State of the Arts

My First Solicited Book Review

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Disclaimer
I recently received a request from the authors of Performing Arts Management: A Handbook of Professional Practices to review the book. (Actually, it was from one of their student assistants.) While I have read and summarized books on this blog before, they have been books I have been interested in reading rather than ones I was solicited to read. The only consideration received for this review was a free copy of the book. When I was asked if I would like to read the book, I told them I was interested in learning more, but made no promises I would write a review, much less say anything nice about it.

My Approach
I am not going to even attempt to approximate the format or voice of some of the more prestigious book reviews. Mainly my approach is going to be as a person who used theatre management texts both as a student and as a professor, seasoned with my experience working in the industry.

Overall, Great
By and large I thought the book was really excellent as a resource. Nearly every time I made a note that they hadn’t covered a topic, I later came across a chapter segment where they handled that subject in great detail. The authors, Tobie Stein and Jessica Bathurst, conducted a massive number of interviews over a number of years which yield a great deal of practical advice.

Weaknesses First
Most of this entry is going to praise the book so I thought I would get the few criticisms out of the way first. Though they were extremely thorough and detailed in most areas, one of the subjects that I would have liked to see covered was volunteer recruitment and the care and handling thereof. This includes board recruitment. Given the importance of these two groups and their comprehensive coverage of so many other areas, I was really surprised there was very little about recruitment, cultivation and retention of volunteers.

New York City Is The Center
The other thing is that the book is VERY New York City and theatre oriented. This is probably no surprise given the authors live and work in New York and Brooklyn. Many of the people and prominent organizations they need to interview are located there. There are mentions of arts organizations outside of New York like the Kennedy Center, Guthrie Theatre and New England summer stock theatres, but everything seemed to come back to New York. Discussion of Las Vegas focussed on how Broadway shows were abridged for Vegas audiences. There are interviews with people from other disciplines certainly, but so much seemed to orient on theatre.

The section on touring seemed to assume that the reader would be presenting a touring play or musical. In some regard, these are the best disciplines to cover because all the unions potentially involved gives something of a “worst case scenario” of the issues that might need to be addressed in a tour. The options of music and dance are mentioned and some of the agents interviewed mention the dance companies they represent. But the focus was so heavily on plays and musicals, I am afraid students using the book might think that is the only sort of touring that goes on.

I was also concerned that people who intended to work in other parts of the country and present differ types of performance may feel the book didn’t contain anything of value for them. I think this is especially true these days when arts organizations have to be more nimble with the type of shows they present and produce. At the very least, it would have been nice to have a contract for a dance tour or musical group included in the examples at the end of the touring chapter.

No, Performing Arts Management Isn’t Boring
The final thing I thought was a weakness for the book was employing the “professional input quote” technique in the first chapter. For most of the book, these quotes are extremely valuable and add great insight. I will even mention a couple instances later. In the first chapter, it drags it down. Here is an example on the second page of the chapter. In the first full paragraph starting with “Commercial producers organize…” The authors took three different interviews with people in different times and places and made it sound like they were participating in the same discussion.

As I read, I could see this book from the student’s point of view. If these were the sort of discussions arts managers had, the job was deadly boring. What was quoted weren’t interesting anecdotes, but rather dry definitions of commercial theatre that were probably better just stated outright rather than quoted. These definitions were made more difficult to comprehend by the inclusion of lengthy background information on the person being quoted. Do I really need to know that Sean Patrick Flahaven is Managing Director of the Melting Pot Theatre, a small off-Broadway non-profit producing theatre to absorb the fact that “The goals of the commercial venture are to first payback its investors, then make a profit and then make something with artistic integrity.” That is his only contribution on that page and he doesn’t appear again until three pages later.

As I have have mentioned, the practice of quoting people is very valuable throughout the rest of the book. There are times later in the book when quotes are also used to provide dry definitions, but they appear amid varied information and citations. But at the time, I was just dreading the whole book was going to be like the first chapter and wondered what I had gotten myself into when I agreed to read the book.

Where It Was Strong
Okay, having gotten that out of the way. I was really impressed by a lot in the book. It was much better than the text I had learned from *mumble* years ago. The comments from different arts professionals interspersed throughout the chapters made good on the promise of the book’s title to discuss the practice of arts managers.

Producer Richard Frankel’s story about how Mel Brooks and Susan Stroman turned the process around and “auditioned” producers for the production of The Producers was great. The way he described the lengths he went to make his proposal stand out was reminiscent of the things actors will do to get themselves remembered at auditions.

Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Peter Gee discussion of the way they decided to furlough employees in the wake of the financial downturn following September 11 was very relevant to the current times.

Well Supported and Designed
Every chapter has examples appropriate to the subject matter. Many right from the people cited in the chapter. I was impressed with the amount of material included in some of the chapters. Charts, graphs, spreadsheets, etc from multiple organizations were included in many chapters so that the student has examples from groups of different sizes and budgets to compare.

The thing I appreciated in terms of classroom activities was that there were discussion questions and occasionally activities/exercises after every section of a chapter. I know as a student that I would skip over the questions at the end of a chapter unless otherwise assigned. The placement of these questions are good on many levels: They are harder for the student to avoid. If a student doesn’t quite understand what they should derive from a section, the questions immediately emphasize what concepts were important in the preceding text. The questions are valuable to a professor for the same reason–if students don’t seem to grasp a concept, the questions are readily available to facilitate learning and reduce pressure to think of discussion topics to lead students to comprehension.

Clear Investment of Time
What impressed me most was the time spent on some of the subject areas. In text books I have encountered before, mission statements received a few paragraphs. In this book, there was an entire chapter on crafting mission statements and how they fed into visions statements and formulation of organizational strategy.

The legal considerations surrounding the decision to found a for or not-for-profit also received an entire chapter. Included was information on filing for non-profit status, including the forms needed and the time line for gaining state and federal approval of your application. While I said I was disappointed that board recruitment wasn’t covered, I thought the book did a very thorough job discussing bylaws and board structure and responsibilities.

I also really appreciated the treatment the book gave Educational Programs. They talked about structure and how to set them up. Included were tips on creating professional development opportunities for teachers and teaching artists. There were some nice examples of program evaluation forms at the end of the chapter.

Since many of my duties include facility management, I was happy to see a chapter on that topic. The examples of forms and policies at the end of the chapter were as long as the chapter itself. There was a chapter devoted entirely to labor relations familiarizing the reader with pretty much every organization representing artists and labor that one could conceivably ever deal with.

I was also impressed by the amount of time the authors devoted to discussing how a agent puts a tour together in the touring chapter. I have never seen the process covered in a text book before, much less in such detail. (I have also engaged the artists represented by one of the agents so I was glad to see him getting so much space.)

I think the strongest statement on the reality of the arts was that the longest chapter in the book was on how to develop a funding base followed in length by the chapter on ticket selling strategies. Again, there were a lot of good examples at the end of the chapters and the authors really encouraged people to take a realistic view of their organization and place in the community when it came to positioning themselves as a cause worth supporting and patronizing.

Good As General Resource, But What About The Students?
Most of the textbook could serve as a general resource for anyone becoming involved with presenting and/or producing performances. And of course, since that is the goal of many students who will use the book, it succeeds in that respect. But for as long as I have been involved in the performing arts, there were a few sections that provided entirely new information to me (e.g.- detailed discussion of non-profit incorporation process). So I will be holding on to this copy.

The one chapter that is particularly valuable to students though was on internships. One of the biggest challenges for students is getting a meaningful experience out of their internship. Not only does the book come right out and say this, but like the rest of the text, student anecdotes about their interning experiences fill the chapter. There is a detailed discussion of how to seek and land internships as well as what to expect.

Should It Be Included?
This chapter also delves into organizational dynamics a little bit too. This is an area I was a little on the fence about in respect to whether more should have been included. Some arts management texts I have seen do include a discussion of this topic. Is it crucial to learn if you are getting into performing arts management, especially given the length of the book already? That is hard to say. While we are all generally subconsciously aware of organizational dynamics operating around us, I personally found it helpful to have the different ways decisions are made in an organization pointed out to me when I was in school. Given the informal structure of many arts organizations, there are often systems in place by which things get accomplished which have no relation at all to job titles.

So anyway, there is its. Performing Arts Management: A Handbook of Professional Practices by Tobie S. Stein and Jessica Bathurst. It seems a valuable resource thanks to an incredible amount of research and interviewing. (The footnotes for each chapter will knock your socks off.) I plan to keep my copy for quite awhile.

Staying Married To The Artistic Process

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I came across an interesting article in The New Republic, by way of Arts and Letters Daily that suggested that a shift in business school orientation partially contributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. At one time universities focused on training graduates to manage manufacturing businesses and often had mini-factories on campus to give students practical experiences.

The focus since about 1965 has shifted to finance and consulting. While this has been largely beneficial for the economy, (until they started creating bad financial products), it is one of the reasons why the country has become weaker in manufacturing. That has been pretty bad for the country.

“Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background….But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”

At first this was just an interesting theory to me, but then I realized that this describes exactly what people are afraid will happen if arts organizations are “run more like a business.” The fear is that decisions will rest entirely on return on investment and will be divorced from the manufacturing process as it were.

There was a time I would not have imagined that any arts organization would have a disconnect between the administration and the artists. I assumed that the administrators would be passionate about the arts with which they were associated. Why else would someone work so hard for so little pay?

Nearly five years ago, I cited observations that orchestra administrations were disassociated from the performances and performers. Given all the conflicts and closures since then, I don’t think the overall environment has gotten any better since. I also don’t assume that this situation is necessarily unique to the orchestra world.

In the last week I have heard Michael Kaiser on his Arts in Crisis tour and Andrew Taylor debating the utility of the arts management degree. In both conversations there was an obvious focus on training arts managers well. But the necessity for training boards well was mentioned too.

It seems to me that maybe the need to advocate the intrinsic value of the arts is necessary internally in addition to external constituencies. Perhaps one of the dangers of emphasizing the economic contribution of the arts to the community is that it creates greater expectations for boards and administrators that the art and its creators be ever more economically viable as well.

Squatting As Economic Stimulus

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In the last year I have posted about businesses encouraging the presence of artists in Philadelphia and London as a strategy for filling empty store fronts and infusing vitality into neighborhoods. I also wrote about artists taking advantage of obscenely low real estate prices in Detroit to purchase properties and establish a little artist colony in that city.

So I read with some interest a Guardian story about an cultural organization in London which is, though they reject the term, squatting in the high rent commercial district. The aim of the group, The Oubliette, is “to support the arts without the need for public or private sector funding.” (Appropriating involuntary in-kind donations of space from the private sector doesn’t seem to be a problem, however.)

The group does a little work prior to “moving in,” generating a business plan and proposal which highlights, among other things, the security they bring to the empty property.

They even have a sort of business plan, which they plan to tout around the capital’s wealthy property magnates. The goal? To persuade the rich to lend their empty properties to the Oubliette to use for exhibitions, concerts and plays. “It’s an alternative way of offering extraordinarily wealthy people a way to contribute to the arts without an enormous pecuniary investment,” according to the erudite Simon.

[…]

In terms of floor space, their new gaff would be the envy of nearly every arts centre in the country. It is so big, in fact, that last Friday’s event, a collaboration with homelessness charity The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, only used parts of the ground and first floors. There was an art exhibition, featuring work by homeless people, as well as the Oubliette’s artist-in-residence, Philip Firsov, and a number of different classical music groups staged mini-concerts in some of the building’s many rooms.

The event was one of many unusual partnerships the Oubliette are trying to forge in an attempt to turn squatting into a legitimate way of showcasing the arts without the taxpayer’s help, while disassociating themselves from wilder, less well organised squatters in other London mansions.

[…]

The group is currently in the process of preparing PowerPoint presentations to give to the owners of empty buildings – both commercial and residential – to persuade them to allow the Oubliette to use their spaces as arts platforms. A draft pitch, seen by the Guardian, attempts to sell squatting as a way of providing free security, preventing property devaluation and adding value to the community.

Twenty-four-hour security costs £7,500 per guard per month, claims the pitch, adding that a derelict property can “result in a loss of up to 18% value on neighbouring property prices”. What’s more, the Oubliette pledge to improve empty buildings. “Our dedicated team includes certified workers in electrics, plumbing and construction,” they say, promising to “return the property back to the owner clean and functional within 28 days’ written notice of wanting the property back”.

The Oubliette is based around a “live-in core” of eight people with distinct roles, including “IT guru”, “PR operative”, “graphic designer”, “legal adviser” (a trainee barrister), “artist-in-residence” and “copywriter”. They have grand plans, according to Simon, who until 2002 was an IT worker living in Chelsea. “Our long-term strategic ambition is to negotiate for consent with an owner of a suitable empty premise for leave to remain,” he said. “Occupying properties in high-profile locations allows us to raise public awareness and garner support, whilst also furthering the organisational aspects of our project and pitch to proprietors.”

He is confident of success, and claims to have successfully negotiated consent to squat in eight properties in London in the past seven years.

While I don’t really condone squatting. I am pleased that they commit to improving a location rather than conforming to the stereotype of artists for whom mundane concerns like maintaining their environment interferes with the connection with their muse. Part of me hopes their presence helps drive real estate prices up. We all know that the arts can lead to the gentrification of run down areas. Usually the artists are priced out of the area before they can contribute to the gentrification of an already gentrified area. No one knows what the ceiling for economic stimulation by the arts might be.

Wry Kaiser

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Michael Kaiser was in town as part of his Arts In Crisis tour. The session was videoed. I don’t know if it will be placed on the internet, but the content was pretty much the same as when he spoke in Madison, WI. I had watched that video back when Andrew Taylor discussed Kaiser’s visit to Madison. If the video of our local session becomes available, I will post it.

I am not going to give a synopsis of his talk here as I am wont to do. His thoughts are pretty widely disseminated through videos like the in WI and via his column on Huffington Post. I am just going to reflect a little on the experience.

He was a very entertaining speaker and the session was quite enjoyable. I encouraged my Assistant Theatre Manager to go because he hadn’t really heard any of this before. And our discussions after about how we should proceed were pretty productive.

Our mayor is the chair of the culture and tourism committee of the National Conference of Mayors and he is pretty enthusiastic about those causes. (He also bills himself as the “Singingest Mayor In America.” I was surprised that he didn’t take the opportunity today.)

He spoke, I think longer than anyone expected, about how important the arts are. He also stayed for the full 1.5 hour session. This impressed on me how important the topic of the arts was to him because he is always on the go. I have seen him get off a 7 hour flight that crosses the international dateline, speak at a meeting about public transportation and then out to another meeting. Since he was still around as the Q&A started, the moderator brought him back up to the stage to field questions about the arts in the city.

A few observations about the session with Kaiser. The first isn’t predicated on something he said. The session opened traditionally with a welcoming chant and then a hula display. I am not Hawaiian, nor am I practitioner of any Hawaiian performing arts. However, my investment in those art forms were such that I wished they had done a slightly different program. The hula was accompanied by singers playing ukelele. This is something many people are familiar with due to movie depictions. So what I found myself wanting was for a performance on ipu heke–double gourd drum. I wanted him to go away perhaps surprised about Hawaiian performing arts and knowing more than he knew when he arrived.

Later, I was gratified to hear him say that was what he aimed for in his programming–having people surprised at some of the events he put together. His example was the Arab Festival at the Kennedy Center earlier this year. He noted nobody expects you to celebrate Arab art in the current political climate.

At one point he underscored how much the arts are dependent on the kindness of strangers when it comes to arts education. This is no great revelation, I am sure. He gave the example of a 3rd grader who benefits from her teacher loving the arts and providing many opportunities for exposure. When the child moves on to 4th grade, if the teacher doesn’t like the arts, then the child doesn’t get any exposure. If the 4th grade teacher doesn’t like math, they don’t have the option of shirking instruction in that. It occurred to me this is actually the case even in states that mandate an arts component because few schools value the subject enough to monitor compliance or ensure a valuable experience.

For me, the talk solidified and confirmed some thoughts I had over Thanksgiving about how I should be approaching various elements of my job. It was good to have the Assistant Theatre Manager start to move in the same direction. I hadn’t really spoken with him about my thinking yet because I hadn’t entirely figured out how to put it into practice. Today was a good catalyst for that conversation.