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Can You Buy At The Price You Are Selling?

June 28, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

I often have arts professionals in their late 30s-early 40s ask me for comp tickets or ask me to request comps on their behalf at another performance space. Their whole decision to attend is based on whether they can get the comps. Since the ticket prices have been in the $10-$30 range and some of these people have stable incomes, on a couple occasions I have opined that this sort of request is to be expected when you are a poor college student, but didn’t they think that at this stage in their career and level of success it wasn’t time to start paying for tickets and free up those comps for starving college students.

This post isn’t about deadbeat mid-career artists who should have long ago started attending shows to support the arts and not because they get comps. As fun as ranting on the subject might be, I am pretty much done now.

I started with that little gripe to catch attention and segue into my real topic of wondering how many artists actually can’t afford to attend/buy the sort of art for which they are being paid. The thought occurred to me as I was wandering through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art and I saw a couple notations about some of the artists owning pieces by other notable artists. I wondered if that were still the case. More to the point, are artists, who sell one of their pieces for a certain price, buying the works of other artists at comparable prices. If not, is it because of an unwillingness to do so or because they can not afford to do so.

Following the latter train of thought, it isn’t news that people in the arts don’t get paid very well–especially those producing the art. (Drew McManus’ recent Compensation Reports illustrate this for orchestras.) I am sure some people are eager to liken artists to third world sweatshop workers who could never afford to buy the clothing they make, but I am pretty sure things aren’t that bad. Many performing artists can probably afford to see a couple shows at the level people are paying to see them perform, but perhaps not as many as they might like or would be helpful toward advancing their craft.

I have no idea where visual artists stand in this regard. My guess is that for the time it takes to create a piece, many probably make below minimum wage and have many mundane bills to pay before they can think about acquiring works of their own. But honestly, I have no idea about the art acquisition statistics for visual artists. Does anyone have any insight or links to research on this matter?

Actually, while I am thinking about it… I have seen a lot of surveys being done about engaging audiences, marketing to audiences, measuring how involved the general public is in the arts (and the need to redefine what activities count as engagement), and even the SNAAP survey which tracks the “lives and careers of arts graduates.” But as far as I know, no one has really surveyed artists to see how involved they are in attending/purchasing the work of others.

I think it would be especially interesting to see the results in terms of cross-disciplines– how often do theatre people attendance dance, how often to dancers go to museums, how often do sculptors go to the symphony? I would also be interested to find out if that changes as a person gets older and advanced in their careers. Do arts people only go to see stuff from other disciplines when they are young and poor and their friends are doing a thing in an abandoned warehouse or do they continue throughout their lives and consume a wider variety?

There would probably be elements of the results that were satisfying as well as some that were depressing. In any case, they could be used to mobilize action. At the last National Performing Arts Convention, people had so many ideas about what to do but were paralyzed about how to do it. Maybe the first, best and simplest step would be to look at the results of a cross-discipline survey mobilize a grassroots support effort by either saying, “Hey, you guys don’t support each other enough in your communities, get out there and see stuff,” or “You guys are really supportive of each other. Now we are are going to train you to advocate to your neighbors for your disciplines and those of your colleagues of the other disciplines. We succeed when we all stand together.”

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

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It’s Yesterday Once More

June 27, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

Tip of the hat to Don Hall (aka Angry White Guy in Chicago) for linking to the Everything Is A Remix web series, some thing of a labor of love by NY film maker Kirby Ferguson. Parts One and Two came out a while back. Part Three just came out a week ago. The last part is due out this fall.

As I have been thinking about intellectual property rights recently, the series struck a chord with me. As you might imagine, the premise of the series is that there are no original ideas. The first video makes that abundantly clear by examining music, especially that of Led Zeppelin, who didn’t make a lot of effort to change any elements of the songs they were appropriating and very little to credit the original artists either. The second video talks about movies like the Star Wars series and the Kill Bill movies and the influences they tapped.

In the third part, Ferguson starts to talk about how creativity and inspiration are based on the work of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton famously said in the 17th century. (Though Bernard of Chartres apparently referenced the metaphor in the 12th century.) His example that most startled me was noting that Xerox created a graphical interface computer with a mouse, desktop, pop up menus and other familiar features, Alto, in the 1970s. It was mostly used by Xerox and some universities and was never released for commercial use. Apple made improvements to the design and interface as well affordability and released the Lisa and Macintosh in the early 80s and that eventually morphed into the iPads people are running around with today.

There is actually a transcript and links to all the music and video Ferguson used for each video chapter, should one wish to purchase any of it.

One thing I appreciate about a lot of blogs and other online venues is that people often make an attempt to at least make a passing reference to the source of their information and the jumping off point for their posts. I feel a little bad for Xerox. Sure, they failed to really exploit the technology they developed for nearly a decade before Apple took off with the idea. Because of this their name gets lost in history if not for people like Ferguson. I am sure Apple probably would have faced a law suit if they had made a public nod in their direction.

Still, it is nice for people to acknowledge that they got their good ideas from you. The tracking data for this blog often shows people from universities reading for a long time. I often wonder if my ideas are making it into a paper–and if I am being credited. Or maybe someone just left their browser window minimized behind their chat window for a long time.

The discussion about intellectual property rights, etc is a pretty lengthy debate and even though I recently talked about the issue, I actually wanted to take another tack with this post and ask:

Are we in the arts standing on the shoulders of those who came before and moving ourselves to innovation?

Again, a subject of lengthy and long debate where the current thinking is probably leaning toward an answer in the negative.

But it strikes me that maybe things aren’t so bad as they seem. Or at least perhaps some of the steps that need to be taken may not be as intimidatingly far away as they seem. If, as Kirby Ferguson says, innovation doesn’t come mostly with a flash of divine insight but rather after an onerous road littered with failures and mistakes, then maybe it is just a matter of recognizing how the past is manifesting itself today. (Albeit probably requiring hard work and likely failures.)

I think I have mentioned before that when I was in grad school getting my MFA in Theatre Management, my class read Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now! was unworkable in current times when so much competed for people’s time and attention. He suggested having subscription parties where key people in the community would invite their friends over for tea and would help convince them to subscribe to your season.

Seems pretty difficult to replicate these days if you think about it in literal terms. But this is exactly what happens on different social media platforms and sites like Kickstarter. Key people in the community present your cause/organization to their friends and convince them to become involved. It is tougher to identify specific influential people than in the past when planning subscription parties. But for the same effort you invested in cultivating relationships with those people, you can disseminate information about your organization in a manner that convinces people to become interested and involved with your organization. They may not become as deeply invested as people did in the past, but you can potentially reach far more people than you did in the past.

I will grant that some innovation that moves past recasting the old in familiar terms will be required for the arts to successfully innovate for the future, but it doesn’t all have to be created nearly whole cloth from scratch.

(In the interests of correctly referencing things. The title of this blog is from a Carpenters song)

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Business Models, State of the Arts

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Info You Can Use: Social Media Tips

June 22, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

In May Tech Soup hosted a series of Monday Twitter chats on the topic of Social Media. They provide a summary of the discussions on their forums. The discussions covered the use of Twitter, Facebook and Videos. Since I have read a fair bit on the use of these, I was most interested in their final discussion which covered the effective use of Tags.

I add a lot of tags to posts I make both here on the blog and connected to social media sites I use at work. I am just never sure if what I am tagging is actually effective. It seemed like being fairly generous with tags was good everywhere except Twitter.

“Blogs, photos, video, and bookmarks can benefit from the use of many tags when they are uploaded. Twitter, again, distinguishes itself, however, by favoring a “less is more”and approach to tagging. It is an accepted convention on Twitter that too many hashtags is unhelpful and, in fact, makes a tweet look too busy and difficult to read. Use tags to not only find content but to identify individuals or organizations who are creating or sharing useful information and, in the case of Twitter, to engage in actual real time conversations or tweetchats.

Individuals who are new to tagging might find themselves asking what tags are best to use for their content. For starters, it is worth considering what types of words might be used to describe your content. A helpful question to ask is, “who is this content intended for?” Understanding who your intended audience is and what terms they might use to seek out your content will help you narrow down on the most appropriate tags to use.

If you are just beginning to use tags, it is often helpful to explore and use tags on broad topics such as “nonprofit,” “art,” and so on, to reach out to a broad audience if you are not familiar with more specific tags for your content. As the article Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging suggests, “be a lemming” and follow what others are doing which can also help you discover more specialized, niche tags.”

I found the advice at the end regarding paying close attention to what other people are using to be particularly valuable. Even if you think you know the hot buzz words from your industry, they may not be the most effective on social media. Tech Soup links to a piece, 40 Hashtags for Social Good which notes that nonprofit is a more popular tag than nonprofits. In the chat about Twitter, Janet Fouts cautions people to research the hashtag they intend to use in case someone else’s of it results in a collision of messaging.

I found the recap of the chat about Twitter to be helpful just because it can be very difficult to get your point across in the limited number of characters and I can also use more guidance. On top of that, the advice is to be as brief as possible in order to leave room for other people to comment and interact with you. Tech Soup also suggests a number of tools that allow everyone in the organization to share the burden of monitoring and creating tweets.

Your experience may vary, of course, so read whatever might be helpful.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use

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Protecting Yourself Into Obscurity

June 21, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

The debate about intellectual property rights rattled around my head while I was visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art and later the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was somewhat surprised to learn they permitted photography provided it was for private use and flash was not used. Video is forbidden. As a contrast, in most live performance settings, you can’t use any sort of recording device at all.

Now let me acknowledge from the start that there are marked differences between the two settings. In a gallery one has greater leeway in the timing of photographs. You can wait for a group to move away from a piece before taking a picture. In a live performance, great moments are fleeting. And because it is more difficult to properly frame people in motion, you often feel the need to take multiple pictures in a short time. This sense of urgency can inevitably put the photographer at a live event in a position where they are impinging on the enjoyment of other attendees far more frequently than the museum photographer. Unless most everyone is participating in recording the event, the distraction of the attempt is generally undesirable, even without flash.

But outside the time when the performance is occurring, almost every element of the performance is protected. Whether you are in the audience before the show or on a backstage tour, you can’t take pictures of the set, lights or costumes because they are considered protected intellectual property. Performers also reserve the control of their likeness.

Yet when I was at the Metropolitan Museum there was an exhibition of costumes by Alexander McQueen and unless I missed the sign, the rules about photography were the same as the rest of the museum. Perhaps it was because his designs were considered fashion and therefore meant to be photographed. But what about all the other works in the museums which are still protected by copyright and whose creators are still very much alive? Are they not being harmed by people taking pictures of their work? Maybe there is a debate raging in the visual arts world that they are. I have only really started reading about visual arts issues in earnest over the last year. Perhaps I have missed the conversation.

Heck, will my posting images from Storm King Art Center dissuade people from visiting them? If so, the genie is out of the bottle Google Maps actually lets you view photos of each piece as it is positioned on the ground. I am guessing that isn’t about to erode attendance because I saw a large number of tweets about visiting Storm King the last few days.

It got me to thinking that all these restrictions are seriously impeding the cause of the performing arts. The elements I am referring don’t even enter the discussion about whether a bootleg copy of a performance replaces a possible sale. This doesn’t approach the question about whether agreeing to allow a promotional video to be broadcast on television also gives permission for the video to be posted on YouTube, if it deserves additional compensation and if it is eroding one’s brand. These are already issues of debate and clearly worthy of discussion on their own.

Few people are going to make the decision to skip the show because they saw a close up picture of a costume or the unattractive back side of a flat. Yeah, so the illusion is broken, but for a lot of people it is exciting to compare the reality with the illusion that fooled them. Are designers going to suddenly be forced out of work or their reputations ruined when photos of the show start appearing online? Will those pictures threaten to allow less talented people to replicate the designs at a lower cost? How is this more a threat to a designer than to a visual artist? Yes, there may be proprietary technology involved. However, most people on a backstage tour don’t have the means to replicate it and if those that do can recreate it from passing photographs, they probably have the means to acquire the information with relatively little effort anyway.

What is being protected? Is the value of whatever is being protected actually enhanced by doing so? Or is the fact that so few are ever exposed to it mean that its perceived value is generally insignificant?

Arts in an Age of Technology, General Musings

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