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Music, Lyrics, Comprehension and Memorization

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Pretty interesting article on The Conversation about how different types of music can help or hinder cognitive activity. The target audience for the article it primarily students in relation to their study habits, but it does provide general insight about how tempo and lyrics can impact comprehension and memorization.

For example, I have found that I have a more difficult time creating anything with verbal or written content if music has lyrics. However, if I am working with numbers, say balancing accounts, lyrics don’t inhibit me at all. (Though my singing along might disturb my co-workers.) Though age may also be a factor because I don’t remember having as much difficulty with writing to music with lyrics when I was younger. And the article sort of alludes to the fact that different people have different capacity to multi-task.

Here is some of what the article has to say. A fair bit of space is also devoted to the damage volume can have on hearing.

Numerous studies have discovered how music can affect study and work habits:

  1. Listening to instrumental or familiar music in the background competes less with a study assignment than music with lyrics or unfamiliar music. Instrumental music also seems to interfere less with reading comprehension and assignments requiring verbal and visual memory than does music with lyrics.
  2. One study showed soft, fast music had a positive impact on learning, but loud and fast, loud and slow, and soft and slow hindered learning.
  3. Upbeat music with a higher tempo may help when you’re doing something requiring movement or motivation, such as exercising or cleaning your room.
  4. The more difficult your task is – for instance, memorizing material, problem-solving or learning something new – the more likely the music is distracting and people often need to turn it off.

When Federal Funding Of Theater Equaled The Cost Of A Battleship

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Artsjournal.com posted an article from The Yale Review reviewing a book about the benefits the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) brought to Depression Era United States.  In addition to discussing these benefits the book’s author, James Shapiro, relates efforts to dismantle FTP by conservatives as an early manifestation of the culture war we experience today.

After reading about all the activity the FTP engaged in across the country, the reviewer Charlie Tyson notes that the budget was “less than 1% of the total funds allocated for federal work relief, or about the cost to build a battleship. Tyson notes that the cost to build an air craft carrier today is around $13 billion and challenges readers to think about what arts organizations and artists could do with that sort of money today.

What was most interesting was reading about the wide scope of activities the Federal Theater Project and the related Federal Dance Theater Project engaged in. If there was ever a time in the history of the US when artistic activity was viewed as populist rather than elitist, it was during the period of 1935 and 1939 when these projects were actively creating works. The works created weren’t just lighthearted fare. There were challenging pieces on topics like poverty, housing, racism, labor relations, and inequality.

The Living Newspaper program of the FTP addressed these topics and focused some criticism upon lawmakers by quoting statements made in the Congressional Record.  It is probably no surprise that legislators who were already opposed to FDR’s New Deal programs targeted works drawing a great amounts of attention to the uncomfortable issues of the day.

The funds distributed to artists through FTP provided for a significant amount of community engagement. To a certain extent there are probably lessons to be drawn today from the activities of artists 90 years ago.  One of the things cited by Tyson was how closely tailored to a target community some of the shows were:

“Unlike Hollywood, which delivered the same products to everyone, the Project was nimble, sensitive to local variation. For example, shows were staged in Spanish in Miami and Tampa and in Yiddish in New York. The Project gave directors license to adjust performances to satisfy local tastes; audiences in different cities might see differing versions of the same play.

A string of early successes established the Federal Theatre’s rep­utation. Its first hit was a production of Macbeth in Harlem, staged by one of the program’s so-called Negro Units. (The Federal Theatre was, at the time, Harlem’s largest employer.) To direct the production, the organization tapped Orson Welles, at that time a virtually unknown twenty-year-old actor with no professional directorial experience. The Harlem Macbeth—commonly known as the Voodoo Macbeth—traded Scottish gloom for Caribbean exot­icism. Set in nineteenth-century Haiti with a large all-Black cast and filled, in Shapiro’s words, with “drumming and spectacle,” the production was a sensation. It moved from Harlem to Broadway and then embarked on a national tour with stops in the Jim Crow South. The play reached roughly 120,000 people.

Many of the shows were performed for free. There are apparently pictures of thousands of people filling parks to watch performances. (Though I imagine many performances also occurred indoors). In total, it was estimated “…thirty million Americans—roughly a quarter of the population—attended Federal Theatre productions.”

Toward the end of the piece Tyson notes that there have been recent calls for more federal funding of non-profit theaters and cites a criticism that theaters have only themselves to blame for producing works with themes criticizing the social and political environment. But Tyson notes that theatrical performances have a long history of containing social messages from Victorian melodramas pointing out the plight of the poor to the social commentary of Federal Theater Project works through to today.

Rome Was Built In A Day. But What Day Was That?

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Seth Godin recently made a post that sort of wrapped the concepts of life long learning, creation being a process, and failure being part of any endeavor.

He starts by saying Rome WAS built in a day.

Rome was built in a day.

It wasn’t finished in a day. In fact, it’s still not finished.

But the day someone said, “this is Rome,” and announced the project, it was there.

Sometimes we get hung up on the beginning, unwilling to start Rome unless we’re sure we can finish it without incident.

I appreciate his suggestion that things come into being when they are acknowledged as existing and being named. Yet something can have an acknowledged existence and not be complete. In the process things are discarded and destroyed and other things remain just as there are parts of Rome which have endured as well as have gone from existence. Or like the Colosseum it both exists as a construction people visit, albeit in a partially destroyed state, but also has some of its constituent parts which were carted away contributing to other structures in the city.

Essentially a version of the Ship of Theseus where some discarded parts are recycled and others destroyed even as others have been added.

In that context as Godin says, we can’t go into the start of some endeavor with too much expectation about the form success will take lest we become paralyzed conceptualizing all of what will be required. That is as true about initiating a creative project as it is building a city or creating ourselves.

There was a day when you came into being. Was it the day of your birth or sometime later when your personality and personal philosophy developed? Are you still being built and who is doing the building?

 

If You Are Apt To Overlook It, How Do You Know Enough To Track It?

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Seth Godin made a post a week or so ago about the need to track things that are really important, but invisible to us or transpire gradually. I sense there is something valuable for arts and cultural organizations in what he has to say, but I am having a difficult time trying to figure out how to accurately track these things. I am hoping readers may have some idea.

In his post he writes:

Gas-powered leaf blowers would disappear if the smoke they belched out was black instead of invisible.

And few people would start smoking if the deposits on their lungs ended up on their face instead.

We’re not very good at paying attention to invisible or gradual outputs.

The trick is simple: If it’s important, make it visible. If it happens over time, create a signal that brings the future into the present.

One of the first things that occurred to me as important, but may transpire gradually is employee or audience dissatisfaction. But how do you accurately track and signal this situation? How do you know whether a dozen individual complaints are related to each other or independent rumblings? In hindsight it is easier to see that comments made in a series of staff meetings over the course of a months culminated in the departure of multiple people, but at the time those comments may not have seemed to be related.

Obviously, it is good to have supervisors who are responsive and emotionally intelligent enough to head off these issues, but if the supervisors are only seeing what is happening in their area, they may not feel there is enough of an issue to report it to those with a more global view of the organization.

Conversely, you may notice a gradual increase in audience satisfaction with their experience, but may not be able to pinpoint why. Is it the new ticketing software? The receptions for audiences under 40? The advance emails telling people where to find parking? These are all great ideas and making people happy so let’s keep them and continue to make everyone happy!

Except what you didn’t know was that it was a front of house manager whose infectious enthusiasm and good training transferred through the staff to the audience. When their parents got sick, they moved back to their hometown. Gradually, that lack of leadership and energy seeps out of the experience and audiences aren’t as satisfied. Having no idea this is the cause, you try new innovative programs to which people may respond, but it isn’t quite like it was. Even if you recognize that the departed staff member was a valuable asset that had been lost, you may not realize their work sent imperceptible ripples through the organization.

Godin uses examples where the link between cause and effect is pretty well known. So there are ways to measure leaf blower exhaust that don’t depend on sight and you can monitor lung health in different ways. But there are other situations where there are multiple factors which may contribute to outputs so it is difficult to know which to make visible. What might be relevant in one community may not be in another. The social dynamic of one region of the country may enjoy the enthusiasm of the front of house manager, but it may come across as insincere and cloying in another part of the country.

But I may be overthinking this and/or coming at this from the belief that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it is meaningful. Some readers may immediately identify the type invisible or gradual issues Godin may be referencing that are associated with the arts and some relatively objective measures that can be used to track them.

Do You Remember Your First Concert Experience?

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Last week Washington Post contributor Theodore Johnson reflected back on the first concert he saw when he was 9 years old (The Fat Boys). He noted that due to Covid restrictions, this summer would a delayed first concert experience for a lot of young people.

Lest you think that my posts advocate for some niche arts and culture insider philosophy, Johnson, a retired naval officer and adviser to the New America think tank, writes much the same as I regarding the value of shared, in-person experiences.  He cites studies that have shown how people value collective experience concerts provide which is all the more reason to lean into those themes in marketing messaging.

And aside from how technologically advanced a major concert is now, I’m most struck by the diversity of the crowds. Maybe there is some social and civic magic to be found in our return to shared, in-person experiences.

Social scientists have identified four themes that help explain the attraction of concerts and the significance of attendance. The most prominent is the experience, followed by the engagement, the novelty and, lastly, the practical reasons.

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Engagement matters. Ours is a society that requires frequent positive community participation if it’s to be resilient against the forces pulling us apart. Scholars have explored the impact of attending concerts, and they’ve found such benefits as an increased sense of belonging and improved well-being. Concert audiences “experienced feelings of togetherness,” researchers report. Sharing a love for something facilitates a path to connection.

The Oral Tradition We Have All Joyfully Perpetuated

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About a week ago, The Atlantic had an article that answered a question that has been nagging me for quite a few years – are kids still passing down the silly, nonsense jokes, hand clapping rhymes, jump rope chants, etc that we inherited as kids or has technology basically diverted their attention from those experiences?

Apparently I am not the only one who has thought this, because in the latter part of the article that exact question is addressed.

Adults, it seems, are in a perpetual state of worry that Kids These Days just don’t play like they used to, probably because of whatever technology was most recently introduced. Roud and Willett both independently brought this up to me and insisted that it’s not true. As Willett’s research shows, technology and media do influence kids’ play—but that doesn’t mean play itself is in jeopardy.

To be honest, I found myself surprised to care so much because my sister and her friends would drive me crazy repeatedly clapping out the story of Miss Suzy and her baby Tiny Tim. But as I got older I realized that these games are a tie that binds generations together. Cootie shots, cootie catchers, applying and peeling glue off the palm of your hands, sketching out that blocky S on your notebook, all comprise a type of oral tradition whose origins are difficult to trace.

Technology does morph some of the games and occasionally adds new bits of cherished lore. I am pretty sure my grandparents weren’t typing 5-8-0-0-8 into calculators and inverting the device to spell BOOBS. That is the first thing the article validates as a piece of cultural heritage. (Though knowing my maternal grandfather, that is probably pretty tame compared to some of the things he did.)

On the other hand, making up a game based on the Weeping Angels episode of Dr. Who shares similarities to games played at least 120 years ago.

Apparently, this is an aspect of our lives which perpetuates itself in a type of decentralized democracy:

Our nostalgia for our own childhood shapes what kids get exposed to. But Steve Roud, a British folklorist and the author of The Lore of the Playground, emphasized to me that folklore is by its nature not handed down by an authority. It is of the people, by the people—even if those people are children.

People Fund People Not Organizations, So Maybe Do That Even More?

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Last month Marginal Revolution blog posted an excerpt of a piece by Adam Mastroianni about how grant funding is broken.  I immediately hopped over to see what he had to say. While his post was mostly focused on grants funding science and the Rhodes scholarship process, there were a lot of common elements that are likely to be familiar to all who apply.

One of the first observations Mastroianni makes is that it is very easy to hack the grant process thanks to relationships you have. This both confirms that people give to people and organizations and that groups that may really need the funding but lack access to guidance, resources and insiders often get locked out.

For instance, most Rhodes selection committees include a cocktail party as part of their interview process. This is a pretty bad way of judging whether someone is a good person, but it’s a pretty good way of judging whether they are pleasant to talk to at a cocktail party, and so Rhodes Scholars are often charming conversationalists and sometimes bad people (see: Bill Clinton, Bobby Jindal, noted anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf).

[…]

For example, the Rhodes Trust probably hopes that by picking the most accomplished college seniors and giving them a super prestigious prize, they will encourage the youngsters to do lots of brave and risky things. Instead, the most popular destinations for my Rhodes cohort were top-tier medical schools, law schools, and PhD programs (guilty), as well as a handful of consulting companies––exactly where we would have gone if we hadn’t gotten the scholarship.

Generally, Mastroianni’s criticism is that most grant programs reward people who are already successful to the detriment of those they say they wish to help.

Mastroianni’s suggested solution is to take advantage of the flaws in the system to force it to reach into the underserved cracks and crevices. His system, which he refers to as “Trust Windfalls,” essentially allows one to provide a benefit to friends–but only once.

But isn’t it unfair that a bunch of money should go to my friends? Also yes. That’s why, if I was an Agent, I should only get one turn at awarding Windfalls. Then I’d have to pass on the responsibility to someone very different from me who I trusted to give out the second round. If I did it right, Trust Windfalls would eventually find their ways into corners of the world that conventional grants could never reach. Just a few trusted links away from me might be a Botswanan ichthyologist or a trucker smuggling medical supplies into Kiev––people who may not speak English or know the right things to say on an application or even realize there are grants they could apply for in the first place. Making Agents temporary also prevents the Trust Windfalls from being hacked: once people know you’re an Agent, every interaction with you becomes a grant application.

If people hate conventional grant funding so much, why haven’t they tried something like this? Honestly, I think it’s because trusting people seems a lot scarier than it really is. Funders have to trust Agents. Agents have to trust their grant recipients, and they have to trust the person they nominate as the next Agent. (We should maybe call the organization that oversees all this the Trust Trust.) Anybody could betray the trust put in them, which would be a huge shame and very embarrassing.

While this is an interesting idea in theory, I think it is overly idealistic in terms of thinking that people will pass the baton on to people outside their own peer group in any great numbers. Funds may be sent to a biologist studying the ecology of a Latin American country or an aid worker in Ukraine, but is the money going to a life long resident of that country or the sister of a person the Trust Agent went to college with who is working for a university program or an NGO with roots in the US? Certainly Mastroianni alludes to the fact something like this could happen.

I think the structure he suggests has a better chance at providing an equitable distribution of funds than the current system. I like the idea of leveraging the problems of current practice into a solution. But the funding source would probably need to be plugging detailed data into relationship mapping software to ensure that the 4th or 5th recipient in the chain not have multiple common ties with the 1st and 2nd people in the chain.

I guess the fact I can identify a flaw and potential solution so easily indicates it is possible to refine his proposal into something workable.  Take a read of his proposal and see what you think.

Can Annotated Press Releases Be A Good Communication Tool?

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Last week Aubrey Bergauer made the following post calling the attention of arts organizations to an annotated press release put out by the financial company Ellevest announcing their success in raising $53 million.

While there were some silly annotations like calling Bankrate “smarties” for naming Ellevest “the #1 mission-driven investment offering,” on the whole the annotations were used to provide deeper perspective on the effort that went into raising those funds and telling Ellevest’s story.

For example, the annotation stating Ellevest is funded by 360 women and underrepresented investors revealed:

“I get the game on these raise announcements. I know what the narrative is “supposed” to be: that institutions were throwing money at us to invest in Ellevest.

What really happened: As we began our raise, we had dozens and dozens (and dozens) of meetings with potential investors, and they were going … fine. Fine to good, in fact.

And then … the women showed up.

Caroline Lewis, of Rogue Ventures, heard about our raise and contacted us. … Then, so did Jesse Draper at Halogen Ventures. And so did Jenny Abramson at Rethink Impact. And so did a number of others.

This opened up our funding round to these underrepresented investors — for them to support us (by funding the company), and, we hope, for us to support them (by working hard to deliver a strong return and build their track records). …

The annotation quoting Caroline Lewis saying there is a need for financial products that serve women stated:

“Like, actually serve women. Not just market to women. And not just be a pinkwashed version of your father’s financial advisor…”

The annotated format serves multiple purposes. For those that just want something formatted for publication to quickly copy and paste, there is the surface text. For those that want the deeper story about the challenges and process, the annotations provide threads to follow. The format opens up all sorts of possibilities.

A release about a milestone anniversary of your organization may list all the people who performed for you over the years, but an annotation on some of those artists might note that the trumpet player in the band met his wife at a performance, settled down in the community and now their daughter is the executive director.

You may send out a release acknowledging that dozens of people worked thousands of hours over the course of a year and a half to implement your equity and diversity policy and practices. You may not be able to list everyone in the press release, but you can include them in an annotation.

Obviously, the biggest issue is that an annotated press release is only available on a web format. You can’t squeeze all that into a PDF or Word document emailed to a media outlet. On the other hand, people are getting their information from traditional media outlets less and less frequently so there is a good chance to get eyeballs on your press release by linking to it via social media posts.

People are able to consume as much or as little additional information as they may like. That way you can keep the details short and sweet for people with passing interest or short attention spans, but let those who are really invested and interested in your organization feel like they are in the know by digging into the tidbits in every annotation.

If I recall correctly, it is relatively easy to include annotations on a number of web and blog platforms like WordPress. I thought my blog had that option so I could illustrate, but since I didn’t use it much I suspect it disappeared during an update years ago.

Guaranteed Income For Artists Spreading

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Nod to Laura Zabel who tweeted a story about the guaranteed basic income for artists pilot program being started in Ireland.  The plan is to provide €325/week to 2000 artists. This is actually more, both in terms of monthly income and number of artists included, than any similar program I have seen piloted in the US. The program will be run across three years which is also longer than any other program I have come across as well.

Minister for the Arts Catherine Martin indicated selection for participation would be random rather than competitive. It sounds like the intent is to make sure those in different sectors and career stages are represented since the article mentions “Likely “streams” will include professional artists, emerging/developing artists and creative arts workers.”

The ministry is quoted as saying there won’t be a means test for who will be able to participate in the program.

The National Campaign for the Arts which had lobbied for the pilot was quoted as saying they were:

“happy with the proposed payment of €325 per week, once it is not means tested and other benefits including disability payments are not diminished, and that there is a clear process for selection…”

In writing about other guaranteed basic income programs previously, it hadn’t occurred to me that participating in the program might end up disadvantaging people from receiving other types of aid due to income restrictions. That is something to be considered when designing programs like this –either to disburse an amount that will offset people’s losses or ensure that the amount people are receiving doesn’t adversely impact their ability to receive other aid.

Ten Pounds of Arts Funding Doesn’t Yield 20 Pounds of Peace

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So like me, you may have been driving home Monday night and heard an interview on NPR conducted by host Mary Louise Kelly with poet Tess Taylor discussing art as civic repair.  Taylor talks about how a plethora of festivals in Belfast have helped people to come together peacefully since the Good Friday Agreement brought about a general cessation of violence in Northern Ireland.  She draws some parallels to political division in the United States.

She tells a story about being assigned to write a travel story about Virginia shortly after the 2016 election. She arrives in Floyd, VA, a mecca of bluegrass and is torn between being upset at the election results and wanting to square dance.

KELLY: You write, (reading) I realized I could either be mad or I could dance, but I can’t do both, so I’m going to dance.

TAYLOR: There might have been so many people right then at that square dance with whom I really had nothing to say about politics. But while we’re doing this dance, we’re actually partaking in a community action that takes place with an old pattern, and people swing around, they have to change partners, nobody can be left out, everybody is called in, and I understood the square dance is a ritual meant to build community and meant also to be sure that people had some relationship with one another so that they were kind of agreeing, perhaps, in a rural, small community to care for each other in some way. But I also felt very amazed by the ability of the dance itself to make me feel more able to work with people around me and to feel as if somehow, in that moment, we had put aside our differences and come together into something bigger.

As the interview closed, it was mentioned that Taylor had written a longer piece on this subject for Harper’s this month so I sought the article out.

There was a great deal of nuance in Taylor’s piece which was careful to say while there were similarities between the friction in the U.S. and Northern Ireland, there were differences that made them, and thus the solutions, distinct.

What I really appreciated was just how much Taylor’s article paralleled my post yesterday about viewing the arts as a prescriptive solution for problems. While Taylor cited research that showed how arts activities can create bonds of friendship, empathy and cooperation, she also noted arts weren’t, and will likely never be, the totality of the solution for Belfast in and of themselves. (my emphasis)

…Artists knew that arts programming was an effective means of weaving people together; they had written many grants justifying projects in these terms, and some were tired of the process. Some expressed concern about instrumentalizing art. “It’s not as if you put in ten pounds of arts funding and get out twenty pounds of peace,” said Glenn Patterson.

…But Durrer is the first to say that investments in reconciliation are naturally hard to quantify: “It’s not as if you can count the number of Protestants and Catholics who sat next to one another in a theater and know anything about how well people are actually reconciling.” My friend Stephen Connolly, a poet, warned me that the festivalization of Belfast can at times feel like a “manufactured peace.” Others felt uneasy about looking to anything in Northern Ireland as a model. Everyone stressed that what had been achieved in the north of Ireland has since frayed and grown tender.

But FitzGibbon, who has collaborated with Boyd on outdoor performances and directed the Belfast Children’s Festival for thirteen years, also emphasized the giddy feeling of making interventions that seemed to result in collective delight.

There is a lot of thoughtful reflection in the Harper’s story and it bears looking at regardless of whether you are considering connecting the arts with social change.

The Arts Aren’t A Band-Aid

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Links to a study examining the validity of claims about the efficacy of the arts in solving issues of health and well-being came across my Twitter feed today.  The study authors, Stephen Clift, Kate Phillips, and Stephen Pritchard, examined research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and found there were problems with the methodology and relevance of previous studies that made claims about arts solving physical and mental health issues for different populations.

The authors cited earlier work by Munira Mirza and Eleonora Belfiore who in 2006 were skeptical about making claims about the instrumental benefits of the arts on health outcomes.

Among Belfiore’s concerns that the authors quote are:

Any form of participatory activity could have “an empowering effect, whether arts-based or not”.

Existing reviews have ignored details which suggest “negative” impacts from arts and cultural engagement. Lessons from experiences of “culture-led regeneration” suggest that “the arts can actually be socially divisive”.

Little attention given to whether cultural and arts initiatives “provide the most cost-effective means to tackling social exclusion, health problems” compared with “established practices within social and health services”.

Little attention to longer-term outcomes as opposed to short-term effects.

Little attention to the artistic or aesthetic quality of cultural and arts engagements in assessing outcomes.

A focus on the role of the arts and culture my serve “as a convenient means to divert attention from the real causes of today’s social problems and the tough solutions that might be needed to solve them”.

While these were criticisms of arts policy in the UK in 2006, the fact that the authors found nearly identical concerns in more recent research conducted both in the UK for DCMS and internationally by WHO, indicate that the problems are shared across borders.

I was particularly drawn to the discussion of the use of art as a band-aid to obfuscate the existence of larger problems. The authors cite businesses use of “art washing” projects to create goodwill and draw attention away from the business practices which create harm in the world. They also note that studies often credit arts programs for reducing anxiety and behavioral difficulties in children without fully recognizing the poverty, domestic abuse and violence in their lives. They suggest that by positioning arts programs as a fix for children’s behavior, the studies accept and normalize the terrible conditions responsible for these problems.

While it wasn’t a central topic of their research, the authors made reference to two studies from 2020, one which states Culture is bad for you, based on the way current practices and manifestations reinforce social inequities; and another that asks, “Can Music Make You Sick,” examining the price musicians pay to pursue their careers. This was actually a theme Drew McManus pursued across a number of podcast discussions with various stakeholders in music organizations.

Long time readers will know that for years now I have been concerned about various claims being made about the instrumental benefits/value of the arts to rectify every ill – health, social, economic, education, etc., as more research occurs debunking these claims, the arts community will be in a difficult place trying to justify their existence in these terms. Which is why it is important to change the narrative away from the arts as prescriptions for whatever ails you.

Creativity Arrives Late To Meetings

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Daniel Pink posted a link on Twitter about a study performed by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University which revealed people have a misperception about when they are most creative.  Most people feel they are most creative at the beginning of a brainstorming session but in fact they tend to produce the highest quality ideas after spending a fair bit of time working on the task.

…participants incorrectly judged their later ideas as less creative—because, the researchers reasoned, those ideas were harder to access. Yet, as in the first study, the opposite was true: ideas that took longer to excavate were more likely to be truly innovative.

In another study, Nordgren and Lucas put the creative-cliff illusion to the test in a real-world setting. They recruited students and alumni of The Second City’s training program to participate in a New Yorker–style cartoon-caption contest …The online competition was judged by three professional comedians, who rated the 91 submissions for novelty and funniness (a proxy for creativity).

[…]

Those who believed good ideas come early submitted fewer jokes overall, the researchers found—and fewer of the jokes they submitted were rated as highly creative by the judges. In other words, the more people believed their funniness would fade over the 15-minute task, the less productive and funny they actually were.

People who did a lot of creative work were less apt to think that the best ideas came early because they perceived their creative level remained consistent throughout. However, that perception is only slightly better than the belief that creativity peaks early.

But participants with lots of creative experience didn’t make the same mistake. They predicted that creativity would remain relatively constant—a belief that is still overly pessimistic, but closer to correct than most other participants’ predictions. Experience helped them see the power of continuing to chip away at the problem.

“It’s really people who are in the trenches doing creative work that learn this lesson,” Nordgren says.

The researchers provide some important advice–don’t let your creative sessions be bound by your meeting schedule. (my emphasis)

“If you’re struggling, keep going,” he says. This and his earlier research on creativity reveal that “our intuitions about how this process works are wrong, and that our best ideas are there. They just require more digging.”

This may mean resisting the temptation to select an idea just because a meeting is ending—a temptation rooted in the false belief that future ideas will be worse. Instead, “maybe you say, ‘I think there are still some better ideas we haven’t explored. Let’s all commit individually to putting another hour into this and come back next week.’”

Creativity Is Not The Last Thing People Need

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When I mentioned organizations addressing issues of health and safety in my post yesterday, I was thinking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Between high school and my first couple years of college, I felt like every class except for foreign language and mathematics brought Maslow’s hierarchy up as a way to open up a conversation about what motivates humans. If you aren’t familiar with the pyramid below, Maslow’s theory said that the lower needs on the pyramid below had to be satisfied before people could move on to higher concerns. So you need to be secure in physiological and safety needs before you can work on intimate relationships.

It should be noted that despite the popularity of this model, there is no scientific data to back it and studies have found that different cultures prioritize needs differently.

 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I mention these criticisms of Maslow’s hierarchy because it is easy to look at this pyramid and get the impression that creativity has to wait until all these other needs are met. This reinforces the idea that arts and culture are a luxury that should yield before all the necessities have been addressed. I think we all know there will always be something else that needs to be solved if you subscribe to that thinking.

I will confess that I engaged in that mode of thought at one time. I was elated by the idea that being able to engage in creativity was a sign that you were approaching your fullest self, but depressed when I realized you pretty much had to be independently wealthy if you were going to check-off all the lower levels in order to get to the peak.

I think the case can easily be made that creativity has an important role at lower levels of the pyramid. Shared creative activities contributes to belongingness. Social groups or clubs whether oriented around religion, service, sports or creative activities all create a sense of belonging.

So too does creativity contribute to the next level up, esteem. Feeling that you have mastered a technique or have enough of a grasp of the fundamentals to metaphorically start drawing outside the lines with confidence can bolster self-esteem.

Continuing to develop all your skills, be it creative, personal, emotional, professional, etc eventually leads you to self-actualization as defined by Maslow and others. However, creativity for its own sake, (as opposed in pursuit of securing safety and physiological needs), begins to factor in much earlier.

So don’t be fooled by this popular image into thinking that creative activities are the last thing that people need in their lives.

Upcoming Webinars: Guidance For Arts Community During Covid-19 Crisis

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Americans For The Arts is hosting a couple webinars to help the arts community deal with the situation surrounding Covid-19.

It appears that both will be archived for those who can’t watch live.  If you follow the links in the titles, you can register to participate.

I have seen the link to this first meeting shared by multiple groups so it is likely to be heavily attended.

We Are Stronger Together: Navigating Crises and Sustaining Healthy Relationships in the Era of Coronavirus

March 18, 2020 at 3:00 PM EST

As a result, the performing arts presenting, booking and touring industry is navigating uncharted waters, as we look to both contracts—and to each other—for direction. Join the partners of the Alliance for Performing Arts Conferences (APAC)*, as we host an informative, field-wide conversation with presenters, agents, artists, and legal and emergency response experts around the current business, legal, financial, ethical and relational realities we are facing TOGETHER.

The second webinar appears to be more focused on organizational plans and policies during the crisis, including providing support for staff and others who may be experiencing anxiety.

Arts and Culture Sector and the Coronavirus: What we Know and How to Move Forward

March 19, 2020 at 3:00 PM EST
Join members of Americans for the Arts’ staff, Ruby Lopez Harper, John Rubsamen, and Narric Rome, with Jan Newcomb, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Arts’ Preparedness and Emergency Response, Barbara Davis, Chief Operating Officer of The Actors Fund, Rhonda Schaller, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, and a representative from the National Endowment for the Arts to hear current information about actions to take, including: planning to consider, handling grant funded projects, managing stress during moments of crisis, and continuing to support artists. This briefing will also include an update on the status of congressional action on economic impact and stimulus funding and how it relates to the arts and cultural sector.

One Does Not Simply Walk Into The Met Opera Orchestra Pit

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Hat tip to Drew McManus for reposting a link to timpanist Jason Haaheim’s summary of his 13 part series on the value of deliberate practice. I figure Drew just reposted the link as bait to me since I have frequently posted about deliberate practice.  Even though I didn’t identify it as such, I think my post on Hilary Hahn’s discussion of daydreaming as part of her practice is a manifestation of deliberate practice.

You may have heard of Haaheim before. He was feted as the scientist who secured a position playing timpani with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. While he says he is not talented, did not go to a major music school and doesn’t have a graduate degree in music, he did not simply walk in off the streets and secure a position the way the stories make it sound. The Met was his 28th audition in field of international orchestras. (He frequently refers to himself as a tenacious loser.)

The fact he wrote a 13 part series on deliberate practice is pretty compelling evidence that he has has invested a lot of time and energy into the act and evaluation of his practicing. He projected his ratio of  hours spent in solitary practice to working under the supervision of a mentor at 112:1

But note, while he says you have to be willing to put in the time, by no means does he claim that they who clock the most hours are the winners. As with the posts I have previously made about deliberate practice, no benefit is accrued if you aren’t paying attention to what you are doing, reflecting upon the experience, collecting feedback from others or by self recording, and analyzing it all. Going through the motions yields very little and may even be harmful if you aren’t paying attention to stress and tension.

In his view, the process of deliberate practice has an exact correspondence with the scientific method where you identify a problem, formulate hypothesis and solution, test, gather data and, analyze.  While that may sound sterile, Haaheim frames many of his posts in pop culture references. For example, the title of one post is: Unless Your Phone Is in Airplane Mode, You Are Practicing like a Nazgûl, in which he compares the influence phones have over minds to the fact a Nazgûl’s will is subsumed by the Dark Lord, Sauron.

So if you have read about the process of deliberate practice but are unsure how to structure a regimen for yourself, Haaheim lays out a pretty thorough road map in his recent post which includes a hyperlinked annotated index of his previous 12 posts on the subject.

Wherein I Compare Creative Placemaking To Spaghetti Sauce

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I don’t remember how I came across it, but a few weeks ago I bookmarked an interview Michael Rohd, a faculty member at Arizona State University, conducted with Roberto Bedoya, City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Manager; Jamie Bennett, Executive Director of ArtPlace America; and Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, a professor at Arizona State University.

They were discussing the process of creative placemaking and how it should be applied in the future in order to acknowledge and honor the needs and concerns of the communities impacted by creative placemaking efforts.

The prologue to the interview mentions the term creative placemaking has been criticized for:

1) suggesting that the people and cultures rooted in a place had not already made it; 2) initially lacking a clear statement of values regarding who was meant to benefit from the community development of which the arts and culture were a part.

In response, people have started using the term creative placekeeping instead. I have heard this come up at a number of conferences I have attended. However, Bedoya notes that while there are legitimate concerns about gentrification and displacement– or replacement, especially in the eyes of communities of color, there is a need to be cautious with the term placekeeping as well.

The trap around place-keeping is sentimentality — “I want the old days” — and it’s not thoughtful. What are we trying to keep, and how, so it stays fresh and new? I think the future of creative placemaking is people not as intensely problematizing it, but trying to figure out the actions associated with placemaking or keeping, to create agency and a notion of civic commitment.

I found this idea of examining how to bring freshness to the elements we are trying to “keep” very intriguing. If you fear the loss of front stoops/porches in your neighborhood, what it is that will be lost? Is it the safe place for kids to play away from the streets? It is the socialization found in waving to neighbors as they pass or inviting them to mount the steps to chat? Is there a way to maintain that somewhere or someway else?

Though as I continued to play my example out in my head, I would think it would almost be preferable that porches and stoops replace a central gathering place that is being repurposed than to lose the stoops and send everyone to gather in a central place.

Another section I that caught my attention was Bennett’s comments about the scope of vision needed for implementing placemaking/placekeeping plans so that it encompasses all potential benefits and consequences. (my emphasis)

How do you figure out if your actions contributed toward healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities? Professor Andrew Taylor at American University reminded me that the first rule of systems thinking is that there is no such thing as side effects, there are only effects. If you are experiencing something as a side effect, it means you haven’t drawn the boundaries of your system widely enough. Many people say, “I’m making an economic development play, and there is an unfortunate side effect that people are displaced or replaced,” to borrow from Roberto. We need to draw the boundaries of our system wide enough that we understand that those are not unrelated or accidental, but part of one system.

At first I thought about how difficult it is to anticipate all the effects a plan might have. But as I considered longer, I realized if you are paying attention to what is happening in other communities that are implementing similar efforts, it isn’t difficult to become aware of the potential positive and negative impacts. Using the term “side effect” in these instances seems like an attempt to minimize the importance of these problems. Acknowledging it as an effect of a plan is to take responsibility for the problems it may cause.

If someone tells you one of the side effects of eating spaghetti sauce is a 80% chance you will have a sleepless night of heartburn, that really isn’t a small issue to you. If that is something you face, you consume the marinara sauce fully aware that any difficulty sleeping is a consequence of your decision and no one else. Likewise, if you are serving spaghetti and offer no other options, you should be aware that it is possible your choice will cause discomfort for some guests.

Education vs Learning

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Seth Godin had a post recently where he made the distinction between education and learning. The way he differentiated the two was that education is  based in compliance and authority–you were able to memorize information or perform in an approved manner in order to pass a test measuring your mastery of content on a certain day.

Learning, by his definition, is part of an ongoing process.

Learning that embraces doing. The doing of speaking up, reviewing and be reviewed. The learning of relevant projects and peer engagement. Learning and doing together, at the same time, each producing the other.

While there is some degree of compliance and submission to authority associated with training in arts disciplines, (some to a greater degree than others), there is a large component of practical doing involved as well.

In the process, one gains many of the tools and skills required for evaluation. Whether one uses those tools to reinforce compliance and authority or to enact self-reflective change is another matter.

It occurred to me that there is some irony to the fact that skillsets that are a result of education with little practical content is frequently more highly valued than an education that has a high degree of practice.

Basically, a person who graduates with a dance degree likely has a lot more experience in real life application of their skills than a graduate with an accounting degree, but which is valued more?

Certainly, not all practical experience is valued, regardless of how good you are at it.  Even the best shepherd in the world is going to have a difficult time finding a job in the US.

What Godin says is needed is engaging in the boring, methodical work of self-assessment, data analysis, etc that helps you learn about yourself and what works.

Of course, there is always something we don’t know so we do need to get instruction from somewhere. But there is no seminar or workshop that will provide all the magical answers, it will just point you to the place to start asking questions.

 

Is Creative Placemaking The Poor Man’s Gentrification?

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Part of last week I was attending the Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit for the South and Appalachian region.

I am sorry to say that one of the biggest impressions I came away with is that poverty is the rule rather than the exception in this country. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I grew up in a rural town and spent a good part of my youth consuming government cheese, rice and powdered milk. I worked in an Appalachian community that was notorious for pill mills and opioid addiction nearly 20 years ago before it was considered so much a crisis that organizations started refusing donations from pharmaceutical companies.

But these all seemed to be generally isolated instances compared to the whole of the country. More and more I am not so sure.

I spent three days last week listening to the majority of the presenters talk about the great projects they have enacted in communities where the median income for a household of four hovers between $19,000 and $32,000 a year.

One of the questions in the first session I attended was about whether placemaking was happening predominantly in rural and impoverished communities. At the time I was thinking about all the urban gentrification that has been going on so I didn’t think that was the case, but by the time I got to the end of conference, I started to wonder if anyone was using creative placemaking as a tool in affluent urban communities. More and more it seemed like Creative Placemaking is something people turn to in order to improve economically depressed communities.

I began to suspect the effort to improve in big cities it is just termed development. If there is any creative element that emerges, it is in compliance with percent for art requirements forcing projects to add artistic elements.

Most of the presenters and attendees seemed to be from small communities. There were some people from Miami and Alameda County, CA at the conference but they talked about how their projects were improving lives in impoverished neighborhoods and creating more positive relationships with the police.  No one was talking about projects on the scale of New York City’s Highline or Hudson Yards

I will confess that this is a large chunk of cynicism talking right now. So much of what is accomplished in smaller communities is definitely due to governments, developers and community advocates entering in conversations to find innovative solutions that improve the status of the entire community. Maybe bigger cities aren’t attending these conferences because they don’t feel the need to participate since they already have developers salivating to build something. As a result, I am hearing the stories of communities with fewer resources.

At the same time I listen to people talk about all small projects they bootstrapped into being viewed as a vast improvement because it added a small walking trail and pole barn pavilion. The fact that this trail is touted as something people can use to spend time with their families after a 10 day of work almost has undertones of those commercials telling us we can improve the lives of people overseas “for pennies a day.” Except that it isn’t overseas. It is kinda dispiriting.

I don’t have to tell those of you in the arts community that even when a project clearly has improved conditions, it isn’t necessarily valued. Germaine Jenkins talked about the farm she and her colleagues at Fresh Future Farm created in North Charleston, SC, transforming an empty lot into a garden with a store that charges people on a sliding scale according to their need. Her lease is up in September with no indication of whether it will be renewed.

There was a time when people were criticizing the superficial understanding of Richard Florida’s observations of the relationship between Creative Class and vibrant communities. There was a sense that you just needed to attract creative people to place and they would take care of the rest. I feel like Creative Placemaking reflects a more sophisticated understanding that a complex mix of factors from public policy, community dynamics, business and cultural resources, etc need to be in place and requires constant attention and balancing.

Yet I am starting to wonder if people see the success of creative placemaking efforts elsewhere and perceive it to be the panacea for the problems that plague their communities.

Yet, perhaps this is what is needed at this juncture– the example of success elsewhere as a model of what should be done locally. Last week Notre Dame cathedral burned down and people apparently recognized that there was a spate of recent church burning in the US that had not received the attention and support that the cathedral did and started donating toward the restoration of those US churches. The people who are undertaking these project understand that there is a lot of hard work and consensus building required. Maybe the examples of others will bring a positive result in the long run.

If The Metric Is Valued, Someone Is Probably Trying To Game The System

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Okay, so I promise I am not seeking out articles that discuss the problems with depending on quantitative metrics to determine effectiveness and value. They just keep falling into my lap. This one is via Dan Pink and is kinda fun to read thanks to some animations.

The piece in The Hustle has us follow the “career” of  Otis has he moves from being a cashier to sales to online advertising to programming to surgery in order to illustrate how the use of quotas and efficiency metrics permeates every industry and every profession to incentivize gaming the system in order to generate the best appearance.

But Otis came to learn that metrics weren’t inherently bad — his bosses had just failed to grasp two important economic principles:

  • Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” and
  • Campbell’s Law: The more a metric is used, the more likely it is to “corrupt the process it is intended to monitor.”

He realized that when his performance was measured with a specific metric, he optimized everything to hit it, regardless of the consequences that arose. As a visiting professor at the London School of Economics told him, improper targets could:

  • Encourage “gaming” the system (e.g., bagging free groceries)
  • Incentivize the wrong aspects of work (e.g., writing trivial code)
  • Erode morale (e.g., writing clickbait)
  • Harm customers (e.g., turning away critical surgery patients)

And so, Otis decided to start his own company — a company where metrics would serve their true purpose: To motivate and align. Efficiency, Otis finally realized, isn’t just output; it is the value of what is produced.

If you think about the measures being applied to non-profit arts and cultural organizations like overhead ratio, economic impact, test scores, etc and pay attention to what organizations are doing in order to meet those metrics, you will probably start to see behaviors that conform to those listed above.

It could manifest as massaging numbers in financials and research; chasing funding that doesn’t align with mission and strains capacity; superficial efforts that check desired boxes; pursuit of a narrow segment of community rather than a focus on broader inclusion. I am sure readers can think of many examples from their own experiences.

Unexamined Initiatives Are Not Worth Implementing

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It is no news flash to even casual readers of the blog that I am involved with Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection program to build public will for arts and culture. Last week, they ran a webinar just to present the basic research and program. In recent months they have been featuring two case studies where people talk about how their organizations are putting the research and messaging into practice. This session was aimed at giving people more complete information about the program.

As much as I have been a fan boy cheer leading the program, what I really appreciated about the webinar last week was the number and type of questions people were asking of the presenters.

It was an indication of just how serious people were thinking about implementing the research that webinar attendees were questioning the research methodology. I think people in arts and culture field are wise to scrutinize whether a new approach to doing business is a popular fad soon to fade or has some rigorous thought behind it. They have little enough time and resources as it is and don’t want to waste it on initiatives lacking substance.

What I really appreciated was when one person, identified as Zi Li, asked about case studies on failed programs because they were interested to learn why those program failed.  My friend Carter Gillies often mentions the problem of survivorship bias  where you only study the successful cases rather than gaining insight from those that failed.

The music on the Awesome 80s radio station is always going to be better than the music today because you are comparing the cream that rose to the top and endured the last 30 years to all the music being performed today, both good and bad.

If you are new to the concept of Creating Connection or just want a refresher, take a look at the video from the webinar which includes all the questions and comments made that day.

Non Profits & Buying Locally – Good For The Community vs Bad For Overhead Ratio

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Back in September, Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ) pointed to a new research study which has found overheard ratio is not a valid measure of organizational effectiveness. In fact, it there is a slight negative correlation between overheard ratio and commonly used measures of efficiency.

“…but our work is the first to approach it using efficiency theory—and we were able to demonstrate the problem using real-world data.”

….“In short,” Coupet says, “this demonstrates that not only is the overhead ratio bad at assessing efficiency, but also that using it to assess efficiency may actively mislead donors. We argue that nonprofit scholars, managers, and donors should move away from concepts and measures of efficiency based on financial ratios, and toward ones that embrace maximizing what nonprofits are able to make and do.”

NPQ says according to the study, overhead ratio is a poor measure of effectiveness because it doesn’t reflect what organizations are doing with their resources or what they “are accomplishing with their non-overhead spending.”

In other words, like I have written so often before, the value of what a non-profit does is not reflected by transactional data, economic impact numbers or test scores.

This being said, another part of the article raises the intriguing idea that if a non-profit is supposed to be working for the benefit of their community, shouldn’t they be focusing on buying locally rather at chain stores or wholesale warehouses? If so, the higher cost of buying locally would raise their costs a bit and impact their overhead ratio. But it may be worthwhile to do so.

Should we stop looking for cost savings that benefit our bottom line but lead to purchasing that harms the greater community? In other words, should nonprofits be considering (and be supported to pursue) their own “buy local” policies?

‘Nonprofits should be shouting about how much of their spending happens at locally owned, minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned or disabled-owned businesses. There is a multiplier effect in spending locally that shows that for every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 of that is re-spent locally, while national chains only spend $14 of that sale locally.’

This is an intriguing idea that has this author (a nonprofit executive who manages purchasing) feeling the financial pinch of a cogent ethical argument: If buying local supports healthy communities, and the mission and values of my organizations are tied to relevant healthy community outcomes, why am I doing my shopping at big box (including online) retailers?

This broadens the scope of what it means to be a non-profit in service to the community. Touting how much is being spent at locally owned business won’t necessarily smother the use of overhead ratio as a standard, but it has the potential to blunt the ratio’s use in an argument of a non-profit’s worthiness.

Are You Persistent or Consistent In Your Pursuit of Excellence?

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Seth Godin made a post earlier this week comparing Persistence with Consistent wherein he starts with the statement “Persistence is sort of annoying.”

He goes on to talk about the way in which consistent is the desirable opposite side of the coin,

Consistent with your statements, consistent in the content you create, consistent in the way you chip away at the problem you’re seeking to solve.

Persistence can be selfish, but consistency is generous.

And the best thing is that you only have to make the choice to be consistent once. After that, it’s simply a matter of keeping your promise.

In this context,  persistence seems to be about performance of a specific action whereas consistent is policy. In this sense persistence is approaching a challenge in the same way until it is worn down to the point you can pass. Whereas consistent is more about dedication to finding a way past that obstruction.

While both approaches never falter in achieving a singular goal, the latter entertains options regarding the methods by which this can be accomplished. In fact, consistent may be better equipped to recognize that surmounting the barrier isn’t the goal but rather getting to the place beyond the barrier and therefore there may be no reason to engage with this particular barrier at all.

What actually drew my attention to Godin’s post was that last line about keeping a promise. Working in the non-profit arts sector is often such a struggle that we feel like we can only survive with dogged persistence. Perhaps what is really needed is a focus on consistency.

If our promise to the community we serve is to provide a certain experience, a persistent approach may keep you locked into executing an approach and methods which have decreasing relevance. A determination to offer a consistently valuable experience can lead you to place more importance on needs of those you intend to serve rather place importance on the methods by which you accomplish it.

Think about it this way. If you want to keep a promise to provide excellent customer service do you do the same thing today as you did five years ago? Do you use the same approach for small groups as large? Kids as for elderly? Film audiences as for Broadway musical audiences? 2500 seat theater as for 150 seat theater?

Sure you will still make bad choices, but a consistent approach to great customer service is likely better able to take the differences of time, place, environment and expectations into account than a persistent approach.

If you are like me, Emerson’s line, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” might have come to mind when you first saw the term. In that context consistency has a negative connotation. After reading and pondering Godin’s post I wondered if it might have been better said as “a foolish persistence.” Though I learn toward consistency is a better word choice.

It should also be noted, Emerson never mentions what the characteristics of wise or non-foolish consistency are. Consistency is not necessarily negative in and of itself. Persistence isn’t either, but it does have implications of a single-mindedness that can quickly become problematic.

You may have noticed I didn’t make definitive claims about persistent being one thing and consistent being another. Ultimately, of course it isn’t about what word you use as much as what practice you embody.

Free In Life, But Eternally Enslaved By Movie Studios In Death

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If we thought it was a problem that older arts administrators were resisting retirement and making it difficult for newer people in the field to advance and gain valuable skills, actors may end up having it worse. According to an article on MIT Technology Review, actors are digitally preserving themselves which would allow them to perform even after they die.

“It’s sort of a safe bet for the people with the money. It’s a familiar face,” says Ingvild Deila, who was scanned by Industrial Light and Magic for her role as Princess Leia in Rogue One. “We like to repeat what’s worked in the past, so it’s part financial, part nostalgia.”

Earlier this year Last Jedi visual-effects supervisor Ben Morris told Inverse that the Star Wars franchise is now scanning all its leads. Just in case. “We will always digitally scan all the lead actors in the film,” says Morris. “We don’t know if we’re going to need them.”

The article talks about some of the technical difficulties that have been encountered during efforts to retroactively create images of people from old video footage supplemented by motion capture from body doubles. The fact that actors are proactively working to collect a plethora of information about their gestural nuances and inevitable improvements in technology mean that an actor’s career can be extended for a long time.

There are all sort of thorny questions that this raises. On the positive side the technology may be an equalizer for women who have often found their careers truncated as they age or start being offered parts as mothers of male actors only a few years their junior  (or in the infamous case of Angelina Jolie and Collin Farrell in Alexander, one year her junior). Of course, that opens a whole can of worms akin to the controversies about retouching magazine photos if the digital recordings of women are used to “de-age” them more than their male counterparts.

Regardless of gender there is the question of authenticity and believability that can arise.

Not to mention, the matter of whether humans are needed at all if an AI can create a digital simulacrum that can deliver a believable, evocative performance.

I am not sure fans’ desire to interact with a live personae would necessarily prevent a digital creation from achieving peak stardom since the online and recorded presence already constitutes a significant portion of so many people’s relationship with those they admire.

If fans need a real life person upon which to shower praise, perhaps it will end up being the directors of design teams that will be the prime recipients of adulation for their masterful manipulation of wholly digital constructs.

The more I think about this issue, the more problems I can think of. My brain is already writing the plot of a movie where a studio kills off an actor so that they can’t contract their likeness to a rival studio, thereby making their recording at the peak of the actor’s powers the most valuable.

I anticipate court cases where heirs lose a lawsuit over the use of their great-grandparent’s likeness because the law governing such matters was underdeveloped in 2020.

Americans For The Arts Unleashes A Pinwheel of Arts Power!!

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Americans for the Arts just rolled out their Social Impact of the Arts pinwheel this week. Instructions and ideas about how to use it may be found in a blog post and/or video made by Clay Lord, Vice President of Local Arts Advancement.

As you know, I apply a pretty critical eye to anything that might make prescriptive claims regarding the ability of the arts to solve all sorts of problems.  As always, I am concerned about people using data like property values increasing 20% due to the presence of a cultural organization and a correlation between taking arts classes for four years scoring 100 points higher on SATs as a primary measure of value of the arts.

I will say that it is clear A LOT of effort went into assembling the data and putting these materials together. It can provide a valuable resource when advocating for the arts and finding practices to emulate.  Between the amount of data points and ease of use, my pinwheel of arts power moniker is pretty deserved.

The topics covered are much wider than the economic and educational benefits we often see cited in relation to the arts. There are sections on diplomacy, innovation, faith, infrastructure, health and wellness, social justice and yes, culture, economics and education. Each of the 26 “slices” of the pinwheel brings up a “Learn More” button in the center that allows you to download a printable PDF specific to the topic with footnoted sources that you can bring to meetings with policy makers to show them what is backed by research.

Arrows on either side of the center hub will take you to examples of practice, reading lists and organizations associated with the topic. According to the video presentation Lord made, they were still populating that content.  Since that video was made at the conference back in June, they have likely added a lot more content since then.  I haven’t checked every slice of the pinwheel, but haven’t been able to find an area that lacks any of those three categories.

The downloadable PDFs have reading lists, examples of practice and organizations included, but the respective categories accessed via the pinwheel hub provide more direct access to the information in each section.

My hope is that the easy availability of data and examples of impacts in a wide range of applications will enable people to advocate for the arts cross a broader spectrum of rationale. Likewise, I hope people find it easy to draw inspiration from the successes organizations have had making artistic and cultural practice part of their effort to create connections and impacts in various endeavors.

Feeling Sliced and Stretched Trying To Meet Evaluative Measures? There Is Good Reason

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Last week I linked to the unabridged version of Carter Gillies’ article for the Arts Professional (UK). The shorter print version has since appeared on their site.

In his response in the comments section of the Arts Professional article, Carter employs some evocative imagery to support his contention that just because you can measure something doesn’t mean the metric tells you anything of value.

If you have been having a difficult time wrapping your head around the arguments I have been laying out about how arts and creativity are valued, Carter’s illustration of the idea might help toward better understanding.

There is an ancient Greek Myth that shows the dangers of confusing our measures with something subject to measurement. In it Procrustes guarantees that the visitors to his inn would fit their beds perfectly…. But Procrustes turns the situation on its head and instead measures the fit by how well the people are measured *by* the bed. In other words, the people are stretched out if they are too small or chopped down if they are too long. Gruesome!

…Do we strap the arts into a framework that satisfies specifically non-artistic values, force a conformity that exists only in conformity obsessed minds? Do we sacrifice all that art can be merely to satisfy a diminished version that is neat and tidy, but itself merely a butchered example of what art does and what it should aim for?

If Arts Council England wants to impose a quality metric for the arts, they have a bureaucratic right to do so. Unfortunately. What they do not have is a right to speak for what things count as quality in the arts, or by extension what the arts themselves are or should be. If they want to take on the role of Procrustes let them be honest about it. But don’t let them tell you that what they are imposing is really what counts as the arts…

Now before you start mumbling indignantly as you recognize how government funders, foundations, etc are applying irrelevant measures in an attempt to define the value of art, recall that we all ultimately end up creating personal definitions and measures of what is and is not worthwhile art. It is just that most of us don’t wield the money and influence that broadly shapes policy and practice for other arts and cultural organizations

I Don’t Know What You Need To Know Because I Know So Much

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This summer I have been seeing a lot of California Symphony Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer popping up in places like videos of conference talks she has been giving. It has been over a year and a half since I wrote about her Orchestra X project so I figured it was time to revisit and reacquaint people with the work she has been doing.

Recently she had a blog post following up on the conversations her organization has been having with the communities they serve. She mentions a theme I keep seeing in formal survey results and collected anecdotes — audiences aren’t clamoring for a change in programming as much as they are intimidated and confused by the decision and experience of attending a cultural event.

The bigger issue, she says, is that those of us on the inside forget what it was like being entirely unfamiliar with information or an experience. Even when we are faced with a new-ish experience, our past experiences allow us to make logical leaps that total novices can’t.

What we learned was that a “basic” level of understanding about the symphony or classical music does not exist among newcomers. Some people didn’t even know the names of the instruments in the orchestra, which to me, the person who had played an instrument all growing up and who wanted to manage a symphony since age 16, was pretty much unfathomable (remember hindsight bias?). The good news, we discovered, was that this group of smart people desperately wanted to learn about everything related to classical music though. And through the discussion we learned that the way we layout and present information on our website made it very difficult for them to do that.

[…]

Virtually every person in the room expressed the sentiment of “awe” when describing the art they saw and heard. No one said, “I need a shorter concert,” or “I need to hear more movie music.” They very much wanted to learn about all facets of the repertoire and were emphatic that the art is incomparable.

Bergauer says that now that California Symphony stopped stressing about programming mix and started focusing on retention versus new audience acquisition. Last season, their new attendee retention rate was over 30%.

Take a closer look at the post. She talks a little more about how rich experiences make us unable to anticipate what new attendees really need to know in order to enjoy themselves.

#19NTC Topics-Oh Yeah Do I Got Ideas For You

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Last week Drew McManus did a call out to the non-profit arts community to submit proposals for the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March 2019. (Proposal deadline is August 17)

Last year, I was excited by the topic Drew was presenting – “Everything Tech Providers Wished You Knew About Writing A RFP (plus the stuff they want to keep secret)

So in the spirit of getting more stuff I am interested in learning about proposed, I am gonna give you a list of some of the things I think would make good topics in the hope some of you will submit something.

  • Data Privacy and Security From Perspective of Communities of Color – I have already reached out to one of the people who made a presentation for the Hispanic National Bar Assn in NYC, but anyone with an interest should submit on this topic. Given that non-profits serving communities of color often need to establish a relationship of trust, this seems like an important subject to address.
  • Analyzing The True Cost of Programs – favorite topic of mine. Related idea:
  • Using Evidence/Data to Rebutt the Concept of Overhead Ratio As A Measure Of Effectiveness
  • Shared /Online Procurement Goods/Services
  • Effective RFP Generation – both internal & external processes
  • Using Geofencing To Better Understand Target Communities – can geofencing help you better understand a community based on where they travel around the community?
  • Ethics of Using Geofencing For Marketing  – i.e. I can geofence a local theater and target people based on the idea that they enjoy attending performances or with the intent of stealing the audience.
  • In-Person/Conference Based Professional Development vs. Online/Technology Delivery. Are there some subject areas better suited to one format over the other?
  • Shared services/technology arrangements – in terms of both back office and program delivery
  • Delete the Facebook Account? – Communication strategies when faced with a concerted social media assault
  • Conforming with Google’s new criteria for Adwords Grants – i.e. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/05/07/nonprofits-can-keep-adwords-grants-following-major-changes-restore-lost-accounts/
  • Energy Saving Performance Contracts
  • Use of technology to provide regular cues to keep strategic plan alive and relevant – i.e. using software/apps to periodically to nag/remind you of milestones in time line, provide encouragement, remind you of ideas you had during the planning session
  • Effective Hiring – from job description to orientation/training  this topic is large enough to be multiple sessions can hit on everything from online job boards/job app apps to new state laws requiring salary range and forbidding asking about salary history

There are plenty more ideas where these came from, but I feel like this is a good broad range of subjects. I have already reached out to a few people encouraging to propose based on topics they are well-qualified to address.

If any of this inspires you in any sort of direction, submit a proposal.  If you got questions, let me know. Like Drew, I am on the conference session committee. Honestly, the conference organizers are really good about providing opportunities for people to ask questions at scheduled office hours and open Q&A sessions, and an online proposal prep group in which you can solicit feedback on proposals you are developing. All these resources are listed on the proposal pages.

They Can Give The Arts ESP? Sign Me Up!

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You may not have caught it last week when the Knight Prototype Fund announced awards for the development of technology to support the arts.

Of the twelve projects, four are focused on helping people interact and receive information about visual arts.  Along those same lines, one seeks to utilize augmented reality glasses to deliver performance content to deaf, hard of hearing and non-English speaking audiences.

The Holy Grail of technology tools for the arts seems to be live delivery of program notes during a performance. I am not sure if the tools aren’t effective, the technology difficult to use or if there is a resistance to a common standard, but these type of projects seem to always be in the works. Back in 2004 we saw Concert Companion.  Artsjournal has been promoting a live streaming of program notes by the Philadelphia Orchestra.  There was also San Jose Ballet’s live casting of commentary during a performance of Sleeping Beauty last May. (Interested to know how that turned out.) Now Knight Prototype Fund is supporting MIT’s ConcertCue which plans to do much the same thing.

From an arts administration standpoint, my interest was piqued by the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts’ proposed ArtsESP which plans “Developing forecasting software that enables cultural institutions to make data-centered decisions in planning their seasons and events.”

Our ticketing system has “tomorrow” as a default choice for many reports and I have often joked how I wish it could tell me how many tickets we will sell tomorrow. Maybe we will be a step closer now…

Nina Simon is involved with the Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center’s project to develop “…a tool in the form of a smartphone/tablet app for cultural institutions to capture visitor demographic data, increasing knowledge on who is and who is not participating in programs.”

There are also some interesting projects designed to assist communities in providing feedback.

One, appropriately called Feedback Loop has the goal of, “Enabling audiences to share immediate feedback and reflections on art by designing hardware and software to test recording and sharing of audience thoughts.”

Wiki Art Depiction Explorer wants to use “crowdsourcing methods to improve Wikipedia descriptions of artworks in major collections so people can better access and understand art virtually.”

Civic Portal looks to encourage “public input on new forms of historical monuments through a digital tool that allows users to identify locations, topics and create designs for potential public art and monuments in our cities.”

This last one reminded me of the crowdmapping projects I wrote about some communities undertaking. (Actually, that is exactly what it is.)

Any of these sound intriguing, take a look at the Knight Prototype Fund page and keep your eyes open for reports of the projects’ progress. I have already tried to see if I could learn more about ArtsESP, but couldn’t discover anything online at the moment.

Who Will Play You In The Opera?

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I frequently write about how people often don’t feel arts and cultural events are for them is because they aren’t seeing themselves and their stories portrayed. So it was with some interest that I read about Opera Philadelphia’s effort to provide a free high definition broadcast of their 2017 opera, We Shall Not Be Moved,  which uses the 1985 bombing of the MOVE compound by the city of Philadelphia as a starting point.

Opera Philadelphia has a history of providing free opera broadcasts on Independence Mall. They are particularly interested in presenting this broadcast because so many people were unable to see the live performance. I was surprised to learn the public broadcast will cost as much as $160,000. Right now they are running a crowdfunding campaign for the last $25,000.

What I was most interested in learning was the details of the original production which involved music by Daniel Bernard Roumain, libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the direction and choreography of Bill T. Jones, all luminaries in their respective fields. It is no surprise to me that they would be involved with the project because they each have a history of working with communities to help them tell their stories.

The students from Art Sanctuary had the opportunity to work with these artists as the piece was developed. We Shall Not Be Moved had its world premiere during O17 at the Wilma Theater, then moved on to Harlem’s Apollo Theater and the Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, it was presented by Dutch National Opera; as noted on the crowdfunding page, the reception there “proved that this timely, Philadelphia-based work could also find relevance with the wider international community.”

Readers may be aware via the Adaptistration blog/Drew McManus that Rob Deemer has been leading an effort to create the Composer Diversity Database in order to make it easier to more broadly program concerts and create music for any sort of artistic projects, including films, video games and of course, operas.

The success We Shall Not Be Moved has had is just another small piece of evidence that there is an audience and interest in projects that don’t appear in or confirm closely to characteristics of the traditional canon.  It bears noting that often these projects aren’t developed and promoted in a traditional manner and that may factor largely into the breadth of their appeal.

Can You Sincerely Build Relationships With A Marketing Motivation?

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Our friends at Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection project hosted another webinar recently showcasing the work being done by City Lights Theater Company in San Jose and Portland Playhouse.

Some of the ideas for engaging the audience that caught my attention were City Lights Theater’s practice of providing small presents to attendees. The theme of the presents aligns with each show in some way. They also hold parties on stage after the show allowing people to meet and mingle with the actors.

They have been doing these things for a number of years, but have recently tweaked both offerings to get people more actively involved. For one show, the present was origami paper and instructions to fold it into a heart. For another it was magnetic words you could form into poetry on your refrigerator.

For some post-show parties they have had drawing activities for audience members. For the play at which they handed out the poetry magnets, they set up a white board during the after party so the audience could write poetry.

You may recall from a previous webinar I covered, Eugene Symphony used a white board in their lobby to collect feedback from the audience. City Lights does that as well,  using the prompts “How Do You Create?” and “City Lights Makes Me Feel…”

The artistic director, Lisa Mallette, talks about other events and presents they have used to deepen their relationship with audiences and reinforce their organizational values. So it is worth watching the video to borrow/steal their good ideas.

Some of the choices they make seem a little counter intuitive because they value relationship building over overt marketing.

It caught my attention when Mallette pointed out their presents aren’t branded with the organizational logo.

“They know where they got it. They are going to remember where they got it. It doesn’t need to say, you know, ‘$5 off your next ticket.’ So we are shifting our thoughts about why we are doing this and making it not about transactional. That has been important for our growth as well.”

She said they avoid surveying people about their willingness to return/tell a friend during the after parties because they see it as compromising the authenticity of the connection they are trying to forge. The party is about sincere relationships so they want to avoid the appearance of plying people with cookies and wine in exchange for goodwill.

While they might ask willingness to recommend in a survey, she said often their surveys ask how the audience is doing rather than how pleased they are with the theater. For example, they will ask audiences if they are feeling creative or working on projects.

It is probably something of a testament to the connection they are forging that since 2011 one of the audience members has been going home after every performance and has been creating sketches based on how he experienced each show. City Lights is currently displaying his work on the back wall of the theater. Some of his sketches appear in the webinar.

Once she introduced the idea, I have really started thinking about whether transaction driven interactions like measuring marketing effectiveness or collecting data in support of grants might be interfering with or run counter to sincere attempts at community  relationship building.

Which, of course, raises questions about the degree of sincerity being invested in relationship building. If you immediately pivot to the need to measure and report effectiveness if you want to survive, you have your answer.

Sure the two goals may not be mutually exclusive. But I figure if a person asked you what you thought of them and how great, hospitable and well dressed they are as frequently as an arts and cultural organization asks those questions about themselves, you would think they were pretty self centered.  So there is probably a lot of room for improvement in asking people about themselves in a way that doesn’t have an underlying transactional motivation. (What they like to read, watch and listen to so that you can focus your marketing efforts there.)

Varied Advice & Insights On Creative Placemaking, Economic Impact

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As a follow up to yesterday’s post on the Creative Placemaking conference I attended, I wanted to share some general thoughts and ideas I had picked up.

Regardless of whether the setting is urban, suburban or rural, there are a number of communities experiencing really difficult times. A number of panelists discussed the need to address the community trauma before you ever talk about economic stimulus. You can’t just walk in and position something as a solution to the problems in the community until those problems are aired and people have a sense that they can move forward from there. Otherwise the issues will likely continue to fester and undermine the foundation of what you are trying to accomplish.

When it comes to investment and grant making in rural communities, it probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that one of the factors contributing to the low level of investment is geographic remoteness. David Stocks of the Educational Foundation of America (which ironically is not involved in education) talked about how program officers will need to invest a lot more effort into bringing support to rural communities.

They might need to take a plane to a regional airport and then drive 2-3 hours before they reach a community. There is also the issue of trying to identify what organizations would make good anchor partners for the work they do.  There is a need for both funders and community organizations to work at expanding their relationship networks to increase the chances that their orbits will intersect.

Marie Mascherin who works for New Jersey Community Capital, characterized her organization primarily as a lender. She talked about how lenders viewed placemaking activities which was a perspective you rarely get. All the same, she warned those in attendance that her organization was atypical in that they got a lot more involved with the community and projects they were working on than most similar lending organizations.

John Davis who was involved with bringing vitality to both New York Mills, MN and Lanesboro, MN passed on a piece of advice he had received from a college professor – don’t make excuses, even about money, for not finding a creative solution. Basically, don’t let lack of money (or other things)  become default excuses about why things can’t be accomplished. In a rural setting where resources are scarce, you pretty much have to try harder to find creative solutions.

(Honestly, “work even harder and don’t make excuses,” wasn’t something I wanted to hear, but wasn’t exactly news.)

Davis also talked about an argument he made to a local government that was balking at renovating a building. He noted it would cost them $35,000 to demolish the building or they could invest $35,000 into renovating the building and have a more valuable property they could sell later if his project failed.

His project didn’t fail, but that concept dovetailed in an interesting way with a comment Ben Fink of Appalshop made about a prison project being proposed near Whitesburg, KY. He said that the $300,000,000 prison was being sold to the community as, at best, creating 300 new jobs. He noted that was $1,000,000 a job–compare that to how much benefit $1 investment in arts and culture has for a community.

It occurred to me that is something to look into and leverage proactively with governments and decision makers. Rather than waiting until it comes time to ask for funding to be renewed, when a discussion comes up about providing tax breaks or subsidies for companies, it might be useful to mention that $1 invested in creative placemaking/arts/culture/education in the community is more efficient.

While I am on the subject of economic activity, in one session I bluntly asked Jeremy Liu of PolicyLink about the veracity of economic impact claims being made by organizations and communities. He said if they are using analytic tools like those offered by Implan, the numbers are dependable.

In the past I have mentioned my concern with arts and culture organizations arguing for funding or policy changes citing the benefits of art and music on learning and test scores when such benefits are only weakly supported or have been debunked.

What has worried me is that decision and policy makers will learn about the lack of evidence for these claims and perhaps actively wield it against the arts community. By the same token, I have often wondered at the rigor behind claims of economic impact of creative activity in communities and feared what might result if they are debunked.¥

A few other tidbits people offered-

Don’t become hyperfocused on placemaking. Don’t value place or a project over the community. Even if you are in a group, no project is completed in isolation.

If you recall in the very beginning of my post yesterday I mentioned that I gained an appreciation and broader perspective on the different roles that contributed to a placemaking project from governments to funding/loan group to community members to the people executing the work, placemaking is a function of many entities working together.

I feel like I am citing him a lot in these last two posts, but I appreciated Ben Fink’s insights about establishing relationships with people in the community. He said the first real shared connection you will make with someone is rarely associated with the project you are trying to accomplish. As an example, your aim may be to solicit participation in a building renovation for a maker space but the initial basis of your relationship is a shared interest in 19th century steam engines.

He said that building community support and participation happened in the same way friendships develop. It is heavily dependent on the dynamics at the formation of the project. If participation is by invitation only, one person ends up being in charge. If you form a clique of interested parties, it becomes insular. But if the project begins with the intention of leaving the door open, interested people will start to gravitate toward the project as they see work happening.

¥- None of this compromises my assertion that while arts and cultural activity may generate economic activity, steady employment, positive social outcomes and quality of life, the none of this is a measure of the value of arts and culture.

Chatbot As Assistant Grant Writer

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When I first saw this piece on Arts Professional about data driven decision making, I thought maybe the author, Patrick Towell, was cribbing Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman’s recent conference session on the same topic.

He even referenced the gut trusting HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion/in Office).

I might have only had myself to blame having brought attention to it with my inspiring post on the subject.

But Towell quickly moves away from that subject to address a pretty significant barrier to using data to drive decisions–people’s comfort levels accessing, interpreting and using the data.

Towell cites respondents to a survey of people working in cultural organizations in the UK:

Some of those respondents work in an organisational culture that doesn’t embrace the use of data: “Data gets bad PR. The greatest barrier to usage is lack of fluency and comfort with data as a medium to tell stories.” For others it was systems being difficult to access and join up: “We can’t effectively understand or engage with our audience without tools to collate, analyse and use our audience data.”

Despite this discomfort, many respondents were eager to use data to support their activities:

Interestingly, many did consider its use in artistic and cultural programming: “Data could be used to inform our programming schedule, driving more revenue.” Audience development was an area where people saw a clear benefit: “Our visitor and sales forecasting is based in fairyland – better datasets and data analysis could be more realistic.” People also thought they could better justify the use of public money through more defensible evidence.

What Towell says his company has done is started to prototype a chatbot that will “sit over your data” as a “kind of Alexa for cultural managers” and help a wider range of people in an organization feel comfortable accessing it. The example they use in the screenshot of the prototype queries the chatbot about how many new members visited shows in December.

If they can get this to work, it would be awesome. If you were able to feed budget numbers into it so just about anyone could ask about revenue and expenses for different combinations of projects, it would make completing grant reports so much easier. Especially if it potentially spread to onus of completing reports around the organization.

The biggest hurdle I see is that funding organizations have such diverse definitions and conditions associated with their reporting, programming a bot AI to keep it all straight might be cost prohibitive.

Still, it is a pretty intriguing idea. Some time in the last couple weeks I saw someone mention they were visiting the websites of arts and culture organizations to see how many used chatbots to facilitate the sale of tickets. (Things like, “when are Thursday performances of Hamlet in June and July?”). The value of chatbots for public facing interactions is rather obvious, but I suspect few people have considered their utility for internal information sharing.

When HiPPOs Attack

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Being the voracious consumer of arts administration theory and philosophy, I jumped on the slide deck Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman put together for their session at the Association of Arts Administration Educators conference.

The topic they covered was “Effective Data Driven Decision Making,” which may sound uninteresting until you realize that the main thrust of their session was providing guidance for dealing with a major barrier to progress in an organization, the HiPPOs.

In his post on Adaptistration reflecting on his conference experience, Drew expresses some surprise that conference attendees hadn’t heard of HiPPO decision making before. I suspect people are familiar with the practice, but just don’t know that particular term.

HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

I am pretty sure everyone has had the experience where they put a lot of effort into developing a plan/proposal, supporting it with research, surveys, etc., perhaps going through multiple layers of people to get their buy-in and approval only to have the final decision maker summarily nix it.

Usually the rejection is based on a personal opinion or gut feeling about what should be done, despite the fact that the people they pay to do research, analyze data, and be subject matter experts say otherwise.

This slide from Drew and Ceci’s presentation summarize it pretty well.

Accompanying this and other slides in the presentation are scads of notes Drew and Ceci graciously supply. Including the following tips about HiPPO behavior:

How to tell if you’re a HiPPO (or work for one). HiPPOs ask:

  • How much traffic is coming to our website?
  • What are our conversion rates?
  • What are the top exit pages on our website?
  • How many average monthly leads do we generate?
  • What is the average site visitor time on site?
  • What are our click-through rates on the homepage slider?

In short, if your data requests sound like grant applications, you have yet to establish a positive data culture.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking about effective data driven decision making in terms of having to collect even more information for reports no one is going to read. Think about this in terms of creating a work environment in which data analysis and expertise is honored across the whole organization (Drew & Ceci also address siloed decision making) and acted upon rather than disregarded on one person’s word.

Basically, the goal is to reduce how frequently you utter the phrase, “So what did I do all that work for…” at work

Go check out the slide presentation and accompanying notes.

Cross Cultural Appreciation Is A Start

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Pacific Standard recently pointed to a study conducted in Portugal that indicated some positive outcomes using the music and culture of immigrant groups to help reduce prejudicial attitudes.

It reports schoolchildren around age 11 who learned about the music and culture of a faraway land expressed warmer feelings toward immigrants from that country than those who did not. What’s more, those positive emotions were still evident three months after this exposure to the foreign culture.

“Music can inspire people to travel to other emotional worlds,” writes a research team led by psychologist Felix Neto of the University of Porto. Their work suggests songs can serve as an emotional bridge between cultures, revealing feelings that are common to both.

Their study, published in the journal Psychology of Music, featured 229 Portuguese sixth graders, all living in greater Lisbon. Two-thirds came from blue-collar families.

The students in the experimental group participated in twenty 90 minute sessions across six months. At the end of that period, their prejudices were reduced compared to the control group and that attitude persisted when the experiment group was surveyed three months later.

Learning of this study lead me to recall something mentioned in a keynote address delivered by Jamie Bennett where he cited an anthropologist working with drumming circles at the Field Museum

As I wrote in that post,

He goes on to say that this was based on observations of immigrants and first generation Americans living in Chicago who participated in drumming circles. As each performed drumming particular to their own cultural background, the group bonded. Bennett says this observation is important because it potentially illustrates that arts and culture is a pathway for integrating society that doesn’t involve assimilation–“I don’t have to become more like you to become more closely bonded.”

Thinking about both of these situations started me wondering if this effect is underappreciated and ineffectively employed to constructive ends. While I am obviously against positioning music and other cultural expressions as prescriptions to cure racism, the impact of cross-cultural exposure is well recognized.

Of course, what has been somewhat controversial in the U.S., at least, is that this impact has often manifested as borrowing/”discovery”/appropriation by people outside of the cultural group who go on to popularize it. Or people have borrowed the appealing elements of cultural expression while avoiding the daily challenges faced by members of the source culture.

The challenge therefore is 1) Opening people to experiencing expressions of cultures that are not their own. 2) Ensuring that the peoples of other cultures are able to retain ownership and identification with their expressions as people come to appreciate it.

Even after that, there is still much work that needs to be done. A reduction in prejudicial attitudes doesn’t equal the elimination of prejudice. A person is more than just the external expressions of their culture. There can be a gap to bridge between appreciating someone for their skillful exhibition of their culture and appreciating them as a whole person.

Pop Up Box Office Are As Much About Listening As Selling

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Hat tip to Artsjournal.com linking to an Arts Professional article all performing arts professionals should read.

Hull Truck Theatre in Hull, England started regular pop-up box office hours in local retail chain locations to help address barriers to participation people had.

(By the way, the barriers were exactly those identified in the US studies like Culture Track – “time, cost, lack of awareness of what’s on, childcare and a sense of it being ‘not for me’”)

Magda Moses, who is the Community Projects Coordinator at Hull Truck Theatre Company started out with a trial visit to one of the stores and had conversations about their past, present and future experiences with theatre, following the theme of an upcoming production of A Christmas Carol.

Members of our box office team then joined us, enabling customers to buy tickets from an ipad.

We now run these pop-up box office and community engagement sessions in four Heron Foods stores once a month, and having other staff in attendance has helped the project become more embedded across the theatre.

One of the things we’ve learnt is to visit on regular days and times so that we can promote our visits in advance and people expect us and get to know our staff.

Since some of the responses they have received have dealt with being intimidated by the theatre building, an opportunity to interact with box office staff provides a point of contact that likely would have never occurred had they not gone out in the community.

In addition to the oft mentioned concerns about how to dress and act at a performance, a number of people identified being concerned that the experience would not live up to the expense of tickets. When the theatre produced a show about local woman advocating for fishing industry reform in the 1960s, Hull Truck Theatre offered “pay what you can” tickets exclusively through pop up box offices at Heron Foods.

Moses writes, “…we received positive feedback that people were thrilled to be able to afford to see a play that was directly relevant to their community.”

It sounds like the feedback they got from these efforts might be better than any paper survey and they have gained some insight into their audience segments. Yes, it is probably more expensive and labor intensive than more conventional approaches, but I am sure there are some intangible benefits that can’t be easily quantified in an ROI analysis.

Every time we visit Heron Food stores we ask about what sorts of events they like to come to, which informs out future programming.

We’ve identified differences in audiences across the city. Shoppers on Orchard Park are likely to bring the whole family, so they want affordable shows that everyone will enjoy. Hessle Road shoppers are likely to be older and are interested in local history and Hull stories. This information helps us make sure our marketing is relevant to each area.

Our pop-up box office sessions are about much more than selling tickets. They’re also about building relationships, trust and familiarity in order to spark the idea that someone can go to the theatre.

The sessions are an important part of the Community Dialogues project and the theatre’s wider commitment to welcome new audiences. So once we get to know someone, we can direct them towards tours, coffee mornings, family events, access performances or workshops, depending on their interests.

Cultural Revival Starts At Home

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I just rediscovered a CityLab story I bookmarked last September discussing how a woman’s effort to revitalize culture and creativity in York, PA started in her apartment.

Bored with the city’s limited cultural offerings, Dwyer and her roommates decided to create their own homegrown events—a series of monthly arts shows in her living room…

The shows were modest affairs. “We would put art on the walls, move the furniture out of our living room. We made sure everyone’s bedroom was clean,” she says. “It was like a meltdown every month preparing for it.”

Soon, the shows started to draw hundreds of people through an evening. That attracted the attention of Dwyer’s landlord, Josh Hankey.

While some landlords might see large impromptu gatherings as something to stop, Hankey saw a business opportunity. “I knew that art could create an attraction,” he says. “I knew it could change the perception of a neighborhood, and I was going to help them whatever way I could.”

This was somewhat timely for me. I had attended a session hosted by my buddies, the Creative Cult where they asked everyone to write down what assets they might bring to revitalizing the creative environment in town. I wrote “my front lawn.”

I was partially inspired by the PorchRockr festival and Porchfests going on around the country. In many places people host music concerts on their front porches and attendees wander through the neighborhood taking it all in.

I am not sure my neighborhood is the best for a concert series, but I was intrigued by the idea of hosting a conversation or speakers series in the shade of my lawn.

The directors of my local art museum are already doing something along these lines. They live in a building across the street from the museum and invite everyone who attends an opening at the museum to walk across the street for an “after party.” This usually happens around 3 pm on a weekend so it is pretty accessible to all. Between passing through their studio spaces on the first floor and the ever growing and changing collection of art in the living space on the second floor, there is a lot for people to see and talk about.

Over the last few years that I have attended the “after party” events, the demographics of those at the party have really diversified in terms of an increase in first-timers and those who wouldn’t be considered museum insiders.

If you are finding people balk when you throw open the doors to your organization and invite them in, maybe the answer can be found in throwing open the doors to your home.

Politicians know the power of retail politics where they meet people one on one at small gatherings. Living room meetings are the hallmark of politicking in New Hampshire.

A similar approach may be useful to breaking down barriers for some people in a community.

Do You Fear Innovation Will Threaten Your Effectiveness Metrics?

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Over the last few years, I have frequently written about the problem with using metrics as a measure of value and performance.  As long as we continue to be told that use of quantitative measures are important, I am gonna keep pushing back and reminding you it ain’t the be all and end all of evaluation.

Carter Gillies is actually more adamant and eloquent on this topic than I am so when I saw a piece on Aeon that started out sounding almost verbatim like Carter, I did a double take to check who the author was.

The author, Jerry Z. Muller, points out that performance metrics often incentive a gaming of the system in a manner which often runs counter to the purpose of the organization.

Or take the case of surgeons. When the metrics of success and failure are made public – affecting their reputation and income – some surgeons will improve their metric scores by refusing to operate on patients with more complex problems, whose surgical outcomes are more likely to be negative. Who suffers? The patients who don’t get operated upon.

One of the other issues is all too familiar to non-profit organizations come grant report time:

To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics in the first place – not to mention the time required to actually read them. As the heterodox management consultants Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman note in Six Simple Rules (2014), employees end up working longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organisation, while sapping their enthusiasm.

Non-profit organizations are well acquainted with implications of metrics. Organizations are often restricted to what government entities, foundations and donors are willing to fund. It can be difficult to innovate or address needs if your funding source has different priorities or restricts how funding can be used.  I have discussed before that there can be a tendency to report that everything you did met or exceeded the plans laid out in your grant proposal.  The fear of losing funding for not being successful enough disincentivizes being honest about challenges the organization faced.

While there have been plenty of embezzlement scandals at non-profits to leave funders concerned about whether their money is being used responsibly, metrics provide faulty assurances because they are so easily falsified.

So what should be used instead of performance metrics? Well, Muller really doesn’t say.  Doing a good job and having good outcomes might be a start. You’ll want to examine numbers to assist in the process of reducing needless waste. But trying to squeeze an extra percentage out so you can improve your efficiency score over last year when you squeezed an extra percentage over the previous year is not constructive.

Ultimately, the truth is that evaluation is hard. Even if we were to urge funders to invest more time in investigating outcomes directly rather than relying on numbers, the tendency to have positive associations for feel good stories will benefit some organizations over those that do unsexy, but impactful work. Then we will be back to rallying removing the emotional element by employing cold, hard numbers for evaluation.

Art Museum, The Game

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Intriguing video came across the old social media feed today in the form of a review calling the visual art oriented MMO Occupy White Walls as “The Weirdest MMO I Have Every Played.” The game is in alpha testing, but according to the reviewer, Fevir, that doesn’t detract from the experience.

Part of the motivation behind the game, according to Yarden Yaroshevski Founder and CEO of StikiPixels which is creating the game, is to provide a place to display the large segment of museums’ collections that are kept in storage and rarely seen.

The game allows you to create your own art gallery or museum and display different works in it. Other players can come by and browse. The game will also send non-player characters (NPCs) to visit and potentially pay admission fees. The in game currency can be used to expand and further customize your space–including “purchasing” art to display.

The game’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) learns what type of art you like as you browse, like or buy. My first thought, given the social media climate, is that this information could be sold to businesses who would then start soliciting you to buy art in real life. Not something I would be too keen on.

However, since people can upload their own images, the AI will serve the valuable function of keeping you from being inundated with pornographic images and memes. The company doesn’t want to be in the position of declaring what is and is not art. Ultimately, they may end up needing to limit or ban some content. If you are concerned about being subjected to dick-pix it would probably be prudent to wait until later stages of game development when the AI algorithm has learned to effectively filter them out.

Currency generated from player and NPC traffic appears to be the only competitive element to the game right now. For the most part, the game is largely focused on providing a platform to present, learn and discuss a wider range of visual art works.

I think it would be great if there was a way to pilot promotional efforts and test responses virtually. If the Artificial Intelligence (AI) was sophisticated enough to cross reference human player responses to different programmatic and promotional efforts and then direct appropriate NPC efforts to create a feedback loop to attract the notice of more players, that might be helpful.

In the context of problems with social media AI algorithms being effective at filtering undesirable activity, I would be concerned that the AI could be easily gamed to garner the most response for the least amount of effort. On the other hand, a my suspicion is lot of social media algorithms are purposefully permissive so as to retain the largest number of users. This game wouldn’t necessarily need to make things so flexible.

Fevir describes himself as “art indifferent” based on his experience with physical museums, but said after a few hours with the game AI, he started to see stuff that appealed to him. Once that happened, he began to delve into the notes about the artist, media and historic period in which the work was made.

He seems to feel that the ability for people to curate exhibits focused on particular artists, mount temporary exhibits and have conversations about brush technique took this beyond the experience of websites like Art Station, Deviant Art and the Museum of Modern Art’s online collection.

While it admittedly may have niche appeal, the basic concept and direction combined with opportunities for virtual reality viewing have some potential. There might be opportunities to mount exhibitions virtual exhibits that parallel real life exhibits. Being able to view and learn about something privately may provide people with the confidence to visit in real life. If people understand that the virtual experience doesn’t compare with really standing before a work, it may drive more visits to museums.

The downside, of course, is that if people feel like a virtual facsimile is acceptable, there may be fewer objections to works being deaccessioned and sold to private entities.

But as with so many pieces of technology, there is always potential for explosive usage in a manner the creators didn’t anticipate. It may be worth keeping an eye on this game or similar software that may emerge.

You Have To Know How They Define Community Before You Can Tell Their Story

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I don’t know what inspired me to do so, but last week I visited ProPublica’s website and learned that Free Street Theater and ProPublica Illinois were teaming up to offer theater-journalism workshops across the Illinois.

What caught my eye was that they put out a call for invitations to communities in manner reminiscent of the process Marc Folk said The Arts Commission of Toledo employed when soliciting feedback from different n eighborhoods of that city.

In addition to going to Toulon, IL, Free Street and ProPublica Illinois will be visiting Urbana, Carbondale/Jackson County, Rock Island/Quad Cities, and Rockford during May. So if you live in or near any of those places, check it out.

They did a trial run at the end of March in Chicago and have posted some of their reflections already. One of the things they recognized immediately was a need to do a better job of making people aware that they were having these workshops.

In the course of playing various games, they discovered that the terms people use to define their community, including how they defined community, had some bearing on how they composed the narrative about themselves.

We played a game in which we were asked to line up according to how strongly we agreed with various statements, from “We are living in a war zone” to “I love ice cream.” You’d be surprised at how many interpretations there are of what a war zone is, and how many people have strong feelings about ice cream.

In small groups, we talked about a time we each felt misrepresented in a news story, and how that directly affected us and our communities. It led to revealing conversations about how we each defined “community.”

[…]

At the end of the night, we returned to the sticky notes to ask: What do we want the story of our community to be? This is an important question — for us and for this project — that journalists rarely ask. But they should. If journalists don’t know how a community views itself, journalists don’t know what that community has at stake when it is represented or misrepresented.

If we never bother to ask — in real, concrete ways — it can seem like we don’t care. Journalists know how to fact-check names and statistics. But how often do journalists fact-check the underlying narrative of a community?

Since there is an ongoing conversation in the arts about how people want to see themselves and their stories depicted in performances and other forms of creative expression, these reflections by ProPublica reporter Natalie Escobar should pretty much be shared by those identifying with the arts and culture community.

You Are Not Alone In Thinking It Can Be Good To Be Alone

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Last month the BBC had a story on their site about the creative benefits of being a loner.

One reason for this is that such people are likely to spend sustained time alone working on their craft. Plus, Feist says, many artists “are trying to make sense of their internal world and a lot of internal personal experiences that they’re trying to give expression to and meaning to through their art.” Solitude allows for the reflection and observation necessary for that creative process.

There is such a high value placed on extroverted behavior in society that introverts can retain a degree of confidence in the value of their approach to life. However, the BBC piece does take the time to distinguish between constructive and destructive introversion behavior. (my emphasis)

Social withdrawal usually is categorised into three types: shyness caused by fear or anxiety; avoidance, from a dislike of socialising; and unsociability, from a preference for solitude.

A paper by Bowker and her colleagues…found that creativity was linked specifically to unsociability. They also found that unsociability had no correlation with aggression (shyness and avoidance did).

…Unsociable people are likely to be “having just enough interaction,” Bowker says. “They have a preference for being alone, but they also don’t mind being with others.”

I partially emphasized that section to distinguish between unsociability and other types of social withdraw. This may be an important distinction given that the URL of the article says “there are benefits to being antisocial” leading me to think the current article title wasn’t the original one. Being unsocial may not necessarily be antisocial.

Another thing from the article to note is the observation that being alone removes distractions resulting in a mode of daydreaming that “helps with focus in the long term but strengthens your sense of both yourself and others. Paradoxically, therefore, periods of solitude actually help when it comes time to socialise once more.”

This suggests the distraction of mobile devices in an otherwise solitary situation may prevent this mode from engaging.

Where To Perform Based On Where They Have Performed

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One of the toughest tasks when it comes to programming for a performing arts venue is trying to bring new experiences to the community that audiences will attend in large enough numbers to make the effort worthwhile. Sometimes you think something will be a hit and it doesn’t do well. Other times you discover you the artist you thought would only have niche appeal appeals to a pretty significant sized niche.

The artificial intelligence work of a company called Topos may help take some of the guesswork out of this process in the future.

According to a piece they wrote, they plugged in data about musical artist touring from 2008 to present, looked at the characteristics of the communities where the artists sold well and then created a list of places the artists hadn’t performed, but should consider.

For example, these suggestions for Florida Georgia Line.

They are careful to note that this is a work in progress and their algorithm is pretty narrowly focused, but they are optimistic about the potential.

In this article, we’ve constructed a narrow, highly specific view of place, ignoring myriad factors that shape neighborhoods.

[…]

Yet even this narrow view reveals much about neighborhoods, from their form (the connected downtown neighborhoods surrounding large arenas) to their milieu (the hipster neighborhoods connected to Bushwick).

We believe this approach starts to demonstrate the potential of understanding location as a set of relationships rather than solely as a set of isolated points or regions to which metrics are ascribed. Many applications of Location Intelligence — from opening a new store to planning a trip, launching a political campaign to arranging a tour — are ultimately about relationships: Brand and customer, traveller and a foreign culture, politician and constituent, touring musician and fan. Understanding the manifold ways one place is similar to another provides rich context for expanding these relationships into new territories.

Once the calculations have been further refined and test for larger tours, it may be awhile before the use of tools like these become viable for use by many arts organizations.

While I think most of us would be reluctant to leave all our decisions to a calculation, this work provides the opportunity to understand our communities better.

What I would be most eager to see is if these tools could help bring about the diversity in programming we all say we aspire to. A list of suggested artists backed by some proven data provides the opportunity to transcend what we and our boards think we know will sell in our community.

Of course, using a list in this manner would likely need to be accompanied by a sincere commitment to communication and trust building with a broader range of the community. It would be far too easy to discredit the list of suggestions by changing the programming but promoting and communicating about it in the same old way.

Money May Make The World Go Round, But Education Drives Participation

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In a recent “Taking Note”, National Endowment for the Arts’  Director of Research & Analysis,  Sunil Iyengar mentioned that in the coming year the NEA will commission some monographs exploring the role of taste and preferences in arts participation.

He later points out a study conducted in Spain that touches on this very notion.  With the obvious disclaimer that the cultural norms of Spain differ from that of the U.S., I wanted to point out a couple interesting observations the Spanish researchers made.

They categorized study participants as either “absolute” or “recoverable” non-attendees. The absolute non-attendees were those who were “impermeable to cultural policy” and would not attend for any reason whatsoever. Recoverable non-attendees were those who had not attended recently but  shared characteristics with people who did. Among the “recoverable” are people who might have had children and will become increasingly open to participating as their kids got older.

The researchers categorized willingness to attend across cultural events, visits to historic/cultural sites or attend cinema.

In all three cases, education works independently of income, in positively affecting attendance. Even the effect of income on arts participation is shown to be “more significant” for people at the higher versus lower education levels.

[…]

The researchers conclude that as education rises, interest in arts attendance grows dramatically. For example, changing a respondent’s education level from “primary education”-only to “higher education” would cut his or her likelihood of being an “absolute non-attendee” by 50 percentage points—for all three arts activities.

Again acknowledging that Spain and the US are different situations, I was pretty astonished to see a 50% reduction absolute non-attendance closely associated with education level. In the conclusions, the researchers suggest cultural policy should be more closely integrated with education policy with an eye to the way technology changes expectations and mode of content delivery.

What I also found interesting was that income level doesn’t seem to have the same impact on attendance that education does for arts events and cultural site visits. Cinema is more price sensitive.

At the same time, the category of “recoverable non-attendee” (that is, a person who just feasibly might have attended an arts event) remains inflexible when income levels are raised, for both cultural-place visits and live performing arts attendance. The authors thus remark on the “clear polarization” among Spaniards when it comes to either high demand or absolute non-interest in these activities.

The way I read this was that people with high levels of education are more likely to attend regardless of income level. Whereas people of low education level don’t take on the characteristics shared by “recoverable” attendees as their income level rises. The first section I quoted above appears to say people with high levels of education become more likely to attend frequently as income goes up, but people with high levels of education and low income will have a tendency to attend at some point.

I scrutinized the original research report (which is in English) for a plain statement either supporting or refuting my reading of this, but I didn’t find a statement that clarified the matter for me.

What I was ultimately hoping to find was something that showed preference (or lack thereof) shaped by education was a greater barrier to participation than price. This would resonate with recent research results from a number of sources that suggest price isn’t as large a barrier as has been assumed.

A caveat to my caveats: While I continue to assert the differences between Spain and the U.S., the Spanish researchers themselves say their findings match that of U.S. researchers so don’t read my disclaimers as a diminishing the validity of the Spanish research on U.S. behavior.  I am just making it clear that I am not ignoring the distinction.

In the three activities, a very large group of absolute non-attendees is observed that it will be difficult to interest in cultural activities, especially in live performances and sites of cultural interest. This result is very general and similar to that obtained by Ateca Amestoy and Prieto Rodríguez (2013) for the United States.

Community Engagement: The Game (Brought To You By Helsinki)

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If you keep hearing how great Finland is, the results they are having might be due, in part, to the problem solving processes they are using.

The city of Helsinki developed a board game to facilitate conversations and decisions about public participation. There is much about their gamification approach that might be applicable and usable by non-profit organizations.

I was especially struck by the following passage in the article, (my emphasis).

Printed on each card is a participation tool the city of Helsinki has used in the past — hosting resident meetings at City Hall, opening city datasets for public use, or allowing public uses in city-owned spaces, for example. Working in pairs, the group identifies tools they have used and places those cards on the board. This is an important part of the game, Laitio said.

“It builds confidence in the teams that things they have been doing are already part of the engagement work,” he said. “The idea that you’re not starting from scratch is important when you’re pushing through change in an organization.”

This resonated with me because so often when a new endeavor is proposed, especially in terms of engagement, there seems to be an unspoken sense that existing processes have failed us and the new innovative solution needs to be generated whole cloth. The idea that you need to reject all that is in order to be successful can be a pretty intimidating prospect.

Even if you don’t think an entire revamp is required, just trying to determine a starting point of the conversation can feel insurmountable. If the game process helps get the conversation rolling, it can be valuable on that basis alone.

A fair portion of the article cites the head of Helsinki’s Division of Culture and Leisure, Tommi Laitio, who talks about how the game helps his staff cut through jargon and buzzwords like “Citizen Engagement.”  Since community engagement seems to be the hot topic in the US arts and culture sector these days, I had to wonder if we weren’t all facing similar challenges and making similar assumptions.

Other benefits of the gamification approach Helsinki has embraced I appreciated (my emphasis):

The game is structured to surface ideas even from shy or quiet participants, she said, which adds to the sense of shared ownership at the end.

“Participation cannot be dictated,” Miettinen said. “That’s why a tool like the Participation Game is so useful. It encourages players to find their own way to put participation in practice. The game presents participation as a collective responsibility of a team rather than just a singular action or something that needs to be done to ‘tick the box.’”

The Helsinki Participation Game is freely available for anyone in the world to use. However, as you might imagine, a process that demands participation and collective responsibility does require some investment:

“…but he cautioned that it can’t simply be “copy-and-pasted” into another organization. “You need to run a design process in your own organization to adapt the game to meet your needs,” he said.

All That Great Research Ain’t Any Good If You Are Reading It Wrong

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If you are like me, you have been excited by the increased quantity and quality of research being made available about arts and culture issues and practices!

Even if you aren’t as excited as I am, you may be finding some research reports to be helpful and interesting to your daily operations.  The format and presentation of information over the last five years or so has really made dense concepts easier to understand.

I encourage you all to head over to a post published today on Arts Hacker where I talk about the potential to misread and misinterpret research findings.

Earlier this month Colleen Dilenschneider wrote about some really egregious misreadings of research findings by cultural executives.  While these anecdotes were entertaining, I thought maybe she was exaggerating the problem a little bit.

However, when I was reading Board Source’s Leading With Intent study in preparation for writing a blog post earlier this month, they had a section which specifically cautioned about misreading their graphics and emphasized the need to carefully read captions explaining what was being depicted.

The Arts Hacker post deals with all of this in greater detail and illustrations. Whether you think you are apt to following into the trap of misinterpreting data or not, it is worth the quick read to help be more mindful of this tendency.

With Great Research Comes Great Responsibility

 

If You Like Taking A Shower, You May Like Nudism

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As soon as I saw the first four lines of a post Seth Godin made last month, I knew what I wanted to write.

Then he wrote a lot of it for me.

Want to go visit a nudist colony?

I don’t know, what’s it like?

You know, a lot of people not wearing clothes.

Show me some pictures, then I’ll know.

Well, actually, you won’t.

You won’t know what it’s like merely by looking at a picture of a bunch of naked people.

The only way you’ll know what it’s like is if you get seen by a bunch of naked people. The only way to have the experience is to have the experience.

He goes on to say that we often try to put a new experience in a familiar box in order to insulate ourselves from the fear of a new experience.

My initial impulse was to write about how seeing video of performance or pictures of objects in a museum doesn’t provide the actual experience of encountering these things live. I was also thinking of writing about how in recent years even those people who do travel to see something live use an electronic device to mediate the experience for them.

But I also got to thinking that the reverse is also true.

We in arts and culture like to criticize participants and potential participants for avoiding an authentic experience and deciding they know about the experience after accepting some form of substitute.

The truth is, the arts and culture sector reinforces to this by talking about their work in the context of other work. While this does provide a frame of reference for entirely unfamiliar experiences, it does the experience and the creators a disservice to frame their work in terms of “just like artist Y,” “if you liked Z, you will love X.”

It is done to sell an experience and we all gotta eat right? People increasingly look for this type of information since their online buying experience so frequently features this form of recommendation. Replicating this process helps people make decisions about participating in an arts and culture event.

But then you can’t turn around and accuse people of being averse to trying something unfamiliar if you continually use the simplest common elements to frame complex and nuanced experiences.

There were stories in November about the works of Jin Yong being translated into English, each which proclaimed him the J.R.R Tolkien of China. Amateur translations of those works have been a guilty pleasure of mine. I can tell you the comparison is only true in the broadest terms.  (Like showers and nudism.)

Likewise, if you decide changing expectations and perceptions about what an artistic/creative/cultural experiences are will require rethinking the whole experience, simply scaling down current practices and placing them in novel settings isn’t ultimately going to be the answer.

In the article upon which I based my post yesterday about a health clinic in Minneapolis that started experimenting with pop-up arts offerings I saw some parallels with arts engagement practices.

Neighborhood clinics like the one depicted in the story are an attempt to bring health services offered at places like hospitals closer to the people who need to be served. That has helped up to a point (not to diminish the work of a clinic that has served a community for 45-50 years). The executive director identified barriers for people: disinterest in health classes/discussions, anxiety, distrust, etc.

Clinics like the one in the story have started to expand their definition of what health entails.

You’re doing the art sitting next to people and you start talking to each other,” Shella said. “It creates community and is therapeutic in the sense that the hospital becomes less sterile—it gives it a sense of beauty and helps people feel more at peace and connected to others.”

Shella said that such activities have emerged from health care providers’ desire to give patients a positive experience. This means seeing them as “whole people,” not just a specific problem or organ that needs fixing. “It’s the recognition that people also have psycho-social needs,” said Shella.

One of the tactics they started to employ is using the pop up arts events as a conduit for information, discussion and lowering of barriers with the focus less sharply on health and more on creating community.

In the same way, the recent trend in arts and culture has been to broaden the definition of what constitutes arts, culture and creative activity. As we have seen in the recent CultureTrack report, the general population has already changed their definition of these things to focus more on food trucks and less on museums.

In the long run, arts and cultural organizations are going to have to continue to re-imagine what it means to have a creative experience. I suspect that means a transition from doing things like scaled down pop-up performances in bars, shopping malls, airports, etc and manifesting in a way that builds community.

I am not saying there is anything particularly wrong with these type of experiences. Obviously, the intersection between health services and a scaled down creative experience has had significance in Minneapolis. I just don’t think that the concept of taking activities to where the people are should represent an end point. There is a next step and new manifestation(s) that haven’t been realized yet.

Hey You Damn Kids, Come On To My Yard!

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About three years ago, I heard about the PorchRokr Festival in Akron’s Highland Square neighborhood.  I had since learned that there was a whole series of Porchfests that have sprung up since the 2007 inaugural effort in Ithaca, NY.

Just before Thanksgiving CityLab had an article that mentioned the revived interest in porches as an architectural feature, citing the Porchfests in the process.

To younger urbanites, he says, porches look like stages. In the Instagram age, the front steps have become places to see and be seen, throw a rocking concert or party, and to foster metropolitan community in a walk-by, stop-in-for-wine sense. “Not by design but by accident—by having strangers descend on their yard, having a musician play, sharing a beer, and meeting some new folks—I gave all these people a tool to look at what porches mean in a new way,” Doyon says.

In 2016 as part of the lead up to the PorchRockr festival, the organizers were holding sessions to teach people how to replicate the festival in other communities. They also held 4 workshops on consecutive weeks to teach participating music groups how to get organized for the festival, deal with stage fright and engage in banter with the audience.

At one time porches and front stoops were central to communal life for families and neighborhoods and show hints of reclaiming that role again.  According to CityLab, one woman in the Buffalo, NY/Toronto, ON area sponsors a whole series of events.

In the warmer months, on her own front steps, she also hosts a “Stories From the Porch” series of speakers on art, history, and culture. Her events have attracted participants as young as 11, who—like her twentysomething kids—love hanging out on the porches. Glica takes pleasure in redefining her community’s relationship to an American architectural feature once dismissed as old-fashioned. “It’s subtle,” she says. “In 10 years we’re going to go, ‘When did that happen?’ But it’s definitely happening.”

While these types of activities can certainly manifest as outgrowths of an organization’s current activities, as someone who believes every bit of creative activity helps to cultivate the cultural ecology of communities, I offer these ideas up to readers as things they could do as individuals as well.

Has Cost Suddenly Become Less A Barrier To Participation?

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Back in October I wrote a couple posts about the newest iteration of the Culture Track report.  The operative word there is iteration. The study is conducted every three years in an attempt to track the shifting trends in perception and participation in cultural activities by the general population.

In my excitement to talk about the findings, I didn’t really take the time to examine the “shift” element that is intended to make this data so valuable. While preparing to do a presentation on the current findings, it occurred to me to take a look at the past finding as a point of comparison so I downloaded the 2014 data.

Even in a superficial scan of the 2014 materials, this next graph jumped out at me.

The legibility is a little tough at full size so I cropped it down to the top 10 responses about barriers to participation. The blue bar is the 2011 responses and the mauve is the 2014 responses.  A mauve only bar indicates they only started asking the question in 2014.

Now look at a representative sample of the top responses for the 2017 survey. One caveat – as best I can tell, the 2011 and 2014 didn’t break out these results by discipline as they did in 2017. Nor did they break it out by barriers for attendees and barriers for non-attendees. That may skew the results in some manner.

In the 2017 responses, regardless of discipline, among those that participate. The number one barrier was “inconvenience.” For the majority, number two and three were “didn’t think of it” and “rather spend time in other ways,” respectively

Among those that didn’t participate, every number one barrier, again regardless of discipline, was “Its not for someone like me.” For the majority, number two and three were “inconvenient” and “didn’t think of it.”

For nearly every discipline, with both participants and non-participants, “It’s Value Is Not Worth the Cost” is number five. (Except for zoo participants where it is fourth and dance participants where it is sixth.)

This significant change in placement really left me wondering what happened in the last three years.

Is cost no longer as big as factor? Does separating out the responses by discipline and participation level provide a truer picture of what presents a barrier to people? Did the researchers ask the questions in a different way that lead to different responses?

This last issue might have been an influence. In 2011 and 2014 they asked if the economy had impacted respondents’ cultural participation and how that manifested. These questions, which seem to have been absent from the 2017 survey, may have primed people to think about costs and their ability to pay.

There was also a question on 2011 and 2014 asking how cultural organizations could make it easier to participate. Lower cost of admission was number one. This question also doesn’t seem to have been included in 2017.

The lack of questions in 2017 suggesting economic factors were a problem and part of a solution may have diminished frequency with which people agreed or strongly agreed that cost was a factor as a barrier. From the information I have been able to find about how each survey was created and conducted, I can’t say if any of these things could have been an influence.

Cost isn’t the only category that make a significant shift. Look at where “I’d rather spend my leisure time in other ways” falls. In 2017 it is usually third or fourth but it was ninth in 2014. I can’t think anything so compelling that has emerged in the last 3 years that has caused people to shift it up in their priorities.

I would like to think that we can attribute these differences to the fact that the researchers are getting a lot better about the way they ask these questions and parse the data.

Forging Your Our Purpose(s)

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There was a piece in Harvard Business Review that made me realize we need to place “finding one’s purpose in life” in the same category as concepts about finding true love and instant success being experienced by special geniuses. It makes for great movie plots, but the reality is that all these things are nearly always the result of unacknowledged hard work and dedication.

The title of John Coleman’s piece, “You Don’t Find Your Purpose — You Build It” sums it up as all good titles do.

It isn’t just movies, but inspirational books/speakers and societal expectations like declaring your college major at 18 years old which reinforce this idea that we need to have a purpose to drive us through life.

In the article, Coleman expounds on the following misconceptions we have about life’s purpose.

Misconception #1: Purpose is only a thing you find.
Misconception #2: Purpose is a single thing.
Misconception #3: Purpose is stable over time.

The article is short so I will let you read the details on each if you would like to know more.

One brief passage relates back to what I have been writing about recently in regard to the idea that creativity is a personal choice and shaped by society:

In achieving professional purpose, most of us have to focus as much on making our work meaningful as in taking meaning from it. Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find. Almost any work can possess remarkable purpose.

Just as the individual decides whether something is a creative exercise and societal pressure often shapes that, so too can an individual determine whether what they are doing has purpose and societal pressure likewise can shape that.

I probably don’t have to point out that while these are similar dynamics, they aren’t necessarily closely related. There are plenty of creative pursuits that individuals and society don’t find to be worthwhile and plenty of things deemed to be worthy purposes that are not considered to be particularly creative.

Creativity Is Partially A Social Construct

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When I was writing my post last week about research suggesting that creativity is often a choice people make, I kept seeing citations referencing an article written by Howard Becker. So I followed up on those citations. It was actually Becker that pointed out many times creative practice involves executing repetitive tasks.

In his article, Becker suggests there is a lot of what we would objectively consider creativity being done out there. It isn’t rare or special at all.  However, societal rules often dictate who and what gets to be considered creative. It is not what is being done, but rather who is doing it.

This doesn’t contradict the idea that creativity is an individual’s choice because internal perception about what is worthwhile is often shaped by external factors, including societal perceptions. Whether you decide to self-censor or just do it, and the rationalization behind just doing it, can be very personal.

There have been other articles written about the fact that people say they value creativity but are afraid of the disruption it might introduce so what is acceptable creativity often falls in a pretty narrow range.

Or as Becker puts it, (my emphasis)

I think it likely that what we, from a different standpoint, might call creative often makes trouble by being “too” creative, too different, not easily assimilable by the organizational apparatus already in place to deal with the category its products belong to, and thus not entitled to such an honorific title as “creative.” Only a short distance separates “creative: from “pain in the ass.”

Becker says there is creativity all around us, but it is being performed by groups who aren’t “allowed” to be creative for various reasons.

Conventional judges, working in conventional organizations, may well classify whatever such workers do as ordinary, certainly not creative or original, because that entire category of work or, alternatively, any kind of work done by members of those social categories, conventionally falls into the category of “uninteresting” and therefore essentially incapable of generating creativity. If the problems those people deal with in their work aren’t “important,” no solution they create can deserve the label of “creative.”

I wondered if an element of this is what reinforced the idea of the starving artist–the sense that the suffering outsider has license to be creative in a manner and magnitude that a person without that backstory isn’t. Accidentally mix up the bios and maybe the starving artist has to starve a little longer while the person standing to their left gets discovered.

Becker cites the example of a mother who has to balance the dietary preferences of a family of fussy eaters against a food budget, what is stocked in the stores and how much time is available for preparation. In other environments, a person navigating such challenges with aplomb might be lauded. Mom’s efforts often pass without comment.

No one gives “genius awards” to these inventors. Not even James Beard Awards for creative cookery. Their creativity goes unremarked and does not provide the subject matter for studies in the field (although culinary critics of course will treat similar experiments by well-known chefs with awe and reverence). Conventional thinking does not imagine that women who are not specially trained and educated can be creative, and some people still think that women are simply, perhaps genetically, incapable of the kind of unusual thinking that merits the word “creative.”

I think there is still more to consider about creativity than what I have written about in the last few days. In an email last week to Carter Gillies, I noted that people often talk about creative practice providing a sense of transcendence and connection with something greater. Theater, dance, song and visual arts all originated with religious and spiritual practice. It isn’t unreasonable to think that people continue to identify with some element of this.

In part, whether you feel a sense of that greater connection may define whether you view an activity is drudgery or having creative associations.

Considering The Essence Of Being Mainstream Or Culturally Specific

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Earlier this month Ian David Moss wrote a piece challenging the arts and culture community to evaluate the language and mindset in which we frame artistic and cultural expression and practice.

He make a case that:

Separating our concepts of “mainstream” and “white” could allow us to treat European art forms as just one of many types of cultural expression within a mix of organizations and communities, instead of privileging them as the historical default.

Starting this post off with that may raise a sense of defensiveness in readers and a reluctance to continue reading which is probably why Moss doesn’t bring it up until the last quarter of his post. Nonetheless it is an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant.

Moss says there is something to consider in response by Justin Laing, a former senior program officer at Heinz Endowments, to a post last year about cultural equity,

Moss provides further context noting:

…The logic on researchers’ part is that “culturally-specific” organizations explicitly target a specific demographic population, whereas “mainstream” organizations target everyone.

[..]

But many cultural equity advocates see orchestral music as unabashedly and irredeemably white: it originated in Europe, the vast majority of composers presented (even by Latin American and Asian orchestras) are European or European-descended, and most of the people who enjoy it are of European origin. To them, when we talk about culturally-specific organizations, that includes symphony orchestras–and ballets, and operas, and encyclopedic art museums. And it’s not at all obvious to them why certain culturally-specific organizations should continue to receive such a disproportionate share of public and philanthropic support compared to other culturally-specific organizations.

Moss acknowledges there are arguments to be made for the universal appeal of these forms, citing Venezuela’s pride in El Sistema and the fact that many arts organizations have been successful at attracting attendance from Black and Latin communities.

This week Artsjournal linked to a Dance Magazine piece talking about how Philadelphia was a hub for black ballerinas from the 1930s-1950s. (Article has video interviews with some of the women that trained as dancers during the period.) There is a sense of hope that there is a trend in this general direction again.

He points out that while there is crossover appeal, it is also clear that opera, ballet, symphony, et. al are by no means the most popular art forms in the U.S. and are perhaps more appropriately labeled as culturally specific rather than mainstream if they are indeed not serving everyone.

This is where the concept of divorcing “white” from “mainstream” comes in. (Moss’ emphasis)

Were the field to adopt this new understanding, an unavoidable question would face every organization celebrating European cultural heritage in the midst of a substantial nonwhite population: is our foremost loyalty to our art form or our local community? In answering, boards and executives would need to realize that true commitment to the latter could mean dramatic changes, changes that would make their organizations unrecognizable to the individuals who founded them. Yet reaffirming a primary commitment to an art form with clear ethnic roots–which, I want to emphasize here, is an equally valid choice under this paradigm–would be a signal to the world that the organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts can only reach so far. And yes, that may make it untenable to go after large sums of money from foundations and government agencies on the premise of being a local “anchor institution.”

So much of this paragraph reminded me of a post I wrote last year citing a similar piece on the topic written by Ronia Holmes where she writes,

All that being said—I don’t think arts organizations are bad entities filled with bad people doing bad things…They really do believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and really do want to offer meaningful, authentic moments of connection.

The problem is that most organizations are not built to do that, and are constantly struggling with it because of expectations that they should be something they are not. Every year, organizations jump through hoops to secure restricted grants that necessitate yet another outreach program or diversity week or community partnership, hoping that if they impress the funders enough they will be given money that can be used for what the organization actually has a mission to do.

If real, authentic, genuine community building isn’t central to your mission, if it isn’t your raison d’être, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Because chances are that not only are you doing it badly, you’re doing it at the expense of your real mission. The mission of most arts organizations—the real mission—is simple: to present an art form. And that’s ok. We need organizations that prioritize preservation, development, and presentation of an art form, and I for one don’t think any organization should be penalized for it.

Both Holmes and Moss are acknowledging the existence of the same dynamics. I can’t imagine they are the only ones thinking along these lines which suggests that perhaps there is both potential and need to have additional conversation and thought in this direction.

It may be uncomfortable to discuss and acknowledge much of what is involved and needs to change, but the general framework of this paradigm is a fair and generally constructive way forward.

(I would suggest, however, that being completely forthright and declaring your mission is to preserve and perpetuate European cultural heritage is not going to be constructive on oh so many ways.)

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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