Home Page

But The Paint And Brushes Were Right There….

April 5, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

When I saw this story over the weekend, it seemed like it was absolutely inevitable that an intersection of trends toward authenticity and audience participation in cultural experiences.

In short, graffiti art on display at a gallery in South Korea was defaced by attendees who interpreted the paint cans and brushes set in front of the work as an invitation to contribute.

My first thought was to wonder why the paint and brushes had been left out in front of the work. Apparently, “…the paint and brushes used in the live performance – which are regarded as integral parts of the artwork.”

The live creation of the work was done in 2016 so I am surprised this hadn’t happened earlier. I wondered if the gallery was counting on some social norms in South Korea to prevent people from doing something like this because they didn’t even add a short barrier in front of the work until after the incident. It seems there were “Do Not Touch” signs already, but they added more to the barrier they have erected.

The article indicates the exhibition has traveled since it was first created so other galleries may have included more preventative measures from the outset.

Ultimately, the story made me consider how the dynamics of people’s relationship with art, culture and associated expectations and assumptions may be shifting. It also made me curious about how these assumptions differ from country to country. Are there “Please Touch…” type museums or experiences in South Korea and other countries? Are there countries/places viewed to be innovators in this area we aren’t hearing about? (Always revelatory to listen to the BBC or Deutsche Welle and realizing there is important news you aren’t hearing.)

Audience Relations

1 Comment

Cause And Effect Are Not Siloed, Should Education About Them Be?

March 31, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Over on The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Hayot suggests that humanities subjects have a marketing problem. Because students are oriented on the utility of degree programs to career development, it is easy to understand what the goals of degrees like accounting, business management, chemistry and physical therapy are but less clear in regard to history and literature outside of teaching those subjects.

Since I often rail against measuring the value of the arts in terms of utility, I was put a little on guard as I started reading further. Hayot’s idea is to reorganize subject matter and reframe content more in terms of social problems that need consideration and addressing which is often what the performing and visual arts practice expresses.

One way to put such a change in place would be to reorganize the existing curriculum into sets of four-course modules. Such modules could come in two types. Skill modules would focus on practices: language learning, writing and speaking, historical, cultural, and social analysis. Theme modules would focus on topics: social justice, migration studies, the problem of God, translation, journalism, wealth and inequality, conflict, ideas of beauty, television, society and technology, and the like.

[…]

They would also need to convey to students that just because modules on issues like sex and sexuality or Latinx studies or Chinese history exist does not mean that they wouldn’t overlap with, say, material in your discussion of human environments or social justice. (You don’t want a curriculum to imply that the study of sexuality or African Americans happens over here, while the study of history “in general” happens over there.)

There is a lot of detail about his proposal in the article that I obviously can’t depict here without cutting and pasting super extensively. What he suggests bears some consideration because it more directly addresses the oft expressed concept that the skills you gain in humanities degree programs can be applied in myriad professions because of the overlap and interrelations between these topics. Hayot is basically calling for the silos of degree programs to be broken down significantly.

If we want to teach students that human life is not organized into disciplines, then we should not organize our curricula into disciplines. If we want to teach students to see historical connections across differing conditions of global power, we should not organize our literature departments exclusively around modern languages, whose effect is to reproduce over and over again the knowledge and aesthetic work produced in a period of European dominance.

Hayot lists a number of benefits he sees in this approach. Among those that appeared to respond most with the complaints of detractors of humanities degrees have made:

• Appealing immediately to students’ actual interests, or, in other words, meeting students where they are, in current historical conditions, rather than lamenting their lack of interest in traditional humanities majors. .. our job is to teach them, by hook or by crook, not to lament their resistance to being taught.

[…]

• Not forcing students into majors because they need a credential — the modules serve as the credential and communicate far more clearly than major titles a set of interests, skills, and expertise (to employers and parents as well).

[…]

• Encouraging comparison in geographic, linguistic, and historical modes, … You couldn’t teach someone about poverty or justice or technology without using examples that cross space, language, and time. This has the advantage of moving geographic and linguistic breadth away from being an “angle” that one takes on a topic and toward being a necessary precondition of humanist knowledge.

This may seem unrelated to performing and visual arts which can have a clearer path of progression from degree to practice than some humanities, but art doesn’t happen in a vacuum and people whose education has been aligned in these terms are probably going to be more likely to appreciate the value of creative expression across different cultures.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

No Comments

Gershwin As The Soundtrack For Labor Protest

March 30, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Artsjournal.com linked to a story about Oakland Symphony’s tradition of social justice in the experiences and programs it has offered. One of the things that popped out at me though was in line with my post yesterday about learning more about the emotional associations people had with classical music.

Hatano, the Oakland symphony’s executive director, said that she gets goosebumps thinking about one of Huerta’s choices for the Playlist series, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Huerta recalled listening to the piece on record as a child. Later, when she protested with grape farmers in New York as an adult, she heard the piece playing in the back of her mind, like a heroic soundtrack for her day.

This stuck out to me because most of the time when people talk about why they enjoy classical music, it tends toward relaxing and sublime imagery like the example given yesterday about sitting in a chair by the lake.

However, Huerta talks about “Rhapsody in Blue” in the context of a heroic theme for a labor protest. And really, that is sort the way a large segment of the population has experienced classical music–as the soundtrack for movies. The most recognizable and memorable are likely those that accompany moments of high energy and dramatic tension whether it is Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna,” anything by Wagner and Beethoven “Symphony No. 5” for movies with explosions and high stakes encounters with villains; or everything that Carl Stalling put in Looney Tune cartoons.

While there are often efforts to remind people that they are familiar with all this music already, if only on a subliminal level, thanks to movie and television scores, I don’t know that I have ever heard anyone say it pops into their head as background theme for their daily lives.

It made me think that if you can find people who can talk about having that experience, it might create a stronger positive association with classical music with people. Since we are all the heroes of our own stories to some extent, recognizing that the music under girding the most dramatic and exciting movie moments could also be appropriate for scoring your personal narrative might improve the perceived accessibility of the genre.

In the last few years of posting, I have often talked about how surveys have revealed that people want to see themselves and their stories depicted on stage. Reflecting the stories of the community on stage may not be the easiest thing for 80 orchestra musicians to accomplish. However, if people begin thinking of classical music concerts as a place where music that has a resonance with the events of their lives, that may make a big difference.

To be clear, people already obviously use music in this way. Pretty much everyone has blasted music that energizes them when they are getting ready to go out and strut their stuff.

But if you have people saying that “Ride of the Valkyries” or “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” depending on the conditions, was running through their minds as they deftly navigated a busy subway station in order to get to work on time, that reframes a daily routine as a bit more magical and special.

Drawing a connection between music with which people are widely, if not unconsciously aware of, and the mundane moments of their lives may help make the genre feel more relatable and accessible than it had before.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations

No Comments

Digging Deep To Find What Really Motivates Decision to Engage With Arts

March 29, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Back in December, Advisory Board for the Arts featured a webinar on marketing the arts emphasizing emotional value to the community. Much to my chagrin, it took me until last week to get a post about the webinar written for ArtsHacker.

Among the interesting tidbits I came away with were the fact that we make choices based on emotional factors and then justify our decision with rational factors like discounts, durability, assumptions about how frequently something might be used, etc.

Importantly for the arts was the finding that for 1/3 our audiences, the arts are part of their core identity so factors like quality and historical significance are enough to convince them of the value of an experience. The other 2/3 need to see connections with other motivators in their lives to see value in participation. I was interested to find that a chart of these motivating factors used in the webinar were parallel to those identified by John Falk in Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience which I had previously written about in an earlier post here.

The webinar focused on an approach used by Utah Symphony called Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) which involves discovering what emotional values motivate an entity’s biggest fans and then tries to build resonance with the broader community.

Now if you look at the image below on the webinar video your first inclination probably wouldn’t be that there is a huge crossover between orchestra fans and the KISS Army, but the image was still pretty evocative for a lot of people. My bigger concern would be people considering this a little deceptive because the energy at the symphony and a KISS concert is so different.

In any case, one of the things they did to learn about what was emotionally resonant with fans is ask them bring 10 images to an interview that represent the symphony but do not include any pictures of symphony, musicians or instruments. So for example, someone brought picture of an Adirondack chair explaining they felt the same sense of calm in the symphony as they did in their chair at the lake.

There is a lot more detail in the ArtsHacker post, including time indexes about where things are discussed in the webinar so take a look. It seems to me that approaches like ZMET and 5 Whys technique Toyota employed are valuable to sussing this information out for the very reason that people do use logic to justify their choices and therefore insulate themselves from their real motivation. Unless you use probing techniques, a simple survey will never reveal this information.