State of the Arts

Well, if I hadn’t actually gone looking at the Cultural Commons website yesterday on my own initiative, I would think maybe I was set up. After talking about how many partnerships failed yesterday, I come across a success on Artsjournal.com today.

Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte (NC) have embarked on a joint venture with both occupying same building. The result, called ImaginOn, is an organization that isn’t quite a library or a theatre, but a little of both with museum qualities thrown in.

There are separate areas for children, tweens and teens. The whole project is quite innovative and exciting and might provide a possible template for libraries (and theatres) in the future. Especially given that big performing arts centers don’t seem to be doing very well these days. Witness this story on Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center and Andrew Taylor’s coverage of the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts’ decision to get out of the presenting business.

I have talked about how arts organziations desperate for their own survival have pooled resources to allow them to occupy the same building. But those organizations didn’t integrate themselves as well as these folks in Charlotte.

Also, according to the article, the groups started to explore a partnership back in 1997 before the opportunity to have a joint facility ever emerged.

The article also doesn’t hide the fact that the collaboration didn’t come easy. “But for all the shared, there were still plenty of differences, such as funding sources, governance, management, and organizational culture.”

My hat is off to these folks for overcoming these difficulties and recognizing what assets the other guys brought to the table.

They are singing my song over at the NY Times today. If you didn’t catch it via Artsjournal.com, check it out here before it disappears into the paper’s archives and you have to pay for access-So Many Acting B.A.’s, So Few Paying Gigs.

While I am not rabid about it, I have considered it my mission over the last twenty years or so to attempt to dissuade people from going into acting as a career. In my mind, people romanticize their ability to go to New York City and get an acting gig after a short period of suffering in a chic spacious warehouse loft. That’s how television and the movies portray it after all.

The NYT article however echos some of my sentiments.

“It’s just tragic how many people want to go into this business,” said Alan Eisenberg, the executive director of Actors Equity. “These schools are just turning out so many grads for whom there is no work.”

“We’re producing too many people,” Mr. Steele [executive director of the University/Resident Theater Association] said, “many of them poorly trained or moved into the field without the connections or relationships necessary to make their transition to a career possible. It’s as if medical school were graduating people without giving them internships at a hospital.”

“Twenty years ago, you didn’t sense the kind of urgency these kids have now,” said Mr. Schlegel, who represents many successful New York theater actors…”Now they think if they don’t get signed by an agent right away, they’ve failed. They never think they’ve got to learn the ropes a bit, get seasoned. They want to know, ‘Where’s my TV series? Where’s my film audition?’ It’s wrong, of course, but that’s what they think, and in a business where we fall all over the young ones, you can’t blame them.”

As you might imagine since these acting programs need people taking instruction from them in order to justify their existence in the university, none of them are reducing the number of students they are graduating. Rather they are including classes in how to get jobs upon graduation as part of their training regimen. Students learn about auditioning effectively, networking, etc.

Just for the record, I don’t know if I have ever dissuaded anyone from going to NY or LA to pursue their dream. Honestly, I never expect my dire pronouncements about how tough the market is, how there will be 10 other people with their level of talent who look just like them at every audition, some of them will have more experience and are a surer bet. Then there are the minimum 10 other people who are better looking, more talented and more experienced who are showing up too. I also go into the cost of living in New York City, the crime, the cold, the dingy apartments, etc.

Its hard to picture that your mind for the glow of stars in your eyes. My sole hope is that knowing what I have told them, they make semi-realistic contingency plans to deal with all potential problems I have mentioned.

One last quote from the article I want to feature in an admittedly snarky attempt to further comment on the American Idol entry I made yesterday.

Ms. Hoffman’s auditioning seminar is one effort to iincrease the responses. Too much vibrato, Ms. Hoffman told a young man who sang the U2 song “With or Without You” and finished each line with a lovely tremulous quiver. Vibrato is more expressive than communicative, she said; in an audition, you want to communicate.

He still had trouble. “It’s really hard, I know, to stay on pitch when you’re straight-toning,” Ms. Hoffman said, this time adding, “So you can add the vibrato if you feel yourself sliding off.”

That is one lesson I took away from observing auditions at a training program with which I was once associated. Vibrato might sound impressive and appeal to the crowds, but it can indicate a lack of mastery of ones vocal instrument.

About a month ago, I talked about some changes proposed for the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Conference which the organizers hope will provide the members with the opportunities they need to do business.

Last week, WAA posted the results of Key Person’s Interviews they had conducted on the discussion board of their website. The discussion board is password protected for members only, but I have received permission to reference the results here. I offer this information to my readership at large more or less as information about trends rather than specifically offering a lot of opinion and analysis (though I will offer some!)

Artists agents/Managers and Presenters were interviewed and the results really begin to illustrate, at least for me, why WAA felt the need to change the format. In certain areas there really exists a fairly large gulf between the two groups. Some of it can never be fixed because as a member of one group, you have priorities that you can’t share with the other group and still do your job.

In other areas there is room for coming together.

One of the main goals of attendance for presenters is networking with other presenters-

“While exhibitors come to the conference with presenters as leads/prospects/targets, presenters come to the conference first and foremost for peer-to-peer interaction with other presenters.
“…opportunities for casual, relaxed, and face-to-face conversations with colleagues, including ‘deep discussions about art,’ seem to be very high on the list of presenter priorities at the conference.
” Face-to-face networking is one of the most significant factors in the curatorial process (III)…Comments to the effect of ‘�WAA should be about relationship building’ were very common.”

Artists/Managers/Agents however feel they are in an adversarial position in some instances with presenters. Many felt that presenters didn’t understand the economics of being an exhibitor as well as the artist/agents understood the economics of being a presenter. There are also mentions of a “cliquey” nature of the conference contributing to the Us vs Them atmosphere.

Others commented that they felt the presenters attending were viewing the conference as a vacation rather than a place of serious business. I wonder how moving it to Los Angeles from places like Albuquerque and Spokane will impact this feeling. There was a comment that presenters at APAP in NYC are much more business like, but I wonder if that is just because there are so many in attendance, no one notices if people have wandered off to go shopping or see a Broadway show.

On the other hand, maybe they weren’t attending WAA to conduct business but rather just scouting. There was another group of responses that exhibitors felt the people from presenting organizations in attendance weren’t empowered to make decisions.

Even more distressing perhaps for the artists/managers, among the results of the survey of presenters was that there was little relationship between showcasing and deciding to contract performers. I wonder how many people will showcase next year knowing that presenters aren’t necessarily making booking decisions as a result.

One thing both sides could agree upon was the despairing lack of ethics some presenters were exhibiting, particularly in terms of breaking contracts and agreements. Of course, no one considers themselves unethical so the last two conference sessions I have attended on ethics have been sparsely attended.

Some interesting state of the arts type results from the interviews, some of which will surprise few people.

” Presenters are moving toward more conservative programming choices because the ‘bottom line’ is factoring into programming in a much more significant way than prior to 9/11…

o Exhibitors seem concerned, even resentful, that presenters seem to be booking more pragmatically these days…

o Many exhibitors perceive presenters, particularly those in the West, are making a shift to more thematic programming and programming that is more intricately tied to arts education programs and/or arts programs within presenters’ host institutions.

I actually wrote about an aspect of this last trend right after I returned from the WAA conference. Ironically, all the schools mentioned in the article are on the East Coast so if it isn’t a trend they are noticing there yet, they will quite soon.

One last bit to mention before I am done. I have saved the best for last. There was one bit of feedback from artist/manager/agents that knocked my socks off and I wonder what it portends.

“Many exhibitors believe that the business has not changed for them, although they see it changing around them. Most exhibitors had a clear idea of their mission or vision. They’ve been doing what they’ve been doing, their niche, their network of peers and presenters, etc. were all slowly evolving.”

I really wonder what this means. It can’t be that everyone else is changing but them. Are they simply too close to the changes they are going through to notice. Or perhaps it is true that their niche is changing and they aren’t and they are feeling the adverse effects of deciding to resist the change but don’t feel they have the skills to compete in the changing world. Instead of admitting things are changing, they hold the belief it is not for them because in that scenario, they continue to be successful.

There were some additional results that might bear this out.

“A few younger exhibitors/firms clearly were aggressively seeking a continued path of growth and evolution. It was this group of exhibitors who articulated the desire to be part of WAA but not the need to be part of WAA. These are the ‘change agents’ of the industry, typified by gaining their experience at larger agencies, going out on their own and aggressively sticking to their business plan, or constantly re-aligning their business plan to respond to outside pressures/dynamics. They are agile, fearless and most like their contemporaries in other industries.

So young folks, seeing the direction things are going, leave a big agency they have worked at for years and start their own business with an eye for responding to the ebb and flow of the shifting marketplace.

Of course, there are the other guys–

“The antithesis to these ‘change agents’ were the ‘old school’: [the] impression is that some don’t see/feel the need to change their small, niche business even while they are keenly aware of how small the marketplace is for their art form and how much economic pressure the presenters are facing.

It seems of late that Andrew Taylor’s writing on Artful Manager has been been inspiring me to connect ideas he presents with those I found in other articles. My entry yesterday is one recent example.

Usually I feel elated and proud of myself for seeing connections between ideas from different places. Some thoughts his writings evoked yesterday were rather disturbing though. I started thinking about subjects everyone wants to think they are on the right side of, but if they make an honest assessment, find they share a burden of blame.

I was reading Andrew Taylor’s Measuring Value keynote speech delivered to the NJ Theatre Alliance. It is mostly a discussion of how any institution or individual that is providing funding to a non-profit concern wants to track the value of the non-profit’s operations on the community. People and institutions are interested in a return on their investment be it serving greater numbers, how effectively these numbers are being served or any other criteria.

He goes on to note that as time goes by, it is the measures that define arts organizations rather than the mission and the elements of the organization that make it unique.

Nothing terrible about this to be sure. But it was a couple sentences he quoted that elicted some memories of other articles. The first is from psychologist Kenneth Kenniston:

“We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up.”

The second is from two attendees at the conference at which Andrew spoke:

“Said one participant, “we’re constantly trying to fit ourselves into what others want us to be.” Said one funder on a panel discussion, “We’re moving away from relationship-based philanthropy,” toward funding based on matrices and aligned with corporate brand.”

I recently read two articles where school focus on what type of graduates they were producing lead to some discomforting results.

The first was Jonathan Kozol’s article in the September issue of Harper’s magazine, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid.” Among the educational disparities he notes, (and as you imagine, there are many) is that at affluent schools, students have choice of electives like journalism and computer graphics while the poorer schools had vocational courses like multiple levels of hair dressing and sewing.

Essentially, there is an expectation about the jobs students at each school will fill when they graduate regardless of their achievements or aspirations.

I mention this as something of a counterpoint to another recent article, this one from the New Yorker, “Getting In- The social logic of Ivy League admissions.” by Malcolm Gladwell. He basically talks about how the Ivy League schools shifted from merit based admissions to other criteria in order to keep their student body a predominantly WASP demographic.

Among the criteria, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen, which Gladwell quotes, were manliness –

“The admissions committee viewed evidence of ‘manliness’ with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him…”

Things that kept people out of the Ivy League were equally intangible-

“…they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.”

The Ivys’ focus shifted from merit

“to a ‘best graduates’ approach to admissions…The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance.”

True, academic success doesn’t equal success in the real world.(Witness Harvard grads and C students, George W. Bush and John Kerry.) This is another example though of how measuring the success of schools by the type of human being they promote can have negative results for certain groups.

I am not saying the No Child Left Behind measures are good. I actually slogged through writing all this to make the following suggestion–if this sort of institutionalization of expectations happens from middle schools all the way up to Ivy League, is it occuring in our arts organizations as well?

The Ivys are doing this sort of thing, Gladwell says, to protect the perception of their brand.

In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, “In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain.

He also uses the following anecdote:

“I once had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his client’s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brand’s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable.”

Though this example has a tinge of racism, this is a real concern for any brand–“Sometimes when companies try to create more of a mass market, a lot of the early adopters feel the brand is being bastardized,..”(from Entrepeneur.com)

So reading these different articles this week got me thinking. Are arts organizations trying to protect their brand either consciously or unconsciously by keeping the bulk of the perceived undesirables out and just letting a token few in? We talk about needing to diversify our audiences and perform outreach to different communities. But do we really want them showing up?

The Kozol article cites schools claiming “rich variations in ethnic background” but in actuality had 2,800 black and Hispanic students, 1 Asian and 3 whites. When arts organizations are claiming to have diverse audiences, are they basing it on similarly tilted numbers? Are they only expending energy and resources to maintain a ratio at which they feel comfortable using the “ethnically diverse audience” tag.

I am not saying it is intentional or maliciously done. I am just asking people to honestly examine the situation the arts are in and figure out if the system is placing limits on who our organizations can appeal to.

If as, I quoted in Andrew Taylor’s article, arts orgs are feeling pressure to conform to a corporate brand or be what other people want us to be (ie people with money), what about feeling pressure to maintain a certain aura for individual patrons? There are certain types of people who give lots of money who essentially keep our doors open. Are we afraid they will stop giving if they feel our ballet/symphony/theatre loses its cachet?

When we read in Kozol’s article or hear on the news that in New Orleans the affluent moved to the suburbs leaving the poor in the city, can it help but enter our subconscious that if the affluent leave us, those left won’t have the means to regularly buy enough tickets or donate enough money?

I am sure there was similar hand wringing at some point over whether offically telling people not to worry about dressing up, it is okay to come in jeans, was going to destroy the brand. That hasn’t driven too many people away. But with the whole controversy over the inconsiderate patrons who come in late and talk on their cell phones or to their friends, there is already additional erosion to the brand transpiring. Can arts organizations afford to risk further potential damage to their public image?

You may damn me for being so politically incorrect and posing these insensitive questions. I am partially playing devil’s advocate, but partially serious. You may think your company is enlightened and doesn’t have any of this taint upon them. But really, unless you are wholly independent of private, foundation or government funding, I feel safe in saying you ain’t as pure as you think. I am certainly not making that claim and I live in a place where I am in the ethnic minority.

When I talked about arts organizations bearing some of the blame at the beginning of this entry, I was essentially referring to a situation I have talked about before where organizations say they aren’t elitist, but don’t make an effort to alter that perception either. I think all these questions I have posed about fear of brand erosion contributing factors to this reluctance to act. (That an some are elitist.)

But at the same time, as I noted, arts organizations are in a sort of trap of expectations. We can resolve to honestly change our programming and really go about cultivating a new audience over the long term and making our offerings accessible to them. There are foundations out there who will be thrilled to underwrite it in return for…you know it…reporting measurable results.

It is a lot tougher to change audiences and donors. Many of the decisions they make are beyond an organization’s scope of control. If they want a Cadillac and they feel you are offering an Elantra, they may leave. When they leave, the Cadillac dealer and the real estate company that specialize in multi-million dollar homes who both underwrite your shows each year may decide to leave as well. (I have seen the ad the bank puts in my playbill and the one they put in the symphony’s playbill. Its pretty clear whose money they value more.)

Then maybe some of your board members leave because they no longer have the opportunity to socialize with the people they want to network. Your fundraising capacity suffers a little more because now you no longer have the matching funds for foundation grant proposals.

In the face of such possible outcomes, is it any wonder an arts institution might feel they were making their organizational identity subservient to measurable outcomes and brand identity? Is it any wonder they keep desperately catering to a segment of the population that is quickly dying off? (And not just for their $10 billion in bequests!)

From the “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” file.

Last week, Artsjournal.com linked to a Backstage story about a Republican proposal in the House of Representatives to get rid of funding for the NEA, NEH and PBS. Looking at donation rates from 2001, they concluded that “The funding could easily be funded by private donations.”

The proposal was part of the Republican Study Committee’s “Operation Offset” report which looks for ways cut the federal budget to pay for the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Now there are many arguements one may make against this certainly. But what inspired my entry today was the recollection of an entry on the Artful Manager a month ago about the delay in the Senate’s vote to repeal the estate tax.

The Artful Manager quotes an article by the American Arts Alliance that noted:

A 2004 Congressional Budget Office study reported that eliminating the estate tax would result in an estimated 22% decline in charitable bequests. A report issued by the Brookings Institution indicates that a repeal of the estate tax would result in a total loss of about $10 billion in charitable giving each year.

The amount the Republican Study Committee says the private sector contributed to non-profit arts in 2001–$11.5 billion. So that leaves 1.5 billion for everyone to fight over, eh?

Well actually, that is comparing apples and oranges. The 10 billion probably includes bequests to hospitals, churches, United Way, Red Cross along with arts organizations. The RSC’s $11.5 billion probably includes direct giving in fundraising campaigns as well as bequests.

The point is though, the House members are projecting private giving can make up for the loss of the NEA at the same time the Senate is considering a move which will remove the incentive for a segment of private giving. Even if the arts only get $2 billion of the annual bequests, that is still huge and there are some who will lose big.

If both efforts succeed, it will be a devestating blow from two directions for some organizations.

The vote to repeal was delayed according to Senate Finance Chair Charles Grassley, “It would appear “unseemly” for Congress to push through a repeal of the estate tax while also coping with the hurricane disaster in the Gulf” (nod to Artful Manager for the link)

What to do? Well again I must bow in deference to His Artfulness who links to the following discussion on the Western States Arts Federation website which examines it all better than I can.

I was just perusing some websites I hadn’t looked at in a bit and came across the Panel on the Non-Profit Sector website. The panel was convened by The Independent Sector, a coalition of about 500 charities, foundations and corporate giving programs.

Back in June, the Panel on the Non-Profit Sector submitted recommendations to Congress regarding issues facing non-profit organizations. On September 30, they finished soliciting comments on a draft of supplemental recommendations they will make to Congress in October.

Their recommendations should be of interest to anyone involved with a non-profit organization. They not only outline steps Congress and the IRS should and shouldn’t take, but those that organizations themselves should enact.

The document includes proposals on Federal and State oversight of non-profits (there should be more and better coordination between state and federal level); Better Standards for Reporting to the IRS; More Stringent and Frequent Reviews of Tax Exempt Status; and Abusive Tax Shelters and Charitable Organizations, Amended Rules for Non-Cash Contributions

There are a couple areas I haven’t mentioned and the standards for different size organizations vary so the report bears reading if you have concerns in any area related to these subjects.

The sections that seemed particularly pertinent to current events were those dealing with excessive travel expenditures and compensation for Board Members and Executive Officers. Essentially, they suggest stricter standards, tougher penalties and greater transparency on Form 990-

Compensation reports on the Forms should clearly distinguish between base salary, benefits, bonuses, long-term incentive compensation, deferred compensation, and other financial arrangements or transactions treated as compensation (for example, interest-free loans or payment of a spouse’s travelexpenses) to the individual

.

There are also suggestions on the size, structure and composition of Boards. The panel cites the problem of:

Failures by boards of directors in fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities may arise when a board leaves governing responsibility to a small number of people, some of whom may have conflicts of interest that can mar their judgment. Other problems emerge when a board disperses responsibility among many people, thereby lessening the obligations of each and by default, increasing the authority of the chief executive officer.

Many board members do not have the training or information necessary to understand adequately their fiduciary responsibilities or common practices for the boards of charitable organizations.

Other sections deal with the related issues of conflicts of interest and audit committees.

The Independent Sector has a statement of their commitment to accountability and transparency right on their main page so the nature of the suggestions, which essentially embrace these concepts, should come as no surprise to anyone.

Since this is also obviously an attempt to take a proactive stance and provide guidance to non-profits before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act starts to be applied to that sector, it will be interesting to see what steps Congress takes.

A very interesting discussion is transpiring across three theatre blogs in the last two weeks that really starts to give a peek at the potential blogs have for people in the arts to participate in an exchange and development of great ideas outside of a collegiate setting. There has been a lot of theoretic talk about the potential, but this is a good illustration.

Actually, I should qualify this further by saying an exchange on original topics. A couple of these blogs have a raging debate over whether Shakespeare really wrote his stuff, but that debate predates the internet.

Anyhow, the postings are on the topic of “Regionalitis,” a term coined by YS at Mirror Up To Nature in a recent entry referring to:

Regionalitis is the peculiar malady suffered by mediocre efforts of excellent playwrights. Usually regionalitis is caused by the continued and incessant performing of a play by regional and smaller theatres, having the interesting effect of perpetuating a undeserved reputation of greatness while at the same time building up an incredible expectation of the casts and directors

.

He makes this comment after seeing Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, in Boston essentially saying it was good, but not great enough to deserve all the performances it is getting across the country accompanied by the hype that surrounds a show that gets produced so much.

Spearbearer Down Left comments on his blog that when he saw The Real Thing at A.C.T. in San Francisco, it was “pitch perfect.” He does conceed that there may be a lot of “me-too-ism” in theatre’s and expand upon it further in a later entry saying:

…but sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion that some plays are done because they’re terrific, but sometimes they’re done because all the cool kids are doing them. I noticed a long time ago that no one really wants to discover new voices. Some do, but to truly discover one involves too big a risk. Better to almost, sort-of discover someone who’s a really hot property but not quite a theatrical household name yet.

A third blogger, Scott Walters, on Theatre Ideas throws his own hat in the ring but expands on the idea a bit himself. He feels that the repeated performances of the same plays across the country deprives people of the opportunity to see shows that speak to their place in the world.

He says that mass media has created the illusion that we are a homogeneous culture watching the same TV show and movies and reading the same books. However, he offers some observations that this might not be the case. He notes that while he lives in Asheville, NC and knows he is the same person who once lived in the middle of NYC,

I have appreciated totally different things depending on where I have lived. For instance, in NYC, rap music “made sense,” it reflected my surroundings; here in Asheville, a small city of 100,000 surrounded by the incredible natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it seems jarring and incongruous. It seems to me that NYC people are focused much more on their inner life — their aesthetic responses, their intellectual and emotional lives; Asheville people are more tuned into the environment that surrounds them, and their souls resonate to the things they see and hear around them. A novel like The Hours drove me crazy when I read it a few months ago; in NYC, I may have thought it absolutely brilliant.

Regionalitis treats every part of the country the same ignoring this differences in life focus. (Perhaps this is why the guy in San Francisco thought the Stoppard play was great but it didn’t resonate with the guy in Boston.) He points out as another example that The Kentucky Cycle was well received regionally all over the country and won a Pultizer Prize, but did poorly in NYC. He posits that it was due to the pacing and subject did not synch with the urban vibe.

He expounds upon this idea in a later entry and later clarifies his ideas after some criticism of them.

The whole process this went through really fires up my idealism gene. One guy coins a phrase, another expands upon his idea looking at it from the vantage of artistic integrity and choices, a third guy looks at it with an eye toward tuning works to regional nuances and I summarize and regurgitate it all.

I didn’t just pull this all together simply because actually watching an idea develop over blogs excited me. It was the whole discussion that got me thinking.

It is no surprise to me that different genres of performances appeal to regions and locales in varying degrees. The idea that mass media is shaping what we do and don’t watch and listen to is nothing new to me either, especially in these days of media consolidation into the hands of a few corporations.

It never occurred to me though that what they were promoting might not, as Scott Walters puts it, make sense for all regions of the country. I always just accepted, (probably due to the media) that the new stuff was just a logical evolution from what came before. New Wave of the 80s gave way to grunge of the 90s gave way to hiphop of the 00s.

Even though I should have known better, it always seemed like popular entertainment companies were reacting to trends rather than shaping them. To a greater degree pop entertainment does. However, once a trend reaches a certain saturation point, companies jump on it and promote it to everyone. They count on a desire to be part of the in crowd to overwhelm any sense that it was incongruous to one’s lifestyle.

That is what this whole regionalitis thread is all about. Arts organizations jumping on a bandwagon and urging audiences to join all the rest of the smart people across the country in enjoying the show.

Arts organizations aren’t as successful as the major media because they don’t have as much money to throw around to convince people to join their fellow citizens. They also can’t guarantee the same experience as everyone else in the country. The AMC movie theatres in Philadelphia offer screen sizes and surround sound systems pretty comparable to those in other cities around the country.

However, the talents of actors and musicians at the theatres and symphonies in Philly aren’t the same as those in theatres elsewhere, nor are the spaces they perform in. Seeing Dali in the Philadelphia Museum of Art isn’t the same as seeing the same works in the Dali Museum in St. Petersburgh, FL.

Nor is there the sense of a collective experience when a book, CD, movie is released on the same day for everyone present when performances transpire in different seasons, months or even years.

And then there are differences in ticket prices, economic conditions, education level and a half dozen other demographic elements.

This makes something of an argument for resisting regionalitis and taking an honest look at what programming and vibe is right for your community instead of trying to ride the coattails of the successes experienced by other people in other places at other times.

Heck with a man not being able to jump into the same river twice. Regionalitis can be like trying to jump into the same river from 1,500 miles away while in the middle of a drought.

So I had a bit of a problem while I was at the WAA conference last week–or as some might say, an “opportunity to learn.”

An agent pulls me aside and tells me–“You know that show you booked? The one you were smart enough to recognize the talent in while your compatriots on the other islands spurned it?”

“Well, to further validate your good taste–the show was a smash at the Edinburgh Fringe and a bunch of big name producers want to have the show on the West End.”

At the same time it is supposed to be in my theatre.

Well honestly, I have to say I am thrilled for the show. But at the same time, my brochures just went out and people are buying tickets at a nice clip right now. But the show isn’t until the Spring so it is good to find out now when I have the time to announce the change. It will be good PR to have to announce the show will have to be rescheduled because it burned up Edinburgh and is going to the West End.

But my theatre is also pretty much booked up until next August at the moment between my shows and rentals so I don’t know when I will reschedule. And before the college will send out a deposit check to an artist, I have to sign a statement saying I will personally reimburse them if a group doesn’t perform.

Guess what got mailed out the day I flew to Alburquerque.

So while the agent is trying to find out if this is a sure thing, I attend round table discussions. One I want to attend is being delayed so I stick my nose in on an session about ethics. I wasn’t going to attend because the same topic was covered last year, but it ended up the panel on this one did a better job.

One of the first questions was if anyone had ever faced an artist cancelling.

I raise my hand and say funny you should mention it and tell my story.

One of the panel members says that he takes that in stride because it happens often when performers in his cabaret series end up getting a contract for a Broadway show. He knows where he stands in the pecking order. He prints up an alteration, explains why the switch is occuring and offers refunds to those who might want it.

Be that as it may, my problem is that: 1- He is talking about a secondary series being affected, not his primary audience attracter. 2- His facility has enough prestige he can easily attract an equally talented performer who is eager to appear.

In many theatres in the region, the person appearing in his secondary series is often the primary attraction for that organization and are difficult to replace.

The roundtable discussion covered the fact that artists/agents/presenters who are new to the process (and some old hands who are just clueless) need to realize the reprecussions of cancellations.

For the presenter, a cancellation can mean upset ticket buyers, an upset board who mandated certain numbers and certain types of performances, loss of revenue and a loss of prestige and credibility with the community.

For the artists, a cancellation can mean loss of income; depending on the timing, mean they are stranded between points A & B with nowhere to sleep; result in a loss of credibility with the public and perhaps with the presenters before and after the cancelling venue because they need to ask those venues for more money in order to meet expenses that week.

For agents, it means a loss of credibility with the artists and/or presenters.

Since the arts community, even nationwide, is fairly small and members tend to meet each other often, an agent/presenter/artist can find themselves increasingly ostracized for problematic behavior.

But of course, this depends on the power and influence of any of these players. Sometimes you have to bite your tongue and do business with these folks in order to please your clients/patrons and just hope they don’t decide to screw you this time around.

The end of my story, fortunately, turned out well. A day after getting the potential bad news, I am told that the West End theatres the London producers wanted weren’t available during that time so they are looking for other dates.

So I get to have my performance AND claim it burned up Edinburgh and perhaps mention it will be going to London shortly after it appears here.

“In the guidelines you wrote up for the Lab Theatre this summer, did you list sex acts as prohibited?” asked the head of the drama department in a phone call to me this morning.

The form he was referring to was one my staff and I made up after students took advantage of the informal agreement we made with them about the lab theatre’s use this summer. After their disappointing behavior, we published an official policy with the usual prohibitions against smoking and drinking in university buildings.

The reason he was asking about sex acts is something else altogether. The drama director had asked to use the lab space for a production of edgy plays by former students and other noted up and comers in the local community.

We had already issued warnings about language and adult situations in our press about the shows but things went a little farther than expected last night. Apparently while the professor was watching the rehearsal that was going pretty well and showing promise up to the point the actors stripped down, got under a sheet and apparently left both little to the imagination and a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t acting.

I don’t mention this so much to titillate and air dirty laundry. It is quite a serious subject and one that will be monitored closely. The drama professor was previously requiring students to see the production and now, even with the changes he is insisting on, has made it completely voluntary lest students accuse him of forcing them to watch obscene material.

I thought the incident was quite apropos and timely in reference to the Camille Pagila interview I cited yesterday in which she says:

The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, “We’re avant-garde.” The avante-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell’s Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avante-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avante-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, “Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.”

She goes on to blame this approach as a strong factor in the loss of funding for arts programs across the country. I don’t necessarily agree. Serrano and Mapplethorpe were an excuse to rally support, but not the initial reason.

I do think that there are a lot of performers who go to nudity as a way to prove they are hip and avant garde because it is the easiest thing to do to provoke shock in people. It is actually quite similar to how beginning acting students often choose to employ shouting and violent gestures in their scenes because anger is easy and doesn’t require vulnerability.

As the drama professor said to me, art is more powerful when it leaves something unsaid and allows the imagination to run wild with its own projected assumptions. The acting space is barely 20×20 with only two-three rows of chairs around. The physical proximity of the audience and the circumstances that lead up to the actors getting into bed together are going to make people uncomfortable enough as it is.

Choosing not to bring the lights down at the end and instead graphically playing it out crosses the line for people and the fidelity of the play. Instead of being memorable for examining the forces that drew these people into bed together, (and believe me, they are controversial in their own right), the scene becomes all about the sex at the end. Instead of leaving thinking about the awful and repellent choices the characters made, people leave thinking about the nudity and whether what happened at the end was real.

Of course, nudity sells tickets. This has been discussed in many articles for the last twenty some odd years debating whether all the nudity that seemed to be creeping into every show on Broadway was a necessary part of the story or whether it was there for sensationalism to draw a crowd. And everyone is an artistic devotee and offended at the suggestion they are pandering just to sell some tickets.

Especially if the ticket sales are doing well.

The Washington National Opera is advertising for a Priority Services Coordinator. This is bad, oh so very bad.

There has been a lot of discussion about the arts being elitist for many years and lately people have been talking in specifics. This week there was a lot of commentary on Camille Pagila’s interview in The Morning News. (There is a portion quoted on Spearbearer Down Left that sums up her theme.) In the interview, she essentially says the says arts and literature has to examine what they are presenting and the context within which they are presenting it.

Elsewhere, The Playgoer lifts a quote of the day from a Guardian article on the backlash against classical music in the UK.

So amidst this environment, imagine how I cringed when I saw the Washington National Opera advertising for a Priority Services Coordinator who “is accountable for the ticketing, fulfillment, and tactics targeted toward specific segments including high-level individual and corporate donors, artists, and other VIPs.”

I don’t have a problem with the job per se. I mean, the opera is located in DC where you have congressman, lobbyists, ambassadors, etc., running around needing cultural experiences. From the size and titles of their development staff, they look to be dealing with a large number of donors too. Having a person dedicated to their needs makes good sense.

What I object to is the title of the position. Even if you are giving people preferential treatment, you aren’t dispelling the perception of elistism by announcing to the public that you if you aren’t dealing with this person, serving you is not a priority for the opera.

It is just an ill considered choice of titles I think. However, they are in DC, performing in the Kennedy Center and despite the claim of being “Your National Opera,” they are probably a little too insulated from the reality of operating an arts organization in the rest of the country to realize how poorly this reflects on the rest of us.

One of the metaphors that has always made me nervous as an arts professional is releated to the need to correctly define what your company does. If you say you make horse drawn carriages rather than that you are in the transportation industry, you will probably go out of business when the automobile rolls around.

In a world where the arts just sort of seem to be lucky to prove their relevance from moment to moment, I think it is understandable if I might wonder if I am working in a horse and buggy industry. The dying industry is usually blind and living in denial about its fate after all so it is hard to tell.

I heard a gentleman speak today at the college’s convocation (I forgot to bring the flyer home so I could credit him. Come back tomorrow for the name.) He was discussing the use of technology in the classroom. I started filing much of what he said away in my brain against the day that I get back in to teaching again.

But he also presented some metaphors which were comforting. One of the things he pointed out was that in the 1800s, ice harvesting in New England was big business sending ice all over the world. However, due to the costs, people in the southern part of the US developed a way to manufacture ice. However, the demand for ice actually increased so much, the New England harvesters actually increased production. In time, of course, refrigeration overtook ice production and yet there is still a need for ice production today (though granted, not through harvesting.)

Okay, so now I just have to worry about not being in an ice harvesting business. Given that the entertainment industry is comprised of movies, cable television, DVDs, etc., it is possible that live arts experiences are the ice harvesting of today. Plenty of demand for many, but not all entertainment forms.

The speaker also referenced the fact that at one time radio was king and then television came along and many of the radio shows were now on television. Instead of withering away, radio changed and started offering something different.

So, okay, this is no big revelation. Changing with changing times is the talk of the industry these days no matter where you go. Blogs talk about it (it was actually one of my first entries), convention speakers talk about it, everyone is saying we should do it.

Question is, how will that happen? Lots of speakers and bloggers have lengthy suggestions about that. However, thinking about things like radio and ice harvesting helps to make a confusing, overwhelming problem seem a little simpler and easy to start tackling. It also gives a point of reference so we can assess in a general way how radio stations successfully made the transition and what sort of thinking lead to the closing of thoses that failed to do so.

Edit: Gentleman in question was Paul Bowers, Asst. Prof. Mass Communications, Director of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Buena Vista University.

Two articles shared the same webpage over a Artsjournal.com today. The first is one talking about Pittsburgh Ballet’s decision to perform to recorded music to save money. The decision was made to preserve the ballet’s budget. They aren’t the first ballet company to go this route and according to the article, they probably won’t be the last.

The move has Drew McManus worried that this is not only a harbinger of the rise of recorded accompaniment, but that mission statements will be used to justify gutting artistic value for economic reasons.

Which leads me to the second article I mentioned earlier. It seems our brethern in Australia are also facing the necessity of making A Better Case for the Arts, as discussed on Artsjournal.com earlier this year in response to a recent Rand report. (I have discussed this before.)

An excerpt from a speech Prof. David Throsby made in the last couple days was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Throsby’s speech sounds much the same as the discussion on Artsjournal.com and the points the Rand report makes:

More and more do arts organisations feel they have to demonstrate their financial rather than their artistic prowess as a means of obtaining funds to support their existence. Arts festivals big and small commission economic impact studies to trumpet their success in creating employment, raising local incomes and encouraging tourism; understanding their cultural impacts often seems to take second place.

Actually, he cites the Rand report right after he cites a similar report made by a British policy group, Demos, titled Capturing Cultural Value.

…John Holden, takes up these arguments, writing that “the value of culture cannot be expressed only with statistics. Audience numbers give us a poor picture of how culture enriches us.” He goes on to argue for a reshaping of the way in which public funding of culture is undertaken. He suggests the need for a language capable of reflecting, recognising and capturing the full range of values expressed through culture, drawing on ideas from anthropology, environmentalism and the debate about “public value” in the field of public sector management.

I wouldn’t be surprised if similar articles started to appear in Germany, France, Spain, et.al. (Or perhaps it is the English speakers’ epidemic.) Looks like everyone is facing the same dilemmia about how to resolve artistic sensibilities with capitalist ones at about the same time.

There is a really fascinating article in the Gotham Gazette this month (It came to my attention via Artsjournal.com)about the arts funding process in NYC.

What makes it fascinating is the history of politics that must be behind the process to have it turn out the way it does.

There are 34 institutions that are guaranteed to share 80% of the funding year after year (ranging from $750,000 to $2 mil). Then there are 175 line item organizations that appear year after year by name that get a smaller piece of the money ($22,000 to $115,000 at this point).

Then there are about 200 groups chosen by city council members to receive money this year with no promise of money next year.

Whatever money remains is available via the Cultural Development Fund. Organizations must fill out a 25 page form that is subject to a peer review panel.

What is really strange though is who are the haves and who are the have nots. The Metropolitian Museum is among the 34 who are guaranteed large amounts of funding ($22 mil this year), the Metropolitian Opera, with a similar budget and high regard, is not (they get $134,000).

The Bronx County Historical Society is among the 34 guaranteed. The historical societies of the other boroughs are not. The Vivian Beaumont in Lincoln Center has as many visitors in a week as the Bronx Historical Society has in a year and the society gets $200,000 to the Beaumont’s $17,000.

The answers to many of these puzzles is politics. According to one commentator, the difference in the classifications is that someone lobbied 25 years ago to be numbered among the 34 and others did not.

There are other elements that come together in this situation that I haven’t mentioned and there are attempts by some to overhaul the system (apparently some defunct groups were awarded money because they were on the automatic funding list).

The whole article is worth reading. I can’t imagine that New York City is alone in this sort of arrangement. It may be educational for people to realize the power of politicking, as demeaning and smarmy as it may feel, could yield funding for life.

Back in the late 80s, early 90s I read Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E.D. Hirsch. While I felt his list was a little on the conservative side politically and basically ignored or glossed over important figures and events in our history, I have come to feel he did have a point.

Though I haven’t read the book in at least 15 years, I clearly remember that he wrote that at one time, he could use the phrase “There is a tide” and business associates would know exactly how things stood without explanation. (The quote is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.)

He bemoaned the fact that he could not do that in the 1980s because of the way students were being educated and the lack of emphasis by families that children be exposed to culturally important things. But times change and old cultural touchstones give way to new.

Just recently I found myself similarly mourning the loss of channels of common culture. Or more precisely, the literal increase in the number of channels. When I was a boy, television was comprised of seven stations the three networks, PBS, two independent stations that 20 odd years later become Fox, WB affiliates and the original WWOR. Because there were so few stations, chances were you were watching the same shows as your neighbors and had something in common to talk about.

When I was in 5th or 6th grade, West Side Story was on Sunday afternoon. The next day at recess, my friends and I had a rumble and I got my first black eye. (Matt Mays ducked when James Barry and I were trying to grab him and I hit my face on James’ head). The inspiration of violence aside, there was no need for explanations about how to conduct ourselves because we all saw the musical the night before. (Well, actually, the dancing was beyond us so we skipped that part and went straight to rumble.)

I have noted the problems advertisers face these days reaching audiences (here and here) because there are so many television channels as opposed to the handful back in the old days.

While cable television and the internet allow more people to become familiar with new ideas than would have been possible when a handful of stations dictated what we knew, the weakness of this system is that now only a comparative handful of people can become familiar with a particular new idea. A smaller segment of the population witnessed the fall of Bo Bice on American Idolthan watched Roots.

Even worse, with more channels competing for eyeballs, the programming is even more mainstream and pitched to appeal to the widest audience possible so even fewer new ideas are being introduced to the country. Though granted, A&E, the History Channel, Discovery Channel, TLC, etc do give me an opportunity to learn about more than that single PBS station I watched — but even they have repositioned themselves to appeal to the most people since they arrived on the cable line up. Their stuff is interesting, but doesn’t challenge general attitudes and thinking.

Honestly, I am a little confounded by the recent brouhaha over Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chair, Kenneth Tomlinson, attempting to scuttle PBS. Or rather, I am confused by the actual attempt. With so many fewer people watching PBS these days than in Nixon’s days when he attempted to interfere with the network of stations, I have to imagine PBS is pretty much preaching to the converted and bringing few new people over to whatever way of thinking he feels is unbalanced.

With all the attention the attempted makeover of PBS is getting, I think more people may start thinking that maybe there is something on the stations that they should be watching. It is that old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. It might have been better to leave well enough alone and let the station be continually overshadowed by competitors rather than give people a reason to yank it into the light, dust it off and examine a lost treasure more closely.

I am not suggesting that cultural values and knowledge be standardized and everyone learn them because you quickly fall into the argument about who decides what is important. I know that the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities is controversial for this reason. The same is true with the programs where everyone in a city reads the same book over the summer. If you are picking one artist or one book, you are excluding so many others whose equal value can be argued.

At the same time, these program fill a desire in our lives to touch upon the time that humans lived in close knit communities where we found joy in our shared values, stories and traditions. Yes, times change and we have to face that inevitability.

But there is also something noble about thinking back to things like the family traditions of our childhood and wanting to share and create similar memories for others. Comfort and security can be found in these type of practices. The mistake comes when we grasp on these things as the only true ways to find comfort and security and insist on the same to others.

I don’t know where and how this common base can be built or found. I don’t believe the Shakespeare initiative and all Chicagoans reading A Raisin in the Sun was intended as a declaration of the true things citizens should know about the exclusion of all others. I am not as sure about Hirsch’s book, though there are certainly things in there worth knowing. With so many options for entertainment and information, I don’t know that any of these programs could have a wide enough an influence to create a common base.

It would sure be nice if we had some stronger common cultural ties beyond reality TV these days though.

Having never lived in a place that had such a vibrant arts community that theatre companies were clamoring to carve out new spaces, I read this article on the licensing of new spaces in Chicago with some interest.

(Have to credit the Improvisation blog Making It Up As I Go for bringing it to my attention. Author linked to me, I followed it back and read some entries.)

The League of Chicago Theatres and City of Chicago announced a new set of guidelines for establishing licensed Off-Loop Theatres (Loop Theatres are located downtown in the area encircled by, the “L”, elevated train system.) The League had hoped to have the licenses approved by now but the hurdle they face is the city’s resistance to “the theatre industry’s request for zoning modifications that would allow certain types of theatrical community centers ‘i.e., Off-Loop theatres’ to open for business in neighborhoods not currently zoned for them.”

The new license will only apply to venues with fewer than 300 seats that don’t serve alcohol. According to the article, to be licensed, “a company must supply legal, financial and organizational documentation and then must pass a comprehensive inspection of the facility. Standards for public safety-code regulations will not change under the new PAV.” The changes manifest themselves mostly in the simplified application process-9 pages rather than the 23 under the previous system. Requirements for background checks and length of lease have also been relaxed.

The licenses will be administered out of the newly formed Dept. of Buildings rather than Dept of Revenue. The department will do pre-inspections of buildings for theatre groups to apprise them of the severity of any existing code violations they may have to address if they sign a lease. Also, Freedom of Information Act information on violations, liens, court proceedings on the buildings is available for people to do due diligence searches.

The new department head announced the office phone number and promised that his office would end the incessant passing off of calls and conflicting answers people got from City Hall.

The whole article was very interesting to me since I have never had to deal with some of these issues in my own experience. It was also encouraging to see that Chicago was making efforts to help theatre groups find proper facilities and make informed decisions.

The one caveat in the article though was that now that the city was facilitating the process and loosening restrictions, everyone would be expected to be licensed. The practice of enforcers looking the other way and theatres hoping to fly under the radar would be coming to an end.

To go off a little tangentially. The website that featured the story, PerformInk Online, (It “provides a wide range of news and information for professionals in the Chicago theatre industry”), has recently stated that in the near future, they will only accept press releases online and only at a specific email address. Everything else sees the physical and virtual trashcans.

Added to the stronger requirement of licenses, this is another sign of how theatre folks gotta get their operations disciplined and in order.

Cultural Commons website has an article on their home page Are Culture Wars Inevitable? I don’t think the author, Arthur C. Brooks, really answers the question but mentions some things to think upon.

Essentially, he talks about the state of affairs and then makes some suggestions about changes for the future, but doesn’t really provide any new insights to either area. He says it might not be inevitable, but the statistics he offers seems to show the numbers are against the arts.

This point lurks in the background of my recent study in Public Administration Review with Greg Lewis, which shows that, on an extremely wide range of cultural issues, supporters of the arts bear little resemblance to the rest of the population. For example, we have found that arts donors are 32 percentage points more likely than the general American population to say they have no religion, 18 points less likely to see homosexual sex as wrong, 10 points more likely to describe themselves as politically left-wing, and 12 points more likely to support abortion on demand.

These differences make cultural policy difficult, as long as any of the subsidized content is controversial. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a satisfying policy for any activity if one part of the population perceives efficient treatment of it to involve subsidies, while for the other it involves censorship (or at very least, that it not be government-funded.

The only solace one might find with those numbers is that a greater percentage of the population in the US hold these attitudes he cites who are not attending the arts. (His assertion that “supporters of the arts bear little resemblance to the rest of the population” is therefore false in this regard. Though certainly people who hold these attitudes AND support the arts do stand apart.)

The solution, at least in a public policy realm, he says “come in four types: elimination of direct arts funding; controlling publicly-funded content; and shifting funding from arts supply to arts demand.”
If you are like me, you immediately noticed that there are only 3 options here. The fourth appears 3 paragraphs later–

“a final alternative to these policies is to do nothing. It may be the case that culture wars skirmishes in the arts are inconsequential, compared with the importance of the art subsidized. Whether or not this is the case, however, should be the focus of responsible ongoing assessment of the benefits and costs of art and arts policy.”

His discussion of the ethics held by a portion of arts donors reminded me that some people combine the fact they feel uneasy about how to approach art with the idea that museums, theatres, et. al. are places where people of low morals frequent. Nevermind that these people stand next to them on the bus and behind them at Starbucks. Far more graphic situations occur in movies thanks to digital effects than could ever appear on stage (though granted, part of the thrill of live performance the lack of insulation). Still, there is a stigma attached, deserved or not to the arts by some quarters.

On the other hand, movies rarely combine that lack of insulation while challenging audiences by employing religious icons in unexpected ways. (Joe writes diplomatically.) The experience can be jarring enough without having deeply held beliefs shaken. You have to respect those who face that experience honestly.

You don’t have the respect those who damn it on hearsay and rumor or who approach the experience anxiously awaiting the end when they can enumerate their shock. More than ever, the internet allows people to be insulated from the experience, be no less shocked and appalled and express their disgust to their representative all from the comfort of their homes.

People have always had the ability to choose to avoid and ignore that which did not interest them. Now it seems people’s main interest is seeking out and calling attention to these very things. The groups you fear will be adversely impacted by these horrors have a hard time not being facinated by something everybody keeps pointing at.

Personally, it seems like the conflicting view that comprise the culture wars are an inevitable part of being alive. I am sure there have been plenty of people who were vocal about their disapproval of the type of art the DeMedici’s or the Catholic Church was commissioning. The difference, people will say is that the art was being privately subsidized rather than publicly.

Given that the NEA budget is about 64 cents per person in the US, anyone tithing to the church back then was probably paying more than the typical citizen does today. (Though the church’s holdings were far vaster than they are today so the subsidy may just be as insignificant.)

Ah! Back from Vacation seeing my adorable nephew. I didn’t do much thinking about the arts at all during my visit, though I am quite convinced that my nephew’s drool patterns on my shirts are harbingers of his future genius in the visual arts.

Fortunately for me, a comment by a blog reader set me to contemplation upon my return so I am ready to write!

Indija Mahjoeddin, a randai scholar in Australia recently commented on an entry back in January on a Randai performance I had attended. I had essentially wondered if, for all the personal growth participation had accorded the students, would casting directors of Broadway and League of Regional Theatre venues see any value in that experience or would the students have been better off doing Chekhov?

Indija bemoans the fact that she has a hard time getting past the gatekeepers at theatres because randai is not avant garde enough for some, but not commercial enough for others.

In my email back to her, I basically pointed out the thorny problems with popularity. While appealing to a fringe audience doesn’t always pay the bills, there are some unsettling repercussions to having ethnic art forms become vogue.

When something becomes hot, people want to jump on the bandwagon and don’t want to spend the time to grasp the deeper significance of an art form. Instead they are satisfied with parroting the superficial aspects. Worse, there are people who sincerely wish to learn the true nature, but come in contact with instructors who are teaching the superficial elements.

I wasn’t in Hawai’i two days before I realized that Hollywood had done hula and Hawaiian culture a great disservice (I actually suspected that was the case before I arrived.)

Trying to maintain true to the cultural heritage of a group while trying to make a living wage educating the greater population about that culture has always been a narrow line to walk.

One of the strangest stories I have come across recently is an article that accuses popstar Gwen Stefani of exploiting a Japanese pop cultural trend. It is just difficult for me to see how a woman who borrows lyrics and music from Fiddler on the Roof for her songs is grossly misrepresenting a trend where Japanese girls dress in clothes from other times and cultures.

The unoriginal stealing from the unoriginal seems like a victimless crime as far as the principles are concerned (those who originated the music and styles they have appropriated might be another matter altogether.)

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has been able to successfully present cultural heritage without being, by and large, accused of exploiting that culture. Email me or comment below.

I’d also like to hear from anyone who might have some anecdotes about people who were accused of exploiting or undermining cultural elements only to later be praised as a great disseminator of the self-same material.

For instance, I have always wondered if Carl Stalling and Chuck Jones were vilified for belittling classical music by scoring Bugs Bunny cartoons with it. Today many people credit the cartoons as their first exposure to classical music and in some cases, the initiating incident in their love of the music.

My state arts council sponsored a meeting with a Jonathan Katz, CEO of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies yesterday on the topic of arts advocacy. The state arts council and the gentleman were working together on their presentation and this was the first time they had delivered it so it was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of value, but it had its high points.

Organizations were encouraged to have their board members attend the meeting, but it didn’t appear too many board members were there. I imagine the 1 pm meeting time might have been an impediment to attendance.

A person from the state discussed the process the government went through in order to fund the state arts council. Personally I prefer the Schoolhouse Rock version of how a bill becomes a law rather than the convoluted flow chart describing how it travels through committees, etc.

Mr. Katz pointed out that each of these stages was an opportunity to have a conversation with people about supporting the arts community. His biggest push though was to have decision makers/persons of influence, be they reporters, politicans, bankers, civic leaders, educators, tourism officials, etc., attend an event because that experience changes the whole context of discussing the arts with them.

He got into a discussion of using the value of the arts as part of the conversation with these persons of influence. Since he started talking about economic benefits, I asked him his views on the Rand report Gifts of the Muse – Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts that was recently discussed on Artsjournal.com.

His feeling was that the report didn’t go far enough in terms of suggesting how to integrate their findings into an advocacy discussion in practical terms. His feeling was that you do need to mention the economic benefits because the arts truly make contributions in that arena. But this discussion has to be balanced by the intrinsic value argument as well. It is just as important to bring recordings of kids chattering excitedly about their experiences to the table as it is to have financial spreadsheets at hand.

One of the most interesting statistics he brought to the talk was that between 1993 and 2001, taken as a whole state arts organization funding grew faster than state government growth. The combined state arts funding grew by 6.6% while state governments grew 6.5%. Mr. Katz’s point was that folks were making some pretty good cases for arts funding.

Mr. Katz also provided some interesting insight into the workings of state governments when it came to arts funding. He really reinforced the idea that advocacy can never stop. One of the things NASAA has observed is that the state arts organizations that made the biggest gains in funding also had the biggest losses when the time came to cut back.

The mistake people made was equating the increase in funding as a sign that the state finally “got it” when it came to the arts. The legislatures on the other hand were of the mind that the arts were the last ones to get a lot of money and now it was their turn not to have money.

They also found that organized advocacy groups were more effective over the long term than individual arts organizations advocating on their own behalf. At the same time, there has to be a single advocacy point person who is rallying the efforts of the group in an effective manner presenting a well-organized united agenda.

How do you do good advocacy you ask? Well, NASAA has some good articles on their website, including a survey that helps organizations and state arts councils evaluate their advocacy activities.

In addition to reaching the opinion leaders in the community, you have to employ the community leaders on your board to flex their persuasive skills on your behalf. They might be able to talk their friends into writing a hundred thousand dollar check, but talking passionately about their involvement with your arts organization will generally have greater yields over the long term.

Every board member has to be able to advocate to friends, family, business partners, etc and answer the question “why are you spending your time working them them?” It isn’t an answer that the staff can give the board members and they will sound more convincing if they can talk specifically about why they view organization as a worthy cause rather than to simply say it is a worthy cause.

Advocacy for your work is also more compelling coming from people not directly associated with the organization. If an educator, tourism official, business owner, etc., talks about how money for the arts helps them in their jobs, it goes a long way in convincing the holders of the purse strings.

This is the essence of the best advocacy efforts according to Mr. Katz — telling decision makers how helping you will help them. It will come as no surprise that public figures welcome any opportunity to maintain their position by helping their constituencies and increasing their visibility. Everyone essentially wants to be seen as doing good. If their help will help you to empower kids, then show them how it can be done.

People want to be loved so if they care about you or if you affect someone who they care about, then chances are they want to do something to sustain that affection.

One last lesson I learned from the talk–don’t just concentrate on your allies. Work on converting perceived enemies to your cause as well. This is particularly important when working in the political arena. The reins of power can change hands. If you have set one person or one political party up as your champion, there is an implied message that the other folks that are not-champions.

Converting them will take different messages than the ones you use for your easy allies and it won’t be easy, but in the long run, it can be worth the effort.

As I thought, Drew McManus featured my account of my orchestra attendance on his blog today. I hadn’t expected him to essentially quote my entire letter to him. I am pleased that he did (and corrected some of my lapses where my mind sped along faster than my fingers).

What really tickled me was that Patricia Mitchell quoted from the letter I wrote Drew on her blog, Oboeinsight.com. I guess what I had to say made her happy because her only comment is “YES”

I obviously think my letter on Drew’s blog is worth reading so go take a look!

Just for the record, I did email the marketing person at the Honolulu Symphony and suggested they take part in what I bet will be a national trend by next May. I haven’t heard from her, but considering that they are approaching their season finale and departure of their music director, it is not surprising that she would be concerned with other things.

I would take myself to cultural events more often, but I am such a ungrateful date. I never thank myself for the lovely dinner before hand or the thought that went into picking the event. Sure I am easy and will go home with myself on the first date, but all I get out of the evening is listening to myself snore.

I am sure I will enjoy the experience more if I take a friend the next time as Drew suggests.

I was sort of heart broken to read that the South Jersey Performing Arts Center is going to be closed. SJPAC is located in Camden, NJ and has always been in the shadow of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark when it came to state funding.

In fact, most of the arts organizations in New Jersey’s rural south have been given the short shrift by the NJ legislature until recently. By law, funding was supposed to be distributed equitably between the northern and southern parts of the state. Lawmakers tried to get around that by giving the northern groups more money in return for taking programs to the southern part of the state. A lawsuit straightened that arrangement out a few years ago.

The thing that really makes me sad is that for the second time in three years, through no fault of his own, the executive director, Mark Fields is out of a job. Three years ago, the president of Rowan University decided to close the Glassboro Center for the Arts, a performing arts facility located on the campus.

This raised a bit of a furor because he cited lack of funds despite the fact he had just spent HUGE amounts of money on his own house, including a very expensive piano which neither he nor his wife could play. He also chose that time to pour a lot of money into the football team. As a result, there were fewer opportunities for arts exposure in South Jersey, especially given the fact the facility did a fairly large number of school performances.

The impact of the whole situation was made somewhat better by the fact that Mark would be taking his passion to SJPAC. Now that is gone as well despite the success he brought to the organization.

What’s more, SJPAC is almost the last presenting organization of any size in South Jersey. The state is pretty much deciding to export its citizens’ entertainment spending across the river to Philadelphia. And, of course, it is sending out the message that a cultured populace is not important.

The facility is also about the only one with any ability to serve a large number of school children. And let me tell you, Camden is in pretty sorry shape as it is. Having an oasis of culture upon which to anchor improvements was about the only thing it might have had going for it and now that is gone.

I was reading today about how companies are trying to use graphic novels to get kids interested in reading. I was briefly filled with some hope, thinking that perhaps a child who read a graphic novel of a great work might become interested in seeing a play based on that work too.

Then I remembered it has been tried before.

In the 1940s, Classics Illustrated tried to turn great works into comic books. According to an entry on Toonopedia “The idea behind Classics Illustrated may have been to use the methods of the “enemy” against it, to expose young comic book readers to great literature, and thus awaken their intellectual appetites.”

According to Toonopedia, it didn’t work. There was too much book to squeeze into too few pages. Unfortunately, kids used the books as a substitute for reading the books. A woman who gave me some old Classics Illustrated told me they were the Cliffs Notes of her generation. (Ironically, Cliff Notes were the internet term paper mills of my generation.)

According to the graphic novel article, there seems to be a greater attempt to stay true to the stories and so readers should get more from them than the Classics Illustrated. Though I suspect kids will still hand in papers based on the adaptation rather than the original.

On the other hand, if it provides a degree of cultural literacy where none might exist without them, then bring on the comic books!

I was a monster reader to begin with, but I will admit, I first learned about Crispus Attucks (A black man, he was the first casualty of the American Revolution when he was killed at the Boston Massacre.), George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman and Johnny Cash’s destructive alcoholic life before he found Jesus because I picked up anything that looked like a comic book.

In the 30 years since I picked up the comic book on his life, I have seen Crispus Attucks named mentioned in books maybe 4 times. So in some regard, the medium might actually be more effective at communicating information about important, but generally overlooked people and subjects. The visual format might help students remember the subject matter too. I still remember that Attucks was very mechanically inclined because I can still recall the picture of him working on a clock.

Hard to weigh the pros and cons though. Promoting academic laziness by implying that a graphic novel can replace a book vs. offering visual stimulus to reinforce the information being learned.

A year ago I wrote about how my one sister lives within 10 miles of some of the best theatre and arts venues in NJ, but has a perception that anything not on Broadway isn’t worth seeing (including Broadway tours.)

I have come up against a similar feeling at my current theatre. A graduate of the college is the artistic director of a dance company. He grew up on this side of the island and got his start in modern dance because of the school. He has decided he wants to give something back to the school and our side of the island by doing his shows in my space.

He is getting intense pressure from his board about this decision. His shows haven’t been doing well in our theatre and I feel sort of bad about it. His shows do much better at the big Broadway touring house in town. He barely fills a third of the 1400 seats in that theatre and they charge him much more for renting the place. However, he does attract enough of a crowd to pay his bill and go home with money in his pocket.

When he does a similar show in my 600 seat theatre–which would appear much fuller if he attracted the same crowd–he hardly attracts anyone.

The problem is, people think that if a show was any good, it would be at the theatre in town. This isn’t something I am just assuming–I overheard people reinforce this idea with comments. The most extremely example was when Ladysmith Black Mambazo performed here and sold the house out. Two people arrived late because they went to the theatre in town.

If that wasn’t bad enough–they had called my theatre, ordered the tickets and had them with my theatre’s name emblazoned across them in hand when they arrived! Despite this, the prejudice over powered them and they ended up trying to use the tickets to see Carol Channing.

I can appreciate this artistic director’s dilemmia. I tried to give him an out and pointed that it is tough enough trying to do art these days without purposely placing impediments to making money in your way. (I mean on top of the fact non-profits are not supposed to be covering all their expenses with earned income.)

My concern isn’t really about losing the income from renting to him. I rarely have an open weekend to rent. We are just beginning a partnership to develop a work for a world premiere in Fall 2006. I am excited by his vision and really want my theatre to be associated with the work.

With all the related educational programs being developed in conjunction with a museum and local arboretum, I don’t think we will have any problem creating enough buzz between now and the opening to overcome the perception that we present substandard work. We should have very nice attendance.

When we speak about the value of the arts and how they need support, we usually group all the arts together. Doing so is good since the Ben Franklin quote that “We must all hang together, or we shall surely all hang separately,” can certainly apply in regard to the government funding each might receive if they don’t.

In some respect though, this practice does blur the fact that each branch does things in its own way and the answers for one are not viable for another. But perhaps some are…

I was reading a recent Adaptistration entry about job satisfaction in orchestras. There is a link to an article at the bottom of the entry that was really eye opening for me in terms of the perceptions musicians have about their relationship with the conductor, the rules governing their lives and their place in the orchestra ensemble.

Coming from a theatre background, there were things that were familiar to me such as union defined limits on rehearsal times. Other things like the deference shown to the conductor and the timid manner in which comments and questions were couched was amazing to me.

Certainly there are domineering directors in the theatre who try to keep actors cowed. But that is an individual working on a particular production at a specific theatre rather than the systematic situation Robert and Seymour Levine describe.

This brought to mind conversations I had with a friend in ballet administration. To my mind, ballet dancers have it worst since they have no union protection at all. (Not that I am a big union person. I have had mixed encounters with them. But with a union there is at least a standard of treatment a non-union person can point to.) According to my friend, in addition to weak protections against being overworked, getting the rights to choreography can be a humiliating experience. (And if it is different, please correct me if I am wrong. It seems rather bizarre to me. Perhaps this is only true for a small segment of regional ballet companies with which my friend is associated.)

Unlike music and theatre where securing performance rights is based on fairly objective criteria, ballet is apparently very subjective. The rights are often in the hands of a person (often a ballerina who danced the principal role) who reviews the skill of the ballet company applying for the rights by attending a performance or via a video recording. From what I have been told, there tends to be a lot of criticism of the female dancers’ technique and body weight (especially if they show any sign of having a bust). The male dancers are generally spared as much scrutiny.

I had attended a black tie affair for my friend’s ballet company and was told that the petite, absolutely gorgeous dancer who had charmed me that night might have to leave the company because her “weight” was judged unseemly. (I think the chair I was sitting on probably outweighed the woman.)

I mention these elements to illustrate some fundamental differences in the assumptions three branches of the performing arts have about how things should be done. I could certainly go on for a week analyzing the flaws in the way live theatres do business. In some respect, I wonder if it might be better if different branches didn’t get to know each other better. It is probably easier for an orchestra official to advocate for more arts funding if he isn’t thinking about the barbaric theatres who might only employ actors for six weeks before sending them back to waiting on tables while his musicians are guaranteed an income all year round.

On the other hand, even though their disciplines are grouped together as “the arts.” Managers in each area rarely talk to each other on substantive topics. Who knows if there are efficient solutions to common problems if no one really shares that information. One of the most common expectation of attendees of the National Performing Arts Convention held last June in Pittsburgh was that they were attending a forum for an exchange of ideas with people from other disciplines. This according to the surveys administered by the IDOC project. But according to the final IDOC report (found at the above link) and The Artful Manager’s own observations of his attendance, people gravitated toward their own kind.

Granted, the IDOC effort found that some of the scheduling was not conducive to mingling. I don’t know when the next National Performing Arts Convention will be held, but perhaps an effort will be made to replicate the efforts of every junior high school dance committee and force the boys and girls together in the center of the room. (Leave some room for the Holy Spirit though as the nuns used to say.)

Since the general public is hanging us all together under “The Arts”. It would probably be good to take up residence together under that roof and talk a little. Perhaps we can see the way to better relationships with our actors/musicians/dancers.

Great! I was going to try to get away with not doing a post today, but now Drew McManus has gone and linked back to my website as a result of a discussion we have been having about a recent post of his. Now you know, there is all this pressure to come up with something pithy so that the new visitors he is sending my way will stay and read a bit.

Okay how about–“Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”

I can’t take credit for that, it is the warped genius of writer Terry Pratchett.

Drew’s ideas are intriguing though. I don’t know if it is viable in practice, but it is something that bears considering. In these changing times, I think any intelligent proposal begs looking in to. Before people label his suggestion as preposterous and not in touch with the reality of how things are done, I actually saw a hint of something similiar in the last two weeks.

In a recent entry I mentioned getting a call from a woman working for a potential competitor.

What I didn’t mention was that this woman was working from her home office as a consultant working up a business plan for the organization. Now granted, if the organization had a building constructed, she might have been working out of there as a full time employee. The fact that the organizing group had picked a person with a home business rather than one with a snazzy office in town might be a harbinger of things to come…or may be not. Perhaps the overriding motivation was that she was cheaper than the guys in town and the organizing group didn’t have a lot of money to spare.

But that is Drew’s exact point.

So we will see how things play out over the next few years. Given that just yesterday The ArtfulManager suggested that the 501 (c) (3) route may be the wrong business classification “tool” for the goals of organizations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next 25-30 years brought a transitional period where the way arts entities are organizes morphs and perhaps diversifies.

There is an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that just seems like a no-win situation for the arts in Cuyahoga County Ohio. They are proposing using a tax from cigarettes to fund the arts.

Doesn’t seem like a position you would want to be in. If people stop smoking, there goes your funding. At the same time do you want to be encouraging people to smoke so you can keep your funding?

When try to raise money by having fun runs and selling candy bars, you can be pretty confident about telling people that it is for a good cause. You really don’t want to be telling people to smoke because it is for a good cause. Even worse, you don’t want your chain smoking Aunt Evelyn smirking at your disapproving look when she lights up and saying that you should be happy, because she is single handedly underwriting your season.

Probably the only thing worse would be if Nevada started to fund the arts with taxes paid by legal sex workers. Can you imagine an arts manager coming home to find his/her spouse has been involved on one side or the other of that?

“Well you were working so hard and so many hours at the theatre. I figured if you got a little more funding, you would be able to hire some help and be home more often. I was only doing it out of love for you honey.”

Okay, maybe that is a little extreme. Though an amusing image if you picture it in a cartoon rather than actually affecting real life people.

The good news from the Plain Dealer article though is that using tourism taxes like restaurant and hotel tax proceeds is already being considered.

There is a fairly famous economic law out there–some guy has it named after him even, that says that technological advances will make the production of materials more efficient and less expensive. I have been searching for over an hour to find the exact wording and name of the law even though it only has a passing relationship to this entry and I CAN’T FIND IT!! So anyone who know, please tell me.
(Took me two years, but I found the answer-Baumol’s Cost Disease)

Anyhow, this mysterious law has often been invoked when it comes to explaining why doing live performance is so expensive. While other sectors become more efficient, live performances are produced much as they were after the Restoration of the Charles II. We pay the increasing cost of using outdated, inefficient methods. Set construction hasn’t started to employ any new revolutionary materials, costumes are still made by hand, performers still need about the same amount of rehearsal time before the product is finished.

Sure nail guns, power saws and sewing machines have made things faster. However, except for recent advances in moving lights which allow you to use fewer instruments to create the same effect (though they cost more than the old ones) live performance is lagging behind in the efficiency department. (Actual the digitization of sound has really been a boon. Not only can it be stored easy, but laptop computers can replace 20 foot long sound boards)

I mention all this to give a respectful nod to the old inefficient methods. The past week has not been good technologically for me. Our computerized ticketing system stopped printing tickets and no one has been able to revived it. Loading the software on a new computer and borrowing a printer from another theatre hasn’t solved the problem either. It doesn’t help that the ticketing software company has gone out of business. So for show this week and the one coming up in a month, we will have to have printed hard tickets.

The brakes went out on the cargo van we intended for luggage transport duty while I was on the way to the airport. Fortunately no one was hurt (and fortunately they didn’t go out while my assistant was following my new car!) Granted this is more a matter of technology getting old than being new but it added to my frustration.

For the last few weeks we have been having trouble with our dimmer racks (they control theatre lights). The lighting system is about 2 years old so it is as state of the art as any equipment with a computer in it can be. Being computerized, it is very flexible and able to give feedback about operations.

Including about things that aren’t happening.

These “smart” dimmers have decided they are overheating and turn themselves off. However, the air in the dimmer room is 72 F and the insides have been vacuumed so often to remove any offending dust, the equipment vendor has commended us on how clean the racks are.

The reason they go out is a mystery so we often wire around that quadrant for shows so they don’t go out in the middle of a performance. The whole episode has made the technical director nostalgic for the old Strand dimmers which would chug along ignoring anything short of a direct hit by artillery.

The worst part is, attempts to tell the computers in the dimmers they aren’t “smart” and can’t decide if they are overheating hasn’t been successful. They still think they can and will shut down. (Even worse, they are so smart, the error code they give with the overheating isn’t in any of the troubleshooting manuals.)

I am sure many people have similar stories about their encounters with technology where the “improvement” gives you more worries than the trouble it is supposed to be alleviating. For example, in newer cars, if you don’t close your gas cap tightly enough, the “check engine” light comes on–and won’t go out for 48 hours after you tighten it. Makes you wonder why there isn’t a “tighten your gas cap” light and a reset switch for it.

So we often talk in the arts about working together with other arts entities more. But what about helping a new one member of the arts family come into existence with which you will have to compete for sustenance and attention?

I got a call today from a woman who is part of the group planning to build a new arts center about five miles from my facility. I haven’t really come in contact with this project too much yet. However, I am told that when they came to tour the theatre a few years ago, there were a lot of naive ideas about how easy it was for volunteers to sustain an quality operation.

Normally, I wouldn’t worry about such a group too much except that they have supporters in the legislature who want the project funded because there are no theatres on this side of the island. This isn’t something you want to hear people saying while your organization is celebrating its 30th year.

Similar claims were made when the local high school rallied support for a performing arts center to be built for them. They claimed they could never get in to my facility and that once built, all schools could use the space. Now many years later, the school has a lovely theatre space and most all the other schools are still renting from us.

The woman who called was making some very considered, informed comments with a healthy dose of skepticism so I ended up speaking with her for about an hour. She had actually done some market research on the communities in the area so she had a good sense of what the resources were. Also, the size of the facility has been reduced from the 1000-1200 seat range to 860. We ended up discussing topics that would essentially fit in my “challenges in arts administration.”

We talked about the costs to contract, feed and transport performers; typical attendance; where we drew our attendance from; number of people I usually had to run a show; their level of competence; how much I lost despite the fact that my light, A/C, cleaning and 3 person’s salaries were subsidized by the college. Since I had to pay for so many other elements of my operations, I could give a good basis for cost.

I felt a little torn by the whole conversation. While I certainly didn’t want to have another organization competiting with mine for an audience, actually being able to discuss something I am passionate about and to have a person understand the implications of the concepts I am discussing is a wonderful thing.

(Actually, I am still so interested in this topic it has taken me over an hour to write this far. I keep stopping to look up data sources for comparsion and leaving voice mail messages for myself at work to remind me what to talk to her about tomorrow.)

I also got a fair bit of information in trade since she had done some research on the new resort developments out this way and knew the potential population growth figures. Since one of the leverage points I am trying to use with the administration of the college is getting ourselves up to a standard to meet the expectations of the people who will be buying these condos. We will be the closest entertainment option (even if this new theatre is built) to the resort community, so it is important we put on a much better face than we have.

I get in this sticky situation about encouraging people to create art every so often. Most times it isn’t about creating an arts group so much as people wanting to become the next big actor or American Idol. I always get caught between wanting to encourage them to express themselves artistically because not enough people are and don’t have the opportunities they need to and wanting to smack them upside the head with a dose of reality.

Too many people watch reality shows like American Idol and see people with no real training win and the runners up actually parlay the experience into some strong possibilities and think they have a chance of doing the same. It was bad enough with people getting off buses in NY and LA with dreams of greatness before, but shows like that probably minimize the reality of the industry even more. (And they forget, the show is meant to elevate a person with no training over others with no training. Mix in some Berklee and Juillard grads and maybe 3-4 untrained reach the sweet 16 round)

So the question I think I need to call this woman with tomorrow is “Why?” She was just doing some research for the group and I don’t know that she is involved enough in the planning to know the actual impetus. I get the sense though that there are people involved with no performing arts experience who fancy the idea of having a theatre in their neighborhood to enhance the property values and such. And it has been noted, people in that neighborhood strangely don’t like to leave it once they get home. They won’t drive 5 miles down to see shows at my theatre, yet we have a fair contingent of people drive 25 miles over a mountain range to attend.

What would really be great though is if they built an arts education center instead where adults and children could take classes in visual arts, dance, etc and eventually feed in to an interest in my theatre.

I had a comment on the Artsjournal discussion I have been citing the last couple days. However, since the comment section didn’t register the links I painstakingly typed in HTML code in the entry, I am mirroring it here as it was meant to be seen.

The entry I was commenting on may be found here.

A week or so ago, Artsjournal linked to a Wired article that talked about people almost having an intrinsic need for art/beauty/meaning/purpose in their lives. I quoted the following bit in my blog:

For companies and entrepreneurs, it’s no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out your bathroom. If you’re like a few million Americans, you’ve got a Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was rare a century ago, but now it’s commonplace. Yet in the US, candles are a $2 billion a year business -for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country’s more inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence.

Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life.

And just recently I saw a great illustration of this as Target Stores rolled out their “Design for All” campaign. They know they can’t compete with WalMart on price, but they are plugging in to this craving people have. You can probably buy most of the same stuff at WalMart, but their message is, you will feel better about yourself if you shop here.

Now how the arts can manage to position themselves in the same manner against the convienence of cable TV, DVDs mailed to your home and all the rest, I don’t quite know.

If you think back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, you know that safety issues like infant mortality will never be superceded by self-actualization activities like the arts, and it is silly to try as has been pointed out. At the same time, those needs Maslow cites are sort of hard wired into the human brain.

While I agree with Phil Kennicott that the current political/social environment may be making people who might have previously been just unfamiliar with the arts into people who are predisposed to view the topic with hate, they too have these deep seated needs. The closest they may ever come to supporting the arts is by attempting to fulfill the need by buying products at Target which in turn supports the arts. (I believe that was one of Ben Cameron’s jobs prior to joining TCG.)

I hate to engage in idealistic speculation that implies the utopian theoretical can be translated into the practical so here is what I think might be a doable suggestion which extends Joli’s thoughts-

Perhaps the entree for answering this need for potential audiences is the garage band approach rather than the massive performing arts center. Maybe organizations should be putting their money into storefront theatres and stand alone black boxes where insecurities about dress code and etiquette aren’t as big an issue because everyone is wearing jeans. (We tell people they don’t necessarily have to dress up, but then they arrive at the venue and the veteran attendees are looking snazzy which gives a contradictory message.)

Once people feel comfortable and good about themselves, then you point out that if they enjoyed this, maybe they want to try the mainstage over on 6th Street–or just keep coming back.

The alternative venue doesn’t necessarily need to be run by one organization. All the arts organizations of a community might go in and share the costs and use it as sort of an outreach facility. Theatre companies the first two weekends of the month, snippets of opera on the third, chamber music on the fourth.

Courtesy of Artsjournal.com, I read a partially satiric, partially serious article from The Guardian. The author pokes fun at the types of people who attend those mega-art shows that you have to reserve times to see.

But his more serious point is that these type of art shows are really no way to view art. Do you really get a chance to understand what you are viewing with hordes of people passing through and subtle encouragements to move along and make space for the next tour group.

He also points out, quite correctly, that there is something of a herd mentality about needing to see the works at a certain time and place when the show is in progress, but feeling no desire to do so when the pieces are ensconced in their home museums.

It attaches, also, to the self-defeating way in which we choose to appreciate art. That is not to say that we must have conditions that enable us to spend as much time in front of a painting as Wollheim, but the herd instinct the modern blockbuster show produces does not do the greatest paintings justice.

This point became clear to me the other day when, in the National Gallery, I shared a room of Titians with a security guard all but uninterrupted for half-an-hour. In that room were some of the same paintings that I had struggled to see at the National’s Sainsbury wing temporary exhibition of Titian in 2003.

The reason this piece caught my fancy today was that just last week I was thinking that I was glad I had taken the opportunity to visit the Dali Museum
when I was in Florida rather than having to be in a position of viewing his art with a horde now that the pieces are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Okay, granted, I don’t live near Philly any more–but if I did…! Visiting the Dali in Florida would still be worth it after doing the Philly show since I presume the side of a barn size pieces found there didn’t make it to Philadelphia.

Going to see a Dali show at all would be worth it. I think that my visit to the Florida museum was the first time I realized just how crappy a job posters and other reproductions did at revealing the subtle and not so subtle elements of art work.

I have really been looking high and low for more people who blog about their experiences in theatre. I haven’t been terribly successful, but I will admit, the signs look promising. People seem to be realizing the potential for the blogs.

For example, a Google search found this nascent blog for The Playmill Theatre in Montana. You can’t actually get to the blogs from the theatre’s homepage. In fact, the home page itself is rather undeveloped at the moment. It just goes to show though that someone was thinking and wanted to get the cast and director (and perhaps the community) writing about their experiences.

I also found a very short, sparse attempt at a production blog for Aristophanes’ Acharnians.

The British seem to be doing the best job of blogging about their lives in the theatre. In addition to My London Life which I cited in an earlier entry, I have found yet another British director faithfully chronicling his experiences running his own company. (Yeah, I know, I could be doing more of the same myself. I suppose you all want to hear about my shopping trips to buy cases of water and soda for performers, eh?)

I also found a culture blog by a Brit who is something of a Terry Teachout of England (though not as prolific an author/journalist/everything)

I was very happy to see that a theatre in San Francisco was taking the idea of bloggers as the new critics to heart and offering free tickets to bloggers with a fairly significant daily readership who agreed to write a review within 24 hours. May have to follow up with them to see how well it worked.

I also found a blog in Portland, OR that does nothing but list upcoming shows and provide links to many of the local theatres. One might think that this might be useless since the local paper prints essentially the same information. And that may be so. However, the format for the listings are so simple that it is very easy to log on one Friday night and scroll back through a page or so to find out what is going on–or follow the link to a favorite performance group to find out what in particular they are currently doing.

More to come…let me know if you have a favorite arts blog out there that has gone unmentioned by me.

Those of you who have been reading since October may be aware that I belong to a block booking consortium (some previous entries here and here)

Last Monday we had the longest meeting to date trying to hammer out schedules for performers. Near the end, one of the newer members asked if it was always this difficult to resolve the scheduling. Some of the other members said this was the worst because there were now more members than ever before and their organizations were becoming more ambitious and doing more performances.

For me, however, I somehow emerged worse off than I entered. I had come in expecting to make final arrangements for 7 groups and then having to contract another 3-4 on my own. Somehow I walked out with only 5 groups and the prospect of scheduling 5-6 more on my own.

What happened was this-my consortium and another consortium, the Hawaii Arts and Music Soceity, hold joint meetings because of the 90% overlap of membership. Since they tend to do a lot of classical, early music and opera, I am not a member. Most of the other big presenters hold dual membership and with more people wanting to do more, they easily filled their schedule and as a result decided to postpone presenting two of the people I wanted.

This actually might turn out for the best because I am thinking that instead of trying to make up the difference with acts whose airfare from the mainland I might have to do pay, I might look into putting together some sort of interesting programs with local performers. The Knight Foundation article I quoted last week mentioning the San Diego Symphony’s “Can Classical Music Be Fun” program got me to thinking that perhaps I could talk to the symphony or ballet about putting together an interactive/fun program to be presented on this side of the island. Who knows, perhaps it will grow into an annual event or lead to further partnerships.

I was reading my Time Magazine today while my computer booted up, hoping that my cable modem would behave today (that was why there was no entry yesterday. No problem yet today, perhaps the Time-Warner cable approves of me reading Time Magazine) In the magazine there was a small inset on Artie Shaw, a big band leader who died last month. (More info, the NY Times and Ken Burns’ PBS Jazz website have interesting synopses of his life.)

I found the article somewhat amusing because it discussed how he was trying to expose his swing audiences to classical music, similiar to how arts organizations try to grab new audiences by offering popular pieces and hoping people will experiment with unfamiliar territory.

Shaw’s experience went something like this:

“Bandleader Artie Shaw had tried feeding long-hair music to short hair audiences, [but] he had discovered that ‘It is necessary to give an audience some familiar points of reference before you can expect it to go along on new things’…He thought…playing old Shaw specials…might lure strayed followers back into the tent. Once they were in, perhaps he could give them [classical works] in small doses. Last week…on the opening night of a nationwide tour, the first part of Artie’s experiment worked. A record breaking crowd, including a good many of the jammy jitterbug type..was lured into Boston’s huge Symphony Ballroom. The Shaw faithful, plus a few horn rimmed jazz intellectuals, clustered around the bandstand…Right there, any semblance of success stopped. When Artie’s boys began unraveling Ravel’s Piece en Forme de Habanera, the crowd around the bandstand applauded politely, but even the most ardent jitterers had to stop dancing. Cried one in petulant exasperation: ‘Artie you suck'”

I don’t know if arts managers will take heart in the fact that hurdles they face in widening the perspective of their audiences are nothing new. Or if they will see this article from 1949 as validation that their efforts are hopeless.

Okay, I have been having the dangest time with my cable modem keeping a connection so I am gonna make this quick and hope I can squeeze it in before things break down again.

Courtesy of Artsjournal.com I found a great article on arts education in the spirit of the one I found locally a month or so ago. This one is in Minneapolis/St.Paul where the program is using the arts to teach critical thinking skills. The article points out that in an age when schools need to meet standardized testing, the skills gained are hard to quantify, though certainly valuable in the job market if they are cultivated.

As I am trying to be brief, all I will say is please, read it. And maybe drop a line to the paper praising them for spending so much space in the Sunday paper to discuss this topic.

In a related story, a study by the University of York has found that teaching students grammar actually has very little beneficial effect on the quality of the students’ writing. What does improve writing skills–getting the students to do a lot of writing.

Just like the first story–it is hard to objectively measure the benefits on a standardized test, though good writing skills are definitely marketable.

I talk about marketable skills because that seems to be the big gripe of job seekers and employers–college doesn’t seem to be providing students with marketable skills (I can do a whole series of blogs expressing my thoughts on that topic). As much as I am leery about the whole No Child Left Behind thing, I have to admit, whatever the schools were doing before wasn’t working too well. Students’ abilities and habits were so ill suited to college, the only benefit I could see was that my own skills would be in higher demand as time progressed.

At this point, if I can convince students to cultivate their critical thinking and expressive powers by using money as an incentive, I will toss the phrase “marketable skills” around until it goes passe and comes back into vogue again.

I came across a very interesting article on Artsjournal.com today. In “Hearing Voices”, J. Mark Scearce essentially says that not only aren’t students being exposed to enough music these days, the ones that are aren’t being taught how to listen to it correctly. Now that may sound strange, but if you read the article, it makes sense. My favorite part of the article is his suggestion that a bumper sticker be created says “Listening: It’s Not As Easy As It Sounds.”

I could see what he meant a little from my own experience. As I have grown older, I have actually come to realize that when I was a teen and adults asked why I was listening to the “crap” I was, they were pretty much right. I go back and listen to the music and while I do feel a sense of nostalgia for those good old days, I have to admit the music is junk.

In fact, I have to admit, I may be responsible for the current state of popular music. I remember hearing an interview at one time about the group Depeche Mode’s heavy use of synthesizers and I recall thinking that it would be great if people could become rich and famous musicians without having to spend the time learning to play an instrument or have much musical talent.

Be careful what you wish for indeed!

Now that I am older and wiser or whatever, I really have grown to appreciate the skill with which musicians create their work. I suddenly become aware of the subtle use of instruments beneath the other instruments to support them with a clever little bit of phrasing. I am not talking about classical music either. Some of the people I refer to are singer-songwriter types. Certainly some of their works are more complexly crafted than others.

I can’t quite name of the quality, but there is something about some music that makes you aware of the investment of time in the song and possession of talent. In some cases, the difference between musicians is obvious in the extreme. But other times, there is just some intangible quality that is a result of the sum of 1000 elements from the length of pauses to personal charisma that determines the difference between good and great.

It isn’t just in music of course. Dance, Drama and the Visual Arts are the same. In fact, if anything should have a bumper sticker, it should be “Acting is harder than it looks”. If someone is a novice with a violin, everyone recognizes that fact pretty quickly. However, everyone thinks they can act because you simply do what you would do in real life.

Just as Scearce says composers have to learn to listen, so too do actors have to learn to listen and watch as a first step. Reality goes on all around us, but it is tricky to recreate it convincingly for an audience.

Certainly it is the same for dance and visual arts. Only through constant observation and exposure does one recognize how movement, texture, color, shape, etc all work together to a desired end.

To some extent, the arts community has become so fixiated on simply trying to get butts in the seats/through the door and perhaps into an outreach program, the fact that long term exposure is really necessary for comprehension to occur. A person may have been coming to performances for two years and that seems like sufficient time to acquire comprehension and appreciation. However, the person may have had only 12 exposures total in those 2 years.

Twelve consecutive days of class is hardly enough to make someone comfortable with art. Stretch that over two years and that is one day every 2 months which hardly affords any sense of continuity at all.

Today the person with whom I had been discussing the state of arts education a week or so ago, sent me a great article about how some local schools were exposing kids to art while meeting the “No Child Left Behind” requirements for science. (For those of you wondering what Yu Gi Oh is, go here)

At Nanaikapono, Peralta’s class is focusing on two-dimensional art, drawing and painting fanciful creatures in various habitats where they face threats from man or nature. Each student researched the science of three different animals, studying their physical characteristics and habitats, before melding those traits to come up with a new animal.

Last week, they wrestled with how their creatures would overcome threats.

“This is when you guys can tell the story, instead of having the television tell them to you,” Enos told them, with his irrepressible smile. “This is when you can use your ideas. Who needs TV anyway?”

Ultimately, the class will create a game together, featuring the 28 creatures they have designed on cards.

“How many of you have played Yu-Go-Ih?” asked Enos, prompting peals of laughter.

“Yu-Gi-Oh!” the students corrected him in chorus.

“Usually you have a winner and a loser,” he went on, with a wink. “We’re going to change that whole dynamic. Everyone who sits down to play this game needs to work together to stop the threat.”

The goal of the game, Ali explained, is to create a balanced ecosystem. The rules will be up to the kids.

….Halfway through the six-week program, the class has learned how both artists and scientists rely on observation, prediction and trial-and-error, and how they must have a deep knowledge of their materials and their settings.

The program is a pilot project that will be expanded to other schools in the spring and mostly incorporate the efforts of visual artists who might work in anything from bronze to clay or fibre arts. I have to say, this really sounds like a great program. I am always at a loss to think of ways to integrate arts and subjects like science and math, so I really applaud the creativity of whomever came up with this.

A recent article by Drew McManus in The Partial Observer awakened some old contemplations. He wondered how classical music in the US fell so far out of favor and traces history for a possible answer.

I have often wondered along the same lines. At one point in our history, (only 70-80 or so years ago) almost every house had a piano in the parlor and people collected sheet music like they run out to get the newly released DVD. One would think this would be fertile ground for music, if not arts appreciation to grow. Instead, it has all fallen by the wayside.

One might blame technological advances and a shift to other forms of entertainment, but Europe has the same diversions available to them and they have maintained a fair ethic of interest in the arts in general. In looking back at some of my earlier entries on the history of the arts in the US like How Did We Get In To This Mess?, there are some answers, but nothing to clearly explain why we differ from our European cousins.

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that people in the US work longer hours than their European counterparts and therefore don’t have the time to cultivate our abilities to process (or even attend) live performances. Instead we gravitate toward the more accessible forms of entertainment like television and the corner video store.

An interesting related note–(my thanks to Vinod’s Blog for bringing the above link and the following link, both from MSN to my attention) according to economist Peter Kuhn at the University of California:

�It used to be that when you got a college degree you could get a white-collar job and take it easy.It�s just the opposite now. It�s blue-collar folks who have more time for leisure.�

(Quote is about 1/2 of the way down in this article)

It makes me wonder if the arts should be restructing programs and pitching to the blue collar sector. They may not have as much disposable income as their managers, but if they have the time and inclination to expand their horizons a little, they could prove to be a good potential audience.

I was having a conversation about arts outreach programs with the outreach coordinator of a dance group I had contracted to do a lecture/demo. With some synchronicity, the Artful Manager has also posted today about arts education.

Since I come from an organization that had a strong arts outreach program, I wanted to establish one here in conjunction with local artists and those I brought in from the Mainland and other countries. The outreach program coordinator also has a strong ethic in this regard as well.

In fact, her ideas were so ambitious, I had to rein her in a little. She wanted to have a week long series of events culminating in a performance that we bused kids in to. Since I am new here, I wanted to use the outreach to begin to establish relationships with local schools that I could eventually cultivate into something larger.

Following my philosophy of making it easy for people to say yes to attending performances, I want to take the performers in to the schools. This can be great or problematic. I have had cases where I have set up a program months out, reminded people two weeks, one week and the day before we arrived and still showed up to find out rooms weren’t set aside, teachers/principals weren’t told about the program and we ended up doing a lecture/demo in the hallways.

On the other hand, there have been schools that did everything but toss rose petals before us and were so enthusiastic about our presence, we had to remind them that we really needed to spend time in schools other than theirs.

But if you take performers to schools, there isn’t a need for the school to get buses, send home permission slips and take travel time out of the day. When I brought this up to the outreach coordinator, she wholeheartedly agreed. With the No Child Left Behind law, the schools she has dealt with are really eliminating any room for creativity and are mandating X number of hours each day for reading, math, etc and specifying rigid standards for how it should be taught and when.

The real problem then is that the schools who have the least amount of arts exposure and would benefit most are those in districts that have the most pressure to raise their scores and therefore have little time for frivolous programs like ours. The districts that do have the time tend to also be those who have allocated time for arts exposure. Still many of them could probably do with more.

The dance company’s coordinator was talking about how the focus used to be on underserved schools whereas now things have moved to drug diversion and family preservation (not surprising since the State Foundation for Culture and the Arts is now funded by federal drug money) Now granted, this new focus pretty much encompasses the underserved/at-risk population as well.

The message I had hoped to communicate with this outreach was really appropriate for this goal though. The dance piece was created as a cooperative effort by a very traditional Hawaiian hālau and a modern dance company. There were a lot of things that the modern dance company wanted to do that was not within the acceptable limits of the hula tradition and the modern company did not want to be restricted by the traditional aspects of hula or to hula at all in the creation of the piece.

Ultimately though, they created this incredible work of art which heralds the arrival of Lo’ihi, a new island off the southeast edge of Hawai’i. (In 30-50,000 years). The underlying message to kids today is that traditional (parents) ways and the new (children) are not mutually exclusive and both outlooks have significance to each other.

Hopefully I can get this into the schools!

So I was a little premature in some of my recent declarations. My bemoaning the fact that no one applied to be my assistant was a couple hours premature. Three people actually applied for the position on the very last day, though two of them didn’t have a complete application packet and so may end up disqualified if they don’t move their butts. (Given that I suspect one of the incompletes was submitted by a person we alerted to the requirements two weeks before it was advertised, this does not bode well.)

My other premature gripe was in regard to low ticket sales for the show. It seems word of mouth trumps two 6pm newscasts and thousands of dollars in advertising.

The second week of the show was a little better than the first–Thursday performance had 40 tickets presale, we sold about 100 at the door. Friday performance had 50 tickets presale Thursday night, 80 sold by the time the box office closed for the afternoon–then we were swamped by an unexpected 250 people at the door. We hadn’t brought staffing on for those numbers so we had a very long line and ended up holding the show for a bit. Saturday night we were smarter–we had 100 sold in advance and about 300 people showed up at the door. We had the right staffing so there was no line.

This brings up the fairly recent question about how performing arts organizations can get people to purchase a little earlier. Many theatres hate the fact that no one is buying subscriptions. At this point, I would be okay with that if they would only buy a week or so ahead of time.

It makes it extremely difficult to balance good customer service with economy. If you cut back on staffing for a night and you get swamped, then people have a negative impression of you because the service suffers. However, if you are paying a full staff and few people show up, then there is negative impression left on your bank account.

The box office manager suggested having one price in advance and another at the door. In my experience, saving $2-$3 in advance hasn’t been an incentive to buy in advance. However, she clarified and suggested we have a higher flat rate price at the door for everyone. Instead of $22 adults, $15 students, and then $25/$18 at the door, she is suggesting we charge $25 for everyone at the door. Given that most people claim a student/senior/military discount when they purchase tickets, saving $10 might be an incredible incentive to buy early.

On the other hand, if people aren’t thinking about what they are going to do until the last minute, they won’t know they missed the opportunity until they pick up the paper/go on line and suddenly discover they have to pay $10 more, the pricing structure becomes a huge disincentive to attend.

What I and all the other theatre managers want to know is–when are most people making their decisions? If it is on Wednesday, then this is a strong incentive to buy early. If it is 5pm on Friday, then this is a strong incentive to go rent a movie.

So, a little cautionary tale to relate here about agents, artists and presenters. I had the experience where an agent didn’t return an executed contract after having it for 4 months. I made a couple calls to prod them to send the contract which was for a performance 2 months hence telling them I couldn’t process a check request without it.

A few weeks go by and I start advancing the show with the performers and mention the same thing. Turns out the performer had recently left the agent because of poor service like this, but unfortunately, since we started the contract with them, we had to continue. (And by the way, when I first called to bug them about sending the contract, the agent directed me to the new agency who then took a while to realize I didn’t have a contract through them.)
I explain how my ability to pay them will be hampered by not having the contract.

Five- six weeks out the agent calls and tells me they don’t have a piece of the contract so I rush the material to them hoping to expedite the process of getting the contract back. (In the meantime, they are calling for ticket counts three times a week) A month out, I speak with the performers again extending my dire warning. They give me another number to call and bug about the contract which I do.

Two and half weeks out, the performer calls in frantically because the agent who has had the stupid contract for 6 months now apparently hasn’t read it in all this time and makes a mistake about the agreed upon fee. I call the agent to clarify matters and she encourages me to send the deposit in (I have started intoning my warning about not being able to pay them now because I have said it so frequently of late.) A week or so out, the performers finally get the contract rush through signing it and filling out the required materials and though they aren’t supposed to, send a copy of the contract to me and return a copy to the agent.

Unfortunately, it is really too late to send the paperwork through in the normal manner. However, the performers’ rep threatens that they won’t show up if I can’t guarantee I can have the check for them. I don’t blame the performers for not wanting to risk their cash flow by having to wait for a check to come a week or so after they perform, but all the same, we sent the contract in nearly 7 months before at this point.

To make matters worse, the agent has pretty much crossed out half the contract, including the Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity clauses which tend to be something that state governments are sensitive about. They didn’t technically apply to this situation, but still at the time, I didn’t know if it would go through the system swiftly or not. It would be tough enough to push it through without those potential stumbling blocks.

I spent a day chasing people around campus, calling secretaries and assistants asking to be alerted when people got out of meetings and requesting that the person in question not be allowed to leave their own office. (These folks are the ones that really run an institution as everyone knows!)

Somehow I managed to get all the approvals I needed and get the checks processed. However, it is a cautionary tale about the performing arts. Here was a situation that wasn’t my fault in the least and that I warned about in many instances, yet it was made my problem nonetheless.

There is little recourse for either me or the performer against the big agency. The performers can’t threaten to take their business elsewhere, they already have, and the agency is so big, they really don’t care if I never do business with them again.

We actually had a letter of warning that we sent back with the contracts 7 months prior warning about this as well. There doesn’t seem to really be a solution to this for the future other than to become the greasy wheel and call the agent everyday starting a month or so out if the contract hasn’t been received.

I know that I said nice things about agents that I met at the WAA conference. They were mostly folks who were in small to medium size agencies and were interested in keeping good relations with everyone involved. This wasn’t my first dealings with the behemoth agencies, but it was the worst indeed.

So yesterday I attended a grants workshop held by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. It was an interesting experience on many fronts. For one thing, they are on a biennium grant schedule which means you apply this year for money for the next two years. Now for a laid back place like Hawaii, it seems strange that you have to get so organized you know what you are going to do for the next two years!

I can’t but think that they are essentially encouraging people to lie their butts off. Arts organizations make things up for annual grant writing, but it pretty much goes without saying a two year cycle essentially encourages people to try to fund their wildest dreams.

Now all this could be moot because of the (big surprise) arts funding problems in the state. When the arts foundation submitted their proposed budget in April/May, all their funds were frozen and remain so. There was a big uproar and the governor allocated money from health and human services earmarked for drug prevention for the arts foundation. (One of the criteria now for getting money is serving at risk youth)

Back in June or so I read a report that said Hawaii had the most per capita spending on the arts. (Which isn’t a heck of a lot given that there are only 1.2 million people living here, but still, a good proportion.) Ah how quickly they fall.

In any case, the people leading the workshop essentially said to live this year as if it were the last we were being funded because it probably is.

Okay, I retrieved the last of the notes I made while at the WAA conference. They are short, but sour I am afraid. The conference was doing a session on trends in government funding and had the NEA representative for presenters and a woman from the Western Arts Federation (WESTAF) there as well. Because the conference was in Spokane, they invited the head of the Spokane Arts Council to sit on the panel.

Unfortunately, between the time she was invited and the time the conference occured, the arts council was pretty much reduced to one person. Apparently in deciding where funds should be allocated, the city asked each division to talk about their accomplishments. The divisions with lots of people who could make concrete claims like paving hundreds of miles of road or fixing so many miles of water mains faired well. The arts council got dissolved.

Now this isn’t any surprising news if you have been watching the trends around the country this last few years. What was really interesting was the assumptions the head of the arts council had made.

She thought based on the small portion the arts council received in the budget, it would be more trouble than it was worth to dissolve it. Wrong.

She thought the loss of political capital the mayor and city council would face would dissuade them. Nope.

She thought the outcry from businesses and individuals whose partnerships with the arts council intertwined their fates with it would provide an impediment. Didn’t really emerge.

Now someone at the conference said that she said the irony of dissolving it as a major arts conference was bringing lots of money to town kept them from destroying it completely. I didn’t hear her say that when I was around. Given that the other situations she had mentioned didn’t give them pause, I doubt the disappointment of a group that was only in town for a week was a real consideration.

Now the head of the arts council is trying to keep many of the initiatives she started going by farming them out to other organizations. For instance, she hopes another company will take on the responsibility of maintaining the arts calendar which is a major source of arts information for the entire region and not just the city.

I know that that according to the rules of writing I learned in school, this is the place I should insert a summation statement for my entry. But I gotta say, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound trite and stupid.

Okay as promised, I took notes at the international tax session at the WAA conference. It was actually a hot topic. The session was scheduled for about 1.5 hours but at the end of the time it ended up moving to another room and continuing. (I moved on to a grants session because I had notes on 90% of what I wanted to know.) Then the discussion apparently infiltrated an Arts Presenter’s session as well.

The speaker at the session was Stanley E. Majors: Attorney, Fettmann, Tolchin & Majors, P.C.. (CPA and Tax Attorney licensed to practice in DC, MD and VA)

Among the things I learned was:

-Tax treaty is determined by place of residence. A French national residing in Switzerland falls under Swiss treaty.

-Everyone in the payment chain-presenter, agent, manager, etc can act as the collection agent of the 30%. The IRS typically starts at the end of the chain with the last person to handle the money before the artist gets it when researching if the money was collected. Mr. Major’s suggestion was to put something in the contract that stipulates who will be the party responsible for withholding. Obviously, many of the presenters’ preference would be for the agent or manager to be the responsible one.

Though empowering everyone in the chain to collect the tax looks like the IRS is just increasing the number of people they can blame, Mr. Major assured us that it wasn’t the case. Nor is it so they can collect the tax multiple times.

-The Alien has to fill out a certificate 8233 to claim exemption if they feel they are entitled to keeping their 30% The IRS has 10 days to agree with the exemption or not. A presenter can not make a decision to withhold or not unless they file. (For example, if you have someone coming in for 1 day and they are making $1000 to speak and then leaving the country and you know they fall below the exemption threshold, you still can’t exempt them unless they file.)

-If you know that a person has falsely filed an exemption, you have to withhold. You don’t necessarily have to research their entire tour schedule, but if you know that they are performing in a city south of you one night and a city to the north of you the night after for the same rate they are charging you and it exceeds the exemption amount and they file an exemption, you can’t accept it.

-Article 16 or 17 of the tax treaty is where the pertinent info is usually found. (For tax treaties, a good place to start is this IRS webpage. It contains links to more specific information, including the treaties, as you find you need it.

-This restrictive clause in the treaties only applies to performers and athletes. Their managers, lighting people, make up people, etc fall under a more liberal portion of the treaties. Apparently, the US actually wants people to come to the country and do business and the more liberal portions reflect that. The restrictive portions are to prevent people like the Rolling Stones from coming in, making millions of dollars and leaving. Unfortunately, since the Rolling Stones are making millions of dollars, they aren’t hurt too much by it, but the smaller folks are.

-Just like US citizens, the alien can get a refund by itemizing their operational expenses on a 1040NR at the end of the year.

-I spoke to Mr. Major specifically about a South African group with incorporation
and Fed. tax number in the US and his opinion was that the taxes didn’t need to be withheld since they are 1) obligated to file corporate tax returns every year 2) the IRS can exert enforcement powers if they lie, especially since so much of their income is derived in the US. (Which is probably why they incorporated in the US in the first place–to avoid the bite) Of course, to get him to issue an opinion the IRS would care about, I assume we would have to pay lots of money.

-If a foreign group claims to be a non-profit organization similiar to 501 (c) (3) in the US, you can request that the IRS make a determination if the organization meets the same criteria as a US non-profit.

That is about everything I learned. The one thing I didn’t note was whether you treat a group as 1 entity earning 10,000 or 10 people earning 1,000. I am told he covered that in a later session on the same topic so I am inquiring if a colleague took notes specifically on that since that was an area of concern for her.

Well I have returned from Spokane, WA a bit older and wiser for the experience. There was plenty that happened so I will have ample fodder for posting. Unfortunately, the amount of work left undone while I was away may keep me from my posting. We shall see.

Let me first start by saying Spokane is a lovely city is walk around, especially near the convention center which is right on the edge of a park where Expo 1974 occurred. The conference itself was well organized and there were some procedures that had been adopted that went over very well with the membership–but more about that in a later entry.

I ended up learning quite a bit, but I was concerned that wouldn’t be so when the conference first started (and not just because of my articles on useless meetings, part 2 here). The keynote speaker was Gunther Schuller who has had a long career as a musician and has certainly shown his love and stamina for his craft (he apparently would play in an orchestra for an opera and then walk into a jazz club to continue playing into the night.) However, in my estimation, he really has no concept about what it takes to run an arts organization.

I was really rather angry at the conference coordinators for picking him and had to resist an outburst at various times during the week when I came in contact with them. (I will avail myself of the feedback forms they provided, however, and probably won’t be any more diplomatic than I will be here.)
It was probably the worst example of many of the things I have railed against the arts community over in prior posts.

His whole speech was about how great the good old days were. He didn’t say anything I didn’t know 20 years ago. He cited the miniscule proportion the NEA budget has to the entire federal budget. He spoke of low listenership and programming of classic music on radio stations and lauded NPR for having the courage to play the music. Pop music and network television are the enemies leading to illiteracy and the destruction of culture. It is a terrible thing, he says that Hootie and the Blowfish get to be on the talk shows and Beethoven is no where to be seen. It was all doom and gloom and really just very old news.

It all may be absolutely true, but nothing he said acknowledged the fact that this was the environment in which arts organizations operate today and then try to offer practical solutions that reflect this fact. His suggested solution was sandwich booking where you put a lesser known show between two popular shows. Again, this is a really old strategy that doesn’t reflect how people currently make decisions to buy tickets.

I momentarily thought I might be wrong about this being an old strategy when he started lauding the great success the Boston and Philadelphia symphonies had with this strategy–until he got around to mentioning that he was talking about men who were running the organizations in 1939! His criteria for what constituted good popular music with which to sandwich the new stuff was even more telling when he discounted the value of most of Vivaldi in an aside. In my mind, if someone isn’t comfortable or familiar with classical music, that composer’s “Four Seasons” is probably a good introduction.

The only suggestion he made that I felt had merit was that the creators of a work (composers/playwrights), the purchasers and presenters, and the performers of works communicate with each other more effectively about how to combat the apathy about the arts. He didn’t give any examples other than those I mentioned, but as a general concept it seems to have merit.

On the whole though, I was really annoyed by the talk. I am going to suggest some alternative speakers for next year (Douglas McLennan would have been perfect this year given that he is about a 45 minute flight away from Spokane). In my mind, a keynote speaker should set the stage for discussion throughout the conference–even if it is arguments. The only discussion that came out of this session was akin to churchgoers musing about why sinners didn’t see the light and come to church and congratulating one another for taking their children to Sunday school. As much as I may dislike most organized religions, to properly employ this metaphor I have to say–there wasn’t any discussion about effectively witnessing and converting the great unwashed. (The problem being that the speaker essentially derided the great unwashed for their entertainment habits.)

So I am learning about something I have never come in contact with before in my career–international tax treaties. Apparently the IRS is joining the INS and making it difficult for international acts to decide to perform in the US. I am told since 9/11 occurred, the IRS has really been cracking down on enforcing taxes on international performers. I guess they feel since they caught Al Capone on taxes, maybe they will get lucky and uncover some plots.

On the other hand this seems like a great topic for the blog so I have to grudgingly give an iota of appreciation for coming in contact with it.

In any case, what this means is that if a performer exceeds a certain level of income in the US in a year, as a presenter you are obligated to deduct 30% from the fees you are paying them. They can file to get it back but that can get annoying as you might easily imagine.

The federal government has apparently gone after a number of universities who haven’t done this for back taxes so my school is taking it very seriously and so are a lot of other places. One of the first things the guy who advised me told me is not to believe folks when they complained we were the only ones doing it. He forwarded me some emails from a Listserv group (definition of Listserv here if you aren’t familiar with the term) that had members from all over the country asking questions related to the tax situation.

Here is what I know so far–Any international performer who makes over a certain amount (the amount differs accord to the treaty the US has with the country of origin) has to have 30% deducted from their fees. Apparently under certain circumstances, this can apply to the value of accomodations and transportation the host organization provides as well. So if you are paying them $10,000 and then provide $10,000 worth of services in airfare, hotels, rental cars, etc you could potentially end up having to deduct $6,000 for taxes. The bit about how much of airfare and accomodations qualifies is a bit more convoluted and apparently doesn’t apply to our situation. Perhaps because they are paying their airfare out of their own fee.

It doesn’t matter if you are paying an agent, it is to be handled as if you are paying the artist directly. (So the performer hates you cause they get paid less, the agent hates you because their cut is smaller.)

The thing that really surprised me is that a we have a group from a foreign country that has incorporated in the US and has its own federal ID number. I assumed that since they would have to file corporate income tax, we would be off the hook with the percentage since the onus would be on them to tell the truth or lie about how much they made. Nope, my guy says. They will be exceeding the $7500/yr threshold set by treaty with their country so unless they show rules to the contrary, they get a bit taken out too.

So the question I have before my people right now–When do we make the performers and their agents aware of the fact they won’t be getting all of their fee, at least not up front.

I am going to a booking conference next week is this going to essentially end my ability to present really good international acts? Are people going to refuse to perform or bump their fees to make up the difference (which is a range I can’t afford). Yeah, there are plenty of great domestic acts and I am looking forward to seeing some at the conference next week.

But I am also living at a crossroads of the world where no racial background is dominant. People are interested in seeing things from their own cultural backgrounds and that of the next person. I don’t think the hyphenated American version of culture is going to cut it here where many people are hardly 1 generation removed from the real thing, if that. And there is far less pressure to move toward a homogenized culture than there is on the mainland so even after a couple generations, an awareness of the real McCoy may not fade.

I will keep folks apprised of what develops and how many people throw things at me out of frustration. I mean I get taxed by my own government all the time, I am used to it. It is just not a part of the American experience I would choose to share with visitors.

USA Today featured an article about a performing arts center being constructed on the site of Woodstock in Bethel, NY.

I have been following the story for awhile now since I grew up near the site and my mother currently lives within 10 miles of the location. (In fact, I mentioned the arts center in an earlier entry) Artists rendition of the site may be found here.

As you might imagine, there are quite a few people who are not happy that the historic land is being torn up for an arts center. One such group is the Woodstock Preservation Alliance. Although they tend to paint Allan Geery as an evil developer, he and his foundation have been somewhat responsive to the desires of the group and eliminated 90% of the planned construction. (Noted in coverage of the hearings here and here) For their own part, the Alliance isn’t opposed to the performing arts center. They realize its economic value to the area. They just don’t want it on the historic portion of the fields.

If you read the articles and look at the website, it is clear that Woodstock really touched a great number of people. Many of those opposed to the development are from Canada and many parts of the US. In fact, some of those opposed didn’t even attend Woodstock which goes to show how the power of the event has captured people’s hearts and imaginations.

On the other hand, a lot of locals support the site. This may not be unexpected. They live in a section of the Catskill mountains that has been economically depressed since people from NYC stopped flocking to the local resorts in the summer. People are heading back to the mountains again, but it is to attend newly built casinos which is a mixed blessing at best.

The one glimmer of hope has come from Allan Gerry and his Sullivan Renaissance program. He has taken the money he got from selling his cable company to Time Warner and has the local communities competing with each other to get improvement grants. Stories about how communities have mobilized to meet this challenge can be found here, here, here.

So when the man who has helped bring some pride back to the county says he is going to use his money build a performing arts center that will feature the NY Philharmonic, it is hard not to be grateful. Even his opponents admit it will be beneficial to the community.

It is tough to identify the bad guy in this case. There are too many elements to address in this small space, but briefly– Yes, Woodstock is a potent and pivotal part of our history and should be preserved and treasured. On the other hand the developer has eliminated a huge part of his plans for the site. His plans will bring thousands of visitors to the historical site which he intends to preserve a large portion of and do homage to in a museum. The Gerry Foundation has shown itself to be reverent of the local communities so the project probably won’t be cheesy or Disneyfy the locale or Woodstock ’69.

Personally, I think I would prefer the amibiance his project will bring to the local community rather than the one the casinos are going to.

If you are like me, you often wondered how the Public Theatre could afford to do Shakespeare in Central Park for free for so many years. Well, it turns out it hasn’t been easy, nor has it been entirely free. An article appeared yesterday in the New York Times on this exact subject.

It turns out you can purchase tickets for reserved seating to the shows and this is not a new development. Founder Joe Papp started an audience sponsor program in 1960. The program was essentially a subscription plan where $7.50 got you reserved seats to 3 of the summer shows. According to the article, Papp felt this pricing scheme was essential for the theatre to survive.

Until recently, the theatre has downplayed the availability of the ticket program for fear of appearing too commerical. Executive Director Mara Manus has really made a push to promote the program this year. $100 gets you a reserved seat. Since the seating is free to all, the money is actually a tax deductible donation according to the website. The benefit you get is not having to stand on line and a preferred seating location.

The Public is capping the number of seats that can be reserved in this manner each night and the rest will be available for free. According to the article, “up to 19,950 of the total 79,800 seats to be occupied this summer will not be available.” The ticket program only covers 19% of the $1.9 million budget for the production this summer. “The remainder derives from foundations (24 percent), corporate donations (21 percent, which includes cash or in-kind giving by companies like J. P. Morgan and The New York Times) and the blocks of Delacorte tickets sold to businesses (16 percent). There is still a 20 percent shortfall.”

So obviously, it hasn’t been the easiest thing to do free Shakespeare all these years. Even the lofty goal of making theatre free to all has entailed selling tickets to those who will pay. I thought perhaps the Public’s other activities generated enough revenue to cover the loss of doing free Shakespeare. But it turns out it hasn’t been entirely free. Publicizing the availability of reserved tickets is a financial necessity. Ms. Mara projects that the Public will be in the black for the first time since 1998. (The Public has a $12 million budget so presumably other measures are being taken in addition to the sale of tickets at the Central Park event.)

This situation holds some interesting lessons for other theatres who try to financially support their free events. Not only will people pay for the privilege of a reserved seat at a free event, they will pay $100 for it. Essentially, people are paying as much as they would for some Broadway shows and they are doing so for a seat exposed to the elements.

I assume all the closest seating locations are taken by those who pay for their tickets no matter how long the first non-donating person has been standing on line. The theatre has 1,900 seats and up to 475 may be sold on any one night. Even though the first non-donating person will have a good seat, there could be some anger on their part if they can’t sit closer after standing on line for hours. The logic that they are getting it for free so they don’t have cause to complain about a donor getting better treatment is usually lost on people–and you have to remember, you are dealing with New Yorkers who can be a little less laid back than other folks. (Edit: Please read comment below where a reader corrects this impression.)

Even though they have been running the program for over 40 years, the fact they are heavily promoting it now means that the first non-donor in line will end up much further back than in the past. (Perhaps 400 people back vs. 100 people back in recent years.) As confounding as it may seem, the theatre could end up with a negative image for more strongly promoting a long time program so they can continue offering a show for free.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

While poking around the web today, I came across the Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy Initiative. It appears the project ended in March 2003, but the website still serves as a resource for research on “exemplary arts-based civic dialogue projects”

The initiative was a joint project of the Amercians for the Arts supported by the Ford Foundation based, in part, on the premise that:

“In the workings of democracy, civic dialogue plays an essential role, giving voice to multiple perspectives and enabling people to develop more multifaceted, humane, and realistic views of issues and each other. Yet there is growing concern that opportunities for civic dialogue in this country have diminished in recent years. In the renewal of civic dialogue, the arts can play a pivotal role in many ways.”

They worked with 32 organizations in their Animating Democracy Initiative Lab, giving them support to develop a number of projects. Those projects can be found listed here.

The website also provides links to case studies and profiles that Americans for the Arts weren’t necessarily involved in and reference materials in the resource section.

Andrew Taylor has a great entry today on The Artful Manager. He lists generalizations about non-profits vs. for profits that have annoyed me for ages. I am not as concerned about the negative light with which for profits are cast as I am with the pure motives and results attributed to non-profits.

From my own experience with organizations I have had contact (and a handful for which I have worked) I can easily attest that many non-profits have forgotten what their mission is, produce their share of the crass and pandering and have hardly cornered the market on community building. Non profits’ existence hinges so much on casting themselves as benevolent and beneficial in order to receive grant money that the positive image pervades.

To be clear, I am not just talking about arts and cultural non-profits, but health and human service sector organizations like Big Brother’s/Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs, the United Way and a host of less recognizable social service agencies as well. Though certainly there are plenty of instances where arts and cultural organizations act poorly as well. (Witness Drew McManus’ frequently entries on how orchestra management bullox up the works here and here among others.)

The part of Mr. Taylor’s argument that really interested me was his thoughts about why one would seek non-profit status:

“The cause would be my choice of creative expression and the context of a consumer market’s willingness to buy it. When there wasn’t adequate volume or density of consumers to cover the cost of my work, the effect would be a drift toward nonprofit status. When there was a sufficient group of individuals that wanted to buy the work at a price that covered its costs, the effect would be a drift toward for-profit status.”

and a little later…

“Tax status is not a cause. It is not a source of nobility or honor or excellence or any other foundation-friendly word you care to utter. Tax status is a tool, a step, a way, an option. To boldly paraphrase a favorite quote of the gun lobby: ‘nonprofits don’t make art, people do.’ They just happen to choose that tax status sometimes along the way. But they can also choose another if it serves their vision, their purpose, or their art.”

In the course of all the interviewing I have done for jobs, I have spoken to boards of directors who are just starting an arts organization and are looking for a person to run it for them. Because they sincerely want to create an organization that benefits the community, and because they have found government and private entities that will give them the money to do it, they inevitably have formed a non-profit to reach this end.

Even as a person in the profession, I haven’t really questioned this because I don’t really know of any alternatives. If I was starting a for profit business I could go to a bank for loans or find investors but I can’t really think of any place outside of a city like NY or LA that a person could do either and be taken seriously. Unless you are all already wealthy, how can a group of people get together to build a performing arts center without going the non-profit route?

But I agree with Mr. Taylor’s idea–if you think there is enough interest in what you are doing that you could pack the house, why not try to make a profit first and then move to non-profit status if you discover that plenty of people have the interest to pack the house, but not the means to support the organization by themselves.

This is something I will be contemplating. I will be keeping my eyes open for articles that might show that such an idea is viable. If anyone sees one, please direct me to it!

Though I have a couple research papers I can discuss, I hate to have this blog get bogged down with me summarizing stats and figures. While it can certainly can provide interesting information and allow arts folks to make a decision about whether they want to read the original document, it can get boring.

That being said, I did spend yesterday trying to find out if anyone has done research on university-arts organization relationships like those I discussed yesterday to see how each fared in promoting their individual agendas and preserving their identities. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.

In an attempt to provide some interesting material, I found an interview with Douglas McLennan, the gentleman who writes/edits Artsjournal.com. He has been writing Artsjournal since 1999 and discusses some of the trends he sees in arts worldwide.

Among the trends he has seen have been: concern about arts funding and the digital age blurring the lines of who owns what and what constitutes ownership. He also notes that since Sept. 11, people have become much more conservative in their artistic tastes. There isn’t as much an interest for in your face art. Rather people are looking for offerings that make them feel comfortable or lift them up.

When asked why he started Artsjournal.com, he mentioned that as a writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer he came across some articles on the web that were very interesting and he wondered why he had never heard about these stories in the months since they came out. He decided to create a website that collected a broad range of arts stories in one place so people could quickly get a sense of what was happening internationally in the arts.

His decision to add bloggers to his website came out of a recognition that arts coverage was declining in the newspapers and journals across the country. He wanted to provide a place where intelligent discourse on arts topics could be presented without the concern for space and time that other media face. He also feels that the presence of conflicting views allows the web to present a product of higher quality than a newspaper.

A newspaper arts writer may feel compelled to be nice because they are the only voice about the arts in town. When there are many voices expressing their views on the same work, it allows the individual more freedom to present their true views because responsibility for a show’s success or failure doesn’t rest solely on their shoulders. They are important opinion leaders, but not the only opinion leader. The competition pressures the writer to keep his/her skills sharp and to consider a wide range of perspectives.

Give it a listen if only to hear the voice behind the website.

Over the course of the last few years I have noticed a number of arts organizations which have allied themselves with state universities in order to alleviate some financial difficulties. Many of these relationships have been more or less alliances and partnerships. However, in a couple cases it has been more akin to selling off one’s soul piecemeal.

As I have written about before, the Asolo Theatre in Sarasota, FL started out as a partner of Florida State University. At one time the Asolo and FSU built a facility together which ended up housing the theatre and the university acting and motion picture, broadcast and radio conservatories. As financial difficulties mounted, the theatre company turned to the university for help and the school ended up owning pretty much everything the theatre owned. In time they were actually paying the salaries of seven of the theatre company’s top staff.

The last time I was down in Sarasota I found that Florida State University had also taken over the administration of Ringling Museums (not to be confused with the Ringling School of Art and Design) which shared a parking lot with the Asolo. (At one time the Asolo Theatre Company performed on the Ringling grounds in an Italian Baroque theatre brought over from Italy.) The museum had been struggling financially for years and turned to the state for help.

Given that the Sarasota Ballet moved in to the vacant Film Conservatory space when that educational unit moved back to the main campus in Tallahassee, Florida State University actually exerts some control over three formerly independent arts organizations. Of the three, the ballet still retains the most autonomy because they are more or less a resident of a state owned building rather than subject to its governance.

A similiar thing happened in Orlando when I was working at the University of Central Florida. The Civic Theatre of Central Florida was in financial trouble. They turned to the university, merged with the university theatre and now after a couple of gradual steps the space is now a venue of the university theatre program. The old Civic Theatre operates in some of the spaces as Orlando Rep (though you wouldn’t know it since the Theatre Dept website doesn’t mention them). However, the board of directors is heavily compromised of people from UCF’s development, university president and arts and sciences dean’s offices.

While this state of affairs does show that the State of Florida does actively support the arts, one wonders if it is worth it in the long run. When you are beholden to the state, many of your decisions are open to scrutiny and questioning not only by your own board of directors, but by myriad people in state government.

A case in point, the Asolo’s agreement with Florida State Univ. was that the producing artistic would retire in 2003. He decided he wasn’t going to retire so the university decided it wasn’t going to continue to pay the salaries of the top 7 administrators if he wasn’t going to leave. The theatre board resolved to pay the $400,000 in salaries in order to keep him at the helm. The university also decided to pull the acting conservatory back to the main campus in response to the weakening relationship it was having with the professional company. This news pretty much horrified the community.

Since then, things have been resolved and the conservatory is slated to stay. (Though people are wondering about that in light of some recent events.) It just illustrates the dangers of looking to a state institution to save you.

There is also the question whether weak organizations should be propped up by the state and given the security to perpetuate poor practices on the tax payer’s dime or not. I personally would be heartbroken to see the Asolo close or the Ringling end up selling off all its art works because it couldn’t keep afloat.

But the truth is, the state doesn’t really know how to run theatres and art galleries. The conservatory faculty that has taken up residence as partners are focussed on education and not administration of the other organization. The state isn’t in the best position to come in and provide expertise and guidance as to what was done wrong and what steps can be taken to improve the situation. The best they can do is hire consultants to provide guidance in their stead. To the best of my knowledge this did not happen in any of these instances.

With cuts to both arts and education in many states, these organizations may find that they have just delayed the inevitable and that they may soon have to fend for themselves.