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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Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.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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Put The Keg Under The Dali

February 19, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

I ended up with an interesting juxtaposition of articles today. After clicking on interesting looking links in my Twitter feed, I had an article asking whether children should be allowed in museums come up in a tab next to tab with YouTube videos about the student art rental program at Oberlin College.

The article about banning kids from museums was a reaction to parents letting their child crawl all over a sculpture worth $10 million at the Tate Modern. Compare that to my realization that Oberlin has been renting out their priceless Dalis, Picassos, Chagalls, Calders, etc to their students for $5 and has been doing so since 1940.

Apparently they haven’t had any lost or damaged in all that time. There is a lot of competition for the paintings with the students camping out all night to be near the head of the line and consulting maps of where the pieces will be located in the room to strategize what they will grab first. (They are limited to 2 pieces though)

Given that Frank Almond recently had his violin stolen coming out of a concert hall, it is amazing to me no one has targeted the student dorms to grab the painting.

And it should be noted, contrary to what is initially claimed in a blog on the Oberlin website, these pieces are not works that would otherwise remain out of circulation. These works are particularly set aside for this rental program and distributed and returned every semester without much incident.

Between the two situations comes the question about the best way to instill a respect for art. Do you keep kids out of the museum until they are mature enough or try to engender respect throughout their lives? Frankly, I recall wandering the Museum of Natural History on my own when I was in 10 or 11 years old so my feeling is that most kids can handle themselves if properly trained.

Presumably college students are mature enough to appreciate art in a museum, but do you dare let them take it and hang it in their dorm room?

Well, clearly you can at Oberlin at least. But the practice of lending out priceless art works like library books hasn’t caught on with museums in any widespread way, despite Oberlin’s 70+ years of success with it. I simultaneously cringe at the idea of a museum doing so and feel slightly ashamed at being so distrustful with so little evidence that people who would borrow can’t be trusted.

Art(ist) Education, Info You Can Use, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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