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Gasp! They Aren’t True Believers!

June 24, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

I have been in my current position for over a year now, but I wasn’t on the job more than a month or so before I realized I was in a situation I had never experienced in my nearly 20 year long career.

I had co-workers who were not true believers.

That is, they were not working here out of some interest or passion for the arts. They did not know some basic industry terminology despite having worked here for five plus years.

One assumed the role when her previous supervisor left. The other had the seniority to bid into the position from an unrelated area. Each likes their job because it is interesting and varied, but they aren’t motivated by a deep abiding interest in any artistic discipline. They would work just as hard at an interesting job somewhere else.

Don’t get me wrong, they perform their roles with great proficiency and absolute devotion. There is never any hint of a desire to avoid working longer hours on a performance day or leaving a task undone until the next day. One made the decision to attend the board meetings when she recognized doing so would help her do her job better. I have no reservations about their work or ethic and would be anxious if I learned they found another job.

It is just that being able to get backstage and watch a performance from the wings holds no special allure for them.

I am not used to working everyday with people who don’t feel like some part of the job is filling a void in their soul. I guess this is what it is like working with normal people who just simply like their jobs.

As soon as I realized this was the case, I immediately remembered attending a conference session where Andrew Taylor mentioned a colleague, dissatisfied with job candidates with arts backgrounds, had hired someone with experience in a Sears call center to be their box office manager because they had a better sense of how to offer good customer service on a large scale.

Recalling that story, I knew I had to consider that we might be better off with people who were relatively agnostic about the arts. (And certainly given that they had far more experience running the facility than I, there was no question about who was more valuable to the operations.)

After I year, I have been pondering the trade offs of the situation. Perhaps the biggest asset has been using their relatively dispassionate relationship to the arts to assess whether a performance might have appeal to a wider segment of the population when we are planning the next season. In some respects, they are a better representatives of the community than the board members are.

On the other side, they aren’t as likely to be enthusing about an upcoming performance over beer with friends. They aren’t automatic brand ambassadors. But in that respect, they are a measure of how much effort I might have to invest in winning over the hearts and minds of the community.

I would be interested to hear any stories and insights other people have about this situation, pros and cons. Are these people taking jobs away from unemployed arts people who would truly appreciate the opportunity and happily work 10 hours overtime, to boot? Or is this balance the sort of thing arts organizations sorely need?

General Musings, Working In The Arts

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We Are Too Small To Get Caught…Right?

June 23, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

It used to be that there were constantly stories about copyright owners going after kids who had downloaded music and video or sampled/excerpted parts of works and represented it as their own. We would hear about companies tracking stuff on computers and going after the owners.

You don’t hear these sort of stories as much any more. Since many of the copyright owners were big corporations, perhaps they figured there was a lot of bad P.R. associated with their efforts.

Or maybe they felt like there was too much of the activity going on that it was fruitless to try to catch everyone and try to stop it.

I know that a lot of performing arts companies have taken liberties with the shows they produce, assuming that the country is so big and their organization so small that no one will bother to check up on them.

Well thanks to technology, it is apparently getting easier for performance rights holders to monitor production activity. Or at least technology is making us more aware that the rights holders are checking on and catching people.

A recent You’ve Cott Mail brought attention to a couple cease and desist letters issued last week due to unauthorized script changes.

An article about a Milwaukee production of David Mamet’s Olenna implies they got caught making their unauthorized change when a review of the show appeared online.

As first reported by Howard Sherman, Hands on a Hardbody show creators actually attended a performance in Texas and noticed the show wasn’t the one they created. A number of actions were subsequently taken by the Dramatists Guild and Samuel French, Inc, which appear in updates on Sherman’s post.

These aren’t isolated incidents. Howard Sherman has been keeping an eye on these issues and addressing them on his blog. Back in January, he discussed the Asolo Repertory Theater having to postpone their opening when they got caught rewriting Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come! [Disclosure: I worked for the Florida State University side of the Asolo about 20 years ago.]

Sherman also covered a Long Island* high school making unauthorized alterations to the school edition of Rent

There are a lot of issues connected with artistic freedom, color blind casting, community standards and the comparative attitudes of material creators toward their works that factor into these stories. Most are addressed in the dozens of comments on Sherman’s posts. They are a good place to start if you aren’t familiar with the basic, but common, issues related to the stage.

While the performance licenses are pretty explicit about what you can and can’t do, the conversation about intellectual property is always evolving so it is definitely something to keep an eye on.

Not to mention that if you have been flaunting the conditions of your license assuming that you won’t get caught, it may be time to reassess that belief.

*I mistakenly misidentified the school involved with Rent as being in CT. Thanks to Howard Sherman for bringing the mistake to my attention

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, Legal Topics, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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What Responsibility to Inspire Society With Big Vision?

June 18, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

As I noted yesterday, I am breaking up my reflections on Robert Stein’s thoughts on the value of museums and the arts in to two posts.

One observation he made that particularly resonated with me was in relation to the “economic value” argument arts organizations often use. (my emphasis)

“Perhaps the most common knee-jerk reaction when Museums are pushed to make the case for their own existence is to turn to studies of economic impact. The hope is that our local constituents will embrace us with open arms if they only understand how good museums are at “pulling their weight” financially. I think we ought to be very careful not to put too much stock in this economic raison d’être.

[…]

Museums are ideally suited to generate social impact — uniquely so. Whereas every business can compete with the museum in respect to its economic muscle in the community, very few could hope to compete with the potential social impact museums are capable of making. Besides, why would we care to win a game that isn’t central to our reason for being? What happens when our city booms around us and the fiscal imprint of our museum is no longer significant to the same degree it once was? When our city is in financial trouble, does it see museums as primarily economic assets or cultural assets? When the next recession strikes and our revenues dip, does our commensurate value to the city dip as well? I hope not.

Stein talks about how the solutions to global problems require input from all areas of society — with an emphasis on the fact that diverse input is an absolute necessity.

Harvard economic historian David Landes addressed this apparent dichotomy … in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are Rich and Some So Poor (Landes, 1998). In it he emphasizes the intangible factors surrounding the economic challenges present in developing nations and surmises the following, “if we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” In this simple observation, Landes has keyed in on one of the very tangible impacts that the arts can bring.

Indeed, I was intrigued by Stein’s citation of writer Neal Stephenson’s premise that writers were shirking their duty to inspire.

In one of my favorite examples, noted science fiction author Neal Stephenson famously chided his fellow scifi authors in an essay for the World Policy Journal. He noted that generations of scientists had been inspired by the work of Arthur C. Clark, William Gibson, and others, but that the current generation of science fiction authors had given up on imagining a positive future world in favor of more dystopian tales.

[…]

Later in the essay Stephenson quotes Michael Crow, the President of Arizona State University, who prodded, “scientists and engineers are ready and looking for things to do. Time for science fiction writers to start pulling their weight and providing big visions that make sense.”

There are frequent conversations about how theater and movies are revivals and adaptations of material that has proven success and have a built in audience. There are gripes that music getting broad play is tested and analyzed for general appeal which yields a generic product that pleases, but doesn’t excite.

Usually the complaints are based on the idea that artists should be producing original works that push the boundaries of creativity and perhaps challenge assumptions.

Rarely is it suggested that artists are failing a responsibility to provide big vision that inspire people to expect and achieve better for themselves. Do artists in fact have this responsibility? I believe it can be illustrated that artists have served this role at various times throughout history, so are they or are they not doing so now?

The degree of introspection required to answer this will consume more than a few days of consideration.

One of initial thoughts was that it is difficult for art organizations faced with management vs labor conflicts or the liquidation of art collections to focus on whether they are providing society with a big vision. But in some sense, these conflicts reflect upon a need for a society to expect better for themselves and not easy cede to the idea that they play an unimportant role.

Arts in an Age of Technology, creativity, State of the Arts

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We Need CRM Software To Manage Our Relationship With Our Own Creativity

June 17, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Dallas Museum of Art Deputy Director, Robert Stein recently made an argument about the value of museums, and by extension, the arts, as a counter to philosopher Peter Singer’s suggestion that philanthropic giving to the arts means that many more people are fated to remain disabled.

I was actually surprised to learn that Singer is a philosopher because it seemed to me that he was making clearly erroneous assumptions that those giving to the arts aren’t also giving to health and social causes as well. Likewise, it is incorrect to assume that absent the opportunity to give to the arts, all those only giving to that cause would choose to support health and social causes instead.

Indeed, I admittedly always assumed that given the choice between healing the sick and feeding the poor and funding the arts, the sick and poor would tend to win out. The fact Singer was essentially implying arts and culture held a greater allure for philanthropists made me wonder if there were appealing elements of arts and culture I was overlooking and needed to exploit more.

Now just because I find Singer’s approach to be weak doesn’t mean that arts organizations don’t have work to do in communicating their value. Stein’s piece is involved and makes a number of compelling arguments about how arts institutions need to position themselves and their value to the community.

In fact, I have ultimately decided to break up my original post and address different portions of Stein’s piece over the course of two days.

I was most drawn to the following concept:

Consider what could happen for a moment if Museums were able to document — like universities do — our creative alumni? With the technology currently at our disposal, why are we only so focused on patron management systems (CRM by another name) that track the money people donate to us? What if we focused instead on keeping a catalog and evidence of the creative imprint our audiences are exposed to and the impact they make on the world. Such a catalogue could effectively illustrate the museum’s imprint on the formation of creative ideas and creative professionals and their resulting innovation across a multitude of fields. This alumni creativity database could be a proof-text for the role of museums in the formation of creativity and a boon for fundraising linked to this important outcome.

This idea that arts organizations really needed to be assembling a database of cultural experiences as sophisticated as that in a customer relationship management system shook me because really, those experiences are the true assets of our organizations and many arts organizations allow their connection with them to dwindle once they pass.

We cross reference giving and attendance history, know where people like to sit, how they like to be addressed and what their social and professional relationships are. Many arts organizations can pull that information up in moments and spit out a report or mail merged letter tailored to a person’s interest.

But our creative record is often contained in banker boxes and file cabinets that we have to sift through for hours in order to derive any value from it. How many people can pull up the program, images, video, interviews, notes by the creative team/curators and feedback from event attendees in a short period of time?

We make statements about putting the art and artist at the center of our work, but do we really cherish and reflect on what we have done the way a child cherishes a favorite teddy bear and the way an adult wistfully remembers that teddy bear? Or is the work filed away alongside expense reports and tax returns and only pulled out for grant reports and anniversary displays?

Near the end of his piece Stein says,

Only by measuring and counting the difference we make in people will we live up to our potential to change lives. Without it, we risk being relegated to the periphery of contemporary society as mere treasure houses for the wealthy in need of a tax-break.

If we give up on the idea that we can know for sure that our museum makes a difference, then Peter Singer is right, we’re not worth supporting.

He is referring to a commitment to investigating the impact work on outsiders that experience it. But it occurs to me that there might be an element of “if you want someone to love you, you must first love yourself,” in all this. Maybe only by making the totality of our creativity, past and present, central to our focus can we really convince the world of our organization’s value to them.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Fundraising

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