State of the Arts

What If I Had Only….

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One of the perennial challenges arts organizations face is attracting a younger audience and the tendency of audiences to commit so late that you wonder if there will be one for your event at all. According to a recent blog post by Priya Parker (which includes her talk at TEDxCambridge on the same subject), this is a result of a paralysis millennials feel when faced with so many choices. There is a fear of missing out on a better option.

Parker has conducted many interviews during her research in which respondents discuss the paralysis they feel at the prospect of making the wrong choice.

“Am I setting up my adult life to be the way that it could optimally be?” one of my subjects asked aloud, speaking of her general approach to life decisions. This subject explained how FOMO could even invade the pursuit of a spouse: “On the personal side, there’s this fear of ‘Am I committing to the right person?’”

More and more, particularly among those who have yet to make those big life decisions (whom to marry, what kind of job to commit to, where to live), FOMO and FOBO – the “fear of better options” – are causing these young leaders to stand still rather than act. “The way I think about it metaphorically is choosing one door to walk through means all the other doors close, and there’s no ability to return back to that path,” one subject told me. “And so rather than actually go through any doorway, it’s better to stand in the atrium and gaze.”

Those with the most options in this generation have a tendency to choose the option that keeps the most options open. Wrap your head around that for a second.

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Many of us watch the choices of our peers and predecessors with a blend of admiration and anxiety. What seems to afflict this cohort – more than the political strivings or existential angst that defined earlier generations of elites – is a persistent anxiety about their might-have-been lives, about the ones that got away.”

I don’t think it is much consolation for art organizations to know this is something of a personal problem because ultimately, your audience’s problem is your problem. But once you have created an appealing work, communicated the information through appropriate channels and made it easy for those last minute decision makers to gain admission to your event, there may not be a heck of a lot left to do but watch and wait.

Obviously, this also has some implications about the development of creativity, a quality that seems to be receiving greater amounts of attention. It was apparently the a cover story of this weekend’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Review. Cultivating creative ability requires a lot of trial and error, especially the error part. You get better by learning from your mistakes. If Millennial are risk-averse, they may be too reluctant to commit themselves fully enough to make great creative strides.

In fact, in her TEDxCambridge talk, Parker mentions a number of related practices that inhibit creativity. One in particular was valuing success over mastery where when given the choice of spending two hours networking over coffee or two hours working on honing their artistic abilities, “they will always choose the coffee.”

Granted, every generation has been accused of being less accomplished than the generation before. Though that is usually by the preceding generation, Parker is speaking about her own generation. In the context of so many sources saying creativity is important, it will be worth paying attention to whether this approach to life will ultimately be a problem for the Millennial generation.

Transcending Expectations

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Back in December I wrote about the production of First Person: Seeing America we were hosting. I had described it as something of a live documentary with the narration, images and music all being performed in front of you rather than having the narration and music underscore the images as it might in a documentary on the History Channel.

The performance occurred this past weekend and it was just as terrific as I anticipated. They did an outreach service for the school today where they explained the process they went through in picking the text, music and images from the thousands of available choices. I was pleased that even with the limited exposure the audience had to the content of the show today, they experienced enough to realize how moving some of the pieces were even for the artists. One of the questions asked was whether the artists gave each other the time they needed to work through their emotions when they became affected by them.

But now that the show is over and the group has moved on, I can confess my embarrassment at mistaken assumptions. The production features NPR talk show host Neal Conan, actor Lily Knight and chamber music group Ensemble Galilei. I loved the concept of the multi-media production from the moment I first heard about it. I was disappointed that one of my consortium partners had managed to grab the show before me. Our geographic proximity precluded my being able to present them. I was pleased when he approached us to partner with him on the production. Yes, I wasn’t his first choice of venue, but who cares.

The mistake I made however was thinking that the production was brainchild of Neal Conan. I just figured the guy with the current affairs radio talk show would be the one who pulled people together to create a history based multi-media production. I mean, a group focused on performing something as staid as early music wouldn’t be creative enough to put a production like this together, right?

Actually, yes.

I spoke to group member Carolyn Anderson Surrick and she said that the initial idea came when she saw a phone card with pictures taken from the Hubble Telescope in a shop. She realized that the images were in the public domain and thought she could do a better job using the images than put them on a phone card. Their first project, A Universe of Dreams, brought poetry, music and images from the telescope together.

Their next project, First Person: Stories from the Edge of the World, used images from National Geographic in a piece about exploration. The current piece, First Person: Seeing America, deals with American history. While Conan has been involved with each of these projects, it was Ensemble Galilei which initially conceived of the idea.

I mention the show because this is probably a good example of how arts groups need to transcend expectations in order to make progress these days. Ensemble Galilei didn’t reinvent themselves or really compromise their identities to accomplish this.

Surrick said they played to the strengths of the ensemble which is early music and Celtic. She said people suggested they do a piece about the Works Progress Administration (WPA) but they felt it would be necessary to have more jazz oriented music to do it correctly. While they might be able to fake it, whatever they played wouldn’t elicit the same frisson experienced when the appropriate music and text came together.

I will acknowledge that one of the biggest drawback with transcending expectations is that you also transcend an audience’s familiar frame of reference. As I mentioned before about shows that shared this quality, you have to work all the harder to explain your new approach in the small window of attention people allow you.

In this instance, some creativity with the show description, the name recognition of Neal Conan and Ensemble Galilei with their respective fan bases brought in respectable ticket sales. But we doubled our sales in the 48 hours after a two page spread appeared in the weekend section of the newspaper. Once people invested enough time to read about the show and understood the concept, they really became interested.

What Values Matter In Arts Grad Training Programs?

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This weekend Scott Walters quoted an extensive comment made on another blog about the value of MFA acting programs. The gist is, students are ill served by the programs which need to focus on training students for 21st century opportunities.

This struck a chord with me because I had recently read a Fast Company article about how UC Berkeley’s Business School started to screen applicants based on whether they embodied the school’s core values. The school had decided to embrace these values in the interests of creating a “reduction of overconfidence and self-focus, which are perceived to be excessively present among the business graduates and leaders of the top business schools.”

At the time I read it, I was idly wondering if arts training programs at the master level might do something similar to address any perceived (and real) problems with those they graduate. It had been a long time since I was in grad school so I didn’t feel I knew enough about the state of things write a post about it. Having read Walter’s recent post, I am no more certain than before since it is the view of a single unidentified commenter. I do feel fairly confident in assuming that, as with most things, there is room for improvement.

I will readily admit that given my ignorance of the state of things, I don’t have any concrete suggestions about they might be done differently. I will say that one thing that stood out in the Fast Company piece was that Berkeley-Haas instituted significant changes in their program based on their stated values and then required their applicants to adhere to them.

Most remarkably, they are not simply communication tools but drive operations from the curriculum, research priorities to staff programs, and faculty hiring. The curriculum, for example, has been extensively revamped in order to introduce elements of creativity, innovation, collaboration, ethics, and social responsibility.

They made sure they embodied the values before they required the students to do the same. It would have been much easier for them to decide to implement the change by altering their admission criteria and assuming that choosing the right students would result in producing the right graduates. But that is less likely if the infrastructure surrounding the students doesn’t emulate and reinforce the values the school wishes to cultivate in its graduates.

Successful realization of any goal is easier for any entity if all members are aligned toward attaining it. Probably the most powerful thing an arts training program can do to convince applicants that it can prepare them to ply their craft in the current environment is to point to a major realignment of priorities to that end.

As the commenter that Walters quotes, SayItLoud, notes, theatre training programs often cite successful graduates and places their students have worked or can intern at. As impressive as that is, the reality is the path those graduates took to success may no longer be viable.

What training programs may really need to do is say to applicants, “We’ve changed ourselves from top to bottom and what success requires now is to push you off the conventional path. This is not the place to pursue training in becoming a triple-threat, actor/singer/dancer. You may have become a video editor/painter/acrobat or a ecologist/architect/percussionist or all six plus four things we aren’t mentioning. Do your interests, values and practices align with ours?”

At the very least, it will get everyone thinking about the whole training process. Given that the current conversation is that arts organizations need to change the way they operate and interact with audiences, you aren’t leading students astray by telling them they need to obtain a wider spectrum of skills. Like as not, they will be the ones helping to drive the change with the types of works they develop.

What Must They Think Of Us

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In diplomacy terms, soft power is a nation’s culture and values as opposed to their economic and military power. Some institutions like McDonalds and Apple cross some of the boundaries between these three areas. For better or for worse, they represent aspects of both U.S. culture and economic power. This week I came across a blog post on the Voice of America (another channel of U.S. soft power) by a student from China who is studying in North Dakota.

I was a little chagrined to learn that everything Dandan knew about the U.S. before coming here, she learned from soap operas.

“When I was still in China, the only American art or entertainment I knew about was the American soap operas. In fact, I got my initial impression of America from “Criminal Minds,” “Sex and the City,” “Gossip Girl” and so on. Although these soap operas were quite ridiculous, even to my eyes, I still believed that most often they presented what was really going on in America.

These soap operas told me that the crimes in America almost existed everywhere and could be extremely disgusting, that everyone has sex and is open about talking about it, and that people in the Upper East Side were presumptuous and arrogant.

Yet when I came to America, the first lesson I learned from my classmates was that soap operas are not as popular as I expected, at least not amongst college students. Lots of people I know haven’t even watched one episode of those “famous” soap operas.

She goes on to talk about how impressed she was by a college theatre production. She also quite taken with her participation in a slavery simulation where she was sold in slave auction and escaped into the night hiding with others in basements until they reached freedom in Minnesota.

I think the arts community may need to add “tools of positive diplomacy” to the rationale for funding and look into getting on the State Department’s cultural ambassador program expanded. There is a lot of counteracting of our national image that apparently needs to be done abroad and we don’t always have to send the big symphonies, Broadway tours and ballets overseas in order to accomplish it. Not everyone is going to be able to see the big American company in the big performance hall in the major city. Smaller groups can bring interesting experiences to other places within countries.

Sure, it is in the best interests of some countries if the citizens have a poor impression of the United States. I figure if we can negotiate to have our military based placed on foreign soil, we must have the skills to create more opportunities for expressions of U.S. culture abroad. China, France and Germany have their Confucius Institutes, Alliance Francaise, and Goethe-Institut, respectively. The U.S. has the Peace Corps as one of its exemplar soft power organizations. Maybe we need an Arts and Culture Corps, too.

Honestly, I think the need and benefit of cultural exposure is probably mutual. U.S. citizens need the experience of traveling and performing abroad as much as people of other cultures need to be exposed to something other than our television programs.