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Don’t Worry, No One Will Call You a Noob

September 2, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

I just realized this week that one of the hurdles the arts needs to surmount to attract younger audiences may be steeper than assumed. One of the issues people identify as a point of anxiety is not knowing the rules of behavior at an arts event.

I have always equated that with awkwardly feeling out of place, but in the last day I wondered if younger audiences might equate that with the vulnerability one feels when being assailed by strangers online.

For older audiences a worst case scenario might be a few people around you looking askance at your faux pas.

For younger audiences, the worst case scenario might be a perception that EVERYBODY is aware of your mistake and are all preparing to declare their derision on social media. It may seem an illogical conclusion, but social fear generally is and the context for that fear is different for younger generations than older generations.

What brought this to mind was a conversation about explicit and implicit signalling of the rules of behavior at arts events occurring in the comments section of the post I made Monday. My thought is that the ideal is to provide frequent, varied experiences so that you can socialize audiences to the range of rules and move from explicit to implicit signalling.

The conversation we have been having on Monday’s post has been about how much explicit signalling is needed for new audiences unfamiliar with the rules.

As I was considering this last night, I got to thinking how at a certain level of detail communicating how to behave, even skilled practitioners of audience relations are going to sound condescending. Less skilled practitioners, which I will number myself among, are going to sound condescending long before that.

Another issue is that really detailed instructional signage and materials will end up reinforcing what we are trying to avoid, namely reinforcing a perceived division between experienced people and novices. I had the image of people in the know looking at all the explicit instructions for behavior and saying, “stupid noobs need to have their hands held.”

For a moment, it popped in my mind that there really aren’t any people at an arts event who are going to use the term “stupid noob.” Maybe arts organizations need to have a campaign slogan, “Nobody will call you noob” to assure people it was safer to make mistakes at an arts event than online. (Philistine, on the other hand…)

That is when I realized, that the psychological stakes some people associate with making a mistake may be much greater than we imagine. I would really be interested to know if anyone has studied any connection between depth of social media involvement and risk aversion.

All this adds another dimension to question of how much information needs to be delivered to allow people to navigate an arts event confidently and what the best channels of delivery are so as not to draw undue attention to the uninitiated.

Some people aren’t comfortable or aware of how to access information online while at an event. And besides, the hallmark of live experience we keep emphasizing is the whole live thing–being able to ask and answer questions in person should always be an option.

Even if the venue prepares online resources for a show, they can’t provide answers to all possible questions. You can go to a soccer match knowing nothing about the game and google information about the off-sides rule.

It isn’t as easy to get an answer if you type in “Why is the Shakespeare play I am watching set in the 1920s.” (Actually, I lied, while you can’t get a definitive answer using that search term, there are apparently a lot of adaptations of the Bard to the 1920s so articles are available about why the decision was made and how well it works.)

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

2 Comments

What You Might Learn In That Stupid Arts Requirement Class

September 1, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

I guess because it is the beginning of the school year, a number of online media outlets are devoting some space to talking about the value of different college classes in one’s life. Slate has a whole, well slate, of stories queued up to address about 16 classes across the week.

A few of them address liberal arts classes so they are worth taking note for the perspective they bring to our little corner of existence.

Yesterday, Dan Check, Vice President of the Slate Group promoted Intro to Acting as a way to get you out of your comfort zone.

Throughout life, we all occasionally feel a lack of competence; college is a great time to practice that feeling, to proceed without mastery or certainty or even talent, and to realize both what effort can do, as well as what it cannot. In the technology world, we often talk about being unafraid to fail, and of failing fast, but very rarely do we find opportunities to practice—that is, to seriously try and seriously fail in a situation where the stakes are as low as a single grade in a single semester outside of one’s major.

This idea about permission to fail comes up relatively frequently in conversations among arts people (at least online). Often it is in terms of there not being enough wiggle room in budgets to allow failure.

It is good to be reminded that one of the things the arts can offer to other areas of endeavor is the experience of failing in a low-stakes environment that involves human interaction. I use this term in contrast to competitive environments like sports or individual efforts like learning a language or physical skill (surfing).

Succeeding and failing at each of these obviously have their benefits as well so people who are comfortable in arts situations like acting need to seek out corresponding experiences that take them out of their comfort zone.

In another piece this week, Mark Joseph Stern acknowledged the complexity of feelings involved when faced with people who don’t share the same degree of knowledge and appreciation of visual art. While he says it makes him feel sad when people dismiss a work of visual art at a glance when ignorance is so easily solved, he admits that encountering a work of visual art can be challenging when we are used to television and video explaining themselves to us.

I once saw a woman stop in front of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, scoff, then turn on her heels and walk away. At the time, I judged her. But in retrospect, I suspect she was simply overwhelmed by its skittering vibrancy—and rather than attempt to process her reaction, she got defensive and gave up.

Second, visual art demands analysis. Most movies and TV shows place plot before all else, allowing shallow, distracted viewing. You can watch, and enjoy, almost anything on TV today without thinking about cinematography or set design or most other visual elements. With paintings, you have to do a little more work, …Learning these skills takes practice—not much, but enough to scare away most museumgoers.

As I implied, these articles aren’t just appearing on Slate. On Quartz this week, Brendan Mathews, asserts that the most useful class you can take in college is a fiction workshop.

Before I began teaching, I worked in marketing, digital media and communications. I saw more than one dot-com boom go bust. And at every one of these jobs, I had to consider new ideas from my colleagues—business plans, market analyses, product prototypes, website redesigns—and provide cogent, meaningful feedback. Back then, I counted on a few simple rules that I learned in my own undergraduate creative writing workshops:

“I like it” and “I don’t like it” are equally worthless. When someone asks you to read a story that they’ve poured their heart and soul into, saying you like it or don’t like it tells them nothing….

No playing favorites. No story in a workshop gets a free pass simply because the writer is a senior and you a lowly sophomore. And no story gets shot down simply because the writer’s last story was a tragically ill-conceived mash-up of gothic horror and My Little Pony fan fiction….

No meanies. Students do not eviscerate each other’s stories for sport, nor do they bestow baskets full of rainbows and sunshine on each other. A good workshop teaches you to put your own issues aside and deliver your opinion—especially your highly critical opinion—with some degree of diplomacy…

And no hard feelings. On the flip side, sometimes you’re the one whose story gets a rough reception in workshop. You expected tears of sympathy; instead you got peals of laughter, or even worse, a shrug. What do you do? You take pride in the fact that you put your work out there, you don’t take it personally, and you vow to do better next time…

Like Dan Check’s piece on acting class, Mathews lays this out in the context everyone wants to know about today–how will this class help me get a job?

Yes, there is a need to emphasize art for art’s sake, but art doesn’t serve a single purpose in life or it wouldn’t have any value as a basic element of human identity. It conveys life skills, economic benefits, aesthetic appreciation and exists on its own merits. Articles like these provide tips on making the case we would just as soon be self-evident for art as it is for accounting, biology, finance, marketing, pre-med, etc.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

1 Comment

Signalling Expectations

August 31, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

Lately I have been seeing many uses of technology aimed at influencing people to drive more considerately and safely. There is a GPS system that will start to give directions in a child’s voice when the vehicle enters a school zone.

On his show, Crowd Control, Daniel Pink put pictures of people in wheelchairs below disabled parking signs and a non-profit in Russia created holograms of people in wheelchairs, both efforts to deter those who didn’t need the spots from parking there.

All these were attempts to use empathy to shape the decisions people made. A question that came to mind was whether technology has desensitized us to needs of others to the point where steps needed to be taken to reassert the need to take care.

Or is the frequency at which people break these rules roughly at the same point it was 20 years ago and this is a case where technology and clever ideas have advanced to the point they can be used to address violators?

As much as I would like to claim we are ceding ever greater amounts of our humanity to technology, I actually suspect in this case the latter is true.

I wanted to use this as a jumping off point to wonder how ideas like these could be used to instill empathy and good judgement in arts audiences. There have been a lot of stories and discussions about talking, texting and other intrusive behaviors in performances.

Two of the ongoing conversations on these matters that I have been following recently are Diane Ragsdale’s Jumper blog and Scott Walters on the Clyde Fitch Report.

One of Walters’ general themes is that the “churchification” of performing arts has made attendance a stale, boring experience.

I am a little wary about what might result from poorly conceived plans to change that, given that people’s online behavior reveals a willingness to do something outlandish to call attention to themselves if they perceive license to do so. But I can certainly see Scott’s point that some sort of social shift is going to be required.

Since every situation will require different degrees of comportment, cultivating a sense of empathy and good judgement in audiences as to what is required and developing a method for performers to signal what the dynamics of the event are, will likely be the crucial element that will make it all work.

Making a preshow announcement and printing the rules in the program book clearly isn’t working so additional methods, channels, whatever, are needed.

Of course, performing arts venues need to do their part by not always having the same rules for every event. First of all, it is difficult to experiment with different ways of communicating intent and expectations if there is no opportunity for practical application. Second, audiences are already probing the boundaries of those rules. Either the boundaries have to loosen from time to time or audiences may defer on entering the boundaries altogether.

Right now some of the more effective and clear methods of communicating that the usual boundaries are not in effect are when people make a curtain speech announcement that riffs on the traditional speech by emphasizing “We ask that you DO take as many pictures as you want. DO tell your friends about the show by making social media posts during the show…”

That is only effective as long as the archetypal announcement exists to riff on. The goal is to ultimately remove it as an archetype even if the rules are still applied in certain instances.

I would suggest that the need to make announcements of any kind will be the indicator that work still needs to be done. The majority of attendees at a classical music concert intrinsically “know” how to behave there just as attendees at a rock concert “know” different rules apply without being told.

When people can enter a room and pick up general clues about expectations from the way the staff and other attendees are interacting and perhaps a glance around for more formal signifiers to confirm, then we are seeing a measure of success.

If events unfold contrary to expectations, either the event host needs consider whether this means they need to do a better job of signalling expectations or they need to do a better job of heeding the audience’s signaled expectations.

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

12 Comments

Have You Gotten To The Point You Care When People Steal Your Work?

August 26, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

You know how you are supposed to check the batteries in your smoke detectors every time we go on or off daylight savings time? It may be worth having a similar rule for checking your intellectual property licenses for your online presences. Maybe every time you renew your domain name?

There was a recent story about a photographer who had set his Creative Commons License to allow commercial use with attribution.

When a map company used his image on one of their publications giving him full attribution, he sued them for their use of the image and lost.

The tone of the article is that it was sort of silly of him to be protesting the use of his work in a way explicitly allowed.

But it occurred to me that it would be very easy for many artists and organizations to accidentally find themselves in a similar situation as their online presence evolved.

For example, maybe your website or blog just starts out as a source of information for people about what you are doing. You set your license to require people to quote you with attribution or a link. You aren’t trying to monetize anything and you would be happy if people quoted you all over the Internet.

Later, your organization starts a new exciting program where you are producing all sorts of interesting stuff (or if you are an individual, you take up a hobby/refine your skills and get really good).

You start putting images and examples of your work online, forgetting your license is so permissive and the next thing you know you are seeing your work appearing all over social media, people are selling tshirts and tote bags with your images and are using your video and audio tracks in their own videos.

If you have been publicizing/bragging about achievements and have realized ambitions much greater than when you first established your blog, website, Pinterest, Flickr, etc, presence you may want to go back and review how much permission people have to utilize the content of those pages.

A similar issue may arise if you are featuring other people’s work and their more stringent use requirements aren’t clearly discernible.

Upon review, you may be surprised by how lax your settings are. Or maybe you will despair that no one wants to steal your stuff despite how lax your settings are.

creativity, Info You Can Use, Legal Topics, Working In The Arts