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State of the Arts

Now That I Hear You Say Aloud Like That…

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There has been some trepidation among members of the Kentucky arts community following the governor’s recent dismissal and reconstitution of the state arts council. Gov. Bevin dismissed all but four of the council members, reduced the size of the council from 16 to 15 and accepted the resignation of the executive director according to a recent report.

The main cause of concern is the arts council’s newly stated focus,

In a news release, Secretary of the Cabinet of Tourism, Arts and Heritage Don Parkinson wrote: “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”

[…]

“The reorganized council strikes the appropriate balance of expertise in the arts and entrepreneurship,” he said. “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”

A more explicit entrepreneurial focus may seem innocuous …. But some worry the shift misconstrues an artist’s role in his or her community.

[…]

“Crafts, sculpture and paintings, for example — and Bevin simply plans to amplify that relatively narrow and crude approach to the arts,” Day says. “This assumes, with such deep misguidedness, that the primary value of the arts is the price they demand.”

This revisits a oft-discussed topic of this blog, what is the purpose and value of art?

Perhaps more immediately for me, I realized how the call for artists to be more entrepreneurial can very quickly be leveraged to the detriment of the arts and culture community.

When I have invoked “entrepreneurial” in the past it was with the intention that those in the arts community acquire the skills to manage their careers, not be cheated by others and make opportunities for themselves rather than wait for it to be provided by others.

In the context of this story, the same terminology almost sounds like, “helping artists make a constructive contribution to society.”

Certainly the execution doesn’t have to be that cynical. Arts Business incubators could be a boon for many communities provided they were sited in rural and other underserved areas employing a model similar to Kentucky’s Appalshop, rather just in places real estate developers wanted to gentrify.

It was instructive for me to have ideas and language I and others have used in relations to arts practice essentially repeated back to me. There is often a line that pops up in television and film comedies that goes something like “well now that I hear it said aloud like that, yes, I guess it is a little ridiculous.”

I am not saying the idea that people should acquire a set of entrepreneurial skills is silly. Rather, hearing the same terminology used in this case makes it clear that when efforts and initiatives for the arts are discussed, care must be taken to provide clear context and definition of the primary value that will result. Economic, intellectual, social, spiritual, etc. benefits may accrue, but the core creative expression has value independent, and regardless of, whether any of these benefits emerge.

Who Cares About Losing & Freezing, I’m Having Fun

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Last week Drew McManus posted about the difficulties sports teams are having filling their seats. The reasons for this problem are very similar to those faced by the arts –an approach that assumes a community owes us their attention and a focus on product, positioning and image over the customer’s experience.

Drew’s post actually helped me coalesce some thoughts I had when I was attending a football game at Notre Dame last month. At the time the team’s record was 4-7. The weather had gone from mid-60s the day before to 20s with snow the day of the game.

Despite this, the campus and the stadium were PACKED with people.

My first thought as I wandered around was that Notre Dame football had cachet that is independent of win-loss records and weather. I don’t know if this level of investment become entrenched early by movies like  Knute Rockne and Rudy or thanks to generations of Catholic priests making sly mention about the team needing their congregants’ prayers.

While these factors might be significant in generating loyalty and involvement, the school invested a lot of attention in the game attendance experience. Entering and leaving the parking lots was well organized and took a reasonable amount of time.  The line in the bookstore had AT LEAST 25 switchbacks before you got to the register but the line moved so quickly that you were rarely standing still and staff members were cheerleading and high-fiving people in line.  Entry into the stadium also went quickly.

If you got too cold you could take refuge in the athletic center next door and watch the game on large screen monitors.

The only sour note was the food service inside the stadium was abysmally organized and their money handling discipline raised grave concerns.

Well actually, the fact Notre Dame screwed up their three touchdown lead to lose the game was pretty disappointing as well.

I am going to remember the food service experience as the worst part because everything else, including the loss, was interesting and enjoyable. (As far as I am concerned, braving the frigid cold is as integral a part of the experience as tailgating.)

While my outlook is not necessarily shared by everyone, perhaps it is illustrative of the point Drew and those he cites are trying to make. You don’t have to necessarily have the highest quality, most glamorous product if you are providing an enjoyable experience in general.

How Wound Into Your Identity Is Creativity?

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My post on Monday about employing a new definition to distinguish between amateurs and professionals garnered a couple comments and multiple loooonnnng emails (you know who you are!) in response.

At the core of these responses, including the original piece I was blogging on, were questions of how one views themselves, upon what criteria are these determinations being made and whether there is any validity for these criteria and terms in the first place.

The influence of psychological, developmental, sociological, scientific and philosophical forces were mentioned in these conversations. They are all so tightly entwined with each other I don’t know that any satisfying conclusion can be reached…or at least this week.

But this idea of how people in general perceive art as part of their identity is compelling to me. It is one of the reasons I am so interested in the effort to build public will for art and culture. The effort is all about asking people to examine to what degree creative expression comprises their identity.

I also frequently cite Jamie Bennett’s TEDx Talk observation that people are more easily able to see themselves on a continuum with sports figures than to identify themselves as an artist.

This is even a bigger issue than whether people are labeled amateurs or professionals. If people who are spending time after work and on weekends engaged in some creative activity don’t consider themselves artists for some reason, that has to be addressed before even getting to the questions about whether they are a professional or amateur.

If you played baseball or went flyfishing in high school but haven’t in 10 years, are you still a baseball player or fisher today?  If you were part of the drama club, art club, choir or band in high school but haven’t done any of those things in 10 years, are you still an artist today?

Outside of picking up your instrument, I would argue it is more likely that you effortlessly employed dramatic, singing and visual arts ability during a conversation, marketing presentation or staff meeting in that 10 year interval and have in fact exercised those skills and done so more easily than you could baseball and flyfishing.

If creative expression is this deeply ingrained into your existence, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say you are an artist before an athlete?

Of course, this gets us right back to questions of value. How how much attention and worth society places upon these skills. How much we value them in ourselves.

These questions of identity and creativity almost certainly don’t apply to readers of this blog who are likely to already have some sense of the answer. The answer to the title of this blog post is we need to tease out of others.

Does The Professional/Amateur Divide Come From Within?

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About 10-15 years ago, the idea of Pro-Ams, emerged. Pro-Ams are essentially amateurs who pursue an avocation with such diligence it was difficult to discern them from people who employed the same skills as a vocation based on degree of knowledge and practical execution.

Since that time there has been some occasional effort to clarify the distinction. Partially, I think there has been concern that sub-par products and services by amateurs not be mistaken as representative of the ideal by those having little familiarity with those products and services.

Most of the attempts to define the distinction have fallen short. The economic definition about professionals being paid and amateurs doing it for the love was problematic even decades prior to the Pro-Am term emerging. Using years of formal training or experience practicing the skills as a measure also falls short.

In both cases, you can find notable exceptions to the rule you don’t dare include in one category or the other lest you insult or overpraise. It also doesn’t take much before elitism and condescension creeps into the process.

In looking for a link about Pro-Ams for a post I did last week, I came across a piece on Medium that offers a definition of the differences that doesn’t involve any of the aforementioned criteria. It doesn’t answer the concerns about sub-par work, but I can attest from recent experience that there are companies with long history, great amounts of experience in their craft and millions in receipts each year who are managing to provide sub-par experiences and products without amateurs serving as poor examples.

Jeff Goins’ Medium piece, The 7 Differences Between Professionals and Amateurs, depends more on internal motivation than external definitions of achievement to draw his distinction.

Even if it wasn’t already highlighted, the following would probably naturally jump out at you:

If you want to be a pro in your field, you’re going to have to break this terrible amateur habit of looking at what people have without paying attention to what they did to get it. Chasing the results without understanding the process will lead to short-lived success, if not outright failure.

I have touched on this idea before. Even though the phrase “success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration,” is well known to the point of cliche, everyone has this idea that success is the result of a rare element – genius, talent, lucky big break – rather than developed as a process. Yes, natural ability often factors in, but people often believe that there is an easy recipe for results rather than the requirement of effort.

Among his seven differences are the following.

1. Amateurs wait for clarity. Pros take action.
You have to know what you are before you can figure out what you want to do.
[…]
In my case, I spent too long waiting for someone to call me a writer before I was willing to act like one. Now I’ve learned that clarity comes with action. We must perform our way into professionalism. We must first call ourselves what we want to become, and then get to the work of mastery.

2. Amateurs want to arrive. Pros want to get better.
You have to become a student long before you get to be a master.
[…]
For the longest time, I just wanted to be recognized for my genius. It wasn’t until I started putting myself around teachers and around the teaching of true masters that I realized how little I knew and how much I still had to grow as a writer.

3. Amateurs practice as much as they have to. Pros never stop.
You have to practice even, maybe especially, when it hurts.

It’s not enough to show up and work every day. You have to keep challenging yourself, keep pushing yourself beyond your limits. This is how we grow.

[…]

6. Amateurs build a skill. Pros build a portfolio.

You must master more than one skill.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a jack of all trades, but you must become a master of some. For example, all the professional writers I know are good at more than one thing. One is a great publicist. Another is really smart at leadership. Another is a fantastic speaker.

For creative professionals, this doesn’t mean you have to work at your craft uninterrupted for eight hours a day — at least not for most professionals. It means you will spend your time getting your work out there through a variety of channels and mediums, or that you’ll work for part of the day and master something else with the rest of your time.

I don’t know that this is the final word on amateurs vs. professionals, but I feel it is a constructive line of thought to pursue, if only because it get away from the practice of judging the worthiness of others.

Perhaps one benefit of these criteria is that you can be a professional at some pursuit, move to amateur status as other things draw your attention (perhaps a focus on professional status in another endeavor), and return to professional status later in life when you decide to rededicate yourself to it.

In this way, one need not sigh regretfully at once having been a “professional” with no hope of returning to that status because you have fallen out of synch with the latest philosophies, techniques and knowledge. Yes, regaining technical expertise later may be a challenge, but if professionals take the long view toward knowledge acquisition, that mindset puts you halfway there and may have kept you from falling too far behind in the interim.

Thoughts? Have you come across other definitions that are better in whole or in part?

Stuff To Ponder: Expanded Approaches To Pay What You Want Pricing

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A few weeks ago economist Alex Tabarrok wrote about a strange “pay what you want” promotion a shoe company was running. It struck him and many commenters of the Marginal Revolution blog as a psychological experiment with a goal of getting most people to select the set middle range price.

In that same post he linked back to 2012 post where he provided an analysis for why “pay what you want” can make sense for charities and performing arts organizations. The analysis may be difficult to understand, but the bottom line is:

Probably more importantly, pay-what-you-want pricing is going to be advantageous when the seller also sells a complementary good, such as concerts, which benefit from consumption spillovers from the pay-what-you-want good.

Basically, when you offer an option to pay what you want, there should be accompanying options like food, merchandise, other participatory activities that you can earn revenue from. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the movie theatre model where a bag of popcorn is $10. Offering pay what you want simply because you think it is a good idea without any sense of how you can offset the loss of revenue isn’t prudent. If end up with a higher per ticket price than you had before, that is great, but don’t plan on it.

One of the commenters on the 2012 post noted that the site HumbleBundle allows you to pay what you want, but also posts the average price paid in real time.

Currently, if you pay more than the average of $4.14, you can unlock additional content and if you pay more than $14 there is another level of content you can receive.

Having some sort of bonus content or access people will receive for exceeding the average is a smart idea. It rewards those who act early before the average increases as a result of people paying to receive that content (or just being generous). This content or access could be better seating, merchandise, concessions, meet and greet opportunities, invites to other organizational activities, etc.

I got to thinking about how my ticketing system can tell me what the average selling price of my tickets are on demand. I could theoretically manually update that information on the lobby screens simply as a point of information at various intervals just as a bit of psychological social pressure on people to pay close to that or a little more. While I might also choose to update that information on our website, I am not sure the sense of social pressure would be as significant for online sales.

However, if ticketing software providers created a way to export that information to update in real time like HumbleBundle does, it might be possible to create a sense of tension and excitement in lobbies just prior to performances. (Or if handled correctly, even online). Granted, it could be done manually but I know I have better things for my staff to do than constantly run reports and post data to a public screen.

Watching it tick steadily up with every purchase is much more interesting. Especially if you are experience the dual satisfaction of seeing how much money was being raised for the organization while knowing you got access cheaper than a lot of other people – “Whoo hoo!! We collectively moved the price to $15.63 (but I got mine for $4.85!)”

Thoughts? What experiences, if any, have you had? I know a number of places are doing pay what you want/can, but I am not clear if they are supplementing their income with related goods and services or if they have found a way to energize audiences around the practice in a productive manner.

The Real Competition Is Inaction

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As he often does, Seth Godin is speaks right to the arts and culture industry when he suggests that we welcome an environment where there is a lot of activity similar to our own rather than viewing it as competition. (my emphasis)

But for the rest of us, in most industries, it turns out that the real competition is inaction. Few markets have expanded to include everyone, and most of those markets (like books and music) have offerings where people buy more than one.

This means that if there’s more good stuff, more people enter the market, the culture gets better, more good work is produced and enjoyed, more people enter the market, and on and on.

So encouraging and promoting the work of your fellow artists, writers, tweeters, designers, singers, painters, speakers, instigators and leaders isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart as well.

I think we can all see the truth in the statement that the real enemy is inaction, not the other organization down the street. The big concern more than anything else these days is that people will stay home and disengage.

I believe I have mentioned it previously, but when I am asked to speak to groups about what my organization is doing I take the opportunity to speak about how all the arts and cultural organizations make the community a great place to live. Even if people don’t patronize all the groups, at the very least it engenders some pride and loyalty to the community. At best, my description of what is enjoyable and valuable about these places may inspire a visit.

The other factor is that the existence of other arts and cultural entities helps attract and cultivate a talent pool that you can benefit from.

When I started in my current job, I was a little disappointed in how few students were initiating their own projects compared to where I came from. It took me awhile to realize that the students with whom I previously interacted were regularly working together on projects at four or five other organizations, plus doing a handful of one-off projects for other people in the arts community. Not only had they developed a close rapport among themselves, but they had many hours exposed to a variety of concepts, techniques and processes working for other people.

I bristle at the suggestion someone invest their time and talent for the experience and exposure, (getting paid doesn’t inhibit the absorption of new skills after all), but I certainly saw their abilities and judgment develop as a result of their effort and discipline.

Moreover, my organization benefited from them having gone through this process. It was only later that I realized how much.

This basic concept then supports the idea that perhaps Professional-Amateurs aren’t the threat to “professional” artists that they have been perceived to be.

If You Give A Teen $100….

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Recently James Doeser wrote about a program the Italian government started where they granted a culture voucher worth €500 to anyone who turns 18 before December 31.

It can be used to buy books, pay for entry fees to parks, museums and archaeological sites, and instead of cash for theatre, cinema and concert tickets. The euros in the app are spent by the young people and the arts organisations then reclaim this money off the state.

There is something wickedly disruptive as well as very elegant about this idea. If it works, it will have a profound impact not just on Italian cultural policy but also how other governments around the world approach the issue of arts funding.

Whereas a voucher scheme like the one underway in Italy is an exercise in ‘demand-side’ economics, the vast majority of our cultural policy in the UK is on the ‘supply side’.

While Doeser generally applauds the program as a way to avoid giving additional benefits to people who can already afford them, (it is pretty well recognized that free admission days are attended by people who already attend, not new audiences), he notes some potential issues:

While ‘supply-side’ interventions have their shortcomings, ‘demand-side’ ones are not without complications. There is a host of interesting effects that a scheme of this sort might unleash on the cultural marketplace: ticket price inflation; the prospect of resale (if I am an arts lover and can get €300 of your unused credits for, say, €100 in cash, then we’d both be better off if we can do this deal); and finally whether there will be low take-up and the Italian government is operating like your gym, confident that people will not use their entitlements.

Of course, I got to thinking about how this might be implemented in the U.S.

Ideally, teens would use the money to indulge their curiosity and expanding their horizons buying books, going to museums, taking classes/lessons, buying paint, visiting historical sites, etc,. But the reality is that they may just use the money to pay for additional months of Netflix subscriptions and buying music from the same people they already are without expanding their experience.

There might be a temptation to specify what the money can be spent on that aligned to a definition. However broad the definition was, it would still delineate what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. My only consolation would be that as restrictive as the arts community’s definition of what constituted arts and culture might be, it would still be orders of magnitude broader than that of the politicians authorizing the funding.

Politics aside, allowing the funding to be use for all the activities the NEA defined as arts participation their 2012 survey of public participation in the arts would provide some excellent insight into what types of activities people were actually engaging in. Every time a voucher number was used, it would provide useful data about people’s actual practice rather than their self-perceived practice.

True, if people had a sense that their use was being tracked they may only use it at a museum rather than when they indulged their guilty pleasure marathon viewing of The Three Stooges movies. While their self consciousness may slightly skew the results, it may engender a growing appreciation of arts and cultural activities that may not fully manifest until 20 years later when they are in their 40s.

Certainly, the program could just serve to further enrich big corporations like Apple, Comcast, Google, Time Warner, Disney, etc and not help non-profit arts organizations much at all.

While we can watch what happens with the Italian program, the reality is our cultural norms differ to a large enough degree that we basically can’t use their experience to project what might happen in the U.S. It comes down to something of a thought experiment about how much we trust U.S. teens (or all citizens if you wanted to expand the program) to spend money exploring. How much tolerance would we have for people who didn’t spend the money as we thought they should?

Yes, I know this doesn’t even factor in that there are hundreds of thousands of teens out there that have a much more dire need to use even a $50-$100 subsidy for food, shelter and medical care.

And yes, there is also the fact that right now the goal of most arts advocates is to have federal arts funding equal $1 for every citizen so $50 is a pipe dream. Since the population of 18 year olds is only a small segment of the population, the grant could be more than $1, but it would likely still divert a lot of funding from somewhere else even if the federal budget were raised.

But ignoring the fact that the current federal arts budget is far from sufficient and that social services for teens and families are also lacking in comparison with places like Italy, would it freak you out to think about what the 18 year old population of the U.S. would likely spend $100 culture voucher on?

Parents will likely recognize that the title of today’s entry is inspired by “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…” While the kid in the story is run a little ragged in the book I bet most arts organizations would be thrilled to have an audience as engaged and participatory as the mouse.

Frank Discussion About Outreach, New Audiences Efforts In The Community

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A couple of good articles on the influence non-profits in the community came out this week. CityLab noted that in some communities, non-profits were exhibiting greater influence and leadership than politicians that represented those districts.

Based on his observations, he argues in the journal American Sociological Review, the role of nonprofits in disadvantaged city neighborhood has been changing. They’re no longer just extensions of the state or representatives of a few interest groups. They’re “legitimate representatives of poor urban neighborhoods,” and in many cases, “supersede” elected officials.

[…]

What’s happening now is that these organizations are directly negotiating for resources from public and private sector entities that hold the proverbial purse strings. Community organizations are now authoritative voices at the table, and often regarded by both private companies and bureaucrats as more invested and deeply knowledgable representatives of the neighborhoods. In Boston, “district-based elected officials, by contrast, attended ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings but were largely absent from substantive discussions of redevelopment planning,” Levine writes.

When I read this earlier this week, I thought it was interesting but didn’t think most arts organizations were deeply involved enough in their communities to wield this type of influence.

As luck would have it, I didn’t have to think too long about how I might express this in a blog post because Ronia Holmes does it so well in a post that came out today on TRG Arts’ blog.

Her post, “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why” is a must read if your arts organization conducts outreach activities or talks about attracting new audiences. I plan to distribute it to my board and partners in other arts organizations.

She makes some very frank statements which may be uncomfortable to read, but they are reasonable and empathize with the position in which arts organizations find themselves.

Almost too much to quote but I will try to keep it brief:

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

Referring to arts organizations which are not native to these disinvested communities:

Rather than grapple with these deeply ingrained failings, most organizations have opted to substitute narrative for action. They have amended their written missions and values in order to recast themselves as inclusive organizations meant for all. They turn to the community and say, “Now we’ve got a space here for you!”

And they fail to hear this critical question: “Why should we abandon our own table for a small chair at yours?”

The following about seeking new audiences really grabbed my attention:

There is a pervasive idea that a “new” audience must be a “diverse” one, and community-building is co-opted as a tactic for patron acquisition. The hard truth is that the disinvested communities targeted by so many outreach programs simply do not have the resources to—or, frankly, the interest in—sustaining these organizations. The model of operation on which most organizations operate need constant and high influxes of cash, and the lion’s share of affluence still rests with white patrons.

The reality is that most arts organizations don’t need a “diverse” audience—they need an audience with discretionary income. Yet the almost maniacal focus on community-building keeps organizations trapped in cycles of trying to sell to—not engage with, but sell to—audiences that don’t have that resource. In the meantime, organizations are unable to concentrate fully on patron retention and loyalty, and identifying and building audiences that are able and willing to fill the funding gaps.

[…]

Every year, organizations jump through hoops to secure restricted grants that necessitate yet another outreach program or diversity week or community partnership, hoping that if they impress the funders enough they will be given money that can be used for what the organization actually has a mission to do.

If real, authentic, genuine community building isn’t central to your mission, if it isn’t your raison d’être, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Because chances are that not only are you doing it badly, you’re doing it at the expense of your real mission. The mission of most arts organizations—the real mission—is simple: to present an art form. And that’s ok. We need organizations that prioritize preservation, development, and presentation of an art form, and I for one don’t think any organization should be penalized for it.

As much as I quoted here, there is a lot I left out. Even though I probably flirted with tl;dnr eight paragraphs ago, I hope this sample is enough to make you want to read more of what she said.

While it is not the final word on the subject, I think we probably recognize the truth in what she says about outreach efforts. The futility of grant chasing has been acknowledged for quite awhile. These are ideas that need continued discussion.

While we would like to be in a position where our organizations are viewed as leaders in the community like those in the CityLab article, most arts organizations really lack the resources and mission to fulfill that role.

How Do I Know If I Should Be Impressed?

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I was intrigued by an article in The Guardian last month that wondered if we enjoy art when it is anonymous, without any preconceived expectations about what we will experience. During the Dance Umbrella Festival at Sadler Wells, one event featured a mix of well-known and unknown choreographers being presented anonymously.

The concept is to allow (or force, depending on your point of view,) people to evaluate a performance on its own merits absent of any bias about whether they are supposed to like what they see.

This idea chimes with broader research in neuroscience on how influential our beliefs are in creating our experiences. For example, put people in a brain scanner and do a blind tasting with two different brands of cola, and you get a fairly even split in terms of preference. But tell them what brand they’re drinking and their brain’s pleasure centres actually light up more if they think it’s their preferred drink. Brand loyalty is a powerful thing. And perhaps what’s true for fizzy drinks follows for Mozart, Godard or Merce Cunningham. Psychologist Paul Bloom writes in his book How Pleasure Works that this leads to a feedback loop. You think you like Pinter. Because of that you get more pleasure from watching his work, which reinforces the idea that you like it. And a fan is born.

The responses to this gambit were a little mixed. Critic Judith Mackrell reeeaallllyyy wanted to know who did what, though she also found it liberating.

Sarah Bradbury at The Upcoming seemed to be able to focus more on the dance and didn’t really reflect much on the experiment.

It got me wondering if there is benefit in doing similar experiments at other events. For example, if you dress actors in Elizabethan clothing and have them perform a period piece by Moliere or Oscar Wilde, would people who subsequently went to see a Shakespeare comedy find they enjoyed it more thinking they had already seen a Shakespearean play?

The reason I suggest Moliere and Wilde is because the language and behavior would be a little more formal and stilted than contemporary conversation so audiences would perceive it as strange, but accessible. Note that I did not suggest outright telling people they were seeing Shakespeare. Outright deception like that is a thorny question I haven’t quite resolved yet.

Thinking along these lines also raised the question of whether people would enjoy a Gilbert & Sullivan light opera if it avoided the stigma of the word opera and was referenced as a musical.

But from another point of view, does calling it a light opera cause people to be more open to seeing opera? The Most Happy Fella really straddles the line between opera and musical. Porgy and Bess is usually placed firmly within the opera category. Would injecting a little category flexibility based on one’s agenda help lower perceptual barriers for opera?

I am not entirely clear how this might work for visual arts, but there might be some good opportunities inherent to leveraging a little ignorance. I recall when I visited the Salvador Dali Museum that many of the works on display are not what people initially envision when they think of his work. Using that sort of anonymity might be a good place to start.

Getting people to consider whether they like the piece more before they know it is a Dali (or whomever) or after may help people recognize that there may be something of value in work they are dismissing simply because a famous name isn’t attached to it. I am not sure this realization will slow people down as they rush past galleries to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre or a special exhibit at their local museum, but maybe they linger a little longer on the way out.

Works that aren’t instantly identifiable as a particular artist’s can also help illustrate that creation is a process. Dali did a lot of sketching and other relatively unremarkable work before he developed his distinctive style.

Any thoughts on this? Have you ever stumbled across a performance, movie, piece of music or work of visual art that you liked but didn’t know the creator? Upon learning his/her identity were surprised you enjoyed the work of someone you had intentionally been avoiding? Has a positive experience you had acted as a gateway to trying a related experience you were previously pretty sure you wouldn’t enjoy?

Those Experiences Don’t Need To Be More Like Our Experiences

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On blogs like mine that address the concerns of non-profit organizations there is frequently discussion about how we bridle under the suggestion that non-profits need to be run more like businesses.

I was reading a couple articles in the recent issue of Arts Management Quarterly that reminded me that the arts world applies a similar set of standards internally.

An article by Victoria Durrer, Raphaela Henze and Ina Ross, “Approaching an Understanding of Arts and Cultural Managers as Intercultural Brokers,” comments,

Rather than engaging in a more nuanced cultural understanding of consumption in these economies, such approaches pejoratively view and address these customers as being 20 years ‘behind’ American or European consumers in their needs and habits. Similarly, a museum in Asia or Africa is typically viewed as needing to be ‘brought up’ to a level in line with the most recent stage of western modernity.

The authors go on to note that many countries are recognizing the need to raise standards and professionalize operations but the way in which these standards are applied and manifest are quite different than in Western countries.

This perception doesn’t only emerge between arts managers of Western and non-Western countries, but within countries as well. In a separate piece “How Globalization Affects Arts Managers,” Raphaela Henze discusses the situation in Germany,

Many of the arts managers explained that the reason for their efforts is to foster ‘integration’…The term has the paternalistic notion of allowing those that are not familiar with the rules to play the game in case they learn and then stick to the rules laid out by those that are already playing.

My guess is that I didn’t really need to mention she was referring to Germany because we can see how this applies in the U.S.

The implications for the United States are probably clear: Existing ideas about what an arts experience should look like should not be forced upon groups expressing an ethnic or cultural identity that differs from the mainstream, including standards of behavior in those situations. Basically, there shouldn’t be statements that something is or is not a valid experience based on existing standards.

In an even larger perspective, this view needs to applied to all experiences regardless of whether they originate from a group expressing an ethnic or cultural identity. The NEA has already started us down this path by expanding their definition of what an artistic or cultural experience is.

I don’t think this concept is particularly new to anyone. However, not only is it useful to remind ourselves of this necessity on occasion, I think it is helpful to do so in the context of a sentiment we dislike—The proper way to run a non-profit is like a regular business. It gives you something additional to think about when making statements of judgement.

Clarifying Pricing Practices

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Colleen Dilenschneider made some really important points about misunderstood concepts that lead non-profit organizations to make poor decisions and policies. The “Six Concepts that Visitor-Serving Organizations Confuse at Their Own Risk,” she discusses have subtle distinctions that can be difficult to clarify.

It is somewhat akin to the differences between PR, Marketing and Advertising. Even if you have taken the 101 course in any of these subjects, others around you may use the terms so interchangeably that you may find yourself having to stop and say, “No, that is advertising, not marketing.”

Among the concepts she mentions are Fads vs. Trends, which I had cited her on before; Market research vs. audience research; High-propensity visitors vs. historical visitors and key performance indicators vs. diagnostic metrics.

Personally, I don’t frequently get into regular discussions about visitor propensity or indicators vs. metrics, but they are worth reading about because you may think about issues related to those general terms and she makes some great observations.

What will cause me to keep this post bookmarked for future reference were her observations about Admission Pricing vs. Affordable Access and Discounts vs. Promotions.  The points she makes are great for getting pricing conversations in board and staff meetings re-oriented and properly focused.

In terms of Admission Pricing vs. Affordable Access, she says:

Admission pricing is the cost of admission for folks who visit your organization. It is an intelligently determined price point that contemplates what high-propensity visitors (people who are interested in visiting cultural organizations) are willing to pay in order to take part in your experience…. Admission price is an economically-sound business imperative for many organizations and admission pricing is not an affordable access program if your organization relies on paid admission in some capacity.

Affordable access (that is effective) is generally rather expensive for cultural organizations and it takes real investment that is usually made at least partially possible by gate revenues…When organizations lower their optimal price point in hopes of “being more affordable” or “reaching underserved audiences” they aren’t truly doing either of those things…Successful affordable access programs are targeted so that they truly reach folks who are unable to attend – not people who would generally pay full price but are just looking for a deal. Admission pricing and affordable access are two completely different means of access that play completely different roles in the sustainability of visitor-serving organizations.

Her thoughts on Discounts vs. Promotions run along the same lines:

Discounts are when an organization offers free or reduced admission to broad, undefined audiences for no clearly identifiable reason. Discounts do a lot of pretty terrible things for visitor-serving organizations. Simply, offering discounts devalues your brand….When an organization provides discounts, it often results in five not-so-awesome outcomes that you can read about here.

Promotions offer a targeted benefit for certain audiences for an identifiable reason. The biggest difference between promotions and discounts may be how they are perceived by the market. Promotions celebrate your community. Promotions demonstrate why an organization is offering free or reduced pricing in the communication of the promotion…In the end, one approach is more about an organization’s flailing attempts to hit specific attendance numbers at the expense of its brand and mission (and long-term ability to hit those numbers), and the other is more about your organization’s relationship with target audiences and communities.

As I suggest, the issues covered by these four concepts often come up in organization discussions and the lack of clarity between them often yields ineffective results.

Dilenschneider’s post started me thinking about what other concepts and practices might be confused and in need of clarification. A couple of ideas have come to mind, but I haven’t fully developed them yet.

If anyone has any suggestions or has thought about similarly confusing concepts they have already created distinct definitions for, I would love to hear them.

Funding Requests As Panhandling

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I have been listening to On The Media’s series on the way poverty is covered in America and suddenly came to the realization that the language associated with the poor has many similarities to the way Non Profit With Balls blogger Vu Le describes funders perceive non-profits.

Proud of this realization, I went to Vu Le’s blog to grab some passages to cite…only to realize he made that exact point back in July.

As I was thinking about the parallels over the weekend, I really started to wonder if arts organizations need to find another tax structure to organize themselves under so that they didn’t have these negative associations to the work they did.

Granted, this is sort of abandoning the issue rather than trying to shift the perception. Arts organizations metaphorically moving out of the tax status neighborhood doesn’t help social service organizations who are painted with the same brush as the impoverished people they seek to serve.

Except that the perception can infect the social service charities as well which shows how unhealthy it is.

In one On the Media episode, Linda Tirado is interviewed and discusses how her family’s belongings were destroyed when their apartment was flooded. Eight months pregnant, she calls a social service organization looking for a chair so she would have a place to sit.

She was told she could have the chair, but she would need to take a resume writing workshop before she could pick it up. The charity wanted to make sure she was trying to better her situation. The only times the workshops were available were when she had to work so she would essentially end up putting herself in danger of being fired for want of a chair.

That is what personal responsibility means to somebody on welfare. It means here are these stupid hoops that we’re gonna make you jump through and then we’re going to give you a solution that absolutely won’t work for you. It’s that kind of just over and over beating your head against these ridiculous regulations and these double-blinds that don’t make any sense. And the whole thing is set up specifically to humiliate you as much as possible because what we need poor people to do in America more than anything else in the world is know their place.

Compare to a similar passage from Vu Le’s post:

The No-Free-Lunch: There have been idiotic proposals by clueless politicians designed to punish the poor for violating whatever ridiculous expectations are set out for them. Like taking away food stamps if their kids don’t get good enough grades or if they’re not volunteering or seeking out employment, despite the fact that there are only so many volunteer and paid positions to go around. In our sector, our funding gets threatened if we don’t comply with various requirements, such as working toward “sustainability.” A colleague mentioned a grant that won’t pay for staff wages and other indirect expenses, and applicants have to demonstrate that they will be completely self-sustaining within a year. That gave us all a good chuckle.

If people see non-profit arts organizations in the same light as welfare recipients, is it any wonder they don’t want their kids going into the arts? If they aren’t going to be constantly asking their parents for support, they will be asking society for support and what self-respecting parent wants that right?

I am not sure people equate the two in exactly that manner, but there is possibly a greater stigma associated with non-profits than we expect. Because people’s perceptions of poverty often has a very strong emotional element, merely surveying people about their attitudes may not be effective since they may not be entirely aware of how much their unconscious associations influence them.

About five years ago, it was relatively common to see people talking about the need for arts to adopt a different corporate structure. Many different options were debated but to my knowledge, no one ever restructured or organized a new arts organization under one of the alternative models. (Though we would really only start to see proof of concept now after five years of operation.)

While the idea that arts organizations need to distance themselves from those that society looks askance at may be immediately satisfying, not only does it not really appear to be viable, it doesn’t really solve the greater issues that arts organizations and non-profits in general face.

I have written before about the effort to build public will for arts and culture which seeks to change general societal perceptions about the arts. I have to imagine that a shift in the negative associations people make with the way arts are supported and funded would integral part to that.

How Much Would You Pay For A Selfie With Me?

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Some concepts have been banging around in my head for a little while that haven’t quite firmed up yet. I am hoping writing it down and getting some feedback from others might help to start develop it.

I have begun to think that as time goes on, the most valuable commodity a public figure/artist, etc might have is their time, not their performance or merchandise.

In a talk Seth Godin gave at Carnegie Hall, he mentioned that when he goes to book signings, fewer people are buying books (around 28 minute mark).

Instead, they want a selfie with him. Since getting a selfie eats up so much time, he has tried to hire a professional photographer who can supply the images to people, but they insist on taking a picture with their own phone. He says the picture itself is worth nothing, it is the ability to reflect on the experience and share it with friends from your own handheld device that has value.

Obviously, one must provide some sort of notable experience or product that inspires people to want to take that selfie with you in the first place. It could very well be that increasingly the most valuable element will be that opportunity to meet the person and take a selfie. The challenge may be how a person manages that to their benefit whether it be monetarily or preservation of their sanity.

There was an article on Vice about how meet and greets as currently conducted suck for everyone. Fans frequently pay hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to meet with someone, but they only get a second with them. Many fans try to squeeze in more time through various tactics, among them trying to grab a selfie when it isn’t allowed. For their own part, the artist is under pressure to participate in interactions with hundreds of fans in a small period of time. In general, all parties can end up dissatisfied.

My first thought is that these artists or their management are trying to make as much money as fast as they can. There has already been some minor backlash so I wonder how much longer this might be sustainable. As the Vice article says, the more famous one gets, the more of you the fans feel they are entitled.

Is there a better way to handle this knowing that the personal interaction and selfie may be viewed as the most valuable part of the experience? Instead of $350 tickets to a performance, does it make sense to charge $150 to everyone and $750 to a meet and greet that only admits a limited number of people but guarantees you longer interaction time?

The problem with that is 1- scalpers will probably still be able to ratchet the tickets up to $1000 on the secondary market unless a solution is found and 2- A high meet and greet price limits access to wealthier people. ($750 is already about a median price of what people are paying for meet and greets so an extended meet and greet pass could easily start at $1500+.)

Many public figures/artists are philosophically opposed to putting up different types of barriers to fan interactions with them. Whether it be limiting numbers, time period or charging for access.

Ultimately, for a lot of public figures I think it may bear examining what part of the experience is most valuable to people and adjusting the experience accordingly.

Unfortunately, while I do get recognized at conferences and other gatherings as the genius blogger I am, few people have been asking for a selfie with me so perhaps I am just coming at this from a place of selfie-envy.

Anyone out there have any predictions on what the nature of public figure-fan interactions will look like in the future? Ideas on how to manage it with things like policies and emerging technologies?

If We Build It, Please Don’t Come

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I am interested to see that artists are gaining an increasingly sophisticated view of their role in gentrifying neighborhoods. Non Profit Quarterly reported on a gathering in Miami to discuss the issue.

According an article in the Miami Herald, there was a sense among attendees that

“Artists find themselves in the uncomfortable and confusing position of feeling as if they have become inadvertently complicit in driving gentrification, even as they are also being victimized by the trend.”

One of the big topics of discussion was that gentrification is happening so quickly now that artists aren’t even able to set down roots before they are displaced. One Miami non-profit art space has had four homes in six years. Another artist claims to have been “priced out of 10 neighborhoods on two continents, from New York to Paris to Miami.”

Artists are beginning to recognize that not only are they getting displaced by gentrification, they are taking long time residents with them and are now essentially seen as harbingers of doom.

Some who contributed to the conversation in Miami were openly hostile to the idea of artists entering their neighborhoods, perceiving them to be an intentional element of a gentrification effort known as Artwashing.

Sensitive to this, some arts entities are working with the community. The Herald article mentions that Opa-locka Florida listened to residents’ feedback and built a park before building an arts center.

There are also accusations of artists being focused only on themselves rather than the impact they have on the communities in which they take up residence. Thinking back, I have to admit that the earliest writing I did on the subject of gentrification was about how artists were being displaced rather than how the neighbors were impacted.

Though to be fair, many of the first places artists were inhabiting were abandoned industrial and warehouse areas rather than residential districts and gentrification was only largely affecting them. The impact of gentrification on residential areas may be comparatively recent, say in the last 10-15 years. If areas are becoming gentrified more quickly than before, it may also be the case that developers are identifying and exploiting trends in neighborhoods that much more quickly than they had.

In the past I have written about how arts organizations can’t be egoistical and think that if they build it, the audiences will naturally come without any effort on their part. However, there are cases when artists may build it and fear what is to come. (Along with their neighbors.) They may not necessarily benefit too much from the increased economic activity prior to being displaced.

I am interested to see what comes of this growing awareness of cause and effect. What choices artists and communities make to manage, mitigate or resist.

Gasp! Orchestra Strike Post That Doesn’t Devolve To “Overpaid Bums”

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On the Marginal Revolution blog, economist Tyler Cowen quotes bits of a Wall Street Journal article on orchestra strikes by Terry Teachout and ends with what seems to be an implication that many orchestra musicians and conductors are being paid too much.

I had expected many of the comments that followed to state orchestra musicians are overpaid bums, but to my surprise very few of the nearly 100 comments did. Instead, there were some of the most interesting discussions about the proficiency of orchestra musicians and ensembles I have seen outside of an arts related news source.  If anything, some orchestra might be tempted to cite these commenters in their negotiations.

There were multiple mentions of musicians today being more skilled than those in the 1950s and 1960s and easily able to tackle compositions with which their predecessors struggled.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra had a number of fans and comments about them emphasized their proficiency:

26 Tununak October 25, 2016 at 11:47 am

The only time I heard the Chicago Symphony live was when I was in Chicago for a conference years ago. They played Petrouchka, and to this day I remember the flute solo as being absolutely breathtaking. I had never really thought about that solo before that moment. There really are differences between the delivery of the very top performers and the rest, and they aren’t necessarily marginal differences.

27 Steve Sailer October 25, 2016 at 7:46 pm
Yup.

For example, I attend a minor league opera series in Los Angeles called Pacific Opera Project that is wildly entertaining and quite moderately priced. They’ll do anything for a laugh. It’s great entertainment value per dollar.

The only problem is when they spring for a really good singer and he suddenly reminds you that the rest of the singers in the production aren’t really good and you are missing out on a whole world of unbelievable singing because you can’t afford it.

Steve Sailer October 25, 2016 at 7:17 am

[…]
That raises an interesting question: if the next time the CSO goes out on strike, if management could secretly fire everybody and replace them with Lyric Opera musicians, how many season ticket holders would notice that diminution in quality?

I’d guess maybe less than 50% but more than 10%, but I’m just making those numbers up.

Since I am living in Ohio, I can’t let Cleveland’s praises remain unsung:

96 Faze October 25, 2016 at 10:25 pm

The insecurity of Clevelanders is reflected in the Cleveland Orchestra’s signature sound, which is perfection. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a looser, scrappier sound. But Cleveland can’t afford to let its hair down. Night after night, year after year, they pump out pure, transcendent perfection. The exquisite tone of the string section alone can leave you gaping. But as one Russian music student of my acquaintance said, “Eeez borink. I don’t learn from them. They have no mistakes.”

I was interested to see the following comment for the very Industrial Revolution assumptions it makes about the purpose of unions:

29 BC October 25, 2016 at 10:11 am

If musicians are that differentiated and not interchangeable, then why unionize and collectively bargain? Most unions represent interchangeable labor and indeed actively discourage differentiation (merit pay, employee evaluation, etc.). When labor is undifferentiated, unionization creates a monopoly. If musicians are individually differentiated, then each musician already has a monopoly on his or her own talents.

Professional athletes’ unions are an exception and their demands are correspondingly different than those of unions in other industries. In professional sports, the unions are pro-market, demanding things like free agency, and the owners are anti-competition, demanding things like salary caps, luxury taxes, etc. Are the musicians striking to end anti-competitve and collusive practices of orchestras or are they acting more like traditional labor unions, just asking for uniformly higher pay?

Discussions about the arts on an economics blog can yield some interesting points of view. There was a comment earlier in the thread where someone said something similar, asking why oboists, for example, didn’t hold out for more than clarinetist in communities where clarinetist were common.

It makes me wonder if part of the difficulty orchestra musicians face is this concept that unions exist to insure a supply of skilled, interchangeable cogs. I don’t think it is necessarily the term “union” that is the problem, any collective effort would likely be regarded as a union even if they called themselves more lighthearted like a Musician Clan.

From the comments and general observations, I think there is an underlying sense that talented individuals can negotiate the best deal for themselves and mediocre individuals join collective bargaining groups in order to get better pay than they would be able to get alone.

Really it is more a matter of what value is placed on the work being done than on the talent and skill of the person doing it. People initially formed unions to get better pay for work that has low value associated with it.

Whether you think orchestra musicians are overpaid or not, to read the comments in this post it appears a number of people feel that the musicians of many orchestras are to be commended for their pursuit of excellence in performance.

Can’t Brag About Them And Not Invite Them To The Table

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I attended a presentation by Mosaic Education Network about their efforts working in conjunction with the Barnett Center at Ohio State University to provide some entrepreneurship workshops for artists in the Columbus, OH.

One of the things that impressed me was that they seemed to have made an effort to attract a more inclusive range of artists than might usually be served by such gatherings. When they spoke about how the different artists came to realize that the challenges they faced weren’t exclusive to their discipline, they mentioned that some attendees thought it was just a problem DJs were facing and visual artists likewise thought it was specific to them.

It got me thinking, how many individuals or organizations seeking to convene artists to talk about entrepreneurship would include DJs on their invite list? If I had been a little quicker with this realization, I might have thought to follow up and ask about the range of disciplines and practices that were invited.

The National Endowment for the Arts expanded their definition of what constituted arts participation when they conducted a study a few years ago. If arts organizations are going to tout those statistics to prove what a wide range of Americans are engaged with arts and cultural activities, it is probably only logical and fair to put practitioners of those disciplines on the literal and figurative invite list.

What they planned to do was hold a Create-a-thon modeled on the hack-a-thon events common in software coding, emphasizing the brain storming practices. This creative event was meant to lead off an 8 week series of workshops people would attend.

What actually ended up happening is a combination of a cautionary lesson and a testament to their nimbleness and willingness to revise their plans.

Associating the Create-a-thon with the software hack-a-thon model resulted in unanticipated expectations among some attendees. People came assuming there would be venture capitalists present and that those who gathered would help them develop their business model. That wasn’t what the organizers envisioned.

I have seen a lot of people advocate for adopted the hack-a-thon for arts and culture. I think I wrote about it myself some years ago. This problem never emerged on my radar which probably means I don’t know nearly enough about hack-a-thons to be stealing the idea.

Clearly if you are considering something along these lines it is very important to communicate exactly what will be occurring or evoke an entirely different model so that people don’t make the wrong assumptions.

They had 40 people attend the first day, but only 20 people came the second day. The presenters clarified the drop in attendance wasn’t due to the absence of venture capital at the event. Some people already knew they wouldn’t be able to make both days.

I wouldn’t normally even bring up the drop in attendance on the second day except that it helps to underscore how successfully they ended up. By the completion of the eight week series of classes/workshops, they ended up serving 76 people. While the interest initially seemed to flag, they attracted additional people through word of mouth and continued attempts to increase awareness.

But it wasn’t just good advertising. They attributed their ultimate success to their willingness to recognize the mistakes in their initial assumptions and take action to alter their plans.

They had assumed that those who were interested in taking their workshops would attend all eight weeks. They learned it was better to think about the classes in a modular fashion and allow people to attend the sessions by which they felt they would be best served.

For example, Week One focused on the Mission Statement; Week Two on Vision; Week Three on Value Proposition the artist brought; Week Four on Marketing, etc.  People only attended the workshops they felt they needed.

While they had planned to offer the classes during the day, they quickly realized that most everyone who had an interest in the workshops had day jobs and shifted to offering them in the evenings.

The presentation by the partners from Mosaic and the Barnett Center was successful by the measure of leaving me wanting to know more.

They seemed to be both working with people and embodying an ethic which are appropriate to the times and environment.

For example, you may have groaned inwardly at the mention of the Mission Statement workshop. Everyone writes these big impressive sounding statements that they can’t remember and never refer back to.  They took one artist’s wordy, paragraph long statement and boiled it down to “I manipulate fabric for curious people.”

That may sound too informal, but it is easy to remember and probably fits more organically with the artist’s vision and value proposition than most arts organization mission statements. Just try memorizing your mission statement and the fabric artist’s. Tomorrow morning I bet you can recite her’s more easily than your own. I bet her’s even fires your imagination better than your own.

In a marketing project they spoke about, an artist had been updating his Instagram followers about the progress he was making on a visual art piece. When it was done, he told them it would be hidden somewhere at a festival and provided clues about where to find it. This helped the artist promote his work and helped build a relationship with the festival when he was able to show how he had driven attendance to their event. Of course, it also contributed to the relationship the artist had with his supporters.

Finally, one of the things the Mosaic Education Network and Barnett Center presenters emphasized for those planning to do Art Entrepreneurship training for their communities went right to the heart of the big debate about paying artists.

Don’t talk to artists about how their art should be profitable and how you are teaching them to be successful, while simultaneously asking those who are helping you provide the workshops to do so for free/the exposure.  No one doubts it is difficult to find funding to support training programs like this, but the people who are helping you should profit from working with you.

Why I Was So Excited To Spend The Weekend In Decatur, IL

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As I had mentioned yesterday, I had been looking forward to participating in the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference at Millikin University for a year due to their student run venture program which include in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

These are part of the Arts Entrepreneurship program, however the university has long had a philosophy of experiential learning.  The essence of what many university faculty and staff members expressed over the weekend was that students were told not to wait for someone to give them permission, but to jump in and try an idea out.

The work the students are doing and the results being accomplished are very impressive. As you have probably guessed, I was very excited to see it all first hand.

While ideally the decisions and responsibilities for each of these ventures would be borne by the students, the extent to which this happens seems to range between ~80%-98%, dependent on the program.

For example, one of instructors in the music publishing area spoke of how much time running the music label took and his efforts to get the students to bear more of the responsibility. On the other hand, he noted students worked very autonomously in other parts of the music production program.

There was a session in which an information systems professor spoke of a project his students had done with the student run gallery as a client. His classes worked on many similar projects for other departments and some external clients. Noticing that these clients were left without software support at the end of every semester, students created a venture independent of any class to service the software.

The conference was held during the university’s Fall Break so unfortunately we really only got to speak with students involved with the Pipe Dreams Theatre venture and the Blue Connection visual arts gallery.

I brought my camera with me so I could take pictures of what I experienced, but looking at the images I realized that these places look like any other theater or gallery space you might find anywhere. There is nothing to distinguish them from any other such place. That is probably to the students’ credit that you can’t easily discern that they are in charge.

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I did want to share this one image from a presentation the Pipe Dreams students gave. They made this sign so I don’t know if the course objective is officially “To run the company in the general direction of not into the ground.”

The work load is the same whether you are taking the class for one credit or three. Everyone does get paid. According to the instructor Sara Theis, the most people have been paid is about $120. Other times she has cut checks for around $2.50. This is all determined by the students.

Pipe Dreams seems to be the venture in which students are more involved and invested.  They hire staff, they buy the equipment, do the marketing, write the grants, choose and cast the shows.

The space they occupy is slightly off campus. Other than the university covering the heat and the salary for the instructor, the students are responsible for everything in the building.  When one season loses money, the next cohort needs to deal with the deficit.

What probably impressed me most was that the students involved with Pipe Dreams are mindful of what the next group will inherit and make long term plans for the viability of the organization. For example, I thought the requirement that a student be involved for three consecutive semesters before they could be part of the managing board was dictated by the instructor, Sara Theis. She assured me that was entire the students’ decision because they saw the need to ensure continuity.

These long term plans include replacing aging equipment. One of the things they mentioned was that it took about three cycles of students before they were able to get ETC to grant them new dimmer system for their lighting.

There was a disagreement about whether the theatre seating was acceptable or not. After learning from an audience survey that people were uncomfortable, they created a plan to purchase new seating.

When they do midnight shows for students, they conduct a risk assessment in advance and institute bag checks.

In a separate panel of current students and alumni of Pipe Dreams, the students were well aware of the value of the experience. They appreciated the opportunity learn to fail and fail a lot in the relative safety of a university setting. They were also pleased that they could walk into a job interview with some realistic experience on their resumes.

Another young woman said that the experience over the years completely disillusioned her about a career in the arts. She said she was grateful because she might have spent 7-10 more years pursuing a career and ending up miserable. I think it is to the program’s credit that they put students in a position where they can really come to that realization as a consequence of choices they freely made for themselves rather than through the direction/requirement of faculty.

They were proud of what they accomplished. One spoke of the way the cohorts he belonged to gradually changed the dynamics of the Pipe Dreams company from safe, pandering programming to the more challenging content they produce now.

Some of their marketing campaigns caused the university to institute new rules about how student events can be promoted. One of students said they make no apologies for trying out new ideas.

They also have gotten some flack from the Millikin Theatre program for snatching up valued members of the campus acting pool which I think is awesome.

While turnover of students impacted continuity, they said it also brought new perspectives and skillsets to address problems the company faced.  They hold retreats every semester to help orient new students and one of their recent projects has been to create procedure manuals in each of the areas of responsibility to hand down to future generations.

Since this post is getting a little long, tomorrow I will offer some insights about some of the other student run ventures. The Blue Connection gallery provides a good contrasting examples to the Pipe Dreams venture.

Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Accounts Ledger?

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This weekend I got to do something I waited an entire year to do…go to Decatur, IL. Your first response may be to wonder why the heck I was looking forward to that for an entire year. The reason is because the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference was being held at Millikin University.

At last year’s conference, I had learned about Millikin’s student run arts businesses and was eager to see it in person. I will just say the experience did not disappoint. Though I am still slogging through my notes from various sessions at different student run ventures so my readers will need to be patient for at least another day before learning more about that portion of the experience.

What I wanted to discuss today is a session I attended on one of the bugbears central to arts entrepreneurship — financial literacy. When people talk about artists needing to be more business minded, that is probably one of the top three issues they envision needing attention.

Of the seven people on the panel, two were accountants that work closely with artists, Jessica Jones and Elaine Grogan Luttrull. It was something that Jessica said that really gelled the whole subject for me. She mentioned that there is an emotional and cultural barrier everyone experiences when it comes to money and finances. It isn’t just people in the arts and it isn’t about numbers being inherently intimidating. She said that she has helped engineers and scientists who work with numbers all day and they have the same issues as everyone else when it comes to finances.

I don’t remember if it was Elaine or Jessica who mentioned it, but they were somewhat opposed to the concept that people should learn “basic skills” because the term means different things to different people. A CPA can look at materials and identify revenues sources in seconds whereas other people need to make an effort and consider the skills far from basic. Jessica commented that you can’t just carve out a top 10 or 20 list of things people need to know, rather people need to become comfortable with the language, concepts and terminology so they know what to ask and how to understand a conversation about their financial situation.

Ken Weiss from University of North Carolina reinforced this idea saying that it isn’t just important for people to know terminology, but the relevance. His school does a session on intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, etc. with a guest speaker who gets the students engaged by helping them understand how these issues help their career.

This idea emerged multiple times in different sessions at the conference. People discussed how their students had the “a-ha!” moment when they came to the realization that they needed to know something for themselves and not just because the professor said they need to know it.

One of the two CPAs spoke about how helpful it was for people to learn what resources were available in terms of things like software to handle accounting, sales records, etc., and then create operational plans and procedures based on whatever resources were most suited to their needs.

That way you aren’t constantly faced with the prospect of processing your numbers and you can spend the majority of your time doing the work you love. Sometimes the biggest impediment is being unaware that these resources exist and being intimidated by the thought of keeping track of it all. Ultimately it comes back to haunt you when it comes time to report your income for taxes.

Others on the panel commented that some arts disciplines were worse than others in recognizing the need to teach students skills to help manage their careers. However with the general concern about university students taking on so much debt, many schools are moving toward making financial literacy a skill that all students must possess.

What Arts and Cultural Concepts Should Every American Know?

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The Aspen Institute has a project in which the arts and culture community might want to participate. They are asking “What Every American Should Know.” They acknowledge right off that the project name might be controversial because it evokes E.D. Hirsh’s book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know which sparked a lot of debate.

I have a clear memory of picking up the book while house sitting for a professor and subsequently having a conversation with him about his objections to some of the topics on Hirsh’s list.

The Aspen Institute asks,

In our sweeping and turbulent nation, how can we cultivate a sense of shared culture and identity? The more fragmented we become, the more necessary it is for us to have a common vocabulary – a shared set of cultural and historical references – that we can all collect and understand.

I think the way the current election campaign is being conducted probably underscores the necessity of the type of thing they are doing.

The Aspen Institute list is an extension of an essay Eric Liu, executive director of the Aspen Institute American Citizenship and Identity Program wrote. In it, he defends the utility of Hirsh’s effort, in part because even protest movements need to employ the shared vocabulary of the culture they are opposing in order to be effective. He also acknowledges that a new list of 5000 topics needs to be constructed for today’s American citizens.

They have set up a website where you can contribute your top 10 topics. They have a selected lists from various distinguished persons such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Henry Hwang, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as examples. I hope they eventually make more lists public. I know 90% of the topics on the selected lists, but the other 5% are new to me so I am curious to know more about what I don’t know.

It probably says something about the validity of Top 10 lists on the Internet that I only started to consider this to be a serious effort when I saw they are scheduling in-person sessions at libraries to discuss the idea of “What Every American Needs To Know.” (scroll to the bottom to see if they are coming to a library near you.)

Obviously I think a lot of arts and culture topics should appear on some lists so the more people that contribute, the better. My only question is what will be done with the lists and will it contribute to effecting the change they seek.

Maybe it is enough just to have conversations in libraries. That may plant the seeds for change that are needed by getting people to talk and relate to one another. Whether it can counteract the bile one finds online remains to be seen.

Only $25 For A Ticket?….We Must Be INSANE!!!!

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In a recent post Seth Godin proposed two ways of approaching your business, “Either you dazzle with as much hype as you can get away with, or you invest in delighting people, regardless of how difficult it is.”

It was the example that he used to support the idea of hyping the hell out of something that left me incredulous.

Years ago, I asked fabled direct marketer Joe Sugarman about the money-back guarantee he offered on the stuff he sold through magazine ads. He said 10% of the people who bought asked for their money back… and if any product dipped below 10%, he’d make the claims more outrageous until it got back up. He told me that this was a sweet spot, somewhere between amazing people with promises and disappointing them with reality.

The idea that someone decided they aren’t being outrageous enough if a certain percentage of people aren’t asking for their money back sort of blew my mind. It goes against the whole concept of customer service. As Shakespeare writes in the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing, “…the fashion of the world is to avoid cost [trouble], and you encounter it.”

But this got me to wondering if a super-hype approach might work for the arts. Trevor O’Donnell is constantly saying that arts marketing doesn’t focus on the audience member and instead references concepts and accolades that are only relevant to insiders. Hyping an event like a cheesy used car commercial would break people of that habit.

I am sure there would be a lot of outcry that this approach was demeaning the work, but if it is successful at attracting a larger following, it might be worth considering.

Note–I am not suggesting anything be changed about the event. People often express concern about dumbing down an experience. I am only suggesting the advertising be dumbed down.

Yeah, I know even that would be a hard sell. I can imagine what my board might think if the advertising strayed from portraying a certain image of the organization.

Recent conversation has focused on the need for the arts community to move away from the conceit that all people need is one exposure and they will be hooked on the arts. I think that is the right mindset.

However, if people arrive with the expectation they are going to leave amazed and so ecstatic they will barely be able to walk straight for an hour afterward, they may convince themselves that they are having a better time than they would have without being primed by the hype.

Of course, there are going to be people who are disappointed, but that is part of the calculation. In fact, adopting this philosophy, you are paying close attention to make sure that ratio doesn’t fall below a certain point.

Probably the biggest difference between circa 1979 when Sugarman’s company was operating at its peak and now is that people can more easily share their dissatisfaction with each other.

Also, most arts events are communal experiences vs. the individual experience of purchasing something from direct marketing. If 10% of 1000 people are upset, everyone is going to know it immediately and it will sour the experience of the other 900.

There is nothing to say you need to make utterly ridiculous claims and aim for a 10% dissatisfaction rate. If you stage pictures and write copy giving the impression audiences are enjoying themselves five times more than they actually are, you probably still won’t be flirting with fraud – but you will be focusing more on audiences. (If your audiences already look like they are having an awesome time, just hype it by a factor of 3 😉 )

If you do resort to a used car type ad, talking about how you must be insane to sell tickets to such a great show for so low a price or for letting people into your museum to see art for FREE! ….well if you balance charm and humor it might help you make progress convincing people that you are a true, worthwhile asset in the community.

Yes, I suppose arts organizations might double down on talking about how great they are instead of how great a time the audience will have. I have to believe there is a limit they will reach where the only option to escalate the hype is to start focusing on audience interests.

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If You Can’t Poach ‘Em, Praise ‘Em

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A few months back when Ceci Dadisman and Drew McManus first floated the idea of recognizing Creative Arts Administrators to the rest of us ArtHacker authors, my first thought was that the project shouldn’t just be about who is doing a great job, but rather who you would love to poach from another company.

I have mentioned this idea in something of an off-handed way in my posts from time to time. We frequently hear about people being lured or headhunted away in relation to for-profit companies. A recent discussion my board had about recruiting new members cited the fact that one woman was pursued and lured to a new job by another company in town as part of her qualifications and value to our board.

You rarely hear this sort of thing in the non-profit realm. I don’t know if people are concerned about being perceived as cutthroat. Perhaps more likely, they don’t feel they can offer pay, benefits or work environment competitive enough to entice people to leave their current job. Intangible factors like idealism about the work being done might also come into play.

All this being said, having a more competitive job market can be beneficial. First of all, it can raise employee morale if they are being courted or see colleagues being courted. It gives a sense that someone external to the organization is paying attention and recognizes their contribution. Not to mention contributing to the sense that a path to advancement exists within the industry.

This type of competition can also help justify the organization’s overhead ratio and funding requests if they can do more than cite the hypothetical need to offer good salaries to retain people. If you are losing talented people to poaching by other non-profits, that says something. (Granted, if you are losing people to poor salaries, that says something as well.)

I should note that I am not just daydreaming about how great it would be if non-profit arts organizations had to compete for the best talent. Drew McManus and I recently had a conversation where we both observed that search firms were increasingly being listed in job postings.

We were a little wary about whether this was a good thing since some of the firms don’t appear to have any experience conducting searches in the arts and culture field. This could be another indication of boards of directors looking to run the arts “more like business” and may result in organizations being lead by people with little practical background in the arts.

But it could also be an indication that arts organizations are seeing the need to have the recruitment and hiring process handled with greater care and alacrity than they possess.

So in time news that people are being actively headhunted away from an organization may come with greater regularity. Depending on what generalizations about Millennials you subscribe to, this may have the effect of attracting a greater number of very talent people to non-profit work as they pursue a desire to do meaningful work. But with that may come a lot more job switching than arts organizations are used to.

So granted, there is a fair degree of speculation in all this. Bottom line though. If you know someone in the arts you would really love to have working with you, but don’t feel like you could snatch them away —Nominate them on ArtsHacker.

And if you are working with an amazing person right now and having them snatched away would break your heart, nominate them on ArtsHacker and let them know their work is valued.

And if you are afraid calling attention to a person’s awesomeness is going to see them headhunted and it is better to keep the person hidden from sight, well you may already be creating an uncomfortable work environment that will cause them to leave anyhow.

Wherein Resides The Identity of A Group?

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When I was taking a college philosophy class we got into the classic debate about where identity resides in a person or thing. If you have a boat and gradually replace every board over the course of five years, is it still the same boat? When did it become a different boat?

The same with humans, if you replace every limb with prosthesis, when does the person cease to be themselves and become a cyborg? When are they essentially a machine?

Sci-Fi really lends itself to the debate: if Capt. Kirk is completely disassembled into atoms and beamed to a planet in a matter transporter and his atoms reassmbled, is he still the same Capt. Kirk that left the Enterprise?

I got to thinking about this topic when I saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven this weekend. There were some significant plot points shared by both the original version and The Seven Samurai, which inspired the original, that weren’t really featured in the newest version. The boastful young gunslinger was missing, for example, but there was a similar plotline in the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, which also has a lot of common plot points with both versions of The Magnificent Seven. Westerns in general probably share a lot of the same plot lines with each other if we get right down to it.

I am really only stopping off at The Magnificent Seven to pose a question about the ethics of presenting a group with a famous name which is comprised of few, if any, of the original members.  Just because a group has the legal right to use a name, and the controversies over who gets to do so can fill a few blog posts, when does it become an issue of misrepresentation when it comes to audience expectations?

Yes, everyone probably knows that Glenn Miller and all of the members of the original orchestra are no longer playing together when they go to a concert. (There are, in fact, four different groups around the world licensed to use that name.) On the other hand, the keyboardist for the band War is the only original member still performing with the group.

There are some very public debates that rage about whether a band went downhill after a key member left or if the group was better off without the bum, but for the most part people aren’t terribly aware of the shifting line ups of most groups over the years.

If you are thinking of presenting such a group, you may have the unenviable task of determining if the soul and identity of the group has departed and deciding whether to pursue the engagement.

Then there is the related question of, what are people buying? Are they buying an opportunity to relive memories of what they were doing when they heard this song and the line up doesn’t matter so much?  Or are they buying a return to their past fandom when they originally saw the group in concert and details do matter?

This isn’t just a question that nags at popular music. What if the conductor who is closely identified with an orchestra and creating their distinctive sound moves on?  Or even going back to the original idea, if there are 80 odd musicians who were part of the ensemble that created the signature sound of the orchestra, as each departs over the years, what is the tipping point where a new orchestra exists?

How much do any of these things matter? Well, in terms of popular music, there is potential for issues as members of groups die and the prospect of a reunion of the originals wanes. Not everyone can afford whatever preservation techniques The Rolling Stones are using.

Is it just the case that people need to move on and accept progress?  Is this true in all scenarios? How do you know which scenario is a bridge too far in terms of faithfully and ethically providing what you are advertising?

Info You Can Use: Revise Your View Of Contracts

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I don’t regularly crosspost about things I have written on Arts Hacker. I sort of feel like I am cheating readers by trying to make one post do double duty on two websites.

However, I have a post today about a session on contracts conducted by the partners at GG Arts Law at the recent Arts Midwest conference.  As I mention in that post, contracts and legal issues always seem to be a concern for arts managers. I have attended multiple conferences in different regions and contracts and law sessions are always well attended, even if they deal with the exact same subject matter as the year before.

What grabbed me about this session was that Brian and Robyn from GG Arts Law started by telling attendees to shift their thinking about why contracts exist and what they are used for.  On television and in the movies, we often see someone suffering under the constraints of a contract they signed and perhaps they get saved by some obscure provision on the bottom of page 731.

While that might be closer to reality for big corporations, it isn’t really applicable on the scale most arts organizations operate on.

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen or people don’t try. I believe it was Brian from GG Arts Law that related a story about a contract that was being translated from Spanish where the person was only going to translate part of the contract because they intended to spring a “gotcha!” on the other party using the contents of the untranslated portion.

What Brian and Robin tried to convey was that contracts should be used to memorialize the details of an agreement at the end of a conversation rather than be used at the start of a conversation.  If someone follows up an inquiry by immediately sending their contract, don’t be afraid to start taking notes or marking it up with the changes you want. There are no iron-clad, non-negotiable industry standards no matter how much people may swear there are.

Even though people are often intimidated by contracts or see it as a bludgeon with which to enforce behavior, that isn’t really what it is for.

Take a look at my post and give the concepts there some serious thought. It may change your whole relationship with the contracting process.

There will be two other posts about contracts coming up on Arts Hacker. The second should appear on Wednesday and is a continuation of my goal to provide general information about contracts. The third is more focused on collaboration and commission contracts and will appear at some point in the future.

Non-Profit Arts Version Of “The Talk”

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From what I have been reading, the new Fair Labor Standards Act regulations regarding overtime pay is going be pretty tough for non-profit arts organizations to handle. If you aren’t up on the news, the salary threshold part of the overtime exemption criteria will rise from $23,660 to $47,476. Anyone making less than that or who doesn’t meet the other criteria for exemption will need to be paid overtime.

Generally, most of the criteria hasn’t changed so the big issue for non-profits is the salary threshold. Last month, American Theatre did a pretty good job of covering how the new rules will impact theaters specifically. There have been articles about non-profits in general, but few that discussed how arts organizations were planning to address the change.

The reason I say this new requirement is going to be tough is because some of the comments of the interviewees made me cringe. One person mentioned the benefit of staffing their organization with young 20-somethings to take advantage of the fact they would still be living at home and under their parents healthcare. Another respondent estimated the cost of living in their anonymous mid-size Midwest city was $20,000/year which I suspect is misinformed. The lowest costs of living, even for small Midwest cities, I found hovered around $25,000.

While I cringed at some of the tactics people were generating to deal with the projected expense they were going to incur, I didn’t view them as particularly extraordinary. The alternative approaches being considered are absolutely typical of the problem solving process arts organizations engage in. This is the sort of unorthodox creativity you have to employ to pull things off in the non-profit arts.

The problem is that depending on stop-gap measures and pressure of organizational culture will no longer be viable in the face of this new salary threshold and expectations of a work-life balance that new employees are bringing to the workplace. The gulf will literally and figuratively be too wide to straddle.

This is going to be one of those situations that is going to result in a lot of negative news before it gets better. Doubtless there will be cases we will be amazed have lingered only to explode somewhat scandalously a decade down the road (or sooner since the salary threshold for non-exempt moves to $51,000 in 2020).

The situation is likely to force long delayed conversations between arts organizations, their funders, boards, audiences and employees about what is really required to operative effectively.

The only consolation is that this conversation will still be way easier than talking to your kids about sex.

I don’t think I am being especially prescient when I say now would be a good time to develop a cogent response to the statement “Arts need to be self-supporting or close,” and start distributing the talking points to everyone. It is guaranteed that sentiment will be expressed constantly.

At the same time, a serious discussion about business plans and legal structures employed by arts organizations may become unavoidable. We may see groups recreate and reinvent themselves. Especially if non-profits are permitted to retain their assets as they transition into a corporate entity with a different tax structure.

All this being said, the American Theatre piece discusses how organizations are already making efforts to implement constructive measures to prepare for these changes.

Maybe around this time next year when people have been operating under the new rules for 9-10 months, I will suggest to Drew McManus that ArtsHacker do a series on some practices and restructuring efforts that initially seem to be working. The salary changes are going to have too significant an impact on the arts industry not to share advice about what has been successful for the organization and beneficial to employees.

In the meantime, I will work on learning more about the implications of FLSA rules in order to provide tips about how to prepare for the changes.

For example, many organizations may not know that use of comp time to offset “binge-and-purge” schedules around production time is already illegal  and is about to become more so for a wider range of employees.

But this kind of comp-hours time-shifting isn’t kosher under FLSA provisions. If a non-overtime-exempt employee works 60 hours one week, say, they can’t offset that by clocking just 20 the next week; they’ll be earning their regular salary for the 20-hour week and time-and-a-half for the hours over 40 in the 60-hour week. This was always the case under the FLSA, but with the new $47, 746 threshold, it will apply to many more employees than before.

Middle School Is Too Young To Start Suffering For Your Art

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There is a lot of conversation about the importance of advocating for the funding and inclusion of arts in K-12 education but according to a recent study, some attention needs to be paid to the social aspects experienced by students interested in the arts.

According to a recent piece in Pacific Standard (h/t Createquity), students taking music and theatre classes are more likely to be bullied than other students. The study the article cites (subscription required) did not include visual arts students.

The study involving 26,420 middle and high school students found that bullying peaks in middle school.

…female music and theater students faced a 41 percent greater risk of being bullied, and male music and theater students faced a 69 percent greater risk of being bullied than their peers.”

Looking specifically at middle school — a period when bullying typically peaks — the researchers found theater and music students had a 39 percent chance of being bullied, compared to a 30 percent chance for their peers who did not participate in such activities.

Not surprisingly, the bullying was more likely to involve physical aggression for boys, and relational aggression for girls — hurtful behavior such as spreading rumors or exclusion from desirable social activities. Female music and theater students had nearly a one-in-three chance of experiencing this sort of victimization, compared to a one-in-four chance for female athletes.

The researchers suggest that perhaps arts educators should receive additional training making them aware of these potential factors in their students’ lives to help prepare the teachers to be better mentors and resources for the students. In addition, they encourage zero tolerance for bullying of any sort and opening arts related rooms as safe spaces where students can gather for some respite.

In something of a “physician heal thy self” approach, the authors of the research paper propose use of arts to combat bullying in general.

Teachers can use discussions of the social-emotional import of art to reduce bullying by drawing parallels from what may seem to students as distant abstractions of composer’s or playwright’s artistic intent into the students’ own lived experiences. Drawing connections from art to daily lives in a framework intended to support students social-emotional competencies can actually reduce bullying and victimization, which seems like a worthwhile investment of time given the results of the present study.

[…]

…a drama-based bullying unit was developed by teachers in a middle school and used in social studies classes to supplement a larger, schoolwide anti-bullying initiative. In the program Burton (2010) described, students assumed the roles of bully, victim, and bystander in theatrical improvisations. The improvisations among girls especially brought the covert nature of relational aggression into the open and allowed victims of bullies a chance at “role reversal, choosing to portray bullies carrying out bullying they had actually experienced” (p. 264). The improvisations were then used to develop devised theatre pieces that were presented to younger students as part of a successful bullying reduction and prevention program.

I don’t know about you, but when I read about improv among girls bringing the “the covert nature of relational aggression into the open and allowed victims of bullies a chance at “role reversal…” I immediately thought of this scene from the movie Mean Girls.

I had worked for an organization that ran a residential arts summer camp and it was always clear that the kids reveled in an environment that didn’t pressure them to conform as they did in school the rest of the year. It didn’t necessarily strike me at the time that they were subject to more bullying than their peers. This was over a decade ago, before social media really took off, so the bullying may not have been as magnified. The data runs from 2005-2011, but the researchers don’t indicate if it has gotten worse across that time period.

Regardless, this is a factor in arts education to which to pay attention. Declaring success in preserving funding for the arts in your school district is worthless if kids are being intimidated for participating in the classes and activities.

Info You Can Use: Success May Result In Reduced Donations (Big MAY)

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I was surprised by a recent piece on Non-Profit Quarterly reporting the results of a recent study finding that the more successful an arts organization was in attracting an audience, the more donations will decline.  The theory the researchers had was that success made an arts organization look less needy.

I was skeptical of this based on what I have observed, so I did a little digging to find the full article which appeared behind a paywall in Public Performance and Management Review. The details of their finding are a little more nuanced.

Even though the researchers make the statement in their conclusion that,

“The evidence suggests that better performance outcomes in terms of increased awareness and attendance have a negative rather than a positive influence on charitable giving.”

The discussion of their findings seems to suggest this is only true in regard to foundations.

For a 10% geometric mean increase in an organization’s attendance, the amount of all contributions received in the following year decreases by 0.72%

If we separate private giving into its three components (individual, corporate, and foundation giving), this negative relationship is statistically significant for foundation grants only. The amount of all charitable giving decreases by 0.08%

They don’t really make any statements about how individuals and corporations handle their giving in response to increased attendance and awareness.

Other Items of Interest:

Some other interesting things they found was that:

“It is worth noting that the amount of donations appears to be unresponsive to both government funding and program revenue.”

Basically, donation amounts don’t seems to be impacted by the amount of government funding or program revenue an organization receives in a year.

•Giving away free tickets may slightly help donations

“The result for increased free access lends some support to the first hypothesis: a 10% increase in the number of free tickets provided by arts and cultural nonprofits results in a 0.34% increase in contributions. This positive relationship is, however, only marginally significant.”

•Younger organizations tend to receive greater support than older organizations.

Donors, however, appear to prefer relatively young organizations, at least in the case of arts and cultural nonprofits. When we divide private giving into its three components, organization age has a negative relationship with institutional giving but is not a significant factor for individual donors.

Big Surprise

Despite what we read about donors really scrutinizing administrative overhead, for arts and cultural non-profit organizations at least, high overhead is not penalized.

…donors to arts and cultural nonprofits do not care about fundraising efficiency, which is measured by the average cost to raise one dollar. As the cost to raise a dollar increases, donations increase rather than decrease. On average, a 10% decrease in fundraising efficiency (i.e., an increase in the fundraising cost to raise a dollar of donation) leads to a 0.72% increase in the total amount of contributions. In other words, an organization would solicit slightly more donations, as compared to other organizations of similar type and size that spend less per dollar raised.

[…]

This finding is counterintuitive and provides no support for the prevailing assumption that donors view high costs of raising funds negatively. The results show that donors to arts and cultural nonprofits, especially foundation funders, reward rather than punish nonprofits that spend more to raise a dollar of donation.

The idea that the appearance of success is what helps you raise money is what provided the impetus for my deeper investigation. I think we all have a feeling that a few big organizations seem to attract big donations. Because the researchers are only looking at data collected via the Cultural Data Project, the social cachet of being seen to donate to a popular organization isn’t factored into the results. The authors do acknowledge that popularity and visibility do seem to be factors.

They suggest that big organizations are attracting larger donations because they are pouring more money into their fundraising budgets and aren’t being penalized for incurring the overhead expense.

I was interested by their observation that organizational size didn’t seem to impact corporate giving. I would assume visibility in the community, and therefore the ability to make a business more visible, is a factor in corporate giving more than organizational size.

Caveats

The researchers admit that since very little research has been done on these specific questions before, more study is required to gain an accurate picture. They say the statistical significance of the relationship between increased success and reduction in donations is marginal.

They also note that they use attendance as their measure of success which may be a poor criteria since it has no bearing on the effectiveness or quality of the experience for an audience member.

Likewise they note that using website visits as a measure of awareness might not be valid for many organizations whose communities may depend on print media, mailings and word of mouth to raise their awareness.

What Oskar Said

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The keynote speaker for the recent Arts Midwest conference was Oskar Eustis who is current artistic director at the Public Theater.  Tweets in reaction to his speech have been Storified if you want some insight.

A lot of what he spoke about centered on the value of government support of the arts and the value of non-profit arts organizations, especially in his career.  One of his first jobs in the arts was supported by a CETA grant. National Endowment for the Arts money supported the development of Angels in America which he commissioned and directed.  Lin Manuel Miranda’s invitation to perform at the White House saw him perform a song that eventually became the opening number for Hamilton which Eustis developed at the Public Theater.

He also mentioned how he was sitting with Julie Taymor at a session of Aspen Ideas Festival when Michael Eisner stood up and said he thought too much importance was placed on the value of non-profit theater, citing how he had bolstered Taymor’s career when he choose her to direct The Lion King. Eustis said before he had a chance to throw down with Eisner, Taymor pointed out she only developed the skills to direct a show of the caliber The Lion King thanks to the experience she had in non-profit theater.

Like me, a lot of these topics are close to Eustis’ heart. He spoke of how worried he was that as a country we have equated having a market economy with having a market society. That is, that we judge the value of what we do based on how financially successful it is.

If you have been reading my recent posts about economic value of the art and culture vs. intrinsic value, you know this permeates societal thinking beyond just the idea that arts organizations need to be run like businesses and support themselves.

Eustis said that he had been pushing for the Public Theater to present more of its work for free as they do with Shakespeare in Central Park, but his board was reticent because they didn’t feel that people would value something they got for free. Eustis acknowledged that might be the case with some things, but given that people were camping out overnight just to get a spot on line to see Shakespeare, he was pretty sure the Public Theater’s work would be sufficiently valued. In the upcoming year, the Public Theater will mount their first free production at one of their regular spaces.

He also mentioned despite doing so many free productions in Central Park, they discovered only their prison program and the shows they trucked out to the five boroughs of NYC were the only programs that were serving a mix of people that reflected the demographics of NYC.

During the Q&A after his address, Mario Garcia Durham, President and CEO of Association of Performing Arts Presenters rose and expressed his dismay that the Kennedy Center was essentially telling people that they would need to buy subscriptions to two seasons if they wanted to get tickets to see Hamilton when it came to Washington D.C.

Durham was concerned that this would place the show out of reach of the demographics with which Miranda most wanted the show to resonate and plead with Eustis to ask Miranda to arrange auxiliary programming to accompany the show that the general population would be able to access.

Eustis replied that while he really didn’t have any control over the decisions made by organizations that presented the show, he did have a right to sit at the table and provide guidance when policies were being shaped. He said if he had his way, when it came time to make the show available for amateur performance, it would only be licensed to only high schools in perpetuity and would never be available for production by theatrical organizations.

I am embarrassed to admit there were some other noteworthy things Eustis said that I can’t recall. They were so noteworthy I tracked down  Arts Midwest President David Freher to discuss them. I figured I needn’t make note about them since they were so vivid in my mind.

If anyone else was at the keynote and was impressed by anything else they heard, please share because it may jog my memory.

Let None Of Them Be Missed

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I have returned from the Arts Midwest Conference in Milwaukee which apparently broke attendance records. I can believe it did because I have never had so much difficulty finding a free moment to speak to agents with whom I didn’t have an appointment.

I will have quite a bit to report over the course of the next few weeks after I have had time to reflect.

One thing I wanted to follow up on from last year’s conference is something of a “credit where credit is due” topic.

About a week after last year’s Arts Midwest conference there was a huge outcry over the NY Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP) planned production of The Mikado which was employing yellow face and other Asian stereotypes in the production design.

I thought I had written about this in my blog, but it turns out I only made a comment on HowlRound regarding the issue. As I note in my comment there, they were pretty quick about cancelling the production but social media response made the two-three days in real time seem like the issue had lingered for a month.

Before going to the conference this year, I had gotten a brochure which made it appear that they had revamped the production and were offering it again for touring this year. I made a point to seek out NYGASP Executive Director David Wannen at the Arts Midwest conference to ask what had transpired.

Wannen told me they had indeed made changes to the production. Part of that included bringing a large number of advisors on board to help guide them in the production design planning as well as the casting decisions.

He noted that one of their loudest blogging critics was encouraging her followers to audition and support the productions. (Auditions are for the company performing in the entire season so persons of color are being considered for all their shows.)

From the way Wannen described the show, there will be Japanese inspired/influenced elements combined with 19th century England, but nothing overtly stereotypical. I saw one picture of the Mikado wearing a dragon like helm that could have as easily come from Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones as a fantasy movie set in China or Japan. (It evoked Smaug from The Hobbit more than a Chinese/Japanese dragon for me)

Wannen said the decision to cancel the production last year was made quickly because there was already a conversation among board and staff that the traditional approach to the show wasn’t going to fly for much longer given the social environment. However, there were many on the NYGASP board who insisted on adhering to the traditional production.

The controversy that emerged last year confirmed for the organization that a change was needed. According to Wannen there was something of a shake up in the board. From what I understood in our discussion, there were some resignations.

By some fortuitous happenstance, I was able to gain some additional insight about the sort of continuous effort required for crisis management.  NYGASP appears to have made a lot of constructive decisions, obtained the investment and buy-in of important and influential constituencies and generated some excellent goodwill for themselves.  We may hear/read a news story about redemption like this and assume all is well and the problems have been fixed.

I was seated next to Wannen on the first leg of my flight home. While we sat at the gate waiting to depart, he was on the phone relating the same things to someone that he had talked with me about — mentioning all the steps that were taken and the goodwill they had garnered in the process.

The lesson I took away from this is that no matter how good the situation may appear externally,  there is always more work to be done after a crisis to regain trust and address negative perceptions.

After I had spoken to Wannen, I walked away feeling optimistic about NYGASP and impressed by the difficult choices they had embraced, including admitting there had been a problem. After sitting next to Wannen on the plane, I realized he recognized despite all the positive response they had received thus far, it was too early to declare any sort of victory right yet.

Even though it may be tempting to put bad experienced behind us as soon as possible, it important for organizational leadership to discern when it is too early to do so.

 

The title of this entry is a paraphrase from The Mikado‘s famous “list” song, “As Someday It May Happen.” Traditionally updated with current events, it is evidence that the show survives all sorts of adaptation.

 

Mario Cavaradossi Could Have Been A Great Rugby Player

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One of the first blog posts I made included speculation about what the arts experience might be like if the arts were covered in the newspaper like sports.

A little over eight years ago I made a post about an experiment The Guardian newspaper conducted along those lines.  They sent their sports writers to arts events and their arts writers to sporting events and asked them to write about the experience.

The links to both articles still work so check them out.

I initially sighed at what seemed to be universal sentiments expressed by people who don’t see themselves as arts attendees: “I go by here every day and never realized how amazing it was inside” and “I had no idea arts lovers were so passionate in expressing their appreciation.”

However, all the writers seemed to sincerely enjoy their experience working in the realm of their opposite numbers. Even if they never chose to return, it seemed like they would speak positively about it if the opportunity ever presented itself.

The title of this post comes from a comment made by a sports writer who saw parallels between being a tenor performing in Tosca and being a top notch rugby player.

You Can’t Tell A Lot About The Value Of Art Based On The Audience With Which It Is Associated

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If you have been following my posts closely for the last couple months, you know the topic of the prescriptive value of the arts to fix various problems has been on my mind lately. Often we see people argue about how the arts stimulate the economy, help students do better in school or contribute to a reduction in crime.

It wasn’t until I was looking back at some old entries that I was reminded of a less frequently discussed measure of success — are the right people being served.

Back in 2008 I wrote about a speech given by Frank Furedi where he criticized the apparent perception that a performance wasn’t successful unless it was attended by the right demographics.

[Britian Cultural Minister Margaret] Hodge had nothing to say about the musical experience of listening to performances at The Proms. Instead she focused entirely on the audience. She observed that ‘the audiences for many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking in particular of The Proms – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this’. In essence, she was arguing that one should judge the merits of a concert on the basis of who’s in the audience.

…For Hodge, and other supporters of the politicisation of culture, the value of classical music is called into question by the fact that apparently the ‘wrong’ people listen to it. ‘The main problem with classical music is its audience’, wrote Sean O’Hagan in the Observer. That’s another way of saying that because its audience is predominantly middle class, classical music is an unreliable instrument for promoting social cohesion and community regeneration.

I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be more opportunities for a wider demographic range of performers and artists. Nor am I suggesting potential audiences should learn to appreciate the standard cultural expressions of the country in which they live.

I feel a lot of progress has been made, especially in the last year, in terms of calling attention the narrow choices that are being made in casting and programming. That shouldn’t be impeded or reversed. There is still a lot of stubborn inertia to overcome.

However, in the process of expanding opportunities, it will be easy to judge something as less valuable because it doesn’t resonate with the correct audiences.

It is just as bad to say Western classical music is less valuable than a Taiko drumming performance because it won’t attract as many Japanese audience members that your funders desire as it is to decide to cast Scarlett Johansson as The Major in The Ghost in the Shell movie because she is more marketable than a Japanese actor.

As Furedi suggests, the view that a work by a Western artist won’t resonate with someone who doesn’t come from a Western background does a disservice to them and underestimates their capacities. (As is the assumption that Westerners won’t enjoy something that isn’t from the Western canon.) Just because someone is thrilled by an experience that tells them more about themselves doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate an experience that has more relevance to another than them.

Yes, steps need to be taken to make audiences more demographically diverse. Judging the worth of a work based on whether it helps you achieve that diversity is misdirected.

Value Of The Arts At Most Intrinsic-It Fixes You For You, Not For Other People

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I am traveling to the Art Midwest Conference today where I will first take a seminar about using Google Analytics which Drew McManus promises will be akin to a heroic journey. Since I have intentionally opted not to fly through Chicago O’Hare this time around, hopefully his seminar will be the only heroic saga I undertake.

As always when I travel, I have dug back into the archives a little for some posts. Back in 2008 I wrote about a column on the value of the arts that Robert Fulford wrote.

Last month I wrote about how it was inadvisable in the long term to talk about the instrumental value of the arts in terms of education and economy. Fulford notes that the “makes you a better human being” argument is equally fraught with peril.

The arts won’t make you virtuous and they won’t make you smart, but they are nevertheless my faith, firmly installed in the part of me where some people put religion.

Great art, alas, has sometimes been loved by monsters, famously the Nazis. George Steiner, the eminent critic, delivers the bad news: “We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

[…]

On a more trivial level, we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the gang played at him by the greatest performers of his time, night after night for a lifetime. Did no good. He remained gloomy, narrow and hopelessly addicted to conventional wisdom. He was like the oaf in Love’s Labour’s Lost who has “never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book, so his intellect is not replenished….”

Fulford says the value of the arts is what you, as the individual gets out of it. Presumably while the arts didn’t improve his gloomy friend for others around him, his friend found some value to himself in it. Right there is probably the value of the arts at it’s most intrinsic.

What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives.

[…]

The arts also let us live, imaginatively, within the world where they are produced. They give us an alternative human narrative — and perhaps that’s their most generous gift to us. History as seen through the arts doesn’t portray demagogues and soldiers as the greatest figures. It’s a history where delicate, fascinating traditions are handed down the generations, developed, subverted, forgotten and rediscovered, all within a drama that makes reality created by politicians seem pale and predictable.

Can You Deliver On The Promise of Clean Restrooms?

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Yesterday evening I was hanging out at the local coffee house participating in a send off of an artist who has been creating murals for a public art project in the city for over 20 years now.

I got to talking to the owner of the coffee house about his management philosophy. Which, when it comes to employees, can be pretty much summarized as, cultivate the good workers and cut loose the deadwood.

He pays his employees a decent wage and involves them in as many aspects of the business as they are comfortable or interested. For example, when considering any potential new menu items, everyone participates in the preparation and pricing to make sure it makes sense in terms of the time and resources it requires.

Sometimes I don’t agree with his choices, but he always good at explaining his rationale to customers. I was on hand when a woman suggested they have loyalty punch cards like other coffee houses and he laid out the alternative approach he had chosen that provides value to the customer.

As closing time approached, the gathering adjourned to the patio so the employees could go home. I made a trip to the restroom and was confronted by this sign.

deserve restroom

When I mentioned the sign to the owner, he said it was there more for the employees than the customers. It communicated the standard of cleanliness they were expected to maintain because god help them if he got a call.

I thought it was pretty damn audacious. It doesn’t just say contact the manager if the restroom isn’t clean. It tells the customer they DESERVE a clean restroom and promises they will get it.

Question to ask yourself: Does your organization operate at a level that you can promises this standard of service?

This isn’t a literal promise about clean restrooms, it has figurative implications about the service you should expect to receive during every interaction while you are on the premises. It plays into the adage about being able to judge the cleanliness of the kitchen from the state of the restrooms, but goes beyond that.

Even with only a handful of customer contact points, it takes a lot of effort and attention to achieve this standard. If you really sit down and make a list, there are more contact points with customers than you think.

Can you tell your customers, figurative clean restrooms are hard to find, but they deserve them, and then deliver on that promise? It is pretty daunting.

Does Your City Need An Arts Bureaucrat?

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Given the Labor Day holiday and the fact that Wells Fargo seems to think kids need to set aside their childish artistic dreams for real career choices, it seems appropriate to do a post on interesting, constructive arts careers.

Jennifer Lasik, Arts Coordinator for the City of Evanston, IL makes a “Case for an ‘Arts Bureaucrat’ in City Government.”

While her boss hates the use of that term, (the real job title is Cultural Arts Coordinator), she sees the arts bureaucrat role as one of the most important parts of her job. (my emphasis)

In public performance or art installation, there is often perceived conflict between what the artists want to accomplish and the objectives of the City regarding liability, maintenance, budgets, and code regulation.

[…]

While intended primarily as a resource for the arts community, City staff has appreciates having someone who “speaks artist,” can plan and evaluate artistic projects, and listen to and fine-tune artists’ proposals to address various departmental questions and concerns. Both groups trust me to negotiate a balance between the artistic and practical aspects of the project, helping artists through the application and permit process, and cutting through some of the bureaucratic red tape that can cause frustration and bottleneck. The time and energy this position saves for both the City staff and the artists is a compelling argument for an arts bureaucrat position.

She lays out the scope of her position which makes it sound like this position, created in 2013, was the next step in a process in which Evanston was amenable. She notes, for example that:

“Public Works uses a “Complete Streets” model, which means that when maintenance or repair work is done, other goals such as public art, accessibility and sustainability are factored into the rebuild.

At the end of her post, she provides some suggestions for municipalities that don’t have the capacity for a full time arts bureaucrat, including appointing a staff person to act as an “arts whisperer” to help facilitate communications.

Big Boards In Big D, But Probably Not For Thee

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There was a piece on the Dallas Morning News website about how the boards of various Dallas arts organizations were beginning to focus on greater diversity in their membership and accountability of their staffs.

The article opens by noting that Dallas Summer Musicals parted ways with their managing director months before his contract expired and the Dallas Museum of Art appeared to have a tense parting with their director.

“In the old Dallas,” says Veletta Forsythe Lill, a former City Council member and past executive director of the Dallas Arts District, “a board would have let a guy finish his term,” as in, why not let Jenkins stay eight more months, until his contract expired?

“But we’re living in a new Dallas,” Lill says, “and the new Dallas naturally carries with it a new breed of board member. The new boards want more control and more accountability.”

[…]

Today’s artistic boards veer younger and more corporate, and although older white men continue to dominate, their once-fierce hold — some would say stranglehold — is beginning to wane. Today’s artistic boards are increasingly more diverse, with women commanding a more powerful presence than ever before.

I was happy to see that boards are starting to take their governance responsibilities seriously and are attempting to make board and staff composition more diverse and reflective of the communities they are serving.

As I was reading through the article, I wondered if the boards would possess the will to evaluate how effective they are at executing their responsibilities.

When I see that Dallas Summer Musicals has 146 board members and 40 members on their executive committee, I can’t help but be skeptical about how effective such an unwieldy arrangement can be.

Reading the following, I suspected the membership numbers are largely courtesy appointments for the purpose of fundraising:

Board giving and participation guidelines: $1,000 down payment to be a general board member, coupled with raising at least $2,000 from outside donors. Must be a season-ticket holder. Executive committee members: Must make a $2,500 down payment, raise at least $5,000 from outside sources and be season-ticket holders.

Similarly large numbers appear on the boards of AT&T Performing Arts Center whose bylaws allow up to 70 members, but currently has 55; Dallas Museum of Art which has 73 board members; and Dallas Symphony Orchestra which has 68 members, 20 of which are on the executive committee.

In January I wrote about San Diego Opera which was revived after a stakeholder revolt fought the board’s decision to cease operations. The board membership went from 53 to 24. One of the key issues they identified as having contributed to their inability to adapt to the changing economic and social environment in San Diego was the “Get, Give or Get Off” board membership policy.

The San Diego Opera was one of those organizations where having a large number of people on the board was a function of fundraising. You pay x amount of money and you’re on the board, and no one wants to alienate any of those folk with contentious conversations that cause discomfort. But that is certainly not a good modus operandi for an organization facing the whitewater of the twenty-first-century cultural organization. And, it was not only the business model that had to change but the governance model, too.

Yes, yes, I know everything is bigger in Texas. With a funding model that includes 40 executive board members bringing in $7,500 each and the other 146 board members bringing in $3000 each, Dallas Summer Musicals may not experience issues that require them to be more nimble and responsive.

For everyone else, everywhere else, it is worth considering if a move toward a leaner, more nimble board might be the best course to meet the organizations long term challenges.

For  your listening pleasure, “Big D” from The Most Happy Fella.

Failing To Your Back Up Plan

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Harvard Business Review had a short piece about a study that found that having a back-up plan often undermines one’s motivation to succeed.  The interviewer specifically uses an example of having a back-up plan to an arts career in one her questions. (not to mention the first image you see is a dancer en pointe in one sneaker)

So, to use another cliché, we need to always act as if failure is not an option?
The punch line of this research could certainly be this: If you prepare for failure, you may be more likely to fail. But the practical advice we would give is more nuanced than that. We’re not suggesting that you always avoid making backup plans. But maybe you could hold off on doing so until you’ve put as much effort as possible into your primary goal. If you’re a manager of a team working toward a certain objective, consider asking a second group, consisting of different people, to come up with the backup plan rather than your A team. If you’re an entrepreneur, think about committing to one start-up idea for a period of time, instead of planning for and being ready to jump to another project as soon as things go south.

My aunt always told my cousin, an aspiring dancer, that she should get a teaching degree to fall back on. Was she wrong?
Success and performance depend on many factors. For some people, not making a backup plan might indeed be beneficial in helping them put their best effort forward. Some parents assume that having a backup plan is always a good thing, yielding nothing but positive outcomes. Given our findings, we’d suggest that they at least consider the possible negative effects.

Before I go any further, lets remind ourselves that achieving a high level of performance in any endeavor is not necessarily rewarded with remuneration or acclaim. Often there is no direct relationship between financial success and ability.  Jihae Shin who authored the study states that plainly – success and performance depend on many factors.  When it comes to arts careers, it often seems like those factor are stacked against you.

Since we are at the start of a new school year, this is probably a good time to resurrect (if it has ever been buried) subject of whether those pursuing an arts careers should be advised to think about a back up plan.

If you tell a person who is highly skilled and possessed of the potential to be a world class actor/dancer/ musician/visual artist to have a back up plan, are you undermining their potential?

If they achieve their potential and can’t find a means of support for themselves through their practice and have no other skills, have you contributed to their misery?

This conversation intersects with the one about artists needing to be more entrepreneurial vs. diluting a conservatory experience to provide instruction in that direction.  Where is the cut off line of talent and skill between those who should be counseled to pursue a discipline relentlessly and those who should start making back up plans?

Who is the best judge of this? Many would say the budding artist can’t be trusted to know themselves. Either they overestimate their talent and ability or are squandering it.

Carter Gillies outright says there was evidence that he should not be an artist…then he stuck his fingers in clay, got an MFA and is supporting himself as a potter.

To a large degree, success in an artistic career is more attributable to an intersection of luck and good connections than the accurate prognostications of mentors, professors, friends and family.

My personal bias is toward picking up as many skills as you can and being open to opportunities that come along. My own career path is not what I envisioned it would be and some of it was a result of getting out of my own way. (Though I suspect I could be a bit more open.)

I am going to go out on a limb and say that when Drew McManus was working his butt off to attend Interlochen Arts Camp, he may have had an inkling that he would be an orchestra consultant one day.  But probably didn’t think he would be running a blogging exchange, arts job board, designing websites for arts organizations and rolling out a scheduling management service.

There are more opportunities to apply our skills than we are lead to believe. When I say this, I don’t just mean artists, I mean that we have been largely socialized to believe that success is found at the end of a college degree in a STEM or Business field and all else results in a job in a fastfood restaurant.

Does keeping your eyes and options open constitute a back up plan that will keep you from reaching your potential? Assuming you are motivated to find something that works for you and apply yourself to pursuing it, I would say it isn’t. Given that many people tend to have multiple careers over the course of their lives, it may be unwise to be too much of a specialist.

Jihae Shin suggests there are different ranges of time in which refusal to entertain other options is useful.  Eschewing any alternative for a lifetime can be destructive.

Aside from your job search, have these findings changed how you operate at work?

Yes, I now sometimes try to delay making a backup plan until after I’ve really done everything I can to accomplish my first goal. For example, when Katy and I were working on this research project, I didn’t think about other projects we could do if this one failed.

Just because you opt for your back up plan doesn’t mean you can never dance again.

But lets face it, the whole subject and conversation is complex and full of nuance. Not the least of which is that as an artist, even the suggestion that you may “never dance again” if you choose a back up plan is emotionally and spiritually painful.

Why Would We Not Want More?

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I frequently write about why arguing the benefits of the arts based on their instrumental value (e.g. improves economy or test scores) is a bad approach because it depends on an absence of a substitute which is effective at accomplishing the same ends.

The alternative is to talk about the intrinsic value of art, or art for arts sake. The problem with this approach is that it lacks that concrete data that everyone says they base their decisions on.

Or rather, it lacks the concrete data that everyone insists they are faithfully basing their decisions upon. If you have paid any attention to the way decisions are made in the political or educational arenas, you know that isn’t true. Still, if you want to make your case, you have to do it in a convincing manner in terms which people can relate.

Teacher Peter Greene had an entry on Huffington Post about a year ago which performs this task pretty effectively in regard to defending music education. It probably isn’t the exact approach to take if you are called to provide testimony at your state legislature, but he provides a general ground plan.  (my emphasis)

Music is universal. It’s a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch— music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?

[…]

Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?

Music is freakin’ magical. In 40-some years I have never gotten over it — you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin’ magical.

Even though the “Why would we not…” questions are not completely based on logic, it shares many of the same motivations that drive scientific inquiry.

We are surrounded by sun, air, earth and water, why would we not want to study them to better understand how they impact things like agriculture and help us prepare for drought, fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes?

As I said, while Greene’s reasoning doesn’t provide quantitative measurements to support it, it does provide what Carter Gillies says is often lacking in such rationale – it begins to teach people why we value the arts – and it does it with language that captures attention and starts to fire the imagination.

Concentrating On What Is There Not On What You Wish Was There

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Maria Popova made a BrainPickings post about Elliott Schwartz’s book, Music: Ways of Listening, about four years ago. The link to it just came to my attention recently.

Popova notes, “you can substitute “reading” for “listening” and “writing” for “music,” and the list would be just as valuable and insightful, and just as needed an antidote to the dulling of our modern modes of information consumption.”

Reading Schwartz’s thoughts, I think you could probably make a similar substitution for most arts disciplines.

As I mentioned last week, I have been trying to be more active about answering Arts related questions on Quora. Yesterday, I received a request to answer a question about what things should one think about if they wanted to become a better dancer. I started thinking what my answer might be if no one else stepped forward to answer. To my slight surprise, many of the general approaches I was thinking of suggesting are included in Schwartz’s list from 1982.

I wouldn’t necessarily include all these in a Quora answer, but among the things Schwartz wrote that jumped out at me were the following:

Develop your sensitivity to music. Try to respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet. When we really hear sounds, we may find them all quite expressive, magical and even ‘beautiful.’ On a more complex level, try to relate sounds to each other in patterns: the successive notes in a melody, or the interrelationships between an ice cream truck jingle and nearby children’s games.

I liked this one especially because it isn’t necessary to do a substitution at all to make it applicable to other arts disciplines. It can be just as valuable to an actor, dancer, writer, visual artist, etc to pay attention to mundane sounds around them and be sensitive to how that might manifest in the work they produce.

The same is true regardless of whatever discipline you might insert. Actors frequently people watch to gain deeper insight into the way they can depict characters and relationships. Dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists can all use people watching to inform their work. And then so on with each discipline.

Try to develop musical concentration, …It may be easy to concentrate on a selection lasting a few minutes, but virtually impossible to maintain attention when confronted with a half-hour Beethoven symphony or a three-hour Verdi opera.

Composers are well aware of this problem. They provide so many musical landmarks and guidelines during the course of a long piece that, even if listening ‘focus’ wanders, you can tell where you are.

The idea that is it okay and normal to lose focus and become bored when participating in an arts experience goes back to the early days of this blog. (obligatory nod to Drew McManus) It is important for people who are relatively inexperienced to be aware that such guideposts exist for them.

Try to listen objectively and dispassionately. Concentrate upon ‘what’s there,’ and not what you hope or wish would be there. At the early stages of directed listening, when a working vocabulary for music is being introduced, it is important that you respond using that vocabulary as often as possible. In this way you can relate and compare pieces that present different styles, cultures and centuries. Try to focus upon ‘what’s there,’ in an objective sense, and don’t be dismayed if a limited vocabulary restricts your earliest responses.

I thought the idea of concentrating on “what’s there” and not what you wish would be there is especially relevant these days when you can get the exact form of gratification you desire upon demand by pulling your smartphone from your pocket. (Though I suppose there were similar issues people were bemoaning in 1982. Can’t think of what since cable and VCRs weren’t ubiquitous presences.)

Popova excerpts seven tips from the book and I have pared down the ideas expressed even further. At the very least it is worthwhile to view the Brainpickings post and ponder what Elliott Schwartz had to say.

Dances With Seedlings

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Via Non-Profit Quarterly is a brief story about the Farm to Ballet Project which is taking agricultural themed ballet to about nine farms throughout Vermont this summer. (Their second season, I should mention.)

When I first started reading about this project, The Wormfarm Institute and their various programs like the Fermentation Fest and Roadside Culture Stands immediately came to mind. There has been a concentrated effort over the last decade or so to call more attention to arts programs in rural settings.

The Farm to Ballet Project partners closely with the farms and reinvest profits either into the farm or other agricultural non-profits.

But he also has a passion for local farming, and the Farm to Ballet Project has allowed him to connect the not-so-obvious dots between dance and agriculture. The project supports the farming community because 75 percent of ticket sales from each performance go to the host farm or to agriculture-related nonprofits. Local farm products are highlighted in other ways, too. For example, at a recent performance, “many in the 300-plus audience of adults and children also enjoyed dinner beforehand made from locally grown ingredients.”

They perform a story ballet that follows farm plants, animals and soil over the course of a year. The dancers in the first video below talk about being lettuce, cucumbers, goats, bees and various other creatures in the performance which occurs outside in the farm fields.

In the second video below, two of the dancers talk about how much they have come to appreciate impact of different grass types (and cow patties) on what sort of movements they can safely execute.

In addition to bringing ballet to communities in a context the audiences have never seen before, they are also providing an opportunity for people to renew an artistic practice that had been interrupted by other life events.

In the interview below, a woman talks about how she never expected to be able to perform classical ballet again after having started a family. This season their youngest company member is 17 and the oldest is 73.

This comment reminded me of a post I made last year about a woman who started two dance companies in different cities for people who had trained in dance to a high level, hadn’t pursued dance as a career, but wanted to continue dancing and choreographing.

This interview is additional evidence that there is an unmet need for an outlet of creative expression in dance and probably other disciplines.

They mention a benefit of performing in a farm field they hadn’t initially anticipated is that kids can follow their impulse to get up and start dancing off to the side without really interrupting the performance.

Telling The Story Of Your Overhead

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Our friends at the Non-Profit Happy Hour Facebook group shared the Furniture Bank’s Charity Overhead Manifesto. In the post, the Furniture Bank talks about how much damage resistance to covering overhead can do to their programs.

We have heard many of these arguments before, but Furniture Bank takes the next necessary step of humanizing and discussing the impact of the work “overhead employees” perform.

The reason this is important is because it takes an abstract concept of overhead and specifically shows how overhead costs are manifested in the organization’s operations. Absent this specificity, it is easy to envision overhead going to senior administrator salaries or unsexy equipment and supplies like filing cabinets and copy paper. While this is inevitably the case to some degree, it isn’t the whole story.

This reminds us how important a compelling story can be. Furniture Bank lists what their overhead helps them accomplish:

  • Maintain, insure and run a fleet of 11 trucks, and a team of movers, picking up furniture from donors and delivering them to clients every day;
  • Employ 25-30 individuals each year who would otherwise face barriers to employment;
  • Pay market rent on a 30,000 Sq Ft client showroom;
  • Sustain an organization with 40 hardworking and big hearted employees who:
    • take orders,
    • track inventory,
    • book client appointments,
    • schedule and complete pickups & deliveries,
    • answer donor inquiries,
    • process donations,
    • ensure we have the right technology to run our operations, and
    • undertake the numerous other tasks that must occur every day to ensure that the community’s unwanted furniture goes directly to a family transitioning out of homelessness or displacement.

That format can be a little boring though. They also participate in the Charity Defense Council’s “I’m Overhead” campaign that has created images with Furniture Bank employees discussing what they do which end with a line about the impact they make, (you can see examples of the full ads on the Furniture Bank site.)

“My name is Miro Janes-Richardson. I make sure families have a place they can finally call home, and I’m overhead.”

My name is Yuri Hernandez. I make sure clients have the dignity of choice and don’t have to sleep on the floor, and I’m overhead.”

Miro is a truck crew leader and Yuri is a client services coordinator.

It may be difficult for arts organizations that don’t have a strong human services aspect to their operations to tell as compelling a story as these, but there are still opportunities to illustrate that staff help the organization be good stewards of donations.

For example:

“Do you recognize this flat? It has been in some of your favorite performances over the last five years including Dangerous Liaisons, Amadeus, A Raisin in the Sun and Christmas Carol. Here at the theater, we are great recyclers, repainting and repairing set piece dozens of times, extending their useful lives for years. This reduces our need to purchase lumber, which is good for the environment. But to make it happen, we need to store flats like this one and be clever about changing its appearance so you don’t recognize it when it appears again.

I am Steve and I work magic to make fake trees look real so that real trees can live, and I am overhead.

That five minutes of typing may not have resulted in the most compelling argument for theater operations, but you get the idea.

It isn’t just enough to tell people that they shouldn’t use overhead ratio as a measure of effectiveness, it is also necessary to communicate specific examples that illustrate that what they may envision the raw numbers represent isn’t necessarily the reality.

I don’t doubt that there will still be people who want 95-100% of their donation to be devoted exclusively to program beneficiaries, but linking overhead activities with impact outcomes can help combat decision making strictly by the numbers.

The Classic Or Contemporary?

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When it comes to Shakespeare, I feel like it is worth taking the time to sit and allow yourself to adjust to the language and rhythms rather than dismissing it outright as too impenetrable. There is a lot in there that can’t be accurately replicated by updating the language.

I would say the same thing about classical music and visual art. Allowing yourself time to transition your perspective from 21 century life to whatever period a piece of music was written in is worth the time.

If you are wandering a museum, you definitely need to be prepared shift between digital graphics of daily existence to Vermeer to Mark Rothko.

So I was interested to read back in April that Shakespeare enjoys a greater degree of appreciation in non-English speaking countries.

A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries reveals, for example, that 88% of surveyed Mexicans like Shakespeare, compared with only 59% of British people; 84% of Brazilians said they found him relevant to today’s world, compared with 57% in the UK; and 83% of Indians said they understood him, far more than the 58% of Britons.

Overall, Shakespeare’s popularity abroad stands at 65%, compared with 59% in the UK.

[…]

The research suggests it is experience of Shakespeare at school which plays the biggest part – studying the original text can put people off for life.

Hilhorst said most Britons were taught Shakespeare in his original English while abroad there were often translations which used a more contemporary, accessible language.

That conclusion would explain why the “do you like Shakespeare” figures are roughly the same among English-speaking countries – USA (63%), Australia (60%) and the UK (59%). In the top five are India (89%), Mexico (88%), Brazil (87%), Turkey (79%) and South Africa (73%)

Only French and Germans like Shakespeare less than English speakers.

There is an implication in the article that Shakespeare is better enjoyed in general when the language is updated to be accessible to contemporary audiences.

I am of two minds about this. First, it is irking no one is really advocating for classical music to be updated to make it more accessible. Certainly, you can put it in different contexts to make it more familiar and accessible like Bugs Bunny cartoons or playing it in bars, but will it increase appreciation and understanding of Bach to hear is played on electric bass, guitar, keyboard and a drum kit?

What about electric violins and turn table?

Does it help people understand The Last Supper if it is digitized or parodied?

star-wars-last-supper-mosaic-72dpi

If I am being honest, maybe Black Violin’s version of Bach’s Brandenburg Concert will help people become more comfortable with the original. But I imagine it is also easy to claim that while it may make you more comfortable, it doesn’t really help you understand Bach’s original composition.

I would also argue this is more akin to a shift in context than an actual adaptation into a contemporary “language.” I would place the common practice of  setting Shakespeare in different time periods while retaining the language in this category.

Which brings me to my second mind. The one advantage Shakespeare has is that the works can be adapted to contemporary times and the adaptations can help you understand the original works. I would say West Side Story may do this better for Romeo and Juliet and Throne of Blood for MacBeth than Forbidden Planet does it for The Tempest (granted, Forbidden Planet wasn’t intended as an adaptation of Tempest).

Whether adaptations like these help inspire people to explore the originals, I don’t know. My sense is that the theatrical format by its very nature lends itself to adaptation in ways that allow people to connect with the original works in ways other arts disciplines don’t.

To a certain degree, there is an argument for making Shakespeare’s language more contemporary because you can do effectively.

But it is still absolutely worth experiencing Shakespeare in the original language.

Can You Answer This Question About The Arts?

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I am a little embarrassed that it hasn’t occurred to me to post about this sooner.

Here on the old blogosphere, general Internet, at conferences, in coffee houses and on the street where you live, we often talk about educating people, reaching out to them, removing the sense of mystery about the arts. Yet it seems so difficult to figure out an effective way to do this.

While I am not going to claim it would have a high ROI, it just occurred to me, (despite participating for years), that getting more arts people answering questions on Quora would help promote and educate people about the subject. In addition, it would give those involved with the arts a sense of what people were asking and give them practice answering the questions.

I have been reading and participating on Quora for a few years and only just recently realized that the arts have pretty light representation in terms of questions and responses. I get a digest of recent responses everyday which often address questions about history (real and speculative), politics, and guns, lots of guns. I have no idea why I get so many topics on guns since that isn’t one of my stated interests.

It just occurred to me this weekend that I don’t really see much about the arts. When I do seek out questions on the topic, the most recent answers can be between 3-5 years old.

Today I got a request to answer – “Why do they tiptoe in ballet?” I have a general idea of how to respond, but many of you with a dance focus can do a better job answering than me.

Here is a brief example of the types of questions in the subject area – What makes acting believable?; How can I improve my live performance as a musician?; Theatre: Why aren’t plays recorded for commercial sale?; What are some interesting tricks that are used in theatrical set design? (this one only has two answers); Is it socially acceptable to go to the theater by myself?

Of course, there are also questions about studying an arts discipline (barely any answers on multiple theatre related ones) and dating someone who is involved in the arts.

Quora can be a great source of information on areas of interest you may have. You may often discover answers to questions you weren’t aware you had. The range of people answering questions can be surprising. Celebrities, prominent business people, Nobel Prize winners and prominent experts often offer their insight. Over time you will also start to recognize and even seek out answers by less noted people who have earned your trust by exhibiting a high level of expertise and thoughtfulness in their responses.

While you will find articles providing advice on how to use Quora for marketing and promotion, the environment of the forum doesn’t really tolerate blatant promotion.

Enquiring Stakeholders Want To Know

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Last week I made a post about “rebranding” overhead costs in other terms in order to get away from the associated stigma. Included in the post, I mentioned that a non-profit was being sued by donors for dipping into its restricted funds to invest in the organization’s exploding growth.

On the Non-Profit Quarterly website today was an interview with Cindy M. Lott about the changing non-profit regulatory and enforcement environment that suggested similar scrutiny of non-profits may only increase.

The interview with Lott discusses a lot about the history of non-profit regulation on the state and federal level. One of the things they note is that the IRS’s decision to digitize 990 filings is going to bring the opportunity for a lot more transparency for non-profit charities. Access to financial documents and other information will hopefully provide a greater capacity to detect misappropriation and embezzlement of funds.

What caused me a bit of concern wasn’t the prospect that governments might use this information to apply undue scrutiny to non-profits, but that donors and funders might.

According to Lott, state attorneys general have always had legal standing to bring a suit against a non-profit entity or board of directors. In recent years, she says, other groups have argued that they have standing to bring suit as well.

Occasionally, we see beneficiaries who say, “Wait a minute—I represent an interest that is not being brought by AGs for whatever reason.” And we see marginalized members of the board and donors who say this as well.

While this is contrary to laws regarding who has standing, the fact that there are shareholder actions and class actions in the private sector may be cited to pressure for the same rights in the non-profit sector. Lott notes that secretary of state offices which oversee non-profits in each state are heavily involved with enforcing consumer protection and might easily equate donor dollars with consumer dollars.

I am merely noting what may be a natural outcome of the current trajectory of an underresourced enforcement community intersecting with a wealth of publicly available data. We may very well find in the near future that donors and beneficiaries who have access to information about where these billions of dollars are going may, in fact, decide that they would like a say when they believe something goes off the rails.

The interview cites the action taken by a wide segment of stakeholders in the case of Sweet Briar College’s planned closing. The footnotes for the interview provide a number of other examples of stakeholder actions, including a class action by donors who discovered 100% of their donation didn’t go toward programs as they intended and a suit by two sons who want to review the cause of losses suffered by a foundation their father established.

At this point I don’t see anything to be immediately alarmed about. It will definitely be worthwhile to keep an eye out for how things develop in the areas of governmental oversight and legal standing of donors and other possible stakeholders.

“…The Art That Is In You Has Only Faintly Touched The Lives Of Your People.”

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Last month, Americans for the Arts blog was printing excerpts from the writing of Robert E. Gard who primary focused on manifesting the Wisconsin Idea through theater and creative writing starting around 1945.

I first became enamored of the concept of the Wisconsin Idea about 10 years ago. The idea that a state government and university system would be focused on a holistic improvement of the lives of the state’s citizenry is pretty inspiring.  Even though political opposition began work to undermine and unravel elements of it almost immediately, people have hewn to the Wisconsin Idea for over a century.

There was an excerpt on Americans for the Arts’ blog of a piece Gard wrote in 1952 that illustrates just how long some themes and debates about the arts in the U.S. have endured.

Your struggle, America, has matured so rapidly that the quaint folkishness of your village has been swept into an almost common molding, and the economic fruit of your struggle has been so plentiful that we, your people, have tended to shun the responsibility of art, sometimes to scorn it, and to look at it askance as a manifestation unworthy of our virile American manhood. You have put down deep taproots, America, that have given us the stuff of wondrous plenty, but these same roots have starved off the expressiveness of yourself. For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

[…]

It became suddenly and completely apparent to me that we could no longer pretend that theater, to have its true vital meaning, could be fabricated and foisted upon the people as entertainment alone, or as sociology, or as an art form practiced by the few for the satisfaction of individual egos. But that theater must grow spontaneously from the lives and the necessities of the people, so that the great dream of a few men and women who saw true visions might come true: the dream of an America accepting the idea of great popular art expression without question, as a thing inherently American.

So there you go, in 1952 Gard expressed concern that: 1 – America has a slightly hostile streak when it comes to the arts or creative self-expression; 2 – Arts needed to be viewed as more than just simple entertainment; 3- Yet not viewed as the province of an elite few, but as place where people saw their own lives reflected.

In 60+ years since Gard wrote that, little has changed. These topics still dominate conversation and are cause for hand wringing.

I am optimistic that things are headed in a constructive direction. Given all the attention focused on programming, casting and employment choices being made in theater and movies, there is a greater opportunity to see oneself and one’s stories.

The same with the effort to build public will for arts and culture I have been writing about recently which has creative self-expression at its core.

I am sure Gard was pretty optimistic back then too, and with good reason if you look at all that was created and still endures in the name of the Wisconsin Idea. It is also pretty clear that the effort has to constantly be sustained against both external forces that seek to oppose and erode it, as well as simple internal neglect and entropy.

To some degree, I see the effort to build public will for arts and culture as a spiritual successor of the Wisconsin Idea. The Idea was always meant to become a national influence. While its spread hasn’t been as prevalent as initially hoped, the folks in Wisconsin have been really good about actively keeping the torch lit and the light has indirectly had a positive influence on others.

If you are looking for a guiding principle to help you speak about arts and culture to those who have negative associations with the concepts, you could do worse than to meditate upon and internalize the empathy and ambition of the last line in the first paragraph I quoted:

For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

Heck With Garage Bands, Rock The Porch!

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Ever since I first heard them mentioned during our state arts council’s grant panel discussion, I have been keeping an eye on the PorchRokr Festival up near Akron.

The hook of the festival is that the artists apply perform on people’s front porches. The audience can wander throughout the neighborhood and decide which lawn to recline on.

Truly an event with deep roots and involvement in the community (unless you want those damn kids to stay off your front lawn.)

What is great is that there an investment and willingness to share what has been learned with others.

I came across a mention of a community panel discussion in a couple weeks where the festival organizers will teach others about their process in advance of the upcoming festival.

Since the Eventbrite link will expire in a couple weeks, here is a description:

Have you ever wondered what it takes to plan and execute a community arts and cultural festival? Join us on Tuesday, August 9th to hear from Katie Carver Reed, Jon Morschl, and Anita Marron of PorchRokr Festival. We’ll learn what it takes to create PorchRokr and the influence the festival has on the local community.

This year’s PorchRokr festival takes place on August 20, 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. in Highland Square. Over 100 bands and performers, rocking 30 porches, on 12 streets, all in one day.

PorchRokr is planned by the Highland Square Neighborhood Association, a Knight Arts Challenge recipient.

In the process of looking for that event listing, I discovered a group is partnering with PorchRokr to offer workshops for the performers over the course of a month.

Again an excerpt since the Facebook event will expire:

A collaborative partnership between The Highland Square Neighborhood Association PorchRokr Festival and Wandering Aesthetics, it is a way for performers – of all genres and all experience levels – to enhance their onstage presence, work through stage fright, brush up on invaluable performance skills and practice in front of an audience.

Each session is designed as a “one-off” workshop geared to nurture onstage success.

1) Making Contact: Overcoming Stage Fright & Forming a Genuine Connection (JULY 23)
2) Do Not Be Dismissed: Presence and Energy in Performance (JULY 30)
3) Seen, but Not Heard: Voice for the Performer (AUGUST 6)
4) From Vamping to Banter: Improv for the Unexpected (AUGUST 13)

*Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend all four (4) sessions

I am encouraged and inspired by programs like these that recognize the value of helping artists help the festival help the audience to have a more enjoyable and memorable experience.

Even if you didn’t run a festival, the topics they cover would make for a good workshop series for any arts organization that was looking to make or strengthen connections with the community.

Overhead By Any Other Name

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FastCoExist recently continued its discussion about how a poor view of non-profit overhead cost is limiting the good such organizations can do by offering some “rebranding” suggestions in order to help change perceptions.

As an illustration of how the concept that non-profits must restrict their overhead cost is a severe impediment toward doing good, they cite a lawsuit against Architecture for Humanity.  The group was experiencing huge program growth, but was limited by donors to only devoting 10% to overhead costs. Because they dipped into program money to fund their growth, they have been taken to court accused of looting the funds.

Many company donations, the suit alleges, were earmarked for project costs. As overhead rose and things got more desperate, those got tapped to cover broader expenses. The plaintiff is calling that looting. The suit shows pretty clearly how groups—even if their rapid growth is woefully mismanaged—can be trapped by antiquated views on things like “overhead” and “indirect costs.”

[Update: Issues like this are why it is good to have Directors and Officers Insurance]

FastCoExist spoke to two brand naming experts who mulled over various concepts for changing how overhead costs are viewed by changing the terminology. The article go through various ideas they discarded to come up with the following suggestions.

From Margaret Wolfson of River + Wolf:

1: Circle funds
2: Encompass funds
3: Vessel funds
4: Core funds

Anthony Shore of Operative Words suggested:

1: Operations costs
2: Operational costs
3: Direct operations costs
4: General operational costs

The author of a Bridgespan report on paying overhead costs noted that this latter set of terms may not be appropriate because “not all operational costs are indirect, and not all indirect costs are operational.”

The naming experts made some additional suggestions that sounded a bit like arts organization donor categories so maybe we are already heading in the right direction and just need to find more sexy language:

Wolfson’s other idea is to award branded titles for budget line items, so folks who cover electrical costs could consider themselves “Illuminators” while those picking up the hardware and software tab would be “Digital Drivers.”

The point is, words definitely do matter. The final expression might end up being a bit unsexy, but only metaphorically. As Shore puts it: “What could be more sexy than dramatically influencing how much money pours into the critical, staying-afloat initiatives within an organization?”

Every Musician Is Important To A Symphony

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In a move that I like to see as reinforcing the importance of orchestra musicians in a time where their value is being diminished during contract negotiations, a long time supporter of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), Marjorie Fisher, recently left $5,000 to every one of the 78 current full-time musicians.

If supporters of other orchestras being to follow her example, we may see musicians fighting a lot harder to maintain the number of permanent positions during contract negotiations.

When I first scanned the story on the Non Profit Quarterly, I initially wondered if this bequest might be in response to the poor treatment symphony musicians have received during contract negotiations. However, given that the Fisher family has made donations to support the DSO in every way possible, (and just illuminated a new possibility), it would be difficult to make that assumption.

That said, between the prevalence of crowd funding campaigns and indications of a shift toward direct support of those in need, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people were investing greater effort into ensuring support was going specifically where they intend.

What Many Of Us Have Learned

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Awhile back Barry Hessenius asked me to write a “What I Have Learned” essay for his blog. He noted that in the past he often featured similar pieces written by people who were approaching the end of their career. This time around he wanted to feature the voices of people who were on the upward arc of their careers.

This past Sunday he posted the collection of essays. I should warn you, the post is L-O-O-O-N-N-G. I wasn’t given a word limit and I would guess none of the other 17 people whose contributions appear were either.

True to Barry’s purpose of providing a forum to some lesser known people, there were names a recognized but many I didn’t and ended up Googling. I had originally intended to provide a list of the contributors with links to bios or websites as a reference, but after opening 10 tabs in my web browers, I realized my entire post was going to end up being a list of names.

So read the post and if you see someone you like, Google them to learn more.

There is a lot to read but there is a lot worth reading. Over a couple days I made note of the next person on the list and performed a Find on the page when I came back to continue reading.

To give a small sample of what people submitted, I was really struck by this advice from EMC Arts’ Karina Mangu-Ward:

Accept offers of support, even if it makes you feel vulnerable:  Early in my work at EmcArts, a more experienced colleague of mine approached me and said that if I was ever interested in developing my practice as a facilitator he’d be willing to mentor me.  I brushed it off at the time, unsure of how to accept the support.  But I kept in the back of my mind.  Four years I later, when I was in a difficult moment of growth, I called him up and asked him if he’d be willing to to set aside two hours a month to talk with me about the big questions I was wrestling with.  Now, he’s one of the most important people in my professional life.

A few contributors mentioned issues of Power, but Ian David Moss from Factured Atlas & Createquity made it his central topic. After a lengthy admonition about abuse of power which included the first sentence below, he suggests people are often unaware of the power they possess and the effective, if seemingly mundane ways, in which it can be exercised.

Power is like a precious, poisonous metal: it requires care and professionalism in handling or people are going to get hurt.

[…]

Know that speaking up is always, always an exercise of power – no matter who you are. Know that asking uncomfortable questions is a way to change the course of a meeting, a policy discussion, a decision. Know that sharing your experience in a forum where it will be heard is an exercise of power. Know that doing so again and again is more powerful than doing so once, as tedious as that may seem to you.

Know that doing your job well, maybe even better than anyone else, is an exercise of power. Know that understanding what you’re good at is an exercise of power. Know that vacuums of leadership mean more power for you. You never need to let your title and salary have the final say on what you’re capable of.

[…]

Know that charging yourself to gain more knowledge, particularly knowledge that most people around you don’t have, is one of the most valuable and impressive forms of power you can exercise. And absolutely no one is stopping you from exercising that particular power starting right now.

Taken out of context, any one paragraph might come off as advice for ruthless ambition, but he figuratively starts and literally ends his contribution with the reminder that “…with power comes responsibility.”

Each of the contributors comes from a different place with their “lessons learned” essay, but generally offer insight of a similarly high quality. Bookmark it and allow yourself to read through it over time.

Spiritual Fulfillment And Cultural Experiences

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High Expectations of Cultural Experiences

Last week I wrote about Ken Davenport’s admonition that an arts experience not exceed a person’s expectations by too large a margin.

As a counterpoint to that, I wanted to call attention to a piece from BrainPickings on Geoff Dyer’s writing about expectations and disappointment. Among the disappointments he lists from his own life include going to Boston’s Museum of Fine Art to see a painting by Paul Gauguin only to find it was out on loan. Upon learning this, he dejectedly trudges out of the museum.

The experience of the missing masterpiece, of the thwarted pilgrimage (which is not at all the same as a wasted journey), made me see that the vast questions posed by Gauguin’s painting had to be supplemented with other, more specific ones. Why do we arrive at a museum on the one day of the week — the only day we have free in a given city — when it is shut? On the day after a blockbuster exhibition has finally — after multiple extensions of its initial four-month run — closed?…

[…]

Impossible — not even conceivable — that a Muslim, on making the mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, could be disappointed. That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage: the latter always has the potential to disappoint.

Part of this reminded me about John Falk’s list of five basic identities types that visit museums I have written about in the past (and probably will write about again.)

Specifically, I was reminded about the Experience Seeker type which Antoinette Duplessis describes as “…‘collecting’ experiences. They want to feel like they’ve ‘been there’ and they’ve ‘done that’ – they want to see the destination, building or what’s iconic on display.”

In this particular instance, Dyer sounds as if he is acting within this type. He goes into the MFA to find a particular painting and leaves when it is not available rather than exploring what other experiences he might have.

Cultural Pilgrimages

What really caught my attention was his comparison of a religious pilgrimage to a secular pilgrimage and how the former could never be disappointing.

I have frequently read, listened and contributed to conversations regarding how people often expect some sort of transcendent experience when they attend an arts event. I had always assumed that this was because people who didn’t have much experience with the arts intellectually idealized what the unfamiliar experience would be like and are subsequently concerned if they didn’t understand what was going on or found themselves becoming bored.

This may actually be the process most people go through in regard to the arts. However, Dyer’s comparison of the two pilgrimages made me wonder if people might not be equating an arts experience with a religious experience when they formed expectations in their minds.

Spiritual Aspects of Cultural Pilgrimages

This idea isn’t that far fetched. Communities across the country often organize special trips to America’s theatre Mecca of NYC to see shows. With all the hype about Hamilton, and Wicked and The Lion King being among the more familiar household names, it is not unreasonable that excitement would build to the point of simulating a religious experience and lead to an expectation of a type of spiritual fulfillment.

These expectations aren’t necessarily created by marketing hype. Just seeing videos on YouTube of devotees lining up to buy tickets for Hamilton and lingering outside to sing together even after they can’t get in can shape expectations. If your experience is disappointing and your spirit isn’t buoyed by the show like thousands, if not millions of others, the failure is with you, correct?

Perhaps the least harmless reaction to this is when people feel the need to leap to their feet to give a standing ovation at the end of a performance even if they are kinda confused by what happened. (Or take a selfie in a museum by a piece they don’t quite understand.)

Spiritual Fulfillment Comes From Within

How the heck do you deal with disappointment when expectations are for spiritual fulfillment? This a type of transcendence is impossible to intentionally deliver. It is an entirely internal matter that people experience for themselves. If people can leave Mecca feeling a sense of transcendence despite the constant danger of being crushed to death by the crowds, others can easily overlook a bad cab ride in NYC if they feel they are completing a once in a lifetime activity.

When the expectations are based in intellect and emotion, as with my initial assumption about the process people went through in regard to the arts, it is relatively easy to provide education which shifts expectations and lets people know it is okay to be bored or confused. If you can assure them that with time and exposure, the experience will become accessible, there is potential to move people away from anxiety toward self-empowerment.

Challenge of Providing Spiritual Fulfillment

But what happens if people view the mystery and inscrutability of an arts experience in a manner similar to the way they view the mysteries of their faith? It is not implausible to make this association given how fervently arts people speak about their (a)vocation. In all likelihood they wouldn’t place as great an importance on an artistic/cultural experience as they would the experiences of their religious practice. But they may seek a person or information source that was able to explain/guide them through the experience with clarity and certainty.

Lacking someone to do so, or being told there was no single interpretation and it was up to the viewer to decide, it can be comforting to verify your perceptions against those of others. In this respect, there really isn’t any difference between those who view the lack of clarity as an intellectual, emotional or spiritual mystery. The difference is in the degree of certitude required to make you comfortable.

If people are convinced that a pinnacle experience they had was akin to a religious one, all others will pale in comparison. No other can be considered since the ideal has already been encountered.

The other alternative is worse. When an experience that is anticipated to have the same payoff as a religious pilgrimage is ruined by a bad cab ride from the New York airport, it can equally sour someone on any subsequent suggestions.

Again, I am not saying people really ever equate a cultural experience with a religious experience. I am just intrigued with Dyer’s suggestion that a secular pilgrimage has a hazard for disappointment that a sacred pilgrimage can not possess and what the implications of that concept may have for arts and culture.

Arts Center, I Choose You!

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I was walking in to work on Saturday and met a woman who has offices in the arts center who told me that there was a Pokemon in the fountain in front of the building.

Sure enough, as part of the new augmented reality game Pokemon Go, when she pointed her phone at the fountain, the virtual map overlay showed a Pokemon in the fountain. She then lamented that someone else was battling to capture it. I assume it was the kid standing on the sidewalk just south of the fountain.

Then she explained that she and her kids had seen some Pokemon in a tree at the Farmers’ Market that morning, but the virtual critters got away.

As we walked into the arts center, her phone informed her my building was a Pokemon center and she told me if I downloaded the app, I could capture them every morning when I came into work.

I asked her how the building and fountain had been designated as spawning points and she said someone must have come along before her, taken a picture of the building and added it to a list of possible points.

At that point, I realized it could be a great boon for getting younger people in the door if they could get their venues included in the game.

Jason Evangelho at Forbes Magazine had the same idea and suggested businesses use the game to lure in customers. Unfortunately, if you read down to the Update postscript at the end, the game creators are the ones who designated these locations using Google Maps, not the general public.

However, Evangelho figures given the opportunities the game represents, they may come up with a way for different places to get themselves added or offer some sort of premium features for game players.

One of the things he mentions places that already are designated as “Pokestops” can do is buy a lure module that attract Pokemons to the location for 30 minutes. (for 100 Pokecoins currently selling for 99 cents.)

It may be worth checking if your location is already designated as a central location in the game so you can think about how to adapt that into your activities.

It should be noted, you may not have any choice in whether you want to accommodate game players. Some police stations designated as Pokemon centers have had a steady stream of people coming in to capture them. It may be necessary to brief staff very soon on whatever customer service policies and procedures you create in response to these visitors. Especially since there have been an increase in accidents due to people paying even more attention to their phones as they swing them about trying to locate their virtual prey.

On the other side, players have posted on social media about the Pokemon company’s sneaky attempts to get them to go back to church.

The game is getting people to wander around in places they haven’t been before so it may increase foot traffic near your organization even if you aren’t a designated game location. Though in an incident echoing the movie Stand By Me, a girl found a dead body when she jumped a fence to find a Pokemon.

All in all, something to be aware of and keep an eye out for associated opportunities. Once it becomes clearer what sort of promotional opportunities exist, I will probably get a post up on ArtsHacker.

Signals Of Quality In Arts Disciplines

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For the last month or so I have been trying to figure out why, depending on the discipline, different elements of an artist’s background signal quality.

I realized that when people on my board or in my audience talk about a classically trained musician, they orient on what conservatory they attended first and then what ensembles they may have played in.

However, when it comes to actors whether the person appeared on Broadway or TV/movie is the most important. Lacking that, if they are based in NY or LA adds to their cachet. However, no one ever seems to care if they went to NYU or Yale Drama or University of Wisconsin for their training.

With dance it is usually which dance company they have performed with and where. Very seldom does the source of their training get mentioned.

Visual artists it is all about whether you can understand what you are looking at, whether you think it is any good and what the price tag is. Many people can discern whether an artist has had formal training or not, but I don’t think I have ever heard someone express confidence that an artist will be good based on the place they studied.

Scott Walters has long talked about the problem of actors needing move to NY/LA/Chicago so they can get work in their own hometown. I am not going to rehash those lengthy arguments.

But along those lines I wanted to toss the question out there about how and why this range of criteria about what constitutes quality developed.

I have come up with a lot of theories that don’t quite make sense. One idea I had was that while there are people who enjoy the arts in general, just as their are cat people and dog people, people who like the arts have one discipline they focus on. Otherwise, wouldn’t there be a single prime criteria that dominated, especially for the performing arts? Instead it seems people accede to the dominant criteria of each discipline, perhaps feeling they aren’t as qualified to judge as they are in their primary focus.

As I said, that doesn’t quite make sense. I can poke a lot of holes in that idea. I am left wondering where these concepts of quality originated from. Is there something that the music education and performance community did to signal a conservatory education is desired in a musician in a way that isn’t as compelling in the acting and dance community? Or is it that the audiences and communities that participate in each of these disciplines gradually oriented on certain signs they felt insured a quality experience.

Another thought I had is there an unconscious desire to be associated with the strongest name recognition. People on the street may recognize the Julliard name, but if given ten options to choose the Big Five orchestras, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas might appear on the list more often than Cleveland based on general impressions people have of each city.

I am not saying people shouldn’t be getting credit for doing well in a conservatory program, especially if they spend a lot of money in the process. I have a suspicion if the underlying factors informing these concepts of quality were better understood, it might be easier to communicate that artists who don’t possess those specific associations and pedigrees can provide a high quality experience. Inversely, one could suggest an artist does not necessarily need those associations and pedigrees in order to be successful.

Granted, there is a continuum there. This claim is more true of having a NYC address than having formal training. It may be easier to break these conceptions now than it was in the past since the internet allows people to verify that quality and these signifiers don’t go hand in hand. (Though we can also attest that the same forum allows a lot of crap to get recognition while hard work and talent are overlooked.)

Anyone have other insights or theories?

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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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