A very interesting question regarding the relationship between an agent and artist was recently broached on the Musical America blog. An agent who has an artist leaving their representation for another company asks who owns the leads and contacts they have cultivated on behalf of the artist.
However, the question has come up as to whether we are obligated to give the artist all of the leads and contacts we have been pursuing on his behalf that have not been booked yet. That doesn’t seem fair. We have been working on some presenters for years, have invested a lot of time, and consider that to be our proprietary information. If we turn all of that over to his new manager, that’s just going to be a gift to the new manager who will follow up on all of our work and take the commissions.
Now you may think the agent is correct. It doesn’t seem fair that the new manager will benefit from the efforts of the company that the artist is leaving. However, lawyer Brian Taylor Goldstein answers that under the law of agency, representatives, a term which applies to people like attorneys, realtors, accountants, artist agents, etc, work for a principal party and all the work they do belongs to that principal. (my emphasis)
…there are four key concepts:
(1) An agent works for the principal and, while the agent can advise the principal, the agent must follow the instructions and directives of the principal.
(2) An agent can never put his or her own interests above that of the principal.
(3) All of the “results and proceeds” of the agent’s work on behalf of the principal belongs to the principal.
(4) Any contractual provision, written or oral, that contravenes rules (1) – (3) is null and void.
In short, when a manager represents an artist, the manager has no proprietary information. In other words, those aren’t your leads and contacts, they are the artist’s. While your leads and contacts may start out as your own, once you contact someone on behalf of an artist, the artist is legally entitled to know anyone you have spoken to on his or her behalf, including the details of such conversation. Moreover, unless there is an agreement to the contrary, the artist is also free to contact anyone directly on his own behalf.
This information was surprising to me. I knew that this relationship existed with one’s realtor, but didn’t realize it extended to artists and agents/managers as well.
Goldstein goes on to explain that the law is set up this way to protect the agent from liability for any breach by the principal. The agent isn’t liable if the artist fails to show up for a performance, for example.
(Of course, since the agent will be the first to receive an emotionally fraught phone call if the artist doesn’t show, they will bear a lot of non-legal responsibility.)
He also enumerates a number of aspects of the agent-artist relationship that people may assume are a matter of law, but are merely a result of traditional practice, and perhaps due for a change.
You may have seen a number of articles out in the last day or two debunking the idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that we need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. A New York Times article quoted a researcher who contributed to the results of a new study who said,
“We found that, yes, practice is important, and of course it’s absolutely necessary to achieve expertise,” said Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University…“But it’s not as important as many people have been saying” compared to inborn gifts.”
One thing I noticed- despite the fact the article starts out talking about a kid kicking a soccer ball and a man learning Japanese and goes on to talk about mastery in the areas of language, sports, chess as well as music, the majority of the comments reference talent versus practice in artistic pursuits. Out of the 260 comments to the article at the time of this post, only about 10-15 talk about athletes and there isn’t really any mention of achieving mastery in any other area.
Perhaps it is due to the influence of the title of the article referencing Carnegie Hall and the fact the pictures are of dancers and musicians. However, I wondered if the artistic orientation of these comments revealed an underlying belief that we only need to consider talent versus practice in relation to artistic achievement.
No one mentioned the impact of talent or practice on writing press releases, analyzing business plans/financials or installing electrical wiring. Yet no one coming straight out of a training program can automatically do any of these things masterfully. It takes time to develop a proficiency and for many, there is a level of quality beyond which they can not advance no matter how much effort they invest.
I wondered if this belief that practice and talent are important to be successful in artistic pursuits might be contributing to the idea that the arts are an elitist pursuit that only a few can participate in.
The reverse of this plagues school teachers and professors. Students and parents who might acknowledge that hard work will never allow them to be a pro-athlete will insist that an A grade or admission to a honor class be granted because a student had worked hard. Other than Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average, there exists a level beyond which some students can’t be successful academically.
So while everyone may believe they achieve academic excellence due only to hard work, the belief that you need to be blessed with innate talent to achieve artistic excellence may contribute to the idea that only an elite few can become artistic masters or have the capacity to understand art.
Of course, people are damned by the inverse assumptions: If you are not succeeding academically, you aren’t working hard enough. If you are a rich and famous artist, you must be talented.
All this occurred to me as I was reading the article so I haven’t really tested this theory with a few days of thought. What do you think?
A few days ago, NPR’s Planet Money ran a story asking why there isn’t demand pricing for movies where you pay more for blockbusters and less for the stinkers. Among the suggestions the correspondents made were having some movies free with a two popcorn cover.
They spoke to a movie theater owner who expressed concerns about low prices signaling that a movie was bad. Not to mention he worried that people would pay for the stinker and sneak into the blockbuster.
The biggest impediment to demand based pricing, however, is the movie studios. As the reporters mention, no studio wants to invest tons of money into making and advertising a show only to have a movie theater price it at $1.
If you are not aware, something similar occurs with many of the big Broadway touring shows, especially those that are getting a percentage of the gate. Theaters have to submit proposed ticket pricing and a marketing budget for the production company’s approval.
One interesting fact that came to light was that the term “B-movie” actually refers to an early practice where movies were graded A, B, C, etc and had corresponding pricing. The practice has fallen by the wayside, but the B movie term stuck around in common parlance.
One of the problems live performances face is the ability to provide such transparency in its pricing for audiences. The price for single perform doing a solo acoustic set might be low because the cost to the theater for one person is low. On the other hand, if that single performer is Eric Clapton, the ticket price is going to be commensurately high.
But a ticket price may be low because the theater has good funding, or will take a loss to encourage people to attend or because the quality stinks. The audience member doesn’t know why prices are the way they are and there isn’t really an elegant way to communicate it, should the arts organization so desire.
As I listened to the reporters asking if movie theaters weren’t foolish not to institute demand based pricing, I wondered if we might be approaching a place where audiences would be psychologically ready for arts organizations to implement similar pricing strategies for their own events. The whole question of demand pricing has been hotly debated by arts organizations and the fact that the subject is popping up in various forms indicates the topic isn’t going away any time soon.
I am back from my trip to Germany. Part of my trip was devoted to helping my mother do some genealogy research. In the process, I came to a realization I think we have all have suspected- The relationship Europeans have with the arts can never be replicated in the United States. There are just too many fundamental differences in the lives we lead and the the way we interact with the arts as we develop from children to adults.
I have traveled fairly extensively in China, Japan, Mongolia, Ireland and Germany and in my view, the arts seem most present in the lives of Japanese and Germans. Though in Japan it manifests more as a pursuit of general excellence while in Germany it seems to manifest as the intentional creation of artistic work.
No matter where I went in Germany from large cities like Frankfurt and Munich, to smaller towns like Obernburg and Volkach and the university town of Heidelberg, there were dozens of notices of concerts, recitals and plays everywhere we went.
Now granted, Germany has the benefit of churches and castles as well as theaters in which these performances can take place.
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Stage in Heidelberg Castle Courtyard
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stage outside Heidelberg Castle
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stage in courtyard of Aschaffenburg Castle
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Germany also has a “percent for art” program where a percentage of the construction project cost is set aside for a work of public art. The wife and daughter of our host in Obernburg had both had works selected for public buildings. (I apologize, I neglected to make note of the names of Marianne’s works.)
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by Marianne Knebel
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by Marianne Knebel
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Die Tore Sind Geoffnet (The Gates Are Open)by Petia Knebel
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I did some research to see whether the German percent for art program pre-dated the United States. It does by a decade, though it is a policy rather than a matter of law. According to my research, this has produced some inconsistent results in terms of quality. I have to admit that my first impression was that Petia had obviously copied ideas from her mother.
Questions of quality aside, what impressed me was that an effort was made to use the work of local artists. Marianne’s work is a half hour drive from her house. Petia’s is about 2-3 miles from the house as the crow flies.
And from what I understood, there is something of a infrastructure to support artists with foundries and factories setting aside space for the artists to work on these pieces. It sounded similar to what the Kohler Company does in the U.S. Even if the quality of work and the selection process is uneven, this seems to be an environment which encourages and enables artistic expression.
It isn’t just concert notices and public art by local artists that a German sees as they go about their day. There are other reminders that aesthetics are valued. The old part of every town we visited had stone streets. In both Obernburg and Volkach, the streets had been dug up for construction and then the stones were cut and laid back down. This wasn’t just a narrow strip for a sewer pipe, it was the whole width of the street.
The street only looks narrow until you have to put all the stones back
Germans also apparently devote a fair bit of time bringing beauty to death. We went to three cemeteries in the course of our genealogy research and they all looked like this:
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I don’t think it is a matter of Germans being better artistic human beings as it is a reflection of the fundamental differences in the activities of our daily lives. I had a bit of insight during my travels that lead to this hypothesis.
My mother’s side of the family came from Obernburg Germany and founded the town of Obernburg, NY. While in the German town, I learned that until around the 1800, it wasn’t permitted to build outside the walls. From the way other towns we visited were structured, I am guessing this was the case in many places. Even now that people are building outside old parts of town, most of the infrastructure for daily life from grocery stores, banks, churches, government buildings, restaurants, are all located in the old town centers.
These areas still have very narrow streets where the speed limit hovers around 15 mph and is better suited to walking and biking than driving. Whereas in the U.S. old buildings might be demolished to make way for a modern building, if any building has been replaced in these German towns, the new construction has conformed to the general dimensions and style of the surrounding buildings.
As a result, people’s lives are centered in these very communal places where they walk past notices about performances and speak to their neighbors about events around town. (Not to mention walking by the venues multiples times a day.)
Remember, I don’t speak German so I didn’t read any newspapers, watch television or go online to learn about local events. Every performance I became aware of was due to walking past a poster, banner or marquee. In this particular environment it was an effective method of communication.
One thing that we know about my ancestors in Obernburg, NY from letters and diary entries was that they didn’t have the opportunity to replicate these community towns that they had left. This was a little disorienting for them. Because land was parceled off in patents that had to be occupied in order to hold it, people were forced to live on their land miles from each other rather than next door.
In a moment of insight, I wondered if this basic difference between being forced to live together in Germany versus being forced to live apart in the U.S. may have been a major factor in the differences that developed in the way each country experiences and views their relationship with the arts. Can land use policy be as, if not more, important than education and direct funding when it comes to participation in the arts?
If nothing else, as far as I was concerned, walking around these picturesque towns were a great argument for the benefits of mixed used neighborhoods.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…