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The Club Bylaws We Wrote Are So Stringent, Even We Aren’t Allowed To Be Members

February 21, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Last week The Guardian wrote about how the current political climate in a number of countries has brought Arthur Miller’s The Crucible into relevance again.

There are a couple sentences in the article that keep echoing in my mind and I have spent the last week trying to decide about what angle to take in my commentary about them. Ultimately, I decided to just toss it out there and let my readers decide how they are most relevant for them.

In the article Douglas Rintoul writes,

Miller talks about the paradox of a community that has created a society grounded in the idea of “exclusion and prohibition”. Its sole function is to keep the community “together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction”.

The reason these two sentences kept coming back to me is that they evoked the oft cited comment about assault on Ben Tre during the Vietnam War, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

(The full context apparently should be: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it’, a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.”)

There is definitely a paradox in the idea that in order to keep a community together, you had to expel any element that might drive the community apart.

So….don’t the people pushing for expulsion constitute a divisive force in the community? Who gets to kick them out?

Every community needs ideals that they form around, but it gets a little strange when the ideals are so stringent they can’t tolerate the flaws of the membership. That is almost a corollary of Groucho Marx comment “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”

Lets all agree that there are times when you do need to remove destructive and dangerous elements from society. But the reality on which that standard should be based before applied is pretty high. The perceived need for removal often demands the standard to be set pretty low. The rationale is easy to make and it is easy to employ fear to shut down opposition.

While this may seem most easily applicable to the current political situation in regard to immigration, it pretty much crops up in a lot of decisions we make and places we frequent and groups with which we associate.

At this point you might be thinking about those other judgmental people you know, but be aware that accusations of “dumbing down” and “selling out” are basically attempts to save Art by excluding from the Arts Community those who are perceived to be cheapening it.

It is really easy to employ this type of thinking and not even recognize it.

General Musings, State of the Arts

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You Know The Type, They Only Want One Thing–Your Fund Raising Ability

February 20, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

If you ever doubted that executive director positions were all about the fundraising and light on requiring artistic vision, the recent news about the firing of Ft. Worth Opera general director will disabuse you of that notion. It was with some dismay that I read about his firing due to lack of creativity when it came to fund raising.

Now I don’t intend to understate the importance of strong fund raising. I probably would have just scanned the Dallas Morning News piece and moved on with my day. While unfortunate, organization leaders get fired or resign fairly frequently.

Except that as I read on it struck me that Woods wasn’t an idler as general director. Every sentence brought accolades for different accomplishments. He brought the opera to greater prominence, navigated challenges with performance facilities, engaged in some innovative programming that appears to have interested a larger segment of the community, and yes, did a respectable job with fund raising against a shortfall.

Just to be sure the Dallas Morning News writer wasn’t personally biased, I sought other reporting on the firing and they seemed to agree on these basic facts. All in all, he didn’t sound like someone you would want to blithely part ways with.

Certainly, there may be some underlying problems that no one is talking about publicly. The comments by the board in all the articles I came across focus so strongly on their desire to find someone who can handle fund raising and business development as Woods’ replacement that it appears that is about all that matters. Artistic and community relationship building skills seem to be such far seconds that I fear all the accomplishments Woods has been praised for will stagnate and perhaps decline.

The opera seeks to hire a leader to “focus more on business and management … to be creative with the fundraising and development aspect,” he said, adding that, “we just didn’t feel Darren could provide us with that leadership from that aspect.”

[…]

Martinez said Woods has brought the opera “to a point where we felt good artistically.” Now, he said, it’s time to move forward with a new general director who can help shape the company’s future, which includes being a good steward of donors’ money.

That last line made me wonder if the board really did approve of Woods’ artistic choices or if there is something going on that isn’t being spoken of.

Over the history of this blog, (holy crap, is it really going to be 13 years on Friday?), I have often cited studies about how fewer people are interested in taking on executive roles in non-profits. Of those energetic people I know who want to assume leadership positions, few to none have a vision that involves fund raising as their primary role. They get excited by the prospect of making an impact and aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty, but job descriptions like this, (and lets be fair, Ft. Worth Opera is far from the only one emphasizing this skillset), don’t really fire their imaginations.

Boards, Fundraising, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A To Preserve Your Culture

February 15, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Last month I saw a story in the New Yorker about an attempt to preserve the culture of the Iñupiat of Alaska through the creation of a video game. I initially thought that the game hadn’t come out, but apparently it was released in 2014.

It really is a gorgeous looking game. It takes the player through the challenges of an Iñupiat heroic journey story that had previously only been passed down by oral tradition to the eldest child. The whole concept of using a video game to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage is pretty interesting.

One of the central concerns for the Iñupiat who were involved was that their stories would be subject to adaptation and appropriation as has often been the case. The game company invested a lot of time in an attempt to assuage those concerns.

With any creative project in which a group of privileged Westerners look to recount the tales and customs of an indigenous group, there is a risk of caricature, even amiable racism. “We’ve repeatedly seen our culture and stories appropriated and used without our permission or involvement,” Fredeen said. “People were skeptical that the project would turn out like these other examples, all appropriation and Westernization.” To reassure them, the development team assembled a group of Iñupiat elders, storytellers, and artists to become partners in the game’s development and lend their ideas and voices to the venture. “As it became clear to the community that this project was only going to move forward with their active participation, that hesitancy quickly evaporated,” Fredeen said. “We’ve had everybody from eighty-five-year-old elders who live most of the year in remote villages to kids in Barrow High School involved in the project.”

Even though there are concerns and anxieties about people sitting alone in dark rooms in front of screens among those of us who advocate for live arts experiences, I feel like this video game development process contains some important lessons. One of the primary lessons relates to how to go about engaging communities to tell their stories.

Just because stories are told in video game form doesn’t close the door on the opportunity to provide a live experience. There are numerous examples of video games being adapted into movies, most of the results being unimpressive. With the bar set so low, there isn’t terrible risk in attempting to depict the core stories employing other methods and media.

(If you aren’t up on your video game lore, the post title refers to the Konami Cheat Code)

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, New Initiatives, State of the Arts

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Viral Needs A Plan

February 14, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

I came across an interview Daniel Pink did with Derek Thompson, Senior Editor at The Atlantic where Thompson gives The 5 Rules for Making a Hit.

Now I want to say from the outset that the title is a bunch of baloney and I hope we all know enough to be heavily skeptical of anything the purports to offer a simple set of rules/tricks to success.

That said, there are some valuable points made. I wonder if Thompson actually packaged his answer in terms of five simple rules or if that was an editorial decision on behalf of Heleo which presented them.

The parts of the article I found valuable dealt with the tendency to equate economic success and public recognition with quality/talent/wisdom/authenticity/veracity, etc.

Rule #2: Virality is a myth — pay attention to dark broadcasts instead

People want to believe that their best work can go viral, because great ideas are self-distributing. You make something that’s inherently wonderful, and then you’re done! No more work. Just give it to a few people, they’ll pass it on, and eventually it’ll become the biggest thing in the world.

But the evidence from network science suggests that virality as most people understand it is a myth. Practically nothing goes viral, even the things that we call viral. Genius needs a distribution plan.
[…]
I see this sometimes at The Atlantic. When most readers see a video or an article go crazy online, they might say, “that thing went viral.” But our website has technology that can tell us exactly how all this information spreads. When an article has exploded, we can see that what’s often happened is that there has been one, or a series of, blasts sending traffic to the piece. Perhaps it’s hit the front page of Reddit, or Drudge, or lots of people are clicking on the article on our Facebook page. The article is going “viral” because of a broadcast.

You can get similar insight into what might be driving traffic to your website by using Google Analytics. ArtsHacker has a number of articles about how to set Analytics up to measure and report on various criteria. Social media services like Youtube and Facebook have their own analysis tools to provide insights into why a post or video is particularly popular.

While you can’t necessarily control what becomes popular with great consistency, you can gain a better understanding of what channels and methods can be effective for garnering the attention you want.

His other rule is:

Rule #5: Keep swinging

People want to believe that quality is destiny. They conflate “good” and “popular” in both directions. They think if somebody writes a great song, other people will inevitably find it and love it; or if a song becomes extremely popular, that means it was inherently worthy.

[…]

Understanding that hits are probabilistic argues for a gospel for perseverance. Sometimes people talk about luck as if it’s debilitating, that nothing you do matters — but if cultural products are probabilistic, think of it like batting. Even with the best batters, there’s a 30% chance they get a hit in every one at bat. As a result the key is to give yourself as many at bats as possible. There is an antidote to luck, in terms of personal effort. It’s perseverance. It’s the only answer.

This one is a little tricky because I think we can all cite examples where perseverance just isn’t enough and the benefits of connections, synchronicity and a good support network of family and friends make all the difference. On the other hand, there is a case to be made that you can achieve a high degree of success through perseverance but it may not conform to the degree success you believe you should have.

If anything, this is a better argument for the fact that failure is a more frequent occurrence in any endeavor than people want to admit. It is just that satisfaction of infrequent hits tend to drive out the recollection of the misses for everyone.

Audience Relations, General Musings, Marketing/PR

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