Working In The Arts – Page 17 – Butts In the Seats

Info You Can Use: Who Owns An Artist’s Booking Data?

July 21, 2014 by Joe Patti

A very interesting question regarding the relationship between an agent and artist was recently broached on the Musical America blog. An agent who has an artist leaving their representation for another company asks who owns the leads and contacts they have cultivated on behalf of the artist.

However, the question has come up as to whether we are obligated to give the artist all of the leads and contacts we have been pursuing on his behalf that have not been booked yet. That doesn’t seem fair. We have been working on some presenters for years, have invested a lot of time, and consider that to be our proprietary information. If we turn all of that over to his new manager, that’s just going to be a gift to the new manager who will follow up on all of our work and take the commissions.

Now you may think the agent is correct. It doesn’t seem fair that the new manager will benefit from the efforts of the company that the artist is leaving. However, lawyer Brian Taylor Goldstein answers that under the law of agency, representatives, a term which applies to people like attorneys, realtors, accountants, artist agents, etc, work for a principal party and all the work they do belongs to that principal. (my emphasis)

…there are four key concepts:

(1) An agent works for the principal and, while the agent can advise the principal, the agent must follow the instructions and directives of the principal.

(2) An agent can never put his or her own interests above that of the principal.

(3) All of the “results and proceeds” of the agent’s work on behalf of the principal belongs to the principal.

(4) Any contractual provision, written or oral, that contravenes rules (1) – (3) is null and void.

In short, when a manager represents an artist, the manager has no proprietary information. In other words, those aren’t your leads and contacts, they are the artist’s. While your leads and contacts may start out as your own, once you contact someone on behalf of an artist, the artist is legally entitled to know anyone you have spoken to on his or her behalf, including the details of such conversation. Moreover, unless there is an agreement to the contrary, the artist is also free to contact anyone directly on his own behalf.

This information was surprising to me. I knew that this relationship existed with one’s realtor, but didn’t realize it extended to artists and agents/managers as well.

Goldstein goes on to explain that the law is set up this way to protect the agent from liability for any breach by the principal. The agent isn’t liable if the artist fails to show up for a performance, for example.

(Of course, since the agent will be the first to receive an emotionally fraught phone call if the artist doesn’t show, they will bear a lot of non-legal responsibility.)

He also enumerates a number of aspects of the agent-artist relationship that people may assume are a matter of law, but are merely a result of traditional practice, and perhaps due for a change.

Talent Is Only For Artists and Athletes

July 16, 2014 by Joe Patti

You may have seen a number of articles out in the last day or two debunking the idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that we need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. A New York Times article quoted a researcher who contributed to the results of a new study who said,

“We found that, yes, practice is important, and of course it’s absolutely necessary to achieve expertise,” said Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University…“But it’s not as important as many people have been saying” compared to inborn gifts.”

One thing I noticed- despite the fact the article starts out talking about a kid kicking a soccer ball and a man learning Japanese and goes on to talk about mastery in the areas of language, sports, chess as well as music, the majority of the comments reference talent versus practice in artistic pursuits. Out of the 260 comments to the article at the time of this post, only about 10-15 talk about athletes and there isn’t really any mention of achieving mastery in any other area.

Perhaps it is due to the influence of the title of the article referencing Carnegie Hall and the fact the pictures are of dancers and musicians. However, I wondered if the artistic orientation of these comments revealed an underlying belief that we only need to consider talent versus practice in relation to artistic achievement.

No one mentioned the impact of talent or practice on writing press releases, analyzing business plans/financials or installing electrical wiring. Yet no one coming straight out of a training program can automatically do any of these things masterfully. It takes time to develop a proficiency and for many, there is a level of quality beyond which they can not advance no matter how much effort they invest.

I wondered if this belief that practice and talent are important to be successful in artistic pursuits might be contributing to the idea that the arts are an elitist pursuit that only a few can participate in.

The reverse of this plagues school teachers and professors. Students and parents who might acknowledge that hard work will never allow them to be a pro-athlete will insist that an A grade or admission to a honor class be granted because a student had worked hard. Other than Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average, there exists a level beyond which some students can’t be successful academically.

So while everyone may believe they achieve academic excellence due only to hard work, the belief that you need to be blessed with innate talent to achieve artistic excellence may contribute to the idea that only an elite few can become artistic masters or have the capacity to understand art.

Of course, people are damned by the inverse assumptions: If you are not succeeding academically, you aren’t working hard enough. If you are a rich and famous artist, you must be talented.

All this occurred to me as I was reading the article so I haven’t really tested this theory with a few days of thought. What do you think?

Gasp! They Aren’t True Believers!

June 24, 2014 by Joe Patti

I have been in my current position for over a year now, but I wasn’t on the job more than a month or so before I realized I was in a situation I had never experienced in my nearly 20 year long career.

I had co-workers who were not true believers.

That is, they were not working here out of some interest or passion for the arts. They did not know some basic industry terminology despite having worked here for five plus years.

One assumed the role when her previous supervisor left. The other had the seniority to bid into the position from an unrelated area. Each likes their job because it is interesting and varied, but they aren’t motivated by a deep abiding interest in any artistic discipline. They would work just as hard at an interesting job somewhere else.

Don’t get me wrong, they perform their roles with great proficiency and absolute devotion. There is never any hint of a desire to avoid working longer hours on a performance day or leaving a task undone until the next day. One made the decision to attend the board meetings when she recognized doing so would help her do her job better. I have no reservations about their work or ethic and would be anxious if I learned they found another job.

It is just that being able to get backstage and watch a performance from the wings holds no special allure for them.

I am not used to working everyday with people who don’t feel like some part of the job is filling a void in their soul. I guess this is what it is like working with normal people who just simply like their jobs.

As soon as I realized this was the case, I immediately remembered attending a conference session where Andrew Taylor mentioned a colleague, dissatisfied with job candidates with arts backgrounds, had hired someone with experience in a Sears call center to be their box office manager because they had a better sense of how to offer good customer service on a large scale.

Recalling that story, I knew I had to consider that we might be better off with people who were relatively agnostic about the arts. (And certainly given that they had far more experience running the facility than I, there was no question about who was more valuable to the operations.)

After I year, I have been pondering the trade offs of the situation. Perhaps the biggest asset has been using their relatively dispassionate relationship to the arts to assess whether a performance might have appeal to a wider segment of the population when we are planning the next season. In some respects, they are a better representatives of the community than the board members are.

On the other side, they aren’t as likely to be enthusing about an upcoming performance over beer with friends. They aren’t automatic brand ambassadors. But in that respect, they are a measure of how much effort I might have to invest in winning over the hearts and minds of the community.

I would be interested to hear any stories and insights other people have about this situation, pros and cons. Are these people taking jobs away from unemployed arts people who would truly appreciate the opportunity and happily work 10 hours overtime, to boot? Or is this balance the sort of thing arts organizations sorely need?

We Are Too Small To Get Caught…Right?

June 23, 2014June 23, 2014 by Joe Patti

It used to be that there were constantly stories about copyright owners going after kids who had downloaded music and video or sampled/excerpted parts of works and represented it as their own. We would hear about companies tracking stuff on computers and going after the owners.

You don’t hear these sort of stories as much any more. Since many of the copyright owners were big corporations, perhaps they figured there was a lot of bad P.R. associated with their efforts.

Or maybe they felt like there was too much of the activity going on that it was fruitless to try to catch everyone and try to stop it.

I know that a lot of performing arts companies have taken liberties with the shows they produce, assuming that the country is so big and their organization so small that no one will bother to check up on them.

Well thanks to technology, it is apparently getting easier for performance rights holders to monitor production activity. Or at least technology is making us more aware that the rights holders are checking on and catching people.

A recent You’ve Cott Mail brought attention to a couple cease and desist letters issued last week due to unauthorized script changes.

An article about a Milwaukee production of David Mamet’s Olenna implies they got caught making their unauthorized change when a review of the show appeared online.

As first reported by Howard Sherman, Hands on a Hardbody show creators actually attended a performance in Texas and noticed the show wasn’t the one they created. A number of actions were subsequently taken by the Dramatists Guild and Samuel French, Inc, which appear in updates on Sherman’s post.

These aren’t isolated incidents. Howard Sherman has been keeping an eye on these issues and addressing them on his blog. Back in January, he discussed the Asolo Repertory Theater having to postpone their opening when they got caught rewriting Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come! [Disclosure: I worked for the Florida State University side of the Asolo about 20 years ago.]

Sherman also covered a Long Island* high school making unauthorized alterations to the school edition of Rent

There are a lot of issues connected with artistic freedom, color blind casting, community standards and the comparative attitudes of material creators toward their works that factor into these stories. Most are addressed in the dozens of comments on Sherman’s posts. They are a good place to start if you aren’t familiar with the basic, but common, issues related to the stage.

While the performance licenses are pretty explicit about what you can and can’t do, the conversation about intellectual property is always evolving so it is definitely something to keep an eye on.

Not to mention that if you have been flaunting the conditions of your license assuming that you won’t get caught, it may be time to reassess that belief.

*I mistakenly misidentified the school involved with Rent as being in CT. Thanks to Howard Sherman for bringing the mistake to my attention

Could You Hurry Up And Get Delighted?

June 10, 2014 by Joe Patti

Seth Godin had a post today reflecting on a woman he noticed in front row seats at a concert being given by jazz bassist Christian McBride. The woman was fidgeting, checking her watch and fiddling with stuff, entirely disengaged with the concert.

Says Godin:

McBride seemed to be too professional and too experienced to get brought down by her disrespect and disengagement. Here’s what he knew: It wasn’t about him, it wasn’t about the music, it wasn’t a response to what he was creating.
[…]
Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, “hey, it’s not for you.” That’s okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you’ve made yourself miserable for no reason.

It’s sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.

We all know that ideally, this is the best philosophy to embrace. We know that the arts aren’t for everyone and that you have to allow people the time and space they need in order to eventually find that your work resonates with them. If it is going to resonate at all, that is.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and we receive a lot of messages that our audiences need to get it, and get it quick. This obviously manifests in ticket sales reports and the requirements of just plain old pride in wanting to have seats full of people enjoying themselves.

There is a lot of subtext that our funding depends on it as well. We are asked about the diversity of our audience. What are the numbers and percentages of racial groups, students and seniors?

Some times there is no subtext at all. I am currently working on a final grant report that asks what we did to engage the community to participate; what did or will we do to remove perceptual, practical and experiential barriers; what motivates patron, board members and volunteers; and to provide a first hand account of how the programming has made an impact on an individual or a group.

Faced with questions like that, you have a lot of motivation to start thinking your audience, board and volunteers need to experience something that moves them, and they need to have that moving experience during the current grant period.

Its no wonder we have ushers patrolling the aisles and glaring at people pulling out their iPhones. Not only can’t we afford to have the individual become disengaged from the performance, we need to make sure the glow of the phone isn’t constituting a perceptual or experiential barrier to a dozen other people around them. These are all black marks against us that our funders expect us to address.

Now as a practical matter, foundations aren’t infiltrating mystery shoppers into our audiences to make sure we are properly identifying these problems and proposing solutions in our final reports. Their questions are meant to inspire some self-examination in grant recipients about procedures and operations.

When heckling at a performance is unchallenged by house staff and results in the cancellation of the run as recently occurred in California, it signals the need for a review of procedures in event spaces across the country.

Questions like these on a grant report indicate the type of activity and outcomes that are valued in grant recipients. These expectations are somewhat in conflict with the long view non-profit arts organizations are enjoined to embrace in respect to cultivating their audiences.

When Christian McBride plays The Blue Note, the venue worries about whether they sold enough tickets, food and alcohol to cover costs. The Blue Note certainly wants all the patrons to have a good time and come back again, but they don’t concern themselves too much with whether people have attained a new level of personal growth.

When McBride plays at a non-profit arts center’s jazz series, the organization worries about all those things The Blue Note worries about, but also has to concern themselves about recognizing potential barriers to entry, the diversity of the audience and whether they have been inspired.

It can be something of a psychic burden to try to balance all the requirements of a non-profit existence. You have to be cool, put your best work out there and not worry about delighting the undelightable.

But at the same time, you wonder how you have failed that person. What barriers have you been complicit in maintaining? Is she really undelightable, or is that a convenient way for writing her off when you should be patient and try harder? How can you change your programming and outreach efforts so she feels engaged and included?

Finding The Cream of the Local Crop

June 9, 2014 by Joe Patti

I attended an event at the local art museum which I thought was structured in an interesting way in terms of generating relationships between the museum, museum patrons and local artists— and making some money for the artists in the process.

The event was called “Cream of the Crop” and is run by the museum every other year. They invite artists within an 85 mile radius of the museum to submit works of art. Then, before the art is delivered, they ask people in the community to commit to spending a certain amount on purchasing a piece which they haven’t seen yet.

After the jury has decided what pieces get to be in the show and which won’t be included, those who have pledged to buy a piece are invited in to take a look and choose which pieces they wish to purchase.

The purchasers are allowed to peruse all the pieces that have been submitted, both those which have been chosen for the show and those which have not. So even if an artist’s piece doesn’t make it into the show, the experience can still be rewarding if their piece ends up selling.

I was one of those who committed to buy a piece this year and I can assure you, there were a number of pieces that didn’t make it in that were on my list of potential purchases. Inevitably, there were a number of pieces that were not included that I and others wondered at the reason why.

Last Friday was the opening of the show. People from the community, the artists who submitted and those who had purchased all gathered to review the works. There were ribbons by those pieces that were deemed the best of the show.

Different colored ribbons were placed next to the pieces that had been purchased which served to call some attention to those as well.

Unlike the conversations at openings for the work of one or two artists, most of the discussion at this opening revolved around the talent hidden in the local community. Given that most of the artists were present, the show held some surprises for people’s friends and neighbors.

On the whole, it was a good opportunity for local artists to showcase their work. Some of them were motivated to do only that. While it was required that every piece submitted be for sale, it was the artists that set the prices and it was clear from the amount being asked, there were some artists who had no intention of parting with their creation.

Unfortunately for some of the attendees, these were some of the more striking pieces. There were a couple works by one artist that people would stand before and mutter that they would buy it if it were priced at half of what it was.

This sort of event may be common at museums across the country and I just am not familiar with it. This isn’t the type of thing performing arts organizations can do because their product is ephemeral by design. Probably the closest parallel might be some form of fringe festival that restricted itself to performers residing in the region.

Though I guess there might be potential in having someone commit to buying a certain amount in tickets and then choose, via video, from among artists selected by a jury panel to perform. That might bump an artist to a larger venue than they might normally have performed in if they were selected by someone who committed enough to buy 200 seats.

Though hopefully the gracious patron could arrange to have them all filled. Few artists are satisfied with a lot of empty seats, regardless of how much they might be paid.

What I appreciated most about the museum event was that the structure got a different cross section of the community into the museum than normally attend the openings. The artists they were talking about reside locally rather than having been chosen from a distant place by curators. This reinforces the local connections as well as the concept that everyone as the potential to be an artist.

Secret Art In Minnesota

June 4, 2014 by Joe Patti

The always cool people at Springboard for the Arts (and that isn’t a commentary on Minnesota weather) recently got to do a “TV Takeover” where they explained how they serve the artistic community in Minnesota. They chose the theme of “Your Secret Art” to emphasize the idea that a lot of people have artistic talent which may not immediately be apparent.

There were two parts of the show I liked, both dealing with “artists taking care of business.” At the 51 minute mark, artists talk about pricing their work and their initial reluctance to ask to be paid or to charge what they were really worth.

The artists that were interviewed note that it is natural to make the mistake of undervaluing your work, but that you need to quickly move past that. Pricing is not only based on your time and materials, but a result of doing market research and understanding how similar work is valued.

This was an important topic for artists and one that is rarely broached in interviews with artists about their careers.

The other part of the show I liked was at the 24 minute mark where artists talk about their work as a business. What really grabbed my attention was the statement made by Uri Sands of TU Dance in answer to the noisome assertion that art is not a profession because you love doing it. Sands says if you have a talent, you have a responsibility to your gift. It requires enormous work whether you are a mathematician, athlete or dancer.

Art requires more of him because he does love it. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have to think about it and could clock in/clock out. But because he loves it, thinking about dance inhabits all his free time as well.

I thought that was a fantastic answer because it is so absolutely true that artists often aren’t easily able to stop investing themselves in one part of their lives come 5:00 pm.

Visual artist Anna Metcalf talked about how valuable it was to refer to creating ceramics as her job. She spoke about having a business plan which helped her establish priorities and also legitimized her art practice as a business. It sounded to me as if this might provide her with a little self-discipline, but there also seemed to be a subtext that the frame work might help keep others from viewing her work as a hobby.

I couldn’t quite catch the name of the third artist interviewed in this segment. Even though she was surrounded by puppets, it sounded as if her practice encompassed many disciplines. Since I just wrote about mentors yesterday, her comment that when was was younger she assumed mentors would find her grabbed my attention.

She said that she now recognizes the need to seek out and cultivate people to be mentors. This made me realize that yesterday’s post really didn’t touch on the idea that you could have multiple mentors at anyone time and that it can be smart to cultivate relationships now with people who could potentially be a mentor in the future.

A corollary to the idea that not everyone is suited to be mentor is that not everyone is suited by knowledge or temperament to be a mentor at every stage of your career. You will outgrow some mentors and grow into others.

Springboard for the Arts and the people they serve are doing some pretty interesting things. I can be worth the time to watch the whole thing.

Either A Mentor or Mentee Be

June 3, 2014 by Joe Patti

Since I am in the mood for suggesting what people should be re-evaluating professionally over the summer, I figured I might talk about finding a mentor today.

I actually don’t know if I have ever written on the subject before. There was an article for arts and culture professionals I found useful on The Guardian website back in March.

I think one of most important steps to take when seeking a mentor is discarding the “those who can’t, teach/if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich” mentality. As the article points out, just because someone is successful, it doesn’t mean they can be an effective mentor. Inversely, just because someone hasn’t achieved commercial recognition for their work, doesn’t mean they can’t be an effective mentor.

You see the truth of this most clearly in sports. There are plenty of coaches who weren’t elite athletes, but who have studied coaching and their specific field of endeavor closely enough that they produce effective teams and individuals.

And like a good coach, a good mentor will challenge you to push yourself in new, possibly uncomfortable directions.

It occurred to me as I was reading the article that I am unaware of any program that trains arts professionals to be good mentors for people outside the workplace. If you are in the position of mentoring someone in your workplace, some of your time is going to be devoted to teaching them to navigate the organization and contribute to the organization’s success.

Mentoring someone with whom you don’t already work is a different situation altogether. In some respects, it is a purer form of mentorship because you don’t have to concern yourself with workplace politics or being evaluated on how effective your mentee becomes.

When I read the article’s suggestion to:

“Also ensure the meeting ends with clear and positive actions. Importantly, as a mentee, make sure you do your homework, otherwise when you meet again you’ll end up going over the same ground.

I wasn’t sure I would have thought to formally establish a course of action to take prior to the next meeting with someone I was mentoring. Granted, every mentor relationship is different and some mentees may require concrete goal setting where others do not.

In the context of a shared work environment, goal setting is obvious. As I thought about it, I was not sure I would have immediately considered it as one of an assortment of tools a mentor could use to guide someone with whom they did not work.

Mentoring in the arts and culture field seems like a worthwhile topic for conference sessions, magazine articles or blog posts. Does anyone know of anyone who has effectively tackled the subject?

Info You Can Use: Legal Tips

May 27, 2014 by Joe Patti

A couple weeks ago, Gene Takagi of the Non-Profit Law Blog made a post cautioning lawyers about issues to consider when representing a nonprofit.

As you might imagine, every one of his tips were important for members of a non-profit board and leadership to know as well. Some of his traps and tips are frequent points of conversation in the non-profit arts community: don’t write a mission statement that is too restrictive; be sure you have a viable business plan and don’t assume non-profit status is your only option; boards members should be aware they have a very real governance role; non-profit doesn’t mean tax-exempt or no-profit; all overhead is not bad; get board and directors insurance.

There were also some topics that are less frequently discussed:

Traps
1. Failing to inform the client at the outset of representation that you represent the organization and not any individual directors or officers.

4. Including “non-voting directors” in the organization’s bylaws (under most states’ laws, there is no such thing as a “non-voting director” and, subject to very limited exceptions, each director has the right to vote on all matters before the board).

5. Providing in the bylaws that the board of directors may combine in-person votes at a meeting with email votes to take board actions.

6. Reinforcing the myth that nonprofits should always minimize overhead expenses (even at the expense of building an appropriate foundation on which to build the organization’s operations).

7. Failing to inform the client about the differences among volunteers, independent contractors, and employees, and the risks of misapplying these classifications.

10. Failing to discuss with the client the benefits of having organizational policies that address the legal and management implications of conflicts of interest, proper gift receipts, misuse of social media, expense reimbursements, acceptance of noncash gifts, document retention/destruction, and whistleblowers.

For me, that first one about the lawyer representing the organization and not you always strikes me as worth repeating. I have never had the ill-fortune of being in a situation where there was a even the whiff of legal action. However, when I am reviewing contract clauses that make me uneasy or am faced with a potentially contentious encounter, I will find myself thinking that the legal department will cover me if worse came to worse. Then I have to remind myself that in fact, they won’t necessarily have my back because they serve the interests of the organization, which may not include protecting me.

Point #5 about mixing in-person and email voting is a reference to a prohibition in California law. However, reading the rationale behind the illegality of such action, it seems reasonable to expect other states would have a similar restrictions.

Since I have heavily summarized his post, it is worth taking a look at everything Takagi cautions and advises for the legal health of a non-profit

What To Do About Curtain Speeches?

May 20, 2014 by Joe Patti

Last week I participated in a Twitter conversation about curtain calls and curtain speeches sponsored by HowlRound. They had the whole thing storified almost before I thought about doing it myself.

The hour went by so quickly and there were so many opinions on the matter, I figured it was a great topic to bring up on the old blog here.

I will start by stating my position on curtain speeches and am happy to have people argue for or against.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have a curtain speech. At worst, they are long, disorganized rambles that are often more about people giving money to support the organization than conducive to experience the audience is about to have.

That said, I see them as a necessary evil. I don’t see that as a contradiction, but rather as something of a corollary to the idea that the best king is the person who doesn’t want the job because they will be least intrusive in the people’s lives.

Many localities require fire exits, etc pointed out to audiences. Given that I have worked in locations that are tornado and earthquake prone, I feel it is important that such an announcement be made. People tend to pay more attention to a human than a recording so I will often do the curtain speech.

There is also the issue of reminding people to turn off cell phones, etc. I have seen great video announcements at movie theaters that get that point across, but those videos don’t often fit with the atmosphere of the evening and again since people will pay closer attention to a live person, I see it as another reason to do the speech.

But at least once a year I end up leaving it to the audio announcement because my presence prior to the show doesn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the event.

In the Twitter chat some people said they like curtain speeches that are made in the theme of the play. One of the most recent I saw had the actor playing the stern housekeeper in the show severely warning audience members about cell phones, etc.

I agree that this can be a clever device and hold attention, but sometimes it too clever by half and ends up detracting from the play itself when people associate the character with the person who made the curtain speech rather than with the role they play in the performance.

The other necessity I see associated with curtain speeches is supporting grants. Not only do you need to acknowledge sponsors and funders from the stage as well as in print, but granting organizations want hard number research. Again, it is more effective to have someone on stage enjoining people to fill out a survey than having it written somewhere or announced by a disembodied voice.

Some times it is just a matter of making people aware there is a meet and greet with the performers after the show. People miss the notice in the program and tend to be grateful for the opportunity. The more people attend, the better outreach attendance data for your grant report.

In some of my past posts I have written that I often use curtain speeches to forge connections with the community. They see me on stage and then I am in the lobby at intermission and the end of the show for them to deliver praise or complaints to.

As I have mentioned, I also try to impart some information about the show that people are unaware of that may enhance their enjoyment. This past year, I feel like my most successful attempts were talking about the impact of A Christmas Carol in shaping holiday traditions we take for granted and reminding people that The Miracle Worker only deals with the first of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan’s accomplishments.

Other curtain speeches aren’t as successful. It takes a little while to understand what information might resonate most with audiences.

I try to keep all this to 3-4 minutes and start right at the performance time so that the curtain speech is covering the stragglers in the audience who are trying to find their seats. That way my delay and the interruption of late comers cancel one another out.

If I didn’t do my speech, the audience would still be disturbed by those latecomers, so better they have my entertaining presence to focus on. The important element of this strategy is to get house management to give the go ahead for the speech when they estimate there are only about 2-3 minutes worth of people left in the lobby.

To make the curtain speech quick, effective, informative and not negatively impact audience enjoyment takes some work. I think the reason why people hate curtain speeches is due to the lack of preparation by those who do them. The reality is, the curtain speech is as much a tone setting first impression as the interaction a customer has with your ticket office staff or office receptionist. Equal attention must be paid.

I am often jotting notes about a performance in a Word document months before the event. Some will be part of a social media post, some will be part of a press release and some will be part of the curtain speech for that show. I usually have a good idea about what I am going to say a few days before the performance. I am waiting in the wings 5-10 minutes before the show starts staring at the floor going over what I intend to say.

Sometimes it is great and sometimes I screw up a little because I try to speak extemporaneously with only a few jotted notes. The goal is always to get a little better, a little more engaging and a little more adept each time.

Things you will notice I have not included: fundraising pleas and promoting other shows. Certain times of the year I might mention one of these topics- i.e. Telling people when to expect the new subscription brochure at the closing show of the current season. I don’t make it a habit to regularly talk about future shows because it can undermine the current show if I am praising the next show on the schedule. (Hamlet will be amazing! Oh, and enjoy tonight’s show…)

There are a lot of great thoughts in the chat. I didn’t see half of them when the discussion was in progress.

What do you think? Can any of this be handled more effectively some other way?

The Tao of Data

May 6, 2014 by Joe Patti

Following a little on the theme of my post last week about being well-rounded, The Drucker Exchange recently had a post about balancing quantitative and qualitative mindsets.

Because there is such a focus on the quantitative these days with people encouraged to enter STEM fields and schools’ value being judged on the basis of test results, the arts community has been pushing back by touting the value of the arts. Though often it is in the context of these same quantitative measures: test scores, economic impact and earnings.

The Drucker Exchange post, as well as the Wall Street Journal column by Thomas Davenport that inspired it, note that like the peanut butter and chocolate of a Reese’s cup (my metaphor), quantitative and qualitative are most effective together.

Despite years of work at providing both knowledge and quantitative analysis to decision-makers, there is scant evidence that we have really improved decisions—so we have our work cut out for us.

At heart I think the historical separation of knowledge and numbers people is a “Two Culture” problem, made famous by C.P. Snow. Knowledge management people are humanities/liberal arts types, and analytics people are math/science types. We need to get them together, however. Almost all key domains of business–including customer insights, understanding the broader business and economic climate, and various approaches to performance improvement—involve both qualitative and quantitative content. The best decisions and the best organizations will make effective use of both.

In my post last week, I suggested that the scientists quoted in the Salon article felt their scientific investigations were enhance by their artistic pursuits. Peter Drucker apparently said much the same thing, but observed the same is true for someone in the humanities in relation to science.

“We will have to demand of the scientifically trained man that he again become a humanist; otherwise he will lack the knowledge and perception needed to make his science effective, indeed to make it truly scientific,” Drucker warned. “We will have to demand of the humanist that he acquire an understanding of science, or else his humanities will be irrelevant and ineffectual.”

From time to time, I also write about what value arts organizations might bring to businesses. Thomas Davenport talks about how people with the qualitative mindset can help the analytically minded tell a clearer story about their data.

Knowledge people are good at dealing with text, and some would probably be able to extend their skills into text mining and analytics. Knowledge management practitioners are also good at capturing insights, and there are many analytical assumptions and results that are never recorded. It’s also likely that some good knowledge analysts could help quants “tell a story with data,” which is something almost every organization is looking for these days.

The companies Davenport is talking about would employ such people full time so it wouldn’t be an opportunity an arts organization could do on the side. Though it certainly points to possible career opportunities for those with a liberal or fine arts background.

Something along these lines could provide a coaching/advisory opportunity on a smaller scale for arts organizations. Ultimately, thinking about how you can help a business tell the story of their data will probably help a non-profit organization do a better job telling the story of their own data on grant applications and marketing materials.

Arts organizations are probably all too close to their own data and tend to see grant reports as a chore. Helping a company in an unrelated field tell their story for an entirely different purpose could cause a shift in perspective that increases their effectiveness in talking about themselves.

Impressive Debut (a.k.a Draft #250)

May 5, 2014 by Joe Patti

Seth Godin had a post today about origin stories, noting that each of the successes he cites has a different origin story. They didn’t follow the same path as someone else to achieve wide spread recognition.

That reminded me of a similar passage in one of Joseph Campbell’s books where he recalls a particular story about King Arthur and his knights setting out on their Grail Quest.

“‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”

I have actually used this quote before, but it has been about 7 years. It is far overdue to be mentioned again.

One of the toughest things about running a business of any sort is being able to balance between embracing best practices and slavishly replicating case studies in success.

Following best practices prevents you from wasting valuable time and energy developing processes and repeating the mistakes someone else has already encountered and overcome.

On the other hand, attempting to replicate someone else’s wild success by imposing their apparent development framework/pathway upon your own company will probably have the same uncomfortable, non-productive results as trying to wedge your feet into their custom built shoes.

Part of the problem is that even when the founders of the wildly successful company talk about their path to prosperity, they aren’t telling you the full story of all the dynamics at play. They may not be entirely aware of all the factors that fed into their success, or they are ignoring and omitting some details that don’t make for a good founding mythology.

In the opening segment of a This American Life episode titled, Origin Story, they discuss the “started in a garage” mythology for companies like Hewlett-Packard (whose origin Godin cites) and Apple.

Ira Glass
This is from a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started what is now the largest technology firm in the world.

Dan Heath
In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage.

[…]

Ira Glass
Even Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard weren’t exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and at Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering. He let them use equipment that they didn’t own themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Job’s garage.

Pino Audia
And, for example, in the case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people, because they introduced him to investors.

If you listen to those first few minutes of the episode or read the transcript, you’ll see that a bit of romance gets injected into the founding stories of a lot of companies.

This is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of sweat and creativity invested in getting these companies off the ground. Just like the hot new artist that explodes on the scene, no one really talks about the years of testing, revision, hustle and lucky breaks that went into the impressive debut (a.k.a Draft #250).

There is a lot of valuable advice you can take by paying attention to someone else’s process- performing due diligence, avoiding undesireable contract stipulations, generating appropriate plans and budgets and being bold with marketing plans.

Just don’t expect to achieve the same results by following exactly the same steps as someone else. You have no idea who or what conditions may have been helping mount those steps. Ultimately, you might be better off carving your own steps or even rappelling down an entirely different mountain instead of trying to climb behind someone else. (Or simply ignore vague metaphors about achieving things altogether.)

Being Great No Matter Where You Are

April 29, 2014 by Joe Patti

When it comes to stimulating your creativity to create new work, is it better to live in a place that bustling with other creative activity or working alone outside of the influence of others?

This is something I have been thinking about for the last month or so, spurred by some contradictory observations I encountered lately.

When I was in NYC last January for the Arts Presenters conference, a person I was wandering around with observed that the work of NYC based artists, even relatively unknown ones, was more innovative than in other areas of the country. He attributed this to the fact that the artists are surrounded by so many others who were experimenting and striving with new ideas.

When I was living in Hawaii, someone who moved back from NYC made a similar observation that ideas that were new in NYC seven or eight years before were just gaining currency in Hawaii.

But earlier this month, in an interview choreographer Trey McIntyre noted that basing his company in Boise, ID had

…bolstered his creativity.

“Being surrounded by other artists and companies is more of a challenge than being away,” he says. “As a choreographer when you watch someone else’s work, especially if you respond to it … that’s the culprit for how a lot of work gets to look the same. I’m appreciative of being cut off that way. There are so many other things to be inspired by.”

Certainly, there are a number of non-mutually exclusive scenarios that can be true. You can be an artist in NYC that is doing exciting work that looks a lot like the exciting work everyone else is doing. Below a certain level of saturation, you can be both exciting and derivative.

Another plausible explanation is that people of talent can and will be creative anywhere. It is just that you get a lot more recognition of your genius in larger cities. Being a groundbreaking genius in Spokane doesn’t make you any less of a genius. It is just that only the residents of Spokane know about it.

I have started wondering if exposure to new influences via internet and social media channels can replace the need for traveling and living in the cultural centers. Especially if you are mindful about exposing yourself to work you feel is outside your taste. Because really, you run the same risk of having a blinkered approach to your art form whether you only view videos that appeal to you and your friends taste or only attend performances that appeal to those same tastes.

Granted, you have a better chance of receiving unsought ideas from street corner/subway performers as you travel about the city and meet new people than if you get all your ideas from your laptop in your bedroom.

My hope is that technology will allow interesting and innovative work to be developed in smaller cities and towns around the country. I confess that my interest in seeing this happen was redoubled this morning by a cynical reading of the news that theater companies in New York City’s five boroughs are now eligible to receive the Regional Tony Award.

The regional Tony was “created to honor theaters that did outstanding work outside of the unofficial industry capital of New York City…” My first reaction was that now the judges no longer have to bother looking at anything outside the city. Instead of rolling these theaters in with the Broadway houses or creating a new category, they put them in competition with every other theater in the country.

(This said, the American Theatre Critics Association members which vote on the award are dispersed throughout the country and NYC based critic Terry Teachout regularly sends out a call for suggestions of theaters around the country that he should visit.)

I will also admit that my first reading of the phrase “widen the pool” in the sentence: “administration committee changed the rules for the regional theater Tony to widen the pool of candidates and give Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway companies a shot at the recognition, which can help with fund-raising and publicity,” was that there were insufficient candidates in the rest of the country to give the award to.

Knowing that there are many theaters that are struggling across the country, my reaction to that was that there needs to be a reversal of that trend and a cultivation of theaters on a more local level. I later realized that I may have been reading too much into that, but maybe I wasn’t.

Ultimately, whether another theater outside NYC wins the regional Tony award doesn’t matter to me as much as investigating and hopefully perpetuating evidence that you can consistently produce creative, innovative, work in interesting, livable communities across the country and attract attention (and hopefully visitors) to your work there.

Being Well Rounded Is Not A Back Up Plan

April 28, 2014 by Joe Patti

Last week Drew McManus wrote a post about the value society places on arts practitioners. He referenced an article he saw in a You’ve Cott Mail newsletter about a teacher who urged kids who wanted to pursue creative careers to have a back-up plan and asked if anyone could provide a link.

I did remember the article and tried my darnedest to find it again. I didn’t have it bookmarked as I had thought, but had done so with a similar article on Salon that started with an anecdote of a parent who was panicked when her son said his favorite subject in school was art.

That article noted that while people assume innovation comes from the science lab, it is the artistic habit which often fuels that innovation.

The external binaries of right and wrong don’t exist in art as they do in most subjects. In math, the answer to the problem is correct or incorrect. In history, a sequence of events is true or false. In art, only the student can decide what critique to listen to and what to ignore. Art is the arena of activity where we develop the skill most required to innovate — the ability to harness our own agency.

Artist and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard P. Feynman put it this way as he distinguished between teaching science and art: in physics, Feynman said, “we have so many techniques — so many mathematical methods — that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, ‘Your lines are too heavy,’ because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines.” In that moment, the art student is learning the validity of their choices, their own direction, and innovative results.

This particular section resonated for me because it seems that education is promulgating the idea of answers being right or wrong as testing becomes more prevalent and valued.

The Salon article goes on to cite a number of scientists who have artistic avocations which they credit with contributing to their scientific accomplishments. This isn’t new, we have often heard about how Einstein played the violin. Probably the biggest failing of the arts community is constantly going to Einstein as their example rather than citing a wider variety of scientists like astronaut Mae Jemison who is quoted in the article saying that the imagination that fueled the creation of sculpture and dance got the space shuttle flying.

To my mind, saying artists need a back up plan is really just an indelicate way of saying they need to be well rounded. I am not trying to inject some political correctness here because the truth is, everyone needs to be well rounded. I think it is Sir Ken Robinson who points out we have no idea what skills people will need 30 years in the future so it is best to teach everyone to be curious and teach themselves.

While there are plenty of artists who engage in a myopic pursuit of their discipline, in my view, the liberal and fine arts education community on the whole does a better job of making its members well rounded than science and business disciplines. Perhaps because few people tell science and business students they need to broaden their experience by having a back up plan.

Just last week a student was sitting in the lobby telling her music professor that she wanted to go to a conservatory so she wouldn’t have to take English and Philosophy courses. He informed her that wasn’t necessarily so since he attended a conservatory and had to take those classes. There was also the issue that as an acting student, those courses would actually inform her work down the road.

Only a week or so earlier, this same student listened to a pianist who had performed a concert for us talk about how she double majored when she was at the Peabody Institute both because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a pianist and she had many other interests. While she ultimately committed to the piano, she said she felt that her other course work gave her an advantage over her other classmates in terms of the opportunities she had available.

But last week our student was thinking about the difficult time she was having in class, not about this bigger career picture. Students need to be pushed to take a wide variety of classes rather than taking the path of least resistance. Framing this in terms of “a back up plan” does a disservice to their interests because it diminishes their passion for the arts.

But it also diminishes the “back up plan” by playing into that binary sense of right and wrong. If you think the arts taste sweet, then setting up anything else as the “back up” option when you fail at being an artist makes it the bitter pill that has to be swallowed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea that an interest in the arts results in a zero-sum outcome is what feeds the purist idealism that allowing yourself to be interested in anything else is a sign of lack of seriousness about your art or selling out.

If you really wanted to be an artist but were told you needed a back up plan, wouldn’t you perhaps unconsciously redouble your efforts toward your art and avoid any involvement with any possible back up option?

Then when you succeed, it is your single minded passion and talent in the face of nay sayers that won out. If you fail, then I guess they were right all the time. You meet their expectation of being a failed artist since you never allowed yourself to exercise your other interests.

When you are young, there often is no conflict between an interest in reading Popular Science, making plays to entertain your family, playing baseball, running a lemonade stand and learning to program a computer. But then you are asked to choose…

If you “correctly” choose law, medicine, business or science, there probably won’t be a societal perceived conflict in continuing with your interests. It is only when you choose the arts that you may be pressured to choose one of your other interests instead.

The truth is, interest in the arts is not a zero sum game. If there are physicists who feel their artistic pursuits enhance their practice of science, there are certainly artists who can find their pursuit of science and technology will enhance their creative output.

I am sure there are accountants who also feel their professional practice is informed by their artistic hobbies. Its just that no one believes accounting can be made more interesting. (Though there are unfortunately too many stories of accountants getting creative in the wrong ways.)

If anything, Drew McManus is great example of being able to cultivate interests and strengths in multiple areas as a musician who has built an arts related business on an understanding of technology and analysis of business practices, including financial filings.

Shakespeare on a Boat

April 23, 2014 by Joe Patti

I am sure by this late hour of 6:00 pm EDT, everyone must be aware that today is the observed 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. This morning I caught a story on NPR about Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London embarking on a 2 year odyssey to perform Hamlet in every country in the world. There was discussion in the story about the hazards they may face in places like Syria, Central African Republic and Ukraine where there has been either recent or ongoing unrest.

My first reaction upon hearing they were going to perform Hamlet was wondering why they chose to present the longest of the plays. Sure there is a lot of exciting action, but there is also a lot of brooding.

But it appears that they have trimmed the show down to 2:40 and perform on a bare bones stage with 12 actors. I thought about this in connection with Shakespeare’s Globe Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole’s comment that,

“We’re going to be very free and open. The set is basically the suitcases that the whole thing travels around in, so it spills out of its own suitcases. And we’re going to be playing in some very prestigious national theaters in some countries, but we’re also going to be playing on beaches on Pacific islands. The idea is that it’s infinitely adaptable to wherever we want to put it up.”

I actually hoped that their plans were to set up in front of or in the parking lots of some of those prestigious national theaters instead of inside them. Dromgoole talked about how a tour of Hamlet was performed on a boat off the coast of Yemen in 1608, noting that the play was always meant to be performed on tour in the manner they are undertaking.

My thought was that it would be a pity if they were performing on beaches and village squares only when there was a lack of a “proper” facility. Looking at the schedule it does appear that they are performing inside the bulk of the time.

As a person who has worked outdoor Shakespeare festivals and music events, I can understand the desire for a stable environment to perform in as you try to keep your world tour on schedule. You can’t perform in places like the Copan Ruins in Honduras every night.

As we have often discussed, the thing that has allowed Shakespeare to endure for 450 years, and will allow the arts to remain relevant, is to bring it to where the people live. I had hoped there would be more of that.

I will admit to being a little self-centered. When I saw that they would be performing around the world on a rudimentary stage, I hoped they would keep a detailed blog so that I could gain insight into how different peoples interacted with the show when it appeared on their streets, without a lot of effort on my part. I was interested to learn where people would stay to watch; where they might wander in and out of the audience; where they might actually wander around curiously behind the stage.

These observations might provide ideas for how to make the attendance experience more interesting for our own audiences. I don’t know that we would get as much of that in the more controlled theatre environment.

On the other hand, thanks to the Globe tour, I have become more aware of the existence of Shakespeare focused theaters in places like Bremer, Germany and Gdansk, Poland.

Care and Feeding of Arts Workers

April 21, 2014 by Joe Patti

There was a good example of the importance of good leadership and management in the context of orchestras in a recent post on The Drucker Exchange.

Although the post starts out using the example of basketball teams, it ends up citing Peter Drucker’s observation that as a knowledge based institution,

“A great orchestra is not composed of great instrumentalists but of adequate ones who produce at their peak,” he wrote in Managing in the Next Society. “When a new conductor is hired to turn around an orchestra that has suffered years of drifting and neglect, he cannot, as a rule, fire any but a few of the sloppiest of most superannuated players. He also cannot as a rule hire many new orchestra members. He has to make productive what he has inherited.”

The passage in Managing the Next Society that is quoted is preceded a few paragraphs earlier with “In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the system; in a knowledge workforce, the system must serve the worker.”

Orchestra musicians may not appreciate being characterized as “adequate,” but they all know that their ensemble thrives as a group, not on the specific talents of each individual. It is the music director or similar leader who often creates the environment which allows the whole to thrive.

This is much the case in arts administration staffs. There are very few superstars that multiple organizations engage in a bidding war to woo away. (Though I grant it might be helpful to have more exemplars people strive to be. Drew McManus can’t bear the adulation by himself.)

Most arts organizations are staffed by adequately skilled employees who are on the cusp of becoming great with the help of the right management of their talents and work environment. Some of that management is probably going to require better pay and professional development opportunities. It may also require scrutinizing organizational culture, shifting job responsibilities and revamping the physical work environment.

While the focus of all this seems to be on identifying good leaders and managers who will point the way to success, recall that Drucker points out that the workforce has to generally be left intact. They are the core resource of the organization with which the leader must work.

Knowledge workers aren’t like gold fish which will thrive if fed and put in a bigger, cleaner fish bowl. Dealing with them is far more complicated. It is by their will and agreement that success occurs.

A good leader or manager is merely one who perceives how to best structure the system to serve the workers. A leader shouldn’t conflate their ability with the value of the organization. Ultimately, audiences will come to see a bad orchestra before they come to see a music director in an empty room.

X Degree + Y Experience = Happy Employer?

April 17, 2014April 14, 2014 by Joe Patti

Over at Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen draws attention to two studies, one that suggests that internships are more valuable than business degrees when it comes to finding a job. The researchers sent out over 9000 fictitious resumes to jobs in banking, finance, management, marketing, insurance and sales. Some applicants had business field degrees, others had arts and sciences degrees like history, English, biology and psychology. As a liberal arts major, I am encouraged by the first sentence.

Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we found no evidence that employers prefer to interview job seekers with business degrees over applicants with nonbusiness degrees. In addition, there is no advantage, in terms of job opportunities, associated with a particular degree; that is, students with particular business degrees (e.g., finance, marketing) fare no better than students with particular non-business degrees (e.g., english, psychology). However, we find strong evidence that internship experience improves employment prospects in economically and statistically signicant ways. Applicants who were assigned a three-month internship (Summer 2009) before they graduated with their Bachelor’s degrees (May 2010) receive about 14 percent more interview requests than those who were not assigned internship experience. The “return” to internship experience is quite large for both business and non-business majors, but it is economically larger for non-business degree holders than that for business-degree holders…More research is needed to better understand the channels through which college degrees and internship experience affect employment prospects.”

There has been a lot of discussion about unpaid internships in the arts, including one last week on HowlRound. These discussions often raise the point that the internship system favors those with the financial and familial support to survive while making little to no income.

The question I wanted to address in the context of this study, however, is whether a degree or experience is more important for the practice of arts management.

A good number of job listings out there require an MFA. If they will accept experience in the place of an MFA, it is as much, if not more, time than would have been required to complete the MFA.

For instance, a recent job posting for the Executive Director of Buffalo Studio Arts requires “Master’s Degree, plus 2 or more years experience at a not-for-profit organization, preferred; Bachelor’s Degree, plus 5 or more years experience at a not-for-profit organization, acceptable”

Another for the Executive Director of the Graham Center at Florida International University required “Master’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization and eight years of experience; or a bachelor’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization and ten years of experience. ”

Now given that a Master’s degree can take 1-3 years to earn, with an MFA being 2-3 years, these jobs can be viewed as requiring slightly more or equivalent experience from a person without a Master’s. With the first description only deeming a Bachelors and experience as acceptable, it seems you are at an immediate disadvantage without that Master’s. This verbiage is not at all uncommon.

As for the second description, if a person with a BA has 8 years experience, there probably isn’t much more to be gained in those additional two years to bring them on par with a person with a Master’s degree. They are either as good or better at year 8, or they aren’t.

In the Buffalo example, I think the determining factor comes down to opportunities which translates to experience. A person with a Master’s and two years of good opportunities is going to be preferable to a person with a BA and five years of poor opportunities. But a person with a BA and three years of good opportunities is easily going to be preferable to a person with a Master’s and three years devoid of practical experience.

But is that how arts employers approaching hiring? Perhaps they do and just use that Master’s = Bachelor’s + Experience to signal expectations and encourage people to self select out of applying. Not that it keeps 50 unqualified people from applying for every qualified person.

My suspicion is that many arts employers adhere closely to that equation to make it easier to sort through the 100s of resumes by preemptively tossing whatever doesn’t neatly fit.

It isn’t fair to single arts employers out in this regard. Any degree serves as a imprimatur for a job applicant in any field. It is a shortcut people use as a guarantee of quality which is why so many people seek to get a college degree even though they may not be suited for college.

Does this bring about the best result for the organization? That is something each has to answer.

Now, it should obviously be acknowledged that I have an MFA so I tend to pass that initial test of fitting into the equation.

I have hired people who didn’t fit neatly in to the equation and benefited from it. Some times there was a large element of faith involved, but that is true in all cases regardless of degree attained.

Again we come back to that first question, how much do the degrees matter versus experience? When I go to conferences and interact with agents, artists and other presenters, I don’t care about the degree anyone has attained. I don’t get better service from people with master’s degrees than those without.

However, I do care and can tell if someone is inexperienced. Experience does have bearing on the quality of service received.

Of course, I am only interacting with people for a short period of time. Degree earned may have a significant impact on the experiences of boards of directors, organization staff and audience base who have to live with them.

As a person who has earned a Master’s degree, I could point to how my degree had a positive impact on the organizations I have worked for. I can also point out how my lack of experience had a negative impact on the organizations I have worked for, even after earning the degree.

Thoughts?

On Your Mark…Get Set…Sketch!

April 2, 2014 by Joe Patti

Just as an interesting look at how things are done elsewhere, here is a picture of prospective students taking an entrance exam for art school in Hainan.

Clicking on the image below will take you to the China Daily site where there are more pictures of the 1901 students taking the sketching exam. That is indeed a lot of butts in the seats.

I confess, my first reaction upon seeing the pictures was that it was a little dehumanizing. However, having seen hundreds of auditions for both performances and academic programs, I am not sure there is a lot about the process of evaluating the work of hundreds of people that doesn’t have an alienating effect, even if it is done individually.

I am not sure how many of the 1900 students were admitted. I believe this is the national exam being administered to residents of the province rather than for admission to a single university. I am not sure how this factors into the admission process since the fabled gaokao (National Higher Education Entrance Examination) which nearly all high school students have to take is usually administered in June rather than January.

Toward A System Of Organizational Critiques

April 1, 2014 by Joe Patti

In a Guardian article last summer talking about the intersections between art and science, “scientist with one foot in the arts” Simon Kirby noted of culture of peer review in the sciences:

(“It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience”)

That one line got me to bookmark the article and think about whether a structured peer review process might be beneficial in the arts.

Let me state from the outset that I am in no way proposing any sort of scenario where a panel snickers behind their hands that what was exciting in NYC Dance seven years ago is just becoming hot in Madison, WI. Nor would I desire a situation where an arts organization with a $20 million budget smiles condescendingly at the excitement expressed by an organization with a $20,000 who got 1000 people to attend their event.

At the same time, we could all use some advice about what we could be doing better outside of anonymous posts on the internet.

With many funding organizations inviting applicants to attend panel reviews of their funding requests or streaming the proceedings of the panels and their process online, it might be logical to offer reviews and critiques of other aspects of organizational operations.

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival has a long running program of having adjudicators travel to productions in each of the 8 regions to provide critiques of performances. Some of the productions and actors are nominated to perform at each of the regional conferences.

Perhaps a similar system might be set up to review and critique different aspects of an arts organization’s operations from the customer experience to board relations. This wouldn’t involve any element of competition that would get you invited to a conference outside of presenting interesting case studies and discussing best practices.

However, it would give arts organizations an objective view of their practices and procedures without the stakes of accreditation hanging over the experience. Adjudicators would gain the ability to apply the same critical eye to their own organization as well as have an opportunity to observe and learn from peer organizations.

Ideally, an adjudication team would include at least one person from a discipline unrelated to the organizational activities so that theater people are learning a little from visual artists, visual artists from classical musicians, musicians from dancers and so forth.

What’s It Take To Do Your Job?

March 19, 2014 by Joe Patti

From the “We Should Steal This Idea…” file, The Guardian has been running a series that is essentially the newspaper version of a career day, called “How Do I Become…”

I was originally attracted to the series when I saw the “How do I become…a set designer.” article. The series covers a lot of arts related careers, including ones you might not immediately think of like perfumer, embalmer and bellmaker.

With all the discussion these days about the cost of going to college, and whether attending is appropriate for everyone, a series like this that draws attention to a whole range of career options people might not immediately consider can prove a good resource.

The thing I really admire about the Guardian series is their ability to provide good summaries about the skills a person needs to acquire for each profession in the subtitles. I have done a number of career days for schools and it can be difficult to boil your job down to a few interesting words like:

“Preparing food, washing up, sweeping floors – start low but aim high and you might find yourself styling food for the big names.”

“Eyeballs and chipolatas should be fun-filled not fearful, in a profession where learning on the job is the only way to cut it.” (butcher)

“Filming is neither fun or glamorous, says cameraman Joel Shippey, which is why you need commitment, the right attitude and a love of people.”

“It’s taken more than a decade for David Stewart to learn how to ‘nose’ whisky, and that patience is a big part of being a malt master and blender”

It’s difficult to break in to and not for the faint-hearted, but the joy and excitement of dealing in gems provides ample compensation.

Obviously, one of my prime interests in a series like this would be to promote arts careers and bring people to a better understanding about what is involved with the jobs.

For as much as this may be a good idea, I am not exactly sure about what the right delivery channel would be. Given that newspapers are on the wane and aren’t read by a lot of young people approaching career decisions, a series like this would ideally be delivered online and through schools.

I am just tossing this out there to see if it sticks on anything or inspires anyone.

Aid and Expectations

March 17, 2014 by Joe Patti

There was a TED Radio segment that aired back in October that hit so many of the conversation points in the arts today: recognizing failure, serving communities and funder priorities.

The topic was aid work in Africa. Italian aid worker Ernesto Sirolli reveals that pretty much every aid effort in Africa has failed. Some failures are attributable to arrogance of thinking you know what the solution is, but are equally attributable to the fact that no one will admit their failures, leaving others to replicate them.

SIROLLI: Every single project that we set up in Africa failed, and I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.

RAZ: How did every single project fail?

SIROLLI: And they still do. See, the first reaction was, let’s not tell anybody we made a mistake. Let’s not tell anybody about this project. I really thought that it was one bad project that will never be repeated, which, I think, is what the Americans in the Peace Corps are thinking right now. That they are in a bad project, but it’s unique. So what they do, they don’t tell anybody what they’ve done because there must be lots and lots of lot good projects out there.

But if they had the chance to go and find out what their colleagues are doing around Africa, they will discover that, in fact, the norm is failure.

What caught my eye was the assumption by each group that their failure was unique based on the assumption everyone else was succeeding. Not surprising since everyone was reporting successes.

Sirolli says that everyone sent back reports to the home office talking about how great things were going when everything was actually going to hell. While the rosy reports were submitted to one office, another letter was sent to him begging him to come help the distressed aid workers.

I think the arts world faces a similar problem, it is just that our budgets are a bit smaller. The failures get a lot more publicity though, if you take a look at all the orchestra negotiations that have broken down and the failure of companies like City Opera in NYC.

Actually, that is not really accurate. We only know the very end results in each of these cases. We don’t know enough about the failures that lead to these situations to learn from them. There isn’t much to be learned from “Don’t Run Out of Money.” A little more transparency and frank discussion may be helpful.

When Sirolli talks about the Enterprise Facilitation system he invented, I felt like his approach was both a lesson to arts organizations and funders.

SIROLLI: … And I invented the system called Enterprise Facilitation where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion. The servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do, you shut up, you never arrive in a community with any ideas and you sit with the local people. We don’t work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do…

…The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. So years and years ago, I had this idea – why don’t we, for once, instead of arriving in a community to tell people what to do, why don’t, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn’t exist.

Art organizations can probably take a cue from him about learning about the community by hanging out in cafes and talking to people rather than holding community meetings. Both funders of arts organizations and the arts organizations themselves might find value in simply helping people to connect their passions with the knowledge they need to realize their passion.

Any entity with resources to offer will probably find it difficult to just step back and not try to motivate people or impose their ideas on the people they hope to help. I am sure Sirolli and his people had that problem when they started. It is extremely difficult to surrender your ego and expectations, especially when you are bringing money to the table.

But the thing is, that is exactly what the best actors are able to do. They set aside their expectations about the way a scene should go and open themselves to the infinite possibilities that might occur. That way if a line is flubbed or delivered differently than it has been in the past, they can respond appropriately to the situation.

Bad actors chug on heedless of unexpected change or are caught short by it. In either case, they call attention to the problem.

This isn’t the best analogy because Sirolli’s people don’t react in order to serve their motivations the way actors do. Still, his people need to strive toward the same goal of suspending judgment in the same manner as actors do.

The Curse of the Experienced Eye

March 11, 2014 by Joe Patti

Ken Davenport recently talked about how he enjoyed Broadway shows much more when he was younger. Part of the reason he has a harder time now is because he analyzes the show with the eye of a producer. The other reason is because when he was younger, he was often ignorant about disparaging news about a show in the absence of social media and websites and thus approached each show without any bias.

I am much the same way. I can’t attend a show at a place I have worked earlier because I feel left out of the social interactions and behind the scenes activity that I was once an initiate of. I also have difficulty watching a show that I have contracted in because I want to be backstage checking things out.

As Davenport says “As a theater pro, I know I’m enjoying a show when I’m not thinking about what went in to making it.” In my case, it is a question of whether the show is of sufficient quality and interest to me that I want to sit in the audience for the whole show rather than watching from the wings or attending to various details.

I was wondering if other arts people out there had a similar experience to Ken Davenport and my own.

I don’t have any problem attending and watching the entire performance I don’t feel personally invested in. But there are other complications that have resulted from my training.

Attending shows first became a chore when I had to write a critique of it from some perspective. With the onus of either taking notes or trying to remember what went on, the shows weren’t as enjoyable any more.

Today, without that responsibility, it is easier to enjoy a performance. Except, now I dread being asked what I thought of the show as soon as the curtain comes down. I usually beat a quick path to the door so that I can have the time to digest what I have seen without being pressured to respond.

Often I know there was something I didn’t like about the show, but it can be difficult to pin down what it is exactly in the moments after the performance.

Then there is the issue of knowing the show wasn’t great quality and watching everyone else fly to their feet to give a standing ovation. It is times like this that I wonder if it is better to have a discerning, critical eye and know the show barely deserves enthusiastic seated applause, much less a hair trigger standing ovation or would I be happier having not developed that skill so I could just sit there and enjoy the show without reservation.

It is something of a two edged sword since the same skill will reveal delightful, intriguing choices that deepen your appreciation of artists’ work.

Some of this is unavoidable and just the cost of growing up and experiencing the world. My high school science teachers removed some of the magic from my childhood by explaining the reality, but later that same knowledge was the basis of a different sort of awe about the world.

So does anyone else face issues like this? Do you have similar circumstances where you can enjoy yourself and then others that require a degree of self-restraint?

Artists Need Not Apply?

March 4, 2014 by Joe Patti

I hadn’t really intended for this to be a “Government and the Arts” themed week on my blog when I wrote about the search for a director of the NEA yesterday, but it seems to be shaping up that way.

Today the Ohio Arts Council posted a tweet saying they were looking for a new deputy director. Curious, I followed the link and was surprised by the minimum qualifications outlined in the job description.

– Completion of undergraduate core program in social or behavioral science or pre-medicine; 30 months experience in delivery of human services or medical assistance in governmental, community or private human support services agency or medical provider; 12 months experience in management; 18 months experience in supervisory principles/techniques.

– Or completion of graduate core program in social or behavioral science or medicine-related field; 24 months experience in delivery of human services or medical assistance in governmental, community or private human support services agency or medical provider; 12 months experience in management; 18 months experience in supervisory principles/techniques.

Wait, what?

I will concede that you don’t necessarily have to be an arts person to do an effective job in an arts related field. I have seen some people argue that a person with general experience in a role can be better than someone with a strict arts background (e.g. call center supervisor as a box office manager). I could see requiring a public policy degree instead of an arts degree, but this medical/social services orientation seems a little bit of a stretch.

Going by the position description, you don’t even need a passing familiarity with the arts to qualify.

Knowledge of social or behavioral science or pre-medicine; program planning for human service organizations; social program & policy analysis; personnel management and policies; agency & governmental laws, rules, regulations & procedures applicable to particular social program; supervisory principles/techniques; management; accounting, finance or budgeting*. Ability to deal with many variables & determine specific action; prepare & deliver speeches before specialized audiences establish professional atmosphere as administrator; handle sensitive inquiries from & contacts with officials & general public.

* May be acquired after employment

Now, let me just say all my interactions with the Ohio Arts Council have been top notch. They have been far more enthusiastic and responsive than we deserve after all the questions and problems that we posed regarding our final grant report as I transitioned into my job last summer.

Not only that, they have been proactive about addressing potential problems, giving me a call when they noticed me doing something online in a new grant application that might cause difficulties down the road.

If this is a result of hiring people using this apparently mismatched job description, I fully endorse it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

If the price of getting this sort of service from a government agency is to advocate for public health degrees over arts degrees, I will be the first to say we all should have entered the healthcare field, instead.

The truth is, there are plenty of people working for the Ohio Arts Council who have arts backgrounds, like the new executive director. The public information director has a background in arts journalism. The current deputy director had a visual arts background before she joined the arts council and later transitioned into the deputy position.

I am sure I would find similar stories for many of the arts council staff.

I reached out to one of my contacts at the arts council about the job description, her response (which came quickly, of course), was as I expected.

That job description is pretty standard for a broad class of deputy director positions across the entire state government system. It was the same way when I was working for the state of Hawaii, except we could insert the appropriate field of study.

The question is, does this really get government and the citizens the most effective employees? Speaking from experience, these descriptions get applied strictly during the initial screening of resumes so chances are an arts person is only going to get an interview if they just happened to get one of these degrees. It isn’t outside of the realm of possibility that a few good people have the qualifications and interest in the arts, but it isn’t an ideal situation.

But even if these criteria weren’t applied strictly, would someone with an arts background or interest in the arts even apply for this job in the first place after reading it? It sounds as if the applicant would be dealing with public health concerns rather than public art.

If someone with the exact public health qualifications applies and gets the job, would they be happy in a role when they expected to be involved with hospitals and health clinics rather than dance performances and art installations?

We Expect Great Things! (just not too great, please)

March 3, 2014 by Joe Patti

Near the end of 2013 I started seeing quite a few blog posts and tweets criticizing the Obama administration for not appointing someone to replace Rocco Landesman as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The administration may have been slow to act, but I wonder how much of the delay was due the difficulty of finding someone the administration felt they could live with and whom felt they could live with the administration.

In an opinion column in the Washington Post, a social science professor writes about her experiences as an appointee to the National Council on the Humanities.

She said there were two reasons she was rejected,

“First, taxes. In 2009 and 2010, the years of my divorce, I filed my taxes late — four weeks and 10 days, respectively. Second, I was not willing to commit to never criticizing the administration, nor to restricting my publishing agenda to topics that were unlikely to be controversial. There is just no point trying to be a public intellectual if you can’t speak your mind. This requirement was conveyed and discussed through phone calls; I have no written record to prove it. But that was how it went.”

Every government entity is risk averse to any flaw in an appointee at any level these days. This American Life recently ran a story about a student whose appointment as the student representative on the Wisconsin Board of Regents was publicly announced and then rescinded. The student absolutely impressed everyone. It was only after his appointment that it was discovered he signed a recall petition in solidarity with his mother who was a teacher.

People will say they value creativity, but they are actually uncomfortable with the fact that creative people don’t conform and will figuratively color outside the lines.

So the Obama administration may have been having a hard time finding someone who would agree not to rock the boat while they held the position. Rocco did raise some controversy with this comments about some arts organizations needing to close, but most of the yelling was within the artistic community. Given the political environment in Washington those sentiments probably comforted a good many members of Congress.

The administration may have gotten what they wanted in the nomination of Jane Chu. Many articles I have written about her imply she won’t cause trouble. The LA Times used the phrase “low profile” to describe her in an number of articles, including one that used “low profile” in the headline.

The Kansas City Star described their city’s resident as “Quietly efficient, guardedly passionate.”

This isn’t to say Chu won’t rock the boat and bring about sweeping change. There have been a number of popes, the current one included, that were assumed to be “safe” choices but proved otherwise.

But right now, Chu is being painted as a rather inoffensive choice for the position which is exactly what you want in an appointee.

Some type of statement will be made about expecting great things of her, but there will be an unspoken subtext that they hope it will not be too great.

What If Your Painting Doesn’t Fit In The Deposit Envelop?

February 26, 2014 by Joe Patti

One of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in my 10 years of blogging is the Artist Pension Trust which has artists deposit their work into across the course of 20 years with the proceeds of the sales going to fund their pensions.

When I first wrote about this back in 2006, I didn’t have too many of the details, but a recent story examining the success of the trust as it reaches its 10 anniversary provides many more details.

I was interested to learn that only 20% of the 2000 participating artists were from the United States. Though given that the number one rule of investment is diversification, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Basically, it works this way:

Participating artists donate 20 of their works over a planned 20-year period (two per year during the first five years, one per year for the ensuing five years and one piece every other year for the remaining 10 years) to the trust. There are regional directors and selection committees, consisting of independent curators, artists and collectors but not dealers (“they bring a conflict of interest,” Moti Shniberg, a former high-tech entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Mutual Art, the parent company of the Artist Pension Trust, said).

The trust “cultivates” the investment by lending them to museums and art festivals. Keeping them locked in storage for 20 years wouldn’t help enhance their value, after all. While the plan is to keep the works for 20 years, some have already been sold when their value increased significantly.

Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.

While the ideal of pooling art for the long term benefit of all is admirable in theory, in practice human nature caused the trust to slightly alter their original plan.

“David Ross noted that his original idea was for all the proceeds of sales of artwork be placed in the general pool, but a number of the artists he had approached, “who all believed that they were going to be successful in their careers,” were unenthusiastic about supporting less accomplished colleagues. “Dividing the profits—40 percent for the artist, 32 percent for the general pool—made the idea easier for them to swallow.”

As noted earlier, there are no dealers on the committees because they have a vested interest in selling an artist’s work rather than letting it be deposited in a trust for 20 years.

I look forward to checking in again on this in 10 years when the trust starts to sell the works of the first depositors in preparation for paying out pensions. How well will those artists who have been had the patience and discipline to participate in this program fare?

Info You Can Use: Rural Arts

February 25, 2014 by Joe Patti

Last week, Americans for the Arts held a blog salon on Rural Arts. There were a lot of familiar names and faces with posts by Wormfarm Institute and Springboard for the Arts’ rural offices, but there were more people with whom I was unfamiliar.

There were three posts that jumped out at me, likely because they were aligned with my penchant for practical knowledge. Two were by Savannah Barrett with Art of the Rural which is coordinating 2014 as Year of the Rural Arts.

Her first post suggests working with Cooperative Extension Services in your community as a method of developing the arts. Cooperative Extensions in many states operate arts extensions as part of their services and apparently the national 4-H has recently started placing a greater emphasis on communication and expressive arts according to Barrett.

Her second post lists federal and philanthropic resources that are involved with rural arts.

The third post was made by Shannon Ford from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lists 6 characteristics which he has identified as making arts rural programs successful. Most of the characteristics are common to pretty much any activity planned by an arts organization- clarity, sustainability, evaluation. However because resources are often particularly scarce in rural communities, the need to be focused on these areas is especially important given the small margin of error.

This is why he emphasizes visibility and partnerships as a way of leveraging good will and shared resources as a way to communicate your goals to many corners of the community and achieve investment.

His last characteristic, authenticity, seemed most important of all given that the values of a rural community are shared. By which I mean in the general sense and in the course of conversation. Even if two people aren’t of like mind about your efforts, whatever you do is going to be a topic of their conversation. As Ford notes, “No good ever came of ignoring your community’s cultural context or norms, and rural perspectives have a long history of being ignored.”

If you are interested in learning more, Americans for the Arts is hosting a three webinars on the rural arts starting Wednesday, February 26, each at 3 pm EST.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014: Economic Development and Art in Rural Communities

Thursday, February 27, 2014: Resources For Rural Arts

Friday, February 28, 2014: Placemaking in Rural Communities

Put The Keg Under The Dali

February 19, 2014 by Joe Patti

I ended up with an interesting juxtaposition of articles today. After clicking on interesting looking links in my Twitter feed, I had an article asking whether children should be allowed in museums come up in a tab next to tab with YouTube videos about the student art rental program at Oberlin College.

The article about banning kids from museums was a reaction to parents letting their child crawl all over a sculpture worth $10 million at the Tate Modern. Compare that to my realization that Oberlin has been renting out their priceless Dalis, Picassos, Chagalls, Calders, etc to their students for $5 and has been doing so since 1940.

Apparently they haven’t had any lost or damaged in all that time. There is a lot of competition for the paintings with the students camping out all night to be near the head of the line and consulting maps of where the pieces will be located in the room to strategize what they will grab first. (They are limited to 2 pieces though)

Given that Frank Almond recently had his violin stolen coming out of a concert hall, it is amazing to me no one has targeted the student dorms to grab the painting.

And it should be noted, contrary to what is initially claimed in a blog on the Oberlin website, these pieces are not works that would otherwise remain out of circulation. These works are particularly set aside for this rental program and distributed and returned every semester without much incident.

Between the two situations comes the question about the best way to instill a respect for art. Do you keep kids out of the museum until they are mature enough or try to engender respect throughout their lives? Frankly, I recall wandering the Museum of Natural History on my own when I was in 10 or 11 years old so my feeling is that most kids can handle themselves if properly trained.

Presumably college students are mature enough to appreciate art in a museum, but do you dare let them take it and hang it in their dorm room?

Well, clearly you can at Oberlin at least. But the practice of lending out priceless art works like library books hasn’t caught on with museums in any widespread way, despite Oberlin’s 70+ years of success with it. I simultaneously cringe at the idea of a museum doing so and feel slightly ashamed at being so distrustful with so little evidence that people who would borrow can’t be trusted.

Everyone Doesn’t Have To Like You

February 18, 2014 by Joe Patti

Today I saw a post on The Creativity Post that had me thinking back to my piece yesterday on Seth Godin’s vision of what constituted an elite. In The Gorgeous Reality of Not Being Liked by Everyone, Jordan Bates addresses the individual who tries to please everyone, but much of what he says can apply to groups and organizations.

We all know we can’t please everyone, but still we either try to do so, or pretend we are doing so. The simple fact is, regardless of what you are writing on your grant applications, everyone in your community can’t be your market. You simply can’t be all things to all people. Just as Godin says trying to convert someone who doesn’t want to be is a near fruitless effort, trying to appeal to everyone can result in diluting your effectiveness across a broad swath, serving no one well.

Certainly, for arts organizations the motivation to serve all that you survey is driven by the funding system we have. No one source provides you with enough support so you have to position yourself broadly enough to garner support from 20 different sources.

As I read Bates’ advice to the individual, I see a lot of similarities for arts organizations.

2. Take Minor Social Risks – Start doing a few things that you normally wouldn’t do because of your fear of what others would think or say…

3. Live by Your Deeper Values – ... The more you seek to align your actions with what you feel in the heart of your being, the less you will invest in the opinions of the mud-flingers.

4. Focus on Actual Outcomes – ..

5. Love Your Good and Bad – Give yourself permission to not be the things you wish you could be. Embrace the fact that all of your qualities — both your boons and shortcomings — are essential to the equation that is you…

There is a fair bit of discussion these days about arts organizations needing to take more risks, focus on outcomes, embracing and acknowledging failure as well as success.

I wonder if it is possible to sit down with your funders and say, “Look, you have been funding us for a long time now so you know we are effective, but we want to narrow our focus on serving X. We anticipate much better outcomes than we are seeing currently and they will be deeper and more meaningful than the results we are currently reporting. Can we count on your continued, and perhaps increased support?”

I feel like there is a bit of a precedent for this sort of thing given the current focus on placemaking by the NEA and other influential funders. You can point to them and note that focused investment in one’s community is being highly valued by funders.

My initial impulse was to say, you have to avoid the perception of catering only to the wealthy. But as I thought about it, I wondered if part of the problem for some organizations has been a divided focus in trying to appeal to both the wealthy and the not so wealthy. Both groups end up feeling that the organization has neither of their interests at heart.

Arts organizations end up being Archie trying to alternately please both Betty and Veronica, except the results are not as hilarious in real life.

Now other than the Metropolitan Opera which has a waiting list miles long and people willing their seats to descendants, I don’t think any arts organization really has an interest in providing a premium product to a wealthy audience. It is the perception that you have to cater to one group based on their money and the other based on your mission that causes the uncomfortable division.

I know in my community the elitist active seekers that Godin describes cut across all social strata and income levels so there is some sense in his suggestion that the focus should be on serving them.

Of course, the question comes up about whether it is sustainable. There is a real possibility that people will have to be let go in order to serve this narrower focus. An organization I once worked for closed down their performing arts program of 20 years to focus on their core competency of over 50 years. This was motivated more by economic need rather than philosophic outlook, but in either case the organization has to examine its priorities. Better to make this decision of your own will than to have it forced upon you.

Even among the curious, everyone is not going to have the same interests and like everything you do. The current environment where most people are buying single tickets rather than subscriptions has changed the relationship and expectations the community has of arts organizations. It can be easier to concede and have them accept that they won’t like everything you present in your efforts to engage whomever you identify you want to serve.

It is likely they will accept that premise if there appears to be a corresponding attempt to discover what does interest and excite them and shift things in that direction. (Remembering the distinction between wants and needs)

Re-Defining Elite

February 17, 2014 by Joe Patti

Seth Godin is talking about us. Well, actually I think that is a little narcissistic to think he is merely talking about people in the creative fields. I am pretty sure his comment encompass American culture as well as that as that of a number of other countries.

His post titled, “I’m an elitist” addresses a lot of topics we in the creative fields get conflicted about:

Lowering the price at the expense of sustainability is a fool’s game.

Only producing tools that don’t need an instruction manual takes power away from those prepared to learn how to use powerful tools. And it’s okay to write a book that some people won’t finish, or a video that some don’t understand.

Giving people what they want isn’t always what they want.

Curators create value. We need more curators, and not from the usual places.

Creating and reinforcing cultural standards and institutions that elevate us is more urgent than ever.

We write history about people who were brave enough to lead, not those that figured out how to pander to the crowd.

Elites aren’t defined by birth or wealth, they are people with a project,…

These are all issues that are constantly being bandied about in the arts today. Pricing seems to always be a topic of conversation.

Diane Ragsdale and Nina Simon recently challenged us to think about wants versus needs.

While Godin never promises you that someone will pay for it, he encourages the creation of challenging work because to do otherwise is a disservice those who are ready to be challenged.

He actually developed that idea in a post he wrote about 4 years ago and links to in his current post.

While Godin does acknowledge that affluence does play a role in ones ability to become an elite by providing free time to pursue knowledge and the tools to communicate and process that knowledge, he states that birth, class and affluence do not make one an elite.

The number of self-selected elites is skyrocketing. Part of this is a function of our ability to make a living without working 14 hours a day in a sweatshop, but part of it is the ease with which it’s possible to find and connect with other elites.

The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from.

Once you identify this as your mission, you save a lot of time and frustration in your outreach. If someone doesn’t choose to be part of the elites, it’s unclear to me that you can persuade them to change their mind.

Two things that come to mind. If we define elites as he does, people who are willing to be challenged, rather than worrying they are the people we are focusing too much upon because they possess interest and ability to support our endeavors, what will need to change in order to engage and coordinate this new constituency? And is it sustainable?

Not the first or last time this basic question has been asked, probably even in the last week given all the conversations about how the non-profit arts sector needs to change themselves. Following Godin’s suggestion to look in new places to find curators may be a start down the right road.

Second question is about that last paragraph of Godin’s that I quote. How do you determine if someone is unwilling to embrace the challenges that are a hallmark of an elite and shift your attention elsewhere? This seems to a difficult proposition because we are not always the most objective.

As I noted at the start of this entry, there is a degree of narcissism in the arts, really just about every industry, where we see people who don’t experience the world in a similar way as we do as an outsider. Lawyers view the world differently from engineers who view the world differently from computer programmers and visual artists. Those who do not value what we value are not valued.

Yet there are groups in each who are furrowing their brows and generating a lot of sweat, tackling problems with the gusto of Godin’s elites. We know they are fellow travelers in pursuit of progress, but we want them to pay attention to us right now. It may be 15 years* before their pursuits orient them in our direction and into our orbit looking for solutions.

I am sure Godin’s definition of outreach is much wider than what arts organization define as outreach, but even if your efforts embody his definition, 15 years is a long time and it is easy to give up on someone (or a group) that is clearly engaged and actively pursuing productive projects simply because they aren’t engaged and active with you.

As a whole, arts organizations currently don’t have that sort of patience. Even if they don’t expect people to fall in love with the arts after one exposure, they still want it to happen fairly quickly and investment to manifest in frequent interactions. Otherwise, organizations wouldn’t purge their mail lists after a year or two of apparent inactivity.

On the other hand, if you take up Godin’s challenge, take the approach that you value seekers and restructure to serve them in all the ways they want to interact with you, both on- and off-line, maybe it doesn’t take 15 years.

*I use 15 years because it was about 15 years ago that friends from grad school took me to an art museum when I was visiting them in NC, as did another pair of friends when I was visiting them in OK. However, it was only about 4 years ago that I started going to art museums of my own accord and on a regular basis. I figure if it takes a person with a career in the arts around 15 years to start to do that, it may take someone who is not in the arts around that long as well to go from infrequent to occasional and we need to wait for them.

What I Learned In The Hospital

February 12, 2014 by Joe Patti

Yesterday I was at our local hospital attending some presentations on different aspects of the hospital’s operations. One of the people spoke about the processes the hospital follows to ensure good customer service. Because there are so many steps and people involved in scheduling a patient’s test, handling their arrival at the front desk, directing them to the proper part of the hospital and then administering the test, there are many opportunities for patients to be upset or frustrated.

The hospital has a whole process set up for each face to face interaction which include a greeting, mention of employee’s name, confirmation of details of visit, pointing out the restrooms and a number of other things I don’t recall. They have an acronym 7-8 characters long that they use to remember all the steps.

The woman who is in charge monitoring customer service followed patients through the process for about a week and conducted some phone surveys as well.

It was interesting to learn that a frequent complaint across the different areas was that people were laughing. One person was upset by people laughing in a backroom and talking about breakfast as she was checking in. Another didn’t like the fact people were laughing in the halls. This is understandable as people going into the hospital would be anxious about any sign that staff wasn’t serious and focused on their jobs.

Arts organizations can probably get away with a lot more cheerfulness in front of clients in the course of their duties, but like any business, would also need to reflect an attentive and efficient demeanor.

One practice the customer service director noticed impacted each patient’s visible level of comfort was when staff did what she termed “managing up” as they passed a patient on to another person. The way she used the term seemed to deviate from the standard definition. It might be more accurate to say they were managing patient expectations.

Essentially, as a patient was handed over to someone else, the escort would introduce the new person and say something complimentary – “she is really friendly,” “he is the best radiologist in the state,” “her nursing team is very attentive.” The hospital encouraged the staff to do this in order to assuage the concerns of patients who were probably anxious about just being in the building even if they felt fine.

I mention all this because one thing she noticed was that the doctors were horrendous employing any of the gestures which are pretty much mandated for the rest of the staff, including simply introducing themselves by name. Obviously, some were extremely personable, but on the whole the general staff was better at remembering to “manage up” than the doctors were when they handed a patient on to technicians or nursing staff.

I started wondering if the same might be true of an arts organization. I would wager that the lower echelons of staff in arts organizations are better at saying complimentary things about their supervisors than executive administration are when they pass clients/customers back to staff for assistance.

There is a lot of focus on the importance of the box office and house staff as a first line of contact for customers and training them to comport themselves well. But rarely do we talk about the importance of other parts of the organization bolstering the image of these areas.

Advertising will talk about how great the performers are, but does anyone else in the organization publicly comment on the quality of the front of house staff? A lot of service oriented companies like airlines and hotels will have advertising which feature friendly, energetic faces eager to make your experience comfortable. But rarely do you see an arts organization emphasize their service as a selling point.

I wonder how much greater the satisfaction of audiences will be if you were to comment, “This is Michael our box office manager, he is a crackerjack at troubleshooting these complicated problems.” or “This is my favorite usher, Mabel, she’ll make sure you find the rest of your party.” (It probably wouldn’t hurt employee and volunteer relations either)

One last thing I learned during my visit to the hospital: A hospital may be really generous making a donation to your organization, but you are only doing half your job if you are just talking to the people who can write you a check. You can enter into a mutually beneficial relationship if you cultivate a relationship with the physician recruitment staff.

Doctors may be primarily concerned with the state of the hospital facilities, but their families are going to be the ones living in your community. They don’t care about how many stents the cardiac unit implanted last year and the mortality rate, but they do care about what activities are available in the community.

The families have a strong influence on whether the doctors stay in the community so the hospital has a vested interest in making sure the families are happy. Our local hospital actually sponsors date nights where they will babysit the kids while the parents go off and do whatever they want until 11 pm. The more amenities the physician recruitment staff knows about, the better for everyone.

While we were on break, one of the hospital staff commented she just learned that the local museum had summer arts classes. Another commented she never knew that and the first observed that a lot of times different organizations have their summer arts camps the same week and she wished they would spread them out.

It just so happened someone called me that afternoon to say they were thinking of starting up a summer arts camp and I saw the directors of the museum at lunch today. I advised both to make sure the recruitment staff knew about their summer plans and try to arrangement them so they didn’t overlap the same weeks.

No Venue Is Too Small To Be Sale Spoofed

February 11, 2014 by Joe Patti

I never really thought of my venue and the shows it presents as a target for ticket resellers and secondary market brokers, but a recent incident provides a cautionary tale.

I had a woman make an appointment to see me to complain about the excessive services charges assessed by our ticket office. Now, our charges are rolled into the price so I thought she had ordered her tickets via Ticketmaster even though she swore she called our number.

When she brought her paperwork in, it was apparent the answer was much more complicated. The receipt showed that the order was placed during the week our ticket office was closed for Christmas holidays. Not only that, the charges for the tickets were twice the face value of the show (a renter presenting an Elvis impersonator).

We don’t know what number she called to order the tickets, but what we ended up piecing together was that a guy in Washington state basically took her request, went online to Ticketmaster and ordered the tickets, chose print at home and then FEDEXed the tickets to her, tacking all sorts of service charges on to the already over priced tickets. When we went in to the system to check if the tickets were actually valid, his name and address were associated with the seats and matched the address on the sales receipt.

In the end, the woman ended up paying over $120 for two tickets that would have cost her about $43 had she reached our ticket office.

In retrospect, I realized I had seen similar offers for our tickets on Facebook and Twitter. One posting was offering tickets to one of our shows, but had linked to a similarly named venue about two hours away. At the time, I thought they put our date on a concert being performed by the same group at another time and the prices were for those seats.

It was only later that I realized the concert in that city was being held at an entirely different venue. Our date was right, whoever was selling just linked to the seating map at the wrong venue.

Since then, I have paid closer attention and have seen people offering tickets on Twitter and Facebook to some of our events at jacked up prices. This isn’t secondary market selling, the seats they offer are in rows where no tickets have been sold and at a time when the event isn’t really in any danger of selling out.

This isn’t technically web or email spoofing since no one has tried to directly impersonate us. This just takes advantage of someone’s lack of knowledge or attention when they are ordering.

This sort of scam is difficult to warn people about. Those who are subscribers or have a close enough relationship with your organization that they read any correspondence they receive from you warning about this situation probably know enough to discern when they are not talking to an authentic representative.

The woman who complained to me actually had her call forwarded a couple times and then was instructed to go online to another site in order to buy the tickets. The inconvenience of this process alone probably would have tipped our regular customers off.

So in addition to watching social media for any positive or negative comments about your organization, you should keep an eye out for people pretending to be one of your ticket outlets as well.

Meandering In Minnesota

February 10, 2014 by Joe Patti

A reader from Oklahoma recently wrote me thanking me for providing information arts organizations in rural settings can use. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a “if Minnesota can do it…” post on Dakotafire, a site that hopes to emulate and replicate that MN’s successes in the Dakotas

I loved the idea promoted by John Davis, Executive Director of the Lanesboro Arts Center, had for making the entirety of Lanesboro, MN an arts campus (video) rather than just focus on building an arts center. (I also love Lanesboro’s claim to be the B&B capital of Minnesota)

The fact that the town of New York Mills, MN, population 1200, decided to sponsor a Great American Think Off is inspiring to me. It suggests that there are still plenty of interesting ideas that aren’t being explored and risks that aren’t being taken.

I was amused by the concept that rural communities don’t have arts/gallery walks like cities do, they have Arts Meanders that include artist studios spanning counties.

Note that none of these links appear in the Dakotafire post. The ideas were so intriguing, I was inspired to seek out the websites for each.

True, these are all existing ideas writ small, or perhaps it is writ large since they take the idea of an arts district and apply it to whole towns and counties.

For me it belies the thinking that there aren’t enough of some type of resource in a place to accomplish anything successfully. The effort invested in some of these projects has been spent over 20 years or so, but the devotion to pursuing the idea has been there.

Learn To Stop Worrying And Love The Data

February 5, 2014 by Joe Patti

Last month, the Cultural Data Project released a study they commissioned to investigate the use of data by arts organizations and what impediments to effectiveness exist.

If you aren’t familiar with the Cultural Data Project, it is an attempt to collect data from arts organizations across the country in order to assemble as comprehensive a set of data as possible. While this is useful for research, it is also meant to provide arts organizations with analysis each can use to better understand the environment in which they operate.

The problem is, few arts organizations are taking advantage of this opportunity.

“Many of the organizations that provide information to the CDP are not taking advantage of the reporting tools, contributing to the sense that CDP is something that they contribute to rather than something they derive value from. “Because of the barriers present in accessing data (e.g., lack of time and data-use training, clunky and difficult to use databases), many nonprofits simply do not attempt to make better use of data at their disposal that could help improve organizational performance.”

This is attributed in part to what respondents characterize as a “collect data first, ask the questions later” approach. The report suggests there is a “more is better” approach that leads to more data being collected than is needed, as well as a lack of ability at framing effective questions that will help move the field forward.

This approach is reinforced by funders: (my emphasis)

“Funder requests often determine what kind of data organizations choose to collect and may crowd out organizations’ interest in asking questions that could inform their own decision-making. This may contribute to a sort of vicious cycle in which organizations’ primary experiences with data are framed as a duty to a funder, and since the data requested by the funder may not be what the organization itself needs to know for its own reflection and improvement, data collection comes to be perceived as a ‘cost of doing business’ rather than an investment that brings strategic value to the organization”

An observation I had really never considered is that while administrative staff works with research data all the time, there is little effort made to get artistic staff using it for their decision making.

“As the previous participant noted, “arts administrators have acquired a taste for data used in financial management, fundraising, audience development and advocacy decision-making. But there is little data on artistic choice, much less data that allows us to explore the relationships between artistic programming and audience or organizational sustainability.”

[…] (many paragraphs later, my emphasis)

But these experts emphasized that until data-informed decision-making takes hold in programming departments, we won’t truly be able to say that the cultural sector is effectively using the available cultural data or using it to full effect. “Until we can engage artists and curators in examining audience, market and trend data, we can never really make progress as a field,” said one. “I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve been allowed to present research to actors, dancers and musicians. They are the ones who can move the world.”

Because data collection is seen as such a chore, according to the report the job is often assigned to “low-salary, junior-level staffers who are given little in the way of training and professional development.” As a result, the collection is executed poorly and there is low value placed on the data.

The Cultural Data Project would like arts organizations to see data as a “tool not an end.” The study respondents felt that one of the areas of highest value for arts organizations is using the data to establish a benchmark against which they can measure themselves, as well as a source of information about practices by groups similar to themselves.

The biggest gap in the arts knowledge economy is in the area of practice,” noted one contributor. “What new or different artistic programs are leading to successful artistic outcomes? What new or different business practices are leading to successful operational outcomes? … Another added that most organizations are eager for this kind of information about their peers, which would take the concept of benchmarking into new and valuable areas: “I think cultural organizations would welcome as much information as possible about the types of programming that are being offered by other similar organizations, along with summary-level data about audience participation or attendance…. Is it new and different? Was it successful? Data that address these questions would be lapped up.”

As you might imagine, among the recommendations for the future, (and there are many more issues addressed than I have covered here), are shifting the way organizations view, collect and handle data as well as involving artistic staff in the evaluation of data.

Joy Is Easy In The Arts–Just Get Out Of The Way

February 4, 2014 by Joe Patti

As promised, I am posting the video of the “Five Minutes To Shine” speech my former colleague and assistant theatre manager, Lehua Simon gave at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference luncheon. The video APAP posted on their site didn’t include the slides (it was difficult to get both the speaker and the video screen in the same shot) so Lehua kindly added her slide presentation to the video below.

As I mentioned in my early post, she got a great response and some of the speakers who followed after her made reference to parts of her presentation. (By the way, that is me at the end yelling “hana hou” which is means “do it again,” basically the Hawaiian call for an encore .)

As you probably noticed, she started to tear up a bit in front of the audience. Half the people at my table were colleagues from Hawaii and told the other half I was the theatre manager in the story who left. There were a lot of whispered questions about what I did that would drive her to start crying in front of 3,000 people. While I possibly did not prepare her well enough for my departure, I had given four months notice and there were many conversations about issues and potential problems during that time.

The questions she was sending me after I left mostly dealt with the new fiscal reporting system that the university had changed over to a few months before I departed. There were a number of things that did not transition from the old system as might be expected. But it is difficult to answer these questions from memory 5,000 miles away.

As frustrating as that was, probably the bigger source of frustration was the new policies and procedures being created as after the furor followed the university athletics program’ attempt to contract Stevie Wonder for a concert that saw $200,000 sent to a company that took the money and ran.

The university was formulating much more restrictive policies as I was leaving and when I was asked to comment on the drafts, I pointed out there was nothing wrong with the old policies, it was the fact they hadn’t been enforced that lead to the problems. When I spoke to the new theatre manager, he said the policies were still shifting to the point every contract they have signed has come back with new requirements.

My purpose in mentioning this is not to scorch bridges, I really valued the opportunities afforded by that job. Rather, I think this is a good illustration of the claim made in the Netflix Human Resource slide show that companies start curtailing freedoms and start instituting more processes the larger and more complex they become.

State universities don’t have the flexibility to hire in the manner that Netflix can, but many organization do if the will to do so exists. It may be worth thinking about whether your processes are helping or hindering your organization’s purpose as well as impacting your employees’ happiness with their jobs.

I am sure Lehua’s discussion of the spiritual fulfillment she receives from doing her job resonates with many of you, whether you work in the arts or not. That sort of joy comes easily when you work in the arts without very much intentional effort by the employer. Companies in other industries have to add amenities to make employees happy. Arts organizations just have focus on getting impediments like onerous processes out of the way. (Lack of funding, alas is a tougher nut.)

Netflix points out that there are some areas that absolutely require processes. So make the processes where necessary and enforce them strictly, but resist making new processes just to answer every problem that pops up. I am sure we have all come across a rule or some requirement in a contract that is so strange, you know there is some sort of story behind it. As Netflix noted, in creative environments it isn’t necessarily cheaper to prevent errors than to fix them when they occur.

Info You Can Use: Netflix HR Policies and the Arts

January 29, 2014 by Joe Patti

Apparently Netflix Powerpoint presentation on human resources has been getting a lot of views this last month. I remember being able to read the accompanying article on Harvard Business Review at one time, but it seems to be protected by a registration requirement now.

The Powerpoint presentation can be viewed however and has some interesting lessons about employee relations for non-profit arts organizations. I will state outright that probably the biggest hurdle for arts organizations will be paying top dollar for top talent since the arts are often limited in their earning ability. However, given that arts people are often motivated by psychic income rather than monetary income, some of Netflix basic philosophy may apply.

Or perhaps having highly talented people working for you and following their ideas about jettisoning process and procedure can help you identify income streams needed to provide appropriate remuneration.

There are 126 slides so I can’t really summarize the whole presentation, but I wanted to talk about a few that stuck out.

Slides 4-18 talk about the values of Netflix making it clear that their view is that the true values of any company aren’t what they say they value on paper, but what employee activities are actually rewarded. A company says they value integrity, but punish a whistleblower, then that is not a true company value.

This is something to think about when writing your organizational values and mission statement. It almost seems best to be like the college campus that only puts in sidewalks when they see where the students walk to get between buildings. It might be best to enumerate the values you do exhibit rather than the ones you aspire to–and then revise as you evince more constructive behavior.

The thing about Netflix HR policy that most companies might have a hard time implementing is in slide 22. “Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” They want people who are performing at their best and give those who aren’t the boot, but in the nicest way possible.

In the article which is now behind a registration system, they talk about a woman who was a great producer, but as technological advances left her behind, she couldn’t conform so they sat her down. They make it sound like she was relived to be let go (and maybe the severance package is just that good).

It seems a little cold hearted, but it does show they are in earnest when they claim a commitment to only working with the top talent they can find. In the slides that follow, they talk more about that, saying they use the metric of who would they fight to keep if the person was being hired away. You keep those you would fight for and give severance to everyone else.

To be fair, they say the approach should go the other way (slide 27) and that every employee should periodically ask what their manager would do to keep them on if they gave their two weeks. Later in the slides, they say that interviewing with other firms while working for Netflix is not a sign of disloyalty, but a good way to discover your market value, just make sure you don’t reveal any corporate secrets. (slide 108)

In slide 38, they admit working for them is not for everyone. They focus on results, so you don’t get an A for effort.

Where things get interesting is around slide 43. This is where they talk about why they are so focused on only keeping the most talented people. They note how companies often start curtailing freedom as they get bigger and more complex. Companies will add processes, but Netflix says that is only a short term solution because they lose their ability to be flexible (slide 51-61) in the face of change.

The solution is to increase the level of talent in your organization faster than complexity, that way you have self-disciplined, creative people working for you who don’t require tons of processes to keep them reined in.

This is the part I felt was most applicable to the arts. The conversation these days focuses on how inflexible arts organizations are at responding to the changing operating environment. Yet we have some of the most talented, creative people working for us. Small arts groups are nimble, but as they grow and become established, they generally seem to become less flexible. The size and desire for job stability by the employees has frequently been identified as prime culprits.

But according to Netflix you can have growth, organizational flexibility and job stability, so perhaps it is the processes that are to blame.

The next slide was the one that intrigued me most:

That last line implying it is better to be flexible enough to recover from a problem rather than having rules to prevent them really caught me off guard. And in the slides that follow (63-71) they give examples of good and bad processes and discuss how their famous “take whatever vacation time you want” policy came into being. (Slide 67 is essentially the thesis)

But the idea that it is better for creative environments to take errors in stride and move past them echoes the oft expressed idea that artists and arts organizations shouldn’t fear making mistakes and taking risks because it is integral to self-development.

There are some interesting slides on employee relations, providing context rather than attempting to control (81-87). I don’t want to get into summarizing that because I wanted to tackle their compensation policy.

Their philosophy is that the compensation for each person is individual and they should be paying top market price for that person. And that they shouldn’t wait until an annual review to award an increase in compensation if they realize they are not paying top dollar, they should do so immediately.

Compensation is not dependent on Netflix success. (96-104) They are against giving raises based on job title (what are all other marketing directors getting? Not all people with that title are of the same quality), or giving across the board percentage raises, or practicing internal parity (everyone in the department/seniority get paid the same).

For Netflix, monetary compensation is everything. I imagine that is because they are hiring people who are both very talented and motivated by the idea monetary compensation is everything.

For arts organizations, it is probably possible with some thought to find non-monetary rewards that motivate employees along the same philosophical lines utilized by Netflix. Perhaps flex time, access to facilities and supplies to exercise their creativity, use of organization owned housing for out of town guests at Christmas, etc.

Given the idea that compensation level is personal to each individual, the opportunities provided to each person may be different. An administrator and a receptionist may end up making the same salary because the administrator values being able to use the ceramic studio to create works they can sell over being paid more.

If you subscribe to their philosophy that A level results for B level effort gains you greater responsibility and compensation that will allow you to grow within the company, then a receptionist who has made great contributions could be promoted to the marketing department.

But then you potentially run into the area that takes the most courage–letting go of a mediocre producer in the marketing department. If there are a couple of stars in the marketing department who have the potential of heading up a new endeavor that will earn more revenue, that’s great, shuffle them off to better things. But you might as easily need to let someone go to get the best talent into marketing.

Netflix philosophy assumes everyone working for them is motivated to advance. I don’t recall if they covered this in the slides or the article, but I suspect if someone declined to be promoted, they might be viewed as too timid for the company’s ambitions and content to invest B effort to generate A work.

This may be just as true for an employee of an arts organization, but much more difficult to discern because the person could value the work/life balance afforded by their position so they can spend time with family or artistic pursuits. You might never find someone who can produce as well as they can working 25 hours a week and they may stick with you for the next 10 years. It can be tougher to discern in the arts and tougher to find the resolve to cut mediocre people loose.

But I suppose allowing for employee work-life balance is why Netflix has the very liberal “no-vacation policy” vacation policy. They probably understand that those needs are just as individual as compensation.

Is A Ticket A Contract?

January 28, 2014 by Joe Patti

Yesterday, commenter Lee Saylor asked a question about foul weather and refunds on a post I did a couple weeks ago regarding that subject.

He noted that like many performing arts organizations, the no-refund policy was on the back of the ticket. That raised an interesting topic I wanted to discuss.

When I was first starting out my career, I was told that a ticket was a contract with the audience member and that the policies on the back were the terms of the contract. If I recall correctly this was to support the idea that if someone purchased a ticket, they had the right not to appear and we had to hold the empty seat for them.

However, I believe it was just last week that someone pointed out to me that it can’t be a contract because you receive the terms after you have made the purchase. That made sense to me because it wouldn’t be fair to a consumer to find out they were bound to certain conditions they were unaware of prior to their purchase.

EXCEPT, that is exactly what happens when you buy software. You don’t learn about the terms of service (TOS) until after you have purchased the software and start to install it. Back when software came on discs, there was a big outcry because if you broke the seal on the envelop it came in the company wouldn’t issue a refund if you didn’t like it or it didn’t work on your computer system.

At the time they were concerned people were copying the discs and returning them. These days I am not sure if software companies will refund you if you actually read the TOS and say you don’t agree and want your money back.

Refunds aside, like buying a ticket, you don’t learn the details of the TOS until after you have made the purchase. (Contrast with buying airline tickets where they encourage you to read their contract of carriage prior to completing your transaction.) So my question is, are they contracts? Does the timing of when you receive the terms determine whether they constitute a contract or not?

Do any lawyers or people who play them on stage or TV have any idea?

Now whether it is a contract or not doesn’t disqualify what is written on the back of your tickets as a statement of policy or rules that will govern the transaction should the person seek to redeem it for a performance.

Whether that will protect you against a legal claim is another issue entirely.

Stuff To Ponder: The Working Job Interview

January 27, 2014 by Joe Patti

Earlier this month, I read an interview with WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg about his company, Automattic’s, hiring process. The title of the interview, Hire by Audition, Not Resumes, is what caught my eye.

What Automattic does is pay potential hires to do short term work for them so they can get a real sense of the person they might be potentially working with long term. Mullenweg says they hire about 40% of those who tryout and have very low employee turnover.

During the trials, we give the applicants actual work. If you’re applying to work in customer support, you’ll answer tickets. If you’re an engineer, you’ll work on engineering problems. If you’re a designer, you’ll design.

There’s nothing like being in the trenches with someone, working with them day by day. It tells you something you can’t learn from resumes, interviews, or reference checks. At the end of the trial, everyone involved has a great sense of whether they want to work together going forward. And, yes, that means everyone — it’s a mutual tryout. Some people decide we’re not the right fit for them.

Automattic employs people who work virtually so they don’t care when and how the work get done which allows people who already have jobs to “audition” for a new one on their own schedule.

It might be problematic for an arts organization to include those who are already employed in a short term work interview that requires them to be physically present. But this format does give both the employer and applicant an opportunity to evaluate the reality of each other.

If you are seeking to fill a position where the person is required to be self-directed, having them physically work onsite for the whole period probably isn’t a necessary. You can give a person marketing or financial materials and ask them to come back after a few days to discuss/present the approach they might take promoting events or improving the financial status of the organization.

Mullenweg admits this process requires a significant investment of time and energy, something most arts organizations don’t have an excess supply of. However, if your organization only has 20 people, each which must shoulder a large share of responsibility, it will be better to make the effort and avoid having someone leave and shift the burden to everyone else. Likewise, it is preferable that each person be competent enough to bear their entire share of the load.

Automattic’s process answers a common gripe from freelancers who are often asked to submit a proposal involving a great deal of work without any compensation only to later find that the company which solicited the materials is using all their ideas. Even under this process the applicant can have his work and ideas appropriated, but at least they will have received some sort of payment for their effort.

Imagining Doing Many Things With The Rest of Your Life

January 22, 2014 by Joe Patti

It is something of a trope that when you are a teenager without a lot of work experience looking to get a better job, you get creative about how you describe your past experience, claiming to have “coordinated the comfort and appreciation of over 1000 customers daily” when your job was to keep the restrooms clean.

After writing my post yesterday about artists doing a better job of communicating their value, I remembered a post on the Theatre Communication Group (TCG) website this summer about how artists already possess many of the skills needed to be entrepreneurs.

At the time, some of the comparisons seemed a little facile and the same sort of stretch teenagers make to sound more skilled.

For example, the improvisation classes we take develop a sensitivity to imagination and impulses. We learn how to say, “Yes” and to follow impulses without fear, judgment or resources. We find ourselves acting with others in highly bizarre and complex scenarios that we have to “act” our ways through. Entrepreneurs, similarly, often find themselves in such situations and must rely on quick thinking, problem solving and the following of impulses.

Further, the storytelling skills we learn as performers, play well into branding ourselves as an artist, entrepreneur or arts business. The research skills we use to research a play and character can simply be repurposed to research one’s market and competition. Our understanding and experience in collaboration aids us in building a culture around creative businesses that represents values: personal, professional, political, artistic, etc. Just like we cast plays, entrepreneurs hire employees.

After reading over the report assembled by the Brooklyn Commune, I realized that the only reason I felt like it was a stretch is that I haven’t really come across many arts people who are interested in applying the skills they acquired in other areas. I have to include myself in that statement. While I look for new opportunities on behalf of my organization, I generally have no inclination to start a business or apply those skills on behalf of a company in another industry.

I think this gets back to the sentiment many of us hear when we begin to embark on a career in the arts, “if you can imagine yourself doing anything else for the rest of your life, pursue that instead.”

What might be inhibiting some of the progress in the arts is that we have so little desire to do anything else that we don’t give a lot of consideration to how our skills might be of practical use outside our field.

One of the reasons the arts community is having difficulty communicating their value to the public at large may be due to never thinking, much less talking, about how the skills we have cultivated are of use anywhere else, because we have no inclination to employ them anywhere else.

When I went back and re-read the TCG posting from the perspective that people would be intentionally trying to apply the skills they have gained to be entrepreneurs, I became more convinced by the idea of the skills being eminently transferable.

I have written a few posts before about how classes and training in the performing arts confer these skills to students, but in my mind I always pictured these students as people who always intended to pursue careers in other areas and are picking up useful skills to transfer to those jobs.

I never really considered someone who had had a successful career in the arts over 10-15 years deciding they would parlay that experience into starting a company that provided logistical support to construction sites.

Again, because we aren’t supposed to imagine doing anything else, why would someone who was successful want to do anything else? But with a partner with construction industry knowledge, an arts person would already have the skills to sell the services, assemble and direct project teams and find creative solutions to problems.

The simple truth is, while we learn a lot of important skills during our arts careers, we don’t acquire all the requisite skills after we start pursuing an arts career. We bring a lot of skills from other jobs and interests in with us.

After I ran my first music festival, I remember the marketing director asking me where I learned to be so highly organized, anticipate problems and develop plans. She wondered if any of my previous jobs had included organizing large outdoor events before.

The truth was while I brought many useful skills from other jobs, none of them directly prepared me for that experience as well as my mother had. Since we lived so far from the supermarket, she used to have us kids make monthly meal menus and shopping lists.

We would go tent camping a few hours away back when you were lucky to have a running water tap nearby much less power. You learned quickly that if you didn’t pack books or games to keep you occupied or forgot to pack the right clothes, it could be a long, boring miserable week.

If you do intend to make a career in the arts, you really still do need possess the drive that comes from a mindset where you can’t imagine doing anything else because it ain’t getting any easier.

Or maybe that is the wrong approach and will just maintain an long too myopic vision.

Since the definition of what it means to participate in artistic pursuits is expanding, the concept of what constitutes a successful artistic career probably also needs to expand—as will the concept of what a person trained in the arts is capable of accomplishing in other industries.

While not all people who work hard pursuing their art becomes highly accomplished or successful, I do believe that it takes a great deal of effort and dedication to become an accomplished exponent.

If nothing else, you need to surmount all the missteps and failures that are part of the process. This has often meant devoting so much time and energy in the pursuit and practice that it doesn’t leave much time for other jobs. But maybe we need to think more about how working in other areas can provide skills to benefit our artistic practice.

A pianist isn’t going to hone her skills by typing hours a day the way a visual artist can learn about composing images in a space while working as a graphic designer. However working in the trust and estate planning department of a bank might provide the pianist with the ability to speak to potential donors about their giving plans and help her better understand how to market her career.

Artist, Value Thyself

January 21, 2014 by Joe Patti

One of the more interesting discussion sessions at the Arts Presenters conference I attended was related to a study/discussion conducted by the Brooklyn Commune Project that was released last month. Andy Horowitz of Culturebot and Risa Shoup of Invisible Dog Art Center reviewed the results.

The report discusses a lot of the factors impacting the arts from Baumol and Bowen’s Cost Disease (which I guess I have been writing about for so long, I couldn’t believe was news to anyone), the idea of public good and a review of how arts funding in America got to the place it is.

In addressing funding by foundations, they noted that it is generally recognized that the best return on investments is realized when you balance investment in “safe” entities as well as entities that are prone to take more risk. However, 90%+ arts funding goes to the safer bets resulting in an environment which hampers innovation.

This is the part of the reports summary which I thought said it best:

We uncovered a treasure trove of lost documents, publications and reports, discovering that chief among the problems of the performing arts is a lack of meaningful documentation and knowledge management, as well as a disastrous lack of intergenerational dialogue and mentorship, not to mention peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

Most significantly, we learned that we, as artists, are not the problem. We have heretofore accepted the received assumptions about artists—that we are bad with money, that we are unprofessional and insufficiently entrepreneurial. We have heretofore accepted the notion that our labor is not “work”, and as such we should be grateful to labor without compensation, to provide our services for free to institutions who are funded expressly to produce and present our art to the public, for the public good. We have heretofore accepted the notion that the system desires to be equitable and just, that it is self-critical and working to improve itself. Now we know differently.

The issue of artists undervaluing their work and heavily self-subsidizing it came up in the conference presentation. According to the 526 respondents to their survey,

75.00% claimed to make between 0-10% of their income from their art practice.
50% of those polled spend at least $2000-5000/year out of pocket on their art practice.
81% of those polled spend $2000 or more per year out of pocket.
$75,000 was the median annual income to be considered “successful”
$45,000 was the median annual income to be considered adequate for “stability.”
20% is the amount of total current income artists claim to receive from their art practice
95% is the amount of total current income artists hope to receive from their art practice in five years.

The speaker oriented in on the income levels deemed to be a sign of success and stability and the fact that artists hoped that 95% of their income would be derived by their practice within five years.

Since all those surveyed lived in the boroughs of New York City, the speakers cited:

“a February 2013 report released by the office of former NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and titled The Middle Class Squeeze, “middle class” in NYC means a household income between $66,400 and $199,200. Lower Middle Class would be $53,120 to $66,400 and Low Income would be anything below $53,120.

What people deemed stable was actually classified as low income and successful fell on the lower end of the middle class income bracket for NYC.

The report goes on to ask, “Why do artists think there even is an “enough”? Maybe it is because we do not work in a sector where extreme wealth is likely.”

Both the report and the speakers at the conference conceded that artists aren’t in it for the money and often view the “psychic income” derived from creating art to be more rewarding than earning cash.

The end of the report contains separate recommendation sections for presenters/producers, funders and artists. Among the suggestions for artists are to redefine the vocabulary and sense of an artist’s value, skills and products both for themselves and others. Part of that requires learning basic business skills like budgeting and finance so you get a better sense of your value.

“At the same time develop practical skills for the knowledge and creative industries (such as graphic and web design, video and audio editing, programming, copywriting) that will support the financial demands and flexible time requirements of your artistic practice.”

My overall impression was that the report was attempting to strike a tenuous balance. While the writers claimed that the problem isn’t the artists’ fault in the introduction, the recommendations say they have to contribute to rectifying the diminished view of their value by being better communicators and actively seeking productive partnerships.

While artists may be misperceived as not being business minded enough, they are enjoined to gain 21st century skills. That might be one of the toughest recommendations to make. They outright say to get a real job to support your artistic pursuits as a practical matter because it is difficult to support yourself otherwise. They note Philip Glass (who received an award at the APAP conference) drove a taxi for three years after Eisenstein on the Beach premiered at the Met.

Perhaps the biggest irony about the report is that even as they end with recommendations against undervaluing your work and discussions about how artists overly subsidize their own products, the report started by talking about the fact they applied for a grant, didn’t get it and went ahead with the effort of putting the report together anyway. (Though admitted they didn’t do a good job on the application.)

This document suggesting that artists motivated by the psychic income will often become involved in a project uncompensated wouldn’t exist if the artists hadn’t done just that.

I am sure they realized there was a conflict between what they said and did because they worked up a budget (see page 6) for what it “would have” cost, estimating the project at $131,000 of which $8,400 was actually contributed (probably by the participants), the rest was contributed in-kind. Their total contributed hours tallied up to 3165.

APAP Reflections

January 15, 2014 by Joe Patti

I just got back in the office today after attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference in NYC and I wanted to share some quick impressions and highlights from the experience. I am sure I will have much more to say in coming days.

The biggest, best experience came during the awards luncheon when Lehua Simon made her speech. I hired Lehua as assistant theatre manager when I was working at Leeward Community College Theatre in Hawaii. At APAP she presented during the “Five Minutes to Shine” session. The attendees of that session voted for the best presentation to be given during the awards luncheon.

I should note that a year ago, I sent her to an entirely different conference and the exact same thing happened. She gave a short presentation and was elected to do a longer presentation in front of the whole conference.

It looks like the conference intends to post video later so I will comment a little more thoroughly at that time. However, despite the fact that there were far more storied people getting awards, the applause was most thunderous for her five minutes and she ended up coming back out to take another bow. Three speakers after her, including Patricia Cruz, Executive Director of Harlem Stage and Robert Lynch, President of Americans for the Arts, referenced Lehua’s speech.

I think it would be incredibly hard to manufacture a moment that had such impact. As far as I was concerned, it just proves some people like Lehua just have innate talent for getting people invested when they speak.

Other moments that jumped out at me:

Johann Zietsman, an arts administrator who grew up in South Africa commented that when Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, people wanted him to defund all the orchestras and museums and devote the money to bringing drinking water to the country. Zietsman said Mandela commented that a country without arts is a country that only has water and taps. Zietsman noted that as crucial as drinking water was to the country, Mandela felt a great deal would be lost if the government didn’t also express value for the arts.

There was a plenary featuring Taylor Mac, Baratunde Thurston, and Abigail Washburn. There was a lot of laughter elicited by the three of them. One comment Taylor Mac made really grabbed me.

He mentioned how he hates audience interaction, (except when he does it, of course), because so often it is about the artist trying to get you to participate in their fun. Mac said his aim is to let the audience have an authentic experience interacting with his performance. If you feel uncomfortable as a result of something in his show, that is a valid experience. He said once he explains it to people in that context, they may still be a bit apprehensive, but they also seem to settle in and become a little more receptive to the experience.

That may sound like an easy rationalization, but I have to confess I felt more at ease with the concept as he explained the audience had permission to be uncomfortable.

As an example of what his performances can involve. He had one show focused on the 1820s. Since Braille was invented in the 1820s, he had everyone in the audience blindfolded and started them playing games like musical chairs. People ended up sitting in the lap of strangers and kissing them.

The session my colleagues and I did on presenting contemporary work by indigenous artists went pretty well. As with many of these sessions, 50 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time and we ended up continuing the conversations in the hallway. The audience was small which wasn’t surprising given the early morning timing, but there were people from the Canadian Arts Council and New England Foundation for the Arts in the audience who asked questions. So between them and those who were motivated to seek us out at 9 am, I feel like we were effective at reaching a good cross-section of people.

The most disappointing part of the conference was actually the opening keynote which featured Diane Paulus from American Repertory Theater, actor Zachary Quinto and composer Stephen Schwartz. I thought each of them was going to speak but instead the format was more like an episode of Inside the Actors Studio with most of the questions going to Schwartz asking him about when his musical Pippin was produced 40 years ago and Paulus about what it was like working with Schwartz on the recent revival of Pippin. Quinto was largely left out.

I felt like a keynote should be about setting the tone for the rest of the conference. Combined with a conference theme of “Shine” the tone seemed more about burnishing 40 year old works rather than encouraging attendees to strive toward anything new. The interviewer should have taken a cue from his laryngitis and left the three to talk about what was on their minds. Once they opened the floor for questions, things started to move in a better direction. (I wrote all of this on the conference survey by the way.)

I will admit that after the keynote was over, it did occur to me that I was potentially expressing a preference for optimistic platitudes over a discussion of the careers of noted artists.

Near the end of the session, Diane Paulus spoke about there not being a conflict between being an artist and being business minded. She described herself and others as identifying themselves as artists with an interest in marketing and artists with an interest in finances.

The observation that really grabbed my attention was that loyalty is not equal to a subscription. She had people talk about how much they loved American Repertory Theater, but when she asked what shows they had seen, they had only seen one in the last year.

That reminded me of Andrew McIntyre’s talk from three years ago where he described patrons who expressed a strong connection with an arts organization claiming to have attended the previous year when it had been two or three years.

There was a lot more that happened that can’t be summarized in a few paragraphs. I hope to write about them more in the coming weeks.

Stuff To Ponder: What Is The Definition of Emergency?

January 8, 2014 by Joe Patti

This last week I have gotten some real lessons in the importance of disaster planning.

During the quiet of the holidays I started a conversation with some colleagues about how we would handle inclement weather on performance days. Everyone keeps telling me how they try to shy away from scheduling shows in January because the weather is so bad. With that in mind, I wanted to have a plan for how we would proceed before the need arose.

Since we present a number of touring shows, we would be in a position of needing to pay artists per our contract unless the weather is so bad a state of emergency is declared. In that case, we would issue refunds to the ticket buyers.

However, if the weather is poor, but not so bad that we cancel the show, there may still be a number of people contacting us asking for refunds because they chose not to attend. My recent conversation has been about what we should do to respond to these people. Since we need to pay the performers, we probably won’t be in a position to offer refunds.

I have been discussing possible options with staff, board members and others. Our eventual solution may not make our customers happy but surveys have shown that even when the solution doesn’t please them, customers have a better impression of your company when you make the attempt to resolve their complaints rather than just refusing them outright.

In the process of the conversation, we decided we should post our policy on our website noting that we only offer refunds when the university closes and/or the sheriff declares a level 3 emergency.

And then came this week with the extreme cold.

Pretty much every school in county closed and many of the universities in the state did as well. We were open though.

Given that it was sunny and there was barely a dusting of snow on the ground, I started to launch into the stereotypical grandparent tirade and talked about how I stood out waiting for the bus in colder weather than this when I was younger. (Unfortunately, I not as tough as my grandfather. I only had to trudge uphill through the snow to the bus stop one way rather than both ways.)

Had we had a show and a different provost who decided to cancel classes, I might have been in a situation whereby our own policy dictated we issue refunds. At the same time the performing artists would stand there looking at me like I was crazy for saying the show was cancelled due to the cold and then glare at me when I said we weren’t paying them.

Not that the cold didn’t cause any difficulties. Yesterday we narrowly avert a large disaster when someone noticed a ball of ice forming on the sprinkler heads of the lobby fire suppression system. They just got the water turned off as the ice melted. There was some flooding, but nothing like what it could have been.

Every company knows that they should have a good disaster plan, how they will respond, where people should turn to for communications, etc,. Performing arts organizations need to know about the evacuation plans of the venue they perform in and think about issues like refunds.

But the events of the last week have made me realize I also need to know about the criteria being used by the decision makers I am depending on. I may assume the criteria is one thing and it won’t be. It may also change as personnel change.

As we heard about school closings Monday morning, a person I know who had attended and taught in some of those schools was amazed, noting they had never closed in the past. He opined that they might be quicker to close now due to people being more litigious.

In any case, being aware of shifting criteria can make for better planning. Had we or one of our renters had a school show this week with all the schools cancelling, that would have been quite problematic. Thinking about that, it just occurred to me that I should know what my policy about payment will be if a renter is impacted by school closings.

The person who made the decision to keep campus open this week when other campuses closed will be stepping down in June. I already started to advocate that very clear guidelines be developed for what conditions will result in the campus being closed and for the successor to be aware of the repercussions on our activities should the decision be made.

Now I also realize I need to know what constitutes a level 3 emergency in the sheriff’s eyes.

Presenting Works By Indigenous Artists

January 6, 2014 by Joe Patti

A week from today, I will be presenting a panel at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference on “Presenting Works By Indigenous Artists.”

Our session is currently scheduled on Monday, January 13 at 9 am in the Madison Suite at the Hilton Midtown. (Check for signs and updates, they have already moved us once.)

Based on my experience in Hawaii, I know there are a lot of high quality indigenous arts performance groups out there who have a product that would appeal to the interests of curious audiences across the country.

However, I also know that there is a degree of uncertainty about how to identify artists, verify their authenticity and promote the show to audiences. So I put together a panel speak about the issue.

From our session proposal:

Session Focus:
Presenting indigenous artists, identifying groups, seeking support for tours, discussing the potential cultural requirements of those artists, promoting the artists in a respectful manner , marketing these performers to audiences who may be curious but unfamiliar with the culture; connecting indigenous artists with their local counterparts in your communities; Developing an understanding in your communities of the living and evolving nature of indigenous arts.

Session Description
There has been a marked increase recently in fine works being created by indigenous artists who combine western staging and presentation techniques with expressions of their own cultures. Recognizing that there may be a degree of uncertainty about artistic content, interactions with performers, expectations, use of terminology and promoting these productions to audiences, this session explores the issues around presenting indigenous artists.

The panel will discuss questions regarding booking decisions – identifying groups, understanding quality, your role as presenter in empowering artists to shape their own cultural expression while dispelling cultural misconceptions or stereotypes

Marketing – what is appropriate? what do I say to my community that doesn’t include these cultures? Interaction with the artists – what are the protocols? How can we create meaningful engagement?

The panel will consist of:

Colleen Furukawa, VP of Programming at Maui Arts and Cultural Center who has been instrumental in the creation and production of a number of cultural dance and visual arts works.

Karen Fischer, President of Pasifika Arts Network which represents indigenous artists and has been working to expand the programming of indigenous work in all disciplines.

Moss Patterson, Artistic Director of Atamira, the leading Maori Contemporary Dance Company based in New Zealand.

Rosy Simas, Choreographer of Rosy Simas Danse. Rosy is a Native American (Seneca) contemporary choreographer. Over the past 20 years, she has created more than 40 original works.

And, of course, myself. I have produced an opera entirely in Hawaiian, a hula drama about the Hawaiian snow goddess and a production showcasing elements of Balinese temple ceremonies. And I presented other significant works by artists from across Oceania and Asia.

You may be thinking it is easy for me to talk about how easy it is to sell indigenous performances based on my experience presenting to communities with a fair representation from similar indigenous communities. While I have lived in Hawaii, I currently live and work in the rural Midwest now and have worked in communities in NJ, FL, NY and UT as well so I am well aware of the varied types of communities many arts organizations are serving.

If you are going to be attending the APAP conference, swing by and see us.

I believe they plan to record us so between that and my own notes I will try to write about the topics we cover and the questions that are asked in a future post.

Forgive Your Mistakes

December 31, 2013 by Joe Patti

As the year ended, it was announced that Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, was closing this January. Given the interminable previews, technical problems and public discussion of Julie Taymor’s dismissal as they moved to revamp the production, wry comments were never far from people’s lips when the show was mentioned.

The show served as a reminder that having successful big names attached to a show like The Edge, Bono and Julie Taymor, doesn’t guarantee success.

I was going to write a post on another topic today, but I got to reading about the difficulties faced by the original production of West Side Story in 1957. Despite also having big names like Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein attached to it, the show was a hard sell and faced a number of problems.

Stephen Sondheim, who hadn’t really become a household name at the time, didn’t want to work in the project for fear of being pigeonholed as a lyricist instead of a composer. His mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, had to convince him that working in such talented company would be invaluable for his career.

No one wanted to produce the show because its gritty story of street gangs ran counter to the happy, bright vision of musicals of the 1950s. (Remember, this is based on the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet, two of the main character are dead on stage by intermission and the two leads by the end of the story.) Even when two producers did sign on, one was unable to raise money and backed out soon after. Some theater owners refused to let their buildings be used for the show.

Finally, Hal Prince, who had previously turned the show down, was convinced to come on as a producer by Stephen Sondheim.

There were high tensions between the four collaborators over many of the artistic decisions, especially between the domineering Jerome Robbins and everyone else. Reportedly by opening night, none of the other three were on speaking terms with Robbins.

But the result was a show that was absolutely groundbreaking at the time, moving contrary to so many conventions. Now, more than 50 years later, West Side Story is one of the most enduring musicals on Broadway. It doesn’t seem quite so innovative today because so many others followed its lead.

In retrospect, it is easy to compare West Side Story to Spiderman and identify why one succeeded and the other failed, but had you been involved in the process of mounting the first production of either one, it would have been difficult to predict the eventual outcome correctly.

By some measures, Spiderman with the built in name recognition of the property, director and producers, along with all the funding behind it should have succeeded where West Side Story with its edgy story that no one wanted fund should have failed.

Today Drew McManus made a wish list for arts and culture in 2014 and asked what his readers wished for.

It wasn’t until I read about West Side Story and thought about Spiderman that I realized my wish is for artists and arts and cultural organizations to be able to forgive themselves for their failures and to realize that success is not always easy or immediately apparent.

Excepting Spiderman for a moment, there are huge, well funded corporations who perform extensive research and data analysis who still fail miserably in their endeavors. (See JCPenny’s assumption that consumers wanted honest pricing.)

While differences in economic realities may allow them to weather the consequences of their mistakes better than you can, at least recognize that having one hundred times your funding doesn’t make them even 10 times a better decision maker than you.

Conversely, your lack of funding does not indicate you lack brains and ability.

Know Who You Are Dealing With

December 30, 2013 by Joe Patti

In about two weeks I will be attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in NYC. I will be hosting a discussion panel, but my primary objective is to learn about different artists that might potentially perform in my space and make contacts with different artists’ agents.

It occurs to me to toss out a cautionary tale about being very, very careful about verifying that the people with whom you are working to arrange a performance are, in fact, the actual artist’s representative.

When I was working in Hawaii, the University of Hawaii at Manoa Athletics department decided they wanted to present a fund raiser featuring Stevie Wonder. They sent $200,000 to people who were not Stevie Wonder’s agent who subsequently took the money and ran off. The FBI ended up getting involved.

Given the scrutiny we faced to even get a $2,000 check cut, those of us working for the university in the performing arts wondered how so much money ended up getting transferred in the first place. Second, even if they didn’t think to ask those of us who handled performing arts contracts for the university, we wondered why none of the other prominent promoters in the state weren’t consulted. Any of us could have told them they were dealing with the wrong person.

However, I will admit that for someone who is inexperienced, it is difficult to discern who Stevie Wonder’s agent is. Many artists have their agent listed on their website, but Stevie Wonder doesn’t. My suspicion is that this keeps people who aren’t seriously prepared and qualified to present him from deluging the agent with requests. Anyone who is serious about presenting him will know how to identify his agent, Creative Artists Agency. (CAA)

That lack of information provides an opening which allows other people to take advantage. Even though I don’t engage artists who command $400-$500,000, I know CAA is one of the few agencies large enough to handle the business of someone like Stevie Wonder. But if you search the internet for “Stevie Wonder agent,” you will find 6-10 listings of people offering to arrange a concert for you. If you didn’t know CAA was his agent, which would you choose? CAA is the first search result, but there are two paid placements that come in above them.

Most of the other companies listed will likely turn around and contact CAA on your behalf to arrange for Stevie Wonder’s performance, taking a cut themselves. This isn’t to say these middlemen are just skimming a piece of the action. There are many that will add value to the exchange and handle the details you don’t have the resources to deal with yourself.

Some might take the money and run.

There are organizations that work to apply a code of ethics to artist booking like North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents (NAPAMA), but plenty of wholly legitimate agents are not members. And the general layperson never knows if these trade organizations are legitimate themselves or just created to provide a semblance of legitimacy.

Probably the best guard against getting cheated is good research and relationships. As I said, many artists will have their agent listed on their website. If they don’t some careful research is in order.

This is especially true if you are partnering with another entity who is going to help you mount your event. The more expensive the artist is going to be, the more you want to work with someone trustworthy who has experience presenting artists of that caliber.

The problem is, if you don’t have a close relationship with such a person, you are basically left assuming that the person you do trust to vouch for them actually knows enough to make that judgement.

The wisest course is get experience presenting events, working your way up to larger and larger names to get the experience. But many people don’t plan to present shows frequently enough to acquire this experience.

Deciding you want to invite someone who regularly commands $50-100,000+ for your fundraiser or anniversary event, having never presented such a performance before and not working with an entity that has, is a recipe for disaster. There are going to be basic expectations about the experience that you are entirely unaware of and unprepared for.

And really, the same is true for artists with $10,000 fees. There will just be exponentially more people involved at the higher fee and the problems will be that much more public.

Please j’onn, Don’t Eat Me

December 23, 2013 by Joe Patti

Not to be outdone by Drew McManus’ generous referral last week of donations toward Jon Silpayamanant’s Mae Mai blog, I went to see him perform this week.

It was a dangerous trek across the backroads of rural Ohio. But none of that compared to the peril of meeting Jon himself, as you can see in this picture. (He is the warrior in the back.)

I assure you, if he hadn’t started to engage a cloaking field which blurred his features, you would appreciate the full terror inspired by his mighty form. In his hand behind me, he is holding a D’k tahg dagger as he muses that the blood of humans, tainted by their cowardice, tastes worse than targ blood.

In other words, I had a great time.

I made the trip to Cincinnati to see A Christmas Carol in the original Klingon. I had seen the show listed before and hadn’t realized this was the first time the production had been mounted in Cincinnati. All the previous productions were (and still are) performed in Chicago and Minnesota. (Video of a Chicago cast here.)

Much honor was earned this month in Cincinnati!

As much as I say that tongue in cheek, even with all the Star Trek fans out there, it isn’t the easiest thing to go to a new city and audition actors who can speak Klingon, or find actors willing to learn.

Jon composed the score for the show and made a special appearance yesterday with members of Il Troubadore to perform during intermission. There were pieces of Klingon opera as well as “Terran folk songs.”

Probably not what you imagined if you read that Jon often focuses his blog writings on “ethnic orchestras,” but like a good writer and musician, he doesn’t discount any potential avenue of exploration.

It makes Western orchestras look silly worrying about what is appropriate to wear onstage. He has to fret over Klingon armour and a Wookie costume (he aims to have one like this by 2015) and face the scrutiny of truly pitiless critics –sci fi enthusiasts.

Allow Yourself The Same Patience You Would A Baby

December 17, 2013 by Joe Patti

I don’t recall who it was that provided the link. I want to credit Maria Popova at Brain Pickings because this is the sort of thing that appears there.

But someone directed me to Stephen McCraine’s Doodle Alley web comic. Specifically his Be Friends With Failure comic that urges beginning artists to have patience with their self and to realize that the process of developing their skill is going to be fraught with mistakes and missteps.

In many ways, it is similar to Ira Glass’ talk about the gap between your creative taste and your ability to execute it I wrote on last year.

I really liked the whole Be Friends With Failure strip, but the frames that got me were these:

McCraine has his strips indexed by general topics of advice for artists like setting goals, improving and motivating yourself. It appears he finished his series last month. There are about 25 strips so it is easy to get through them all in a relatively short time. He tackles some interesting concepts like “Practice Does Not Make Perfect” , “Know Your Artistic Lineage,” “Diversify Your Study,” and “You vs. You.

The answers to all your problems aren’t going to be encapsulated in a short web strip, but I think the medium and execution are an effective shorthand reminder to help steer yourself back on track. You may not have the time or inclination to pick up a text that discusses these concepts, but I think the format is such that you would more quickly return to it for a little boost of motivation.

Wherein I Hallucinate About Internships

December 16, 2013December 16, 2013 by Joe Patti

I recently misread the title of a post on Museum 2.0. But in that second of misapprehension, my brain flooded with assumptions about the subject of the post. I misread “A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships” to be something like “Ethics for Shared Museum Internships.” In that moment, I thought shared internships was a great idea and had a vision for how it would work.

Some of these assumptions were made in the context of the growing discussion of problems with unpaid internships, most recently an quoting former Sleep No More interns as saying there wasn’t any educational benefit to the experience.

One thing articles about unpaid internships have focused on is the idea that the experience is supposed to be educational and of no direct benefit for whomever the intern is working. Now the best information I have right now is that these guidelines don’t apply to non-profit and public sectors. But there are rumblings that this may be changed. And there is also the issue of just because you can use an intern in the place of a staff person, doesn’t mean you should.

What I thought the Museum 2.0 post was going to suggest was trading interns between companies, particularly between for- and non-profits. I had this immediate vision of interns at a bank working in a museum and the museum intern working in a bank for a few weeks. The benefit being that the future banker would have an understanding of arts non-profits and the future museum director/curator would gain insight into what motivated banks to support arts organizations (or what motivates individuals to give as part of their bequest if the intern worked in the the trusts department.)

While it may not be entirely appropriate for a non-profit to “act like a business,” this type of experience can contribute to a better understanding of the points of view of board members who are business leaders by future non-profit leaders, and those of non-profits by future business leaders and board members. Miracles probably won’t result from a few weeks spent interning in a different company, but it shouldn’t impede things too badly either.

Moments later, I realized what the real title of the piece was, but my initial impression still seemed like an interesting idea. Even if you didn’t do an internship trade, placing an intern to work for a week at the company that did your brochure printing or the hotel that put your performers up, would give an intern a better understanding of the work done by the close partners of the organization.

A few years down the road, the intern might be in a position to propose an arrangement that is mutually beneficial to both the non-profit and the commercial partner that ends up bringing them closer together. A closer bond would also be the hopeful long term benefit of the intern swap I initially mentioned. Once the interns had reported on their experience and moved on, hopefully the cooperating businesses and non-profit would feel a continuing respect and understanding of each other.

Of course, it can be hard work to arrange all these details. It is hard enough to ensure that the experience at your organization is meaningful and doesn’t relegate the intern to copying and answering the phone, much less to provide the same experience at other work sites. But then, the intern isn’t really supposed to be making a lot of copies during this period anyway.

Any thoughts about this, its viability and how it might be accomplished? I mean, essentially what I am asking is, since I already hallucinated the post into existence, does anyone want to write about Ethics of Shared Internships?

Hard To Pronounce Show? There Is An App For That!

December 11, 2013 by Joe Patti

We all know that an online ticket platform can make it more convenient for people to purchase tickets at their leisure, but a recent article on Slate suggests that it may also help sell tickets by avoiding opportunities for anxiety.

…1980s change in Swedish liquor retailing that led to stores being moved from an “ask a clerk to retrieve a bottle” model to a “self-service” format. It turned out that, not only did removing a layer of human interaction spike sales (by 20 percent) but it also led to a shift in those sales toward a large number of difficult-to-pronounce drinks. According to Swedes independently surveyed by the researchers, it is apparently harder to say Stolichnaya than Absolut in Swedish, and there were real challenges with French wine pronunciation as well.* So take away having to say anything out loud and the sales of the tongue-tied bottles increased by 7 percent.

Another example they gave was that online ordering for pizza increased the spending on each order. People didn’t order more pizzas, but they did order more toppings on each pizza. The theory was that people were more comfortable doubling up on meats or making a complicated order (like for a Starbucks coffee) when they could do so online rather than having to express it to a person.

Of course, that may not always be in the best interest of the consumer…

..the website induced more “double bacon” than “double veggies” orders. The picture painted is one of people avoiding the awkwardness of complex—and fattening—orders online and making simpler—and healthier—ones when they had to deal with a real, live person.

I oriented more on the concept that ordering online helped people avoid potential mispronunciations on shows like Antigone and Coriolanus or artists with foreign pronunciations like Stephen Colbert.

I wondered given non-profit arts organizations are in the business of educating, is it better to gently correct or even correctly pronounce the name when reviewing the order, or to just ignore the mistake and avoid embarrassing the customer at all.

I don’t have any research to show that this sort of anxiety factors into the method people choose when they order tickets, but the research showed that people deferred their real desires even when the opportunity for embarrassment seemed low.

Though anxiety over the ticketing ordering process probably ranks lower than most barriers to participation for arts audiences, it does seem like another reason for having the alternative available and easy navigate.

I am not trying to contradict my blogging confrere Drew McManus with the title of this post and encourage people to develop new apps, but many of the commenters on the Slate article mentioned how much they loved being able to place their order when they entered Starbucks or a deli and have it waiting by the time they got to the register.

It may be beneficial to use a ticketing service that offers those sort of apps so people can order in advance or while they wait on line.

Perhaps I am overly sensitive to constantly being up-sold during my Christmas shopping excursions, but the last paragraph of the article especially resonated with me. The author, Joshua Gans, notes that this potential for embarrassment also inhibits employees who are forced to ask for customer names, email addresses, store credit cards and extended warranties, from giving the best and most sincere service to customers. It can undermine confidence and goodwill if customers pick up on this unease or are annoyed at a time when they are spending money.

So in addition to examining whether your processes are making things difficult for your customers, you may need to evaluate their impact on your employees as well.

Economic Impact Ain’t Everything

December 9, 2013 by Joe Patti

Drew McManus cautions a little today against putting a lot of stock in studies about the economic impact of the arts.

I had been thinking along the same lines because so many people were crowing last week about studies showing arts and culture had a $500 billion impact on the economy.

The problem is, between 1998-2008 the impact of arts and culture on current dollar GDP was between 3.5% and 3.7% of the economy. According to a piece from Pacific Standard, arts and culture has been hanging around at 3.2% of the economy since 2009. When you are talking 500 billion, each tenth of a percentage there represents tens of billions of dollars so a .3%-.5% difference adds up quite a bit of lost impact. (Though the report was measuring where things stood in 2011 we are talking about a 2 year “hang.”)

From some of the responses I was reading, it seemed like people thought this was the first time the economic impact of arts and culture had been measured. It does appear that the criteria and methods are more refined than in the past, so the number may be more accurate. But as Drew suggests, people have been attempting to measure economic impact of arts and culture for quite some time now.

And remember, often economic measurements aren’t always your friend and acknowledging their validity can be a two edged sword if someone else can claim bring equal or better results.

A recent opinion blog on the NY Times reminded me that when it comes to economic impact and earnings potential for arts and culture positions, it is important to note that the figures are a result of specific decisions being made:

Is the crisis rather one of harsh economic reality? Humanities majors on average start earning $31,000 per year and move to an average of $50,000 in their middle years. (The figures for writers and performing artists are much lower.) By contrast, business majors start with salaries 26 percent higher than humanities majors and move to salaries 51 percent higher.

But this data does not show that business majors earn more because they majored in business. Business majors may well be more interested in earning money and so accept jobs that pay well even if they are not otherwise fulfilling, whereas people interested in the humanities and the arts may be willing to take more fulfilling but lower-paying jobs. College professors, for example, often know that they could have made far more if they had gone to law school or gotten an M.B.A., but are willing to accept significantly lower pay to teach a subject they love.

Economic impact of arts activity could potentially be greater if more people choose to charge more (or it could be lower because it wouldn’t be as widespread.) Arts and Culture salaries could be higher if people held out for more money (but again, there might be fewer people employed in those areas.) Choices have been made in an attempt to provide more widespread access and because people have been motivated by considerations other than money.

(And by the way, salaries start to even out around mid-career. Note that liberal arts is tied with medical technology, theatre with health care administration, history with business administration, and philosophy is WAY above both of them.)

People may tell you that back in the old days, people stuck with a job no matter how awful it was instead of pursuing what interested them. That may be true to a degree, but this weekend my mother told me that when my grandfather was working in the garage at a car dealership about 4-5 miles from their house, he was unhappy and bounced back and forth between parts manager and service manager and would curse up a storm every night.

Then he got a job at West Point Military Academy in shipping/receiving in the early 60s, and even though it was 40 miles away which required him to get up earlier every day, she never heard him curse after that point.

Not only do I know that my grandfather couldn’t be the only one who did this, I have heard interviews recently with people who lived in towns with good manufacturing bases who talked about how easy it was to quit a job in the morning and have a new one by the afternoon.

People may characterize following your bliss and studying a topic that interests you as an irresponsible and effete decision, but it isn’t unrelated to decisions people have made in the past. There may have been a good many people who stayed in a soul crushing job all their lives, but that may have been more of a choice than a necessity.

This by no means ignores that there are other forces conspiring to place college educated people in low paying jobs. There is more involved in finding employment than choosing a field of study and embracing the realities of jobs in that field.

But the choice to accept a job at low pay also contributes to the job being low paying. Sometimes it is because there are few alternatives but to accept those jobs. Sometimes it is because the applicants concede the organization has important uses for that money.

Salaries and economic impact are not the sole measure of value of people and their labor. Good thing too because we probably all have more value as soylent green.

Don’t Be Nervous, It’s Not About You

December 4, 2013 by Joe Patti

I do a lot of public speaking and am generally pretty comfortable doing it. The place I get most nervous is up on stage. In a classroom or hall full of 50-100 people, no problem. On stage, in a theatre, and my nervous energy starts to rev up.

It doesn’t approach anywhere near paralysis, but it is there.

At the last theatre I worked at, I got pretty accustomed to the space and the general energy of the people. But now that I am standing up in a new space, I gotta start all over again.

I took a little guidance from a post Seth Godin made about public speaking on Monday to prepare for my appearance before the performance we had Tuesday night.

In his post, “Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear,” he says:

1. You believe that you are being actively judged

2. You believe that the subject of the talk is you

When you stand up to give a speech, there’s a temptation to believe that the audience is actually interested in you.

This just isn’t true. (Or if it is, it doesn’t benefit you to think that it is).

You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged. The topic of the talk isn’t you, the topic of the talk is the audience, and specifically, how they can use your experience and knowledge to achieve their objectives.

[…]

If you dive into your (irrelevant to the listener) personal hurdles, if you try to justify what you’ve done, if you find yourself aswirl in a whirlpool of the resistance, all you’re providing is a little schadenfreude as a form of entertainment.

On the other hand, if you realize that you have a chance to be generous in this moment, to teach and to lead, you can leave the self-doubt behind and speak a truth that the audience needs to hear. When you bring that to people who need it, your fear pales in comparison.

Not the simple advice found in, “imagine everybody in their underwear,” but probably more useful to you in the process of preparing for your moment in the spotlight so you don’t start getting worked up in advance.

Incidentally, this is the same advice usually given about marketing and advertising–It isn’t about you, it is about your audience and what is valuable to them. So you shouldn’t be spending a lot time listing accomplishments trying to justify your organization, but rather make the focus about your audience and how they benefit.