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creativity

Creativity Arrives Late To Meetings

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Daniel Pink posted a link on Twitter about a study performed by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University which revealed people have a misperception about when they are most creative.  Most people feel they are most creative at the beginning of a brainstorming session but in fact they tend to produce the highest quality ideas after spending a fair bit of time working on the task.

…participants incorrectly judged their later ideas as less creative—because, the researchers reasoned, those ideas were harder to access. Yet, as in the first study, the opposite was true: ideas that took longer to excavate were more likely to be truly innovative.

In another study, Nordgren and Lucas put the creative-cliff illusion to the test in a real-world setting. They recruited students and alumni of The Second City’s training program to participate in a New Yorker–style cartoon-caption contest …The online competition was judged by three professional comedians, who rated the 91 submissions for novelty and funniness (a proxy for creativity).

[…]

Those who believed good ideas come early submitted fewer jokes overall, the researchers found—and fewer of the jokes they submitted were rated as highly creative by the judges. In other words, the more people believed their funniness would fade over the 15-minute task, the less productive and funny they actually were.

People who did a lot of creative work were less apt to think that the best ideas came early because they perceived their creative level remained consistent throughout. However, that perception is only slightly better than the belief that creativity peaks early.

But participants with lots of creative experience didn’t make the same mistake. They predicted that creativity would remain relatively constant—a belief that is still overly pessimistic, but closer to correct than most other participants’ predictions. Experience helped them see the power of continuing to chip away at the problem.

“It’s really people who are in the trenches doing creative work that learn this lesson,” Nordgren says.

The researchers provide some important advice–don’t let your creative sessions be bound by your meeting schedule. (my emphasis)

“If you’re struggling, keep going,” he says. This and his earlier research on creativity reveal that “our intuitions about how this process works are wrong, and that our best ideas are there. They just require more digging.”

This may mean resisting the temptation to select an idea just because a meeting is ending—a temptation rooted in the false belief that future ideas will be worse. Instead, “maybe you say, ‘I think there are still some better ideas we haven’t explored. Let’s all commit individually to putting another hour into this and come back next week.’”

Top Of Your Pyramid Is The Bottom Of Someone Else’s

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Hat tip to Vu Le at NonProfitAF for posting a link on social media to an essay on Medium comparing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need to the Blackfeet Nation’s similar concept.  Maslow had lived among the Blackfeet in Alberta, Canada for six weeks when he was developing his theories. If you read the article the question of whether he appropriated the concept without crediting the Blackfeet is a complicated one.

What immediately appealed to me was the point that while Maslow’s hierarchy ends with self-actualization, that is where the Blackfeet model begins.  To a great degree it is the difference between an individually focused society and a communal one. The assumption seems to be that the community will provide the food, shelter, clothing and safety needs that provide the base of Maslow’s model and therefore you start life working on the self-actualization part and then one moves on to contributing to the welfare and perpetuity of the culture.

The Blackfoot model describes the inverse of Maslow’s Hierarchy:

1. Self-actualization. Where Maslow’s hierarchy ends with self-actualization, the Blackfoot model begins here. In their view, we are each born into the world as a spark of divinity, with a great purpose embedded in us. That means that we arrive on earth self-actualized.
[..]

4. Community Actualization. In tending to our basic needs and safety, the tribe equips us to manifest our sacred purpose, designing a model of education that supports us in expressing our gifts. Community actualization describes the Blackfoot goal that each member of the tribe manifest their purpose and have their basic needs met.
5. Cultural Perpetuity. Each member of the tribe will one day be gone. So passing on their knowledge of how to achieve community actualization and harmony with the land and other peoples gives rise to an endurance of the Blackfoot way of life, or cultural perpetuity.

The big reason this appealed to me is that it aligns with a post I wrote last May, Creativity Is Not The Last Thing People Need

As I wrote then:

It should be noted that despite the popularity of this model, there is no scientific data to back it and studies have found that different cultures prioritize needs differently.

I mention these criticisms of Maslow’s hierarchy because it is easy to look at this pyramid and get the impression that creativity has to wait until all these other needs are met. This reinforces the idea that arts and culture are a luxury that should yield before all the necessities have been addressed. I think we all know there will always be something else that needs to be solved if you subscribe to that thinking.

When I wrote that post, I had linked to the Wikipedia article on Maslow’s hierarchy which notes the Blackfeet influence but I didn’t know enough about it at the time to understand the differences in world view to apply it.  I certainly can’t make any definitive statements about how expressions of creativity might be viewed and valued in a Blackfeet society, but from the little bit that discussed in the Medium article it seems it would be viewed as more integral to everyone’s basic identity and capacity vs. a gift bestowed/possessed by a chosen few.

The Secret Lives Of Museum Tour Guides

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Long times readers know that when I was living in Ohio I had a close relationship with a local group called the Creative Cult. We did a number of projects together and I participated in the events they sponsored. The local art museum wisely decided to bring one of the cult’s inner circle, Nick, on staff and he has been making some great contributions to the organization.

This week the museum has made a series of Facebook posts under the title “Things Written At The Front Desk,” with some pictures from Nick’s journal/sketchbook and other projects he has worked on while at the desk. Today was the second post in the series and really caught my attention because it featured Nick’s illustrations of a guide to a gallery exhibit.   At first I was excited because I thought perhaps the museum had reopened for socially distanced exhibitions, but the guide was made for a pre-Covid exhibit.

Regardless of when it was made, the concept of walking into a museum and picking up a guide to an exhibition which was hand illustrated by one of the people greeting you struck me as something that would make the whole experience feel more welcoming and accessible.  The pamphlet Nick illustrated reflects his quirky aesthetic, presenting the visitor with Marty, a cartoon figure who will accompany on your journey complete with a map of Marty’s suggested route through the exhibition.

Then things take a strange turn and some of the illustrations reference to Marty’s diary and a beast being hunted down by a classic mob armed with pitchforks and torches. Clearly the whole guide isn’t depicted so we are missing parts of the story, but that makes you want to learn more, right?

Not only that, wouldn’t you be interested in seeing a museum exhibition framed by an information pamphlet that implied your tour guide may have a monstrous alter-ego….or perhaps it was all just a strange dream?

https://www.facebook.com/southern.ohio.museum/posts/5655438514481520

 

Creative Expression As The Basis For Inclusive Democracy

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I came across a TED talk video on the importance of creative industries to national governments not five minutes after I had a conversation with staff on that very topic.

Mehret Mandefro talks about how she contributed to making creative industries a central part of Ethiopia’s plans to provide employment opportunities for the segment of its population experiencing the greatest growth, 15 to 29 year olds.

She notes that typically arts and creativity are seen as nice things to have, but not essential.  She disagrees and feels it is not only important for economic development, but also social identity and political stability. While she hadn’t intended to do so when she moved back to Ethiopia, Mandefro found herself essentially building a training program for creative workers from the ground up. (Demonstrated by the video of this talk.) That lead to her eventually participating in the generation of policy recommendations for creative industries for inclusion in the National Jobs Action Plan.

Now, putting culture on the economic agenda is an incredibly important milestone. But the truth of the matter is, there’s far more at stake than just jobs. Ethiopia is at a critical juncture, not just economically but democratically. It seems like the rest of the world is at a similar make-or-break moment. From my perspective on the ground in Ethiopia, the country can go one of two ways: either down a path of inclusive, democratic participation, or down a more divisive path of ethnic divisions. If we all agree that the good way to go is down the inclusive path, the question becomes: How do we get there?

[…]

…Artists have long found ways to inspire inclusion, tell stories and make music for lasting political impact. The late, great American hero, Congressman John Lewis, understood this when he said, “Without dance, without drama, without photography, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.”

…I think any government that views arts as a nice thing to have as opposed to a must-have is kidding itself. Arts and culture in all of their forms are indispensable for a country’s economic and democratic growth. It’s precisely countries like Ethiopia that can’t afford to ignore the very sector that has the potential to make the greatest civic impact. So just as John Lewis understood that the civil rights movement could not take flight without the arts, without a thriving creative sector that is organized like an industry, Ethiopia’s future, or any other country at its moment of reckoning, cannot take flight. The economic and democratic gains these industries afford make the creative economy essential to development and progress.

You Say Capt. Kirk Was Unqualified? That’s What Made Him A Leader.

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In December Seth Godin made two posts titled Creativity Is An Act of Leadership. The second of the two added (Redux).

I am a little leery of the trend in articles which label leaders as doing constructive things and managers being dedicated to the status quo. It smacks of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Not to mention, there are so many articles with these lists, you would be hard pressed to keep track of what you are supposed to be doing lest to backslide into managerial morass. I prefer to think of the qualities attributed to leaders as things one should aspire to so you don’t get caught in a destructive cycle of self-recrimination if you occasionally want to spend time not reinventing the wheel.

That said, these are some of the things in Godin’s posts I liked. It resonates with work environments at artist organizations, especially as many move toward a more shared governance dynamic. Though there are still plenty of places with structured tiers of authority.

Leadership is voluntary. It’s voluntary to lead and it’s voluntary to follow.

When you have power and authority, it’s tempting to manage instead. Managers get what they got yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Managers use authority to enforce behavior.

But leadership involves acting as if. Leaders paint a picture of the future and encourage us to go there with them.

Which is what anyone who makes change through creative work is doing.

[…]

For too long, we’ve been confused about the true nature of leadership. It’s not about authority at all. It’s the brave work of inventing the future.

The second post is similar, but it focuses more on the theme of how leadership is like creativity in that you are constantly pushing into uncharted territory. The idea of leaders being those who stretch beyond their qualifications is intriguing. At the same time, the sentiment has long been enshrined in the opening narration of Star Trek episodes about going where no one has gone before.

If you feel like an impostor, it might be because you’re comparing yourself to a manager. We want managers and craftspeople to know precisely the steps that are involved in their work, and we want them to do it flawlessly.

Leaders, on the other hand, can never be qualified, because they’ve never done this before.

And creators — creators that don’t have a fancy job or aren’t given the label of “leader” — the same thing is true for them.

You don’t need a permit or a badge or a title to be a creative. You simply need to care enough to do creative work.

[…]

The next time you’re stuck being creative, perhaps it pays to substitute the word ‘leader’. And yes, the next time you’re stuck being a leader, perhaps it makes sense to use the word ‘creator’ instead.

Maybe They Could Increase Residency By Offering A Pastry Of The Month Subscripton?

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A little bit of amplification of my local community today. Next City ran an article on the Mill Hill artist village that is developing in one of Macon’s original neighborhoods, Ft. Hawkins. The project is a partnership between Macon-Bibb Urban Development Authority, Macon Arts Alliance and the Historic Macon Foundation which has developed renovated houses once used by mill workers into artist housing.

They also turned the auditorium building that once served the mill community into an activity space which includes a large industrial kitchen which is being used by a baking collective, but is also available for hourly rental on a more casual basis.

The industrial kitchen was installed as a result of interviews done with the local community when the project had barely been conceived. People had mentioned their mode of creative expression was related to food and that they were running businesses out of their home kitchens.

When the project first began, the people behind what would become Mill Hill worked with the local Roving Listeners group. They went door to door in 2015 for six months, getting stories from people. This included talking with people at Davis Homes, a 184-unit public housing development down the street from Mill Hill.

“We weren’t even talking about a forthcoming project,” Olive says. “It’s pretty common for development projects to go in and say, ‘We’re going to do this planning effort. We’re going to have community meetings. We’re going to do this.’ And it’s all sort of framed around ‘because we’re going to do this project in the future.’ And really, with the Roving Listeners phase, it wasn’t through any lens. It was just knocking on people’s doors.”

They recorded people’s stories and compiled some of them along with photos in a book called “Heard on the East Side,” distributing it to residents. They also referred back to those conversations when creating the Mill Hill master plan, which was completed in 2018.

Currently, there isn’t a lot of occupancy in the artist village. Of the seven houses that have been restored, only one has been purchased by a private individual. One the Arts Alliance owns for use by its artist-in-residence. As those interviewed for the article indicated, there hasn’t been a lot of marketing done to make people aware of the spaces. As a result, they haven’t reached a critical mass of interest.

I will confess to possibly contributing to that. When I was looking to buy a house around this time last year, I was seriously considering some of those houses but the fact listings indicated they had been on the market for over a year raised concerns about how easy it would be to resell a house if I decided to move.

However, one of the great benefits those houses have is that they are located right next to a pedestrian and maintenance gate into the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. It is basically a private entrance into an historic site with miles of walking & biking trails which also hooks up to an expanding community trail.  I used that entrance a number of times when I was living in Macon’s downtown. Even when the historical park is closed, you can pick up the community trail about 1/4 mile away.

I should also mention that the houses are pretty nice with a lot of open space making them well suited for studio use.

While the houses might not be occupied, the former auditorium space gets used a lot for events, classes and meetings of all sorts. The kitchen the bakers used is HUGE and well-equipped. The best events are those which show off the talents of those bakers.

So overall the project definitely has potential for great growth and is something worth watching.

This Christmas, Take A Vacation In The History of Your Neighborhood

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A number of arts organizations like the one I run as my day job, have started focusing on programming that is locally and regionally sourced since drawing on artists from a greater distance is not practical.  Back in April I saw an article on CityLab that seemed like cool idea that could be scaled up, adapted and lead by local arts organizations, even if it was over Zoom.  I held off writing about it because best results probably depended on access to local libraries and historical archives and not many of them were open to the public at the time. While this still remains the case in some communities, I thought I would toss the idea out there as something to tool up for as vaccine distribution increases.

The article author Ariel Aberg-Riger, set out to discover the history of her neighborhood in Buffalo, NY and created a little pictorial guide to her journey. She delved into the archives of newspapers, libraries, Library of Congress and local historical groups as well as chatting online with neighborhood groups on Facebook.

Her account is rather engaging and amusing. She talks about how she thought it ridiculous that people were taking out classified ads with pictures of their kids—until she realized that practice was an early precursor of Instagram. She found out that in 1924 a burglar had been caught by a previous owner of her house when the burglar reached under his pillow and woke the owner.

She also learned that her street originally had a different name that didn’t appear on maps because the road wasn’t paved. More interestingly  the person for whom the road was originally named opposed having it paved, but the city insisted on it so they could deliver coal to the public school. The compromise left part of the road unpaved for four years and as a result, the brick paving is two different colors right in front of Aberg-Riger’s house.

There is quite a bit more she discovered about how those who originally owned the land under her house were connected to the history of Buffalo at large, but I felt like just the little bit I shared here could provide the basis for creating short stories, plays, visual art works, storytelling sessions, narrative dances, etc, etc.

There are a number of directions an arts organization could go from involving people in researching elements of their community by holding contests for the best stories that are uncovered to getting them to participate in creating works based on information that is uncovered.

Stories from a more distant past might be useful in addressing uncomfortable topics of the present, including making people aware that history is seldom as clear cut as reported and problems faced today aren’t necessarily unprecedented and insurmountable and therefore capable of resolution.

Developing New Skills & Capacities

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In my post Monday I was wondering what influence Covid might have on dance choreography given the visual range of cameras, etc. Tuesday morning I woke up and saw a link on Artsjournal.com to an NPR interview with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre Artistic Director Robert Battle which partially answered that question.

Battle talks about a lot of the challenges the Ailey company had to navigate while trying to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Alvin Ailey’s  “Revelations”, a signature piece created during the Civil Rights era. Many of the challenges they faced were familiar – testing for the virus, changing the spacing between people, rehearsing in unfamiliar spaces and rendering a performance for an unfamiliar medium.

However, Battle also talks about lessons learned that they hope to leverage to their benefit even after Covid restrictions are lifted. This serves as an important example to all in the arts community because it is generally acknowledged that there is no return to the previous operating environment. As a result, new skills and capacities need to be developed. (my emphasis):

BATTLE: I definitely think so because often, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes, that thing that you, you know, you have to do differently and rethink and reimagine actually sticks around, you know (laughter)? It’s like, I can’t imagine that once we’re back doing live performance that some of the things we’ve learned about filming dance and embracing that as a thing unto itself rather than only a response to not being able to be in the theater, but to go into the art of filming dance – and I think that’s what’s wonderful about what we did with “Revelations.” You know, we did the “Wade In The Water” part outside in the garden. So it gave you that sense of being more authentic. So it just offered us such opportunities.

And so we want to make the filming look as if that’s what it’s meant to be – that it’s not saying, oh, well, unfortunately, we can’t be in the theater, so we’re going to do this. But we want it to look as if that was the intention all the time. And that’s what I think we’re achieving.

I Want Your Advice, But Not Your Feedback

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Via Daniel Pink is a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that suggests asking for advice rather than feedback.  On the surface this may sound like a distinction without a difference, but research has found that asking for advice garners more actionable suggestions than asking for feedback.

Those who were asked to give feedback tended to give vague comments along with general praise, such as, “the applicant seems to meet most of the requirements.” In contrast, those who were asked to provide advice were more critical and actionable in their comments…Specifically, advice-givers suggested 34% more ways to improve the application and 56% more ways to improve in general.

According to Amantha Imber who wrote the HBR piece, an important element of soliciting advice is specificity about what you want to learn.

Ask yourself, “What will really help me get better at [problem]?” For example, instead of asking, “What do you think of my revenue numbers from last quarter?” you could say, “So far, I’ve tried [a] and [b] but I haven’t been able to meet my goal. How would you have gone about doing this?”

[…]

If you ask people to think about what could help you in the future, the advice you will receive will be more specific and actionable. For example, you could make the ask specific, such as, “What could I change about my presentation skills to deliver a more powerful presentation next time?” or “Could you give me a few tips to make my slides more appealing?”

I feel I should mention that this approach for getting actionable suggestions is not a completely new idea in the arts world. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process which has been employed for about 20-30 years now involves creators asking for reactions about specific elements pretty much as outlined in the HBR article. Except in Lerman’s process there are more specific guidelines about the way respondents phrase their statements in order to keep the process focused.

Networks and Resources Have Always Mattered

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I recently came across an article the LA Review of Books on the book The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz.

Obviously, this sounded like a book I wanted to learn more about.

According to the reviewer, Robert Diab, Deresiewicz feels that the promise of the Long Tail espoused by Chris Anderson hasn’t emerged. He suggests that the broad ability to create has resulted a “..pie has been “pulverized into a million tiny crumbs.” The only people Deresiewicz feels have consistently benefited are big tech companies who have an interest in having people create content and then allowing other people to pirate that content.

This runs contrary to the early optimism of figures like former Wired editor Chris Anderson, who saw a bright future for less popular artists….Rather than a graph showing a sharp curve with most sales going to the top 100 or so artists, the net would lead to a graph with sales dispersed more gradually over millions of artists — leading to a long tail. But as Deresiewicz makes clear, this hasn’t happened. The net didn’t feed a long tail of content consumption; it just made the head of the curve a lot taller. In the 1980s, 80 percent of music album revenue went to the top 20 percent of content. Now it goes to the top one percent.

Deresiewicz conducted interviews with about 120 artists and found this to be the case across most disciplines. A lot of people were making very little. Others were doing moderately well, but weren’t able to really rise above a certain income cap. He also feels that artists are more vulnerable to market forces and less able to take the time to cultivate their ability. Unless Diab is misrepresenting Deresiewicz, I found myself disagreeing with some of his assumptions and conclusions.

According to Deresiewicz, the history of artists has moved from an apprentice to master system supported by patronage to the artist as a solitary genius and then to the post World War II model where “institutions — museums, theaters, orchestras, and universities — gave the creator a safe and steady perch.”

Deresiewicz feels that the concept of the artist as an entrepreneur responsible for managing all details for themselves has emerged in tandem with shift to institutions depending on temporary workers, adjunct instructors, general downsizing, and has not been beneficial.

But conditions today favor the amateur. They favor “speed, brevity, and repetition; novelty but also recognizability.” Artists no longer have the time nor the space to “cultivate an inner stillness or focus”; no time for the “slow build.” Creators need to cater to the market’s demand for constant and immediate engagement, for “flexibility, versatility, and extroversion.” As a result, “irony, complexity, and subtlety are out; the game is won by the brief, the bright, the loud, and the easily grasped.”

[…]

Deresiewicz shies away from putting it starkly, but the lesson is clear: a career on the older professional model — a gradual build to a moderate critical success — is only viable at this point for those who can support themselves for the long haul.

Again noting I have not read the book, the quibble I had with Deresiewicz is that throughout the range of history he mentions, it has always been the case that only those with either an independent source of wealth or family/friends network of support has been able to have an artistic career. You needed that to gain an apprenticeship during Da Vinci’s time and an internship any time in the last 25 years or more. Now granted, a much larger proportion of the population was supporting themselves as artisans during Da Vinci’s time than now, but the folks at the top of the social structure were also making  money from the work of those at the bottom.

I don’t doubt his statistics about 80% of revenue today going to 1% of content and the belief that an artistic career is becoming more tenuous and less remunerative. I just don’t know that what is required to carve out freedom to mature in ones artistic practice has worsened precipitously overall. It has always been weighted against those without access to connections and comparable resources.

One Creativity To Guide Them All!

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H/t Artsjournal.com which linked to an article on recent study which found artistic creativity and scientific creativity emerge from a similar source. (my emphasis)

“The big change for education systems would be moving away from a rather fragmented and haphazard approach to teaching creativity, to a much more holistic and integrated approach,” Prof Cropley says.

[…]

“Until this research, we didn’t know whether creativity in STEM was the same as creativity in anything, or if there was something unique about creativity in STEM. If creativity was different in STEM – that is, it involved special attitudes or abilities – then we’d need to teach STEM students differently to develop their creativity.

“As it turns out, creativity is general in nature – it is essentially a multi-faceted competency that involves similar attitudes, disposition, skills and knowledge, all transferrable from one situation to another.

“So, whether you’re in art, maths or engineering, you’ll share an openness to new ideas, divergent thinking, and a sense of flexibility.

Reading the text of the study, the researchers note that there is more exploration necessary in this area. For one thing, the study didn’t look at the role of age and gender in creativity. They also encourage deeper exploration of micro-domains of different fields:

Future studies therefore should investigate more explicitly possible differences between domains and micro-domains driven by specific environmental or contextual factors unique to those areas of activity. In simple terms, do engineers, for example, learn to think like engineers, in contrast to scientists or mathematicians? Does this then influence how these domains see creativity in products?

The last paragraph of the study summarizes the holistic and integrated approach the education system should employ as well as providing a little insight into how different fields value creativity:

People who are open, flexible and adept at thinking divergently are best placed to be creative, and education systems at all levels should foster those qualities. Conversely, while all areas of endeavor recognize creativity in outcomes (products) as inseparable from originality and relevance/effectiveness, there are discipline specific differences in exactly how these qualities are valued. It is no surprise that engineers have a more functional (see Cropley & Cropley, 2005) view of product creativity – valuing effectiveness and feasibility in particular – whereas artists place greater emphasis on originality. Creativity in people is broadly domain general, but creativity in products is shaped by the needs, standards and cultures of the disciplines that produce those creative outcomes.

For Whom Are People Creating Art?

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In September, the National Endowment for the Arts released the results of an Arts Participation survey, Why We Engage: Attending, Creating and Performing Art.

Much of the information about why people attend was very similar to other recent survey results I have written about in the last 3-6 months. To be honest, given that all the data was collected pre-Covid and so much of that may no longer be valid in the future, I didn’t want to devote a lot of time reviewing that information.

What caught my eye were some findings about how people view their own creative expression.

Like this bit about the intended audience for created art and how it was shared. I was surprised so few performing artists share their work on the internet compared to other artists.

Between 35 and 40 percent of art creators and performers said their art was intended only for personal consumption. (The percentage was highest for creative writers at nearly 40 percent.) Greater variance was observed among those who reported their intended audience as only people they personally knew: 52 percent of art creators identified this audience type, with only 32 percent of creative writers doing so. The highest percentage of respondents creating or performing for the general public were creative writers (29 percent), followed by arts performers (18 percent), and visual art creators (13 percent).

Nearly half of those who personally created art used the internet to share their work. In contrast, about 41 percent of those who engaged in creative writing used the internet to share their writing, and fewer than 14 percent of those who personally performed art shared their work in this manner.

The findings on price and income are interesting and complex. Income quartile was not predictive of whether people would say price factored in their decision to attend an event. In other words, income level didn’t necessarily align with whether they said price was a factor. However, of those identifying low cost as a motivation, it was almost the only reason they attended.

The percentage of each income group reporting that low cost motivated their attendance ranged from 30 to 39 percent, with those in the lowest-income quartile citing it the most often as a factor, and those in highest-income quartile citing it the least often. However, unlike in 2012, income quartile was not a significant predictor of whether an individual would identify low cost as a reason for attendance. Of those who identified low cost as a reason for attendance, between 68 and 71 percent of each income quartile group indicated the factor as the most important or only reason for their attendance.

Socialization was a big factor in generational terms. The younger the generation, the more frequently the respondent would say not having someone to accompany them was a barrier to participation. While Covid may change a lot about people’s willingness to venture out for in-person experiences, I suspect this is one finding of the survey that will hold true for those that are willing to attend in-person in the future.

An Eye For Justice And Opera

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I knew Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved opera. There are stories about her and Justice Scalia’s friendship and shared love of opera. A few weeks ago, I had written about the artistic director of the Tulsa Opera’s comments in a documentary film about being married by Justice Ginsburg who had admired the director’s work as a composer.

I have to say I appreciated that Chief Justice Robert’s eulogy today used her love of the performing arts as a significant theme, referencing opera multiple times, her rock star reputation and speaking of the court as her stage.  I wish more eulogies were that way. It makes the deceased seem like they lived a more well rounded life versus simply talking about their professional accomplishments.

So I was annoyed that some news sources edited the performing arts content out of videos of Robert’s speech.

There were a couple article this weekend about Ginsburg’s passion for the arts, but the one I like best was written by the Washington Post’s Peter Marks.

Not only was she a passionate spectator, she made cameo appearances in some productions and appears to have married a whole lot of creatives along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

It was interesting to note that the very first commenter on the Washington Post article says he asked for a refund as soon as he saw Ginsburg was performing that night because he paid good money to see professionals, not amateurs perform.

That, of course, is a whole other discussion.

The Originality That Is Sought Is Not The True Originality

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h/t to Artsjournal.com (I believe) which linked to an article about creativity from the Chinese perspective, or at least perspective of the philosopher(s) known as Zhuangzi.

This is a view that resonates with the sentiment, much hated by some arts students, that you need to master the fundamentals before you can diverge from them.    The author of the article, Julianne Chung, cites one of the many parables/stories that comprise the works attributed to Zhuangzi, (you may know the famous “Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a man.“), in which a wheelwright speaks about true mastery and understanding is earned through long, patience and experience and thus books only contain the “chaff and dregs” of true knowledge.

Chung’s discussion of this view leans toward the “99% perspiration, 1% inspiration” approach to creativity. While this may sound like a endorsement of learning by rote repetition, it is clear that observation and reflection are important components of this process.

Of course, being a Daoist philosopher, one of Zhuangzi’s underlying ideas is the true Way can not be actively sought and Chung reflects that in her commentary:

…de-emphasising originality might ironically result in greater creativity. This is because striving for originality can actually be counterproductive when it comes to achieving genuinely fresh results: if we focus on the task of achieving something original, we’ll explore only the range of possibilities deemed sufficiently likely to yield that result, leaving out a lot that could have contributed to achieving something original.

But imagine instead that we worked with the idea that creativity wasn’t about novelty. That doesn’t mean we’d have to give up the value of originality entirely, but rather see it as one of a range of possible outcomes. Casting a wider net in this way might hence make creativity (whatever it involves) easier to achieve.

[…]

This alternative perspective on creativity might help us to see it as an everyday phenomenon in which we all participate – rather than an extraordinary talent or gift that only a few enjoy. And it might also allow us to make sense of the idea of living creatively: of an integrated life, lived spontaneously, in which all of life’s contrasting aspects can be arranged to form a rich and variegated whole.

The concept that an original product is one of many possible outcomes seems to be a more constructive approach than always striving for novelty and viewing anything that is not as lesser.

Long time readers will likely recognize that the suggestion embracing this perspective may help a broader range of people view creativity as something everyone has the capacity to participate in is very appealing to me.

Cirque Got Back In The Air In China

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Many have probably heard about the Broadway productions in South Korea which only experienced a brief shutdown thanks to the swift and fairly comprehensive measures the government and productions put in place to combat Covid-19. Come to find out, there is a Cirque du Soleil production in Hangzhou, China which managed to get back into production in May despite China being an early epicenter of the disease. The China show didn’t start performing again until July, however.  It was one of two Cirque productions performing at the time of the article was written. (I am not sure what the other production is. I see Mystere is running in Vegas, but the other Vegas productions don’t start until October.)

During the shutdown period, many of acrobats cobbled together practice routines to maintain their strength and flexibility since their normal training faculties were unavailable. One of the biggest challenges the production faced was that many of their foreign performers had left the country and couldn’t re-enter in order to rejoin the show.  They ended up having to basically revamp the performances and supporting technology to integrate all the changes into the overarching narrative concept.

Over a manic three-week period, “X” hired over a dozen replacement actors and acrobats from troupes across China, who had to be trained and taught the show in its entirety.

Scenes containing foreign stars were replaced and re-choreographed. A duo of figure-skating Russians was swapped out for a group of Cyr wheel performers, who roll around the stage inside giant metal hoops. The high-flying bungee rope artists were substituted for a “water meteor” juggling act. Local trampoline specialists created a simplified version of the show’s original “trampowall” segment, in which the experienced foreign artists would flip and spin off of a high vertical wall.

Changing or cutting acts is routine during Cirque shows, but making so many changes while remaining faithful to the “X” storyline was a huge challenge, according to Chouinard.

[…]

The hardest-working crewmembers were the technical team, who had to adjust the music, graphics, lighting, and animations to fit with the altered show. Each change, meanwhile, had to be discussed and approved by Cirque’s headquarters back in Canada.

What was most surprising to learn was that the Chinese producers, Xintiandi,  were able to continue paying the bills for their idled production even as Cirque du Soleil was filing for bankruptcy protection. Still, despite Xintiandi’s substantial cash reserves, they have been renting out their performance facility to other events in an attempt to offset the reduced income resulting from a mandatory 50% seating capacity and weakened tourism outlook for Hangzhou.

Between February and June, Xintiandi continued to pay staff wages, venue bills, financial payments, and maintenance costs, without earning 1 yuan in income.

The Chinese firm, meanwhile, still has to pay Cirque an annual licensing fee for the show. When Sixth Tone spoke with Xia in July, she said the company was currently negotiating this year’s payment with its Canadian partner, with a slight grimace.

The deep pockets of Xintiandi have enabled the show to absorb these losses, but the current 50% attendance limit means the show can’t run profitably.

The Man Who Decided To Raise Artists Instead of Chickens

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It was with some sorrow that I learned this week that a great man who has literally been part of the grassroots effort to provide arts experiences to young people died last week. Albert Appel who, with his wife Clare, founded, or he might say floundered, into establishing an arts and music camp just turned 98 on July 5. A tribute to his life appears on the Appel Farm Arts and Music Campus website.

When I say he was literally part of a grassroots effort, it is because when he and his wife started giving music lessons to neighbor kids back around 1960, he was running a farm with 20,000 chickens, feed crops, and other animals. Gradually, the chickens began to be replaced by children. Again, literally. When I worked on the concert presenting side of the organization back in the early 2000s, two of the camp dorms were still refurbished chicken coops and were referred to as North & South Coop.

Albert, and his wife Clare, who had passed away before I started working there, are an admonishment against making assumptions about the artistic interests and capabilities of farmers. Albert trained to be a farmer, but he also played violin. He actually met Clare when friends told him they needed a violinist to fill out their string quartet.

The way Albert liked to tell it, he and Clare started the camp because kids would come over for music lessons and would never go home so he started charging their parents to let them hang around his house.

When I moved to South Jersey to take the job in winter 2000, I was told I could live in Albert’s house until I found a place of my own. I was given two room that used to be offices for the camp. As you moved through Albert’s house you could see that they had continued to add on to the house to accommodate camp activities. There were also some out buildings behind the house that got used. Finally, they moved a lot of the operations across the road–into the chicken coops, among other buildings. However, some of the original rooms continued to be used as living quarters for the camp counselors and staff during my tenure there.

The founding philosophy of the camp was that every kid has the capacity for creative expression. Come to think of it, working there may have serve to form my own views along those lines. A camper’s day was spent pursuing one major and two minors. The major was the area they identified as their core interest or area of experience and the minors were things they hadn’t really done, but wanted to explore. The subjects ranged from acting, dancing, music, ceramics, painting, photography, creative writing, video production.

Due to security concerns, folks like myself who didn’t work for the camp program weren’t generally allowed on the grounds past the administration building. However, I frequently helped distribute the mail and even without hearing them say it, it was clear that for a lot of those kids camp was a place they felt they could be themselves surrounded by people with similar interests versus who they had to be at home and at school.

But as I said, I wasn’t directly involved with the camp. My job was to run the operations for the concert series and music festival as well as to support the school outreach efforts. I count myself lucky to have lived in Albert’s house for a short time because even after I moved out, I would get invited to join him and his second wife, Peimin, when they were entertaining guests. Often it was groups like the Corigliano Quartet who were staying over in preparation for school residencies.

Albert would often pull out his violin to play or talk about his children’s music lessons on various instruments. Nearly all of Albert’s children play an instrument to some extent or another. His son Toby is a violist on the Julliard faculty. One story I recall involved inducements for him to practice piano. There are also a couple wild stories about Albert I heard from his kids.

Albert was definitely a character. Even though the livestock and poultry mostly departed the farm, all campers were required to work in the camp garden and the vegetables all made it to the kitchen for meals. Albert often gave the gardeners a hard time about how they were going about planting. A farmer can never really retire. He was just as passionate about creating an environment for people to cut loose with creative expression. At 80, he was pulling out his violin to play beside the campers. You would also hear the low drone of the instrument across the fields in the middle of the winter.

Obviously at 98, his death wasn’t unexpected but it is still saddening. Though at his 80th birthday party, he kept joking that if he had known he would live as long as he had, he would have taken better care of himself and he might have already made it to 90. Apparently someone was taking good care of him if he was so seriously pushing 100.

His legacy runs much deeper than thousands of kids attending arts camp over 60 years. As I mentioned, when I worked there the other nine months of the year were devoted to a concert series, school outreach programs and a pretty active conference calendar. Shortly after I left, Appel Farm started offering afternoon and evening arts classes to kids and adults and were the arts content provider for a local school district.

Now they have added a Families to College program that works with the whole family to provide an environment aligned with increasing the chances of success for college bound students. They are also involved with providing a charter school STEAM program. In a rural portion of southern NJ, programs like these can have big impacts.

I am sure there has been some positive impact on the economy of Elmer, NJ and Salem County that wouldn’t have existed if Appel Farm Arts and Music Center wasn’t there. But when we talk about the value of the arts, few would have the patience to wait 90 years, or smaller increment thereof, to see the result of giving 8 year old Albert music lessons. (Or his wife Clare for that matter, I am told she eclipsed him in passion for the camp’s mission.) And yet, there are thousands upon thousands of people who will attest to the immeasurable value of their experiences.

Love It So Much I Had To Destroy It

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A little background. I have had a Facebook account since ~2011 but I only created it so I could access and control my organizational Facebook pages. There are a very small number of people I friended when created the account and I pretty much haven’t friended anyone since. I don’t have a Facebook connection with any of my siblings or my mother. I pretty much ignore anything Facebook suggests I might want to watch.

That is until about 3-4 months ago. There was a video of magician/puzzle enthusiast Chris Ramsay solving a three dimensional puzzle. I am not really into puzzles, but the time, effort and craftsmanship people have put into creating the puzzles Ramsay gets his hands on is worthy of admiration. After awhile I realized watching Ramsay disassemble and reassemble a puzzle in 40 minutes that I know would take me a couple days to solve has gotten me to pay attention to all the different perspectives one may have to take to solve a problem–though his default opening move is usually to spin the puzzle. (His videos are generally edited down to about 10 minutes, but he generally has a timer running next to him.)

Suffice to say, he is really, really good at solving puzzles. However, there was one he really couldn’t solve and subsequently took a circular saw to it to learn its secrets. Then he immediately felt regret at having done it.

He made a video where he admits he could present a number of reasonable explanations about why he cut it open, but that he would be lying. He expresses his regret for cutting it open and apologizes to his viewers for having done it.

It was all very heartfelt and honest. Even though he wasn’t reflecting on his own creative process directly, he dedicates so many of his videos to admiring the mastery of puzzle makers and magicians, I feel like there is something worthwhile in witnessing his apology. Actually, you could probably use this as a jumping off point for a discussion about the destructive ways in which a declared fervent love or admiration for something can manifest.

I found the video on YouTube and cued it up to the start of the apology. Feel free to start from the beginning to see how the puzzle was crafted.

 

 

A Luxury Until You Ask: “Did Anybody Feel Like This Before?”

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If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably know that my gold standard for speeches about creative practice is one made by Ira Glass.

This being said, the TED site recently posted a video of Ethan Hawke titled, “Give Yourself Permission to Be Creative” which isn’t far behind Glass. In 10 minutes, he hits all the things we talk about in relation to arts and creativity: how little it is valued; how important it becomes in emotional times; how meaningful people find it in their lives, even though they are reticent to express it.

So you have to ask yourself: Do you think human creativity matters? Well, hmm. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and, “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?”

Or the inverse — something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight. You know, you’re dizzy. “Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?” And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it.

This is the part that really caught my attention because I think it is emblematic of how people may not feel they can share the delight they have experienced in the creative process:

My great-grandmother, Della Hall Walker Green, on her deathbed, she wrote this little biography in the hospital, and it was only about 36 pages long, and she spent about five pages on the one time she did costumes for a play. Her first husband got, like, a paragraph. Cotton farming, of which she did for 50 years, gets a mention. Five pages on doing these costumes. And I look — my mom gave me one of her quilts that she made, and you can feel it. She was expressing herself, and it has a power that’s real.

He bookends his talk by acknowledging that being creative often involves the risk of looking foolish. But he also says that as humans, we find it is one of the easiest, most natural things to start doing, especially as children. We see/hear something and are moved to start singing, percussing, or dancing in response to it. We might express our affinity by re-creating and recreating (one of the best pair of homographs in English) something through our play.

Music Doesn’t Make You Smarter, You Were Smart Already

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Not long ago I saw a link on Artsjournal.com to a short news piece saying a study found music won’t make people smarter. I sought out the study in on the Memory & Cognition journal website to learn a bit more about this metareview of previous studies on the subject.

The study authors state the following:

We can thus conclude that these findings convincingly refute all the theories claiming that music training causes improvements in any domain-general cognitive skill or academic achievement (e.g., Moreno et al., 2011; Patel, 2011; Saarikivi et al., 2019; Tierney & Kraus, 2013). In fact, there is no need to postulate any explanatory mechanism in the absence of any genuine effect or between-study variability. In other words, since there is no phenomenon, there is nothing to explain

Later they discuss that musical ability and intelligence are connected, but it is innate, rather trained, musical skill that is associated with intelligence. For awhile it appeared their findings might support that there is value in music education because it helps to strengthen those entwined roots at the base of natural musical aptitude and intelligence, basically activating a natural capacity which may have otherwise been dormant. However, the following statement seemed to eliminate that possibility.

These findings corroborate the hypothesis according to which the observed correlation between music training and particular domain-general cognitive/academic skills is a byproduct of previous abilities…Therefore, there is no reason to support the hypothesis that music training boosts cognition or academic skills. Rather, all the evidence points toward the opposite conclusion, that is, that the impact of music training on cognitive and academic skills is null

They do say it might be worth studying whether music training is beneficial for things like prosocial behavior and self-esteem. They say this is an understudied area along with exploring whether some “elements of music instruction (e.g., arithmetical music notation) could be used to facilitate learning in other disciplines such as arithmetic.”

200 Years Later, Still Looking For Concert Sponsors

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From the “more things change, the more things stay the same,” whose life do you think this describes?

….she is particularly sharp-eyed, and refreshing, on the practicalities that shape any artist’s life. How to make a living is a priority. “Reference is made throughout this book to the sums [deleted] earned,” reads the first introductory note. “He was strapped for cash,” she observes baldly, in those or similar words, more than once. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how many rehearsals can be squeezed in (usually only one, leading to some disastrous premieres), how much tickets should cost, how to wheedle rich sponsors into donating, how to deal with the uncomfortable business of self-promotion: all make the difference between food on the table or hunger, performance or silence. Ask any composer working today. The issues have not changed.

This is from a review in The Guardian of Laura Tumbridge’s Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces.

If you are interested, the reviewer, Fiona Maddocks, enjoyed the book which focuses on the composer through the lens of nine of his works. As a result, the book is a relatively short 288 pages.

It may be a good candidate as an introductory book for people who might be simultaneously interested and intimidated by the prospect of learning about classical music and composers. It appears Tumbridge really humanizes Beethoven, discussing the complaints neighbors had about loud music and shouting coming from his apartment as well as the composer’s resentment that Napoleon’s invasion of Vienna was putting a cramp on the city’s party scene. Not to mention that French occupation of Vienna apparently suppressed attendance of an early version of his opera, Fidelio.

Proteges Aren’t Vessels To Be Filled

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Daniel Pink tweeted about a mentorship study conducted by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University this week. While the study was conducted on scientists, I have to think the results apply even more truly for arts professionals because it finds the most successful proteges are those that chart a different path from their mentors.

Basically, the finding are that proteges whose mentors don’t push them to be mini-me clones of themselves (or proteges that don’t style themselves in that manner) are much more successful in the long run. This may seem like a foregone conclusion for arts disciplines which pride themselves on pushing boundaries. In my own career path, I have encountered mentors in acting, tech and administration who had a fairly narrow concept of the path they wanted proteges to follow. While I may be moving into old fogey-hood and that may not be as widespread, I get the sense that there are still people who demand a strict adherence to their guidance.

But new research from Brian Uzzi, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, shows that mentorship is indeed beneficial—especially when mentors pass down unwritten, intuitive forms of knowledge.

[…]

What’s more, “mini-mes” don’t necessarily thrive. Protégés are most successful when they work on different topics than their mentors.

For many of us, that’s a new way of thinking about mentorship. “People almost always think of the mentor as the really active element. The mentee is the passive element, absorbing the mentor’s knowledge,” Uzzi says. “Some of that’s true, but it turns out it’s really not a one-way arrow. It’s incumbent upon the mentee to branch out, take their mentor’s tacit knowledge, and do something that breaks new ground. The mentee has a big responsibility for their own success.”

The researchers were careful to study the mentor-protege relationships that existed before the mentor won a big prize. Obviously once someone receives great recognition, they will tend to attract the interest of many more highly skilled people from which they could chose proteges. In the study they compared proteges of pre-prize winners with those of people who didn’t receive a prize for their work.

In the short term, proteges of non-prize winners received more accolades, but in the long term, those that were mentored by future-prize winners had even greater success. The most successful proteges of all are those who worked with future prize winners and then went on to work in a different subject area from their mentor.

They attribute this arc to the fact that future prize winners need to do more basic work upon which to ground new progress so their proteges will receive recognition later in their careers. Proteges going in new directions from their mentors need additional time to succeed in charting their own path.

Of course, this whole dynamic mirrors the ideal parent-child relationship where the parent wants the child to exceed their achievements.

In addition, Uzzi expresses some concern that Covid-19 is inhibiting the transmission of the unwritten, intuitive knowledge. This is something to think about concerning the arts. It can be a good thing in that it potentially interrupts the transmission of practices we don’t want enshrined like limits on opportunities for under-represented people in all levels of performance, governance and decision making. Obviously it can be detrimental if people have to reinvent or rediscover knowledge that facilitates creation.

Uzzi and his coauthors believe that what’s being passed between future prizewinners and protégés is tacit knowledge. Mentees aren’t just learning concrete skills from their mentors. They’re also picking up how their mentors come up with research questions, how they brainstorm, how they interact with collaborators, and so on—knowledge that is difficult to codify and often learned by doing.

Yeah, I Have Weird Feelings, Too

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Hat tip to the National Endowment for the Arts for linking to this video of an 11 year old taking The Bob Ross Challenge – basically trying to keep up and replicate Bob Ross’ painting instructions as he relates them during an episode of his show.

The kid, Khary Halsey, an avowed Bob Ross fan since he was six, is charming and hilarious just on his own. But it is right at the end of the video that he says something that encompasses what the creative experience should be for everyone, “From the looks of it, I did horrible, but I feel great.”

Okay, so obviously people shouldn’t always think they did horrible, it is the satisfaction and enjoyment of the experience regardless of the perceived quality of the product that I am advocating as the ideal.

Khary isn’t sure if he is supposed to be having this contradictory experience so he follows up saying, “I have weird feelings.”   The truth is, those feelings are quite normal and shared by a lot of people, including, I am sure many with long careers in the arts.  There are a lot messages we get throughout the day, both overt and subtle,  that equate quality with marketability. (And don’t get us started on “you shouldn’t expect to get paid if you are having fun.”)

Innovation Results From Hard Work And Funding

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In the Washington Post, Jon Gertner reviews a book about innovation by Matt Ridley.  One aspect of the book Gertner emphasizes is Ridley’s view that innovation is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration:

Ridley’s most important chapters, and his book’s most interesting, are where he calls attention to “surprisingly consistent patterns” that describe the process of making new things. Innovation, he tells us, is usually gradual, even though we tend to subscribe to the breakthrough myth….He also illustrates how innovation can be a matter of the right people solving the right problem at the right time — and that it often involves exhaustive trial-and-error work, rather than egg-headed theoretical applications. This was typically the case with Thomas Edison, who, as Ridley notes, tried 6,000 different organic materials in the search for a filament for his electric light.

Gertner’s criticism of the book is it underappreciates the contributions of government funding in that long process of trial-and-error exploration.

Thus, you won’t find a lot here about the development of the atomic bomb, which depended almost entirely on state largesse, or about the subsidization of renewable energy. Nor will you read much on the transistor, many early lasers or the photovoltaic solar cell, which were created under the auspices of Bell Labs, part of a government-authorized monopoly…. And in Ridley’s story about the origins of Google, you will not see any indication that its founders were helped in their earliest days by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Indeed, his book consistently plays down the influence of public funding in medicine, public health, personal technology, transportation and communications; it likewise minimizes — quite strenuously, and erroneously — the role of federal assistance in the development of natural gas fracking, which was kept alive by research investments from the Energy Department in the 1970s.

Reading this review, I realized in the 16+ years I have been writing this blog, I don’t think I have ever made a post that tied the lengthy process of creativity together with the importance of funding.

I have dealt with the topics separately. I have had a number of posts about how even creators often attribute their first big successes to some inherent stroke of genius or talent rather than to the 7 years of trial and error that lead to it.

I have also made posts about the importance of government and foundation funding to creative industries. I think the closest I may have come to directly tying both together are some posts I made about how people who have a support and expectations of relatively affluent families/friends are more able to participate in low paying internships/apprenticeships which can be highly important to networking and career development.

In any case, obviously innovation is a long term process which requires funding support and there aren’t a lot of entities willing to make that investment when it comes to creative arts.

By that same token, it shouldn’t be forgotten that businesses in general have benefited from government support of the basic research which constitutes the backbone of many of their products.

Perhaps all those calls for the arts to be run like a business should be answered by noting that contrary to all the garage origin stories of many famous companies, artists are often left to subsidize their own development. Additionally, the history of innovation of all types is one of government support.

 

Making Time For Your Creativity Can Be The Hardest Part

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While people still haven’t returned to the daily routines they may have had before Covid-19 brought a halt to so much of our lives, it might be worth encouraging people to continue cultivating whatever creative practices they may have engaged in during these times. Reinforce the value of whatever they became interested in as part of their lives. Chances are people are reconsidering what things they found fulfilling before and whether those things still hold value for them.

That said, there is always an investment of time and a learning curve involved with starting anything new. That can be a disincentive to continuing for people who are seeking the comfort of their earlier familiar lives.

It has been awhile since I linked to a cartoon from the Zen Pencils site. This one is excerpted from a page the cartoonist wrote about his own practice.

Long time readers know before I moved to my current position in Georgia, I lived in Ohio where I tried to infiltrate a Creative Cult, a group of people who provided the community with various hands-on creative experiences at different places around town. They are still up to their shenanigans and currently have people on a hunt around the community trying to find “eggs” that were stolen out of museum paintings.

Nick Sherman, a young gentleman who may or may not be the mysterious, yet dashing cult leader has a weekly newsletter which includes missives to him from the Creative Underground explaining all the ways in which the Man will try to convince him he isn’t creative or that he should be prioritizing other things over his creative pursuits.

For example, on May 1 the Creative Underground wrote:

This is what we mean. THE MAN starts by whispering in your ear something very obvious; that there is a time for art-making, and there is a time not for art-making. A harmless statement right? Wrong! THE MAN never stops where he should. He then goes on to cleverly suggest that, “If you are doing your art, you must be neglecting something else.” Do you see his trap?

Then because you want to be a responsible, upstanding, person you think, “Of course! I do not see my little old grandmother nearly enough.” You go see her. And in this way, THE MAN keeps bringing up distraction after distraction (even legitimate ones!) that keep you from your art. Something always comes up. Soon, your brain makes a very dangerous and direct comparison. It flashes like a bright-red neon sign against the darkest corner of your brain. “ART = SELFISH”

In this way, Nick anthropomorphizes all those insecurities and doubts everyone has about their creative practice. Granted, sometimes there are actually people in our lives who are more than happy to give voice to these sentiments and there is no need to provide them with a metaphoric form.

You can subscribe to Nick’s newsletter here if you have an interest.

Teamwork? We Got Tons

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I read stories celebrating the fact that Covid-19 is finally making businesses recognize the benefits of telecommuting, confident that there will be this great revolution that will see people working from home in the future. To me it seems like it will be a terrible situation which will create greater class divides and income inequality.

I don’t think it takes a great deal of imagination to see how telecommuting will enable companies to more easily classify workers as independent contractors and not provide any health benefits. Because employees won’t be seeing and interacting with each other on a regular basis where they can compare notes about wages, work loads and other expectations, it will make it easier to underpay employees and prevent them from organizing to demand better pay.

Already employees are subsidizing the companies they work for by bearing the cost of electricity and internet connections. I know at least one person who is paying for her own mobile hotspot in order to do her job because the internet speed in her location is not fast enough.

Yes, it may provide greater work opportunities to people living in rural areas and may even improve the economies of some rural places as people move there, but again those places will need to have good technology infrastructure in place to support those workers. And not everyone will have the resources to move to places with a lower cost of living, nor will the potential pay for the work they are qualified to do justify the move.

Which is not to say the current work environment is any more beneficial. I just feel that except for people with higher status jobs, a move to telecommuting is potentially a worse situation unless accompanied by some strong worker protections, especially in regard to health insurance.

But the intent of this blog post isn’t really to get into a debate about socio-political-economic policy as much as it is to provide a context for potentially the biggest drawback of telecommuting — a degradation of creative interaction and teamwork.

Steve Jobs famously designed Pixar’s offices so all the restrooms and mailboxes were in a central location so that people working in disparate departments and projects would engage in casual “what are you working on?” conversations they wouldn’t otherwise have. His hope was that this would drive innovation and result in creative leaps.

Today on the CNN site there was an article titled “Minneapolis theater community uses stagecraft skills to support businesses of color in the aftermath of protests” One of the people interviewed made what is probably a very familiar comment to many of you:

“For anyone who has arts training, they are taught early on how to collaborate with people. And that collaboration comes with the ability to quickly organize and problem-solve,” said University Rebuild organizer Daisuke Kawachi, who pointed out the valuable stagecraft skills volunteers are now applying to their community.

And as with Pixar, physical proximity makes others more aware of resources than they might have normally been:

Kawachi estimated University Rebuild has supported more than 200 businesses. He said the number could be higher, because some requests have come on the spot while volunteers are in the field.
“We’ll go to a business and then their neighbor will say ‘come over.'”

Because we are steeped in the culture, a lot of us take a collaborative team environment for granted. As much as businesses have been saying that creativity is one of the top things they look for in employees, if telecommuting becomes widespread, collaboration and teamwork may become a greater competitive advantage as well.

I Figured This Was Highly Unlikely. What A Difference A Month Makes

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Early last month I bookmarked an article by Jeremy Reynolds in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette intending to come back to address it in a blog post in some manner. In the article, Reynolds was arguing for shorter classical music concerts.  At the time, I figured it would never happen broadly due to the inertia of tradition.

Now with public events shutdown and artists and organizations streaming their performances, I strongly suspect a lot more people are going to be open to exploring the basic concepts Reynolds espouses.

If concerts were shorter, the quality of musicianship could increase significantly. I often chastise classical groups for bloated, unnecessarily long recitals. An hour of tight, balanced, in-tune playing is vastly preferable to a two- or three-hour slog of mediocrity.

While some organizations say a program should fill an evening, offering quantity over quality is a poor strategy even if funders tend to favor inventive and diverse programming.

He also accuses ever lengthening intermissions of impeding the momentum of the experience. Since his article opens with him advising friends to go home at intermission, I imagine he would be all for a short, intermissionless performance which would solve two problems at once.

He addresses the idea that you have to give people their money’s worth:

I realize that the cost of ticket prices (which I recently argued are too expensive given how little revenue tickets generate) causes some groups to feel they need to hit a minimum threshold of time, but this is arbitrary. Maybe it’s not about the length of the program, but what an organization does with it that matters most.

[…]

The New World Symphony, a forward-thinking training ensemble in Miami, rolled out a series of concerts years ago that ran for 30 minutes and 60-75 minutes.

“The trick is not to think you have to fill an evening,” orchestra President Howard Herring said. “The question isn’t just: What music do I want to bring forth? but What is the uncompromised artistic experience that only we can provide?”

Now that groups and individuals are streaming their performances, they are almost certainly getting a lot of exercise evaluating and providing a highly focused uncompromised artistic experience. If things ever move back to the former semblance of normal, I think it would be a safe bet that those who continued to employ the “muscles” they developed while focusing on delivering an uncompromised experience will be on a firmer path to success.

Being Generous With Your Creativity

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Since I have been on the topic of arts and cultural organizations broadly providing content to anyone who happens by virtually, I figured there is space to point to another voice in the conversation.

Seth Godin made a post recently titled Generous isn’t always the same as free.  I raised the idea yesterday that maybe providing all this content isn’t in the best interests of creative entities in the long term.

Godin’s idea of generous not being the same as free may hold a key to resolving questions about this. He uses examples of a doctor taking the time to understand your needs, a waitress anticipating your needs and a boss who provides the challenging work you need.

In this last case, the generosity might actually result in you working longer and harder than before in order for you to grow. It may be a few years before you recognize that bit of generosity was beneficial and required more of your boss than they need have invested in you.

I don’t bring this up to transition to an argument about suffering contributing to the eventual growth or appreciation of creative organizations or those that participate in their activities. Lord knows there has been plenty of “suffering for your art” conversations throughout history.

Rather, I wanted emphasize Godin’s point that the common element in each of his examples is the contributions to stronger relationships.

Gifts create connection and possibility, but not all gifts have monetary value. In fact, some of the most important gifts involve time, effort and care instead.

[…]

In this moment when we’re so disconnected and afraid, the answer might not be a freebie. That might simply push us further apart. The answer might be showing up to do the difficult work of connection, of caring and of extending ourselves where it’s not expected.

When you are pretty anxious about the future of your organization, you may not feel you have the luxury of the deliberative, multi-week process Nina Simon laid out in her blog post I excerpted yesterday. You should have the time, though, to consider whether choices made and effort expended are generous gestures that will contribute to a relationship, albeit over a long term, or a simple freebie.

Streaming And Providing Content Is Well And Good, But What’s Next?

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Last week in reaction to my post about Colleen Dilenschneider’s suggestion that cultural non-profits continue their marketing efforts during the Covid-19 shutdowns with a shift in focus, Carter Gillies made a number of comments on my post warning about making the marketing all about the organization rather than outwardly focused on the needs of the community.

So it seems absolutely vital that we take as much of the cues for misperception off the table. Even if we are not actively ‘selling’ anything, we can’t let the public be confused that our motivation at this point is somehow still about ‘us’. The Starbucks CEO was absolutely terrified that his attempts to remedy racism would be seen as more marketing. Marketing in normal circumstances is, well, normal. In a climate where the focus is so narrow, as it is today, we must pay special attention to doing what is right FOR the community, whether-it-is-right-for-us-or-not. If we are perceived as merely doing what it takes to promote our own identity and importance this will quickly backfire. Even saying organizations should be “maintaining high levels of awareness and being top of mind in the meantime” sounds offensive and selfishly oriented.

When I was writing about Dilenschneider’s post, I was envisioning that she was encouraging organizations to provide content on social media about streaming events, online activities, creative projects you can do at home, pretty much as they are doing now.

Keven Karplus chimed in with a comment pointing at such a home activity that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had recently posted.

So it didn’t really surprise me when the erstwhile director of Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Nina Simon, made a post on Medium wondering if this spate of event streaming and online activities was really the best approach. I had been harboring the same questions about whether the rush to provide content would ultimately be in the best interest of the arts and culture community.

Part of my concern was that organizations might be providing validation that a virtual experience was as good as an in-person experience. If the organization is able to pull this sort of thing out of their back pocket in a week, then they have the capacity to provide it on a continuous basis, right? Many people may not realize that a lot of the content is archival and was never intended to be seen by an audience.  American Theatre has a great piece that talks about many of the factors that are weighing on people’s minds as they make content available.

In her post Simon writes,

And it makes me wonder: is this the most meaningful way cultural organizations can contribute — or is it just the fastest way?

I’m not opposed to these offerings. I can see the hope and pleasure small snippets of art, music, history, and nature provide. But why are we doing it? Are we doing it based on some kind of expressed community need? Are we doing it with an eye towards serving communities that are struggling most? Or are we doing it to assure ourselves that we are “doing something,” to assure our donors we still exist— and that our jobs are worth keeping (which is in itself important!)?

You could argue that these organizations are contributing what they do best. But we’re a creative sector, and I think we could get more creative. In the race to deliver, I worry we may distract ourselves from the potential to envision and deliver true community value.

She lays out four steps she is using to figure out how to best contribute. As I read them, there was nothing I hadn’t heard before regarding connecting with new segments of the community. Only, now that there is less activity in our organizations, we have more time and energy to focus on following these steps.

1 – Select A Community Focus – she gives the example of homeless, elderly, nurses, but they can be any group.

2- Listen To The Community – While you can’t physically meet with people associated with your chosen segment, you may have the time to use social media to research, identify leaders, resources and challenges that face the community

3- Map Your Skills and Assets – I have to quote Nina directly here because she points out assets you may not think of (i.e. lending a lonely family member your dog)

If you’re exploring this as an individual, you might have assets like your time, your bilingualism, or your ability to cook. As an organization, you might have assets like a building, a digital following, or the ear of the mayor.

For me, the most important part of this step is creative dot-connecting. How can you use your creativity to make unexpected connections between what is desired and what you have? These connections don’t have to be huge to be meaningful

4- Check Your Assumptions – Nina points out she didn’t just drive to her sister’s house with a 70 lbs dog and drop it off, she had a conversation first. Nor should you decide what the segment of the community needs from you before marshaling your energy and resources.

Toward the end of her post, she encourages moving fast when there is an obvious way to contribute, but move slow when the path is not obvious or creativity could yield better results. She lays out a deliberate approach she is using in applying the four steps above and estimates it will be three-four weeks before she comes up with something concrete and useful.

As I do with many of my posts, I encourage readers to read her whole post in depth rather than relying on my imperfect synopsis. Especially since she lays out her argument much more convincingly than I have.

Imagine That, Creative Expression Retains And Increases In Value In Difficult Economic Times

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By now you have probably heard about all the residents of cities around the world who have emerged on balconies and rooftops to sing together or provide impromptu concerts to those in their neighborhoods.  Imagine all the economic value they are generating with this creative activity! Surely it will help sustain the commerce of their communities in this difficult time.

Except, no it won’t. No one is doing any of this to bolster the economies of their communities, they are doing it to bolster a sense of hope and solidarity among their neighbors.

If there was any time to illustrate that the value of creative expression is independent of economic outcomes, it is now.  People are singing together across streets and alleys. Libraries are streaming their staff reading books. Organizations are providing creative activities that families can do at home together as downloads or video demonstrations. I saw a link to a public radio story about a group in NC who will provide a 30 minute virtual concerts to loved ones.

The biggest danger is the one that  has always existed–the assumption that if you were willing to provide this content for free during tough times, you can find some other means of support during better economic times.

Yet there is also the opportunity to turn around and say, when people were scared and panicking about whether they had a sufficient supply of toilet paper, expressions of creativity forged bonds between citizens, buoyed their spirits and gave them hope.  Artists provided a great service in maintaining the mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being of their community in a time of national angst. While this activity normally does yield economic benefits in a ratio significantly greater than the funding inputs, the real value creatives provide is unrelated to the economy.

While we may say these things all of the time in different ways, right now there are a lot of examples floating around broadcast and social media one can reference when making the case for support to funders.

In addition, while you wouldn’t necessarily want to continue doing something for free indefinitely, there is also an opportunity to leverage processes and expertise you may have developed communicating and providing content from afar into a more significant program. (i.e. You never had the time and resources before to stream content until your priorities were shifted for you.)

Likewise, once the current crisis is over, there will be an opportunity to hopefully solidify any relationships your activities for those in isolation have helped you develop.

In the meantime, pay attention to all the ways in which creative expression is exhibiting its value to society and take notes for later use.

Encouraging Creative Expression At A Social Distance

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I took a little break from social media this weekend. When I logged in this morning I was surprised to see how many local musicians had streamed concerts over the weekend. I have also been pleased to see libraries streaming staff reading books to kids and museums giving tours and demonstrations.

However, as I am wont to do even in better times, I wanted to encourage organizations not to just push content out for passive viewers. The only thing worse than having people sit quietly in your dark room and watch something is providing the opportunity to do the same thing in a more comfortable dark room at home.

I have been encouraging organizations to provide opportunities to actively participate at face to face events for a couple years now. The same should hold even in times of social distancing. There are still plenty of opportunities to use technology to have people exercise their creativity.

You can do everything from having people send in video of themselves singing a song which you edit into a whole. Likewise for performing parts from a play or poetry reading.

Character limits on social media sites like Twitter lend themselves well for “what happens next…” participatory storytelling where you build on what the previous person wrote while under the discipline of a character limit (can’t make sequential posts!) Obviously can do the same thing with Facebook posts.

Or get really up the game and do sequential visual storytelling with pictures or video on sites like Instagram or TikTok where you can edit other people’s work into your own to simulate interacting with them.

Arts Professional UK has a Creative Communities page which looks like it is being updated with activities every day.

Today it has links to a BBC project soliciting short scripts,

…between 5-10 minutes in length whose 2-4 characters now find themselves in isolation, but connecting via video conferencing. They may be friends, lovers, neighbours, colleagues, family or strangers. But they’re all alone together and using modern technology to stay connected.

And there are face mask art projects:

The Turban Project has published step-by-step instructions for creating and decorating a personalised lightweight face mask for adults and children (see examples). Care Wear has published instructions for making a decorative fabric cover for a protective N95Mask, intended for reuse after laundering if needed during a severe shortage of masks.

While I am at it, here are a couple other projects with participatory content.

Voluntary Arts is curating a daily update of creative ideas – by and for creative workers – to be explored and enjoyed in response to the coronavirus.

Nonsuch Studios are launching Creative Quarantine, a daily email of creative activities for people to do in their own home. Led by a group of artists and creatives who’ve been sent home, they will be sending two different emails with content appropriate to adults and to children and families, which will include extra educational features for children who are off school.

If you know of any US based projects doing something similar, let me know in the comments. Or just tag me on Twitter @buttsintheseats

 

You Can Tap Into The Arts, But No One Will Think It Does Any Good

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In the wake of Kobe Bryant’s death, Dance Magazine related a short anecdote about Bryant taking tap dance lessons to help prevent additional injury to his ankles.

That summer, he researched ways to make his ankles stronger, and landed on tap dancing. “I worked on it all of that summer and benefited for the rest of my career,” he wrote.

Though Bryant continued to suffer from ankle injuries, tap helped him learn to keep his ankles loose and active, which helped prevent injuries elsewhere.

[…]

…Though he stopped dancing after that summer, he says that “for a year there I could tell my feet to do this and they would actually do that.”

Over the last couple weeks I have been thinking about why my initial reaction to this story was that it provides a good example of the value of the arts when I often warn about citing the prescriptive benefits of the arts. Let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more prescriptive than the idea that dance helped Bryant mitigate additional injury.

Ultimately, I realized that as a superb athlete, this was an example of how dance was supplementing his existing capabilities. Often when we hear about arts benefiting test scores, economy, social interactions, etc., there is an implication that the arts are improving things to an acceptable level. That there is some flaw to fix– a kid’s test scores need to be better; the foot traffic in stores & restaurants is tepid; people are having overly aggressive interactions.

With Kobe Bryant though, he is at the top of his field as an athlete and the tap lessons are something he used to provide a benefit his already demanding training regimen didn’t afford. While suffering a problematic injury is just as negative as poor test scores, low economic activity or negative social interactions, I can’t imagine anyone considered Kobe deficient and needed the arts to fix him. Tap was an available option he found suitable to his needs.

The difference between a supplemental activity and a prescriptive one is a bit subtle. In truth, at its base, the supplement is just as prescriptive. The context in which it is presented makes a significant difference. In Kobe’s case, there are no promises of outcome measures that have to be backed by qualitative data. The celebrity association aside, the value of tap dancing and the arts in general aren’t evaluated in terms of his scoring record.

Sure, saying ‘it worked for me” lacks the empirical evidence that people may want to justify funding. (It shouldn’t be used anyway.) Regardless of whether you have empirical data or not, if Shaq and Kobe both took tap together, the benefits each realize will vary based on dozens of variables in their physical, mental and emotional attributes.

For example, Kobe was open to exploring the way people in other disciplines achieve success and employed an approach Shaq probably wouldn’t have. He credits a conversation with composer John Williams for shifting his perception on leadership:

This conversation was held after the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals. Bryant said the talk helped him become a better leader and that he took some of Williams’ ideas into training camp for the next season. “I felt like there were a lot of similarities between what [Williams] does and what I have to do on the basketball court,” Bryant said. “And some of the things he said to me were fascinating.”

On the other hand, it is assumed that great achievement in one area occurs in a vacuum with no contributions from any other pursuits. You can tell people Einstein as well as myriad other highly accomplished scientists played musical instruments and no one credits any benefit to the music–even if Einstein credits his accomplishments to playing violin.  So even though Kobe said he attributes tap dance for improving his agility and reducing injuries, few people will likely perceive tap as having anything to contribute to basketball.

Because really, no one would consider basketball and tap have any relationship with each other.

 

Art Helps Get The Buses Running On Time And Where They Are Needed

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Last week Shelterforce had an article about places around the country that are using arts and culture strategies as part of transit planning processes. They provide examples of projects in beginning, middle and final stages in three communities around the country. However, these efforts are occurring in far more communities than that. The article mentioned an inaugural program of Transportation America which placed Arts, Culture and Transit Fellows in three additional communities.

These fellowships are”…designed to give art professionals opportunities for hands-on learning about the transportation planning and design process in their respective regions.’

At a nascent project in Northwest Arkansas, there is an effort to extend the hours and reach of transit lines. What the artists are contributing is collecting stories from

…constituencies whose feedback is often left out of planning discussions. Wilhite says those are the people they will pull in to participate in listening sessions and story circles “to get a conversation going about what’s proposed.”

Wilhite sees their role as artists and storytellers to be not just gatherers of information from a wider range of communities, but gatherers of stories that are more nuanced than what can be gleaned from an online survey. “We get the same answer but make it more complex, which is to [not only] say that people want transit, [but that] it needs to be here, and there.”

[…]

They are planning to facilitate citizen ride audits, in which residents of different backgrounds and transit needs—possibly students, seniors, the disabled—ride and record in various media their transit experience over a period of time. Another planned activity is the production of a theater piece that will be performed on bus lines.

…They will also work with a local arts center to create a temporary bus shelter—there are none in Springdale—in its parking lot. “Our goal is to increase ridership eventually, but [for now], get people excited, familiar, and even just aware [of the buses] maybe for the first time.”

Another project in Nashville helped address concerns about safety at a particularly dangerous intersection. In this case, feedback at community meetings was facilitated by hands on art projects. I am intrigued by the idea that modeling a pedestrian refuge out of clay and pipe cleaners might have directly contributed to the creation of a pedestrian refuge in the street improvement project.

Attendees used Play-Doh and pipe cleaners to create what they wanted to see in the area, be it transportation systems or parks, and on sticky notes they wrote how Nolensville Pike made them feel. The ideas specifically relating to pedestrian safety included adding more crosswalks, pedestrian refuge islands, and separate bike lanes along the corridor.

“Art definitely helped take down that barrier that people have when they don’t know what to say in a public meeting,” Carpenter says. “It helps stimulate people’s thinking about any issue [so they can] participate more in the conversation.”

[…]

The resident and business feedback resulted in change. ENCP was able to secure $1 million from the city budget to make positive changes along Nolensville Pike that included adding a traffic signal, crosswalk, and a permanent pedestrian refuge island in front of Azafrán Park,…

[…]

“I can guarantee that these specific projects … would not have happened were it not for us demonstrating the feedback that we got from people,” Carpenter says. “To have people testifying that they want these kinds of improvements on the Nolensville Pike [was important].”

The third project the article covered is one I have mentioned before, and one of my favorite stories, the use of cultural experiences to mitigate the impact of the construction of the Green Line light rail in St. Paul, MN on area businesses. In short, Springboard for the Arts trained a number of arts groups who went out and did everything from visual art projects to performances in Vietnamese restaurants, all of which helped draw people into area businesses despite the construction.

Creative Placemaking Is More Than Just Murals

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Recently the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published an issue of their Community Development Innovation Review  (CDIR) focused on “Transforming Community Development through Arts and Culture.” If you think it strange that a Federal Reserve Bank should be devoting an entire 200 page issue to this topic, a few years back I wrote about a Non-Profit Executive Transition Toolkit published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.  Some interesting things related to non-profit arts come out of these banks periodically.

I am only about a quarter of the way through the CDIR issue which is comprised of many short pieces by different arts, cultural and community development professionals around the country. There was a piece by Paul Singh from NeighborWorks America, (page A49) an organization he describes as providing capacity-building resources to 250 community development organizations nationwide.

What caught my eye was Singh’s list of challenges organizations face “in pursuing creative community development.”

• Insufficient understanding of the potential value of creativity, cultural expression, and artistic practice to community development
• Difficulty demonstrating and articulating the impact of creative community development
• Struggle with identifying arts partners and developing shared expectations and frameworks
• Need to avoid gentrification-led displacement and promote inclusion
• Difficulty in securing financial resources

Even though I generally advocate for staying away from discussing the utilitarian or prescriptive value of the arts, (e.g. add art to solve X problem), the fact that people even had difficulty providing justification on that basis points to a need for people in the creative field to become more skilled at discussing the value of arts and culture. Ideally, the area in which people become most adept is explaining the value for its own sake–why they enjoy it; what it makes them feel or think; how it contributes to personal growth; how sharing the experience with others strengthens bonds with family and friends.

But again, acknowledging that we live in a society which has evaluates everything in the context of utilitarian, neo-liberal value sets, it is prudent to be skilled in carrying on a discussion in those terms so you can introduce the idea there are other ways of measuring value.

Singh expounds a bit on where organizations in NeighborWorks network meet some obstacles:

Many network organizations that we spoke to shared that their early efforts were limited by preconceived notions of what constitutes “art” or “creative placemaking.” They initially tended to prioritize artistic products (e.g., the archetypal mural project) over partnerships with artists that could yield creative ways of addressing a range of problems. Community developers can also be risk-averse, which can limit receptivity to creative processes that delve into ambiguity or the unexpected.  External models and examples that can expand the vision are often required, along with an internal champion who pushes boundaries, to introduce and keep creative community development at the forefront of an organization’s strategy.

I was really hoping he would provide some concrete examples about what type of approaches had worked in different communities, but much of what he indicated needed to be done was general and theoretical. In some instances, I got the impression that implementation of some strategies was so new there hadn’t been time to let them work, much less collect data on their effectiveness.

Don’t Call It An Arts Desert

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Last week Springboard for the Arts’ Executive Director Laura Zabel addressed the concept of solving “arts deserts” in a series of tweets.

The above sentiment particularly resonated with me because I worked for an arts organization in a rural part of a state where the statutory requirement that a percentage of arts funding to our part of the state was interpreted as giving more money to arts organizations in the urban areas if they sent touring shows to our part of the state. With the help of the speaker of the legislature, who was from our part of the state, that requirement was clarified as direct funding.

This tweet, in addition to the others in the chain, reminded me of Ronia Holmes’ piece that I have cited before, Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why, where she writes:

Disinvested communities are not devoid of arts and culture. In America particularly, communities who historically have been excluded from the table have responded by building their own tables, using whatever resources could be scraped together. Marginalized communities have established organizations that don’t treat them or their cultural output as deviations from the norm to be celebrated for diversity, but as fundamental components of society. The organizations they created, and continue to create, are replete with artists, leaders, decision-makers, and workers who look like and are part of the community they serve, who share similar lived experiences, and have a deep understanding of what programming will truly resonate.

These organizations are often in a constant struggle to survive in a system that is not only structured against them in terms of funding and other resource allocation, but that delivers a consistent message that what these community-based and -built organizations do is better handled by some organization several zip codes away. An organization that looks nothing like the community they’re supposedly courting, either in terms of staff composition or artistic output, …

I keep coming back to Holmes’ essay because I and others continue to observe examples where these problematic practices exist. The reality is, this dynamic doesn’t just exist between urban and rural locales or different towns, you can see it in operation between different neighborhoods and blocks in places we live. There are cultural districts and neighborhoods with parks and sidewalks that create similar impressions that places which lack certain amenities also lack a strong sense of culture, social bonds, and traditions because they are less visibly on display. But if you know where and how to look, you find they are consistently practiced and quite visible.

Daydreaming The Way To Better Performance

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Tyler Cowen shared a link on his Marginal Revolution blog about Hillary Hahn discussing daydreaming as a form of practice. The link went to blog post by Bill Benzon featuring a video of an interview with Hahn. Benzon transcribes the relevant portion of the interview, but I listened/watched the whole thing.

Hahn talks the challenges of touring, including difficulties practicing for the next tour; reading between the lines on Yelp reviews to find decent coffee in a new city; and her “Ice Princess” nickname which seems to be more about scrutiny of her facial expression and range of motion when performing.

But as Benzon says, the real prize comes around 55:54 when she discusses daydreaming and playfulness when she practices. As someone who has come out of the theatre acting tradition, I was intrigued when she talked about being honest to the moment rather than executing a rigid conception of the music. While this is considered important in acting, my perception has been this isn’t valued in classical music.

In theater, if an actor says “I’m sorry” more defiantly today than they did yesterday, as the person performing opposite them, the way you move and deliver your next line has to be an authentic response to that .  Hahn says when she is doing master classes and she sees a student is clearly censoring their playing because they think it would be improper to do otherwise, she says she talks to them about it. She says when she has low energy during a performance, she doesn’t try to pump herself up, but uses that and plays a little more mellow so that when she reaches a point in a piece where the energy starts to increase, the audience is even more aware of the palpable change.

What classical musicians might think of all this I don’t know,  but as someone from the outside it runs contrary to my conception of the philosophy and practice of classical music and begins to align more with what I know of the process of theatre, dance and visual artists.

Around 1:22.00 in the video she does a demonstration of what she means by daydreaming during practice. It isn’t so much daydreaming in the woolgathering sense as it is paying close attention to what one is doing and playing with different options to imagine what might happen during a performance. (The following comes much closer to the 1 hour mark, but expresses her approach)

I reverse the assumptions that I have. I just neutralize everything and then I’m…Kind of letting my mind wander. I’m thinking about what is going on with the orchestra. Waiting for something to occur to me. I think people don’t ever think that happens in practice.

For a lot of people, I think practice is about being more accurate, improving your playing, being more expressive, being more this or that. But for me, yes, there’s that, but… Those are the tools to get to the point where you can let your mind wander and get ideas.

During her demonstration of her practice process, she verbalizes what she is thinking:

“…so right there I heard the violin kicked into a certain resonance and I was really listening for that and that felt like it had a certain tone quality that I like.

And that feels good so it gave me a little bit of inspiration…

[…]

Perhaps I can take that further…how far can I go?…how long can I hold it?…can I get away with that?…I imagine the conductor is looking at me like…” (makes ‘get on with it’ hand motions)

She talks about how having this bit of fun helps her feel creative, cleanse her system of instincts she has and find answers to questions she has about the music. Earlier in the interview, in a bit that Benzon transcribed, she seems to indicate this approach also helps keep her nimble enough to practice with unfamiliar musicians on short notice:

I’m always trying to trigger in mind into new phrasing ideas, so I don’t get stuck and so that when I’m working with other people, I don’t have a lot of rehearsal time and I need to present a unified concert. So, when I’m working with other people, how can I play it in a way that’s authentic to me, but really coincides with what they’re doing and brings out a better version of the music than we could arrive at ourselves separately.

As I said, for musicians this may all be familiar equipment in a potential toolbox, but as an outsider I found it helped make unfamiliar material more relatable.

Arts Marketing Is About Shared Interests, Not Demographics

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Back in October Sara Leonard made a blog post for Americans for the Arts about marketing in the context of the “false-consensus effect,” the idea that your personal opinions, beliefs and interests are more widely shared than they actually are. She says this gets in the way of effectively promoting an experience to others

It makes sense; it’s such a logical starting point! We go to market an event and think to ourselves, “What do I think is cool about this?” or “Why would I want to go?” Or maybe we’re repeating what the artist themselves thinks is the key source of attraction to a given event, believing that the artist must know what’s good about their own work. But here’s the problem: we—you, me, artists—are NOT our average audience members…. Our job, as arts marketers, is to serve our current and prospective audiences a picture that connects with their interests and values in a package that evokes an experience they want to have. And to do that, we need to cast our imaginations beyond the limitations of our own perspectives and experiences, get to know what makes our people tick, and to imagine the other complexly and with respect.

She says the best approach is to employ three  W questions- Who? Where? Why do they care? But in addition to using these questions to segment the universe of potential audiences in order to properly target them, she suggests applying them in slightly different ways with those whom we already know versus those we don’t know yet. The latter group being people who rarely, if ever, participate in events we sponsor. (Though I suppose it could equally apply to people who might attend frequently with whom we have a pretty tenuous relationship in terms of understanding their motivations.)

What I appreciated about Sara’s perspective on this was that she reversed the order of her 3W questions when it came to people we don’t know yet. She asks “Why do they already care”   about some part of what is being offered first. From there she goes on to identify Who those people are and where connections with them might be made.

Perhaps the most salient point she exhorts readers to keep in mind came toward the end (my emphasis):

Your “who” groups should not be based solely on demographics. There is nothing about our demographic characteristics alone that explains WHY we spend our time and money the way we do, so let’s imagine and create connections based on shared interests and values first. Then, look around the room and see what demographic groups are missing. (Hint: That’s a “who” for next time…)

 

What About “Make Sure You Draw All Your Work” On The Test?

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Hey all. Dan Pink linked to a round up of education research that came out in 2019. There were studies on how good teachers were better than awards when it came to raising attendance rates; the benefits of sleep on learning; gender differences in math ability are social construct; black students get fewer warnings before heading to the principal’s office, and many others.

As you might expect, among the “many others” were studies on the benefits of arts:

As arts programs continue to face the budget ax, a handful of new studies suggest that’s a grave mistake. The arts provide cognitive, academic, behavioral, and social benefits that go far beyond simply learning how to play music or perform scenes in a play.

In a major new study from Rice University involving 10,000 students in third through eighth grades, researchers determined that expanding a school’s arts programs improved writing scores, increased the students’ compassion for others, and reduced disciplinary infractions. The benefits of such programs may be especially pronounced for students who come from low-income families, according to a 10-year study of 30,000 students released in 2019.

Unexpectedly, another recent study found that artistic commitment—think of a budding violinist or passionate young thespian—can boost executive function skills like focus and working memory, linking the arts to a set of overlooked skills that are highly correlated to success in both academics and life.

The one that drew my attention most was a study that found while doodling distracted from learning, intentional drawing reinforced learning and memory better than reading and note taking.  The way I read it, this approach may be the easiest way to integrate creative expression and the arts into any subject AND improve test scores.

In a follow-up experiment, the researchers compared two methods of note-taking—writing words by hand versus drawing concepts—and found drawing to be “an effective and reliable encoding strategy, far superior to writing.” The researchers found that when the undergraduates visually represented science concepts like isotope and spore, their recall was nearly twice as good as when they wrote down definitions supplied by the lecturer.

Importantly, the benefits of drawing were not dependent on the students’ level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well.

[…]

Why is drawing such a powerful memory tool? The researchers explain that it “requires elaboration on the meaning of the term and translating the definition to a new form (a picture).” Unlike listening to a lecture or viewing an image—activities in which students passively absorb information—drawing is active. It forces students to grapple with what they’re learning and reconstruct it in a way that makes sense to them.

It made sense to me that drawing was beneficial because it forces one to take the information they are receiving, process it and then execute it into a meaningful depiction. Reading and writing down lecture notes don’t require that you be able to process the concept, only that you recognize and understand the individual words. If you have studied a foreign language you may have had the experience where you can pronounce the words flawlessly and know what each word means separately, but can’t translate the meaning of an entire sentence accurately.

The article discusses other reinforcing actions in of the increased number of steps and synaptic connections which are required to execute a drawing which helps to solidify concepts in memory, but that is how is how I conceptualize I read.

If you are interested in putting this into practice either for your own note taking or to assist students, there are suggestions of implementation – student created learning aids, interactive notebooks, data visualization (which apparently can be applied to literature); book/comic book making; and one-pagers where students visually show the teacher their understanding of the concept.

The (Maybe) Final Recordings of the 2019 NEA Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge

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This week the National Endowment for the Arts posted the final recordings of works created for the NEA Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge. Last Spring, six works by seven high school students were chosen as winners of the competition.

The subjects of their works were: mermaid kingdoms threatened by pirates; The American Civil War; Australia’s Great Emu War of 1932; choosing whether to attend college; Greco-Persian wars; and time travel.

The thing I really appreciated about the release of the final recordings is that the NEA also posted the original songs each person submitted alongside the final song they developed in conjunction with a mentor. This helps reinforce the reality of the process in creative process. Many of the songs have different lyrics and music by the time it came to do the professional recording.

Having the initial and final pieces side by side helps people understand the adage about genius being 98% perspiration and 2% inspiration is very much real. If the creators continue to work on these projects, in all likelihood these final recordings will turn out to actually be an intermediate step in the development process.

No Creativity Here, We Are Serious About Education

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I recently saw an article on Arts Professional UK reporting that the governments of England and Wales would be opting out of the new creative thinking assessment section of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international standardized test administered to 15 year olds. (The United States also participates, but I haven’t been able to discover their stand on the new test module.)

I had some mixed feelings about this news. Students will continue to take the test in math, science and reading,  so it raises my hackles a little that they will still be testing those subjects and eschewing creativity. According to one commenters, there is a fear that measuring creativity would indicate you aren’t serious about education.

Professor Bill Lucas, Co-chair of the PISA 2021 Test of Creative Thinking….some people fear opting into the creative thinking assessment would give “a signal that you don’t value standards in English, maths and science as much, because you are somehow potentially aligning yourself with a view of the purpose of education that is beyond the basics of the core subjects.

Thinking the purpose of education is beyond that of reading, math and science?! The horror! Satisfying a voracious curiosity is so outdated.

The creativity test has been designed to (my emphasis),

…measure and reflect “the nature of real world and everyday creative thinking”. …

…will provide policymakers with valid, reliable and actionable measurement tools that will help them to make evidence-based decisions. The results will also encourage a wider societal debate on both the importance and methods of supporting this crucial competence through education,” the assessor says.

“Creative thinking is thus more than simply coming up with random ideas. It is a tangible competence, grounded in knowledge and practice, that supports individuals in achieving better outcomes, oftentimes in constrained and challenging environments.”

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know I am a proponent of anything that emphasizes the concept creativity is a process requiring effort, reflection, and trial and error rather than a magical ability granted or retracted at the caprice of the gods.

On the other hand, if you have read this blog for any length of time, you also know that I discuss the fact that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean the result you get is meaningful.

One of the things countries do with this test is compare themselves with other countries. As I am reading about the test design, there is discussion of how cultural norms and expectations affect creative thinking. Even assuming the test prompts are appropriate to the culture of the country in which the test is administered, I would expect the way different cultures view creative expression would impact the results in ways that couldn’t be compared like math and science competencies could.

For that matter, there may not be a firm basis of comparison in the same country between the 15 year olds that took the test one year and those that took the test when it was administered three years prior.

Is there really an objective, comparative measure for creativity when students are given one hour to:

…engage in open and imaginative writing (with constraints limiting the length of written text that human raters will need to evaluate); generate ideas for various written formats by considering different stimuli, such as cartoons without captions or fantasy illustrations; and make an original improvement to someone else’s written work (as provided in the task stimuli).

[…}

…engage in open problem-solving tasks with a social focus, either individually or in simulated collaborative scenarios; generate ideas for solutions to social problems, based on a given scenario; and suggest original improvements to problem solutions (as provided in the task stimuli).

There is also a visual expression section with tasks similar to the written expression section described above and a scientific problem solving section with tasks similar to the social problem solving described.

As a way to give the individual something to reflect upon in regard to their own skills and providing a bit of an imprimatur to creative expression, these tests could be useful.

As a thing schools and countries should fret over as something with real relevance and providing indications of future success, it doesn’t really have any real meaning. (Though if they fear appearing too frivolous about education, there might even be a few countries who will be ashamed if their students attain too high a result.)

These tests just reflect what a cohort of 15 year olds can do in an hour on a certain day.  Whatever that means in terms of math, science and reading, it means even less when it comes to subjective judgments about how creative someone was in generating captions for cartoons or how original their suggested solution to a problem might be.

I didn’t realize until I started searching for links to other PISA related stories that the result of the last test were actually released today (The Arts Professional UK article came out last week).

The headline on a New York Times piece is “It Just Isn’t Working: PISA Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts. – An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math even though the country has spent billions to close gaps with the rest of the world.”

Part of you might be thinking the test scores wouldn’t be as bad if schools would actually introduce the role of creative thinking and problem solving into the education process.  That is likely true. But should creative capacity be measured by tests? Do you want fretful headlines about American kids doing worse in creative measures than 65% of the world?  It would be a clear indicator that people were paying attention and invested in creativity, but there are lot more constructive indicators of those things available.

 

NB: As a perfect illustration of how you can’t be creative within a strict time period: The moment I hit publish on this post, I immediately realized I should have titled it “No Creativity, We’re British,” as a take off on the play, No Sex Please, We’re British — something that would have qualified as an original improvement on someone else’s written work noted as a measure in the creativity test. (Granted, you might be hard pressed to judge it an improvement)

It’s Time To Paint The Town Red

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Hey all! If you live in a small or medium sized town and have always thought the asphalt and concrete slabs of your streets wouldn’t be so bad if they just had a coat of paint, Bloomberg Philanthropies is making it possible to take your art to the streets.

Their Asphalt Art initiative is open to applications from communities with populations of 30,000-500,000 people. Deadline is December 12, 2019

The initiative will fund “visual interventions on roadways (intersections and crosswalks), pedestrian spaces (plazas and sidewalks), and vertical infrastructure (utility boxes, traffic barriers and underpasses).”

There is a CityLab piece on the project with gorgeous examples of what other cities around the world have done. Bloomberg Philanthropies also offers a free guide and promises to include project planning information like model contracts, permits and insurance. If you don’t intend to apply for a grant, but are contemplating a project along these lines, these resources could be valuable.

A type of project along these lines that has been very popular lately is painting crosswalks with the goal of making pedestrians safer in the theory drivers will tend to slow down when driving across/near an image that doesn’t conform to familiar road markings. If that is an appealing notion, you should be aware that the Federal Highway Administration frowns on crosswalk art and actively requests cities remove them.

The Kentucky removal particularly peeved Lydon, who said that piece of street art saved lives.

“That was at an intersection with almost 10 crashes a year,” he said. “After it went in, it went down to zero. But the state DOT there too them to get rid of it because of the letter from [the federal authorities].”

And locals living near new street art in Rochester, New York told local radio station WXXI that the rainbow designs there calmed traffic on streets that were less than pedestrian friendly.

[…]

But the Highway Administration doesn’t see it that way, ruling in its report that “crosswalk art is actually contrary to the goal of increased safety and most likely could be a contributing factor to a false sense of security for both motorists and pedestrians.”

There are still a lot of other type of projects one could undertake. There are a number of pictures of pedestrian plazas and parking lots in the articles, but I think vertical structures like utility boxes, traffic barriers and underpasses are particularly ripe for development. I passed this information on to some people I know who were eyeing a train underpass I frequently walk under. I think more people would feel safer walking through there if there was more light and color.

Knitting Needles Over Netflix

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So via Georgia Council for the Arts’ social media is a study on Artsy finding that many Americans would rather do something creative than watch TV or surf the net.

I initially wondered if there might be a bias to the study seeing it was commissioned by “Bluprint, NBCUniversal’s subscription service for online creative learning,” even though I am pretty sure NBCUniversal probably wouldn’t want to advertise the fact people would rather not be watching tv or streaming content.

The study was conducted by IPSOS with over 2000 randomly selected people so the results are probably relatively dependable. They asked participants about their creative hobby which was defined as “anything from drawing and painting to knitting, baking, making music, beer brewing, or journaling.”

What the study found was pretty interesting (my emphasis):

Americans have creative hobbies, but they’re hungry for more creative stimulation.

  • 75 percent of participants reported having at least one creative hobby.
  • The most popular activities were baking, gardening, cooking (beyond everyday meals), home decor, and DIY crafting.
  • 68 percent said that they are eager to use their creativity more often.

Participants with creative hobbies reported that making things by hand brings them joy.

  • 79 percent said they “love the process of creating something from scratch.”
  • 88 percent agreed with the statement: “Successfully finishing a creative project brings me joy.”
  • 75 percent reported that they “make mistakes along the way,” but that doesn’t lessen their “enjoyment.”

Some would sacrifice streaming TV and movies for their creative hobbies.

  • Of those who have Netflix, 77 percent would rather give up their subscription than give up their creative hobby.

Parents want their children to have ample opportunities for creativity.

  • 77 percent agreed with the statement “I want my child(ren) to be more creative than I got the opportunity to be when I was a child.”
  • 61 percent agreed that “public education doesn’t focus enough on creative arts.”
  • 72 percent agreed that “standardized test scores are prioritized more than creative thinking in schools.”
  • 79 percent of parents would prefer that their children “make just enough to get by in a creative job that they love,” rather than “make lots of money in a job they aren’t passionate about.”

Those findings I bolded really jumped out at me. I was interesting to me that they asked about mistakes and failures being a disincentive to continuing their hobby. It made me feel like the survey creators understood some of the underlying concepts behind creative expression. (Versus a sense that only something that is marketable has value.)

The bit about giving up Netflix before their hobby probably runs counter to a lot of the assumptions we all make about how people prefer to spend their free time.

I was also surprised that nearly 80% of parents wanted their kids to achieve just enough in their careers to support their creative pursuits rather than make a lot of money. Honestly, I wondered if it was the way the question was phrased or if people knew what answer they were ideally supposed to chose rather than what they would push their kids toward in practice.

My cynicism aside though, it was good to read something outside the circle of content I regularly consume specifically mentioning that people are recognizing that they have the capacity for creative expression and have begun to exercise it.

Deliberate Practice Better Than A lot of Practice

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The Guardian recently had a story about a study debunking the idea that it took 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. I have written a number of posts on the subject over the last few years, but feel it is important to revisit it often given our cultural predilection for valuing quantity over quality.

…there was little to separate the good from the best musicians, with each logging an average of about 11,000 hours. In all, the number of hours spent practising accounted for about a quarter of the skills difference across the three groups, according to the study published in Royal Society Open Science.

Macnamara believes practice is less of a driver. “Once you get to the highly skilled groups, practice stops accounting for the difference. Everyone has practised a lot and other factors are at play in determining who goes on to that super-elite level,” she said.

“The factors depend on the skill being learned: in chess it could be intelligence or working memory, in sport it may be how efficiently a person uses oxygen. To complicate matters further, one factor can drive another. A child who enjoys playing the violin, for example, may be happy to practise and be focused on the task because they do not see it as a chore.”

That last bit about the value of enjoyment is really one of the key elements. This is enjoyment in terms of being engaged by the practice, not necessarily being happy about the callouses, aches and frustrating lack of progress. (In fact Nina Simon just posted about a torturous experience whose ridiculous sadism she feels helps her prepare for the adversity life throws at us.)

If your practice is based on pushing yourself to do 5 minutes more than yesterday, then your focus will be on the clock rather than on improving.  The result is that you can play longer, but not that much better.

There is a lot of evidence that variety and deliberate practice helps much more than consistently practicing in the same way. Teaching others a skill is often very valuable to improving your own practice. Even if you don’t feel you are a particularly good teacher or enjoy teaching, the act of teaching any skill at all, even washing dishes, can instill the patience and tolerance of yourself useful for your own practice.

Since we can often be harder on ourselves than others, learning not to obsess about our mistakes might be one of the most valuable assets in practice that no one ever teaches us. A focus on achieving “not wrong” is not equivalent to achieving greater mastery. At a certain point needing to redeem the poor job you did yesterday or deriding yourself for doing better yesterday than today becomes an obstacle rather than path to growth.

As the researchers imply, there can be other factors outside of your control which limit greater mastery. But you never know if that limitation is permanent or a temporary factor associated with your current method of pursuit. Mental healthwise, it may be better to assume the latter and examine alternative approaches.

 

Is Artistic Authority Being Eroded?

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I was glancing at an interview with Arti Prashar on Arts Professional UK site as she departs her position at Spare Tyre Theatre Company. I had come for the title of the article, “Exit interview: ‘We’re asked to follow a business model that just doesn’t work'” but it was something else that really caught my attention.

She says,

“…I began to observe, slowly but surely, that the authority of artists was being eroded. I wasn’t having that, so I negotiated becoming the Artistic Director and CEO.”

It struck me that she felt she needed to become CEO in order to retain authority. (Her first 8 years at Spare Tyre was as Artistic Director.) It made me wonder if this was the case globally outside of the UK. I suspect it is.

I have discussed the problems with the sentiment that “arts should be run more like a business,” in a number of blog posts over the years. I wonder now if that concept, combined with the sense that artists should be more business minded might be contributing to the erosion of artists’ authority.

Artists should definitely be knowledgeable enough to monitor the health of their own careers so that their work is not exploited by others. But if an artist is not perceived as possessing authority in their own realm independent of their business acumen, that is troubling.

Prashar doesn’t give specific examples of how she felt artists’ authority was being eroded. As I thought about how this problem might manifest, I began to wonder if this was actually related to the question of why we value art.

If an artist doesn’t feel they have the authority to say a work has value on its own, but needs to cite relevance in connection with social and political movements to convince others it has value, that may be just as problematic as economic impact and ability to raise test scores being the only rationale for granting funding.

You may be thinking that these elements are all important for getting people to participate in an event or other opportunity. People need to either perceive something is relevant to them or is worth their time and money as part of their decision to be present.

But can an artist walk into a room and say this thing is important and worth doing and be believed simply based on their authority as an artist? If not, why?

Is it because we have come to doubt or suspect their authority to make that statement despite 15 years of practice?

If I walk in and say the same thing is important and worth doing because 1000 people will pay $50, do you doubt my authority to make that statement? Do you think to inquire how much experience I have in making these predictions if I am waving a spreadsheet around instead of a violin bow?

Seeing Our Stories Told: The Hero At The End of Your Story Is The Victim At The Start of Mine

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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.

 

Arts Not An Indulgence When So Many Social Justice Issues Need Attention

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Apparently Vu Le of Nonprofit AF blog spoke at Association of California Symphony Orchestras last week. (those lucky dogs) In his post this week, he addresses the question about whether arts and culture have value when there are so many health and social justice problems that need to be attention. As the executive director of a social justice non-profit, he knows very well just how much organizations like his need funding and attention.

He says yes, arts and culture definitely play an important role in society and helping to address the problems we face. He mentions that as an immigrant from Vietnam, both music and art saved his life and made him feel valuable when he was doing poorly in school due to his lack of English literacy.

“I began to look forward to the art projects. For so long I had sucked at everything that required English, including gym (I could not understand the rules of various activities, like volleyball). With art, I felt competent and respected and sure of myself. My being good at something changed the way the other kids saw me. Art motivated me to continue to learn, to explore. It gave me confidence. It kept me in school.”

In blog posts throughout the years, I have often pointed out that people turn to art, music, theater, etc to help them cope with tragedy and difficulty in their lives. But of course, as a person in the arts, I am predisposed to look for those connections. So I was happy to read that Le had observed similar situations.

He is definitely aware of all the places arts and cultural organizations fall short of serving all segments of their communities. But he disputes the argument that the arts are indulgent in when there is such need in the world and expresses gratitude for the work arts practitioners do.  As long as the following excerpt is, a number of his expressions of gratitude are edited out so it is worth reading the whole post just for that.

I’m telling you these stories because when there is so much going on, so many problems to solve, sometimes we think of art and music as indulgent. Who has time for singing and dancing and stained-glass snowflakes when kids are starving or locked in cages? By thinking this way, we forget about art and music’s power to heal, mobilize, build community, and so much more.

[…]

Art and music are critical in our work for social justice, as frequently they are the only things that can reach people, that can provide comfort or generate the visceral, raw emotions needed for social change. After the election in 2016, when many families and children were terrified, Families of Color Seattle gathered the kids and used art—having the kids draw themselves as superheroes, for example—to help them process their feelings. And this year protesters in Hong Kong, are singing “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Miserables as they do a sit-in at the airport.

Yes, there are plenty of things to improve on. Art and music are not always accessible to marginalized communities. Resources are not equitably distributed to artists of color, artists with disability, LGBTQ artists. And in public schools, art and music programs are always the first to get cut, and the schools with the most low-income kids and kids of color are disproportionately affected. Symphonies, orchestras, ballets, and other art forms continue to struggle with diversity and community engagement.

While we work on those challenges, though, let’s take a moment to appreciate the organizations and professionals who are creating art and music, whose skills and dedication bring beauty and hope and happiness to a world sorely in need of it.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ VR Headsets

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On Saturday, the Knight Foundation will be issuing a call “for ideas exploring how arts institutions can present immersive experiences to engage audiences” (disclosure: Knight Foundation has funded projects for my day job and supports tons of stuff in my community.)

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.

From digital overlays of  museum spaces and VR interpretations of surreal landscapes, to artistic interpretations of climate change and digital recreations of fragile Cuban sculpture, artists, museums and other arts institutions are experimenting with these emerging technologies.

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.

If you are looking for some context or jumping off points for your own ideas, I have written about a number of projects associated with augmented reality in the past couple years, as well as projects in the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund

If you have an idea germinating,  guidelines will be posted on the Knight Foundation website on July 27. You can sign up for the July 30 informational webinar now.

Signs Of When Seeds Were Planted

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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.

The Arts Aren’t The Cherry, They Are The Yeast

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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.”

Baumol Effect Is A Blessing, Not A Disease

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Economist Alex Tabarrok recently made an interesting post on Baumol’s cost disease.  The concept usually explained by noting that since it doesn’t take any less time to perform a string quartet than it did when Beethoven wrote it, orchestras have no way to save money by taking advantage of advances in productivity and efficiency.

Tabarrok comes at it from the perspective that it is only more expensive to perform a string quartet now because productivity has increased in other industries.

The Baumol effect is easy to explain but difficult to grasp.

[…]

Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising implication: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive. In 1826, the average wage of $1.14 meant that the 2.66 hours needed to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 had an opportunity cost of just $3.02. At a wage of $26.44, the 2.66 hours of labor in music production had an opportunity cost of $70.33. Thus, in 2010 it was 23 times (70.33/3.02) more expensive to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 than in 1826.

[…]

The focus on relative prices tells us that the cost disease is misnamed. The cost disease is not a disease but a blessing. To be sure, it would be better if productivity increased in all industries, but that is just to say that more is better. There is nothing negative about productivity growth, even if it is unbalanced.

If that is a little hard to understand, he uses a more relatable example to point out that “…over time prices have very little connection to affordability.”

If the price of the same can of soup is higher at Wegmans than at Walmart we understand that soup is more affordable at Walmart. But if the price of the same can of soup is higher today than in the past it doesn’t imply that soup was more affordable in the past, even if we have done all the right corrections for inflation.

So just because a ticket costs more than it did years ago, doesn’t mean it is necessarily less affordable. Granted, it may still be a bit more difficult to get the funds together than in the past. I have had people tell me they were able to see Broadway shows for $15 at one time. While I suspect they may be mis-remembering how much of their weekly salary that $15 represented, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that tickets today are a greater portion of the weekly salary for that same job today. The production values are likely a lot higher than people saw when they were paying $15 so the ratio of value to money spent is probably fairly good.

Based on Tabarrok’s explanation, the concept that certain artistic expressions are fated to be an increasing burden on society because they can’t be executed with greater efficiency is not valid. Productivity growth in other areas provides the capacity to support those artistic expressions.

Does Gazing Out From The Belly Of A God Provide New Perspective?

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There was an interesting video on Shanghaiist in the last week about a hotel whose architect designed three giant deities for the facade to combat rumors that the building was constructed on a cemetery.

The three deities, Fu (福), Lu (禄), and Shou (寿), represent the three attributes of a good life, “prosperity,” “status,” and “longevity,” respectively. They were added to the design of the 40-meter-tall building by a local architect to compensate for rumors that the structure was being built on top of an old cemetery.

I will let you take a look at the video first. (Let me just say I present this mostly as a diversion and basis of idle musing rather than subject for serious analysis.)

 

One of the first thoughts I had was, if this was in the US, would this be considered some form of artwashing? For example, if someone had used positive imagery on a hotel constructed on a toxic waste site or some other dubious association as a way to assuage fears.

I am not trying to conflate toxic waste with human remains. Personally, I would have no problem staying in this hotel. I have worked in enough theaters that were purported to be haunted or built on sanctified land that this doesn’t bother me. The placement of the hotel and anticipated repercussions appears it has a much stronger social and cultural significance in China than it might in the US.

I just found myself musing about cultural differences. Would something along these lines this be viewed with skepticism in the US while in China it might be viewed as an appropriate gesture given the history of the plot of land.

I also wondered why a hotel might choose to go to the expense of the extra construction. Presumably people coming from out of town wouldn’t be aware of the rumors. Though if it is the sort of place that gains more business from people visiting local residents or conducting business with government or local companies rather than tourism, they might depend more strongly on word of mouth.

I was amused by the comment made by one of the residents that the building unexpectedly became a distinctive feature of the community. I was thinking to myself, how could three 120 foot high deities NOT become a distinctive feature of the community? If nothing else, you could navigate the streets in relation to where it was on the horizon.

Perhaps people did initially see the statues as a cynical use of spectacle to make money but ended up finding that it created a unique sense of place in the neighborhood.

Thinking about all this made me start to wonder how efforts at creative placemaking might appear from the outside through the lens of other cultures. Does it appear like we are trying to manufacture a sense of community where one doesn’t exist organically? (I get the image of some foreign visitor paraphrasing Regina George “stop trying to make community happen, it isn’t not going to happen.”)

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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