the arts. This problem has been recognized for quite awhile now.
But also note my intentional use of “traditional career path” because there are an ever broadening array of ways in which creative abilities can be applied. Training programs aren’t doing the best job of preparing students to pursue those options.
This summer I have been seeing a lot of California Symphony Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer popping up in places like videos of conference talks she has been giving. It has been over a year and a half since I wrote about her Orchestra X project so I figured it was time to revisit and reacquaint people with the work she has been doing.
Recently she had a blog post following up on the conversations her organization has been having with the communities they serve. She mentions a theme I keep seeing in formal survey results and collected anecdotes — audiences aren’t clamoring for a change in programming as much as they are intimidated and confused by the decision and experience of attending a cultural event.
The bigger issue, she says, is that those of us on the inside forget what it was like being entirely unfamiliar with information or an experience. Even when we are faced with a new-ish experience, our past experiences allow us to make logical leaps that total novices can’t.
What we learned was that a “basic” level of understanding about the symphony or classical music does not exist among newcomers. Some people didn’t even know the names of the instruments in the orchestra, which to me, the person who had played an instrument all growing up and who wanted to manage a symphony since age 16, was pretty much unfathomable (remember hindsight bias?). The good news, we discovered, was that this group of smart people desperately wanted to learn about everything related to classical music though. And through the discussion we learned that the way we layout and present information on our website made it very difficult for them to do that.
[…]
Virtually every person in the room expressed the sentiment of “awe” when describing the art they saw and heard. No one said, “I need a shorter concert,” or “I need to hear more movie music.” They very much wanted to learn about all facets of the repertoire and were emphatic that the art is incomparable.
Bergauer says that now that California Symphony stopped stressing about programming mix and started focusing on retention versus new audience acquisition. Last season, their new attendee retention rate was over 30%.
Take a closer look at the post. She talks a little more about how rich experiences make us unable to anticipate what new attendees really need to know in order to enjoy themselves.
I was reading a piece in CityLab about Repair Cafes which strike me as a good complement to MakerSpaces and creative activities that arts and cultural entities may host. The concept was started in Amsterdam by Martine Postma who was disturbed by how much repairable equipment was sitting at the curb on trash day. She sells start up kits that allow you to use the Repair Cafe logo and puts you in touch with the other Repair Cafe’s around the world.
But beyond reducing what is sent to the landfill, personal empowerment plays a large role in the Repair Cafe concept:
What she’s discovered was that it wasn’t that people liked throwing away old stuff. “Often when they don’t know how to repair something, they replace it, but they keep the old one in the cupboard—out of guilt,” she said. “Then at a certain moment, the cupboard is full and you decide this has been lying around [long enough].”
[…]
For the time being, communities are doing what they can to encourage people to fix things. Libraries like the one in Howard County, for example, have started renting out tools and creating “makerspaces” where members learn to both repair and create. Elsewhere, cities have hosted MakerLabs, FabLabs—short for fabrication lab—and Innovation Labs for both adults and children. Bike shops and nonprofits alike have fished scrapped vehicles from the landfill to repair and donate to the underserved community.
The social and personalized elements of the Repair Cafes, makerspaces, etc may be part of the value and appeal. After all, you can watch a YouTube how-to video to fix something that breaks. If you don’t have confidence in your ability to effect the repairs, having someone available to teach you the skills to do so in the process of fixing your stuff might motivate you to act. This despite the fact it is more trouble to haul your broken equipment somewhere versus tossing it in the trash.
It is also easier to toss stuff away rather than hauling it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but people donate goods to non-profits all the time because they know it is better not to let things go to waste.
Just as recognizing your capacity to be creative is empowering, learning to fix items can instill a degree of pride and self-satisfaction which is why I feel it is such a close companion effort to creative activities.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…