Working In The Arts

You Wanna Come Upstairs And See My New Etchings?

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There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.

I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.

I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.

The artistic director  burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.

Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.

The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.

Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.

Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.

(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)

The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.

Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.

I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.

Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.

For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”

They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.

And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.

And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.

Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences?  As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?

What Will You Do If You Win?

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Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.

Stuff To Ponder: Quantifiable Data Is For Other People

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I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself.

This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life which was covering the efforts of an organization called Give Directly which gives money directly to the poorest people in a country, in this case, Kenya, on the belief that they know best how to spend it.

Despite all the problems you might assume might arise, things seem to be going very well with the program.

Still, the founders were all grad students at MIT and Harvard so they are all about hard data. They weren’t satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of outcomes they found in their research. The organization is doing exhaustive research conducting surveys that take an entire day to administer to measure the differences in outcomes between those who receive funds and those who don’t.

This American Life also talked to people from Heifer International who give cows and training raising and caring for them, to people in developing countries. Their program sound incredibly beneficial. The cows are so big and healthy, the reporters talked about how intimidated they were by them.

The reporters mentioned that the people at Give Directly would like charities like Heifer International to do studies to determine what program design was most effective. The reporter asks a Heifer representative (around 30 minute mark) if they would consider giving cows and training to one village and then give the money they would spend on cows and training, to another village to see what was more effective.

The woman representing Heifer said that sounded too much like an experiment and you can’t do that with the lives of real people.

The reporter says he imagines the Give Directly people would respond “that we have to do experiments because that is the only way to figure out the very best way to help people.”

The Heifer representative spoke about it not being that linear and that there are some elements that are not easily quantified by the limits of data.

I immediately found myself siding with the Give Directly people. You are never going to be able to serve everyone who needs help. So if you are providing cows to one village and money to another, at least you aren’t setting up a control group that doesn’t get anything beneficial which is the case with most experiments. (control group getting sugar pills, other group getting the medicine).

And actually, that is how Give Directly is conducting their study–with a control group that doesn’t receive any support at all.

However, it only took about 15 seconds to realize that I was hearing very familiar language being used. How often have people in the arts talked about the benefits of what they do not being easily measured and provided anecdotes about smiling faces and lives changed? I know one acting teacher who yelled at a curriculum committee for trying to apply concrete measures to his classes.

Just recently GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance got together to ask that overhead not be used as a metric for deciding what charities to support.

Yet with the increased focus on quantifiable results with things like K12 test scores and college four year graduation rates, Give Directly’s model may become a more prevalent one in the future.

The good news is that they give money without any application process or strings attached. The bad news is that it is according to their own criteria.

A grass roof on your house qualified you to receive support from Give Directly in Kenya. If you had a better roof, you didn’t receive any money. A very slim distinction the story admits, between the very poorest and the slightly less poor.

I think we can all admit there are inefficiencies in the way non-profit arts organizations are run that could benefit from good evidence based criteria. However, I don’t think it is a self-deceptive rationalization to believe that what is effective for an art organization in Chicago will be quite different from one in the rural southwest.

This is not to say groups like Give Directly will formulate a one-size-fits-all giving formula. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard number results become viewed as an increasingly more important measure of success.

As I wrote about two years ago, Warren Buffett’s grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, has been talking about non-profits merging to become more efficient and solution oriented instead of problem oriented.

Warren Buffett’s son, (Howard Warren Buffett’s uncle), recently derided what he called “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” which criticized transplanting solutions with “little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.” He too calls for a better way of doing things.

Both are more directly referring to work that is being done in the developing world, but criteria applied in one sector will inevitably migrate to another. Talking about the unmeasurable benefits of the arts is only going to so convincing. It would be wise to acknowledge problems, pay attention and participate in the conversation so that others are not proposing solutions for you in your absence.

Of Blogs and Boards

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So Minnesota Orchestra Association CEO Michael Henson declared that “blogs are senseless and must be ignored,” and he is right.

At least in the same sense that people think Congress is ineffectual but approve of their own representative. People don’t value blogs themselves, they value the people behind them.

Lynn Harrell hardly posts on his blog, but because of his stature when he posted about Delta taking both his cello’s and his frequent flyer miles, it raised such a ruckus there were newspaper articles about the situation and a segment on the Colbert Report.

The same is true for Bill Eddins, he doesn’t post often, but when he does, people respond.

Drew McManus doesn’t get cited as an expert solely by sitting in front of his computer typing away, he is out there consulting, speaking at conferences, giving interviews…and writing interesting things on his blog.

Emily Hogstad wouldn’t have garnered so much attention about MOA’s pre-emptive domain squatting if she hadn’t developed trust with years productive and interesting work.

Were blogs not to exist, these people wouldn’t be any less smart, talented and worth listening to. The blog medium just makes it easier to do so.

In the same vein, people don’t give to organizations, they give to people. Michael Henson seems to have either forgotten or been unaware of that fact.

Except in this case it is the reverse of the situation with Congress. People don’t value the individual musicians, but they value their relationship with the assemblage of musicians as a whole.

And perhaps unfortunately for Michael Henson and the MOA board, people don’t just value their relationship with the current musicians, but those of the past as well. Henson and the board may think they are bringing a recalcitrant bunch of musicians to heel, but by shutting down the season, they are interfering with a Minnesotan sense of pride in their historical support of arts and culture, including the Minnesota Orchestras of the past.

Now you even have Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton making a statement about the window closing on the two parties after having remained voluntarily quiet on the subject for months.Since there have been calls for the orchestra to return state monies, this may be a harbinger of things to come.

It is heartening that when we have had so many government officials telling artists and organizations what sort of art they should create, the subtext of Gov. Dayton’s remarks is basically to just get back to making art.

There is a conceit expressed by theatre technical staff where they say about actors, “without us, they would be performing naked in the dark.” This ignores the fact that theatrical performances don’t have to occur in a dark room outfitted in fancy costumes.

Sure, audiences LOVE the spectacle, but give them the option of a sun lit live performance in the middle of a cow pasture or an opportunity to listen to a recording of that same group in a 2000 seat concert hall accompanied by a spectacular light show and see where they go. Even if the tickets to the cow pasture are more expensive, people are going to choose the live show over the light show.

Orchestra boards are making the same mistake. They think their job is to get a musical performance for as cheap as possible, but people prefer the substance over the reasonable facsimile.

Now the question of whether people prefer orchestra music over something else is one of programming rather than labor and organizational existence.

Orchestra board members may be important people individually, but as a group they are subsidiary to the musicians themselves. Just as people only come to see the light and costumes in the context of a performance, no one comes to an orchestra concert for the board members.

When board members are feted for the great work they did for the orchestra, it is due to the delight the orchestra brought. The board made it possible for the musicians to deliver that delight, but the board is not the source of that delight.

Boards are praised for helping to construct, support and build arts organizations. Not for making them less. No board has ever been praised for their courage in cutting the oboes.

Boards, like blogs are meaningless of themselves and only gain value by dint of the talent of the people behind them.

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The Minnesota Orchestra cross-blog event is a collection of more than a dozen bloggers, musicians, patrons, and administrators writing about the orchestra’s devastating work stoppage. You can find all of the contributions in the following list and the authors encourage everyone to participate by sharing, commenting, or publishing something at your own culture blog.

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