Home Page

The Arts Should Be Like…

June 5, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Carter Gillies emailed me a question this morning relating arts with sports which set off a whole cascade of thoughts.

First of all, we often talk about how arts organizations and creators need to behave in relation to the frame work of other professions and industries, does anyone ever talk about how other industries need to conduct themselves more like artistic and creative entities. (Other than maybe Disney, Pixar and Hollywood?)

Second, I got to thinking that there are three general areas that the arts are compared with: Sports, Business and Religion.

Sports

My very first blog post, I cited a piece by Chris Lavin about “Why the Arts Should Be Covered Like Sports.” Fifteen years later, it is still a pretty engaging idea. In fact, back in 2008 The Guardian newspaper had their sports and arts writers cover each other’s beats. Jon Silpayamanant would occasionally write about arts and sports, making comparisons of their business models.

There are other stories I could cite, including perennial stories of after school arts and sports activities competing for the same funding in schools with the arts often losing. I offer some of these as examples of the way arts and sports are compared and therefore are accorded some equality. Like being a dog person or a cat person, there is a sense a person can’t be both an avid fan of sport and art.

Business

I think I and others have written enough about how the arts need to be run like a business (or artists need to be more entrepreneurial) in the last few years that I don’t need to do much linking. I don’t think anyone will deny that arts organizations need to take some lessons in operating efficient, making decisions informed by data, and being aware of effective methods of promotion and awareness building. But as my friend Carter Gillies will argue more eloquently than I, profit making should not be the driver of creation. Financial success is not a measure of artistic value.

Religion

It probably isn’t a coincidence that in my very first blog post, I talked about religion as well as sports. Religion and art have been intertwined throughout history. The first forms of theatre come from religious ceremonies. Religions organizations have long history commissioning works of visual art and music. Of course, religious groups have also sought to ban art. Art and religion have many similarities. Both tap into passions of their practitioners in similar ways in that they will say they feel driven by some greater purpose. You are supposed to practice for the sake of doing so rather than out of desire of some reward. There are claims that both will make you a better person. There are frequent calls for various reformations to enable better service of the community.

Which Is Right For You?

As I thought about these three general areas, it occurred to me that often arts organizations and the communities that coalesced around them could have a strong orientation toward one area over the others.

The identity of some places are primary focused on entertainment. That is what they do, that is what people are attracted by. They want to experience the newest big hit.

The identity of others is oriented more around success and prestige. They are the exemplar of the highest value. There are important people having important experiences.

The identity of still other places emphasizes the purity of experience and the enrichment of self. Authenticity, investment and understanding of the experience are valued.

These all roughly correspond with sports, business and religion. Obviously, not every organization is focused on providing a narrow set of experiences. Not everyone in the community who is engaged with a certain organization is focused on having the same experience as everyone else. One may be having a self-enriching experience while everyone around them is in it for the entertainment or prestige.

While I will admit that these insights may not be fulled developed at this point, I wondered if there was some value for arts organizations in taking primary lessons from the “thing” they are most like.

Instead of thinking your organization is similar to sports, for-profit businesses and religion, recognize that what you offer and why most people are drawn to you is akin to a religious experience. It won’t exempt you from keeping the books straight, practicing good governance and being prepared to discuss your identity and activities in an engaging context that doesn’t allow it to be dismissed as a niche esoteric pursuit.

It may help add clarity to your mission and objectives if you aren’t promising to consistently and simultaneously provide an experience with broad commercial appeal, at the highest level of excellence and prestige, and soul-enriching authenticity.

Understanding who you serve, what people value about you and making peace with the fact you can’t be all things to all people can take a bit of pressure off yourselves. (Or can shape decisions of a direction you want to go).

You obviously can’t focus on one type of experience to the exclusion of all others because no two people are going to have the same degree of motivation for participating. Also, you can end up reinforcing the negative side of all these types: too commercial; pandering to elites/lowest common denominator; too inscrutable, etc.

But there are also some frames of reference that will never provide a shortcut allowing people to relate to the arts. A few weeks ago, a Basquiat sold for $110 million in auction. You can liken it to a bidding war for an athlete all you want, but it isn’t likely that a significant number of people will decide they need to pay closer attention to the arts.

The fact there was a record setting competition for the painting doesn’t help people understand the value of the work. If it had sold for $110, fewer people would have a negative impression of rich elites, but their journey to understanding and cultivation of an interest in visual art would be equally as long

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, General Musings

No Comments

You Want A Tarantella On A Violin, I Want A Tarantula

May 31, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Almost as soon as I published my post yesterday about building community around augmented reality, I started thinking about how that might work with live performance.

One of my first thoughts was that augmented reality could allow everyone in the audience to experience the event the way they wanted. When symphony orchestras project things behind them while they play, purists often complain that it detracts from the experience.

With augmented reality, some people could watch the concert with some sort of animated overlay while others watched without any enhancement at all. There could be different “channels” of programming available at an event. One might have the animations, another might have program notes, another might have subtitles in your chosen language. There may be a choice of animations geared toward different age groups.

Credit where due, a recent repost of one of Holly Mulcahy’s blog entries with a picture of a tarantula crawling on her violin started getting my imagination going about what sort of things might possibly be overlaid on people during a concert.

The features could be educational as well as entertaining. During a concert, you might be prompted to “catch” notes cascading from a changing selection of instruments which would help people learn different orchestra instruments. Granted, this might result in wild physical movements that others might find distracting so an organization would obviously need to be judicious about what they used when.

The technology might also open the possibility for people to create custom overlays that demeaned whatever was being looked at, reinforcing attitudes about art by placing statues, paintings and performers in lewd context.

That same possibility for custom augmentation also provides the opportunity to engage a larger community in live experience of art and culture. Whenever I start thinking about how to leverage technology to benefit the arts, inevitably I think about the cost of having someone create this content and getting staff to implement it.

But the cost and staffing needs don’t necessarily need to be burdensome. I am writing this post using the Firefox browser adorned by a custom skin someone made. If there was enough interest, there might be people around the world who would create program notes, animations, editable supertitles for operas, games, etc that could be licensed for use.

Part of the promotion for the event could include mention of program notes by a famed Japanese commentator, animations by a Brazilian artist, or maybe contributions by a local person of note.

The opportunity to tap into the expertise and passion of a worldwide pool of creators could be very beneficial by creating stronger bonds between members of an international community.

The local community and audiences might also be involved in providing content. You could have little QR code or other visual cue attached to an actor that a phone might pick up so that people could understand the character’s backstory during an opera. Audience members might submit questions or make comments that could either contribute to a clearer packet of information in the future or could be answered live by on-duty staff.

Obviously, too much of this type of interaction touches on the current debate about technology and live performance. Specifically, what is the value of live performance if your experience is mediated by technology? Clarifying information can be valuable to attendees, but a chatroom environment which occupies the majority of a person’s attention becomes problematic.

While I tend toward keeping distracting (both to oneself and seat mates) technologies out of a live experience, I will admit that I would really be excited to see how imaginative different people could be in creating new contexts for familiar works. I also wonder if we wouldn’t see more people trying out unfamiliar experiences if they knew they could consult a guiding source of information. Indian dance and Kabuki performances might pop up in more unexpected places.

Arts in an Age of Technology, General Musings, State of the Arts

4 Comments

What Does A Community Built Around Augmented Reality Look Like?

May 30, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Two months ago I confessed I may have misread the impact and potential of the Pokemon Go game on attracting new customers and audiences.

However, the Knight Foundation feels that the basic technology and dynamics of the augmented reality game may have potential use for engaging communities. Earlier this month, they announced a multi-year partnership with Pokemon Go developer and publisher Niantic. They started out by shutting down three miles of streets in Charlotte, NC during the Open Streets 704 events and creating places with which players of Pokemon Go and Ingress games can interact.

I haven’t seen any follow up articles evaluating how it went. I suspect it may be awhile before anyone makes any statements. The Knight Foundation was approaching the whole project with an open mind and few pre-determined expectations.

We don’t know, but we believe that in embracing change, we might get a glimpse of how to build cities and communities of the future that are even more active and engaging than today.

Our plan in this partnership is to learn. This year, Knight Foundation and Niantic will work together to explore how Pokémon GO can bring more people, more energy and more excitement to great public places in some of the 26 communities where Knight Foundation invests.

[…]

Neither of us knows exactly where this partnership will lead us, but we hope that, together, we’ll learn something about the power—and limits—of technology to support more engaged communities.

This seems like something to pay attention to see what develops. When I first talked about Pokemon Go last July, my approach, along with dozens of other commenters, was to find a way to respond to an emerging trend. The intention of Knight Foundation appears to be toward more proactively developing an emerging technology and the accompanying social dynamics for community building.

I imagine what attracts the Knight Foundation to Niantic’s games is that they have gotten people up and moving around physical communities. There are a number of communities and transactional interactions that have developed on the online, but the big complaint has been that this has removed the need for in-person interactions.

Augmented reality games may have a digital element that keeps your gaze averted, but it requires moving about reality to play which can be seen as an improvement (up to the point you fall into an open manhole, I suppose). If the Knight Foundation does have an agenda that are going into the partnership with, I suspect it is to find ways to induce people to share/employ augmented elements in each other’s presence.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, New Initiatives

1 Comment

Judging Yourself As You Judge Others

May 24, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will love you for helping them out, especially during the heaviest period in their granting cycle.

Perhaps the biggest benefit for you will be identifying those areas people like yourself do well or fall short in making the case for their programs. You can get advice about how to write an effective proposal on a monthly basis, but until you apply a critical eye to a proposal from outside disciplines, geography and demographic attributes with which you are familiar, you aren’t likely to appreciate all the potential pitfalls.

I recently participated in a panel for my state arts council for a program my organization wasn’t eligible to participate in.

There were a number of times people referenced discipline specific shorthand or neighborhoods/towns they were doing outreach in. I suspected that this information would be more compelling if I better understood the relevance.

Recognizing that I was probably making the same mistake of assuming reviewers would be excited by similar discussions of accomplishments for which they had no frame of reference, I started to pull out old grant proposals and found a number of places that could probably use additional information about why it was important that certain groups were involved or being represented in our programs.

During the panel review process I made additional notes as panelists would comment about things they wished they had seen more detail about. In other cases, it was observed too much time was spent talking about other organizational activities rather than focusing on the proposed project.

Now I will grant you, often space limitations imposed by the application form makes it difficult to provide the detail that will really allow your project to shine. It is important to make a case with the granting organization that 3-4 more lines of text would make all the difference. Volunteering to serve on a grant panel can provide you with the opportunity to make that case in person.

I also want to acknowledge that when you are faced with a tall pile of proposals to review, the last thing you want to do is engage in prolonged introspection of the strengths and weaknesses of your own submissions. But it can be worthwhile to at least take the time to make duplicates of notes that represent potential areas of concern in your work for later review.

Then, of course, there is benefit in seeing what other people are doing. What novel ideas and approaches are out there? How are others executing their programs? How are they defining and measuring success? What strategies are they employing to deal with challenges?

One really, really general piece of advice I will give based on what I have seen is to make sure your website has links to your social media accounts. This is website and social media 101, but I was surprised at how many people mention they promote their events on social media, but don’t have links on their websites. Web searches will turn the social media accounts up, but there was often no easy way for someone who discovered an organization through their website to stay connected through social media. (Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a web search turned some of them up, I have no idea if I found the full range of online presence.)

Advocacy, Fundraising, General Musings, State of the Arts, Volunteers, Working In The Arts

No Comments