“Creativity Is Time-Consuming”

Last week I received an email from a Patricia Martin who was apparently trying to spread the word about a survey of American Life and Culture she had recently released. I get a lot of these emails but don’t often feel the subject is relevant to my blog. This time it was. What I liked about the survey results is that they are written to convince people to involve culture in their business whether it be in regard to employees, part of their customer relations or both. The format is easy and quick to read and every page has a “take away” for that section in the margins.

Since I had been reading about the feeling that the youngest generation of arts professionals didn’t have a good work ethic in the Americans for the Arts leadership salon, I was encouraged to read the following and hoped the methodology of their survey made it true.

“We found some 60-year-old bloggers held the same opinions as 24-year-old poets: they are willing to work hard in their creative endeavors. Content creators say they spend a lot of their time producing and spreading their creative expressions. They don’t spend time gaming online.This may be because creating original content is demanding—as is mastering and maintaining a social network online. Creativity is time-consuming. The time demands of a creative life, no matter what age a person is, require allegiance to one’s art.”

Other sections talk about this group valuing education and living within one’s means. I understand that there are always going to be at least some people who match these descriptions. I am hoping the percentage of those embracing these philosophies is high. I look around and it doesn’t seem it is so. We hear all about how young people are using social media technologies to spread the word about their passions, but I haven’t seen it yet. Or rather, I haven’t seen it done effectively.

The cast of the show going up in two weeks has Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages set up for the show. I have been keeping an eye on them and except for the Youtube page, none of them are very well developed. This isn’t a case of their approach not appealing to me. This is a matter of there not being even the most basic content on the pages to make people interested in the performances. The twitter page more or less says “going to rehearsal tonight” over and over again. They are handing out flyers with all the social media page addresses on them but there is nothing there to see. My hope is they are actually handing out the flyers we printed up with information about the show along with them.

It is said that very few people create online content and the majority consume it. I suspect that just like everything else in life, there is only a small percentage of those producing who have the capacity to create something worthwhile. The idealism of the millions exercising their creative powers doesn’t hold up to reality because a lot of them are playing video games rather than investing the time to hone their skills.

Perhaps I haven’t come across those dedicated to becoming effective because they are off working on getting better.

Talkin’ Bout Emerging Leaders

Okay special double blog post today. Since my other entry was dealing with education and arts people following their passion, I felt I needed to call attention to the Emerging Leader conversation that has been transpiring in a special blogging salon on Americans for the Arts website. It started October 16 and just finished today.

There are a lot of great entries on the blog, including ones that question the definition of Emerging Leader in terms of age and experience. American’s for the Arts defines Emerging Leader as “either new to the field, with up to five years of experience, or are 35 years of age or younger.”

Ian Moss’ post on Generation Y and Entitlement garnered a long series of comments and is worth reading if have any young people working for you or ever plan to. Other participants add to the conversation like Ruby Classen’s entries on why jobbing hopping by a younger generation seeking a broader skillset can be viewed as lack of loyalty by long time arts leaders.

What was also interesting was reading that a number of veteran arts leaders were contacting people involved with organizing Emerging Leaders at Americans for the Arts and 20UNDER40 who saw these efforts as a storm the Bastille and kill the old folks.

Just as great to read the rebuttals from the veteran leaders too both as entries and comments. It shows that people from many stages in their careers are aware of these issues and engaged in these conversations.

It was also a little disconcerting to learn that because of the internal politics of some organizations, people who wanted to participate felt they had to remain silent.

People share their stories about lack of confidence they have had about their career choices and direction. This includes difficulties in finding jobs in the first place, of course. As many entries as I have linked to, it ain’t near all of them. If you have any interest in arts administration at all, bookmark the site and resolve to spend a couple minutes everyday reading a few entries until you have gotten to them all.

J-Schoolers Now With The Rest of Us Doing It For Love

Crunchy Conservative Rod Dreher, an editor for the Dallas Morning News, ponders the fate of J-school students suggesting they had better be in it for the love.

“Can you imagine going into debt and devoting two years of your life to earning an advanced degree in a field in which you have very little chance of earning a living? I mentioned this to my wife, who, like me, holds an undergraduate journalism degree. “Can you believe people are actually going to journalism school anymore?” I said. She responded, “You and I, when we were that age, would have been completely romantic about it, and wouldn’t have listened to older people who told us there would be no jobs for us.'”

Hmm, sounds like some other industry I know of. What was it again?

He goes on to talk about writing a grad school recommendation for a young journalist he knows.

“And yet, I warned him not to go to journalism grad school, because of the job market, to no avail. He’s got passion, and he’s got hope. I can recommend him to these schools with great confidence in his ability to do the work required of him. He will emerge an even more capable journalist than he already is. Any magazine or newspaper would be lucky to have this guy working for them. If only potential paid the bills! Sigh.”

Ha ha! Finally we get our revenge on those two bit critics who panned our shows! Now they shall be brought low and learn how it feels to ply your craft out of pure love of doing it and have people who have little understanding of their work tell everyone it stinks!

Actually, that sounds a lot like what playwrights and novelists go through. In reality, journalists are really just talented writers who found a format for expression that would pay them regularly for exercising their art. Unfortunately, it seems that time has passed and what was an exception looks to join the rule of the arts and humanities where there are a lot of hard working and talented practitioners and few notable successes that everyone believes they can become.

Substitution Blues

Ken Davenport posted some interesting information about the impact of absenteeism in Broadway shows on Producer’s Perspective. He was curious to learn if the need to have an understudy stand in was having an impact on audiences so he commissioned someone to study the question.

The impetus for this was the increasing rate of absenteeism in Broadway shows, particularly West Side Story. I had read the NY Post article Ken links to back in August and I couldn’t believe there was such a high rate of absences given that there are no lack of performers who are just as talented waiting to step on to the Broadway stage. Cameron Mackintosh did clean house on Les Miserables when he felt the quality was flagging so it seemed pretty risky for actors to appear to be slacking off. In retrospect, I suppose there is always the teensy little chance that the Post sensationalized the problem beyond the reality.

While some respondents to the survey liked the idea of an understudy having a chance to surpass the star, absenteeism was generally seen in a negative light. The perception was that it is becoming more prevalent and that the quality is not the same. Some respondents felt that they had to apologize to the guests they asked along or advise their friends not to attend the show. On the whole, people said they are becoming more cautious about their ticket purchases.

Davenport suggests the Actors Union and Producers get together to explore the problem. It should be noted that his survey results said people thought there was more absenteeism, but there was no study done on the question of whether there actually is more absenteeism over all. Though as a practical matter, the truth has little bearing if audiences have decided the problem is widespread and are acting accordingly. As Davenport suggests, better training of understudies may begin to reverse the perception that understudies are offering a vastly inferior product.

One of the commenters on the entry suggests that the understudy notice in the program book may have a psychological effect prejudicing a person against the show before the curtain rises. (Though I have attended a show where there was a small flurry of the notices falling out when I opened the Playbill. That certainly didn’t help my confidence.) Of course, eliminating proper notice probably runs afoul New York’s fraud laws.

While reading the entry, I recalled Holly Mulcahy’s September column on The Partial Observer about substitutions in orchestra programs. I wondered if the practice of changing up a concert offering was undermining confidence in orchestras as much as changes in casts are in Broadway shows. And has anyone ever done a study on that?