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Placemaking As Imagined By The People Who Live There

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The Shelterforce website had an interesting article about some data collection techniques being used for Creative Placemaking efforts. Author Keli Tianga’s description of a crowdmapping process was the approach that most intrigued me.

In crowdmapping, participants get out on foot and survey a neighborhood for its existing creative and cultural assets. “Every small group gets a small section of [a neighborhood’s] overall map to work from—this is so they can focus their efforts and share ideas with one another,” said Leo Vazquez, executive director of the National Consortium for Creative Placemaking.

Teams are given color-coded stickers, and mark places on the map they’ve identified for their potential. Large, blank walls on the sides of buildings can become canvasses for murals; empty, fenced-in land owned by private business can become a site for temporary large-scale sculpture installations; community gardens can also become venues for outdoor music performances, and small parks can become designated spots for contemplation or solo art-making.

In the process, I made special note of being outside and observing how a community moves and interacts with one another and with space—where people are gathered, which streets have the most pedestrians, which playground is the most popular are all things to remember when at the point of trying to reach people “where they are.”

Crowdmapping’s virtue is its practicality and democracy—it requires no prior training, and everyone’s viewpoint is useful…

What appealed to me most was that is such great participatory activity that can go a long way toward solving the problem of involving people who are most impacted by decisions but may not show up to formal meetings. People who don’t feel like they are represented or have their voices heard can gain a measure of confidence that their contributions matter when they are made responsible for imagining/suggesting what a neighborhood might become.

The article discusses how places like Baltimore are using these type of maps, overlaid with other data about social and economic indicators to make decisions about how to deploy resources.

Keli Tianga also writes about some really intensive one on one discussions that were conducted in Cincinnati as part of a process called “design thinking.”

Following a link to a story about the design thinking process on the ArtsPlace America site provided some usefl insight about why people are reluctant to participate in community meetings soliciting feedback about development plans.

…we discovered barriers that hadn’t been considered before. Many of the events weren’t physically accessible to Walnut Hills’ older residents. Other residents said they didn’t feel safe leaving their homes, or were afraid that by vocalizing their concerns they’d be labeled as “snitches.” Finally, some admitted that they thought attending these meetings would only encourage and accelerate the gentrification of their neighborhood.

[…]

High Fives was ultimately seen as a huge success for both the RF and Design Impact. Residents who hadn’t previously participated in listening sessions or community council meetings stepped up to plan what High Fives looked like, when it would happen and how to get other residents involved. Those who felt less comfortable leading tasks still contributed by spreading the word or distributing signs, a reminder that “resident leadership” can look different depending on the person.

Someone Loses When Everybody Wins

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I would swear sometimes that Seth Godin is spying on me and then writing blog posts based on what I am thinking at the time. Or maybe he is just good at writing stuff that you can easily project your own experiences upon.

In any case, today he wrote about how you can make people feel like outsiders even if that is not your intention.

You can’t have insiders unless you have outsiders.

And you can’t have winners unless you have losers.

That doesn’t mean that you’re required to create insiders and winners. All it means is that when people begin to measure themselves only in comparison to others (“How did I rank?”) then you need to accept the impact of those choices.

It’s entirely possible to be happy and engaged and productive without creating this dynamic. But in a culture based on scarcity, it’s often easier to award or deduct points and to keep a scoreboard instead.

Just yesterday I cited Nina Simon’s Palo Alto TED Talk where she talks about this very idea. In her talks and book, The Art of Relevance, she mentions that even if you are providing more opportunities for a wider range of people and not reducing service or access to the demographics you have long served, there will be people who will view themselves as having lost out in the process.

I have written about two of Nina’s talks on the subject before so I won’t expound too much on the subject except to reiterate Godin’s point that you need to understand people may evaluate their situation in these terms.

Godin’s last sentence is particularly applicable to arts organizations who definitely operate in a culture of scarcity and are apt to adopt score keeping.   The state arts council or large foundation may be pleased that they have been able to increase funding in your community by 25% over last year. Instead of viewing this as a testament to the burgeoning creative vitality in the community, it can be easy to focus on the fact that another organization got more than you even though your own funding didn’t decrease, or decide you would have gotten more funding if not for the 5 new organizations that emerged in the last two years.

From this perspective, you might begin to empathize with the long time insider who insists they have lost out even as you believe everyone in the community should be excited that your hard work and sincerity opened new doors for a wider range of people without closing off existing opportunities.

What Is Curation These Days?

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I was perusing the Arts and Letters Daily site and saw a link to a Weekly Standard article discussing how the idea of curation has evolved from PT Barnum’s American Museum to a professionalization of the process to the current state where:

…“curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4 fireworks and light show for Macy’s. On its website, a strip club in New York promised a few years ago to “curate a night of Curious burlesque.” Self-help gurus suggest that by self-curating—decluttering your life—you can find inner peace.

The mention of social media posts as forum to present a collection of things, ideas, images, etc that one has personally curated reminded me of a post I made last month about the search for authentic experiences.

In that post, I cited a CityLab piece that suggested that in aggregate, the unique experiences presented on social media sites blended in a bland sameness.

Consumers craving “authentic” experiences tend to build their digital personas by recycling the same kinds of content that populate their own feeds. Especially on Instagram, photos of under-the-radar coffee shops, building interiors, and artful design objects begin to look utterly banal as they aggregate by the thousand. The real world, without any impetus other than the encouragement of the market, has conformed to these aesthetic standards in response.

I started to wonder if arts organizations might have a role to play in helping people stand out by bringing the focus more sharply on them as an individual again. Nina Simon has talked about setting up pop up museums in bars where people can display artifacts of their failed relationships. Providing this sort of opportunity allows people to curate as a fish in a much smaller pond and lends some of the prestige and imprimatur of an arts organization to the individual.

Even if every other arts organization replicates the same program, the fact the experience is only occurring at a single physical location avoids the problem of being able to see 100 variations on an idea in 15 minutes that exists with social media curation.  Sure the curator receives fewer “likes” but hopefully the face to face validation ultimately feels more valuable.

Now my suggestion that an arts organization would be lending their prestige to amateurs might raise the hackles of some who fear the diminution of their reputation. Others would counter that arts organizations need to recognize reality and not seek to preserve their reputation at the cost of a diminishing audience.

Both views have merit. The degree to which an arts or cultural organization invests themselves in providing these opportunities and promoting what people have curated should be well considered.

Being associated with something silly or low quality may be embarrassing, but there is an opportunity to recover. The Weekly Standard makes reference to the Confederate statuary which is being torn down around the country. It is often mentioned that many of those statues were erected years after the Civil War ended and were funded by various interest groups which strikes me essentially as a form of curation by the public. Towns and cities permitted the placement of those statues and now find themselves involved in some controversy.

Lest you interpret this as a cautionary tale against being too permissive or emphatically supportive in any future programs that allow community participation, it is just as much a warning about hewing closely to any longstanding, potentially unsavory associations your organization has had that may come to light. Being viewed as increasingly open and welcoming to involvement by the breadth of the community might mitigate any negative historic associations.

Math, Science, Theater All Win Today

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This video tweeted by Massachusetts Math teacher Kim Spek made me very happy today. h/t to Sarah Carleton

Perfect statement illustrating the intersection of science, math, theater and wonder. Nothing more I can say except follow the link and check out the slo-mo version on her Twitter feed to better see how the transformation works.

Forging Your Our Purpose(s)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody Wants To Play Find The Non-Profit

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I have mentioned before that people don’t normally perceive a difference between non-profit and for-profit cultural organizations. Colleen Dilenschneider has a good summary of the research showing this.

What makes people care about the difference between for-profits and non-profits is the positive social impact that the organization is achieving.

Dilenschneider writes:

Nonprofits do not “own” social good. Corporate social responsibility is a necessity for companies today. There are countless articles on the importance of for-profit companies doing good. It is a key tactic for gaining customers and increasing sales.

Being good at your mission is good business. Data demonstrate that organizations highlighting their missions outperform those marketing primarily as attractions.

Interestingly, this is the one area in which non-profit identity definitely works in favor of their tax status. In a piece on The Conversation that Non-Profit Quarterly cited last summer, researchers found the following (my emphasis):

In one study, we asked people to donate money to an organization supporting literacy and education. The only difference was that some people were told the company was a for-profit social venture – it had a social mission and also made a profit. Other participants were told it was a nonprofit. People gave 40 percent less money when they believed the organization was a for-profit social venture.

In another study, we gave people money and asked them to purchase a decorative notepad from one of two organizations. When given a choice to buy it from a nonprofit or a for-profit social venture, nearly two out of three people went with the nonprofit.

It seems people don’t think companies can make a profit and support a social cause at the same time.

These findings along with Dilenschneider’s data may emphasize the value of highlighting your organizational mission and the impact you have over encouraging people to engage with you in a commercial manner.

Before you get too excited thinking this could be good news if you just change your messaging, the researchers in The Conversation had additional insight that recalls our old nemesis, Overhead Ratio.

…emphasizing a social cause makes people think the company is altruistic. When the company also makes money, this flies in the face of a belief that it’s generous or altruistic. When companies have a social mission, people tend to think that all money should go to the social cause…

This doesn’t mean that nonprofits always win though…when people were told the nonprofit was known to have excessive spending, the majority of people flipped and bought their notepad from the for-profit social venture.

Creativity Is Partially A Social Construct

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

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

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

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

Or as Becker puts it, (my emphasis)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity Is Partially A Choice

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Last week Isaac Kaplan wrote an editorial on Artsy about a study that suggested whether you were creative or not was partially a matter of perception.

I might not have gone on to read the study, but the title, “I Don’t Take My Tuba to Work at Microsoft”, kinda reeled me in. (Actually, the full title is, “I Don’t Take My Tuba to Work at Microsoft”: Arts Graduates and the Portability of Creative Identity.)

In the quest to help people recognize their capacity for creativity, figuring out how arts graduates craft their identities can be an important first step.  The authors of the study note that the narrative we have for ourselves can serve as a coping mechanism in potentially disappointing outcomes,

…our notions of personal success and professional status, including the expectations we think others have for us; what roles we imagine for ourselves; and what work we are willing to do…for example, shows that an artistic or bohemian identity helps middle-class kids justify taking working class jobs.

Because viewed objectively, creative practice often requires executing repetitive tasks

“… for example, we label playing in a symphony “creative,” though it is to a certain extent “extremely repetitive and boring work..”

The researchers drew a large part of the data for their study from the The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP). The “don’t take my tuba..” in the title is a quote from one of the respondents.

As you might imagine, while some people didn’t find the work they were doing to be creative, others saw opportunities to employ the skills they had acquired in their arts training.

(The following are from three separate sections of the study, as reflected by the breaks in the left edge line)

As another former music major responded, “I can often apply the same creative thinking strategies I learned as a musician to scientific problems.”

Research is a remarkably creative process, which relates to the training I received at [arts school].

My education has been a solid foundation for being open and creative with my work, although it is an indirect relationship to my major course of study. I have been very effective professionally in large part because I use creativity in my approach to solving problems, planning, and innovating. I am able to see possibilities where others can’t, and I’m able to identify the consistent and related themes woven among seemingly divergent concepts . .

As an executive assistant, I have a boss who thinks in very grand sweeping terms and a staff that thinks in very precise “tell me exactly what I need to do” terms. As a theater director, I’ve learned how to speak both languages fluently, and often serve as “translator” to others. I also have a strong creative thought process, which I’ve applied to suggesting overhauls to many of our procedures to make our work much more efficient.

Likely none of the respondents were told their artistic background would be helpful in these ways when they were hired. They saw the opportunity to apply what they had learned to the situation.

I am by no means implying that the difference between people who view their training as being applicable to their positions and those that don’t is a matter of having an optimistic, can-do outlook. There are plenty of environments where initiative and innovation are not welcomed and actively stifled.

What I took away from the piece is that creativity is both a factor of perception and opportunity. It is not enough just to give people the opportunity to be creative, the perception needs to be cultivated and reinforced.

Packing boxes containing 100 bowls in the back of a truck may feel menial and boring whereas putting 100 bowls into a kiln to be fired may feel creative despite the first act taking 10 minutes and the latter taking over an hour.

It isn’t as simple as deciding the artist feels more invested in their work than a person loading a truck. Both may employ the same amount of diligence to avoid breakage. There is no guarantee the person loading the kiln isn’t an assistant hired to keep a space clean and yet feels they are engaged in a creative endeavor a la the old “…what and quit show business? joke.

How do you help people find that ineffable quality that makes all the difference?

End of An Era, Who Will Pick Up The Torch

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Over the last week you may have seen mention that after 10 years in existence,  Createquity will be ceasing operations at the end of the 2017 calendar year.

This is a great pity. One of the goals founder Ian David Moss had as he developed his blogging project into a think tank was to facilitate arts administrators’ ability to understand research findings since they so often didn’t have the opportunity to review, much less finish research reports. Just last week, I cited one of his recent entries as the basis for a post.

It will probably come as no surprise that difficulty finding suitable funding for Createquity’s efforts is the basis for the decision to cease operations. Ian discusses all the options they weighed and opportunities of which they tried to avail themselves.  Ultimately, in summary he says,

These are among the reasons why the arts field has, since the 1980s, dug a formidable graveyard for failed think tank initiatives, some of which have become so buried under the weight of history that I only learned about them for the first time earlier this year.

The project I most regret seeing fall by the wayside is their effort to chart what we know about the benefits of the arts in improving lives.  Createquity graphed out research studies about the benefits of the arts on a scale that indicated the quality of the evidence and whether the research said a benefit existed.  This information is extremely important to know if you are going to advocate for arts and culture and cite research findings. Looking at Createquity’s evaluation, the evidence that supports commonly made assertions about the benefit of arts in educational and social outcomes is weaker than it is made out to be or there is a lack of corroborating research.

Think about it this way. TV news programs often have short segments where they talk about the amazing benefits of dark chocolate, red wine, acai berries, etc., but when you take the time to really examine the evidence you discover you would have to consume three times your body weight daily to realize those benefits.

Funding for arts and culture entities is already tenuous as it is, (to whit, Createquity), the sector doesn’t need to have people denouncing it for making overblown claims. (And as I have often argued, we shouldn’t be invoking the utilitarian value of the arts to justify it anyway.)

There the end of his post, Moss talks about the preparations they are going through over the next few months. They will be publishing summary articles about the work they have done.  (One on cultural equity was published today.)

They intend to make their work available to anyone who might wish to continue where they are leaving off.

Over the next couple of months, we will be polishing up our internal training materials and resources to make it as easy as possible for people in the arts community to carry on aspects of the work we’ve started in their own spaces and in their own names. And in November and December, you can expect to see some parting thoughts from our team to philanthropists and researchers seeking to optimize their investments in the arts in the decade ahead. Our goal in all of this is to activate the latent potential of our work over the past ten years into the most accessible and actionable content possible.

I think there are many who join me in hoping that someone will be able to continue the important work they have started.

Planning Out Your Creative Utopia

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About two years ago I started an after (work) hours art show that would provide students and local artists an opportunity to show their work and get experience speaking about it with people who didn’t have the shared vocabulary of visual artists.

Last Thursday we had the 4th iteration of the event, which we have been holding every 6 months or so.  Due to my involvement with the Creating Connection initiative, I consciously tried to employ suggested language about personal capacity for creativity in the promotional materials. I referenced people’s past comments about not realizing their neighbors were so talented or even interested in creating works of visual art.

Our frequent local partners/collaborators, the Creative Cult, had approached me about having a hands-on activity for attendees so the opportunity to create something yourself also figured heavily in our promotional materials. Since we usually have more artists enter than we have space to accommodate, we originally discussed placing the activity in a side corridor off the lobby. However, we had fewer applications than expected so we were able to move their activities to a prime spot.

They got people involved in executing their vision of a Creative Utopia…in cardboard. While the idea was to theoretically rebuild our town with the features that would make it a great place for people to express their creativity, few people felt constrained by that basic concept. And who could blame them.

The cardboard village was dubbed “Cult-topia” since the guys from the Cult provided all the art materials and scrounged up a lot of cardboard in advance.

While young kids were the most enthusiastic and added the most color to the project, there were a lot of people of all ages who contributed to the creative utopia.

One thing we noticed about the event– People lingered a lot longer than in the past, even those who weren’t helping to build Cult-topia. We aren’t exactly sure why. Did they like watching people have fun making ugly buildings out of cardboard? Was it the presence of more cafe tables to sit at? Even though the crowd was the same size as the past, did the ambiance feel calmer and less frenetic because the layout was a little more spread out?

I was reminded of an observation Nina Simon made in her book where she mentions that her museum started offering all-ages participatory activities at their events and exhibitions. She says none of the activities were specifically targeted as family events. Kids and adults just worked side by side at many of the events. Little by little, they noticed the melded events were packed, but the Family Day branded events saw decreasing attendance. She characterized it as the appeal of a room that was large enough to accommodate everyone versus a special segment.

I wondered if something along those lines was in operation in this situation. Did the presence of participatory activities keep all attendees engaged for a longer period of time regardless of whether they contributed or even viewed themselves as someone who would dive in to cardboard construction projects with gusto?

At the end of the night, I was asked if we could leave Cult-topia up on display for a few days. Some might feel it was a mistake to agree to leave a shabby looking project created by committee prominently placed in an art center lobby. This is the type of thing that draws derisive commentary about something not being art, art being dumbed down or the infamous, “I could do that.”

But that is sort of the point. By leaving it up for about a week, we hope to validate people’s capacity to make a creative contribution. No one is saying it is great art. Just that people had a great time putting it together. It is a small step in a journey of 1000 miles.

It can be a risky move and could diminish the organization in the eyes of some. But probably the easiest way to combat the perception that work by “people like me” doesn’t appear at an arts event is to display the work of people like them.

Considering The Essence Of Being Mainstream Or Culturally Specific

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

He make a case that:

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

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

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

Moss provides further context noting:

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

[..]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Cultural Track Data Challenge Assumptions About Your Community?

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As I promised in my last post, I took a deeper look at the Culture Track reporting over the weekend.  More specifically, I took at a look at both the Top Line deck and Supporting Data documents which are available for download. I didn’t review the raw data.

The Supporting Data document is presented with visual graphs which makes it easy to interpret. Though I also hungered for some analytical commentary from the Culture Track folks about what the greater implications might be.

A few observations from Supporting Data in the hopes of making the opportunity to dig in irresistible for readers.

First of all, the charts seem to belie the idea that Millennials are  abandoning cultural experiences. Except for watching TV (which includes streaming) they lead in every category. This is only one of three pages.

 

Now you may be saying, sure but participation once a year isn’t a high hurdle.

However, that generation also leads in frequency per month too.

 

If you remember what I quoted and wrote last week about the perceptions of those who were high frequency attenders, this has some important implications.

People who attend three or more cultural experiences per month are 94% more likely to cite “it doesn’t change” as a barrier to more frequent cultural participation compared those who attend one or fewer cultural experiences per month.

Given that what people define as a cultural experience is pretty broad, the chances that your average attendee is participating in three or more experiences a month is pretty good. Being 94% more likely to feel lack of change is a barrier to participation is pretty significant.

While you shouldn’t take all this information at face value without digging in and questioning the basis of the findings, the fact the data depicted may contradict your assumptions can be enough to get conversations started reevaluating long held beliefs.

The study authors slice and dice the data through a number of different lenses which make for interesting viewing. Most every question is presented in terms of generation, race/ethnicity, community size, education level, marital status and parental status.

So for example, the following information about where people get advertised and non-advertised information about cultural activities is presented in these contexts. (There is also a chart for offline information sources which I haven’t included)

 

Perhaps of most interest to different arts and cultural organizations, they break down motivators and barriers for participation for 12 different disciplines/cultural activities.

Below is a sample for art museums. There is also a chart with barriers for non-participants for each area.

 

 

NOTICE: The Response I Give May Only Reflect My Current Preferences

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You may have already heard that the CultureTrack report was released yesterday. Compiled and released every three years by LaPlaca Cohen, the report helps track the ways in which attitudes toward culture are shifting.

I haven’t read the full report yet. Just looking at the summary on the animated and interactive site they set up for the report, I knew this would probably be something I returned to a couple times. So for your homework, review the site and we will talk about it more on Monday.

….Unless I get distracted by something else.

What first alerted me to the release of the study was an advance piece on Artsy titled “37% of Art Museum Visitors Don’t View Them as Culture,” which did its job in getting me to read more.

Sure enough the article notes that,

“For many respondents, going to the park or eating at a food truck counts as a cultural experience, while attending a museum does not.”

This wasn’t far off from some of the responses my organization got last winter during our listening tour where people listed going to the speedway as a favorite cultural experience.

Another interesting finding highlighted in the article was largest motivation to engage in cultural activities was to have fun.

Cultural activities continue to be a source of leisure and relaxation for many. The survey found that 81% of audiences are motivated to attend a cultural activity because they want to have fun. A desire to feel less stressed was tied in third place, along with “experiencing new things,” with 76% citing both as reasons for participation. 71% cited learning something new as a reason to participate in culture.

This doesn’t mean that levity must replace education at museums, noted Harnick, but rather that the two cannot be divorced from one another. Culture offers the opportunity to connect with other people and take a pause from daily life—today’s audiences are full of anxiety and looking for a chance to relax, a conclusion that gels with other findings that show high levels of anxiety among the general population.

I spoke to someone today who suggested the current political environment in the country might be contributing to that sense of anxiety.

In terms of barriers to participation, feeling that the experience wasn’t “for someone like me” topped the list.

I can’t really cover all the findings I found interesting, but here are a few to consider.

In terms of loyalty, people rated trustworthiness, consistent quality and customer service as the top three factors. Pricing and discounts were fifth and sixth. Social media and advertising were 10th and 11th with 15% and 13% of responses, respectively. So pricing and advertising aren’t big factors in building loyalty.

Since there is a discussion about whether people want to experience culture as a passive observer or an active participant, I was interested to read that 28% of people wanted their experience to be active and 24% wanted their experience to be calm. But as with everything, there was a bit of nuance illuminated by the data. (their emphasis)

Cultural audiences—like everyone—are multidimensional, and they have different needs and wants at different times, or even simultaneously. In fact, 15% of cultural consumers who chose “calm” as one of their top-three descriptors of an ideal cultural activity also chose “active,” while 24% of those who chose “reflective” also chose “social.”

In the same section, was another valuable insight about the desire for new experiences by active culture consumers (Their emphasis).

People who attend three or more cultural experiences per month are 94% more likely to cite “it doesn’t change” as a barrier to more frequent cultural participation compared those who attend one or fewer cultural experiences per month.

Given that what people define as a cultural experience is pretty broad, the chances that your average attendee is participating in three or more experiences a month is pretty good. Being 94% more likely to feel lack of change is a barrier to participation is pretty significant. I hope there is something in the report that provides more detail about what types of experiences people are participating in and what they feel isn’t changing. Is it the programming? The overall experience?

The section on the role of digital technology in a cultural experience was also quite interesting. People responded that they felt digital enhanced their experience, provided deeper understanding and allowed them to share their experience with friends.

However, the lack of opportunity to use digital made people feel they were able to focus and become more invested in the experience, made the experience feel more authentic and less complicated.

There is a lot more to learn from the detailed study. Or perhaps it is better to say, there is a lot more I hope to learn from the detailed study.

Perhaps the takeaway is, people are more nuanced than the feedback they are giving you at the moment. Whether it is an audience survey, a comment made on social media, or to the box office a statement should be view as “this is how I feel right now, but in other times and situations, my preferences may contradict what I just said.”

Watch How You Step

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A friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video that suggests that the way humans walked changed with the evolution of footwear. For Europe this shift started around the 1500.

People apparently shifted from stepping toe first to stepping heel first as the bottoms of their shoes became sturdier to deal with urban environments.  Heel stepping was a gateway drug to poor calf definition and bad posture because it is a more forgiving mode of movement that allows for a degree of laziness.  You’ll fall over if you have bad posture while toe stepping.

What does this have to do with the arts you ask? Well there are pictures in the video of artwork and fencing manuals created prior to the 1500 which show people moving toe first.  This reminded me of a lecture I heard years ago that said ballet was based on the idealized movements of members of the (French, I think) court. The speaker made a particular point in discussing how the clothing of the time dictated how people moved– the necessity of holding your arms away from your body, etc.

Seeing this video made me think that perhaps the footwear and attendant walking style of the time were also elements that entered ballet.

I also got to thinking, has the fact that people no longer walk toe first contributed to a sense that ballet is not relevant to people’s lives? Not that we move around in the fashion of really any type of dance. It just got me wondering if lacking familiarity with toe stepping as a mode of movement adds an additional layer of alienation.

Check out the video.

https://youtu.be/EszwYNvvCjQ

Hey Buddy, You Want To Share A Creative Experience?

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Back in August I presented material in a pre-conference session at the Arts Midwest (AMW) conference alongside AMW President/CEO David Fraher; Creating Connection Program Director Anne Romens; and my friend Nick Sherman. (Slides on the AMW site, scroll down to “Messages that Matter: Tapping into What Audiences Value + Creating Connection: What Does Your Community Value?”).

For my part of the presentation, I spoke about some of the programs we had instituted in our community based on materials from Creating Connection, or as I often refer to it, Building Public Will For Arts and Culture.

One program I hadn’t talked about was our Arts Buddy program which we developed to respond to the problem of having no one to attend an event with which is often cited as a major impediment to event attendance. Long time readers will remember I started developing the idea back in 2015 after being inspired by a program instituted by a Brazilian bus company.

Anne Romens wanted to know more about the program so they could discuss it in workshops they were conducting in September. We ended up turning our discussion into an interview which Anne posted on the Creating Connection blog last week.

Anne told me she presented the idea at 5 workshops in September and people loved the idea. They pulled out their pens and started scribbling. One person apparently asked if I had legal rights to the idea or if she could use it.

I had I known it would be so popular I would have patented it and started a licensing program!

(The idea was developed with feedback from a number of people both through my blog and emails so neither I, nor anyone else should be looking to patent it.)

You will have to read the interview to see what all the excitement was about.

Major Case Of Do As We Say, Not As We Do

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Back in August, I came across the most extreme example of failing to plan for an executive transition that I have seen to date. When the executive director of MarinSpace decided to step down, the board chose to dissolve the organization rather than to look for a replacement.

The board’s vote to dissolve occurred when longtime CEO Shelley Hamilton announced she no longer wished to play that role, opting instead to take another, part-time role.

“Her skill set is so specific and unique that when she decided to move to part-time, the board decided it would be [too] difficult to move someone into that (executive director) role with that same skill set,” said interim ED Peter Lee. “Instead of trying to go through that process, we thought it would be better to dissolve and spread the wealth in Marin County.”

And the organization has no lack of assets to distribute:

After it dissolves, it will have between $2 and $3 million in assets, including a building worth $2.5 million, and these will need to be distributed. The 14,500-square-foot building currently houses other nonprofits at 20 percent below market rate.

[…]

Lee laid out three possibilities for distribution of the assets: one organization could acquire the assets and staff and run the group relatively as-is; assets could be liquidated and distributed among a number of nonprofits; or a nonprofit could acquire MarinSpace’s building and staff, but the cash assets of approximately $300,000 could be distributed to other groups.

The thing that really gets me is the disconnect between their mission and practice.  The organization’s mission is:

We believe positive social change happens best through collective effort. Our mission is to strengthen networks of community organizations by providing collaboration services and shared workspace.

and they boast

“…our CEO provides key leadership services to the Nonprofit Centers Network, both as a founding Board Member and as a senior project consultant.

They list Sustainability and Professionalism among their guiding principles.

Yet they have a situation whereby they have created a structure that they have decided can’t exist in the absence of a single person. How does that reflect best practices for leading non-profits that they were theoretically instilling in client organizations?   How have they worked toward their own sustainability?

What sort of effect might this decision have on the non-profits housed in their facility and those served by those non-profits? How does this decision and uncertain outcomes reflect their mission of collective effort?

Fortunately, they are taking a responsible course by intending to create and oversee a process of distributing their assets as part of the dissolution. As I have written before, sometimes non-profit boards will walk away from an organization and declare they have washed their hands of their involvement. In doing so, they can actually be held personally liable for anything that occurs in relation to the organization having lost the protection of director and officers liability insurance.

You May Be Dead, But Thanks To A QR Code Your Memory Can Last Forever

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Over on ArtsHacker today, Ceci Dadisman wrote a post suggesting that the dreaded/derided QR code may be making a comeback thanks to improved functionality on Apple’s new iOS11.

I have been keeping an eye open for close to a year to see if QR codes might return given that they are used on and for E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G in China. With that sort of massive usage, it isn’t hard to foresee that companies will recognize the utility in transactions and encourage people to use them. When I say they are used for  everything in China, I mean beggars on the street have signs with QR codes on them so you can donate.  A village planted trees in the shape of a QR code that can be scanned from the air.

There are some other interesting uses like the shopping mall with a giant code on the side of the building so you can discover the hours as you drive by rather than pulling up and squinting at the sign on the door. QR codes also allow all those people waving signs on the side of the road/middle of the sidewalk get paid for catching your attention when you scan their sign to learn more.

The one use that really caught my eye, and you almost miss it in the article, is putting QR codes on tombstones so that people can learn more about the person.

But QR codes appear for dead people, too… Since people in China believe that QR codes are here to stay, even tombstones are engraved with QR codes that memorialize the life-story — through biographies, photographs, and videos — of the deceased. From the leadership of the China Funeral Association: “In modern times, people should commemorate their deceased loved ones in modern ways”.

While some obvious uses for QR codes in the arts would be to provide information about art works in museums and performers and their characters in performances, (especially interactive ones where a printed program might get in the way), I wonder what innovative uses for storytelling people might come up with.

One idea that just popped to mind is a quest that wasn’t dependent on the presence of physical objects. If you scan a treasure chest or information source without having first found and scanned a key/preceding information source, you won’t receive the treasure/solution. That way you can have multiple people play a game without having to make multiple versions of an item for people to claim.

Anything else pop to mind for people?

Looking To The Countryside

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As a person who has lived and worked in rural locations, I read an article about the Catskill Mountain Foundation (CMF) on the Inside Philanthropy site with great interest.  I thought some of the observations made in the piece were valuable both for funders who might be reluctant to fund rural organizations, and for organizations who were rallying support for creative placemaking and related endeavors in rural locations.

Writing for Inside Philanthropy, Mike Scutari suggests that some of the assumptions funders have about getting the most bang for their buck by supporting programs based in urban locales might not be entirely accurate.

Scan Inside Philanthropy’s archives and you’ll find examples of huge urban philanthropy efforts whose return on investment is murky at best. Most recently, David Callahan wrote that despite an influx of $1 billion from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to Flint, Michigan, life has mostly become worse in the city over the past half-century.

Finn’s smaller-is-more-impactful approach flips conventional wisdom on its head: Funders can move the dial more effectively by operating in more concentrated communities.

CMF Founder Peter Finn identified four challenges that particularly face rural organizations in addition to the perennial general concerns about the shrinking pool of available funding.

First, a feeling among some locals that change is not welcome. It’s an idea we sometimes see in urban creative placemaking, where some longtime residents can view arts organizations as interlopers and gentrifiers. Finn’s experience suggests that rural organizations aren’t immune from this perception. “The Catskill Mountain Foundation encountered this at times during the past 20 years,” Finn noted, “but seems to have finally gotten beyond this.”

Second, attracting sustained participation from the local community….

Third, finding talented staff. “We have been lucky that we were able to hire several excellent staff members…But in rural communities, the pool of talent to select from is limited.”

And lastly, the perennial specter of donor fatigue. “It is relatively easy to attract money in the early years for an energetic new arts organization that seems to be on path to success. All organizations encounter bumps in the road, and some donors are lost in this process. There has to be a core of key donors committed to sticking with the mission for the organization to become both successful and sustainable.”

Some of these points probably aren’t groundbreaking revelations. Still, it takes living in a rural community to appreciate the particular nuances of some of these points. I included the entire quote about CMF encountering resistance to change over 20 years because acceptance of the new tends to be a lot faster in urban environments. In many places rural locations you are considered a newcomer if you haven’t been around for about 50 years. I don’t doubt that some people may have finally warmed to them after 20 years.

Remind Yourself Maximum Performance Is Not Necessarily Optimum Performance

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Last week I wrote about a blog entry Seth Godin made in January that examined phrases like “The purpose of society is to maximize profit” and “The only purpose of a company is to maximize long-term shareholder value.”

I intentionally wrote about Godin’s January post in order to provide some additional context for a post he made recently. (Though last week’s post got some pretty good response so check it out too)

I once drove home from college at 100 miles an hour. It saved two hours. My old car barely made it, and I was hardly able to speak once I peeled myself out of the car.

That was maximum speed, but it wasn’t optimum.

Systems have an optimum level of performance. It’s the output that permits the elements (including the humans) to do their best work, to persist at it, to avoid disasters, bad decisions and burnout.

One definition of maximization is: A short-term output level of high stress, where parts degrade but short-term performance is high.

This excerpt from his post addresses a number of issues faced by non-profit organizations.

First is the obvious reminder that it is easy to equate optimum outputs with maximum outputs.

This mistaken equivalency is the basis for the whole “X needs to run more like a business,” and “X should be self-supporting or close” sentiment. The work non-profits do can’t be maximized because it involves interacting and responding to humans, not providing products for human consumption.  There is a difference between helping someone cultivate their creative abilities and producing the computers, instruments, paint, lighting or fabric that serve as a medium of creative expression.

Which is not to say it didn’t take Crayola a fair bit of time and effort to develop their new blue crayon, but the trial and error mixing chemical compounds can be accomplished a lot faster and with fewer repercussions than involved in trying to use that crayon to express what is inside yourself.

The second obvious reminder for non-profits is Godin’s point that humans are one of the elements that is susceptible to burnout. Optimum output is nowhere near the maximum output staff are capable of but the replacement cost is pretty high.

We are all pretty much aware of these issues because the problem is discussed across a range of forums. Still the press of societal expectations make it easy to succumb to the mistaken notion that maximum equals optimum and therefore if our organization isn’t working to its maximum ability, we are not producing optimal results.

Stuff To Think About: The Profitability Equals Value Assumption

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You haven’t been working in the non-profit arts and culture sector long enough or you haven’t been paying close enough attention if you haven’t heard/read someone say that an arts organization shouldn’t exist if it can’t be self supporting.

If you have found yourself at a lack of response to this argument, you might read up a little on a blog post Seth Godin made earlier this year where he addresses the mistake of equating profitability with value.

Profit is a good way to demonstrate the creation of value.

In fact, it’s a pretty lousy method. The local water company clearly creates more value (in the sense that we can’t live without it) than the handbag store down the street, and yet the handbag store has a much higher profit margin. That’s not because of value, but because of mismatches in supply and demand, or less relevant inputs like brand, market power and corporate structure.

[…]

I hope we can agree that a caring nurse in the pediatric oncology ward adds more value than a well-paid cosmetic plastic surgeon doing augmentations. People with more money might pay more, but that doesn’t equate to value.

The best way to measure value created is to measure value, not profit.

The purpose of society is to maximize profit

Well, since profit isn’t a good measure of value created, this isn’t at all consistent. More important, things like a living wage, sustainability, fairness and the creation of meaning matter even more. When we consider how to advance our culture, “will it hurt profits?” ought not to be the first (or even the fifth) question we ask.

Pay attention to the last line of this next quote from Godin because it is basically verbatim a core point made by the Potter-Warrior-Philosopher Carter Gillies.

The only purpose of a company is to maximize long-term shareholder value.

Says who? Is the only purpose of your career to maximize lifetime income? If a company is the collective work of humans, we ought to measure the value that those humans seek to create.

Just because there’s a number (a number that’s easy to read, easy to game, easy to keep track of) doesn’t mean it’s relevant.

Okay, so Carter may not be a warrior, but he does fiercely fight to advance the notion that just because we can measure it, it doesn’t mean the measure is relevant.

One of my favorite quotes from Carter that runs along these lines is in a guest post he made on Diane Ragsdale’s blog.

The way we mostly talk to these people is we have found that our ends, the things we value in themselves, can be the means to their own ends. They value the economy? Well, the arts are good for the economy! They think that cognitive development is important? Well, the arts are good for cognitive development! We make our own ends the means to their ends.

But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient. That’s never only what they are to us. Sometimes we just have to make the case for a lesser value as the expedient means to secure funding or policy decisions. It’s better than not making any sense at all.

Just as Godin says, concepts like economic impact and cognitive development can produce numbers that are easy to understand, game and keep track of which helps when making the case for funding and policy. But none of these numbers are expressions of the core value of arts and creativity. Why those of us in the field value it.

It takes more effort to explain a complex concept like the value of arts and culture which is why Arts Midwest and others are engaged in a long term project to build public will for it and create an environment in which a similarly shorthand expression of value is possible.  I don’t think anyone will necessarily equate the value of arts and culture with clean water and pediatric nurses. The goal is an environment where the value of arts and culture is generally assumed.

Back in June Diane Ragsdale made a similar post exploring the different concepts of value and cited an idea that there are different types of “economies” that exist, each with a different “currency” that serves as a valid measure of value and relevance. In this context, we wouldn’t equate the value of clean water and pediatric nurses with that of arts and culture any more than we would equate the winner of the World Series with the most effective Coast Guard cutter crew.

Say Musicals Aren’t Serious Drama, But They Are Seriously Hard To Emulate

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Telling a story in an interesting and compelling way ain’t easy. Sure, we all know that, but an article about efforts Chinese creatives are making to tell their own stories through musical theater reminds us it isn’t as easy as it looks.

Broadway and West End musicals are pretty popular in China, but Chinese artists understandably have a desire to see works with domestic origins onstage as well. While China has opera traditions that were considered to have reached their maturity 800 years ago, the basic format and practices don’t easily translate over to musical theater conventions.

“People prefer to see foreign musicals because they’re more mature productions,” said Jin. “Our original musicals still have many issues — with the market, theaters, production, rehearsals.”

One particular issue, believes Qiu, is that Chinese musicals suffer from clumsy scripts. Many playwrights consider musicals to be simply a matter of “adding a storyline to a gala” or “a drama plus songs,” he said.

“Our creators and producers are lagging behind actors and musicians,” said Jin. “They need to slowly work out the laws of musicals.” Jin believes that most local productions are hastily thrown together without a clear development process; he previously complained… that domestic productions focus too much on visuals and too little on the music and script.

In contrast, Zhou pointed out, successful international productions often center on strong narratives and timely themes. “Americans are good at telling stories; they’re good at finding problems that exist in the here and now,” she said. ….“Only when we find things that we want to express will we truly find the soul of original musicals,” Zhou said of Chinese productions, which she believes rarely address contemporary societal issues. “Only then will musicals really be good and will people really want to see them.”

The lesson I take from the perspective of outsiders trying to adopt the form is that we often take for granted just how much development, both rapid innovation and quiet increments, has been involved in familiar modes of artistic expression.

Last year I saw an Ira Gershwin musical from the 1930s that sounded good on paper but left me wondering how it had won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The experience gave me a greater appreciation as to why shows like Oklahoma! were considered groundbreaking for unifying story, song and dance. So much of what I expect from musical theater is a result of the changes Oklahoma! brought to the stage. No one could imagine hewing to the previous conventions after that.

Given that the performing arts in the West are faced with a similar challenge of finding a new narrative with which their audiences can relate, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that Chinese creatives might help provide the template for doing so.

Know Thy Self And Don’t Keep It A Secret

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Last month Barry Hessenius made a post that expanded on a concept proposed management guru Peter Drucker’s article, “Managing Oneself,” that I wrote on a decade ago.

Drucker had suggested that people understand how they work and then communicate that to other people to help others help you to be more effective.

“Whenever someone goes to his or her associates and says, “This is what I am good at. This is how I work. These are my values. This is the contribution I plan to concentrate on and the results I should be expected to deliver,” the response is always, “This is most helpful. But why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

And one gets the same reaction – without exception, in my experience-if one continues by asking, “And what do I need to know about your strengths, how you perform, your values, and your proposed contribution?” In fact, knowledge workers should request this of everyone with whom they work, whether as subordinate, superior, colleague, or team member. And again, whenever this is done, the reaction is always, “Thanks for asking me. But why didn’t you ask me earlier?” Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another.”

Hessenius suggests very much the same thing in the context of writing a “Users Manual” for others. He cites some suggestions made by Abby Falik, founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year,

She synthesized these answers into a six-section manual: Note: See link for her excellent user manual for ideas.

My style
What I value
What I don’t have patience for
How to best communicate with me
How to help me
What people misunderstand about me

Then he added some of his own suggestions:

Here are some variations of the above (with just a couple of ideas in each) along the same theme:

How I communicate – preferences (e.g., do you prefer direct contact, phone calls, emails, tweets, Facebook or something else)
What’s important to me in workplace relationships (e.g., do you like blunt, direct communication or do you prefer gentle tact)
What I don’t like, what I try to avoid (e.g., do you abhor people who are late, or are you flexible with timelines? Do you like ad hoc conversations or consider them a waste of your time?)
How you can help me work better……
How I can help you work better…….
Things that don’t mean much to me (e.g., is getting credit really important or is the idea itself what you are after?)
What I’m not so good at, but trying to improve (e.g., do you have a short fuse or are you calm and steady; are you detailed oriented or a big picture person?)
Bad habits that drive me crazy (e.g., does it make you crazy when people tell you they will call you in the afternoon with an answer and then don’t?)

Hessenius’ thoughts are a good update from Drucker’s original concept given the advances in technology since Drucker originally wrote “Managing Oneself.” What technologies and methods of communication people are comfortable using might be included in the manual.

Since there is a blurring line between work and personal time, someone might want to declare whether they are open to being contacted after 5 pm, on weekends and vacation periods. Likewise, organizations might declare their values are that no one is expected, overtly or tacitly, to regularly work or respond outside of regular business hours.

Indeed, since there so many options and opportunities for collaborating to reach certain goals than in the past, the necessity of creating a statement about your process and expectations may be more of a requirement than an option.

It also occurred to me that someone might be inspired to use such an “owners manual” at some point in a romantic relationship. While I honestly think it could help avoid a good deal of misunderstanding and miscommunication, when I imagine people using it, I envision Frazier and Lillith from Cheers. (I am sure there is probably a similar scene from Big Bang Theory, but you gotta love the classics)

The Secret of Magic (And Pretty Much Everything Creative)

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I was catching up on episodes of This American Life this weekend and came across a great piece that illuminates so many underappreciated elements of the creative process.

They speak to Teller of the duo Penn & Teller about a magic trick he worked on.  It was a re-imagining of a trick that was created in 1920s/30s so you might think the adaptation process would be relatively easy but it took him 18 months to get it to the point he was satisfied with it.

To some extent, mastering the technical aspects were easy compared to being satisfied with the framework of the trick.  Teller’s partner Penn disliked the trick, even when it eventually became part of the show but there were points in the process where he hated it. When it became part of the show, he just disliked it because it wasn’t too his taste. Still there was a point where Penn told Teller he would be fine with making it part of the show but Teller wasn’t satisfied and kept working on the presentation.

What I loved about the story is that it explored all the elements that went into the creation of the piece: How Teller would work on the trick every evening after the Vegas show and in his pajamas while on vacation. All the input Teller got from different people about how to frame the trick. What bits of psychology and storytelling are important to creating and presenting a trick.

Perhaps most significantly, despite the long,  uncomfortable series of conversations Penn and Teller had about the trick. These type of conversations have been part of a 40 year partnership.

Ira Glass

… Here are these two men, who respect each other but don’t socialize or hang out together, who have been arguing, they say, constantly and fiercely, but productively, for over 40 years, and Penn knows how much work Teller has put into this trick and how much he would enjoy performing it every night.

Penn Jillette

He’s not saying this outright, but it’s implicit. This is beautiful. This is mystifying. This is entertaining. People will love it. It’s really important to me. All those five things are true. So it’s very, very uncomfortable.

Ira Glass

Uncomfortable because Penn agrees. It’s a great trick. It totally works. He just doesn’t like it. It doesn’t feel like their show to him, this red ball that’s also a disobedient puppy….

Part of the solution that gets the trick on stage is letting the audience in on part of the secret—the trick is done with a piece of thread. This actually isn’t ground breaking given that Penn and Teller are known for telling people how tricks work. They believe this adds to the enjoyment of the trick.

Teller

If you understand the good magic trick, and I mean really understand it right down to the mechanics at the core of its psychology, the magic trick gets better, not worse.

[…]

Ira Glass

Teller gestures to the ball like he’s summoning it with his hand and it glides along the thread to him. That’s the sound you’re hearing. Now, what’s mind-bending is that David and I can actually see that he’s tilting the thread downwards and that’s why it slides towards him. We can see the ball’s on a thread. We can see how it’s done. We hear it sliding along.

David Kestenbaum

God, that’s pretty.

Ira Glass

And at the same time, it totally looks like he’s this sorcerer who enchanted this inanimate object into obeying him.

David Kestenbaum

That is so beautiful, actually, when you see the thread.

[…]

Ira Glass

He then takes the hoop and spins it around the ball in various ways, which makes it look like there can’t possibly be a thread there. But of course, we can see the thread.

David Kestenbaum

Can I say that’s crazy? That’s so convincing. Your brain really cannot sort that out.

Teller

Your brain cannot sort this out. It’s visual double-talk. It’s amazing. I’m sitting here and I’m doing it, and it’s still fooling my brain.

I felt like this provided some reaffirmation about inviting people to witness and participate in the creative process. If even the guy who knows exactly how it is done is fascinated, how much greater still is the enjoyment of the people who are allowed to witness the secret?

The secret isn’t just the technical execution of the trick. It is understanding what makes your mode of creative expression work. It is the commitment to not settling. It is acknowledging that conflict is part of productive partnerships.

I have written before about how often we just assume a great idea or skilled execution springs fully formed from the brain of geniuses whose abilities we can’t match. The truth is pretty much every creative work or idea is the either directly or indirectly the culmination of previous efforts.

As I listened to the program, I also realized that it isn’t just enough to literally or figuratively give a back stage tour in an effort to provide insight into the process. Backstage tours can be illuminating and intriguing for those who have never been, but they also tend to present a superficial perspective into what really goes on.

It is one thing to say people work together to develop elements of a performance. When you talk about the challenges Teller faced in developing a trick, how he sought to resolve them and how sometimes the solutions were perceived as worse, it provides much deeper dimension to the concept of working together to develop something.

How to do that effectively is called good storytelling. Sometimes you need someone else to help you do it. Could Penn and Teller have told that story in 20 minutes or was This American Life best suited to the task?

Here is a video of the trick by the way. You may actually enjoy it more if you listen to how it came together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZDoXUWGhtQ

Hoping To Not Just Change The Name, But The Smell Of The Rose As Well

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In the last couple weeks two arts service organizations have taken the arguably long overdue step toward establishing greater parity among their members.

Last week at the Arts Midwest Conference, Ohio Arts Presenters Network (OAPN) president Robert Baird announced that the organization would be changing its name to Ohio Arts Professionals Network. While the acronym remains the same, the change was effected to acknowledge that agents, artists and other professionals were members of the organization.

Today, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) made a similar announcement that going forward they would be the Association of Performing Arts Professionals.

This isn’t the first time APAP has changed its name to reflect the composition of its membership. It started in 1957 as Association of College and University Concert Managers (ACUCM). In 1973 it changed to Association of College, University and Community Arts Administrators (ACUCAA) and became Association of Performing Arts Presenters in 1988 to acknowledge the membership wasn’t primarily based in higher education any longer. (Though I think ACUCAA, pronounced ah-koo-kah, was a lot more fun to say than APAP)

More than just superficially changing the name, APAP committed to a new program to help artists become members,

In addition to the updated name, this year the organization has introduced a pilot initiative called Artist Access, a one-year introductory membership program allowing qualified individual professional artists who have never been an organizational member of APAP, and who have never attended APAP as a full registrant, to become an APAP member and attend its annual members conference at reduced rates. More information is found at artistaccess.apap365.org.

Certainly, there is more work to be done to help everyone feel like an equal member of the respective organizations. (As with my cable company’s special pricing, I wonder where are the discount and benefits for long term loyal artists who have felt marginalized.) The format of the artist/agent/presenter interactions at the conferences often leave all involved feeling uncomfortable.

There have been efforts to change this situation. Over a decade ago, the Western Arts Alliance started experimenting with the physical layout of their conference, seeking to change the power dynamic.  Along with the name change, last week OAPN expressed their commitment to making attendance at their conference feel less confrontational by shifting the focus to a block booking format where artists, agents and presenting organizations sit down and try to set up beneficial routing arrangements that save the presenters money and get the artists working.

It will be interesting to see how these efforts develop and what new initiatives emerge to address concerns about the state of this corner of the creative and culture industry.

Insight Into Creating Public Art Works

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Last week Americans for the Arts had a blog salon covering lessons learned from public art projects. As a person who is always interested in the process people went through to execute their project, I read many of the entries with great interest.

Two stood out for me. The first was Jessica Witte’s discussion of how she got people involved with the creation of an intricate 400 foot long seed drawing near the St. Louis Arch. She gave examples of how previous works lead to the project and then how she executed the project.

I appreciated that she mentioned the different considerations that went into the project. Things like chalking out the design the night before are pretty obvious but she also discusses how she made sure there was water, picnic tables and food trucks available to encourage people to linger and explore.

She also reached out to non-profits whose mission aligned with the project early in the planning stage which she noted will constitute a network of advisors and assistance for future projects.

She hired Art Ambassadors to help her welcome people, explain the project and encourage them to join in. Part of this effort also involved crowdsourcing the documentation of the project.

Throughout, she reflects on how she would improve the project for the next time.  I appreciated all the detail as a resource of things to consider if doing a similar type project.

 

The other entry I liked was Daily Tour les jours’ post about how they prototyped the Musical Shadows installation in Mesa, AZ. I may have posted on the project before, but I can’t find the entry. Here is a video of the final result:

Again, for me learning about the process was interesting. I would never have imagined that an early stage involved placing post it notes on the ground of a concrete plaza in order to get some initial feedback about the concept from people.

There is a short video of them using a piece of paper on the end of a cordless drill to help make a shadow over their sensors. That apparently helped them determine “the spacing of the sensors would have a large impact on the interaction, and forced us to begin considering different sensor layouts”.

Then there was field testing of various types including getting feedback from people about what sounds worked best. In total, they list eight different prototypes before delivery.

This entry made me appreciate just how much work goes into projects like this. Embedded in that are lessons about failure and revision that are valuable to remember.

I hope you will explore the entries a bit more and even take a look at the whole salon since there is likely something in there that will impress you in ways that didn’t strike me.

Being Smart About Lawyer-Board Members

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Non-Profit Business Advisor recently published a piece to make non-profit organizations aware of the potential problems related to having a lawyer serve on the board. Back in 2016 I provided similar information on ArtsHacker.  I wanted to revisit the topic due to how easy it is for both the lawyer/board member and the rest of the organization to misunderstand the role the lawyer is fulfilling

The general aim of both pieces was to emphasize the need to distinguish the context in which advice and comments are being made.

Some of the questions both raise are:

When the lawyer board member makes a comment, is it a legal opinion or personal opinion? Are people according the member’s personal opinion more deference due to their profession?

When they provide their professional opinion, could it be clouded by the fact they earlier advocated or voted for a related course of action?

Is a conversation covered by attorney-client privilege?

Loss of Attorney-Client Privilege. Are you communications with the rest of the board protected by the attorney-client privilege? If it’s clear that the communications are to be attorney-client communications, they should be protected by the privilege. However, such protection may be lost if it’s not clear that you are communicating only as a lawyer or if the communication is recorded in minutes to which other persons have access.

If a lawyer represents a statement as professional advice, do they actually have the specialized knowledge and experience to offer that advice?

Actually, as I notice the strong similarities between my ArtsHacker post and the recent Non-Profit Business Advisor article, I realize that both were drawn from lawyers at the same law firm so either of the links here represent a good resource for exploring the nuances of this topic more carefully.

When Kissing Feels As Safe As Being Stabbed

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From the “why hasn’t this existed before” file is an article about staging intimacy with the same care employed with fight choreography.

The fact I came across this mention on economist Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog rather than a performing arts industry aligned publication somewhat compounded my curiosity about the lack of conversation the topic.

The article in the Louisville Eccentric Observer discusses the need for clear rules when employing any type of intimacy onstage. Whether it is a kiss, nudity, simulated consensual intercourse or staging emotionally and physically intense depictions of sexual violence, abuse and unwelcomed physical contact, performers shouldn’t be left on their own to negotiate the interaction.

Those interviewed discuss the need to have someone act as third party providing an element of control and clarity for each situation. In some cases, they take a page from fight choreography practice and place the recipient of an action in control. (For those who aren’t familiar, in situations where a person is grappled, thrown, choked, pulled around by their hair, the person being attacked rather than the attacker is generally in control.)

Even if you could be guaranteed that everyone would be well behaved and well intention and no one would take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the way a show is staged to take liberties for their own gratification, being asked to engage in an unfamiliar action with an unfamiliar person is difficult for people.

Having someone who works toward assuring a environment of safety and comfort for all parties when it comes to intimate acts just as they do with stage combat seems like it should have been a standard practice for years. Reading the article I wouldn’t doubt that many groups may already approach these interactions with the same care they would have approached fight choreography and never thought they were doing anything special.

I do want to suggest a different term for the role be created. I have a sense that being asked to work with the “Intimacy Director” might make people as uncomfortable as being told to just improvise the scene because the director didn’t have any ideas about how it should be staged.

The article suggests that while every theater company may not have the means to hire an intimacy director, they can use existing guidelines to make things safer and more comfortable.

Among those guidelines and suggestions are the following:

They are practitioners who use concrete guidelines and techniques, such as the “four pillars” of intimacy direction, according to Alicia Rodis, a member of Intimacy Directors International.

Consent: Get the performers’ permission — including concrete boundaries and out of bounds body parts, and do it before you start.

Communication: Keep talking throughout the process. What’s working, what’s not, who’s touching who and how and do they feel safe.

Choreography: Performers wouldn’t spontaneously add an extra pirouette to a dance number or an extra kick to a fight scene. Don’t add an ass grab or extra kissing.

Context: Just because you kiss someone in one scene doesn’t mean you can kiss them in another scene without communicating about adjusting the choreography and seeking consent to do so. Just because someone is topless with you on stage, it doesn’t mean they won’t mind being topless around you offstage, or in another scene onstage.

A Manufactured Rival Might Be Better For You Than An Actual Rival

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I am taking some time off to spend with family so I am plumbing into the archives again for a bit.

A few years back, I wrote about a company that didn’t feel they had enough competitors to force them to be innovative so they invented one.

Nothing consolidates a team and brushes away internal squabbles like the threat of a common enemy. Because ePrize’s next largest competitor is too small to raise their blood temperature, the company created Slither Corp.

By asking its employees what they think their counterpart at Slither would do differently, Linker says ePrize “creates a fun, safe opening for continual discussion about what the company could do better.”

Ask yourself these three questions to see if a threat can unblock your business’ innovations.

Who or what is our worst enemy?
What is our enemy doing that we can do better?
Can we create an enemy to spark new ideas?

Since most arts organizations probably feel they have no lack of competition, I had suggested using a fictitious enemy to remove some of the emotional associations which might get in the way of objectively addressing issues the organization may face.

It can be difficult to get motivated to do better if you perceive that the other organizations in town get all the grants, have the more affluent donors, get more recognition, get the benefit of the doubt when they make missteps, etc.  It is easy to make excuses why you will never succeed if you are focused on how great other people are rather than your own successes and capabilities.

The suggestion I made back then is worth considering.  Essentially, competing against the pretend rival you inflate in your mind might be more constructive than competing against the actual rival who you have inflated in your mind.

By creating an imaginary enemy, you can concentrate on responding to events without the emotional subtext lurking beneath the conversations. Yes, there are plenty of groups out there eating your lunch, but your biggest problem is The House of Extraordinary Matinee idols. (THEM) Your fictional enemy, THEM, noting the trend of sold out shows has decided to program seasons of 100% musicals. How do you position your next season in relation to this imagined challenge?

The fictional enemy doesn’t have to be a proxy for an actual rival in the community, it just has to present a credible challenge to your organization in order to spur innovation and creative thinking.

Enough With Problems This Week. One Suggested Solution

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Back in June, The Stage had an article about the dire need for changes in the theatre industry in the UK. The article summarized a report that mentioned a lot of familiar issues: low pay, overwork, dependence on unpaid interns, lack of staff from low income and minority backgrounds, and closed recruitment practices. I recently finished reading the report which expounds upon these issues.

However, since I have spent the week talking about inequities in the arts, I didn’t want to continue the week highlighting more problems. Instead, I wanted offer some encouragement and solution to some of these issues by drawing attention to a piece written by Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director of the California Symphony.

If you are an ArtsHacker reader, you might remember Aubrey was cited as one of the Most Creative People In Arts Administration for her leadership of the California Symphony.

Back in May, Aubrey wrote about how the symphony decided to invest in talent development for the staff.  She acknowledges it isn’t necessarily an inexpensive undertaking and offers tips to leverage conference and training opportunities to their fullest.  Part of that process seems to include the mandate that as a staff member, your purpose in going is to learn and when you return you need to share that information as well as a plan of action for implementation.

What’s not acceptable at the California Symphony is to attend a conference/seminar/workshop and feel inspired and warm and fuzzy for about a week. I want action from the investment, so employees are required to report back at a future staff meeting what they learned, their key takeaways, and what they plan to implement in their work here based on all that….

1. This holds everyone accountable, so their performance can be evaluated against the goals and ideas they set for themselves.
2. They’ve just passed on the inspiration, ideas, and takeaways from conference in a personal way to the rest of the staff. #win

Aubrey attributes their growth in revenue over the last few years to the benefits of investing in talent development.

She suggests new hire boot camps for everyone.  The California Symphony uses this orient people to their audience development plan and intends to expand it to a messaging overview.

(i.e. brand personality, how we talk about ourselves, key words or messages to use in our public communications…because every single role is public-facing to some degree, not just the marketing personnel).

She also talks about providing staff with a professional development stipend they can use at their discretion and advocates for mentoring.

What she proposes won’t solve all the problems outlined in report featured in The Stage, but these steps can significantly change the general tenor of the work environment in a positive direction.

Consider: Underserved Reflects Funding, Not Number Of Orgs Serving Community

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Hat tip to Artsjournal for linking to an American Theatre article about the inequities in arts funding citing a Helicon Collaborative study which found “..58 percent of arts funding goes to 2 percent of big-budget arts organizations.”

Those of us who have worked for smaller arts organizations are probably familiar with the sting of seeing the dominant large arts organizations in the community consistently garner a large portion of funding.  The opening of the American Theatre piece relates a particularly sharp sting adding insult to injury for an organization which saw another group get funding to present the programming they specialized in.

….St. Paul’s much bigger Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which received $86,039 to present Notes From Asia, “a series of performances, films, conversations, and an exhibit that will highlight arts and culture of Eastern Asian communities for East Asian, Asian American, and broader audiences.”

Reyes felt this as a blow, since that description isn’t far off from the kind of programming Mu does. Why give the grant to a larger, non-culturally specific theatre? Said Reyes, “There are these assumptions that they can do this culturally specific programming because they’re the Ordway, and we somehow don’t have that capacity to work with a community that we have been working with for 25 years.”

The statistics cited from the study that were most unexpected were the large number of organizations serving communities of color:

More specifically, the study found that organizations focused on communities of color make up 25 percent of all arts nonprofits but receive just 4 percent of all foundation giving.

The study notes that these funding disparities are out of sync with a nation in which 37 percent of the population are people of color and 50 percent are low-income.

I think the common idea of many conversations is that there are no organizations doing work that resonates with communities of color so it falls upon more mainstream arts orgs to provide the programming.

That 25% is out of 41,000 organizations by the way. That is a lot more than I would have guessed. I would suspect that they don’t have large budgets or capacity, but that doesn’t disqualify them for support.

In fact, wonder if the term “underserved community” isn’t more a reflection of funding directed to a community than number of extant entities providing services.

As I was reading about these particular stats, I remembered Ronia Holmes’ post “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why“, that I wrote about last Fall.

Disinvested communities are not devoid of arts and culture. In America particularly, communities who historically have been excluded from the table have responded by building their own tables, using whatever resources could be scraped together. Marginalized communities have established organizations that don’t treat them or their cultural output as deviations from the norm to be celebrated for diversity, but as fundamental components of society. The organizations they created, and continue to create, are replete with artists, leaders, decision-makers, and workers who look like and are part of the community they serve, who share similar lived experiences, and have a deep understanding of what programming will truly resonate.

I encourage you to read Holmes’ full piece because I think she is quite incisive on the matter- critical of current practice, but sympathetic about what motivates that practice.

When I originally read Holmes’ essay, I didn’t imagine that there were as many organizations out there as the Helicon Collaborative says there are. My first impulse is to advocate for greater funding to help them gain greater visibility and potentially have greater impact in their communities.

However, I am also mindful of what Holmes wrote about larger established arts organizations making overtures to welcome disinvested communities:

“And they fail to hear this critical question: “Why should we abandon our own table for a small chair at yours?””

Enabling the underfunded 25% to achieve greater impact and visibility is all good, it just can’t come with expectations that they abandon or reconstitute the tables they have constructed for themselves.

I don’t necessarily want to see places like the Ordway lose funding. Except that it seems non-profit funding is often a zero sum game. I have heard people of color speak enthusiastically about the Ordway’s programming and partnering with their communities.

If you think about it though, if more mainstream arts and culture organizations are given funding to break down barriers with underserved communities that don’t frequent their programs, shouldn’t the organizations that have developed in those communities considered underserved be provided reciprocal funding to break down barriers with audiences that frequent mainstream arts and cultural organizations?

Unexpected Development In Student Debt

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There was a warning shot across the bows of university/conservatory arts training programs whose graduates have debt out of proportion with their earning potential in the Chicago Tribune last week. Harvard University is suspending graduate admissions for their theatre program for three years after receiving a failing grade from the Department of Education.

Simply put, the federal policy looks at the debts-to-earnings ratios of career-training programs (and, yes, the arts are a career) in an attempt to discern whether the programs provide students reasonable returns on their investment in tuition. The 2015 regulations hold that the average student’s debt from the program should not exceed 20 percent of their discretionary income or 8 percent of their total income. If that is not the case, then the program could lose access to federal student loans.

[…]

Which brings us back to Harvard and… the A.R.T. Institute, …. The Institute has been facing two big problems.

The first is that the median debt rate for students of the two-year program, which enrolls about 23 people a year, is a whopping $78,000 and the typical post-graduation income of those students is miserably low when compared with that debt: just $36,000 a year. If you’re trying to make it in New York City, or even in Boston or Chicago, $36K per annum sure does not allow a lot of cushion for debt repayment.

Such are the entry-level salaries in the arts, which long have been subsidized by those who work therein, especially those in the kinds of jobs you can expect straight out of graduate school.

Tribune reporter Chris Jones goes on to suggest that arts training programs should be held to similar standards as trade schools rather than claiming an exception,

“…based on the mostly spurious argument that students are pursuing their creative dreams, know the cruel realities of the profession and thus have some awareness of the financial risks and the inequality of its rewards — some people, obviously, make a whole lot.

In many cases, these students are going into debt to acquire credentials and, yet more importantly, a network to aid them in a profession that, to its detriment, is growing ever-more nepotistic and lazily elitist, especially when it comes to its dominance by a few well-known training programs.”

That last sentence about the industry being partially to blame for using the imprimatur of a brand name as a shortcut for hiring decisions evokes the recent conversations about arts careers only being accessible to people with the means to take on debt and support themselves during unpaid internships.

Well, actually Jones goes on to explicitly talk about that, no extrapolation of concepts required.

But who wants the arts dominated by debt-free elites?

[…]

…If these programs cannot be made more affordable and accessible without the promotion of onerous indebtedness, then more attention must be paid by the culture industry to those programs that can.

Many fine public universities offer excellent arts education, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The issue that needs fixing is whether such programs can open an equivalent number of doors.

The ultimate question of course is, will people start to make the effort to seek out talent elsewhere or will the status quo remain?  I don’t really want to wish complications upon anyone, but I wonder if the issues Harvard faced might crop up with other schools and that will provide greater incentive and necessity for arts and media companies to look elsewhere when hiring.

Good Basic Advice At Any Career Stage

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Juilliard Professor Benjamin Sosland shared some advice he gives his students as they think about developing their careers. Some of the advice is pretty common across most career advice articles, but there were a number of suggestions I hadn’t seen very often and wanted to share.

(I would share a fair bit more but MusicalAmerica seems to take pains to inhibit easily excerpting from articles on their site.)

• Are you meeting people who can offer guidance and a helping hand? (Networking is not a dirty word. Really)

[..]

• Do you maintain a mailing list and is your website and use of social media reaching the audience you hope to attract?
• Is there a self-generated artistic project that you have always dreamed of realizing?
• Have you gained the necessary financial literacy to plan and advocate for such a project? (A good budget is based on research, not wishful thinking.)
• Do you write thank you notes to anyone and everyone who ever offers even the slightest bit of assistance? (Not to get all Emily Post or anything but, wow, is this ever a powerful tool.)
• Have you developed a vocabulary to be a convincing advocate for your art? (Here is a good exercise. Defend this sentence: The arts are important.)
• Do you have role models whose careers you admire and do you know the story of their journey? Case studies on successful people are fascinating. (Hint: there is no such ting as a self-made man or woman.)

I don’t believe I have mentioned the self-generated artistic project too much here on the blog, but I bring the topic up with students with a fair bit of frequency. I just had such a conversation about two weeks ago.  Sosland’s follow up point about financial literacy to plan and advocate for the project is one of my motivations for such conversations. Of course, I often talk about the need to develop these skills regardless of the method.

Some of these suggestions are good regardless of the stage you are in your career. As much as I write on the topic, I don’t feel I am as adept as I should be when it comes to speaking extemporaneously as an advocate for the arts.

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you will know I heartily support that last suggestion about examining the career journeys of people you admire. I am a big proponent of breaking the illusion that success and talent are exclusive blessings from the heavens rather than the result of a long term (often unexamined) process and effort.

Finally, the thank you note suggestion I could definitely do a much better job at. Despite my mother inculcating the practice in my siblings and myself, my sisters are much better at the follow through than am I.

Cycling With Your Board’s Soul

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I don’t think I could have timed it any better…

Last week, Anne Midgette wrote a piece in the Washington Post about the various and confusing roles boards of directors play in the performing arts.

What do boards do? It varies from one company to another. Some performing arts boards serve in a purely advisory function — voting on new hires, for example, sometimes only nominally rubber-stamping choices made by the artistic staff. Other boards, though, have fiduciary responsibility, providing vital financial support to keep the doors open.

[…]

Yet there’s an odd disconnect between the size and financial heft of performing-arts boards and their actual function. Some board members would laugh at the idea that they exercise considerable influence on an organization; some, indeed, resent being viewed as “walking checkbooks,” with the implication that they should pony up and shut up. Although board members often bring considerable business expertise to the table, the attitude often prevails that they don’t really understand art and shouldn’t sully it with mundane business considerations. This leads to a Catch-22, whereby board members are branded as Philistines by harping on issues such as financial viability and ticket sales, but are kept at arms’ length from creative mandates — or from exercising oversight in a meaningful way.

Where the good timing comes in relates to a piece that I tossed in the hopper at ArtsHacker.com that ended up published today, the same day I saw Midgette’s article. (h/t Artsjournal.com).

The ArtsHacker post calls attention a fascinating article from the Non-Profit Quarterly about the cyclical stages a board will go through. I have rarely, if ever, seen the topic discussed. This is regrettable because it brings clarity to a topic that is replete with stereotypes, assumptions and misunderstandings.

According to the article boards tend to go from deferring to the executive staff to becoming more involved in the wake of a crisis to really being engaged with the organization to ceding authority to the executive staff and then becoming more engaged again after a crisis.

Many of the issues Midgette mentions pop up at different points in the cycle. At some points the board sees their role as bringing expertise to the organization. At a different point, the board is mostly about prestige and the members only start thinking about the challenges facing the organization about 30 minutes before the meeting.

At their best, the board is engaged and focused on good governance, working in active partnership with the staff and holding them to account for decisions. At worst, they are relatively disengaged and unfocused on the concerns of the organization.

By and large, I don’t know staffs or boards of directors of non-profits are really aware that this cycle of changing dynamics exists. Those in a bad situation grouse reinforcing established stereotypes and those in a good situation count their blessings and pray it continues until they retire or cycle off the board.  There is no sense that one can actually exert influence over the situation.

By understanding the characteristics of each stage, you can better identify where your organization’s relationship with its board is. Knowing that, you can work on moving things toward a more productive stage or work to prevent a good environment from souring.

Shared Leadership Provides Opportunity To Manage Up

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Last month Non Profit Quarterly suggested that organizations undergoing executive leadership transition consider the shared leadership model that many performing arts organizations employ.  They note that it can be valuable to have one person focus on artistic or programmatic issues freeing the executive director up to focus on developing organizational capacity and funding.

This week, Createquity tweeted about a study dealing with the same dynamic from the perspective of the employees on the organizational chart just below the executive leadership. These people can be torn between the conflicting demands of programming and economics represented by the two leaders and be unclear where their duty and loyalty should reside.

People in the performing arts can already attest to feeling squeezed by situations like this. What was interesting to me though was that the authors of the study suggested the ambiguity of the situation can provide those in the tier below the executives with the ability to essentially “manage up” and serve as arbiter between the two leaders.

The paper referenced in the article was based on research conducted in the Dutch movie industry and focuses on the role of the 1st Assistant Director (1st AD) who is responsible to both the Director and Producer. They note that while the director is more powerful in Italy and the producer more powerful in Hollywood and more balanced in the Netherlands, the organizational chart is essentially the same in all countries. (my emphasis)

However, role conflict and role ambiguity also provide 1st ADs with opportunities to define their role expansively. By doing so, 1st ADs can increase their ability to act as a buffer between the dual leaders. Moreover, the more the director and producer employ a narrow definition of their respective roles, the more space they leave for the 1st AD, and the more likely it is that positive effects ensue from the 1st AD facilitating collaboration between the dual leaders, and bridging the artistic and commercial sides of the organization.

Our study has a number of practical implications, the first of which is to suggest that organizations could profit from designing structures in such a way that it leaves space for lower-level organizational members, who can mediate between dual or multiple leaders by expanding their role, while taking into account how leaders can directly and indirectly facilitate such behavior. Second, because employees, also in non-project-based organizations, tend to have increasingly less stable, defined and demarcated roles, they have to be able to, or learn how to, proactively define their own roles. Finally, managers need to learn how to accommodate the positive aspects of role expansion while at the same time mitigating its potentially negative effects on organizational stability, especially as a result of discontent by those organizational members whose roles are being invaded.

Given that so many arts organizations are already operating under this structure, this seemed like valuable advice for both employees to identify how they can expand their role within their organizations and for the leaders to create an environment that allows employees to carve out a little more space for themselves.

No Tall Tales To Tell

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You wouldn’t think fishermen needed help telling a story, but according to Non-Profit Quarterly, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is looking for just that.

They are getting help from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod in securing the services of a digital storyteller to serve as part time artist-in-residence for a year. (Deadline to submit is June 30)

According to the Non-Profit Quarterly,

This is a unique opportunity for an enterprising photojournalist/videographer seeking to tell the story of a normally hard-to-reach profession. The Fishermen’s Alliance goal for the artist-in-residence is to give the general public a better understanding of organization’s value to Cape Cod.

Presently, the Fishermen’s Alliance YouTube channel has 25 subscribers. The 20 or so videos have a modest number of views. Their tagline is, “Small Boats. Big Ideas.” That message is not apparent in their existing videos. However, their plan to engage an artist-in-residence is certainly a big idea. One would not expect this kind of initiative to be launched by a relatively small-membership organization of commercial fishermen. Any nonprofit would do well to watch what the Fishermen’s Alliance artist-in-residence begins to produce online and take careful notes.

[…]

…Perhaps the biggest challenge for any nonprofit is strategic: How to create content that people want to consume, and how to create engaging videos that get shared. The Fishermen’s Alliance artist-in-residence will need a solid understanding of metrics and how they point the way for continual improvement. Yes, there is the still photography part of the job, but the cornerstone of any nonprofit’s content marketing efforts today needs to be video. From 360-degree videos (for the ambitious) to Facebook Live, all nonprofits need to respond to their audience’s shorter attention span by making content interactive and visual.

This can be valuable advice for non-profit organizations as something they need to strive for. But for arts organizations, the story may illuminate new opportunities. Can your organization or artists with whom you work offer similar services to non-profits and businesses in your community to help them attain similar goals.

 

Post title a riff on Love and Rockets’ “No New Tale To Tell”

The Authentic Experience of 12 People Touring A Room Designed For One Person

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I visited Fallingwater this weekend. Believe it or not, my impetus for being there wasn’t due to the 150th anniversary Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, but rather because for the last 6-7 years, I have been obsessed by the idea of visiting the Nationality Rooms at University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. Visiting Fallingwater actually came in second as a “well since I will be in the area…” consideration.

First of all, let me just say visiting the Cathedral of Learning is absolutely worth it. The idea of inviting different countries to set up classrooms to reflect a learning environment in their nation makes a positive statement about the people of the United States in these contentious times. The newest rooms in development are Finland and Iran. The newer rooms on the 3rd floor are open for regular class use (with some stern warnings about keeping them clean) which would make for an interesting learning experience.

As for Fallingwater, it will come as no surprise that visiting was pretty great. It is one of the most highly esteemed works of architecture in the country.  One of the things I was interested to learn was that when the original owner’s son bequeathed the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the two conditions he set for opening the house to the public was that there not be any velvet ropes, nor could there be any scripted tours.

If you have toured the house, you know to be grateful for the first condition. The interior is intentionally cramped based on Wright’s desire to force people to go outdoors.

Assuming the prohibition against scripted tours eliminates recorded guides, humans are guaranteed employment.  Given the cramped quarters and original furnishings, you probably want humans keeping an eye on things.  I assume the Conservancy does monitor the quality of the tour narration and has a list of things to cover.

Something I didn’t appreciate until later was that the tour guides were scrupulous about mentioning what furniture had been removed from each room in order to accommodate tours.  I also visited the Frick Pittsburgh which had a room depicting furnishings of a historical period. Next to the portal was a big sign next saying how controversial period rooms are because they don’t accurately reflect how the inhabitants really lived.  Learning this, I saw a number of the points made about the authenticity of certain features (or lack thereof) at Fallingwater with a new perspective.

As I have mentioned recently, decisions about how to depict, represent, discuss, etc., artistic works, cultural practices and even daily lives of others are never clear cut and easy. I am sure that the classrooms in the Cathedral of Learning don’t accurately reflect classrooms in the countries they purport to represent. But given the time invested in creating them, I don’t doubt that they accurately reflect an important essence of those individual countries.

I think the 24 hour news cycle and prevalence of social media is underscoring the importance of fully considering the impact of decisions and what our potential response might be.  Artist training programs may want to consider a renewed emphasis on philosophy and rhetoric as artists are increasingly called upon to defend their decisions without contributing to controversy.

Fallingwater

Cultivate Paranoia Or A Constructive Environment?

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Over the years I have written about studies which have found that the younger generation starting careers in non-profit organizations weren’t content to put in long hours and pay their dues. There is a desire for work-life balance and ability to advance in the organization relatively quickly.  The general caution to non-profits has been that if workers don’t feel that their labor is allowing them to make a difference, they may look elsewhere.

Yesterday, Non-Profit Quarterly suggested there might be another facet to the way that idealism manifests –leaking/whistleblowing.  The evidence of this trend is mostly anecdotal, but it bears considering (if only because you shouldn’t be doing anything shady in the first place).

Harris writes that workers and potential workers are increasingly clear that they must “be their own brand.” So, if the ethical choices of an institution do not align with that of a millennial who is confident about his or her own brand, including their moral reasoning, and if the social stakes are high enough, the millennial may go with his or her own commitments even if that institution is the federal government.

While there have been a number of instances of notable mismanagement, malfeasance, and outright fraud in the non-profit sector, there are plenty of less serious issues employees might bring to light.

Certainly, employees need to exercise good judgment and maturity so as not to mischaracterize the difficult work that non-profits do as illegal exploitation. However, there is a thin line between asking people to work hard for low pay and asking people to work hard and pressuring them not to claim overtime or comp time.

While the NPQ article suggests an increased threat of whistleblowing will keep employers honest, it might be more productive to view changing expectations as an impetus to effect change toward a more constructive work environment rather suspiciously eyeing new worker for signs of betrayal.

Myths And Truths About Your Brain On Music

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Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education.  The study was conducted in Germany so the author the article suggests that perhaps neurologists in the US do a better job of communicating the truth about music education better than their German counterparts, but I suspect that isn’t the case.

In the study, both music teachers and students were roughly equally adept (or bad) at separating myth from truth.

“Teachers and students correctly rejected 60 and 59 percent of the seven neuromyths,” the researchers report. Proven statements were correctly seen as true by 76 percent of music teachers and 78 percent of students.

That means there were a whole lot of wrong answers…

“The three most-trusted neuromyths included neuroscientific terminology, such as ‘brain hemisphere’ or ‘cognitive abilities,'” the researchers note. This suggests music teachers, like the rest of us, can be fooled into thinking an assertion is true if it is stated using neuro-jargon.

The researchers warn that this tendency may lead teachers to assign their pupils worthless or counterproductive homework. For example, 44 percent of teachers, and nearly 40.1 percent of aspiring instructors, believed this unproven statement: “The ability to improvise on the piano is controlled by the right hemisphere; special exercises can enhance the performance of the hemisphere.” In fact, such “exercises” would be a waste of time.

You can read the full study on the Frontiers in Psychology website.

The following chart from the study shows which of the myths and which of the proven statements the study participants correctly identified.  As you can see in the myths category, among some of the biggest misapprehensions were associated with music improving calculus ability; relationship between dominant hand and speech and music processing; and the impact of music education cognitive ability.

Among the substantiated theses, answers started to get a little iffy on the subject of the conditions which contributed to the positive influence of passive listening.

As the article suggests, the language used in some of these statements can be a little difficult to unravel and may influence participants’ perceptions. (At least in English, I am not sure if German terminology is clearer.) Questions 7M and 8S deal with similar concepts and probably appeared in sequence with each other.

Given that the survey was administered to music teachers and educators in training, I am sure they struggled with 1M that suggests musicians are smarter than everyone else. The fact that 75-80% answered it correctly can probably be attributed to a suspicion it was a trick question.

Being aware of what claims of benefits of arts and culture participation have been substantiated and which haven’t can be important for advocacy efforts. You don’t want to get caught citing debunked data.

Back in December, I called attention to Createquity project to survey all the available studies and evaluate the strength of the findings: Everything We Know About Whether and How the Arts Improve Lives. That page is a good place to start if you want to get a sense of whether the claims you are making are borne out by research and how strong the results are.

Holding A Note, Six Weeks At A Time

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I recently became aware of the Young Professionals’ Choral Collective out of Cincinnati and was impressed at how they structured themselves to facilitate involvement by a younger demographic.

They position their identity in the following way:

Do you love to sing? Did you sing in high school/college/church and miss the music-making, the friendships, the fun and the community of a choir? Do you want to get more involved in Cincinnati arts scene? Do you want to find new friends to go with you to all the new bars and restaurants in OTR & Downtown Cincinnati? Do you want to sing in a choir but can’t commit to a full-year weekly schedule? Then check us out!

What impressed me most was that they structure participation in 6 week cycles. You only need to commit yourself for that period of time. Given that so many surveys about arts participation mention lack of time as an impediment to participation, I thought this was a smart way to respond to this challenge.

Currently they claim over 850 members. There are no auditions for their self-produced concerts nor do they place limits on how many people can participate in each cycle. Presumably, they work with whomever they have.

Of course, since they have positioned themselves as a place where people with an avid interest in choral performance can continue to practice their passion, new members are likely to have some degree of experience and coaching.

Socialization is definitely a primary ingredient in their organizational model. In a TEDx talk about the group, Artistic Director KellyAnn Nelson repeatedly jokes about the role of alcohol in their activities. They rehearse in bars and go to a different restaurant after every rehearsal as a way of publicly supporting area businesses.

Given how boisterous she claims they are at these dinners, I imagine it also provides some publicity for the group’s concerts and acts as recruitment for new members.  They encourage members (and prospective members) who aren’t able to participate in a cycle of rehearsals to stop by, hang out and eat with the group when they can make it.

The ease of joining, stopping and rejoining, probably relieves people of internal distress over conflicting obligations and makes them more apt to join in the first place.

It may also create a sense of membership in people who only participated in one cycle five years ago. The ability to rejoin without much guilt may provide a sense of continuity with the organization that makes them more apt to evangelize about the group even if they never sing with them again.

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I often use the example of people who sing in a church choir not seeing themselves on a continuum with Aretha Franklin. I am not sure if singing in a civic choir would necessarily solve that issue, but I would see a small victory if a person considered themselves a singer because they continued to identify as a member of a group five years after participating.

Judging Yourself As You Judge Others

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Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will love you for helping them out, especially during the heaviest period in their granting cycle.

Perhaps the biggest benefit for you will be identifying those areas people like yourself do well or fall short in making the case for their programs.  You can get advice about how to write an effective proposal on a monthly basis, but until you apply a critical eye to a proposal from outside disciplines, geography and demographic attributes with which you are familiar, you aren’t likely to appreciate all the potential pitfalls.

I recently participated in a panel for my state arts council for a program my organization wasn’t eligible to participate in.

There were a number of times people referenced discipline specific shorthand or neighborhoods/towns they were doing outreach in. I suspected that this information would be more compelling if I better understood the relevance.

Recognizing that I was probably making the same mistake of assuming reviewers would be excited by similar discussions of accomplishments for which they had no frame of reference, I started to pull out old grant proposals and found a number of places that could probably use additional information about why it was important that certain groups were involved or being represented in our programs.

During the panel review process I made additional notes as panelists would comment about things they wished they had seen more detail about. In other cases, it was observed too much time was spent talking about other organizational activities rather than focusing on the proposed project.

Now I will grant you, often space limitations imposed by the application form makes it difficult to provide the detail that will really allow your project to shine. It is important to make a case with the granting organization that 3-4 more lines of text would make all the difference.  Volunteering to serve on a grant panel can provide you with the opportunity to make that case in person.

I also want to acknowledge that when you are faced with a tall pile of proposals to review, the last thing you want to do is engage in prolonged introspection of the strengths and weaknesses of your own submissions. But it can be worthwhile to at least take the time to make duplicates of notes that represent potential areas of concern in your work for later review.

Then, of course, there is benefit in seeing what other people are doing. What novel ideas and approaches are out there? How are others executing their programs? How are they defining and measuring success? What strategies are they employing to deal with challenges?

One really, really general piece of advice I will give based on what I have seen is to make sure your website has links to your social media accounts. This is website and social media 101, but I was surprised at how many people mention they promote their events on social media, but don’t have links on their websites. Web searches will turn the social media accounts up, but there was often no easy way for someone who discovered an organization through their website to stay connected through social media.  (Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a web search turned some of them up, I have no idea if I found the full range of online presence.)

 

Deity or Destitute

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In the comment section of yesterday’s post, Carter Gillies warned about succumbing to the temptations of survivorship bias and only holding up a few successful cases as examples to emulate.

The tales of college dropouts that became millionaires as an argument against education, for example.

On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder if there is a way to tell a compelling story about being an artist that doesn’t involve angst and disaster.

We hear stories about successful celebrities who are secretly plagued by depression and self-doubt.

There is idealization of the starving artist that suffers at the edge of poverty, but occupies the moral high ground because they never sold out and became commercially successful.

Zen Pencils, one of my favorite sites for illustrating inspirational ideas, featured the words of self-taught pianist James Rhodes. There was a link encouraging people to read the whole piece from The Guardian on which the cartoon was based.

Amid the inspiration thoughts was Rhodes’ confession that he didn’t approach the cultivation of his skills in the most constructive way:

I didn’t play the piano for 10 years…. And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure…

While I appreciate that the inspirational idealism of the piece was leavened by a recognition of reality, this hardly recommends the life of an artist.

As I was riding to work recently I heard an interview with someone who talked about the value of experience of live performance over recorded performance in the context of something going wrong on stage.

I will admit that I have spoken about experiencing a performance live in these terms myself. When I heard this expressed on the radio, I wondered if we really should continue to use the opportunity for something to go wrong as a selling point for live performance. Can’t we find a more compelling rationale to convince potential audiences that they should invest time, money and energy in being present at a performance than the promise of seeing someone screw up?

People who work in the arts inevitably says how fulfilling their lives are despite the challenges. There is often a sentiment expressed along the lines of not being able to imagine working 9-5 behind a desk.

I understand all this. I can identify with it having lived it and spoken in these terms myself. I know sex, danger and suffering sell. But as people in a creative industry, isn’t there an interesting narrative that doesn’t involve incurring physical and psychic scars along the way?

Or won’t we allow ourselves to have a relatively mundane experience? Does our narrative have to involve suffering of some sort in order to be valid? A little bit of martyrdom to make us special for not having settled for a conventional life?

I will openly admit to participating in and perpetuating some of these narratives. I have only just started to think about how to craft a compelling narrative about the arts that doesn’t evoke the blessings of unnatural talent or noble suffering, so I don’t have any clear answers in that regard at this point.

Lemonade Stand? Cool Kids Sell Art In Their Frontyards

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A year ago on Quartz a list appeared by former Stanford dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, outlining what every 18 year old should know.

I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a post about how the arts, especially performing arts, provided experience in most of these areas. Among them were that an 18 year old should know how to: talk to strangers; manage his assignments, workload, and deadlines; handle interpersonal problems; cope with ups and downs, and must be able to take risks.

While, “contribute to the running of a house hold,” another on her list, may not appear to exactly fit into the performing arts, in her reasoning she says this teaches “respect the needs of others, or do their fair share for the good of the whole.” Those are skills you pick up when working as an ensemble.

As I was reading the article, I was envisioning kids in school, after school and summer arts camps/programs acquiring these skills since that is where arts experiences would likely teach these skills prior to someone turning 18.

So when I hit the eighth thing an 18 year old should know, “be able earn and manage money,” I realized that wasn’t something most arts programs would teach kids.

But if we are going to talk about the need for artists to manage and monitor their own careers,including finances, maybe elementary budgeting and accounting skills should be introduced to teen and even tween students.

Oh, but that is such a yucky, boring topic right? The kids want to have have fun making art, that will just scare them away.

I am not suggesting that you pull out your college accounting text. You can introduce cost and pricing in a fun way at an age appropriate level.

With younger kids, you start out saying – You made this painting or ceramic piece and now it is time to sell it. How much will you sell it for? How many do you think you can make in a week? How much could you make if you sell every thing at the end of the week?

This type of instruction hits on the cross-discipline approach schools are looking for these days. You can also get kids excited by the idea of how much money they might make.

Any kid can have a lemonade stand. Cool kids sell paintings, pottery and tickets to sidewalk performances!

Later you introduce the concept of material costs and time invested into the mix and take a more sophisticated approach to pricing. In certain situations maybe you have high school students participate in budgeting production costs for costuming and set building for performances. If they are involved in making the decisions required of a budget cap, all the better.

By connecting the idea that art has monetary value, you create a greater appreciation for art in students when they are young. It isn’t just something you do for fun and shouldn’t expect to be paid for.

While this runs counter to the idea that art should be created for its own sake, not with the goal of remuneration, the absence of this instruction hasn’t prevented people from claiming the arts should be self supporting.

Still, executed poorly the focus can be all about maximizing commercial viability over illustrating a connection between basic economic skills and art. Kids shouldn’t be given a message their work is bad simply because no one has bought it. And let’s not drag 14 year olds into the debate about doing something for exposure vs. being paid.

Given that not every person in an after school program or summer camp is going to enter an arts career, involving some basic economic considerations in art instruction when kids are young can shape attitudes and perception about the validity of arts and cultural endeavors over the long term.

Change Language, Change Yourself

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The Washington Post had a story about an internet company in Korea which started a policy three years ago where all employees would be addressed by an English name rather than their Korean names.

Actually, as the story points, out even being addressed by a name at all was strange. Generally in a Korean workplace, you are addressed by an honorific title rather than by name.

One popular Korean blog was more explicit on shirking honorifics in the workplace: “Dropping your pants and [urinating] in the person’s briefcase would be only a little ruder than calling him/her by his/her first name.”

But some companies are looking to eliminate some of this hierarchy. The best way to do that, it seems, is dictating that employees take English names. Using the actual name of your boss or co-workers feels impolite. But, hopefully, calling him or her an English nickname taps into a different cultural mind-set.

The goal of using English nicknames is to circumvent the hierarchical mindset that inhibits progress,

In the hierarchical structure, employees cannot follow or share their own ideas. Decision-making is usually stymied by going through many chains of hierarchy. And projects are not necessarily led by expertise but by who has the highest title.

“ ‘You should, you must follow my commands over your own thinking,’ ” Hong said. “It’s like they’re soldiers. They are not working together.”

This story reminded me of a similar one where a company in Japan instituted a policy where everyone was required to speak English in the workplace for much the same reason.

Soon after the switch he conducted a board meeting entirely in English, and each time a nervous executive in a navy-blue suit asked cautiously if he might explain something in Japanese, the answer was no: Say it in English, or don’t say it. The board meeting took twice as long as a normal one.

That was five years ago. Today, Mikitani says, the culture and even the dress code are showing all the signs of having been altered by the imposition of the English language. It makes the Whorfian idea, that your native language determines how the world looks to you and thus constrains your thinking, look tame.

[…]

At Rakuten the complicated management of respect levels fell away after the switch to English, says Mikitani, and good riddance to it. He had wanted to “break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society,” and he claims the anglophone policy jump-started that. “A new casual vibe permeates our office, with employees happily shunning the monotonous navy suit typical of the Japanese workplace,” he says; he speaks of the language policy “breathing new life into a moribund business culture.”

These examples provide a little bit more evidence that the language we use is powerful. Even unconscious use of dismissive or diminishing terms over a period of time can have consequential results. If you are lived in different regions of the United States, you know that there are different characteristics attributed to places based on verbal content from the gruff people in NYC, the stoic New Englanders, Midwest Nice and laid back Californians, to name a few. Some of it is superficial, but it also informs the general tenor of exchanges in these places.

In addition to reflecting on the language we use in our workplace and personal interactions, these articles made me wonder if there is anything about the language the arts and cultural community uses that can be beneficial to other segments of the population.

Let’s face it, the language of corporations and academia certainly makes its way into conversations and grant reports when statements are being made about policies, effectiveness and pursuing objectives. There should be room for some influence to flow the other way.

Big Ideas From Small Places

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Great ideas can be found and cultivated everywhere. That is the basic message of a blog post on the Center for Small Towns’ website.  They note that reporting on rural towns often seeks to reinforce an existing narrative rather than illuminating the facts. (On The Media did a great series about coverage of rural news this last Fall.)

Center for Small Towns calls attention to some pretty awesome ideas communities are doing that you may wish you had thought of first.

For instance, Lanesboro, MN created Poetry Parking Lots where they had people compose haiku about “the beauty of southeastern Minnesota, and of the strong community of Lanesboro.” They posted the haiku on light posts in parking lots.

 

They also made cast iron medallions which they placed around town “inviting residents and visitors to hunt for the various medallions as they walk about town.” This reminded me a lot of the manhole covers in Japan I wrote about a few years back. The art on the manhole covers serves the same purpose of emphasizing points of pride about the cities in which they are found.

In Fergus Falls, MN, an artist created a “Citizen Kit” to encourage civic engagement. The kits included,

“…a small red box complete with City Council meeting “punch cards,” citizen pledge cards to put in your wallet, and buttons. The citizen kits came complete with a spray painted gold hole punch, for local community leaders to use when they saw people attending city council meetings.”

Websites like Art of the Rural are also focused on stories like these where groups are employing innovative ideas in smaller places. As the title of the post suggests, good ideas pop up in all sorts of places, regardless of population. But I feel ideas like these can be especially effective at connecting with communities because they resonate so closely with the core identity of a place.

Does Your Experience Need Speed Bumps?

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Via Marginal Revolution blog, comes a story about a tourist spot in China that supposedly put in speed bumps to force people to slow down and appreciate the scenery.

It made me think, is this worth doing in places like museums where people rush past exhibits in order to get to the famous stuff so they can say they were there? Do you set things up so people have to take a circuitous route through choke points either on arrival or departure so people are forced to slow down and take a look around them for a couple minutes?

Or acknowledging the different doors for different people concept I wrote about yesterday, do you clearly mark an express lane for experience seekers who want to validate their visit with a selfie and direct everyone else in another direction so they can proceed at their own pace undisturbed?

Is the purpose as a museum to force these people to stand still long enough that they realize there are other delights to be experienced, or do you allow them to reinforce their narrow definition of what is valuable to experience?

Yes, I intentionally made both options sound negative and restricted the options to something of a false choice. There are other ways to look at an experience often the same person may seek a different type of experience in different places or different visits to the same place.

A couple years back I wrote about John Falk’s Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Falk talks about the five different types of motivations which impel museum visitors.  It is pretty clear these categories of motivation are not exclusive to museums and can apply to any arts and culture or tourist visit activity.

I don’t think there are any clear or easy answers to the questions I initially pose. Being aware of these different motivations is helpful and important when evaluating the experience you offer visitors.

It isn’t easy to offer an experience that is 100% fulfilling on all five categories 100% of the time.

Using the example Nina Simon gave in the TEDx talk I cited yesterday, if you have an event about the history of surfing on the beach away from your traditional facility, you are likely to attract an entirely new segment of people.

Consider: What does a person exploring the topic of surf history want out of the experience? What opportunities does a person seeking the experience of being at an interesting event want? What do people seeking to facilitate the experience for others need? What do people with relatively high degree of expertise on surf history want? What about people seeking to recharge or reflect?

A crowded event on a beach may not suit the needs of a person seeking to recharge or provide the rigorous detail an expert is seeking. However, a different event on the subject in a different place might, so you make an effort to ensure those elements are present at this other event and these people are aware of the opportunity. Just be cognizant that while a topic like surf history may open them to the idea of visiting your organization for the first time, the traditional experience visitors have at your organization may still alienate them.

But don’t get overwhelmed by the idea of an expanding multiplicity of permutations. Remember, every person who walks in the door, regardless of whether they are new or returning, will fall into one or more of those categories.  Returning people will have the benefit of familiarity, but otherwise every visit can be viewed as an entirely new experience. There is always going to be some element of “each person, each day at a time,” to every interaction.

On Not Surrendering To “The Flow”

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Via Artsjournal.com is a thought-provoking essay about artistic performance on Aeon. Dancer Barbara Gail Montero posits that a true expert performer doesn’t surrender to “the flow,” but only appears to do so while mindfully evaluating what they are doing.  When you become experienced and realize just how much you don’t know, what was a mindlessly simple introductory exercise becomes the subject of close scrutiny toward improvement.

Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia found that ‘the paragons of effortless performance were fifth-graders who, given a simple topic, would start writing in seconds and would produce copy as fast as their little fingers could move the pencil.’

Those fifth-graders are in flow. The young tennis player’s game is fun, and the child’s tendu is easy. It’s the experts’ technique that becomes difficult; not to the outside world, but to themselves. Just as in Plato’s dialogue the Apology, where Socrates is wise because he knows he is ignorant, it’s the capacity to recognise where there’s room for improvement that leads us to the highest levels of human achievement. In other words, the idea that expert actions are in a placid state of flow – a state in which things seem to fall into place on their own – is a myth.

Throughout her piece, she cites a number of artists and athletes whose example attest to the idea that they aren’t transitioning into a sublime spiritual world when they perform, it only appears so. For example violinist Arnold Steinhardt writes how,

Even when he’s practised innumerable times, the playing doesn’t happen on its own. That’s not to say that he can’t ‘slip into the music’s spiritual realm’, as he puts it. But this realm is also his ‘work area’, in which the members of his quartet ‘expend a significant amount of energy slaving over [their] individual instruments’. However sublime the quartet’s performances, they are not handed down from above.

She says one of the reasons why the myth of entering the flow persists is because the effort is invisible to the outside observer. She suggests that the general desire for an easy path to excellence might also motivate this perception.

Perhaps flow draws us in because we generally dislike hard work. Numerous self-help books turn on this tendency, suggesting that instead of buckling down to a lifetime of toil, you can reach great heights by simply letting go of the thought, the effort, the trying. But I suspect the popularity of these books springs from the same source as the vogue for fad diets..It’s not that they work, but they are easy to follow.

Now if you are skeptical about her basic thesis, you aren’t alone. The commenters on the piece varied in degree in their agreement or opposition to Montero’s ideas. Personally, I thought much of what she described as happening during a performance more as a focus on intentional practice rather than performance. One of the commenters, Ian Dyball, a Ph.D. student in the field of performance consciousness suggested something similar.

“Barbara, in my opinion, you confuse the notions of practice and performance. If a performer is noticing mistakes, he or she is not fully engaged in performance but is also, at that moment, practising…If a question or an analysis takes place it is a distraction to the performing artist and, potentially, to the performance. It is, to a degree, practising. The questioning mind (the person) is not in a state of flow despite the fact that the action itself may be being achieved unconsciously; as a habit programmed by, ultimately imperfect (if the thought is correct), practice.”

In her reply, Montero, does concede that she is blurring the distinction between performance and practice and that there may be people who are not engaging in self-analysis when they perform. Her experience may not be the experience of all performers. (I suspect she may not have written the headline, by the way.)

While I do question some of her assertions about what true performers are doing, I think the idea is worth some extensive thought.  I have written frequently about how the myth of inspiration and talent can cause people to think there is a magic ability you either have or don’t have. Or it can be lost and only regained through luck.

While Montero’s article goes in the other direction by suggesting every moment must be examined for a path to improvement without room for a little surrender, I think it is valuable for its emphasis on the work that is involved. In many ways, it  respects artists for seeking opportunities for improvement in the most fundamental exercises of their training.  What might appear to be disposable activities to keep novices busy and out of the way are acknowledged to be the building blocks for the entire discipline.

These ideas aren’t just important for the arts community to consider about how they approach their own practice, but I think it crucial to introduce some of these concepts when talking to people who doubt their own creativity.

Yes, everyone has the capacity to be creative. No, it isn’t a magic power that is granted or withdrawn by some impersonal force. Yes, excellence takes work, just like everything else.

Whose Theater Is It Anyway?

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I have written about stakeholder revolts where people in the community force non-profit boards to reconstitute themselves, usually in reaction to a planned closing of the organization.   In other places, board are revising their membership in order to better embrace their governance role and diversifying to better reflect community demographics.

It isn’t often that you hear the staff of an organization demand that the board resign and reform. Howard Sherman related the contentious and confusing situation at Theatre Puget Sound in a recent post on the Arts Integrity Initiative.  The theatre staff made an “either you go, or we do” ultimatum in a no-confidence letter to the board.

Unfortunately, this drama is playing out in a very public way according to Sherman because the executive director,

….sent the request for the board’s resignation to a wide cross section of the Seattle community, including the media, leaders of other arts organizations, community philanthropists and more, and even included a pair of internal e-mails by the board.

I second Sherman’s suggestion that the situation isn’t well served by rehashing all the gory details.

…The Stranger is on the case for those who want more information, and for future study by arts management educators and students. However, the bird’s eye view of the contretemps should serve as a reminder for boards and executive and senior leadership of arts organizations to examine their practices and policies, because while the situation is rare, it demonstrates how a rapid cascade of events can put an arts organization at risk.

Given the context of recent stakeholder revolts and other actions, this situation does bear watching for glimpses of larger trends that may be emerging in the non-profit world that may impact the arts.

The very question of who owns a non-profit organization is clear in theory, but muddied by practice. Especially when the founder is closely involved and identified with the organization. (which, to be clear, is not the case here.)

This episode could prove to be a challenge to the concept of organizational ownership depending on how it develops. Many of the deadlines the involved parties set expire at the end of this week, May 5-7, if you want to monitor things as they occur.

Though given the heated passions involved, it may be better to wait and revisit things later, allowing time to provide some insulation.

So I Joined A Cult

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Do you have a few moments so I can share some information about a cult I joined?

No, wait, wait, before you run away. This is not that type of cult. In fact, this cult demands much less in the way of slavish devotion than most arts people willingly surrender to the groups they work with.

This cult emerged from the process we all idealize when we envision the result of arts education. You can read the origin story on their website, but I wanted to give my take on it.

Four guys took a class on the creative process and were so inspired by the teacher, they looked for a way to extend what they learned after the class ended. They started rooming together. They had a couple art shows of their own and entered those sponsored by others. They started a lifestyle clothing line called C*MAR which stood for Creative Minds Are Rare.

I liked their ambition and energy so at a point between their first and second art show, I approached them about helping to launch and promote a semi-annual “After Dark” art event to showcase the talent of the visual artists in the community.

Then they started a cult.

The Creative Cult to be exact. They decided they wanted to teach others the creative process. On a monthly basis, they began holding hourly events in different places around town getting the 40-50 attendees to engage in and talk about the creative process.

I have mentioned some of these events before. There are images from each of the events on their website. Don’t feel obligated to look too closely for me.

As with all cults, there was an obligatory bloody sacrifice. In this case, the guys killed off their identity as C*MAR. They realized the activities of the creative cult and their ambitions for it had eclipsed that of the lifestyle clothing company.

Also, after some conversations, they realized the name Creative Minds Are Rare is entirely contrary to their heartfelt mission, “We teach people our creative process, so that artists and ‘non-artists’ alike may develop their own.”

Now they are in talks to start Creative Cult chapters in other places. I tell them that at this point in their development, any self-respecting cult would have robes and kool-aid, but to no avail. There was a cult meeting in a candle-lit damp basement so I can hope.

I often talk about the movement to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture (so much so, you probably assumed that was the cult I joined). I really see these guys achieving this naturally by instinct whereas so many other arts entities will have to work to shift their approaches and mindset.

Which is not to say the organizers don’t work hard putting these events together and trying to learn more about the creative process. I send them literature that impresses me and they send some back. I know a couple of them are in the daily habit of creating for a few hours every morning outside of their regular work. They show up at poetry readings around town to get feedback.

My organization partnered with two other organizations to conduct an “arts listening tour” in the community and at least one of the cult organizers was at every session taking notes about people’s perceptions of the arts and culture opportunities in the area. They are committed to always doing a better job.

Yesterday I wrote about how it would be a mistake for other classical musicians to try to emulate pianist Alpin Hong’s personality in order to connect with audiences. I would say the same thing about the “inner circle” of the cult.

As young guys, they have a certain cachet with exactly the target demographic most arts organizations want to reach. It would be a disaster of comedic proportions if most of the established arts organizations in the area tried to adopt their approach. However, I think we all ultimately benefit from the work they do because it potentially opens people up to the idea of participating in other activities in town.

In turn, I have been talking them up in the circles in which I travel on the local, state, regional and national level. While we can’t replicate the exact dynamics of the Creative Cult’s relationship with each other, it is still a good example of the type of things that can be done.

Classical Composers Were The Rock Stars Of Their Day. Would They Be Allowed To Be Rock Stars Today?

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I don’t often advocate for specific performers here on Butts in the Seats. I get enough requests to review things on my blog and hundreds of emails from artists at my day job that I don’t want to encourage more solicitations.

However pianist Alpin Hong really impressed me when he was performing his Chasing Chopin show here last week. He did a session with 75 third graders that had the teachers and my board member in charge of outreach raving on social media.

He spoke to the students in our BFA Musical Theater program about arts careers and they loved him as well. I told him if he ever decided to move away from touring as a classical pianist, he should be a motivational speaker. I don’t mean in the mode of “energize your potential!” He has an enthusiasm and sincerity that is compelling, but grounded. He does a great job of integrating his playing into the conversation.

The only problem, I told him, is that a piano playing motivational speaker is a little outside the norm and might be a difficult sell.

But he aims to be outside the norm. He repeatedly said there are thousands of kids learning to play the piano with technical perfection so you need something to distinguish yourself.

One of the things that apparently distinguishes him is that he is physically demonstrative when he plays. He is nowhere near Jerry Lee Lewis, but as he says in Chasing Chopin, there was a time when he played to win competitions but in the face of personal tragedy, he recognized the truth in Chopin’s comment, “It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.” Now the music inhabits his body to some extent when he plays.

One of his missions is to break the stereotype of classical musicians spending hours practicing alone in dark rooms without any other interests or ambitions. He talks about wanting to be a ninja when he grew up. He is an incredible video game/table top game fanatic.

When we were waiting our turn for a radio interview, he got into a long discussion about Magic: The Gathering and Warhammer 40000 tabletop gaming with one of the other guests. I felt obligated to pull out my history with Dungeons and Dragons in order to maintain a little cred in their company.

When people try to make the music seem relevant, they cite how classical composers were the rock stars of their day. Alpin is pretty much embodying that, though not in a gratuitous way. His charisma is a sincere, natural extension of his extroverted personality. Classical music is not going to be saved by more people trying to emulate his style and method in order to appear more accessible. It will come off forced and false.

He mentioned that sometimes people comment that he is too animated when he plays and distracts from the music. I thought it was appropriate with neither dramatic flourishes or feigned seriousness. When someone is playing alone I think that is an opportunity to reveal a little bit of their personality. Only in a classical music setting could you make this complaint about his movements.

Which got me thinking—everyone references classical composers as rock stars, but do they really want those type of effusive performances? How can we tell potential audience members that the composers and musicians of yore were regarded as celebrities and then insist that both the audience and artist move as little as possible? What rock concerts have you been attending?

To be clear, despite his demeanor he is serious about his profession. He sets high standards for anyone looking to enter the performing arts because he knows what a difficult life it is. There was a pretty nice sized group of high school students in the lobby wanting to get selfies with him after the evening show. When they mentioned they were in chorus together, he made them sing for him. When they demurred, he said that this far into the semester, they should have something under their belt and ready to go. And they did.

It wasn’t a polished performance, nor did he expect one from them. He just wanted to reinforce that an artist always has to be prepared and thinking about opportunities. Even if you don’t see it as a career path, don’t shy away from exercising your creative side and showing where your effort has been going.

When he spoke to the BFA Musical Theatre students earlier that afternoon he urged them not to think of career cultivation as something that happened with other people at conferences, auditions or after graduation. He said you never know who is going to be in a position to provide you an opportunity later in life. People’s careers take unexpected directions. You need to show your classmates, professors and coaches what type of person you are right now.

Alpin’s own career arc did not follow an expected path. There were a number of years away from the piano before he decided to audition for Julliard. He has some theories about why they decided to take a chance on him, but no definitive answers.

We had many conversations across the two days (concluding with a 10 pm-12:30 am discussion in the hotel bar, so technically three days I guess). There is a lot I am not mentioning here. When I think about all the problems facing the arts and classical music in particular, I see his philosophy, approach and dedication as contributing to the solution.

Is Creativity Really The Best Aphrodisiac?

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Well I am glad I mentioned yesterday how fulfilling I found all the creative projects I have been involved with over the course of my career. Today in The Atlantic, they had a story about three studies that found average looking men are judged more attractive if they are perceived as creative.

Now that I know this, I have some posts planned for upcoming weeks that should make me as appealing as the ever dapper Drew McManus.

Well, maybe I am over selling that point. According to the study,

Though the subjects always thought the physically more handsome men were more attractive, the more creative men seemed more attractive than the uncreative ones.

[…]

To Christopher Watkins, a professor of psychology at Scotland’s Abertay University and the author of the study, the results show that creativity can help boost the romantic and social prospects of average-looking men. Creativity, Watkins says, is a proxy for intelligence, and it signals the ability of your potential future mate or friend to solve tricky problems.

Unfortunately, there was a WTF moment in regard to creativity and women. In two of the three studies, being viewed as creative did not enhance attractiveness for females.

For women, two of the three experiments demonstrated that facial attractiveness enhanced their overall attractiveness to a greater extent than creativity (written expression and creative thinking) enhanced their overall attractiveness. Indeed, across these experiments, creativity weakened the appeal of women with less attractive faces and did not benefit their attractiveness when displayed by women with attractive faces.

However, the third trial using the same methodology contradicted the first two.

To Watkins, the fact that the third trial contradicted the first two helped him come to the “general conclusion” that creativity enhances all peoples’ attractiveness, “especially if they do not have an especially attractive face.” Though, as he writes in the study, further research is needed to firm up the gender effects.

Something I think important to note about these trials is that the creativity or lack thereof was presented in a very static way. People were shown pictures of men and women and then pictures or lists of things these people supposedly thought up. Those participating in the study made their judgements based on these elements.

There were no pictures of people actively doing something creative: acting, dancing, painting, writing, singing, reading etc. I have to think that at least half the appeal of creativity is observing or participating in the action. That probably doesn’t translate over well to making abstract connections between an image of a person and an image of results.

I am not discounting the article’s suggestion that there is an unfortunate bias against women you see as smarter, funnier or more successful than yourself. The act of imagining someone as creative probably does reveal personal biases. (Primarily, a lack of imagination) But I don’t think it is a good indication of how appealing you will be perceived when you are actually in the act of doing something creative.

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