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Who Owns The Meaning Of Art, Revisited

June 27, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Ray Bradbury’s recent death has had me revisiting some thoughts about the issue of who owns the meaning of art. In all the retrospectives on his life, you may have heard he intended his novel Fahrenheit 451 to be about how television would erode literature and that he never intended the book to be about censorship.

Yet pretty much every high school English class teaches that it is about censorship despite his protestations to the contrary. In fact, there is a move to designate Error 451 as a response to any content removed from the web for legal reasons.

I wrote an entry tackling this situation about 5 years ago and cited an article about Bradbury which mentions he apparently walked out of a class at UCLA where a student wouldn’t stop insisting he meant the book to be about censorship.

In that entry I pondered how much license a person has to definitively state what an artist really meant.

As we write program notes, conduct Q&As or talk to ushers and patrons in the lobby, how much are we getting wrong? Maybe the idea that Hamlet was motivated by an Oedipal complex never crossed Shakespeare’s mind. (Especially since the concept is never considered until after Freud coined the term.)

Second is the matter of balance. Where does the balance fall between telling people what is meant and telling people there is no single correct interpretation? People come to educators and arts professionals for the tools to process unfamiliar material. We try to give them language and lenses to assist in this endeavor but part of the joy of encountering art is to see something no one told you was there.

The problem is that sometimes these realizations are tainted by the context we bring to the work and don’t reflect the intentions or reality of the artist. Now granted, personal context is the basis of some works of art like Impressionist paintings. But you are also in the position of not being able to tell people they are wrong about Hamlet since you subscribe to and encourage the “No wrong answer” school of thought.

I don’t want to necessarily paint Bradbury as an obstinate curmudgeon in respect to Fahrenheit 451. It isn’t clear from his interviews if he was annoyed at people for having a different interpretation about the book or because they insisted his interpretation was invalid and ignored it.

Many creators openly welcome and celebrate the variety of experiences people have interacting with their work. Poet Denise Levertov explicitly states this in her poem, The Secret.

As I wrote in a blog post about 5 years ago, I think her poem should be required reading for fine art and literature classes at handed out at arts events to reassure people they aren’t stupid of they don’t “get it.” Your perception of a work doesn’t need to be in synch with that of the creator for you to have an authentic experience.

And because the personal context you bring shapes your perceptions, it is worth re-visiting a book, recording, performance, painting, etc many times over the course of your life in order to experience it anew.

Still we come back to the original question. Who owns the meaning of art? Who has that last word? When a creator sets it free into the wilderness, do they relinquish all claim to it?

creativity, General Musings, State of the Arts

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I Don’t Remember The Nest Being So Nice

June 26, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

There is potential that cities across the country can ultimately benefit from this economic downturn if they play their cards right and tap into those returning home to help contribute to raising the quality of life. This at least, according to a piece by Will Doig on Salon.com.

According to Doig, young people who have moved to the big cities around the country like NYC, LA and Chicago, find the cost of living to be too high and returning to the places they left, often to start their own businesses.

“Or as urban analyst Aaron Renn puts it: “New York City is like a giant refinery for human capital … Taking in people, adding value, then exporting them is one of New York’s core competencies.”

And it exports them in droves. People associate brain drain with the agricultural and industrial Midwest. But most years, when foreign immigration is excluded, it’s places like New York and Chicago that lose the most residents. Chicago loses nearly 81 people a day to out-migration, more than any other metro area in America. Between mid-2010 and mid-2011, nearly 100,000 people left the New York area. Los Angeles lost almost 50,000.”

Of course, this doesn’t diminish the fact that a whole lot of people are returning home to live a fairly depressing unemployed existence. But according to Doig, in returning home, these people bring expectations of products and services they experienced in the big cities, paving the way for these same products and creating demand for business and government services. They also tell their friends about the great environment in the “nests” to which they have returned attracting more people there.

The reason why I mention cities need to play their cards right is because they have a role in perpetuating an image of their cities as vibrant, interesting places to live. According to Doig’s piece, the reputation perpetuated about cities belie the actual conditions in those cities. (My emphasis)

“The mesofacts say that Charlotte [North Carolina] is a boom town and Portland [Oregon] is cool.” In reality, the economies of both Charlotte and Portland have been struggling for a while now. Yet new residents still flock to these places because the mesofacts tell them they’re hot, when it’s actually Pittsburgh they should be looking to, where per capita income has risen faster than any other major Midwestern city’s, and the unemployment rate has been lower than the national average since 2006.

“I’ve been saying to people in Pittsburgh for years, ‘What Seattle was in the ’90s, you’re going to be that big.’ And they’d laugh. But the data show it,” says Russell. “The editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette keeps saying the biggest problem in Pittsburgh is brain drain. And I’m like, you’re 20 years too late. Why are you torpedoing your own in-migration? When you’re running around saying you have a brain drain problem, what you’re saying to the world is, ‘We’re a loser.’ But if you can convince people the data are true as opposed to the mesofacts, then you open the sluicegates.”

If Doig is correct about all this, it could be the time for arts organizations to step up and take advantage of their trend. As Scott Walters and many other have noted, artists flock to cities like NYC, Chicago and LA convinced they can make their careers there. This is due not only to the alluring glow of the lights of Broadway, but to the practices of many regional theatres that often do their casting in major cities forcing actors to move there if they want to work back home.

This isn’t just the case for theatre either, Trey McIntyre confounded everyone when he chose to base his dance company in Boise, ID rather than one of the major cities. Artists aren’t just seduced away from home by the mythology of these cities, there are very practical reasons to move there if you want an opportunity to practice.

But as I said, arts organizations have an opportunity to reverse this trend by focusing on hiring locally and then getting the local arts community to tell their friends in the big cities why they should move back. For many of those who left, artistic spaces that seemed provincial and under equipped when they left may suddenly seem luxurious after working and living in dingy, holes in the wall in the big city. Yet they have also probably seen and done some pretty artistically interesting things.

As people move back, the arts organizations can tap into the returnees’ experiences interacting with the current thought and aesthetics churning in the big cities and adapt them as their own. You are never going to overcome the allure of going off to the golden cities, but by providing a reason to return, many places across the country can embrace the situation and leverage it to their own advantage.

creativity, General Musings, Marketing/PR, New Initiatives, State of the Arts

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Info You Can Use: Be Careful of Social Couponing

June 25, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

If you have been considering using social coupons to increase attendance at your events and attract new customers, you may want to read a study covered last month in MIT Sloan Management Review (h/t Drucker Exchange) that noted the repercussions of a badly designed deal could last for months.

The authors, V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan tracked three businesses for a year after they started their social coupon campaigns. The three businesses did attract large numbers of new customers with the campaigns, but experienced significant losses during the month they offered their deal, in some cases two or three times their normal net monthly profits.

“Such losses would not have been so serious if the businesses were able to achieve higher revenues and increased profits in future months. However, this was not the case. Despite their best marketing efforts, the three businesses had difficulty retaining most of the new customers who were attracted to the coupon offers. Based on our analysis, it will take the car wash service and ethnic restaurant 15 and 18 months, respectively, to recover from the profit shortfall following the coupon launch; for the beauty salon and spa, the recovery period for the coupon campaign at current business levels was projected at more than 98 months, or eight years.”

Now granted, given that most non-profit arts organizations lose money on many of their events, these facts may hardly be a deterrent to using social coupons. However, arts organizations do seek new audiences. The authors state that basic design of social coupons aren’t really conducive to new customer acquisition, but steps can be take to mitigate the losses of a campaign.

One approach may be to upselling or cross-selling products and services. Many theatres have tiered pricing on their seating so being able to upgrade to center orchestra may seem like a good deal to some attendees. If theatres are trying to attract a younger audience, they may want to cross sell tickets to their edgier space whose ticket prices are comparable to the discount the person is paying.

In other words, a person comes in with a 50% coupon for a $30 ticket and the theatre asks if they would like a ticket for a later date at the other space where the top price is $20 for the same $15 price. This approach helps to retain the person for another performance for what is probably the average ticket revenue at the other space.

Another approach the article suggests is limiting the size of the discount and the conditions under which it may be redeemed. They mention that the restaurant in their study later offered 30% discount on two days a week and reduced their losses to close to zero.

They also suggest only offering the coupon to new customers, but I am personally ambivalent about that. I think that sours your relationship with existing customers. If you have ever seen those cable commercials that offer tons of great channels at a low price –but only to new customers–like me you may have been a little annoyed wondering what benefit you will ever derive for having paid your bill on time for 5 years. To my mind, even if it isn’t the same benefit, existing customers should feel like they are rewarded for loyalty if the new kids are getting some sort of incentive to participate.

Audience Relations, Business Models, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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Shorter Board Meetings? You Have My Consent!

June 20, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Last week a very interesting article came down my Twitter feed, (I apologize for not noting the source), written by Les Wallace about the best board meeting he ever attended.

What made it the best meeting he ever attended was a very effective use of the time, revolving around the use of a consent agenda. I had not really heard of a consent agenda before, but fortunately the folks over at Board Source wrote up a handy guide explaining:

A consent agenda is a bundle of items that is voted on, without discussion, as a package. It differentiates between routine matters not needing explanation and more complex issues needing examination.

[…]

With a consent agenda, what might have taken an hour for the board to review, takes only five minutes. Because it promotes good time management, a consent agenda leaves room for the board to focus on issues of real importance to the organization and its future, such as the organization’s image and brand, changing demographics of its constituents, or program opportunities created by new technology.

According to Board Source the types of things typically found in a consent agenda are the minutes of the previous meeting, confirmation of decisions, the CEO and committee reports, informational materials and routine correspondence. You don’t want to have financial documents and anything potentially controversial or requiring substantive discussion and decision making as part of the consent agenda.

It takes a fair amount of work to compile all this information. The organization has to be disciplined all the way through. Wallace mentions the work the CEO, staff and other board members did in advance to prepare the materials and have it placed it in the board section of the website for review two weeks prior to the meeting.

Wallace also mentions the board meeting moved from important to trivial matters rather than following Robert’s Rules of Order. The financial statements provided were color coded dashboard summaries of the organization’s financial position provided by the finance committee. An executive summary of staff and committee reports were provided at the meeting with more detailed information available online.

According to Wallace, this cut about 40 minutes out of the meeting and the board used that time to address strategic issues for the organization, attend to some board development and other governance issues.

The Board Source article has more information about how to use a consent agenda and exercises to use to help transition boards to this practice. It’s worth a look if this sounds the least bit intriguing to you.

One of my initial concerns was that the consent agenda could be used to hide problems amid minutiae or circumvent board members, but according to the Board Source guidance (my emphasis):

“If a board member has a question, wants to discuss an item, or disagrees with a recommendation, he or she should request that the item be removed from the consent agenda. Without question or argument, the board chair should remove the item from the consent agenda and add it to the meeting agenda for discussion.”

Using a consent agenda requires a great deal of discipline on the board if it is going to be effective-

“Just a quick question” is not an option when using a consent agenda. Either an item is removed and discussed or it stays put. This places the burden of facilitation on the board chair to be disciplined about stopping discussion and removing items from the consent agenda.”

Boards, Info You Can Use, Leadership, Legal Topics

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