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Once You Have Found Her, Never Let Her Go

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A couple weeks ago violinist Holly Mulcahy made a Facebook post about giving the manager at the Wichita, KS airport Enterprise counter her card which had a BOGO ticket offer printed on the back.

Organizations often have the idea of printing off promotional/discount materials and having performers and other members of the artistic staff distribute them in the hopes of attracting new audiences. But it occurred to me that these efforts aren’t really worthwhile unless there is a strong commitment from performers and staff to distribute these materials outside of their social circle and act as an ambassador for your organizational brand.

My impression is that Holly is largely in the drivers seat on this and tells the organizations with which she works what she is interested in doing and what materials would be helpful in making that happen. I still remember a post she made years ago about a little social meet-up she had a hand in organizing at a restaurant in Chattanooga that had great cinnamon buns. There is part of me that still wants to eat those cinnamon buns.

I think there is a case to be made for a bottom up approach to audience cultivation where the artists or general staff mention the type of things they would be invested in doing and working to get materials, spaces and other resources to make it happen versus administrators deciding on a new initiative and asking staff to participate.

Not every idea is going to be great, no matter where it comes from. Holly makes it look easy because she has been thinking about the audience experience every day, all the time, for years and has sorted through many ideas. When she promises some enchanted evening, she is invested in making it happen and probably had conversations with people about experiences with ticketing, parking, dining, etc,. with the goal of improving them.

It may take years of just talking about an organizational commitment to a better audience experience and enacting changes in other areas before good ideas and investment manifest.  The adage about change starting from within first is probably really applicable to audience development. You need to do cultivation work with staff before you can really be successful at audience cultivation.  The BOGO coupon comes toward the end as one tool in your process rather than defining the audience cultivation effort.

 

Coming To A PBS Station Near You…

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I didn’t realize I missed posting yesterday until early this morning. Right now my team and I are really busy preparing for a concert which is being taped for PBS.  This show, A Night of Georgia Music, features violinist Robert McDuffie; Chuck Leavell (Allman Brothers, Rolling Stones) and Mike Mills (R.E.M) backed by an orchestra  from a conservatory bearing McDuffie’s name. They had performed the show in other places and had their plans to do it here in Macon curtailed by Covid.  Somewhat fortunately, that delay provided additional time to arrange for the taping.

Let me tell you, the process of getting this produced is far more complicated than you might imagine. The securing the rights for the songs being performed alone is mind boggling. The person handling the clearances does it for a living and even she had a hard time determining if what rights applications might be necessary for all the nuanced forms the concert might manifest. There is obviously broadcast rights for PBS stations. There was also the question of whether DVDs and other types of recordings might be issued and what format they might take. Would the concert be streamed by stations? Would recordings be offered as premiums for pledging or used during a pledge drive? There was even a question of non-mechanical royalties if the cameras caught a clear shot of the sheet music being used.

While shuffling of VIP seating, (I don’t know how many times I have reassigned the same blocks of tickets to different people), special meet and greets, and navigating audiences around cameras and recording equipment is definitely going to be a challenge, these are familiar activities. We are somewhat relieved that we are only responsible for handling that piece of the puzzle.

Even though it has been a tight squeeze to pull it off, the fact that our historic venue would appear on television provided a little leverage in getting some repairs made. So there has already been a little bit of a benefit from the event.

I will let folks know how things turn out and when to start looking for the concert on your local PBS affiliate. I am sure it will be awhile before it does.

If you are interested in learning more, there was a radio interview with the three principal performers that just came out.

A First Stab At A State Of Performing Arts Survey

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Association of Performing Arts Professionals featured a webinar today reporting on the results of a survey they conducted about the state of the performing arts. Regrettably, I missed it but they posted many slides on Twitter today.  The study they conducted last month is meant to provide a baseline against which to assess how things are developing going into the future.

One of the first slides to catch my attention addressed ticket sales. We have been wondering if our sales numbers were reflected by the nation as a whole.  Sure enough, in terms of single ticket sales, numbers are down and only 52% of audiences reported buying tickets in late January/early February. (This may be a factor of supply of performances to view as it is demand, however.)

In another post, they reported subscriptions are down as well. Really, neither of these datapoints are of great surprise to me given how the state of the pandemic has fluctuated.  They also noted many organizations are offering non-ticketed content to keep audiences engaged.

Audience support of mask and vaccine mandates at performances was strong.

Also of interest was the news that arts professionals are returning to work, but are much more mindful of a work-life balance. There are concerns about being able to fully staff positions with qualified individuals due to worker expectations and people leaving the field or being lured away by better work environment and compensation.

 

Is Your Talent Being Hoarded?

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The Marginal Revolution blog linked to a really interesting study on talent hoarding a practice in which managers prevent productive workers from seeking promotions. The study author, Ingrid Haegele, found that when the manager is promoted, subordinates have the best opportunity to gain promotions themselves.

My findings indicate that talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent by reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers….Manager rotations increase worker applications for major promotions by 123%, indicating that talent hoarding deters a large group of workers from applying for promotions.

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I find that talent hoarding has disparate impacts by gender. Talent hoarding deters a larger share of female applicants from applying for major promotions compared to men. Female marginal applicants are twice as likely to land a major promotion than males, implying that talent hoarding
is more consequential for women’s career progression. Conditional on landing a promotion, women are almost three times as likely as their male counterparts to perform well in their new positions, suggesting that the firm may be failing to realize potential productivity gains by not enabling
talented women to progress to higher-level positions. Female marginal applicants are much more qualified than males in terms of their educational qualifications and past performance, indicating that talent hoarding affects women at a higher part of the quality distribution compared to men.

Interestingly, Haegele found that talent hoarding was generally gender neutral. Male and female managers were equally likely to hoard talent and these managers suppressed the advancement opportunities of both male and female subordinates generally equally. She says credits the gender difference to:

“….the survey finds that women in the firm place more value on preserving a good relationship with their manager and rely more on managers’ career guidance when making application decisions.”

As a result, they are less likely to apply for promotions.

A couple things to note: First, this is only a study of the impact of talent hoarding. There are plenty of other factors which contribute to workplace inequities for everyone. The author had to control for a lot of factors in her study, among them being that managers have a lot of subtle tools that their disposal to reinforce talent hoarding that are difficult to detect.

The other thing to note is that she conducted her survey on a large multi-national manufacturing corporation with most of its employees in Germany. While she does cite other studies illustrating how talent hoarding occurs in the U.S. and other countries, her findings may not be entirely applicable to small non-profits in the U.S.

Talent hoarding in staff of 12 is certain to have entirely different dynamics, especially with the limited opportunities for internal promotions.

But if anything, during this Great Resignation period where people are looking for better opportunities for themselves, being aware that your manager has a disincentive to praise your talents, both within the organization and to you personally is something to consider.

Curiosity Satisfied By A Strange Answer

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I am not sure how I came across the article, but this Fall I came across an interview on The First Peoples Fund website with master traditional folk artist Kevin Locke. In the course of the conversation, Locke notes that what is widely known as the Native American flute is a pretty recent invention that wasn’t really part of the traditional cultural practices. The bolded section is the interviewer’s question. I don’t seem to see the interviewer identified.

In 1983 or 1982, a German American named Michael Graham Allen invented the Native American flute. It’s based on the Japanese wind instrument called a shakuhachi. I asked Allen why he did that. He said he made an original Indigenous flute but he didn’t know how to market it. He came upon this tuning system based on the Japanese shakuhachi and renamed it as a Native American flute….Pretty soon, everybody all over the world got interested in this instrument. But it’s not an Indigenous North American musical aesthetic. It’s basically Japanese. But the beautiful thing about it — and I’m not knocking it, I’m just saying people need to be aware where this instrument comes from…

And the instrument sounds so good! There are thousands of Native American flute music recordings that are just improvisational. I don’t want to discredit the music. I think it’s a great thing, but it has nothing to do with Indigenous tradition.

That in itself is a problem because the original genre associated with the Indigenous flute is a classic poetic or literary style that comes from the woodlands in the Great Lakes area, Northern Plains, and Southern Plains. And it existed for so many generations because the genre has characteristics that are uniform across most of North America. It’s a formulaic compositional pattern, even though the songs are diverse within themselves.

That’s so wild. First, I didn’t know the history of the Native American flute. Initially I had mixed feelings about its non-Indigenous origins. But what I’m hearing is that this musical instrument lifts your creativity. Is that accurate? 

Yeah. 

I don’t know exactly how to process this since it pretty much seems like a type of cultural exploitation. Though I don’t know if the article provides enough information to determine that either if it was an Indigenous instrument that had Japanese tuning and was marketed as a Native American flute.  The situation is confusing and  Locke frames it in a very gracious way and seems to indicate that it has been a medium through which other Native artists have found success. It seems like it might have been invented in the name of Indigenous peoples but they also have primary ownership of it.

It does, however, clarify my previous general sense that Japanese and Indigenous cultures developed a similar musical instrument independently of each other. Not so much I guess.  I thought it worth following Locke’s suggestion about raising awareness of the instrument’s origins and posting about it.

Come For A Haircut, See A Van Gogh

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It will probably come as no surprise to anyone running an arts venue that many attendees are over the mask wearing thing. At my venue, we actually had a more conservative mandatory policy for mask wearing than our university parent. At the beginning of December, we were prevailed upon to loosen those restrictions by my boss so for about two weeks we were at “strongly suggested” before the omicron surge saw everyone, including our parent organization institute mandatory masking again.  Still, it wasn’t long after the new year that we had people leveraging loopholes to avoid wearing masks.

Over the holidays I was amused to read that some landmark institutions in the Netherlands were chafing against restrictions there in a fairly creative way. The Van Gogh Museum, Mauritshuis gallery, and Concertgebouw concert hall engaged some barbers, nail artists and fitness instructors to provide services at their venues because those businesses weren’t restricted in the way that art institutions were.

“We wanted to make the point that a museum is a safe visit and we should be open,” Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker told AFP.

“The mayor called me last night and she said she’s not permitting this. We expect to get a warning at some point after which we will have to close, but we wanted to make this point very badly so here we are.”

One of the barber’s clients said he had come because he was “pro-culture”.

[…]

Nearby, the “Hair salon at the Concertgebouw” event saw two masked barbers clip hair on stage, while the orchestra played Symphony No. 2 by Charles Iver.

“After two years of patience and an ever-constructive attitude, it is high time for a fair perspective for the cultural sector,” Concertgebouw director Simon Renink said.

Fitness classes took place at the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague, home to Vermeer’s famed “Girl with the Peal Earring, while the Speelklok museum in Utrecht set itself up as a gym.

No mention of whether the ubiquitous “Shave and a Haircut” riff was played anywhere.

While the pandemic is certainly going to force arts organizations to rethink their business models, I am not sure that salon services are going to become the next trend. Exercise and yoga classes at museums and galleries was a thing pre-pandemic so I wouldn’t completely discount the idea.

The story does remind us that arts people are very creative thinkers. If arts leaders are willing to exercise this skillset in defiance of governments, perhaps they will be more willing to try new ideas without fearing the reactions of funders and donors as much

 

Haven’t Seen You Around Recently

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I’m happy to say that things are starting to get back to a place where I feel like I can start blogging again. Hopefully it will stay that way. I really underestimated how difficult things were going to become when I made the “On Hiatus” post in November.

When I finally got a chance to start reading about practices and trends in the arts, a familiar source caught my attention – Colleen Dilenschneider. Last week she posted that not only was visitation by new and non-recent visitors up on 2020 and 2021 versus 2019 and earlier, but that visitation by self-identifying non-white members of these groups was also up in this period of time.

The percentage of new and non-recent visitors who self-identify as non-White increased 52% from 2019 to 2020! It rose from 10.0% to 15.2%. This percentage fell to 13.9% of new and non-recent attendance in 2021, but is still a dramatic 39% increase compared to 2019 levels!

Earlier in February, she had posted that in recent years people have begun to perceive many, though not all, cultural entities as being more welcoming to individuals like themselves. That article is worth reading for greater insight into this trend. Unfortunately, symphony/orchestras were most strongly perceived as “not welcoming to people like me” among survey respondents.

In last week’s post, Dilenschneider provides some guidance about how to interpret the increased numbers:

Please resist the urge to see these numbers and think “Score! We got people who were disinterested in attending to visit us during the pandemic.” Behavioral economics and audience motivation studies suggest that entities should instead say, “Score! We got people who were already interested in visiting us to finally move us up on their to-do list and trial/re-trial our experience!”

She suggests that the uptick in attendance is likely due to the start of efforts toward diversity, equity, inclusion and justice (DEIJ). Specifically she mentions that due to the pandemic, marketing messaging shifted from “Visit Now” toward DEIJ and customer-centric values.

On Hiatus

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Apologies to my readers. The departure of some staff and absence of others has placed me in a situation where I can no longer post regularly. Hopefully this will resolve itself soon and I can return to my regular schedule. Until then, I hope you will continue to remain subscribed so you will receive notifications when my posts begin again.

I appreciate everyone’s support over the years.

Thank you

Do You Need To Feel Transcendent Or Sleep Better Right Now?

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Ruth Hartt got a bit of a kick from the post I made last week where I termed her use of stock video footage and other clips to create an video marketing piece as a “Franken-Ad.” She tagged me and others about another set of Franken-ads she made more along the lines of print or social media pieces.

She uses these ads to address the pretty much cliched use of terms like “joyful,” “nostalgic,” “rhapsodic,” “timeless,” “refined,” and “sumptuous” to suggest that people will have a transcendent experience.  She associates this with Maslow’s hierarchy of need and raises the point that during current times especially, most people are focused on solving challenges related to health and safety rather than self-actualization.

Recent studies reveal that the benefits of a peak experience don’t end at self transcendence. Science tells us that awe increases pro-social behavior and has an integral part to play in health and happiness. In fact, people who report experiencing awe regularly have remarkably stronger immune systems and better mental health. Why aren’t arts organizations touting these benefits?

“Come for the classical music; stay for the lowered levels of inflammatory cytokines!” We chuckle at this imaginary tagline, but I’m confident that there are swaths of consumers who would be intrigued by this value proposition.

Frequent readers will know that I am not a proponent of arguing the instrumental value of the arts or positioning it as a prescription for ills,  especially since so much of the research on the benefits of the arts have had questionable results. So I am not entirely on board with all the claims her mocked up ads make. However, since it is true that any pro-social behavior contributes to health and happiness, an arts experience is just as valid an option as many others.

Tolerance for uncertainty and inspiring creative risk-taking may not roll off the tongue as easily as sumptuous and transcendent, but after years exposure to those latter terms, any alternative will catch the eye and intrigue people.

I am not really suggesting listing all the terms she uses in her ads, but I do like Hartt’s choice of an image of a woman who looks like she might be poised at the edge of anticipation or anxiety juxtaposed with “Warning this concert may cause: Lowered Stress, …Improved Mood, …Decreased Pain…Increased Alertness.” There is a sense that things could go either way.

I don’t know that I would use those exact terms, but an ad that communicated these general concepts instead of suggesting transcendence presents the experience as more relatable to the viewer.  If you are a new attendee still processing your experience, you might think you did something went wrong if you aren’t experiencing the promised ecstasy.

I also appreciated that one of her ads targeted businesses. While again I would be worried about companies seeing arts experiences as another tool to be used alongside nap lounges and ping pong tables to get the best work product from employees, the general idea that the presence of these experiences makes the community more attractive and liveable for employees is as beneficial as having sincerely motivated employees.

Yes, But When She Said It, It Sounded Brilliant

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Vu Le posted this week about a well-observed phenomenon he termed “Outsider Efficiency Bias.”  He defined this as basically having an outsider like a consultant come in and be lauded for making the same observations and recommendations that internal constituencies have.

Because this is a common experience, I figured someone would have already coined a term for it, but I couldn’t find one. Though logical fallacies like appeal to authority, appeal to accomplishment and appeal to novelty all intersect.

He points out this manifests in the hiring and contracting decisions organizations make and beyond just bringing consultants in for a week or two.

•Board members insisting on hiring an external candidate to be the ED instead of promoting a qualified person within the organization
•EDs/CEOs doing the same thing, hiring a staff from outside, often neglecting internal candidates
•Foundations hiring people from academia or the corporate world, who have no experience in nonprofit, to be the CEO
•Organizations hiring consultants from outside the geographic area instead of contracting with local consultants who live and work there
•Organizations hiring local consultants instead of just listening to their staff
•Conferences booking national and international speakers instead of working with local speakers

Le said he experienced this situation with his own board when they suggested bringing in an outsider to advise them about how to write blogs and articles better. If you aren’t aware, Vu Le is in fairly high demand as a speaker and panelist based on the content of his blog posts and use of social media to advocate for equity.

He acknowledges that an outsider perspective is important to the growth of organizations and is not discounting the need, but he lists many ways in which a bias toward outsiders can undermine the short and long term health of an organization.

I would have to copy and paste a significant portion of his post to include everything so I encourage people to read the original and think about how the bias exists in your organizational culture.

Since the Bible talks about a prophet being honored everywhere except in his own town and among his friends and family, this behavior is pretty deep seated but can be avoided with the investment of some thought and attention.

What’s Been Learned So Far About Offering Virtual Theatre

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American Theatre released results of a survey about virtual theatre offerings during Covid this week. Respondents represent 64 organizations from 25 states.

As you might already imagine, the bad news is that virtual programming was not financially viable for nearly all organizations.

Many experienced a promising initial swell of audience interest in the early months of 2020, but also a disappointing and steady subsequent decline in interest over the past year or so. Companies that sold tickets at pre-pandemic prices almost uniformly experienced a significant dip both in number of tickets sold and box-office revenue compared to the outcomes of similar in-person plays produced during previous seasons; some companies experienced only moderate drops, while for others, the change was drastic.

[…]

Theatres that conducted their own surveys to gauge audience feedback on virtual offerings found that while the quality of the work was typically quite appreciated, audiences consistently expressed a strong preference for live, in-person theatre and saw the virtual version as a better-than-nothing alternative to no theatre at all.

Some theatres found their production costs were less than live performances, mostly due to having smaller casts, production and support crews. Others found it was actually more expensive to create virtual content.

There were some upsides reported, including expanded and increased access:

Many noted that virtual offerings served as an important way to engage their core audience base and maintain donor interest during a time when this would not be possible without the internet, producing ripple effects that cannot always easily be quantified: Most theatre companies reported increased donor support in the early months of the pandemic, and it’s possible though hard to measure whether a sustained virtual presence may have bolstered donor interest. Other companies who may not have seen an overall increase in ticket sales nonetheless reported a promising increase in viewership from younger virtual audiences.

…more than a third of respondents praised virtual theatre for increasing accessibility for those not able to attend in person, whether due to disability, health issues, transportation barriers, or living in rural areas far from the nearest theatre company. As Liz Lisle (she/her), managing director of Shotgun Players in San Francisco, put it, “For us, it is not an economic question—it is an accessibility and engagement question.” Measuring by revenue is “the wrong frame. Virtual theatre brings greater engagement.”

There is a great deal more detailed observation discussed in the article that can offer insight to organizations of multiple disciplines. One thing that seemed to be clear to most respondents is that providing virtual content isn’t simply a matter of putting cameras and sound equipment near a performance executed in a generally conventional way. The quality often compares unfavorably with professional video & film production.

Many respondents seemed to feel the best course was to provide content which supplemented or complemented a live performance. The value added element seemed more suited to achieving goals and fulfilling expectations.

Though that approach leaves people who have difficultly accessing physical spaces without the option of experience the full production. There is certainly an opportunity for those with the resources and expertise to meet an unmet need of providing virtual performances to this segment of the population nationally and perhaps internationally. I wouldn’t be surprised if people are already pursuing further experimentation with the virtual theatre form.

The American Theatre piece bears the title “The Jury Is In on Virtual Theatre,” but I think it is a little too early in the process of exploring virtual theatre offerings to make that claim.

Focus On Product vs Process

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On Museum 2.0 Seema Rao asks why museum educators are so undervalued in the context of a question she was asked about the difference between a Sip and Paint session and a class on marbling technique.

She answers by noting that Sip and Paint sessions are focused on the final product while learning an artistic technique is about teaching you the process with the goal of empowering you to make it your own. However, they are intentionally designed to look the same to help learners feel comfortable with the experience.

Sip and Paints are product focused, in a sense. They prove to participants there is a simple set of steps to get something. It’s closer to learning to write a letter. Sure, we all have different handwriting, but we are essentially communicating the same sound. Much of modern and contemporary art, particularly, is often about communicating an “a” by drawing a cow, or rather coming up with new forms of communication. Teaching you to paint a sunflower step by step will not get you closer to appreciating the innovations of Van Gogh, largely because you’re skipping right past being innovative.

Museum educators working with adults, though, know adults yearn structure. Society rewards the structured in school and work. So, they come up with projects that mimic the safety of Sip and Paints, projects though that don’t have one single end-point. They safely allow adults places to not follow the rules or forget there are rules at all.

Rao goes on to mention that museum education departments are typically the most under-resourced area of their institutions, to the point there is often an expectation that they execute their operations with volunteers. This immediately put me in mind of the debate that has arisen about the Art Institute of Chicago “firing” their volunteer docents. I half wondered if she weren’t making an oblique reference to that situation.

The Art Institute was phasing out their docent program with the plan of replacing them with paid educators. The Art Institute had required quite a bit of their docents in terms of engaging in a long probationary period and engaging in research projects. It was acknowledged that these could prove impediments to diversifying the composition of the docent corps. Unfortunately, while paying people for their labor and working to diversify the composition of the education staff were positive steps, there was also a perception that the museum was dismissing 82 of their most avid supporters.

From reading Rao’s post, I think she would appreciate that the Art Institute of Chicago’s docents had invested so much time into educating themselves about the collection, but would be just as happy that the museum was directing financial resources into education rather than depending on the passion of volunteers.

“What’s the solution? One is that educators need to stand up and show their work, show the challenges, and highlight the hard work behind the scenes. “

Does This Franken-Ad Have More Emotional Resonance With Audiences Than The Highly Produced One You Are Using?

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Last month, Trevor O’Donnell directed his readers to a post by Ruth Hartt discussing how to market the arts in a way that focuses on solving the “problems” people have rather than focusing on selling a performance.

” Because no matter the industry, customers don’t want products, or services, or concert tickets. Their purchases are caused by deeper motivations: they want solutions to their problems. Take, for example, the young businessman who wants to impress his sophisticated date, so he “hires” the orchestra concert to help him. Or the busy working mom who wants to get her elderly mother something other than the usual flowers for her birthday, so she “hires” the orchestra concert as an experience they can share together.”

Hartt cobbles together an ad out of “some stock footage, added some clips from a popular Mommy YouTuber, layered in a few royalty-free tracks” to create an appeal to stay-at-home mothers. Because it is assembled from disparate sources, things don’t mesh exactly right. As she notes, the refreshed woman on a beach at the end should be in a theater in order to make sense.

Her goal was to create a work with an emotional pull in response to the problem of: (her emphasis)

“Help me escape from the grime and chaos of mom life with an evening of dressing up and feeling fancy so that I can feel rejuvenated and be a better mom and wife.”

Check out her ad below, read more of her thoughts, and see symphony ad she is contrasting this to-

Looking To Public Art To Revitalize Cities Post-Covid

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Somewhat in line with my post yesterday about the growing number of basic guarantee income programs for artists, Artsjournal.com had an interview with the mayor of Toronto, John Tory, about the beginning of a 10 year initiative to create public art. The program had been delayed by the start of Covid and the mayor says that has created an even greater need for public works of art.

This is true for a couple of reasons: first, I think the sense of joy — the look and feel of the city being enlivened by artistic creations of all kinds — became even more important after a desolate period when you’d walk around downtown and it was bleak, I mean it was a wasteland. The second reason, which was valid before but now became 100 times more valid, was that it also allows some of our artists to tell their stories. And beyond the benefits to us of having those stories told and those works displayed, this program will retain the services of 1,500 artists over the course of this year. That’s not unimportant in the context of a group that has been very hard hit. I’m not minimizing the problems other people have had, but artists had a terrible time. Now there’s a need to bring the city back to life and there’s nothing like the arts and culture to do that.

I was interested to see the interviewer, Jonathan Dekel, follow up by asking the mayor how this vision of supporting artists and their importance to the city reconciles with the concerns about gentrification displacing the artists. The mayor made mention of some measures like tax relief for music venues and affordable housing arrangements which recognize that artists’ income is not regular from month to month.

Guaranteed Income For Artists Spreading

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Nod to Laura Zabel who tweeted a story about the guaranteed basic income for artists pilot program being started in Ireland.  The plan is to provide €325/week to 2000 artists. This is actually more, both in terms of monthly income and number of artists included, than any similar program I have seen piloted in the US. The program will be run across three years which is also longer than any other program I have come across as well.

Minister for the Arts Catherine Martin indicated selection for participation would be random rather than competitive. It sounds like the intent is to make sure those in different sectors and career stages are represented since the article mentions “Likely “streams” will include professional artists, emerging/developing artists and creative arts workers.”

The ministry is quoted as saying there won’t be a means test for who will be able to participate in the program.

The National Campaign for the Arts which had lobbied for the pilot was quoted as saying they were:

“happy with the proposed payment of €325 per week, once it is not means tested and other benefits including disability payments are not diminished, and that there is a clear process for selection…”

In writing about other guaranteed basic income programs previously, it hadn’t occurred to me that participating in the program might end up disadvantaging people from receiving other types of aid due to income restrictions. That is something to be considered when designing programs like this –either to disburse an amount that will offset people’s losses or ensure that the amount people are receiving doesn’t adversely impact their ability to receive other aid.

All That Is Philanthropy Is Not Gold

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I have been following Lucy Bernholz, a self-described philanthropy wonk, for ages it seems. She writes the blog Philanthropy 2173 and is a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civic Society.  When I saw an interview with the AP about a how philanthropy isn’t all about money, I took a closer look.

And before I get into my post proper, if you are interested in hearing more, she is participating in a Zoom conversation on the topic on November 4 @4pm ET

Basically she says that there is more to philanthropy than giving money, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the news outlets and most non-profits focus on what billionaires are doing with their money. Or for that matter, the round up requests you get when you buy your groceries.  The result is that our understanding of non-monetary methods of philanthropy are pretty much stifled. Alternatives aren’t just volunteering and donating blood and organs. It can be donating genetic material for disease research or giving photographs to organizations which document historical events like the Japanese internment during World War II.

When Bernholz was asked about how tax law has impacted philanthropy, she gave the following response:

A: It never came up in our conversations. Only when we brought it up. What’s fascinating about that is only 8% of Americans bother to take the charitable tax deduction on their tax return. Now, tax policy is pretty much the only policy idea the philanthropy industry has any interest in. They’re serving 8% of the population. And I know that 8% is not Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not Pierre Omidyar. It’s not Laurene Powell Jobs. They’ve all said: “We don’t care about the tax benefit. We’re gonna do an LLC, because that gives us more control and more anonymity.” So there’s some 8% who care. In poker, they’d call that a tell. If and until the nonprofit and philanthropic industries start advocating for really rich people to pay their taxes, I think the view of that whole industry as a wealth preservation mechanism is quite justified.

It was surprising to learn that only 8% of Americans take the deduction. Gallup polling has shown about 80% of Americans donated every year pre-Covid. Granted, not everyone may donate to a level at which it makes sense to claim the deduction, but surely more than 8% donate above that threshold.

We frequently hear that the U.S. government subsidizes non-profits by allowing that deduction, but it appears the subsidy isn’t as great as we may think if so few claim the deduction.

Bernholz mentions that many wealthy people have eschewed tax deduction and formed LLCs to distribute funds to maintain tight control. But there is also increased prevalence of donor advised funds (DAF) which do provide a deduction without any mandate to distribute the funds to charities, and therefore an heightened level of control as well. If you consider that a portion of that 8% claiming deductions may have never reached a charity because it is parked in a DAF that hasn’t distributed, the government is subsidizing non-profits even less than we might imagine.

How Arts Orgs Used Relief Funding Is Beginning To Be Examined

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A couple weeks ago Hyperallergic had an article that was a critical of museums who had received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds meant to keep people employed, but instead ended up laying off large numbers of people. They particularly noted that the Museum of Science Boston initially didn’t qualify for the program due to employing more than 500 people, but were later able to apply for funding after laying off more than 300 people.  The article also suggested that while some institutions needed the money to survive, some of those at the top ended up in almost better financial shape.

It found that out of $1.6 billion given to about 7,500 cultural institutions that qualified for PPP loans, nearly half of the money ($771 million) went to just 228 recipients. These same 288 institutions collectively laid off more than 14,400 employees, or at least 28% of their workforce.

[…]

However, AFSCME’s report found that not all museums faired that poorly during the pandemic. In fact, an analysis of 69 cultural institutions with available financial data revealed that 67% of them ended fiscal year (FY) 2020 with operating surpluses.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which received $3.3 million in PPP loans, laid off 97 workers during the pandemic despite ending FY 2020 with a $2.3 million surplus. Nearby, the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County ended FY 2020 with a $23.9 million operating surplus after receiving a $4.8 million PPP loan. And yet, it furloughed its 127 part-time employees from March 2020 until the end of December 2020.

Not to excuse the act of laying off people after accepting money to keep staff employed, the fact that institutions ended fiscal year 2020 with a surplus may not be indicate they profited off of layoffs. Many non-profits have a July 1 -June 30 fiscal year so if the organization was doing well from July 1, 2019 through March 2020 when the pandemic started, losses of the three months from March-June 2020 may not have moved them into a deficit. The PPP program started in April 2020 with a deadline of June 30, 2020 so organizations may not have received the funds until their 2021 fiscal year.

It has been generally acknowledged that a lot of those who applied for the PPP program didn’t have the severe financial need the program was intended to serve. Determining whether museums used funds meant to stave off layoffs to achieve better financial footing should be examined, but it isn’t clear from the information provided here. The full report can be downloaded on the AFSCME website. I haven’t downloaded the report at this time because the registration form indicates they and others may use the information to solicit and lobby me.

It will be interesting to see if a similar examination is conducted of performing arts venues which largely fall under the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program, something most museums were not eligible due to the fixed seating requirement for that program.  From what I have seen, the administration of that program is still plagued with errors which they are trying to resolve for adversely effected venues, but that raises concerns that there was opportunity for inappropriately granting funds as well.

When It Comes To Work, What Is The Cost-Benefit Between Lethargy And A Sense Of Belonging

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Dan Pink pointed to a study (warning, ad heavy page) that suggests while office interruptions may be disruptive to one’s workflow, it ultimately creates a sense of worth and belonging for people. This is something to be considered both in terms of the conversation about shifting to working remotely and digital vs. in-person arts experiences. There seems to be an indication that as social creatures, the negatives of in-person work and play interactions may be outweighed by the positive.

The study which appears in the Journal of Applied Psychology was conducted at the University of Cincinnati:

Study authors surveyed a group of 111 employees twice per day for three full weeks. Each time, employees answered questions about their experiences at the office that day. More specifically, participants recorded if they had endured any interruptions, how mentally tired they felt, their sense of belonging, and their overall job satisfaction.

Those polls led the research team to conclude that while work interruptions in a vacuum can certainly lead to feeling more lethargic and dissatisfied, the social interactions that usually accompany those intrusions produce feelings of belonging and increased job satisfaction.

“Our study revealed that by providing this avenue for social interaction with one’s colleagues, work interruptions led to a greater sense of belonging. This sense of belonging, in turn, led to higher job satisfaction,” Dr. Puranik adds.

I am not necessarily advocating for returning to the office-centric work environment of yore. I felt like this was a relatively honest discussion of the dynamics of in-person office work. It would be interesting to see a similar study conducted with a larger sample size in a year or so when remote work has a chance to exist as a norm that (hopefully) is not necessitated by the existence of a pandemic. (It didn’t escape my notice that the researchers apparently interrupted people at work twice a day to ask them how they felt being interrupted at work.)

What I fear is that people will become acclimated to a lack of social contact and not value it as much as they do now. The lethargy and dissatisfaction people may experience when interrupted shouldn’t be discounted because a sense of belonging and job satisfaction are somehow more important or valuable. People may find the working from home uninterrupted raises their energy level and satisfaction and that is a good trade off for feeling disconnected.

It also bears considering that a work environment can be created where it isn’t a zero-sum between feeling a sense of belonging and lethargy. Those options haven’t really been explored.

But ultimately people feeling that a lack of social contact is an acceptable trade off is a bad situation for museums and live performing arts events. Digital offerings can prove a good substitute and keep people engaged when they are in a situation where they can’t be present in person, but it flattens the experience. It provides too much latitude to avoid and look away from even the least inconvenient, unchallenging situations.

I have discussed how I am definitely an introvert and have no problem being alone. There are times I don’t really want to go forth from my house, but am grateful I did after having an experience.

On Sunday, after locking up the building at 9:30 pm after our visual and performing arts event, I stood outside for 90 minutes talking to a kid that had been energized by the experience. I had already worked 8 days straight and done two 12+ hour days and had to be back at work the next morning, but I realized interacting with this 22 year old was going to be valuable for both of us. Even as I was talking to him, I was thinking that had we had this conversation in a Zoom meeting, it would have been so easy to open up other websites and watch videos/read other things or just sign off from the conversation rather than devote attention to each other for 1.5 hours.

While I would certainly be comfortable in a world absent of demands for me to be personally present, I can recognize that isn’t wholly constructive in the long run.

Didn’t Happen As Envisioned, But It Came Out Much Better

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I have often viewed my professional career as having moments where I build on general ideas and concepts from earlier positions, but adapted to suit the local community. I am always wary of being the guy who constantly says “well, when I was at X, we did…” And in this particular case, it was actually our marketing director who had an idea and took leadership of a project that closely resembled work I had done before.

In my previous position, readers may remember I had started a semi-annual visual arts fair sited in the lobby of the performing arts center I ran.  Not knowing that, our marketing director proposed something along the lines of a fringe festival model with visual arts merchants and activities sited in the lobby of our historic theatre and performances/exhibitions sited in locations around the space, including the box seats, dressing rooms, balcony stairs, green room and main stage area.

The first attempt at mounting this event happened this weekend and it turned out to be successful in ways we hadn’t envisioned.  We imagined people would bring their kids to see the art works on sales and participate in the hands on activities. While the kids were busy, the parents would stick their heads in on the TED Talk-esque sessions happening in the main room. There would be other times that people would wander the space seeing the installations and then the performance elements would start late afternoon and go into the evening.

It turned out that very few people applied to do the TED Talk type program, but instead we had so many show up who had never been to the venue before or hadn’t been in 30 years, that we ended up running a constant cycle of tours of the facility. We had held open houses in the past with the specific intent of letting people see the mysterious backstage areas and didnt have much interest, but it turn out this festival idea drew people in and left us in a position to give the tours. Now we are thinking of scrapping a lengthy TED Talk program in the future, both for lack of apparent interest but also because it would interfere with our ability to give tours.

The installations by visual artists exhibited a great use of our space and now that more people have seen how the spaces were used, we expect to receive more applications with a broader use of the particular architecture of the building in the future. Likewise, many performing artists “understood the assignment,” as it were and came up with a creative use of the space.

One of the performances pieces ended up becoming an impromptu exhibit.  On Saturday, an artist and her collaborator staged a comedic dating game were participants had to rotate between activities set up in the box seats of the theater. Some of the assignments were things like drawing a portrait of the relative that always ruins Thanksgiving. Another was to write down the worst pick up lines or insults a prospective suitor has used. Since the collection of responses was so amusing, we left everything up on Sunday as the “Graveyard of Bad Dates.” Throughout the day people stopped to read what had been written, make their own contributions, or participate in the activities. There was an 1000 piece puzzle that got closer to completion by end of day Sunday. The most amusing experience was watching people who were unfamiliar with record players discovering that the music would start wherever you dropped the needle.

One of the most gratifying outcomes, (though we shouldn’t have been surprised since we intentionally designed for it), was the diversity of artists represented. We had set up a blind jury system where we recruited visual and performing artists to both advise us on the design and execution of our overall project and to serve as a jury on the works submitted. We excised identifiable information from the applications before sending it to them to score. This was definitely a much more time and labor intensive process than an internal review would have been, but we were pleased with the results. More than half the participating creators, both performers and visual, were black and one was neurodivergent.

While we might have ended up in the same place using internal staff to choose artists, we are more confident in the outcome since we took steps to reduce the opportunity for bias. Additionally, since we were doing so many tours engaging in conversations with visitors we were able to learn that many of those who had never been in the space before/within the last 20 years, came from diverse racial, geographic and economic backgrounds.

The advice of the external jury was instrumental in shaping our application process and policies. For instance, we discarded the idea of table fees and used an honor system based percentage of sales so that artists that didn’t sell anything weren’t out the additional expense of a table fee.

Like my previous experience running an arts fair in the lobby of a performing arts center, newer artists got to see how more experienced artists operated in order to capture sales by carrying items with different price points and displaying their work to the greatest benefit. There were artists who only sold 2-3 pieces who said that was the most they had ever sold at this type of event. Others who came in from out of the area was pleased to be able to network and share tips with more locally based artists.

There was one artist who gave a painting lesson to a girl on Saturday. On Sunday the girl showed up for a second lesson and then the mother showed up and said their home needed three pieces by her daughter so she needed to take another lesson.

One of the artists was so excited and invested in the concept of the fringe festival style event, he ended up being our primary tour guide for the weekend. He is interested in learning more stories about the building, who performed there and what ghosts haunt it.

As I often write, it is generally difficult to import an idea from one community to another and have the same success. I suspect we may even have a different experience if we do the same event next year. There is a lot of groundwork we (90% credit going to the marketing director and her energy, I was more perspiration than inspiration on this project) that occurred over the last two years I haven’t mentioned that contributed to the perception of this event as successful. Even if we only retain 5% of the goodwill we generated, the event probably made the most progress in our pursuit of shifting perceptions about who our organization is for of any in the past year.

I Hope No Arts Organization Is Doing Anything Close To This

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In writing posts I often draw on examples from commercial enterprises and other types of non-profits to provide interesting ideas or lessons that my primary audience of arts and culture professionals might use. It isn’t often that I come across something where I firmly believe no arts and cultural organization could possibly be engaging in.

But just in case, here is an example of an operation which would undoubtedly give non-profit charities a bad name and make people want to subject them to additional scrutiny.  Gene Takagi of the Non-Profit Law blog had retweeted a post by Karl Mill which I initially assumed was just going to deal with what can be a fine line between what is allowed in terms of political lobbying and action by 501 (c) (3) non-profits and is better organized as a 501 (c) (4).

But it got oh so much worse than that really quickly. In addition to wanting to actively lobby for political candidates, the proposed non-profit intended to assist the homeless and indigent by enrolling them in the multi-level marketing program of the company which was forming said non-profit organization.

Mill goes through the application for non-profit status in some detail, commenting on what activity is okay, falls into a gray area of the law, and falls off the rails completely. Some of that is definitely useful for those who are confused about the difference between issue advocacy and lobbying. But he also gets to the point where he starts to comment “I wish I were making this up.”

At the end he sums up all the problems he identified in a bulleted list:

At this point, you might be wondering whether your organization can learn anything from an organization that was planning on:

  • Scooping up homeless and other indigent individuals;

  • Putting them in a home together and brainwashing persuading them to pay to become salespeople for a multi-level marketing company,

  • Charging them a fee for that initiation on top of the fees that all salespeople pay up the chain;

  • Taking control of their finances and charging them money for non-compliance, and

  • Having their conscripted army of indigent salespersons produce videos, op-eds, and go canvassing door-to-door to campaign in support of the company’s chosen candidates or in opposition to the company’s political enemies.

Concerning Trend With Regional Booking Conferences

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I was really disappointed last Friday when I read that Arts Midwest would be pausing their conference.  I have a hard time believing it will gear up again in the future. If you aren’t aware, Arts Midwest ran one of the regional conferences that presenting venues attend to book acts. Back in 2019, SouthArts announced they were ceasing operations of Performing Arts Exchange, the conference that served the southeast.  With Arts Midwest effectively ceasing to operate their conference, that just leaves the Western Arts Alliance as a regional conference for the western region.

The national conference, Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) continues to operate, as do smaller conferences like Arts Northwest, Arts Market which meets every other year, and state base conferences like Ohio Arts Presenters Network. However, the scope and reach of those conferences is limited.  For example, in addition to meeting every other year, Arts Market doesn’t have the professional development opportunities that the regional and nationals offer.

Like many others, I particularly liked the Arts Midwest conference because it was well run and had a smaller, more collegial feel than the NYC based APAP. Even though I moved to the southeast, I continued to attend the Midwest conference. APAP is definitely a great conference and there is more opportunity see performers in their “natural environment” of music clubs, dance studios, and theatres vs. hotel ballrooms, but it is expensive to attend with the added costs of NYC hotel rooms and food.

I enjoy the regional conference because they introduce me to new cities and let me see what is great about them. For people who live in the region, it is easier to drive or take a short flight to a regional than to travel to another part of the country.

Arts Midwest President& CEO Torrie Allen writes that the decision to pause is financial:

We have deep respect and gratitude for this conference family, and we must acknowledge that we are facing a changing industry. Production costs have increased while event revenue has not. We have begun to encounter unsustainable financial losses on this event. While these losses pre-date the pivots we have made in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have grown exponentially these past two years. As a steward of private and public dollars, we have a financial responsibility to our communities, partners, and donors to pause and take the time needed to reimagine our presence in this space.

I don’t envy him this decision. He basically assumed the President & CEO role just as Covid began. Attendees to the 2019 conference got to meet him. I was personally excited to see what the future held for Arts Midwest because he seemed to have the energy and dynamism to take the organization into the future. With the conference program being cancelled, I will only be able to watch what happens from afar.

Ultimately, I am a little worried about what this might mean for touring artists and venues in the future. Learning about artists via their website, videos and Zoom is only going to be so effective. Sitting down and talking with agents in person moved the needle for me in ways that digital promotions did not. Walking up and down the aisles in the exhibition halls opened me to exploring ideas and acts I hadn’t been considering. Some of them I booked, others I didn’t but I now viewed those options as possibilities where I hadn’t before.

I wonder if efforts to advance diversity and equity in the performing arts might stall as a result of venue operators only being exposed to and seeking out artists and agents with whom they are already familiar. The other influential aspect of in person booking conferences is sitting down to see something new, being not quite sure if you like it, but having others in the room clapping and stomping their feet in reaction to what they are seeing.

Some of the other conferences might expand to fill the void, but given the economic uncertainty of the times, it is likely to take time for them to scale up and expand their reach to larger geographical areas.

As much as I write about arts administration and practices, if you have read the blog for any number of years, you know that I always come back from conferences with some new insight to discuss. I had my epiphany about building public will for arts and culture at an Arts Midwest conference and always attend anything to do with legal questions. I think the professional development opportunities and chance to network with all sorts of people is valuable for attendees. I worry that the disappearance of the regional conferences and their ability to put speakers and experts of note in front of large convenings will negatively impact the practice of arts administration across large parts of the country.

Who Gave You Your First Break?

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Tweets responding to UK based Arts Emergency’s new campaign were filling my Twitter feed today. I have written about them a couple times before. They are essentially focused on cultivating the next generation of creative workers through training opportunities, scholarships and mentoring.

The organization’s name and raison d’etre is premised on the idea that cuts in funding nationally have created an emergency for the future of the creative economy in the UK.  Their newest push is #BreakTheGlass, as in “In Case of Emergency, Break The Glass.”

What I really admire about their execution of this awareness campaign is that they aren’t focusing on the negative consequences that cause their organization so much concern, instead they have asked people to tag & tweet about the person(s) who “gave you some key advice or encouragement early in your career.”

Today my feed was packed with people calling out those who helped them get jobs in theater, in broadcasting, print media, etc. I usually view Twitter with a chronological order setting and there were so many people talking about those who gave them their first big break, I was scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling only to find I was still viewing tweets that were only 5 hours old.

I don’t want to horn in on Arts Emergency’s initiative, but maybe folks here in the US need to pick up the tune and call out those for whose help we are grateful. October is Arts & Humanities Month which would make it a suitable time. Or if we don’t want to steal attention from Arts Emergency, next month around Thanksgiving would be appropriate as well.

Ultimately, over the long term I think advocacy for arts and culture needs to have positive messaging like this that doesn’t focus on economic impact, test scores and behavioral outcomes as benefits. Talking about mentors and being grateful for opportunities and investment of trust and faith is a good way to emphasize the benefits of arts and culture in cultivating relationships and reinforcing the social fabric without explicitly making those claims.

Composer Was A Rock Star Of Their Day? Rock Stars Aren’t Even The Rock Stars Of Today

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I often read about classical music composers being the rock star of their day, but don’t often get a lot of detail about what that meant. I just happened upon an article in Lapham’s Quarterly about Franz Liszt which pretty much shows that fans haven’t changed much since the 19th century when people collected his discarded cigar butts, silk gloves and broken piano strings.

Before a concert Liszt mingled with the audience, charming them with his witty remarks. He had a semicircle of chairs placed around the piano on stage so that illustrious guests could sit near him and converse with him between pieces…He brought his silk gloves on stage and threw them down to be fought over by audience members. Women were said to carry his discarded cigar butts in their cleavages. When he broke piano strings, as he often did in his performances, people collected the broken strings and had them made into bracelets. There was even a phase where Liszt invited listeners to write a question for him (on any topic) on a slip of paper and put it into a hat, from which questions would be drawn out for the great man to answer from the stage.

The article says Liszt was the first to organize a program where he was the headlining soloist versus a night which included performances by different people. And some contemporaries regarded his early work as “sheer racket” so there are numerous parallels with rock music and stardom.

Though, as I am sure many before me have pointed out, while there are claims about composers being the rock stars of their day, audiences today aren’t permitted to have the same relationship with the composer as the audiences of their day.

One of the most obvious counters to claims that 200 year old music should be viewed as relevant today because it was the pop music of 200 years ago is that music styles falls out of favor over time. I mean heck, saying someone was the rock star of their day itself is arguably a dated reference since rock isn’t really a mainstream music genre anymore.

So if an appeal is made to potential audiences to view a composers music as the equivalent of current pop music because the composer was the celebrity of their day, people should at least be given the opportunity to freely react and interact as they would to a pop idol.

I have mentioned this basic idea before in a post about a Utah Symphony Orchestra’s (USO) advertising campaign where they had musicians made up as members of the band KISS and had a tagline about their musicians being rock stars. I was concerned people would be disappointed by the difference in energy between a KISS concert and a USO concert, not because orchestra music isn’t as hard driving as rock, the same audience members can equally experience a frisson listening to both, but because they wouldn’t be able to express their appreciation as frehley. (homophonic pun intended obviously)

 

Maybe The Cult Rules Aren’t As Important As We Thought

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Seema Rao at Museum 2.0 shared notes from a session she conducted at the Museum Computer Network conference last week titled “Are Museums A Cult?”

The answer, as I am sure you have anticipated, is that they definitely can be for the same reasons theaters, operas, ballets, orchestras, etc can be. As you read her notes, you can see how easy it is to substitute your own discipline in.

I got to museum bc I loved art. I loved the ideas around art and I loved sharing those ideas. I figured everyone here was the same—excited to share. Then, I got into museum work. I found that people were only excited with sharing if they could control every aspect of learning. Sharing with parameters is not true sharing.

It was disheartening. I realized the field often preferences things to people. Given the capitalistic matrix we live in, I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. I was also saddened.

And I wasn’t alone in my disillusionment. Everyone I knew was wondering if they were in a field that was problematic. We went into this field for good. And we were wondering, if somehow, our idealism blinded us. If we were on the side of the good.

[…]

As a field, we’re in a crisis. Why? Because of the system. It’s trained us, not unlike a cult, to question only enough to keep the system going. It requires sacrifice from most people, and certainly doesn’t sacrifice for Us.

The system sucks. The system gives a few people great tax breaks by giving a few more people the chance to do scholarship. It’s a system reinforcing scarcity. And like all hierarchical systems, it needs a whole lot of other people to get less, and have less say.

This is a conversation that has been ongoing for some time now. While it can feel dispiriting to feel you are working in an industry that is so slow to change, there are organizations and programs that are working toward a more productive relationship with audiences.

A week ago, a new orchestra entity had their first performance in my venue attracting an audience of 900 people. The philosophy of the programming is essentially “not your grandparents’ orchestra” in an attempt to attract new audiences. Based on attendance demographics and surveys, it has started on the road to achieving those goals. Some responses said they didn’t care for the program mix and there were a comments about educating attendees in proper applause etiquette, but those were much fewer than you might imagine.

There were far more notes about people not wearing their masks in the audience chamber–that might have been more a reflection of cocktail consumption since we didn’t experience any resistance to mask wearing at the door.

Strange as it may seem to say in the middle of a pandemic, it is actually encouraging to learn that the programming may factor less into the decision not to attend than lack of social distancing and mask wearing. I would rather be stricter with masks than about when you can respond to hearing something that moves you.

If the people who are showing up in numbers at the fringes of a pandemic threat aren’t reacting negatively to a change in programming philosophy, the resulting word of mouth may literally enable an organization to change the narrative about themselves.

Can the cult persevere if the cult practices don’t seem that important any more?

Bach Is Raking It In On Spotify

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h/t to Alex Tabarrok who posted about a Classicfm.com story on how much money classical music composers would make from Spotify streams of their music.

Using the estimate figure of $0.0037 (£0.0028) in earnings per stream, and calculating for inflation, the website revealed the following ranking of classical music’s highest paid Spotify composers.

Top 10 classical composers based on 2021 earnings

Bach: 6.7 million monthly plays, $299,329 (£222,327) annual earnings
Beethoven: 6.5 million monthly plays, $286,353 (£212,689) annual earnings
Mozart: 6 million monthly plays, $266,649 (£198,054) annual earnings
Chopin: 5.4 million monthly plays, $238, 290 (£176,990) annual earnings
Debussy: 4.6 million monthly plays, $204,259 (£151,713) annual earnings
Vivaldi: 3.6 million monthly plays, $159,975 (£118,821) annual earnings
Schubert: 2.9 million monthly plays, $127,017 (£94,342) annual earnings
Brahms: 2.6 million monthly plays, $113,871 (£84,578) annual earnings
Handel: 2.519 million monthly plays $111,832 (£83,063) annual earnings
Liszt: 2.516 million monthly plays $111,746 (£83,000) annual earnings

In case you were wondering, Bach’s “‘Prélude’ from Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major” is his most frequently played piece; Beethoven’s “‘Adagio’ from his ‘Moonlight’ Sonata No. 14,” is his most popular piece.

Tabbarok mentioned that as composers would actually get less money than reported since composer royalties are actually a smaller percentage of a play. With the possible exception of Debussy who did record his own music, the millions of plays reported are recordings by myriad entities rather than the composers. If Spotify/recording technology and the composers existed contemporaneously, a recording of their personal performances would be available for play.

An Orchestra Where You Don’t Have To Read Music? Depends On Who Is Invited To Play

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H/T to Artsjournal.com which included an article about the Philadelphia Public Orchestra, (PPO) being billed as the World’s First Public Orchestra. The way the article describes it, this is a pretty radical departure from the Western organizational and operational model.

The PPO will have a bottom up approach where the musicians choose the composers suited to their needs rather than the musicians being chosen to suit the composition. Similarly, the musicians will guide and administer the direction of the organization.

The Philadelphia Public Orchestra’s manifesto, written by Meyers, makes it quite clear that the musicians themselves will eventually and collectively steer the ship: “After the orchestra has been established for at least one season, the orchestra members ideally take control of all decision-making.”

[…]

“So yes, we launch it together, and there can be an advisory board to help it exist, and then the orchestra should take over and let the musicians, the performers, think of who they might like to ask for a commission, what themes are interesting to them. …”

The structure also seems designed for the inclusion of musical styles and instruments outside of the traditional Western orchestra in that its not necessary to read music.

“The bottom line is, this is a public orchestra, where people can come together and participate from their own comfort zone and within their own traditions,” Tidd explains from Rotterdam, where he’s on tour. “People who read music represent a very small percentage of the music happening in the world, including in America. Some people learn stuff by ear. Others use modified forms of written music — chord charts, graphical scores, all kinds of things. Removing the need to read music makes it more universal.”

[…]

To some extent, says Tidd, the application process will prioritize those who have never played in a traditional orchestral setting before and haven’t had access to this kind of project.

“We’re not trying to have 25 members of the Philadelphia Orchestra here,” Tidd emphasizes. “This orchestra will be very diverse.” (As of 2020, the Philadelphia Orchestra had just three Black members.)

It will be interesting to see who applies to play. The Philadelphia area has a plethora of cultural and musical traditions, but I would imagine they will have to continually practice some degree of outreach and invitation to a wide variety of musicians in an attempt to attract the breadth of participation they probably desire.

The ensemble will likely need to also engage in a lot of work to find some common ground upon which to operate. One of the last shows we had prior to Covid was a group of Tuvan throat singers. They mentioned that when a national orchestra was being formed in Tuva one of the issues they ran into was that since everyone’s instrument was made to suit the preference and physical stature of the performer to some degree, there wasn’t a common tuning standard. Now obviously this was only an issue when trying to perform a formal composition. Tuvans have long met and performed their traditional songs in large groups without the difference in instruments being a factor.

The PPO could easily end up being comprised of musicians performing on instruments originating from China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Africa, Oceania, Indigenous people of the Americas, etc. As the article says, some traditions use notation styles that differ from Western music and others don’t use written notations at all.

I don’t have any doubt that the PPO can arrive at some extremely interesting compositions, but there will probably be a continuous, evolving conversation about what the vision of the ensemble and the music is supposed to be. Should every musician perform in at least one piece per concert, for example? Will there be a focus on music and/or instruments from a specific part of the world or demonstrations of cross-cultural works that might surprise audiences? (Do Balinese gamelan and mariachi mix well?)

Actually, Jon Silpayamanant is the person who would know better than I how these negotiations can be accomplished. He has been writing about the music practices of many cultures and bringing them together in performance for a couple decades now.

“Feels Like A Luxury To Feel Valued”

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Last month, NextCity had something of a preliminary update on the guaranteed income for artists programs in San Francisco, CA and St. Paul, MN I wrote about last April.

Both programs started in May so they are only a few months into their planned 18 month arc. According to the NextCity article, there are groups advocating for St. Petersburg, FL to be the third community to participate in this pilot program. NextCity explains that the policy differences between guaranteed income and the related universal basic income: “…guaranteed income providing an equity lens to focus on communities disproportionately impacted by COVID and decades of economic divestment.”

They spoke to artists in both communities to gauge their impressions of the program thus far:

Both Watts and Gamble spoke to using the cash for basic needs — rent, bills, home repairs. “I don’t have to struggle to create,” as Watts put it. They also spoke to the importance of the easy, straightforward application process and the promise that funding would be unrestricted. “I would have not said yes if there were strings attached,” Gamble says.

Most importantly, the artists say, they feel valued after an incredibly difficult pandemic year. “I feel like people just don’t understand how hard [the pandemic] has hit artists — the arts just went away for over a year,” says Gamble. “It almost feels like a luxury to feel valued, because it usually feels like there’s never enough funds for artists.”

Your Programming Is More Inclusive, But What About Giving Opportunities?

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Hat tip to Artsjournal.com which featured an article that seems to indicate it is better to diversify the donor base rather than continue to ask the same pool of donors to give more.  The article discusses giving to public radio stations which have a slightly different appeal process than most non-profits and more closely tie donating to membership than many performing arts organizations.

The piece uses the example of WABE, located in Atlanta, GA which upon noting that the average donation amount made by all listeners was $14/month decided to ask their existing monthly donors to increase their giving to $15/month.  This ended up backfiring on the station.

But the $15 ask turned out to be “too high,” Barasoain said. Though the team was happy with the total revenue the drive brought in, the bigger gifts came at the expense of suppressing the number of donors by an estimated 12%–16%, he said.

During WABE’s previous two fall drives, on-air pitches requested gifts in any amount. The total number of pledges for the fall 2019 drive dropped 34% compared to fall 2017 and 20% versus fall 2018.

In the 2019 drive, “we were tapping the same group of donors to give more and more money to the station,” Hyman said. “And it’s just not sustainable long-term.”

The station immediately pivoted and lowered its pledge-drive asks.

In fall 2020, the team pitched gifts of $10 per month. The number of pledges increased 11%, and revenue decreased less than 2% from fall 2019.

The station has since expanded the ways in which they solicit support to include telemarketing and direct mail as a way to supplement their on-air fund drives.

The article discusses the efforts of WFAE in Charlotte, NC and KEXP in Seattle, WA which have removed minimum monthly giving levels for the sustaining member category to create a sense of participation. There is evidence that the monthly giving helps keep people feeling engaged on an ongoing basis and improves retention.

KEXP in Seattle prioritizes “participation first,” said Erin Lightfoot, director of annual and digital philanthropy. “We’ve always really highlighted … ways that everyone can participate in supporting the station no matter what their financial capacity is, and also being extremely grateful for that.” During on-air drives, pitch announcers vary the requested giving levels.

“We do try to vary it a lot in order to make sure that we’re really inviting everyone in no matter what their capacity or their comfort level is with gift-giving,” Lightfoot said.

Something to think about in terms of making giving feel more inclusive as a complement to programming feeling more inclusive.

Do Me A Favor And Get The Word Out?

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Seth Godin recently made a post where he noted that while at one time asking someone for a favor involved a personal, one-to-one appeal, email lists and databases have made it easy to make a more impersonal appeal to a broader range of people.

While you may be thinking that posts about the evils of spam is so early oughts, there is a distinction in that a lot of spam is delivered to people with whom the sender has little, if any type of relationship. Godin is noting that technology has made it easier to degrade more established relationships.

If you ask 100 people for a favor to “get the word out,” then of course you don’t care so much if 80 or 90 people decline. The problem is that you’ve just hurt the relationship you had with these people (as thin as it was) as well as made it more difficult for the next person, the one who actually put some effort and care into making a connection.

The honest first line of the programmatic ask is, “I’m using you to get what I want right now, because I didn’t plan ahead, care enough or show up with enough generosity to do it the old way.”

[…]

Just because you are in a hurry, know how to use mailmerge and have figured out how to hustle people doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

At the risk of sounding stupid for stating the obvious that the post-Covid world has new expectations, there are signs that a lot of people didn’t get that message and are returning to their offices, dusting off their desks, starting their computers and picking up where they left off.

Do me a favor and get the word out?

How Much More Tolerance Left For Crushing Summer Internship As Career Starter

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When I was an undergraduate, and even after I graduated college, I applied to work at the Williamstown Theater Festival, one of the most prestigious summer theaters in the country. Recent reporting makes me think I may have dodged a bullet when I wasn’t accepted.

You may have seen that back in July, the sound crew all walked off the job to protest long hours and unsafe working conditions at the festival. This week additional reporting by the L.A. Times revealed a greater extent to which these conditions existed, impacting the well-being of interns and apprentices.

Seffinger spent the summer rigging and focusing lights by hand for up to 16 hours a day. While crawling in the restricted space above a Williamstown stage to hang a power cable, he hit the back of his head on a horizontal metal support pole and suffered what doctors later diagnosed as a concussion.

He said he had been explicitly instructed during orientation to remove any hard hats when climbing in this area, or any stage space at height; according to Bagwell, Seffinger’s supervisor, the festival’s hard hats did not have chin straps and could potentially drop into the house and hurt someone. Seffinger used his own health insurance coverage for the hospital visit, otherwise, he would have had to pay out of pocket with no assistance from the festival. And he was ineligible for workers’ compensation, as interns were categorized as unpaid festival volunteers.

Those interviewed for the story cited fear of career impacting reprisals and concern about the strength of claims kept them from filing claims with OSHA and the state of Massachusetts. As well that:

Without money, major credits or other benefits to fall back on, young theater artists were not in a position to speak up against safety issues, overwork or lack of opportunity without risking retribution. Those who did make in-person complaints to supervisors and schedulers were either ignored or instructed to grin and bear it,…

One woman interviewed for the story said her parents took out a loan to cover the $4000 apprentice program fee which was supposed to provide her education and experience toward an acting career, but required so much work from her that there were no opportunities to learn or perform.

It was made clear that “festival needs” — a shorthand for the litany of tasks required by the star-studded marquee productions — came before any educational or creative opportunity. Many times, Ayala found herself ditching her acting classes to save her energy for her next shift or recover from her last one.

“It was hard when the projects that were supposed to be my opportunities felt like the bottom of an endless list of tasks,” said Zeftel. “No one has time to be a collaborative artist because they’re being utilized as cogs in the machine to make the festival’s biggest priorities happen.”

Apprentices’ chances to act were scattered across smaller, one-night-only projects that rehearsed and played at odd overnight hours, but they could do so only if they weren’t assigned to other, more menial tasks. Three sources told The Times that it was not uncommon for an apprentice to go an entire summer without acting in anything.

I definitely worked long hours for little pay at summer theaters, (as well as year round theaters, for that matter), and while the culture has long demanded that the individual subsume their lives to the needs of the production, I was never in a situation as bad as described in these articles.

I was certainly miserable at times. When the conversation about kids today needing to pay their dues, I don’t wish the same experience on others. Learning the ropes of any job will always be difficult and frustrating. Just as we need to let our physical body rest to recover from endurance and strength building exercise, so too do we need emotional and mental rest so we can develop and employ our additional capacity.

As business journals try to analyze the motivations behind the current Great Resignation, it would behoove the theater world to note that people have left jobs that were far less onerous than the internship/apprenticeship conditions that exist. If any sector needs to change their business model quickly to respond to the times, it is arts and culture.   These practices were never the most constructive element in the career pathway in the best of times, it would be surprising if they remain viable at all going forward.

I Wish I Was Going With You Approach To Customer Service

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This morning I attended a brand reveal for a Marriott hotel slated to open half a block from my venue in/around January. This particular collection of hotels is highly customized to the community in which it resides so there was a lot of detail discussed in the 1.5 hours of the actual presentation.

One thing that occurred to me during the presentation was that you should only pay for brand design that you have the budget to execute. The amount of money they are going to spend executing the branding vision is going to be significant.

When the designers started talking about the brand values that would be embodied, a couple struck me as concepts to be embraced by arts and culture organizations.

One was – we are not docents, we are friends-in-the-know. The other was – we are not interested, we are invested.   These statements seemed to embody the nuanced difference between good customer service and great customer service.

If you had two people working at the front desk and they each provided the same information to guests, but there was something you couldn’t put your finger on that made one of them seem superior to the other, something akin to these two concepts are likely to be present.  The better service comes from someone who isn’t just doling out information, but makes you feel they wish they were going with you or want you to have the same great experience they had when they were there.

So now I am letting these ideas percolate in my brain as I look around at our operation and think about how that can manifest at different points in our visitor experience. (Though I suppose we shouldn’t give people the impression we wish we were accompanying them when they ask directions to the restrooms.) Of course, however we decide that should be embodied in our building should be present where ever we are representing the organization outside out facilities as well.

Let me just point out that these are not entirely new concepts. In terms of marketing, they are a variation on Trevor O’Donnell’s “Gal In Starbucks” test from six years ago that I have written on a number of times. This is something the arts and culture industry should have been working toward for a few years now at least.

Visitor Expectations Of Proof of Vaccination? – Not Yet, But Maybe Soon

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People working or closely aligned with arts organizations know that a central topic of conversation in recent weeks is whether to require proof of vaccination for audiences. Drew McManus has been tracking and collecting this information closely for a few weeks now.

As has Colleen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS. All through Covid she has been regularly updating her readers on shifts in perspectives on the question of what will make people feel safer about attending arts events as well as when they think they will feel comfortable participating in arts experiences. In her September 15 entry, she reviews survey findings about vaccinations. 

If you have been reading my blog or her’s for the last year, you will know that at one time attendees wearing masks wasn’t on the list of responses people gave and then suddenly it was in the top five. She says the same has happened with vaccine requirements.

It is worth paying very close attention to her analysis because she goes to pains to warn against letting biases and assumptions lead you to conclusions not borne out by the data.

But “requiring proof of vaccination” is the new factor to watch here. Remember that just because people say that it will make them feel safer doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t visit if it’s not enforced – or even that they think it should be enforced yet. That said, the fact that 56% of visitors to performance-based organizations report that proof of vaccination requirements will make them feel safer is particularly notable. This safety preference may impact performance-based organizations first if these data offer any prescient insights.

[…]

As we’ve been reminding folks upon watching the data outcomes over time, people with kids under 13 in the household, as a group, were never cool with discarding masks. Kids are getting the virus and some predictions are grim. This may be one of the reasons why intentions to visit cultural organizations among people with children were lower during the time in which masks were no longer required.

She specifically addresses how easy it is to default to survivorship bias and availability heuristic:

Remember that this research contemplates potential visitors, not just recent visitors. “That’s not what we’re observing in our onsite surveys” is a silly response to this information if you don’t require proof of vaccination onsite. The people who don’t feel safe visiting aren’t there to fill out an onsite survey. They are likely staying home.

[…]

Most typically, we hear confirmation bias statements justifying and reconciling powerlessness over mask mandates, like “it’s a good thing we don’t require them because someone thanked us for being mask-free!” This is also an example of an availability heuristic when we mistake anecdotal evidence as representative data. People who don’t want masks may feel strongly about it and speak up, but those who do want mask mandates – a majority of US likely visitors to cultural entities – probably don’t think that they need to thank you for keeping them safe. Just because a group is loud doesn’t mean they are representative.

All this being said, in terms of the overall question about whether cultural organizations should require proof of vaccination, she writes that the answer isn’t currently clear but that “‘…the data suggests that the answer is “not yet…but maybe soon.'”

Advocacy Gameshow Is Now Documentary, But Will People Still Think Of Fundraising As A Competition?

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You may have seen last week that CBS quickly shifted directions when their planned show to pit activists against each other in a game show like competition drew extremely negative responses from the general public.  Now the intent is to create a documentary around the work the six contestants do.

According to reporting by Salon, part of what would determine the winner was the social media responses each contestant engendered among viewers:

A press release written up by Deadline includes the details:
[…]

Activists go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes, with their success measured via online engagement, social metrics and hosts’ input. The three teams have one ultimate goal: to create impactful movements that amplify their message, drive action, and advance them to the G20 Summit in Rome, Italy. There, they will meet with world leaders in the hope of securing funding and awareness for their causes. The team that receives the largest commitment is celebrated as the overall winner at the finale, which will also feature musical performances by some of the world’s most passionate artists.

There is so much about this process and how much the creators of the show actually know, or think they know about how non-profit fundraising works. Not to mention what sort of impression people will get about what organizations should be doing in order to garner support from them. The articles I linked about each have examples of things people tweeted in response to the planned show, comparing it to the Hunger Games. Others mentioned that in many places, activists are jailed or tortured in response to their advocacy.

According to Salon:

…more than 70 progressive groups and activists signed an open letter to CBS and Global Citizen critiqueing the premise.

“Pitting activists against one another upholds the ‘oppression Olympics’ and perpetuates the belief that justice issues must fight over ‘breadcrumbs’ supplied by those with power, resources and large platforms,” the letter states. “Ultimately, this results from the very oppressive systems which we are trying to dismantle. Our lived realities, struggles and traumas are not games, nor competitions for the consumerist gaze.”

If you are thinking you may have read about something similar not long ago, I did indeed cover a similar, though untelevised, funding opportunity the Morgan Stanley announced in May which similarly has applicants working with experts to hone their pitches to funders.

Enters Stage Right, Wearing Mask

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There have been a lot of stories about shows re-opening on Broadway and how important that is to the economy of NYC. While I haven’t read everything single article, one that appeared on Bloomberg yesterday is among the most complete in terms of imagery and coverage of a variety of different arts disciplines.

The article discusses the hopes of Broadway shows like Six, which went from thunderous applause at its final preview performance on March 11, 2020…to nothing when Broadway closed down on March 12. It also takes a look at dance companies and dance performance venues, the Metropolitan Opera and NY Philharmonic and speaks to restaurant owners whose livelihood is nearly inextricably linked to attendance of Broadway shows.

The large number of images are an important companion to the article because every picture of artists rehearsing or performing–including those painting in parks–show them wearing masks. All the hopes and dreams for mounting a production are entwined with those pieces of fabric and people’s willingness to wear them and get vaccinated.

And so, even as costumes are sewn, lines are rehearsed, sets are built, and playbills are printed, organizers are acutely aware that, even in a best-case scenario, audience numbers are a long way from their 2019 levels. “It may be that people don’t show up for a while, and they come back when they feel safe,” says Deborah Borda, president and chief executive officer of the New York Philharmonic, who says the first weekend of the orchestra’s season has already sold out. “But increasingly, yes, everyone has anxiety, but people are feeling like ‘Good lord, we have to find some pathway to normalization.’”

That pathway, Borda is convinced, runs straight through live performance. “I like to think that music is a fundamental human right, like good health, clean air, fresh water,” she says. “It’s that important to human beings, and I believe that. And that’s what we try to deliver.”

There Is A Lot Of Grand Out There

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My day job is Executive Director of The Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.  Around the end of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, it was vogue to name theaters as Grand Opera Houses, even if they didn’t host opera concerts. As far as we know, the was never any fully mounted opera in my venue, for example.

However, at least once a week we get a call for tickets, refunds or a staff person at a Grand Opera House in some other part of the country. About 80% of the time it is for the one in Wilmington, DE but last week it was for one in Colorado. It seems like there is one in just about every state based on the calls we get. Not long ago, a government entity in Belfast, Ireland actually tagged us in a social media post about job openings in the Belfast Grand Opera House. (I felt that was a little embarrassing since their FB tag is GOHBelfast and ours is grandoperahousemacon.)

Any way, earlier this week I saw a Twitter conversation about grand operas in Shanghai which seems to promise even greater confusion.

Opera has a different performance style, history and association in China than in the U.S. and Europe so there are likely specific motivations for each of the organizations and venues mentioned to employ the term.

Thinking perhaps the official names of some of these entities in hanzi might differ enough that native speakers wouldn’t be confused, I did some research and it seems that the distinction is exactly the same as in English. In fact the architects for the Shanghai Grand Opera House use the same hanzi as the performance company, Shanghai Opera House: 上海歌剧院. It made me wonder if the architects made a mistake since Chinese language news sites referred to the venue planned for completion in 2023 as 上海大歌剧院。 If you aren’t seeing a difference, there isn’t much of one. Just as in English the only difference is the inclusion of the word “Grand.”

In any case, there will be some work to do establishing a clear identity for each of these entities.

When You Actually Want Your Sidewalk To Fall To Disrepair

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More great stories of artists being part of infrastructure projects, this time from a Next City article that came out last week. I have written about these type of projects before and one of my favorite go-to examples is the Green Line project in St. Paul, MN which employed artists to help mitigate the impact light rail construction on nearby businesses.

This recent Next City piece discusses a similar effort in the small town of Grand Marais, MN that was also seeing the impact of construction:

She began by interviewing village residents about detours in their lives and turned their stories into a playful scavenger hunt of signage that reframed the construction as an exploration of unexpected life shifts. Detour signs sharing personal life stories are now installed throughout the village. With artist collaboration, this infrastructure project became an opportunity to turn road detour signs into messages of community joy.

In the article they talk about artist-in-residence programs in cities, both large and small, and the impact the artists have had on planning and design. However, what really caught my eye was another project in St. Paul, MN – Sidewalk Poetry.

“In St. Paul, Minnesota, artist Marcus Young turned common sidewalks into atlases of community stories by inviting residents to share poems printed in the concrete. City residents are invited annually to submit their poems for consideration to be printed into sidewalks as they are scheduled for replacement across the city by the public works department. Young saw this system-based work as a re-imagining of the city’s annual sidewalk maintenance program in which the city replaces 10 miles of sidewalk a year, a way to enhance a civic system to give it a new sense of relevance and appreciation.”

In the article linked in the quoted section above, they emphasize the fact that only sidewalks slated for replacement are part of the program, “never in new development, ensuring that the poems are able to be found across the entire city.” The project solicited poems in the languages of groups with high representation in St. Paul, including English, Spanish, Hmong, Somali and Dakota.

The project involves an interesting mix of priorities. While some people will request that a poem not appear in front of their home or business, the city is not able to fulfill all the requests they receive to place a poem in a specific place because they strive to balance where the poems are placed and because not every patch of sidewalk requires repair.

Maybe I Should Have Held Out For A House, Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgetting Artists Bring Value To The Art

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

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

Iyengar writes (my emphasis):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He start with the following statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

Gentrification Is For More Than Just City Neighborhoods

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Shelterforce posted a video and article about how the term gentrification manifests in different ways and thus doesn’t always conform to the same definition in every community, leading to the term being applied very broadly.  While this may not seem like a topic for a blog focused on arts management concerns, my organization recently received a grant to create a work addressing aspects of gentrification.

Shelterforce identifies four broad conditions people apply the term gentrification to and note that while over time all four may manifest in a community, only one may ever exist in the community.

In summary the conditions are: 1- housing costs rise, displacing residents who can’t afford rents and taxes. 2- Housing costs rise, residents aren’t displaced, but the character of the neighborhood changes over time. 3- Communities of color experience a “cultural displacement” where relevant businesses and places are lost or political displacement where power dynamics shift as wealthier, and perhaps whiter, groups flow into the neighborhood. 4- Communities who have experienced disinvestment are subject to new investment focused on attracting new businesses/residents rather than bolstering development for the benefit of current residents.

Until the last week or so I always associated gentrification with cities. In my mind it was something that occurred when there was focus placed on revitalizing neighborhoods either because artists, (perhaps displaced from somewhere else), had taken up residence in abandoned buildings leading to the area becoming the center of activity and with it a desire for an infrastructure supporting service, safety and quality of life. Or because a revitalization effort in one area created a ripple effect creating a demand for better quality of life infrastructure.

However, my mother has been recently talking to me about the changes that occurred in the local school district of the rural, update New York county in which I grew up. Both my parents started out as school teachers. My mother in particular would talk about how the disrespect and discipline problems she experienced substitute teaching in the 1980s convinced her she couldn’t return to teaching when we kids were old enough to take care of ourselves.

I always chalked it up to permissive parents and a shift toward the perception of the student as a customer of the education system. It is only recently that my mother talked about how people from NYC had moved up to our county because the school district was so highly regarded, but then started to push back against the culture that under-girded the excellence and close-knit cooperation that made the schools so attractive.

All this was invisible to me growing up. And the district was still very much rural at the time. My house was surrounded by fields of diary cows and fodder and the school buses picked up kids at their farms–as well as the housing developments speckling the hills here and there.

It is only in the last week or so that I realized that rural places can experience some of what is described as gentrification. I can also attest that not all aspects of gentrification appear together. When I went back to see the old house about five years ago, there were dozens of new houses awkwardly placed in the middle of fields, bare acres on all sides with only a few recently planted trees around them as foliage. (Other parts of the county have seen so much development, the exit off the NYS Thruway was unrecognizable from my visit even a few years earlier.)

However, despite all these new house in the area the same general stores, same pizza place, and same gas stations that were there as when I grew up.  It amazed me that there hadn’t been enough pressure to see new businesses pop up to cater to the community. Unless there is “I got mine” mindset to keep the community from being attractive to other potential arrivals. There was one enterprising farmer started growing hops and opened a microbrewery.  Many of the beer names have a Pacific Northwest theme so I wonder where their core clientele is located.

Seats Are Open, But So Are The Doors For More Diverse Stories

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On Friday one of my colleagues at work is flying to NYC to see Springsteen on Broadway, the show that re-opened earlier than pretty much all the others. She purchased the tickets months ago when they first went on sale.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear most people share her level of optimism. A CNBC story reported that even the most popular titles are seeing very soft sales.

Although tickets have been on sale for months, neither “Wicked” nor “The Lion King” – the top two highest-grossing musicals in history – sold out their first week of performances. “Hamilton,” which historically sold out months of performances within minutes, also has plenty of opening week availability. Between September 14, 2021, and June 5, 2022, only one performance of “Hamilton″ is sold out.

A Forbes article projects some potential doom and gloom for the production of the show Pass Over, which has been getting a lot of great press. In fact, there is a suggestion in a couple articles that they moved up the date of their opening to last Sunday in order to take advantage of the the good press they have received.

This is somewhat unfortunate for the production of Pass Over because in addition to the high quality and expectations, there are a lot of good portents associated with the show. For one, it is the first show by a Black playwright to appear in the August Wilson Theatre since the venue was named for the esteemed Black playwright in 2005. (A lot of “about time” comments on social media noting that it took 15 years for that to happen).

According to a Reuters piece, Pass Over is among a number of upcoming shows which are being supported by first time Black investors.

However, seven new plays have been announced for this fall, all by Black writers. Some are being financed by first-time Broadway investors, including co-founder of television network BET, Sheila Johnson, who is putting money behind the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Johnson and celebrity chef Carla Hall are also investing in a new musical called “Grace” about Black culinary history.

Actor Blair Underwood and former basketball player Renee Montgomery are investing in the stage play “Pass Over”, a modern twist on “Waiting for Godot.”

“There is various new money that is coming into Broadway, and that money is extraordinarily helpful and it is also diverse money, which is also very interesting and new,” said Brian Moreland, producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” opening in October.

Whether we like it or not, money has a big influence in terms of what stories get told so this can be a positive indication for greater representation in whose stories get told and who is involved in telling those stories.

You Can Lead A Patron To The Door, But Only They Decide If They Feel Safe Stepping In

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As something of a dovetail to my post yesterday about Drew McManus’ effort to compile a database of performing arts venue vaccination policies, (Drew reported a surge of new entries to the database overnight which I am going to credit completely to my readers), Colleen Dilenschneider posted last week that performing arts and museum audiences are increasingly interested in returning to masking requirements. (emphasis original)

At our last published masking data update (July 2), IMPACTS Experience found that 43% of high-propensity visitors to cultural entities in the United States believed that organizations should require all visitors to wear a mask. That was down from 53% on June 18, 62% on June 4, and 67% on May 2. People were feeling more comfortable going maskless!

But the percentages are going back up again.

As of August 13, 61% of high-propensity visitors to museums and performing arts organizations in the US believe these entities should mandate masks when indoors for all visitors again.

In my post yesterday, I suggested the database being compiled by McManus could be useful in supporting a case people might want to make for the implementation of masking and vaccination requirements. As Dilenschneider notes in the beginning of her post, organizational and government policy statements don’t drive attendance in and of themselves. The individual makes their own determinations about their health and safety. (my emphasis this time)

While the research is clear that potential visitors across the country are generally desiring mask mandates again and those organizations that do not have them risk jeopardizing attendance, some regions of the US don’t allow organizations to require masks…We understand that this kind of market research could be even more difficult to digest for these entities – and we hear you. Oof. However, how comfortable – or uncomfortable – people feel visiting a cultural institution given its safety protocols doesn’t change just because an entity cannot take a certain action to keep visitors safe….

Remember: Cultural leaders don’t get to decide how guests feel about their own safety, and neither does the CDC. Potential guests decide for themselves what makes them feel comfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Resource: Performing Arts Org Vax Policy Database

Considering Appropriateness of Funding Set-Aside Practices

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Washington Post reported an interesting development in the Washington, D.C. arts and cultural environment last week. The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities asked the D.C. Council to end the practice of setting aside approximately $7 million in guaranteed funding to a group of established city arts organizations.

That money, which averaged a bit more than $7 million a year, now goes into a general fund of more than $33 million — and anyone can compete for a piece of it. The more money there is at a community level, the more likely some of the city’s grass-roots talent will be discovered.

To their credit, the big-time beneficiaries of the old set-aside did not fight the change. Rather, they explained the economic rationale for bypassing the arts commission and lobbying the D.C. Council to give them special dispensation. They acknowledged that the funding program may have unintentionally added to arts funding disparities — with residents living east of the Anacostia River getting far less than Whites in more-affluent areas.

The article mentions this was a particularly productive development for the Commission on the Arts and Humanities which had been viewed as so dysfunctional over the past year, members of the DC Council overseeing the commission were considering whether it should be dissolved.

The article raises a good issue in raising awareness of set aside programs where many of the most affluent and prestigious arts organizations in a municipality or state are guaranteed a certain level of funding while all other arts organizations are forced to compete for the remaining funds. This isn’t on the case in the US, back in March I cited a work that discussed how powerful arts organizations were making an end run around the Australian Council for the Arts to secure their funding directly from the government.

I’d be interested to know what economic rationale the D.C. arts organizations cited to justify circumventing the arts commission and lobbying the DC Council directly. In any case, I suspect we may see more of these set aside arrangements come under scrutiny as possibly perpetuating  funding disparities within the greater community.

Searching For The Unforced Substitute

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Via Artsjournal.com is a FastCompany article by Amy Globus whose thesis is that Covid-19 gave the arts world the kick in the butt required to motivate it to think about how to leverage digital offerings to its benefit.

I will say from the outset that like many stories I have seen written on this theme, as much as they celebrate the success of efforts by organizations and the millions of view garnered, there is little acknowledgement of whether anyone was able to recoup the cost of producing/adapting content for the digital medium. Though Globus does acknowledge many won’t have the resources to create 3-D digital models or virtual/augmented reality experiences.

This being said and gotten out of the way, articles like this one seem to always be worthwhile reading because they offer insight into how different organizations are creating content which is either valued added or an alternative to just pointing a camera at real life works and posting it on the internet.

The truth is, the trial and error experimentation to find what works is likely to incur costs that will never be covered.  Seeing what others might be doing can be instructive and help shorten the development process. Though there is a chance arts organizations will develop offerings which distinctly resonate with the characteristics their communities and aren’t as successfully replicatible elsewhere. We could see, for example, museums emerge over the next decade whose experiences are markedly different from others.

Or it could be like a Tiktok trend where everyone does the same choreography to the same music and makes the same faces as everyone else.

To my mind, it will be the value added or alternative content rather than the digital substitution for the live experience which will provide the best course for arts organizations.

A couple examples from the FastCompany article:

Celebrated fashion designer Thom Browne launched his 2021 collection in a virtual 3D showroom—and while the experience was developed due to COVID-19 restrictions, it certainly doesn’t feel like a forced substitute. Never before have audiences at a runway show had such in-depth access to the details of Browne’s work. In this iteration, viewers can take their sweet time experiencing each piece in 360-degree, high-definition glory. Browne now intends to include a virtual element in future launches, as a valuable component alongside live showings.

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…But organizations without the budget or resources for flashy experiences needn’t feel like they’re doomed to the “old normal.”

One of the biggest successes in digital experience innovations during COVID-19 was the Frick Collection’s Cocktails With a Curator series. Low-tech videos filmed inside curators’ homes generated millions of views, proving, as The New York Times observed, that “online audiences don’t expect a simulation of a gallery visit on-screen. They want a museum experience native to the web—and that can be a little faster, a little less polished, a little more direct.”

Oh Jellyfish, Where Is Thy Sting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running An Intellectual Property Rights Grabbing Contest Isn’t A Good PR Move

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Laura Zabel, Executive Director of the awesome Springboard for the Arts posted a important Twitter thread on being mindful about the way you solicit creative work from the community.

Read the whole thread, it is short but she makes the important point that you may be asking creatives to do a lot of free labor on spec and if there is only a couple winners, most won’t see any sort of reimbursement for their time. She suggests that a request for proposals (RFP) might be more appropriate. She likewise reminds readers to make sure the planned remuneration, whether it is contest prize or fee for services, is appropriate for the level of effort people will need to invest in your project.

Perhaps most importantly, she urges people not to use any language which claims all the intellectual property rights for anything that is submitted. She notes that many templates have this language in it so even if it isn’t your intention, you could be making a “rights grab.”

Free Admission Wasn’t Useful But Will It Become Necessary?

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According to CityLab Berliners are returning to the city’s museums, with credit being given to free admission Sundays.  Sixty-seven museums are offering free admission which is part of a larger effort to explore ways in which people can assemble during the pandemic.

 

Participating museums are required to follow hygiene and distancing rules. Offering free entrance to the museums alone won’t bring back crowds to the city center — people need to feel it is safe to visit museums and public places again, said Klaus Lederer, Berlin’s Senator for Culture and Europe.

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The Museum Sunday is also one of several cultural happenings in Berlin that has found a way to attract visitors amid a sustained global health crisis. Events like the Berlin Art Week, the open-air event Draussenstadt and the Clubculture reboot weekend, a pilot project to experiment how partying can work during a pandemic, are taking place in Berlin this summer.

The free admission Sundays were being planned prior to the pandemic as a way to attract a broader audience. In the US at least research has shown that free admission doesn’t really attract new visitors, but rather attract those who already visit the museum thereby delaying their next potential paid visit by a year or two. Hearing about a similar plan in Berlin made me wonder if the same held true for Germany or if there are are more nuanced dynamics at work there.

This being said, given that people have had 18+ months of not attending public events, a situation that may extend into the near future, it may be necessary to offer free admission to entice the return of those who would normally visit. What that portends for the future remains to be seen.

Is Economic Impact Declining As Most Important Measure of Value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maintaining A Consistent Brand Requires Change

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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