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State of the Arts

Please j’onn, Don’t Eat Me

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Not to be outdone by Drew McManus’ generous referral last week of donations toward Jon Silpayamanant’s Mae Mai blog, I went to see him perform this week.

It was a dangerous trek across the backroads of rural Ohio. But none of that compared to the peril of meeting Jon himself, as you can see in this picture. (He is the warrior in the back.)

Fierce Klingon cellist and his brother in blood

I assure you, if he hadn’t started to engage a cloaking field which blurred his features, you would appreciate the full terror inspired by his mighty form. In his hand behind me, he is holding a D’k tahg dagger as he muses that the blood of humans, tainted by their cowardice, tastes worse than targ blood.

In other words, I had a great time.

I made the trip to Cincinnati to see A Christmas Carol in the original Klingon. I had seen the show listed before and hadn’t realized this was the first time the production had been mounted in Cincinnati. All the previous productions were (and still are) performed in Chicago and Minnesota. (Video of a Chicago cast here.)

Much honor was earned this month in Cincinnati!

As much as I say that tongue in cheek, even with all the Star Trek fans out there, it isn’t the easiest thing to go to a new city and audition actors who can speak Klingon, or find actors willing to learn.

Jon composed the score for the show and made a special appearance yesterday with members of Il Troubadore to perform during intermission. There were pieces of Klingon opera as well as “Terran folk songs.”

Probably not what you imagined if you read that Jon often focuses his blog writings on “ethnic orchestras,” but like a good writer and musician, he doesn’t discount any potential avenue of exploration.

It makes Western orchestras look silly worrying about what is appropriate to wear onstage. He has to fret over Klingon armour and a Wookie costume (he aims to have one like this by 2015) and face the scrutiny of truly pitiless critics –sci fi enthusiasts.

Info You Can Use: Speed Dating For Volunteers

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Last month Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a small piece on a “Speed Dating” event that 15 Sacramento non-profits organized to recruit volunteers. In addition to it being a great idea for volunteer recruitment, it also seemed like a (relatively) low-stakes way to practice and evaluate the most effective methods of speaking about your organization for fundraising and promotion purposes.

On the merits of recruiting volunteers, I thought it was a better option than just listing opportunities on websites and newspapers because it is more active and takes advantage of the cachet of other organizations to engage with people who might not immediately be attracted to your organization.

By this I mean, had you advertised a volunteer recruitment open house for your theater, it may pass the notice of people who don’t already have an affinity for your discipline or organization.

If you are part of an event that also includes the local Red Cross, schools, hospitals and other non-profits, you have an almost guaranteed opportunity pitch your organization to everyone there. Since everyone is expected to interact with everyone else, it removes the awkwardness of volunteer fairs where you attempt to engage with people who pass your booth. Ultimately you have the opportunity to gain the participation of a person who was only vaguely familiar with your organization, was unaware you went into elementary schools, but is absolutely invested in helping with those activities.

This approach may be well suited to recruiting young volunteers because it is so direct and interactive rather than depending on them to find and research you at some point in their busy day. (Which is not at all to say that older retirees wouldn’t find it great fun as well.)

In the NPQ comments section, Abigail Denecke echoed my thoughts wondering what questions/statements/approach might have been most effective at cultivating additional action. And I liked commenter Laura Halley’s idea about using a speed dating structure as a general orientation tool.

Economic Impact Ain’t Everything

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Drew McManus cautions a little today against putting a lot of stock in studies about the economic impact of the arts.

I had been thinking along the same lines because so many people were crowing last week about studies showing arts and culture had a $500 billion impact on the economy.

The problem is, between 1998-2008 the impact of arts and culture on current dollar GDP was between 3.5% and 3.7% of the economy. According to a piece from Pacific Standard, arts and culture has been hanging around at 3.2% of the economy since 2009. When you are talking 500 billion, each tenth of a percentage there represents tens of billions of dollars so a .3%-.5% difference adds up quite a bit of lost impact. (Though the report was measuring where things stood in 2011 we are talking about a 2 year “hang.”)

From some of the responses I was reading, it seemed like people thought this was the first time the economic impact of arts and culture had been measured. It does appear that the criteria and methods are more refined than in the past, so the number may be more accurate. But as Drew suggests, people have been attempting to measure economic impact of arts and culture for quite some time now.

And remember, often economic measurements aren’t always your friend and acknowledging their validity can be a two edged sword if someone else can claim bring equal or better results.

A recent opinion blog on the NY Times reminded me that when it comes to economic impact and earnings potential for arts and culture positions, it is important to note that the figures are a result of specific decisions being made:

Is the crisis rather one of harsh economic reality? Humanities majors on average start earning $31,000 per year and move to an average of $50,000 in their middle years. (The figures for writers and performing artists are much lower.) By contrast, business majors start with salaries 26 percent higher than humanities majors and move to salaries 51 percent higher.

But this data does not show that business majors earn more because they majored in business. Business majors may well be more interested in earning money and so accept jobs that pay well even if they are not otherwise fulfilling, whereas people interested in the humanities and the arts may be willing to take more fulfilling but lower-paying jobs. College professors, for example, often know that they could have made far more if they had gone to law school or gotten an M.B.A., but are willing to accept significantly lower pay to teach a subject they love.

Economic impact of arts activity could potentially be greater if more people choose to charge more (or it could be lower because it wouldn’t be as widespread.) Arts and Culture salaries could be higher if people held out for more money (but again, there might be fewer people employed in those areas.) Choices have been made in an attempt to provide more widespread access and because people have been motivated by considerations other than money.

(And by the way, salaries start to even out around mid-career. Note that liberal arts is tied with medical technology, theatre with health care administration, history with business administration, and philosophy is WAY above both of them.)

People may tell you that back in the old days, people stuck with a job no matter how awful it was instead of pursuing what interested them. That may be true to a degree, but this weekend my mother told me that when my grandfather was working in the garage at a car dealership about 4-5 miles from their house, he was unhappy and bounced back and forth between parts manager and service manager and would curse up a storm every night.

Then he got a job at West Point Military Academy in shipping/receiving in the early 60s, and even though it was 40 miles away which required him to get up earlier every day, she never heard him curse after that point.

Not only do I know that my grandfather couldn’t be the only one who did this, I have heard interviews recently with people who lived in towns with good manufacturing bases who talked about how easy it was to quit a job in the morning and have a new one by the afternoon.

People may characterize following your bliss and studying a topic that interests you as an irresponsible and effete decision, but it isn’t unrelated to decisions people have made in the past. There may have been a good many people who stayed in a soul crushing job all their lives, but that may have been more of a choice than a necessity.

This by no means ignores that there are other forces conspiring to place college educated people in low paying jobs. There is more involved in finding employment than choosing a field of study and embracing the realities of jobs in that field.

But the choice to accept a job at low pay also contributes to the job being low paying. Sometimes it is because there are few alternatives but to accept those jobs. Sometimes it is because the applicants concede the organization has important uses for that money.

Salaries and economic impact are not the sole measure of value of people and their labor. Good thing too because we probably all have more value as soylent green.

Wishing You Were A Famous Actor, Tenured Professor Or A Drug Kingpin

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This weekend I was reading an piece on Slate that likened new Ph.Ds seeking tenured positions in higher ed to drug dealers hoping to become drug kingpins.

“If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and-file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing,” wrote Alexandre Afonso, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London.

[…]
“The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics,” he writes. “Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labor markets virtually everywhere… Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.”

Since I work in higher education, I thought this theory was interesting and entertaining and then moved on. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized this pretty much describes the same situation faced by people who want to be actors (as well a orchestra musicians, I imagine). I don’t know why it didn’t strike me earlier, I have been reading Scott Walters’ thoughts on the subject of too many acting students being graduated for the available jobs for years.

Just like the rank and file drug dealers and doctoral program graduates, thousands of actors graduate a training program at some level hoping to become a big star, or at least steadily employed at a livable wage, each year.

The problem is, the only opportunities are on the periphery as either a low level drug dealer or adjunct, while the available spots at the core as a kingpin or tenured professor are increasingly few. (Though I will confess that other than increased pressure from law enforcement and internecine conflicts, I am not sure what is limiting the number of kingpin slots.)

It may be much worse for actors because it appears there are fewer and fewer paid opportunities even on the periphery for them to pick up, much less achieve a reasonable career and income. (Though it is difficult to gauge because the surveys aren’t able to comprehensively measure all paid opportunities.)

But I have long known about all these factors that conspire against practicing artists and that students are undeterred and pursue the career path anyway. My realization that the comparison of Phds to drug dealers was apt for actors was pretty much just that– a realization that arts people don’t really diverge too far from the norm in their aspirations.

Not that desiring to be a drug kingpin is normal, but the act of aspiring to achieve a severely limited status is widely shared by all humans and not specific to artists.

This may seem like common sense, but when you hear students urged to pursue practical majors in Business and STEM fields, you might get the impression that aspiring to the unobtainable is embraced by only the margins of society. As the Slate article notes, the similar conditions exist across all areas of the labor market. It may only be pursued to greater extremes by the margins, but the impulse is deep seated in us all.

Thanks For The Virtual Relationship

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I started my current job in May, however I came to interview for the position right before Thanksgiving last year. As you might imagine, I count that date as an important milestone. Given the proximity of this “anniversary” to Thanksgiving, there were a number of cards and loaves of pumpkin bread being distributed to those who welcomed and assisted me in the transition to my new job.

I probably missed a number of people in the process. One person I whose participation in my job search I did want to recognize is Drew McManus. I use the term “participation” because while Drew did directly contribute to my getting this job, he also more indirectly helped with a little experiment I was running.

So this entry is actually less about saying how wonderful Drew is (though he is), as reflecting on what it is we actually value about employees and coworkers.

I actually started my job search a few years back and I asked Drew if I could use him as a reference. At the time, we had never met in person. And as of right now, our only in person meeting was a couple hours for dinner during a lay over I had in Chicago when I was returning from a job interview.

I wanted to see if it was actually possible to get a job based on the recommendation of someone whom you had never met or worked with directly. I listed Drew about third or fourth on my reference list behind people who had actually supervised my work directly on a daily basis.

While it is true to say that we never really met, we have communicated quite often over the years via email and a number of times on the phone, soliciting each other’s advice and discussing the arts environment. We would coordinate on cross-blog projects. I would frequently alert Drew to problems with the website hosting the blog and there were a few times I expressed criticism of some of the changes he was proposing.

So in many respects, our relationship was similar to that of many workplaces where coworkers assist and comment on each other’s work and labor to advance the interests of the company, in this case the Inside the Arts page.

The Adaptistration blog has passed its decade mark and Butts in the Seats will reach that point in February. In some respects, Drew is more familiar with the quality of my work and thoughts on arts administration than my previous four work supervisors. Since I am faithful about scheduling blog posts to cover my absences during vacations, he knows a bit about my work ethic.

Yet we work in a field that emphasizes in-person interactions with our customer base. We want people experiencing the arts in close physical proximity with the performer or actual piece of visual art.

There is a 10 year section of my life’s work that does not exist physically. There are people who have published fewer pages of incoherent ramblings than I have who are recognized poets and authors (or gotten tenure). I can’t quite say for sure if those 10 years of effort even helped me get this job or not.

Do you really want to hire someone who values interactions and creative content that are generated virtually for a job that is so much about the physical experience?

I think most everyone would agree this is pretty much indicative of the new normal and has been for awhile. Even the novelty of this story has waned from what it might have been four or five years back. I have interacted with Drew and others so frequently and so regularly it is difficult to remember or even believe that we have only met physically for two hours.

To some degree, the situation was almost akin to the blind auditions orchestras hold. My value was being discussed based largely on the quality of my work for the benefit of the project and not colored by office politics, personal affiliations or the size of the tip I leave when we go to lunch.

The common joke is that you never really know if the person on the other end of the computer is who they represent themselves to be, but this is also the stuff upon which relationships and trust are, and will be developed.

Even though Drew was last on my list, he received a surprising number of calls and apparently carried on fairly decent length conversations. And I actually got called out for some in-person interviews afterward. I don’t know whether his conversations helped my case, but they clearly didn’t hurt.

One thing I take from this is that while the opportunity to view performances online can undermine the value of live attendance in people’s minds, this experience has shown me that it is possible to develop a seemingly deep relationship with them as well. All the information you put out there on your website and all the interactions you have on social media can make people feel as if they have visited your performance space and experienced an event there, even if they haven’t.

I won’t argue that it isn’t a shallow, illusory relationship which may crumble quickly upon contact with the real life situation. But I think half the barriers to participation audiences encounter are mental and anything that removes or diminishes those perceptions and makes people feel as if they have the ease of a longstanding relationship with you is helpful.

Though again, the image that you put out there has to match the reality fairly closely. You can’t promote yourself as Disney if the reality is the Jersey Boardwalk after a hurricane.

Software Update As An Exercise of Artistic License

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Earlier this week I was reading an article about the practical consequences of receiving content and updates from “the Cloud.”

Previously, I had read a little bit about how we are really renting rather than buying content. This article reinforces that noting how “upgrades” actually removed features or content that people had specifically opted to purchase.

I started to think, “ah, soon the arts will be the only provider of authentic content..,” except that hasn’t been the case for decades, if ever.

I am not sure about the other disciplines, but in theatre there has long been a battle between the content creators and the interpreters over the faithful depiction of the creator’s work.

Performing groups will omit content for considerations like running time and language or cast people of the opposite gender in a role. The standard royalties contract requires you to perform the show as written, at least dialogue wise. Some playwrights/lyricists/composers will actually specify that you can not under any circumstances cut or change specific elements of their show.

Others will actually provide permission to make changes with suggestions on how it can be accomplished.

With situations like Amazon removing and changing content from people’s Kindles and Tesla using a software update to remove a feature people paid $2250 for, both done without telling people it was happening, it seems like a good time to revisit the idea of whether it is suitable to make changes to a performance and represent it as the original.

There has been a lot of discussion about sampling other people’s work and representing it as your own. While censorship is an eternal topic of conversation, there generally isn’t as much conversation about changing someone else’s work and still representing it as their’s.

Content creators often make specific choices in the expressions of their vision that they feel are crucial to what they are trying to communicate. Replacing all the cursing in David Mamet’s plays with “darn it” changes everything about the dynamics between the characters. He would probably be horrified to have his name associated with a production of American Buffalo that inserted fiddlesticks for every utterance of f–k.

Adaptation and artistic license has been a common feature of the arts. When a musician announces that they are going to play a song by someone else, you can be reasonably certain that there are going to be alterations from the original.

However, when dealing with content with which the average viewer is not familiar, is it honest to claim to be performing a work if you have made crucial changes?

For example, Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s longer plays, so maybe you decide to cut the scene where Hamlet speaks to the players of “the play within the play” about his intent to entrap his uncle with a thinly veiled depiction of Hamlet’s father’s murder. Rather, you choose to reference the scheme briefly when the uncle reacts strongly to seeing the scene.

This decision removes the famous “Speak the speech I pray you…” speech and arguably weakens the show by removing a demonstration of Hamlet’s character development. Though since you cut it, you would argue that it wasn’t so important.

However, the real question is, if you don’t tell people about all the cuts and changes you made, are you defrauding your audience by letting them think they are buying tickets to the authentic product? They wanted the experience of seeing Hamlet. You diluted it by removing some important parts.

This is a debate that can get tossed back and forth for a long time. It seems an interesting situation to consider in the context of a consumer’s ever decreasing status as an owner of content.

Is there any difference between softening perceived Anti-semitism in a performance of Merchant of Venice in the name of artistic vision and Amazon agreeing to remove the N-word from electronic copies of Huckleberry Finn sold to certain school districts because their vision is that Huck be less racist?

It has started to occur to me that as people begin to consume content via media that can be altered without notice or detection, artists may actually have less scope for claiming artistic licenses lest they end up providing justification for widespread revisionism.

Ironically, it may prove to have been easier to claim artistic freedom and expression when there was a definitive source both you and your detractors could agree you were diverging from. How can you claim your interpretation is a rejection of the rampant injustice embodied by the original if you can’t be sure if what you are reacting to is the original sentiment or some latter action?

And why are you so upset anyway when you can work to get the offensive content revised to your liking?

Person Who….

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Margy Waller tweeted a link to an article which theorized that using the term “People on Bikes” rather than “cyclists” would help improve road safety by humanizing the bike riders.

I immediately wondered if there was any benefit, internally and externally, to changing the terminology applied to arts patrons. (Instead of, for example, “arts patron.”) The article starts out saying that even for those who ride bikes, the term cyclist evokes the image of a hardcore enthusiast who has uses specialized equipment and clothing like a high end bike and spandex bike shorts.

The arts have the same image problem with people perceiving arts patrons as being hardcore afficinados with a set dress code and specialized knowledge.

Replace the word “biking” with “arts attendance” and “cyclist” with “arts patron” in the next paragraph and you have a sentiment drawn straight from an arts blog or conference. (I don’t know that arts patron is the wrong term to use, I just employ it for want of a clearly alienating term.)

“From an advocacy standpoint, getting rid of the word “cyclist” removes perceptual barriers that prevent people from trying biking in the first place, says Dave Snyder, executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition. “It makes biking accessible to anyone, and diminishes the sense of biking as an activity for a subculture or one that requires an ‘identity’ to engage in. Someone who has a bike in their house somewhere and only occasionally rides it and never would consider themselves a ‘cyclist’ is someone we should definitely reach out to.”

The poster by Bike Pittsburgh featured in the article looks exactly like posters and banners I have seen arts organizations use to show that their employees performed every day functions in the community.

This may seem like silly semantics, but the article argues that the active “people who X” humanizes the entity more than the passive label.

“Try saying “people who drive” instead of “drivers,” or “people who walk” instead of “pedestrians.” Suddenly this passive, faceless term that usually connotes a victim or someone at fault turns into a more active, visual description of an actual human who is choosing to do something. I can identify more with a “person who drives” or a “person who walks” or a “person who uses a wheelchair” or a “person who rides the bus” or a “person on a Segway,” even if I don’t do any of those things, because I understand, even beyond their mode of transit, they’re still people.”

So my first question is, are there terms like patron, community, attendee that tends to make us apply a generic identity on people instead of individualizing them?

Second question is, what term should be used? “Person who attends dance” denies someone’s identity as a person who attends theater, concerts, museums, etc.

“Person who participates in the arts” seemed the best bet to me. It avoids the hardcore stigma of “person who is enthusiastic about the arts” and is more active than “one who enjoys the arts.”

In addition to being unwieldy terminology, I know this sounds like saccharine soaked political correctness. But these things can make a difference. The idea of viewing people as brains rather than butts in the seats I wrote about a couple years ago, for example.

I am actually somewhat more interested in the internal benefits of a language change than shifting attitudes externally, though I would welcome any campaign that could achieve that.

Long ago I worked at a place where the box office kept a list of all the stupid things they were asked on the back of the door. I didn’t think having staff constantly reminded that their customers were dopes was very conducive to good service. Even if they were consciously being as pleasant as they could, that list was eroding their respect unconsciously.

So I wonder what might change if an organization’s staff started referring to customers as “people who love the arts.” Marketing department meetings would talk about adverting goals in terms of attracting 500 lovers of the arts for a show. Curtain speeches could celebrate that a performance is sold out with 1100 people who love the arts.

What are your thoughts? Is there any creative person (person who exercises creativity?) who can think of an elegant, but active descriptor?

Arts In Schools Is Only Half The Battle

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Over the last couple months, I have been enjoying Jon Silpayamanant’s series on the WPA Music Project. After reading his entries, I have begun to think that the push to put more arts in schools is may only be half the effort required to really spark an interest and sense of value in the arts.

The WPA projects involved a lot of direct and personal contact with concerts and free classes, each project involving hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of people in a single region each year.

According to the latest statistics released by the Federal Music Project, 2,399,446 students unable to pay for private musical instruction attended the free classes of the project in its 140 music centers throughout Greater New York during the year ending June 30. The number of classes held reached the enormous total of 145,133. (New York Times 1936)

When the federal will and funds were aligned behind the arts, a great deal of activity occurred. But my intent is not to get into the very politicized discussion of why there should be more federal support of the arts.

One thing that struck me from a post suggesting the Depression had a far more devastating effect on classical music and orchestras than seen in current times, is just how integrated into daily life live music performance once was.

Even if you manage to convince large swaths of people to take music lessons and put a piano in their living rooms, our current lifestyles almost guarantee that we will never have such as large proportion of the population that possesses some degree of musical training as we once did. Nor will we likely return to the frequency of exposure to live music people once enjoyed.

In the early 1900s musicians weren’t just performing in concert halls, they were providing music in movie theaters, restaurants, pubs, hotels and even funeral homes. As radio and recorded music become more available, (not to mention Prohibition closing down pubs) thousands of musicians were put out of work.

From the research Silpayamanant cites, it appears that even though live music was no longer as present in everyday life as before, during the 1930s the Federal Music Project brought live performance and practice back into people’s lives pretty personally and directly.

So people of my grandmother’s generation who were born in the early 1900s were exposed to live music on all sides and then had the Federal government validate the value of the arts through myriad WPA programs. They passed these values on to my mother’s generation. My parents passed these values on to my generation, though they were further diluted by the times.

You probably see where I am going with this: these first two generations are dying off as audiences right now.

I am not suggesting that returning arts to the schools won’t be helpful. When I was a kid, it reinforced the perception of value my parents and grandparents passed on to me. Reading Silpayamanant’s posts have just reminded me that not only do arts organizations need to change the way they operate in order to acknowledge changing times, arts education has to do the same.

It is so easy to say, if only we have more of a certain type of activity, things will turn around. It is easy to forget the larger social dynamics have changed. People are no longer surrounded by the same sort of artistic exemplars in their every day life to normalize the pursuit of an artistic discipline. Celebration of those who can create in an electronic medium is more prevalent and likely provides a more familiar touchstone for today’s fledgling creatives.

Using All The Parts of The Chicken

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“Ordinary businesses have clear-cut yardsticks to measure their performance: profits, return on investment, stock prices. But what does high performance mean for a non-profit arts group? A bigger budget? A larger audience? A shiny new building?”

You have probably read something along those lines about the difference between for profit businesses and non-profits before. But when I read this at the start of a report about data collection that the National Center for Arts Research was conducting, a thought struck me.

I was wondering if much of the construction of new buildings and expansion of programs that strained the means of non-profit groups was motivated by a desire to provide some physical manifestation of the organizations’ successes. Non-profit arts organizations are frequently urged to run themselves more like a business and are governed by board members who work for businesses who use profits, stock prices and return on investment as a measure of success.

That provides some possible context for the situation at the Minnesota Orchestra which recently underwent a major renovation of the physical plant and then turned around and has tried to cut labor costs. A publicly traded company that reported building new facilities and cutting labor costs would be viewed as a success. Not so much with the Minnesota Orchestra.

It may be that the non-profit model was doomed once the ideal of increasing shareholder value was embraced by for-profit businesses. Even though they may intellectually understand the mission of the non-profit on whose board they serve, business people may unconsciously seek to apply for-profit values to the organization in an attempt to validate its work.

Number of people served each year may provide some degree of satisfaction, but no one seriously evaluates McDonald’s success as a business by the billions served sign out front. (In fact, I can’t remember if they still have the count on the sign. That is how much I pay attention any more.) That may not be a really compelling measure for most people.

Overhead, as a measure of effective use of funds has been increasingly recognized as a flawed metric. The deeper analysis being performed by the National Center for Arts Research may provide a solution because the data is synthesized in a manner more closely resembling a stock and bond rating.

Still, this is all relative to money. Non-profits aren’t supposed to be profligate spenders, but their goal isn’t to make money and these ratings are all essentially a measure of return on investment. Experimentation and an attempt at a little R&D is going to reflect poorly on you.

I spent the weekend trying to think if there was any other metric of value that could be use instead of one relative to money and I couldn’t think of one. Unless you can conclusively prove that people have a better life, test scores, job prospects, (all of which are pretty much tied to earning potential), for having met you, there really isn’t any measure of success that can be used as an alternative to effective use of funds.

The truth is, even if chickens were medium of exchange, someone would be probably be reporting if you made good use of all the parts or threw away the beaks.

So non-profit arts organizations are stuck with money as a measure. As much as I hate to have to do it myself, completing data collection reports like the Cultural Data Project is probably going to help the arts furnish evidence of their value.

I don’t imagine that it will ever prevent some arts organizations from feeling the need to provide visible and public proof of their success, but the rigor and benchmarks that can be established may satisfy many that the organization is quite effective at what they do.

A Musician Shall Lead Them

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While I have left Hawaii, I still keep an eye on how things are going there and what my friends are up to. I was interested and pleased to see that Jonathan Parrish had been hired as the new executive director of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra (HSO). The HSO replaced another HSO, the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra which ceased operations a few years ago. Jonathan had been on the musicians negotiating committee for both HSO organizations.

Given all the acrimony between orchestra management and musicians over the last few years, the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra being the most recent and publicized example, it was heartening to see that the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra board decided to hire a musician into the position.

I admit that one of my first reactions was to hope that Jonathan wasn’t the figurative prom date of last resort.

I know Jonathan and worked with him from time to time and served on a board alongside him. I can attest that the press release is quite accurate when it says he did a lot of good work with Chamber Music Hawaii. Their concerts were well attended and they did a good number of education programs throughout the years.

A symphony orchestra is a whole different scale in payroll and facility rental cost alone, but having been part of the negotiations for so long, Jonathan is probably well aware of those numbers.

Not knowing was his plans are, I can’t say for sure, but I suspect HSO will be much more visible and involved in the community under Jonathan’s leadership than it has been in the past. My impression of Jonathan’s work with Chamber Music Hawaii was that he worked hard to showcase the talents of as wide a variety of the musicians as he could.

Hopefully the HSO will be able to garner the support they need from the community to continue.

Quirky Little Trick For Monetizing Creativity

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A post yesterday on the Drucker Exchange blog caught my eye instantly. How could it not when it started (my emphasis),

The story is told that when Peter Drucker was asked how to become a better manager, he replied: “Learn how to play the violin.”

This was, apparently, Drucker’s way of saying that the best managers and knowledge workers are excellent critical thinkers, creative and open to learning new things—just a few of the attributes that, according to a recent article in Time, seem to be in increasingly short supply among recent college graduates.

…The magazine cited several surveys showing that large and growing numbers of job applicants lack “communication and interpersonal skills” or are weak when it comes to “communication, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration.”

The article goes on to cite Peter Drucker saying that lack of social skills shouldn’t be the biggest disqualifier for a position because you are hiring them for their brains, not to act as a social director. It goes on to quote Drucker encouraging companies to hire someone based on the strengths they bring where the company is lacking rather than trying to hire to the job description.

But the entry later quotes a talk Drucker gave where he says the employee needs to be responsible for managing themselves. (this link isn’t the talk, but an article Drucker wrote on the topic.)

“For the first time in human history, we will have to take responsibility for managing ourselves,” Drucker declared during a 1999 talk he gave in Los Angeles. “This is probably a much bigger change than any technology, this change in the human condition. Nobody teaches it—no school, no college—and it will probably be another hundred years before anybody does teach it. In the meantime, the achievers . . . will have to learn to manage themselves, to build on their strengths, to build on their values.”

Drucker may be right that these skills are not taught directly in schools, but some part of them are required in the practical activities of performing arts classes. Teamwork, goal setting, communication, vision, deadlines, it is all there and is ultimately tested when the curtain goes up. All these things can be learned in a classroom or by participating in activities of your local theatre/dance/music ensemble.

(Though certainly recognition of and building your own strengths and values is always going to be something you have to develop on your own.)

There is a question of whether performing arts students are being properly prepared to perform and work in the new modes of expression and communication that will emerge in the future. Because we don’t know what those modes will be, the question is really more about instilling flexibility and creativity of thinking as well as a degree of entrepreneurship.

But is it enough? We keep seeing articles like the one in Time magazine cited on The Drucker Exchange or whenever people reference the IBM study where CEO valued creativity as crucial to ensure the future of their companies.

And yet an ever increasing number of standardized tests are administered every year despite the fact that the only standardized test you are regularly required to pass as an adult is your tax return. And they have software and people that will help you out by soliciting information from you.

The arts aren’t the sole source of creativity in the world, and the CEOs in the IBM study weren’t specifically looking for creativity as it manifests in the arts, but it seems like there is a huge unmet need out there and maybe arts people need to sit down and figure out how package it for Fortune 500 companies if they are so desperate for it.

It probably can’t be done in the same fashion as in college art classes. Drucker is right when he suggests that there is no formal way to teach soft skills. You can’t put together a 40 hour course on being creative and issue certificates confident at having instilled the ability in your pupils.

And yet, people commit acts of creativity every day. Some times with as much effort as it takes the grass to grow, other times with much angst, but with the knowledge and confidence that they are capable of it.

But it seems that finding a method to monetize effectively teaching/instilling creativity is about the only way these days to convince people not to dismiss liberal arts as a pursuit and that there is a Way of learning that does not embrace standardize testing.

Sometimes They Just Want To Go Home

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I was perusing the tweets of those at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference (NAMPC) while thinking about a comment made by the director of the local arts museum wondering why people were leaving a fundraiser so early.

This was the exact opposite situation from one apparently expressed by Alan Brown at the NAMP Conference who wondered why arts organizations were so quick to chase people out after the event was over.

The live and silent auction were over and no one was going to be asked to donate more money. There was plenty of food and alcohol to consume, a cigar and brandy station had been set up in the newly renovated alley for those who wanted to parttake. There was plenty of art to look at, including an amazing new installation and the artist was on hand to chat with.

They had only expected about 75 people to attend and more than 130 showed up so there were plenty of people with whom to mix and mingle. (And one of the other attendees remarked to me that there were a lot of new faces at the event so it wasn’t as if the conversation topics dried up.)

And it was only 8:30 pm on the Saturday night of a three day weekend.

By 8:45 except for the staff and volunteers, the place had pretty much cleared out.

So when I saw Sara Leonard tweet quoting a speaker at the conference saying, “Create the value your audience craves,” I wondered what might have been lacking that might have kept everyone hanging around a little longer.

The auctioneer had to ask for quiet a couple times during the auction because people were too boisterous so they were clearly having a good time.

Perhaps what the audience valued was an organization that ran an efficient fundraiser that showed them a good time and got them out before 9:00.

Maybe as Alan Brown suggests, everyone was used to being chased out and left of their own accord. Or maybe, as one off the museum staff suggested, the community likes to get to bed early.

I feel that I must make a bemused observation that clearly one needs to appeal to a younger audience not only to sustain support for the arts long term, but to find some people willing to stick around and keep the party going for you in the short term. (which I mean both literally and figuratively.)

Whether it be fund raisers or performances, it isn’t enough just to have a fun after-event party in order to attract younger audiences, the content of the main event has to be of some interest because there are plenty of bars and dance clubs where they can go instead and circumvent the boring part.

But the truth is, sometimes it isn’t anything you did. Audiences just want to go home and that is an enjoyable evening.

Is This An iPad I See Before Me?

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Last week we hosted an Immersive Game + Simulations Technologies conference in my facility. This is an area in which I am only generally familiar so some of the speakers had some very interesting things to so. The keynote speech given by Simon Solotko provided me with an immediate vision of a likely intersection between live performance and technology.

Fair warning: Don’t read any further if you can’t tolerate the idea of cell phones and iPads being used in your arts facility.

Solotko addressed the idea of augmented reality where technology overlays some sort of information upon the “real world.” For example, if you pointed the camera on your cell phone down the street, an arrow might appear on the screen over the image of the street showing you which way to turn to get to a bakery.

Solotko’s thought was that you could use this technology to provide whatever information you wanted people to know about you, and only that information. If you were at a writers’ conference you might put information out on the Cloud that you were doing research on a book about the Civil War. When someone pointed their phone/iPad in your direction they would see that information, but know nothing more about you than that. So if they shared your interest or had some resources you were seeking, they might come over and speak with you.

Solotko noted that you wouldn’t want to use facial recognition to connect yourself to the information you put out there because it is far too permanent and identifiable to be able to retract. Not to mention that there would be problems in low light environments. (This has a lot of social utility and you might want to put some information out there while you are in a dance club, after all.)

According to Solotko, this is really what the Samsung Galaxy Gear is all about. Its utility is about more than just moving the functions of a phone to your wrist, but providing an platform to deliver the augmented reality experience Solotko envisions.

As he describes it, you would put some information out there on the Cloud then program your wristband with some distinctive pattern of color. When someone pointed their camera at you, it would pick up the pattern and provide whatever information you chose to share.

I immediately recognized live performances could use this to provide supplemental information about the artist performing; the character they are playing; provide stream a real time translation of Shakespearean speeches or Italian aria being delivered; and perhaps even offer another layer of characterization by revealing a character’s internal thoughts that belie their spoken sentiments. (Though if an actor is any good, they shouldn’t need a virtual thought bubble to communicate, but it could definitely have its uses.)

Of course, orchestras had this idea a long time ago with the ill-fated Concert Companion project.

As I noted earlier, this means actively encouraging people to hold up their phones or wear their Google Glasses and ceasing to worry that they are recording every moment on stage. Whether audiences and venues are ready to embrace this shift in the viewing environment is likely to depend on a number of factors.

Welcome To The Emporium

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There is a method of teaching math colleges have begun using called the Emporium Model. Basically, it is an inversion of the usual classroom experience. The student spends time watching videos of lectures or interacting with teaching software outside of the class period. During the class period, students essentially do “homework” with assistance from each other or the professor. The approach has shown some respectable success, especially with remedial classes.

I was wondering if a similar approach might be constructive for the arts. One of the things audiences say they value most about an arts attendance experience is the social aspect interacting with friends and other people.

It got me to thinking if there might be some value in setting up a situation where people could watch a performance or participate with some sort of massive open online course (MOOC) before gathering in an interactive setting. This interactive setting probably wouldn’t be a full live performance, but rather some sort of workshop/master class/discussion where people would have close contact with an artist/facilitator while also having informal social interactions with their friends.

This is sort of an imperfect application of the Emporium model idea because who would want to spend a few hours viewing a performance or participating in an online class of some sort in preparation for a social occasion with their friends?

Except, maybe they would. To those of us closely involved with providing live performances or opportunities to experience visual arts in person, it may seem absurd to set up a situation where we encourage people to substitute a recording or picture for the full live experience. But if people are increasingly interested in having these experiences on their own schedules, rather than ours, there may be some logic to this solution.

People can watch something in 20 minute segments throughout the week and then have fun with their friends at one of three facilitated sessions scheduled every day over the course of a week.

While this may eliminate the full live performance as we know it, it could also provide an entree to eventual attendance by making it seem like something you would inevitably do at some point. You have been going to workshops and discussions with friends for months now, why not actually attend one of those performances some time?

Peer pressure may not only motivate people to attend, but to pay closer attention to the materials they review in advance. If your friend asks why you fast forwarded past a particularly interesting section, you might be more apt to watch the video all the way through the next time and pay closer attention.

Those discussions about what was skipped can also provide hints about programming decisions to the arts group facilitating the sessions — a workshop and focus group in one!

I don’t claim this idea is full developed. It just struck me as an alternative way to use people’s desire for a positive social experience. Probably the biggest hurdle for arts organizations is making what is now seen to be their central focus ancillary to the education and social mingling.

But if colleges can make the homework the focus of the in class experience and the “lecture” portion secondary, it can be accomplished. Since it will require artists who have the skills to teach and interact as well as perform, it could provide more employment opportunities to artists.

I haven’t looked at the full active offering of MOOCs, but one benefit of this approach that I see is that a fair portion of the educational material and media has already been developed and placed in accessible locations. If the internet doesn’t already host suitable content, the distribution channels are available for anything you might create yourself.

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been Creative?

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There was an article on Salon this weekend which noted that while people in creative fields are facing increasingly difficult times, the amount of literature/media celebrating creativity continues to increase. The author basically concludes that the idea of creativity is valued, but society doesn’t really actively seeks out and support creatives.

He says the same basic examples are recycled over and over again to illustrate how beneficial creativity is to the economy, but there isn’t an expanding effort toward cultivating creatives.

It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well…the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.

This reinforces the uneasiness I felt when I learned the National Endowment for the Arts decided to expand their definition of participation in arts activity to include viewing/listening to recordings and broadcasts. Suddenly 74% of adults were participants.

I support the idea that the survey should acknowledge that technology was a valid way to interact with the arts, but I was still left asking, “So what?”

That 74% was twice the number who reported having attended an arts event. That means that 38%+ did not view themselves as having participated in an arts activity.

Even if you went and told them, “Hey, that thing you do? It is participating in an arts activity,” they basically didn’t have to make an effort to change their lifestyle in order to continue being counted as a participant.

Those who cared about being considered a participant gained a measure of satisfaction they didn’t have and those who didn’t care could just live on.

Since that initial study came out in 2008, there hasn’t really been any initiative to encourage people to up their game and be more of an active participant.

I am not talking about fulfilling the self-interest of arts organizations to get people through their doors. That portion of the study didn’t really change anything for arts organizations. They knew long before then that people were watching broadcasts and listening to recordings and doing other things rather than attending and it was going to be necessary for arts organizations to change their approach.

There hasn’t been strong effort to say, what you are doing is considered participation, now try picking up a guitar, writing poems and short stories, sketching the clouds.

I don’t discount the possibility that people are already quietly doing this. Perhaps the next NEA survey should ask if listening and watching broadcasts and recordings has lead to further exploration through taking a class, experimenting with Photoshop, keeping a journal, etc,.

The very act of asking that question might reinforce the idea that creative efforts should be valued better than a series of television and print ads encouraging people to get up and paint in the manner of exercise campaigns.

In the past I have advocated asking people what they liked about their last arts experience when you encounter them at supermarket check out line or at dinner parties. It occurs to me we should add asking if people do any acting, singing, dancing, painting, writing, etc., themselves to introduce the idea there is value in self-improvement and education.

While the Salon article takes a fairly cynical tone about feeling self-important after reading a book on creativity or watching a TED talk, it is true that creativity can’t be achieved through passivity. Quiet time is certainly helpful, but the creative process is active, full of mistakes, risk, disappointments and blisters as well as the sublime.

Kiss Your Local Librarian

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So this week I learned that it is really a good idea to create a good relationship with your local librarians. Google may provide you with a lot of information, but it still ain’t got nothing on the librarians when it comes to pulling the information together and providing it in a relevant form.

We are doing The Miracle Worker this year and I inherited the start of an attempt at a “One Book, One Community” type program. When I reached out to the working group that had been formed prior to my arrival, the public library responded by asking, “Was A Book Selected?”

I responded by saying I assumed it would either be the script or Helen Keller’s autobiography. I wasn’t aware of too many other texts. Certainly, there were other texts but there didn’t seem to be many that were age appropriate for younger children.

Au contraire, both the campus and public libraries metaphorically responded, providing me with a large list of books, videos and other materials with summaries notes on age appropriateness and how they fulfilled state and Common Core standards.

Over half this media didn’t appear on a Google or Amazon search and certainly those results didn’t include anything about recommended age groups and state standards.

I have every library card I have ever owned since I was a kid so I am no stranger to the stacks, but I have to say that I have apparently been underestimating the powers of my libraries.

I look at this list and I begin to think about all the effort putting together educational packets for shows that could have been reduced by working more closely with the local library.

Don’t discount your library!

Oh, You Want Us To Teach It, Too?

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Last month on Americans for the Arts’ Arts Blog, Elizabeth Laskowski, wrote about how she welcomed standardized testing for the arts because it was making her school finally take her seriously.

My first thought was that she was basically embracing the philosophy of the kid who always acts up in class–even attention in a negative context is better than no attention.

Because students will now be tested in the arts area, Laskowski will now receive regular evaluations of her teaching, attending her class will no longer be a “carrot and stick” privilege afforded well-behaved children, students will get up to 135-180 minutes a week with her instead of 30 and the grades in her class will actually count.

It probably goes without saying that I think it shouldn’t take the threat of testing to create a situation where a music teacher is thrilled that:

“We will no longer be simply a prep time for general education teachers, or a way for the kids to blow off a little steam before they get back to work. The arts will be full fledged, real, and valuable subjects, worthy of time, money, and respect.”

Elizabeth Laskowski’s post illustrated for me that it isn’t enough to just advocate for arts in the schools, requiring that they be treated seriously and taught is also apparently necessary.

Parents may have to scrutinize claims of arts classes being offered. It appears all classes are not created equal and one should not assume that three years of music class provides roughly equivalent instruction hours as three years of French.

Old School Community Engagement

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Apropos of my post yesterday about community engagement, the term has so recently been bandied about as something arts organizations should aspire to, it is easy to forget that it isn’t a new idea.

Bread and Puppet, for example, turns 50 this year. They started out in the streets, in the community giving people bread alongside the performances and involving members of the community in their performance.

They may be viewed as agitprop rabble rousers, but the philosophy founder Peter Shumann espouses about his work pretty much parallels the current thought about how the arts should be integral to a community:

“We give you a piece of bread with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking, eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show or we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual.

Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto, written 20 years ago, further echoes current sentiments about the value of art.

Cheap Art is not an easy life style though. While the group has endured for 50 years, they haven’t amassed a fortune in the process. From what I have read over the years, their work is fueled as much by passion and sweat today as it was 50 years ago.

The article I link to about the 50th anniversary, suggests Schumann doesn’t feel he has made the impact he had hoped.

While it probably isn’t in the direction Schumann had hoped, his work did have an impact on me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 80s, Bread and Puppet was invited to work with the students to create a performance. If I recall correctly, the piece was protesting the destruction brought about by damming a river to build a hydroelectric plant.

But what impressed me was Schumann’s ability to improvise his show according to the facilities and number of people he had available. My conception of plays to that point was based in the execution of concrete set of lines, stage directions and set pieces.

I recall that the school hadn’t been able to recruit the number of students he had asked for. I thought Schumann would be angry—again based on the idea that shows required a specific number of people. But he and his team just made do and we got an opportunity to work with those great larger than life puppets. The result was pretty visually interesting. (Yeah, I know he didn’t invent improvised performance and the revelation would have certainly come at some point.)

I didn’t go on to protest the construction of environmentally unfriendly projects, but I do still have a poster and the experience has informed programming decisions I have made.

I presented long time Bread and Puppet collaborator, Paul Zaloom at one point. And my college experience with Bread and Puppet was the basic inspiration for a site specific work I commissioned in conjunction with another performance group to provide a similar experience to another set of students. A fair bit of the work I have done in recent years has been about providing a venue for local artists to give voice to elements of their community.

I am sure the memory of that one weekend working with Bread and Puppets has contributed to my conviction about the value of the arts as practice and experience.

At some point in our lives, maybe we all need an encounter with a madman with wild hair who comes with challenging ideas in one hand and a loaf of bread offered in the other.

I was about to suggest that it would be good to sometimes be that madman for our communities, but I realized it takes experience to make the product in both hands palatable.

Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

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I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is something of a euphemism for “what is the least I have to do to convince people to see my show?”

While there may be some truth to this, there are a number of arts organizations who sincerely wish to forge stronger bonds with their communities.

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently released a resource for those wishing to develop community engagement activities.

The 14 members of the Leadership Development Institute, comprised of presenters from across the country developed the content for “A Cooperative Inquiry: How Can Performing Arts Organizations Build and Sustain Meaningful Relationships with Their Communities?”

They organize the content into the following areas:

Making the Case – Why is it important to know and connect with community?

Building an Organizational Culture – Why is it important to integrate community engagement into a presenter’s mission/strategic plan?

Connecting with Your Community – How should geographic, socioeconomic and political realities of the community inform an organization’s approach?

Involving Artists – How should artists – who are key stakeholders in the arts ecology – be involved in connecting their work with communities?

Evaluating Impact – How can evaluation serve internal learning and enhanced community engagement?

The material gets the old Butts in the Seats seal of approval because it offers practical solutions. Being part of the Leadership Development Institute requires that you discuss the theories, go back and try to implement what you discussed within the context of your organization and then come back and report to the whole group.

As a result, most of the five areas listed above ends with a “How It Works In Practice” section discussing what did and didn’t work for some of the participants. Each area also has a worksheet associated with it to help guide discussions and planning.

The areas that I read with the greatest interest were the first two, making the case and building organizational culture. It seems to me that if you don’t have a clear understanding of your goals and investment by the staff, all your efforts are likely to come to naught.

I liked the five sample generic case statements they provided because they ran the gamut from invoking Aristotelian ideals to the short and practical,

“Unless our arts organizations continually evaluate our missions and evolve our programming to reflect the communities in which we serve, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and impotent as a force for social and cultural change in our cities.”

I also appreciated that there was one specifically geared to university campus based art organizations.

When it came to making statements about who the community you served was and who you would like to connect to, I liked their suggestion that an arts organization work a little backwards and start by examining a performance or event that you deemed culturally successful and determine what made it important and relevant.

This appealed to me because so often statements about mission and who you serve are very aspirational. That is how it should be.

But often looking at these statements in the context of an event you feel was successful might contradict some of that self-image if the community you think you are serving well isn’t participating in your greatest successes.

On the other hand, you may discover that you have made greater strides in serving a community than you imagined when you recognize that what you identify as the culturally successful event, while not the best attended or financially rewarding, has had the deepest impact in the community. This may manifest in a hundred small ways that aren’t directly recorded on a balance sheet.

When it comes time to try to build organizational culture around the idea of community engagement, that culturally successful event can provide a great starting point.

Staff can be dubious when new initiatives are introduced so having an example of an event that everyone is proud of provides a set of shared values from which to start a conversation about other efforts in which everyone can feel some degree of investment.

You Wanna Come Upstairs And See My New Etchings?

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There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.

I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.

I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.

The artistic director  burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.

Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.

The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.

Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.

Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.

(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)

The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.

Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.

I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.

Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.

For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”

They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.

And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.

And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.

Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences?  As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?

Truly A Transformational Arts Experience

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I just wanted to share this cool video that truly embodies the term “creative placemaking” courtesy of WFPL.

Artist Matthew Mazzotta used materials from a blighted house in York, Alabama that was being torn down to construct a house that can be “unrolled” to make a 100 seat public performance space on the same lot the old house sat.

You can read about the project and some of the travails it faced, view pictures and watch other videos of the process.

What Will You Do If You Win?

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Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.

Stuff To Ponder: Quantifiable Data Is For Other People

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I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself.

This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life which was covering the efforts of an organization called Give Directly which gives money directly to the poorest people in a country, in this case, Kenya, on the belief that they know best how to spend it.

Despite all the problems you might assume might arise, things seem to be going very well with the program.

Still, the founders were all grad students at MIT and Harvard so they are all about hard data. They weren’t satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of outcomes they found in their research. The organization is doing exhaustive research conducting surveys that take an entire day to administer to measure the differences in outcomes between those who receive funds and those who don’t.

This American Life also talked to people from Heifer International who give cows and training raising and caring for them, to people in developing countries. Their program sound incredibly beneficial. The cows are so big and healthy, the reporters talked about how intimidated they were by them.

The reporters mentioned that the people at Give Directly would like charities like Heifer International to do studies to determine what program design was most effective. The reporter asks a Heifer representative (around 30 minute mark) if they would consider giving cows and training to one village and then give the money they would spend on cows and training, to another village to see what was more effective.

The woman representing Heifer said that sounded too much like an experiment and you can’t do that with the lives of real people.

The reporter says he imagines the Give Directly people would respond “that we have to do experiments because that is the only way to figure out the very best way to help people.”

The Heifer representative spoke about it not being that linear and that there are some elements that are not easily quantified by the limits of data.

I immediately found myself siding with the Give Directly people. You are never going to be able to serve everyone who needs help. So if you are providing cows to one village and money to another, at least you aren’t setting up a control group that doesn’t get anything beneficial which is the case with most experiments. (control group getting sugar pills, other group getting the medicine).

And actually, that is how Give Directly is conducting their study–with a control group that doesn’t receive any support at all.

However, it only took about 15 seconds to realize that I was hearing very familiar language being used. How often have people in the arts talked about the benefits of what they do not being easily measured and provided anecdotes about smiling faces and lives changed? I know one acting teacher who yelled at a curriculum committee for trying to apply concrete measures to his classes.

Just recently GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance got together to ask that overhead not be used as a metric for deciding what charities to support.

Yet with the increased focus on quantifiable results with things like K12 test scores and college four year graduation rates, Give Directly’s model may become a more prevalent one in the future.

The good news is that they give money without any application process or strings attached. The bad news is that it is according to their own criteria.

A grass roof on your house qualified you to receive support from Give Directly in Kenya. If you had a better roof, you didn’t receive any money. A very slim distinction the story admits, between the very poorest and the slightly less poor.

I think we can all admit there are inefficiencies in the way non-profit arts organizations are run that could benefit from good evidence based criteria. However, I don’t think it is a self-deceptive rationalization to believe that what is effective for an art organization in Chicago will be quite different from one in the rural southwest.

This is not to say groups like Give Directly will formulate a one-size-fits-all giving formula. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard number results become viewed as an increasingly more important measure of success.

As I wrote about two years ago, Warren Buffett’s grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, has been talking about non-profits merging to become more efficient and solution oriented instead of problem oriented.

Warren Buffett’s son, (Howard Warren Buffett’s uncle), recently derided what he called “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” which criticized transplanting solutions with “little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.” He too calls for a better way of doing things.

Both are more directly referring to work that is being done in the developing world, but criteria applied in one sector will inevitably migrate to another. Talking about the unmeasurable benefits of the arts is only going to so convincing. It would be wise to acknowledge problems, pay attention and participate in the conversation so that others are not proposing solutions for you in your absence.

Keep Your Arts Sharp and The Arts Will Keep You Sharp

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I was reading an article on The Atlantic about why employers often have a hard time finding workers even during periods of high unemployment.

I saw the sentence, “And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task.” My mind made a leap and it occurred to me that might be the message the arts need to ride the coattails of.

People are changing jobs more frequently now, either involuntarily, or as we are told of Gen Y, out of a desire to do something meaningful. I am sure there will be a lot of articles and news stories over the next few years about how people need to be more agile and keep renewing and reviewing their knowledge and skills.

Keeping in line with this sentiment, the arts community could talk about how gaining knowledge, skills, comfort with artistic experiences and pursuits is something that is easily acquired over time. (Instead of a panicked crash course at the concert hall doors.)

Two hurdles that must be overcome are the perception that the arts are an indulgence and that learning is an onerous chore.

This provides an opportunity to advocate for arts education by pointing out that learning in an artistic/creative context provides the sense of fun that makes the experience more enjoyable. And in fact, may assist in keeping them engaged in the process of maintaining their professional/vocational skills.

There is a great proliferation of information sources for self-directed learning about the arts that don’t require one to expose themselves to the elements of the event attendance experience that intimidate- blogs, online videos, websites, classes, lectures, master classes and volunteering. People just need to be made better aware of them.

Of Blogs and Boards

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So Minnesota Orchestra Association CEO Michael Henson declared that “blogs are senseless and must be ignored,” and he is right.

At least in the same sense that people think Congress is ineffectual but approve of their own representative. People don’t value blogs themselves, they value the people behind them.

Lynn Harrell hardly posts on his blog, but because of his stature when he posted about Delta taking both his cello’s and his frequent flyer miles, it raised such a ruckus there were newspaper articles about the situation and a segment on the Colbert Report.

The same is true for Bill Eddins, he doesn’t post often, but when he does, people respond.

Drew McManus doesn’t get cited as an expert solely by sitting in front of his computer typing away, he is out there consulting, speaking at conferences, giving interviews…and writing interesting things on his blog.

Emily Hogstad wouldn’t have garnered so much attention about MOA’s pre-emptive domain squatting if she hadn’t developed trust with years productive and interesting work.

Were blogs not to exist, these people wouldn’t be any less smart, talented and worth listening to. The blog medium just makes it easier to do so.

In the same vein, people don’t give to organizations, they give to people. Michael Henson seems to have either forgotten or been unaware of that fact.

Except in this case it is the reverse of the situation with Congress. People don’t value the individual musicians, but they value their relationship with the assemblage of musicians as a whole.

And perhaps unfortunately for Michael Henson and the MOA board, people don’t just value their relationship with the current musicians, but those of the past as well. Henson and the board may think they are bringing a recalcitrant bunch of musicians to heel, but by shutting down the season, they are interfering with a Minnesotan sense of pride in their historical support of arts and culture, including the Minnesota Orchestras of the past.

Now you even have Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton making a statement about the window closing on the two parties after having remained voluntarily quiet on the subject for months.Since there have been calls for the orchestra to return state monies, this may be a harbinger of things to come.

It is heartening that when we have had so many government officials telling artists and organizations what sort of art they should create, the subtext of Gov. Dayton’s remarks is basically to just get back to making art.

There is a conceit expressed by theatre technical staff where they say about actors, “without us, they would be performing naked in the dark.” This ignores the fact that theatrical performances don’t have to occur in a dark room outfitted in fancy costumes.

Sure, audiences LOVE the spectacle, but give them the option of a sun lit live performance in the middle of a cow pasture or an opportunity to listen to a recording of that same group in a 2000 seat concert hall accompanied by a spectacular light show and see where they go. Even if the tickets to the cow pasture are more expensive, people are going to choose the live show over the light show.

Orchestra boards are making the same mistake. They think their job is to get a musical performance for as cheap as possible, but people prefer the substance over the reasonable facsimile.

Now the question of whether people prefer orchestra music over something else is one of programming rather than labor and organizational existence.

Orchestra board members may be important people individually, but as a group they are subsidiary to the musicians themselves. Just as people only come to see the light and costumes in the context of a performance, no one comes to an orchestra concert for the board members.

When board members are feted for the great work they did for the orchestra, it is due to the delight the orchestra brought. The board made it possible for the musicians to deliver that delight, but the board is not the source of that delight.

Boards are praised for helping to construct, support and build arts organizations. Not for making them less. No board has ever been praised for their courage in cutting the oboes.

Boards, like blogs are meaningless of themselves and only gain value by dint of the talent of the people behind them.

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The Minnesota Orchestra cross-blog event is a collection of more than a dozen bloggers, musicians, patrons, and administrators writing about the orchestra’s devastating work stoppage. You can find all of the contributions in the following list and the authors encourage everyone to participate by sharing, commenting, or publishing something at your own culture blog.

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Take Me To The River

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As the summer comes to a close, I wanted to share something that caught my eye back in May. I bookmarked it and looked back at it periodically throughout the summer because I liked the idea so much.

Back in May, as a celebration of the Minnesota River,

“performers staged a “paddling theater production” …The event offered stories, songs and characters from local river lore, presented both as live theater and live-action radio drama in an original production called “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine.”

… Eighteen voyageur canoes, each holding nine audience members and a guide, paddled the 13-mile theater route. Audience members could choose to take part in the theatrical voyage by signing up for a spot on a guided voyageur canoe or by bringing their own canoe or kayak.”

Take a look at the pictures that accompany the article. (Actually it is more photo essay than written text.) It looks to me like the company may have stopped at different points along the river to perform for people gathered there.

I am not sure if they did one scene or the whole story at each stop. From the images, it appears that those of the audience that didn’t take the canoes may have been bussed to the second stop.

I just like the whole concept of using the river as a mode of transport and medium for performance. Even before I read about this project, I had been pondering the possibilities for doing something similar on the nearby Ohio River.

A few years back someone told me a dance concert had been performed on a barge anchored in the Genesee River (or maybe Erie Canal) where those waterways pass through Rochester, NY. The image of people arrayed along the shoreline watching the performance has fired my imagination since.

Even if you don’t live on a navigable waterway, something like this could be possible between towns connected by a railroad or a hiking trail like the Appalachian Trail. It could serve the double purpose of bringing performances to different communities in a novel way and getting those avid about outdoors activities involved.

Imagine your company arriving in town with an entourage of 30-40 hiker-campers. Along the way there could be commentary on the flora, fauna, geologic features and historical sites found along the route.

This is the sort of audience participation and interaction that everyone talks about, only it isn’t dependent on having a physical performance space.

(Not that passively listening to Talking Heads is bad 😉 )

Founder or Flounder? Being An Employee Is Okay

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Hat tip to Jari-Pekka Raitamaa who tweeted an article about mistakes people make when considering founding a tech start up. It occurred to me that the same basic advice could be given to people thinking about founding an arts company of some sort.

The basic premise of article by Jolie O’Dell, Stop founding! 10 signs you’re ‘employee material’ is that many would be founders need to get some significant experience working in a company before they decide to start one. And even then, they may be better suited staying as an employee.

You’ve never tried a real job
[…]
If all you’ve tried so far is freelancing, consulting, or agency work, founding is a pretty big leap. You don’t know about how companies run from the inside, about different management styles. You might have trouble forming and functioning in teams.

Why this is bad for founders: Founding requires commitment and longevity. Regardless of your C-suite title, in day-to-day operations, you’re functioning as a team lead responsible for managing a small crew of professionals. Experience in management with a corporate safety net is a boon.

Along the same lines, if you have only worked as a performer or only done short term administrative work for an arts organization, you may not have the skills and endurance to lead a small group through the rough formative years of the company.

You’ve already failed at one or more startups
We fetishize failure in the startup community, and we especially fetishize failing quickly. But regardless of the lessons you learn or the network you build, failure is still a bad thing.

In and of itself, failure is the universe telling you that your idea wasn’t good enough.
And it’s got nothing to do with execution. It’s your idea. Twitter was really poorly executed at first. It succeeded. Ditto for Facebook and lots of other consumer software. Ditto for a lot of programming languages. You can have wiggle room in execution for a truly great idea.

Why this is bad for founders: A string of bad ideas is more than just “throwing [stuff] at a wall and seeing what sticks.” It might be a sign that you’re jumping in too deep, too quickly. Fail at a few side projects, if you must. But be cautious about rushing into a new venture with nothing but failure under your belt.

The bit about fetishizing failure and failing quickly and often caught my eye (so my emphasis) because non-profit arts organizations are often criticized for their conservative approach and unwillingness to take chances and flirt with failure. To some extent, it may be to your credit to have embarked on a new endeavor and failed.

Still it is easy to fail as a result of ill-informed and conceived choices. The article makes good points about making sure you have learned from your mistakes before proceeding.

You can’t design or code (Translate as “You Can’t Directly Contribute To The Product”)

Lean startup culture says you need three archetypes for a startup: a developer, a designer, and a hustler. Traditionally, the hustler does biz dev, sales, hiring, and management tasks.

But what does a hustler do at a founding-stage startup, really? It often turns into long hours for long hours’ sake, lots of meetings with few outcomes, and boatloads of cheerleading and enthusiasm for a business that’s generating no income and has few or no users.

If you can’t pinpoint your exact skill set — and if your skill set isn’t unique, valuable, and directly related to product creation — you might want to take an employee position at a later stage company.

Why this is bad for founders: Creating a minimum viable product is often Task Number One at a lean startup. Your salary shortens the runway for such a nascent company, and you can’t sell, aka “hustle,” against a product that doesn’t exist yet.

While it might have been good to trim this one down, the bit about the hustler putting in long hours for long hours sake and doing a lot of cheerleading struck a chord.

True, the crucial function in an arts organization ends up being fundraising. But I am pretty sure the time is coming soon if it hasn’t arrive yet, given the expectations created by Kickstarter and its ilk, where it will be difficult to raise any sort of funding without some sort of interesting product example.

I suspect people won’t be as willing to give based only on the idea of a promising group creating good art. Unless you are in a position to pitch in and produce from the get go, your presence may be a hindrance rather than a help.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates didn’t bring Steve Ballmer on to run the business side of Microsoft until five years after the company had been founded and provided its first piece of software.

The arts are already full of people working unnecessarily long hours, don’t add yourself to their number.

Which leads to the next point:

Your big idea is unoriginal

[…]
If the market is saturated with variations on your idea, back slowly away from your drawing board and wait for your next big idea.

Why this is bad for founders: With too many competitors come too many problems. You might not be able to wedge your way into a crowded marketplace. Or you might get suddenly squashed by a drawn-out patent or other IP lawsuit.

Along the same theory that people probably won’t give to groups without a demonstrable product, new funding for old ideas and methods of producing art is probably not long for this world either.

Again, along those lines…

You don’t know what you want

Why do you want to be a founder? This is brutally difficult territory and requires immense passion and Herculean dedication.

Scratch that: It requires Odyssean dedication. You’re on a quest with no end in sight. Every task seems impossible. There are new difficulties around every corner.

So why the heck would you want to do that?

If you don’t have a clear vision, if you’re only running on the heady fumes of startup mania, you will most certainly fail.

Why this is bad for founders: Enthusiasm only goes so far. Only a heart and mind obsessed with a specific mission will be able to sustain you through the hard times that await you.

Again, founding an organization out of simple rejection of the current choices isn’t enough. Your vision can’t be predicated on, “We will different from them and do it better.”

What does that look like in practical terms? It isn’t enough to say you will be nimble and more responsive to change, you have to have an idea of what practices and infrastructure you need to have in place to make it happen.

The other signs Jolie O’Dell lists that I haven’t expounded upon are pretty apparent or closely related to the points I have already made: “You’re young and/or inexperienced”; “You have no network”; “You get bored really quickly”; “You have no net worth”; “You’re the primary breadwinner of a multiperson household.”

I am not saying people shouldn’t found new organizations. It seems pretty clear we need new ideas and new methods. These are just some important things to consider before you undertake such an endeavor.

Trading Time For Tickets

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So here is a question which may seem obsolete in an age of internet and mobile apps: Who is more important, the customer at the window or the customer on the phone?

Even though you may not face this particular problem, the question is one about expectations.

The situation I recently faced arose because our local audiences tend to buy their tickets over the phone or in person from our ticket office rather than online, at outlets or the Ticketmaster 800 number.

A musical act has been doing their Christmas show here for a decade and generally packs the house. This year I had the bright idea to send out postcards to everyone who had ordered tickets in the past. The postcard told them to ignore all the public announcements of tickets going on sale Monday, they could order their tickets the Friday prior in recognition of their loyalty to the group.

That Friday we had a line out the door and the phone ringing off the hook. I had two people at the window and one in the backroom on the phones. So that people didn’t get frustrated by the lack of an answer, I was in another room answering the phone and taking number to call back since we only had so many terminals to sell tickets out of.

After a half hour, we cleared enough of the line at the window to move another person to phone orders and returned calls to everyone on the list within an hour.

The issue is that people on the phone generally had an expectation of parity with the people at the window. If someone left their number with me at 10:15, they expected to get their ticket order in before the person who got online at the window at 10:30 and certainly before the person who happened to get through to the person handling the phones.

The truth is, it is pretty difficult to treat everyone in a completely egalitarian manner. It is difficult to ask the next person in line at the window to wait while you call someone back who called 5 minutes before they got there.

At the same time, you don’t want to give precedence to everyone at the window just because they made the effort to drive in. Many people only have one car or can only make a call during their 15 minute break at work.

Back in the day when the Internet was new and landlines walked the earth, you could put people on hold, attend to the person at the window and then go to the phone and back to the window. I am not sure the people on the phone especially would have the patience for that these days.

I would like to hear about policies and practices people have implemented that made this process seem fairer to both staff and patrons.

But I also wanted to note that Seth Godin actually recently addressed this issue on his blog. (my emphasis)

It seems egalitarian, but it’s actually regressive, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that different people value their time differently. People with time to spare are far more likely to be rewarded.

Another example: Call the company that sells your favorite tech brand and ask for customer service. You’ll be on hold for one to sixty minutes. Why do they do this? They can obviously afford to answer the phone right away, can’t they?

Like the mom who waits for the sixth whine before responding to her kid, these companies are making sure that only people who really and truly need/want to talk to them actually get talked to. Everyone else hangs up long before that.

You can hear the CFO, “well, if we answered on the first ring, more people would call!”

Again, at first glance, this seems like a smart way to triage with limited resources. But once again, it misses the opportunity to treat different people differently. Shouldn’t the really great customer, or the person about to buy a ton of items get their call answered right away? The time tax is a bludgeon, a blunt instrument that can’t discriminate.

Godin straight out acknowledges that people with more free time will get advantages. I quoted some additional text from him to raise the point that most arts organizations aren’t in a position of having the resources to answer calls immediately, but can genuinely be struggling to cover the phones.

I wonder if his suggestion about treating different people differently might be even more valid for those who have fewer resources. It could allow them to prioritize and focus on who is served.

Instead of the preferential donor/subscriber hotline which reinforces the social stratification the arts are trying so hard to distance themselves from, the preference could be predicated, as Godin suggests, on providing service to society.

Putting literacy volunteers and Habitat for Humanity volunteers at the front of the line could certainly show an organizations commitment to serving and improving the community.

The Long Arc Of Artistic Growth

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A few weeks ago the directors of the local museum invited me to an after hours talk by an artist whose work was showing in one of the galleries. Apparently the artist had floated the idea of doing a powerpoint presentation, but ended up talking about her work while walking around the gallery.

I am glad she opted for that because listening to her talk about how her process has evolved while referencing the different pieces in the gallery was much more engaging. Once she was done, everyone went scurrying back to the walls to look at the pieces in the context of her commentary.

For the last few weeks I have been wondering if a performing artist could be as effective and engaging talking about their process. A visual artist has a bit of a benefit in this regard.

When the artist I saw speak noted that she got more comfortable with the idea that she didn’t have to include the limbs in great detail when she was really interested in a person’s head and torso, the evidence was right before you as she compared an early work to a later work.

When an actor or musician says they did something one way in the past and now they do it this way and demonstrates the differences, you never know, they could be lying. Also the way they depict their style of performance in the past is informed (and perhaps infected) with everything they have learned since. They can’t perfectly reproduce their past imperfections.

This dynamism is what makes live performance interesting so we certainly don’t want people trying to ossify their abilities. It just doesn’t have the verifiable elements that visual arts have.

Ultimately, primary qualification for successfully talking about your process is being skilled at talking about your process in an interesting way. The artist I saw could have been just as terminally boring without a powerpoint as with.

I was reading an article in Boston Magazine about the incredible lengths to which a musician was going in order to audition for a percussionist spot on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every night he was sending excerpts of his practice to Christopher Lamb, the principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic. At one point Lamb responds,

“in the case of Ravel’s Boléro, a piece with a famously repetitive snare-drum part — “You’re too young, this is too fast for this old guy … relax, be more inviting.’”

After reading that, I wanted to know what did too young sound like, what does relaxing and more inviting sound like?

Would I, as a layman, actually be able to discern the difference or would I need to be a percussionist practicing 20 hours a day as this auditioner was, to even perceive the nuance?

What is the impact on the rest of the musicians if he is playing too young versus more relaxed, and does it have an impact on the enjoyment of the audience? Or is it just the other musicians who will really notice?

If there was a demonstrable difference between the week before and the week after he got the note, (versus comparing how he played when he was 15 versus today), it might be interesting to audiences to learn about “the change that landed me the job on the BSO.” (Well, he isn’t listed as a BSO musician, but you get the idea.)

In regard to theatre performances, they are often intentionally directed in opposition to previous productions so an actor could be equally brilliant at the same role in entirely different ways simply because the productions had different focuses. There can be both maturation of skill as well as an increased flexibility of approach that an actor can talk about.

All this got me wondering if artists conducting performance talks should move beyond talking about what they did to create the present work and talk about that evolution. The frustrations, mistakes and choices that had been made over time might help break down the perception of talent and inspiration being absolute things that are doled out to some and not to others.

People may be better able to identify and connect with artists who talk about a process of misses, self-criticism and evolution that parallels their own experience. Not to mention realizing that careers are not usually made on reality television shows.

Again it wouldn’t work for everyone. Some people won’t be skilled at keeping the conversation from crossing from self-examination and deprecation over to self-pity and recrimination, alienating their audience.

Anyone have examples of artist talks that they thought were done very well?

SoHo On Erie

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In the wake of Richard Florida’s advocacy for the creative class as harbingers of vitality in a city, a number of locales subscribed to the notation with mixed results.

Things aren’t as simple as providing fallow ground for artists, adding a little water and standing back to watch prosperity grow.

That said, I have been watching an effort in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood with some interest. Maybe the long term plan is to spur gentrification and economic vitality, but right now it looks like they are looking to create an artist colony and inject some vitality into a neighborhood.

They adopted the most aggressive approach I have seen in getting artists there.

What initially caught my eye was their offer of assistance with transportation, hotels and meals to artists across the country to help them attend a Welcome to Collinwood weekend earlier this month.

When artists arrived, there were all sorts of tours and activities for them, including an opportunity to check out houses they could buy for $6500 and fix up.

“Our $6,500 house program is a perfect opportunity for artists who want to create their own live/work space and don’t mind putting a little rehab and TLC into their property. We select houses that are in moderate to good condition, houses where rehab costs will be relatively low, and then give artists 6 months to make any necessary repairs to the property. After those repairs are complete, you own the house outright.”

If you aren’t in to rehabbing a house, they will do it for you at a cost that is less than market price–with a $1500 allowance for appliances.

And it appears they may even give you some work to do via grants for community art projects.

I am not sure how many people attended the weekend and it is far to early to know if anything positive will develop since it only occurred a few weeks ago. Anyone who is interested can contact them to get involved.

Obviously I would like to see this succeed. There are Weed and Seed programs where they offer housing to police officers at low prices and mortgages in order to help stabilize communities. I have no idea whether Collinwood is a high crime area or not, I just draw the parallel in order to express a hope that the introduction of artists to communities is shown to contribute to a similar state.

It isn’t enough to feel secure in your community, pride and excitement are important as well.

What Do You Sell Online?

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Okay, this entry is more a question for readers than any sort of discussion of issues. Basically, I would like to know how many price levels of tickets do you put on sale online?

When I was working in Hawaii, my colleagues at the other campuses and I put most of our base ticket prices for sale online- Adult, Student/Senior/Military, Under 12 and University Student.

When I arrived at my current job, I noticed only the top level ticket price for each area was listed online even though we offer just about the same discount categories as we did in Hawaii. Thinking it a mistake, I asked my box office manager why that was and she told me the software vendor suggested we only offer the highest level because people would take advantage.

[N.B. From a question I received, I wanted to clarify that this listing was on the purchase screen. When it came time to buy the ticket, they were advised to only let people buy full price tickets and not make the other price levels available. The other ticket prices were advertised both on and off line]

This was not my experience at all in Hawaii or other places I worked which also offered lower ticket prices online. Most of the time people wanted to pay the difference when someone couldn’t make it and they brought a person who didn’t qualify for discounts.

I admit I was a little riled when I heard that the ticket office was given this advice because I think that making people call or walk in to buy discounted tickets places a barrier to entry to many. I felt like this went against everything I have been working toward with my own practices and adovocating this blog.

Not to mention that someone can call and misrepresent their eligibility for discounts over the phone as easily as they can place the order online so you really aren’t preventing people who want to from taking advantage.

It’s not that my ticket office can’t ask that the internet site be set to offer more price levels, I just felt this advice reflected big corporate indifference. And that there was no effort on the company’s part to help venues facilitate the process for their customers.

But as I started to look around, I realized that many performing arts venues only seem to offer the highest level ticket online, even if they don’t use the same vendor we do.

So now my question is, what are people’s experiences and practices putting multiple levels of prices online?

Value Is Not Price

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The Drucker Exchange recently noted that the Cincinnati Reds and Michigan Wolverines teams have started using dynamic pricing, scaling prices based on popularity.

The Reds don’t provide much information about their structure, though they promise the price will never fall below whatever the season ticket holder pays. They set their base pricing at the start of the season per anticipated demand and start implementing the dynamic pricing two weeks out so it probably pays to buy early.

The Wolverines basically set their anticipated pricing from the start ranging from $65 for the Akron game, $10 less than last year, to $195 for the Notre Dame game, $100 more than last year. (And by the way, that is the lowest price tickets. Their top tier tickets for Notre Dame are $500.)

The piece on The Drucker Exchange says the mistake companies often make is to ask what customers value. This is aptly illustrated by the secondary market for those Wolverines games. You can get those $65 Akron tickets for $35 on the secondary market, but those $195 Notre Dame tickets seem to be going for about $319 already. (Single tickets go on sale tomorrow, 8/1)

Peter Drucker lamented how few companies recognize the importance of simply asking themselves what their customers value. “It may be the most important question,” Drucker noted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “Yet is the one least often asked.”

One reason for this is that companies think they already know. “Value is what they, in their business, define as quality,” Drucker wrote. “But this is almost always the wrong definition.” For example, for a teenage girl, “value in a shoe is high fashion,” while durability and price matter little.

“Another reason why the question ‘What is value to the customer?’ is rarely asked is that the economists think they know the answer: Value is price,” Drucker added. “This is misleading, if not actually the wrong answer.”

For instance, electrical contractors, while famously price-conscious, may prefer one of the most expensive fuse boxes on the market. “To the contractor this line is actually low-priced because it is engineered to be installed fast and by relatively unskilled labor,” he explained.

The ultimate lesson is simple but not easy: “The customer never buys a product,” Drucker wrote. “The customer buys value.”

(My emphasis on that last sentence on the Drucker citation)

There are many intangibles that factor into what people value. Will the Notre Dame game be three times better than Akron? Possibly. By game day in September, there is a fair chance the primary market tickets to the Notre Dame game will be four or five times more expensive than Akron, if not more.

There will be a point where the quality of the actual Notre Dame gameplay can’t be better than that of Akron in proportion to the difference in ticket price.

What people are willing to pay so much more for is the experience of tailgating and attending a potentially great game steeping in the palpable excitement surrounding the long rivalry between the two teams with thousands of others.

I have resistance to dynamic pricing for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with the relationship I feel we are trying to cultivate with our audiences.

The question is, do people really recognize and value that we are making the effort? Is it all pretty much one-sided? Many people don’t really discern between profit and non-profits organizations when making their entertainment decisions.

Are non-profits basically putting themselves at a disadvantage by not using dynamic pricing for shows that clearly will sell out months before the performance date based on a devotion to an audience that has no idea the organization has decided to suffer for their benefit?

There is a need to keep prices low to provide affordable access. If 900 people clearly value attending a performance that they will commit at $25 a ticket between one and three months before the show, do you really owe it to the last 100 people to maintain the $25 rate until they get around to buying tickets?

Or do you owe it to your long suffering staff to try to increase the revenue stream so you can pay them $12/hour instead of $8 by using dynamic pricing?

We aren’t sure about the investment of the community in your organization, but we can be more certain about the investment of your staff.

I am still a little uncertain about dynamic pricing. The issues aren’t as clear as I present them here. However, one issue I don’t generally see people mention in the dynamic pricing conversation is that by not using it you are potentially punishing your staff in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of much less value.

If customers show they willing to place a higher value on a product, should non-profits acknowledge that by placing a commensurately higher price on it?

What Should I Talk About?

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Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.

Info You Can Use: Generating Interview Questions

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I have only been at my new job for six weeks and already they have me on a search committee. Some may groan at the thought, but the position being hired will likely impact my area pretty significantly so I was actually relieved when I was asked to serve.

We had our first committee meeting today which was preceded by a training session on interviewing. In addition to reminding us about the usual forbidden subjects of age, race, religion, martial status, etc, the human resource director talked a little about a new approach the university was using with searches.

It is a little difficult to explain clearly here, but essentially it starts with the committee prioritizing the most important areas of the job (e.g. leadership, communication, experience, strategic vision, collegiality etc).

This would help us determine what questions should be asked at what stage of the process. If leadership and experience are top priorities and were going to make or break a candidate for us, we would ask questions that related to those areas during the phone interview phase rather than exploring collegiality.

At later stages we might have more questions touching on leadership and experience since they are high priorities, add in questions dealing with middling priorities to help us expand our impression of the candidates, but choose to only ask a few questions on low priority items or omit them altogether.

What really impressed me about this approach is that it keeps the early interview rounds focused and theoretically dictates how long latter phases of the interview process actually need to be.

Instead of saying, we should have the candidate meet with Bob because it just seems like a good idea, looking at the prioritization you may realize there isn’t any reason for an official meeting with Bob. If there is, a low prioritization might point to a 20 minute meeting or a meal alongside others rather than an hour long one on one meeting in Bob’s office.

Now, notice I say theoretically. Politics may dictate the candidates meet with Bob even in the absence of a compelling reason. That could be detrimental to the search. The HR director mentioned that searches often fail because highly qualified candidates can identify weak processes like undue focus in irrelevant areas.

There was one slide in the HR director’s presentation that I immediately knew I wanted to feature here on the blog. After the committee had finished its discussions, I ran down to the human resource office to ask her permission to share it with you.

It is a general template for the interview questions.  Clicking on the image will open a new window so you can refer to it and my commentary on it without having to back arrow.

Interview Guide Template. Used with permission. © Shawnee State University
Interview Guide Template.
Used with permission. © Shawnee State University

The bullet points on the left under “Leadership” note general activities the university has identified that person possessing leadership qualities will have/need to engage in.

The italicized text in the center is how these qualities are specifically exhibited in relation to this job. (This being an example document, they are exceedingly general.) Under that are the questions that are derived from this.

The Situation/Obstacle/Action/Results at the bottom allow the committee member to make notes about how the candidate’s answer touched upon these different phases during the situation being described.

What I really like about this format is that it places the elements from which the questions emerged on the same page with the question. There are always going to be answers you never anticipated when you envisioned the qualities of the person fulfilling the job. It is easy to become confused about whether the response illustrates that they are qualified or not.

But if you gaze down and see the answer being given touches upon all the qualities that comprise the foundation of the question, you can feel more confident about their qualifications.

I am looking forward to continuing in this process. I may end up with a different impression later on, though the search chair has used it in a few searches before and speaks highly of it.

No, Humanities Don’t Suck

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Some of you may be aware that there is a fairly active debate about the utility of humanities degrees in progress. Some governors are proposing students pursuing STEM majors pay a lower tuition than those pursuing humanities degrees.

There are studies that show while humanities majors make less than business and science majors right out of graduation, they end up making more 10-15 years down the road.

“Undergraduate professional degrees frequently lead to relatively high starting salaries and relatively flat pay scales thereafter. Humanities undergraduates may struggle more in the first few years after graduation, but in the long run they frequently find career paths with greater long-term growth potential; the skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking that we all talk about turn out to have real-world uses. Students and the general public legitimately worry about employability, but there’s no reason for us to surrender to the mistaken belief that humanities degrees are a poor investment.”

Studies like this and the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) are helping to collect data to refute the idea that humanities majors are useless.

The technical director for my performing arts center and I were talking last week when the conversation turned quickly to the value of the performing arts as a major that confers real world skills.

If you are reading this blog, you are likely already aware of most of them: You learn to plan a project invested with your own personal vision; research your portion of the project; present and execute your part of the project as part of a team.

Some arts disciplines require you to cross train in both technical and performance roles. All performing arts disciplines require the practitioner to possess some degree of empathy.

These are all skills that pretty much every business desires in an employee.

Then there is the big benefit–the unambiguous deadline.

One of the things I know drives college professors crazy is when a student says they can’t finish the paper and can they hand it in on Monday. If this option is denied, the student often enlists parents and administrators on their behalf. For all the good reasons the professor may have for not allowing this exception, a Friday versus Monday deadline appears to be somewhat arbitrary.

But when the performance time comes, that is the inescapable deadline. Well, I suppose it is escapable, but the time to “hand in” your assignment comes and passes with or without you. Whether it is submitted and what the quality of the work is apparent as are the consequences, if any.

One can always fake it and one’s parents will frequently speak praises regardless of whether they are earned. There is no guarantee a student will graduate with good organizational skills.

However, performance is an area where practical skills applicable to the real world are taught because the end product is meant to be consumed in the real world.

These are all skills that clearly do matter and have real world applications. The message that the humanities don’t matter undermines the teaching of these skills.

In the process of getting someone ready to give a public performance, there are many smaller scale performances conducted in more private environments. The stakes are much lower so it is easier to be irresponsible about handling your contribution.

But each one of these times instills the abilities needed for that big public performance. For many people that culminating event may not be on stage, but pitching an idea in the boardroom of Johnson & Johnson.

Artisanal ≠ Careless

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One of the questions on “Wait, Wait..Don’t Tell Me” this weekend referenced the fact that fast food giants were instructing their employees and robotic processors (which may be one in the same) to essentially dial back the quality control a bit to make food less perfect and more rustic looking in order to hitch their wagon to the artisanal trend.

Kinda makes you wonder when companies understand artisanal to be investment of less care and effort rather than more.

I metaphorically rolled my eyes (because I was driving at the time), thinking to myself that there are hundreds of performing arts organizations handcrafting works all over the country, but lacking an audience because people will really only pay so much for authenticity. Packaging that provides the rustic illusion at a cheap price will trump quality at the real price a whole lot of the time.

The reality is, there is a very real trend sustained by people who are willing to pay more for authenticity. And they aren’t all hipsters from the trendy side of town. What they value isn’t just the product, but a sense of connection with the creators/cultivators.

Most arts organizations haven’t found a way to do this in an engaging way while getting the marketing department out of the way. I am sure the primary reasons why the Trey McIntyre Project’s dancers are treated like rock stars is because the company has cultivated a public enough profile that people recognize them when they are out running daily errands.

In some cases, with a little imagination and patience, providing that sense of connection may be fairly easy to accomplish.

I went into the local art museum last Saturday. The main exhibit area was empty and the next installation won’t be in until mid-July. However, the new directors of the museum were in painting the walls getting the area ready.

When I finished looking at the permanent collection, I chatted with the directors since they were there and so readily accessible. Since I was senior to them, having started my new job a whole three weeks before they started theirs, I asked them if they had considered changing their Saturday hours, at least for the summer.

They open on Saturday afternoons an hour after the farmers market, which is held 50 feet west of their front door, closes. There are enough people visiting the market that they have to park a couple blocks east of the museum and walk right by the front door. One of the directors assured me that they had already started considering that change.

Then we chatted a little about Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog and some of the ideas for interactive exhibits she has written about. I mentioned the possibility of using some of their spaces for lectures and demonstrations connected with our shows in some of the museum spaces since they are only a block and a half from the performing arts center.

I left feeling good about prospect of future collaboration, but also for the future of the museum given that they were very visible in their space and eager to engage despite how busy they were.

I think this openness will result in an a sense of an “artisanal” experience/connection to those in the community who value it.

When You Invite An Artist To Dinner

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Last week I was invited to dinner to meet with a muralist who is in town painting the floodwall murals. I don’t mean to constantly harp on the small town charm I am experiencing here at my new job, but you write what you know, eh?

I have been thinking recently back to my childhood when my parents would regularly invite our teachers home for dinner. It wasn’t just my family. Every kid’s family seemed to take turns. We were all horrified because not only were our teachers invading our personal sanctums, but given we were Catholic school kids, our homes were being visited by nuns who kept us at the edge of terror!

I am not sure anyone does this any more, but this was the type of grassroots effort that let both the kids and the teachers know the community valued education.

I wonder if it might be effective to do the same thing with the arts where you invited your neighbors over to meet an artist.

I know a few groups that have house concerts by guest musicians as fund raising events. While that sort of intimacy offers a great experience, the type of people invited and the expectations placed upon them by the fund raising format aren’t really conducive to what I have in mind.

Having the party at the biggest mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood probably won’t make the arts appear accessible to new segments of the community either.

But a back yard cook out or dinner you would invite your friends to anyway, but in this instance you say, I would like you to come to dinner to meet this local/visiting artist, provides a low pressure environment that communicates that you value the arts.

The artist doesn’t need to perform or have their work on display. Just the fact they are the guest of honor to whom everyone is introduced at a gathering with good food and good company can be sufficient to influence attitudes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfb9hgmufI

Info You Can Use: We Are More Than Just Our Overhead Ratio

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Well, the timing could be a little better.

Part of the big news today is that GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance joined together to sign an open letter to all donors asking them not to use overhead as a primary criteria for giving.

The letter does a pretty good job in a short space of discussing how inaccurate the ratio is and the consequences for non-profits when they feel they have to hobble themselves to maintain a low number.

The letter specific cites Stanford Social Innovation Review‘s article, The Non-Profit Starvation Cycle which does a good job explaining the problem in detail.

The reason why I said the timing could be better is because it comes on the heels of a weekend where CNN has been majorly featuring a story about charities that have been fleecing donors with the causes only getting 4% in some cases.

Now make no mistake, I am not defending a 96% overhead by any means. There are a lot of scams out there and it appears pretty clear that the organizations featured in the story set out to deceive right from the moment they generated names that sound very close to nationally recognized charities.

My concern is that to people unfamiliar with charities, the timing of the letter’s release makes it almost appear to be an apologist for the high overhead ratios these dishonest groups had. Especially since a picture of the website of the one of the groups CNN damns contains a claim that Charity Navigator gave them a 3 star rating.

The proximity of these two announcements aside, the public recognition that charities should not be judged on overhead alone is a real advance in the effort to get non-profits evaluated on less superficial criteria. It will likely still happen for some time to come, but it is an encouraging sign.

You Wanna Be Where Everybody Knows Your Name

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As I have stated before, I grew up in a rural setting in upstate NY and just before I started blogging, I worked at a rural arts and music center. But now that I am paying much closer attention to the lives of arts organizations and the communities they try to serve, moving to work in a rural environment has given much greater insight into the impetus behind Scott Walters’ efforts on behalf of rural arts organizations that lead to the creation of the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education (CRADLE).

There may not be the financial support or audience attendance in numbers that larger cities and communities enjoy, but the impact of arts programs and opportunities can be much more immediate and apparent. This is not to say there isn’t just as profound an impact in other places, just that the feedback loop is that much smaller. Because everyone knows everyone, even if a person doesn’t make a comment about their experience to you, you are likely to hear about it from someone else.

Case in point, I met an administrator at the university early one Friday, later that day he got his haircut. That night his hairdresser, whom I had never met before, said he made positive remarks about me.

What has been interesting to me is to have confirmation of many of the benefits we in the arts claim we bring to the community.

People from the local hospital told me my arts center is important to the health of their organization because they generally don’t have problems attracting doctors to the area, but after a year or two pressure from their families often sees them moving away due to lack of activities. The better a job I do, the better it is for them.

The community board which helps us fund the bulk of our presenting was invited to have a fund raiser at a local wine store. The board had a band playing and the store owner had wine and beer tasting. The community board made quite a respectable amount of money that night so they were happy.

The owner of the shop said the arts people attracted the type of clientele he was looking for. They came, they chatted, they browsed, they bought. He was happy. I think everyone hopes there will be another opportunity to do that again.

Yeah, you can say this only reinforces the stereotype of arts people as effete wine drinkers, but you can grab a six pack of Bud in the supermarket. This business owner is focused on attracting people who drink wine and craft brewed beer and smoke cigars and the arts board helped to deliver them.

On the other hand, there were many people to just stopped in to grab a six pack and bottles who picked up performance season information and bought raffle tickets so the store potentially delivered new audiences to the theatre.

The last incident falls into the “big impact/change of life” category. This past weekend the local arts council had its first ever community arts awards event in my theatre. It was actually pretty well put together for a first attempt. Each award was interspersed with performances by youth performers.

I was surprised to learn that not only does this small town have an organization that teaches kids to do aerial acrobatics, but that the school is under the umbrella of the local museum. I am going to have to check it out. It may give Nina Simon and her Museum 2.0 a run for her money.

Probably the most conspicuous example of the arts impacting lives was the honoree who had been teaching piano for 60 years and so had a legion of people, from music teachers to kids attending top music conservatories, speaking her praises.

Among the other honorees were the Irish owners of the local pub who declared “what good is a pub without stories and music to fill it?” and the owners of a plumbing supply house who between them have sat on the boards of just about every arts organization in town.

There was a visual artist who had moved from Seattle and was instrumental in the founding of the local visual arts center. Known to be something of a recluse, the awards organizers went to his studio and made a really nice video of him talking about his art and his process. I wondered if the reception the film received from the audience emboldened him a little because he spoke a fair bit when he went on stage to accept the award.

Granted, there is a big fish in a small pond element to all of this. In terms of reaching numbers, a performer doing a show in Tampa impacts the lives of more people in one night than one of those honorees might in a year. Many times that is what foundations and granting organization are looking for.

But as I sat there Saturday night, I couldn’t help but think that what was happening in this town was what many arts organizations dreamed of. The results of an interaction with the arts, both positive and negative, and the bonds it creates between people are so easy to observe.

Person A and Person B may leave an event and separately speak about their experience with Persons C and D, respectively. No only is there a high chance that C and D will meet and speak about the experience related to them second hand, there is a good chance C will meet B, another person who actually attended, and get their view on the experience. All four then share a common bond around the experience.

Unless all four travel in the same circles, what is the chance that this interaction will happen often in a city of 300,000? Here it happens many times every day.

Obviously, there is a downside to this lack of anonymity. I was both amused and a little uneasy about having the an opinion of me by someone I just met come back to me via their hair stylist at a wine tasting that same afternoon. I am certainly going to have to step carefully at times.

But it also strikes me that for those willing to listen, it can be very easy to collect a fairly accurate view of the community without the need to resort to a lot of guess work.

Speaking of drinking wine and beer, this entry title brought to you by Cheers, of course

Drop And Give Me A Sonnet

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Recently, (though it could have been 6 months ago the way time flies for me) Howard Sherman pointed back to a Huffington Post entry he did a few years ago about how the theater community looks derisively upon community theater.

I don’t know that this will ever change. But I recently got to thinking in the context of the Pro-Am trend where people are making greater efforts to hone their skills and knowledge, should community theaters be pushed to do and expect more to serve the needs of Pro-Ams and improve their own proficiencies?

Even though this proposal may see funding diverted away from larger established organizations (which has actually been suggested often in any case), in the long term it may benefit the arts in general.

Now that I am back living in a rural setting, I drive past volunteer firehouses regularly. It got me to thinking, not only are these firemen volunteering to run into burning buildings, they have to undergo 50-100 hours of training, refresher training, maintain good physical condition and show up to a certain percentage of calls to qualify for the privilege of risking their lives.

Not to mention mundane maintenance, housekeeping and fund raising duties.

I started wondering if maybe there needed to be a bit of a cultural shift for community theater groups toward requiring people to take classes and training in order to participate. I know there are many organizations that are pretty substantial and offer classes, but most come together on a project by project basis and don’t engage in a larger education effort.

Those who work backstage have the best chance of gaining additional skills because they are often being taught by people with some sort of construction background. Still, often novices are integrated into the effort without much safety training in advance. And they can be limited to only learning the techniques the most experienced person knows if there isn’t any effort to bring in outside experts.

I think actors might suffer most if they are only involved on per project basis. They gain the experience of performing and can certainly advance. But since the director is responsible for guiding many people, there is really no opportunity to instruct actors about techniques and the process of experimenting and exploring one’s options.

Having classes can enhance the value of the organization overall. Teaching is an effective path to learning so even if the group handles the classes entirely internally, they end up a little better off than when they started.

Bringing in guest teachers for seminars, whether it is a person from the community theatre the next county over, a professor at the local college or a designer from the big city, is even more ideal. (And maybe the experience will cut down on the derision a little.)

Now you may think it an awful idea to require people to attend classes if they want to participate in a performance because it puts up a barrier to entry at a time when the arts are trying to be welcoming to all.

But I wonder if a lack of this sort of rigor has resulted in the attitude we are seeing today that artists shouldn’t want to be paid because they engaged in a fun activity. Taking a class won’t necessarily guarantee a person will become any more skillful, but they will be more aware of the dedication and investment involved.

I don’t think having a requirement that if you want to participate, you should want to get better, is that onerous.

The classes don’t even necessarily need to be separate from the rehearsal process, though only having them as part of the process is actually more elitist because the training is limited to those who are cast.

When you think about it, when sports teams practice they don’t arrive at the field and move to their assigned roles. There are a lot of drills that focus on the fundamental skills of the game, improving physical condition and endurance. Players are asked to perform outside of their accustomed roles. There are clinics occasionally given by skilled practitioners.

This happens at all levels of play because the expectation is that you will strive to be a better player at the end of the season than you were when you came to the first training session. People who aren’t willing to make that commitment get cut from the team.

So that is why I wonder what sort of results would we see if funding and influence were directed toward creating an environment where honing skills became the norm.

I have been thinking for 20 minutes of a way to say it without it sounding condescending without much luck, but this bringing influence to bear would of necessity include a culture shift which saw “professional groups” partnering with community groups to provide training and assistance. As I said, I don’t think there will ever be a time when community theater will be viewed with complete parity by professional groups, but the gap will never close without increased interaction.

Quality Endures

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If you have ever read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know he engages in an examination of the concept of quality. I wrote a bit about how it applies to the arts a few years ago.

In the post I made the following observation:

We go before legislatures and tell them that they should be concentrating on all the lives that have been changed and not numbers served when choosing to fund the arts. But when we get back to our offices, damned if it ain’t a lot about the numbers, eh?

In his book Pirsig talks about how he decided not to let his students know what grade they got on a paper but instead give extensive feedback about the work they did and how to improve. The students went crazy. The comments on the quality were well and good, but they wanted a quantitative measure of their success.

When you are running an arts organization it is much the same way. You love the comments about how great the show was, but what you really care about are a satisfying number of butts in the seats (or butts passing through the doors if you are a museum/gallery.)

I think we still face the problem that art for art sake doesn’t pay the bills. The numbers, both in attendance and income, drive us just as crazy as Pirsig’s students because it is the easiest thing to evaluate success on.

On the other hand, as I noted, in the absence of grades the A & B students rose to occasion and did better, the C students either improved or hovered in that territory and the D & F sunk. We all know that not all great artists garner the attention, and certainly the monetary compensation, they deserve. But many of them continue producing great art because they are either motivated internally or by the praise they receive.

Professor Longhair and Earl Carroll of the Coasters, both took jobs as janitors when their careers faltered. Both their careers came back to a degree, Carroll for example was the subject of a kids’ book, That’s Our Custodian, and toured with the Coasters on weekends because he seemed to value being around the kids.

“Mr. Carroll told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1988. “When they found out I was a rock ’n’ roller — I was on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo with Bill Cosby — the kids couldn’t believe it.”

He added: “Now they call me the star of the school.”

What endures in people’s minds about their experiences with the arts often doesn’t include the size of the crowd. Sure I remember attending a U2 concert with thousands of others, but I don’t remember the size of the audience for my first Broadway play (Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan) or the Steppenwolf company’s production of The Grapes of Wrath.

It’s the butts in the seats that make doing the show possible and it is a sad thing that talent often goes unrecognized and labors in obscurity while trendy, flash in the pan products get recognition. It is the quality of the people, both on stage and in the audience, that often makes being in the seat worthwhile and endures in spite of the absence of recognition.

Going Back To The Farm

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One of my favorite posts was one I did covering a grant report made to the University of Wisconsin-Extension, Putting Culture Back into Agriculture.

One of the great things about the report is that it talks about the impact of the Wisconsin Idea on the arts in that state with artists crisscrossing the state helping farmers and townspeople learn how to paint, write plays and learn how to sing together.

I put a number of great quotes in my entry, but one I omitted which seems just as relevant now as it was when UW-Madison President Glenn Frank said it in 1925:

There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama…. The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast complex and swiftly moving technical civilization born of science and the machine….

Even if you don’t see your organization as serving a rural community, the reflections by the grantees about what they did wrong in their approach to serving their community, how they rectified it and how things turned out splendidly just the same.

It isn’t often you see this sort of humility in grant reports and it can serve as an example of what to emulate.

Before There Was Rocco..

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…there was Anthony Radich.

Looking back at some of my old entries, I was surprised to find I had forgotten that five years before Rocco Landesman uttered his infamous blasphemy/straight talk about there being too much art, Western Arts Federation Executive Director, Anthony Radich had suggested killing off arts organizations.

So let’s euthanize some arts organizations. Let’s pull some of the nonprofit arts programming off the arts-production line and free up funding and talent for reallocation to stronger efforts–especially to new efforts tilted toward engaging the public. Let’s return to the concept of offering seed money for organizations that, over a period of years, need to attract enough of an audience and develop enough of a stable financial base to survive and not structure them to live eternally on the dole. Let’s find a way to extinguish those very large groups that are out of audience-building momentum and running on inertia. Instead of locking arts funders into a cycle of limited choices, let’s free up some venture capital for new arts efforts that share the arts in new ways with the public.

I guess everybody takes note of the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, but forgets about what the head of an equally important regional arts service organization says.

As with Rocco, the issue is much more nuanced than at first glance. I wrote about it and there was some good discussion on Andrew Taylor’s blog at the time.

If They Can’t Come To The Museum, Should The Museum Go To Them?

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Back in 2006 I wrote on an NPR story that is probably even more relevant now than then.

The story centered around the Museum of Online Museums, a curated list of museums of all sorts around the world that had online presences. As I noted, the philosophy behind it is

The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.

Since the site has a mix of well known museums alongside ones that were curated by amateurs, the story raised the question about who is qualified to call themselves a museum and what actually constitutes qualifications.

My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn’t necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven’t done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)

[…]

Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?

The same questions have been applied to who gets to call themselves artists/musicians/actors as well as what constitutes a legitimate theatre/opera/orchestra/dance company and who are just dabblers.

The answers have become more difficult to arrive at with the proliferation of so many channels of dissemination. You don’t necessarily need to have performed in an established location or be represented by a music label to be a successful and recognized music artist, for example.

Can Renting Culture Suffice?

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I am beginning the process of moving to assume a new job in Ohio. If you are reading this, either my computer is packed and on its way to a new home or I am.

Fear not devoted readers, I have prepared a number of entries to hold you over until my computer, internet access and myself shall join up again.

Back in 2006 I cited an article Bill Ivey and Steven Tepper wrote on the growing cultural divide. (No subscription needed for the link in this post).

They discussed the emergence and impact of Pro-Ams, Professional Amateurs, a term that was fairly new back then. There is a lot to consider about what they have to say seven years later. At the time, they felt there will be a cultural divide between those who had the time and resources to navigate their choices and involve themselves in pro-am pursuits and those who didn’t.

I have to ponder more if the signs indicate things are moving in the direction they warn against or not.

What did catch my eye upon review this time around is their suggestion that we are moving toward renting culture rather than owning it.

“A few decades ago, cultural consumption required a small number of pieces of equipment – a television set and antenna, an AM/FM radio, and a record turntable. Now cable television, high-speed Internet connections, DVD-rental services, satellite radio, and streaming-audio services all require hefty monthly fees. Even consumption that feels like a purchase, like an iTune download, is often really a rental…”

This lack of ownership has been reinforced even since then by incidents where Amazon removed and changed content that people had purchased.

I wonder does this work to the benefit of live performance if music, books and videos become viewed as more ephemeral? Does the value of engaging in ephemeral experiences rise?

Or does it give rise to a notion that it is all disposable, not worth valuing and preserving since you can’t own it but can conveniently request access on demand?

It could conceivably lead to both.

What Happens When We Lock 12 Artists In A House And Make Them…Draw!

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I am a long time reader of the web comic, Penny Arcade (sometimes NSFW) which is focused on gaming culture (online, console, tabletop) The creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, have been among the few people to actually make a living at it, though they have said it was a near thing a few times in their careers.

They have used their success to found charity that mobilizes the gaming industry to benefit kids and a successful series of conventions started in response to what they felt were inequities in gaming conventions.

They recently started an online reality competition, Strip Search, to find the next great web comic artist. The competition basically seems to be an attempt to give web comic artists exposure while making fun of the whole reality competition format.

They have them do goofy challenges like remembering trivia from a tour of Seattle and a drawing version of the telephone game in return for prizes. The elimination challenges are more focused toward an artist’s professional life- designing t-shirts and skateboard art to a client’s specs, interviews by the media and cultivating your brand by responding to social media praise and criticism.

The winner of the elimination challenge has to go before Holkins and Krahulik to draw a comic strip based on randomly drawn topics. The one drawing the worst strip has to leave the show.

This is where things really veer from the traditional format. While the artists draw, Holkins and Krahulik ask them all sorts of questions looking to unnerve them a little. Krahulik especially likes to say stuff like “CONTESTANTS 10 MINUTES! is what you will have in 30 minutes.” Then they make the contestants sit in the “shame hole” which is an SUV parked outside, while they judge the strips.

This may sound a bit torturous, but my view is that it is an attempt to satirize many elements of format. At the end of each episode, Holkins and Krahulik jump into the SUV with the loser and really encourage them to keep working and talk about their own experiences trying to get their careers off the ground. In a recent episode, Holkins gave one of the guys his contact information and encouraged him to contact him at any time for advice.

I think their aim is to both encourage the artist to continue and encourage their fans to support the artist. When I visited some of the artists’ sites, it appears they all got invited to the Penny Arcade Exchange conventions to speak on panels and gain more exposure.

Compared to most reality competitions, you might find this one a bit amateurish and unpolished. The production values aren’t high and Holkins and Krahulik aren’t the poised panel of judges you find on most shows. The result is some honest moments like a recent episode with audio of Krahulik cursing off camera at the prospect of having to choose between two well-executed pieces.

Ultimately, they do send someone home, but Krahulik refuses to enact the ritual destruction of the losing piece and instead gives it back to the artist to keep.

While manipulation of events and environment are the hallmarks of reality competitions, it seems like there are places Penny Arcade doesn’t want to go. For instance, while I have been watching, I found myself thinking that the contestants were being too nice to each other and complimenting their competitors’ skills.

It got me to thinking about why I thought it was necessary for them to less supportive of each other –or at least be edited to appear that way. Isn’t it tough enough to be in a competition that is broadcast all over the internet for everyone to comment on?

Heck, isn’t it tough enough just trying to make a living from being a visual artist?

It may not bring the prestige of a cable show like Top Chef, but in terms of artists using their success and following to help other artists, I think there is something there worth emulating.

I’m My Own Idea Czar

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La Piana Consulting blog had a post a few weeks ago about how the dynamics of non-profits can crush new ideas and creative approaches to problems.

Their last suggested solution to avoid this is to appoint an “Idea Czar”:

“Appoint an “Idea Czar” from outside the senior management ranks. This person becomes a human suggestion box, an ombudsman for creativity. Anyone with a novel idea that might answer a current challenge is invited to share it with the Idea Czar, who periodically reports on what he or she has learned at management team or board meetings. Then use those reports to dive deeply into a specific question that piques the particular group’s interest or that the CEO would really like the board’s or management team’s best thinking on.”

I walked around most of today pondering whether this could actually work. I mean, it would require someone with enough seniority and experience to be taken seriously by management, but who also hasn’t been around so long that they are cynical about the viability of ideas. Even if the didn’t discount them immediately, they would need to be idealistic and energetic enough to effectively advocate for the idea in the face of a resistant board and senior management.

I recognized fairly early on that in my venue the idea czar would be our assistant theatre manager. (I am fairly idealistic, but she tops me.) This made me realize that it isn’t enough to appoint someone on staff into the position, if you really want to break out of a status quo, the hiring process has to involve actively recruiting people who possess idealism and strength of character to advocate in the face of a tendency to say No.

Apropos of this, Barry Hessenius posted this week about how one can be their own best/worst gatekeepers in terms of openness to “good ideas, new thinking and ways to actually be better managers, administrators and leaders; opportunities for new projects, collaborations and ways of seeing our world.”

Just as this problem of gatekeeping can manifest on both a personal and organizational level, the solution can probably be implemented on a personal and organizational level.

It probably isn’t enough to appoint a person to be the company idea czar if the board and administration are going to perpetuate an environment that is hostile to new ideas. Management and leadership should practice self-advocacy by setting aside time each week to entertain new ideas in the same way 3M, Google and Hewlett-Packard give employees time each week to develop new ideas and products.

Management and leadership might use this time to read websites they bookmarked, jot down what interesting ideas they have and then go back to ideas they jotted down in previous sessions. I think this last step is important because realizing you had forgotten some of the great ideas you had had weeks before serves to reinforce that fact you have the capacity to have good ideas.

Even if none of those ideas ever travel from the idea journal into practice within the company, the very act of engaging with new ideas, looking at them, turning them over a little, before putting them away, helps the mind practice accepting and handling new ideas rather than simply rejecting them.

Good Reason To Create Art Isn’t Always To Create Good Art

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We are often warned that art, and solutions in general, created by committee isn’t any good and doesn’t please anyone. But I wonder, if everyone involved feels ownership in what is produced and it strengthens the community, does it necessarily have to be of high quality aesthetically?

The wide gazing eyes of Thomas Cott fell upon a project sponsored in Mexico by the Scribe paper company. The company attached a small apartment to a billboard to house the artist who would be painting an advertisement for the company.

Over the course of 10 days the artist took suggestions about what to paint submitted over Twitter. The result may never be hailed as a work of genius, but the project garnered a lot of attention for Scribe. (You can see section details here) I am guessing it also strengthened the company’s relationship with a good segment of their customer base.

I am not sure what sort of guidance the artist was given by Scribe about integrating suggestions into her work, but apparently about 50 were used on the billboard.

Let’s pursue art for art sake and strive for excellence always. But for as much as we talk about connecting with our communities, it can often have the subtext of “but only on our own terms.” As Howard Sherman pointed out, there is a lot of disdain for anything tinged as low populism community theatre.

The primary goal of a community theatre production may have less to do with creating good art than spending time accomplishing something in cooperation with your neighbors. Heck, most guys who go fishing don’t want to actually catch something, they want to drink beer with their buddies.

So we may talk about how the arts need to connect with their community, but are we really ready to produce art for community sake, rather than art for art sake, and run the risk of creating really bad art that results in people feeling more connected with each other?

It likely takes starting from a place where you put community connections first and the pride and ego of the organization second. Scribe could have ended up in a situation where they had their name attached to a really ugly billboard in a prominent spot and they had to figure out what was the minimum amount of time they had to leave it up before they could paint it over.

It takes courage to cede control in a very public way. Just as not every masterful artist has the ability to teach what they know to others, not every artist and arts organization has the ability to lead a project like this to a good outcome.

Is It Against The Law To Pay Me More?

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You may have heard about Dan Palotta’s recent TED Talk about how judging charities on concepts like administrative overhead ratios is hobbling their ability to solve huge problems.

He makes some persuasive points, though some of the concerns I had with his proposals when they appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog three years ago still remain.

Gene Takagi picked up on the talk and addressed legal considerations which would prevent non-profits from operating in the manner Palotta suggests. (Just to be clear, Palotta never suggests charities cleave to non-profit status.)

Takagi notes that charity pay scales are limited by laws governing 501 c 3s and so can’t compete well on salary if supporters show tolerance for doing so to attract the best talent. Expenditures are limited in much the same manner,

“If a for-profit spends 90 cents to make $1, it may be a perfectly acceptable profit margin, but if a charity spends 90 cents to make $1, it would be widely viewed as a terrible waste. As a result, many charities fail to properly report their fundraising expenses, and the IRS has raised the possibility of utilizing the controversial commensurate test, which addresses whether a charity is using its resource in line with its charitable mission…But this can’t be judged strictly on percentages, and charities should be allowed to experiment so if an honest fundraising and mission awareness-raising campaign fails, the charity isn’t slaughtered for it. The problem, however, is not the law, but the misguided public ideology of which Dan spoke.”

Charities are also often limited and discouraged from pursuing new revenue ideas by federal and state laws as well as popular sentiment.

I think the biggest question that this whole discussion raises for me is whether social attitudes are such that a for-profit company raising money for social issues will be tolerated. Given that people will give money to projects via things like Kickstarter without much consideration about whether it is non-profit or not, is the idea that non-profits do things that companies won’t due to lack of profitability and governments can’t/won’t due to lack of political will and expertise, over?

Currently I think there is a capricious element to Kickstarter campaigns that make it an unsuitable model for garnering long term support. However the very existence of such mechanisms may be shifting mindsets to a place where worthiness and overhead ratios are not mutually exclusive.

Rememberances of Lost Opportunities

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Via You’ve Cott Mail comes a NewMusicBox article on how the Mondavi Center is using Google Hangouts as a way to connect with audiences and perhaps as an update of the traditional concert talk.

Author Dustin Soiseth starts out talking about the ill-fated Concert Companion and the resistance to its use which helped to keep it from spreading.

In the context of my post yesterday decrying how social media was allowing people to escape from boredom and uncomfortable situations yesterday, when I read the article I thought, “now this is social media I can support.”

I know it can seem hypocritical to be against using social media devices unless people are reading what I want them to read, but having them semi-engaged is preferable to being entirely disengaged.

I mean, if you are on a first date with a person, if they are going to be surreptitiously using their devices instead of giving you their full attention, better they be looking up information on Neutral Milk Hotel so they can pretend to be a fan and try to make a connection with you than have them looking up cat videos on YouTube. (Not that I am speaking from experience.)

As I acknowledged at the end of my post yesterday, there is an inevitability to social media’s appearance/participation in arts events so it is important to find a way to make the experience constructive.

Soiseth points out much the same thing.

The use of supertitles in opera, while commonplace now, was quite controversial when it began in America in the 1980s. When Beverly Sills introduced them at the New York City Opera in 1983, she was called a “philistine” in The New York Times. In 1985, James Levine famously replied “Over my dead body” when asked about the possibility of supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera, and yet ten years later there they were, Met Titles in the back of every seat, and in standing room, too.

Concert Companion was rebuffed and now the technology is manifesting itself in performance halls in forms the arts organization doesn’t control. Though that opportunity was lost, other opportunities are presenting themselves.

Even though the Google Hangouts Soiseth attended/researched weren’t well attended, there appears to be some potential in the model the Mondavi Center is using. Some of the difficulties they seemed to face appeared to be related to awareness and lack of familiarity with the experience.

Organizations might even be able to replicate the Concert Companion experience by putting QR codes in their program books that people can scan at the change of each scene or movement in order to access notes on the performance at each juncture. After the performance, people can scan other codes for supplemental videos, discussion fora and the like.

We all know that even without an iPhone in hand, people are going to get bored and turn their attention elsewhere, look at their neighbors, read the program book, clean their fingernails, etc. It is okay to be bored.

Given that people are likely to become disengaged at some point and given that the presence of social media devices are only likely to increase, the prudent thing to do might be to provide an outlet for people’s impulse to grab their phones in the middle of the show.

Take the approach of: we would prefer you don’t pull out your phone, but if you feel you must, here is some interesting material to look at rather than to text your friends about going to the beach tomorrow. That said, this material isn’t going anywhere and you can look at it during intermission or tomorrow morning.

I can foresee that people may use hashtags or chat environments generated by the arts organization to discuss the performance during the show. My sentiment about that is the same as yesterday–encouraging audiences it some time to percolate in their brains and discuss it later.

Not to mention, the audience at large may potentially be upset by people spread throughout the theatre giggling as they try to outdo each other insulting the actors’ costumes.

On the other hand, that interaction may provide the arts organization more feedback about their show than they have ever gotten on a survey.

If you are feeling like I am flip flopping on this topic, I have to answer by saying it is a really difficult thing to address in an objective way. I don’t think the sentiments I expressed yesterday are at all unreasonable. I am concerned about what it means for society at large when people are afraid to be alone with their own thoughts.

But I also know that using a social media device during a performance and honestly facing the truths of one’s life are not mutually exclusive and room must be made for both.

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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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