Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management
NewsRoom Contact Us

Working In The Arts

Going Corporate

by

Drew McManus came out with a really strong entry in his Shop Talk podcast today. He talks about transitioning from a non-profit arts career to a commercial career with guests Marc van Bree and Ceci Dadisman, who shifted from orchestra/opera to companies which handle e-commerce shipping and real estate, respectively.

Some of what they say is a little hard to hear. Van Bree and Dadisman talk about the lack of investment/mentoring in employee skill and professional development in non-profits and the low tolerance/preoccupation with failure and mistakes. While this can definitely be attributable to lack of resources and the recording could support a plea to funders to allow money to be used in this area, the guests suggest there are fundamental practices non-profits are failing at that no expensive CRM can fix.

While he was reluctant to use the word “regret,” van Bree said he wonders how much further along in his career he would be if he had started in the commercial sector rather than non-profit.

As the conversation moves on the guests, acknowledge that a corporate environment can be extremely toxic and pretty callous, especially when it comes time to “right-sizing” the employee base. Van Bree makes the observation that work culture follows results, not the other way around. Ping-pong tables and free beer won’t yield great results, but great results can create a positive work culture that doesn’t need ping pong tables to feel fulfilling–a situation which is not exclusive to either commercial or non-profit environment.

The conversation turns toward the difference between an entity focused on creating value vs. generating profits. In the commercial world the latter can manifest in a company whose focus is to look so good on paper they get bought out. Things can go to hell quickly if the company isn’t bought out–and can go to hell immediately after the buy out when that impetus is removed.

Near the end Drew asks what his guests felt they brought from the non-profit world that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Both mentioned that having a broad skillset, both theoretical and practical, and vocabulary that allowed them to speak the language of other departments was something that their colleagues who had been on a more narrowly focused track didn’t possess. (Though Van Bree says knowing how to fix everything and being tempted into doing it may have gotten him in trouble a couple times.) Van Bree said that having to interact with so many different non-profit stakeholders from audience to board members provided him with a very broad range of social skills and savvy.

There is a lot of really poignant reflections and observations made so it is worth paying close attention as you watch/listen. Especially if you are a sci-fi/fantasy fan and understand the Star Trek and Lord of the Rings metaphors at the end which are particularly spot on.

One quibble I did have with the guests comments. After Van Bree wonders about his career path had he started in a commercial career, he suggests that had he gone into non-profits in his 60s after a commercial career it would have been an atypical career arc. I actually think it is all too frequent a path and may be the cause of some of the non-profit arts world’s current woes. So many times we see someone appointed to the top executive position of an arts organization having come from health care, energy sector or other corporate environment.

Dadisman and van Bree said they face some skepticism transitioning to commercial jobs about whether they had the capacity to work at that level, but there doesn’t seem to be the same barriers for people going straight to the executive suite of a non-profit without much prior experience in the field.

I am increasingly beginning to believe that may be adversely impacting the artistic missions of many organizations.  While protecting monied interests from being offended has always been a factor, in these times when the importance of equity and inclusion has been brought front and center, I have observed two separate executives violate their most publicly stated core value about equity in the face of very mildly controversial content (i.e. akin to child perceiving parents divorce is their fault when the facts may be otherwise). Even when this lack of consistency has been pointed out, they stick to their decisions and then continue to publicly announce their core value about equity without any sense of irony. I feel like this comes from a very corporate focused cover your ass and keep repeating slogan mentality.

 

Two Shows, Three Trucks

by

I was talking with an agent for some Broadway show tours this week in order to get a sense of what things might look like for productions in Fall 2021/Spring 2022.  I was intrigued to learn that they were considering sending out two shows in repertory.

What that means is the same cast and crew rehearse so they are capable of mounting two different shows. This was once a common practice in theatre, and is still not terribly uncommon, especially among Shakespeare festivals.

I have seen some smaller touring productions offer this option, but never heard of it on the scale of a Broadway touring show. Given that you can do so much with projections these days, they can cut down on built set pieces to allow the tour to go out with the same number of trucks a Broadway tour of a single show would.

I am not sure if this is the right solution, but this is the first group I have spoken with that seems to acknowledged that times have changed and touring productions need to adopt new approaches.

This offers an opportunity to be more responsive when it comes to routing a show. Usually the tour of Show A will have one schedule and tour of Show B will have another schedule. It doesn’t help either me or the production company if Show A is touring near me but I want to see Show B.  The repertory approach means they can send one tour out and perform one show 150 miles away and then another show in my venue.  Since they are only sending one tour out with one set of cast and crew, there is a potential to save money vs. sending the two shows out separately.

If they were particularly well-organized and a venue had the space to shift and store things, they could feasibly do one show one night and the other show the next night and have the labor costs involved in doing so be economical for the venue.

How this might impact the quality of the show and the production values people expect, I don’t know. It is absolutely possible to execute a high quality experience with the investment of enough attention.

I suspect the first year or so of post-Covid touring will be an environment that will see even tours of single productions stumbling to find their footing and how well they handle that will be the biggest factor in the success and quality of their product.

Don’t Deserve Praise For Something Embarrassingly Easily And Long Overdue

by

Yesterday Drew McManus released another episode of his Shop Talk podcast where he speaks to Kenji Bunch and Jenny Bilfield about artistic elitism. I was listening to it while painting one of my bedrooms and there was an uncanny period where Kenji Bunch was echoing my exact thoughts on a four second delay. It came at the 28 minute mark (cued up below) where Bunch talks about how he had programmed his season with 100% Black American composers with a 50/50 gender split. He says he got a lot of praise for it, but he was a little embarrassed because it was ridiculously easy to do and something he felt he should have done long ago. He suggests there are institutionalized pressures against making those type of decisions based on chicken-egg gatekeeping. (e.g. employers are looking for experience, but you can’t get experience without a job.)

At the time, though four seconds earlier, I was reflecting very closely along the same lines about the last six months. At my day job we have been offering a curated storytelling series and outdoor cabaret series that features local stories and voices. Many of them are stories and voices of Black residents. We have been getting praise for amplifying these stories and voices from members of the Black community, including some of our board members.

Like Kenji I have been a little embarrassed because it hasn’t involved much effort to arrange for interesting and charismatic people to step into our spaces. My staff and I know there is more to be done and feel people need to hold our feet to the fire to do it and not let us off too easily.  There may be a time when that comes. Right now people may be in a little bit of shock to see their faces and stories on stage when it isn’t Black History Month and then realize it wasn’t a token effort when it happens again 4-6 weeks later with more of the same listed on the schedule.

I think I have mentioned before on this blog that in some respects the situation with Covid has facilitated some of this. Absent the expectation to provide the same type of programming we have in the past, there is more permission, and even a recognition of the necessity, to focus on local talent and stories.

We had actually been moving in this general direction prior to Covid knowing that the planned construction of a building next to us in 2024 might limit our use of our loading dock and thus larger scale performances. We planned to shift the programming gradually to get audiences used to seeing smaller scaled shows. In some respects that transition might be easier and more acceptable to audiences than it would have without Covid. (And who knows how long construction may be delayed now or if it will happen at all if there is a greater shift to working from home.)

I bring all this up to propose that the near future may be the best opportunity to implement measures to make your organization and programming more inclusive. Not only is the institutional inertia that would normally resist such decisions likely to be weaker, the execution of the effort will likely be easier than you anticipated and warmly welcomed.

What you shouldn’t walk away with is a plan to only effect change up to a certain point as a sop to critics with an expectation of grateful praise. As I said, my team and I pretty much anticipate people will eventually say that was great, why did you stop there, if we don’t continue to think about how we can do better for everyone.

 

Maybe They Could Increase Residency By Offering A Pastry Of The Month Subscripton?

by

A little bit of amplification of my local community today. Next City ran an article on the Mill Hill artist village that is developing in one of Macon’s original neighborhoods, Ft. Hawkins. The project is a partnership between Macon-Bibb Urban Development Authority, Macon Arts Alliance and the Historic Macon Foundation which has developed renovated houses once used by mill workers into artist housing.

They also turned the auditorium building that once served the mill community into an activity space which includes a large industrial kitchen which is being used by a baking collective, but is also available for hourly rental on a more casual basis.

The industrial kitchen was installed as a result of interviews done with the local community when the project had barely been conceived. People had mentioned their mode of creative expression was related to food and that they were running businesses out of their home kitchens.

When the project first began, the people behind what would become Mill Hill worked with the local Roving Listeners group. They went door to door in 2015 for six months, getting stories from people. This included talking with people at Davis Homes, a 184-unit public housing development down the street from Mill Hill.

“We weren’t even talking about a forthcoming project,” Olive says. “It’s pretty common for development projects to go in and say, ‘We’re going to do this planning effort. We’re going to have community meetings. We’re going to do this.’ And it’s all sort of framed around ‘because we’re going to do this project in the future.’ And really, with the Roving Listeners phase, it wasn’t through any lens. It was just knocking on people’s doors.”

They recorded people’s stories and compiled some of them along with photos in a book called “Heard on the East Side,” distributing it to residents. They also referred back to those conversations when creating the Mill Hill master plan, which was completed in 2018.

Currently, there isn’t a lot of occupancy in the artist village. Of the seven houses that have been restored, only one has been purchased by a private individual. One the Arts Alliance owns for use by its artist-in-residence. As those interviewed for the article indicated, there hasn’t been a lot of marketing done to make people aware of the spaces. As a result, they haven’t reached a critical mass of interest.

I will confess to possibly contributing to that. When I was looking to buy a house around this time last year, I was seriously considering some of those houses but the fact listings indicated they had been on the market for over a year raised concerns about how easy it would be to resell a house if I decided to move.

However, one of the great benefits those houses have is that they are located right next to a pedestrian and maintenance gate into the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. It is basically a private entrance into an historic site with miles of walking & biking trails which also hooks up to an expanding community trail.  I used that entrance a number of times when I was living in Macon’s downtown. Even when the historical park is closed, you can pick up the community trail about 1/4 mile away.

I should also mention that the houses are pretty nice with a lot of open space making them well suited for studio use.

While the houses might not be occupied, the former auditorium space gets used a lot for events, classes and meetings of all sorts. The kitchen the bakers used is HUGE and well-equipped. The best events are those which show off the talents of those bakers.

So overall the project definitely has potential for great growth and is something worth watching.

Developing New Skills & Capacities

by

In my post Monday I was wondering what influence Covid might have on dance choreography given the visual range of cameras, etc. Tuesday morning I woke up and saw a link on Artsjournal.com to an NPR interview with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre Artistic Director Robert Battle which partially answered that question.

Battle talks about a lot of the challenges the Ailey company had to navigate while trying to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Alvin Ailey’s  “Revelations”, a signature piece created during the Civil Rights era. Many of the challenges they faced were familiar – testing for the virus, changing the spacing between people, rehearsing in unfamiliar spaces and rendering a performance for an unfamiliar medium.

However, Battle also talks about lessons learned that they hope to leverage to their benefit even after Covid restrictions are lifted. This serves as an important example to all in the arts community because it is generally acknowledged that there is no return to the previous operating environment. As a result, new skills and capacities need to be developed. (my emphasis):

BATTLE: I definitely think so because often, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes, that thing that you, you know, you have to do differently and rethink and reimagine actually sticks around, you know (laughter)? It’s like, I can’t imagine that once we’re back doing live performance that some of the things we’ve learned about filming dance and embracing that as a thing unto itself rather than only a response to not being able to be in the theater, but to go into the art of filming dance – and I think that’s what’s wonderful about what we did with “Revelations.” You know, we did the “Wade In The Water” part outside in the garden. So it gave you that sense of being more authentic. So it just offered us such opportunities.

And so we want to make the filming look as if that’s what it’s meant to be – that it’s not saying, oh, well, unfortunately, we can’t be in the theater, so we’re going to do this. But we want it to look as if that was the intention all the time. And that’s what I think we’re achieving.

Germany Would Like You To Perform With Confidence

by

Big thanks to Rainer Glaap who sent me a link to a news report that Germany has created a $2.5 billion cancellation fund that would allow event organizers to plan shows in the third and fourth quarter of 2021 with some confidence by promising to cover any Covid related losses. They are also working on funding to mitigate against losses due to capacity restrictions.

Scholz said that the federal government would like to reimburse all costs “which were made in optimistic expectation and cannot be realised due to corona restrictions” for events in the second half of 2021. “Otherwise the pandemic will be over at some point, but there will be no concerts. And so the whole machinery with the many self-employed soloists and musicians gets back on its feet,” he added.

Scholz says he is also working on a funding program to support cultural events that are financially impacted by capacity restrictions enforced due to coronavirus, as well as hybrid shows.

Apparently Austria implemented a similar program in October and ended up putting it into practice a short time later:

The protective umbrella was put to use sooner rather than later when Austria went into lockdown on 3 November. The lockdown was lifted today, however leisure facilities and cultural institutions will not be permitted to reopen.

Similarly motivated to stimulate cultural activity, the article reports that Denmark had provided subsidies for organizing socially distanced events in September and October.

The insurance and subsidy approaches both provide interesting models for the Save Our Stages effort in the US. I suspect other countries have arrived at additional plans that would be equally viable and worth exploring.

Who Is Prioritized In Programming Decisions

by

The Atlantic ran an article about how museums are having to deal with questions about equity and representation in their programming that are posed by both external and internal constituencies.

The content of the article is pretty much applicable to every arts and cultural organization, regardless of discipline because the root of the problem seems to be the process by which programming decisions are made.

The collection departments at museums don’t tend to engage with the educational staff—who help interpret exhibitions by organizing lectures and seminars that can enhance public understanding of a display’s importance—until too late. “When I was first in the art-museum world as an educator, we were presented exhibitions after they had been curated and decided upon,” she said. “And then it was our job to figure out how to teach from those exhibitions. How the content mattered, how relevant it was to our community, all those decisions were made outside my office.”

In that sense, context enters the conversation at the end of the decision-making process. And even when educators are involved, they can sometimes focus too much on scholarship—as with the “White Gold” exhibit—trapping museums in a cycle of overemphasizing academics and underemphasizing analysis in a racial and historical context, leading to misguided exhibitions. “What curatorial processes could benefit from are open-ended questions rather than setting out theses to prove,” Bradley said.

This basic scenario has long existed across arts and cultural disciplines. This is part of what people are referencing when they discuss silos in organizations. A programming decision is made by one group and then another group is tasked with marketing it to some segment of the community. What this does is put those who weren’t involved in the decision making in the position of reverse engineering a rationale for the value of the programming and trying to make it stick. A better alternative would be starting from the question of what will be valued by the community and letting the programming decisions emerge from that.

How one goes about discussing the question of what will be valued differs from place to place and organization to organization. Some of the museums mentioned in The Atlantic article received feedback from community partner organizations, others made an intentional decision to involve people without formal arts training so that the process didn’t get bogged down in academic lingo and context.

I Want Your Advice, But Not Your Feedback

by

Via Daniel Pink is a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that suggests asking for advice rather than feedback.  On the surface this may sound like a distinction without a difference, but research has found that asking for advice garners more actionable suggestions than asking for feedback.

Those who were asked to give feedback tended to give vague comments along with general praise, such as, “the applicant seems to meet most of the requirements.” In contrast, those who were asked to provide advice were more critical and actionable in their comments…Specifically, advice-givers suggested 34% more ways to improve the application and 56% more ways to improve in general.

According to Amantha Imber who wrote the HBR piece, an important element of soliciting advice is specificity about what you want to learn.

Ask yourself, “What will really help me get better at [problem]?” For example, instead of asking, “What do you think of my revenue numbers from last quarter?” you could say, “So far, I’ve tried [a] and [b] but I haven’t been able to meet my goal. How would you have gone about doing this?”

[…]

If you ask people to think about what could help you in the future, the advice you will receive will be more specific and actionable. For example, you could make the ask specific, such as, “What could I change about my presentation skills to deliver a more powerful presentation next time?” or “Could you give me a few tips to make my slides more appealing?”

I feel I should mention that this approach for getting actionable suggestions is not a completely new idea in the arts world. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process which has been employed for about 20-30 years now involves creators asking for reactions about specific elements pretty much as outlined in the HBR article. Except in Lerman’s process there are more specific guidelines about the way respondents phrase their statements in order to keep the process focused.

Wasn’t Looking For Substantive Discussion of Workplace Equity On An Orchestra Podcast, But There It Was

by

I may owe some apologies to Drew McManus because I would have never expected that a podcast about the classical music industry would provide one of the best discussions about the complexities of workplace equity that I have heard. (And I have heard a lot, even in the last 10 days.)

The most recent episode of Shop Talk features a conversation with Ruby Lopez Harper, Americans for the Arts Senior Director of Local Arts Advancement; and Dr. Brea M. Heidelberg, Associate Professor & the Director of the Entertainment & Arts Management program at Drexel University.

The fact both guests had an established rapport from having previously worked together allowed them to move quickly to a substantive discussion of workplace equity efforts. For the most part, Drew just stood back and let them delve into the subject.

Even before they brought it up, I was already thinking about what the future might hold when workplace equity programs are no longer the hot priority for funders. It occurred to me that the test-focused values of our education system is reflected in many other aspects of our lives. (Likely the education system is also a reflection of broader values.)

Just as knowledge is only valued until a test approves of our apparent mastery, there is a feeling that once you have taken the equity seminar and received the certificate, the problematic elements have been eliminated and you are now an approved good person.

So it would make sense that there might be a similar transactional approach to funding: Once X amount of dollars has been spent on the problem and Y positive outcomes have been reported, (and as we know, every funded program comes off exactly as planned, at least in final reports), then the bulk of the important work as been done and the funder can move on.

It also occurred to me that the mindset of orchestra musicians, though not necessarily the boards and administration that run the organizations, might be among the best suited for work place equity efforts. Musicians know that the attainment of knowledge and ability is not complete when a passing grade is received but rather it is a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement — much as the pursuit of equity.

Kudos to Drew for pulling this off. This is not an easy topic to get honest, quality discourse on. Take a listen.

As Drew writes,

…it’s more frank than candid and I mean that in the best possible way. Even if you don’t think you’re the sort of person who “needs” to hear this, you do. If you’re white, you’ll probably feel uncomfortable, but again, only in the best possible way. Don’t miss the section on #TraumaEntrapment around the 40min mark.

Always Pondering The Line Between Constructive Persistence And Futility

by

Seth Godin made a post on his Medium site last week about persistence. Whenever I see posts praising persistence I always start to philosophize about how one knows the line between constructive persistence and continuing to do something based on sunk cost fallacy thinking–the idea that you have invested so much into doing something you can’t stop now.

In particular, he writes about how 20 years ago he committed to writing one blog post everyday as part of his practice. He admits that doesn’t mean every post will be great, but suggests that the practice has helped make him a better writer.

Certainly this is the type of commitment artists make to their craft. While you might immediately think of classical musicians when I mention this, I know one visual artist that painted every day during his honeymoon (and is still married some 45ish years later); another who sketches at every opportunity, even when he is talking to you; and of course many writers and diarists who have a daily discipline.

But I also know some people who cut back on blogging everyday with a goal of only writing when they had a quality thoughts to share. In my opinion, they achieved that goal. There is definitely a difference between the goal of only expressing valuable ideas and the goal of becoming a better writer, but simply writing every day won’t help you obtain that goal.  I have talked about deliberate practice in earlier posts.

Godin opens his post pretty much directly addressing performers, though it is certainly a metaphor for broader practice.

We’re not entitled to an audience, to applause or to make a living. The work we most want to do, the thing that pushes us to be show up — it might not resonate with the audience we bring it to.

There’s no guarantee, none at all.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show up. The lack of a guarantee is precisely why the work is worth doing, because it’s the guarantee that we’ve been brainwashed to require, and without it, few people have the guts enough to show up anyway.

I don’t know that he provides any insight into  where persistent labor veers into futility, but the last line does provide one criterion for knowing your efforts are meaningful:

Outcomes are important. Figuring out how to serve our audience is essential. But the outcome isn’t the practice, the practice leads us to the outcome.

Find work worth doing, and begin there.

After you begin, persist with the urgency of generosity. Which is the best kind of urgency.

Verdi At Bat

by

Maybe we should be keeping an eye on Tulsa Opera. Back in August I wrote about a film that was screened in my venue about Tulsa Opera’s casting a transgender person as Don Giovanni. A couple weeks ago, I saw link to an interview with Tulsa Opera Artistic Director Tobias Picker about a production of Rigoletto they staged in October on a baseball field so that they could have socially distanced performances.

The Tulsa Drillers minor league team offered the use of their field to the opera. Looking at the pictures attached to a review of the production, it looks like the opera embraced the opportunity fully. Performers strode out on to the field wielding baseball bats, toting beers and wearing jerseys proclaiming their membership in “The Dukes” baseball team.  The conductor wore a Maestro jersey.

The English translation appeared on the screen of the jumbotron and apparently the program consisted of “packs of trading cards that included photos of the cast, along with their operatic “stats” (character descriptions and past roles).” The Tulsa Driller’s announcer served as narrator.

I found a couple short Facebook videos of the production so you could see it in action, but there are also quite a few photos attached to the review.

It looks like Tulsa Opera only had one performance, but they managed to get an audience of 1800 people. (There are indications they had some preview performances so attendees at those performances might be part of their total production attendance.) The show was cut to a 90 minute performance and was followed by a fireworks display.

You have to applaud their creativity and efforts to find a way to mount a socially distanced production. I haven’t come across any definitive numbers indicating whether they attracted people who don’t normally attend opera.  I have to wonder if they found it rewarding enough to try something similar in the future.

It’s More Than Just Naming A Minster of Culture And Other Measures To Help Creative Industries

by

To continue where I left off from yesterday’s post about the UNESCO document, Culture in crisis: Policy guide for a resilient creative sector, the next section addresses providing support for cultural and creative industries in the wake of the Covid epidemic. Whereas the policies covered in yesterday’s post were more targeted toward helping individual artists and organizations, this section is more focused on broader sectors. This part of the document has seven separate sections, but I don’t intend to take screenshots of them all.  Some of the proposals aren’t as relevant to non-profit arts organizations so I will summarize rather than going into detail.

The measures proposed in this section include: Accelerated payment of aid and subsidies; Temporary relief from regulatory obligations; compensation for business interruption losses; relief from taxes and social charges; stimulating demand; preferential loans; strengthening infrastructure and facilities.

Since I am writing from the bias of a U.S. based non-profit, some of these measures aren’t as significant as others.  Accelerated payment of aid is basically the suggestion to pay disbursements on grants already in place rather than waiting for final reports or the completion of services in order to allow organizations to remain liquid and finish all that stuff.

Relief from regulatory obligations as described in the document are focused on broadcast networks. I am not sure there are a lot of regulations in the U.S. that are inhibiting organizations from staying liquid and aren’t important for protecting workers and participants (i.e. those that deal with employment, health and safety, supervision of children in camps).

Similarly, relief from taxes doesn’t impact a lot of non-profit arts organizations. In some locations where the organization is making a voluntary payment to local government to support infrastructure, some discussion about payment is probably worthwhile. For those organizations that pay local/state sales tax, getting that removed in a time when tax receipts are way down is probably an extremely difficult conversation.

The preferential loans section is a valuable proposal, but the content of that section can be summarized as: The loans should be made, but the banking sector has insufficient understanding of the variations in creative organizations necessary to evaluate them for creditworthiness for loans so the banks need to be trained first.

Compensation for business interruption loss of course is a big issue, especially in terms of insurance paying claims. This section definitely is definitely worth reading since it is so relevant and balances the concerns of both government and industry.

Stimulating demand is a really interesting section and something folks in the U.S would love to see the government embrace. Look at that first line “The State is sending a clear message that the art and culture are essential services to which all citizens must have access.”

I appreciated the fact they noted change and results wouldn’t happen immediately and counseled a long term view.

I also think the observation that ministries of culture (or the NEA in the case of the US) does not have the expertise to stimulate demand is valuable to note. This is something extremely important to acknowledge when it comes to discussions about elevating arts & culture to Cabinet level position in the U.S. government. It isn’t enough to have someone in the position, the overall policy and practice of the government must be aligned toward cultivating both supply and demand. Even if the culture secretary/minister portfolio doesn’t have the ability to stimulate demand, government policy should be that those that do work hand-in-hand with the culture secretary/minister toward that end.

I debated whether to take a screenshot of the Infrastructure section because it states the well-known and easily summarized “Edifice Complex” truism. People like to fund impressive looking structures, but don’t want to fund the programs or people or programs that will inhabit the structures. However, I feel like we can all use the vindication:

Saving Culture and Creativity Without Compromising Their Best Interests

by

Very big THANK YOU to friend of the blog Rainer Glaap who sent me a link to an UNESCO document, Culture in crisis: Policy guide for a resilient creative sector. At this point I think I am going to approach this document over the course of multiple entries because there is so much I see to talk about. At 56 pages, it probably isn’t comprehensive but the suggestions it makes are well-considered.

UNESCO proposes three different areas in which governments can take action to support the culture and creative industries in light of the impact Covid has had upon them: 1 – Direct Support for Artists and Cultural Professional; 2- Support for Sectors of the Cultural and Creative Industries; and 3- Strengthening the competitiveness of the cultural and creative industries.

They have a number of proposed measures within each area. Today I am going to focus on the Direct Support area which had four suggested course of action areas: Social Benefits, Commissioning and purchase of works, Compensation for loss of Income and Skills Development.

I am going to provide screenshots of the content because I think they do such a good job presenting it. In each section they describe the measure, explain why it should be chosen, things to consider, pitfalls to avoid and then examples of good programs in different countries with different budget resources.

I appreciate the international perspective for the wide range of ideas of how to approach Covid related challenges, but also because it acknowledges not every country has the resources of a large industrialized nation, but can take effective measures to cultivate and preserve creative and cultural resources and practitioners.

What I really loved was Actions to Consider and Pitfalls to Avoid sections of each area because they anticipate things like support being perceived as hand outs or make work schemes as well as the problems with employing institutional standards to individual practice.

This is the one for the Social Benefit measure

Here is the one for commissioning work.  Take note about the concern for maintaining intellectual property rights, valuing the work properly, supporting artists but guarding against institutional seizure of power.

Here is the one for compensation of lost income. Note the concern for proper remuneration for female artists.

Finally, the skills development measure which is focused on experimenting so creatives are ready for the next normal.  Note that among the concerns is that this not be viewed as a stopgap until things revert back to “normal” as well as that the skills developed be put into practice quickly.

As I mentioned, there are also explanations of each category and examples of good international practices which I didn’t screenshot for this post so definitely check out the document to learn more.

Networks and Resources Have Always Mattered

by

I recently came across an article the LA Review of Books on the book The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz.

Obviously, this sounded like a book I wanted to learn more about.

According to the reviewer, Robert Diab, Deresiewicz feels that the promise of the Long Tail espoused by Chris Anderson hasn’t emerged. He suggests that the broad ability to create has resulted a “..pie has been “pulverized into a million tiny crumbs.” The only people Deresiewicz feels have consistently benefited are big tech companies who have an interest in having people create content and then allowing other people to pirate that content.

This runs contrary to the early optimism of figures like former Wired editor Chris Anderson, who saw a bright future for less popular artists….Rather than a graph showing a sharp curve with most sales going to the top 100 or so artists, the net would lead to a graph with sales dispersed more gradually over millions of artists — leading to a long tail. But as Deresiewicz makes clear, this hasn’t happened. The net didn’t feed a long tail of content consumption; it just made the head of the curve a lot taller. In the 1980s, 80 percent of music album revenue went to the top 20 percent of content. Now it goes to the top one percent.

Deresiewicz conducted interviews with about 120 artists and found this to be the case across most disciplines. A lot of people were making very little. Others were doing moderately well, but weren’t able to really rise above a certain income cap. He also feels that artists are more vulnerable to market forces and less able to take the time to cultivate their ability. Unless Diab is misrepresenting Deresiewicz, I found myself disagreeing with some of his assumptions and conclusions.

According to Deresiewicz, the history of artists has moved from an apprentice to master system supported by patronage to the artist as a solitary genius and then to the post World War II model where “institutions — museums, theaters, orchestras, and universities — gave the creator a safe and steady perch.”

Deresiewicz feels that the concept of the artist as an entrepreneur responsible for managing all details for themselves has emerged in tandem with shift to institutions depending on temporary workers, adjunct instructors, general downsizing, and has not been beneficial.

But conditions today favor the amateur. They favor “speed, brevity, and repetition; novelty but also recognizability.” Artists no longer have the time nor the space to “cultivate an inner stillness or focus”; no time for the “slow build.” Creators need to cater to the market’s demand for constant and immediate engagement, for “flexibility, versatility, and extroversion.” As a result, “irony, complexity, and subtlety are out; the game is won by the brief, the bright, the loud, and the easily grasped.”

[…]

Deresiewicz shies away from putting it starkly, but the lesson is clear: a career on the older professional model — a gradual build to a moderate critical success — is only viable at this point for those who can support themselves for the long haul.

Again noting I have not read the book, the quibble I had with Deresiewicz is that throughout the range of history he mentions, it has always been the case that only those with either an independent source of wealth or family/friends network of support has been able to have an artistic career. You needed that to gain an apprenticeship during Da Vinci’s time and an internship any time in the last 25 years or more. Now granted, a much larger proportion of the population was supporting themselves as artisans during Da Vinci’s time than now, but the folks at the top of the social structure were also making  money from the work of those at the bottom.

I don’t doubt his statistics about 80% of revenue today going to 1% of content and the belief that an artistic career is becoming more tenuous and less remunerative. I just don’t know that what is required to carve out freedom to mature in ones artistic practice has worsened precipitously overall. It has always been weighted against those without access to connections and comparable resources.

Don’t Feel Obligated To Sink More Into Bad Choices

by

I am not saying anything new when I note that there are a lot of arts organizations which are incapable of taking much action due to Covid related legal restrictions or lack of resources. My assumption has been that those who are able to make plans or take action are exploring opportunities that require relatively low investment of time and resources — basically taking advantage of any option that allows them to stay nimble and muster the most leverage.

Much to my surprise, as few resources and time people have at their disposal, I have already started to witness people engaging in behavior reflective of  the sunk cost fallacy. This is the practice of feeling you have to continue down a path you recognize as a bad choice based on the fact you committed so much effort to this point. The Wikipedia article I linked to has some good examples – staying in a bad relationship because you have invested so much time and emotional energy in it, getting a membership to an expensive gym in order to force yourself to exercise, continuing a war because otherwise the sacrifice of lives would have been in vain.

One particular example given is applicable to the arts if you substitute a performance/visual arts experience in for deciding whether to stay or leave a ball game you aren’t enjoying:

The economist will suggest that, since the second option involves suffering in only one way (wasted money), while the first involves suffering in two (wasted money plus wasted time), option two is preferable. In either case, the ticket-buyer has paid the price of the ticket so that part of the decision should no longer affect the future. If the ticket-buyer regrets buying the ticket, the current decision should be based on whether they want to see the game at all, regardless of the price, just as if they were to go to a free baseball game.

Many people, however, would feel obliged to stay for the rest of the game despite not really wanting to, perhaps because they feel that doing otherwise would be wasting the money they spent on the ticket. They may feel they have passed the point of no return. Economists regard this behaviour as irrational. It is inefficient because it misallocates resources by taking irrelevant information into account.

One particular recent example I had in mind when writing this post resulted from sharing our research on livestreaming options and equipment after a successful execution with colleagues. What we had found was inexpensive and simple to use, especially in light of the fact that the cameras would communicate well with each other which made switching between camera angles very simple.

Despite our colleagues admitting that this sounded like a simpler option than the one they were working on which required more expensive and complicated equipment and software, they turned down our offer to lend them the equipment because they had put so much effort into researching their option. (I am pretty sure they hadn’t purchased everything they needed at that point.)

It should be acknowledge, there is probably no one out there that doesn’t make irrational decisions which are not in their best interest. I would bet Dan Ariely who studies irrational behavior for a living has succumbed a number of times. It isn’t terribly surprising given the times we live in that we make poor decisions based on gut or emotion, but all the more reason to pay very close attention to what is motivating your actions because there is so little margin for error.

The Past May Hold Answers, But They Are Imperfect

by

I came across an interesting contrast in perspective about solutions for a post-Covid world last week. In American Theatre, Jim Warren, the founding artistic director of the American Shakespeare Center proposed a model for theatre to ensure long-term, consistent employment for artists by returning to the rotating repertory model and having artists fulfill administrative roles.

For those that are not familiar with the rotating repertory model, it is a practice where the same core group of performers appear in every production in a season instead of contracting a separate slate of performers for each production.   So if you have a core group of 18 performers, 10 of them may be in the production currently appearing on stage while 8 of them are rehearsing the next production and there may be an overlap of 4 – 5 working on both productions, though with less demands on their time and energy in one of those productions.

Warren also suggests artists take on administrative roles:

Perhaps we need to return to structures similar to what we had at the birth of many theatre companies, when actors split the duties of marketing, fundraising, education, bookkeeping, making websites, and every other job that needed doing. Perhaps we could hire actors full-time to create the shows, use their individual superpowers in other areas, and then hire part-timers to handle the overflow of admin work when we need more help.

The end goal is to provide everyone with a 40 hour work week, health coverage, paid vacation and sick time.

These are not insignificant goals. As Drew McManus has been writing about over at Adaptistration, the current trend in the orchestra world is to dissolve contracts with musicians and try to run the organization solely using fee for service arrangements where musicians are only paid when they perform. (While maintaining their skills and expensive instruments at a high standard while waiting to be called.)

However, there were some people who took umbrage with Warren’s proposal, particularly with the idea that current administrators must go and that most actors are equally adept at administration as performance.

Others challenged the assumption that pre-Covid many arts entities had the resources to provide their administrators with a 40 hour work week, health coverage, paid vacation and sick time.

Warren admits that he had been striving to create these working conditions for years prior to Covid and many of his solutions at the time were imperfect so there was certainly an implication that there was still a lot of work to be done on these ideas.

I don’t think anyone is necessarily debating that the goals he sets are not worthy, but given that no one was satisfied with the status quo in the decades prior to Covid, a solution is going to require casting gazes further and broader than before. I was initially tempted to say the solution would require multiples of effort beyond what had been invested before, but I think it is really more a matter of the will to blaze new paths into the unknown than mustering additional strength to lift or surmount obstacles.

One Creativity To Guide Them All!

by

H/t Artsjournal.com which linked to an article on recent study which found artistic creativity and scientific creativity emerge from a similar source. (my emphasis)

“The big change for education systems would be moving away from a rather fragmented and haphazard approach to teaching creativity, to a much more holistic and integrated approach,” Prof Cropley says.

[…]

“Until this research, we didn’t know whether creativity in STEM was the same as creativity in anything, or if there was something unique about creativity in STEM. If creativity was different in STEM – that is, it involved special attitudes or abilities – then we’d need to teach STEM students differently to develop their creativity.

“As it turns out, creativity is general in nature – it is essentially a multi-faceted competency that involves similar attitudes, disposition, skills and knowledge, all transferrable from one situation to another.

“So, whether you’re in art, maths or engineering, you’ll share an openness to new ideas, divergent thinking, and a sense of flexibility.

Reading the text of the study, the researchers note that there is more exploration necessary in this area. For one thing, the study didn’t look at the role of age and gender in creativity. They also encourage deeper exploration of micro-domains of different fields:

Future studies therefore should investigate more explicitly possible differences between domains and micro-domains driven by specific environmental or contextual factors unique to those areas of activity. In simple terms, do engineers, for example, learn to think like engineers, in contrast to scientists or mathematicians? Does this then influence how these domains see creativity in products?

The last paragraph of the study summarizes the holistic and integrated approach the education system should employ as well as providing a little insight into how different fields value creativity:

People who are open, flexible and adept at thinking divergently are best placed to be creative, and education systems at all levels should foster those qualities. Conversely, while all areas of endeavor recognize creativity in outcomes (products) as inseparable from originality and relevance/effectiveness, there are discipline specific differences in exactly how these qualities are valued. It is no surprise that engineers have a more functional (see Cropley & Cropley, 2005) view of product creativity – valuing effectiveness and feasibility in particular – whereas artists place greater emphasis on originality. Creativity in people is broadly domain general, but creativity in products is shaped by the needs, standards and cultures of the disciplines that produce those creative outcomes.

We Are Gonna Need A Slower Elevator

by

There has been an ongoing conversation among the arts community that there needs to be less effort invested in selling people on an arts experience and more listening to people to find out what they are looking for.

Seth Godin made a post earlier this month that encompassed that when he suggested substituting the elevator pitch with the elevator question.

The alternative is the elevator question, not the elevator pitch. To begin a conversation–not about you, but about the person you’re hoping to connect with. If you know who they are and what they want, it’s a lot more likely you can figure out if they’re a good fit for who you are and what you want. And you can take the opportunity to help them find what they need, especially if it’s not from you.

[…]

Instead of looking at everyone as someone who could fund you or buy from you or hire you, it might help to imagine that almost no one can do those things, but there are plenty of people you might be able to help in some other way, even if it’s only to respect them enough to not make a pitch.

The truth is, unless you are in the presence of a very narrow demographic, chances are that few people you meet can fund or buy from you. Since we know that the narrow demographic most inclined to buy from us is not sufficient to support our work long term, you do need to talk to a lot of people whose general inclination toward the arts and your organization is less known. Therefore the elevator question is going to be better alternative.

Of course, the elevator part is a misnomer for this concept because there is likely no way the conversation will effectively be completed on an elevator trip between floors. It may be months or years.

Just because you aren’t practicing to deliver a frantically paced pitch between floors doesn’t mean you should neglect to provide a focused introduction of yourself and the work you and your organization does. There is so much more you can talk about if you aren’t trying to milk a sale out of precious seconds, but people will appreciate an organized, interesting self-introduction as much as they appreciate not feeling hustled to buy into something.

For Whom Are People Creating Art?

by

In September, the National Endowment for the Arts released the results of an Arts Participation survey, Why We Engage: Attending, Creating and Performing Art.

Much of the information about why people attend was very similar to other recent survey results I have written about in the last 3-6 months. To be honest, given that all the data was collected pre-Covid and so much of that may no longer be valid in the future, I didn’t want to devote a lot of time reviewing that information.

What caught my eye were some findings about how people view their own creative expression.

Like this bit about the intended audience for created art and how it was shared. I was surprised so few performing artists share their work on the internet compared to other artists.

Between 35 and 40 percent of art creators and performers said their art was intended only for personal consumption. (The percentage was highest for creative writers at nearly 40 percent.) Greater variance was observed among those who reported their intended audience as only people they personally knew: 52 percent of art creators identified this audience type, with only 32 percent of creative writers doing so. The highest percentage of respondents creating or performing for the general public were creative writers (29 percent), followed by arts performers (18 percent), and visual art creators (13 percent).

Nearly half of those who personally created art used the internet to share their work. In contrast, about 41 percent of those who engaged in creative writing used the internet to share their writing, and fewer than 14 percent of those who personally performed art shared their work in this manner.

The findings on price and income are interesting and complex. Income quartile was not predictive of whether people would say price factored in their decision to attend an event. In other words, income level didn’t necessarily align with whether they said price was a factor. However, of those identifying low cost as a motivation, it was almost the only reason they attended.

The percentage of each income group reporting that low cost motivated their attendance ranged from 30 to 39 percent, with those in the lowest-income quartile citing it the most often as a factor, and those in highest-income quartile citing it the least often. However, unlike in 2012, income quartile was not a significant predictor of whether an individual would identify low cost as a reason for attendance. Of those who identified low cost as a reason for attendance, between 68 and 71 percent of each income quartile group indicated the factor as the most important or only reason for their attendance.

Socialization was a big factor in generational terms. The younger the generation, the more frequently the respondent would say not having someone to accompany them was a barrier to participation. While Covid may change a lot about people’s willingness to venture out for in-person experiences, I suspect this is one finding of the survey that will hold true for those that are willing to attend in-person in the future.

Inspired By A Fiction Of Your Creation

by

In the closing plenary of the Arts Midwest/Western Arts Alliance conference, Arts Midwest CEO Torrie Allen spoke to Theaster Gates about a number of topics. What caught my attention was Gates’ fabrication of the Yamaguchi Institute.  You may have heard this story already. Gates claimed that his ceramics mentor was a Japanese immigrant, Shoji Yamaguchi, that moved to Mississippi in search of a fabled “black clay” with which to make his pottery. Yamguchi marries a black civil rights activist and begins teaching black people how to make pottery in the Japanese tradition..

The whole thing was a fiction created by Gates but bolstered by Gates hiring an actor to play Yamaguchi’s son during a showing of Yamaguchi/Gates work. Gates admitted the truth of things some years ago, but in his discussion with Allen a couple weeks ago, added some nuance.

Gates in fact had traveled to Japan and studied how the Japanese made their ceramics. He says people in Japan felt he was a hard worker, but was pretty bad at making pottery. Finally one of the masters notes Gates is trying so hard to make a Japanese tea bowl and failing, perhaps he should try making a Mississippi tea bowl. Gates said that made him recognize that “maybe there is something worth mining in my own history.”

Yamaguchi was Gates attempt to create a context that connects his cultural roots with that of the Japanese craft. He says that he created a Yamaguchi as “a way of…creating an imaginary and psychic value for the history of where my people are from.”  Gates said in the process of making up Yamguchi and the discipline he embodied, he decided to adhere to the Yamaguchi way and his pottery improved. “I actually became a better potter because Yamaguchi showed me the way.”

Gates says this type of myth making helps to create hope when it feels like so many forces are moving against you. He also said inventing Yamaguchi filled a vacuum of leadership in his life.

Gates also talks about how the Yamaguchi Institute hosted dinners where people from the community could have conversations and exchange ideas to create relationships across economic and racial lines. It sounds like there was a good chance it was a predecessor of the On The Table movement that originated in Chicago and spread across the nation to other communities.

This is a really fascinating story because essentially Gates created a fiction through which to focus his own self-discipline and provide himself with hope and guidance.

Dance Cyberman, Dance

by

There was a minor uproar recently in the UK over an ad campaign featuring a picture of a ballerina with text suggesting that her next job could be cyber. The implication a lot of people saw in this was that the arts aren’t a viable career path.

And I recall there was a similar ad campaign in the US in the last 4-5 years, but I can’t remember what it was. If anyone recalls, please refresh our memories. I remember President Obama made an ill-advised comment, but I feel like there was an ad as well.

The UK government decided to scrap the ad campaign after criticism from many quarters.

Charlotte Bence, from the Equity trade union, said: “Fatima doesn’t need to retrain – what Fatima needs is adequate state support as a freelance artist, support that so far she has been lacking. Freelance workers deserve better than patronising adverts telling them to go and work elsewhere.”

Earlier the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, denied encouraging workers in the struggling arts industry to retrain. He insisted he was talking generally about the need for some workers to “adapt”, and suggested there would be “fresh and new opportunities” available for people who could not do their old jobs.

According to Arts Council England, the arts and culture industry contributes more than £10bn a year to the UK economy.

The government’s messaging aimed at those working in the arts sector has been heavily criticised in recent weeks. After Sunak’s winter economy plan was released with a focus on “viable” jobs, many in the arts expressed anger at the government appearing to suggest their roles were “luxurious hobbies” that could be given up for other work.

There was a parody of the government ad that came across my Twitter feed today that perfectly reversed the original piece. It featured a Cyberman, a villain from the Dr. Who series. Instead of a dancer getting work in cyber, a cyber’s next job will be in dance.

While, that raises the spectre of robots replacing dancers, if you have ever seen a cyberman move you wouldn’t be terribly concerned at this juncture.

What I Opposed In Good Times I Praise You For In Bad

by

Recently I have been talking about how Covid times have brought a greater tolerance on the part of boards/audiences for experimentation with programming choices. I guess I have been talking about it with colleagues and co-workers because when I went to find my post I made so I could link to it, I couldn’t find it.

In any case, Drew McManus posted another episode of his Shop Talk podcast today where he talks with Jeff Vom Saal, Executive Director of Spokane Symphony & Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox and Zak Vassar, President & CEO of the Toledo Alliance for the Performing Arts.

At around the 16 min mark, Drew talks about the difference between creativity and innovation and notes there really hasn’t been a lot of the latter in the orchestra world and in fact many great administrators have been punished by boards and donors for pushing boundaries and taking risks. He says now arts organizations are paying the price for failing to become nimble enough to respond to the current challenges.

Vassar responds by talking about a trustee that recently pulled him aside and said:

“You’re trying to do something that in a good economy I would have voted down everyday of the week. But now is the time to experiment and to be nimble and to learn what we didn’t know and learn how to do it better. Because by the time the economy and the world comes back online, you’re gonna be at least one hare’s run faster on the track than the slowest tortoise…”

Let’s just ponder that for a second. I am not saying organizational staff don’t buy into this sort of thinking as well, but just imagine having a board member tell you that they would have fought you tooth and nail in better economic times, but now that you are really wondering about how you are going to meet payroll, have no audience willing to show up, slimmer fundraising prospect and almost no staff to pursue donations and grants, this is the best time to invest non-existent time, energy and resources into innovating?

I understand that when you feel you have nothing left to lose and find your perceived competitors on a level playing field (or teetering at the edge of the field) it seems like seeking new pathways is the best course of action.

Why were the decisions we are making now problematic when the economy was better and there was more ability to mitigate the impact of failure?

Perhaps the first thing in need of change the organizational dynamics that won’t tolerate change until complete failure is imminent.

We have seen the results of this type of thinking for decades – people rally around an organization at the moment its existence is imperiled. Those cases are isolated and individual. Now everyone is imperiled and we realize there is a need for a broad, communal rally–probably necessitating listening more to the other people at the rally.

Or more aptly in the terms of this metaphor, inviting a lot more people to the rally than in the past and listening to them.

If you have a board member that is either explicitly or implicitly communicating they would have opposed you before, but now they are willing to support you, you need to have a very honest talk that makes it clear there can be no return to those old modes of thinking when the economic picture improves. While the economy may improve, the operating environment and expectations people have will not return to what they were before.

Mounting A Performing Arts Conference When No One Wants To Travel

by

Two regional arts conferences, Western Arts Alliance and Arts Midwest partnered on offering a single online conference to replace their respective in-person events.

I will say right from the outset, I really need an in-person conference which takes me away from my job. The online conference doesn’t offer enough content to justify my staying at home all week, but trying to participate virtually with the demands and distractions of my job is not working.

I am not saying I would have traveled to Omaha this year. I am just recognizing the benefits of intentionally carving time out to devote to your professional development.

Also, the technology they are using to deliver the conference is very frustrating to use. I suspect it looked really well designed when the conference organizers were reviewing it because it brings a lot of valuable features together in one place. I thought they made a good choice when I first poked around it prior to the conference start.

However, in practice when you have over 1000 people using it to view content and interact to conduct business, the shortcomings become clearer. There were some sessions where people have openly commented they are doing research on other platforms for conferences they organize.

This being said, the virtual conference format allows me to have my staff participate, something I wouldn’t have been able to afford with an in-person conference. Being able to divide and conquer when it comes to attending and offering observations on different conferences sessions and performance showcases is pretty valuable.

As I write this, the second day of the conference is drawing to a close. There are still two more days, but one observation my staff and I have made already is that there is a stark gulf between people who have acknowledged the future will not be the same as the past and those that view their current situation as akin to a delayed flight home–incredibly inconveniencing, but you’ll eventually get back to familiar surroundings.

In one session I attended yesterday, I wondered what people had been doing for the last seven months because people were asking questions that seemed to indicate they hadn’t really considered their options for re-opening. Sessions I attended today were much better and assuring. People were offering examples of creative approaches they were using, plans they had for the future and the responses they were seeing from the community.

My marketing director had been in a session on Failure yesterday where the host basically summed up the session by noting if organizations weren’t exploring different options now, in two-three years when new models of participation begin to solidify and gain significant traction, those organizations will be two years behind the curve. Currently, because no one knows what will happen, there is a greater tolerance for experimentation and associated mistakes. It is difficult to criticize a decision as bad if no one can say what the better decision would have been–implementing that better option next time has an almost equal chance of failing in the current operating environment.

What I think will be problematic for the performing artists showcasing at the conference is that they are packaging themselves to suit last year’s paradigm. While their showcases are pre-recorded in venues that show off their talent much, much better than an in-person experience in a conference hotel ballroom, they also don’t have the opportunity to discuss what they have to offer in light of what they may have gleaned from sessions earlier in the day.

To be clear, I definitely don’t think depending on being able to deliver a quality, problem free livestream performance would have been a better option. I am just saying had the performance been delivered live, whether in-person or live stream, artists and agents could have taken what they were hearing venues were saying about their plans and concerns over the course of the day and revised their script to present themselves as capable of providing a solution to those problems.

I was considering writing this post next week after the conference was over so I could provide a more complete assessment of the experience, but I know a few performing arts presenters who may be participating in the conference read my blog so I wanted to get them thinking about these factors which may be shaping how they are experiencing different parts of the conference.

Cirque Got Back In The Air In China

by

Many have probably heard about the Broadway productions in South Korea which only experienced a brief shutdown thanks to the swift and fairly comprehensive measures the government and productions put in place to combat Covid-19. Come to find out, there is a Cirque du Soleil production in Hangzhou, China which managed to get back into production in May despite China being an early epicenter of the disease. The China show didn’t start performing again until July, however.  It was one of two Cirque productions performing at the time of the article was written. (I am not sure what the other production is. I see Mystere is running in Vegas, but the other Vegas productions don’t start until October.)

During the shutdown period, many of acrobats cobbled together practice routines to maintain their strength and flexibility since their normal training faculties were unavailable. One of the biggest challenges the production faced was that many of their foreign performers had left the country and couldn’t re-enter in order to rejoin the show.  They ended up having to basically revamp the performances and supporting technology to integrate all the changes into the overarching narrative concept.

Over a manic three-week period, “X” hired over a dozen replacement actors and acrobats from troupes across China, who had to be trained and taught the show in its entirety.

Scenes containing foreign stars were replaced and re-choreographed. A duo of figure-skating Russians was swapped out for a group of Cyr wheel performers, who roll around the stage inside giant metal hoops. The high-flying bungee rope artists were substituted for a “water meteor” juggling act. Local trampoline specialists created a simplified version of the show’s original “trampowall” segment, in which the experienced foreign artists would flip and spin off of a high vertical wall.

Changing or cutting acts is routine during Cirque shows, but making so many changes while remaining faithful to the “X” storyline was a huge challenge, according to Chouinard.

[…]

The hardest-working crewmembers were the technical team, who had to adjust the music, graphics, lighting, and animations to fit with the altered show. Each change, meanwhile, had to be discussed and approved by Cirque’s headquarters back in Canada.

What was most surprising to learn was that the Chinese producers, Xintiandi,  were able to continue paying the bills for their idled production even as Cirque du Soleil was filing for bankruptcy protection. Still, despite Xintiandi’s substantial cash reserves, they have been renting out their performance facility to other events in an attempt to offset the reduced income resulting from a mandatory 50% seating capacity and weakened tourism outlook for Hangzhou.

Between February and June, Xintiandi continued to pay staff wages, venue bills, financial payments, and maintenance costs, without earning 1 yuan in income.

The Chinese firm, meanwhile, still has to pay Cirque an annual licensing fee for the show. When Sixth Tone spoke with Xia in July, she said the company was currently negotiating this year’s payment with its Canadian partner, with a slight grimace.

The deep pockets of Xintiandi have enabled the show to absorb these losses, but the current 50% attendance limit means the show can’t run profitably.

Live From Our Fire Escape

by

Today Drew McManus had a post on Adaptistration titled “In the Age Of COVID, Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention.” This was pretty timely because I had my own tale of adapting to the times to tell.

This weekend at my venue, we hosted our first live event since March -an outdoor cabaret performance on our fire escape. (Not so much an invention, I suppose since the first thing people did when the pandemic started was sing from their apartment windows and fire escapes.)

As you can see from the pictures below, we have a pretty substantial fire escape with multiple levels that can be used for performance. Since this was our first time out and we didn’t want to expose more of our equipment to the summer heat and possible rain than necessary, we limited our activities to one level.

The audience sat in our parking lot. As you can see, we prepped the parking lot by chalking out seating pods. The seating was general admission and we undersold what we imagined our capacity to be in order to provide both our audience and ourselves with the flexibility to see how things developed.

We determined the size and number of pods to create by analyzing the ticket purchasing patterns. We drew out two person, four person, six person and in one case 10 person, pods based on how people purchased their tickets. The pods were spaced to allow six feet between groups of unrelated people. Then we allowed enough room on the perimeter for people who felt the need for greater distancing to set up as they wanted.

Our aim was to observe how many people chose the pods versus the open areas in order to get a sense of what our actual capacity for the space might be while ensuring good sightlines. We capped the event at 175 people, but now figure we can get up to about 250 and still ensure appropriate spacing and flexibility in seating location.

Our local mask ordinance requires that if you are anywhere outside your home within six feet of a person with whom you do not live, you must wear a mask. The example given is if you are waiting at a crosswalk alone, you don’t have to wear a mask, but if someone arrives to wait with you, you need to be wearing one.

Since people were coming with picnic set-ups or could grab food from partner restaurants and didn’t have to wear a mask while eating, our policy was you could only sit with people in your household and could remove your mask while seated in your pod with them. Since moving to and from that space requires becoming closer to others, you needed to wear a mask as you moved about everywhere else. By and large everyone heeded the rule and those that didn’t we firmly prodded to comply.

One bit of fortunate timing was about three weeks ago the local government expanded permission to have open containers on downtown streets from First Friday only to every night between 4 pm-10 pm to allow bar patrons to use sidewalk tables restaurants and the downtown association had deployed. This allowed us to serve alcohol out of our own bar which helped improve the financial situation of the event.

Overall, it was regarded as a success and we are planning to run at least one more before it gets too cool this Fall. Stay tuned.

The Man Who Decided To Raise Artists Instead of Chickens

by

It was with some sorrow that I learned this week that a great man who has literally been part of the grassroots effort to provide arts experiences to young people died last week. Albert Appel who, with his wife Clare, founded, or he might say floundered, into establishing an arts and music camp just turned 98 on July 5. A tribute to his life appears on the Appel Farm Arts and Music Campus website.

When I say he was literally part of a grassroots effort, it is because when he and his wife started giving music lessons to neighbor kids back around 1960, he was running a farm with 20,000 chickens, feed crops, and other animals. Gradually, the chickens began to be replaced by children. Again, literally. When I worked on the concert presenting side of the organization back in the early 2000s, two of the camp dorms were still refurbished chicken coops and were referred to as North & South Coop.

Albert, and his wife Clare, who had passed away before I started working there, are an admonishment against making assumptions about the artistic interests and capabilities of farmers. Albert trained to be a farmer, but he also played violin. He actually met Clare when friends told him they needed a violinist to fill out their string quartet.

The way Albert liked to tell it, he and Clare started the camp because kids would come over for music lessons and would never go home so he started charging their parents to let them hang around his house.

When I moved to South Jersey to take the job in winter 2000, I was told I could live in Albert’s house until I found a place of my own. I was given two room that used to be offices for the camp. As you moved through Albert’s house you could see that they had continued to add on to the house to accommodate camp activities. There were also some out buildings behind the house that got used. Finally, they moved a lot of the operations across the road–into the chicken coops, among other buildings. However, some of the original rooms continued to be used as living quarters for the camp counselors and staff during my tenure there.

The founding philosophy of the camp was that every kid has the capacity for creative expression. Come to think of it, working there may have serve to form my own views along those lines. A camper’s day was spent pursuing one major and two minors. The major was the area they identified as their core interest or area of experience and the minors were things they hadn’t really done, but wanted to explore. The subjects ranged from acting, dancing, music, ceramics, painting, photography, creative writing, video production.

Due to security concerns, folks like myself who didn’t work for the camp program weren’t generally allowed on the grounds past the administration building. However, I frequently helped distribute the mail and even without hearing them say it, it was clear that for a lot of those kids camp was a place they felt they could be themselves surrounded by people with similar interests versus who they had to be at home and at school.

But as I said, I wasn’t directly involved with the camp. My job was to run the operations for the concert series and music festival as well as to support the school outreach efforts. I count myself lucky to have lived in Albert’s house for a short time because even after I moved out, I would get invited to join him and his second wife, Peimin, when they were entertaining guests. Often it was groups like the Corigliano Quartet who were staying over in preparation for school residencies.

Albert would often pull out his violin to play or talk about his children’s music lessons on various instruments. Nearly all of Albert’s children play an instrument to some extent or another. His son Toby is a violist on the Julliard faculty. One story I recall involved inducements for him to practice piano. There are also a couple wild stories about Albert I heard from his kids.

Albert was definitely a character. Even though the livestock and poultry mostly departed the farm, all campers were required to work in the camp garden and the vegetables all made it to the kitchen for meals. Albert often gave the gardeners a hard time about how they were going about planting. A farmer can never really retire. He was just as passionate about creating an environment for people to cut loose with creative expression. At 80, he was pulling out his violin to play beside the campers. You would also hear the low drone of the instrument across the fields in the middle of the winter.

Obviously at 98, his death wasn’t unexpected but it is still saddening. Though at his 80th birthday party, he kept joking that if he had known he would live as long as he had, he would have taken better care of himself and he might have already made it to 90. Apparently someone was taking good care of him if he was so seriously pushing 100.

His legacy runs much deeper than thousands of kids attending arts camp over 60 years. As I mentioned, when I worked there the other nine months of the year were devoted to a concert series, school outreach programs and a pretty active conference calendar. Shortly after I left, Appel Farm started offering afternoon and evening arts classes to kids and adults and were the arts content provider for a local school district.

Now they have added a Families to College program that works with the whole family to provide an environment aligned with increasing the chances of success for college bound students. They are also involved with providing a charter school STEAM program. In a rural portion of southern NJ, programs like these can have big impacts.

I am sure there has been some positive impact on the economy of Elmer, NJ and Salem County that wouldn’t have existed if Appel Farm Arts and Music Center wasn’t there. But when we talk about the value of the arts, few would have the patience to wait 90 years, or smaller increment thereof, to see the result of giving 8 year old Albert music lessons. (Or his wife Clare for that matter, I am told she eclipsed him in passion for the camp’s mission.) And yet, there are thousands upon thousands of people who will attest to the immeasurable value of their experiences.

Fulfilling Mission Vs. Fulfilling Design

by

Drew McManus has recently rolled out a video podcast on the Adaptistration site with the goal of addressing topics facing the orchestra business. Today, he posted the second episode title, Art Has Always Been Political, with guests Jason Haaheim and Weston Sprott.

They get to discussing the familiar topic of how the non-profit model in the U.S. has tended to reinforce the values and demographic composition of those who had the money to support non-profits. Right around the 23:10 mark, Sprott approaches the fact many arts organizations reflect a very wealthy, Caucasian demographic from the point of view of mission vs. design.

He says that many arts non-profits fail to live up to their mission statements, mostly by virtue of the fact that those statements are idealized visions of reality.  From the design perspective, they are operating exactly as intended:

“…if you shift the paradigm and think, is this organization serving the group of people that it was designed to serve, then that is yes…Now that doesn’t mean that the group of people that it was designed to serve is the correct group or an inclusive group, but it is what it was designed to serve.  If you have an administration and a board and everyone that funds you fits in one, in general, to one demographic, then it’s not surprising that the people that perform and the people that attend the concerts…all fit into that demographic.  It was designed to be that way.

I don’t think that a lot of opera companies or The Met, for example, were designed with the idea that we want to make sure that people from all cultures and backgrounds, including black people and brown people and other groups who are marginalized feel like they are truly comfortable in our space. So that is a different question..Does our mission say we reach those people? Yeah it does. Was our organization designed  to reach those people and is it structured to reach those people? It’s not.

This reinforces what Nina Simon says in The Art of Relevance  about needing to create more doors through which the people you wish to serve can enter. While some of those doors may indeed be physical if you are designating space for new people, in most cases they are conceptual. But require no less effort than a construction project in order to properly revise staffing, board composition, funding, programming so that the organization is designed to serve this broader range of people.

 

Do They Know Its Covid Time At All?

by

I am guessing it isn’t any news that a lot of arts and cultural organizations are struggling financially and grappling with the challenges presented by Covid-19. I mean, there is a lobbying effort to have Congress provide relief specifically aimed at helping both for and not-for-profit arts and events organizations and spaces. A lot of service and trade organizations have partnered up to advocate in this area.

But you wouldn’t know it isn’t business as usual from the job postings out there. I am hardly the first to notice this. I saw someone tweet about it a couple weeks ago†. While I had noticed an increase in job listings over the last few months and took that as a positive sign, I didn’t read any of them because I am not currently seeking a position.

After that tweet, I started paying closer attention.  I have to say, they are right. I have looked at about 40 listings that were posted since mid-July for everything from executive director for state arts councils and major cultural centers to part time jobs in rural communities. With one exception, none of them acknowledged that there was an epidemic going on and how that might impact job duties, or even more helpfully, how the board of directors had resolved to respond.

Honestly, it looks like people pulled out the job description file they used for their last search. The Opportunities & Challenges heading of one description listed delays due to jurisdictional issues between government entities, but apparently the epidemic won’t hinder anything.

By the way, the one group that did acknowledge the operating environment had changed was Children’s Theatre of Charlotte which wrote:

CTC is facing the current economic challenge with resiliency and innovation. In 2020-21, CTC will mount an entirely virtual season with four productions: The Velveteen Rabbit, GRIMMZ Fairy Tales, My Wonderful Birthday Suit and Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba. In addition, CTC will provide week-long mini-camps as a resource for families looking for creative solutions this school year, along with a combination of in-person and virtual theatre education classes in the evenings.

Nothing complicated about this. Hundreds of organizations have sent out this sort of messaging in press releases and social media posts the last few months. However, no one else seems to see the need to even awkwardly cut and paste out of a press release and into a job description.

I seems like right now, if you are looking to hire quality people, a job listing should implicitly, if not explicitly carry a message which acknowledges regardless of whether you are looking to get a job or transfer from another one, there is even more stress and anxiety associated with that process than usual. However, not only has our organization developed a plan which frankly acknowledges what is viable over the next two years, we are looking to add someone to a supportive team which will translate this plan into action.

Even if I were out of a job and extremely anxious to find another, I would question my potential career with an organization that failed to give a nod to overwhelming reality.

Likewise, the shifting expectations and activity associated with diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) didn’t seem to be present other than generic statements about the applicant needing to be committed to DEI. These may be new additions to some of the descriptions, but they read as boilerplate from the past. There were a couple exceptions like Burlington, VT’s Flynn Center which included:

“Address systemic racism with thoughtful programmatic vision, embedded governance structures, dynamic staffing, equitable vendor interactions, and intentional audience experiences.”

and Dance/USA:

Recognize, acknowledge and address power imbalances and privilege within a membership that is diverse with regard to a role (e.g., dancer, choreographer, artistic director, arts administrator, presenter, agent) and locale, as well as broader diversity dimensions such as race, ethnicity, economic status, gender, disability status, gender expression, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion.

† N.B. – Nina Simon was the person who mentioned generic job descriptions in a Medium post she made. My recollection was that I saw it on Twitter and my gut told me Nina wrote it, but I couldn’t find the Twitter post–because I saw it elsewhere.

We Are More Accepting Of Disease Spreading In Large Crowds Than I Thought

by

A recent study looking at a connection between influenza mortality and professional sports leagues provides some insights into the possible impact of the more highly contagious Covid-19 virus if large group assemblies were permitted.

The researchers looked at influenza rates and sports activity from 1962 through 2016. They do a lot of work with their data taking into account geography (a number of New York teams that play(ed) in NJ), the entry of new sports franchises in that time period, the extent of public transit lines, impact of people gathering at bars to watch competitions, and the fact that some sports seasons occur outside of flu season, among many other factors.

What they found is:

The results show cities acquiring one new professional sports team experienced 4% to 24% increases in local influenza mortality across all age groups compared to cities without professional sports teams, suggesting that sports-related changes in social distancing patterns represent important influenza transmission mechanisms. These results are in line with Stoecker et al. (2016) who estimated an 18% increase in flu mortality among the local population age 65 or older in MSAs that sent an NFL team to the Super Bowl. In addition, local flu mortality fell in some years when work stoppages occurred in sports leagues, further buttressing the evidence that games played by professional sports teams make substantial contributions to local seasonal flu mortality.

My first thought was that we have been pretty blase about the potential impact of these large gathering on influenza mortality. Though I guess that was sort of clear back in March/April when people were saying Covid-19 wasn’t worse than the flu. There was already an acceptance that a number of people die every year. Perhaps that will happen one day with Covid-19 as we become acclimated to its impact.

One interesting thing to note – while there was an 18% increase in mortality among the 65+ population of MSAs that sent teams to the Super Bowl, in that earlier Stoecker et al. (2016) study they cite, there wasn’t an increase in mortality for the city that hosted the Super Bowl.

…suggesting that changes in travel patterns bringing large numbers of spectators to the host city play a small role in the process. This result does not completely rule out changes in travel patterns as a mechanism for transmission. It is possible that the mechanism works in the opposite direction: fans who travel to the host city for the Super Bowl become infected there and bring the virus back home with them..

One thing to keep in mind, and the study authors point this out, is that all large gatherings are not created equal. They suggest future research do a deeper dive into distinctions like size, age and amenities of facilities. Some sports are played in larger, younger facilities with better HVAC systems and more enclosed seating areas than others. All these things can impact the spread of disease. Likewise, some of these facilities also host concerts and other events with large attendance. Different activities spread disease at varying rates even if they are held in the same facilities with similar attendance.

Also, apparently not all work stoppages are created the same. Flu mortality fell during the 1982 NFL and 2011 NBA stoppage, but there was no impact from the 2004 NHL work stoppage. They theorize fans engaged in substitute activities which exposed them to the flu.

So overall this some clearer information verifying for arts organizations, who I suspect are already doing pretty well at proceeding with caution, the importance of paying attention to the attendance and spacing at your events.

Seems More About Arts Production Than Gender Identity–Just As It Should Be

by

This past weekend the Macon Film Festival held one of their few live screenings of this year in my theater. (The rest of the festival content is being streamed.) They showed The Sound of Identity, a documentary about the first opera performance by a trans person in the U.S. The singer, Lucia Lucas, is an American living in Germany who was invited to perform Don Giovanni for Tulsa Opera in their 2018-2019 season. The angle they were taking is that Don Giovanni is a master of disguise and uses that in the process of his seductions.

The movie is basically what you want a film on this subject to be. Despite the PR text about Oklahoma being one of the reddest parts of the United States and the artistic director, Tobias Picker’s line in the trailer about potentially needing to resign, the socio-political elements of Tulsa never factor in. (They do have some fantastic shots of the city.) The movie could have happened anywhere, it just so happens Tulsa invited Lucas first. Similarly, the general approach of the movie was that this was a production of Don Giovanni where the lead just happened to be a trans person.

Because in fact, the movie is really about us –the arts profession. I am not alone in feeling this. I had a conversation with my marketing director and she remarked, unprompted, how much the movie was about arts administration. The biggest conflicts arise from things we deal with every day regardless of what the show is and who is performing.  Their bad dress rehearsal moment is when the singer playing Leporello, a major part, gets sick and the assistant director does the blocking while the guy playing Commendatore sings the part, all of which makes it difficult for Lucas to synch up properly.

This is actually a good movie to show people who aren’t familiar with mounting a production because there is a lot of detail, but very little technical jargon. Though certainly I may be assuming a lot of shared basic knowledge from my long career in the arts.

Pretty much everything we discuss about running an arts organization is in this movie. The whole opera is dying and tickets only cover a portion of the $500,000 cost it takes to mount a production conversation occurs. (Their revenue goal was $120,000. We never hear the final tally, but sales were at ~$70,000 a few weeks out.)

Lucas and the artistic director have a conversation about how a trans person in the lead will attract a new audience and some of those they talk to say that is the reason they are attending. (With one guy it seemed pretty clear he didn’t anticipate coming back for other productions.)

There is a discussion about the need for board diversity. A representative for Tulsa Opera touts the board diversity, but the interviewer actually says he has to push back on that statement because the board of 30-50 (per the movie) has only two people of color. The representative backpedals a little saying there are a large number of homosexuals on the board.

There is a fair portion of the movie associated with promoting the production which illustrates just how much time is involved and how difficult it can be to do it well.

Between the organization and Lucas’ own drive, the singer is shown doing a lot of social gatherings. That comes up as a potential problem in a conversation with the director when Lucas says she isn’t feeling the guidance the director is giving with a particular song. The director says Lucas needs to conserve her energy and not do so many public appearances that she feels drained during rehearsals.

Lucas also prints up promotional postcards on her own dime and goes out to a park to hand them out. The artistic director accompanies her, but isn’t happy with what is happening. When they interview him alone, he says something akin to “I don’t want to characterize it as a fiasco, but it was sort of a fiasco.”

There was a moment in a restaurant that made me cringe a little where Lucas and the artistic director are eating and strike up a conversation with one of the restaurant staff. They tell her they are doing Don Giovanni and ask her if she knows the show. The staff member says she hasn’t heard of it and then Lucas says, “well here is the score.” Then they end the conversation telling her to tell anyone who asks that they are doing the opera.  I didn’t feel like that exchange advanced the staff person’s knowledge or incentive to attend much at all.

Which is not to say that Lucas wasn’t able to have constructive conversations about the opera or her career because she was shown chatting at least a half dozen social gatherings. Near the end of the movie, she says she wants people to leave the opera hating Giovanni, but also loving him, but hating themselves for loving him because he represents misogyny and sexual predation in an extreme.  Something like that would get people wanting to know more.

Ultimately, there is a scene where Lucas says she has been told that it is not her job to worry about how well the show is selling and has been asked to scale back her activities.

You are probably getting the sense that there is very little sensationalism about the lead in this opera being a trans person. So much of the movie is pretty run of the mill as far as productions go, but also relatable for people who aren’t in the arts world. Lucas has been a huge video game fan since she was younger. We see her playing video games while rehearsing in her room as a way to disconnect her brain. She also draws a parallel between being able to play Magic: The Gathering online versus playing in person to the experience of watching arts online being no substitute for experiencing it live in person.

There is a section where Lucas and the artistic director, Tobias Picker, are playing a Mario Brothers game where Picker talks about the challenges of his career as a composer and being married in the Supreme Court by Ruth Bader Ginsberg who is a fan of his work. The conversations between Lucas and Picker are some of the best moments of the movie.

The director of the opera, Denni Sayers, has some good moments waxing philosophical about art and celebrity–kids today want to be famous, but can’t answer when you ask what they want to be famous for when there are so many things to be involved with from politics, racial justice, environment, science, arts, etc.

As I said, the movie is really about arts organizations and the environment in which they operate. If you have an opportunity to see the movie, I think you will enjoy it. Right now it is playing a few film festivals, but the producers alluded to an ability to stream it that will be announced soon.

 

Flippin’ Piece of Art

by

While I am not really plugged into the visual arts gallery/museum world, one topic I have seen come up repeatedly is the sense that the creator of a piece should realize some benefit when the price of their work skyrockets during resale. Apparently there has been some specific concern about buyers targeting the work of contemporary black artists with an intent to quickly flip works for significantly higher prices.

According to Artnet, Christie’s  Auction House worked with curator Destinee Ross-Sutton to create a type of covenant placing conditions on the resale of art works in their “Say It Loud (I’m Black and Proud)” show.

Each artist will receive 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of their work. All buyers must also sign a contract with extensive conditions. They must agree not to resell the work at auction for at least five years; if they do want to sell, they must give the artist right of first refusal; and, if they sell to someone else, they have to give 15 percent of the upside back to the artists.

I was initially skeptical about how effectively this type of agreement could be enforced. Though if Christie’s had the will to enforce it, they certainly have the clout and capacity to penalize bad faith purchasers. According to the article, the conditions didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of buyers and most of the pieces have already sold.

According to the specialist at Christie’s coordinating the show with Ross-Sutton, the buyer covenant will benefit the auction house by providing them with insight into sincere collectors of works by artists of color.

The project also has the benefit of giving Christie’s access to collectors it might not have met otherwise, and insight into their preferences and holdings. “We’re excited to cater to this emerging clientele as well as develop programs that specifically cater to collectors of color,” Cunha adds.

Curator Ross-Sutton sees the success of a purchase agreement backed by an organization like Christie’s as an important message to artists not to underestimate their ability to insist on similar conditions.

Ross-Sutton hopes the experience will empower artists to take charge of their careers, including by pushing their gallery representatives to implement similar sales restrictions. “Many artists do not realize the power they have,” she says. “We cannot only put the blame on these so-called ‘flippers’—artists have to be more discerning and so do galleries.

I was trying to think of a parallel situation in the performing arts. Even though the value of a performance is more variable and transitory, I am sure there is some corresponding situation, perhaps with playwrights, choreographers, designers, etc, with which this situation might have relevance, (other than the lack of representation of people of color in many of these roles), but I feel like I am suffering from a momentary lack of imagination.

What’s This Soft Landing Thing You Speak Of?

by

This week Vu Le at the Nonprofit AF wrote a pretty thought provoking post about the way the left-leaning non-profit sector consumes, rather than supports, its leaders as more conservative focused groups do. Le had recently left his job when someone reached out to ask if he had a “soft landing.”

I got to understand what Angie meant by “soft landing.” This is what conservatives do for their leaders. They provide them with support to ensure that their work continues….They understand that their most effective leaders are their greatest weapon, so they do everything they can to protect and invest in them and their ideas.

The progressive side, meanwhile, treats people like batteries. Batteries are only as valuable when they have any juice left to power machines. As soon as they are empty, they are worthless and you toss them and you get fresh batteries. People burn out, they leave and are sometimes never heard from again, and we are OK with it, because we just find new people/batteries to replace them with…As Pia Infante of The Whitman Institute said, “The right invests in people and ideas; the left invests in projects and programs.”

Le goes on to enumerate how this manifests. It isn’t just that arrangements might be made for a conservative to get a book deal, a job with a think tank, or a seat on a company’s board of directors where a progressive won’t. He notes that if organizational leadership transitions, funders will take a wait and see attitude before continuing to support them as if the good work the organization had done was inseparable from the leader.

Le speaks of his own experience working with foundation program officers for decades and having them tell him an innovative idea he has to expand the impact of his organization work doesn’t align with the foundation priorities. He says if funders sincerely want to make the difference they profess they do, they need to at least trust those with whom they have a long relationship to execute what is needed.

He provides a good number of other examples that are worth reading and considering. He ends his post with a bright bit of hope. The woman who had contacted him about his soft landing came through with a grant that will support Vu Le during a time when his speaking engagements were cancelling.

“What’s the catch?” I asked Angie skeptically. Funders had reached out with encouraging words, but almost none had offered financial assistance. “Are there metrics, outcomes? Do I need to pay it back?” I asked. “No,” she said, “just keep writing or working on your sketch comedy show or whatever. Your voice is important, and for everyone who wants to see the nonprofit sector and its funders change, we need you.”

Talking More About The Real DNA of Your Successes

by

Nina Simon was recently a guest on a podcast hosted by Culture Reset. As always, I find anything she has to say increases my contemplation about the way arts organizations, including my own, operate and interact with the community.

There was one part of Nina’s commentary about her career that caught my attention because it resonates closely with a central topic I have been writing on for a couple years. (By the way, MANY thanks to Culture Reset for providing a transcript of the podcast, I was not looking forward to having to transcribe this by ear.) (also, my emphasis)

…I identify very quickly the board cared about attendance, dollars and good press. And so I said, ‘OK, I’m going to make change in the direction I want, that generates those outcomes, and then I’m going to show them those numbers on a platter. And I’m going to tell them here are the activities, the weird activities we did that led to those outcomes. And I am going to buy myself more and more space to pursue this strategy as long as it delivers these outcomes.

But the fatal mistake I made is that (and this is very personal for me. I actually haven’t talked about this before) is that as the years went on and we did more and more of this work, I kept delivering those same outcomes to the board and I delivered the strategy where we shared that area of change, we shared all the data, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when I was getting ready to leave and when they started to recruit my successor, there was a real battle that was rooted in the fact I think, that the board had never fully internalised these strategies, led to those outcomes. And that is my fault because it was easier for me to sell them those outcomes and have them nod and be happy and for me to go on with my team doing the great work we were doing than it was to really say to them, we’ve got to talk about how different this is and what we are willing to do to keep this, you know, that what is in the DNA of the success that you’re so proud of.

While anecdotal, this is another example of why we can’t continue to simply use economic value of the arts as a justification of its existence.

As I have quoted Carter Gillies a number of times before in connection with this idea:

But this never teaches them why we value the arts. It is not a conversation that discusses the arts the way we feel about them. Its not a picture of the intrinsic value of the arts, because in talking about instrumentality we always make the arts subservient. That’s never only what they are to us. Sometimes we just have to make the case for a lesser value as the expedient means to secure funding or policy decisions. It’s better than not making any sense at all.

Nina basically says at first she used these metrics to help her gain some room to operate so that the board would be more open to some of the more orthodox approaches she was looking to implement. If you know Nina’s history, with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, you know it was in dire shape when she took up the mantle of executive director so there was a need to implement a turn around couched in the terms that met the board’s criteria of success.

But even in the face a wondrous revitalization which included a growth in staff and attendance and a expansion into adjoining property, she and the board never got around to having a serious conversation about the fact that it was those wacky ideas she and the staff implemented that made people feel the museum was a place made for them. The metrics they were looking for followed that effort, but the metrics weren’t the measure of the organization’s success.  The measure was that people felt heard, represented, and respected. To them museum was more invested in them than before, and they became more invested in turn and showed up at the door.

The conversation Nina regrets not having needs to happen more often and it will get easier with each attempt. (Not to mention it is the stuff of good grant narratives.)

Success isn’t a matter of good budgeting, advertising and the highest quality programs the organization can afford. From what I remember, I think some of the stuff Nina did that people engaged with most involved activity prompts, paper, and magic markers.  Success is a matter of the highest quality experiences and interactions.

One of the stand out memories I have of this past Friday is a conversation our marketing director had while asking permission to take the picture of three little girls in a very unsocially distanced hug where one declared “She is practically my best friend!” There wasn’t any special investment on our part, though the father appreciated being asked if we could snap the photo, but it was pretty clear that despite all the Covid related signs and paraphernalia, the group felt good about the interactions they were having.

It often doesn’t take much to help people feel they, their family and friends are welcome. What can be tough is asking and correctly discerning what the things that make them feel welcome are and deciding to effect the changes to include them.

Are You An Implementer Or A Reader Of Arts Blog Knowledge?

by

Via Artsjournal.com, on Arts & Culture Texas site, Tarra Gaines gives name to the difference between live and streamed performance. (my emphasis)

Amid this deluge of performance art offerings flowing into my house, I realized two words marred my experience: remote and control. With remote clenched in one hand and phone in the other, it hit me: No longer a member of an audience, I had become merely a viewer now.

The problem with streaming performing arts for me is that in ordinary times, even when watching a television show or movie at home I truly like, I still tend to fast forward through subplots, characters, dialogue I find tedious…

[..]

Streaming the performing arts at home has taught me that sometimes the visceral power of theater is all about the audience being in it together as a community, but other times its potency lies in all the judging looks I would receive trying to leave the theater in the middle of a scene.

I have come to understand the difference between being a viewer and being an audience is that bit of control we give up to become a part of the we.

Certainly, nothing we haven’t already considered in a general sense. It did get me wondering if there might be some value in messaging, either overtly or as subtext, that says, “We don’t want viewers, we want you to participate as an audience member.”

Basically, the idea would be to make negative associations with being a viewer versus being part of an audience.  There is definite potential in associating audience status with people’s existing values about connecting and sharing experiences with others.

It is important to remember that we know from the soon to be mythical pre-Covid times that people yearned to share experiences that were active rather than passive observation of an event. Elevating audience over viewer through reinforced messaging and imagery by itself ain’t gonna cut it.

Back in early June, I mentioned Nina Simon’s talk for the Opera America conference where she encouraged arts organizations to start using social media messaging to build relationships and start conversations with the groups you want to begin attracting to your organization. One of the benefits of doing this when you aren’t operating at your usual capacity is that you can learn about what interests people and start planning future programming to align with those expectations without having your current programming contradict what you are saying.

The general public aren’t necessarily aware that the arrangements for something happening in August 2020 were made 18-24 months or more earlier. So if you are saying communicating “we are committed to X for the future” and what enters your space next week doesn’t seem to align with that messaging, it can make things difficult.

Obviously, seeing not being able to operate as a beneficial opportunity for your organization is an effort to make lemonade with a whole lot of lemons but that aphorism is all about dealing with the present situation, not the more ideal one you wish you had.

Even Covid Can’t Stop Translating Plan Into Action

by

If readers have been paying close attention, you probably know I currently run an historic theater in Macon, GA. Last week, the Macon Arts Alliance released the cultural master plan the community had been working on for the previous year or so. It won’t surprise you to learn that it had originally been slated to be released at the start of March, but concerns over coronavirus delayed that. There is likely some argument to be made that the plan should have been released at a later time when things were more stable, especially since it calls for the creation of a cultural liaison staff position by a county government facing a financially problematic environment.

However, the plan was developed in parallel with the next iteration of the county master plan and the current election cycle will see a change of mayor and council members so it was important to get the cultural master plan into circulation.

I participated in about 90% of the public meetings that were held for the plan, plus served on a subcommittee so I have some investment in it. Macon is fortunate in that it is one of the communities in which the Knight Foundation is highly active. They, alongside a number of other local foundations, provided the funding needed to bring a team from Lord Cultural Resources to conduct all the meetings and data crunching.

One thing I feel the cultural plan does well is acknowledge the connection between race, household income and access to cultural assets:

The majority of assets are located in or around downtown Macon. Average income in the downtown area is in a lower tier ($14,700-60,600); this is because, despite higher rents in new downtown developments, many students live in the downtown area. Beyond downtown, most cultural assets are located west of the Ocmulgee River, where income is higher on average. Macon’s large African-American community can be better served, as currently most assets are clustered in areas with whiter populations. The east side, where incomes are generally lower, has relatively few cultural assets beyond key attractions such the Ocmulgee Mounds, Fort Hawkins, and the recently renovated Mill Hill Community Arts Center.

The video that accompanies the plan almost immediately acknowledges the perception of crime and blight associated with the community. These same issues came up repeatedly in the community conversations that informed the plan. In fact, one of the biggest lingering image problems that exists is that the downtown isn’t safe. So while a lot of the cultural assets may be downtown, they may not be accessed as much as they could be. (I obviously have a vested interest being the leader of one of those assets.)

While I think the plan is still oriented too much on a conventional concept of arts and culture, (I grumble at the Bach underscoring a video for a community that boasts significant rock and soul roots), even before the protests surrounding George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, there was an acknowledgement of the work that needed to be done to create a more equitable environment in the community.

Keeping in mind my frequent refrain not to engaged in whole cloth adoption of bylaws, policies, etc of other organizations as your own, I link to the plan for communities that might be considering similar efforts so you can get a sense of the things you need to be considering and addressing.

 

Please Yield To Oncoming Road Boxes Before Proceeding To Dance On Stage

by

I had a post today on ArtsHacker with the click-baity title, You Can’t Just Let People Tear Your Clothes Off Anymore. The post talks about the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) reopening guideline which were released last month.

Since I have been reading and writing about different guidelines, as well as reviewing our state governor’s orders, I didn’t feel like there was anything unexpected or onerous proposed in the first half of their document.

As I write in the ArtsHacker article, if your organization interacts with IATSE personnel, it is helpful to know what their expectations will be when you work with them. I also thought it would be useful for organizations that hadn’t formulated human resource policies regarding “…training, testing, reporting, quarantine length and leave policies, the guide provides a good framework for creating them, including some information on paid leave laws in the U.S. and Quebec.”

Where I thought the guide is most valuable is in the second half where it applies all the standard best practices that are general knowledge to some of the specific activities associated with putting on a performance. This can be especially true for touring performances. When you are operating out of a different physical space every night or so, there is always a bit of reinvention required. When that is complicated by the need to take care to limit exposure to a virus, the level of attention to detail required increases many times over, especially when you are actively participating in a live performance experience.

It is no longer acceptable to rush up to a mirror, apply make-up and discard kleenex and cotton balls with the intention of cleaning it up later. At the very least, you have to hand it off to someone wearing gloves or holding a trashbag. As the title of the ArtsHacker post suggests, even having wardrobe personnel standing by in the wings to pull off one set of clothes and help you don another set needs to be planned and executed with even greater discipline than usual.

Given the restricted space of many theater backstages and the pauses in movement of personnel and equipment throughout a space required by Covid-19 guidelines, I anticipate a not insubstantial amount of time will be required to effect the load-in and load-out process. This may mean tours will need to scale back the amount of equipment they travel with,  add more days between performances, or travel shorter distances between event dates. This may translate into fewer cities being included in a tour due to time constraints or the economics of needing to pay more personnel for longer hours.

You Can’t Just Let People Tear Your Clothes Off Anymore

200 Years Later, Still Looking For Concert Sponsors

by

From the “more things change, the more things stay the same,” whose life do you think this describes?

….she is particularly sharp-eyed, and refreshing, on the practicalities that shape any artist’s life. How to make a living is a priority. “Reference is made throughout this book to the sums [deleted] earned,” reads the first introductory note. “He was strapped for cash,” she observes baldly, in those or similar words, more than once. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how many rehearsals can be squeezed in (usually only one, leading to some disastrous premieres), how much tickets should cost, how to wheedle rich sponsors into donating, how to deal with the uncomfortable business of self-promotion: all make the difference between food on the table or hunger, performance or silence. Ask any composer working today. The issues have not changed.

This is from a review in The Guardian of Laura Tumbridge’s Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces.

If you are interested, the reviewer, Fiona Maddocks, enjoyed the book which focuses on the composer through the lens of nine of his works. As a result, the book is a relatively short 288 pages.

It may be a good candidate as an introductory book for people who might be simultaneously interested and intimidated by the prospect of learning about classical music and composers. It appears Tumbridge really humanizes Beethoven, discussing the complaints neighbors had about loud music and shouting coming from his apartment as well as the composer’s resentment that Napoleon’s invasion of Vienna was putting a cramp on the city’s party scene. Not to mention that French occupation of Vienna apparently suppressed attendance of an early version of his opera, Fidelio.

You’re Invited To My Pool For A Concert

by

I am sure a lot of people are wondering what other people are doing about performances as you plan for the day you can actually start again. Classicfm.com shared a number of images and videos of the way different venues have been spacing both musicians and audiences.

To me the most novel idea and location was a cello concert at the bottom of an empty pool in Germany. Are the acoustics of a pool conducive to the cello range?  There is another article with more pictures from other angles. The lane markers made for good spacing guides and the grade of the floor as it moved toward the shallow end helped with sightlines.

In Hong Kong, they had plexiglass between orchestra members, but in The Netherlands, they had empty seats and dividers to separate audience members.

There are a number of pictures of people arrayed in seating at social distance which may strike many as a bit depressing given the appearance of sparse attendance.

One image I found very striking was that of the London Mozart Players performing in a church. While there was no audience because they were video taping, when I saw all the musicians wearing vibrant red facemasks and bits of red clothing, my first thought was that they really made it work even spaced apart. Granted, some of that is due to good audio and video editing and the ability to zoom in close to the musicians, but for most of the video it is pretty clear everyone is spaced further apart than usual.

 

 

Proteges Aren’t Vessels To Be Filled

by

Daniel Pink tweeted about a mentorship study conducted by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University this week. While the study was conducted on scientists, I have to think the results apply even more truly for arts professionals because it finds the most successful proteges are those that chart a different path from their mentors.

Basically, the finding are that proteges whose mentors don’t push them to be mini-me clones of themselves (or proteges that don’t style themselves in that manner) are much more successful in the long run. This may seem like a foregone conclusion for arts disciplines which pride themselves on pushing boundaries. In my own career path, I have encountered mentors in acting, tech and administration who had a fairly narrow concept of the path they wanted proteges to follow. While I may be moving into old fogey-hood and that may not be as widespread, I get the sense that there are still people who demand a strict adherence to their guidance.

But new research from Brian Uzzi, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, shows that mentorship is indeed beneficial—especially when mentors pass down unwritten, intuitive forms of knowledge.

[…]

What’s more, “mini-mes” don’t necessarily thrive. Protégés are most successful when they work on different topics than their mentors.

For many of us, that’s a new way of thinking about mentorship. “People almost always think of the mentor as the really active element. The mentee is the passive element, absorbing the mentor’s knowledge,” Uzzi says. “Some of that’s true, but it turns out it’s really not a one-way arrow. It’s incumbent upon the mentee to branch out, take their mentor’s tacit knowledge, and do something that breaks new ground. The mentee has a big responsibility for their own success.”

The researchers were careful to study the mentor-protege relationships that existed before the mentor won a big prize. Obviously once someone receives great recognition, they will tend to attract the interest of many more highly skilled people from which they could chose proteges. In the study they compared proteges of pre-prize winners with those of people who didn’t receive a prize for their work.

In the short term, proteges of non-prize winners received more accolades, but in the long term, those that were mentored by future-prize winners had even greater success. The most successful proteges of all are those who worked with future prize winners and then went on to work in a different subject area from their mentor.

They attribute this arc to the fact that future prize winners need to do more basic work upon which to ground new progress so their proteges will receive recognition later in their careers. Proteges going in new directions from their mentors need additional time to succeed in charting their own path.

Of course, this whole dynamic mirrors the ideal parent-child relationship where the parent wants the child to exceed their achievements.

In addition, Uzzi expresses some concern that Covid-19 is inhibiting the transmission of the unwritten, intuitive knowledge. This is something to think about concerning the arts. It can be a good thing in that it potentially interrupts the transmission of practices we don’t want enshrined like limits on opportunities for under-represented people in all levels of performance, governance and decision making. Obviously it can be detrimental if people have to reinvent or rediscover knowledge that facilitates creation.

Uzzi and his coauthors believe that what’s being passed between future prizewinners and protégés is tacit knowledge. Mentees aren’t just learning concrete skills from their mentors. They’re also picking up how their mentors come up with research questions, how they brainstorm, how they interact with collaborators, and so on—knowledge that is difficult to codify and often learned by doing.

…..Though Lack of Transparency Hinders A Professional From Knowing Their Value

by

Perhaps providentially after my post last week about how a professional know their value, I saw a post on HowlRound by Elsa Hiltner which address some of the factors underlying the stereotype of artists being bad with money. Specifically, she feels the lack of transparency about pay/fees contributes to this situation and uses the situation faced by designers as part of her example. She lauds the efforts of a number of job sites that now require pay transparency in listings and points to a crowdsourced spreadsheet she set up where designers record how much they were paid for projects.

Designers often don’t learn how their fees and contract terms might differ from the other artists on board because they aren’t always able to talk with the rest of the production or design team before signing—or don’t even know who else is on the team. Occasionally, contracts forbid talking about pay rates with others, which is illegal.

[…]

Unsurprisingly, artists are held responsible for this state of affairs. Society, and artist themselves, are continuously sold the stereotype that artists are “bad” at money, uncomfortable with talking about money, or not effective at negotiation. This is not rooted in artists’ everyday experiences. Once hired, many are responsible for managing show budgets and most negotiate fees and contract terms, often dozens of times a year.

The idea that artists are “bad” at talking about money or are too concerned with competition or the veneer of monetary success to discuss their income or contracts with each other is a tool used by hiring companies to maintain a power dynamic that favors them.

She addresses the dynamics where artists accept validation as a reward for their work since the pay is so low, but notes that equitable across the organization, even if it is low, is actual validation. It is a sign that the experience you bring to the table is valued on par with those of similar skill and experience in a different department.

She has a whole list of suggestions about how we can do better so take a look at the post.

A Professional Knows Their Value

by

Seth Godin offers a pretty good definition of amateur, professional and hack in a recent post. While I haven’t fully considered all the implications of his definition, I feel like it makes the best distinction between professional and amateur I have come across because it avoids explicit or implicit comparisons of quality, dedication, training/education that are often present in discussing these terms.

The amateur contributes with unfiltered joy. There’s really no other upside–create your work because you can, because it helps someone else, because it makes you feel good.

The professional shows up even when she doesn’t feel like it. The professional understands the market, the customer and the price to be paid for work that’s worth paying for. But the professional isn’t a hack.

A hack is a professional who doesn’t care.

If I have one quibble, it is that his definition of professional is tied to economic value of a product. Granted, the classic definition is that amateurs do things for the love of it and professionals get paid, but we all know that often professionals are asked to do things for exposure or told they shouldn’t expect payment for something they enjoy, and that doesn’t make them any less of a professional.

At the same time, I appreciate the way the definition of a professional includes a sense of dedication that goes beyond the love of the creative process and implies the professional has done the work to educate themselves about external factors surrounding their work. There is the idea that one’s work has market value and all the complicated discussions we have about the quality of work having no relation to market price, but also the sense that the professional knows when their work is being devalued.

Godin’s distinction between hacks and both amateurs and professionals is that the latter two groups have a longer view about the role and value of their work in the greater ecosystem:

Serviceable is for hacks. Memorable and remarkable belong to professionals and hard-working amateurs.

Thoughts?

Yeah, I Have Weird Feelings, Too

by

Hat tip to the National Endowment for the Arts for linking to this video of an 11 year old taking The Bob Ross Challenge – basically trying to keep up and replicate Bob Ross’ painting instructions as he relates them during an episode of his show.

The kid, Khary Halsey, an avowed Bob Ross fan since he was six, is charming and hilarious just on his own. But it is right at the end of the video that he says something that encompasses what the creative experience should be for everyone, “From the looks of it, I did horrible, but I feel great.”

Okay, so obviously people shouldn’t always think they did horrible, it is the satisfaction and enjoyment of the experience regardless of the perceived quality of the product that I am advocating as the ideal.

Khary isn’t sure if he is supposed to be having this contradictory experience so he follows up saying, “I have weird feelings.”   The truth is, those feelings are quite normal and shared by a lot of people, including, I am sure many with long careers in the arts.  There are a lot messages we get throughout the day, both overt and subtle,  that equate quality with marketability. (And don’t get us started on “you shouldn’t expect to get paid if you are having fun.”)

Culture Track Report Says The Same People Won’t Be Returning

by

You may have seen the news today that the results of the Culture Track Covid-19 report were publicly released today. While some of the data about audience willingness to return to arts and culture organizations is a little dated due to the survey being conducted at the end of April through May 19, the majority of the findings can be very valuable to arts and cultural organizations.

They had only expected about 50,000 people to participate but had over 124,000 respondents to the survey. Participants ranged from knitting groups and walking clubs to organizations you might typically associate with arts and culture activities. Back on June 17, Advisory Board for the Arts hosted a webinar where staff from Slover Linnet and LaPlaca Cohen gave an early preview of the results to organizations that had participated in the study. If you want a deeper view of the results, you can watch the webinar.

The infographic layout of the report that came out today does a good job presenting the data, but there is one thing I don’t think they made clear enough which may cause people to question the results. Especially since the methodology is explained in a separate document rather than included as an appendix to the Key Finding report.

Since so many of the respondents were people on the mailing lists of arts and culture organizations around the country, you would correctly assume that it might skew the data. The Culture Track folks worked with another organization to distribute the survey a representative sample of the US population. The results you see in the key findings report are weighted to be representative of the US population.

The webinar presents both the core subscriber/ticket buyer response percentages and weighted percentages.  While the core supporters are much more likely to say the arts are important and worthy of preservation than the general population, they also more likely to expect organizations to implement strict health and safety protocols upon re-opening.

A couple of the bigger takeaways for me:

• People said they were feeling lonely, bored and disconnected and one of the things they missed most was sharing experiences with family and friends. In the webinar, the presenters suggested if there were a way for arts organizations to digitally allow people to share experiences, it would potentially serve a large need.

• Something to keep in mind is that people may want a much more interactive experience in the future. 81% of respondents said they were doing something creative while quarantined. Cooking, singing, handcrafting (knitting, painting, pottery, woodwork, etc), photography and writing were among the top responses.

• Many people were engaging in digital cultural experiences in the 30 days prior to taking the survey. In the webinar, the speakers noted that the demographics of people participating digitally was more diverse in terms of education, gender, race/ethnicity than those attending in person. They suggested that digital content might be a way to attract more diverse groups to in person experiences over the long term. (Obviously online content needs to align with an in-person experience–including how welcome one feels.)  There are also some who appreciated digital content as a solution to concerns about affordability, transportation and schedule.

• Unfortunately few people reported paying for digital content. In the webinar, they said 2% of people reported they paid for digital content, but in the Key Findings report that came out today, it says 13% have paid for content. It made me wonder if they received additional or corrected data since June 17. Most of the other numbers I was using to cross reference the webinar and Key Findings report remained the same.

• In general, what people crave the most upon an anticipated return to in-person experiences is ability to enjoy oneself/de-stress in the company of family and friends.

Obviously, a lot of nuance and detail not included here so take a look at the report and/or webinar. Overall the the title of this post reflects the reality of the next normal. Those that physically engage in-person won’t be the same as before in both the literal sense demographically and metaphoric “no one can enter the same river twice” sense. The faces may be familiar, but they will have different expectations.

 

 

Delay May Appear Wise, But Is The Outcome The Same?

by

Interesting short piece on the FastCompany website that points out the current uncertainty about the future created the the Covid-19 pandemic makes deferring on a decision seem the wise option, however there is always a cost associated with delaying on that decision. The author of the piece, Art Markman, says that because deferring the decision seems so attractive, people don’t actually think through whether the delay will make any difference or not. (my emphasis)

Leaders might think it prudent to wait for more information about the status of the pandemic before moving forward. However, it is always worth making a decision tree to determine whether a different decision would be reached in each of these conditions. Key leaders do not always take this step. In some cases, leaders might find that the best outcome is actually the same regardless of the status of the pandemic. In that case, deferring the decision would involve paying a cost to defer the decision in order to get information that does not change the decision that gets made. There was no reason to incur that cost.

I haven’t come up with a scenario other than capital improvements/repairs and staffing decisions in which this might apply to arts and cultural organizations. I may be too entrenched right now  in thinking about the pros and cons of re-opening venues in the context of economics and public perception/willingness to broaden my imagination. However, I figure some readers might be in situations where being reminded to make a decision tree might be useful for helping move things forward.

No Subscription Model Should Last Forever

by

I was listening to an episode of How I Built This where Guy Raz interviews ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia.

At first I was just drawn to listen because Kadakia presented a familiar story of someone who loved dance and continued dancing even as she was studying Operations Research and Economics at MIT. As I got into the story, I realized it held some lessons about discounting and subscriptions for arts and culture non-profits.

It was the desire to dance that lead her to found the earliest iteration of ClassPass. She was looking to take a class in NYC and couldn’t figure out time, place, price and transportation. She struck on the idea of making a search engine that would unify this information and allow you to find and make reservations for classes in the way OpenTable allows you to make restaurant reservations.

The idea was so compelling to people that when her boss at Warner Music called in her to ask why she was quitting, she walked out with a $10,000 check from him as an investment in her unformed company. While the company was feted with great fanfare, it took 10 days before they had their first reservation. Kadakia says that is when they approached the dance & exercise studios to get a sense of customer behavior and realized that unlike plane and restaurant reservations where people have already made a decision they are going to fly or go out to eat, people looking for classes  (this is ~2012) hadn’t decided to take a class.

This is where the lessons about human nature, discounts and subscriptions starts to kick in (about 34 minutes into the show.) As Guy Raz observes, in the course of about 5 years, Kadakia ends up running 5 different companies because the business model changes so drastically. (It may not seem drastic on a small scale, but when you realize she goes from raising around $40 million in her second round of funding to a recent $1 billion valuation, each change has big implications.) Kadakia says each time they changed the model, human behavior changed on them.

One of the first things they did was offer 30 day passes to a range of different classes. They promised studios around 70% of people would convert to more permanent students. It ended up about only 10% did which Kadakia admits was unfair to the studios. What they discovered was that people were continuing to take classes by signing up with a new email address. Now, my first instinct was to accuse them of gaming the system and curse them under my breath.

Kadakia and her team may have done that, but what she said they realized was that people enjoyed being able to attend a variety of classes. Instead of $45 for a 30 day product, they moved to a subscription model for $99 where you could take up to 10 classes a month, but no more than three at the same studio. Eventually they moved to an unlimited class model.

As the company grew, the fitness industry of spin, barre, bootcamp, etc classes was growing as well and they began doing business with bigger, more marquee names. This raised the average per-class rate they had to pay to studios. Kadakia says they reached a place where they were faced with adopting the business model most gyms use where they are counting on you not exercising in order to make their money. As someone who both continued to dance and took classes every day, she felt the idea of betting against their customers was anti-ethical to their founding principles of getting people to exercise.

Faced with the prospect of having a lot of people angry at them for drastically raising the price of the unlimited pass, they moved away from that as their core product and now package classes differently.

As referenced earlier, one of the main things I took away from this was that sales and subscription models not only need to be structured differently for different communities, but potentially changed up across the lifespan of your organization because audience dynamics and expectations are likely to evolve. I fully expect most venues will find the ticketing model and policies they had in place pre-Covid won’t as fit well for audiences now.

 

Innovation Results From Hard Work And Funding

by

In the Washington Post, Jon Gertner reviews a book about innovation by Matt Ridley.  One aspect of the book Gertner emphasizes is Ridley’s view that innovation is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration:

Ridley’s most important chapters, and his book’s most interesting, are where he calls attention to “surprisingly consistent patterns” that describe the process of making new things. Innovation, he tells us, is usually gradual, even though we tend to subscribe to the breakthrough myth….He also illustrates how innovation can be a matter of the right people solving the right problem at the right time — and that it often involves exhaustive trial-and-error work, rather than egg-headed theoretical applications. This was typically the case with Thomas Edison, who, as Ridley notes, tried 6,000 different organic materials in the search for a filament for his electric light.

Gertner’s criticism of the book is it underappreciates the contributions of government funding in that long process of trial-and-error exploration.

Thus, you won’t find a lot here about the development of the atomic bomb, which depended almost entirely on state largesse, or about the subsidization of renewable energy. Nor will you read much on the transistor, many early lasers or the photovoltaic solar cell, which were created under the auspices of Bell Labs, part of a government-authorized monopoly…. And in Ridley’s story about the origins of Google, you will not see any indication that its founders were helped in their earliest days by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Indeed, his book consistently plays down the influence of public funding in medicine, public health, personal technology, transportation and communications; it likewise minimizes — quite strenuously, and erroneously — the role of federal assistance in the development of natural gas fracking, which was kept alive by research investments from the Energy Department in the 1970s.

Reading this review, I realized in the 16+ years I have been writing this blog, I don’t think I have ever made a post that tied the lengthy process of creativity together with the importance of funding.

I have dealt with the topics separately. I have had a number of posts about how even creators often attribute their first big successes to some inherent stroke of genius or talent rather than to the 7 years of trial and error that lead to it.

I have also made posts about the importance of government and foundation funding to creative industries. I think the closest I may have come to directly tying both together are some posts I made about how people who have a support and expectations of relatively affluent families/friends are more able to participate in low paying internships/apprenticeships which can be highly important to networking and career development.

In any case, obviously innovation is a long term process which requires funding support and there aren’t a lot of entities willing to make that investment when it comes to creative arts.

By that same token, it shouldn’t be forgotten that businesses in general have benefited from government support of the basic research which constitutes the backbone of many of their products.

Perhaps all those calls for the arts to be run like a business should be answered by noting that contrary to all the garage origin stories of many famous companies, artists are often left to subsidize their own development. Additionally, the history of innovation of all types is one of government support.

 

It’s A Good Time To Broaden Board Composition Too

by

Tyler Green’s tweet today about art museums acting like corporations rather than charities got me to look at the full series of tweets on the subject.  He is angered by the fact that instead of stepping up to support museums in a time of crisis, the billionaire members of boards are voting for mass lay-offs of staffs.

In brief, his argument seems to be that while museum boards are comprised of people who make the largest individual donations to museums, they are not the largest sources of support for those museums.

He notes that many charities have board members who represent the membership or community the organization serves, but institutions like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) don’t have any.

All this is worth serious consideration as our organizations seek to move on to the next normal. Those who have supported our organizations in the past with their participation may no longer feel safe engaging with the general public. There is an opportunity to start working toward oft expressed ideals of engaging a broader audience with whom you haven’t had the time and resources to initiate a conversation. Because they are increasingly likely to be your new audience.

Their numbers may not be as large as your old audience, but social distancing rules have reduced your top capacity so you have some cover to explain the smaller crowds.

I wrote about Nina Simon’s talk on this effort earlier this month.

But perhaps most importantly in the context of Tyler Green’s posts, it is probably time to broaden the membership of the board. This is likely to necessitate a shift in corporate/board culture. Even if your board isn’t comprised of billionaires, it is highly likely that the group dynamics of the board are going to feel alienating to any new members chosen to represent the core demographics served by your organization.

Psychology of Re-Opening

by

Artsjournal.com linked to a Washington Post story about all the psychological considerations some movie theater operators are factoring into re-opening their spaces for screenings. To paraphrase one of those interviewed, there may be a whole series of conditions that have to be met to admit audiences, but you don’t want people to feel like they are undergoing an airport screening just to see a movie.

An owner of a movie chain in Omaha has decided to rely on a mix of subtle imagery and social proof:

One conclusion: Leaning in to safety messaging is a surefire way to turn off customers.

“If you’re leading off the pitch with ‘It’s so clean you’re not going to get sick’ then you’ve already lost the argument,” said Barstow, whose company is about to open a new Omaha location. Instead of talking about disinfectant and distancing, he says, he believes it more effective to roll out traditional marketing that slips in the requisite information — an image of a shiny lobby with an employee in the background who just happens to be wearing a mask, for instance.

“You let people know you’re taking care of them, but very subtly,” he said.

Barstow said he and his daughter, who runs the company’s marketing operation, have discovered that the best weapon for luring customers might be not what the theater is doing at all — it’s the sight of other customers.

[…]

“Seeing someone like a mom bring her three kids to a matinee is I think going to be the best tool to make people feel comfortable about coming themselves.” Of course, he acknowledges, such events need to happen organically, captured instead of contrived on social media.

At my venue, we had already been planning to start showing movies in late July before our governor added live performance venues alongside movie theaters as places that are allowed to hold events. One of the major points of concern for employees was whether customers would wear masks. We weren’t sure how forceful we could be, but the recent decision by the AMC movie theater chain to make masks mandatory gives us a little more support, regardless of how insistent we decide to be.

One interesting observation from the Washington Post article I hadn’t really considered was the importance of having mask wearing staff communicate reassurance with their eyes and posture since the rest of the face won’t be visible. In this, perhaps the performing arts have a competitive advantage.

“You have to train staff how to reassure customers with their eyes, because no one will be able to see their mouths,” said Barstow, who is mandating employees wear masks.

“Maybe,” he mused, “we should hire local drama students.”

Making Time For Your Creativity Can Be The Hardest Part

by

While people still haven’t returned to the daily routines they may have had before Covid-19 brought a halt to so much of our lives, it might be worth encouraging people to continue cultivating whatever creative practices they may have engaged in during these times. Reinforce the value of whatever they became interested in as part of their lives. Chances are people are reconsidering what things they found fulfilling before and whether those things still hold value for them.

That said, there is always an investment of time and a learning curve involved with starting anything new. That can be a disincentive to continuing for people who are seeking the comfort of their earlier familiar lives.

It has been awhile since I linked to a cartoon from the Zen Pencils site. This one is excerpted from a page the cartoonist wrote about his own practice.

Long time readers know before I moved to my current position in Georgia, I lived in Ohio where I tried to infiltrate a Creative Cult, a group of people who provided the community with various hands-on creative experiences at different places around town. They are still up to their shenanigans and currently have people on a hunt around the community trying to find “eggs” that were stolen out of museum paintings.

Nick Sherman, a young gentleman who may or may not be the mysterious, yet dashing cult leader has a weekly newsletter which includes missives to him from the Creative Underground explaining all the ways in which the Man will try to convince him he isn’t creative or that he should be prioritizing other things over his creative pursuits.

For example, on May 1 the Creative Underground wrote:

This is what we mean. THE MAN starts by whispering in your ear something very obvious; that there is a time for art-making, and there is a time not for art-making. A harmless statement right? Wrong! THE MAN never stops where he should. He then goes on to cleverly suggest that, “If you are doing your art, you must be neglecting something else.” Do you see his trap?

Then because you want to be a responsible, upstanding, person you think, “Of course! I do not see my little old grandmother nearly enough.” You go see her. And in this way, THE MAN keeps bringing up distraction after distraction (even legitimate ones!) that keep you from your art. Something always comes up. Soon, your brain makes a very dangerous and direct comparison. It flashes like a bright-red neon sign against the darkest corner of your brain. “ART = SELFISH”

In this way, Nick anthropomorphizes all those insecurities and doubts everyone has about their creative practice. Granted, sometimes there are actually people in our lives who are more than happy to give voice to these sentiments and there is no need to provide them with a metaphoric form.

You can subscribe to Nick’s newsletter here if you have an interest.

Putting Some O’ That Theory Into Practice

by

I arrived in my office last Friday to find a heck of a lot more emails in my Inbox than I am used to. It turned out the evening before the governor had announced a change of guidelines that would allow performing arts organizations to open after July 1 and people immediately started scrambling trying to ascertain what it all meant.  Ultimately, nothing the new order contained deviated from our expectations by much at all in terms of how it would impact seating capacity or operational practices. We were on a Zoom call with the county attorney today and he had nothing surprising to say in his reading of the order, but it was good to have our understanding confirmed.

Like me, you may have heard that Texas’ governor had issued guidance on performing arts centers last week.  However, I was surprised to learn that Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL was having concerts last week. I hadn’t heard that things had opened that far in any other state.

The performances in Clearwater were in their lobby in a cabaret type setting  with attendance capped at 80 people. It looks like the three shows on June 11 sold out quickly and the added shows on June 14,  19 & 25 sold out as well. I was wondering if there are any readers in Florida who may have attended who could talk about the show and what their experience was. I see from an article on the show there were some screening procedures and people were seated at a social distance.

Fans were offered face masks at the gate, temperature-checked upon entry, and delivered drinks and snacks by servers in gloves and black masks. They sat in groups of four or fewer, and for the most part, only got up to hit the head.

The venue is also communicating their safety policies in the events scheduled this month which include the following.

– Venue staff will be wearing face masks; we encourage patrons to do the same. Face masks are available at the door upon request.
– Hand sanitizer stations are readily available. If you are in need of an attendant with cleaning supplies, please ask the wait staff.
– Table selection is on a first-come/first-served basis. We ask that you not change tables once you are seated.
– We encourage remaining at your table during the show. If you wish to stand, you will be asked to move behind the seated area and maintain social distancing.
– All food and beverage service will be table-side. There will be no walk-up service available.
– If you suspect you are ill or reside with someone who is ill with flu-like symptoms, we ask you to exchange for a future show.
– While we are committed to providing a clean and safe environment, it is impossible to eliminate all health risk in any location so please use discretion.

This seems a good example upon which to base your own venue communications as you start to open so that you don’t have to invent it all from scratch.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

/ Find It!

/ Recent Comments

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