Home Page

Artists Make Great Tour Guides

February 16, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

A couple days ago, CityLab had an article about a fledgling sharing economy start up called Lokafy that pairs tourists with local residents willing to act as tour guides to the “real” areas of their city. Lokafy is so fledgling that it is only in Paris and Toronto with plans to shortly start the service in New York City.

What grabbed my attention about Lokafy was that they value people with artistic temperaments as guides.

Samra recruits “Lokafyers” through the “creative gigs” section on Craigslist. “I think it’s really great for travelers to meet the artists in a city because artists are the ones who kind of step back and interpret life and soak in what’s going on around them,” she says. She views the local guides as something between a tour leader and a friend.

Travelers can expect to see the hidden gems, says Samra. In Toronto, one Lokafyer took her guests to St. Lawrence Market by way of side streets so that they could see street art they may have overlooked.

This concept appealed to me on many levels. It provides a little flexible employment for people, especially artists. It exposes tourists to the work of local artists and helps them become invested in the city in ways they might not have on the usual tourist circuit.

It also gives creatives an opportunity to practice talking to regular people about art, allowing them to make mistakes and get feedback in a relatively low stakes environment.

As with other sharing economy services, I wondered in the back of my mind if this service would be able to scale up and still maintain its intimate connection with tourists. Just as real estate companies have come to dominate AirBnB listings in some cities, tour operators may end up taking advantage of the Lokafy’s image to the point where tourists frequently find that their local tour guide has ushered them on to a full tour bus.

It occurred to me that the value of this idea goes beyond tourism. Even if Lokafy doesn’t take off or spread to smaller cities around the U.S., a similar service sponsored out of the chamber of commerce, local arts council or convention and visitor’s bureau would be great for new residents.

Just moved to Columbus, OH; Birmingham, AL; Chattanooga, TN and want to get to know your city but don’t really know where to begin?

What if you could get a pre-screened personal guide to take you around to many interesting corners of the city, point out hidden treasures and provide historical insight into things you see everyday on the way to work, deepening your appreciation of your new home in ways the printed/web visitors’ guides can’t?

Only problem I see with this program becoming popular is that either: 1) You become good friends with the person who hired you as a tour guide. So should you be charging them to hang out tomorrow? or;

2) Your current friends think you are so awesome they want you to give tours to their friends and family for free, or;

3) Just like with your art practice, people think you shouldn’t need to be paid to have fun, ignoring the fact that you have spent time scrupulously assembling notes and plans for different neighborhoods.

If you have been reading my blog for the last year or so, I see this as an extension of the general “talking to strangers” concept I have been collecting and making attempts to implement.

Audience Relations, General Musings, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

2 Comments

Is This Organization Big Enough For The Two Of Us?

February 15, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

I don’t recall what originally brought it to my attention or caused me to read it more closely, but the Executive Director job search announcement for Forecast Public Art struck me as interesting.

Forecast is looking for a new executive director because the founding executive director is stepping down after 38 years to become the Director of Community Services. At first, I thought this might be part of a leadership succession plan where the former executive director would be around as a resource as he transitioned into retirement.

However, after reading the press release on the matter, the narrative I was making up in my head about the situation changed. Based on the statement that Forecast has “seen an increase in the demand for its public art community services,” I started to think that executive director Jack Becker decided that community services work was where his passions really lay versus the other efforts Forecast pursues.

The truth may be a combination of both or something else altogether. If anyone has any additional information, I would love to know.

Regardless of the real reasons, how arts organizations handle leadership issues is an area of interest for me so I would like to see how things turn out. It may require a fair bit of discipline on the part of many people to look (or direct others) to someone else for leadership decisions after 38 years of one person holding the executive position.

Just two months ago, I wrote a piece for ArtsHacker that dealt with conducting searches for non-profit executives. In that post I included a link to an excellent Nonprofit Executive Succession-Planning Toolkit put together by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

While useful in every succession situation, it may be particularly applicable in the case of Forecast because it contains a self-reflection questionnaire designed for the departing executive. One of the things it asks is what the departing executive envisions their relationship with the organization to be in the future, a question which covers everything from a complete split to emeritus status to a continued daily role such as the one at Forecast.

There are also tools and advice in both the toolkit and other resources I link to in the post to help guide the board of directors through various different scenarios that sees the executive depart.

Leadership, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Stuff A Computer Programmer In Your Arts Hole

February 10, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Possible evidence of what I suggested yesterday regarding the need to discuss all the career paths available to arts grads comes in a post last week by Alex Tabbarok Marginal Revolution blog.

Tabbarok opens by reviewing graduation data he used in a book he published showing more students graduated with a bachelor’s degree in visual and performing arts in 2009 than in “in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined.”

So what has happened since 2009? The good news is that enrollment in STEM fields has increased dramatically. The number of graduates with computer science degrees, for example, has increased by 34%, chemical engineering degrees are up by a whopping 49.5% and math and statistics degrees have increased by 32%.

The bad news is that we are still graduating more students in the visual and performing arts than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined. As I said in Launching nothing wrong with the visual and performing arts but those are degrees which are unlikely to generate spillovers to society.

In the comments section there is a lot of discussion about the relative usefulness of different majors. The following observations about the mix of proficiencies one needs to create a successful product in computer science caught my eye.

Floccina February 4, 2016 at 10:04 am

The CS majors could be made easier. There are hard programming tasks and easy programmings task, there IMO are even programming where less intelligent people can do a better job by making interface that is easier to understand. Some programing task require less intelligence and more art. So perhaps there should be an easy Computer programming major. And perhaps it would make us all better off by increasing total production.

Fill disclosure I am a programmer who not so smart. When I have a difficult algorithm to write that I cannot look up I get help from a smart person.

Andy February 4, 2016 at 11:09 am

I agree. I’m a liberal arts major in English and Information Studies (not programming), and lucked out by finding a job that trained me in administrative computing. CS majors are really needed for software engineering but for programming for basic business processes they can really screw things up, often because their communication skills aren’t that great. The setup we have at my university – train liberal arts majors in computing – has worked well because they draw smart people from areas and occupations that emphasize communication and critical thinking. I’m always hearing horror stories of young CS majors who overengineered systems to the point of unmaintainability and can’t be reasoned with.

An inch below that, someone comments that Apple was able to produce a successful product because Steve Wozinak was a genius at writing effective code and Steve Jobs knew that the user interface needed to be simple and attractive to users.

The problem with Tabbarok’s view, which is generally shared, is that it assumes a computer science major gets plugged into a computer science job hole and a psychology major gets plugged into a psychology job hole and if there are no corresponding jobs needing to be plugged into, then those majors are useless.

This ignores the fact that the value of computer programs, chemicals, medicine, etc., don’t become self-evident upon creation. Like it or not, marketing, advertising and design communicate something that draws attention and causes people to value those items. Whether that thing deserves to be valued is another conversation altogether.

Would you have even known of the existence of the original Macintosh 128k, much less wanted to buy the boxy thing if it weren’t for the iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad? Why did VHS trump Beta when the latter was the superior format? Acai berries always had the same nutritional qualities so why were they miracle berries one year and barely mentioned the next?

The value of something isn’t completely dependent or proportionate to its usefulness.

From a certain point of view, the computer science, chemistry and biology degree really only has value because the creative team at a marketing firm has made the software, artificial sweetener or drug important. Even then, the product may fail for intangible and unexpected reasons just as high budget movies do.

To some degree, more computer science jobs create more creative jobs and creative jobs help create more computer science jobs. This sort of interdependence is illustrated by the success of Amazon, Google and Facebook. Nobody would be hired in one group of jobs if the other area was deficient. (Lord knows, whoever keeps updating the TOS for Facebook has nearly screwed things up a number of times.)

This gets back to what I was saying yesterday. Everyone is done a disservice when they are told actors can only act, violinists can only be in an orchestra, psychologists can only get jobs in clinical, counseling and school psychology.

God help us if a tuba player starts a technology company!

This isn’t to say that there is no value in pursuing a discipline toward a highly specialized end. There is a lot of training, study and practice behind orchestra musicians, surgeons, major league baseball players, ballet dancers, etc. It is widely acknowledged that there are only a few such slots available to the tens to hundreds of thousands of practitioners (except surgeons, of course, I hope there aren’t that many people practicing surgery for fun).

Those who don’t have the ability and will to operate at an elite level shouldn’t have other options closed off to them by a siloing mentality if they have skills that overlap well into other areas.

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

2 Comments

A Real Artist Wouldn’t…

February 9, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Throughout my life I have frequently seen articles about all the careers you can pursue with X major. Some of the options seemed a little far fetched and based on individual outlier examples. (Though philosophy majors have racked up some interesting achievements so perhaps it is I whose vision is limited.)

Over the last few months it occurred to me that when it comes to arts careers, the “if you are not suffering, you are selling out” philosophy might be influencing mentors and educators when it comes to providing advice to young students and practitioners. More accurately, it may be less about starving as purity of practice.

I haven’t assembled enough examples to really support this thesis, but I thought I would toss the idea out there to spur some thought and draw attention to how career options are being communicated, including in one’s personal practice.

I started thinking along these lines last Fall when I was attending the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education SAEE conference. One of the research presentations found that music conservatory graduates felt they hadn’t been prepared for anything but a career as a member of an orchestra or as a soloist.

This isn’t necessarily groundbreaking news. It has long been observed by both faculty and students of all disciplines, including arts, science, business and law, that more people are being graduated than there are open positions. One of the goals of SAEE is to find ways to train students to better manage their careers and make their own opportunities. It is still a fledgling effort, though.

A little more recently, I was listening to faculty from the video game design program at my university on a video conference talking about the program and career opportunities. It wasn’t until a prospective student asked what other career options existed for the degree that the faculty members mentioned there were some graduates that had gone into medical imaging and simulation and were actually making quite a bit more money than those who went into the gaming industry.

I was surprised to learn that there were good options in the medical field. It had never occurred to me that such opportunities existed. I don’t think they were intentionally hiding that fact, especially with all the other things they needed to talk about. Still, there was something in the way they spoke about the medical field careers that made it sound like the less preferential option versus the core focus of the program. Given that the program is pretty competitive and rigorous, it could only raise the profile if they touted a range of career options.

It is natural that we are all biased toward what we perceive to be the pure practice of our discipline. The question remains, are we telling the broadest, best and most interesting range of stories about the opportunities our disciplines afford?

It isn’t enough to convince people that what the arts and culture represent and create have resonance and meaning in their lives with an eye to making them consumers. There is also a need to mention the diverse ways these skills can be manifested and practiced even if they lack some elemental of idealized purity. Or if we feel some practitioners are bastardizing and demeaning an art form with lack of skill and discipline.

At the very least this would create a growing awareness of all the ways artistic vocations are practiced and improve the perception of the arts as a career path.

Art(ist) Education, Working In The Arts

1 Comment