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Joshua Bell Experiment Issues Discussed

June 18, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

Via Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog is a three part discussion about Joshua Bell’s experience playing anonymously at a Washington, DC train station back in April.

The three parts were actually recorded on the same day but have been posted periodically on the Polysemy Woodshed podcast/blog page. (Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Their discussions were some of the most thoughtful on the event that I have come across. The participants tackled a lot of the same issues about respect and recognition of talent, appropriateness of venue and curiosity of the children that I and others who have blogged on this topic have.

Among the specific ideas I found intriguing was the concept of an agreement existing between the performer and listener. Another was comments in part two by one of the participants where she talks about how discouraging it was that people walking by Bell seemed determined to ignore him. A short time later she acknowledges the common practice of tuning out information that is not immediately pertinent when she admits that she has only just noticed there were a lot of birds singing in her backyard and she has no idea if they have recently taken up residence there or if she has been tuning them out for a long time now.

The idea that you have have to have a frame of reference of some sort to assist your evaluation of art also came up in relation to art appearing in familiar and unfamiliar situations as well as simply having had enough prior experience that you can make a deliberate choice between stopping or walking away.

Part of the allure of Joshua Bell, one commenter argues is that there are a series of actions one engages in prior to attending a performance that create a sense of excitement and anticipation. Having circumvented these preparatory stages by appearing unannounced in a train station, Bell divested himself of much of the framework that make his performances so valued. He became merely a good violin player in the subway.

For those of you who recoil at the idea that Joshua Bell has much less value unannounced outside the symphony hall as he does inside let me point out that the U.S. dollar has no value outside what we invest in it. It is not backed by gold or silver–just belief. Print the exact design of a dollar bill on the exact same paper using only black ink and it is worth only the paper it is printed on. Add the blues, greens, yellows and reds and suddenly it is worth a bit more. It isn’t perfect analogy but in the same manner do tickets, clothes, dinner arrangements and nice performance halls contribute additional value to Joshua Bell.

As those discussing the situation point out, all these ancillary elements that enhance the value of the experience in our minds don’t actually improve the art. They are just things we as attendees have convinced ourselves are important to improving our receptiveness and enjoyment of the event.

One of the people talks about Matt Haimovitz who looked be one of the next great concert cellists but gave it all up because he felt he was disconnected from the audience and instead started playing in rock clubs, ice cream parlors and malls.

As the third segment ended, they pondered whether it was worth having orchestra musicians busk from time to time in the hopes that some ideas about how things might be changed to reach the man on the street would emerge.

I am not quite sure if there will be another installment or not. Each episode didn’t really indicate either overtly or imply by incomplete discussion arc that there would be additional sections posted. Since each segment was posted in two week intervals, I may just have to wait a couple weeks to find out!

General Musings

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Consider the Source

June 13, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

We all know (or at least suspect) that when you survey a group and allow people to reply if they are moved to do so that you will generally get responses at either end of the spectrum and not many from the middle. People will really only go to the trouble of filling out a survey if they love or hate the survey subject.

Over on Salon.com’s Machinist blog, they dealt with the same issue with online rating systems like TripAdvisor, IMDb and Amazon.com. (Read the comments section on the entry for a lot of other insight into other weaknesses in these rating systems.)

“To see how an Amazon star-rating compares to society’s “true” opinion, Hu, Pavlou and Zhang conducted their own survey of one product, singer-songwriter Jason Mraz’s 2005 album, “Mr. A-Z.” In a survey of 66 college students, about two-thirds gave the album three or four stars. There were also a bunch of twos, some ones, and very few fives. On Amazon the picture is completely different. More than half of reviewers judge “Mr. A-Z” a five-star CD, while there are only a small number of threes, twos and ones.

Pavlou explains the lovefest by citing a specific kind of response bias, what he calls “purchasing bias.” In order to review something, you must have already purchased it. But people buy stuff they think they’re going to like — that’s why they buy stuff…Purchasing bias, Pavlou points out, is related to the price of a product; a higher price reduces the probability that someone who is unlikely to enjoy a product will buy it and review it anyway….If the Jason Mraz album was $200 rather than $11, then only die-hard fans would buy it and rate it, skewing its average review higher…The more expensive a product, Pavlou says, the more you should discount its high reviews.”

The article talks about a company called Summize which is translating all the star ratings into a thermometer bar like this one for the aforementioned Mraz album. Clicking on the various colors representing the good, bad and ugly number of ratings gives you direct access to the reviews with those ratings. Seeing all the reviews of each star category together rather than interspersed with ratings of other stars aids a little more in decision making. It can also reveal if marketing departments have tried to seed in good reviews at intervals when comments with similar syntax and spelling errors pop up side by side.

As the entry also points out, considering the source is still paramount when dealing with critiques. A reviewing site called Yelp allows you to cross reference reviewers with other reviewers of similar minds to evaluate if you share their taste and thus, have a higher degree of confidence in their opinions.

Refining software to compare our taste to those of others for us is what Web 3.0 is projected to be all about. (Web 2.0 is user generated content like blogging, Wikipedia, YouTube.) It is speculated that the next generation of web applications will search the internet for what we want and like a TIVO, will gradually learn what our preferences are in order to make suggestions. Presumably, we will be able to trade these specs with loved ones to aid them in Christmas shopping for us.

I imagine that as with Tivo, advertisers will be scrambling to figure out how to position their products in ways that the next generation of search agents will suggest them to consumers. (I am guessing they will pay software developers to have the agents favor them.)

The potential good news for arts organizations is that even if they don’t try to be manipulative in the type of Metawords they use in their web design, the artificial intelligences of the search agents may inform their masters that they have a high degree of confidence that they will enjoy a performance based on the years of criteria the agent has indexed even though they have never gone to see a show before.

I am sure that large corporations will see to it that software is developed enabling the agent to inform the arts organization website that this is the first time its master has purchased tickets to a show allowing the arts organization to offer great seats at reduced prices and perhaps flag the purchaser to receive free background information about the show and special attention by the front of house staff.

If the companies that develop these agents are smart, they won’t allow the users to be so specific in their criteria that they close themselves off from seemingly out of left field recommendations synthesized by the agent based on a profile it has compiled.

Terms and Ideas

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Truth Inside a Sumo Dohyo

June 11, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

I am beginning to worry that people are losing a sense of curiosity and are becoming more risk averse about things with which they are not completely familiar.

I went to see a sumo tournament yesterday and really loved it. The matches progressed surprisingly quickly for all the ritual involved (40 men in single elimination in under three hours, including intermission, and two trophy presentations.) The sense of theatre was appealing to me as well. There was none of the outrageous boasting you find in professional televised wrestling. Except for one man, there wasn’t much flexing and scowling.

Most of the intimidation was accomplished by steely glares, little gestures when slapping oneself and the amount of salt thrown into the ring. None of this was too subtle for the audience which ooohed, aaahed and applauded in approval at the gestures. It is rather amusing to conclude a wrestler did not make good on his boastful salt tossing when he is quickly ejected from the ring.

My concern about the degradation of curiosity was based on the low attendance at both days of the tournament. Even though I wasn’t involved in the effort at all, true to my background, I worried about how much money the businessman who spearheaded the effort might have been losing. They attributed the low attendance to the fact that there were no men from the state wrestling. I will say that despite the fact there are a lot of Japanese here, they only comprised about half the audience with Caucasians, Polynesians, Filipinos and some Mongolians (a number of the wrestlers were Mongolian) making up the rest.

Even though I often grumble that people are more interested in sports than the arts, I was rather dismayed by the attendance. Posters for the tournament went up 6 months ago. I was actually relieved to find out the contest was in June because our performance schedule was so busy back then. Three months ago a local man who had attained the pinnacle rank of Yokozuna returned to promote the event and has been talking it up all over the place.

Of course, last week there were all sorts of stories in the media about the event. I was excited to be attending and read up about the sport on the event website which included a short introductory video. The result was that I actually spent more on tickets than I had intended because I wanted to be closer to the action.

As you might imagine the real source of my dismay isn’t my empathy for the event producers. It is that attendance was so low despite all the media promotion, the personal support of a man who is viewed locally as a hero and the readily available background information that has some bad implications for my programming which isn’t backed with the resources to provide all that.

Part of my surprise is derived from the fact that sumo has had no place in my life. Though it isn’t as big as soccer, baseball and football, there are a few clubs in the state. I would have expected a more general familiarity to pose less of a barrier to attendance.

It has been about 13 years since the last tournament was here, but with the Yokozuna making a lot of public appearances, I would have expected a buzz of people reminiscing about attending or missing out the last time. Perhaps what I saw this weekend was the best of what the local environment can generate. Perhaps even fewer would have attended had the event happened on the East Coast.

I being to see why some organizations are casting local celebrities in shows. Even though most people wouldn’t have personally known a local sumo competitor, the fact that one shared common experiences and knowledge with a wrestler can be enough motivation to participate in an unfamiliar experience. All it takes is a handful of other people who have also never met the local person either sitting near you clapping and shouting his name to validate the experience as an enjoyable one. This is another example of why word of mouth is so powerful.

If this represents a growing trend it means that programming will not only need to be relevant to the interests and lives of my local audience, but also may need to have a more direct association with which they can identify. Over the next year I have three shows possessing local connections to varying degrees. I will have to observe them closely to see if interest increases as the less apparently connections are revealed.

Audience Relations

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Leadership Training Trends

June 6, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

I didn’t intend to have a number of entries this week wherein I talked about other blogs but I was visiting the Americans for the Arts website checking on something related to their recent Arts. Ask for More campaign when I caught sight of their blog and decided to take a gander.

They had a number of people attending blogging about their experience at the Americans for the Arts national conference in Las Vegas this past week. There were a couple entries on the blog about leadership training that caught my attention.

The first was from John Arroyo:

“I began to think of this idea and wondered if whether or not we are overdoing it in the leadership field. There are so many institutes and workshops at all levels, but if we truly believe that leaders are self-identified and not tied to a title, when is it over stimulation?”

He goes on to talk about how leadership can be exhibited on all levels and for many an Executive Director position is no longer an ultimate career goal. This partially echoes some of what was being said in the Emerging Leadership program I attended at the Arts Presenters conference. I begin to wonder if there is an interesting shift in thinking and attitude transpiring nationally.

The other entry that caught my eye came from a time prior to the convention from Chad Baumann, Director of Marketing and Communications for AFTA and writer of Arts Marketing blog. In his entry on Artsblog, he cites a recent story noting that the MFA will become the new MBA as the economy increasingly orients toward creativity and expresses some concern about the emphasis the training programs might take.

“As more people compare the pros and cons of the MFA vs. MBA, I only have one major fear: that the MFA will become too business oriented. Arts organizations in the past have been criticized for having managers who didn’t come from business backgrounds. Many have made the argument that arts organizations suffer because they are lead by artists, not business professionals. I have the opposite fear.

“…I hope that most MFA programs in arts administration provide the necessary business training, but keep at the forefront what makes their students valuable-their artistic and creative abilities. Creativity is the commodity that is in high demand”

Management Philosophy

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