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Music To Repel, Redeem and Raze By

April 20, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

You have probably heard stories about how people blast classical music to scare drug dealers out of their neighborhoods, homeless out of train stations and teens away from convenience stores.

There was recently a story in the Wall Street Journal about a town in India that is using drummers to shame people into paying taxes.

Among my first thoughts were that it is pretty awful for a guy who has been playing drums since he was two to have his performance used to punish people. Thinking of my post yesterday, it occurred to me that this may be another manifestation of the disconnect between people who value the arts and those who see little value at all. Assumptions are made about the utility of the arts as well as about how undesirable elements of society will react when exposed to them.

There is a little more nuance to the story than that. The drummers play the same music they are hired to play at weddings and birthday parties. So as the article suggests, the drumming may indeed be more about calling attention to scofflaws than torturing them. (Though the classical music being blared in train stations to scare kids away is the same music chamber groups are hired to perform at weddings, so that isn’t proof in itself.)

Also the inclusion of the musicians is accompanied by an effort to create a safer environment. Often tax collectors are beaten up. The musicians and the collectors are accompanied by security guards bearing a banner with the city coat of arms.

On the other hand, since 1/3 of the population doesn’t pay their taxes, they assume the effectiveness of the drummers will wear off soon. They next plan to send transgender women, who are believed to be able to impose hexes on people, to perform mocking dances in front of houses. Again, using a group to shame others solely on the basis of their identity or practices makes me a little uneasy.

It is difficult to begrudge those who need money for their participation in efforts aimed to force social compliance.

It really does say something about the way the arts are perceived that people think it can be used in a prescriptive way to separate the desirable from the undesirable; improve cognition and behavior and a host of other things.

Would Walter White suddenly find stores and other places he frequented that played classical music repulsive after he started cooking meth and dealing drugs?

Of course not. If we have learned anything, its that every James Bond villain or psychopathic killer is attractive, cultured, loves classical music and wants to watch the world burn.

Clearly then, while classical music keeps riff-raff away from train stations and 7-11s, it attracts megalomaniacs to concert halls in droves.

Gives you second thoughts about Drew McManus looking so suave and sophisticated in the pictures on his orchestra consulting website, doesn’t it?

(Yeah, he only wishes he was filthy rich enough to have sharks with freakin’ laser beams attached to their heads.)

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Do You Love Opera For It’s Economic Impact?

April 19, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

In addition to responding to comments he makes on the blog, I have had some email exchanges with artist Carter Gillies. Many times in the course of our correspondence, he will say “I think we are talking about the same thing, just in different words.” I am not always sure that we are, but I often get the impression he is operating a few steps ahead of me.

That feeling of disconnect is actually a central feature of a guest post he wrote nearly a month ago for Diane Ragsdale’s Jumper blog.

Since it was a long piece, I bookmarked it for later reading. I am somewhat embarrassed it has taken me close to a month to read it, but I encourage everyone to do so, even if it means coming back to your bookmark a couple months hence. Having read it, a lot of what he was trying to get at in our correspondence became clearer to me.

What Carter does is take a really deep look into the way we define the value of the arts. In doing so, he bolsters the argument that we should avoid talking about the value of the arts in relation to economic, social, educational, developmental etc., benefits.

To heavily summarize what he says, he notes that people in the arts have a clear sense of the value of the arts. People who are not aware of this value and even perceive the arts as valueless, do not share the same language and metrics for evaluating the arts. Communicating the value is therefore as difficult as the challenge of describing a color to a person who in unable to perceive that color. (my emphasis)

The way we mostly talk to these people is we have found that our ends, the things we value in themselves, can be the means to their own ends. They value the economy? Well, the arts are good for the economy! They think that cognitive development is important? Well, the arts are good for cognitive development! We make our own ends the means to their ends.

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

I don’t wake up excited to go to work to stimulate the economy. I am not eager to go to a museum opening so I can have my cognitive abilities developed. In this context, it almost sounds ridiculous.

This illustrates the disconnect between shared metrics and terminology. As an arts person, I can understand the argument that I need to pay taxes to help stimulate the economy and contribute to the cognitive development of others, but I can’t convince the government to provide funding for the arts based on why I value the arts. I get them, but they don’t get me. I need to talk about economy and cognitive development to be able to receive that tax money.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to the arts. When we talk about why we love our parents and siblings, we may talk about how well they treat us but that doesn’t truly explain why we love them. The reasons are just external metrics we know others can understand and identify. The real reasons are ineffable. There will be people with whom you become romantically involved who may treat you much better by those same standards than your family ever did, but you will never love them the way you love your bratty sibling.

Citing Archimedes famous quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world,” Carter notes:

In the arts we have thrown facts together, constructing the longest possible lever, but have seemingly forgotten we also need somewhere to place it. Those facts need to rest on values that can act as a fulcrum. The facts without value, or the wrong value, will simply have no leverage. They will fail to motivate.

He suggests what is needed is a change of perspective rather than trying to change minds. While this might be accomplished via the proposal to create public will for the arts that I often cite, Carter also notes that the arts community needs to change its perspective as well.

The confusion we are mired in is thinking that our difficulty is practical when in fact the impediment is structural. We need to better understand this to make appreciable headway. We can celebrate both the good art does and the good art is, a structural difference, the lever and the fulcrum. That is the value of intrinsic value for the arts.

I should note, whether you agree with the practice or not, use of taxes for economic development and education weren’t foregone conclusions. It required a change in perspective to implement both.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas

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It’s Easier To Destroy The Building Than Fix The Roof

April 18, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

For over a decade now there has been a conversation about how detrimental it can be if an arts organization decides to add new programs in order to qualify for foundation grants and funding. Usually the negative issues revolve around conflicts with core mission and placing additional strain on staff and resources.

Until recently, I hadn’t heard about arts organizations feeling they have gotten caught in a vicious cycle of needing to build multi-million dollar expansions in order to attract more money.

According to a Non-Profit Quarterly piece referencing an article in The Art Newspaper, that is the very situation facing museums. Even in the deepest throes of the recent recession, museums were spending billion on expansions. (my emphasis)

The museums say they need to expand to attract new donors, and that requires enough space to display enough work to pique the special interests of individual prospects.

“If there isn’t room to show these works, you are hamstrung when you want to make the case to a private collector that a particular object would have a suitable home in the museum,” says Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Art Newspaper agrees, saying, “Patrons are also more likely to stump up for a splashy expansion than for a lower-profile renovation or acquisition.”

In fact, in the article, new galleries, buildings, and wings are described as grounds for friendly competition among the ultra-wealthy. But after the expansion comes expanded operating costs, of course, and…well, the monthly nut becomes bigger and more formidable.

[…]

But large institutions have ended up being in constant capital campaign mode, creating bigger sustainability issues in the long run unless the donor money continues to expand and those donors fall in love with funding operations—a doubtful prospect. Too few capital campaigns and major gifts are structured to include endowments or other funding to sustain the buildings over time.

Not only is there a sense in both articles that there is quite a bit of vanity involved, there was also a suggestion that museums would “become a dumping ground for speculative investments in the art market.”

With the existing concerns that museums are becoming too closely tied to commercial efforts, it may not be unreasonable to fear that people may seek to burnish the value of their collections by having it shown in prestigious museums. Having taken on greater operating costs, wouldn’t museums feel pressured by influential donors (and concerned board members) to accept?

You may be thinking, none of this applies to you because you don’t work for a large, prestigious museum. However, this situation illustrates the dangerous cycle and potential for conflicts of interest, writ large.

Not only that, the sentence I emphasized is related to the more encompassing issue of funders in general not providing support for overhead and operational expenses. There is an implicit suggestion that capital campaigns and major gift solicitations be structured to include support for operations and long term infrastructure maintenance.

It may not be as sexy, but it is necessary and needs to be seriously considered by arts non-profits of all sizes. It is probably easier to carve out a portion of a major capital gift for these purposes than to solicit for it directly.

Arts Facilities, Fundraising, State of the Arts

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Maybe Art CAN Support Your Retirement

April 13, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

One of the more intriguing ideas I have written about here is the Artist Pension Trust. It was started 10 years ago with the goal of providing retirement benefits to the 2000 participating artists, each of which commit to “depositing” 20 works in the trust over 20 years. The trust then sells the works to provide benefits to the members.

When I first wrote about it 10 years ago, the plan was to evaluate the state of the trust at this year. According to a recent piece in the NY Times, the Trust decided to start disbursing funds, in part to reassure participants that it works.

Since its founding, the trust has evolved significantly. This month it will make its first distributions, rather than wait to make a large payout at the end of a 25-year period as originally planned, along the lines of a pension fund.

“This was built as a pension, but we decided to pay as we go along so people can see the model works,” said Al Brenner, a board member. “Also, it’s been 10 years, and in some cases it was right to sell. But we’re extremely cautious and don’t want to sell too soon.”

As I wrote two years ago, some of the participants have withdrawn over the years due to needing money, but the trust still has more applicants than it planned to accept and is looking into creating a new global grouping.

To put this in context, there are 8 regional groupings of 250 in which artists’ works are pooled, plus one global group of 628. So they are looking to accommodate more artists in a 10th group.

I was encouraged to learn that the Trust, recognizing that it has the capacity to provide additional services to artists, doesn’t solely see itself as a money making enterprise.

Along with changing its distribution plan, the trust no longer defines itself as a financial product but as a kind of artist cooperative, providing services as varied as free storage and transport, or a loans-and-exhibitions program that promotes the work of artists internationally.

Indeed, some artists have joined more for the community support than the financial advantages.

“I’m aware the ultimate goal is financial security for the future, but it’s not the reason why I joined,” said Alicia Paz, a Mexican artist who lives in London. “I’m more interested in the networking and the support structure for the now.”

Of course, the real validation of the concept won’t come for another 15-20 years when a large number of participants start to depend on the Trust’s distributions to support themselves in retirement.

State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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