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!)