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Maybe I Should Have Held Out For A House, Too

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For Purpose Law Group posted the second installment of their “Nonprofits: What Not To Do,” series yesterday. The first installment dealt with the infamous Indianapolis Museum of Art job posting for a director who would help the organization continue to serve its “core white audience,” along with some other questionable decisions organizations have made.

This most recent post deals with creating prudent safeguards in executive compensation practices. It put me in mind of Drew McManus’ annual Orchestra Compensation Reports series which examines compensation for concert masters, music directors and executives.

In the most recent posting by For Purpose, they discuss how the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) wanted their new executive director to live closer to the facility than Manhattan and so offered a housing bonus of $968,000 so she could purchase a home nearby. This being NYC real estate, the bonus only covered half the cost of the house, but it is still a pretty dang good down payment. Since there were no provisions made regarding the house or repayment of the bonus should the executive director resign or be fired, when she did leave the organization six years later, she retained the house.

While the previous executive director being with the organization for 36 years, 16 as executive director, may have created high expectations for the new exec’s longevity in the mind of the board members, For Purpose writes the board should considered that eventuality.

Not to mention that knowledge of such preferential arrangements can impact morale among other staff in the organization, something the pandemic only exacerbated at BAM:

This scrutiny has also arisen amidst the background of severe fiscal carnage due to the pandemic; BAM lost millions. It had to “cease live programming, lay off or furlough staff and dip into endowments.”

And there was staff grumbling all along. “To be in an all-staff meeting where we were hearing so much about capital projects and how grateful Katy was to be able to walk to work was very disheartening,” said a former education coordinator. “It made a lot of us question the austerity we saw in other parts of the institution.”

It is likely that CEO compensation practices in the commercial sector influenced the board of an organization based in a world financial capital. However, there are different standards and levels of scrutiny accorded to non-profit orgs. The For Purpose Law article lists a number of resources boards can use to establish compensation standards. If you have questions, pop over and take a look.

Forgetting Artists Bring Value To The Art

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Last week, Sunil Iyengar is the NEA director of the Office of Research & Analysis, penned a piece aligned with the occasion of Labor Day, commenting that the value of art often subtracts the artist from the equation.

Readers know that I have regularly written about arts having value beyond educational and economic outcomes for a few years now, but Iyengar comes at this general idea from a slightly different angle in focusing on the value the artists bring. While it is obvious that art doesn’t spontaneously burst into existence from nothing, it is also easy to occasionally forget the work doesn’t exists independently of the creative.

Iyengar writes (my emphasis):

For instance, we speak of the social and emotional learning (SEL) that derives from arts education. But where do teaching artists fit into the equation? How does their own vocational practice enable them to transmit SEL to others? Or we refer to the arts’ value for public health strategies. How do artists find themselves partnering effectively with organizations, in clinical and non-clinical settings, to build trust in community health providers?

Most conspicuously, we talk about the economic impacts of the arts—but how do we measure the opportunity costs for various sectors and communities that lack adequate support systems for artists?

It all sounds painfully schematic—using terms like “system,” “units,“ or “impacts” when discussing the arts. Know what’s worse? Neglecting to consider artists as central to any theoretical framework that might be used to launch a better and sustainable future for “the arts” nationwide.

He goes on to write about the high unemployment rates of artists during the pandemic and the low pay artists receive in the best of times, less as the economic picture began to recover during the Spring and Summer. He says while arts administrators have expressed hopes of a rebirth and re-visioning of the arts will result from the Covid enforced pause, any solution that does not improve conditions for artists and protect their interests and prerogatives will ultimately fail to achieve ambitions for change and revitalization.

Iyengar cites the results of a study conducted with participants of the Periscope program of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville in which:

…“several others initiated loose attacks against funding structures that require artists to engage with community development, citing concerns about stretching their capacity, inequality of expectations between themselves and other entities also engaged in processes of community development, and burdening their creativity,” the authors add.

Robinson and Novak-Leonard go so far as to state: “The failure of communities, and specifically, funders, to recognize the primary entrepreneurial motivation of artists–a desire to maintain control of their creative process—while ignoring the considerable social good artists undertake in their practices, undermines the effort, training, skill, and labor involved in the production of art.”

…The entrepreneurial artists in our sample demonstrated an ability to see and act upon opportunities in community on their own terms.

One thing to note is that Periscope is an entrepreneurship training program for artists so the study authors aren’t saying that all artists will naturally identify opportunities to engage with the community and pursue them.

I think there is a danger in looking at these results and using it to bolster the “arts should be run like a business” mentality and mandate entrepreneurship training for anyone seeking funding. That is doomed to fail if artists aren’t ready to embrace the effort to expand their capacity in that area. A one size fits all policy is ill-advised for any group and much, much, much less so when it comes to creatives.

Sometimes You’re The Wind, Sometimes You’re The Weathervane

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Seth Godin made an interesting post that intersects somewhat with the questions arts organizations are having about putting content on digital platforms. Alas, I don’t know that it provides any of the answers being sought but he makes a crucial point about not confusing distribution capacity with influence and power.

He start with the following statement:

To be powerful, a medium needs two things:
The ability to reach people who take action
The ability for someone in charge to change what those people see and hear and do

Then he provides a number of examples which illustrate that impressive statistics about the extent of reach can be essentially meaningless. This is something to keep in mind when people cite number of impressions for websites, broadcast or print media outlets. But on the other hand, he notes that sometimes the people with control are exerting it haphazardly without any sense of how to focus it effectively:

People in the music business are flummoxed by the number of new acts that are showing up out of nowhere and becoming hits on TikTok. They’re talking about how powerful this company is.

But it’s not. It’s simply reporting on what people are doing, not actively causing it.

The folks with the power are the anonymous engineers, tweaking algorithms without clear awareness of what the impact might be.

The last bit he writes puts me in mind of my ongoing discussion about how the criteria we use to measure the value of something is frequently irrelevant, but people will be convinced of it measure’s importance.

Google and Amazon used to invite authors to come speak, at the author’s expense. The implied promise was that they’re so powerful, access to their people was priceless. But the algorithm writers weren’t in the room. You ended up spending time with people who pretended they had influence, but were more like weatherpeople, not weather makers.

[…]

There are still cultural weather makers, but they might not be the people we think they are.

Certainly that last line applies to those of us who work in the arts and culture industry. Sometimes we are the weather makers and no one gives credit, but sometimes we think we are the weather makers and don’t recognize what is really moving the winds and tides.

Info You Can Use: Database of Performing Arts Venue Vax Policies

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Drew McManus has started a database of the different policies performing arts venues around the country have enacted.  He started it last Friday and announced the 100th entry this morning. If you follow the links, you can see both the database and a form with which you can provide information about your venue or venues in your community.

I immediately passed it around to members of my consortium as soon as I saw it last Friday. Probably the biggest value it has is providing guidance and a bit of moral support for performing arts organizations around the country so that if they are getting push back from boards and higher ups, they can point to other entities around the country and in their region who are taking certain steps.

For the venue I run, most of the self-sponsored shows on our schedule are happening in the Spring so we were just starting to formulate the beginnings of a policy when groups renting from us over the next three months contacted us to tell us what measures they would like to take. In one case we were surprised by how rigorous one group’s standards were because were concerned their audience was the type to vocally push back. It turned out their policies were heavily driven by the insistence of the artists who were scheduled to perform.

It has been a week since they made an announcement about their policies and it doesn’t appear they have had more than a couple people requesting refunds. It has shown us that everyone’s input has something to contribute to policy creation and not to make broad assumptions about how audiences will react.

Take a look at the database and add your information as you can.

 

Resource: Performing Arts Org Vax Policy Database

Oh Jellyfish, Where Is Thy Sting?

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Hat tip to Georgia Council for the Arts which posted a link to the Smithsonian article, Why Science Needs Art.  The article focuses largely on marine life, but the basic gist is that there is so much about science the general public doesn’t understand or have the equipment to experience that artistic execution is necessary to translate that into comprehensible terms.

One of the first examples given discusses how a student from the Maryland Institute College of Art working at the Smithsonian museum kept getting questions about how jellyfish sting.

She always got the same question from visitors, “how do jellyfish stings work?” She had the scientific answer for them but found it difficult to explain the microscopic stinging cells that fire like harpoons out of jelly tentacles without a clear visual.

That’s when a lightbulb went off in Payne’s mind. She could show visitors how jellyfish sting using art. Payne immediately got to work in the sculpture shop at her school, excited to bring the microscopic stinging cells into full view.

Payne built a 3D model of one of the stinging cells that line jelly tentacles—called a nematocyst—that visitors could touch and interact with. The model showed visitors a jelly’s stinging power and helped Payne explain how to take care of a jellyfish sting.

Later, a marine scientist discusses how she took up photography in order to capture animals in the natural habitat because they looked entirely different there than preserved in a museum.  And the merged scientific and artistic perspective have benefits toward greater application:

Her discoveries apply to fields beyond science, like technology. Right now, Osborn’s team is looking at how a spineless, free-swimming bristle worm called a Tomopteris moves to help the tech industry make better, lighter and more maneuverable robots.

But studying these and other midwater creatures takes a highly trained eye for discerning shapes. “I do illustrations, sketch and photograph the animal to understand its structure,” Osborn explained.

This ability to pay careful attention to patterns, shapes and spatial relationships helps scientists properly observe and discover—key pillars of the scientific process. It also helps them create clear visuals of the collected data. Graphs, figures and scientific illustrations are all more powerful when they have a touch of artistry.

Is Economic Impact Declining As Most Important Measure of Value?

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As I go about arguing against using measures like economic impact and test scores for valuing the arts, I occasionally get push back from people who note that for better or for worse dollars and test score are quantifiable and compelling and therefore are what will matter most to policy makers, funders, and individual donors.

The thing is, we know that a lot of people value things that aren’t so easily measured but are deemed to be important. Scott Walters recently posted a reaction to a CNN story about the impact working from home has been having:

If your browser is blocking the image, it reads: “This obsession with “the economy” distorts the issue. Is working from home good for human beings? Is it good for the environment? Instead, we focus on latte consumption. Come on, @CNN, THINK https://t.co/qH4yKTVv2b ”

We know from research conducted by projects like Creating Connection that people view participation in arts events has having positive associations with interpersonal relationships, physical and mental health, social good, self-improvement along with other benefits.

With so much in the news about people rethinking their relationship with work and its place in their lives and stories of athletes asserting boundaries about the activities in which they are willing to participate, this is a time when people are recognizing that customary process and values may no longer be relevant. Or perhaps it is better said that people are questioning whether they continue subsuming their existing values of health and well-being to economic opportunity and test scores.

In this there is an opportunity to work on reframing the terms in which the arts are valued so that they resonate in empathy with the introspection and questioning about values and norms which is occurring.

The Logo May Be A Little Different, But The Brand Remains The Same

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I had a post appear on ArtsHacker this week that dealt with the concept of rebranding.  In the post I cite an article by Mark Ritson arguing for revitalization of a brand rather than rebranding. Ritson’s position is that unless legally required to engage in rebranding, there is more to lose than gain by rebranding. He uses the UK National Lottery as a case study to make his point. I am not going to go too much into his reasoning behind revitalization here. I encourage you to read my ArtsHacker piece and perhaps move on to Ritson’s article.

The part that really got me thinking was his statement that the secret to maintaining a consistent brand was flexibility and change. His point was that the value of a brand is more related to a promise being made and not proportionally related to the quality of advertising and graphics. (my emphasis)

Step three, don’t reproduce the executions and approaches of the past – despite their proven impact. Time has moved on. Instead, ask what these key words or imperatives demand of you in 2022. That question is crucial because, although you don’t change the DNA of a brand when you revitalise it, you do have to acknowledge one of the core paradoxes of branding: consistency demands change.

[…]

If your beauty brand is all about health and nature, plastic packaging with a picture of waterfall and a product packed full of parabens might have worked once upon a time. But wake up and smell the future! Doing the same thing, over a long period of time – ironically – often makes you ultimately inconsistent with your stated brand position.

As I comment in the ArtsHacker post, if the organization identifies a problem to be solved and suggested changes are countered with “that is what people want/the way we have always done it,” that is probably the exact area you should be evaluating. It may not be that your beloved holiday tradition needs to be scrapped, but how it is conducted may no longer feel as relevant to your community as it once did.

Take a look and think about it. The post-Covid world provides an opportunity to revitalize how you are perceived in the community.

Maintaining A Consistent Brand Requires Change

Four Centuries of Romans Can’t Be Wrong

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For Purpose Law Group made a post on their site advocating shared leadership models for non-profits.  They note that there is an increasing recognition that a hierarchical model with a sole leader in charge does not best serve the needs for the organization. They provide a brief list of resources people can consult to learn more about shared leadership governance, but their central thesis is that for over 400 years the Roman Empire was run on a co-leadership model which existed at every level from local magistrate to the consuls at the center of the Empire.

And apparently this structure didn’t rely on the partners getting along well with each other:

“In most analyses of co-leadership,” Professor Sally observes, “the analysis is on the personalities of the partners. Yet, this cannot be the whole story….” He explains: “The fact that the Roman Republic sustained co-leadership for more than four centuries means that there were structures, norms, and behaviors that supported an immense variety of personalities in consulship, quaestorship, and so on….”

I took a look at the article written by Professor Sally in which he describes 10 features of the Roman structure which made this work.

Right at the top is that the leaders assume and depart the office on the same day according to a fixed schedule. This prevented one person from accumulating more influence than the other. If one died prematurely of illness or in battle, they were not replaced. In terms of how this translates to the modern business world, if one person departs, the other remains in the position, but only until a new duo can be found to assume the office. The individual then moves on to a different position.

Now how this would work in a small organization where there aren’t many other positions is not addressed, though there are some good examples in the text of problems dual leaders have run into when trying to agree on an shared exit strategy.

Other features of the Roman system: Each leader would take on equivalent assignments so that neither would accumulate significantly more opportunities or glory.

There were two leaders, but one office. All perks and symbols of office were shared, including space. Sally notes in modern practice companies whose co-leaders are located in different geographic areas will have an additional office space for the partner, even if it sits empty for the bulk of the year.

There are a number of other rules the Romans followed. It is pretty fascinating to read how they were followed, the conflicts that sometimes arose in the course of trying to adhere to the model as well as the crises which emerged when decisions were made to break with the practices.

This article on the Roman practice provides a different lens through which to look at piece which advocate for businesses to consider shared leadership. So often it feels like shared leadership is an innovative approach, but in fact it is more akin to reinventing the wheel.

Moving Beyond Under-Served

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Something has been puzzling me lately and I haven’t come any closer to figuring out the answer. I appears to me that when there is discussion about populations which are under-served by the arts in the U.S. it seems to largely be in the context of race whereas when I see the same discussions going on in the UK, it seems to be in the context of class.

Earlier this month, The Conversation had an article about there being a class crisis in the arts, citing Welsh actor Michael Sheen. The authors of the piece were based at the University of Edinburgh and University of Sheffield and it was pretty clear that they were talking about the situation in the UK.

I have also seen a fair bit of social media discussion about a Guardian article on the subject. Much of the social media conversation is oriented on class:

I am not sure if it is a matter of demographics with Caucasians, which have for better or worse been defined as the norm, being 87% of the population in the UK versus 76% of the population in US, resulting in Britons  perceiveing degree of opportunity spread more along class lines.

Or if there has been such a history in the US of linking negative associations to race, including groups who later came to be regarded as “white,” that race has become the default lens through which to assess inequities in the US.

It is not that there hasn’t been recognition in the US that inequities are based in economics. Right now people are looking a little askance at how the wealthiest individuals and corporations are spending their money and paying their taxes. In the arts, there has been a recognition that people whose families can support them through unpaid internships are often more likely to succeed. Not to mention Martin Luther King was working to build a coalition of all poor Americans, was in Memphis to support all sanitation workers when he was assassinated, and was about to embark on the Poor People’s Campaign.

It strikes me that one of the ways the arts can work toward equity and inclusion is to decouple the concept of under-served from race based demographics. I am not sure what the most constructive terminology and frame might be. I can see the consequences of only using a single dimension like economic status allowing groups to hide the fact they are neglecting to serve people of different races and abilities.  You don’t want to adopt a position of “we don’t see differences, we serve people,” because differences do exist and need to be acknowledged in order to create a welcoming environment.

Probably the best approach would be if funders did not use measures or criteria which incentivize using race, economic status, ability, etc., as a definition of under-served. The problem is, funders can collect data about participation from these demographics to show they are paying attention and want organizations to work toward welcoming a greater range of their communities, but how do you combat the perception that the organization is being rewarded for reaching out to an “other” group?

It is also difficult as an arts organization seeking to perpetuate diversity, equity and inclusion to force funders to change their criteria even as they seek support from those funders. Obviously a small step is to write a grant proposal that doesn’t employ the term under-served at all, but applications and final reports are often formatted with a bias connecting under-served with race, ability and economic status.

Barriers To Equity Admission Are Suddenly Dropped

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Big news today from Actors’ Equity Association  the union which represents stage actors and stage managers. The union basically immediately opened membership to anyone who has ever worked professionally as an actor or stage manager on production and ever will, along with members of associated sister unions like SAG-AFTRA, AGMA and AGVA. Anyone who currently in the member candidate program working toward their union card can immediately become a member with any fees already paid to the union counting toward their initiation dues.

It should be noted that the definition of working professionally seems to being paid any amount as long as you can provide a pay stub. The previous process was based on a certain number of hours worked on a production under a union contract.

The union says they are doing this as a step toward diversity and inclusion due to the high degree of self-selection that has existed in the hiring process:

But Equity theatres, like all entertainment industry employers, are disproportionately run by white people, and their programming and hiring decisions show that they often hold biases in favor of people from similar demographics. In fact, recent hiring studies demonstrate that Equity contracts are disproportionately offered to white people, and the majority of new members join via a contract.  Because our membership rules until now have left access to membership in employers’ hands, they have implicitly created a disproportionately high barrier to access for actors and stage managers of marginalized identities. We have inadvertently contributed to the systemic exclusion of people of color and people of other marginalized identities from the benefits of union membership.

In a Backstage article, Diep Tran quotes Equity President Kate Shindle as saying this is not a cash grab after the Covid shutdown:

But she is adamant that Open Access is not a “cash grab” to get more money into the union; Equity was affected in the last year when its members were unable to work because of COVID-19 and thus, pay into their union.

“I am telling you the God’s honest truth when I say that no part of this has felt like any kind of cash grab,” she says.

Shindle also admits that with this change, it may mean that auditions become “more crowded,” but she believes that overall, more members are a good thing: “We’re eager to look at the ways in which structural and systemic racism has permeated our industry and say, Okay, these are things we can just fix without anyone’s permission. We don’t have to have an industry summit in order to say it should be easier to join Equity if you want to join Equity.”

One of my colleague’s first reaction was to wonder if the influx of membership would help the union’s issues with health coverage. Back in April, actors were marching in protest against the union’s change in the number of weeks members had to work in order to receive health coverage, in addition to calling attention to racism, sexism, and unsafe work environments.

It will be interesting to see how this move plays out over the next few years. One of the biggest challenges will likely be broadening the appeal of union membership geographically. While it sounds like anyone who performed for a small stipend could become a member of Actors’ Equity, the restrictions on working on non-union shows may limit people’s opportunities to participate in local or regional productions.

For decades now the fact that acting opportunities were oriented in a few cities, particularly New York City, has been identified as a significant problem. (Call out to Scott Walters who often wrote on this subject.)  The joke about needing to move to NYC from Milwaukee in order to audition for a part in Milwaukee wasn’t far from the truth.

Equity is probably going to have to create new sets of rules that allow people to perform in myriad more circumstances than they currently are. The union was formed over 100 years ago to protect actors from exploitative situations and there are still many areas in which advocacy of a few broad basic work rules like the recent trend away from grueling rehearsal schedules can create new standards of practice.

 

There Will Be More Dancing In The Streets

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I saw an article on CityLab about some pretty successful Open Streets efforts that rose up during Covid.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept, Open Streets is a national effort to temporarily close streets down to traffic to allow for community use of the space.

Where I live, a local organization works to shut streets down a couple times a year in different neighborhoods around the city. Part of the local effort has been to perform different projects which help make the streets safer by making drivers slow down and become more aware of pedestrians.

I was surprised to read in the CityLab piece that one group successfully managed to shut down a 30 block span of a street in NYC for 12 hours every. single. day.  While technically that is a temporary shut down of the street, it is increasingly becoming a permanent feature.

Programming was paramount. Practically each day, there is something going on in the street. Salsa and the Colombian coin toss game of sapo on Tuesdays. Family bike rides on Friday. The avenue even has its own newsletter. “If you don’t activate the street, people won’t feel comfortable using it,” said Burke.

Alejandra Lopez, a local resident, had stopped by last week for a bike helmet, but they were all out. Instead, she found out about the English classes that are also held on the avenue, which brought her back today. The Open Street reminded Lopez of her hometown, Bogotá, and its famous weekly Ciclovía. “This is like the evolution of that,” she said, carrying a new helmet in one hand.

The daily effort is driven by 100 volunteers and is mostly funded by donations. Some of the people who teach the language and dance classes are paid a stipend, but most all the work is done by volunteers. The vision, however, is to turn it into a work training program.

The program could provide summer jobs for teens, or re-entry training for formerly incarcerated people, with transferable carpentry and landscaping skills. (Burke called for crossing guards to be hired from nearby communities.) To Maerowitz, the Open Street could be more than just a space to spread out: It could be a site where one’s community is strengthened.

“We can give neighbors ownership of the street through work,” she said.

The article talks about some of the issues and tensions that have emerged in different Open Streets projects around the country. There is always push back and anger from some drivers at having streets shutdown, but organizers have discovered some socio-economic forces at work as well. There has been criticism that Open Streets projects are often sited in wealthier neighborhoods, but some have observed that there is often resistance in poorer neighborhoods based in skepticism about broken promises of the past as well as lack of consultation and communication with residents.

Last year, the launch of Oakland’s Slow Streets program faced a barrage of criticism over lack of community input, with Black and low-income residents expressing far less enthusiasm for the traffic restrictions.

[…]

…in poorer areas, they hit resistance, highlighting disparities ingrained in traffic violence. If a neighbor in a marginalized community grumbles at a program meant to enhance safety, and the response is to scrap instead of fix, something else may be at play there.

“When you apply the layer of historical trauma that communities of color have experienced, it’s a reaction formation,” Logan said. “I’ve been so hurt from you that it’s easier to push you away than to collaborate and figure out a solution. The last time we talked about promises, you broke that.”

Did Covid Suddenly Make You More Aware of Sidewalk Space?

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The Americans for the Arts blog had an interview with an arts group that was flexing their skills to solve problems in their community. They spoke with Yin Kong, one of the founders of Think Chinatown which started the initiative Assembly for Chinatown to provide outdoor dining for restaurants in New York City’s Chinatown.

While restaurants in other parts of the city were able to find ways to cope with Covid restrictions by setting up dining on sidewalks or in dedicated parking spaces on the street, Chinatown has narrower sidewalks and streets. Regulations frequently changed and violations earned a $1,000 fine. Outdoor dining really hadn’t been part of the business practice among Chinatown restaurants so between physical restrictions, legal hurdles, and custom there was little incentive for the financially ailing restaurants for that neighborhood to pursue outdoor dining options.

Think Chinatown collaborated with A+A+A Studio to write a guide on how to build affordable structures that met Department of Transportation guidelines. Artists worked with business owners to decorate the structures in colorful murals.

We removed the financial risk for these restaurants by covering the construction costs. We selected restaurants where we believed the impact could most be felt. For the most part, the project has helped bring attention to businesses and provide more space.

We are still connected with the restaurants who participate—we do not drop these and leave. We live in the neighborhood and are here to adjust. For some murals, it has been almost a year [since they were created], so we are repainting. We want them to continue to be colorful, delightful work.

The Assembly for Chinatown page mentions the project has helped 13 businesses at nine sites. In some cases, adjacent businesses got wrapped into the effort. In one case, a restaurant, cafe and florist had a structure constructed. In another, a restaurant and neighboring tea importer shared a space.

The interview is short, but it is clear that the perceptual, legal, and logistical hurdles they faced required a lot of time and effort to navigate before the first two pieces of wood were attached together. They provided access where it didn’t exist or seemed difficult to achieve and got people thinking of new possibilities for doing business in their neightborhood.

Headlines Writing Checks That The Body Text Ain’t Really Cashing

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Yesterday, economist Tyler Cowen addressed one of the dichotomies being recognized in the arts sector – the conflict between values of equity, fairness, diversity, etc., espoused in the arts world and the transactional nature of arts patronage. Discussions of how the arts are supported and funded are becoming an increasingly prevalent topic of conversation.

Cowen, who is most definitely an avowed supporter, consumer and advocate of the arts takes a bit of an academic analytical approach to the “wokeness” embodied in The Art Newspaper articles on visual art.

To put it bluntly, the art world is torn. In terms of demographics, the art world should lean fairly hard left, at least in the Anglo countries. It is highly educated, cosmopolitan, wealthy, and “aware” of the world. And many of the individuals operating in the art world do lean fairly strongly to the left. Yet the art world itself is based on principles fairly different from Woke and often directly opposed to Woke.

First and foremost, the art world is based on ownership of property. Most (by no means all) of those properties were created by dead white males, or perhaps by living white males.

Art markets typically are ruled by Power Laws and massive inequality, with most works going to zero value and a small percentage of the creators hitting it big…. Indeed, you earn status by showing how discriminating your eye is, which means by dumping on the works that aren’t going anywhere.

Textiles, which are arguably the “most female” genre in terms of their creators, are worth systematically much less in the marketplace…(…The same is true for some kinds of pottery as well….)

Some of the issues he addresses I was aware of but hadn’t thought of in the terms or context he expresses.

Part of the point of his post was illustrate there is a breadth of intellectual discourse about art & culture that doesn’t immediately gravitate toward the extremes of woke or anti-wokeness. Of The Art Newspaper he says, “It tries to incorporate Woke rhetoric into an essentially non-Woke and anti-Woke set of customs and incentives and property rights.”

You will have to read his analysis of how they achieve that balance in various articles he cites. Basically, he says the body of the articles turn out to be less controversial than the headlines suggest.

Some of the commenters to the post suggest that Cowen uses “woke” so frequently in the post because he is intentionally trying to beat all meaning and emotional associations out of the term.

Colorado And The Case Of The Hidden Salary

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I have noticed Drew McManus will get me riled up about an arts administration topic and then suggests I write an Arts Hacker post about it. Last week was no exception. Last Thursday he posted about how he had gone back to requiring employers posting positions on Arts Admin Jobs to include a salary range.  He had done so because there was a growing demand among job applicants and others within the non-profit world to have salaries included.

But that Drew also noticed an editorial on the Chronicle of Philanthropy (registration required) was making waves for suggesting that omitting the salary was in everyone’s best interest. And boy did that garner a spirited response from readers.

With good reason since part of the rationale seemed to be along the lines of someone being grossly underpaid at $40,000 would be too intimidated to apply for a job more appropriately paying $120,000, so it is better to keep the salary hidden….you know, for their sake.

There is a lot more to the effort than just some opinion pieces. As I note in my Arts Hacker post, Show The Salary started in the UK and is an international effort that probably extends even further than my research turned up.

There are definitely signs that there will be immense resistance by companies and organizations to list salary ranges. While there are a number of states and municipalities which have rules against requiring or discriminating against applicants who don’t provide their current salary, only Colorado requires employers to provide salary and benefits information in their employment listings.

As a result, a number of companies who allow employees to work remotely are specifically saying Colorado residents can not apply for open positions. Nike says residents will need to move from the state before performing any work.

Since there are a significant number of positions open in the arts right now, including at the executive level, there is an opportunity to create a strong precedent and expectation of listing salary ranges. Such a simple move is likely to exert a lasting influence and shift in the general work culture among arts organizations going forward.

There is more detail about the whole topic in my Arts Hacker post so check it out.

 

Time To Include #ShowTheSalary In The Hiring Process

 

Keep Your Eyes Open For NEA American Rescue Plan Grant Webinars

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While everyone is waiting for their Shuttered Venue Operating Grant (SVOG) application to be processed, you should be taking a look at the National Endowment for the Arts American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding. The NEA just held a webinar today about it, but most states and regional arts organizations are having one for their members. Americans for the Arts is having one on July 6.

In a nutshell, the reason why you want to apply for this is because there are far fewer restrictions than usual on the program. The only broad categories that they won’t fund are capital improvements and project grants. Usually all they fund are projects. They still don’t provide funding to individual artists.

They will pay for operational costs like salaries and non-capital equipment.  You can apply even if you have an SVOG grant pending or have received funding from other programs like PPP or EIDL.  You just can’t apply for reimbursement of the same expenses covered by another program. So if other funding covers salaries until December 31, you would need to apply salaries from January 1 onward to the ARP grant. The funding can be applied across two years which allows some time to regain momentum lost during Covid.

They have a PDF prepared with all the information you will be expected to provide. Note that everyone has the deadline of August 12, 2021 to submit a short form application on Grants.gov, but then organizations whose legal identity begins with A-L will apply through the separate NEA applicant portal August 19-25 and those with names beginning M-Z will apply August 27-September 2.

My guess is that they are trying to avoid a lot of the snafus which plagued the SVOG program.

Take a look at the information and find a webinar to attend. As you might imagine there is a ton of interest in these programs. I received an email about 2-3 hours before the webinar started that they had reached capacity with registrations and keep trying to get in if you are initially blocked so I queued up 20 minutes early in the hopes of being admitted.

Really Don’t Want To Think Of Post-Covid Marketing As Online Dating

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Back in March Harvard Business Review (HBR) had a piece on how marketing will change post-Covid.  It is definitely geared toward commercial business and often oriented toward business to business sales rather than individuals, but there were some interesting observations, some of which have long been points of discussion in non-profit arts.

4. Old truth: Courting customers is just like dating.
New truth: Courting customers is just like online dating.

I mainly include this one because of the imagery this evokes. The article notes that marketing used to be a numbers game. Like dating, you would present yourself broadly in public at parties, bars, and other public places, using your best lines, seeing who might be interested. These days where people make split second decisions before swiping, they say the numbers game is algorithms and not chance and broad exposure. Essentially they say data driven decision making is going to be more valuable than trying to increase the frequency people see your face.

5. Old truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your marketing strategy.
New truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your customer journey.

…We have all called customer service and spoken to a call center rep or chatbot that was not operating with the same information as a retail location — and vice versa.

…Marketing must be viewed in the context of the full end-to-end journey and, where possible, work to connect the dots.

The idea that people would go from being first time attendees to subscribers to donors and perhaps volunteers or board members, across a span of years is a frequent subject discussed in the arts so this concept is not new.

What caught my attention was that they said the answer to making sure everyone in your organization was operating with the same information is not to consolidate all operations and communications through one location. Rather it is ensuring everything is aligned around the customer’s need. This certainly makes sense because you often have different types of customers. There aren’t only ticket buyers, subscribers, donors and groups, you might have operations that include renters, students, and other constituencies. The best point of contact for each of these is different, but it is definitely to your benefit if each area is aware of how the others interact with their specific group.

In other words, as I have said over the years–marketing is everybody’s job. The organization can’t run effectively by taking a siloed view as to what their role and interests are.

8. Old truth: Your brand should stand behind great products.
New truth: Your brand should stand behind great values.

[…]

In fact, key themes from EY research show that while quality, convenience, and price still very much matter to consumer choice, factors like sustainability, trust, ethical sourcing, and social responsibility are increasingly important to how consumers select their products and services. Marketing has an opportunity to educate the broader C-suite (and even the board) on the importance of brand values when it comes to differentiating in a post-pandemic marketplace where brand preferences have been upended.

If you have been working in the arts for any length of time, you know organizations have long espoused values about equity, inclusion and access, but it is no long sufficient to say these things, it is necessary to translate these values into action. The authors of the HBR article recognize that the impetus to change will not necessarily come from the top and it may require advocacy from staff to executives and board members to effect the change that is needed.

Arts Incubators Can Offer A Different Type of Education

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An article from Oregon Arts Watch about an arts incubator program, Tulatin Valley Creates  rolled across my feed this week. The article inevitably talked about how the program helped artists apply for Covid relief from various entities across the span of the last year.

What I was interested to see was artists talking about how participation in the incubator helped them re-evaluate their work and employ a new approach.

Julian Saporiti who graduated from Berklee School of Music drew a distinction between the training received in degree programs and in the incubator:

“That’s different from education programs that focus on individual virtuosity,” he says. “The incubator classes were very much emboldening participants, with the aim being to spread that collaborative approach to the rest of the community.”

One artist, Emily Miller, said that conversations in the incubator lead her to broaden her approach.

“What I realized during the incubator and looking at it from different perspectives is that I had to keep redirecting conversations away from the same narrative we hear about ocean plastic — whose fault is it? How can we solve it? The incubator helped me get from that point to, ‘OK we understand this problem — now where are we going?’ I want people to focus on creative transformation, and how they can apply it in their own lives — even if they have nothing to do with ocean plastic.” The changes she’s making as a result broaden her project’s relevance to more people.”

Another participant, Jamie Cromier, went in planning to open a gallery but her thinking evolved after recognizing a number of factors:

“…she decided instead to partner with people in the community who were already working in that area, and to focus instead on what she was passionate about: not the administrative work of founding and running a gallery (while raising three children), but instead helping them make art that served mental health. She wound up creating art boxes that would go out to people with mental health issues who could use them to create art.”

I appreciated the fact that the incubator program has a process which is helping people think and reflect on their plans and practice. Hopefully there are other programs out there having similar outcomes.

The Arts Aren’t A Band-Aid

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Links to a study examining the validity of claims about the efficacy of the arts in solving issues of health and well-being came across my Twitter feed today.  The study authors, Stephen Clift, Kate Phillips, and Stephen Pritchard, examined research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and found there were problems with the methodology and relevance of previous studies that made claims about arts solving physical and mental health issues for different populations.

The authors cited earlier work by Munira Mirza and Eleonora Belfiore who in 2006 were skeptical about making claims about the instrumental benefits of the arts on health outcomes.

Among Belfiore’s concerns that the authors quote are:

Any form of participatory activity could have “an empowering effect, whether arts-based or not”.

Existing reviews have ignored details which suggest “negative” impacts from arts and cultural engagement. Lessons from experiences of “culture-led regeneration” suggest that “the arts can actually be socially divisive”.

Little attention given to whether cultural and arts initiatives “provide the most cost-effective means to tackling social exclusion, health problems” compared with “established practices within social and health services”.

Little attention to longer-term outcomes as opposed to short-term effects.

Little attention to the artistic or aesthetic quality of cultural and arts engagements in assessing outcomes.

A focus on the role of the arts and culture my serve “as a convenient means to divert attention from the real causes of today’s social problems and the tough solutions that might be needed to solve them”.

While these were criticisms of arts policy in the UK in 2006, the fact that the authors found nearly identical concerns in more recent research conducted both in the UK for DCMS and internationally by WHO, indicate that the problems are shared across borders.

I was particularly drawn to the discussion of the use of art as a band-aid to obfuscate the existence of larger problems. The authors cite businesses use of “art washing” projects to create goodwill and draw attention away from the business practices which create harm in the world. They also note that studies often credit arts programs for reducing anxiety and behavioral difficulties in children without fully recognizing the poverty, domestic abuse and violence in their lives. They suggest that by positioning arts programs as a fix for children’s behavior, the studies accept and normalize the terrible conditions responsible for these problems.

While it wasn’t a central topic of their research, the authors made reference to two studies from 2020, one which states Culture is bad for you, based on the way current practices and manifestations reinforce social inequities; and another that asks, “Can Music Make You Sick,” examining the price musicians pay to pursue their careers. This was actually a theme Drew McManus pursued across a number of podcast discussions with various stakeholders in music organizations.

Long time readers will know that for years now I have been concerned about various claims being made about the instrumental benefits/value of the arts to rectify every ill – health, social, economic, education, etc., as more research occurs debunking these claims, the arts community will be in a difficult place trying to justify their existence in these terms. Which is why it is important to change the narrative away from the arts as prescriptions for whatever ails you.

Cleaning Up Litter Never Looked So Cool

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Video came across my social media last month about the litter picking samurai of Tokyo.  These theater performers call attention to the trash dropped in the streets of the city to generate a sense of responsibility and pride in keeping things clean.  Some commenters to the video wonder if they set things up for the performance given the timing and spacing of some of their movements. That may have been the case to create some drama for some of the shots, but I found other videos of them cleaning and sorting the trash they collect before disposing of it so it appears they are committed to putting in a full effort.

During Covid the arts community has become thoughtful about ways in which they can contribute to change in the world. These folks in Japan seemed like a good example of how performance skills can be employed in informal settings, (as opposed to performance spaces), to model positive actions.

Additionally, since there is so much uncertainty and tentativeness regarding the status of events and the return of audiences, the format of these types of performances can help the arts remain relevant and visible in communities.

Not to mention emphasizing the fact that the arts can be used in efforts to solve problems.

 

 

Similar efforts can be intentionally employed to achieve a specific goal. Back in 2014 the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and Sojourn Theatre partnered on a project to call attention to the fact that crosswalk signals were timed too short to allow senior citizens to traverse intersections.

A Grant Proposal Isn’t An Investment Pitch

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Last week Vu Le made a tweet that revealed a very troubling picture of corporations misunderstanding how non-profits operate and work that they do. This seems to be the “non-profits should be run like a business” taken to the extreme.

The goal of Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Mental Health grant program is to:

“…specifically addresses the lack of both private and public investment in children’s mental health and of effective ways to connect innovative ideas with capital.

The resulting systemic funding gap has only increased with the deepening crisis in children’s mental health due to COVID-19 and ongoing social injustice issues.”

That sounds like it is a mix of a venture capital opportunity and a grant program. They do specifically say they applicants can receive up to $100,000 in grants, but as Vu Le notes, they also have to spend six weeks working on their pitches:

Early October: Finalists announced; six-week program commences, during which finalists learn from industry experts, enhance their proposals and develop their pitches.

Which makes it sound like applicants will be judged on the slickness of presentation rather than on quality of their solutions.

I do think a lot of organizations suffer from not having access to a skilled grant writer and can benefit from help and coaching, but that isn’t a problem it takes six weeks to solve.

While the program acknowledges there is a “systemic funding gap,” since there is no guarantee of funding, the only groups that can afford to invest time in generating innovative approaches to mental health services and have staff attend six weeks of pitch coaching are those who are already well-resourced enough to absorb that cost. Those at the other end of the funding gap will have had to make a heroic superheroic effort and leap of faith just to submit to the first round.

I will say that despite all the focus on new, innovative ideas, I didn’t see anything that disqualified existing programs as Vu Le’s post suggests. There is a question about whether the program is a new pilot or an existing program, but immediately follows asking how it is innovative and transformative. Pretty much every other description of the ideas they are looking for indicates a bias toward brand new rather than under recognized and underfunded.

I could hold forth at length about all the problematic dynamics operating here, but want avoid having casual readers tune out and move on. A lot of the language from the commercial sector has been creeping into non-profits and this grant program is really replete with it. The fact there is so much money at stake is sure to influence the vocabulary used by non-profit organizations going forward.

A few months back I had tweeted about my discomfort with the use of “deliverables” in the non-profit because so much of the work done does not result in discrete commodities. I think it is even less appropriate to be applying that concept and attendant time lines to addressing mental health.

 

Low Wear And Tear Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing

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We ran into an unanticipated complication of the Covid epidemic last week.

You may have heard that cars are engineered to operate more efficiently at highway speeds because engines get hot enough for a long enough period to burn off impurities, etc. (Though certainly hybrids are well on the way to turning that situation around.)

Well apparently there is something similar at work with septic systems.

A combination of smaller audiences; new, low water use toilets; and the flushing of supposedly “disposable” wipes over the last year meant there was not enough water flow through the pipes to keep things clear. When one thing snagged and came to rest, there was insufficient pressure to ensure the next things through passed by.

And lest you think this is a problem experienced by older, historic buildings, the issue was exacerbated by plumbing installed during a renovation completed three years ago. As the guys who came to address the issue said, it was up to code but the people who installed it never had to service their own work.

My suspicion is that as many venues gear up to to return to capacity they will find that the low demands placed on their infrastructure during the last year hasn’t necessarily forestalled degradation and, in fact, may have resulted in new problems.

We were fortunate in that we were sensitive to some early warning signs and took some action to investigate, otherwise things may have backed up at the next large capacity event. Folks would do well to be a little paranoid about unfamiliar, but seemingly minor sights, smells and sounds as they prepare for the return of audiences. It may pay to take extra time to examine equipment and technology, especially if you assume there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it after so much inactivity.

Who You Calling Dormant?

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So much appreciation to Howard Sherman for his commentary on Twitter last week about a statement by the Broadway League that re-opening Broadway meant the return of a dormant industry.

In the tweets that followed the one above, Sherman notes that the 40 theaters that comprise Broadway are not the entire industry and that the artists and companies around the country have been far from dormant, expending a great deal of effort to reach out to communities with new approaches. Or by bringing renewed attention to underused formats like audio dramas.

The whole thread is only 10 tweets with a couple postscripts, but in case people were thinking of skipping it I wanted to call attention to his thoughts about the concept of “restart”:

Stop Killing Kittens

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Last week Drew McManus encouraged arts marketers to break pre-Covid bad habits by renewed his plea to stop using cliched terms like “beloved.”  If you read his post closely you will notice he has been making the plea since 2014 when he created the hashtag #BanBeloved  (Which has probably be co-opted by those that oppose Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name.)

Drew asserts that every time an arts marketer uses the term “beloved,” a kitten dies.

So, you know if you won’t do it for the sake of your general community, think of the kittens.

Drew has identified a number of other objectionable adjectives, but others have reared their ugly heads and gotten over used in the interim. If you search your heart, you know what they are.

Earlier in April, Trevor O’Donnell made a similar plea about considering the language being used in marketing materials, encouraging people to focus on the audience and the shared experience.

Calling it a side-splitting, roll-in-the-aisles romp may be cute and catchy, and it may ring comfortingly familiar to older arts leaders, but it isn’t true and it’s not effective communication.

New audiences don’t respond to frivolous hyperbole. They want clear, honest, useful information that explains why your products matter to them. If what they’re looking for is a fun, stimulating way to create lasting memories with family, friends or loved ones, your job is to sell social experiences that offer lasting memories; i.e. if that memory is about sharing a funny play, you should probably say something like, “You’ll remember laughing together for a lifetime.”

O’Donnell attributes the use of hyperbole and focus on the organization vs. the audience to older arts administrators who are set in their ways. As I had noted a couple weeks back, there are a heck of a lot of advertisements for jobs at arts and culture organizations out there right now, particularly at the President/CEO/Vice-President level. It will be interesting if we see a significant shift in programming, promotional and operational practices over the next five years as a result of all this.

Is E-sports The Next Big College Degree?

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So here is something to keep on your radar and  consider the long term implications – Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest names in video gaming, donated $25 million to the University of Michigan to help them launch an esports team.  If you are not familiar with esports it is basically teams of people competing against each other on some of the marquee video game titles.   The competitors may be sitting down, but reflexes, timing, strategy, leadership and teamwork are significant determinants in success.

It is already fairly widespread and lucrative as hell which means it will inevitably continue to expand. Especially if Covid or other pandemics continues to be prevalent because the teams communicate over headsets and can therefore be easily isolated from each other.

So it is no surprise that universities are beginning to get on board. Not only is it an area of interest for students, some of them are already competing professionally.

Kotick’s enthusiasm to establish esports at Michigan is part of a bigger movement that has legitimized gaming as a path to a college degree and career.

There are nearly 200 colleges and universities nationwide with varsity esports programs and more than $16 million in scholarships is awarded to esports athletes each year.

The growth of collegiate esports allows institutions and their students to tap into a market that is expected to surpass $1.5 billion by 2023, per Esports Ecosystem Report.

Not only do video games present competition for live performance, (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said video gaming was a bigger source of worry for them than Disney & HBO streaming services), but also a potentially expanding source of employment for creatives.

The small university in southern Ohio at which I worked three years ago had long been recognized as a top 10 video game design program. It taught both programmers and artists and included classes in composing and designing sound/music for video games. There wasn’t an acting for video games class, but it did have a motion capture studio and independent companies in town were working on related technologies.

It is a lot more difficult to design and program for video games than most people imagine. Increasing demands for realism mean serious calculus for the physics and intense execution of detail in the art. As computing capacity and processing improves, it is only going to get worse–or better if you are a highly skilled creative being sought after by gaming companies.

After realizing their professors were right and enjoying playing video games does not translate into being able to create them, many students would change the focus of their majors. But they were still pretty adept and enthusiastic video gamers. And so 3-4 years ago, that small university in rural Ohio started an esports roster alongside their athletics teams.

Now there were other universities that started esports teams a few years ago as well, but the fact that a small university could have an organized a roster of ~50 competing on 6-7 game titles for years while the University of Michigan was operating at a recreational level provides some indication about the shifting dynamics of who is and can participate in esports.

Time To Review – To Whom Are You Accountable?

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During the Covid pandemic there has been a fair bit of introspection and soul searching about arts and culture, the role they should have in people’s lives, and the medium through which the experience should be delivered.

Now that there is some optimism about a transition to a relatively better operational environment for businesses and other organizations,  (Yes, i am indeed taking pains not to use terms like “return to normal”), it is definitely time to think about how those theories will be manifested.

Vu Le linked to an important essay by Hildy Gottlieb addressing the question of to whom non-profits should be accountable. Her primary thesis is that it is illogical to view the organization as accountable to funders & donors. She dissects the illogic of the implications of a funder accountable position. Among her best examples is the following:

If organizations are primarily accountable to donors, and a donor dies, is the organization still accountable to that person? What if it’s been 30 years since they died, and the world has changed dramatically — are you still accountable to that person’s wishes? Or are you accountable to their heirs? What if the heirs don’t care about your mission — perhaps their mother was an animal lover, and they could never understand that part of her. Maybe they even hate your organization. Are you accountable to the second and third generations of a donor who loved you, even if her heirs do not?

Gottlieb says the organizational mission determines to whom you are accountable. If your mission is serving a certain group, but they take a backseat to funders, then you are not fulfilling your mission. She addresses the concept of there being no mission to execute without the money with the following anecdote:

I once found myself in conversation with board members from a federally funded health center, who all listed patient health as their highest priority. However, one board member kept insisting, “We can only prioritize patient care to the extent we have the money to do so.”

So I took a sheet of paper and wrote “Values Statement’ at the top. Then I wrote, “Our primary focus will always be the health of our patients, as long as we have the money to do so.” I asked if that is what they would like to post in their lobby.

Suddenly their sense of accountability shifted.

She also notes that in the United States the organization has tax-exempt status in return for providing a public service. The reason for being and accountability is the public service and not the money. The “good stewardship” of funds that results in underpaid staff who turn over at a high rate doesn’t help the organization to advance it’s mission.

“Focusing their primary accountability on the money, we see board members spend a huge percentage of their time discussing financial matters, and often zero time discussing what success would look like in their community”

Gottlieb also debunks the sense that fundraising is a result of relationship building, the oft voice sentiment “people give to people, not organizations.” She says no one is fooled that the relationship is more than a transactional one:

Here is what “fundraising is about relationships” really tells a donor:

If you give us money, we will be your friend.
If we think you will give us money, we will court you as our friend.
The more money you give us, the more friendly we will be.
If you fail to give us money, we will eventually stop calling you.

If we truly valued donors as people, we would stop categorizing them as LYBUNTs and SYBUNTs.

So much of what she writes can easily be applied to the way arts and cultural organizations approach donors/members/volunteers. While I often say it is worthwhile to read an article, I strongly emphasize the importance of reading this one and thinking about how the opportunity for a fresh start will change the way your organization operates moving forward.

I was considering putting such an emphatic statement at the beginning of this post, but considered that anyone who read this far would be more prepared to make the effort toward this goal.

I strongly suspect being more steadfast in prioritizing mission over money will make accomplishing progress in areas of equity and inclusion suddenly much easier than it was before.

Cross-Discipline Pollination For Post-Covid Arts

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Following the link tweeted by Ava Wong Davies got me to a lengthy blog post by Tim X. Atack about things that need to change in theatre post-Covid.  I will initially engaged by his insistence that the arts needs to stop citing the economic value of the arts when arguing why they need to be supported. As long time readers know, I am very much in agreement with this sentiment.

…there’s a growing feeling that over a year later, the driving focus is to get back to business as it was before the pandemic – maybe, even, to take steps backwards.

That feeling’s compounded by hearing, over and over, industry leaders using the language of our oppressors as justification for business as usual. I’m so so tired of the assertion that The Arts need to be protected because ‘they give five pounds back for every pound put in,’ like some Gordon Gecko hokey cokey. It might be true, but the people we’re making this upward argument to simply Do. Not. Fucking. Care. There are easier ways to make profit, without the messy business of creating art that makes you think about things and feel stuff.

And worse, when the bottom line becomes the principle reason work is made, defaults rule. The idea of art being life-changing or surprising or transformative actually becomes a threat when the main thing you want to do is keep an existing base happy. Theatre stops being alive and becomes transactional. Experiences become about promises made in return for money, rather than invitations to be part of something new, or bigger. Even political plays stop being political and become ‘about the politics’ instead, worthy but inert, leading nowhere.

Atack also broaches a subject I have been less enthusiastic about as a post-Covid reality, the digitization of the live performance experience. He argues from the perspective of the need for cross-disciplinary competency which makes the necessity feel less objectionable to me. (Though even an introvert like myself thinks the spark of having a live interaction with another over a shared experience is irreplaceable.)

At the start of lockdown I heard one artistic director say their theatre was ‘not about to become a film production studio’. But in truth, those kind of skills and cross-disciplinary thinking were shown to be desperately needed the very second theatres started uploading what felt like 1 million appallingly made films…

[…]

… All told, we might not want our theatres to entirely become film studios. But if we don’t regularly allow film-makers, and artists of other disciplines, into our theatre culture on progressive and free-thinking terms, to cross-pollinate and diversify the form, if we don’t modernise our concept of a theatre career, when the next virus comes we might as well just shut up shop and walk away.

As I said, his entry is a good length has has many other thoughts about the dynamics of the arts industry post-Covid so it may be worth taking a read to see if anything he says stimulates some thoughts for you as well.

Things Getting Better For Virtually Singing Together

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An article on FastCompany recently caught my eye that suggests a company in Sweden is helping to solve a big problem in collaborative virtual concerts. One of the big impediments has been getting music and vocals coming in from different video/audio streams synchronized.

The article quotes San Francisco Opera general manager, Matthew Shilvock, who says his organization has been using the tool called Aloha, which marries low latency technology with now very familiar video chat interfaces:

It allows a singer and a pianist to essentially be in the digital space together making real-time music—which is just transformational for us,” Shilvock tells Fast Company. “A pianist can now hear a singer breathe, and that may sound very basic, but those breath cues are the things that allow the pianist to really mold their sounds to what the singer is doing.”

“To see the emotional reaction of a pianist [who is] now finally able to hear those cues is just amazing,” he adds.

While the software is still in beta, some music schools in Sweden have been using the technology for classes since last Fall. Even if everything goes back to full in person performances that existed before, tools like this might expand the window of rehearsal periods and cut down on the travel and housing expenses previously associated with live productions.

Little Pushback On Writers of Job Ads

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Last week I saw this tweet from Aksana Khan stating that England based Arts Emergency, where she works, often asks employers to rewrite their job listings before they will forward the ad onward. Out of the zillion articles written to help job seekers write better resumes, this may be one of two or three pieces I have ever seen telling employers they need to do better. The full article found on Arts Emergency’s site is the first I have seen that suggests they will flat out refuse to distribute an ad if it isn’t up to standard.

In the last year or two there has definitely been a big push especially among employees in the non-profit industry to call out organizations who aren’t listing a concrete salary range, but Arts Emergency is asking much more.

Khan writes: “We refuse to green light bad ads because young people deserve better. The only reason why barriers exist is because gatekeepers don’t accommodate a young person’s needs and situation.”

In addition to asking employers to state the salary, they also ask that the listing is clear about location, possibility for working remotely, Covid related measures, expected hours, availability of pastoral care, what expenses may be covered.

What was most amusing to me were tips that sounded very much like those given to job seekers creating resumes:

•Use bullet points. Some sentences are abominably long. They start in England and end up in Australia when they finally get to the point. Bullet points make your ad easier to digest for those who are neurodivergent.
•Be conversational! It’s refreshing compared to the usual long, jargon-y sentences written in a passive tone. Job adverts give an insight into your work culture. If your language isn’t easy to understand, good luck with your diversity policy.

Other suggestions in this section included offering alternatives to cover letters and resume as applications like video and audio formats. And providing a link to the website so the candidate can get a better sense of what the organization does.

There is also a section on terms to avoid which brings up some issues to consider:

Don’t say your ideal candidate:

“is energetic.” It implies you’re looking for a younger candidate and it’s ableist because some people have health conditions which prevent them from being “bouncier”.
“is mature.” It feeds into an idea that you need to be a certain age to be a team leader or manager.
“is a digital native.” It’s a horribly colonialist, ageist label which ignores the reality of digital poverty.
“must have a degree.” It’s lazy to put this in your personal specification if you don’t explain what skills you’d like from candidates.
“must have a driving license”. … Some people have medical conditions which means they can’t drive. And not everyone can afford the lessons, the car, and maintaining one. You must add a sentence on why it’s “essential”.
“must have [insert number] of years of experience in XYZ industry.” This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy on the lack of diversity in creative fields. Those who are working-class and/or people of colour are less likely to accrue paid experience compared to a white middle-class individual.

Building Connections May Not Require Improving Connectivity

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A few years back I became interested in research that showed that Black, Latinx, and Hispanic people who lived near public parks don’t necessarily feel comfortable using them so a CityLab story on that topic caught my eye. The story itself discusses how mayors of cities around the country are still trying to figure out how to make public spaces more welcoming to everyone, especially as people are gravitating toward parks as places to assemble during the pandemic.

There is a lot of history that factors into the discomfort and wariness people feel in relation to parks and many cities aren’t doing the best job of it. Despite multiple police related shootings of Black men in the past few years, apparently Minneapolis is among the best cities in terms of trying to bring equity to their public park system.

“Beginning in 2011, the city’s park and recreation board started working on what she and her colleagues say is the nation’s first comprehensive racial equity plan for parks, to be reviewed and updated every year. It came up with seven criteria to ensure that park funding would be allocated to areas that needed it most — including the racial make-up of surrounding neighborhoods, the general and youth population of an area, and the condition and lifespan of the parks themselves.

“It’s not just about investment and capital planning; it’s about procurement, and youth and community engagement,” Lusk said. “It’s about staffing diversity — if they are representative of their communities — and the siting of community gardens in areas they haven’t been historically.”

When I followed links to previous stories and studies that have been done, there was one story that reinforced the need to do thorough, inclusive surveying if your goal is to be welcoming to everyone. What a study in Houston found was that Whites, Blacks and Latinos had different priorities for parks.

“…the majority of respondents replied that they wanted their neighborhoods and parks linked to biking and walking paths. The problem with that survey is that about two-thirds of the respondents were white with household incomes over $75,000…

To correct this misrepresentation, a group of researchers from Rice University, conducted another survey, … This one was targeted at African-American and Latino neighborhoods … Lo and behold, the priorities differed from those of the initial survey. As the researchers write in the report about the surveys, “More Inclusive Parks Planning: Park Quality and Preferences for Park Access and Amenities”:

‘Neighborhood connectivity to parks was not a salient issue among park users in these neighborhoods, although this had been a primary finding from the 2014 Master Plan Survey and a favored option of 31 percent of respondents in our closed-ended question. Instead, they envisioned a diverse set of new or improved amenities—most prominently, restrooms and water fountains, and an array of recreational infrastructure—in better maintained and safer parks.’

In fact, connectivity was ranked last among priorities for black and Latino Houstonians. What do they want for their parks? Not only clean, functioning public bathrooms, but also better lighting to make parks safer at night and better playground equipment that’s not prone to breaking down.

I call attention to this because many arts organizations have become more determined to be more welcoming to a wider range of their community, but may be making the wrong assumptions about what everyone feels they need.

One of the first things I paid attention to when I started my current job going on three years ago was where bus stops were located relative to my venue and how late they ran, assuming that more people would consider participating in events if public transportation was available. I know it is a big factor in my community when it comes to getting to work, but perhaps it isn’t among the top impediments for everyone when it comes to attending a performance. (It may be easier to coordinate car pooling with family/friends to a single event than getting to work every day, for instance.)

Being viewed as welcoming to more people is likely to require putting in the time to collect data and build relationships with the people who can provide an accurate picture of what is most important.

Looks Like Streaming Is Here To Stay A Bit Longer

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I saw on FastCompany that Live Nation is wiring some of their venues for livestreaming and wondered what, if any impact it may have on the way performing arts venues operate in the future.

This is potentially a brilliant business move, because not only will livestreaming repeatedly capture superfans who would happily spend an evening and $120-$600 on tickets, but it will increase access for fans whose towns and budgets do not align with tours. Perhaps more critically, it will reach the many (many) semi-fans who would not tromp through crowds to see Pink, but would totally pay $15-40 to project her onto their living room wall.

Here are some of the things this got me thinking-

Pretty much at every community in which I have worked, people will complain there is too much they want to participate going on at the same time and they wish organizations would coordinate their calendars. (Of course there is often an overlap with the people who say there is nothing to do in the community.) Am I going to be in a position where I not only have to worry about what is going on in immediate area, but also a big event 300 miles away that people who live in a 10 mile radius of my venue are staying home to see?

There is plenty of precedent for this in relation to college sports. I have frequently been advised not to program during home football games of universities 200 miles away, during NCAA finals and similar events. Now granted, I don’t have empirical evidence this is a factor since it is difficult to survey people who chose not to come, but these events are frequently cited as a reason for low attendance.

Another concern is that performers may see less of a need to tour so extensively if they feel live streaming is extending their reach to people who live in the spaces between major markets, but won’t travel that far to see the show. Touring isn’t cheap or easy so it isn’t inconceivable that performers will skip places that may have gone in the past, especially if any sort of formal or informal social distancing conventions persist in the coming years. That decision will rob many communities of the economic impact of those tours.

The negative impact of casinos showrooms on performing arts venues has been widely acknowledged due to their ability to pay performers extremely well and require non-compete clauses over a broad geographic radius. I am not sure that Live Nation venues would require similarly large radii given the appeal of livestream broadcasts are not geographically bound, but performers feeling satisfied they are reaching who they need to reach via livestream may inadvertently have the same effect.

Now granted, this last hypothesis while possible, may not manifest. If there is enough perceived demand in smaller markets, touring groups are likely to make more money with a live performance than they would from streaming it 200 miles away. In fact, the streaming may increase the interest in seeing the liveshow.

As with so many things, its the unanticipated impacts of trends for which one needs to remain alert. Even if you don’t see your operation as being on the same scale as those of Live Nation’s, the ripples may impact you just the same. I can see plenty of positive potential as well as other performers move to fill in the gaps and find themselves thriving.

There Are A Lot Of Arts Jobs Being Advertised. Let’s Pay Attention To Who Is Getting Hired

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Drew McManus tweeted today that he was two resumes submissions away from being able to launch the candidate resume feature on the Arts Admin Jobs site. So if you are looking for a job, or looking to hire, check the site out.

I am going to take this opportunity to raise a question that has been bouncing around my head for a number of months now– what is the state of employment in arts administration?

There has been a lot of conversation about the willingness of audiences to return to arts and cultural venues and events, but where do things stand with staff and creatives?

I am asking because I have been seeing a TON of employment listings just on a passive basis for every level of administration at organizations of various sizes. When I started to actively look at job sites to see where things stood, I was pretty flabbergasted to see how many screens I had to advance through just to review all the openings listed in the previous seven day period and so there were so many more listings after that.

Executive level positions seem to be over represented and there are surprising number at large institutions. It may be that once those jobs are filled there will be a surge in listings for lower level positions.

I am really curious to know what has happened to cause this. Yes, there is an increased sense of optimism which would lead organizations to staff up again, but why aren’t they hiring back laid off staff?

Have those furloughed staff chosen not to return/left the industry? Is there an attempt to take this opportunity to diversify the composition of staff and replace people to contributed to toxic work environments?

Have people on the executive level chosen to retire at this point? Is the financial outlook for the organization such that executive level staff don’t feel they are suited to revitalize it or operate under the constraints that will exist moving forward?

One thing that has become clear over the last year is that companies of all types need to examine how expectations have shifted. If people are used to running organizations that are imbued with a certain sense of grandeur and that is no longer possible financially or prudent if the organization wishes present itself as relevant in the community, these leaders may decide it is best to step aside in favor of another.

I would really love it if folks could share any insight they have about openings in their own organization or local community.

I also think that we should collectively pay attention to who is being hired into these positions.  Take a look at the job boards that serve your particular discipline and make note of the open positions and then in 6-9 months visit the websites of those places or seek out news stories to see who was hired and what ambitions the organization hoped they would achieve.

One Year Later, What Have We Learned About Working From Home?

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Vox Recode provided some interesting insights into factors which will exist as people increasingly work from home. Some of the issues I had already anticipated like a move to a less permanent, more freelance/contract worker environment,  and difficulties that may crop up if your supervisor and you live in different time zones but they expect responses aligned to their 9-5 schedule.

There were some surprises for me like the finding that older workers were more open to telecommuting than younger workers whom I assumed would be more comfortable with a digital existence. But apparently it isn’t degree of comfort with technology that was the defining factor:

Employees over the age of 40 were more likely to say they would prefer to continue working remotely, while employees younger than 40 were more likely to want to return to the office, according to one study of teleworkers done by Bucknell University. Young people felt they were missing out on the mentorship and soft skills they would have received working alongside older colleagues in the office, who can help them advance their careers.

“They are impatient to be successful,” Eddy Ng, a professor at Bucknell University and one of the report’s authors, told Recode. “They now know the value of social capital and the need to interact with others.”

The fact that older workers are likely to have living spaces large enough to accommodate office spaces and that are not intruded upon by roommates and younger children were also mentioned as possibly contributing to this finding.

There was also a racial divide and the theories supporting it bear considering if you are planning to do better on diversity and/or letting people work from home:

Nearly all Black knowledge workers currently working from home, some 97 percent, want a hybrid or fully remote work model, compared with 79 percent of their white counterparts, according to data from Slack’s Future Forum survey. The report posited a number of reasons, including remote work reducing the need for “code switching,” or making oneself and one’s speech fit the norms of a majority white office. Being outside the office also reduced instances of microaggressions and discrimination and improved Black employees’ ability to recover from those incidents. With remote work, Black knowledge workers reported a greater sense of belonging, a greater ability to manage work stress, and greater work-life balance than their white colleagues.

The Vox article suggests that productivity will gradually become less focused on the quantitative measures that have persisted since factory assembly lines and more aligned toward quality of work and interactions. However, they caution that using productivity as a measure of an employees worth, regardless of whether it is based on quantity or quality should not be the bottom line.

One of the things they caution against is a situation arts organizations have been urged to move away from –siloing. If you aren’t going into a shared workspace every day you aren’t interacting with everyone that works for your company, only a core group with whom you need to perform your tasks. As a result, there isn’t the sharing of ideas that lead to innovation; creating of empathy for needs of others, (you’re more likely to make things easier for Carol in accounting if you see how hard she works); or the creation of a general organizational culture.

At the same time, the article says that seeing people in their home environments rather than their office cubicle has helped to humanize them.

You don’t come out of seeing your coworkers — and their living rooms and their babies and their pets — in the middle of a global pandemic without getting a little closer to them. And such closeness makes people happier and better at work.

The pandemic did a good job of humanizing people, not only because we saw more of their interior lives but because we worked with them while going through something immense.

[…]

Indeed, one in six people reported crying with a coworker this year, according to Microsoft’s study, and nearly one in three say they are more likely to be their authentic selves at work than last year. About 40 percent said they were less embarrassed when their home life showed up at work compared to how things used to be. All of these interactions correlate with a better sense of well-being, higher productivity, and more positive perceptions of work, according to the study.

Hopefully that isn’t all just the stress of the pandemic and people will continue to feel a closer connection with each other.

Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program Opens April 8

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If you have been looking at the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program information page as I have suggested, you may have seen it says the applications will open in early April,

However, there is a new button on that page that takes you to the application portal which informs you things are scheduled to kick off on April 8. You can sign up there to get additional notifications.

 

 

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to register for a DUNS number (or research what your number is), register for SAM.GOV, and check out any webinars your state arts council, state small business administration resource or trade/discipline service organization may be offering.

There are FAQs and Checklists on the Small Business Administration webpage, but you are gonna have questions.

SVOG Program Updates Coming Fast Now

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While I am pretty sure people are following the developments of the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program pretty closely and are probably getting regular updates from their state and industry service organizations, I figure it doesn’t hurt to put reminders and updates out there myself.

Especially since all the updates I have been getting from service organizations haven’t pointed out some important distinctions between the FAQs the Small Business Administration is putting out on a weekly basis now. (Likewise, assume I am not pointing out the distinctions that are important to you and read through them!)

For example, about a week or two ago they started posting check lists of materials you should be collecting in advance of the opening of the application period which appears to be on track to happen in early April. The latest version of the check list can be found here, but since they are updating between Thursdays-Sundays, if you are reading this after March 18 you are better off going to the main page.

The same goes with the regular FAQ document. The passage of the American Rescue Plan has caused sections of the FAQ to be removed in the March 12 version.

For example, the March 5 version had this question:

6.Can an entity apply for a PPP loan now and decide later on the loan if it did not receive an SVOG? At what stage is a PPP loan considered “received”?

but it is now replaced with:

6.*No longer relevant / deleted per the American Rescue Plan being signed into law.

Though if you scroll down, you will see a couple new points of information have been added to that section which address PPP loans and SVOG funding:

21.*How will receiving a PPP loan affect an eligible entity’s SVOG award?

22.*If a portion of my PPP loan was forgiven, will that affect how much of the loan amount is deducted from my SVOG?

As before, anything that has been updated since the last FAQ has an asterisk. But you should through everything thoroughly in case you missed an update.

Among the latest updates are answers to questions about whether the payout will be lump sum or multiple payments. Answer – it depends on a number of factors. See page 16

Should you use fiscal year 2019 or calendar year 2019? – You can use either, but if you apply for the supplemental funding phase you need to use the same time frame.

There was also a new entry answering questions about whether sponsorships should be counted as earned revenue since donations are not counted as such. The answer is different for commercial and non-profit performing arts entities:

Because it represents payment made in exchange for a service (i.e., recognition or advertising), sponsorship payments (such as naming rights) received by for-profit entities will be considered earned revenue. Like the treatment afforded memberships and fundraising events, sponsorship payments received by non-profits will be considered part earned revenue and part gross revenue. In such cases, the sponsorship payment amount a non-profit receives that represents a fair market value for services in exchange (i.e. promotion, free admission, use of facilities) will be deemed earned revenue and the portion of the sponsorship payment that exceeds that amount will be deemed a contribution and thus gross revenue…

Well Done Rare Medium

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It is pretty widely acknowledged that people who work for non-profits do so for intangible benefits like a feeling of contributing to the betterment of society and self-actualization rather than rewarding levels of remuneration.

Of all the benefits non-profit workers feel they get from the work they do, compliments are probably not one of them. A story in Harvard Business Review noted that two research efforts found that while people felt that compliments were beneficial and should be given more often, many people refrained from expressing compliments to others.

…we consistently found that people underestimated how good their compliment would make the recipient feel. Compliment-givers tend to believe the other person won’t enjoy their interaction as much as they actually do; in fact, they often believe that their exchange will probably make the person a little uncomfortable. Yet, consistently, receiving a compliment brightens people’s day much more than anticipated, leaving them feeling better, and less uncomfortable, than givers expect.

[…]

In fact, only 50% of people in one experiment who wrote down a compliment for a friend actually sent the compliment along when given the chance, even though they’d already done the hardest part — coming up with something nice and thoughtful to say. That is, despite the widely shared desire to give more compliments, when faced with the decision people still often forgo low-cost opportunities to make others feel appreciated and valued.

Among the concerns people had were that their delivery of the compliment would be awkward and that repeatedly giving compliments on consecutive days would diminish the value of the praise and be perceived as increasingly insincere.

The authors conclude by noting that gratitude and praise is especially important now more than ever and advocate for creating a culture of gratitude:

As Aron Ain, CEO of Ultimate Kronos Group has said, “Gratitude is not about a one-time holiday party, day off, or spot bonus…It is about creating a culture of gratitude.”

(Title of this post is based on a recollection of a clue in a Hardy Boys book from ~40 years ago where the antagonist writes a note congratulating a fortune teller.)

Would You Start Taking Piano Lessons From A 14 Year Old?

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A few weeks ago economist Tyler Cowen discussed how he had taught chess when he was 14-15 years old. His regular clientele were two adults in their 50s and 20s and a child prodigy around 10-11. He said he would have likely had more students if it weren’t for transportation issues.

My first thought was to wonder if anyone, especially and adult, would ever pay a teenager to instruct them in an artistic discipline. I don’t know about acting or visual arts, but by 14-16 there are some pretty skilled dancers and musicians out there.

Yes, I know there are summer camps, etc where teenagers are placed in a position of teaching younger kids, but I was thinking more along the lines of hiring someone in your hometown to provide lessons.

Cowen does admit that his situation was something of an outlier, but only because he felt most teenagers would assume no one would take them up on the offer rather than just offering their services. It also doesn’t appear that Cowen was necessarily exceptionally skilled. He said he stopped teaching when he stopped playing chess and characterizes it as something of a transactional decision. But that might be adult Tyler imposing his economist bias on his memories.

It has long been recognized that teaching your skill to someone else improves the teacher’s understanding of that skill so there is a benefit to teens hanging up a shingle and offering to help people get started.

Looking at some of Tyler’s reflections on his experience, there seem to be applicable parallels to teaching an artistic discipline.

2. Chess teaching isn’t mainly about chess. A chess teacher has to have a certain mystique above all, while at the same time being approachable. Even at 14 this is possible. Your students are hiring you at least as much for your mystique as for the content of your lessons.

3. Not everyone taking chess lessons wanted to be a better chess player. For some, taking the lesson was a substitute for hard work on chess, not a complement to it… Some of the students wanted to show you their chess games, so that someone else would be sharing in their triumphs and tragedies. That is an OK enough way to proceed with a chess lesson, but often the students were more interested in “showing” than in listening and learning and hearing the hard truths about their play.

4. Students are too interested in asking your opinion of particular openings. At lower-tier amateur levels of chess, the opening just doesn’t matter that much, provided you don’t get into an untenable position too quickly. Nonetheless openings are a fun thing to learn about, and discussing openings can give people the illusion of learning something important, if only because you can share opening moves with the top players and thereby affiliate with them.

As I read these, (Cowen offers seven insights in total), it seemed that paying attention to why people took lessons had a lot in common with why people attend performances. Some people want to improve, but others’ goals are to obtain a lesser degree of knowledge, mastery and affiliation with the people and practice of those skill sets.

Gaining an understanding of these motivations from the point of view of a teacher, even if it is in retrospect as an adult, might help artists do a better job of relating with audiences as an adult.  There is a difference between understanding what audiences want having learned it from teachers and mentors who are providing their worldview and reflecting on direct experiences you had before your perceptions were colored by years of formal training.

I think about the tasks I resented having to do and the difficult experiences I had when I was a young kid and a teenager that I would later realize gave me a competitive advantage when interviewing for a job. Now I resent that the foul medicine turned out to actually be good for me.

Is This “Yes, And…” Problem Solving?

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A couple weeks ago I caught Thomas Wolf’s blog post about why Concert Companion, the hand-held device that offered commentary synchronized to the performance content, had failed to gain wide distribution. I really appreciated the information. I have written about Concert Companion’s lack of traction among orchestras but Wolf provides far more detail than I was ever aware of.

Wolf suggested reviving the practice with modern technology and setting it during rehearsals instead of performances.

Rehearsals offer one of the best ways to learn about music. You not only get to hear a work being played, but you can gain insights into how musicians think about a piece as they work on it. However, observing an actual rehearsal, without some help about what is going on, can be downright frustrating if not boring. Musicians talk to one another in ways that are difficult to hear and even if they are miked (which many of them find distracting), they often talk in musical shorthand that a non-musician doesn’t understand.

[…]

Now imagine that you are sitting in a real rehearsal (or watching it on a screen) and a trained musician who is not playing is offering commentary in real time that you can read on a screen. For example:

The musicians just stopped and are discussing whether a repeated passage should have an echo effect the second time it is played. They are going to try it that way. Listen to the effect when they play that thematic material boldly the first time and quietly the second time.

or

The basses and cellos are in unison here and they are trying to make sure they are in tune with one another. That is why they are playing those notes so slowly. Each player is adjusting his or her pitch until they get the intonation just right.

I didn’t think this really would solve some of the problems that Concert Companion faced. One of the things Wolf identified as a problem was that it needed a trained person present to advance the notes in synch with the music and that was an additional expense orchestras couldn’t afford. Wolf’s suggestion of having someone writing live commentary requires someone even more highly trained to provide high quality insight on a moment’s notice AND type quickly enough that the viewers receive the information in a timely manner.

I can tell you from experience that people underestimate the amount of time it takes just to type in supertitles for an opera and then get that to synch up correctly. While the commentary wouldn’t have to synch quite as well, that is still a tall order. It seemed to me there would be a greater cost in time, energy and funding.

I was prepared to write a post about it when Drew McManus beat me to it, and worse, he liked the idea.

It wasn’t until the end of his post that Drew provided the obvious answer. He mentioned that 20 years ago he had been organizing outings to live rehearsals where they would sit far enough from the stage to avoid interrupting things. Today you can put people in the audience with their cellphones and earbuds, set up an audio only Zoom meeting, and have an interactive conversation with one or more guides to learn more about what was going on.

This still requires a trained staff member, or as Drew suggests, a super fan, but would present far less of a scramble to provide content.

The obvious extension of this is that you can do the same thing at a final rehearsal for a live performance of any genre. Live streaming a rehearsal with commentary to even a small group of people watching from home might be problematic until things can be worked out with rights holders. However this could enhance the value of seeing a performance live and expand the core audiences for an organization.

As I wrote this, I recognized I am the third person in a chain adding an idea about how to solve a problem. Is this “yes, and..” problem solving?

What Does It Mean To Have Influence

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I saw an article containing an interview with choreographer Robert Moses that basically opens with Moses saying the conversations occurring regarding equity are addressing the wrong questions.

How to increase equity? “Ask different questions,” is the reply from Moses. Or preferably, don’t ask the same tiresome questions.

“The notion of change is sophomoric,” Moses says. “The idea is to give people honest opportunity to be part of whatever they’re intending to be a part of. The questions get tiresome because they come from the same place. It’s not interesting if it doesn’t have anything to do with what needs to happen.”

Moses poses a question of his own: “Should we have more representation? No, we should have more influence. More actual ability to exercise that influence and power. All those things will be happening for the better of everyone,” he says, heavily emphasizing the “everyone” in his declaration. “It has to be in as many hands as possible… It’s about talk that’s useful. An organization that powers those things is what I care about. The conversations then can take place that move us all. We’re not spinning our wheels and using portions of a cultural experience to affix something to the moment.

I’m not exactly sure I completely understand what he means. Which is good I guess, because if I thought I knew what he meant, I might stop considering the larger implications of the statement.

If influence and power in as many hands as possible isn’t more representation, what is it? It is obvious that representation can be employed superficially, but so too can pursuing talk and conversations that is useful. Often both can feel like progress when they are just the appearance of progress. So isn’t productive work in representation and/or conversation valuable?

The distinguishing element that sticks out to me is the mention of “…using portions of a cultural experience to affix something to the moment.” That seems to reproach focusing on creating standards based on conditions at a specific time versus embracing broader, long term goals. For example, the idea that you are done when the composition of your board reflects the demographics of the community versus the broader goal of seeking to create an environment where power and influence are shared in the broadest terms possible.

Anyone else want to share their thoughts?

It’s A Year Later, Do You Know Where Your Marketing Is?

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Hat tip to Dave Wakeman for tweeting an insightful piece about marketing during Covid — Mine.

I know, self-involved much, Joe?

To be fair, all credit rightfully goes to Colleen Dilenschneider whose piece I was drawing attention to.

Wakeman revisiting an entry I made nearly a year ago provides a good check for the non-profit arts industry. In that original post, Dilenschneider talked about how to effectively shift messaging from “visit now,” to maintaining general awareness, if not cultivating an active engagement dialogue.

Now obviously the truth is more complicated than depicted in Wakeman’s tweet. The economics of digital engagement did not provide a sustainable revenue stream, even for the best resourced arts organizations. There were big loans, grant programs and donor drives. There were layoffs and cutbacks. Capacity to survive is not solely determined by a good social media and digital strategy.

That said, a good social media and digital communication strategy will definitely be a determinant of success when people start to wander back to participate in events and activities.

Now that we are reaching the year anniversary of everything closing, take time to evaluate what you have been doing. What has worked, what needs to be changed, what needs to be started.

Post title is from the iconic PSA series

Lifetime Token Payments As Next Form of Arts Funding?

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There has been an ongoing conversation in the visual arts world about the issue of an artist selling a work for $250, having it sell for $2500 five years later and then $25,000 five years after that due to the hype that has built up around their work, but the artist not benefiting from any of that.  The only thing that was added to the work to make it worth so much more than at the time of creation was a lot of hype and speculative manipulation to make it so.

There have been a number of ideas floated about ways to provide an artist a royalty of some sort every time a work is resold, but that depends on the work beings sold publicly and a lot of good will on the part of the sellers to remit the proper amount to the artist or their estate.

Or at least that is true for physical works of art. The was an article in Art Newspaper that discussed the use of non-fungible tokens (NFT) which accompany digital works as they are traded among different owners. Each time the work changes hands, the artist receives a royalty. Currently this process, including the payment, is all based in cryptocurrency technology—a medium whose value and stability fluctuates to far greater extremes than the art market. A royalty of $50 today could be worth 50 cents tomorrow and $5,000 next month.

There is a somewhat more complete explanation on this site, along with some art based examples (i.e. William Shatner digital collectibles will earn the erstwhile Star Trek captain royalties for years to come.)

While the technology and payment vehicles need further development to make them easier to use on a broader scale, I envisioned something like this being a way for performing artists and organizations to monetize digital content they create in the future.

I suspect the tools to do so will be widely available  and easy to use once big players in the entertainment industry like Disney realize the potential revenue stream available from issuing limited edition releases of content. Unlike the copy blocking encoding that made legitimately purchased recordings and games incompatible with DVD players and computers, companies will want this content passed around a lot if it means they can collect a royalty or create a profile of the people who are using and trading it.

If it works well for digital content, I am sure someone will figure out a corresponding method to apply to physical and live works.

This may put the same tools in the hands of artists and others in the creative industry and shift the dynamics of how we do business and interact with participants/consumers.

More Reminders About Importance of Libraries

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I was reading a story about the earthquake that hit Christchurch, NZ ten years ago today which damaged large parts of the city. According to the article there was a significant effort by the local government which collected more than 100,000 ideas from over 10,000 people about how Christchurch should be rebuilt, but those plans and ideas were discarded by the national government of the time. The basic theme of the article is that much of the development which has occurred in the last 10 years hasn’t revitalized Christchurch.

The one place where local input was included in the plan generated by the national government was Tūranga, a library and community space which looks pretty dang awesome. Not only are there cafes and play areas, but there is a lot of focus on indigenous Maori culture and art as well as a digital wall depicting Christchurch’s features, history and stories. It is easy to see why the facility is well-regarded by residents.

Before I took a deeper look at the library in Christchurch, I was immediately reminded of the State Library of Queensland in Australia which Nina Simon had spoken about in a TED talk about 4 years ago. I summarized her story in a blog post at the time.

…State Library of Queensland which built a gorgeous new white building and then invited aboriginal elders in to help them design an indigenous knowledge center. The elders noted that for them, knowledge wasn’t shared through books, but rather through music, dance and storytelling in a setting that wasn’t so sterile looking, most importantly around a fire. The librarians, true to their intent renovated a space for music, dance and storytelling and infused it with color. And they built a firepit (away from the flammable archives, of course).

Part of the reason I checked out the floor plan of the library in Christchurch is because I wanted to see if they had included anything like a fire pit at their library. It doesn’t appear that there is, but there are plenty of other facilities and equipment for sharing ideas and stories.

By the way, if you want to see pictures of the fire pit area in Queensland, they are on the library’s webpage. Scroll down to “Story Circle” heading. It almost doesn’t look like it is outside, but I found some YouTube videos of events and while it is nicely enclosed there is definitely a lot fresh air flow through the space.

The lesson here may be not to give libraries short shrift in the economizing that may come now or as we emerge from Covid restrictions because they are important community spaces.

One specifically arts related thing I wanted to note was the significant role the article said it played in helping people transition post-earthquake in Christchurch:

If you don’t live in New Zealand and you read about Christchurch in those years, most likely it was about the creative, guerrilla projects that popped up in the immediate aftermath of the quakes. Temporary site activations—Gap Fillers—brought life back to the empty gravel lots with music, performance, art, and community participation. These were almost spontaneous events, a community responding to challenging times however it could. They represented the best of the city, and inspired residents and visitors to believe that the new Christchurch that grew from the rubble of the old could be eclectic, engaging, and exciting.

 

Open Arms With Grasping Fists Not A Welcoming Appearance

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So by now you have probably heard about the ill-advised job posting made by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields which said they were “…seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience.’”

My first thought was, this the type of faux pas that is bound to occur more often because organizations know they need to be more diverse but don’t have someone to advise them on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Or if the company does, the staff member’s advice is either not heeded or the person doesn’t feel empowered to point out how problematic this type of language is.

Even though they were making a mess of it, I viewed it as a sign of progress that people were starting to say the quiet part aloud as it were, and admitting they needed to actively pursue creating a welcoming environment instead of claiming everyone is welcome and they don’t discriminate.

While the museum has revised the job description to omit the word “white,” I don’t think it helped matters that the CEO of the museum was quoted in the NY Times article saying that the use of “white” was “..intended to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as part of its efforts toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion.”

That makes DEI efforts sound like a zero sum game where one group must lose out if another group is to gain something. For years the message has been that arts and culture enriches everyone’s lives so theoretically diversifying programming should offer a broader range of opportunities for enrichment, correct? So why is there an automatic assumption and implication that someone is going to lose?

I think back to the talks Nina Simon has given where she talks about creating new doorways through which people can experience a cultural institution. She does mention that not everything is for everyone. Certainly given the limits of time, space and resources there is a good chance there will be less of some content. But if it was assumed everyone had the capacity to enjoy the content that was previously offered, they are likely equally capable of enjoying new content.

So of course, I should have known Nina would be able to summarize all of this in just a couple tweets.

 

What Do You Perceive As Biggest Impediment to Equity Efforts?

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Advisory Board for the Arts had sent out a survey on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access (DEI&A) efforts that non-profit organizations were undertaking. They released the results in infographic form this week.

Keeping in mind that the respondents were self-selected so there wasn’t a lot of rigor behind the process, the results are still an interesting preliminary view of what organizations perceive is going on with their efforts.

I was particularly interested in the pressures and challenges section where respondents indicated there was a lot of pressure to do more in relation to DEI&A across a number of internal and external constituencies. The biggest perceived source of pressure to do less is among board members and individual donors. Still there wasn’t perceived pressure either way from unions, donors, corporate sponsors, and audience members.

This all makes me yearn for a more complete study of the question. My suspicion is that groups who were already very interested in implementing DEI&A chose to answer the survey and so they were either inclined to view their efforts favorably or their constituencies were aligned toward DEI&A efforts to begin with.

However, it would be great if these results were close to reality because that would mean the impediment to change couldn’t necessarily be blamed on external groups. They are shown as largely indifferent in this area. Even board members who were seen as most in opposition to DEI&A efforts were more likely to be for or indifferent to them rather than against.

In terms of challenges and hurdles, the survey found that developing an authentic, rather than performative, stance and creating meaningful metrics to hold the organizational accountable were among the top concerns people had.

Stuff to ponder so take a look.

The Secret Lives Of Museum Tour Guides

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Long times readers know that when I was living in Ohio I had a close relationship with a local group called the Creative Cult. We did a number of projects together and I participated in the events they sponsored. The local art museum wisely decided to bring one of the cult’s inner circle, Nick, on staff and he has been making some great contributions to the organization.

This week the museum has made a series of Facebook posts under the title “Things Written At The Front Desk,” with some pictures from Nick’s journal/sketchbook and other projects he has worked on while at the desk. Today was the second post in the series and really caught my attention because it featured Nick’s illustrations of a guide to a gallery exhibit.   At first I was excited because I thought perhaps the museum had reopened for socially distanced exhibitions, but the guide was made for a pre-Covid exhibit.

Regardless of when it was made, the concept of walking into a museum and picking up a guide to an exhibition which was hand illustrated by one of the people greeting you struck me as something that would make the whole experience feel more welcoming and accessible.  The pamphlet Nick illustrated reflects his quirky aesthetic, presenting the visitor with Marty, a cartoon figure who will accompany on your journey complete with a map of Marty’s suggested route through the exhibition.

Then things take a strange turn and some of the illustrations reference to Marty’s diary and a beast being hunted down by a classic mob armed with pitchforks and torches. Clearly the whole guide isn’t depicted so we are missing parts of the story, but that makes you want to learn more, right?

Not only that, wouldn’t you be interested in seeing a museum exhibition framed by an information pamphlet that implied your tour guide may have a monstrous alter-ego….or perhaps it was all just a strange dream?

https://www.facebook.com/southern.ohio.museum/posts/5655438514481520

 

Reconnecting After The Highways Get Disconnected

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This week CityLab mentioned that the US Senate was working on funding a program to reclaim areas of communities displaced/demolished/bifurcated by highway projects as those roads are decommissioned.

As Streetsblog reported on Jan. 11, the Economic Justice Act, a spending package worth over $435 billion, includes a $10 billion pilot program that would provide funds for communities to examine transit infrastructure that has divided them along racial and economic lines and potentially alter or remove them. It would also help pay for plans to redevelop reclaimed land. The program contains specific language requiring projects funded through it prioritize equity and avoid displacement. It also provides grants meant to facilitate community engagement and participation as well as construction.

I immediately recognized that there was a sizeable opportunity for arts organizations to be involved, if not lead, the facilitation of community engagement around these efforts. I had written about 500 Plates, a project that literally brought people from every neighborhood in Akron, OH to a long table down the center of the highway in question to discuss what should happen after the highway was permanently closed to traffic.

Of course, I also thought about Springboard for the Arts’ Irrigate program which prepared 600 local artists to go out along the route of a new light-rail line in an attempt to mitigate the negative impact the construction might have on the residents and businesses.

I live in a community where the width of the interstate is expanding, increasing the displacement that occurred in the 1960s & 70s and we are looking into ways to employ creative expression to address the ongoing conversation about blight. So there are opportunities to spark conversation and action on both ends of the spectrum. However, it sounds like there may be actual funding available to conduct conversations about reclamation and repurposing.

What Outcome Had The US Have Sustained Its Version Of The BBC?

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Back in December, Joseph Horowitz had a lengthy piece in The American Scholar about the impact of the pandemic on the arts in America. I may revisit the article in future posts, but there was one section that caught my attention because it seemed a testament to both the influence of a shared cultural ideal and the power of leaders who advance an agenda.

Horowitz writes that while there was resistance to government run media a la the BBC, there seemed to be enough will and interest post-Works Progress Administration to support programming featuring public intellectuals and artists.

A little-known footnote to this 1930s saga of the artist and the state was an unsuccessful campaign to implement an “American BBC,” … An alliance of university and radio leaders argued that a public radio system would ghettoize education. “Controlled radio” was also denounced as a “threat to democracy.” Crucially, David Sarnoff and William Paley, leading NBC and CBS respectively, were visionaries for whom an educational mission incorporating culture was a genuine priority, whatever its commercial liabilities…

Later, when TV entered the picture, CBS initiated Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus specials and Young People’s Concerts, and Sarnoff created an NBC Opera offering innovative productions of opera in English. But Paley retired as president in 1959, Sarnoff in 1970; their successors gradually abandoned the high mission at hand. PBS and NPR, ironically, have offered nothing remotely as ambitious as the arts programming CBS and NBC once championed. If American arts audiences today compare unfavorably with audiences elsewhere, the minimal role of the state—the cumulative absence of an “American BBC”—is far from irrelevant.

I frequently hear people extolling Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts and wonder why no one tries to replicate them since they were so well-received, but Horowitz’s piece recounts how the lack of investment, both in terms of general policy and economics, allowed both opportunity and popular will and interest in these experiences to wane.

Even though the Western canon of arts and literature were lionized to the exclusion of others during this era, a different infrastructure would exist today to amplify a shift telling a broader range of stories had focus and investment been sustained.

Horowitz’s conclusion near the close of the article is that the upheaval cause by the pandemic has provided another set of opportunities to effect enduring change if we are ready to take it.

Heavy Lifting of Leadership Occurs Before Baton Is Raised

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A week ago I cited a couple of posts Seth Godin had made about leadership. I and other readers were taken by his statement that leadership is a voluntary, risky and creative endeavor.

Since then he actually made a post about leadership that is directly related to the arts, using the what the public sees of an orchestra conductor vs. what the time and effort that under girds their appearance as a metaphor for all leadership.

(Just to note, I don’t know his characterization of what conductors do is completely accurate and exclusive to conductors within an organization, but trust the reader will get the overall meaning.)

Godin opens by saying the quality of a conductor is judged in one-two hour increments in which they wave a small stick and don’t make any noise. However, among the things great conductors do are:

Conductors set the agenda.

They amplify the hard work and esprit de corps of some, while working to damp down the skeptics within the organization.
They figure out which voices to focus on, when.
They have less power than it appears, and use their position to lead, not manage.

They transform a lot of ‘me’s’ into one ‘us’.

They stick with it for decades.

It’s a form of leadership that happens in private, but once in a while, we see it on stage.

In the interests of not copying and pasting 3/4 of a blog post, this is only an excerpt of his list. The gaps indicate where some of the omissions fall. Take a look at the full post if you are interested.

Like the posts I quoted last week, Godin’s view of leadership is one of generosity and humility that doesn’t seek the limelight or employ some form of duress to accomplish an objective. Though there also seems to be an implication that recognition is a natural reward for taking on the risk and work of being a leader. I am not sure that is entirely accurate in practice–especially when faced by people who employ or value the opposite characteristics.

Creative Expression As The Basis For Inclusive Democracy

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I came across a TED talk video on the importance of creative industries to national governments not five minutes after I had a conversation with staff on that very topic.

Mehret Mandefro talks about how she contributed to making creative industries a central part of Ethiopia’s plans to provide employment opportunities for the segment of its population experiencing the greatest growth, 15 to 29 year olds.

She notes that typically arts and creativity are seen as nice things to have, but not essential.  She disagrees and feels it is not only important for economic development, but also social identity and political stability. While she hadn’t intended to do so when she moved back to Ethiopia, Mandefro found herself essentially building a training program for creative workers from the ground up. (Demonstrated by the video of this talk.) That lead to her eventually participating in the generation of policy recommendations for creative industries for inclusion in the National Jobs Action Plan.

Now, putting culture on the economic agenda is an incredibly important milestone. But the truth of the matter is, there’s far more at stake than just jobs. Ethiopia is at a critical juncture, not just economically but democratically. It seems like the rest of the world is at a similar make-or-break moment. From my perspective on the ground in Ethiopia, the country can go one of two ways: either down a path of inclusive, democratic participation, or down a more divisive path of ethnic divisions. If we all agree that the good way to go is down the inclusive path, the question becomes: How do we get there?

[…]

…Artists have long found ways to inspire inclusion, tell stories and make music for lasting political impact. The late, great American hero, Congressman John Lewis, understood this when he said, “Without dance, without drama, without photography, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.”

…I think any government that views arts as a nice thing to have as opposed to a must-have is kidding itself. Arts and culture in all of their forms are indispensable for a country’s economic and democratic growth. It’s precisely countries like Ethiopia that can’t afford to ignore the very sector that has the potential to make the greatest civic impact. So just as John Lewis understood that the civil rights movement could not take flight without the arts, without a thriving creative sector that is organized like an industry, Ethiopia’s future, or any other country at its moment of reckoning, cannot take flight. The economic and democratic gains these industries afford make the creative economy essential to development and progress.

TikTok As A New Employee Training Manual?

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Daniel Pink made a tweet today that I immediately bookmarked so I could go back to it.

I hadn’t noticed at the time that this was year-end summary type article that reviewed the best advice entrepreneurs had given in 2020. There are a lot of interesting bits of insights covered here, some of which are more applicable to arts organizations than others.

The “What Would Your Replacement Do?” question referenced in Pink’s tweet was one of those with broad application. It refers to a mental exercise Upstart co-founder Dave Girouard would use to keep himself from getting too complacent:

…what would happen if tomorrow my board got together and fired me,” says Girouard….And if they bring her in and she starts at Upstart — what would she do differently than what I’m doing? I think about that for a while, and then I tell myself, ‘Why the hell aren’t you doing those things?’ It’s just this weird game I play to get myself to recognize that while I’m doing some things okay, I can be lulled into a place of feeling good about myself when I’m probably not doing some other things very well.”

The first bit of advice on the list caught my eye because it was a list of 40 questions to ask on interviews. The list is obviously written for the commercial sector and pretty heavily geared for start-ups there were still quite a number that would easily suit non-profit arts.

Things like: “What’s something that would only happen here but wouldn’t at other organizations?”, “When you’ve done your best work here, what about the culture has enabled you to do that?”, “What would 1:1’s be like with my direct manager? What types of topics would we discuss?”, “What is the title of the most senior underrepresented person at the company?”

“If I asked your investors what they’re worried about, what would they say?” –this one caught my attention because I immediately thought to replace “investors” with “board” which got me thinking about how well the organization might be communicating issues with the board and if the board was paying attention.

An article about Job To Be Done (JTBD) also caught my attention based on the statement: “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.” This is often the case with people and arts and cultural experiences. People value the experiences across multiple dimensions.

Sunita Mohanty, who was interviewed for the article said she often uses the following prompt in relation to product development.

Which she says translates into the following: “Peloton JTBD: When I need an option to workout, but I can’t go to my favorite studio, help me to get a convenient and inspiring indoor workout, so I can feel my best for myself and my family.”

Off the top of my head, the way this might translate for an arts situation might be: “When I am seeking opportunities to spend time connecting with my family and friends, but I have trouble identifying places we feel completely welcomed, help us see ourselves and our stories so we feel acknowledged and valued in the broader community.

There is a lot of really valuable advice about hiring, evaluation, office culture, and diversity and inclusion listed in the article. As tempted as I am to cover them all, I don’t want to make this post super long. Many of the ideas intersect with other posts I have made or other articles that are out there.

But one idea that never came to my attention before was use of asynchronous video tools as a form of communication and new hire training.

In the early days of building Drift, I was using WhatsApp all the time. It was easy to record and send videos quickly. And so I started to communicate to my senior leadership team mostly asynchronously through video and audio messages,” says Cancel. “If we have a problem, we’d make a quick video on what we sucked at, how we fixed it, the results, and what we learned.
[…]
But Cancel has also noticed other benefits. “It allowed me to really think through what I was saying, versus just getting in a room with someone or having a back and forth in text messaging or a phone call,” he says. “It was the sharing aspect that really made it an effective tool for us — all of a sudden we had old videos on different topics that we could share with people who were starting their journey at Drift in their onboarding process…getting everyone focused, and helping folks understand why we were making decisions, giving us an ability to be transparent in a way that we couldn’t before.”

Given that so many people feel comfortable making videos of every little move they make, this struck me as a pretty viable practice in arts organizations and one that might even inform creative works.

You Say Capt. Kirk Was Unqualified? That’s What Made Him A Leader.

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In December Seth Godin made two posts titled Creativity Is An Act of Leadership. The second of the two added (Redux).

I am a little leery of the trend in articles which label leaders as doing constructive things and managers being dedicated to the status quo. It smacks of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Not to mention, there are so many articles with these lists, you would be hard pressed to keep track of what you are supposed to be doing lest to backslide into managerial morass. I prefer to think of the qualities attributed to leaders as things one should aspire to so you don’t get caught in a destructive cycle of self-recrimination if you occasionally want to spend time not reinventing the wheel.

That said, these are some of the things in Godin’s posts I liked. It resonates with work environments at artist organizations, especially as many move toward a more shared governance dynamic. Though there are still plenty of places with structured tiers of authority.

Leadership is voluntary. It’s voluntary to lead and it’s voluntary to follow.

When you have power and authority, it’s tempting to manage instead. Managers get what they got yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Managers use authority to enforce behavior.

But leadership involves acting as if. Leaders paint a picture of the future and encourage us to go there with them.

Which is what anyone who makes change through creative work is doing.

[…]

For too long, we’ve been confused about the true nature of leadership. It’s not about authority at all. It’s the brave work of inventing the future.

The second post is similar, but it focuses more on the theme of how leadership is like creativity in that you are constantly pushing into uncharted territory. The idea of leaders being those who stretch beyond their qualifications is intriguing. At the same time, the sentiment has long been enshrined in the opening narration of Star Trek episodes about going where no one has gone before.

If you feel like an impostor, it might be because you’re comparing yourself to a manager. We want managers and craftspeople to know precisely the steps that are involved in their work, and we want them to do it flawlessly.

Leaders, on the other hand, can never be qualified, because they’ve never done this before.

And creators — creators that don’t have a fancy job or aren’t given the label of “leader” — the same thing is true for them.

You don’t need a permit or a badge or a title to be a creative. You simply need to care enough to do creative work.

[…]

The next time you’re stuck being creative, perhaps it pays to substitute the word ‘leader’. And yes, the next time you’re stuck being a leader, perhaps it makes sense to use the word ‘creator’ instead.

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