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Cultivate Paranoia Or A Constructive Environment?

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Over the years I have written about studies which have found that the younger generation starting careers in non-profit organizations weren’t content to put in long hours and pay their dues. There is a desire for work-life balance and ability to advance in the organization relatively quickly.  The general caution to non-profits has been that if workers don’t feel that their labor is allowing them to make a difference, they may look elsewhere.

Yesterday, Non-Profit Quarterly suggested there might be another facet to the way that idealism manifests –leaking/whistleblowing.  The evidence of this trend is mostly anecdotal, but it bears considering (if only because you shouldn’t be doing anything shady in the first place).

Harris writes that workers and potential workers are increasingly clear that they must “be their own brand.” So, if the ethical choices of an institution do not align with that of a millennial who is confident about his or her own brand, including their moral reasoning, and if the social stakes are high enough, the millennial may go with his or her own commitments even if that institution is the federal government.

While there have been a number of instances of notable mismanagement, malfeasance, and outright fraud in the non-profit sector, there are plenty of less serious issues employees might bring to light.

Certainly, employees need to exercise good judgment and maturity so as not to mischaracterize the difficult work that non-profits do as illegal exploitation. However, there is a thin line between asking people to work hard for low pay and asking people to work hard and pressuring them not to claim overtime or comp time.

While the NPQ article suggests an increased threat of whistleblowing will keep employers honest, it might be more productive to view changing expectations as an impetus to effect change toward a more constructive work environment rather suspiciously eyeing new worker for signs of betrayal.

Giving Circles As Next Iteration of Crowdfunding?

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Last week, Non-Profit Quarterly noted that the number of Giving Circles in the US were growing and wondered if this had implications for institutional giving. If you haven’t heard of them before, Giving Circles are usually comprised of a number of individuals in a community who pool their money and collectively make decisions about what causes the circle will support.

Lynn O’Connell, DFW’s grants chairwoman, belongs to four giving circles. She said, “No circle looks or acts like any other. Dues, size, structure, and mission are all a little different. It’s not just about writing a check, but the circles area a major force in helping people learn about philanthropy and about nonprofits.” Further, because giving circles have very little overhead, most of the money raised goes directly to grants.

I want to call attention to two things in this quote. First, low overhead being cited as a benefit. Despite efforts to reduce overhead as a criteria of effectiveness, it remains part of the conversation. The second is a little more promising – the fact that circles are educating people about philanthropy and non-profits. A trend in this direction can be benefit non-profits.

An additional positive perspective: “A previous giving circle study by the University of Nebraska found that people who join giving circles give more, volunteer more, and are more engaged in their communities.”

The financial support that giving circles provide is relatively small scale compared to large established foundations. However, they are apparently growing out of a distrust of donating through mediating entities.

It’s also interesting to contrast the giving circle form as it relates to the trend away from “intermediated” giving, which has weakened general funds in United Ways and community foundations and boosted the use of donor-advised funds. Perhaps this tropism is less about greater individualism and more a “no confidence” vote on past intermediaries.

Something I wondered was if we might see online giving efforts evolve from models like that of Kickstarter where many people give to projects, to virtual giving circles where those of shared interest and giving philosophies might cooperate regardless of geographic separation.

Since wealthier individuals might have more tax incentive to form and give through foundations, it is possible that some Internet based giving circles with thousands of members could emerge as influential in diverse sectors either competing with foundations or providing leadership in new directions. A geographic spread of members might also see giving less concentrated around urban regions.

Myths And Truths About Your Brain On Music

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Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education.  The study was conducted in Germany so the author the article suggests that perhaps neurologists in the US do a better job of communicating the truth about music education better than their German counterparts, but I suspect that isn’t the case.

In the study, both music teachers and students were roughly equally adept (or bad) at separating myth from truth.

“Teachers and students correctly rejected 60 and 59 percent of the seven neuromyths,” the researchers report. Proven statements were correctly seen as true by 76 percent of music teachers and 78 percent of students.

That means there were a whole lot of wrong answers…

“The three most-trusted neuromyths included neuroscientific terminology, such as ‘brain hemisphere’ or ‘cognitive abilities,'” the researchers note. This suggests music teachers, like the rest of us, can be fooled into thinking an assertion is true if it is stated using neuro-jargon.

The researchers warn that this tendency may lead teachers to assign their pupils worthless or counterproductive homework. For example, 44 percent of teachers, and nearly 40.1 percent of aspiring instructors, believed this unproven statement: “The ability to improvise on the piano is controlled by the right hemisphere; special exercises can enhance the performance of the hemisphere.” In fact, such “exercises” would be a waste of time.

You can read the full study on the Frontiers in Psychology website.

The following chart from the study shows which of the myths and which of the proven statements the study participants correctly identified.  As you can see in the myths category, among some of the biggest misapprehensions were associated with music improving calculus ability; relationship between dominant hand and speech and music processing; and the impact of music education cognitive ability.

Among the substantiated theses, answers started to get a little iffy on the subject of the conditions which contributed to the positive influence of passive listening.

As the article suggests, the language used in some of these statements can be a little difficult to unravel and may influence participants’ perceptions. (At least in English, I am not sure if German terminology is clearer.) Questions 7M and 8S deal with similar concepts and probably appeared in sequence with each other.

Given that the survey was administered to music teachers and educators in training, I am sure they struggled with 1M that suggests musicians are smarter than everyone else. The fact that 75-80% answered it correctly can probably be attributed to a suspicion it was a trick question.

Being aware of what claims of benefits of arts and culture participation have been substantiated and which haven’t can be important for advocacy efforts. You don’t want to get caught citing debunked data.

Back in December, I called attention to Createquity project to survey all the available studies and evaluate the strength of the findings: Everything We Know About Whether and How the Arts Improve Lives. That page is a good place to start if you want to get a sense of whether the claims you are making are borne out by research and how strong the results are.

Holding A Note, Six Weeks At A Time

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I recently became aware of the Young Professionals’ Choral Collective out of Cincinnati and was impressed at how they structured themselves to facilitate involvement by a younger demographic.

They position their identity in the following way:

Do you love to sing? Did you sing in high school/college/church and miss the music-making, the friendships, the fun and the community of a choir? Do you want to get more involved in Cincinnati arts scene? Do you want to find new friends to go with you to all the new bars and restaurants in OTR & Downtown Cincinnati? Do you want to sing in a choir but can’t commit to a full-year weekly schedule? Then check us out!

What impressed me most was that they structure participation in 6 week cycles. You only need to commit yourself for that period of time. Given that so many surveys about arts participation mention lack of time as an impediment to participation, I thought this was a smart way to respond to this challenge.

Currently they claim over 850 members. There are no auditions for their self-produced concerts nor do they place limits on how many people can participate in each cycle. Presumably, they work with whomever they have.

Of course, since they have positioned themselves as a place where people with an avid interest in choral performance can continue to practice their passion, new members are likely to have some degree of experience and coaching.

Socialization is definitely a primary ingredient in their organizational model. In a TEDx talk about the group, Artistic Director KellyAnn Nelson repeatedly jokes about the role of alcohol in their activities. They rehearse in bars and go to a different restaurant after every rehearsal as a way of publicly supporting area businesses.

Given how boisterous she claims they are at these dinners, I imagine it also provides some publicity for the group’s concerts and acts as recruitment for new members.  They encourage members (and prospective members) who aren’t able to participate in a cycle of rehearsals to stop by, hang out and eat with the group when they can make it.

The ease of joining, stopping and rejoining, probably relieves people of internal distress over conflicting obligations and makes them more apt to join in the first place.

It may also create a sense of membership in people who only participated in one cycle five years ago. The ability to rejoin without much guilt may provide a sense of continuity with the organization that makes them more apt to evangelize about the group even if they never sing with them again.

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I often use the example of people who sing in a church choir not seeing themselves on a continuum with Aretha Franklin. I am not sure if singing in a civic choir would necessarily solve that issue, but I would see a small victory if a person considered themselves a singer because they continued to identify as a member of a group five years after participating.

You Want A Tarantella On A Violin, I Want A Tarantula

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Almost as soon as I published my post yesterday about building community around augmented reality, I started thinking about how that might work with live performance.

One of my first thoughts was that augmented reality could allow everyone in the audience to experience the event the way they wanted. When symphony orchestras project things behind them while they play, purists often complain that it detracts from the experience.

With augmented reality, some people could watch the concert with some sort of animated overlay while others watched without any enhancement at all.  There could be different “channels” of programming available at an event. One might have the animations, another might have program notes, another might have subtitles in your chosen language. There may be a choice of animations geared toward different age groups.

Credit where due, a recent repost of one of Holly Mulcahy’s blog entries with a picture of a tarantula crawling on her violin started getting my imagination going about what sort of things might possibly be overlaid on people during a concert.

The features could be educational as well as entertaining. During a concert, you might be prompted to “catch” notes cascading from a changing selection of instruments which would help people learn different orchestra instruments.  Granted, this might result in wild physical movements that others might find distracting so an organization would obviously need to be judicious about what they used when.

The technology might also open the possibility for people to create custom overlays that demeaned whatever was being looked at, reinforcing attitudes about art by placing statues, paintings and performers in lewd context.

That same possibility for custom augmentation also provides the opportunity to engage a larger community in live experience of art and culture. Whenever I start thinking about how to leverage technology to benefit the arts, inevitably I think about the cost of having someone create this content and getting staff to implement it.

But the cost and staffing needs don’t necessarily need to be burdensome. I am writing this post using the Firefox browser adorned by a custom skin someone made. If there was enough interest, there might be people around the world who would create program notes, animations, editable supertitles for operas, games, etc that could be licensed for use.

Part of the promotion for the event could include mention of program notes by a famed Japanese commentator, animations by a Brazilian artist, or maybe contributions by a local person of note.

The opportunity to tap into the expertise and passion of a worldwide pool of creators could be very beneficial by creating stronger bonds between members of an international community.

The local community and audiences might also be involved in providing content. You could have little QR code or other visual cue attached to an actor that a phone might pick up so that people could understand the character’s backstory during an opera. Audience members might submit questions or make comments that could either contribute to a clearer packet of information in the future or could be answered live by on-duty staff.

Obviously, too much of this type of interaction touches on the current debate about technology and live performance. Specifically, what is the value of live performance if your experience is mediated by technology? Clarifying information can be valuable to attendees, but a chatroom environment which occupies the majority of a person’s attention becomes problematic.

While I tend toward keeping distracting (both to oneself and seat mates) technologies out of a live experience, I will admit that I would really be excited to see how imaginative different people could be in creating new contexts for familiar works.  I also wonder if we wouldn’t see more people trying out unfamiliar experiences if they knew they could consult a guiding source of information. Indian dance and Kabuki performances might pop up in more unexpected places.

Judging Yourself As You Judge Others

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Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will love you for helping them out, especially during the heaviest period in their granting cycle.

Perhaps the biggest benefit for you will be identifying those areas people like yourself do well or fall short in making the case for their programs.  You can get advice about how to write an effective proposal on a monthly basis, but until you apply a critical eye to a proposal from outside disciplines, geography and demographic attributes with which you are familiar, you aren’t likely to appreciate all the potential pitfalls.

I recently participated in a panel for my state arts council for a program my organization wasn’t eligible to participate in.

There were a number of times people referenced discipline specific shorthand or neighborhoods/towns they were doing outreach in. I suspected that this information would be more compelling if I better understood the relevance.

Recognizing that I was probably making the same mistake of assuming reviewers would be excited by similar discussions of accomplishments for which they had no frame of reference, I started to pull out old grant proposals and found a number of places that could probably use additional information about why it was important that certain groups were involved or being represented in our programs.

During the panel review process I made additional notes as panelists would comment about things they wished they had seen more detail about. In other cases, it was observed too much time was spent talking about other organizational activities rather than focusing on the proposed project.

Now I will grant you, often space limitations imposed by the application form makes it difficult to provide the detail that will really allow your project to shine. It is important to make a case with the granting organization that 3-4 more lines of text would make all the difference.  Volunteering to serve on a grant panel can provide you with the opportunity to make that case in person.

I also want to acknowledge that when you are faced with a tall pile of proposals to review, the last thing you want to do is engage in prolonged introspection of the strengths and weaknesses of your own submissions. But it can be worthwhile to at least take the time to make duplicates of notes that represent potential areas of concern in your work for later review.

Then, of course, there is benefit in seeing what other people are doing. What novel ideas and approaches are out there? How are others executing their programs? How are they defining and measuring success? What strategies are they employing to deal with challenges?

One really, really general piece of advice I will give based on what I have seen is to make sure your website has links to your social media accounts. This is website and social media 101, but I was surprised at how many people mention they promote their events on social media, but don’t have links on their websites. Web searches will turn the social media accounts up, but there was often no easy way for someone who discovered an organization through their website to stay connected through social media.  (Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a web search turned some of them up, I have no idea if I found the full range of online presence.)

 

Deity or Destitute

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In the comment section of yesterday’s post, Carter Gillies warned about succumbing to the temptations of survivorship bias and only holding up a few successful cases as examples to emulate.

The tales of college dropouts that became millionaires as an argument against education, for example.

On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder if there is a way to tell a compelling story about being an artist that doesn’t involve angst and disaster.

We hear stories about successful celebrities who are secretly plagued by depression and self-doubt.

There is idealization of the starving artist that suffers at the edge of poverty, but occupies the moral high ground because they never sold out and became commercially successful.

Zen Pencils, one of my favorite sites for illustrating inspirational ideas, featured the words of self-taught pianist James Rhodes. There was a link encouraging people to read the whole piece from The Guardian on which the cartoon was based.

Amid the inspiration thoughts was Rhodes’ confession that he didn’t approach the cultivation of his skills in the most constructive way:

I didn’t play the piano for 10 years…. And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure…

While I appreciate that the inspirational idealism of the piece was leavened by a recognition of reality, this hardly recommends the life of an artist.

As I was riding to work recently I heard an interview with someone who talked about the value of experience of live performance over recorded performance in the context of something going wrong on stage.

I will admit that I have spoken about experiencing a performance live in these terms myself. When I heard this expressed on the radio, I wondered if we really should continue to use the opportunity for something to go wrong as a selling point for live performance. Can’t we find a more compelling rationale to convince potential audiences that they should invest time, money and energy in being present at a performance than the promise of seeing someone screw up?

People who work in the arts inevitably says how fulfilling their lives are despite the challenges. There is often a sentiment expressed along the lines of not being able to imagine working 9-5 behind a desk.

I understand all this. I can identify with it having lived it and spoken in these terms myself. I know sex, danger and suffering sell. But as people in a creative industry, isn’t there an interesting narrative that doesn’t involve incurring physical and psychic scars along the way?

Or won’t we allow ourselves to have a relatively mundane experience? Does our narrative have to involve suffering of some sort in order to be valid? A little bit of martyrdom to make us special for not having settled for a conventional life?

I will openly admit to participating in and perpetuating some of these narratives. I have only just started to think about how to craft a compelling narrative about the arts that doesn’t evoke the blessings of unnatural talent or noble suffering, so I don’t have any clear answers in that regard at this point.

Deliberate Practice, Imagination, Openness To New Experiences

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The idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master something has largely been debunked since Malcolm Gladwell first suggested it. Still, I think he did everyone a favor by suggesting this number because since then there has been a closer examination of how we come to master skills.

Theories today focus on deliberate practice where you are reflecting and getting feedback on your efforts rather than engaging in repetition over a period of time. It is quality of practice rather than quantity.

Last December on Creativity Post they examined this idea of deliberate practice a bit more and found some suggestion that variety of experience may be just as important as paying attention to the quality of the practice you engage in.

I have seen some findings on this before. They had two sets of kids practice throwing objects into a bucket. One group threw objects at a bucket three feet away and others threw objects at buckets three feet away for part of the time and five feet away for part of the time. When they moved the buckets to a four foot distance, the second group tended to be more accurate.

The Creativity Post piece reported findings with some additional nuance:

David [Epstein]: It’s one of the reasons why we see this interesting pattern in the sports realm—in non-golf sports—where kids who get highly technical instruction early in life in a single sport don’t go on to become elite. It’s completely the opposite of what you expect from a deliberate practice framework. It’s the Roger Federer model, the kids who play a bunch of different sports, learn a whole variety of skills, a lot of improv, who delay focusing, actually go on to become elite more often. Of course, there are a million different pathways. Steve Nash didn’t play basketball until he was 13. They’re behind in technical skills early on, but they get this broad exposure and range of skills so the thinking is they tend to be much more creative and able to transfer their skills.

This made me wonder if classical music training, which tends to be one of the more repetitive training regimens, would be better served by encouraging a wide variety of creative pursuits in the earlier stages rather than a singular focus.

Yes, sports are different from arts and creativity despite the frequent comparisons. But the observation about creative practice by Scott Barry Kaufman is really intriguing:

The E. Paul Torrance studies followed kids starting in elementary school and they’re still following them 50 years later. It found quite clearly that there are a wide range of characteristics that predicted life-long creative achievement—a lot more factors than just persistence or practice.

In fact, they found one of the most important characteristics was the extent to which kids fell in love with a future image of themselves. That has passion, but it also has an imagination component to it. Openness to experience, for instance, we’ve found is the best predictor of publicly recognized creative achievement, even better than conscientiousness.

Positive image of yourself in the future, imagination, and openness to experience as important predictors of publicly recognized creative achievement. Something to think about it.

Big Ideas From Small Places

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Great ideas can be found and cultivated everywhere. That is the basic message of a blog post on the Center for Small Towns’ website.  They note that reporting on rural towns often seeks to reinforce an existing narrative rather than illuminating the facts. (On The Media did a great series about coverage of rural news this last Fall.)

Center for Small Towns calls attention to some pretty awesome ideas communities are doing that you may wish you had thought of first.

For instance, Lanesboro, MN created Poetry Parking Lots where they had people compose haiku about “the beauty of southeastern Minnesota, and of the strong community of Lanesboro.” They posted the haiku on light posts in parking lots.

 

They also made cast iron medallions which they placed around town “inviting residents and visitors to hunt for the various medallions as they walk about town.” This reminded me a lot of the manhole covers in Japan I wrote about a few years back. The art on the manhole covers serves the same purpose of emphasizing points of pride about the cities in which they are found.

In Fergus Falls, MN, an artist created a “Citizen Kit” to encourage civic engagement. The kits included,

“…a small red box complete with City Council meeting “punch cards,” citizen pledge cards to put in your wallet, and buttons. The citizen kits came complete with a spray painted gold hole punch, for local community leaders to use when they saw people attending city council meetings.”

Websites like Art of the Rural are also focused on stories like these where groups are employing innovative ideas in smaller places. As the title of the post suggests, good ideas pop up in all sorts of places, regardless of population. But I feel ideas like these can be especially effective at connecting with communities because they resonate so closely with the core identity of a place.

Have I Said Too Much Or Haven’t Said Enough?

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I have a fairly regular standing appointment on a radio station to talk about upcoming events at our performing arts center. Often the host will ask me to talk about the process we go through to book shows. Since I talked about it the time before, I am surprised he wants to hear about it again. But I also realize that what seems pretty repetitive and boring to me as someone on the inside might be fascinating to other people.

It got me to thinking, should we be revealing more details about our process than we are? Will the public be more engaged by an open discussion of the challenges we face?

Mostly I am thinking about the programming area. We generally don’t talk about our upcoming season until the last show of the current season. Partially, this is a matter of making a dramatic reveal. I don’t know that there is as much anticipation and fanfare about that sort of thing to make it as valuable a tactic as it was 20-30+ years ago.

The bigger rationale for not giving details about what we are considering is to avoid creating expectations in the community that we ultimately are unable to deliver on. Often it will look good for a top name for 6 months straight only to have the plans fall through at the last minute. As disappointing as that is for programming staff, at least they don’t have to deliver the news to 15,000 people waiting for the on-sale announcement, potentially damaging organizational credibility.

In a way, it is like the stereotypical horse race where one horse is in front the entire time and then ends up losing completely in the final yards. With that image in mind and with so many past comparisons about how the arts are like sports or should be promoted/covered like sports, I wondered if discussion about upcoming programming should be handled like speculation about a team draft.

Even if plans to have Wicked appear next season fall through at the last minute, does it create excitement and drama for people to know that is what you are trying to do for three months?  Or does it make the replacement show look worse by comparison and potentially sour people on attending a show they would have been excited to see if they hadn’t been yearning for Wicked?

Maybe Wicked has too much notoriety to be a proper example.  It might be better to evoke a musical group that is replaced by an equally notable group after the first group had been mentioned regularly for a number of months.

While contracts often state you are committing to the conditions if you announce before contracts are finalized, I am not suggesting a firm announcement, just an open discussion about what the organization is thinking about for the coming year. Because even if things fall through, you can provide assurances of your sincere intent to pursue the opportunity again in the future.

That’s one benefit to this approach. You don’t have to guess whether something will connect with the community because people will mention their approval to staff at religious services, at the coffee house, supermarket, etc throughout the planning process.

Of course, they may also express their displeasure just as sports fans do over draft choices and other decisions sports teams make. So staff will need to be prepared to discuss the philosophy behind pursuing a type of programming, including the concept that not everything the organization does is meant for everyone in the community.   An ongoing conversation about plans may require developing a greater tolerance for criticism.

But even in the face of criticism, you can recognize people have some degree of investment in what happens in your organization.

(And by the way, this idea is hardly new. A version was suggested 15 years ago in the article I linked to earlier and is worth a read.)

Thoughts?

I think some of the anticipated negative aspects like Wicked vs. “any other option you would normally think was great” assumes that the program decision making and new season communication process wouldn’t change. I think change would occur either organically or of recognized necessity. There would be few, if any, cases of stark disappointment because the community and arts organization understood each other a little better.

I also think it also underestimates the tolerance and understanding of disappointing outcomes from people who are used to release dates of anticipated movies, books, albums and tech devices being delayed for another year.

Post title inspired by REM. But I was also thinking of evoking an appropriately similar line from “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” “Have I said too much?/There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you/But all you have to do is look at me to know/That every word is true.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PWO11ilSYc

Does Your Experience Need Speed Bumps?

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Via Marginal Revolution blog, comes a story about a tourist spot in China that supposedly put in speed bumps to force people to slow down and appreciate the scenery.

It made me think, is this worth doing in places like museums where people rush past exhibits in order to get to the famous stuff so they can say they were there? Do you set things up so people have to take a circuitous route through choke points either on arrival or departure so people are forced to slow down and take a look around them for a couple minutes?

Or acknowledging the different doors for different people concept I wrote about yesterday, do you clearly mark an express lane for experience seekers who want to validate their visit with a selfie and direct everyone else in another direction so they can proceed at their own pace undisturbed?

Is the purpose as a museum to force these people to stand still long enough that they realize there are other delights to be experienced, or do you allow them to reinforce their narrow definition of what is valuable to experience?

Yes, I intentionally made both options sound negative and restricted the options to something of a false choice. There are other ways to look at an experience often the same person may seek a different type of experience in different places or different visits to the same place.

A couple years back I wrote about John Falk’s Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Falk talks about the five different types of motivations which impel museum visitors.  It is pretty clear these categories of motivation are not exclusive to museums and can apply to any arts and culture or tourist visit activity.

I don’t think there are any clear or easy answers to the questions I initially pose. Being aware of these different motivations is helpful and important when evaluating the experience you offer visitors.

It isn’t easy to offer an experience that is 100% fulfilling on all five categories 100% of the time.

Using the example Nina Simon gave in the TEDx talk I cited yesterday, if you have an event about the history of surfing on the beach away from your traditional facility, you are likely to attract an entirely new segment of people.

Consider: What does a person exploring the topic of surf history want out of the experience? What opportunities does a person seeking the experience of being at an interesting event want? What do people seeking to facilitate the experience for others need? What do people with relatively high degree of expertise on surf history want? What about people seeking to recharge or reflect?

A crowded event on a beach may not suit the needs of a person seeking to recharge or provide the rigorous detail an expert is seeking. However, a different event on the subject in a different place might, so you make an effort to ensure those elements are present at this other event and these people are aware of the opportunity. Just be cognizant that while a topic like surf history may open them to the idea of visiting your organization for the first time, the traditional experience visitors have at your organization may still alienate them.

But don’t get overwhelmed by the idea of an expanding multiplicity of permutations. Remember, every person who walks in the door, regardless of whether they are new or returning, will fall into one or more of those categories.  Returning people will have the benefit of familiarity, but otherwise every visit can be viewed as an entirely new experience. There is always going to be some element of “each person, each day at a time,” to every interaction.

Relevance Begins At The Door

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If you haven’t been following Nina Simon on her Museum 2.0 blog or haven’t read her book, The Art of Relevance, her recent TEDx Palo Alto talk could be a good 12 minute intro to her thoughts on making arts organizations relevant in their communities. (And if you like this, check out her longer talk at the Minnesota History Center that I covered last October.)

In her TEDx talk, she discusses how easy it is for an insider to decide to participate in an organizations and how many decisions an outsider has to navigate before deciding there is meaning for them on the other side of the literal and metaphoric front door.

She uses the door metaphor a lot throughout her talk. She says that often organizations think that being more inclusive means  opening existing doors wider, but what is necessary is to create entirely new doors to access organizational programs. In the case of her Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, this has meant things like having part of their surfing exhibition on the beach.

Perhaps the most extreme and literal example of opening new doors she mentioned was that of the State Library of Queensland which built a gorgeous new white building and then invited aboriginal elders in to help them design an indigenous knowledge center.  The elders noted that for them, knowledge wasn’t shared through books, but rather through music, dance and storytelling in a setting that wasn’t so sterile looking, most importantly around a fire.  The librarians, true to their intent renovated a space for music, dance and storytelling and infused it with color. And they built a firepit (away from the flammable archives, of course).

In her Minnesota History Center talk she suggested that not everything an organization does is for everyone. In her TEDx talk, she returns to that theme by noting that not everything you do in the process of opening new doors is going to please everyone. Your organization is no longer going to conform to the idea of what people think a theater, museum, opera company, orchestra, etc should look like.

Suddenly a metaphoric neon pink door appears on the side of the building as part of an attempt to provide an experience in a context relevant to a certain segment of the population. Anyone is free to enter that door, but it isn’t meant to provide the same experience as the original doors of the building. It may be difficult for insiders to accept that every door or program isn’t meant for them. She says a door that says welcome to one person may say keep out to another. (The door in this case being myriad perceptual elements.)

There is an important subtext here that distinguishes this line of thinking from historical conversations the arts have about connecting with audiences. She never suggests that the people entering these additional doors will one day enter the traditional doors. Typically, conversations about engaging new audiences are focused on getting people in the door with an eye to getting them hooked on the core programming of the organization. It may happen, but Nina never suggests that will happen.

If it is the case that not every door/program is meant for everyone, some people may never/infrequently choose to enter the original doors/engage with the core programs.  The end goal is to grow the relevance of the organization to a place where traffic through the new doors causes an identity to evolve which blends with or even subsumes what is currently considered the core program.

 

On Not Surrendering To “The Flow”

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Via Artsjournal.com is a thought-provoking essay about artistic performance on Aeon. Dancer Barbara Gail Montero posits that a true expert performer doesn’t surrender to “the flow,” but only appears to do so while mindfully evaluating what they are doing.  When you become experienced and realize just how much you don’t know, what was a mindlessly simple introductory exercise becomes the subject of close scrutiny toward improvement.

Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia found that ‘the paragons of effortless performance were fifth-graders who, given a simple topic, would start writing in seconds and would produce copy as fast as their little fingers could move the pencil.’

Those fifth-graders are in flow. The young tennis player’s game is fun, and the child’s tendu is easy. It’s the experts’ technique that becomes difficult; not to the outside world, but to themselves. Just as in Plato’s dialogue the Apology, where Socrates is wise because he knows he is ignorant, it’s the capacity to recognise where there’s room for improvement that leads us to the highest levels of human achievement. In other words, the idea that expert actions are in a placid state of flow – a state in which things seem to fall into place on their own – is a myth.

Throughout her piece, she cites a number of artists and athletes whose example attest to the idea that they aren’t transitioning into a sublime spiritual world when they perform, it only appears so. For example violinist Arnold Steinhardt writes how,

Even when he’s practised innumerable times, the playing doesn’t happen on its own. That’s not to say that he can’t ‘slip into the music’s spiritual realm’, as he puts it. But this realm is also his ‘work area’, in which the members of his quartet ‘expend a significant amount of energy slaving over [their] individual instruments’. However sublime the quartet’s performances, they are not handed down from above.

She says one of the reasons why the myth of entering the flow persists is because the effort is invisible to the outside observer. She suggests that the general desire for an easy path to excellence might also motivate this perception.

Perhaps flow draws us in because we generally dislike hard work. Numerous self-help books turn on this tendency, suggesting that instead of buckling down to a lifetime of toil, you can reach great heights by simply letting go of the thought, the effort, the trying. But I suspect the popularity of these books springs from the same source as the vogue for fad diets..It’s not that they work, but they are easy to follow.

Now if you are skeptical about her basic thesis, you aren’t alone. The commenters on the piece varied in degree in their agreement or opposition to Montero’s ideas. Personally, I thought much of what she described as happening during a performance more as a focus on intentional practice rather than performance. One of the commenters, Ian Dyball, a Ph.D. student in the field of performance consciousness suggested something similar.

“Barbara, in my opinion, you confuse the notions of practice and performance. If a performer is noticing mistakes, he or she is not fully engaged in performance but is also, at that moment, practising…If a question or an analysis takes place it is a distraction to the performing artist and, potentially, to the performance. It is, to a degree, practising. The questioning mind (the person) is not in a state of flow despite the fact that the action itself may be being achieved unconsciously; as a habit programmed by, ultimately imperfect (if the thought is correct), practice.”

In her reply, Montero, does concede that she is blurring the distinction between performance and practice and that there may be people who are not engaging in self-analysis when they perform. Her experience may not be the experience of all performers. (I suspect she may not have written the headline, by the way.)

While I do question some of her assertions about what true performers are doing, I think the idea is worth some extensive thought.  I have written frequently about how the myth of inspiration and talent can cause people to think there is a magic ability you either have or don’t have. Or it can be lost and only regained through luck.

While Montero’s article goes in the other direction by suggesting every moment must be examined for a path to improvement without room for a little surrender, I think it is valuable for its emphasis on the work that is involved. In many ways, it  respects artists for seeking opportunities for improvement in the most fundamental exercises of their training.  What might appear to be disposable activities to keep novices busy and out of the way are acknowledged to be the building blocks for the entire discipline.

These ideas aren’t just important for the arts community to consider about how they approach their own practice, but I think it crucial to introduce some of these concepts when talking to people who doubt their own creativity.

Yes, everyone has the capacity to be creative. No, it isn’t a magic power that is granted or withdrawn by some impersonal force. Yes, excellence takes work, just like everything else.

Hero To The World, Ho-hum At Home

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I have mentioned a couple times how Jamie Bennett addressed a belief in a TEDx talk that art is what other people do in other places.  I wonder if there might be a little “familiarity breeds contempt” or “no prophet is accepted in his own country” bias operating there.

A year ago, Colleen Dilenschneider made a post talking about how local audiences seem to appreciate their hometown cultural organizations least.

Local audiences believe that the value of the visitor experience is less worthy of the organization’s admission cost than non-local visitors to the same institution. On average, people living within 25 miles of the organization (or, locals) indicate value for cost perceptions that are 14% lower than those of regional visitors!

But so many organizations offer discounts for locals. Are these folks even paying full admission? No. On average, the locals in this data reported paying 20% less than regional visitors – and they still report that the value wasn’t as worthy of the cost as non-local audiences paying full admission!

Okay. But local audiences are probably more satisfied with their experience, right? After all, the organization is right there strengthening the reputation of their own city, and, again, many are getting in at a reduced cost.

Nope again. Take a look at the data cut for overall satisfaction in regard to distance traveled. Locals report satisfaction levels that are 11% lower than regional visitors who had the same visitor experience.

Believe it or not, she says this bias exists even in places like New York City which means maybe the Metropolitan Museum of Art should rethink their plan to offer free admission only to NYC residents. People in the rest of the state, country and world are going to appreciate the experience much more than they do.

Instead of devaluing yourself by offering price discounts, she suggests promotional strategies and special events or perks that add value to the experience of local audiences.

Dilenschneider suggests that these findings may make the leaders of cultural organizations angry, especially those that pride themselves in serving their local community.  I confess I had that same initial reaction, partially on behalf of many of the other cultural organizations in my area. She says this anger is good because it can impel you to action.

I got that when one receives solicited or unsolicited feedback from participants, they might do well to examine the feedback to get a sense of what sort of value added experiences or perks the organization could offer.

The opportunity may not be directly obvious from the answers people give, but after observing some trends and subtext, could result in something that resonates with the community like barbecue or chili cook-offs. This event may or may not have a specific hook related to the organization. (Re-create a painting using barbecue foods at a museum event?)

Whose Theater Is It Anyway?

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I have written about stakeholder revolts where people in the community force non-profit boards to reconstitute themselves, usually in reaction to a planned closing of the organization.   In other places, board are revising their membership in order to better embrace their governance role and diversifying to better reflect community demographics.

It isn’t often that you hear the staff of an organization demand that the board resign and reform. Howard Sherman related the contentious and confusing situation at Theatre Puget Sound in a recent post on the Arts Integrity Initiative.  The theatre staff made an “either you go, or we do” ultimatum in a no-confidence letter to the board.

Unfortunately, this drama is playing out in a very public way according to Sherman because the executive director,

….sent the request for the board’s resignation to a wide cross section of the Seattle community, including the media, leaders of other arts organizations, community philanthropists and more, and even included a pair of internal e-mails by the board.

I second Sherman’s suggestion that the situation isn’t well served by rehashing all the gory details.

…The Stranger is on the case for those who want more information, and for future study by arts management educators and students. However, the bird’s eye view of the contretemps should serve as a reminder for boards and executive and senior leadership of arts organizations to examine their practices and policies, because while the situation is rare, it demonstrates how a rapid cascade of events can put an arts organization at risk.

Given the context of recent stakeholder revolts and other actions, this situation does bear watching for glimpses of larger trends that may be emerging in the non-profit world that may impact the arts.

The very question of who owns a non-profit organization is clear in theory, but muddied by practice. Especially when the founder is closely involved and identified with the organization. (which, to be clear, is not the case here.)

This episode could prove to be a challenge to the concept of organizational ownership depending on how it develops. Many of the deadlines the involved parties set expire at the end of this week, May 5-7, if you want to monitor things as they occur.

Though given the heated passions involved, it may be better to wait and revisit things later, allowing time to provide some insulation.

Classical Composers Were The Rock Stars Of Their Day. Would They Be Allowed To Be Rock Stars Today?

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I don’t often advocate for specific performers here on Butts in the Seats. I get enough requests to review things on my blog and hundreds of emails from artists at my day job that I don’t want to encourage more solicitations.

However pianist Alpin Hong really impressed me when he was performing his Chasing Chopin show here last week. He did a session with 75 third graders that had the teachers and my board member in charge of outreach raving on social media.

He spoke to the students in our BFA Musical Theater program about arts careers and they loved him as well. I told him if he ever decided to move away from touring as a classical pianist, he should be a motivational speaker. I don’t mean in the mode of “energize your potential!” He has an enthusiasm and sincerity that is compelling, but grounded. He does a great job of integrating his playing into the conversation.

The only problem, I told him, is that a piano playing motivational speaker is a little outside the norm and might be a difficult sell.

But he aims to be outside the norm. He repeatedly said there are thousands of kids learning to play the piano with technical perfection so you need something to distinguish yourself.

One of the things that apparently distinguishes him is that he is physically demonstrative when he plays. He is nowhere near Jerry Lee Lewis, but as he says in Chasing Chopin, there was a time when he played to win competitions but in the face of personal tragedy, he recognized the truth in Chopin’s comment, “It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.” Now the music inhabits his body to some extent when he plays.

One of his missions is to break the stereotype of classical musicians spending hours practicing alone in dark rooms without any other interests or ambitions. He talks about wanting to be a ninja when he grew up. He is an incredible video game/table top game fanatic.

When we were waiting our turn for a radio interview, he got into a long discussion about Magic: The Gathering and Warhammer 40000 tabletop gaming with one of the other guests. I felt obligated to pull out my history with Dungeons and Dragons in order to maintain a little cred in their company.

When people try to make the music seem relevant, they cite how classical composers were the rock stars of their day. Alpin is pretty much embodying that, though not in a gratuitous way. His charisma is a sincere, natural extension of his extroverted personality. Classical music is not going to be saved by more people trying to emulate his style and method in order to appear more accessible. It will come off forced and false.

He mentioned that sometimes people comment that he is too animated when he plays and distracts from the music. I thought it was appropriate with neither dramatic flourishes or feigned seriousness. When someone is playing alone I think that is an opportunity to reveal a little bit of their personality. Only in a classical music setting could you make this complaint about his movements.

Which got me thinking—everyone references classical composers as rock stars, but do they really want those type of effusive performances? How can we tell potential audience members that the composers and musicians of yore were regarded as celebrities and then insist that both the audience and artist move as little as possible? What rock concerts have you been attending?

To be clear, despite his demeanor he is serious about his profession. He sets high standards for anyone looking to enter the performing arts because he knows what a difficult life it is. There was a pretty nice sized group of high school students in the lobby wanting to get selfies with him after the evening show. When they mentioned they were in chorus together, he made them sing for him. When they demurred, he said that this far into the semester, they should have something under their belt and ready to go. And they did.

It wasn’t a polished performance, nor did he expect one from them. He just wanted to reinforce that an artist always has to be prepared and thinking about opportunities. Even if you don’t see it as a career path, don’t shy away from exercising your creative side and showing where your effort has been going.

When he spoke to the BFA Musical Theatre students earlier that afternoon he urged them not to think of career cultivation as something that happened with other people at conferences, auditions or after graduation. He said you never know who is going to be in a position to provide you an opportunity later in life. People’s careers take unexpected directions. You need to show your classmates, professors and coaches what type of person you are right now.

Alpin’s own career arc did not follow an expected path. There were a number of years away from the piano before he decided to audition for Julliard. He has some theories about why they decided to take a chance on him, but no definitive answers.

We had many conversations across the two days (concluding with a 10 pm-12:30 am discussion in the hotel bar, so technically three days I guess). There is a lot I am not mentioning here. When I think about all the problems facing the arts and classical music in particular, I see his philosophy, approach and dedication as contributing to the solution.

Well-Established, Innovative, Accredited, Untested Terminology Does Not Have Generation Specific Appeal

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Back in February, Seth Godin made a post about “The two vocabularies (because there are two audiences),” discussing how the vocabulary that appeals to people who consider themselves early adopters differs from those who see themselves as part of the mass market.

So for example, early adopters of electric cars may want to consider themselves on the leading edge of technology and preserving the environment and are attracted by language that reflects that.

Whereas people in the mass market want assurances that they won’t be stranded in the middle of the desert by a depleted charge and won’t even look in the direction of an electric car in the mall parking lot if marketing doesn’t evoke dependability.

He offers a list of words for both categories. For early adopters, terms like: “New, Innovative, Breakthrough, Controversial, Brave, Untested, Slice/Dominate/Win, Dangerous.”

For mass market, terms like: “Tested, Established, Proven, Industry-leading, Widespread, Easy, Experienced, Certified, Highest-rated.

When I first saw this list in February, my initial thought was that the early adopter language would appeal to younger audiences and the mass market language to older audiences. Assuming you could describe the experience you were offering accurately using both sets of terms, these lists were good starting points for separate parallel marketing campaigns.

I couldn’t see trying to use both sets of vocabulary effectively in the same campaigns. Either you would turn one or both segments off with too edgy/boring language or the event would appear to occupy a wishy-washy middle ground of no particular appeal. (Or in the case of this post title, make you wonder, what the hell?)

I sort of skimmed over Godin’s statement that:

“It’s worth noting here that you’re only an early adopter sometimes, when you want to be. And you’re only in the mass market by choice as well. It’s an attitude,”

and made my own assumptions about people.

However….

Since February I have read/written about how younger audiences are concerned about mitigating the risk of having a bad experience.  An edgy, novel experience is great at times, but the assurance of a little mass market language probably won’t be misplaced at others. Especially in the absence of a group of peers to accompany one.

Cultural Intellectual Property Rights

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A few years back I had organized a panel on presenting the work of contemporary indigenous artists at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference. We were fortunate to have Moss Patterson of New Zealand’s Atamira Dance Company on the panel.  Prior to the panel we had a good discussion about various issues facing artists who were representing their cultural practices. It is a really complicated, but interesting subject.

One of the things Moss kept mentioning was that treaty and law guaranteed the Maori cultural expressions belonged to them. I wasn’t entirely clear to me at the time why this was important because it seemed obvious that a culture could lay claim to its traditional expressions.

Okay, in my defense, the APAP conference is a really busy environment and not exactly conducive to contemplation.

It wasn’t until Andrew Taylor tweeted about Maya weavers in Guatemala who are advocating for collective intellectual property protection for their textiles that I made the connection with Moss’ comments.

The bill has two objectives. First, it calls for a recognition of a definition of collective intellectual property, which is linked to the right of Indigenous Peoples to administer and manage their heritage. Second, it asks that indigenous nations be recognized as authors, in which case they would automatically benefit from intellectual property law. Recognizing indigenous nations as authors just like individuals or companies means that corporations that benefit from the export of Maya hand-woven goods will have to pay royalties to the communities who are the authors of huipiles.

Based on this, I did a little research on intellectual property law and Maori culture and found a heavily annotated summary on the Library of Congress page. The article provides a more detailed understanding of the factors.

…issues include the use of Māori symbols or language in trademarks and inappropriate use of customary knowledge and expressions in products, advertising, and for other commercial purposes. In general, Māori consider that they are unable to exercise control of the trade of their culture in any real or comprehensive sense under the traditional intellectual property framework, and that they are also not reaping the benefits of this trade, whether nationally or internationally.

The fact that certain knowledge or cultural expressions may be seen from a non-Māori or “Western” perspective as having entered the “public domain” is important in considering the type and level of protection that can be achieved. This concept is not necessarily recognized by Māori and other indigenous peoples for whom the cultural knowledge forms an integral part of their history and identity as both individuals and as a group

[…]

The Ka Mate haka “has become a symbol, not only of the All Blacks, but of New Zealand and all its people.”…it has also been used, satirically or otherwise, in foreign advertisements for Italian cars, Scottish whisky, and for a British employment website.Māori people, and particularly the Ngāti Toa tribe of the warrior chief Te Rauparaha, who authored the haka in 1821, have taken offense and expressed their anger at the inappropriate use of the words and actions,…

The recent anger caused by the Halloween costume of the Polynesian demi-god Maui from Disney’s Moana movie may provide a relateable example of the type of things that cause concern for Maori (among other Polynesian cultures in which Maui plays a part).

My goal here isn’t get make statements about the evils of cultural appropriation, just to provide an expanded context and history of the topic from different perspectives.

For Maori, these rights extend back to 1840 and have been the basis of many laws, initiatives, debates and legal proceedings since then. On the other hand, there are emerging efforts to secure intellectual property rights in other places around the world like Guatemala. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar efforts emerged in the United States as digital media make appropriation easier and corporate efforts to perpetuate IP rights for long periods of time continue.

It’s That They Think Ticket Prices Are Too High

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A little while ago I came across a presentation by the Wallace Foundation that seeks to aggregate a number of studies to provide insight for building millennial audiences.

If you have been following the research about performing arts audiences for any length of time, there probably won’t be much in the presentation that will surprise you. The barriers to participation, for example, are familiar: cost, no one to go with and the variety of available choices.

However, if you are new to the topic or just seeking a review, the presentation is a good tool. The visuals are easy to navigate and provide some useful insights.

Of particular interest was the topic of cost and younger audiences. In response to the objection that the cost is too high, I have often heard colleagues note that young people will easily drop more money at a bar on a week night than a ticket would cost.

As it so often is, cost is just an excuse for something else. In this case, it is the assurance that one will enjoy the experience.

Among the responses quoted in the Wallace presentation are the following:

“It’s not about the cost or whether I have the money, but just about the investment and the risk.”

and

“I can see myself paying $100 for a show I’ve wanted to see for a long time, but not more than $50-60 for a normal show, and really more like $20 to 30 if I can.”

What was most interesting was that millennials tended to overestimate the cost of the ticket by a significant margin. Check out this chart.

One of the suggestions in the presentation is obviously to find a more effective way to communicate the pricing.

As I looked through the findings, I realized there was a lot in common with the recent survey findings communicated by Ballet Austin which noted audiences were open to experimenting with unfamiliar works if they were provided with information that assured an enjoyable experience.

I subsequently realized the Wallace Foundation funded Ballet Austin’s research so the common elements are to be expected. (And explains why I was experiencing deja vu reading some of the survey quotes.) The Ballet Austin results are worth a read for the detail not mentioned in the presentation document.

One other image I wanted to share, especially for those who may not take my advice to view the full presentation, is this handy chart on experiences millenials in general seek from different performance disciplines. (As they say, your mileage may vary.)

Everyone Wants Creativity, But Don’t Want To Flirt With Failure

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Now and again I have cited the 2010 IBM study where CEOs worldwide ranked creativity as the most relevant and important skill their employees needed to take their companies in the future.  According to a piece by Larry Robertson on Creativity Post, similar studies by consultants and multi-national companies like Price Waterhouse Coopers, Boston Consulting Group,  Ernst & Young and Adobe have all arrived at the same answer.

Robertson expounds on seven general themes that emerge from the studies. (I am just providing a simple list.)

Creativity clearly surfaces as:

1. A Key Quality…

2. Relevant at Every Level…

3. Critical in Every Sector…

4. A Motivator and Value Maker…

5. One of the Few Things You Can Actually Control…

6. The Telltale Sign of an Effective Leader…

7. A Greater Social Need…

And yet, even with all the agreement and evidence, a substantial gap still exists between what we want, value, and believe creativity’s importance to be and what we actually do to encourage and fuel it.

Few organizations hire, train, or create environments that promote and prioritize creativity. Few leaders set an example beyond their declarations of creativity’s strategic importance. And the few exceptions? Not surprisingly, they are the leaders viewed by their industries, the market, their employees, and their customers as having the highest likelihood of thriving in a disruptive world.

One leader, in a single organization, could read this and seek change. That would be good, but the need is far greater. Collectively, as human beings, we need to bridge the gap between “perceived need and actual use” when it comes to creativity…

I think we probably all realize that creativity isn’t supported in practice because it involves risk. No one wants to be the one blamed when something goes wrong. When TV shows and movies depict a creative risk taker, it is often a father (is it ever the mother?) who has relegated himself and his family to near poverty due to the failed inventions he has sunk resources into. If something works, everyone is surprised and it is usually to save the day.

If someone is successful at plying their creativity in a scientific way, it is usually as a vehicle for some adventure. If it is depicted in association with the arts, it is a rags to riches story that often involves the recognition of hubris that grounds them.

Rarely are creative abilities depicted as part of a successful character’s normal background that isn’t the basis of moving the story forward or some character flaw/quirk. Creativity is either the reason why someone’s life is held back or it enables them to lead an amazing life of opportunity. Sometimes it is a combination of both– the broke, but zany person who finds meaning in the simple pleasures of life and helps the main character change their life. Rarely is creativity associated with a solid, normal life.

Think about how many characters have been successful doctors, lawyers and business people who didn’t seem to have to do much in these areas to be successful. How many characters have a comparable life in a creative profession? (Mike Brady from the Brady Bunch? Can you think of more?)

Granted, most people get into a creative field because provides interesting opportunities and elevates your day above the mundane. They don’t necessarily want their story to be completely normal.

My point is that creativity is often depicted on the extremes, either part of resounding success or abject failure. With that context lurking in the collective subconscious, I wouldn’t necessarily blame businesses if they viewed cultivating and employing increased creativity with some apprehension.

Talking To Your Neighbors About Saving The NEA

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Margy Waller’s piece about How To Talk About Saving the NEA has been making the rounds these last couple weeks. You should take a look at it if you haven’t already.  Her piece isn’t so much about how to convince your legislator that the NEA is worth saving as much as it is about making the case to your neighbors.  While there is a lot of immediacy about preserving the NEA, Waller’s piece integrates the longer, broader encompassing view that aligns with the agenda of building public will for arts and culture.

She addresses the common objections about supporting the arts: arts are entertainment and a private experience; they are a commodity; they are a passive experience; and a low priority.

The response she proposed advocates for support based on the ripple effect arts have (my emphasis):

A thriving arts sector creates ripple effects of benefits throughout our community, even for those who don’t attend.

These are broad-based benefits that people already believe are real—and that they value:

A vibrant, thriving place: Neighborhoods are livelier, communities are strengthened, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc. Note that this goes well beyond the usual dollars-and-cents economic argument and is about creating and sustaining an environment that is memorable and a place where people want to live, visit, and work.
[…]
This organizing idea shapes the subsequent conversation in important ways. It moves people away from thinking about private concerns and personal interests (me) and toward thinking about public concerns and communal benefits (we).

Importantly, people who hear this message often shift from thinking of themselves as passive recipients of consumer goods, and begin to see their role as active citizens interested in addressing the public good.

Now obviously, this shift in perception can’t happen in a vacuum. There actually has to be artistic and cultural activity occurring that resonates with people as contributing to the public good.

She notes that “While it’s true that some decision-makers expect to see this economic impact data, our research reveals that it is not persuasive to the public and is not useful to build broad support for public funding.”

She provides a check list to help keep messaging focused. The following is only an excerpt so be sure to check out the whole thing.

[..]

✓ Vibrancy/Connectedness: Does the example include benefits that could be seen as examples of vibrancy/vitality or increased connectedness?

✓ Benefits to All: Does the example point out potential benefits to people who are not participating in the specific event?

✓ Behind the scenes: Does the discussion also remind people that this doesn’t happen by accident but requires investment, etc.?

✓ One of Many: When possible, it is helpful to mention additional examples in the discussion, which helps audiences focus on the broader point that a strong arts sector creates a range of benefits.

[…]

We can’t say the sky is falling—that undermines our efforts because most people won’t agree with us. We should advocate for good policy on immigration and health care, etc. because these changes could be incredibly devastating to the arts, artists and the communities where they live. It’s not responsible to fight only for the NEA budget in the face of other damaging proposals.

The first point on her check list was “Arts Organization: Are the benefits created by an organization/event/institution that NEA supported?” An important distinction to emphasize if you are talking to people about this is that while many smaller arts organizations, especially in rural locales, may not receive support directly from the NEA, there is a good chance that they do receive a fair amount of funding through their state arts agency, which in turn is strongly supported by the NEA. Since there is likely to be a dearth of private funders, arts organizations in more rural locales potentially have the most to lose even receiving indirect NEA funding.

It can be important to emphasize these indirect relationships to NEA funding because it can be easy to disregard the relevance otherwise.

As someone pointed out to me yesterday, even if you don’t ultimately see a significant impact to your finances, the fact that another organization has to scale back can mean fewer great opportunities for your organization when a group decides not to tour.  Perhaps fewer venues participating in touring means the routing doesn’t work out for your location for a performance or visual arts show. Indirect impacts can have the most significant repercussions but can be the hardest to anticipate.

This Isn’t Your Grandpa’s Retirement

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I guess I should have waited a few more days before making last week’s post about today’s graying audiences not being the same graying audiences of two decades ago. Toward the end of last week I saw that Jimmy Buffet is launching Margaritaville branded and themed retirement communities.

Even if you view this as a cynical way to capitalize on the name, you have to admit that the Margaritaville name defines a lifestyle. There is a specific demographic who identify with this lifestyle and most of them weren’t retiring 20 years ago.

This reinforces the point I made last week that while the proportion of gray heads in the audience may seem to have remained constant for the last two decades, the current cohort that comprises your older audiences have distinct characteristics and interests.  Their parents wouldn’t want to live in a Margaritaville retirement village in significant numbers, nor would their grandchildren. (Their kids, maybe.)

Ultimately, the differences between the Margaritaville communities and those already being built by the company Buffett is partnering with may be superficial. It might be the same ground plans with different color schemes, furniture and soundtrack, but the company is telling retirees that they understand they have different expectations of their retirement experience than previous generations.

More to think about, eh?

Where Have All The Hunters Gone?

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I am pretty open about admitting when I made a wrong call. While I consistently counsel against investing too many resources into the hottest fad, even I have to admit that the Pokemon Go! craze and the associated suggestions about how businesses could tap into it to attract customers faded out a lot faster than I would have predicted.

Back in July, I wrote about the swarms of people running around near our building and anticipated the opportunities that might emerge as the game features were developed. There were tons of articles like this one about how people were strategizing about how to use the game to connect with a new, larger segment of people.

Yes, there are still bunches of people playing the game. Its keeping people more active than they normally would be. And they are wandering into places that others would prefer they not be.

But even places that are paying to partner and attract people to their locations don’t appear to be getting many visits from their participation.

For me this just reinforces my sense that it is prudent to watch a fad and evaluate it as it matures to see if it still appears to be relevant to your goals.

These Aren’t Your Grandpa’s Old People

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For the last 20-25 years, audiences have been getting grayer and dying off.

We have all heard that statement multiple times in our careers. We have probably made that statement multiple times in our careers.

But have we really thought about the logical implications of that statement as we repeat it?

Last week I was on a conference call planning next year’s Arts Midwest conference when someone made a comment that was head smackingly obvious. If you break down that initial statement you realize over the last 20-25 years, people who didn’t have gray hair now do. And a lot of people have indeed died off.

So right now we are interacting with an almost entirely new generation of people we describe as “older audience.”

What the person said was essentially that the gray haired people today were a lot more rock n’ roll than the previous gray haired crowd. The tongue-in-cheek comment was that the new old people aren’t like the old old people.

Observations have been made that often people age into an appreciation of classical arts and culture- orchestra, opera, ballet etc., but let’s not forget that they aren’t necessarily aging out of the experiences and interests they had when they were younger. If the icons of their youth are still able to rock, they are ready to rock along with them.

While you may be well aware of all this, ask yourself if you aren’t viewing older audiences’ tastes today through pretty much the same lens as you did with older audiences 20 years ago. It can be easy to do because some members of that older crowd from 20 years ago are still around. They have been loyal to you for 20 years so you want to meet their expectations and keep them around.

But if we aren’t supposed to treat millennials as a monolithic group, we can’t treat older audiences as one either.

The bulk of your current loyal audience is not the same as the loyal audience of the past. It is likely that the current audience’s loyalty manifests in a different way. They may not be subscribing to the full season, for instance, but they still feel invested in your work and tell their friends.

The comment about the “new old people” wasn’t made in connection with a proposed conference topic, but the concept caused a little discussion. I would be interested to see if it got developed into something. It is one of those ideas that immediately strikes one as relevant, but creating a productive conversation around it that doesn’t subscribe to old assumptions or condescending stereotypes is another thing.

Cross-Sector Training, So Hard To Get Instructed By You

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Last Fall Grantmakers in the Arts published a summary of key findings from a study about community arts training. The study focused on the increasing focus of local arts agencies into cross-sector partnerships/efforts.

What I found encouraging was the expanding view among local arts agencies about their roles and the constituencies they serve. (my emphasis)

2. Cross-sector arts partnerships are becoming a core activity for increasing numbers of local arts agencies. So, the question arises: Is this just a new funding fad that is likely to dissipate as soon as its national champions switch channels? Here are a few reasons why we think this is not the case:

74 percent agreed that cross-sector arts partnerships are central to their mission.
85 percent identified organizations from other community sectors (e.g., human services, public safety, health care, community development) as a key constituency, and 75 percent were actively partnering with them.
75 percent said their recent strategic planning process addressed “broadening the impact of the arts beyond traditional arts activities and venues” as a priority.
78 percent agreed with the statement, “we see ourselves as a change agent in our community.”

From our perspective it would be a mistake to interpret this level of collaboration and commitment outside the bounds of the typical local arts agency mission as solely opportunistic. In fact, we see this as a possible indication that some local arts agencies are shifting their mission focus from “arts-centric” to community-centric. Specific evidence of this showed up when we asked respondents what they regarded as the most critical issues facing their community. Most responses reflected problems and concerns affecting the broader community as well as (but much more than) those relevant solely to their arts constituencies.

The article notes that demand for training outstrips supply. They found that 79% of respondents were interested in receiving training in effectively working cross-sector, but only 18% of organizations were supplying that training. The report itself noted that rural respondents especially felt underserved, finding training was “…generally inaccessible, due to time, money and travel…”

If you are interested in finding training in this area, there is a list of programs of all types from page 13-42 of the study.

Something not in the study that I was pleased to see in the Grantmakers in the Arts piece was an “Implications for Funders” section.  They advocate for patience and funding for training over the long term and emphasize the need for infrastructure investment beyond just training.

One paragraph really struck me as an important lesson for arts organizations as well as funders, namely involving the community to whom you hope to bring benefits in the plan. (my emphasis)

Vague nomenclature is potentially damaging. By definition community arts practice advances the notion that the work is going to affect people’s lives. As such, the fusion of art making and community development is often a morally and ethically complex enterprise. In our work at the Center we have found that when the institutions supporting the work are vague or ambiguous about their intentions or definitions of success, this lack of clarity can migrate to the work itself and harm the communities involved. Here is one reason why. Labels like social practice, placemaking, and community cultural development all imply community involvement of some kind. In too many instances we have found that scant attention is being paid to what this means exactly. At a minimum funders and practitioners alike should be considering some critical ethical questions as a part of their basic practice. How are the people who will bear the consequences of a project’s success or failure going to be engaged? If some public benefit is part of the deal, is there any accountability built in? And when the curtain closes, who will be there to either sustain the good work — or pick up the pieces?

Post title inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s “Cross Town Traffic” Couldn’t find a video that wasn’t a cover.

Music Majors, Special Forces of the Arts

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Going back to the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project special report I referenced yesterday, there were findings in another area that grabbed my interest.  The following chart breaks down responses to questions about brainstorming and risk taking being encouraged in artist training programs.

Keep in mind that all these results are based on alumni perceptions of their training program. The report authors note the outlier status of Music when it comes to graduates who responded “that brainstorming and risk taking without fear of penalty were present to a “Some” or “Very Much” degree as part of their coursework.

Alumni from all but one major overwhelmingly reported their curriculum emphasized generating new ideas or brainstorming. The outlier in this dimension was music majors—only 79% of whom  reported their curriculum emphasized generating ideas or brainstorming.

There was a 23% range in responses by major when comparing coursework emphasis on taking risks without fear of penalty. Architecture majors and creative writing majors (89% and 88%, respectively) were the most likely to indicate curricula focused on this area, while music majors were the least likely (66%).

Music majors (70%) indicated the lowest level of coursework emphasis on inventing methods to arrive at unconventional solutions while architecture majors (92%) indicated the highest.

My initial assumption is that because music programs often emphasize technical proficiency, there isn’t a lot of room for risk taking, brainstorming and inventing unconventional methods. My second assumption is that the programs are designed this way due to the high demands of orchestral auditioning.

Now the million dollar question: Is this approach beneficial or detrimental to students?

On one hand, not only are the number of orchestral performing positions shrinking, the relations between management and musicians in contract negotiations are frequently hostile.

On the other hand, preparing students to perform at a highest level of excellence in the most hostile scenario could be viewed as an ideal path in the context of “if you can survive this…” It would sort of make them the elite special forces of the arts world.

But who really wishes that for their students? Since the majority of graduates won’t end up working in an orchestral environment, don’t they need to acquire practice in brainstorming, risk taking in a low stakes environment and pursuing unconventional paths? (And note that brainstorming, risk taking and employing unconventional means are also traits valued in special forces.)

What do people who focused on studying music think? Any validity to my assumptions? Other forces at work? Do these numbers reflect something else? Is the current process good/bad for graduates?

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Resilient and Adaptable, Arts Grads Could Still Use More Career Training

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The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) just released a special report that focused on how alumni of creative arts programs across different graduate cohorts felt about the education they received.  Since I am interested in the conversation about artist as entrepreneur and career preparation, I gravitated toward those findings.

All cohorts from pre-1985 through 2015 felt they could have used more education in career preparation.

In the module, alumni are asked whether they would have benefited from more knowledge on:

a. developing a three- to five-year strategic plan to realize their goals;
b. marketing and promoting their work and talents;
c. communicating through and about their art through engaging with the community, speaking in public, and receiving feedback;
d. managing finances through things like developing budgets, raising money for projects, and saving for the future;
e. and monitoring legal and tax issues like copyright, trademarks, sales, and income tax.

Most alumni agreed they could have benefited from more knowledge in all of these areas (Table 3), with at least 80% of all alumni cohorts saying they would have benefited from more knowledge in each area.

Furthermore, alumni in each cohort reported about the same level of agreement (“Somewhat” or “Strongly”) when asked whether their education prepared them for work in many different jobs and roles. These reports ranged from a low of 65% in the 2006–2010 cohort to a high of 69% for the earliest two cohorts, leaving about one third of alumni in each cohort feeling their education did not prepare them for work in many different jobs and roles.

What really brought the perceived lack of preparation by alumni into focus was this next chart which reflects the degree to which career preparation was integrated into their education. Exposure to a network of professionals is relatively high. However, other aspects of career development and discussion of careers outside the arts are depressingly low for some disciplines.

The SNAAP report observes:

Institutions may need to further explore ways to provide career services across different major fields in the arts. Solitary fields, where art is less likely to be created or performed in groups, may not be getting the same quality of exposure.

Long time readers may recall that when I attended the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference last October, there was discussion about how university career services weren’t really well calibrated for arts careers.

One more chart I wanted to point out. After the reading the other content in this post, it probably won’t surprise you to see only 18% of respondents Strongly Agreed they were confident about financially managing their career. Also not surprising, confidence went down the more debt a person was carrying.

However, I was really encouraged by the resilience, adaptability and opportunity recognition numbers. Even if people don’t necessarily feel like got enough education in career planning, feeling capable in these three ability areas ain’t nothing to sneeze at. I am really curious about how those numbers compare to graduates from other degree disciplines.

Stuff To Ponder: Familiarity As A Proxy For Certainty

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Two years into a six year research project, Ballet Austin has started learning things about their audiences that run contrary to their assumptions. While the audiences in every community are different, what they have learned provides a lesson that you may not know your audiences as well as you think you do.

One of the biggest assumptions Ballet Austin made was that audiences became more open to new works as they became more familiar with them and thus followed a roughly linear progression of attendance. What they learned was that people were open to a cross-section of genres and the biggest determinant was how confident people were that they would enjoy the experience.

In other words, the market research suggested that encouraging people to attend the ballet more often was less about increasing their familiarity with productions and more about bridging an uncertainty gap. “Familiarity is about information,” notes Martin, “whereas uncertainty about how an experience will feel is much more personal. You can give somebody a lot of information but that’s not necessarily going to reassure them that they’re going to belong in that audience.”

[…]

Audience uncertainty partly grew out of how Ballet Austin was presenting information about its productions. The research showed that images as well as the language used in promotional pieces, ads and even program titles, often created a disconnect. “What we thought we were saying was not what people were hearing,” Martin says.

The problem was especially glaring for abstract productions. Based on the promotional materials in some cases, prospective audience members simply couldn’t fathom what they would be seeing. An ad for a recent program, “To China With Love,” featured an image of two dancers seeming to float among clouds, which many found ambiguous. One person mistook it for a mattress ad. The confusion made Loignon wonder if Ballet Austin should consider cutting back on print ads for abstract ballets and investing more in online videos that show the work itself.

The fact they were considering focusing more of their resources on having video representations and eschewing print was interesting to me. If you have ever read Trevor O’Donnell’s thoughts on the imagery used in print marketing by arts organizations, you know that he is pretty solidly against depictions like that of the two dancers floating in the clouds for the very reason Ballet Austin discovered.

Ultimately though, I was encouraged by the recognition that familiarity was a proxy for certainty. Audiences can be open to adventure if they receive help in feeling confident about their choices.

If you read the whole piece you can learn about the various tactics Ballet Austin has employed in an attempt to close the uncertainty gap for audiences.

Another process I was interested to read about was how they created social interaction experiences. There is often a lot of talk about the need to create social situations to attract millennials. Ballet Austin’s experience doing this really illustrates the importance of constantly tweaking and perhaps defining success by quality of experience rather than quantity.

Though it has taken various forms, an event known as Ballet Bash! is meant to facilitate social gatherings before a performance and during intermission. One time, Bash! included a DJ for a pre-performance party with refreshments. The cost outweighed the benefits, however, so Ballet Austin cut the DJ and instead offered carefully selected music in an area at the Long Center with spectacular views of Austin’s expanding skyline. That iteration was modestly attended. For a later production, Ballet Bash! was replaced by a social lounge in a smaller, more intimate wing of the Long Center’s mezzanine. At recent performances, around 15 people were sitting in small groups during the hour before the performance and intermission, which Ballet Austin considered a promising start.

There are other imaginative social and interactive experiences Ballet Austin created for their audiences that attracted larger numbers. I wanted to include the paragraph above in order to ask the obvious question about whether your organization would consider the participation of 15 people a promising start. From the context of the paragraph, I would assume this approach balanced their goals for cost with desired outcomes.

As a cross-reference to this research, you can also check out California Symphony’s Orchestra X blog and this post in particular about what their research discovered. In short, it was nearly every other element of the experience except the programming that was an impediment to audience enjoyment. Ceci Dadisman provides some perspective on this on ArtHacker today.

You Took My Joy And I Want It Back

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If you found yourself agreeing with the thesis of my post yesterday about claiming someone is selling out or is dumbing down art is an attempt to exclude those people in order to save Art, I have something else challenging to suggest.

We don’t get to dictate who is allowed to enjoy art.

While you might immediately agree that this should be so, remember there was an effort to organize an art strike during the recent presidential inauguration. Artists have disavowed works they sold to Ivanka Trump and asked her to remove their works from her apartment.

While I can appreciate the various motivations which move artists to make these statements, I don’t think it is constructive in the long run to be sending a message that art is for you as long as the art makers approve of you. In fact, as soon as I wrote that sentence I realized how much it sounded like the rationale people make when refusing to provide services for same-sex weddings.

This is not like being upset because a political campaign is using a song without permission.  They paid the asking price, and for the most part the work appears as the background of their lives as a statement of their taste rather than to imply tacit approval.

The bigger and long term issue is that there is a contradictory message in saying art is everywhere, everyone has the potential for creative expression and engages in it more often than they realized…and then put out a call for all that to be withdrawn in solidarity.

First of all, since everyone can access some type of creative expression on their phone, they are less likely to notice something is missing than they were when accessibility was tied to a physical place.

Second, if everyone can do it, then everyone has to participate in the art strike, which is damn difficult to pull off.  In these instances you can’t go around saying, Oh no, we are the real owners of real Art, not you, we are hiding it away and you should be concerned.

The constructive thing to do is encourage people to cultivate and employ the abilities they have in the service of expressing what they think about an issue rather than withholding access to something that has no relevance to the issue of concern.

Because lets face it, there are a lot of people out there who have no compunction about expressing their views emphatically and loudly. Investing energy into removing, rather than contributing a new or counter expression, seems counterproductive.

“Makers and Takers” slides too facilely off people’s tongues these days. Let it never be said artists are takers, creativity is all about making.

Ultimately, there can’t be advocacy for universal investment and ownership in creative expression by the individual, education system, foundations and government while also reserving the right to reclaim it all.

Post title is from the lyrics of Lucinda Williams’ “Joy”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMJ_-5lVw1s

The Club Bylaws We Wrote Are So Stringent, Even We Aren’t Allowed To Be Members

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Last week The Guardian wrote about how the current political climate in a number of countries has brought Arthur Miller’s The Crucible into relevance again.

There are a couple sentences in the article that keep echoing in my mind and I have spent the last week trying to decide about what angle to take in my commentary about them. Ultimately, I decided to just toss it out there and let my readers decide how they are most relevant for them.

In the article Douglas Rintoul writes,

Miller talks about the paradox of a community that has created a society grounded in the idea of “exclusion and prohibition”. Its sole function is to keep the community “together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction”.

The reason these two sentences kept coming back to me is that they evoked the oft cited comment about assault on Ben Tre during the Vietnam War, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

(The full context apparently should be: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it’, a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.”)

There is definitely a paradox in the idea that in order to keep a community together, you had to expel any element that might drive the community apart.

So….don’t the people pushing for expulsion constitute a divisive force in the community? Who gets to kick them out?

Every community needs ideals that they form around, but it gets a little strange when the ideals are so stringent they can’t tolerate the flaws of the membership. That is almost a corollary of Groucho Marx comment “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”

Lets all agree that there are times when you do need to remove destructive and dangerous elements from society.   But the reality on which that standard should be based before applied is pretty high.   The perceived need for removal often demands the standard to be set pretty low. The rationale is easy to make and it is easy to employ fear to shut down opposition.

While this may seem most easily applicable to the current political situation in regard to immigration, it pretty much crops up in a lot of decisions we make and places we frequent and groups with which we associate.

At this point you might be thinking about those other judgmental people you know, but be aware that accusations of “dumbing down” and “selling out” are basically attempts to save Art by excluding from the Arts Community those who are perceived to be cheapening it.

It is really easy to employ this type of thinking and not even recognize it.

You Know The Type, They Only Want One Thing–Your Fund Raising Ability

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If you ever doubted that executive director positions were all about the fundraising and light on requiring artistic vision, the recent news about the firing of Ft. Worth Opera general director will disabuse you of that notion. It was with some dismay that I read about his firing due to lack of creativity when it came to fund raising.

Now I don’t intend to understate the importance of strong fund raising. I probably would have just scanned the Dallas Morning News piece and moved on with my day. While unfortunate, organization leaders get fired or resign fairly frequently.

Except that as I read on it struck me that Woods wasn’t an idler as general director. Every sentence brought accolades for different accomplishments. He brought the opera to greater prominence, navigated challenges with performance facilities, engaged in some innovative programming that appears to have interested a larger segment of the community, and yes, did a respectable job with fund raising against a shortfall.

Just to be sure the Dallas Morning News writer wasn’t personally biased, I sought other reporting on the firing and they seemed to agree on these basic facts. All in all, he didn’t sound like someone you would want to blithely part ways with.

Certainly, there may be some underlying problems that no one is talking about publicly. The comments by the board in all the articles I came across focus so strongly on their desire to find someone who can handle fund raising and business development as Woods’ replacement that it appears that is about all that matters. Artistic and community relationship building skills seem to be such far seconds that I fear all the accomplishments Woods has been praised for will stagnate and perhaps decline.

The opera seeks to hire a leader to “focus more on business and management … to be creative with the fundraising and development aspect,” he said, adding that, “we just didn’t feel Darren could provide us with that leadership from that aspect.”

[…]

Martinez said Woods has brought the opera “to a point where we felt good artistically.” Now, he said, it’s time to move forward with a new general director who can help shape the company’s future, which includes being a good steward of donors’ money.

That last line made me wonder if the board really did approve of Woods’ artistic choices or if there is something going on that isn’t being spoken of.

Over the history of this blog, (holy crap, is it really going to be 13 years on Friday?), I have often cited studies about how fewer people are interested in taking on executive roles in non-profits. Of those energetic people I know who want to assume leadership positions, few to none have a vision that involves fund raising as their primary role. They get excited by the prospect of making an impact and aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty, but job descriptions like this, (and lets be fair, Ft. Worth Opera is far from the only one emphasizing this skillset), don’t really fire their imaginations.

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A To Preserve Your Culture

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Last month I saw a story in the New Yorker about an attempt to preserve the culture of the Iñupiat of Alaska through the creation of a video game. I initially thought that the game hadn’t come out, but apparently it was released in 2014.

It really is a gorgeous looking game. It takes the player through the challenges of an Iñupiat heroic journey story that had previously only been passed down by oral tradition to the eldest child. The whole concept of using a video game to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage is pretty interesting.

One of the central concerns for the Iñupiat who were involved was that their stories would be subject to adaptation and appropriation as has often been the case. The game company invested a lot of time in an attempt to assuage those concerns.

With any creative project in which a group of privileged Westerners look to recount the tales and customs of an indigenous group, there is a risk of caricature, even amiable racism. “We’ve repeatedly seen our culture and stories appropriated and used without our permission or involvement,” Fredeen said. “People were skeptical that the project would turn out like these other examples, all appropriation and Westernization.” To reassure them, the development team assembled a group of Iñupiat elders, storytellers, and artists to become partners in the game’s development and lend their ideas and voices to the venture. “As it became clear to the community that this project was only going to move forward with their active participation, that hesitancy quickly evaporated,” Fredeen said. “We’ve had everybody from eighty-five-year-old elders who live most of the year in remote villages to kids in Barrow High School involved in the project.”

Even though there are concerns and anxieties about people sitting alone in dark rooms in front of screens among those of us who advocate for live arts experiences, I feel like this video game development process contains some important lessons. One of the primary lessons relates to how to go about engaging communities to tell their stories.

Just because stories are told in video game form doesn’t close the door on the opportunity to provide a live experience. There are numerous examples of video games being adapted into movies, most of the results being unimpressive. With the bar set so low, there isn’t terrible risk in attempting to depict the core stories employing other methods and media.

(If you aren’t up on your video game lore, the post title refers to the Konami Cheat Code)

The Gravity of Culture

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Seth Godin made a post last week about maintaining a commitment to quality in your work. (my emphasis)

When you seek the mass market, there are two paths available:

You can dumb down your message and your expectations, and meet your audience where they stand. You can coarsen your lyrics, offer simpler solutions, ask for less effort, demand less work, promise bigger results…
Or you can smarten it up, and lead despite your goal of mass, not chase it.

The very fact that “dumb down” is an expression and “smarten up” isn’t should give any optimist pause.

Culture is a gravitational force, and it resists your efforts to make things work better.

So what? Persist.

My first impulse was to mentally acknowledge he was right about how the impulse to improve isn’t common enough to bring a term like “smarten up” into common usage. I read his comment about culture resisting efforts to make things work better as an indictment of a society that demands satisfying results that require little of them in return.

However, when I got to thinking about it, those who embrace and define high culture often don’t want practitioners of low/pop culture to transition upward. There are a fair number of examples of pop artists who decide they want to pursue a more rigorous path as they mature. They are criticized for lacking the excellence required or expected of someone who has dedicated decades training in some discipline of high culture.

Certainly, some of these people may lack the seriousness, nuance and general quality of a long time practitioner. There may be valid concerns that in their popularity, they are misleading their fans into believing they represent the higher levels of achievement when a perceptible gap exists.

But for others, after 10-20 years of sincerely trying to “smarten up,” they are probably going to be operating at least at or above a level of 80%-90% of achievable excellence. That puts them on par with a lot of people who, like them, have spent decades solely devoted to the high culture discipline.

Except that the latter group will be labeled an X discipline artist while the former pop artist will forever have a modifier like crossover-X discipline artist. Essentially, you get branded if you try to step out of the original lines drawn around you.

So like Godin says, culture can be a gravitational force. It can feel like you are constantly being pulled to lower your standards, but it can also feel like you are being pushed away from ever being recognized as having achieved your ambitions if you try to become more proficient.

Yes, ideally things could get to a place where people and their efforts could be fairly evaluated but will it ever really be possible to create truly objective evaluations that are free from these sort of judgments?

I frequently cite Jamie Bennett’s comment that people have an easier time viewing themselves on a continuum with famous sports figures than they do with famous artists. As I think about it, I wonder if people are getting a message that they shouldn’t try to see themselves on an arts continuum.

What Are You Saying When You Say Diversity?

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Australia’s ArtsHub site had a valuable piece on “diversity” efforts by arts organizations. I put diversity in quotes because the title of the article is “Diversity is a white word.”

Author Tania Canas expounds on that saying the word,

It seeks to make sense, through the white lens, of difference by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness. Terms such as ‘diversity’, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) only normalise whiteness as the example of what it means to be and exist in the world. Therefore the diversity discourse within the cultural sector, has only created frames by which diversity is given ‘permission’ to exist under conditional inclusion.

[…]

Just because we exist in a space, doesn’t mean we’ve had autonomy in the process by which the existence has occurred. It is not about ‘giving a voice’, we already have one. It has been systematically silenced.

I should probably acknowledge at this point that anything I write on this topic is likely to flirt with offending someone either with poorly considered statement or condescension. That said, I can see her point that diversity goals and programs are often essentially a statement of intent to include the “not us.”

I found the Ladder of Participation image in the center of the article to be a helpful visual guide on the continuity of program characteristics from citizen participation to tokenism to non-participation.

I saw some truth in Canas’ statement that holding up an artist who has “made it” as an exemplar or creating Ambassador programs or Diversity officers is often a superficial gesture revealing the industry

“…has no clue about how to develop, nurture, support nor fiercely defend artists. The industry wants to ‘highlight voices’ without the responsibility of meaningly supporting them…appointments of a sole diversity officer or diversity ambassador can actually be an indication of the absence of a wider support for diversity throughout the entire institution.”

The constructive approach, she says, is to focus is on building community, not audiences. A good deal of what she wrote reminded me of Ronia Holmes’ “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why” which I wrote about back in November.

Holmes’ piece is worth reading for its blunt honesty, both in criticizing insufficient and half-hearted attempts to engage marginalized communities, but in its acknowledgment of the financial challenges arts organizations face. Between the two pieces, there is a lot of basis for introspection about organizational diversity and inclusion programs.

Thank God I Wasn’t Here When It Was Relevant

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I have served on my county library system board for over half a year now.

They say public libraries aren’t relevant any more but as the title of the post suggests, if this is what the library is like when it is irrelevant, I am glad I wasn’t around when it was relevant. In my short time on the board, we have had to review or construct policies to address things like harassment of staff by visitors, people monopolizing meeting rooms to run their businesses out of them, wages and benefits, and had to chart a course of action upon learning poor building construction lead to mold issues.

Libraries may not be as important a source of reading material as they have been in the past, but they definitely serve a need in the community. For every problem that crops up, there are 500 people who regularly avail themselves of the facilities, programming and services.  I was entirely unaware of the web of relationships the library had with other community organizations, businesses and social groups.

I have served on a number boards before but this is the first one I have been on that has really engaged me so thoroughly in exercising what I preach in terms of conscientious board governance and fiscal oversight. In addition to addressing programming and policies, there is a lot more money running through a six branch library system than you might imagine.

There was a story a year ago about the financial benefits received by the former president of the Queens (NY) Borough Library system (as well as the alleged liberties he took with the finances.)  It left me wondering what sort of financial controls the borough library system had in place given that we on the board are required to authorize the payment of the bills every month. Though our list is pretty long so I imagine it would be easy to slip some personal expenses in there unnoticed.

I have also tried to bring some of the good practices I have written about to the organization. I stress “tried” because just when I was going to note the professional development budget hadn’t really been used during the year and encourage more staff development, the library director requested that staff be allowed to attend an upcoming conference.

Obviously, like most of us that serve on boards outside our own organization, I have brought other valuable insights and practices to the table.  The experience has certainly improved some of the practices in which we engage in my organization.

The point of this post is mostly to encourage people to serve on other non-profit boards if you already aren’t and to really pay attention to how that responsibility can inform the practices in your own organization.

As I wrote this, I remembered one of my earliest encounters with a perceptual barrier to participation: When I was about 11-13 the librarians encouraged me to start using the adult section of the library.  I had passed by the threshold many times, but I was anxious about entering and being told I didn’t belong there.  I can still connect with the emotions of that memory so I can empathize with people who show up to my performance hall for the first time.

Of course, my other purpose in writing this post is to encourage everyone to support their local library!

I Was 15% More Dishonest In 2016, But Can You Prove It?

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In my post yesterday, I quoted Matt Burriesci as he addressed how uncomfortable people feel when it comes to advocating the intangible value of the arts.

We should stop being ashamed to believe in a value that cannot be weighed, measured, cut, or quantified — and to try and convince others to believe it, too.

I’ve floated these ideas to a few of my friends who work in the arts — privately, of course, because one never wants to utter such things in public. Almost all of them have said the same thing, and in the same weary, confused voice: “Well, yeah, Burriesci­­, I mean, I agree — but that’s just idealism.”

This line of thought pretty much illustrates how uncertain the arts community feels when it comes to trying to justify the value of what they do. How do you validate results that are difficult to measure?

Fortuitously, Seth Godin helps to provide an answer in a context we can all understand — the value of soft skills in the workplace.

Now obviously, these same soft skills are valuable outside of the workplace, but so much of what we value as a society is in the context of economic benefits.

Organizations spend a ton of time measuring the vocational skills, because they can. Because there’s a hundred years of history. And mostly, because it’s safe. It’s not personal, it’s business.

We know how to measure typing speed. We have a lot more trouble measuring passion or commitment.

Organizations give feedback on vocational skill output daily, and save the other stuff for the annual review if they measure it at all.

And organizations hire and fire based on vocational skill output all the time, but practically need an act of the Board to get rid of a negative thinker, a bully or a sloth (if he’s good at something measurable).

He likens someone whose poor skills detract from the productivity of the workplace with an employee that walks out the door with a computer under their arm every day. Both are stealing from you in some fashion.

But perhaps most applicable to the argument about the value of liberal & fine arts, culture, creativity, etc is Godin’s assertion that just because they are difficult to teach and measure, doesn’t mean so-called soft skills are not valuable and worth the effort.

We rarely hire for these attributes because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure.

And we fire slowly (and retrain rarely) when these skills are missing, because we’re worried about stepping on toes, being called out for getting personal, or possibly, wasting time on a lost cause.

Which is crazy, because infants aren’t good at any of the soft skills. Of course we learn them. We learn them accidentally, by osmosis, by the collisions we have with teachers, parents, bosses and the world. But just because they’re difficult to measure doesn’t mean we can’t improve them, can’t practice them, can’t change.

Now a slight tangent here– let’s recognize arts and cultural organizations are some of the worst offenders when it comes to hiring for skills and turning a blind eye to poor interpersonal skills because the employee has passion; isn’t getting paid a lot; and there isn’t time or money to train or model proper behavior.

Don’t read Godin’s article and get trapped into thinking about how the arts can help people develop all those soft skills he lists. First, the whole point is to stay away from a utilitarian justification for the value of the arts. Second, as I note, it’s a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes when it comes to being an exemplar for cultivating those skills in the workplace.

I think the argument to be made is that we can all generally acknowledge that the presence of arts, culture and creativity in our lives enhances society/communities in myriad ways. We can’t measure the benefit specifically or attribute improvements directly and exclusively to the presence of arts & culture. Nor do we want to because creative expression is always going to be one important factor among many (like walkability, public transportation, employment, new initiatives.)

This is important in much the same way as skills like leadership, collaboration, resilience, passion, competitiveness, resourcefulness and hundreds of other factors are important to the success of a business or organization. You can’t set a goal to improve passion by 10% and leadership by 30% next year, but you know you have to work on cultivating both.

You can hire someone based on their sense of humor, honesty and friendliness because you know those factors are important to the effectiveness of your work environment. But no one is hired as the one that fills the humor, honesty and friendliness gap on the team the way they would be for their vocational skills.

Nobody doubts these attributes are important in a business environment even though they can’t be easily measured. In fact, when a young person starts out the are likely to cite these skills in a resume to make up for their lack of experience.

The challenge of the arts and culture community then is to create an environment where the value of the presence, or lack thereof, arts/culture/creativity is acknowledged in much the same way rather than something that can be decanted in discrete amounts.

The Safe Thing Is Not Working

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There has been a lot of conversation recently about what to do in light of the Trump Administration’s stated intent to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

This past weekend Matt Burriesci had a piece on Salon that took a contrarian stance to the effort to bring pressure on Congress to preserve federal funding for arts and culture.

In Burriesci’s view arguing the economic value of the arts in order to get funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities has failed. He admits he has been complicit in perpetuating that rationale and helped send out the call for arts and culture lovers to contact their representatives every time funding was threatened.

I’ve worked in the arts for 25 years. In all that time, I’ve never met a single artist or cultural leader who has said to me, “You know what I’m really passionate about? Improving math scores, creating exports, advancing health care and helping local merchants.”…

The arts and humanities have value because they make us better human beings. That’s basically it. They teach us history and encourage virtue, they help us debate serious issues in a respectful (or sometimes indirect) manner, they make us appreciate beauty, they make us more empathetic and they challenge our own beliefs. All of this helps ensure a skeptical, human and responsible citizenry. And if you don’t think that has value, well — what rock have you been living under?

A humanistic culture does not select a crazy demagogue to lead it. We are no longer a humanistic culture. One of the reasons we are not is because we, as cultural leaders, have abandoned our charge to create that culture, and do so without shame, apology or equivocation.

He argues for a return to advocating arts for arts sake and is pretty critical of the lobbying efforts of organizations like Americans for the Arts. In his view, they have been more interested in trying to make the arts palatable to legislators rather than advancing the values and interests of the arts and culture community which he feels should be nothing more than the intrinsic value of art.

The main reason you have a lobbyist is to advance your priorities as central to the republic, and to preserve those federal agencies and policies that support those priorities. Americans for the Arts has spent years and tens of millions of dollars advancing this neoliberal defense. Have we seen a steady increase in funding for agencies like the NEA and the NEH?…For too long, arts leaders accepted a foolishly low bar for success: the mere preservation of these agencies has been accepted as victory.

He claims, and at this point it is difficult to contradict him, that those that oppose funding for arts and cultural entities have never really cared about all the charts and graphs and studies. The opposition has only delayed the process of de-funding.

But what he suggests as a course of action is difficult and would take some courage to embrace because it abandons the evidence based arguments for less tangible measures.

We can extricate ourselves from this colossal strategic failure, and return to our true business: rebuilding the culture. We should stop being ashamed to believe in a value that cannot be weighed, measured, cut, or quantified — and to try and convince others to believe it, too.

I’ve floated these ideas to a few of my friends who work in the arts — privately, of course, because one never wants to utter such things in public. Almost all of them have said the same thing, and in the same weary, confused voice: “Well, yeah, Burriesci­­, I mean, I agree — but that’s just idealism.”

Yeah.

That’s all it is.

Now whether you believe that purely arguing the merits of arts, humanities, creative and cultural pursuits for their intrinsic value will be compelling, I think you have to concede the point that the terms and perhaps the very nature of the conversation has to change.

As many of you know, I am proponent of the movement to build public will for arts and culture. One of the reasons I like it is because it freely admits there isn’t one specific answer or approach that is correct for every community and situation. That leads me to believe the approach has within it, the potential to provide a better response in the conversation.

Yes, You Do Understand Art

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Last night I gained some additional assurances that everyone has the capacity to comprehend art at a basic level when they encounter it.

Some recent university grads started a “creative cult” here in town. Every month they have some sort of activity at a different place. The specific activity is never announced in advance, only the basic theme. The first one was the “Induction Ceremony,” the second was “World Building” and last night was “The Definition of Art.” These are quick, fun group activities that run about an hour and attract 40-50 people each time.

Last night attendees were split into three groups, each which assembled near a table full of found objects. We were given a prompt and told not to reveal it to any of the other teams. We were told to brainstorm for 5-10 minutes and write and sketch what that meant to us on large sheets of butcher paper. Then we were set loose to construct something representing our prompt using the objects on the table.

Every table had different supplies. Among the things are on our table were card board, a watering can, a golf club, magazines, Christmas ornaments, bubble wrap, drone bumpers, string, birthday decorations, scissors, tape and glue.

After the assembling period was done, we were given another sheet and told to rotate counter clockwise to the other team tables at set intervals to discuss and write down what we thought their piece represented.

When that phase was done, the teams that didn’t create a piece talked about what they thought it was all about.

Let me just say, given the materials on hand and time available for construction by committee, there wasn’t much opportunity to create realistic depictions of the prompts.  In fact, at one point, we were told that all the materials we were provided needed to appear on our table in context of our piece which probably further muddied the waters.

Not only did the guesses for each piece have commonalities, but some of the options suggested either hit the target exactly or were close enough that game show judges would have accepted the answer.

Not every individual’s initial guess was correct, but as a group walking around and discussing each piece, a reasonable sense of the concept behind it emerged.  Looking at the pieces through the lens of the “wrong” answers often made them more interesting than the correct ones.

The guys who organized the event were really pleased because they weren’t sure that people would be able to accurately discern the source prompts when they created the activity.  I was excited by their excitement over achieving their goal.

Part of their goal was exactly as I suggested earlier — to show people that they had the capacity to comprehend some basic things about an abstract representation.

I would say they also wanted to show people they had the capacity to communicate concepts via abstract representations except the underlying goal of the whole creative cult effort is about empowering people in regard to their creativity.

While obviously not as good as having been there, here is a little bit of video taken of the pieces after the event. I was going to see if readers could guess what the prompts were, but the guys put them in the description.  In order of appearance, Batman, the Lincoln Memorial and Wendy’s 4×4 (we guessed Wendy’s)

Supporting Coverage Of The Cultural Organizations You Support

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Yesterday on ye olde Twitter feed came a story about how two Buffalo, NY area arts & culture funders were helping to establish an arts and culture desk at a local public radio station.

I don’t recall who distributed the link but what drew me to it was the question in the post about whether this might be a new mode of funding for arts coverage.

In case you missed it, both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal announced last year that they were constricting their arts and culture coverage, joining other news and media sources that had made the same decision in the past.

A press release about establishing the news desk says the intent is to cover groups, disciplines and topics that often get overlooked:

…Arts Services Initiative of Western New York Executive Director Tod A. Kniazuk said. “The establishment of this desk means that culturals of all sizes and disciplines, and artists in all mediums and stages of their careers, will have a greater opportunity to get the message out about their work and its impact.”

…explained Stanton H. Hudson, Jr., Executive Director of the TR Site…And, through a dedicated arts and culture news desk at WBFO, artists and cultural organizations will be provided enhanced opportunities for listeners to experience their work, which often address historical and contemporary social, religious, political, and cultural issues and provide a framework for exploring challenging and difficult subjects.”

A column on the Artvoice paper site applauded the decision, citing the importance of coverage for small cultural groups and how they sustained Buffalo through the tough times

This can be a particular threat to the smaller, edgier, scrappier, low budget venues, tucked into warehouse or storefront spaces, hidden in basements or abandoned social halls. These venues depend upon coverage in mainstream media to attract new audiences.

In Buffalo, where small venues have arguably sustained the city through its hard times and fueled its burgeoning renaissance, it is dangerous to neglect or abandon this aspect of a diverse and lively arts scene.

To get back to the question that lead me to the article, is this a sign of things to come? Will community foundations need to support some sort of system of coverage for the arts and cultural organizations in their community?

Will arts and cultural organizations kick in funding to support such coverage? If so, it might be best funneled through an arts council in order to avoid accusations of favoritism to those who paid the most or the emergence of a pay for review system that caused a controversy in Los Angeles.

While I do wonder if reviews are really as important as word of mouth/social media any more, and it might vary by community, I do think general coverage of news, activity and trends can be important for the cultural health of a community. Reviews and stories about specific events only provide a snapshot of an instance. Conversations about long term initiatives, trends and developments can be particularly of value because they communicate overarching information that can be missed when we are so focused on what is immediately in front of us.

I am not saying subsidized coverage of culture shouldn’t call attention to particular groups and events. Just that it is often easier for an organization to catch and engage momentary attention than it is to communicate the arc of progress or illuminate the entire cultural ecology of a community. That is where the real value of coverage by a media organization can lie.

Arts Aren’t Great Because Great Men Say They Are

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Since the news started going around last week that the Trump administration was looking to de-fund the NEA, NEH and PBS, there have been a ton of memes circulating quoting Winston Churchill refusing to defund the arts during the Second World War saying, “…then what are we fighting for?”

Except, as I wrote four years ago, that story is completely apocryphal. He never said that. He said some things close to that and the precursor of the Arts Council of England was formed in 1940 ““to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.”

Yes, it may be a little pedantic to call out the error, but given that fake news is a topic of frequent discussion these days, I think accuracy may be the best policy.

As I was re-reading that post of four years ago, I noticed that included a story about how Lincoln insisted on completing the dome of the Capitol during the Civil War so that people could see the government would continue. And how Roosevelt cited that story when he was dedicating the National Gallery. And how Kennedy cited both Lincoln and Roosevelt when asking for public support of the arts saying they,

“‘understood that the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose- and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”

I was left hoping that the Lincoln story was true because it was the foundation of rationales made by subsequent presidents.

But the real question is, are the arts only great because important people have said they are? Do the arts become less worthwhile if we can’t find important people to vindicate their value? If Lin-Manuel Miranda decides next week it is all about fly fishing, will arts, culture and creative expression be abandoned in droves? (More likely than not hordes of people would track Miranda down to a stream in Montana and serenade him.)

Famous people can be the focus or public face for will and effort, but they are not the will. Often that famous face is not required. What famous people did all the marches of this past weekend coalesce around?

Creative expression doesn’t need a famous face behind it to matter. It doesn’t need a million people to march before it matters. Though those numbers certainly make a cause compelling and something you ignore at your own peril.

I don’t look at the folder of supportive comments I collect for grant reports and think wistfully it would be great to have a quote from a famous person instead of these 50 comments from nobodies.

I am pretty cynical about this perennial threat of defunding arts and culture. I see it akin to an older kid holding a toy over a toilet bowl and threatening to drop it in. Whether they ultimately drop it in or not, the kid seems to revel in the reaction the threat elicits.

I don’t think an argument accompanying a picture of Winston Churchill is any more compelling to decision makers than a picture of any one of us saying the same thing so we might as well get in the practice of standing behind our own sentiments.

In terms of getting people to act to support the arts, I suspect for a large percentage of people on your social media feed, your picture and statement of support is going to be a lot more compelling than Winston Churchill’s.

Does Creative Placemaking Work? It’s Complicated

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Back in November Slover Linett released the results of a multi-year study on creative placemaking. The study was primarily focused on the impact that music pavilion and band shells that the Levitt Foundation has constructed or renovated across the country.

In the process of discussing the results of the study, the study authors made some very interesting statements about the process and goals of creative placemaking. In particular, they say that measuring the economic impact of creative placemaking is not an accurate measure of the value of creative placemaking in the community.

If you have been reading this blog over the last few months, you probably know that I have been increasingly advocating that the value of the arts should not be measured in terms of impact on economy, education, etc., so these statements were of particular interest to me.

In the executive summary they talk about how assessments of creative placemaking effectiveness have changed:

At first, creative placemaking assessment efforts were focused on developing “indicators” of change and success: new frameworks for bringing together a variety of data points that are related to intended creative placemaking outcomes, which can be tracked over time to gauge the impact of the investment in creative placemaking initiatives. But it has since become clear that the indicators approach has real limitations, especially with respect to connecting changes in the indicators with specific features or activities of any given creative placemaking project

As the authors looked at creative placemaking and the research that has been done in regard to it, they found that there were myriad factors inherent to each neighborhood that contributed to any improvement or lack thereof so it was difficult to credit placemaking for improving conditions. Also no one is consistently gathering data on some other factors that have relevance. (my emphasis)

One objection was that, because data for the indicators is usually collected on a relatively broad geographic level as well as a broad, somewhat abstract conceptual level (based on hard-to-define notions like economic vitality, vibrancy, and livability), it’s virtually impossible to connect any given creative placemaking project with observed change (or lack of change) in the indicators. Another concern was that defining the indicators at such a broad, conceptual level failed to respond to each creative placemaking project’s unique goals, vision, and starting point. [Ian David] Moss argued that there was essentially no mechanism for connecting the Endowment’s investments in Our Town projects to the indicators one sees. A project could be entirely successful on its own terms but fail to move the needle in a meaningful way in its city or neighborhood. Or it could be caught up in a wave of transformation sweeping the entire community, and wrongly attribute that wave to its own efforts. There’s simply no way for us to tell.

Now if this is the case for creative placemaking efforts, it raises a question about whether one could truly draw a connection between construction/renovation/expansion of a facility or introduction of a new program initiative and positive economic outcomes in a city or neighborhood. To some extent these statements seems to suggest that many claims of economic impact by arts entities outside of their direct spending are on shaky ground and may need to be re-evaluated.

On the other hand, a placemaking effort could appear to have had no benefit when measured in terms of economic impact, but had a substantial positive social impact. Of course, a positive economic impact may have a negative social impact as residents are dispossessed by gentrification.

In our view, the indicators systems also often unintentionally favored economic vitality and livability over outcomes related to building a community’s social capital, in large part because there is little or no national, regularly collected data on levels of empowerment, self-efficacy, social bonding, or social bridging—concepts which may be more subjective than economic indicators but are central goals of many creative placemaking efforts and are widely considered critical components of the social health of a place. As a result, some practitioners argued that the indicators-based approach to measuring the impact of creative placemaking could privilege projects that are economically beneficial but may actually diminish the social capital of a community and its members—for instance, by highlighting the economic impact of creative placemaking investments without reckoning with unintended consequences like gentrification on those who might be displaced because of rising property values.

If you think I have been overly idealistic in advocating for a consideration of the intrinsic value of art, here is a little bit of evidence of a shift toward seeing the less easily quantifiable impacts as valid and worthy goals.

As I am sure my frequent interlocutor Carter Gillies would point out, valuing the arts for positive social impact is still something of a prescriptive view of the arts rather than prizing the intrinsic value. But it feels like a step in the right direction to look at the benefits to human relationships over commerce.

I Am Not Really An Artist, But…

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I often talk about the difficulty people have in seeing themselves as creative or as regularly participating in a creative pursuit. I was reminded recently that it can be the off-handed depreciating remarks we make that can reinforce this view.

Yesterday we were meeting with the outside consultant that is going to help us with the arts listening tour we are conducting in our community. The consultant listened to us talk about our goals for the sessions and perceptual, economic and physical barriers people experience that we hoped to learn about.

At a certain point in the conversation she stopped us and said that when she taught class she often gave assignments that required some creative component, in part because reading and grading multi-page papers is pretty burdensome.

She said after listening to us talk, she recognized that when she would give an assignment, she would often preface it by saying, “I’m not an artist….” or “I can’t draw…” She realized that was contrary to the her goal in giving the assignment. In addition, it was giving people permission/excuse not to really try.

She said in the future she would stop using those phrases and instead say, “I don’t have formal training as an artist, but this is how I represent this concept/process visually and it makes sense to me.”

We often say if we can change the life of even one person, we will be content. We haven’t even executed our project and we have already had an impact!

When we comment that we can’t draw, act, dance, sing, etc, it is often to excuse our perceived lack of ability. Or, as is the case in this classroom setting, in an attempt to alleviate any pressure people may feel about needing to produce something of quality on demand.

But it also perpetuates the idea that we are not possessed of any ability whatsoever. That isn’t true. Who hasn’t doodled in their notebook, sung in the shower, lip-synched, danced and pantomimed like no one was watching?

I don’t know if our consultant’s alternative phrasing is the most ideal. I would love to hear other people’s thoughts. But I think it is a start in the right direction.

Perhaps more importantly, her moment of self-reflection forced me to recognize that even as a person who works in the arts, I have probably prefaced an attempt at creative expression by saying “I’m not a…” I am sure I am not the only one either.

Asking Boards What They Think Of Themselves

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A few arts organizations in my community are partnering to conduct an arts listening tour where we will go out into the community and try to get a sense of what the barriers to participation for different groups might be. We met with the outside facilitator today so she could get a sense of what we wanted to do and help us avoid inhibiting honest discussion.

She mentioned that one of her major focuses is non-profit boards and that research on board effectiveness is almost exclusively conducted by talking to the executive officer of the organization rather than the board members. She said if you asked the boards themselves they would probably have a different view about their effectiveness.

She told us this to emphasize the importance of including the people we wanted to know about as listening tour participants rather than asking other groups why they thought people in those demographics weren’t engaged. The need to involve those who were not already engaged in our activities has been at the forefront of our mind since we started planning this project.

Later in the day the facilitator’s anecdote came back to me and lead to me to wonder, how many executive officers ask their board to reflect on their effectiveness. How many boards ask it of themselves? How many discuss the differences and similarities between the directors’ and executive officer’s perceptions?

I know this gets into uncomfortable territory. I actually stumbled into it recently when I mentioned my perception of my board’s decision making process to the board president, citing specific examples. To her credit she thanked me for reflecting something they were too close to see and brought it up at a board meeting.

Not all issues are that easily addressed and not all board dynamics allow for these sort of discussions. Perhaps the first step is to work on changing the dynamics.

If it is true that most of the research about the actions, attitudes and effectiveness of boards of directors is derived from what the organizations’ executive officers say about them, maybe the boards have been unfairly maligned and should be given an opportunity to respond.

(And I know there are a lot of people reading this thinking, no they haven’t and no they shouldn’t, but try to get past that.)

Today being the observation of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, it is appropriate to think about all of our relationships that seem antagonistic to some degree and make us feel uneasy and fearful about acting to resolve. Not all movements need to be large and public impacting thousands. Sometimes they can be small, private and personal impacting a handful.

Theatre of Education

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There is a lot of conversation in the performing arts about potential audiences not seeing themselves or their stories up on stage. If this is something that concerns you, you may want to take some pointers from a New Yorker article about an immersive play experience in Chicago.

Set in an old school, Learning Curve, was created in cooperation with “fifty teen-agers … drawing on their own experiences, and on dozens of interviews with teachers, parents, administrators, and peers” in an attempt to communicate what it is like to attend Chicago city schools.

Similar to other immersive theater pieces like Sleep No More and The Donkey Show, attendee-participants follow a “choose-your-own-adventure” track through the experience.

Each scene lasts just a few minutes but manages, with depth and candor, to make a serious point about the personal and political stew that is public education.

My track that evening brought me to a chaotic advanced Spanish class, where a flustered teacher fought for control of her students while impatiently accommodating a timid new pupil. A real teacher in attendance remarked afterward, “Yup, that’s exactly what school’s like.” Next, I visited a distracted guidance counselor, who informed me that several of my classes were no longer available owing to budget cuts. “You can thank Rahm for that,” he said, referring to Chicago’s mayor. In another intimate scene, I spied a teacher cheating on standardized tests. When caught, she defended herself. “What am I supposed to do? Let the state slap you in the face and call you failures?” Later, I took this same test, frantically filling in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil while tortured by the ticks of an amplified clock. How quickly that very particular brand of panic returns! But then I assisted in a clever prom proposal, in a janitor’s closet, complete with a guitar and a disco ball, and remembered that, for all of high school’s angst, it provides many small moments of wonder.

While the work was intended to illustrate the experiences of the students, whom the article author terms “silent shareholders,” it engendered “sympathy for the elusive authority figures in their lives” among the student creators. Teachers, seeing students depict them, in turn recognized some of their choices contributed to the stresses their students experience.

Looking at the immersive format in this context, it seems obvious (though it hadn’t occurred to me earlier) that it can be used for more than presenting exciting re-imagined tellings of Shakespearean stories and be a tool for dialogue and social change.

Did anyone in the Chicago area happen to see the show and wants to share their own impressions?

Volunteering Ain’t Free

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Somewhat apropos of yesterday’s post, Non-Profit Quarterly had a post about Phoenix Comicon’s recent decision to charge volunteers to work their convention.

I am not sure this is really a scandalous decision given that many outdoor festivals I know have had this policy for going on two decades. The more controversial aspect might be that the Con is a for-profit company that was requiring people to become members of a 501 (c) (7) non-profit for which the Con leadership were officers in order to become volunteers. Many objected that this was a major conflict of interest.

But as the Non Profit Quarterly noted (and as I suggested yesterday), co-ordinating the work of volunteers ain’t cheap:

Finally, for charitable nonprofits, or 501(c)(3) organizations, requesting payment for volunteering is an increasingly popular practice, and one that helps organizations sustain their operations—and, in particular, recruit, manage, and sustain the volunteer workforce they often rely upon. While it can feel counterintuitive for volunteers to pay to serve, the effort required for nonprofits to absorb and deploy a volunteer workforce is significant. As both formal corporate volunteer programs and solo entrepreneurs looking to build up their client base increase, volunteers are a plentiful resource for 501(c)(3) organizations. It’s critical to balance the value these volunteers deliver with the cost it takes to engage them.

Another reason to charge volunteers many event organizers, both for and non-profit, will cite is that it shows investment and provides incentive to actually work their shift. As someone who has run an outdoor music festival, I can attest that there is always a segment of the volunteer base that sign up just to get free admission to the event. According to a re-post of a letter by Phoenix Comic-con’s director, combating no-shows and reining in ballooning staffing was the primary reason for pursuing a pay to volunteer model.  In the last few days, they have re-evaluated their decision to have volunteers register as members of the aligned non-profit.

If You Give Me More Helping Hands, Give Me More Cash

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The idea of mandatory national service gets bandied about a lot, especially during presidential election years. This year it seemed to pop up more frequently due to the proposals for free college tuition being floated by some of the candidates. People were suggesting at the very least those who received free tuition needed to reciprocate in some fashion such as national service in the military, Peace Corps, Americorps, etc.

Last week a discussion held by a local public radio station on the pros and cons of mandatory service came across my social media feed. The host and his guests made a lot of good points about the cons, not the least of which is that people are supportive of the idea for younger people, but when you suggest a mandatory service of even one hour a month for all citizens, there is fierce resistance.

Most of the negative outcomes they mentioned were from the point of view of those who would be providing service. Something they overlooked was the fact that there is expense involved in administering a service program, regardless of whether the participants are being paid or not. This is true whether the service is military or civil. I am going to mostly address it from the civil side, but the basic factors are almost identical. This issue is overlooked pretty much everywhere I could find a national service discussion online.

Supervisory infrastructure, materials, equipment, space, facilities and dozens of other details are necessary if there are any expectations of a meaningful experience with meaningful outcomes from a mandatory service experience.

Mandatory service on a national or even state level can be a boon to the work that non-profits and other service organizations do, but it will require a significant increase in capacity building funding from some combination of governments and foundations. Otherwise having service workers becomes more of a hindrance than a help to an organization.

This issue needs to be raised a lot more emphatically when these ideas are discussed. Otherwise, people will be looking askance at the non-profit sector wondering how it could be screwing things up so badly when they were being provided with the service of 3 million high school graduates every year.

I think it is too easy to equate added labor with industrial productivity and revenue generation and see mandatory service as a boon to organizational sustainability. But very little work non-profit organizations do generates revenue. Being able to teach more children will require more space and instructional supplies. Being able to feed more homeless or elderly will require more food, vehicles and food preparation equipment. Being able to provide health services to people will require more space, medicine, diagnostic equipment.

More capacity to do these things means more money than ever will be spent. Unfortunately, the organizations’ capacity to generate the money to cover these costs probably won’t increase a whit.

The only area in which I could see any sort of return on investment would be in terms of the old WPA type infrastructure projects. If you have people planting trees that can be harvested decades down the road, clearing/creating parks that can be used to generate revenue or gentrify an area to increase the tax base, then you might tie a tangible result to the service. However, a lot of the needed services have intangible results.

So yes, ultimately the nation would be more unified and healthier for having a stronger ethic of service. But getting there ain’t free.

If You’re Happy Cause Your Boss Knows It Clap Your Hands

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Here is a little topic of discussion for you– Does having a boss that is an arts industry insider make for a happier work environment than working for one that comes from outside the arts?

In Harvard Business Review, researchers found that having an insider for a boss made for a happier environment.

Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business. This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good boss may need some rethinking. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, this argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma, organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also matters enormously.

[…]

When we look closely at the data, a striking pattern emerges. The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. Even we were surprised by the size of the measured effect. For instance, among American workers, having a technically competent boss is considerably more important for employee job satisfaction than their salary (even when pay is really high).

[…]

Moreover, we saw that when employees stayed in the same job but got a new boss, if the new boss was technically competent, the employees’ job satisfaction subsequently rose.

I am sure we can all think of personal experiences that reinforce or disprove these findings.

Something I was wondering as I read this article was what category to use when define deep expertise for a non-profit arts executive. Is it “arts” or “non-profit”? I have noticed that if they didn’t come up through the ranks in an arts field, non-profit arts executive directors and presidents often seem to come from the healthcare field.

Since the job description of non-profit CEOs seems to focus so much on fund raising these days, the non-profit category is probably the defining characteristic for the financial health of the organization, but what impact, if any, does that have on work satisfaction in the organization? (Obviously, I mean when the leader comes from any non-arts non-profit. I am not picking on healthcare.)

We often hear rumblings about the arts being too insular and needing outside perspectives. Is it really the case that arts people don’t have the capacity to innovate in their approach or is it the case of received wisdom akin to engineers not leading other engineers?

Thoughts?

This Is What You Said, This Is How We Are Fixing It

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If you haven’t seen the first iteration of ArtsHacker’s Most Creative People In Arts Administration, hop over there now and check it out.

Or actually, wait until you read the rest of my post, then go over there…

If there was one thing I learned as a member of the review panel, it was that there are a lot of unrecognized arts administrators doing great work out there. This year Juan José Escalante, Executive Director of José Limón Dance Festival and Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director of California Symphony both deservedly tied for top honors.

One thing that impressed me about Bergauer’s nomination were support documents that included the symphony’s blog. To be certain, there are only a few entries on the blog, but the one I appreciated the most discussed the results of discussion sessions they conducted with Millennials and Gen Xers.

The post reviews all the issues the discussion participants raised and then lists what the symphony has done to address these issues. This is important because one of the key rules of surveying is don’t ask for a feedback on an situation you don’t intend to take action on. Not only did they take action, but they used the blog to communicate what that action is within the confines of their operating environment. (i.e. They don’t control the ticketing system of the venues at which they perform.)

The blog post is a treasure trove of great feedback for any arts organization since there is very little that is specific to the California Symphony. The things discussion attendees wanted to know but weren’t finding easy to access included things like: why is this music a big deal?, how long will it run?, what will the experience be like?, what are each of the instruments called?

The music selected for the program mattered least.

There were a lot of quotable sections of the blog. Here are some of my most favorite favorites.

Read the Manual:

Then, they get to step 4): make a decision on why they want to attend a specific concert, and our response is essentially “WHY CAN’T YOU FIGURE OUT WHY RACHMANINOFF’S SECOND SYMPHONY IS A BIG DEAL? LOOK IT UP IF YOU WANT TO KNOW!” (marketing failboat — why do we set up our sites this way, and then wonder why the sales funnel is getting choked up at the add-to-cart step?).

Everyone Else Is In The Know:

One participant asked if there is “a separate webpage for younger people we could make?” What was so interesting about that comment is that this person assumed that they were in the minority as far as understanding answers to these types of questions. The assumption was that other, older people are much more familiar with the symphony when in reality, there is no magical age at which one suddenly becomes an aficionado.

Comment from a discussion participant:

“It was so impressive — I didn’t expect it to feel THAT different than Spotify.”

On Pricing:

Even the discussion group brought up (on their own, without any prompting) the idea that they’ll all shell out big bucks for Taylor Swift. So price alone is never an isolated issue; it’s all about the perceived value one is receiving in exchange for that price. What we did find interesting was the comment of, “I’m more likely to go to three $25 performances than I am one $75 or $100 performance.” Many others chimed in with agreement to that statement.

Okay, now you can go over to the Arts Hacker site. Thanks for reading.

What We Know And How Well We Know It

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Createquity just released a valuable tool for arts advocates. They compiled the data from all the studies they could find to provide a comprehensive report on Everything We Know About Whether and How The Arts Improve Lives.

I haven’t had an opportunity to dig deeply into the data and ponder what it all means. What I find most helpful is their graphical depiction about where findings about the value of arts fall on two axis – how strong the quality of the evidence is and does the evidence indicate that a benefit exists.

So you can easily see that there is low evidence that cultural engagement can help encourage healing after traumatic events and that the quality of the evidence is weak. On the other hand there is strong evidence that arts participation in early childhood promotes social and emotional development.

The good news is that no survey found that there is an absence of benefit to the arts. Some people may be disappointed to learn that there is very mixed evidence, leaning toward negative, that arts education may improve scholastic attainment in terms of test scores, grades, etc and that the quality of the research backing that is very strong. As recently as 2016 research has “found no or minimal effects for arts and cultural participation or education on attainment measures.” Even the positive research say “overall, the impact of arts participation on academic learning appears to be positive but low.”

I had heard things along these lines and had started collecting information to verify if this might be the case and assess how valid the findings were. Fortunately, the folks at Createquity have done a lot of the heavy lifting in this regard.

Despite what may seem like disheartening news, a large amount of the findings fall into the “evidence that a benefit exists” category with many having medium to high quality levels of research in support of the findings. Many of those in the low quality evidence sector are only there due to lack of research on the subject.

Createquity admits this project is a work in process. As more evidence emerges, they will update it. If they find that the basic premises and interpretations of the researchers is flawed, they will revise the materials.

So often we hear about so many different research findings about the arts it is difficult to assess the value of the findings. Createquity provides a much needed degree of clarity by putting the research on a continuum. Advocacy becomes much easier when you know what you are saying is corroborated with evidence and you know just how strong the evidence is.

Rethinking The Term Business Model

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In Arts Professional (UK), José Rodríguez recently wrote about how non-profit arts organizations frequently misunderstand what a business model is.

The first misconception he lists is that only businesses need business models and since non-profit arts organizations aren’t businesses, ergo, they don’t need a business model. I don’t think I have ever heard a non-profit in the US suggest they weren’t a business, but he talks about a perception of “business” as a dirty word which is definitely something I have heard in the arts community.

The misconception he addresses that is worth attention is that business models are not necessarily related to moneymaking. My emphasis.

2. Business models are only about money

There are many definitions of business models, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what we are actually talking about, but what most of these definitions have in common is the central role of value creation. And here lies the main difference with what people usually think about business models. It is not only about how your organisation makes money, but about how it creates value and organises itself around its value propositions.

Value is defined as ‘the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth or usefulness of something’. Value can be money, but it can also be many other things. Value is what is important for you and your stakeholders. And for being able to create value, we need to understand the desires, needs, challenges and problems of those that we are trying to serve: audiences, community, employees, volunteers, customers, funders, sponsors, etc. Keep it in mind: Business models are not (only) about money, but about value.

[…]

So what is a business model?

A business model is a vital concept determining the success of any organisation and not a complex formula relating to its profit-making mechanisms. A business model is just a story explaining who your audiences and customers are, what they value, and how you will be able to sustain the organisation in providing that value.

At its most basic, every business model has three components, which respond to a few simple questions:

  • Which stakeholders do we serve? Which of their needs do we seek to address?
  • What do our stakeholder groups value? How do we create that value for each one of them?
  • How do we generate income, and attract other necessary resources, to be able to create value for our stakeholders in a sustained way?

Since it is in the last paragraph of the article, it can be easy to miss but an important feature of business plans is that they are temporary. Since the stakeholders you serve may change, the things your stakeholders value may change or the way you are able to create value for your stakeholders may change, then of necessity your business model must change.

By his definition, making changes to your business model doesn’t necessarily mean a change to your tax status unless you significantly change the way you generate income. Conceiving of business models in this context may help you operate in a more flexible, nimble manner since it moves you away from thinking you need to act in a set way to stay within certain strictures.

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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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