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Meanwhile, Next Door In Austria

October 6, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

The title of today’s post references the fact yesterday’s post was about cultural funding in Germany. I hadn’t planned it this way, but I wanted to draw attention to the lengths various venues in Austria went to this summer in order to perform in front of live audiences.

According to a piece on Vox, the Salzburg Festival in Vienna went ahead with their centiennial anniversary festival with audiences subject to the following conditions:

Among the rules: Audience members were asked to wear masks and social distance at one meter. Seating capacities were reduced, and every second seat in every concert hall was locked so people couldn’t get around the restrictions. There were no intermissions at performances, or refreshments available.

Simply buying a ticket meant agreeing to engage in contact tracing, if it came to that: Tickets were personalized with names, and audience members had to show an ID when they entered any venue. ..

In the end, the festival attracted more than 76,000 visitors — a little more than a quarter of last year’s — from 39 countries during August. According to the festival’s final report on the event, “not a single positive case has been reported to the authorities.” And of the 3,600 coronavirus tests carried out on the 1,400 people involved in festival preparation, just one came back positive in early July.

What was more interesting to me was the process the Vienna State Opera used to determine the testing schedule for their employees. Encouraged by the success of the Salzburg Festival, they planned to reopen last month and implemented a system of color-coded lanyards to indicate which employees were most at risk for exposure to the Covid virus.

Singers and people working directly with the singers are part of the red group and are tested every week (since they can’t always wear masks or keep distance onstage). Administrators are part of the orange group and are tested every four weeks. The yellow and white groups — people who don’t have close contact with artists, such as delivery people — are only tested if there’s a known exposure. And everyone wears colored lanyards to denote their risk, while groups are instructed to stay apart.

Read the whole article because there are interviews with individual artists about how they are impacted. The tl;dnr version is – artists are risking their health for even less pay than before

Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Budgeting More Money For Culture, Despite Covid. You Can Probably Guess Where

October 5, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Artnet reported that Germany’s 2021 draft budget held an increase in funding for cultural organizations in the country.

You may recall that I made a post in May that clarified German cultural organizations didn’t receive $54 billion in aid as had widely been reported.

German arts administrator Rainer Glaap had brought the misunderstanding to my attention and provided links to stories that explained that the money was spread across a wide swath of industries and that since each German state had their own programs and interpretations of how funding was to be used benefits to cultural entities varied wildly with freelance artists often receiving short shrift.

The most recent story seems to be more specifically focused on funding for cultural entities since the budget numbers cited are $2.26 billion and it quotes the German culture minister

Culture minister Monika Grütters says that such a strong budget for the final year before the German elections underscores the country’s commitment to culture, especially on top of its existing billion-dollar coronavirus rescue program.

“Especially in times of crisis, culture is the foundation of our social cohesion,” Grütters says in a statement. “Art, culture, and the media make us aware time and again of our great privilege to live in a country of freedom of the press, culture, and opinion, where controversial debates are possible, desired, and endurable. The protection of these freedoms remains the highest principle of federal cultural policy.”

The German government’s cultural budget has grown by about 60 percent since Grütters took office in 2013, and 85 percent since the German chancellor Angela Merkel came to power in 2005.

The story doesn’t really get into whether the different states were taking steps to make sure freelancers and small business groups were better able to access funding or other supports than previously.

While the erroneous $54 billion amount had caused no shortage of envy among arts and cultural professions last Spring, I wanted to point out prioritizing culture is not an outlier. Not only has improving funding for cultural organizations been a priority this year, it has been a priority for over a decade. It should be noted, this budget has to be approved by the German Senate before it is put in effect.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Finance, Fundraising, Government Relations

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Be Sure Your Data Doesn’t Just Mean You Are Good At Posting Memes

September 30, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

If you have been reading my writing for the last few years, you know that in addition to employing the preceding phrase fairly often, I argue that not everything that can be measured about an arts organization’s activity is a valid measure of the value of the organization and the work it does.

What should also be acknowledged as a corollary to that is that not all data is created equal or equally valuable. Since there is a growing push for arts organizations to do a better job of embracing data-driven decision making .

Over at Arts Hacker, I recently summarized a post by Colleen Dilenschneider distinguishing between key performance indicators (KPIs), diagnostic metrics and vanity metrics.

Briefly, KPIs measure progress toward your mission/goals, diagnostic metrics inform KPIs and vanity metrics sound impressive, but aren’t an indication of any sort of progress. (i.e. Your social media engagement increased 1000% in a week because you posted a kitten meme.)

The problem, Dillenschneider says, is that valuing vanity metrics can result in allocating resources away from mission focused activities and evaluation. For example, the executive director may suddenly gain national prominence and invitations to speak at conferences, etc. which may raise the profile of the organization and make many stakeholders extremely proud of their association.

But if this isn’t contributing to a recognition of problems with the quality of the work being done and the poor community interactions that are occurring, then there is no value to having a year over year increase in the number of speaking invitations.

If you are trying to use data to inform your decisions, take a look at the post. The line between KPIs and diagnostic metrics can be confusing and it can be easy to categorize the latter as part of the former without a reminder of the dividing line.

Yes, Data Driven Decision Making. But What Data Is Important?

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use

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Artist Waits 50 Years For A Wrong To Be Righted

September 29, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Quick post today since I am going to link to something longer worth reading.

The venue I run is associated with a university across town that made things right for an alum after it was deferred for 50 years. One of the first Black women admitted to the university back in the 60s was pursuing a career in medical illustration and so was majoring in both biology and art. However, as a result of some racist motivations, the chair of the art department at the time denied her an opportunity to mount a final exhibit. As a result, she was able to graduate with the biology degree, but not the art degree.

That student, Gwendolyn Middleton Payton, had a chance midnight meeting at the Atlanta airport with one of the university history faculty and happened to relate her story. The faculty member advocated for her leading to Payton receiving her final exhibit and degree last Friday.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) wrote an extensive story I referenced earlier. If you are interested, there is a video on Facebook of Payton’s remarks at the exhibit.

Our marketing director was responsible for shepherding a lot of the details along, including the AJC interview and had mentioned Payton’s son was on The Walking Dead. For some reason, I didn’t make the connection that her son is Khary Payton, who I actually knew better as a voice actor for a lot of superhero cartoons, until his mother mentioned him in her talk.

Through our marketing director, I learned some roadblocks and assumptions that thwarted her earlier efforts to get her full degree that illustrated people did not appreciate the enormity of the challenges Payton faced. She said she had to pick her battles and if you read the AJC article, you will see she fought a lot. She just chose not to fight the final exhibition battle when graduation was imminent.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education

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