Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management
NewsRoom Contact Us

Working In The Arts

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

by

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?

by

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.

Wherein I Muse About The Value of Self Investment

by

Recently I have been thinking back about different projects I have participated in over the last 10-15 years that I really found fulfilling. I invested a lot of time in those projects and didn’t really begrudge all the extra hours I put into those activities.

Since there certainly have been times that I resented the work I had to do on a project and all the extra hours they required, I thought maybe it was that I have matured in my outlook over time.

While it may be true that I am more mature now, I also realized that the common element in the projects I found fulfilling were ones that I had a hand in organizing.

The more I thought about my own experience, the more I recognized that the projects I most hated being involved in were those where someone else made the decisions, wrote the grants, decided on the execution, set the deadlines, determined who would be invited to participate, made me responsible for overseeing and running it all and then walked away until the opening ceremonies.

When you are low on the chain of command, you aren’t always in a position to have ownership on every aspect of decision making and much scope of control over the process. That is just the reality of entry level positions. Some of my bad experiences were a result of having a task re-delegated downward by someone else who was feeling just as dis-invested in the process as me. Sometimes the annoying program is caused by uncomfortable political pressure or board fiat.

Recalling these episodes in my career has just reinforced the importance of involving the people who will be handling the practical execution in the initial planning and decision making stages. Which is not to say that no action should be taken in the absence of full concurrence. People with the most accountability do need to make difficult policy and strategic decisions that may not meet with unified approval of the organization.

When it comes to the conversations about how it is going to be done and who is going to be involved, the people who are going to get their hands dirty need to be at the table. All the better if the people at the top who made the initial decision about direction are prepared to put their hands on the project, too.

Okay, so it is not news that you have to get buy-in from your team before undertaking a major initiative. It is one thing to hear or read advice on good organizational dynamics and another to recognize how they have manifested in your life.

It is just as bad to have a situation where someone is saying, well we wrote we would do it like this in the grant, so we have to do it this way. The grant should be written based on how the project team says it will all unfold.

Obviously, something similar applies for statements like “that is the way we have always done it,” and “that is industry standard.” Arts and cultural organizations need to employ a flexible approach in their processes. Call it the tail wagging the dog or the map is not the territory, you can’t let the customary procedures dictate the program.

Now on the flip side, I gotta acknowledge in the arts there is no lack of self-investment. People will pour a lot of themselves into a project for little or no reward, doing it for the love. If you hesitate, then maybe someone questions your investment. Maybe it is you. Are you really part of the team or are you just pretending?

Enough has been written on that subject that I don’t need to add more to it except to say that sort of (self)manipulation shouldn’t dictate the program either. You need to acknowledge your lack of investment and consider stepping away or saying no to begin with.

Breeze It, Buzz It, Easy Does It

by

This week Jonathan Mandell addressed an issue that has been troubling me for a few years. I have noticed more and more frequently that actors don’t seem to be taking the time to decompress and disassociate themselves from the characters they have been portraying.

Often the actors are in the lobby before the audience is and have formed up in a receiving line. It makes me wonder if the social media age has turned this into an expectation. I can’t say whether it is a chicken or egg problem. Are actors zipping out quickly because they want the recognition or because the audience expects to see them?

Probably the most egregious example I have seen in the last five years was when I attended a piece in a blackbox space. I was seated near the door so I was the first one out of the room. As I exited, one of the actors shot by me clearly still living as the cruel bastard he just finished portraying.

The fact that these emotions were still roiling inside him was a bigger issue than wondering how the heck he got from the stage, out the back of the room and traversed two hallways in the time it took me to take 10 steps.  It isn’t really healthy to remain connected with those negative aspects or try to suppress them so you can conduct social interactions for longer than necessary.

Mandell cites NYU professor Erin Mee who is making an effort to include “cooling down” as part of actor training.

She has launched something of a campaign to convince actors, acting teachers, artistic directors, and entire theatres to see cooling down as an integral part of the artistic process. Her campaign is starting small: In the Spring, she will teach a workshop at Tisch on cooling down.

“It is something that is mostly ignored in actor training in the United States,” Mee says. “And I think that’s a problem for actors. It affects their health. It may also affect their acting; if you are afraid you may never be able to get out of character or let go of the character, you may resist getting fully into character. I think we do our actors a disservice if we don’t train them to cool down as much as we train them to warm up.”

I was surprised to read that this sort of training isn’t taught as part of the process. It was something that I was taught when I was an undergraduate so many years ago. I was associated with two productions of the play, Extremities, where the cooling down process for the male actor included a reconciliation process with the woman in the cast.

I was interested to read that there is researching being done to determine if performers experience physical, psychological and emotional harm over the long term.

“The Germans are looking at what actors and dancers actually do, cognitively and physically, to transform themselves when they perform on stage.  The next step will be to do some longitudinal studies – stage acting, dancing, and singing over time – to discover how this work alters the brains of performers,” McConachie says. “There’s no doubt that actors’ brains differ in important ways from the brains of accountants, cab drivers, and neurosurgeons, but exactly how and why, no one knows yet.  Is this a good thing or psychologically harmful?  I suppose it depends on your point of view.  I think we can say that most actors do not become serial killers” (notwithstanding “the occasional John Wilkes Booth.”) At the same time, McConachie says, “it’s not hard to imagine that some characters could draw some actors into situations, thoughts, and emotions that could be temporarily dangerous and even harmful to them over the long term.”

This topic bears keeping an eye in the future just to discover how you can live a slightly healthier, sane life as an artist.

Blog title is from the iconic “Cool” from West Side Story. The scene from the movie actually does a great job illustrating the emotions just bubbling under the surface.

Unbiased Hiring Practices Have Been Around For A Long Time (Just Not Around Here)

by

Drew McManus has been discussing diversity in programming for the last week or so on Adaptistration.  With those thoughts bopping around my cranium, it was probably only natural that a post on Center for the Future of Museums blog caught my eye on my Twitter feed.

They are looking for museums to participate in the first cohort to test a process for removing bias in hiring.

Participants will work with GapJumpers to tailor a challenge-based hiring experience to their own staffing needs. We are accepting applications for the first cohort of participants through Friday, April 21, 2017. The project will run from May 1 through September 1, 2017. Participating museums will share their experiences with the field through blog posts and testimonials.

How does it work?

Together with the individual museum, GapJumpers will craft a Blind Skills Audition, part of their proprietary process that replaces the resume with examples of their job skills. Instead of submitting resumes, applicants submit their responses to a specific challenge assignment. The individual challenges are designed by GapJumpers with the input of the museum using natural language processing software. Applicants submit their answers in a digital format and are assessed by GapJumpers according to a rubric developed in partnership with the museum’s hiring manager. The hiring manager only receives an applicant pool comprised of persons who have met the standards of the assessment for review.

If this sounds interesting, read the post and contact the author Nicole Ivy.

One of the things Ivy mentions is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s use of identity blind auditions in 1952. You may wonder why these type of hiring practices aren’t more prevalent in the arts after 60+ years

I recently learned that back in mid-10th century China, the Song Dynasty instituted a policy of anonymizing imperial examinations. By the early 11th century, they decided removing the names wasn’t enough and started having the examinations recopied by clerks because the quality of the test taker’s calligraphy could reveal something about their social standing. Nearly 400,000 people took the triennial examination by the end of the Song Dynasty so that is pretty serious commitment to making the tests fair.  (During some dynasties, you could buy status at lower levels, but not at the imperial level.)

The imperial examinations for government service were held long before the Song Dynasty and ended in the late 19th century. They weren’t always inclusive and free from corruption, but a lot of effort was invested into making them so over long periods of time.

With the example of a centuries long practice like that, it is somewhat puzzling that a more equitable, unbiased hiring process hasn’t emerged.  I am not necessarily talking about a complete adaptation of practices from China as much as even a similar process that developed separately and independently.

Perhaps the distinguishing factor we have to face up to is the lack of will to create a hiring process that has sought to minimize opportunities for bias.

I think it is worth paying attention to the tools and processes the Center for the Future of Museums develops. From the description it doesn’t appear to be anything wholly exclusive to museums that can’t be adapted to other disciplines.

Toward De-gamification of Job Interviews

by

This week Barry Hessenius wrote about the process of interviewing someone for a job.  One of his points was not to use other people’s interview questions/generic questions you pull off the Internet. Just like borrowing another organization’s bylaws to create your own, those questions don’t suit the specific needs of your organization.

The other point he spent a lot of time on was trying to be clever or tricky with the questions you ask rather asking questions about things you need to know.

 To the extent we are trying to “game” the process with clever questions, the candidates will likewise try to game the process with answers they think fit our line of questioning.  We don’t want the interview to be a contest of gaming each other.  We want it to be a frank, candid interchange between us; honest, transparent and fair to all.

Our obsession with everybody in the entire field needing to be a leader; our preoccupation with educational benchmarks in the form of degrees, which we equate with automatically being able to do the best job); and our laser like focus on where an applicant worked before – all color our thinking when we determine what we should ask of our finalists.

The two things he says you need to know are 1) whether the person can do the job well regardless of where they worked before. You are interviewing them for  future performance, not the past. 2) Are they a good organizational fit.

I have been going back and forth in my mind about whether there aren’t more than these two things you need to know. I haven’t decided yet, but I do agree that his plea for simple, directness makes sense.

He also seems to strongly lean toward taking responsibility for the whole process yourself rather than engaging a consultant for the same reason you don’t use other people’s questions–their priorities are not aligned with yours.

He advocated for a process that is a discussion rather than a one sided Q&A. That brought up a memory of an interview I was invited to observe and provide feedback on. One of the opening questions was “What do you understand the job of X to entail?”

What I liked about this question is that it addressed whether the candidate had done research on the job and organization. In this particular case, the person being interviewed expressed questions they had about certain aspects. (I read about X program, I was wondering if that means you do…”) This seemed to lead to a more conversational dynamic.

The interviewers did have specific questions that they were keeping track of, but by the time they started to run through them, they were able to acknowledge that at least a half dozen had already been covered already. I appreciated that approach because I have seen interviews where interviewers apologize for the obligation to ask questions that have already been answered.

I was also thinking, even if “What do you understand the job of X to entail,” strikes people as falling in the “trying to be clever..” category, it can still be useful for determining if you wrote a good job description. It could be smart to ask a couple people from the community who aren’t intimately aware of what your vacant position does to review the job description and even do research on the organization as best they can. Then ask them what they understand the job to entail.

If a person who lives in your community and participates in some of your activities can’t answer that in a manner that hits on all the things you want a candidate to notice about your organization, it is probably prudent to make some rewrites.

If your test candidates as a group seem to orient on the parts of the position that are low priority, again you may want to either rewrite or review what if website and promotional materials are inadvertently drawing focus away from those things that are really important.

Given that many arts and culture non-profits may not have the budget to have a human resources person on staff, running a couple questions and a job description by outside members of the community to gain these sort of perspectives may not be a bad idea.

Especially if they ask, “can one person do all things things?” or “wow, a job with this much responsibility must pay $80,000” when you are paying $40,000.

All The Boring Moments Of The Creative Process

by

I have been paying attention to what people do as part of their creative process lately. So I was happy to read George Saunders’ piece in The Guardian from last month, “What writers really do when they write.”

I think there is often a tendency for people to attribute artists with amazing insight and skill that they don’t feel they possess  themselves.  In the past I have written about how even artists themselves seem to overlook all the effort that goes into creating new content and credit flashes of genius for the success of works.

What I liked about Saunders’ article was that is emphasized that both multiple mundane revisions and aesthetic judgement often contribute to the final product, with the emphasis on mundane and multiple revision. (my emphasis)

Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.

What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”

He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.

An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists know this.

And also this anecdote:

When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.

But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to “grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice”. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to “me, on a different day”.

Making multiple incremental improvements until something feels right or is less lame are both valid paths in the creative process, along with dozens of others. There isn’t any lightning strike of inspiration that produces a finished product after one iteration. Thinking that is what should happen results in a lot of staring into the sky waiting for that lightning bolt and afraid it will never come.

The creative process is different for everyone. Sometimes the process is different for the same person at different times. Sometimes staring at the sky works.

It is important for people who don’t think they are creative to understand that there isn’t something special going on in terms of some ineffable magic that some people can tap into and they can’t.  Mostly it is boring process.  You don’t always create something others think is great by adjusting plastic figurines and making a character less of an asshole.

What seems magical about the process is expressed by the sentence I bolded above. Working outside the realm of strict logic can be an uncomfortable prospect. But that feeling is pretty normal, even for people who have been doing it a long time.

People Like You Read A Blog Post Like This

by

Even though it often feels like promoting arts and culture as a non-profit entity requires inventing entirely new methods wholecloth because our emphasis and motivations are not driven by a profit motive, I am encouraged when I see commonalities in research findings and advice. We are, after all, dealing with the same set of human beings.

Seth Godin recently had a post about getting people to shift to a new product. While his example revolves around getting someone to switch brands of motorcycle, I saw a few familiar lessons peeking out between the Harleys and BMWs.

If you are marketing to people who will have to switch to engage with you, do it with intention. Your pitch of, “this is very very good” is insufficient. Your pitch of, “you need something in this category” makes no sense, because I’m already buying in that category. Instead, you must spend the time, the effort and the money to teach me new information that allows me to make a new decision. Not that I was wrong before, but that I was under-informed.

This caught my attention for two reasons. First, it reinforces that providing a high quality performance is not enough if people already feel they are having quality experiences with their current choices. (Which could be everything from other experiences to entertainment delivery platforms.)

Second, it reiterates the importance of having sufficient information about the unfamiliar that I wrote about on Monday and last month.

And then there is this from Godin:

Ignore the tribal links at your peril. Without a doubt, “people like us do things like this,” is the most powerful marketing mantra available. Make it true, then share the news.

While this idea is most often emphasized in relation to getting millennial involved in what you are doing, (the study I cited on Monday being a prime example), participating in activities and associating with things that reinforce your self image is a fundamental element of our society, regardless of age.

(And I am really curious, how many people didn’t pass over this post because of the title? That would really prove a point despite being so blatantly click-baity)

Talking To Your Neighbors About Saving The NEA

by

Margy Waller’s piece about How To Talk About Saving the NEA has been making the rounds these last couple weeks. You should take a look at it if you haven’t already.  Her piece isn’t so much about how to convince your legislator that the NEA is worth saving as much as it is about making the case to your neighbors.  While there is a lot of immediacy about preserving the NEA, Waller’s piece integrates the longer, broader encompassing view that aligns with the agenda of building public will for arts and culture.

She addresses the common objections about supporting the arts: arts are entertainment and a private experience; they are a commodity; they are a passive experience; and a low priority.

The response she proposed advocates for support based on the ripple effect arts have (my emphasis):

A thriving arts sector creates ripple effects of benefits throughout our community, even for those who don’t attend.

These are broad-based benefits that people already believe are real—and that they value:

A vibrant, thriving place: Neighborhoods are livelier, communities are strengthened, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc. Note that this goes well beyond the usual dollars-and-cents economic argument and is about creating and sustaining an environment that is memorable and a place where people want to live, visit, and work.
[…]
This organizing idea shapes the subsequent conversation in important ways. It moves people away from thinking about private concerns and personal interests (me) and toward thinking about public concerns and communal benefits (we).

Importantly, people who hear this message often shift from thinking of themselves as passive recipients of consumer goods, and begin to see their role as active citizens interested in addressing the public good.

Now obviously, this shift in perception can’t happen in a vacuum. There actually has to be artistic and cultural activity occurring that resonates with people as contributing to the public good.

She notes that “While it’s true that some decision-makers expect to see this economic impact data, our research reveals that it is not persuasive to the public and is not useful to build broad support for public funding.”

She provides a check list to help keep messaging focused. The following is only an excerpt so be sure to check out the whole thing.

[..]

✓ Vibrancy/Connectedness: Does the example include benefits that could be seen as examples of vibrancy/vitality or increased connectedness?

✓ Benefits to All: Does the example point out potential benefits to people who are not participating in the specific event?

✓ Behind the scenes: Does the discussion also remind people that this doesn’t happen by accident but requires investment, etc.?

✓ One of Many: When possible, it is helpful to mention additional examples in the discussion, which helps audiences focus on the broader point that a strong arts sector creates a range of benefits.

[…]

We can’t say the sky is falling—that undermines our efforts because most people won’t agree with us. We should advocate for good policy on immigration and health care, etc. because these changes could be incredibly devastating to the arts, artists and the communities where they live. It’s not responsible to fight only for the NEA budget in the face of other damaging proposals.

The first point on her check list was “Arts Organization: Are the benefits created by an organization/event/institution that NEA supported?” An important distinction to emphasize if you are talking to people about this is that while many smaller arts organizations, especially in rural locales, may not receive support directly from the NEA, there is a good chance that they do receive a fair amount of funding through their state arts agency, which in turn is strongly supported by the NEA. Since there is likely to be a dearth of private funders, arts organizations in more rural locales potentially have the most to lose even receiving indirect NEA funding.

It can be important to emphasize these indirect relationships to NEA funding because it can be easy to disregard the relevance otherwise.

As someone pointed out to me yesterday, even if you don’t ultimately see a significant impact to your finances, the fact that another organization has to scale back can mean fewer great opportunities for your organization when a group decides not to tour.  Perhaps fewer venues participating in touring means the routing doesn’t work out for your location for a performance or visual arts show. Indirect impacts can have the most significant repercussions but can be the hardest to anticipate.

We Accidentally Built An Arts And Community Space

by

This really great story on the Americans for the Arts blog caught my eye that I would label as unintentional placemaking. Though I could think of other apt terms.

Douglas Sorocco writes about how Oklahoma City law firm Dunlap Codding built an arts and community space as part of the construction of their offices.

Except,

…to be completely honest, “decided to build” is a bit misleading. We didn’t expressly set out to build an arts and community space. Like most creative endeavors, the concept evolved over time and in response to observations of our community’s needs. Our original blueprints called for a full kitchen/breakroom. An imposing commercial overhead garage door existed in the area and, thinking ourselves clever, we decided to replace it with a glass door to allow for natural light and fresh breezes. Of course, we didn’t want to look out the door at a parking lot filled with concrete—so an urban green space was necessary…In the end, we created a kitchen and indoor event center that opened to the outdoors—complete with modular tables and reconfigurable seating.

Having initially designed the infrastructure for our staff’s use, we soon realized that it would be empty 99.9999997% of the time—OK, maybe only a slight exaggeration. It seemed wasteful to create such an inviting space and leave it fallow…An off-hand comment made by a young creative resonated with us: “While community doesn’t need a space, it doesn’t hurt to have one.” We decided to make our space available. Rather than saying “no,” we simply said, “why not?”

Use of the space is free for community groups and $20/hr for private events. Sorocco says they initially had to coax people into using the space, but since then there have been over 1200 events, including a music series which they have underwrote.

The reason why I wanted to call attention to this wasn’t just simply because they were generous enough to open up a space intended for staff to the community, but because it even entered their minds at all.

I saw it as a positive sign that their mindset was attuned to the possibility employing the space to this purpose. Typically, a business that was inclined to support cultural and community events might make donations, advocate for their staff to volunteer their time, participate in a 5k walk/run, etc., People will laud them for their generosity.

No one is going to reproach a business for keeping their awesome employee lounge to themselves. It takes some flexibility and creativity to look at employee lounge, decide it is being under utilized, see the opportunities, and make the effort to share with others.

Don’t Deny Your Creativity!

by

Earlier this month, Kathryn Haydon addressed the insidious personal belief that one is not creative.  I use the term insidious because I view the belief as something that undermines something essential about a person. While belief that one does not draw well may be erroneous because you haven’t given yourself time to develop the skill, denying you have the capacity to be creative denies something that one possesses almost naturally at birth.

While you may have to work at getting better at a certain set of skills as you get older, Haydon cites studies conducted with the same subjects over a period of decades that almost seems to show people work at being less creative.

Basically she says people perceive themselves as being less creative for two reasons- they compare themselves to those held up as examples of creativity and they fear judgment for being wrong.

It just might be that the main reason you think you’re not creative is because you compare yourself to others who are famous for their creativity (Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, and Lady Gaga) or to people in your own life who are known for their creativity.

When you’re in a comparison mindset, you inadvertently diminish your own creative ability. You envision Picasso and your highly divergent friends on a pedestal that you cannot possibly ascend.

[…]

Society has perpetuated the myth that creativity has to be comparative, and if comparative, mutually exclusive: “If Picasso is creative then I am not.”  This reasoning is incorrect.

and later,

…fear is the only thing standing in the way of training it back. (Fear can also come in the form of saying, “I’m not creative” to protect yourself from risk. You now know that this is false, so if you keep using this line it is heretofore a cop-out. Everybody is creative.)

It is no mystery that society and our educational system emphasize discovering the right solution rather than discovering the creative solution which stacks the decks against creativity.

In order to get back in touch with your creative ability, she suggests some exercises like “Try thinking like someone else: an alien, a rock, a stray cat, a high school math teacher.” She cautions against deciding to go all-in, 100% on creativity in one shot like a resolution to start a diet on Monday.

In other words, don’t let the first risk you ever take be taking out a second mortgage on your house to try a new business idea. Start instead by doing something that gives you slight discomfort, like driving a new route to the grocery store or sharing an unconventional insight in your next meeting. As you practice taking small risks you will become more comfortable sharing the fresh perspectives that you have gained by practicing your creative thinking.

For people in the arts, talking a new route to work may seem a little elementary a step, but for some people it might be a significant step. It could be a version of “failing fast,” especially if they turn off the GPS while taking an unfamiliar route.

The strategies for cultivating creativity are all just on a relative scale of risk taking and potential failure. For an arts organization it might be new programs. For an individual, it is looking at something with a new perspective.

This Isn’t Your Grandpa’s Retirement

by

I guess I should have waited a few more days before making last week’s post about today’s graying audiences not being the same graying audiences of two decades ago. Toward the end of last week I saw that Jimmy Buffet is launching Margaritaville branded and themed retirement communities.

Even if you view this as a cynical way to capitalize on the name, you have to admit that the Margaritaville name defines a lifestyle. There is a specific demographic who identify with this lifestyle and most of them weren’t retiring 20 years ago.

This reinforces the point I made last week that while the proportion of gray heads in the audience may seem to have remained constant for the last two decades, the current cohort that comprises your older audiences have distinct characteristics and interests.  Their parents wouldn’t want to live in a Margaritaville retirement village in significant numbers, nor would their grandchildren. (Their kids, maybe.)

Ultimately, the differences between the Margaritaville communities and those already being built by the company Buffett is partnering with may be superficial. It might be the same ground plans with different color schemes, furniture and soundtrack, but the company is telling retirees that they understand they have different expectations of their retirement experience than previous generations.

More to think about, eh?

Cross-Sector Training, So Hard To Get Instructed By You

by

Last Fall Grantmakers in the Arts published a summary of key findings from a study about community arts training. The study focused on the increasing focus of local arts agencies into cross-sector partnerships/efforts.

What I found encouraging was the expanding view among local arts agencies about their roles and the constituencies they serve. (my emphasis)

2. Cross-sector arts partnerships are becoming a core activity for increasing numbers of local arts agencies. So, the question arises: Is this just a new funding fad that is likely to dissipate as soon as its national champions switch channels? Here are a few reasons why we think this is not the case:

74 percent agreed that cross-sector arts partnerships are central to their mission.
85 percent identified organizations from other community sectors (e.g., human services, public safety, health care, community development) as a key constituency, and 75 percent were actively partnering with them.
75 percent said their recent strategic planning process addressed “broadening the impact of the arts beyond traditional arts activities and venues” as a priority.
78 percent agreed with the statement, “we see ourselves as a change agent in our community.”

From our perspective it would be a mistake to interpret this level of collaboration and commitment outside the bounds of the typical local arts agency mission as solely opportunistic. In fact, we see this as a possible indication that some local arts agencies are shifting their mission focus from “arts-centric” to community-centric. Specific evidence of this showed up when we asked respondents what they regarded as the most critical issues facing their community. Most responses reflected problems and concerns affecting the broader community as well as (but much more than) those relevant solely to their arts constituencies.

The article notes that demand for training outstrips supply. They found that 79% of respondents were interested in receiving training in effectively working cross-sector, but only 18% of organizations were supplying that training. The report itself noted that rural respondents especially felt underserved, finding training was “…generally inaccessible, due to time, money and travel…”

If you are interested in finding training in this area, there is a list of programs of all types from page 13-42 of the study.

Something not in the study that I was pleased to see in the Grantmakers in the Arts piece was an “Implications for Funders” section.  They advocate for patience and funding for training over the long term and emphasize the need for infrastructure investment beyond just training.

One paragraph really struck me as an important lesson for arts organizations as well as funders, namely involving the community to whom you hope to bring benefits in the plan. (my emphasis)

Vague nomenclature is potentially damaging. By definition community arts practice advances the notion that the work is going to affect people’s lives. As such, the fusion of art making and community development is often a morally and ethically complex enterprise. In our work at the Center we have found that when the institutions supporting the work are vague or ambiguous about their intentions or definitions of success, this lack of clarity can migrate to the work itself and harm the communities involved. Here is one reason why. Labels like social practice, placemaking, and community cultural development all imply community involvement of some kind. In too many instances we have found that scant attention is being paid to what this means exactly. At a minimum funders and practitioners alike should be considering some critical ethical questions as a part of their basic practice. How are the people who will bear the consequences of a project’s success or failure going to be engaged? If some public benefit is part of the deal, is there any accountability built in? And when the curtain closes, who will be there to either sustain the good work — or pick up the pieces?

Post title inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s “Cross Town Traffic” Couldn’t find a video that wasn’t a cover.

Music Majors, Special Forces of the Arts

by

Going back to the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project special report I referenced yesterday, there were findings in another area that grabbed my interest.  The following chart breaks down responses to questions about brainstorming and risk taking being encouraged in artist training programs.

Keep in mind that all these results are based on alumni perceptions of their training program. The report authors note the outlier status of Music when it comes to graduates who responded “that brainstorming and risk taking without fear of penalty were present to a “Some” or “Very Much” degree as part of their coursework.

Alumni from all but one major overwhelmingly reported their curriculum emphasized generating new ideas or brainstorming. The outlier in this dimension was music majors—only 79% of whom  reported their curriculum emphasized generating ideas or brainstorming.

There was a 23% range in responses by major when comparing coursework emphasis on taking risks without fear of penalty. Architecture majors and creative writing majors (89% and 88%, respectively) were the most likely to indicate curricula focused on this area, while music majors were the least likely (66%).

Music majors (70%) indicated the lowest level of coursework emphasis on inventing methods to arrive at unconventional solutions while architecture majors (92%) indicated the highest.

My initial assumption is that because music programs often emphasize technical proficiency, there isn’t a lot of room for risk taking, brainstorming and inventing unconventional methods. My second assumption is that the programs are designed this way due to the high demands of orchestral auditioning.

Now the million dollar question: Is this approach beneficial or detrimental to students?

On one hand, not only are the number of orchestral performing positions shrinking, the relations between management and musicians in contract negotiations are frequently hostile.

On the other hand, preparing students to perform at a highest level of excellence in the most hostile scenario could be viewed as an ideal path in the context of “if you can survive this…” It would sort of make them the elite special forces of the arts world.

But who really wishes that for their students? Since the majority of graduates won’t end up working in an orchestral environment, don’t they need to acquire practice in brainstorming, risk taking in a low stakes environment and pursuing unconventional paths? (And note that brainstorming, risk taking and employing unconventional means are also traits valued in special forces.)

What do people who focused on studying music think? Any validity to my assumptions? Other forces at work? Do these numbers reflect something else? Is the current process good/bad for graduates?

You’re tired writing a college essay? Make an order at the Best essay writing service and get your papers done superb fast!

Resilient and Adaptable, Arts Grads Could Still Use More Career Training

by

The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) just released a special report that focused on how alumni of creative arts programs across different graduate cohorts felt about the education they received.  Since I am interested in the conversation about artist as entrepreneur and career preparation, I gravitated toward those findings.

All cohorts from pre-1985 through 2015 felt they could have used more education in career preparation.

In the module, alumni are asked whether they would have benefited from more knowledge on:

a. developing a three- to five-year strategic plan to realize their goals;
b. marketing and promoting their work and talents;
c. communicating through and about their art through engaging with the community, speaking in public, and receiving feedback;
d. managing finances through things like developing budgets, raising money for projects, and saving for the future;
e. and monitoring legal and tax issues like copyright, trademarks, sales, and income tax.

Most alumni agreed they could have benefited from more knowledge in all of these areas (Table 3), with at least 80% of all alumni cohorts saying they would have benefited from more knowledge in each area.

Furthermore, alumni in each cohort reported about the same level of agreement (“Somewhat” or “Strongly”) when asked whether their education prepared them for work in many different jobs and roles. These reports ranged from a low of 65% in the 2006–2010 cohort to a high of 69% for the earliest two cohorts, leaving about one third of alumni in each cohort feeling their education did not prepare them for work in many different jobs and roles.

What really brought the perceived lack of preparation by alumni into focus was this next chart which reflects the degree to which career preparation was integrated into their education. Exposure to a network of professionals is relatively high. However, other aspects of career development and discussion of careers outside the arts are depressingly low for some disciplines.

The SNAAP report observes:

Institutions may need to further explore ways to provide career services across different major fields in the arts. Solitary fields, where art is less likely to be created or performed in groups, may not be getting the same quality of exposure.

Long time readers may recall that when I attended the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference last October, there was discussion about how university career services weren’t really well calibrated for arts careers.

One more chart I wanted to point out. After the reading the other content in this post, it probably won’t surprise you to see only 18% of respondents Strongly Agreed they were confident about financially managing their career. Also not surprising, confidence went down the more debt a person was carrying.

However, I was really encouraged by the resilience, adaptability and opportunity recognition numbers. Even if people don’t necessarily feel like got enough education in career planning, feeling capable in these three ability areas ain’t nothing to sneeze at. I am really curious about how those numbers compare to graduates from other degree disciplines.

You Took My Joy And I Want It Back

by

If you found yourself agreeing with the thesis of my post yesterday about claiming someone is selling out or is dumbing down art is an attempt to exclude those people in order to save Art, I have something else challenging to suggest.

We don’t get to dictate who is allowed to enjoy art.

While you might immediately agree that this should be so, remember there was an effort to organize an art strike during the recent presidential inauguration. Artists have disavowed works they sold to Ivanka Trump and asked her to remove their works from her apartment.

While I can appreciate the various motivations which move artists to make these statements, I don’t think it is constructive in the long run to be sending a message that art is for you as long as the art makers approve of you. In fact, as soon as I wrote that sentence I realized how much it sounded like the rationale people make when refusing to provide services for same-sex weddings.

This is not like being upset because a political campaign is using a song without permission.  They paid the asking price, and for the most part the work appears as the background of their lives as a statement of their taste rather than to imply tacit approval.

The bigger and long term issue is that there is a contradictory message in saying art is everywhere, everyone has the potential for creative expression and engages in it more often than they realized…and then put out a call for all that to be withdrawn in solidarity.

First of all, since everyone can access some type of creative expression on their phone, they are less likely to notice something is missing than they were when accessibility was tied to a physical place.

Second, if everyone can do it, then everyone has to participate in the art strike, which is damn difficult to pull off.  In these instances you can’t go around saying, Oh no, we are the real owners of real Art, not you, we are hiding it away and you should be concerned.

The constructive thing to do is encourage people to cultivate and employ the abilities they have in the service of expressing what they think about an issue rather than withholding access to something that has no relevance to the issue of concern.

Because lets face it, there are a lot of people out there who have no compunction about expressing their views emphatically and loudly. Investing energy into removing, rather than contributing a new or counter expression, seems counterproductive.

“Makers and Takers” slides too facilely off people’s tongues these days. Let it never be said artists are takers, creativity is all about making.

Ultimately, there can’t be advocacy for universal investment and ownership in creative expression by the individual, education system, foundations and government while also reserving the right to reclaim it all.

Post title is from the lyrics of Lucinda Williams’ “Joy”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMJ_-5lVw1s

You Know The Type, They Only Want One Thing–Your Fund Raising Ability

by

If you ever doubted that executive director positions were all about the fundraising and light on requiring artistic vision, the recent news about the firing of Ft. Worth Opera general director will disabuse you of that notion. It was with some dismay that I read about his firing due to lack of creativity when it came to fund raising.

Now I don’t intend to understate the importance of strong fund raising. I probably would have just scanned the Dallas Morning News piece and moved on with my day. While unfortunate, organization leaders get fired or resign fairly frequently.

Except that as I read on it struck me that Woods wasn’t an idler as general director. Every sentence brought accolades for different accomplishments. He brought the opera to greater prominence, navigated challenges with performance facilities, engaged in some innovative programming that appears to have interested a larger segment of the community, and yes, did a respectable job with fund raising against a shortfall.

Just to be sure the Dallas Morning News writer wasn’t personally biased, I sought other reporting on the firing and they seemed to agree on these basic facts. All in all, he didn’t sound like someone you would want to blithely part ways with.

Certainly, there may be some underlying problems that no one is talking about publicly. The comments by the board in all the articles I came across focus so strongly on their desire to find someone who can handle fund raising and business development as Woods’ replacement that it appears that is about all that matters. Artistic and community relationship building skills seem to be such far seconds that I fear all the accomplishments Woods has been praised for will stagnate and perhaps decline.

The opera seeks to hire a leader to “focus more on business and management … to be creative with the fundraising and development aspect,” he said, adding that, “we just didn’t feel Darren could provide us with that leadership from that aspect.”

[…]

Martinez said Woods has brought the opera “to a point where we felt good artistically.” Now, he said, it’s time to move forward with a new general director who can help shape the company’s future, which includes being a good steward of donors’ money.

That last line made me wonder if the board really did approve of Woods’ artistic choices or if there is something going on that isn’t being spoken of.

Over the history of this blog, (holy crap, is it really going to be 13 years on Friday?), I have often cited studies about how fewer people are interested in taking on executive roles in non-profits. Of those energetic people I know who want to assume leadership positions, few to none have a vision that involves fund raising as their primary role. They get excited by the prospect of making an impact and aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty, but job descriptions like this, (and lets be fair, Ft. Worth Opera is far from the only one emphasizing this skillset), don’t really fire their imaginations.

The Gravity of Culture

by

Seth Godin made a post last week about maintaining a commitment to quality in your work. (my emphasis)

When you seek the mass market, there are two paths available:

You can dumb down your message and your expectations, and meet your audience where they stand. You can coarsen your lyrics, offer simpler solutions, ask for less effort, demand less work, promise bigger results…
Or you can smarten it up, and lead despite your goal of mass, not chase it.

The very fact that “dumb down” is an expression and “smarten up” isn’t should give any optimist pause.

Culture is a gravitational force, and it resists your efforts to make things work better.

So what? Persist.

My first impulse was to mentally acknowledge he was right about how the impulse to improve isn’t common enough to bring a term like “smarten up” into common usage. I read his comment about culture resisting efforts to make things work better as an indictment of a society that demands satisfying results that require little of them in return.

However, when I got to thinking about it, those who embrace and define high culture often don’t want practitioners of low/pop culture to transition upward. There are a fair number of examples of pop artists who decide they want to pursue a more rigorous path as they mature. They are criticized for lacking the excellence required or expected of someone who has dedicated decades training in some discipline of high culture.

Certainly, some of these people may lack the seriousness, nuance and general quality of a long time practitioner. There may be valid concerns that in their popularity, they are misleading their fans into believing they represent the higher levels of achievement when a perceptible gap exists.

But for others, after 10-20 years of sincerely trying to “smarten up,” they are probably going to be operating at least at or above a level of 80%-90% of achievable excellence. That puts them on par with a lot of people who, like them, have spent decades solely devoted to the high culture discipline.

Except that the latter group will be labeled an X discipline artist while the former pop artist will forever have a modifier like crossover-X discipline artist. Essentially, you get branded if you try to step out of the original lines drawn around you.

So like Godin says, culture can be a gravitational force. It can feel like you are constantly being pulled to lower your standards, but it can also feel like you are being pushed away from ever being recognized as having achieved your ambitions if you try to become more proficient.

Yes, ideally things could get to a place where people and their efforts could be fairly evaluated but will it ever really be possible to create truly objective evaluations that are free from these sort of judgments?

I frequently cite Jamie Bennett’s comment that people have an easier time viewing themselves on a continuum with famous sports figures than they do with famous artists. As I think about it, I wonder if people are getting a message that they shouldn’t try to see themselves on an arts continuum.

Thank God I Wasn’t Here When It Was Relevant

by

I have served on my county library system board for over half a year now.

They say public libraries aren’t relevant any more but as the title of the post suggests, if this is what the library is like when it is irrelevant, I am glad I wasn’t around when it was relevant. In my short time on the board, we have had to review or construct policies to address things like harassment of staff by visitors, people monopolizing meeting rooms to run their businesses out of them, wages and benefits, and had to chart a course of action upon learning poor building construction lead to mold issues.

Libraries may not be as important a source of reading material as they have been in the past, but they definitely serve a need in the community. For every problem that crops up, there are 500 people who regularly avail themselves of the facilities, programming and services.  I was entirely unaware of the web of relationships the library had with other community organizations, businesses and social groups.

I have served on a number boards before but this is the first one I have been on that has really engaged me so thoroughly in exercising what I preach in terms of conscientious board governance and fiscal oversight. In addition to addressing programming and policies, there is a lot more money running through a six branch library system than you might imagine.

There was a story a year ago about the financial benefits received by the former president of the Queens (NY) Borough Library system (as well as the alleged liberties he took with the finances.)  It left me wondering what sort of financial controls the borough library system had in place given that we on the board are required to authorize the payment of the bills every month. Though our list is pretty long so I imagine it would be easy to slip some personal expenses in there unnoticed.

I have also tried to bring some of the good practices I have written about to the organization. I stress “tried” because just when I was going to note the professional development budget hadn’t really been used during the year and encourage more staff development, the library director requested that staff be allowed to attend an upcoming conference.

Obviously, like most of us that serve on boards outside our own organization, I have brought other valuable insights and practices to the table.  The experience has certainly improved some of the practices in which we engage in my organization.

The point of this post is mostly to encourage people to serve on other non-profit boards if you already aren’t and to really pay attention to how that responsibility can inform the practices in your own organization.

As I wrote this, I remembered one of my earliest encounters with a perceptual barrier to participation: When I was about 11-13 the librarians encouraged me to start using the adult section of the library.  I had passed by the threshold many times, but I was anxious about entering and being told I didn’t belong there.  I can still connect with the emotions of that memory so I can empathize with people who show up to my performance hall for the first time.

Of course, my other purpose in writing this post is to encourage everyone to support their local library!

I Was 15% More Dishonest In 2016, But Can You Prove It?

by

In my post yesterday, I quoted Matt Burriesci as he addressed how uncomfortable people feel when it comes to advocating the intangible value of the arts.

We should stop being ashamed to believe in a value that cannot be weighed, measured, cut, or quantified — and to try and convince others to believe it, too.

I’ve floated these ideas to a few of my friends who work in the arts — privately, of course, because one never wants to utter such things in public. Almost all of them have said the same thing, and in the same weary, confused voice: “Well, yeah, Burriesci­­, I mean, I agree — but that’s just idealism.”

This line of thought pretty much illustrates how uncertain the arts community feels when it comes to trying to justify the value of what they do. How do you validate results that are difficult to measure?

Fortuitously, Seth Godin helps to provide an answer in a context we can all understand — the value of soft skills in the workplace.

Now obviously, these same soft skills are valuable outside of the workplace, but so much of what we value as a society is in the context of economic benefits.

Organizations spend a ton of time measuring the vocational skills, because they can. Because there’s a hundred years of history. And mostly, because it’s safe. It’s not personal, it’s business.

We know how to measure typing speed. We have a lot more trouble measuring passion or commitment.

Organizations give feedback on vocational skill output daily, and save the other stuff for the annual review if they measure it at all.

And organizations hire and fire based on vocational skill output all the time, but practically need an act of the Board to get rid of a negative thinker, a bully or a sloth (if he’s good at something measurable).

He likens someone whose poor skills detract from the productivity of the workplace with an employee that walks out the door with a computer under their arm every day. Both are stealing from you in some fashion.

But perhaps most applicable to the argument about the value of liberal & fine arts, culture, creativity, etc is Godin’s assertion that just because they are difficult to teach and measure, doesn’t mean so-called soft skills are not valuable and worth the effort.

We rarely hire for these attributes because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure.

And we fire slowly (and retrain rarely) when these skills are missing, because we’re worried about stepping on toes, being called out for getting personal, or possibly, wasting time on a lost cause.

Which is crazy, because infants aren’t good at any of the soft skills. Of course we learn them. We learn them accidentally, by osmosis, by the collisions we have with teachers, parents, bosses and the world. But just because they’re difficult to measure doesn’t mean we can’t improve them, can’t practice them, can’t change.

Now a slight tangent here– let’s recognize arts and cultural organizations are some of the worst offenders when it comes to hiring for skills and turning a blind eye to poor interpersonal skills because the employee has passion; isn’t getting paid a lot; and there isn’t time or money to train or model proper behavior.

Don’t read Godin’s article and get trapped into thinking about how the arts can help people develop all those soft skills he lists. First, the whole point is to stay away from a utilitarian justification for the value of the arts. Second, as I note, it’s a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes when it comes to being an exemplar for cultivating those skills in the workplace.

I think the argument to be made is that we can all generally acknowledge that the presence of arts, culture and creativity in our lives enhances society/communities in myriad ways. We can’t measure the benefit specifically or attribute improvements directly and exclusively to the presence of arts & culture. Nor do we want to because creative expression is always going to be one important factor among many (like walkability, public transportation, employment, new initiatives.)

This is important in much the same way as skills like leadership, collaboration, resilience, passion, competitiveness, resourcefulness and hundreds of other factors are important to the success of a business or organization. You can’t set a goal to improve passion by 10% and leadership by 30% next year, but you know you have to work on cultivating both.

You can hire someone based on their sense of humor, honesty and friendliness because you know those factors are important to the effectiveness of your work environment. But no one is hired as the one that fills the humor, honesty and friendliness gap on the team the way they would be for their vocational skills.

Nobody doubts these attributes are important in a business environment even though they can’t be easily measured. In fact, when a young person starts out the are likely to cite these skills in a resume to make up for their lack of experience.

The challenge of the arts and culture community then is to create an environment where the value of the presence, or lack thereof, arts/culture/creativity is acknowledged in much the same way rather than something that can be decanted in discrete amounts.

There Isn’t A Template For That

by

I was really grateful for Aaron Overton’s very first post on ArtsHacker last week.  Aaron is a programmer with a lot of experience in website development for performing arts organizations. (Disclosure: He did some work on the ticketing integration for my day job website.)

In his ArtsHacker post, he talks about how much work goes into making it easy to keep an arts organization website updated and looking good. I had a conversation about that very subject the day before his post appeared. Had I know his piece was coming out, I would have delayed my meeting a day and used the post to bolster my argument.

Because performing arts organizations have an ever changing cycle of events, it can take a lot of work to keep your website current, attractive and put the most relevant information in front of site visitors’ eyes.   Publishing platforms like WordPress make creation and maintenance of websites much easier than it was even 5 years ago, but there is still A LOT of coding that has to occur to make the process of adding and removing content quick, painless and in many cases, automatic.

The back end of my day job’s website has a nice set of orderly field that I can plug event information and images in to and everything appears in its proper place on the website.  About a year ago, I noticed a less than ideal placement of some information and asked my web guy if he could fix it. I was sitting next to him when he made the fix and even though it was easy to accomplish, I got enough of a look under the hood to realize how much work went into making things so simple.

At the time I even remarked that all those ads for build your own website in minutes services like Wix and Squarespace probably made people underestimate how much work went into making websites work well.  Certainly, those sites provide a great service to people and businesses to help them get up and going. But there may come a time in your personal/professional/organizational development where they won’t be enough.

And I made a similar comment in the meeting I had last week.

If you take a look at the first example in Aaron’s post, he mentions desired features that are likely common to many performing arts organizations:

…display headshots of the cast for an event. The set of headshots might have color-tinted photos with the actor’s name displayed on the bottom and some sort of rollover effect that slides in from the bottom when the user hovers or taps.

The client needs to have a pool of actors and be able to build “teams” that can be attached to events. The headshot photos may have many purposes, so they won’t necessarily have a uniform size or aspect ratio.

But to make that happen, he had to consider the following factors:

  • Provide a way for a site manager to create team member profiles with a large headshot photo.
  • Provide a team builder to group team members into ordered lists and note their roles on that team.
  • Create a way to easily place that team on a page for display, along with a few options to allow for different usages.
  • Crop the provided headshots to the right size and aspect ratio.
  • Style the output to account for converting the photos to tinted grayscale.
  • Accommodate different screen sizes and devices so that the final output looks good whether on a desktop or a mobile device.

These are only some of the tasks. During development, many other tasks have revealed themselves as necessary, most of which may have little to do with the final display seen by the site visitor but are necessary to making sure the feature not only works, but is efficient and doesn’t slow down the user experience.

The purpose of Aaron’s post isn’t to tell people to be prepared to pay a lot for a good website. He provides a number of tips about how to approach the design process and conversations you should have with your programmer early on so that you don’t end up paying too much.

Supporting Coverage Of The Cultural Organizations You Support

by

Yesterday on ye olde Twitter feed came a story about how two Buffalo, NY area arts & culture funders were helping to establish an arts and culture desk at a local public radio station.

I don’t recall who distributed the link but what drew me to it was the question in the post about whether this might be a new mode of funding for arts coverage.

In case you missed it, both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal announced last year that they were constricting their arts and culture coverage, joining other news and media sources that had made the same decision in the past.

A press release about establishing the news desk says the intent is to cover groups, disciplines and topics that often get overlooked:

…Arts Services Initiative of Western New York Executive Director Tod A. Kniazuk said. “The establishment of this desk means that culturals of all sizes and disciplines, and artists in all mediums and stages of their careers, will have a greater opportunity to get the message out about their work and its impact.”

…explained Stanton H. Hudson, Jr., Executive Director of the TR Site…And, through a dedicated arts and culture news desk at WBFO, artists and cultural organizations will be provided enhanced opportunities for listeners to experience their work, which often address historical and contemporary social, religious, political, and cultural issues and provide a framework for exploring challenging and difficult subjects.”

A column on the Artvoice paper site applauded the decision, citing the importance of coverage for small cultural groups and how they sustained Buffalo through the tough times

This can be a particular threat to the smaller, edgier, scrappier, low budget venues, tucked into warehouse or storefront spaces, hidden in basements or abandoned social halls. These venues depend upon coverage in mainstream media to attract new audiences.

In Buffalo, where small venues have arguably sustained the city through its hard times and fueled its burgeoning renaissance, it is dangerous to neglect or abandon this aspect of a diverse and lively arts scene.

To get back to the question that lead me to the article, is this a sign of things to come? Will community foundations need to support some sort of system of coverage for the arts and cultural organizations in their community?

Will arts and cultural organizations kick in funding to support such coverage? If so, it might be best funneled through an arts council in order to avoid accusations of favoritism to those who paid the most or the emergence of a pay for review system that caused a controversy in Los Angeles.

While I do wonder if reviews are really as important as word of mouth/social media any more, and it might vary by community, I do think general coverage of news, activity and trends can be important for the cultural health of a community. Reviews and stories about specific events only provide a snapshot of an instance. Conversations about long term initiatives, trends and developments can be particularly of value because they communicate overarching information that can be missed when we are so focused on what is immediately in front of us.

I am not saying subsidized coverage of culture shouldn’t call attention to particular groups and events. Just that it is often easier for an organization to catch and engage momentary attention than it is to communicate the arc of progress or illuminate the entire cultural ecology of a community. That is where the real value of coverage by a media organization can lie.

Arts Aren’t Great Because Great Men Say They Are

by

Since the news started going around last week that the Trump administration was looking to de-fund the NEA, NEH and PBS, there have been a ton of memes circulating quoting Winston Churchill refusing to defund the arts during the Second World War saying, “…then what are we fighting for?”

Except, as I wrote four years ago, that story is completely apocryphal. He never said that. He said some things close to that and the precursor of the Arts Council of England was formed in 1940 ““to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.”

Yes, it may be a little pedantic to call out the error, but given that fake news is a topic of frequent discussion these days, I think accuracy may be the best policy.

As I was re-reading that post of four years ago, I noticed that included a story about how Lincoln insisted on completing the dome of the Capitol during the Civil War so that people could see the government would continue. And how Roosevelt cited that story when he was dedicating the National Gallery. And how Kennedy cited both Lincoln and Roosevelt when asking for public support of the arts saying they,

“‘understood that the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose- and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”

I was left hoping that the Lincoln story was true because it was the foundation of rationales made by subsequent presidents.

But the real question is, are the arts only great because important people have said they are? Do the arts become less worthwhile if we can’t find important people to vindicate their value? If Lin-Manuel Miranda decides next week it is all about fly fishing, will arts, culture and creative expression be abandoned in droves? (More likely than not hordes of people would track Miranda down to a stream in Montana and serenade him.)

Famous people can be the focus or public face for will and effort, but they are not the will. Often that famous face is not required. What famous people did all the marches of this past weekend coalesce around?

Creative expression doesn’t need a famous face behind it to matter. It doesn’t need a million people to march before it matters. Though those numbers certainly make a cause compelling and something you ignore at your own peril.

I don’t look at the folder of supportive comments I collect for grant reports and think wistfully it would be great to have a quote from a famous person instead of these 50 comments from nobodies.

I am pretty cynical about this perennial threat of defunding arts and culture. I see it akin to an older kid holding a toy over a toilet bowl and threatening to drop it in. Whether they ultimately drop it in or not, the kid seems to revel in the reaction the threat elicits.

I don’t think an argument accompanying a picture of Winston Churchill is any more compelling to decision makers than a picture of any one of us saying the same thing so we might as well get in the practice of standing behind our own sentiments.

In terms of getting people to act to support the arts, I suspect for a large percentage of people on your social media feed, your picture and statement of support is going to be a lot more compelling than Winston Churchill’s.

I Am Not Really An Artist, But…

by

I often talk about the difficulty people have in seeing themselves as creative or as regularly participating in a creative pursuit. I was reminded recently that it can be the off-handed depreciating remarks we make that can reinforce this view.

Yesterday we were meeting with the outside consultant that is going to help us with the arts listening tour we are conducting in our community. The consultant listened to us talk about our goals for the sessions and perceptual, economic and physical barriers people experience that we hoped to learn about.

At a certain point in the conversation she stopped us and said that when she taught class she often gave assignments that required some creative component, in part because reading and grading multi-page papers is pretty burdensome.

She said after listening to us talk, she recognized that when she would give an assignment, she would often preface it by saying, “I’m not an artist….” or “I can’t draw…” She realized that was contrary to the her goal in giving the assignment. In addition, it was giving people permission/excuse not to really try.

She said in the future she would stop using those phrases and instead say, “I don’t have formal training as an artist, but this is how I represent this concept/process visually and it makes sense to me.”

We often say if we can change the life of even one person, we will be content. We haven’t even executed our project and we have already had an impact!

When we comment that we can’t draw, act, dance, sing, etc, it is often to excuse our perceived lack of ability. Or, as is the case in this classroom setting, in an attempt to alleviate any pressure people may feel about needing to produce something of quality on demand.

But it also perpetuates the idea that we are not possessed of any ability whatsoever. That isn’t true. Who hasn’t doodled in their notebook, sung in the shower, lip-synched, danced and pantomimed like no one was watching?

I don’t know if our consultant’s alternative phrasing is the most ideal. I would love to hear other people’s thoughts. But I think it is a start in the right direction.

Perhaps more importantly, her moment of self-reflection forced me to recognize that even as a person who works in the arts, I have probably prefaced an attempt at creative expression by saying “I’m not a…” I am sure I am not the only one either.

Asking Boards What They Think Of Themselves

by

A few arts organizations in my community are partnering to conduct an arts listening tour where we will go out into the community and try to get a sense of what the barriers to participation for different groups might be. We met with the outside facilitator today so she could get a sense of what we wanted to do and help us avoid inhibiting honest discussion.

She mentioned that one of her major focuses is non-profit boards and that research on board effectiveness is almost exclusively conducted by talking to the executive officer of the organization rather than the board members. She said if you asked the boards themselves they would probably have a different view about their effectiveness.

She told us this to emphasize the importance of including the people we wanted to know about as listening tour participants rather than asking other groups why they thought people in those demographics weren’t engaged. The need to involve those who were not already engaged in our activities has been at the forefront of our mind since we started planning this project.

Later in the day the facilitator’s anecdote came back to me and lead to me to wonder, how many executive officers ask their board to reflect on their effectiveness. How many boards ask it of themselves? How many discuss the differences and similarities between the directors’ and executive officer’s perceptions?

I know this gets into uncomfortable territory. I actually stumbled into it recently when I mentioned my perception of my board’s decision making process to the board president, citing specific examples. To her credit she thanked me for reflecting something they were too close to see and brought it up at a board meeting.

Not all issues are that easily addressed and not all board dynamics allow for these sort of discussions. Perhaps the first step is to work on changing the dynamics.

If it is true that most of the research about the actions, attitudes and effectiveness of boards of directors is derived from what the organizations’ executive officers say about them, maybe the boards have been unfairly maligned and should be given an opportunity to respond.

(And I know there are a lot of people reading this thinking, no they haven’t and no they shouldn’t, but try to get past that.)

Today being the observation of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, it is appropriate to think about all of our relationships that seem antagonistic to some degree and make us feel uneasy and fearful about acting to resolve. Not all movements need to be large and public impacting thousands. Sometimes they can be small, private and personal impacting a handful.

Theatre of Education

by

There is a lot of conversation in the performing arts about potential audiences not seeing themselves or their stories up on stage. If this is something that concerns you, you may want to take some pointers from a New Yorker article about an immersive play experience in Chicago.

Set in an old school, Learning Curve, was created in cooperation with “fifty teen-agers … drawing on their own experiences, and on dozens of interviews with teachers, parents, administrators, and peers” in an attempt to communicate what it is like to attend Chicago city schools.

Similar to other immersive theater pieces like Sleep No More and The Donkey Show, attendee-participants follow a “choose-your-own-adventure” track through the experience.

Each scene lasts just a few minutes but manages, with depth and candor, to make a serious point about the personal and political stew that is public education.

My track that evening brought me to a chaotic advanced Spanish class, where a flustered teacher fought for control of her students while impatiently accommodating a timid new pupil. A real teacher in attendance remarked afterward, “Yup, that’s exactly what school’s like.” Next, I visited a distracted guidance counselor, who informed me that several of my classes were no longer available owing to budget cuts. “You can thank Rahm for that,” he said, referring to Chicago’s mayor. In another intimate scene, I spied a teacher cheating on standardized tests. When caught, she defended herself. “What am I supposed to do? Let the state slap you in the face and call you failures?” Later, I took this same test, frantically filling in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil while tortured by the ticks of an amplified clock. How quickly that very particular brand of panic returns! But then I assisted in a clever prom proposal, in a janitor’s closet, complete with a guitar and a disco ball, and remembered that, for all of high school’s angst, it provides many small moments of wonder.

While the work was intended to illustrate the experiences of the students, whom the article author terms “silent shareholders,” it engendered “sympathy for the elusive authority figures in their lives” among the student creators. Teachers, seeing students depict them, in turn recognized some of their choices contributed to the stresses their students experience.

Looking at the immersive format in this context, it seems obvious (though it hadn’t occurred to me earlier) that it can be used for more than presenting exciting re-imagined tellings of Shakespearean stories and be a tool for dialogue and social change.

Did anyone in the Chicago area happen to see the show and wants to share their own impressions?

Volunteering Ain’t Free

by

Somewhat apropos of yesterday’s post, Non-Profit Quarterly had a post about Phoenix Comicon’s recent decision to charge volunteers to work their convention.

I am not sure this is really a scandalous decision given that many outdoor festivals I know have had this policy for going on two decades. The more controversial aspect might be that the Con is a for-profit company that was requiring people to become members of a 501 (c) (7) non-profit for which the Con leadership were officers in order to become volunteers. Many objected that this was a major conflict of interest.

But as the Non Profit Quarterly noted (and as I suggested yesterday), co-ordinating the work of volunteers ain’t cheap:

Finally, for charitable nonprofits, or 501(c)(3) organizations, requesting payment for volunteering is an increasingly popular practice, and one that helps organizations sustain their operations—and, in particular, recruit, manage, and sustain the volunteer workforce they often rely upon. While it can feel counterintuitive for volunteers to pay to serve, the effort required for nonprofits to absorb and deploy a volunteer workforce is significant. As both formal corporate volunteer programs and solo entrepreneurs looking to build up their client base increase, volunteers are a plentiful resource for 501(c)(3) organizations. It’s critical to balance the value these volunteers deliver with the cost it takes to engage them.

Another reason to charge volunteers many event organizers, both for and non-profit, will cite is that it shows investment and provides incentive to actually work their shift. As someone who has run an outdoor music festival, I can attest that there is always a segment of the volunteer base that sign up just to get free admission to the event. According to a re-post of a letter by Phoenix Comic-con’s director, combating no-shows and reining in ballooning staffing was the primary reason for pursuing a pay to volunteer model.  In the last few days, they have re-evaluated their decision to have volunteers register as members of the aligned non-profit.

If You Give Me More Helping Hands, Give Me More Cash

by

The idea of mandatory national service gets bandied about a lot, especially during presidential election years. This year it seemed to pop up more frequently due to the proposals for free college tuition being floated by some of the candidates. People were suggesting at the very least those who received free tuition needed to reciprocate in some fashion such as national service in the military, Peace Corps, Americorps, etc.

Last week a discussion held by a local public radio station on the pros and cons of mandatory service came across my social media feed. The host and his guests made a lot of good points about the cons, not the least of which is that people are supportive of the idea for younger people, but when you suggest a mandatory service of even one hour a month for all citizens, there is fierce resistance.

Most of the negative outcomes they mentioned were from the point of view of those who would be providing service. Something they overlooked was the fact that there is expense involved in administering a service program, regardless of whether the participants are being paid or not. This is true whether the service is military or civil. I am going to mostly address it from the civil side, but the basic factors are almost identical. This issue is overlooked pretty much everywhere I could find a national service discussion online.

Supervisory infrastructure, materials, equipment, space, facilities and dozens of other details are necessary if there are any expectations of a meaningful experience with meaningful outcomes from a mandatory service experience.

Mandatory service on a national or even state level can be a boon to the work that non-profits and other service organizations do, but it will require a significant increase in capacity building funding from some combination of governments and foundations. Otherwise having service workers becomes more of a hindrance than a help to an organization.

This issue needs to be raised a lot more emphatically when these ideas are discussed. Otherwise, people will be looking askance at the non-profit sector wondering how it could be screwing things up so badly when they were being provided with the service of 3 million high school graduates every year.

I think it is too easy to equate added labor with industrial productivity and revenue generation and see mandatory service as a boon to organizational sustainability. But very little work non-profit organizations do generates revenue. Being able to teach more children will require more space and instructional supplies. Being able to feed more homeless or elderly will require more food, vehicles and food preparation equipment. Being able to provide health services to people will require more space, medicine, diagnostic equipment.

More capacity to do these things means more money than ever will be spent. Unfortunately, the organizations’ capacity to generate the money to cover these costs probably won’t increase a whit.

The only area in which I could see any sort of return on investment would be in terms of the old WPA type infrastructure projects. If you have people planting trees that can be harvested decades down the road, clearing/creating parks that can be used to generate revenue or gentrify an area to increase the tax base, then you might tie a tangible result to the service. However, a lot of the needed services have intangible results.

So yes, ultimately the nation would be more unified and healthier for having a stronger ethic of service. But getting there ain’t free.

If You’re Happy Cause Your Boss Knows It Clap Your Hands

by

Here is a little topic of discussion for you– Does having a boss that is an arts industry insider make for a happier work environment than working for one that comes from outside the arts?

In Harvard Business Review, researchers found that having an insider for a boss made for a happier environment.

Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business. This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good boss may need some rethinking. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, this argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma, organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also matters enormously.

[…]

When we look closely at the data, a striking pattern emerges. The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. Even we were surprised by the size of the measured effect. For instance, among American workers, having a technically competent boss is considerably more important for employee job satisfaction than their salary (even when pay is really high).

[…]

Moreover, we saw that when employees stayed in the same job but got a new boss, if the new boss was technically competent, the employees’ job satisfaction subsequently rose.

I am sure we can all think of personal experiences that reinforce or disprove these findings.

Something I was wondering as I read this article was what category to use when define deep expertise for a non-profit arts executive. Is it “arts” or “non-profit”? I have noticed that if they didn’t come up through the ranks in an arts field, non-profit arts executive directors and presidents often seem to come from the healthcare field.

Since the job description of non-profit CEOs seems to focus so much on fund raising these days, the non-profit category is probably the defining characteristic for the financial health of the organization, but what impact, if any, does that have on work satisfaction in the organization? (Obviously, I mean when the leader comes from any non-arts non-profit. I am not picking on healthcare.)

We often hear rumblings about the arts being too insular and needing outside perspectives. Is it really the case that arts people don’t have the capacity to innovate in their approach or is it the case of received wisdom akin to engineers not leading other engineers?

Thoughts?

Don’t Go To Abilene Unless YOU Really Want To

by

One of the more famous illustrations of the perils of group behavior is the Abilene Paradox. I wrote about the issue some years back but in short, its a story management expert Jerry Harvey told about how he and his in-laws all took a trip to Abilene that none of them wanted to take because none of them wanted to speak their mind.

As I wrote:

There is an article by Harvey that illustrates how the paradox can manifest itself in various situations and also contains suggestions on how to avoid taking a trip to Abilene. In what might appear to be the most extreme case, he suggests that the instigator of the misguided trip may need to step forward and declare their misgivings about their own project in order to break the fear which keeps the cycle of reinforcement intact.

“… we frequently fail to take action in an organizational setting because we fear that the actions we take may result in our separation from others, or, in the language of Mr. Porter, we are afraid of being tabbed as “disloyal” or are afraid of being ostracized as “non-team players.”

This is why I felt arts organizations might be especially vulnerable to trips to Abilene. Members aren’t simply employees/volunteers/board members but assumed to be true believers in the cause. There could be a fear, real or imagined that disagreement with the group equates to lack of commitment to the greater ideals rather than merely disloyalty to the company.

If you see yourself or your organization as particularly susceptible to making metaphoric trips to Abliene, you may want to resolve to resist doing so in the new year.

Coach or Mentor?

by

Looking back through my archives, I rediscovered a piece I wrote on the concept that most mentoring programs are really coaching programs.  The piece by Rebecca Ryan I link to is no longer available, even on her updated site but the longer article on the difference between mentoring and coaching still is active.

From that post:

Coaching essentially consists of helping someone fulfill their function for the company whereas mentoring is more of a customize relationship aimed at growing the person.

In Ryan’s view, most mentoring programs are essentially buddy programs. Whereas:

“True Mentoring occurs when an elder’s intention is to entrust another with the welfare of her or his estate (or something similarly significant.) In business, this means that one generation of leaders takes the next generation under its wing and over time, teaches them everything they know….So you see, Mentoring is intended to occur alongside a transfer of responsibility. Most Mentoring programs have no such intention.”

The problem she feels lies in the fact that companies try to use mentoring to fill in gaps but don’t commit to designing and implementing the program resulting in low retention and burn out.

So as we move into the new year, if you are mentoring someone or are considering doing so, think about what results are are intending to achieve.

What We Know And How Well We Know It

by

Createquity just released a valuable tool for arts advocates. They compiled the data from all the studies they could find to provide a comprehensive report on Everything We Know About Whether and How The Arts Improve Lives.

I haven’t had an opportunity to dig deeply into the data and ponder what it all means. What I find most helpful is their graphical depiction about where findings about the value of arts fall on two axis – how strong the quality of the evidence is and does the evidence indicate that a benefit exists.

So you can easily see that there is low evidence that cultural engagement can help encourage healing after traumatic events and that the quality of the evidence is weak. On the other hand there is strong evidence that arts participation in early childhood promotes social and emotional development.

The good news is that no survey found that there is an absence of benefit to the arts. Some people may be disappointed to learn that there is very mixed evidence, leaning toward negative, that arts education may improve scholastic attainment in terms of test scores, grades, etc and that the quality of the research backing that is very strong. As recently as 2016 research has “found no or minimal effects for arts and cultural participation or education on attainment measures.” Even the positive research say “overall, the impact of arts participation on academic learning appears to be positive but low.”

I had heard things along these lines and had started collecting information to verify if this might be the case and assess how valid the findings were. Fortunately, the folks at Createquity have done a lot of the heavy lifting in this regard.

Despite what may seem like disheartening news, a large amount of the findings fall into the “evidence that a benefit exists” category with many having medium to high quality levels of research in support of the findings. Many of those in the low quality evidence sector are only there due to lack of research on the subject.

Createquity admits this project is a work in process. As more evidence emerges, they will update it. If they find that the basic premises and interpretations of the researchers is flawed, they will revise the materials.

So often we hear about so many different research findings about the arts it is difficult to assess the value of the findings. Createquity provides a much needed degree of clarity by putting the research on a continuum. Advocacy becomes much easier when you know what you are saying is corroborated with evidence and you know just how strong the evidence is.

Rethinking The Term Business Model

by

In Arts Professional (UK), José Rodríguez recently wrote about how non-profit arts organizations frequently misunderstand what a business model is.

The first misconception he lists is that only businesses need business models and since non-profit arts organizations aren’t businesses, ergo, they don’t need a business model. I don’t think I have ever heard a non-profit in the US suggest they weren’t a business, but he talks about a perception of “business” as a dirty word which is definitely something I have heard in the arts community.

The misconception he addresses that is worth attention is that business models are not necessarily related to moneymaking. My emphasis.

2. Business models are only about money

There are many definitions of business models, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what we are actually talking about, but what most of these definitions have in common is the central role of value creation. And here lies the main difference with what people usually think about business models. It is not only about how your organisation makes money, but about how it creates value and organises itself around its value propositions.

Value is defined as ‘the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth or usefulness of something’. Value can be money, but it can also be many other things. Value is what is important for you and your stakeholders. And for being able to create value, we need to understand the desires, needs, challenges and problems of those that we are trying to serve: audiences, community, employees, volunteers, customers, funders, sponsors, etc. Keep it in mind: Business models are not (only) about money, but about value.

[…]

So what is a business model?

A business model is a vital concept determining the success of any organisation and not a complex formula relating to its profit-making mechanisms. A business model is just a story explaining who your audiences and customers are, what they value, and how you will be able to sustain the organisation in providing that value.

At its most basic, every business model has three components, which respond to a few simple questions:

  • Which stakeholders do we serve? Which of their needs do we seek to address?
  • What do our stakeholder groups value? How do we create that value for each one of them?
  • How do we generate income, and attract other necessary resources, to be able to create value for our stakeholders in a sustained way?

Since it is in the last paragraph of the article, it can be easy to miss but an important feature of business plans is that they are temporary. Since the stakeholders you serve may change, the things your stakeholders value may change or the way you are able to create value for your stakeholders may change, then of necessity your business model must change.

By his definition, making changes to your business model doesn’t necessarily mean a change to your tax status unless you significantly change the way you generate income. Conceiving of business models in this context may help you operate in a more flexible, nimble manner since it moves you away from thinking you need to act in a set way to stay within certain strictures.

What Am I Going To Do With All These Skills?

by

I was recently talking to a conservatory trained pianist who has taken a position teaching at a liberal arts college this last semester. He was complaining about the politics and bureaucracy involved with working in a university system. At one point the conversation turned to him complaining that he didn’t understand why his students had to study math, history, foreign language, etc, asking what use was that to musician.

Someone else at the table turned the topic in another direction before I had the opportunity to point out that he was a pretty clear illustration that even conservatory trained musicians probably need to acquire diverse skillsets in order to advance or supplement their careers.

There was recently a piece in Elle Magazine about Alexandra Ansanelli who was a principal dancer with the NYC Ballet and Royal Ballet, but decided to retire at age 28. Now she works as the director of operations and communications for her father’s medical practice.

In the course of the article there were the usual anecdotes about the pressure of being a dancer and issues with body image that dancers experience.

The article mentioned how poorly prepared for retirement many dancers are both mentally and economically.

Dancers are notoriously bad at planning for their second acts. They underestimate the age at which they’ll retire (the average age of retirement is 34), overestimate the amount of money they’ll earn, and misjudge the forces that will end their careers. More than one-third of the dancers in a 2004 survey were driven to retirement by an injury; only 5 percent left because they actually wanted a new career. When dancers enter the workforce in their thirties, many are woefully unprepared. Only 3 percent of current dancers say that teaching dance is their preferred post-retirement line of work, but it’s the most common fate: 53 percent end up teaching dance in some capacity.

“We know of no other occupation that requires such extensive training, that is held in such esteem as a contribution to culture, and that pays so little,” the authors of the 2004 survey write. Even during peak earning years: in the U.S., an average dancer’s annual total income is just $35,000—about half of which comes from non-dance activities. Even stars might not earn much more, or find themselves better equipped for life on the outside.

What I had never really considered was that the cloistered conservatory type environment which continued into the years of her professional practice delayed her social development as well. (my emphasis)

Though she spends many of her days in an office, she says she’s not an office person. Learning to communicate verbally has been a challenge. “I didn’t realize how introverted I was. I had been so used to emoting silently and physically.” Nonetheless, she is seemingly ahead of many of her peers. She is aware of the limitations that her career imposed, and actively working to overcome them.

When I ask her how her personal life has changed, she answers, “It exists now.” But it’s hard to catch up on everything her peers went through as teenagers and young adults. “I feel I’m learning all the time, what to do, what not to do.” She worries about what new acquaintances will think of her past. “It’s freaky to a lot of people,” the way she left her career. “Did she have some kind of mental breakdown?” she imagines they wonder.

Obviously, her experience and personality is not indicative of everyone’s. It is just that the longer I continue my career in the arts and the more I think and learn about the training process, the more I wonder if long term well-being is being sacrificed for short term definitions of achievement and excellence.

There are many factors that feed into this situation. Training programs are responding to external demands for quality. However, we also know that supply exceeds demand in terms of quantity.

There is already a lot of conversation about low pay and graduating more people than can find jobs, but a lot of those issues are related to the fact that students are being prepared for traditional jobs rather than provided with the capacity to re-cast their skills as appropriate for emerging jobs.

Yes, I know I am flirting very near the argument that an artist’s value is only worth what they are paid for their product, but positioning your skillset for wide applications is different than doing a better job marketing your product to a narrow set of applications.

Be True To Your Audience Just Like You Would Your Girl Or Guy

by

Last week I was initially dismayed to read 85% of audiences in Washington D.C. patronized one theater. I try to promote the concept that all arts organizations in a community need to work together to illuminate all the opportunities for cultural participation, but news like that can cause people to scramble and jealously cling to whatever audiences they can get.

The people quoted in the article admit as much:

That means encouraging audiences to go to any theater, following the “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy. It can be a bit counterintuitive for chronically embattled nonprofit arts organizations long in the habit of primarily looking out for themselves.

“It’s the fear that if I introduce you to my friends, you’ll like them better than you like me,” Woolly Mammoth managing director Meghan Pressman says.

However, there are a number of people quoted in the piece that feel the study underestimates how broadly people already attend other organizations, in part because the study that was conducted only included seven of the many theater groups in the Washington D.C. area. Some of the groups in the survey do have 20%-30% overlaps between their audiences. In surveys others have conducted for Signature Theatre and Round House Theatre, found even greater overlap:

In the two-year Round House survey, 43 percent of single-ticket buyers had been to four or more theaters within a year, 59 percent went to three or more, 76 percent to two or more, and 91 percent went to at least one theater other than Round House. That does not include attending the big touring houses (the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, the Warner Theatre), which further raises the figures.

Perhaps more encouraging is that the theaters are already collaborating on projects and not defensively guarding their audiences.

Examples seem to be growing. Signature and Round House cross-promoted the musicals “Jelly’s Last Jam” (recently at Signature) and “Caroline, or Change” (with Signature talent working at the Bethesda stage). Round House just partnered with Olney Theatre Center on a co-production of the two-part, seven-hour “Angels in America,” presented at Round House and geared to moving patrons between the two troupes. Next year, the organizations will team up again — sharing infrastructure, artists and audiences — for a show at Olney.

So obviously by the end of the article I was breathing a little easier and had a more optimistic view of things.  Though admittedly the idea that there were audiences that felt such a high degree of loyalty to a single theater was encouraging. (Assuming it was loyalty and not lack of awareness or other barriers that kept them from attending other places.)

Something from the middle of the article worth of note was an observation made about how theaters cultivate audiences:

For Robinson, the issue is keeping audiences the first time they visit. She describes a “magic math” that happens when patrons can be lured to more than one performance, and to more than one theater, per year. Repeat attendance jumps and attrition dives, yet the art of keeping audiences is often lost, as organizations fret about attracting fresh faces.

“It’s a gong that we clang,” Robinson says, warning against too much “prospecting” for brand-new clientele. “If we date, and you don’t ask me out again in a few weeks, I’ll forget how cute you are.”

Even if your stance is to glare at others and try to retain what audiences you have, you do well to remember not to take those audiences for granted. To extend the dating example, good communication and attentiveness are a necessary part of retaining audiences.

Improving Survey Results, But Not The Experience

by

Two days ago I wrote about how “experience” is increasingly valued by consumers over things like brand, product and opportunity.  Hopefully you noticed that I attributed my enjoyment largely to the service elements of the experience and not the available amenities.  That is an important distinction because that is often what really matters.

Back in 2015 The Atlantic wrote about how hospitals with high patient satisfaction scores had some of the worst mortality and reinfection rates in the country.  Tying reimbursement rates to patient satisfaction surveys has lead to a focus on patient comfort and demands to the detriment of their medical well-being.

Many hospitals seem to be highly focused on pixie-dusted sleight of hand because they believe they can trick patients into thinking they got better care. The emphasis on these trappings can ultimately cost hospitals money and patients their health, because the smoke and mirrors serve to distract from the real problem, which CMS does not address: Patient surveys won’t drastically and directly improve healthcare.

But research has shown that hiring more nurses, and treating them well, can accomplish just that. It turns out that nurses are the key to patient satisfaction after all—but not in the way that hospitals have interpreted.

 … And University of Pennsylvania professor Linda Aiken found that higher staffing of registered nurses has been linked to fewer patient deaths and improved quality of health…When hospitals improve nurse working conditions, rather than tricking patients into believing they’re getting better care, the quality of care really does get better.

Now obviously, people don’t usually die if they have a negative reaction to an arts experience. An arts and cultural organization rarely has a situation where there is as clear a distinction between what a customer wants and what they need as in a hospital.

One thing we can take from the article is that just as teaching to the test doesn’t necessarily result in higher quality graduates, adding glitz and glamour in order to improve survey results doesn’t guarantee people will really have a fulfilling experience.

The Atlantic article talked about how hospital administrators were concerned that patients gave the food low scores. They blamed the nurses for doing a bad job at making it sound appetizing rather than trying to improve the food. There are some pretty clear parallels between that and blaming the marketing department for failing to make a show sound appealing while neglecting to evaluate the programming choices.

To a degree, the need to focus on programming choices and training staff to offer a positive experience should be encouraging to non-profit arts organizations that don’t have the resources to offer a lot of fancy amenities. Notice that providing sufficient staffing was important. The resources to accomplish that can be a challenge for many.

I was fortunate to be at a table with the head of my state arts council yesterday to hear her say she wanted grant reports that were honest about what did and didn’t work rather than telling the arts council that everything was going great, just as they expected. There was a sense in her comments that the arts organizations in the state needed to be stretching themselves to try different things and figure out what did and didn’t work.

(She also allowed me to evangelize a little on Building Public Will For Arts and Culture!)

At the conversations I had at the event yesterday, I was happy to see that colleagues across the state had already begun to sense that the focus was shifting to providing creative experience without it necessarily being explicitly stated.

The one question from The Atlantic article I still haven’t quite resolved is whether audiences surveys really have a lot of value or not. You may not receive effusive responses if your efforts on focused on competence rather than spectacle. The results may be good, but not so enthusiastic that you can take pride in moving the average score significantly.

If people aren’t moved by a strong reaction, they may not complete a survey and you won’t be completely sure how you are doing. You also don’t want strong reactions driving your decisions so you are basically left with either begging people to complete surveys honestly or don’t conduct surveys and just blindly hope you are headed in the right direction.

My suspicion is that there are alternative methods to soliciting and collecting information that don’t involve surveys. My further suspicion is these methods require more effort and resources to employ effectively than do surveys.

Now That I Hear You Say Aloud Like That…

by

There has been some trepidation among members of the Kentucky arts community following the governor’s recent dismissal and reconstitution of the state arts council. Gov. Bevin dismissed all but four of the council members, reduced the size of the council from 16 to 15 and accepted the resignation of the executive director according to a recent report.

The main cause of concern is the arts council’s newly stated focus,

In a news release, Secretary of the Cabinet of Tourism, Arts and Heritage Don Parkinson wrote: “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”

[…]

“The reorganized council strikes the appropriate balance of expertise in the arts and entrepreneurship,” he said. “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”

A more explicit entrepreneurial focus may seem innocuous …. But some worry the shift misconstrues an artist’s role in his or her community.

[…]

“Crafts, sculpture and paintings, for example — and Bevin simply plans to amplify that relatively narrow and crude approach to the arts,” Day says. “This assumes, with such deep misguidedness, that the primary value of the arts is the price they demand.”

This revisits a oft-discussed topic of this blog, what is the purpose and value of art?

Perhaps more immediately for me, I realized how the call for artists to be more entrepreneurial can very quickly be leveraged to the detriment of the arts and culture community.

When I have invoked “entrepreneurial” in the past it was with the intention that those in the arts community acquire the skills to manage their careers, not be cheated by others and make opportunities for themselves rather than wait for it to be provided by others.

In the context of this story, the same terminology almost sounds like, “helping artists make a constructive contribution to society.”

Certainly the execution doesn’t have to be that cynical. Arts Business incubators could be a boon for many communities provided they were sited in rural and other underserved areas employing a model similar to Kentucky’s Appalshop, rather just in places real estate developers wanted to gentrify.

It was instructive for me to have ideas and language I and others have used in relations to arts practice essentially repeated back to me. There is often a line that pops up in television and film comedies that goes something like “well now that I hear it said aloud like that, yes, I guess it is a little ridiculous.”

I am not saying the idea that people should acquire a set of entrepreneurial skills is silly. Rather, hearing the same terminology used in this case makes it clear that when efforts and initiatives for the arts are discussed, care must be taken to provide clear context and definition of the primary value that will result. Economic, intellectual, social, spiritual, etc. benefits may accrue, but the core creative expression has value independent, and regardless of, whether any of these benefits emerge.

Does The Professional/Amateur Divide Come From Within?

by

About 10-15 years ago, the idea of Pro-Ams, emerged. Pro-Ams are essentially amateurs who pursue an avocation with such diligence it was difficult to discern them from people who employed the same skills as a vocation based on degree of knowledge and practical execution.

Since that time there has been some occasional effort to clarify the distinction. Partially, I think there has been concern that sub-par products and services by amateurs not be mistaken as representative of the ideal by those having little familiarity with those products and services.

Most of the attempts to define the distinction have fallen short. The economic definition about professionals being paid and amateurs doing it for the love was problematic even decades prior to the Pro-Am term emerging. Using years of formal training or experience practicing the skills as a measure also falls short.

In both cases, you can find notable exceptions to the rule you don’t dare include in one category or the other lest you insult or overpraise. It also doesn’t take much before elitism and condescension creeps into the process.

In looking for a link about Pro-Ams for a post I did last week, I came across a piece on Medium that offers a definition of the differences that doesn’t involve any of the aforementioned criteria. It doesn’t answer the concerns about sub-par work, but I can attest from recent experience that there are companies with long history, great amounts of experience in their craft and millions in receipts each year who are managing to provide sub-par experiences and products without amateurs serving as poor examples.

Jeff Goins’ Medium piece, The 7 Differences Between Professionals and Amateurs, depends more on internal motivation than external definitions of achievement to draw his distinction.

Even if it wasn’t already highlighted, the following would probably naturally jump out at you:

If you want to be a pro in your field, you’re going to have to break this terrible amateur habit of looking at what people have without paying attention to what they did to get it. Chasing the results without understanding the process will lead to short-lived success, if not outright failure.

I have touched on this idea before. Even though the phrase “success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration,” is well known to the point of cliche, everyone has this idea that success is the result of a rare element – genius, talent, lucky big break – rather than developed as a process. Yes, natural ability often factors in, but people often believe that there is an easy recipe for results rather than the requirement of effort.

Among his seven differences are the following.

1. Amateurs wait for clarity. Pros take action.
You have to know what you are before you can figure out what you want to do.
[…]
In my case, I spent too long waiting for someone to call me a writer before I was willing to act like one. Now I’ve learned that clarity comes with action. We must perform our way into professionalism. We must first call ourselves what we want to become, and then get to the work of mastery.

2. Amateurs want to arrive. Pros want to get better.
You have to become a student long before you get to be a master.
[…]
For the longest time, I just wanted to be recognized for my genius. It wasn’t until I started putting myself around teachers and around the teaching of true masters that I realized how little I knew and how much I still had to grow as a writer.

3. Amateurs practice as much as they have to. Pros never stop.
You have to practice even, maybe especially, when it hurts.

It’s not enough to show up and work every day. You have to keep challenging yourself, keep pushing yourself beyond your limits. This is how we grow.

[…]

6. Amateurs build a skill. Pros build a portfolio.

You must master more than one skill.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a jack of all trades, but you must become a master of some. For example, all the professional writers I know are good at more than one thing. One is a great publicist. Another is really smart at leadership. Another is a fantastic speaker.

For creative professionals, this doesn’t mean you have to work at your craft uninterrupted for eight hours a day — at least not for most professionals. It means you will spend your time getting your work out there through a variety of channels and mediums, or that you’ll work for part of the day and master something else with the rest of your time.

I don’t know that this is the final word on amateurs vs. professionals, but I feel it is a constructive line of thought to pursue, if only because it get away from the practice of judging the worthiness of others.

Perhaps one benefit of these criteria is that you can be a professional at some pursuit, move to amateur status as other things draw your attention (perhaps a focus on professional status in another endeavor), and return to professional status later in life when you decide to rededicate yourself to it.

In this way, one need not sigh regretfully at once having been a “professional” with no hope of returning to that status because you have fallen out of synch with the latest philosophies, techniques and knowledge. Yes, regaining technical expertise later may be a challenge, but if professionals take the long view toward knowledge acquisition, that mindset puts you halfway there and may have kept you from falling too far behind in the interim.

Thoughts? Have you come across other definitions that are better in whole or in part?

Stuff To Ponder: Expanded Approaches To Pay What You Want Pricing

by

A few weeks ago economist Alex Tabarrok wrote about a strange “pay what you want” promotion a shoe company was running. It struck him and many commenters of the Marginal Revolution blog as a psychological experiment with a goal of getting most people to select the set middle range price.

In that same post he linked back to 2012 post where he provided an analysis for why “pay what you want” can make sense for charities and performing arts organizations. The analysis may be difficult to understand, but the bottom line is:

Probably more importantly, pay-what-you-want pricing is going to be advantageous when the seller also sells a complementary good, such as concerts, which benefit from consumption spillovers from the pay-what-you-want good.

Basically, when you offer an option to pay what you want, there should be accompanying options like food, merchandise, other participatory activities that you can earn revenue from. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the movie theatre model where a bag of popcorn is $10. Offering pay what you want simply because you think it is a good idea without any sense of how you can offset the loss of revenue isn’t prudent. If end up with a higher per ticket price than you had before, that is great, but don’t plan on it.

One of the commenters on the 2012 post noted that the site HumbleBundle allows you to pay what you want, but also posts the average price paid in real time.

Currently, if you pay more than the average of $4.14, you can unlock additional content and if you pay more than $14 there is another level of content you can receive.

Having some sort of bonus content or access people will receive for exceeding the average is a smart idea. It rewards those who act early before the average increases as a result of people paying to receive that content (or just being generous). This content or access could be better seating, merchandise, concessions, meet and greet opportunities, invites to other organizational activities, etc.

I got to thinking about how my ticketing system can tell me what the average selling price of my tickets are on demand. I could theoretically manually update that information on the lobby screens simply as a point of information at various intervals just as a bit of psychological social pressure on people to pay close to that or a little more. While I might also choose to update that information on our website, I am not sure the sense of social pressure would be as significant for online sales.

However, if ticketing software providers created a way to export that information to update in real time like HumbleBundle does, it might be possible to create a sense of tension and excitement in lobbies just prior to performances. (Or if handled correctly, even online). Granted, it could be done manually but I know I have better things for my staff to do than constantly run reports and post data to a public screen.

Watching it tick steadily up with every purchase is much more interesting. Especially if you are experience the dual satisfaction of seeing how much money was being raised for the organization while knowing you got access cheaper than a lot of other people – “Whoo hoo!! We collectively moved the price to $15.63 (but I got mine for $4.85!)”

Thoughts? What experiences, if any, have you had? I know a number of places are doing pay what you want/can, but I am not clear if they are supplementing their income with related goods and services or if they have found a way to energize audiences around the practice in a productive manner.

The Real Competition Is Inaction

by

As he often does, Seth Godin is speaks right to the arts and culture industry when he suggests that we welcome an environment where there is a lot of activity similar to our own rather than viewing it as competition. (my emphasis)

But for the rest of us, in most industries, it turns out that the real competition is inaction. Few markets have expanded to include everyone, and most of those markets (like books and music) have offerings where people buy more than one.

This means that if there’s more good stuff, more people enter the market, the culture gets better, more good work is produced and enjoyed, more people enter the market, and on and on.

So encouraging and promoting the work of your fellow artists, writers, tweeters, designers, singers, painters, speakers, instigators and leaders isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart as well.

I think we can all see the truth in the statement that the real enemy is inaction, not the other organization down the street. The big concern more than anything else these days is that people will stay home and disengage.

I believe I have mentioned it previously, but when I am asked to speak to groups about what my organization is doing I take the opportunity to speak about how all the arts and cultural organizations make the community a great place to live. Even if people don’t patronize all the groups, at the very least it engenders some pride and loyalty to the community. At best, my description of what is enjoyable and valuable about these places may inspire a visit.

The other factor is that the existence of other arts and cultural entities helps attract and cultivate a talent pool that you can benefit from.

When I started in my current job, I was a little disappointed in how few students were initiating their own projects compared to where I came from. It took me awhile to realize that the students with whom I previously interacted were regularly working together on projects at four or five other organizations, plus doing a handful of one-off projects for other people in the arts community. Not only had they developed a close rapport among themselves, but they had many hours exposed to a variety of concepts, techniques and processes working for other people.

I bristle at the suggestion someone invest their time and talent for the experience and exposure, (getting paid doesn’t inhibit the absorption of new skills after all), but I certainly saw their abilities and judgment develop as a result of their effort and discipline.

Moreover, my organization benefited from them having gone through this process. It was only later that I realized how much.

This basic concept then supports the idea that perhaps Professional-Amateurs aren’t the threat to “professional” artists that they have been perceived to be.

If You Give A Teen $100….

by

Recently James Doeser wrote about a program the Italian government started where they granted a culture voucher worth €500 to anyone who turns 18 before December 31.

It can be used to buy books, pay for entry fees to parks, museums and archaeological sites, and instead of cash for theatre, cinema and concert tickets. The euros in the app are spent by the young people and the arts organisations then reclaim this money off the state.

There is something wickedly disruptive as well as very elegant about this idea. If it works, it will have a profound impact not just on Italian cultural policy but also how other governments around the world approach the issue of arts funding.

Whereas a voucher scheme like the one underway in Italy is an exercise in ‘demand-side’ economics, the vast majority of our cultural policy in the UK is on the ‘supply side’.

While Doeser generally applauds the program as a way to avoid giving additional benefits to people who can already afford them, (it is pretty well recognized that free admission days are attended by people who already attend, not new audiences), he notes some potential issues:

While ‘supply-side’ interventions have their shortcomings, ‘demand-side’ ones are not without complications. There is a host of interesting effects that a scheme of this sort might unleash on the cultural marketplace: ticket price inflation; the prospect of resale (if I am an arts lover and can get €300 of your unused credits for, say, €100 in cash, then we’d both be better off if we can do this deal); and finally whether there will be low take-up and the Italian government is operating like your gym, confident that people will not use their entitlements.

Of course, I got to thinking about how this might be implemented in the U.S.

Ideally, teens would use the money to indulge their curiosity and expanding their horizons buying books, going to museums, taking classes/lessons, buying paint, visiting historical sites, etc,. But the reality is that they may just use the money to pay for additional months of Netflix subscriptions and buying music from the same people they already are without expanding their experience.

There might be a temptation to specify what the money can be spent on that aligned to a definition. However broad the definition was, it would still delineate what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. My only consolation would be that as restrictive as the arts community’s definition of what constituted arts and culture might be, it would still be orders of magnitude broader than that of the politicians authorizing the funding.

Politics aside, allowing the funding to be use for all the activities the NEA defined as arts participation their 2012 survey of public participation in the arts would provide some excellent insight into what types of activities people were actually engaging in. Every time a voucher number was used, it would provide useful data about people’s actual practice rather than their self-perceived practice.

True, if people had a sense that their use was being tracked they may only use it at a museum rather than when they indulged their guilty pleasure marathon viewing of The Three Stooges movies. While their self consciousness may slightly skew the results, it may engender a growing appreciation of arts and cultural activities that may not fully manifest until 20 years later when they are in their 40s.

Certainly, the program could just serve to further enrich big corporations like Apple, Comcast, Google, Time Warner, Disney, etc and not help non-profit arts organizations much at all.

While we can watch what happens with the Italian program, the reality is our cultural norms differ to a large enough degree that we basically can’t use their experience to project what might happen in the U.S. It comes down to something of a thought experiment about how much we trust U.S. teens (or all citizens if you wanted to expand the program) to spend money exploring. How much tolerance would we have for people who didn’t spend the money as we thought they should?

Yes, I know this doesn’t even factor in that there are hundreds of thousands of teens out there that have a much more dire need to use even a $50-$100 subsidy for food, shelter and medical care.

And yes, there is also the fact that right now the goal of most arts advocates is to have federal arts funding equal $1 for every citizen so $50 is a pipe dream. Since the population of 18 year olds is only a small segment of the population, the grant could be more than $1, but it would likely still divert a lot of funding from somewhere else even if the federal budget were raised.

But ignoring the fact that the current federal arts budget is far from sufficient and that social services for teens and families are also lacking in comparison with places like Italy, would it freak you out to think about what the 18 year old population of the U.S. would likely spend $100 culture voucher on?

Parents will likely recognize that the title of today’s entry is inspired by “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…” While the kid in the story is run a little ragged in the book I bet most arts organizations would be thrilled to have an audience as engaged and participatory as the mouse.

Frank Discussion About Outreach, New Audiences Efforts In The Community

by

A couple of good articles on the influence non-profits in the community came out this week. CityLab noted that in some communities, non-profits were exhibiting greater influence and leadership than politicians that represented those districts.

Based on his observations, he argues in the journal American Sociological Review, the role of nonprofits in disadvantaged city neighborhood has been changing. They’re no longer just extensions of the state or representatives of a few interest groups. They’re “legitimate representatives of poor urban neighborhoods,” and in many cases, “supersede” elected officials.

[…]

What’s happening now is that these organizations are directly negotiating for resources from public and private sector entities that hold the proverbial purse strings. Community organizations are now authoritative voices at the table, and often regarded by both private companies and bureaucrats as more invested and deeply knowledgable representatives of the neighborhoods. In Boston, “district-based elected officials, by contrast, attended ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings but were largely absent from substantive discussions of redevelopment planning,” Levine writes.

When I read this earlier this week, I thought it was interesting but didn’t think most arts organizations were deeply involved enough in their communities to wield this type of influence.

As luck would have it, I didn’t have to think too long about how I might express this in a blog post because Ronia Holmes does it so well in a post that came out today on TRG Arts’ blog.

Her post, “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why” is a must read if your arts organization conducts outreach activities or talks about attracting new audiences. I plan to distribute it to my board and partners in other arts organizations.

She makes some very frank statements which may be uncomfortable to read, but they are reasonable and empathize with the position in which arts organizations find themselves.

Almost too much to quote but I will try to keep it brief:

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.

Referring to arts organizations which are not native to these disinvested communities:

Rather than grapple with these deeply ingrained failings, most organizations have opted to substitute narrative for action. They have amended their written missions and values in order to recast themselves as inclusive organizations meant for all. They turn to the community and say, “Now we’ve got a space here for you!”

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

The following about seeking new audiences really grabbed my attention:

There is a pervasive idea that a “new” audience must be a “diverse” one, and community-building is co-opted as a tactic for patron acquisition. The hard truth is that the disinvested communities targeted by so many outreach programs simply do not have the resources to—or, frankly, the interest in—sustaining these organizations. The model of operation on which most organizations operate need constant and high influxes of cash, and the lion’s share of affluence still rests with white patrons.

The reality is that most arts organizations don’t need a “diverse” audience—they need an audience with discretionary income. Yet the almost maniacal focus on community-building keeps organizations trapped in cycles of trying to sell to—not engage with, but sell to—audiences that don’t have that resource. In the meantime, organizations are unable to concentrate fully on patron retention and loyalty, and identifying and building audiences that are able and willing to fill the funding gaps.

[…]

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.

As much as I quoted here, there is a lot I left out. Even though I probably flirted with tl;dnr eight paragraphs ago, I hope this sample is enough to make you want to read more of what she said.

While it is not the final word on the subject, I think we probably recognize the truth in what she says about outreach efforts. The futility of grant chasing has been acknowledged for quite awhile. These are ideas that need continued discussion.

While we would like to be in a position where our organizations are viewed as leaders in the community like those in the CityLab article, most arts organizations really lack the resources and mission to fulfill that role.

Those Experiences Don’t Need To Be More Like Our Experiences

by

On blogs like mine that address the concerns of non-profit organizations there is frequently discussion about how we bridle under the suggestion that non-profits need to be run more like businesses.

I was reading a couple articles in the recent issue of Arts Management Quarterly that reminded me that the arts world applies a similar set of standards internally.

An article by Victoria Durrer, Raphaela Henze and Ina Ross, “Approaching an Understanding of Arts and Cultural Managers as Intercultural Brokers,” comments,

Rather than engaging in a more nuanced cultural understanding of consumption in these economies, such approaches pejoratively view and address these customers as being 20 years ‘behind’ American or European consumers in their needs and habits. Similarly, a museum in Asia or Africa is typically viewed as needing to be ‘brought up’ to a level in line with the most recent stage of western modernity.

The authors go on to note that many countries are recognizing the need to raise standards and professionalize operations but the way in which these standards are applied and manifest are quite different than in Western countries.

This perception doesn’t only emerge between arts managers of Western and non-Western countries, but within countries as well. In a separate piece “How Globalization Affects Arts Managers,” Raphaela Henze discusses the situation in Germany,

Many of the arts managers explained that the reason for their efforts is to foster ‘integration’…The term has the paternalistic notion of allowing those that are not familiar with the rules to play the game in case they learn and then stick to the rules laid out by those that are already playing.

My guess is that I didn’t really need to mention she was referring to Germany because we can see how this applies in the U.S.

The implications for the United States are probably clear: Existing ideas about what an arts experience should look like should not be forced upon groups expressing an ethnic or cultural identity that differs from the mainstream, including standards of behavior in those situations. Basically, there shouldn’t be statements that something is or is not a valid experience based on existing standards.

In an even larger perspective, this view needs to applied to all experiences regardless of whether they originate from a group expressing an ethnic or cultural identity. The NEA has already started us down this path by expanding their definition of what an artistic or cultural experience is.

I don’t think this concept is particularly new to anyone. However, not only is it useful to remind ourselves of this necessity on occasion, I think it is helpful to do so in the context of a sentiment we dislike—The proper way to run a non-profit is like a regular business. It gives you something additional to think about when making statements of judgement.

Clarifying Pricing Practices

by

Colleen Dilenschneider made some really important points about misunderstood concepts that lead non-profit organizations to make poor decisions and policies. The “Six Concepts that Visitor-Serving Organizations Confuse at Their Own Risk,” she discusses have subtle distinctions that can be difficult to clarify.

It is somewhat akin to the differences between PR, Marketing and Advertising. Even if you have taken the 101 course in any of these subjects, others around you may use the terms so interchangeably that you may find yourself having to stop and say, “No, that is advertising, not marketing.”

Among the concepts she mentions are Fads vs. Trends, which I had cited her on before; Market research vs. audience research; High-propensity visitors vs. historical visitors and key performance indicators vs. diagnostic metrics.

Personally, I don’t frequently get into regular discussions about visitor propensity or indicators vs. metrics, but they are worth reading about because you may think about issues related to those general terms and she makes some great observations.

What will cause me to keep this post bookmarked for future reference were her observations about Admission Pricing vs. Affordable Access and Discounts vs. Promotions.  The points she makes are great for getting pricing conversations in board and staff meetings re-oriented and properly focused.

In terms of Admission Pricing vs. Affordable Access, she says:

Admission pricing is the cost of admission for folks who visit your organization. It is an intelligently determined price point that contemplates what high-propensity visitors (people who are interested in visiting cultural organizations) are willing to pay in order to take part in your experience…. Admission price is an economically-sound business imperative for many organizations and admission pricing is not an affordable access program if your organization relies on paid admission in some capacity.

Affordable access (that is effective) is generally rather expensive for cultural organizations and it takes real investment that is usually made at least partially possible by gate revenues…When organizations lower their optimal price point in hopes of “being more affordable” or “reaching underserved audiences” they aren’t truly doing either of those things…Successful affordable access programs are targeted so that they truly reach folks who are unable to attend – not people who would generally pay full price but are just looking for a deal. Admission pricing and affordable access are two completely different means of access that play completely different roles in the sustainability of visitor-serving organizations.

Her thoughts on Discounts vs. Promotions run along the same lines:

Discounts are when an organization offers free or reduced admission to broad, undefined audiences for no clearly identifiable reason. Discounts do a lot of pretty terrible things for visitor-serving organizations. Simply, offering discounts devalues your brand….When an organization provides discounts, it often results in five not-so-awesome outcomes that you can read about here.

Promotions offer a targeted benefit for certain audiences for an identifiable reason. The biggest difference between promotions and discounts may be how they are perceived by the market. Promotions celebrate your community. Promotions demonstrate why an organization is offering free or reduced pricing in the communication of the promotion…In the end, one approach is more about an organization’s flailing attempts to hit specific attendance numbers at the expense of its brand and mission (and long-term ability to hit those numbers), and the other is more about your organization’s relationship with target audiences and communities.

As I suggest, the issues covered by these four concepts often come up in organization discussions and the lack of clarity between them often yields ineffective results.

Dilenschneider’s post started me thinking about what other concepts and practices might be confused and in need of clarification. A couple of ideas have come to mind, but I haven’t fully developed them yet.

If anyone has any suggestions or has thought about similarly confusing concepts they have already created distinct definitions for, I would love to hear them.

Funding Requests As Panhandling

by

I have been listening to On The Media’s series on the way poverty is covered in America and suddenly came to the realization that the language associated with the poor has many similarities to the way Non Profit With Balls blogger Vu Le describes funders perceive non-profits.

Proud of this realization, I went to Vu Le’s blog to grab some passages to cite…only to realize he made that exact point back in July.

As I was thinking about the parallels over the weekend, I really started to wonder if arts organizations need to find another tax structure to organize themselves under so that they didn’t have these negative associations to the work they did.

Granted, this is sort of abandoning the issue rather than trying to shift the perception. Arts organizations metaphorically moving out of the tax status neighborhood doesn’t help social service organizations who are painted with the same brush as the impoverished people they seek to serve.

Except that the perception can infect the social service charities as well which shows how unhealthy it is.

In one On the Media episode, Linda Tirado is interviewed and discusses how her family’s belongings were destroyed when their apartment was flooded. Eight months pregnant, she calls a social service organization looking for a chair so she would have a place to sit.

She was told she could have the chair, but she would need to take a resume writing workshop before she could pick it up. The charity wanted to make sure she was trying to better her situation. The only times the workshops were available were when she had to work so she would essentially end up putting herself in danger of being fired for want of a chair.

That is what personal responsibility means to somebody on welfare. It means here are these stupid hoops that we’re gonna make you jump through and then we’re going to give you a solution that absolutely won’t work for you. It’s that kind of just over and over beating your head against these ridiculous regulations and these double-blinds that don’t make any sense. And the whole thing is set up specifically to humiliate you as much as possible because what we need poor people to do in America more than anything else in the world is know their place.

Compare to a similar passage from Vu Le’s post:

The No-Free-Lunch: There have been idiotic proposals by clueless politicians designed to punish the poor for violating whatever ridiculous expectations are set out for them. Like taking away food stamps if their kids don’t get good enough grades or if they’re not volunteering or seeking out employment, despite the fact that there are only so many volunteer and paid positions to go around. In our sector, our funding gets threatened if we don’t comply with various requirements, such as working toward “sustainability.” A colleague mentioned a grant that won’t pay for staff wages and other indirect expenses, and applicants have to demonstrate that they will be completely self-sustaining within a year. That gave us all a good chuckle.

If people see non-profit arts organizations in the same light as welfare recipients, is it any wonder they don’t want their kids going into the arts? If they aren’t going to be constantly asking their parents for support, they will be asking society for support and what self-respecting parent wants that right?

I am not sure people equate the two in exactly that manner, but there is possibly a greater stigma associated with non-profits than we expect. Because people’s perceptions of poverty often has a very strong emotional element, merely surveying people about their attitudes may not be effective since they may not be entirely aware of how much their unconscious associations influence them.

About five years ago, it was relatively common to see people talking about the need for arts to adopt a different corporate structure. Many different options were debated but to my knowledge, no one ever restructured or organized a new arts organization under one of the alternative models. (Though we would really only start to see proof of concept now after five years of operation.)

While the idea that arts organizations need to distance themselves from those that society looks askance at may be immediately satisfying, not only does it not really appear to be viable, it doesn’t really solve the greater issues that arts organizations and non-profits in general face.

I have written before about the effort to build public will for arts and culture which seeks to change general societal perceptions about the arts. I have to imagine that a shift in the negative associations people make with the way arts are supported and funded would integral part to that.

If We Build It, Please Don’t Come

by

I am interested to see that artists are gaining an increasingly sophisticated view of their role in gentrifying neighborhoods. Non Profit Quarterly reported on a gathering in Miami to discuss the issue.

According an article in the Miami Herald, there was a sense among attendees that

“Artists find themselves in the uncomfortable and confusing position of feeling as if they have become inadvertently complicit in driving gentrification, even as they are also being victimized by the trend.”

One of the big topics of discussion was that gentrification is happening so quickly now that artists aren’t even able to set down roots before they are displaced. One Miami non-profit art space has had four homes in six years. Another artist claims to have been “priced out of 10 neighborhoods on two continents, from New York to Paris to Miami.”

Artists are beginning to recognize that not only are they getting displaced by gentrification, they are taking long time residents with them and are now essentially seen as harbingers of doom.

Some who contributed to the conversation in Miami were openly hostile to the idea of artists entering their neighborhoods, perceiving them to be an intentional element of a gentrification effort known as Artwashing.

Sensitive to this, some arts entities are working with the community. The Herald article mentions that Opa-locka Florida listened to residents’ feedback and built a park before building an arts center.

There are also accusations of artists being focused only on themselves rather than the impact they have on the communities in which they take up residence. Thinking back, I have to admit that the earliest writing I did on the subject of gentrification was about how artists were being displaced rather than how the neighbors were impacted.

Though to be fair, many of the first places artists were inhabiting were abandoned industrial and warehouse areas rather than residential districts and gentrification was only largely affecting them. The impact of gentrification on residential areas may be comparatively recent, say in the last 10-15 years. If areas are becoming gentrified more quickly than before, it may also be the case that developers are identifying and exploiting trends in neighborhoods that much more quickly than they had.

In the past I have written about how arts organizations can’t be egoistical and think that if they build it, the audiences will naturally come without any effort on their part. However, there are cases when artists may build it and fear what is to come. (Along with their neighbors.) They may not necessarily benefit too much from the increased economic activity prior to being displaced.

I am interested to see what comes of this growing awareness of cause and effect. What choices artists and communities make to manage, mitigate or resist.

Gasp! Orchestra Strike Post That Doesn’t Devolve To “Overpaid Bums”

by

On the Marginal Revolution blog, economist Tyler Cowen quotes bits of a Wall Street Journal article on orchestra strikes by Terry Teachout and ends with what seems to be an implication that many orchestra musicians and conductors are being paid too much.

I had expected many of the comments that followed to state orchestra musicians are overpaid bums, but to my surprise very few of the nearly 100 comments did. Instead, there were some of the most interesting discussions about the proficiency of orchestra musicians and ensembles I have seen outside of an arts related news source.  If anything, some orchestra might be tempted to cite these commenters in their negotiations.

There were multiple mentions of musicians today being more skilled than those in the 1950s and 1960s and easily able to tackle compositions with which their predecessors struggled.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra had a number of fans and comments about them emphasized their proficiency:

26 Tununak October 25, 2016 at 11:47 am

The only time I heard the Chicago Symphony live was when I was in Chicago for a conference years ago. They played Petrouchka, and to this day I remember the flute solo as being absolutely breathtaking. I had never really thought about that solo before that moment. There really are differences between the delivery of the very top performers and the rest, and they aren’t necessarily marginal differences.

27 Steve Sailer October 25, 2016 at 7:46 pm
Yup.

For example, I attend a minor league opera series in Los Angeles called Pacific Opera Project that is wildly entertaining and quite moderately priced. They’ll do anything for a laugh. It’s great entertainment value per dollar.

The only problem is when they spring for a really good singer and he suddenly reminds you that the rest of the singers in the production aren’t really good and you are missing out on a whole world of unbelievable singing because you can’t afford it.

Steve Sailer October 25, 2016 at 7:17 am

[…]
That raises an interesting question: if the next time the CSO goes out on strike, if management could secretly fire everybody and replace them with Lyric Opera musicians, how many season ticket holders would notice that diminution in quality?

I’d guess maybe less than 50% but more than 10%, but I’m just making those numbers up.

Since I am living in Ohio, I can’t let Cleveland’s praises remain unsung:

96 Faze October 25, 2016 at 10:25 pm

The insecurity of Clevelanders is reflected in the Cleveland Orchestra’s signature sound, which is perfection. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a looser, scrappier sound. But Cleveland can’t afford to let its hair down. Night after night, year after year, they pump out pure, transcendent perfection. The exquisite tone of the string section alone can leave you gaping. But as one Russian music student of my acquaintance said, “Eeez borink. I don’t learn from them. They have no mistakes.”

I was interested to see the following comment for the very Industrial Revolution assumptions it makes about the purpose of unions:

29 BC October 25, 2016 at 10:11 am

If musicians are that differentiated and not interchangeable, then why unionize and collectively bargain? Most unions represent interchangeable labor and indeed actively discourage differentiation (merit pay, employee evaluation, etc.). When labor is undifferentiated, unionization creates a monopoly. If musicians are individually differentiated, then each musician already has a monopoly on his or her own talents.

Professional athletes’ unions are an exception and their demands are correspondingly different than those of unions in other industries. In professional sports, the unions are pro-market, demanding things like free agency, and the owners are anti-competition, demanding things like salary caps, luxury taxes, etc. Are the musicians striking to end anti-competitve and collusive practices of orchestras or are they acting more like traditional labor unions, just asking for uniformly higher pay?

Discussions about the arts on an economics blog can yield some interesting points of view. There was a comment earlier in the thread where someone said something similar, asking why oboists, for example, didn’t hold out for more than clarinetist in communities where clarinetist were common.

It makes me wonder if part of the difficulty orchestra musicians face is this concept that unions exist to insure a supply of skilled, interchangeable cogs. I don’t think it is necessarily the term “union” that is the problem, any collective effort would likely be regarded as a union even if they called themselves more lighthearted like a Musician Clan.

From the comments and general observations, I think there is an underlying sense that talented individuals can negotiate the best deal for themselves and mediocre individuals join collective bargaining groups in order to get better pay than they would be able to get alone.

Really it is more a matter of what value is placed on the work being done than on the talent and skill of the person doing it. People initially formed unions to get better pay for work that has low value associated with it.

Whether you think orchestra musicians are overpaid or not, to read the comments in this post it appears a number of people feel that the musicians of many orchestras are to be commended for their pursuit of excellence in performance.

Not Everything Is For You

by

There is a video of Nina Simon speaking at the Minnesota History as part of her Art of Relevance book tour early this month. Many things she said jumped out at me and I am going to pass the video along to a couple other people in the hope of starting some conversations.

Around the 47 minute mark she talked about responding to organizational insiders who are dissatisfied by programming that seeks to attract new audiences.  She uses the metaphor about going to a restaurant and how you don’t suddenly decide to boycott the restaurant if they start adding vegetarian and heart healthy options to their regular menu.  In her particular experience long time insiders complained about interactive programming and community festivals, she pointed out that the new people coming to those events weren’t complaining that the museum was offering programming and opportunities that insiders valued.

When she talked about that, it occurred to me that often resistance to new programming is  rooted in the belief that everything should be for oneself. The truth is, everything isn’t for you.

Granted, some times new programs are part of a zero sum equation, especially in a performing arts situation where there are finite resources and dates. A new initiative may displace one of regular events. Instead of 10 things designed for you, you only get nine. For a lot of people even 1/10 of a change can result in them feeling the organization is no longer relevant to them. This may especially be true in the case of subscription holders.  That one bad grape in ten ruins the value of the whole package.

In this situation it can be a little tricky to say, that’s okay you don’t need to come to that show, we have other discount configurations that may suit your needs. Not only might your delivery of that message be flawed and sound offensive, but even with perfect delivery, the patron may only hear “that’s okay you don’t need to come.”

Even if the new initiatives are additions and don’t displace any of the current offerings, patrons, donors, board members can still feel the organization is no longer the one they value, despite having lost nothing.

Or at least lost nothing but the desire to keep the delight they feel to themselves. Nina addresses that a couple minutes earlier with the response, wouldn’t you want to share the joy you feel with everyone else? She says even though in their hearts they want to say, “No way!” it is difficult to admit it aloud.

Even though Nina makes it sound easy. Even though she cites examples of people who are excited to see new vibrancy come to the organization they value, it isn’t easy to go against the inertia of thinking that everything that is being done is being done for you.

Regularly reinforcing, gently and diplomatically, of course, the sense that “What We Do, We Do For YOU (collectively)” rather than “for you” (singularly) is important….even though we do want everyone to feel individually invested.

I think Nina’s restaurant metaphor is a useful one. Most of the time restaurants make menu changes and it barely registers notice from people. You can assure people that while it may feel like the organization is metaphorically changing from a steakhouse to a vegetarian restaurant, that isn’t what is happening. Besides, you may find you some of the vegetarian offerings appeal to you.

(As any vegetarian will tell you, if there is a delicious vegetarian option available on a buffet, it will be cleaned out immediately by all the meat-eaters.)

 

Too Much Art To Learn, No Time For Managing You?

by

One last post about the arts entrepreneurship conference I attended a couple weeks ago. Tomorrow it will be on to other things.

There are increasingly productive efforts being made toward teaching/mentoring/instilling, (whatever term you want to use), artists to manage their own careers.  I purposely didn’t use the term entrepreneurial practices because there are those that rankle at the idea artists need to measure their success in terms of economics and commerce. I have written enough about the idea that arts organizations should be run like a business to agree with that point.

On the other hand, everyone can use some sort of guidance about how to manage their lives and careers, even if it doesn’t have a commercial focus.

You Interview For A Job, Not A Career

An issue that came up at the conference was that career development offices, especially those at universities and colleges, tend to operate with a 20th century orientation on preparing to interview for a job rather than creating a career for one self. This is least helpful for students in arts disciplines where interviewing often doesn’t occupy a central role in career advancement.

The thing is, when parents come on a college visit with high school students, they ask the admissions office how many graduates get a job, not how many graduates started their own businesses or independent careers. Most parents would likely be terrified at the thought of what might happen if their defiant 16/17 year old tried to start their own company. The focus of career offices are partially driven by the expectations of tuition paying parents.

You Don’t Know You Want To Know It Until You Do

The other difficulty with trying to teach students to be more entrepreneurs mentioned at the conference is that they often aren’t in a place where they are receptive to forced instruction in that topic. One of the panelists spoke about how a visiting artist held a Q&A after conducting a master class and said she wished she had learn more about the business side in school. But she also admitted that she probably wouldn’t have paid attention at the time.

Once students have a project they become personally invested in, then they become interested in learning what is involved in making it a reality. That may be the advantage Millikin University has in having experiential learning as an institutional value. They put students in a position where they become invested in the success of something while they are in school.

Many people don’t have that experience until after they graduate and lack the easy access to advice and resources an academic setting affords. That was one of the central topics of discussion on a panel lead by Millikin professor Dr. Mark Tonelli. He presented a series of quotations from research he conducted with students and graduates.

Lives Are Ruined, Others Are Not

One graduate’s response reflected their perception of what their education lacked:

“We have a jazz degree, but no idea how to go about teaching private lessons ourselves, we have no idea how to adapt our jazz skills to the popular music scene (i.e. gigs that pay), having our heads buried in self-indulgent art music leaves us completely out of touch with current trends in music, we don’t know how to negotiate contracts, when to hire an agent, how much to pay people, where to find legal advice, we don’t even know how to do our !@#$%&* taxes…this is pathetic for a university-level bachelor degree.”

While my first impulse upon seeing this was to become indignant about how schools are failing to prepare students, there were others who presented a more moderated view.

“I feel I was fully prepared musically and artistically…it was my understanding that my degree would not encompass any business elements [so] I cannot hold it against the degree. I do feel that more business would be helpful to most students. At the same time, I am somewhat comfortable with the notion that it is an arts only degree and those who wish to make a living can sink or swim by learning business in the real world…I remember some professors saying that while the business was very important, there is just so much art to be learned that it is better to do a great job of that than diluting the degree with a mixture of art and business.”

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, of the respondents Dr. Tonelli quoted simply said they wished they could just play jazz and not have to worry about the business side at all.

Beauty Now, Sharks Later Is Not The Only Option

As a person who works on the business side of the arts, I was a little annoyed by the student being told there is so much art to be learned it is better to put off learning about business until later. If you are learning to be an artist, is learning about the business side a dilution or is it a holistic approach to the subject?

Is there so much art to be learned that some can’t be learned later? I am pretty sure there is an assumption you will need to continue honing and gaining skills after graduation. Performers take voice and acting lessons throughout their careers. Visual artists pick up new techniques and skills. Musicians study additional technique.

The way the student characterized those wanting to make a living as having to sink or swim illustrates quite a bit about how business skills are viewed.  Do instructors and mentors really want their charges to think they will be fully informed about the thing they are most passionate about in life, but if they want to do anything with it, they are on their own with the sharks?

A university/conservatory education provides the basis upon which you continue to develop over the course of your career. So why aren’t some general career management skills part of that, again with the assumption that one will need to continue to learn? If that were the case, the first graduate cited might be less discontented with their degree: aware of the basics but knowing there was more to know and having a sense of what they potentially needed to know more about.

The idea that career management skills are something separate you pick up later if you need it seemed divorced from how artists have historically managed their careers. Worse, it places the artist in a passive role, waiting to be discovered by someone else who will promote and manage them or give them a job. Certainly at a certain point one needs managers, accountants and agents to handle one’s business—but until you get to that point one really needs to be aware of how to perform many of those tasks for oneself. To be active and in control rather than simply waiting.

Very few artists have achieved success as hermits passing their work through a partially opened door to an agent. There plenty of instances when an artist has found themselves in a difficult place because they didn’t have the skills to monitor how their agents were handling their business.

Can’t Brag About Them And Not Invite Them To The Table

by

I attended a presentation by Mosaic Education Network about their efforts working in conjunction with the Barnett Center at Ohio State University to provide some entrepreneurship workshops for artists in the Columbus, OH.

One of the things that impressed me was that they seemed to have made an effort to attract a more inclusive range of artists than might usually be served by such gatherings. When they spoke about how the different artists came to realize that the challenges they faced weren’t exclusive to their discipline, they mentioned that some attendees thought it was just a problem DJs were facing and visual artists likewise thought it was specific to them.

It got me thinking, how many individuals or organizations seeking to convene artists to talk about entrepreneurship would include DJs on their invite list? If I had been a little quicker with this realization, I might have thought to follow up and ask about the range of disciplines and practices that were invited.

The National Endowment for the Arts expanded their definition of what constituted arts participation when they conducted a study a few years ago. If arts organizations are going to tout those statistics to prove what a wide range of Americans are engaged with arts and cultural activities, it is probably only logical and fair to put practitioners of those disciplines on the literal and figurative invite list.

What they planned to do was hold a Create-a-thon modeled on the hack-a-thon events common in software coding, emphasizing the brain storming practices. This creative event was meant to lead off an 8 week series of workshops people would attend.

What actually ended up happening is a combination of a cautionary lesson and a testament to their nimbleness and willingness to revise their plans.

Associating the Create-a-thon with the software hack-a-thon model resulted in unanticipated expectations among some attendees. People came assuming there would be venture capitalists present and that those who gathered would help them develop their business model. That wasn’t what the organizers envisioned.

I have seen a lot of people advocate for adopted the hack-a-thon for arts and culture. I think I wrote about it myself some years ago. This problem never emerged on my radar which probably means I don’t know nearly enough about hack-a-thons to be stealing the idea.

Clearly if you are considering something along these lines it is very important to communicate exactly what will be occurring or evoke an entirely different model so that people don’t make the wrong assumptions.

They had 40 people attend the first day, but only 20 people came the second day. The presenters clarified the drop in attendance wasn’t due to the absence of venture capital at the event. Some people already knew they wouldn’t be able to make both days.

I wouldn’t normally even bring up the drop in attendance on the second day except that it helps to underscore how successfully they ended up. By the completion of the eight week series of classes/workshops, they ended up serving 76 people. While the interest initially seemed to flag, they attracted additional people through word of mouth and continued attempts to increase awareness.

But it wasn’t just good advertising. They attributed their ultimate success to their willingness to recognize the mistakes in their initial assumptions and take action to alter their plans.

They had assumed that those who were interested in taking their workshops would attend all eight weeks. They learned it was better to think about the classes in a modular fashion and allow people to attend the sessions by which they felt they would be best served.

For example, Week One focused on the Mission Statement; Week Two on Vision; Week Three on Value Proposition the artist brought; Week Four on Marketing, etc.  People only attended the workshops they felt they needed.

While they had planned to offer the classes during the day, they quickly realized that most everyone who had an interest in the workshops had day jobs and shifted to offering them in the evenings.

The presentation by the partners from Mosaic and the Barnett Center was successful by the measure of leaving me wanting to know more.

They seemed to be both working with people and embodying an ethic which are appropriate to the times and environment.

For example, you may have groaned inwardly at the mention of the Mission Statement workshop. Everyone writes these big impressive sounding statements that they can’t remember and never refer back to.  They took one artist’s wordy, paragraph long statement and boiled it down to “I manipulate fabric for curious people.”

That may sound too informal, but it is easy to remember and probably fits more organically with the artist’s vision and value proposition than most arts organization mission statements. Just try memorizing your mission statement and the fabric artist’s. Tomorrow morning I bet you can recite her’s more easily than your own. I bet her’s even fires your imagination better than your own.

In a marketing project they spoke about, an artist had been updating his Instagram followers about the progress he was making on a visual art piece. When it was done, he told them it would be hidden somewhere at a festival and provided clues about where to find it. This helped the artist promote his work and helped build a relationship with the festival when he was able to show how he had driven attendance to their event. Of course, it also contributed to the relationship the artist had with his supporters.

Finally, one of the things the Mosaic Education Network and Barnett Center presenters emphasized for those planning to do Art Entrepreneurship training for their communities went right to the heart of the big debate about paying artists.

Don’t talk to artists about how their art should be profitable and how you are teaching them to be successful, while simultaneously asking those who are helping you provide the workshops to do so for free/the exposure.  No one doubts it is difficult to find funding to support training programs like this, but the people who are helping you should profit from working with you.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

/ Find It!

/ Recent Comments

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