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The Gravity of Culture

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin made a post last week about maintaining a commitment to quality in your work. (my emphasis)

When you seek the mass market, there are two paths available:

You can dumb down your message and your expectations, and meet your audience where they stand. You can coarsen your lyrics, offer simpler solutions, ask for less effort, demand less work, promise bigger results…
Or you can smarten it up, and lead despite your goal of mass, not chase it.

The very fact that “dumb down” is an expression and “smarten up” isn’t should give any optimist pause.

Culture is a gravitational force, and it resists your efforts to make things work better.

So what? Persist.

My first impulse was to mentally acknowledge he was right about how the impulse to improve isn’t common enough to bring a term like “smarten up” into common usage. I read his comment about culture resisting efforts to make things work better as an indictment of a society that demands satisfying results that require little of them in return.

However, when I got to thinking about it, those who embrace and define high culture often don’t want practitioners of low/pop culture to transition upward. There are a fair number of examples of pop artists who decide they want to pursue a more rigorous path as they mature. They are criticized for lacking the excellence required or expected of someone who has dedicated decades training in some discipline of high culture.

Certainly, some of these people may lack the seriousness, nuance and general quality of a long time practitioner. There may be valid concerns that in their popularity, they are misleading their fans into believing they represent the higher levels of achievement when a perceptible gap exists.

But for others, after 10-20 years of sincerely trying to “smarten up,” they are probably going to be operating at least at or above a level of 80%-90% of achievable excellence. That puts them on par with a lot of people who, like them, have spent decades solely devoted to the high culture discipline.

Except that the latter group will be labeled an X discipline artist while the former pop artist will forever have a modifier like crossover-X discipline artist. Essentially, you get branded if you try to step out of the original lines drawn around you.

So like Godin says, culture can be a gravitational force. It can feel like you are constantly being pulled to lower your standards, but it can also feel like you are being pushed away from ever being recognized as having achieved your ambitions if you try to become more proficient.

Yes, ideally things could get to a place where people and their efforts could be fairly evaluated but will it ever really be possible to create truly objective evaluations that are free from these sort of judgments?

I frequently cite Jamie Bennett’s comment that people have an easier time viewing themselves on a continuum with famous sports figures than they do with famous artists. As I think about it, I wonder if people are getting a message that they shouldn’t try to see themselves on an arts continuum.

Info You Can Use, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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What Are You Saying When You Say Diversity?

by:

Joe Patti

Australia’s ArtsHub site had a valuable piece on “diversity” efforts by arts organizations. I put diversity in quotes because the title of the article is “Diversity is a white word.”

Author Tania Canas expounds on that saying the word,

It seeks to make sense, through the white lens, of difference by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness. Terms such as ‘diversity’, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) only normalise whiteness as the example of what it means to be and exist in the world. Therefore the diversity discourse within the cultural sector, has only created frames by which diversity is given ‘permission’ to exist under conditional inclusion.

[…]

Just because we exist in a space, doesn’t mean we’ve had autonomy in the process by which the existence has occurred. It is not about ‘giving a voice’, we already have one. It has been systematically silenced.

I should probably acknowledge at this point that anything I write on this topic is likely to flirt with offending someone either with poorly considered statement or condescension. That said, I can see her point that diversity goals and programs are often essentially a statement of intent to include the “not us.”

I found the Ladder of Participation image in the center of the article to be a helpful visual guide on the continuity of program characteristics from citizen participation to tokenism to non-participation.

I saw some truth in Canas’ statement that holding up an artist who has “made it” as an exemplar or creating Ambassador programs or Diversity officers is often a superficial gesture revealing the industry

“…has no clue about how to develop, nurture, support nor fiercely defend artists. The industry wants to ‘highlight voices’ without the responsibility of meaningly supporting them…appointments of a sole diversity officer or diversity ambassador can actually be an indication of the absence of a wider support for diversity throughout the entire institution.”

The constructive approach, she says, is to focus is on building community, not audiences. A good deal of what she wrote reminded me of Ronia Holmes’ “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why” which I wrote about back in November.

Holmes’ piece is worth reading for its blunt honesty, both in criticizing insufficient and half-hearted attempts to engage marginalized communities, but in its acknowledgment of the financial challenges arts organizations face. Between the two pieces, there is a lot of basis for introspection about organizational diversity and inclusion programs.

Leadership, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas

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First, Accentuate The Positive

by:

Joe Patti

I was reading Peter Drucker’s Managing the Non-Profit Organization. In a chapter near the end of the book he talks about self-renewal through change of perspective using examples like a musician who was asked to sit in the audience for a performance and a hospital administrator who ended up providing care in one of the wards. Each found new purpose and perspective through the experience and in some cases, continued to make it a regular practice.

One suggestion he gave intrigued me. I haven’t put it into practice for a long enough time to say if it yields the results it claims, but I thought I would share and see if anyone had observations one way or another.

“The most effective road to self-renewal is to look for the unexpected success and run with it. Most people brush the evidence of success aside because they are so problem-focused. The reports…are also problem-focused–with a front page that summarizes all the areas in which the organization underperformed…Non-profit executives should make the first page show the areas where the organization overperformed against plan or budget because that is where the first signs of unexpected success begin to appear…The first few times you will brush it aside…Eventually, though a suspicion may begin to surface that some of the problems would work themselves out if we paid more attention to the things that were working exceptionally well.”

One of the first thoughts that I wondered about for arts organizations is whether many board and staff members would have the mental discipline to discern between present success achieved due to highly popular programming and incremental success in the areas of impact and outcomes. The latter may not be financially rewarding in the short term, but might become so after a long term commitment to a shift of focus.

I am not saying the leadership in many arts organizations are so easily seduced that they can’t keep their eyes on the mission. There is the other side of the coin where a program fails by the measure of the project’s financial and attendance goals, but the staff feels something valuable came out of the experience either for themselves in lessons learned or for the participants’ excitement. Yet they also feel it is necessary to report to funders that everything went as planned, all goals were reached and nothing went wrong. This practice can also serve to perpetuate the pursuit of unproductive ends.

Has anyone had experience with Drucker’s suggested approach where you started paying attention to small victories and came to the realization your organization had a huge competence that you weren’t fully exercising?

Art(ist) Education, Business Models, General Musings, Management Philosophy, Terms and Ideas

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Thank God I Wasn’t Here When It Was Relevant

by:

Joe Patti

I have served on my county library system board for over half a year now.

They say public libraries aren’t relevant any more but as the title of the post suggests, if this is what the library is like when it is irrelevant, I am glad I wasn’t around when it was relevant. In my short time on the board, we have had to review or construct policies to address things like harassment of staff by visitors, people monopolizing meeting rooms to run their businesses out of them, wages and benefits, and had to chart a course of action upon learning poor building construction lead to mold issues.

Libraries may not be as important a source of reading material as they have been in the past, but they definitely serve a need in the community. For every problem that crops up, there are 500 people who regularly avail themselves of the facilities, programming and services.  I was entirely unaware of the web of relationships the library had with other community organizations, businesses and social groups.

I have served on a number boards before but this is the first one I have been on that has really engaged me so thoroughly in exercising what I preach in terms of conscientious board governance and fiscal oversight. In addition to addressing programming and policies, there is a lot more money running through a six branch library system than you might imagine.

There was a story a year ago about the financial benefits received by the former president of the Queens (NY) Borough Library system (as well as the alleged liberties he took with the finances.)  It left me wondering what sort of financial controls the borough library system had in place given that we on the board are required to authorize the payment of the bills every month. Though our list is pretty long so I imagine it would be easy to slip some personal expenses in there unnoticed.

I have also tried to bring some of the good practices I have written about to the organization. I stress “tried” because just when I was going to note the professional development budget hadn’t really been used during the year and encourage more staff development, the library director requested that staff be allowed to attend an upcoming conference.

Obviously, like most of us that serve on boards outside our own organization, I have brought other valuable insights and practices to the table.  The experience has certainly improved some of the practices in which we engage in my organization.

The point of this post is mostly to encourage people to serve on other non-profit boards if you already aren’t and to really pay attention to how that responsibility can inform the practices in your own organization.

As I wrote this, I remembered one of my earliest encounters with a perceptual barrier to participation: When I was about 11-13 the librarians encouraged me to start using the adult section of the library.  I had passed by the threshold many times, but I was anxious about entering and being told I didn’t belong there.  I can still connect with the emotions of that memory so I can empathize with people who show up to my performance hall for the first time.

Of course, my other purpose in writing this post is to encourage everyone to support their local library!

Boards, Leadership, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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