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We Expect Great Things! (just not too great, please)

March 3, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Near the end of 2013 I started seeing quite a few blog posts and tweets criticizing the Obama administration for not appointing someone to replace Rocco Landesman as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The administration may have been slow to act, but I wonder how much of the delay was due the difficulty of finding someone the administration felt they could live with and whom felt they could live with the administration.

In an opinion column in the Washington Post, a social science professor writes about her experiences as an appointee to the National Council on the Humanities.

She said there were two reasons she was rejected,

“First, taxes. In 2009 and 2010, the years of my divorce, I filed my taxes late — four weeks and 10 days, respectively. Second, I was not willing to commit to never criticizing the administration, nor to restricting my publishing agenda to topics that were unlikely to be controversial. There is just no point trying to be a public intellectual if you can’t speak your mind. This requirement was conveyed and discussed through phone calls; I have no written record to prove it. But that was how it went.”

Every government entity is risk averse to any flaw in an appointee at any level these days. This American Life recently ran a story about a student whose appointment as the student representative on the Wisconsin Board of Regents was publicly announced and then rescinded. The student absolutely impressed everyone. It was only after his appointment that it was discovered he signed a recall petition in solidarity with his mother who was a teacher.

People will say they value creativity, but they are actually uncomfortable with the fact that creative people don’t conform and will figuratively color outside the lines.

So the Obama administration may have been having a hard time finding someone who would agree not to rock the boat while they held the position. Rocco did raise some controversy with this comments about some arts organizations needing to close, but most of the yelling was within the artistic community. Given the political environment in Washington those sentiments probably comforted a good many members of Congress.

The administration may have gotten what they wanted in the nomination of Jane Chu. Many articles I have written about her imply she won’t cause trouble. The LA Times used the phrase “low profile” to describe her in an number of articles, including one that used “low profile” in the headline.

The Kansas City Star described their city’s resident as “Quietly efficient, guardedly passionate.”

This isn’t to say Chu won’t rock the boat and bring about sweeping change. There have been a number of popes, the current one included, that were assumed to be “safe” choices but proved otherwise.

But right now, Chu is being painted as a rather inoffensive choice for the position which is exactly what you want in an appointee.

Some type of statement will be made about expecting great things of her, but there will be an unspoken subtext that they hope it will not be too great.

Advocacy, Government Relations, Working In The Arts

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What If Your Painting Doesn’t Fit In The Deposit Envelop?

February 26, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

One of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in my 10 years of blogging is the Artist Pension Trust which has artists deposit their work into across the course of 20 years with the proceeds of the sales going to fund their pensions.

When I first wrote about this back in 2006, I didn’t have too many of the details, but a recent story examining the success of the trust as it reaches its 10 anniversary provides many more details.

I was interested to learn that only 20% of the 2000 participating artists were from the United States. Though given that the number one rule of investment is diversification, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Basically, it works this way:

Participating artists donate 20 of their works over a planned 20-year period (two per year during the first five years, one per year for the ensuing five years and one piece every other year for the remaining 10 years) to the trust. There are regional directors and selection committees, consisting of independent curators, artists and collectors but not dealers (“they bring a conflict of interest,” Moti Shniberg, a former high-tech entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Mutual Art, the parent company of the Artist Pension Trust, said).

The trust “cultivates” the investment by lending them to museums and art festivals. Keeping them locked in storage for 20 years wouldn’t help enhance their value, after all. While the plan is to keep the works for 20 years, some have already been sold when their value increased significantly.

Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.

While the ideal of pooling art for the long term benefit of all is admirable in theory, in practice human nature caused the trust to slightly alter their original plan.

“David Ross noted that his original idea was for all the proceeds of sales of artwork be placed in the general pool, but a number of the artists he had approached, “who all believed that they were going to be successful in their careers,” were unenthusiastic about supporting less accomplished colleagues. “Dividing the profits—40 percent for the artist, 32 percent for the general pool—made the idea easier for them to swallow.”

As noted earlier, there are no dealers on the committees because they have a vested interest in selling an artist’s work rather than letting it be deposited in a trust for 20 years.

I look forward to checking in again on this in 10 years when the trust starts to sell the works of the first depositors in preparation for paying out pensions. How well will those artists who have been had the patience and discipline to participate in this program fare?

State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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Info You Can Use: Rural Arts

February 25, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Last week, Americans for the Arts held a blog salon on Rural Arts. There were a lot of familiar names and faces with posts by Wormfarm Institute and Springboard for the Arts’ rural offices, but there were more people with whom I was unfamiliar.

There were three posts that jumped out at me, likely because they were aligned with my penchant for practical knowledge. Two were by Savannah Barrett with Art of the Rural which is coordinating 2014 as Year of the Rural Arts.

Her first post suggests working with Cooperative Extension Services in your community as a method of developing the arts. Cooperative Extensions in many states operate arts extensions as part of their services and apparently the national 4-H has recently started placing a greater emphasis on communication and expressive arts according to Barrett.

Her second post lists federal and philanthropic resources that are involved with rural arts.

The third post was made by Shannon Ford from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lists 6 characteristics which he has identified as making arts rural programs successful. Most of the characteristics are common to pretty much any activity planned by an arts organization- clarity, sustainability, evaluation. However because resources are often particularly scarce in rural communities, the need to be focused on these areas is especially important given the small margin of error.

This is why he emphasizes visibility and partnerships as a way of leveraging good will and shared resources as a way to communicate your goals to many corners of the community and achieve investment.

His last characteristic, authenticity, seemed most important of all given that the values of a rural community are shared. By which I mean in the general sense and in the course of conversation. Even if two people aren’t of like mind about your efforts, whatever you do is going to be a topic of their conversation. As Ford notes, “No good ever came of ignoring your community’s cultural context or norms, and rural perspectives have a long history of being ignored.”

If you are interested in learning more, Americans for the Arts is hosting a three webinars on the rural arts starting Wednesday, February 26, each at 3 pm EST.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014: Economic Development and Art in Rural Communities

Thursday, February 27, 2014: Resources For Rural Arts

Friday, February 28, 2014: Placemaking in Rural Communities

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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10 Years O’ Blogging

February 24, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

So Drew McManus beat me to it, Butts in the Seats turned 10 on Sunday. It was February 23, 2004 when I made my first post. Now here I am nearly 1500 posts later, still going pretty strong. Back then there weren’t many people blogging about the arts. I actually took my initial inspiration from Andrew Taylor’s Artful Manager blog.

While I started blogging just as the activity and the term blog was starting to enter popular culture, I just came across an article on The Guardian that says blogging is actually 20 years old this year. Though back then, blogs were more akin to personal webpages and diaries where you had to make a conscious, and often complicated, effort to have your posts appear in some sort of chronological order on a webpage. The tools that made it easy to make posts without having to handcode HTML were still many years away.

My first few posts were made on space provided by Earthlink. But after two or three posts, I quickly realized that was not going to work at all and moved over to MovableType. I joined the Inside the Arts family on December 13, 2007, but still maintained my blog independently on MovableType for some years before moving to WordPress with most of the rest of the Inside the Arts blogs.

There have been a lot of changes in the 10 years I have blogged, both in terms of the subject matter I tackle and my outlook about the arts. But also in terms of some of the metrics that are important to me as a blogger. At one time, I would watch my Technorati rating closely as well as the stock price of my blog on a blog stock exchange I can’t even find anymore. Now I check out trends on Google Analytics and reports via my blog desktop.

I had thought about doing a retrospective of my favorite posts or listing the top most visited posts but ultimately decided not to. I may do so in another context at a later date.

I did want to reflect on the value I think blogging has had relative to my initial motivation for starting the blog. Basically, I was looking for a job when I first started writing my blog. I thought that as an up and coming technology, it would be important for me as an arts professional to be involved in blogging.

Believe it or not, two days after starting my blog I got a call to interview at Wayne State University. I can’t attribute the interview to my starting the blog, though I think there were some people who were intrigued that I had started one. Even though I didn’t get the job, that experience convinced me that I should be blogging about arts management. I know for a fact that my blogging got me my job in Hawaii and contributed to getting my current job and other interviews. (Spikes in Google Analytics frequently preceded a call, though some times a lack of a call.)

Really, the very act of blogging has helped me develop and evolve my thoughts about the arts and made me better at the jobs I have held, even if none one is reading the posts. It helps if people do read the posts and comment because they contribute their own thoughts and point out weaknesses in my philosophy.

A show just opened in the local museum featuring an artist from the region. He has held to a discipline that he will paint every day and continued to do so even during his honeymoon back in 1956. Looking at his work, you can easily see his technique evolve.

I think it is important for everyone to have that sort of discipline in order to become better at what they do. It isn’t enough to simply do your job day after day. I don’t have to tell you that because you are so closely involved in it, there is little time to stand back and reflect on how to do it better unless you carve the time out for yourself.

For me, part of the time I carve out is invested in writing this blog. Even though I only post about three times a week now, I employ time on other days reflecting, reading, or doing activities to continue my development.

I have no idea if I will still be blogging 10 years from now, but I do believe I will be involved in some sort of daily activity that is continuing my development in whatever area I value.

My thanks to all of you who have been reading my blog on a consistent basis whether you started 10 years ago or 10 days ago. I hope that you will find my writing valuable in the coming years.

General Musings

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