Working In The Arts

Wherein I Speak of Chocolate Chip Cookies and Zombies (But Mostly Cookies)

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My mother sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies today. This sort of thing has been going on for a few years. She has been finding these new cookie recipes which she swears are better than the old recipes and she sends them to me.

Frankly, I am not having it. Maybe it is due to the temperature differences en route to my house, but when I eat the cookies she mails me, I can’t believe she is claiming these are better than the ones I grew up on. It isn’t just the taste. The texture and general consistency of the cookies are all wrong.

I will eat other cookies, but when it comes time to make cookies to give to others, I am sticking to the old proven recipes in my book.

I am sure we all have something in our lives we are attached to in this manner. Something that we have an emotional attachment to for which we will accept no substitutes.

And maybe you can see where I am going with this. I bring this up to remind you that this is a powerful factor to contend with when we are trying to energize programming with new and challenging content.

Last week we opened the season with a guy who does a great job channeling Frank Sinatra who was joined by three guys who used to be in some of the Motown groups of the 60s. It was a great show and a lot of fun. I was dancing in the wings backstage. We had a great sized audience. As an opening show it really set the tone for the rest of the season.

As people left the performance they were telling me it was the best thing they had seen in a long time here. I have been hearing the same thing over the course of the last week. It hasn’t just been people who attended the show. Their friends and kids have been telling me they were told the same thing.

My perception is that it was a great show, but the best thing that has appeared here in a long time…I don’t know about that.

Though I admit I was backstage so I didn’t get the full impact of the show. Those guys all understood the power of showmanship and connecting with the audience so I don’t doubt everyone felt they had a quality experience.

We can talk about innovating our programs, educating and engaging audiences with new ideas. It is easy to forget that there is often a “homemade chocolate chip cookies” grade emotional attachment involved in some of the content we offer.

By no means do older audience members lack the interest and curiosity to participate in innovative approaches to art. They certainly have expectations of their experience that are rooted in the present.

But they also tend to have a much stronger emotional investment in their experience than younger audiences.

After the show last week, I received a call from a long time attendee who told me what he liked and disliked about the performance and then proceeded to complain about last season. One of his objections was to the profanity in West Side Story, a show that first hit Broadway over 50 years ago when this gentleman was in his 20s.

Yes, he may be a cranky old man that needs to recognize that honest portrayals of life include profanity. Maybe it isn’t healthy to be dwelling on gripes for 6+ months, but it is also a sign of an investment in what we do that isn’t exhibited by younger audiences.

It may be that we need to shift thinking and practices to engage younger audiences instead of being entrenched in practices of the past that appeal only to older audiences. But it also may be that societal dynamics have shifted to a place where it is unrealistic to expect that level of investment from people any longer.

Just think about how long bands like the Rolling Stones have endured. Then try to identify a group that has emerged in the last decade that has engendered a relationship with audiences that will sustain their zombie corpses.

Current efforts to sustain performing arts organizations may or may not correctly be compared to attempts to keep a corpse animated. I think we talk so much about the financial aspects of keeping an organization operational that it is easy to forget that it is more than just money keeping things going.

There is an emotional investment that accompanies the money and in some respects, it is much easier to find alternative sources of funding than it is to replace the value of that emotional investment.

The Arts Are For Swingers

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Do you ever sit in your office, thinking wistfully of the days when you were a kid and you would run around the playground, playing games and swinging on the swings?

Do you think your audience is thinking the same thing?

Well apparently some folks at Boston’s Convention Center were thinking along those lines because they built a temporary playground for adults on one of their lawns.

The playground is temporary because the convention center plans to expand on to that land in about 18 months. However, it is being used as something of a proof of concept testing ground.

The BCEC, Sasaki and Utile figured, why not test out some concepts for what should be the permanent park, further south on D Street towards residential South Boston?

The playground contains a “set of 20 lighted oval swings, bocce, ping pong, beanbag toss, Adirondack chairs, a sound stage, and open-air bar” and has become wildly popular.

Like the community ovens I wrote about a week or so ago, this is another idea for the type of thing that can be done to increase community engagement.

Now, according to one of the commenters on the article, the playground in Boston cost around $1.1 million which seems a little expensive for a project with an 18 month life span. Though maybe the equipment will migrate to the permanent park.

Many cities are seeing quick pop-up parks appearing on their streets.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation in Philadelphia set up an amazing looking pop up park for the summer. It was slated to close September 1 but got extended an entire month due to popular demand.

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park has a pop-up Audubon program aimed at kids. Huntsville, AL will have activities popping up along their streets this month.

If you look at the pictures associated with each of the projects, you will see that they run the gamut from ambitiously expensive to simple and versatile.

Pop up events like this can be used to inspire community action as well as a tool for direct engagement. While reading about pop-ups, I learned that a community in Dallas dressed up a street with benches, trees and pop up shops for a day to provide evidence for its potential. (If you are looking to use this for community improvement, check out Better Block.)

One of the commenters on the Boston Convention Center park story shared this video of a fun installation on the streets of Montreal where people generated music as they played on the swings.

[vimeo 97090808 w=500 h=281]

Montreal’s 21 Swings (21 Balançoires) from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Info You Can Use: You Can Hack Being An Arts Administrator

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Drew McManus is fulfilling one of my ambitions.

When I was first starting out this blog, I envisioned creating some sort of repository of information about arts and arts administration that people could consult.

It should be noted that I was unemployed when I started this blog nearly 11 years ago so I had a lot of time on my hands to be ambitious. That plan never panned out. Getting a job and getting really busy sort of diverted my focus from that.

However, despite being quite busy with his job as a consultant, Drew McManus has deluded concluded that trolling through 990 filings and evaluating the effectiveness of orchestra websites aren’t monopolizing enough of his time.

Drew has decided to create an Arts Administration version of Lifehacker. He is looking for people to be contributors to this effort. If you are interested, sign up on his website.

To my mind, everyone has something to contribute. If you are a student in college, you can contribute tips on engaging your friends and colleagues.

If you live outside the U.S. there are plenty of challenges we face in common and plenty of insights from your particular experiences that can be of value.

In that vein, I wanted to call attention to a course being offered free online by Stanford “How To Start A Start up” It is being hosted by Sam Altman of the venture firm Y Combinator. The course speakers are a who’s who of Silicon Valley.

It isn’t directly arts related, but there will obviously be some commonalities with arts business. Among the topics are building company culture, how to operate, how to manage and how to raise money. Everyone keeps talking about the need for a shift in thinking in the arts and this may spur some different approaches.

After learning about this class, I did a survey of all the Massive Open Online Courses being offered by different entities around the country -MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Coursera etc. No one offers anything related to arts administration that I could see. The only online arts administration program I am aware of is the Certified Performing Arts Executive program at University of New Orleans.

[N.B. Dang it! Nina Simon made a liar of me pointing out this course on arts innovation. It didn’t show up on my search because it started the day before.]

Given the lack of any centralized source of information, tips and tricks related to arts administration, a resource like the one Drew is proposing is sorely needed.

Please consider signing up to make a contribution. With your help, a lot of people will be able to hack being arts administrators

Hey Did You Hear About…

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I was really surprised to find my name tucked at the bottom of Barry Hessenius’ 2014’s Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts (USA) In fact, since I read his blog via Feedly and had caught up with my subscriptions on Saturday, I might not have read the post for another week if it weren’t for someone tweeting that Robert Bush from Charlotte’s Arts and Science Council made the list.

It’s not that I don’t think what I produce is worthwhile, it is just that I don’t perceive the old blog here as having that high a profile.

Now, of course, there is pressure to meet the standard set by the company I am listed in.

But Barry’s list dovetails nicely with the subject I intended to address today: cooperation and competition in the arts. Last month, Seth Godin observed that authors don’t compete with each other.

Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other’s books. Authors don’t try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…

Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?

And yet authors do it all the time.

It’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there’s plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what’s getting read isn’t ours.

It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.

Even though the limits of funding, revenue generation opportunities and audience free time make existence as an arts organization or artist seem like a zero sum game, my experience starting about 15 years or so has been that arts people are generally pretty supportive of the work of colleagues in both word and action. They will tell their friends about interesting events and invite them along when they attend.

That hasn’t always been my experience. About 20 years ago, I feel like there was a lot more “us vs. them, we do the real art in this town” attitude. It has seemed over time the people I have worked with have espoused this view less and less.

Which isn’t to say that people aren’t envious of other organizations’ funding base; think other organization’s programming needs to be more diverse; think the annual awards ceremony for their community is all political; and aren’t befuddled by the more abstract and conceptual extremes of artistic expression.

Godin cites the intense rivalry of Pepsi and Coke as the antithesis of the relationship authors share. I mean, be honest. Haven’t you held your breath a moment when pouring Coke into a cup printed with a Pepsi logo, imagining the cup will melt? Have you ever mixed Pepsi and Coke together, standing at arm’s length expecting a reaction similar to dropping Mentos into a bottle of diet Coke, if not an explosion? That is how apparent the rivalry of the two companies is to the general public.

It would be hard to imagine Pepsi or Coke tweeting about members of other companies showing up on a list of the most influential and powerful people in the beverage industry.

But watch who calls attention to Barry Hessenius’ list over the next couple days. I bet you will find that the majority of those who do, don’t work for the same companies and organizations as those named. There may even be former employers and co-workers celebrating the attention someone has received. As Godin noted, there is a recognition that the success of one enhances the prestige and fortunes of the many.

Hey did you hear that Nina Simon, Laura Zabel and Donna Collins made the list?