Terms and Ideas

Via Non-Profit Marketing Blog, are a couple links to Frogloop, a blog whose goal is to “catalyzing expertise in nonprofit online communication.”

I haven’t gotten a chance to really look at the site, but Katya at Non-Profit Marketing blog linked to an interesting piece on using social networking sites like Facebook to fundraise. The short story is, it is too early in the process to tell if it will be effective. But the guys at Frogloop do a super job analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the practice. They also offer tips on how to position your organization to be most successful.

To top it all off they even provide a Return on Investment calculator to figure out if it is worth tasking an employee or volunteer to work on developing fundraising efforts on social networks.

I plugged in a few different numbers and as near as I can figure it, you pretty much already have to have a powerful fundraising machine at your disposal (think Sierra Club) to make social networking worth the investment. It seems the type of thing that will complement efforts by providing people with an alternative way to give and encourage others to do the same. It doesn’t appear that social network fundraising is going to provide leverage for small organization to raise big money unless the cause is already poised to take off.

I would be really interested to learn if someone (perhaps the good people at Frogloop) have created a similar calculator for direct mail, phone appeals and the other tools fund raisers use. I assume the tools are out there, I just haven’t seen them.

On the other hand, ignorance might be bliss. I might discover I would save money if I stopped asking for it. Though as Andrew Taylor pointed out back in May, some times fund raising events aren’t about making money.

For some reason the past two weeks have been chock full of site specific performances in my city. I don’t know if this is a trend or a coincidence. I thought I would make mention of them in the hope that others might find inspiration in them. Considering one event sold out an extended run very quickly, I would imagine it earned a mention on butts in the seas.

Said event, which I was unable to get tickets for, took over a house that was set to be torn down for a performance of “The Living Tarot.” The dance company repainted all the rooms to create an interpretation of different Tarot cards. When the audience arrived, small groups were given a tarot reading (with a very limited deck, of course) and were lead through the house in the order that their reading dictated. Company members were stationed in each room to perform the essence of that particular card.

The project was quite intriguing and I am sorry I was not quick enough with my credit card to secure tickets. This isn’t the type of thing one sees often considering the dance group not only found someone willing to let them take over the house before it was torn down but also convinced businesses nearby to let the audience park in their lots.

The second performance I saw this past Friday in the rotunda at city hall. Since Friday was a state holiday, the group was able to set up their performance during the day and leave it up for a show on Saturday evening. The rotunda was set up with stages reminiscent of the old traveling carnival attractions (i.e. painted canvas hawking the strong man). I’m told the original intent was to have people walk around from station to station as the performances rotated but somehow most of the action ended up at the center stage and the audience mostly sat. I am not quite sure what caused the plan to be changed.

The performances were a mixed bag in terms of quality and some of the segues between pieces didn’t quite work. On the whole, it was interesting. Even with the focus of the event being on the center stage, the setting and the social dynamics enabled them to use the space and interact with the audience to a degree that a proscenium stage would have allowed.

The final event I wanted to mention wasn’t site specific per se, but it was in an unorthodox location. On Saturday I attended a fundraiser for a dance company at the furniture store cum bar, restaurant and theatre I wrote about earlier this year. It was the first time I had been to the facility, (first time I have ever been valet parked at a furniture store, too), and I have to say the juxtaposition works despite what I feel was some healthy skepticism on my part.

As impressed as I was by the architecture, I also appreciated the design of the event. Admission was $20 General, $100 VIP with various rewards, $250 for even better perqs, including dinner. While $20 didn’t get you all the benefits, you could wander through various rooms including the restaurant and watch the entertainment in each location. The way the entertainment was programmed, most everyone would gravitate toward the bar and the theater. There was plenty of room for those who did wander into the restaurant section that they could stand apart from the diners without disturbing them but still enjoy the performances.

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I thought it was cleverly done to make those who paid $20 feel as if they got more for their money by allowing them access everywhere while also insuring that those who paid $250 were not in a situation where they felt their experience was diluted by throngs hovering at their elbows.

I have a feeling that great dynamic was just dumb luck but I am going to ask the artistic director running the fund raiser if it were planned. It seems like a winning atmosphere to cultivate, especially given that I was coaxed into parting with a little more money that evening.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently reported on some interesting research that has emerged about what motivates people’s giving.

Scholars have found that fund-raising appeals do best when they are crafted around a single gripping image, informing donors about big gifts that their peers have contributed helps expand giving, and holding an athletic marathon – or even a walk over smoldering coals – might do more to encourage donations than a picnic or gala ball.

A quick expansion on these findings and summary of the article- A single picture of an impoverished person was more effective in getting donations than the same picture with stats or a picture with two impoverished people. People who were told that another person gave a large gift just prior to them were more likely to give more, up to a point, than if they were not informed. People will pay more to do something strenuous for a cause than a pleasant activity. One person’s research actually found that people gave more after putting their hands in ice water.

So what are the implications for the arts? Well, first off I should issue the caveat one of the researchers gave, while physical discomfort may be effective for raising money to succor those who live uncomfortable lives, it may not motivate people “…to support an art museum or the Girl Scouts of the USA.” That is actually the next avenue of research in which some intend to pursue.

What the research does suggest is that donors like to have a personal connection with what ever they support. The article mentions penpal programs and an ability to socialize with the beneficiaries can be effective. I know some arts organizations engage in adopt an actor or dancer programs already so that is a possibility.

I remember reading a blog or article mentioning some negative aspects in to these programs though. I have a vague recollection that it had something to do with the performers feeling like commodities. You also run the risk of having some performers, (or pieces of art if a gallery tries this), being more prestigious than others. I know of an acting conservatory that encouraged donors to “adopt” their students and the elephant in the room was often that some sponsored students were in better roles than others or appeared on the more prestigious stage.

One thing in the realm of personal connections I found interesting was the idea that non-profits often underestimated how committed people might be if they lacked a personal connection to a cause.

“Rebecca Ratner, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland at College Park, found that some charities expressed doubt that potential volunteers without a personal tie to the cause could be serious and committed.

“Don’t underestimate how much people care about your organization, even if they don’t have a personal connection to it,” she said.”

One of the things the researchers noted was that people like to spread their money out among a number of causes rather than invest it in fewer causes. They suggested giving people various ways to support a single cause in your organization may be a way to tap into this inclination.

“A donor who supports a single charity by sponsoring a child, paying for school supplies, and supporting advocacy may feel more satisfied than a supporter who gives the same amount to a single program within the organization…”

What seemed to be a core concern for all donors is that an entity in need was realizing the fullest benefit possible from their giving. People would rather have a program inefficiently use their money than to have it devoted to overhead like administration and marketing.

After spotting a mention of the list in a New York Magazine book review of economist Tyler Cowen’s new book, I searched Cowen’s blog to see if he had included his tips for visiting an art museum there. (Presumably the list is in his book, too.)

The entry appeared about two years ago. The impetus for writing on the subject, a post on Two Blowhards blog, actually has some interesting commentary about different people’s styles for moving around a museum.

Cowen’s post is a little more pragmatic attempting to strip away any pretense in one’s relationship to the art itself.

“A key general principle is to stop self-deceiving and admit to yourself that you don’t just love “art for art’s sake.” You also like art for the role it plays in your life, for its signaling value, and for how it complements other things you value, such as relationships and your self-image. It then becomes possible for you to turn this fact to your advantage, rather than having it work against you. Keeping up the full pretense means that you must impose a high implicit tax on your museum-going. This leads you to restrict your number of visits and ultimately to resent the art and find it boring.”

As cynical as it may sound, it might be the most honest way of approaching art, be it visual or performing, that I have heard. I have yet to attempt embracing this view in practice.

He offers a couple suggestions about experiencing visual art that can make the encounter interesting for novices including trying to decide which work in each room you might take home and why and going with other people to see it through their eyes.

He also gives people permission not to like what they see noting that many museums display “large numbers of second-rate paintings by first-rate artists. Try to find them. Don’t think it is all great, it isn’t.”

A museum probably wouldn’t be well served by having docents pass these last bit of instructions on to tour groups. Some of the other exercises he and other suggest would probably make the experience even more engaging. Intimating that each work is more masterful than the last is probably confusing and ultimately alienating to people who are pretty sure it simply is not so.

I have been coming across a lot of interesting information lately. It’s just that very little of it is pertinent to arts management. At least, not in a way that my brain has been able to perceive connections.

As a believer in the need to expose ones mind to myriad ideas in order to stop thinking about work and day to day concerns all the time, I will step out of the usual theme of this blog and suggest some thought stimulating material.

In this case, I would like to point you to the TED website. They hold an annual conference where they invite thinkers and performers who have something interesting to share. Every week they post need video of sessions that were conducted during the conferences.

I have been checking a couple out each week for a month or so now and can attest to the quality of thought being presented. I hate to admit it, but I haven’t watched any of the performances yet because so many other topics are so compelling.

The videos are only about 20 minutes long so they fit a lunch break or short quiet moments you might be able to grab at home.

Among some of my favorites of the ones I have watched thus far-

Charles Leadbetter talking about creativity.

Sir Ken Robinson discussing the problems inherent to removing creativity from education (very funny guy)

Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell talking about marketing and answering unrealized needs.

Now granted, some of the above talks will cover areas of interest to people in the arts. But I was also intrigued by-

Barry Schwartz talking about being overwhelmed by choices. An interesting supplement to Gladwell’s praise of offering more choices and Godin’s discussion of how people are so bombarded with advertising, they tune out.

Steven Levitt talking about why crack dealers still live with their mothers.

Peter Donnelly discussing how, when even mathematicians are mistaken about statistics, the layperson can make enormous errors in believing them. (A caution to us, perhaps, about the validity of survey data.)

Hope you find something that fires your imagination and interest.

There was an article on Salon.com yesterday that tickled the edges of my intuition a little. It was one of those things that I wasn’t sure about the applications to the arts but seemed to bear watching and considering.

The article was about a woman who develops Alternate Reality Games where they propose “What if” scenarios and use the combined brain power of participants to play the situations to help predict what might happen. In a “World without Oil” scenario, not only did people talk about where they would acquire resources and how they would go about their lives, “document[ing] their imagined scenarios in blogs, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and podcasts,” some people actually took action and planted gardens and converted their vehicles to run on bio-diesel.

The concept was used to hype the release of a Microsoft game and political action groups have made appeals to members/readers to help sift through large government documents. Darker applications have occurred to some who have begun exploring how the structure could be used to manipulate the public or use large groups for surveillance activities.

On a less somber note, the article mention flash buying mobs that have formed where 100 people will show up at a store and commit to buying products if they are given deep discounts. I know a lot of arts organizations who would readily extend discounts if that many people would pop up at their door.

While the temptation to use this sort of thing to manipulate the public may be great, I was thinking of something along the lines of leveraging collective brain power to discover how altering practices may make attending performances and exhibits more enticing. How to do it effectively rather than as a hi-tech survey, I don’t know.

Partnering with a company so they will include your organization in one of these souped up scavenger hunts is probably also counterproductive. No matter how entrancing a performance or gallery show is, the participants’ attention will be on gathering information. God forbid they decide they have gotten what they need in the middle of a performance and then head for the doors.

It would be fascinating to see if some sort of performance work or even a theatre facility could be created in this manner. I am not talking about creation by committee, which tends to generate awful results, but rather tapping into the collective knowledge to do research on a time period or on architectural features that work. I imagine people sending video and pictures of weaponry and costumes to a creative team. Or perhaps they send images of hallways, door knobs and light switch placements that work well in buildings.

I have been hearing Americans for the Arts’ “The Less Arts Kids Get, The More It Shows” PSAs on the radio lately. Inspired, I went to the website trying to see if they had any banner ads that I could put on my organizational website when I announced my new season. I looked under all the tabs, including resources, get involved and join us. I noticed there were bumper stickers available so I sent them an email asking about web images and floating some ideas.

That was two weeks ago and I still haven’t heard from them. I intended to make a tongue in cheek post about how if I was a 20-something, I would probably simply appropriate the image from their website, photoshop it into something usable and use it in a video I posted on YouTube.

However, upon returning to the site, I noticed a link about becoming an official campaign partner. Since the list of their partners is mostly state and local arts councils, I didn’t think that applied to me. I only wanted to toss up something on my work site to show my support.

It turns out that is exactly what I was looking for. If it wasn’t for my curiosity, I may not have discovered that fact even after following the link since it isn’t until page 3 that you learn you can apply to get the logo for your website and newsletters for free.

Frankly, it seems like a lot of impediments for individual arts organizations to show their support. I can see from the structure of their campaign that they want to provide some exclusivity to the state and community arts partners who paid to participate in the effort. But I think it would all really be effective if members of the community saw the logo on webpages, brochure and program book so often that they automatically began intoning “The Less Kids Get, the More It Shows,” every time the word Art came up in conversation.

In spite of what I feel are missteps, I want to encourage everyone to think about filling out the application as a general level partner and placing the logo on your website as you begin adding the events of your next season.

If you run/host arts classes or have youth arts organizations who rent your facilities for recitals/performances, think about posting a big sign where parents dropping of their kids can see it thanking them for getting their children involved in the arts. Maybe list some of the benefits for their kids, success stories, and maybe how to get a window sticker.

And you know, if you are a passionate twenty-something (especially at heart!) who loves the arts and you are moved to create a video on YouTube…

We all know (or at least suspect) that when you survey a group and allow people to reply if they are moved to do so that you will generally get responses at either end of the spectrum and not many from the middle. People will really only go to the trouble of filling out a survey if they love or hate the survey subject.

Over on Salon.com’s Machinist blog, they dealt with the same issue with online rating systems like TripAdvisor, IMDb and Amazon.com. (Read the comments section on the entry for a lot of other insight into other weaknesses in these rating systems.)

“To see how an Amazon star-rating compares to society’s “true” opinion, Hu, Pavlou and Zhang conducted their own survey of one product, singer-songwriter Jason Mraz’s 2005 album, “Mr. A-Z.” In a survey of 66 college students, about two-thirds gave the album three or four stars. There were also a bunch of twos, some ones, and very few fives. On Amazon the picture is completely different. More than half of reviewers judge “Mr. A-Z” a five-star CD, while there are only a small number of threes, twos and ones.

Pavlou explains the lovefest by citing a specific kind of response bias, what he calls “purchasing bias.” In order to review something, you must have already purchased it. But people buy stuff they think they’re going to like — that’s why they buy stuff…Purchasing bias, Pavlou points out, is related to the price of a product; a higher price reduces the probability that someone who is unlikely to enjoy a product will buy it and review it anyway….If the Jason Mraz album was $200 rather than $11, then only die-hard fans would buy it and rate it, skewing its average review higher…The more expensive a product, Pavlou says, the more you should discount its high reviews.”

The article talks about a company called Summize which is translating all the star ratings into a thermometer bar like this one for the aforementioned Mraz album. Clicking on the various colors representing the good, bad and ugly number of ratings gives you direct access to the reviews with those ratings. Seeing all the reviews of each star category together rather than interspersed with ratings of other stars aids a little more in decision making. It can also reveal if marketing departments have tried to seed in good reviews at intervals when comments with similar syntax and spelling errors pop up side by side.

As the entry also points out, considering the source is still paramount when dealing with critiques. A reviewing site called Yelp allows you to cross reference reviewers with other reviewers of similar minds to evaluate if you share their taste and thus, have a higher degree of confidence in their opinions.

Refining software to compare our taste to those of others for us is what Web 3.0 is projected to be all about. (Web 2.0 is user generated content like blogging, Wikipedia, YouTube.) It is speculated that the next generation of web applications will search the internet for what we want and like a TIVO, will gradually learn what our preferences are in order to make suggestions. Presumably, we will be able to trade these specs with loved ones to aid them in Christmas shopping for us.

I imagine that as with Tivo, advertisers will be scrambling to figure out how to position their products in ways that the next generation of search agents will suggest them to consumers. (I am guessing they will pay software developers to have the agents favor them.)

The potential good news for arts organizations is that even if they don’t try to be manipulative in the type of Metawords they use in their web design, the artificial intelligences of the search agents may inform their masters that they have a high degree of confidence that they will enjoy a performance based on the years of criteria the agent has indexed even though they have never gone to see a show before.

I am sure that large corporations will see to it that software is developed enabling the agent to inform the arts organization website that this is the first time its master has purchased tickets to a show allowing the arts organization to offer great seats at reduced prices and perhaps flag the purchaser to receive free background information about the show and special attention by the front of house staff.

If the companies that develop these agents are smart, they won’t allow the users to be so specific in their criteria that they close themselves off from seemingly out of left field recommendations synthesized by the agent based on a profile it has compiled.

In the beginning of March the Rand Corporation released a report on the need for greater collaboration and centralization of arts related activities in large cities. The report examines 11 municipalities in an attempt to provide advice to Philadelphia.

I am not going to do a full review of the report titled, “Arts and Culture in the Metropolis: Strategies for Sustainability.” For those who may believe the document may have something of interest for them, but fear they may not have the time to read the whole thing, I quote the introduction.

“Readers interested in the roots of the current problems facing metropolitan arts sectors should focus on Chapter Two. Those who are particularly interested in the methods we developed with regard to applicability to other regions should look at Chapters Three and Four. Those interested solely in Philadelphia should turn to Chapter Five.”

One of the interesting things their study found was what impact audiences identifying with a region vs. a neighborhood has in support of the arts.

“…despite the difficulty of traveling from the suburbs to the city, suburban Bostonians identified with the city and were frequent attendees at city arts events, whereas residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area…identify not with the area as a whole but rather with the specific communities in which they live. One by-product of this phenomenon is that many…are building their own arts centers even though they duplicate similar centers in surrounding communities.”

(pdf pgs 49-50, doc. pg 27-28)

They go on to talk about how this causes a lot of competition for resources in the region. It occurs to me that the question cities should ask before constructing new arts centers, if they aren’t already, is what dynamic their greater metropolitan area has. You don’t want to build a huge performing arts center counting on attendance from suburbanites who aren’t inclined to show up.

I am also wondering what the best plan of action is for the future. As people’s entertainment orientation turns toward their home entertainment systems, logic might dictate an arts center close to home to make attendance an easy decision. Yet clearly you want to avoid having many arts centers competing for funding and audiences near each other.

Is the solution to have the central arts council and largest city government of a region engage in a long term campaign to encourage closer identification with the city in the hopes of preserving the financial health of the region? I am not talking about squashing competition and variety here. Having too many arts centers in competition for the marquee performers needed to attract ticket buyers and donors necessary to support operations threatens to drive up costs.

For those organizations and governments looking to set up or revamp an Arts Council of some type, Chapter 4, (pg 55ff of pdf, p33ff of doc) contains a survey of all the permutations these entities take. It is amazing to see all the different ways they have been organized as part and apart from local government and how they are funded. The myriad combinations of functions they serve including fundraising, re-granting, advice, information coordination, advocacy, promotion, alliances and even arts presenting/producing themselves.

As a supplement to my entry today, I offer the following handful of links on affordable housing for artists.

Artspace- Developer of Artist Housing across the country. Many of their spaces are in Minnesota where they are based, but are also found in places like Minot, Reno, Buffalo and Mt. Rainier, MD.
(Hat tip to NY Foundation for the Arts)

Chicago Artist Resource has a page on how to find space in an area zoned favorably for artists. Also has a pretty complete looking How To.. resource to help people with the legalities and logistics.

New York City and Boston have space specs if an artist needs to live in the same place he/she works.

Paducah, KY has a very attractive incentive program with low rate loans, opportunity for free lots and even partial payment of architectural fees.
(hat tip to The Law Portal for the Chicago, NY, Boston and Paducah links)

Waterloo, IA has a work and living space in a downtown area designated as an Arts and Culture District.

Riverdam Millyard in Biddeford, ME isn’t necessarily a special zoned area but the effort of some developers to bring SoHo to Maine. I note their site because their list of tenants gives you a sense of what type of mix might emerge in such a space. Not too clear if you can live there though. Suspect you can’t.

I have no idea how I came across it, but I found The Law Portal-Law Primers for the Arts today. As the name implies, the site has links to other sources of information on various laws that apply to the arts. There is also a link to information about how to conduct legal research online.

Some of the topics covered you might expect-free speech, cyberspace law, non-profit law, copyright/fair use, setting up a business, contracts, taxes, visas, etc.

There are some issues covered with which I hadn’t anticipated when I visited the site like those surrounding the use of various materials in the creation of art. The site not only links to articles and laws dealing with this subject but a place to find the Material Safety Data Sheets and OSHA regulations surrounding their use.

Something else I hadn’t expected was an article on what to do if an artist starts performing in your gallery without permission.

The site is a good resource not only for law regarding many of these issues, but also policy discussions on the topics I have mentioned as well as things like network neutrality, privacy and media consolidation.

Last week, Andrew Taylor linked to the draft of Charles Leadbetter’s upcoming book, We-Think. It has taken a week or so, but I have read the entire thing and found much of it thought provoking.

The general theme of the book is that some of the biggest innovations of the recent past have been a result of the cooperative effort of enthusiastic amatuers. Among the examples he cites are familiar like Wikipedia, Craigslist and Linux. But he also reveals that mountain bikes were actually developed by enthusiasts who assembled prototypes from scavenged parts so they could ride off road. Many recent astronomical observations have been made the same way, placing cobbled together telescopes alongside multi-million dollar observatories as contributors to discoveries.

Since I have been on pondering the nature of leadership in the arts of late, one of the dozens of things that caught my eye was the following (my emphasis):

Most important for innovation, leaders will have to be open to challenge and question: they will have to be curious and inquisitive.They cannot afford to be intellectually closed.They will have to be accessible to the people they lead, visible and part of the conversation at work, rather than cut off in the executive suite. Leadership will not longer be the preserve of the people at the top of the organisation: it needs to be exercised in large and small way by many people at all levels. If innovation is going to come from all over the organisation, then so too will leadership.

One of the issues Leadbetter addresses in the book is that so many companies say they want people to come up with creative solutions, but the sentiment is mostly lip service. To be sure, the whole problem of companies not supporting their assertion that they value out of the box thinking is a regular topic of business magazine articles. (And lets not even get into the whole fallacy of the “we’re like family here” claim.)

I have a suspicion though that there is a movement afoot that companies will find themselves unable to oppose. As more and more people find some self-actualization in contributing to these collaborative efforts, their desire to feel similar satisfaction at work could end up subverting the organizational culture of their companies. The subtle proliferation of Casual Fridays will be nothing next to this trend!

As people see that they have something of value to contribute to the team laboring on their out of work interest, they may feel that they have something to contribute at work as well. This may lead to some big conflicts as the employee expects things to be restructured to facilitate collaboration or perhaps their expertise doesn’t quite translate over to the function they serve at the company.

A smart company may look into giving employees the opportunity to fill the knowledge gaps needed to translate existing expertise or explore reorganizing things if there is some potential in the suggestion.

They may not have a choice. Employees already create informal networks to get things done in many companies. Get enough people together who have participated in highly effective self-organized groups in their private lives, and the company’s management may find themselves out of the loop.

I have been covering a lot of arts theory lately so I think it is time to share some practical tips. Here is one for your job search process. If you are trying to do a good job in your search, you will attempt to throughly research an organization before you apply so you can craft a cover letter that connects your experiences with their programs and goals.

You also want to know if the organization and environment is for you. What you especially want to know is what those catch all phrases like “competitive compensation” or “salary commiserate with experience and education” really mean.

Web sites are a great place to start, but for more intensive research, one of the places to consult if the organization is a non-profit is its annual 990 filing. If you go to Guidestar, create a free account and search for the organization, you can get access to these documents. There are other sources of information you can peruse as well if you become a paid subscriber to the service.

Organizations have to report the salaries of their highest paid directors and employees making in excess of $50,000/year. You can find out directly what the person in the job you are seeking made if they are listed there. This information either appears around page 5-6 in section V-A or Part I of Schedule A which tends to be page 9-10.

If the position is not listed there it is either because 1-the person doesn’t make more than $50,000 a year or 2) There are more than five people making more than that. (Companies are only required to list top 5 employees.)

In this case, you have to extrapolate what the salary for your position might be. If you are going for Marketing Director and the Executive Director isn’t even listed as making $50,000, chances are the best you can hope for is low 40s. You might also take a look at page 2 of the 990 where they list total amount paid in salaries. If their website shows 4 employees and the total they paid in salaries is $85,000, chances are the salary for your position won’t be very high.

Other than scoping out possible salary range, one can also check out the health of the organization. The form contains a balance sheet that shows how much the company began and ended the year with, what form their assets and liabilities are in and how much grant and donor support the place enjoys. Schedule A has a 4 year financial history of the organization so you can see what the general trend has been.

Often the filing will also include expenses listed by category so you can get a sense what your budget might be as marketing or technical director based on how much was spent for promotion or construction materials.

Finally, there is often a narrative about their recent activities which can give you additional insight into what the organization is all about.

The caveat is that these filings may not provide a complete or truthful picture of the situation. If large corporations can be evasive and creative with their accounting, so can performing arts organizations.

Also, you need to be aware of what the numbers you are looking at really represent. Seeing a listing of assets in the millions may look impressive if you aren’t looking to see how much of that is land, equipment, buildings, etc versus liquid assets like cash with which salaries and day to day operation costs are covered. The most gorgeous facility with state of the art equipment doesn’t do much good if an organization has poor cash flow management and can’t pay anyone to perform.

One of the exercises Peter Drucker suggests in the “Managing Oneself” article I cited yesterday is feedback analysis suggesting that:

“Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.”

If you are thinking of making this a practice, you might check out FutureMe.org. It is a website that allows you to send email messages to your future self anywhere between 3 days and 50 years. You could use the service to aid in feedback analysis, self-reflection or just entertain your future self.

There was a piece on NPR this weekend about the FutureMe website where the founder read off some of the public letters submitted to the site. (You can flag your letters as private or public when you submit them.) Some of them were funny and others, the the story of a man who uses the service to cope with his progressing Alzheimer’s, were quite touching.

By way for an Arts Presenters newsletter I was directed to a worthwhile resource for non-profits of all kinds put out by Mellon Financial Corp, Discover Total Resources: A Guide for Nonprofits. (Downloadable PDF, by the way.)

Though billed as “a descriptive checklist to be used as a guide, or self-audit, by boards, staff and volunteers to assess the degree to which they are tapping a full range of community resources: people, money, goods and services,” the document is much more than a mere checklist. It provides great ideas and some of the best fundamental guidance about how to run a non-profit I have seen in or out of textbooks.

It does indeed provide a self-discovery audit for your organization, but some of the real value as one might imagine comes in the Money chapter. No coincidence, I am sure, that it is the longest chapter. Though honestly, read them all.

I single out the Money chapter because it is the area of greatest concern for non-profits and it is dense with good guidance about topics like internal financial controls and being wary about earning income outside the purview of your non-profit status. Some of the grant and fundraising notes are familiar, but the summary of options is good.

One option I had never heard of before is a Program Related Investment.

“Stated simply, a PRI is an equity investment, loan or loan guarantee made by a foundation to serve a charitable purpose. It is sometimes called a social investment. Unlike grants, PRIs must be repaid, sometimes with the addition of a low interest rate.”

They seem to be used for social service programs which may be why I hadn’t come across them before. Doesn’t seem to be any reason I can see for them not to be use in the arts. Though their use may be more complicated than the summary can do justice to.

While reading I had a “duh, why didn’t I think of that” moment when it came to the idea of consortia and other cooperative efforts between organizations. One of the suggestions they make is that groups can leverage their pooled resources to obtain higher quality products and services than they could alone. Among the examples they give are purchasing supplies in bulk and perhaps sharing legal and accounting services.

I often talk about how block booking efforts are going to become a financial necessity in the near future for arts organizations, but I lacked the wit at the time to make the logical extension of that idea to other operational areas. Some of the examples the document gives about cooperative efforts might be worth reading to spark ideas and surmount blind spots like mine in ones thinking.

Well it took me 2 years to find the answer, but I did it! Two years ago I was looking for the economic law that technological advances will make it possible to produce goods more efficiently, but because the performing arts create works in much the same way they did 500 years ago, they don’t enjoy the benefits of this law.

An article on the New Music Box website on New Music Economics revealed what I had forgotten–it isBaumol’s cost-disease!

Matthew Guerrieri does a good job covering the topic in the New Music Box piece. Much better than my brief treatment two years ago which was more about bemoaning the failure of technology forcing my theatre to go old school with our ticketing and lighting. (Though my entry is arguably more entertaining.)

If you are thinking about not reading the article, give it a second consideration. As Guerrieri notes, the Baumol effect is “one of the main rationales behind government subsidization of the arts.” Opponents of government funding of the arts try to find exceptions to the rule. Becoming familiar with the arguments on both sides can be key to your arts advocacy efforts.

By some serendipity while I had my car radio scanning stations, I heard a story about a company offering the opportunity to hold massive conference calls.

A company called TeleTownHall uses voice over internet protocol connected to their technology to enable you to call up to 30,000 people in seconds. When people answer, they are asked to hold the line if they would like to participate in a townhall meeting. According to the website, 30,000 calls yields between 4-6,000 participants.

The service is marketed mostly to politicians and business executives, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could be used to solicit feedback or survey your community in order to discover how you can better serve them. You can also limit the calls to patrons and donors or similar membership groups.

You can keep control of the thousands of voices you have invited via a web interface.

A Web-based control screen enables the VIP to see the name and location of every person they are speaking with, and to invite each person to ask a question or to raise a concern. As dialogue begins, everyone can hear both the VIP and the selected speaker. In addition to this feature, the VIP can choose to pose questions to the entire group, and tally the answers that the audience gives via touchtone response on their telephone keypads

When it is all over, you receive a report of who participated, who answered the survey questions and what the results were.

They bill the service as being affordable but given that their primary clients have people donating $1500.00 at a time pop, that may be a relative term. There is no mention of what their rates may actually be. This may be an exercise arts organization can do periodically as grant funding for surveying allows.

Since I have been exploring leadership in the arts recently I was interested to see that Drew McManus over at Adaptistration was writing about three executive styles- managers, leaders and builders. Today he dealt with the first two. Initially, I didn’t feel the need to post about his entry other than a “Hey, check this out,” until I started pondering it.

The thing that struck me the most was that he didn’t characterize being a leader as the ideal and suggested that, in fact, such a person could be detrimental to organizational success.

Unfortunately, a Leader’s strengths often pull double duty by serving as their weakness. An over reliance on senior staff can put the administration in jeopardy if personnel turnover is too high. And since most Leaders tend to under-perform when directly managing certain aspects of the organization they end up spending inordinate amounts of time keeping the organization running. The result is an organization that suffers from continually falling short of their goals and an executive leader suffering from a severe case of burnout.

Usually I have seen managers and leaders compared as in this article where managers are listed as “Perpetuates group conflicts” and “Doesn’t insure imagination, creativity, or ethical behavior” vs. leaders who “Works to develop harmonious interpersonal relationships” and “Uses personal power to influence the thoughts and actions of others.” (Note: Yes, article was written in 1996, but it was updated a few months ago and an update article written in 2003 did not change this view.)

This site too, suggests that one should aim to be a leader rather than a manager.

What Drew was writing made sense to me. A lot more sense than the many articles I have read throughout my life urging one to eschew managing in favor of solely cultivating leadership traits. So I started looking around for what people were saying about leadership vs. management. Not only did I find the websites linked to above, but some sites that support Drew’s like Mulhauser Consulting, Ltd. which bases their view on empirical studies.

I also came across this entry on Management Craft blog which seemed to lay out the whole leadership vs. management debate practically. (Comments are very interested too) The writer, Lisa Haneberg makes an interesting observation that:

“There is a shortage of great management in many of today’s corporations. Perhaps the management vs. leadership mindset is one reason for this. Leadership is certainly the “sexier” of the two and I wonder if some have abandoned developing excellent management skills because they want to be a leader.”

(Note: Somehow I neglected the link to the Management Craft blog entry when I first wrote this entry.)

Came across this bit of information before but forgot to write about it.

Google has a word processing program which is reputed to be as good as MS Word in terms of its features. One benefit it has over Word though is that multiple people can work on the same document simultaneously from different places. No more having to create a read-only copy if someone else is working on a document you want to view.

This has great potential for a lot of different people. Students can work on different sections of papers together while sitting side by side or in the comfort of their own homes, perhaps chatting about each segment using an instant messaging program.

Likewise for arts organizations, different people can work on different sections of a grant proposal narrative at the same time while referencing stats and language the lead writer is using. The online storage reportedly saves as information is being typed rather than at programmed intervals. Google Docs also allows people to telecommute from home or lets a traveling supervisor check on progress, proof and edit from different time zones without worrying about whether software at their destination will be compatible.

A number of years ago I was reading an article that suggested one day our personal computers would regress back to essentially being work stations again with all our software and information processing being accessed from central host locations over the Internet. It looks like that is drawing closer to being true.

On the other hand, given that Google seems to save information on every search conducted via their service, you may want to consider just how sensitive the information you are typing into their word processors and spreadsheets might be. Since most of your financial information is available on Guidestar if you are a non-profit, having that information floating around probably isn’t too big a concern. You probably want to forgo using Google Docs to write a report to a lawyer detailing financial malfeasance though.

I spent my day in a meeting with my block booking consortium trying to solidify portions of my season for next year. (On my supposed day off! The things I do for art.) As we spoke, I was reminded of a conversation I overheard at the APAP convention last month. A man I assumed was giving an orientation lesson to new attendees was warning the new members against common missteps people make when negotiating contracts with artist agents.

Apparently the number of people and organizations entering the field who are poorly educated/informed about general practices, not to mention legal and ethical considerations inherent to the business is a big concern at the conferences.

With that in mind, I thought I would link back to my primer of presenting terms I did a couple years ago.

I also wanted to link to the Arts Presenters code of ethics but for some reason they are in a password protected area of the website. I can’t imagine why they would want the code of ethics to be secret. I see the code was in the process of being revised, but that was a year ago. They may have neglected to make it public on their website when they were done.

As a substitute, I offer the North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents code of ethics which the Arts Presenters New Colleague Handbook encourages people to consult. (The link to NAPAMAA in handbook is expired, use mine.)

I have linked to the guidelines before. I like the NAPAMAA ethical guidelines because they explain the problems caused by not adhering to them instead of just pronouncing things unethical. Out of concern that people may not follow the link, I am going to list a few of the more important points in the Manager-Presenter Relations section that the industry is concerned that people aren’t following.

2. Demonstrate leadership at every step of the booking and contracting process.

* Every step of the booking process activity should be a model for both sides of the bargaining table.
* Managers must be frank and forceful with presenters about the effects on artists’ careers of potential abuses, such as unreasonable holds, premature requests for contracts, and other restrictions, such as exaggerated exclusivity clauses….

4. “Holds” should only be requested and granted with the understanding that a decision will be made within an agreed time frame, generally less than thirty days.
* It is recognized, given the committee structure governing many presenting organizations and the complicated and delicate process involved in putting a season together, that the requesting and granting of “holds” may be a necessary step in the booking process. All parties involved must recognize and respect the good faith aspect of holds and not abuse the process.

5. Contracts should only be requested and supplied when all parties can confirm their intention to sign it.
* The contract should be completely, accurately and promptly executed, including any and all riders, except when specific retarding circumstances (government grants, etc.) are clearly defined.
* All parties, including the artist(s), should be fully aware of all conditions and be ready and willing to fulfill them.
* Subsequent impairments should be fully, frankly and promptly communicated to all concerned.
* Remember, verbal agreements are legally binding.

6. In the event of a cancellation, the manager and presenter should work together to maintain good will in service of future partnerships.
* The manager-presenter relationship is a partnership in the service of a larger cause-the bond between artists and audiences. The contract is a crucial link in that chain. If it is broken, far more is lost than what can be entered on a balance sheet. In the event a cancellation threatens, be it willful or not, the important thing is to save the bond. The process will be painful and difficult no matter what. The best preventive medicine is a thoughtfully designed and realistic contract. The only palliative is the frankness and good will of the parties.
* If, despite all efforts to prevent it, a cancellation does occur, all sides must use their best efforts either to find a suitable replacement artist or to reschedule the date….

8. Presenters must realize how much is at stake when they request a hold or a contract.
* Failure to honor a commitment can adversely affect the viability of an entire tour, with consequences not only for management and artists but also for other presenters. It is especially reprehensible when the desire to cancel stems from problematic ticket sales. Presenters will find managements and artists willing to assist in marketing and promotion efforts that can lead to increased sales. Such cancellations will involve reimbursements to management and artists.
* NAPAMA members are advised not to sign contracts that contain cancellation at will clauses.

Neill Archer Roan posted an interesting leadership case study/exercise yesterday. What I really admired about it were the questions.

I appreciated that they didn’t specifically ask who was at fault and how could the person(s) handle the situation more constructively. The questions don’t even ask how you would address the situation with the development director or the board. I am sure any group discussion of the case would probably result in blame being assigned, but I like the fact that the questions don’t necessarily imply that removing a person is part of the solution.

Too often we imagine the solution to be simpler than it is and decide “if only X were to happen, we would be all right.” The X factor is usually just a symptom or a quick fix for a symptom and doesn’t address an underlying cause.

The entry is worth taking a look at just to think about. Some of the questions Neill poses may not have any significance to any situation you are in. You may never ponder “What behavioral or cognitive patterns are in place?” for example, unless you are really interested in organizational behavior.

Even though he places the reader in the position of Executive Director, one need not take that point of view to consider any part of the scenario. In the best situation, you will come up with some questions he hasn’t posed. Moving beyond what Neill suggests shows that your brain is really churning away and exercising your problem solving muscles.

One of the early super sessions I participated in at the APAP conference earlier this month featured Rebecca Ryan speaking about how to attract young people to the arts. Ryan is the principal at Next Generation Consulting which did a pretty good study for the Arts Council of Indianapolis about just that topic. They ask about behavior rather than intent–what is the last arts event you attended rather than what type of event do you think you might like to attend.

She shared some of the conclusions of that study at the conference, the executive summary of which may be found on her website. Some of the more interesting findings about the under 40 set may be found on page 3 where she talks about why young people attend the arts, how much they are typically willing to pay and what the best media for reaching them can be.

The whole summary is only 7 pages long so read it! But in order to entice you into doing so, a few highlights-

“Young patrons attend arts and cultural events for reasons beyond the art itself. Specifically, young patrons want experiences that foster learning, connecting, and sensing.” (page 3)

(Their site has a blog entry giving an example of this during a visit to MoMA)

– The most popular reason 20-40 years olds attend arts andculture events is to learn something;

– Being social is the second most popular reason young patrons attend arts and culture events;

– Supporting an artist or arts organization ranked third among the reasons all arts patrons (regardless of age) attend arts and culture events. (page 4)

Pay attention to this one (my emphasis):

Our research shows many young people who, when asked for examples of their arts participation, mentioned for-profit galleries, house concerts, rock shows, and music clubs. These young people didn’t consider arts events to only be non-profit arts events, but rather had a much broader definition of ‘art.’ (page 4)

One of the ways she suggested was easy to tap into the younger generation’s desire to share an experience is to include a “Tell A Friend” link to each event page. Since we here at Butts In the Seats are all about inexpensive, practical solutions, (well, that and attractive arts management groupies, but we haven’t found any yet), I thought I would provide the HTML code for doing a tell a friend link.

The following method will launch a person’s email program (so it won’t work if they access email via web browsers), insert a subject line and put a short blurb about your show in the body of the email. You can do much more attractive jobs with java script set ups, this method doesn’t even allow for blank lines between information, but if you choose your information wisely, you can do an effective job.

Code:

<a href=”mailto:?subject=Your Subject Here&body=Description of a really great show with lions and tiger and bears, oh my! on Saturday, February 3, 8 pm. $23 adults/$19 students, seniors, military. More information at http://mytheatredomain.com”>Tell A Friend!</a>

Note: The ampersand before body has to be &”amp; without the quotes. I couldn’t make show up correctly without making it confusing.

Assuming you have a mail client that will launch, click on the following to see this in action:

Tell A Friend!

And I would be remiss if I didn’t provide an opportunity for you to tell your friends about Butts In The Seats-

Tell A Friend About the Butts In The Seats Blog

My intent yesterday was to report a bit further on some of the entries I caught a glance of while listing Philanthropy Blogs in Monday’s entry. For those who read such blogs regularly what I saw might seem mundane, but as a new reader I was excited and engaged by what I saw.

As I began to plumb a little deeper into the blogs I became convinced that the philanthropy industry blogs were the site of contentious debate. First was this entry on Gift Hub about the writer of Wealth Bondage calling philanthrophy bloggers Uncle Toms beholden to the wealthy.

I got so wrapped up in reading both sides of the story on the entry and learning about the Wealth Bondage blog that I found myself short on time to do an entry. White Courtesy Telephone notes that WB writer Happy Tutor styles himself as a modern day Diogenes challenging all who linger too close to the blog while on the information superhighway.

It wasn’t until I happened to go back and read the comments section on Gift Hub that I saw the author, Philip Cubeta, claim to be Happy Tutor. The satire tags on the entry seem to bear it out as far as that goes. Apparently he is a man at war against himself, casting aspersions at his alter egos. Or may be not.

I am still a little confused and unsure about the truth of the matter. It is intellectual elitism or intellectual rigor rarely seen in these days. Let’s just say I walked in a little late on a joke and caught the last line and punchline. I thought I would just shed a little light on the situation, as dim a bulb as I might be, in case others were exploring those blogs and were also taken in/confused.

Among the more interesting entries I came across during my explorations was this one on White Courtesy Telephone about Power and Powerlessness in Foundations. The entry was revelatory for me because it didn’t touch upon the relationship between grantors and grantees as I assumed it would, but rather on the internal power struggles of foundations.

Over time I came to believe that my colleagues and I acted out of a sense of powerlessness. Think about it. We start our foundation careers with a diminished sense of self-worth. Many of us … were lackluster community organizers or so-so [nonprofit executive directors]. We weren’t up for the challenge of real work 🙂 And for reasons that had little to do with actual talent, we found ourselves in foundation jobs that paid well and were very secure. We were fooling ourselves because as program officers, our jobs were never 100 percent secure. There were always a hundred other people out there ready to replace us.

There was also a great entry on Donor Power Blog- Marketing: No Longer A Department. Blog author Jeff Brooks points out that “It’s everyone’s job to tell the story [of the organization] in a motivating and exciting way.” Not only that, it is incumbent on the marketing department to let them rather than trying to wholly control the transmission of the message themselves.

Where Most Needed blog had two entries that really caught my eye. One on protecting against donors who renege on pledges. The other entry is on dealing with demanding donors.

The final blog entry I wanted to cite today is from Charity Governance where author Jack Siegel makes a case for why the Sarbanes-Oxley Act shouldn’t be applied to non-profits. His basic argument is that non-profits lack the monetary and personnel resources (as well as availability of external auditing firms) to comply. The entry is well written and cross-referenced with Security and Exchange Commission and Government Accounting Office publications. (Be warned, you can’t avoid finding out about the book he wrote.)

I have to attend one of the final rehearsals for a show going up this weekend, but I wanted to do a quick entry on something I learned today.

Shannon Daut, Director of Programs for WESTAF (Western Arts Federation) spoke to my booking consortium today about various benefits we will accrue by our state rejoining WESTAF. Our consortium was already receiving some financial support under a couple of their programs that didn’t require the state to be a member so we were familiar with a lot of what she said.

One of the things she did tell me that came as a sort of surprise was that for granting purposes an underserved community could be one that wasn’t served by the arts well at all as well as one that was underserved by a particular discipline. As an example of the latter, she mentioned that Denver where WESTAF is headquartered was underserved by dance.

What is necessary for the granting process is to make the case for why a community is underserved citing data be it historical trends or census data. One of the other criteria for the grants is that the arts organization be engaged with what the community wants. You can’t just seek financial support to bring Jethro Tull in because they never tour your part of the country unless there are a lot of people who want to see the band.

According to Shannon, if you have plans to present an group of an underserved discipline in proper proportion to the demand of your community, you have a fair chance of receiving support even if your community is renowned as a hot bed for other disciplines.

Just some FYI materials to provide a little guidance to those who are looking for ways to position their events.

The NEA just came out with a report on consumer spending on the arts in 2005. It seems when adjusted for inflation, spending on performing arts events was flat with 2004 spending. 2004 only saw 0.9% growth so it isn’t terribly surprising that it is flat. What is sort of depressing is that the economy grew in both 2004 and 2005 but arts spending didn’t. By 3.9% and 3.2%, respectively, according to the report.

As bad as that may seem, adjusted spending attending movies and sports events both dropped. Movies dropped for a third year by 4.7% and spectator sporting events by 1.6%, down from 1.6% growth in 2004.

So where is all the money going? As you might imagine, to at home entertainment equipment which saw 12.7% growth. But there was also comparable growth (11.7%) in non-durable toys and sports supplies.

It seems the biggest growth moves in different directions. People are staying at home and enjoying audio and video equipment and/or getting out and getting active. (Or at least they are buying a lot of expensive equipment with that intent before being seduced by their home entertainment centers!)

This makes it a little tough to decide how to position events. It is fairly easy to portray watching television at home as passive and inactive and show attendance at a show or gallery as exciting and engaging (if your current patrons find it so). The problem is, sports and outdoor activities are even more active than event attendance.

Perhaps portraying arts attendance as a continuation of an active lifestyle? Coming home from running/biking/climbing, etc., you are too amped up to sit passively watching two dimensional images. Only the passion exuding from live performers makes your nerve endings tingle and makes you feel alive!

I was a little nervous that there might be some competition for my status as the only (to my knowledge) theatre manager who actively blogs. I was over looking at Artsmanager.org, a service of the Kennedy Center which offers itself as a resource for arts managers.

What made me nervous was the “Lessons from the Field” section where Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser talks about the organizations he worked for or that his consultant business helped out. The case studies he presents are interesting reads.

Unfortunately, (because I would actually be happier if more managers blogged) it doesn’t appear like much on the website has been updated since March. It looks like they started out strongly enough in January adding some good content but then had their attention diverted to other things.

I have found more complete information and resource links elsewhere, but I will say I like their Q&A section where people can submit questions to be answered. The questions posed are unlike those answered pretty much anywhere else I have come across. For example-“What payroll taxes apply to board members who are paid for their services?” “Is it wise to write a letter to the editor in response to bad press?” and “What kind of listserv should I use?”

I think if they made the Q&A section the core purpose of the site it would be a great resource for arts organizations on its own. Not only would they be addressing questions whose answers aren’t easily found in one place, in the course of researching answers, they can identify more resources for that section of the site.

So, operating under the assumption that the Q&A section hasn’t been updated due to lack of questions, (and hoping that it isn’t lack of personnel), I encourage people to pose some questions. (bottom of page)

I have finally finished Joli Jensen’s Is Art Good For Us? The book isn’t really that long. The fact the library let me borrow it for 12 weeks sort of contributed to some procrastination though.

The short answer to the question posed by the title is, yes, art is good for us. However, it is not going to cure the ills of the world any more than studying karate, studying history and going to church is guaranteed to make us better citizens and people. Art is good for us in the same ways all these things, along with sunny days, picnics in the park and puppies licking our faces are good for us. They all have a hand in influencing us in positive directions, but none are guaranteed–alone or together–to make the world a better place.

Reading the book was somewhat like learning the stages of human cognitive and emotional development. As I read I felt as if I were reviewing the evolution of my own philosophy about why people should be attending the theatre. I could see that my own views were moving in the direction Jensen espouses.

One of the things I had never thought about was how much how we view art is tied to democracy. Jensen compares the views of Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, Lewis Mumford and John Dewey in this context. I won’t go into how art and democracy are connected in each one’s mind, but I will say that it was fascinating having never considered it and leave it at that.

There were four general philosophical view Jensen has identified artists as having between 1910s and 1940s. The first was Renewal-“new art is necessary for a social renaissance.” Second is radical view –art as a revolutionary weapon for social change influenced by the rise of Marxist thought. The third was the conservation view of the New Humanists-“art is a repository for higher values to be sustained, protected and judged by standards other than immediate personal or social effect.”

The fourth view Jensen identifies rolls the other three into itself. Respectively, the subversion view of the avant-garde movement saw art as “making things better by restoring the world, changing the world, or maintaining the truth of the world” by challenging the status quo.

While she identifies these views as arising at the beginning of the last century, we still see people cleave to them today. This seems especially true of the renewal view where art will provide a refuge from evil commercialism, make babies smarter and remove violence from our schools. Neill Archer Roan had a great blog entry on this subject back in March that I have been waiting until I did this entry to cite.

The book is fairly easy to read but if you only have time or desire to read parts of it, I would suggest the introduction where Jensen lays out her argument, Chapter 3 Art As An Antidote: The Mass Culture Debates and Chapter 4: Art As Elixir: Contemporary Arts Discourse. It is in Chapter 3 that she tackles the ideas that there is high art and low art, art that illuminates and art (commercial/movies/television) devoid of benefit and which validates the mundane.

I have always had a nagging feeling that positioning art as a cure for evils and enhancement of intelligence, etc did it a disservice. I had similar feelings about trying to define where the line between valuable and valueless art was. I could just never figure out how to logically argue my position. Or at least I didn’t feel confident enough to do so. Reading this chapter I have a better idea of how.

Part of my position I have already stated–art is like cereal. It provide nutrition for your body, mind and soul as part of a balanced breakfast that includes exercise, good schools, good healthcare, health relationships with family, friends and neighbors. When you go before a governmental body to ask for funds perhaps your position should be that you need funding as an integral part of the healthy mix rather than alone as a better, more powerful cure for what ails you. I blogged on this idea before. Check out the Ben Cameron quote. He says it best.

Another element of my position is no surprise. Adopting a view that art is uplifting and mass media is an opiate of the masses that deceives people into believing their shallow existence is infused with rich experiences is just plain bad public relations. Your disdain for people who place high value on mass media can’t help but be apparent in your interactions, atmosphere and advertising.

Of course, you can never completely eliminate a disdainful attitude from your dealings. You just need to minimize the negative vibe you give off. Everyone is incredulous about the absence of something in someone else’s life be it lack of: a cellphone, interest in Lost, addiction to Starbucks coffee, a MySpace account, et. al. A sense of exclusivity whets the appetite to belong. The maddening logic comes in that the environment must be inclusive enough to allow everyone to share in the exclusivity.

Yes I am poking a little fun at the current atmosphere. I guess it is my nervous anticipation that I will soon be labeled a freak for my conspicious lack of piercings and tattoos. It doesn’t make it any less true that people want to feel this way.

In Chapter 4 Joli Jensen points out some of the downsides to positioning art as a medicine for societal ills. One aspect plays into the medicine metaphor quite well in the form of the old adage that it has to taste bad to be good for you. The value of avant garde art has always been in its power to shock and challenge. Just as consumers are always looking for a more pleasant tasting cough formula, a good portion of the public doesn’t want to pay for art that is foul to their senses. Nor do they want to be told that they will be better for it. In a way, like Mother trying to force big spoon of cod liver oil into the mouth, it treats people like children.

There will always be an audience for avant garde art. Like the pain of tattoos and piercings, its benefit is best realized by those who come to it willingly. I was about to say that the audience for avant garde art will probably regrettably be small. As people come to appreciate tattoo art more there might just be renewed interest in avant garde works. Especially if someone can make a connection between being tattooed and an exhibit.

This blog entry, though not much longer than previous entries, has taken me a couple days to write. This is mostly because while I have suggested people read some select chapters, there is value in reading just about all of it. My copy of the book is bristling with Post-It notes marking paragraphs to discuss. I have been attempting to distill concepts and avoid summarizing chapter by chapter which would probably lead to multiple days of lengthy, boring entries devoted to the book. There are a lot of great things to think about so the task of informative compression hasn’t been easy.

In the interests of relative brevity, (relative to how much I just threatened to write), I will attempt to tell you why you should read this book. Or at least the intro and chapters 3, 4, and 5.

The purpose of Is Art Good For Us is essentially to tackle the logical fallacies, unsubstantiated claims and ill-serving reasoning employed in the pursuit of arts audiences and funding. In addition to the aspects I have already mentioned, Jensen tackles the whole idea of selling out and how commercial success demotes good art to trash. It is somewhat akin to the idea that it is the journey, not the destination that is important. Art is good as long as you are in constant pursuit of funding. Once you there is a surfeit, you have lost your soul. She quotes from a conference “The Arts and Public Purpose” that noted “audiences did not know or care if a play or opera was fiananced by nonprofit or commercial sources, although that distinction remains important to artists” (her emphasis).

In terms of changing the way the conversation about the arts is conducted, Jensen address the reprecussions and pretty much summarizes what is wrong with the current approach.

“If we gave up notions of art as social medicine, the logic of American cultural and social criticism would become unraveled. The arts must maintain their conceptual distinctiveness so that they can still be invoked as a fudge factor in criticism…”

“Invoking the arts as a fudge factor also allows us to avoid the hard work of directly defining what we value and what should be done…Current arts discourse allows us to be for all good things, and against all bad things by invoking the presumed good of the arts in opposition to the presumed bad of media, commerce and the marketplace.”

“Such a discourse has significant costs. It guarantees that our social criticism is vague, overblown, insulting and impotent. When we discuss our common life, what is wrong with it and what can be done to improve it, we need all the directness, specificity, clarity and compassion we can muster.”

The alternative path is encompassed by Dewey’s expressive view. It is an approach that includes many of the things I have already mentioned-viewing “arts as forms of social practice; as such the arts share the possibility of all human practice to solve problems and make the world better.” Jensen says “Dewey asks us to consider a work of art as something that ‘develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment.'”

If you are thinking that this view sounds a cop out that defines everything as art so that it doesn’t have to take responsibility for categorizing anything as art or not, I have to agree that I felt the same way. I can see the validity of the argument since I can envision how it can apply even to performing and visual art pieces that seem to invest the least effort necessary to make money. Personally the proliferation of lazily made art ultimately doesn’t bother me since it takes little effort on my part to turn my attention elsewhere.

Professionally is another matter. I am not quite sure yet how to shift my perspective and apply it effectively. When I am booking artists should I be selecting performances that I believe contain elements that the greatest number of people will deem “characteristically valuable?” I am pretty sure that it isn’t completely constructive if I program artists because I believe people ought to see them and despair that I am surrounded by ignorant louts when no one shows up.

If I invite a group that I am not sure will have wide appeal because I would like to offer people an opportunity to see something from the other side of the world, am I elitist because I readily acknowledge it might not be everyone’s cup of tea? If I figure there are enough people interested that I will be able to pay a band, provide my local population and the band an opportunity to interact and don’t damn those who didn’t buy tickets, it seems like a good thing. But would I have been a better guy if I engaged a different band with the potential of interacting with a larger audience?

When you choose one path you are inevitably discarding at least one other. I can’t say the expressive approach helps me judge if I am doing a good job any better than the other one did. Unfortunately, no matter what approach I take, my bosses’ judgements of the job I am doing does revolve around numbers.

Like most philosophies, Dewey’s sounds good on paper. Practical application is a little more tricky. In truth, I certainly need more time to digest and ponder all the implications of what he says. By most measures, he suggests a healthier approach simply based on the less antagonistic relationship with the public he espouses. It is a little dysfunctional to simultaneously despair that people aren’t attending arts events and disdain performances that enjoy the large audiences associated with commercial success.

If there is any criteria by which to measure success in Dewey’s view, it is the potency of the relationship that is developed. Art, Jensen says quoting Dewey, “needs to be acknowledged as a form of social relationship, not ‘treated as the pleasure of an idle moment or as a means of ostentatious display.'” It seems then the audience member has an equal responsibility to take the experience seriously and contribute to the cultivation of the relationship.

That about does it for the observations I have. As expected the book does a more thorough job explaining how Dewey’s position applies to the arts. Lacking the time to read it all, I suggest reading the intro, chapters 3-5 and the conclusion. 😉

Via CNN today was a story about how a cooperative effort between opera students at Southern Methodist University and Dallas Opera to bring opera and life lessons to elementary school kids.

The partnership goes into the schools with an opera called Red Carnations which deals with the dangers stranger pose as the story unfolds. The teachers are provided with study guides prior to the visit so they can prepare the students for the experience.

Obviously the point is to introduce opera to kids at a young age but I imagine there is also a hope that teachers will see the relevance of opera and the arts as teaching tools.

Though I suppose opera was the downfall of a teacher in Bennett, CO

By way of a weekly newsletter from NYFA, I learned about the start of a continuing study by the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia University that looks at the needs of aging artists. They had conducted earlier research on New York artists (along with those in other cities) in 1988 and 1997. According to the executive summary, there is an urgency to this study based on the impeding retirement of baby boomer artists.

While foundations and other funders have long directed their largesse to emerging and even mid-career artists, notably few have concerned themselves with the artist as s/he matures into old age- artistically, emotionally, financially and chronologically. Special attention to aging artists is important for material support and policy-making and is made more urgent in a time of scarce resources when the baby boomer generation is about to enter the ranks of the retired.

Among the problems faced by the Research Center is actually finding artists. “Past evidence shows that as people age, they often become more isolated from each other, making it difficult for organizations to serve them as a group as well as posing many individual problems.” The Research Center uses a methodology developed by sociologist Douglas Heckathorn previous employed to conduct a survey for the NEA that required them to seek aged jazz musicians.

I heard a series of interviews on NPR last year about the jazz survey which really underscored the plight of these jazz musicians now that they had retired. It was the recollection of these stories that made me notice the call for study participants on the NYFA newsletter.

If you read this blog and are an aging artist (62+) living in the five boroughs or know someone who is, contact the Research Center for Arts and Culture at 212.678.8184 or email rcac@columbia.edu. There is also a meeting on March 27, 2006 from 6-8 pm about the study.

My college is going through a SWOT analysis process at the moment and each division and department is supposed to fill out a 29 page form detailing where things stand.

SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. Wikipedia has a good primer article on it, including a few warnings about how not to use it. I also found a web page that performs some SWOT analyses on familiar corporations.

Essentially, the analysis serves as a tool to get organizations talking about the internal factors (Strengths and Weaknesses) and external factors (Opportunities and Threats) in relation to a project or venture. It doesn’t have to be applied to an entire organization, but perhaps to a sub-area like ticket office operations. Small groups within an organization can employ this process in order to make recommendations to management.

I just thought I would toss this information out there as an FYI. While it does have its weaknesses, the process is fairly easy to use and doesn’t require participation by everyone in the organization to be effective.

Thanks to a newsletter from NYFA I became aware of an innovative pension plan for artists.

The Artist Pension Trust provides pension services to artists “a group whose career trajectories and employment patterns make existing pension programs inaccessible.”

They do this by essentially having artists invest their talent instead of money. Each artist makes annual contributions of work over the course of 20 years. The pension funds come from the sale of the art work. The proceeds of the sales are distributed as follows:

“40% is directed to the pool and distributed pro rata among all the artists…and 40% is directed to the account of the artist whose work was sold. Each artist receives an equal share of the pooled funds generated by the sale of the works held in the Artist Pension Trust, thereby benefiting from the collective success of all of the artists in his/her Trust. Each artist is additionally rewarded according to his/her own individual market success, since 40% of the proceeds of the sale of his/her work can be invested in the artist’s individual account.”

The thing I like about this arrangement is that not only is each individual rewarded for his/her own success, but it also encourages all the contributing artists to promote their fellows. Instead of viewing each other entirely as competitors for art buyers’ money, there is a benefit to openly advocating another’s work.

The remaining 20% of the proceeds will go to the pension fund administration fees. This may seem like an excessive amount until note that the fund has to store the pieces and promises museum quality care and presentation.

I’ve touched lightly upon the problems with the training of theatre professionals a couple times in entries. I never really got into it in the depth that Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas did in a recent entry.

It is an interesting read just for the simple fact that how artists are trained should be a periennial topic of discussion. I agree with Walters that offering BAs and BFAs in the arts is a disservice to students because the programs have too narrow a focus at a point in a student’s career when they need to have a wide variety of experiences with which to inform their art later.

Walters quotes at some length Tony Kushner’s keynote address to the 1997 Association of Theatre in Higher Education conference (reprinted in Jan 1998 American Theatre) which borrowed Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” title.

Among the sentiments Kushner stated were

“we should abolish all undergraduate art majors…any college or university worth its salt tell its undergraduate students that henceforth they cannot major in theatre, the visual arts, writing, filmmaking, photography or musical composition….[and instead] must prepare to spend the next four years of their lives in the Purgatory of the Liberal Arts.”

There are a few bits of knowledge Kushner feels students should know with which I don’t quite agree. I don’t know that people come across alexandrines enough in their careers that they would remember what it was much less need to memorize the definition in the first place. And I don’t know that my hormone laden brain could have really absorbed the Poetics when I was in college. I came to a greater understanding when I looked back upon it later in life.

I do think that if you are going to get into the arts as a career you are probably better served by someone telling you to get familiar with history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, political science and literature and then come back and you’ll talk.

Even BA programs that theoretically don’t have the conservatory focus and are supposed to provide a well-rounded education tends to have an organizational culture, if not an overt policy, that the Art and all related activites are to receive first priority. Certainly the discipline to rehearse, be prepare for performances, sculpt, paint, photograph, etc are important habits for artists to cultivate. But if the degree calls for a well rounded education, the program focus should be equally distributed.

Just as a disclaimer, I will say I think this is more possible to realize for visual arts, dance and theatre. I don’t know as much about music but I get the sense that you pretty much have to be focussed on your instrument all day, every day or you are doomed. I am not saying this is the way it should be. It just seems to be the way it is. Even dance where a woman’s career is over by the time she is 30 seems to allow a little more leeway when it comes to exploring the forces that might influence the formation and expression of dance.

In fact, Walters quotes an article by a Juillard faculty member saying something quite similar.

The longer students stay in a conservatory the narrower their definition of life in the arts becomes. Julliard’s president, Joseph William Polisi, noticed, as he traveled around, that many graduates were not leading full, juicy lives. He began to feel responsible for too many graduates who were thinking that a life in the arts is only about technique and gigs. Faculty members weren’t be encouraged to send graduates out there to explore other art forms or ask big questions. We weren’t modeling the very life we wanted them to lead.”

“…Ninety percent will be piecing it together in some different way: working in other fields, originating work, collaborating with artists of other fields, starting theatre companies and launching business endeavors. We need to model the way for students and young artists to think and be joyful and make meaning of this hodgepodge that is a contemporary career. [emphasis mine.-Joe]We’re good at rehearsing Shakespeare scenes and improvising the hell out of awkward situations. But we’re not so sensitive to training inner skills that will make a sustainable creative life in the theatre.”

The obstacles to creating a program where a student is prepared to be an artist in all these ways isn’t just in the difficulties related to changing the teaching methods and prevailing culture of a training program. There is also the expectations of the students that need to be surmounted.

There seems to be a real focus on only learning what is necessary these days. In part it is a function of the internet society where you can learn all you want to know about something whenever the need may arise. Students are looking for the minimum training they will need to get a job. With the cost of college these days, it is hard to blame them. My theory about the disparity between male and female enrollment in college these days is not that fewer men are able to get into college, it is that the requisite training/experience for the careers the men want can be found in other places.

If you tell a student that if they want to be an actor, they need to spend four years pondering philosophy, history, literature and all the rest and then they can go on to get a masters in acting and then go get a job, the student is going to take their tuition money to your competitors, independent acting classes, or use it to move to NYC to try their luck.

My thanks to Philip Horn who was nice enough to send me the spreadsheets I referred to in my last entry.

As I mentioned in my earlier entry, the spreadsheets are a type of evaluation and planning tool that allows artists/agents/presenters look at where they are in their professional lives and where they want to be. I imagine the forms also would help the National Arts Leadership Institute decide what types of classes need to be offered, what regions they need to be offered in and perhaps, who they might tap to be future instructors.

Take a look at this Professional Development for Presenters sheet (Downloadable File in Adobe pdf format).They have the subject areas coded (artistic, business, leadership, etc) and allow the presenter to assess what their knowledge level is in each area and then presumably make plans for filling in those knowledge gaps.

They have a second spreadsheet which can help in making those plans. The Professional Development for Touring Artists (Also downloadable pdf) sheet is formatted slightly differently giving people a tool for planning when over the next few years they plan on acquiring new knowledge and skills, sharpening existing ones and taking action.

Certainly, these sheets are nothing you can’t find in any self-help book these days. However, as I mentioned, if NALI collects copies, they can be useful in planning courses and tapping into those individuals who claim they can teach the subject in their sleep. It is also of value to read the sheets if only to be aware of how much one didn’t know they didn’t know was probably worth knowing.

The Professional Development for Presenters sheet really struck a chord with me because there are a lot of similarities between it and evaluation instruments my college is developing in the course of its reaccreditation and assessment efforts. The big push these days is student learning outcomings which encompasses measuring and assessing beyond grading.

I don’t know how NALI intends to use these sheets, but in classrooms today a student would fill out the form before the start of the course showing where they felt their knowledge in the subject was, then at the end of the course they would get the sheet back and indicate where they felt their knowledge was. At this point, the teacher would also indicate on the sheet where they felt the student’s knowledge was. (In many cases, the teacher also marks the sheet at the beginning of the semester for later comparison. This wouldn’t be viable during a weekend conference though.)

This reveals all sorts of dimensions in a class. A person may get a C but feel satisfied with the class because they acquired the knowledge they sought. (Often my experience as an undergrad) Another may get an A but might be dissatisfied because they didn’t learn anything new having mastered the material earlier.

The process can also help a school, or in this case NALI, realize that what they are teaching and perhaps how they are teaching it isn’t effective if people are leaving with little more confidence in what they know than they arrived. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If people think they need to sign up for the “basics” course but turn out to be fairly familiar with the material, NALI can plan future offerings accordingly and rejoice at having a knowledgable constituency.

As Andrew Taylor says in his comments on the previous post it will be interesting to see how well NALI develops.

Well, as promised long ago, I have finally started to update my links section to list helpful arts related blogs and web resources. I have only gotten as far last March in my search for valuable links I have mentioned so there are more resource links, if not blog links, to come.

We have been cleaning out the technical director’s office these past two weeks because the clutter was threatening to consume students. We managed to free up about 400 cubic feet of space in the back of the office thus far. Since the piles of…valued possessions (*cough*) started migrating across the scene shop, the secretary started boxing books up to free up some maneuvering space.

It wasn’t until 2 days later I found out that the TD had told a student he would lend her his stage management book if he could find it at home. His book, of course, was not at home but in his office and I had been holding said book reminiscing about my stint as a stage manager years ago.

As I started searching through the boxes to find it, it occurred to me that it might be worth mentioning the book as a resource on the old blog here.

The book I was searching for was an old copy of Lawrence Stern’s Stage Management. It is the bible of stage management and was actually the first text on the subject.

Since it was first written, two other texts have come in to wide use, Thomas Kelly’s The Backstage Guide to Stage Management, and Daniel A. Ionazzi’s The Stage Management Handbook.

Now I haven’t read or used the Ionazzi or Kelly book, but about as many people swear by Kelly as they do for Stern. I know size doesn’t matter. But I have to ask–why the heck is the Stern book $60.00+ and the Kelly book with only 50 fewer pages is ~$20.00? I suspect it is because of the resources and forms in the Stern appendices, but still, geez.

All that aside, for those of you who don’t know, the stage manager is the linchpin of any performance. The director, designers, technicians, actors, etc create the product and the stage manager serves as quality control.

After rehearsals are through, the director and designers leave. The stage manager, having taken copious notes on everything that occurred during rehearsals, is in charge. The SM makes sure everything and everybody is where they are supposed to be, doing what they are supposed to be doing at the exact time it is supposed to happen night after night. If things get sloppy, they must take steps to tighten things up.

If the performance is happening in a union house, they make sure things are being run according to union rules. (Though there is often another member of the cast who monitors the sitation from a different perspective.)

Essentially stage management is one of the toughest, most thankless jobs in the performing arts. If anyone is going to be the target of pent up frustrations, it is often the stage manager. I have done the job so I know.

Some times the person can be a power seeking jerk and deserves the ire directed her way. Other times, the person seems so unperturbable it is a little weird. I fell somewhere in between.

I never did find that book tonight. I will have to go back tomorrow and root around some more. I want this woman to do well as stage manager because she has dreams of getting outta here and working on the Mainland. She has really set herself apart from other students with her willingness to commit to doing thing well. We will all be proud to have her claim she learned her craft here.

About a month ago I made brief mention in an entry of NYFA article that discusses how a hospital in Brooklyn is offering low cost health services to artists in NYC.

I actually made Laura Colby’s (agent mention in article) acquaintance a year ago and emailed her with praise for her efforts. She told me there are similar efforts being made all over the country and I should keep my eye open for them.

I forgot that suggestion until today when I came across a section on the Folk Alliance website listing all sorts of health resources for artists.

Along with a listing of insurance companies, the website has links to pages dealing with industry hazards like tinnitus, performance anxiety and hand care of musicians. One of the most amusingly titled links is The Accordian: A Back Breaker. The webpage includes a 7 part series of articles on the best way to enjoy playing and how to choose the instrument that is right for you.

Much to my surprise, there was also a link to a Performing Arts Medicine program at Ithaca College. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. There are sports medicine programs, why not performing arts medicine? I mean, except for the fact that athletic programs in schools and professional sports organizations have more money to toss around than their arts counterparts.

But wouldn’t you know it, a Google search on the subject turned up a number of such programs, including a Performing Arts Medicine Association.

Taking up Laura’s challenge, I also did a Google Search for non-union entities that offer help with artist health care.

Washington State, Rhode Island and Texas have a mixture of resources and advocacy efforts for artist coverage going on right now.

The Artists Foundation in Boston directs people to some insurance sources. They also make people aware of the hazardous materials they may be coming in contact with depending on the type of art they are pursuing.

Out in LA, the Center for Cultural Innovation offers medical and dental coverage for $19.95 a year. I saw some implication that it is an introductory rate. Still, pretty dang good unless it just covers bandaids and dental floss.

The Actor’s Fund provides healthcare and support for all entertainment industry professionals. (I actually didn’t know they were a separate entity from Actors’ Equity until today.) They even have their own nursing home.

Fractured Atlas seems to offer the largest listing of resources as it contains a database of health insurance providers for their members listed by state.

It is no surprise health coverage is a big issue for artists–heck it is a big issue for most people. Hopefully as time progresses, similar programs will emerge as more and more people realize this is an issue that needs attention.

Programs like the one in Brooklyn is actually win-win. In exchange for the low rates, some artists promise to perform in the various wards. For some people, there may not be any more potent an encounter with the arts than when they are feeling their most weak and vulnerable.

I usually spend my Saturday mornings watching cartoons. But, you know, they are into repeats now so the last few weekends, I have been flipping through the channels. On one of the local public access channels, I have come across a series of programs put together by Annenberg/CPB about teaching the arts to elementary school children.

The programs for Arts in Every Classroom are really fantastic. But let me first promote the above link to those readers who may not read to the end of the entry. You can watch all the 8 one hour programs over a high speed connection by video on demand for free.

So off with you if you have to go or want to watch the shows immediately. Everyone else, let me tell you why I liked watching the shows. (Keeping in mind, I haven’t watched them all.)

What I liked was that the programs alternate showing the teachers discussing and executing the activities in the workshop and then working with the students back in the classroom. And really, while it is fun to see how silly adults look doing some of these things, the rewarding part is realizing the kids really get it!

One of my favorite activities is watching the students make hats that express an idea, integrate that idea into movement while wearing the hat and then discuss how the construction of the hat dictated the way they moved (they moved carefully so that pieces didn’t fall off or perhaps wiggle too much indicating more joy than they intended, etc).

Leading up to the hat construction, the students were shown period costumes and were asked what sort of person would wear those clothes. The students responded with observations about everything from social class to the climate of the place in which the person lived.

This is what I thought was so fantastic about the program–it was crossing so many subject areas. In just one or two episodes, the classes were touching upon dance, visual arts, history, physics, acting, teamwork, etc.

Even though the observation about climate was based on the fact that the costume had layers upon layers dictated more by fashion than weather, the students did show some good critical thinking skills. Another example that pops to mind was that the students attributed a costume as belonging to either a poet or a prince. When asked why they felt the clothing would be worn by people of two distinctly separate classes, the students’ answer showed that they had a sense that a person would want to dress to the level of the company they hoped to keep. (The old adage of dressing for the job you want, not the one you have.)

The other thing I liked was the fact you couldn’t dismiss these activities as ones only a school with money and resources could afford to engage in. In many of the in-school segments, you can clearly see the classes are occuring on the floor of the cafeteria with the tables pushed up against the walls.

These are schools that don’t have the resources for an arts room of any size and have to squeeze classes in around lunch. I have taken programs into a number of these schools. In some, the transformation from classroom to lunchroom and back is pulled off with astounding coordination in the course of 3-5 minutes.

Anyway, it looks as if the program may have run its course on the cable access channel so I may have to watch the show on the ‘Net if I want to see more. I will let you know if I am impressed further.

Stumbling through the 1s and 0s of the internet as I often do, I came across an interesting arts resource– CANuniversity. A program of the Community Arts Network, the university exists “a resource for people involved or interested in community arts training. CANu looks at college and university programs and courses and at the university-community partnerships and faculty- and student-led projects that enhance that training and put it into practice.”

The “Why CANu” section of the web page kinda creates a scrappy atmosphere for the project

The field of community arts is growing rapidly, attracting practitioners, thinkers and participants around the world. And when the arts intersect with education, community development, healthcare, environmental concerns, religion, politics – in fact in any sensitive area of community activity – skills are required that have never been a part of a traditional arts education.

Training in these skills is not yet the field norm. Certainly many practitioners have no formal training whatsoever, relying primarily on peer advice and lessons learned “on the job.” Only now as the field matures are formal training opportunities becoming available, often taught by those pioneers whose wisdom comes from years of practice.

Universities are beginning to offer degree programs in community arts, usually as a minor or a concentration within an art degree. But even as this kind of education proliferates, it is still flying below the radar, tucked into arts departments like theater, dance, performance studies or public art, under rubrics like “applied theater” and “art for development.” But it’s also showing up in programs like public administration, business management, social work, social justice, education, community development, public dialogue, social sculpture, architecture, citizenship, public policy, even tourism. This diffusion is partly because its proponents have to use every trick in the book to squeeze this work into the severely protected fiefdoms of academia. But it’s also happening for a healthy reason: As artists collaborate with – and even become part of – other fields, the professionals in those fields are demanding adapted training programs too.

This actually sounds like a reflection of Daniel Pink’s new book coming out called a Whole New Mind which argues that right brained folks who currently don’t get paid very well will be the element that allows the US to maintain a competitive edge in the world market of tomorrow. He suggests that creative people will be in demand in those fields mentioned in the last CANu paragraph I quoted.

I haven’t really had a chance to read the essays and syllabi listed on the website at this point, but I will obviously report anything interesting I come across.

But given that my interests and yours certainly will differ–give it a look-see yourself!

I am not usually star struck or more impressed by celebrities I meet than I am of people I meet in the general course of my life, but for about 10-15 years now, I have sincerely admired one person– Danica McKellar. Most people know her as Winnie from The Wonder Years, though she has been in quite a number of shows and movies since then.

What earned my admiration was the fact that she did not define herself as a person by her celebrity and has earned laurels in other areas upon which she can rest her reputation. In addition to her on screen involvement, she has a BA in Math from UCLA and has a math proof named after her. For a long time now, she has devoted time on her website to helping kids with math problems and has been the spokesperson for Figure This!, a website that provides math challenges for families to work on together.

Given that I was so awful at math in school, her involvement helping other people in this field of study has been enough to make her my hero for a long time now.

I found a very interesting Studio 360 session with her as a guest that discusses the right brain/left brain connection between the Arts and Math. Her segment begins about 11 minutes into the show, but her comments intertwine with other interviews. The first is Eve Beglarian, a composer who explores the use of math in music. There is also a story on David Galenson, an economist who is using quantitative measures like regression analysis and statistics to figure out what artists are trying to say and at what time in artists lives do they produce the most creative works.

There are some interesting commentary by Danica and Eve about how their math lives/mindset and artistic lives/mindset were almost violently in conflict with each other socially and internally. In some cases, they say their right brain and left brain activities are often mutually exclusive. At the same time, they discuss the aesthetic beauty inherent to pure math and the fact that the solutions to right brain activities lay in left and vice versa.

The third story on Studio 360 addresses the right/left conflict pointing out that usually those skilled in math are usually portrayed in movies and television as abnormal- they are borderline insane or anti-social or idiot-savants. McKellar acknowledges that mathematicians can tend to become absorbed in their work and seem a little flighty at times, but in general, the characterization is more of a caricature than reality.

A pretty interesting series of stories all in all. The program is rather long to listen to in its entirety, but fortunately the individual interview segments are broken out as separate links so one can return to the webpage to listen to each section separately without having to scroll through to the appropriate time stamp.

As promised, I am going to tackle the idea of arts groups doing inservice days for teachers. I could have sworn I wrote on this topic before, but a search of the site using different terminology says no.

The idea is pretty simple really. Arts organizations should leverage their expertise and create inservice day programs for teachers. Every so many days a year, teachers usually have days where they have to go to work and the students don’t. Usually there are sessions about how they can sharpen their teaching skills.

One place I worked, in cooperation with the local school districts, helped bring artists and teachers together to teach them new skills and activities for their students. The teachers loved it because instead of trying to learn from handouts, they were engaged in practical activities squishing clay between their fingers and doing other fun stuff.

Usually high school visual art teachers have a degree or a number of classes in their field so they know what they are doing to some extent. High School drama teachers on the other hand tend to be English or History teachers who are drafted into running the drama club so they need a lot of help! (I think this practice diminished the value of the arts in schools because it perpetuates the idea that anyone can fake their way through the creation of art. Of course, the lackluster results just convince people there isn’t much worth to it.)

Anyway, these poor part time drama teachers can always use a quick basic class in lighting design theory, use of a light/sound board, costuming, acting exercises, cheap, but impressive looking set construction techniques, etc.

It is stuff like that I hope to offer teachers under the next phase of the strategic plan. Of course, I will also be looking to have the sessions resonate with the Dept of Ed. Fine Arts Curriculum.

I thought I would do a quick run through of common terminology, features and expectations of the presenting business for those folks who aren’t familiar with them. I had done an article some time ago on how misunderstanding about common expectations can lead to uncomfortable cancelation situations. I thought it might be good to talk about some contractual features as well.

Deposit It is common for performers to require you to send a 50% deposit to them or their agent about a month or so before they are set to perform as a security. They usually require the balance in their hands right before or right after the performance.

Force Majeure-Better definition than I can give found here. Pretty much every contract has them. They are about as ubiquitous as a Miranda warning on a police/lawyer show. It doesn’t take long before you can recite the clause in your sleep.

Insurance– One thing I see quite a bit is the expectation that the presenter carries about $1 million in insurance to protect performers and crew from any mishaps. If you are renting a space, it will most certainly be included as a requirement for space use. In many cases, it is included in the performers contract as well to protect them.

Advancing the Show – Usually the road manager or the artist does this a few weeks to a month before a performance to discuss details of the technical rider, transportation, sound check times, food, accomodations–basically anything they are concerned about.

Backline – Essentially any sound equipment and instruments that the performers aren’t bringing with them that they expect the presenting venue to supply. It makes a tour a lot cheaper if they don’t have to haul pianos, extra guitars, amps, drum kits, etc across the country. Pay very close attention to this because many performers are very particular about the name brand of the equipment that they use.

Tech Rider– List of technical equipment and services that a performer requires. It includes the backline, but will also encompass lighting, special effects, stage layout, power requirements for tour buses (as well as places to park said buses and trailers), size and composition of running crews.

Hospitality– Essentially what people want to eat and when they want to eat it. It can be very simple or very complicated. They say an army travels on its stomach and so does a tour so this is very important. I recently had a guy tell me he crosses catering off contracts immediately. I have no idea how he gets away with it.

I always double check this section when advancing a show. Many times vegetarians or people with food allergies join a group and they don’t change the rider. I also order more than I need–girlfriends, best friends, surprise visitors, etc tend to show up in the dressing room unannounced and are invited to chow down. If you do your checking and pad the order in advance, it saves a lot of hassle on the performance day.

Hospitality will also encompass other aspects of how performers are treated. Some people will want irons and garment steamers and towels both backstage on on stage. This section might also specify that the performers want food served on real plates rather than paper or paper is okay, but styrofoam is not.

Transportation– Another big variable in the presenting calculation. Sometimes you have to pay airfare, sometimes cab (or limo) fare, other times the performer is driving themselves and absorbing all the costs. Sometimes you have to do the driving yourself. This is actually the reason I decided to do this entry. I had a slight disagreement with an artist’s manager over this recently.

When I worked in New Jersey, we would drive people to and from the airport one time in 20 to 25 instances. Here in Hawaii, we generally arrange for cars for people to drive around. A contract I got recently specifies that we pay for their ground transportation and provide a map and directions to them. A similar contract for their opening act specifies having a sedan for him. My assumption then is that we are providing cars for them, especially since they are coming early with wives and girlfriends so they can see the sights.

The group manager tells me that he reads the contract to mean that we have to pay to have them driven around and haven’t I ever done a concert before. Now I am thinking he means we are to pay to have them driving around the island sightseeing and shopping and I tell him we can’t do that. He actually meant that he wanted a ride from the airport to hotel, hotel to venue and back and then to airport again. (My mistake was telling him we couldn’t do it before I understood exactly what he was asking for. One of my prime rules is to never worry travelers to unknown places unnecessarily.) It was an easy mistake to make, but also illustrates why you should read over a contract carefully and discuss any gray areas during the advancing calls.

Security– This can be a sticky area. I have almost never had to use professional security people for backstage and front of stage security. Actually, it is never. The only professionals I have used were for gate security to screen for alcohol. On the other hand, the volunteers I have used were people I knew I could trust and looked as if they were keeping an eye on things and weren’t going to let someone by unchallenged. Yes, some were big and tough looking, but most were just determined looking.

Because we had the right looking dependable people, no tour manager, etc ever really questioned our security measures whether they had asked for professional shirted security folks or not. We always made it clear that we had a volunteer security force back when we signed the contracts as well.

Whether you can get away with it is another thing altogether. My advice is, as it is for all things, cultivate a good group of volunteers and note which ones might be trusted for special positions for future events.

That is about all I can think of as a summary of the major points of a presenting contract. These are just basic generalizations. Your milage may vary.