Home Page

Wait, This Is A Seminar Description And Not A Blog Post?

November 5, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

A couple weeks ago I saw a blog post from Museums as Progress talking about how staff expertise isn’t necessarily relevant to visitors. The point they made was just because expertise is important to us as insiders, doesn’t mean that is what visitors directly value.

The visitor taking pictures of their kid having fun isn’t there to learn about your discipline. The couple on a date isn’t asking for engagement programming. People come to museums to relax, connect with others, discover something about themselves — and, yes, sometimes learn something new along the way or “engage” with the museum — but for most people, most of the time, the goals are manifold and your expertise matters only to the extent that it helps them achieve what they’re actually trying to accomplish.

Source

Except I eventually realized what I was reading wasn’t a blog post, but a six paragraph description of a session they are holding next Thursday.

For a moment I wondered how effective such a long session description would be in attracting participants. But that was through the lens of thinking people have too short an attention span to bother reading six paragraphs promoting an event.

The fact is, they were informing people about the problem the session was meant to address and what type of conversation they could expect.

” — expertise becomes a shield against harder questions about relevance and impact. If we admitted that people’s goals differ from ours, we’d have to become students again, learning what actually matters to the communities we claim to support.

The challenge isn’t whether your museum has valuable expertise — it does. The question is whether that expertise can serve community progress in ways that generate institutional returns

Source

In the first paragraph of this post I mentioned expertise may not be something visitors directly value. But I do think people value the product of that expertise without consciously realizing it.

I have mentioned that research has shown people perceive cultural organizations as more trustworthy than media outlets, government entities, and other NGOs. It is likely due to the care and exercise of expertise that has led people to regard cultural organizations in that manner. While people may not be driven to attend to learn more about biodiversity and colonial history, they probably want to be confident that what they do learn about these topics while visiting is reasonably accurate.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Need To Be Someone, Not Just Anyone

November 4, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin reinforced a conversation that has been circulating in the arts world with greater vigor over the last five-six years —people have so many options these days you need to distinguish yourself and your value.

People don’t need to enter your business, or even interact with a person, to get their direct need satisfied which is why arts orgs need to emphasize all the ways in which they solve other problems people face.

Ruth Hartt advocates for employing this approach both in the way organizations market themselves and in the organizational culture they create to reinforce this in every plan and public interaction.

Godin writes:

Good, fast and cheap used to be the goals of a typical small business. Today, there’s probably a giant, heartless competitor who is gooder, faster and cheaper than you.

The way forward is simple: Be worth the trip. Be worth the price.

“You can pick anyone, and we’re anyone” isn’t going to be helpful going forward. Be someone instead.

Source

While people may not need to enter your physical space or interact with your staff to acquire what they need, one practice that is likely to become valued is having someone with whom they can interact. As much conversation as there is about AI being the way of the future, there seems to be increasing recognition that the available tools are not meeting our expectations.

There is currently a competitive advantage in saving people from depending on some of the information delivered by web searches.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Management Philosophy, Marketing/PR

No Comments

Guaranteed Artist Income Program Finds Those Who Slip Through The Cracks

November 3, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Writing for SMU DataArts, Doug Noonan recently had a short piece about identifying gig workers and free lancers in the creative industry which are usually missed by federal surveys. He notes that while there are a lot of anecdotal data about people in this group, there aren’t any hard statistics–mostly because it is so difficult to identify people in order to collect data from them.

However, he said that a Guaranteed Income for Artist program in New York State launched in Spring 2022 ended up finding these people thanks to the broad criteria.

Eligibility for the program hinged on four simple criteria—self-identify as an artist/culture bearer/maker, age 18 or older, New York State residency, and income below the local self-sufficiency standard—and over 22,000 eligible artists applied. Almost 90 percent of the survey respondents were recruited through this program, and as a result, PoA provides unusually rich coverage of artists who are otherwise difficult to capture in conventional datasets.

Source

I have been writing about basic guaranteed income programs for quite awhile and it never occurred to me, though it seems obvious in retrospect, that these programs can be used to identify individuals that might be missed otherwise.

One of the things Noonan takes pains to emphasize is the gulf between what these artists were making and what various other surveys measure. He notes the artists participating in the guaranteed income program had a median household income of $20,000, with 81% of participants living in NYC. (my emphasis)

Let that sink in: fully 81% of them lived in New York City on that income. And remember, these figures represent household income—not just the artist’s earnings. Compare this to federal statistics: the NEA touts median annual earnings of about $70,000 , but that’s individual income. The median household earnings from the ACS for artists runs closer to $122,000 per year. The gap isn’t just large—it’s a chasm that reveals how many artists federal data simply don’t see.

Source

There are a number of charts analyzing who the people in the survey were demographically and type of work they were engaged in. One chart called out the large number of participants that were acting as caregivers alongside their creative practice.

To some extent it was surprising to see just how optimistic many of these artists reported in the questions about their well-being.

Here’s what makes this portrait especially striking: despite the financial precarity, the mindset is remarkably resilient. A full 73.2% “agree/strongly agree” that they lead a purposeful/meaningful life and 60.4% are optimistic about the future. Conversely, fewer than 22% disagree with the idea that they feel agency over their future and fewer than 30% disagree with the idea that they had good mental health last month. At the same time, only 45.8% believe the general public values their work, even as 86.7% report feeling confident articulating their creative process and labor

Source

Art(ist) Education, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Basic Guaranteed Income Programs Are Not A Cure All

October 28, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

I have been reading and writing about Basic Guaranteed Income programs for quite a number of years. I was interested to see that Ireland decided to make their Basic Artist Income program permanent.

But I am also cautiously optimistic based on information I read back in August suggesting that basic guaranteed income programs aren’t as successful at achieving their goals as they may seem.

On The Argument, Kelsey Piper writes that solutions to poverty will require more than just giving people cash.

Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction.

Source

This was the case regardless of how much people were getting. There have been separate studies conducted on programs where people received $333/month, $500/month, and $1000/month and the outcomes were similar.

In each case, compared to a control group that was getting between $20 and $50 a month, there was little change.

…$1,000 per month for three years, while the control group got $50 per month. They found that participants worked less — but nothing else improved. Not their health, not their sleep, not their jobs, not their education, and not even time spent with their children. They did experience a reduction in stress at the start of the study, but it quickly went away.

Source

To be clear, these studies found that people weren’t spending the extra money on “vice goods,” but rather on things they needed like food and clothing for their kids, paying down debt, etc. Different groups had different issues the money helped them with, and it definitely relieved some pressures but overall people’s lives and well-being didn’t improve.

Piper says that often journalists writing about these programs are cherry-picking those positive results from studies that are openly reporting the problems that have been observed. The promising news about these projects we often hear about are only part of the whole picture.

But the other side of this according to Piper, is that giving people money for very targeted purposes rather than a cure for all that ails a group do show promise. She cites programs giving cash to pregnant women to improve pregnancy outcomes and cash for parolees to prevent recidivism as among those currently under study.

So in that regard, the Irish program which was created to enable working artists to continue to be productive during Covid has been successful. The support has reportedly enabled artists to spend up to an additional 4 hours a week engaging in creative activities.

Advocacy, Finance, Fundraising, Government Relations, Working In The Arts

No Comments