Defined Plan For Change –Including The Accusations

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mistake Of Viewing Culture As An Industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

When Federal Funding Of Theater Equaled The Cost Of A Battleship

Artsjournal.com posted an article from The Yale Review reviewing a book about the benefits the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) brought to Depression Era United States.  In addition to discussing these benefits the book’s author, James Shapiro, relates efforts to dismantle FTP by conservatives as an early manifestation of the culture war we experience today.

After reading about all the activity the FTP engaged in across the country, the reviewer Charlie Tyson notes that the budget was “less than 1% of the total funds allocated for federal work relief, or about the cost to build a battleship. Tyson notes that the cost to build an air craft carrier today is around $13 billion and challenges readers to think about what arts organizations and artists could do with that sort of money today.

What was most interesting was reading about the wide scope of activities the Federal Theater Project and the related Federal Dance Theater Project engaged in. If there was ever a time in the history of the US when artistic activity was viewed as populist rather than elitist, it was during the period of 1935 and 1939 when these projects were actively creating works. The works created weren’t just lighthearted fare. There were challenging pieces on topics like poverty, housing, racism, labor relations, and inequality.

The Living Newspaper program of the FTP addressed these topics and focused some criticism upon lawmakers by quoting statements made in the Congressional Record.  It is probably no surprise that legislators who were already opposed to FDR’s New Deal programs targeted works drawing a great amounts of attention to the uncomfortable issues of the day.

The funds distributed to artists through FTP provided for a significant amount of community engagement. To a certain extent there are probably lessons to be drawn today from the activities of artists 90 years ago.  One of the things cited by Tyson was how closely tailored to a target community some of the shows were:

“Unlike Hollywood, which delivered the same products to everyone, the Project was nimble, sensitive to local variation. For example, shows were staged in Spanish in Miami and Tampa and in Yiddish in New York. The Project gave directors license to adjust performances to satisfy local tastes; audiences in different cities might see differing versions of the same play.

A string of early successes established the Federal Theatre’s rep­utation. Its first hit was a production of Macbeth in Harlem, staged by one of the program’s so-called Negro Units. (The Federal Theatre was, at the time, Harlem’s largest employer.) To direct the production, the organization tapped Orson Welles, at that time a virtually unknown twenty-year-old actor with no professional directorial experience. The Harlem Macbeth—commonly known as the Voodoo Macbeth—traded Scottish gloom for Caribbean exot­icism. Set in nineteenth-century Haiti with a large all-Black cast and filled, in Shapiro’s words, with “drumming and spectacle,” the production was a sensation. It moved from Harlem to Broadway and then embarked on a national tour with stops in the Jim Crow South. The play reached roughly 120,000 people.

Many of the shows were performed for free. There are apparently pictures of thousands of people filling parks to watch performances. (Though I imagine many performances also occurred indoors). In total, it was estimated “…thirty million Americans—roughly a quarter of the population—attended Federal Theatre productions.”

Toward the end of the piece Tyson notes that there have been recent calls for more federal funding of non-profit theaters and cites a criticism that theaters have only themselves to blame for producing works with themes criticizing the social and political environment. But Tyson notes that theatrical performances have a long history of containing social messages from Victorian melodramas pointing out the plight of the poor to the social commentary of Federal Theater Project works through to today.

Free Admission Isn’t An Audience Building Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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