I was catching up on some of the TED Talks I had marked on the old Google reader today when I came across a fun, short talk dissecting what makes a TED talk work vs. what elements people don’t respond as positively. The speaker, Sebastian Wernicke, even created a web site with a TED talk generator utilizing the best (and worst) words according to his statistical analysis.

It’s all tongue-in-cheek, but it also sort of falls into the category of “its funny, because its true” which in some respects isn’t so funny. A similar analysis is used to determine television and radio programming. The algorithms Pandora.com uses to suggest songs you may like based on songs you already like isn’t much different from the analysis many corporate owned radio stations use to determine whether to add a song to their play list. Even in a niche area like Hawaiian music, corporate has to evaluate and approve what gets played locally. I know because I tried.

I know it is not news that people gravitate toward the middle of the road stuff that challenges and excites just enough to keep people engaged but goes no further. Anyone who finds a new format to present this in gets copied. It strikes me that this may be part of the problem the arts face. The definition of the middle of the road has become concentrated around such a narrow point by analysis and replication that areas of the arts which used to be considered more mainstream suddenly find themselves of fringe interest.

I’ll grant that the arts suffer from a certain lack of nimbleness and we are seeing the result of that. I wonder though if the view of the arts as an interest of a fringe population is what has helped to lead to calls for defunding time and time again or for Rocco Landesman’s claim that there are too many arts organizations. There aren’t calls to evaluate organizational effectiveness and allocation of resources. The assumption seems to be that the nation is ill-served by the arts as a whole. Borders bookstores announced they were closing down stores last week. Starbucks did a similar thing a year or so ago and closed many of its stores. People may have said there were too many Starbucks around, but no has said we needed to have fewer coffee shops or book stores. The respective companies evaluated which areas were under performing and made a decision.

I will concede that governments aren’t currently in the business of evaluating arts organizations and so don’t have the data the head office a private sector company would have so they can create the criteria for cutting funding. I am certain most of us would be a little nervous about what sort of criteria might be set. Our return on investment in some areas is likely stronger in some areas than in others and it would be easy for someone who wanted to defund us to focus on our deficiencies. Or worse yet, compare us to the big impressive organization over yonder.

What I have noticed though is that no one who wants to reduce or remove funding has really made it an issue of quality. No one has even decided to call the arts on all the things arts leaders claim their disciplines provide at budget hearings. Which makes me think it isn’t a matter of the arts doing valuable work, it is matter of the arts no longer really being a mainstream concern. There are certainly other factors and it isn’t really a revelation that the arts aren’t as mainstream as they once were. It is a little depressing to recognize that no one is out there saying if we want their money, we need to do a better job at providing a benefit. Andrew Taylor noted this in an entry last week.

In terms of what the answer might be. It could lay in the direction of the random acts of culture program I wrote about the Knight Foundation sponsoring. I followed a trackback to that entry from The Waltzing Porcupine blog and discovered a link to an entry on the Asking Audiences blog that reinforced the idea that flash performances may be part of a strategy for arts organizations to become more nimble and find increased relevancy in audience’s lives. (emphasis from the original)

“What struck me most forcefully, watching videos of Random Acts of dance, poetry, classical music, and opera from around the country, was that the bystanders (well, they start as bystanders but soon become an audience) are obviously experiencing a range of real, pleasurable human emotions. That’s something you can’t usually see on the faces of arts audiences sitting in concert halls and auditoriums.

Why is that? Not just because they’re not expecting an arts attack and are thrown off balance, although clearly that’s part of the fun. I think it has to do with the fact that, in these Random Acts, the performers and the audience are in every sense on the same level. The performers are dressed like you and me. They’re in our midst, not on a stage. We’re together in this crazy business (opera, life).

[…]

But the Random Acts program is more ambitious and, from the looks of it, more dramatically subversive. It almost makes you think the arts have been in hiding all these years, playing it safe in their own cultural caves instead of venturing out to where life is really going on. Hence the feeling of celebration surrounding these performances: the arts are coming out of the closet, redefining themselves as things regular people do, in regular places — no longer “hallowed” experiences set apart from daily life.

[…]

But there is a subtle chipping-away effect. You can see the bystanders’ identities being challenged by their own reactions to the performance: “I’m not a dance (or classical music, or poetry, or opera) person. But wait a second. This is fun!”…