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A First Stab At A State Of Performing Arts Survey

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Joe Patti

Association of Performing Arts Professionals featured a webinar today reporting on the results of a survey they conducted about the state of the performing arts. Regrettably, I missed it but they posted many slides on Twitter today.  The study they conducted last month is meant to provide a baseline against which to assess how things are developing going into the future.

One of the first slides to catch my attention addressed ticket sales. We have been wondering if our sales numbers were reflected by the nation as a whole.  Sure enough, in terms of single ticket sales, numbers are down and only 52% of audiences reported buying tickets in late January/early February. (This may be a factor of supply of performances to view as it is demand, however.)

In another post, they reported subscriptions are down as well. Really, neither of these datapoints are of great surprise to me given how the state of the pandemic has fluctuated.  They also noted many organizations are offering non-ticketed content to keep audiences engaged.

Audience support of mask and vaccine mandates at performances was strong.

Also of interest was the news that arts professionals are returning to work, but are much more mindful of a work-life balance. There are concerns about being able to fully staff positions with qualified individuals due to worker expectations and people leaving the field or being lured away by better work environment and compensation.

 

State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Is Your Talent Being Hoarded?

by:

Joe Patti

The Marginal Revolution blog linked to a really interesting study on talent hoarding a practice in which managers prevent productive workers from seeking promotions. The study author, Ingrid Haegele, found that when the manager is promoted, subordinates have the best opportunity to gain promotions themselves.

My findings indicate that talent hoarding causes misallocation of talent by reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers….Manager rotations increase worker applications for major promotions by 123%, indicating that talent hoarding deters a large group of workers from applying for promotions.

[…]

I find that talent hoarding has disparate impacts by gender. Talent hoarding deters a larger share of female applicants from applying for major promotions compared to men. Female marginal applicants are twice as likely to land a major promotion than males, implying that talent hoarding
is more consequential for women’s career progression. Conditional on landing a promotion, women are almost three times as likely as their male counterparts to perform well in their new positions, suggesting that the firm may be failing to realize potential productivity gains by not enabling
talented women to progress to higher-level positions. Female marginal applicants are much more qualified than males in terms of their educational qualifications and past performance, indicating that talent hoarding affects women at a higher part of the quality distribution compared to men.

Interestingly, Haegele found that talent hoarding was generally gender neutral. Male and female managers were equally likely to hoard talent and these managers suppressed the advancement opportunities of both male and female subordinates generally equally. She says credits the gender difference to:

“….the survey finds that women in the firm place more value on preserving a good relationship with their manager and rely more on managers’ career guidance when making application decisions.”

As a result, they are less likely to apply for promotions.

A couple things to note: First, this is only a study of the impact of talent hoarding. There are plenty of other factors which contribute to workplace inequities for everyone. The author had to control for a lot of factors in her study, among them being that managers have a lot of subtle tools that their disposal to reinforce talent hoarding that are difficult to detect.

The other thing to note is that she conducted her survey on a large multi-national manufacturing corporation with most of its employees in Germany. While she does cite other studies illustrating how talent hoarding occurs in the U.S. and other countries, her findings may not be entirely applicable to small non-profits in the U.S.

Talent hoarding in staff of 12 is certain to have entirely different dynamics, especially with the limited opportunities for internal promotions.

But if anything, during this Great Resignation period where people are looking for better opportunities for themselves, being aware that your manager has a disincentive to praise your talents, both within the organization and to you personally is something to consider.

Leadership, Working In The Arts

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Curiosity Satisfied By A Strange Answer

by:

Joe Patti

I am not sure how I came across the article, but this Fall I came across an interview on The First Peoples Fund website with master traditional folk artist Kevin Locke. In the course of the conversation, Locke notes that what is widely known as the Native American flute is a pretty recent invention that wasn’t really part of the traditional cultural practices. The bolded section is the interviewer’s question. I don’t seem to see the interviewer identified.

In 1983 or 1982, a German American named Michael Graham Allen invented the Native American flute. It’s based on the Japanese wind instrument called a shakuhachi. I asked Allen why he did that. He said he made an original Indigenous flute but he didn’t know how to market it. He came upon this tuning system based on the Japanese shakuhachi and renamed it as a Native American flute….Pretty soon, everybody all over the world got interested in this instrument. But it’s not an Indigenous North American musical aesthetic. It’s basically Japanese. But the beautiful thing about it — and I’m not knocking it, I’m just saying people need to be aware where this instrument comes from…

And the instrument sounds so good! There are thousands of Native American flute music recordings that are just improvisational. I don’t want to discredit the music. I think it’s a great thing, but it has nothing to do with Indigenous tradition.

That in itself is a problem because the original genre associated with the Indigenous flute is a classic poetic or literary style that comes from the woodlands in the Great Lakes area, Northern Plains, and Southern Plains. And it existed for so many generations because the genre has characteristics that are uniform across most of North America. It’s a formulaic compositional pattern, even though the songs are diverse within themselves.

That’s so wild. First, I didn’t know the history of the Native American flute. Initially I had mixed feelings about its non-Indigenous origins. But what I’m hearing is that this musical instrument lifts your creativity. Is that accurate? 

Yeah. 

I don’t know exactly how to process this since it pretty much seems like a type of cultural exploitation. Though I don’t know if the article provides enough information to determine that either if it was an Indigenous instrument that had Japanese tuning and was marketed as a Native American flute.  The situation is confusing and  Locke frames it in a very gracious way and seems to indicate that it has been a medium through which other Native artists have found success. It seems like it might have been invented in the name of Indigenous peoples but they also have primary ownership of it.

It does, however, clarify my previous general sense that Japanese and Indigenous cultures developed a similar musical instrument independently of each other. Not so much I guess.  I thought it worth following Locke’s suggestion about raising awareness of the instrument’s origins and posting about it.

General Musings

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Come For A Haircut, See A Van Gogh

by:

Joe Patti

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone running an arts venue that many attendees are over the mask wearing thing. At my venue, we actually had a more conservative mandatory policy for mask wearing than our university parent. At the beginning of December, we were prevailed upon to loosen those restrictions by my boss so for about two weeks we were at “strongly suggested” before the omicron surge saw everyone, including our parent organization institute mandatory masking again.  Still, it wasn’t long after the new year that we had people leveraging loopholes to avoid wearing masks.

Over the holidays I was amused to read that some landmark institutions in the Netherlands were chafing against restrictions there in a fairly creative way. The Van Gogh Museum, Mauritshuis gallery, and Concertgebouw concert hall engaged some barbers, nail artists and fitness instructors to provide services at their venues because those businesses weren’t restricted in the way that art institutions were.

“We wanted to make the point that a museum is a safe visit and we should be open,” Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker told AFP.

“The mayor called me last night and she said she’s not permitting this. We expect to get a warning at some point after which we will have to close, but we wanted to make this point very badly so here we are.”

One of the barber’s clients said he had come because he was “pro-culture”.

[…]

Nearby, the “Hair salon at the Concertgebouw” event saw two masked barbers clip hair on stage, while the orchestra played Symphony No. 2 by Charles Iver.

“After two years of patience and an ever-constructive attitude, it is high time for a fair perspective for the cultural sector,” Concertgebouw director Simon Renink said.

Fitness classes took place at the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague, home to Vermeer’s famed “Girl with the Peal Earring, while the Speelklok museum in Utrecht set itself up as a gym.

No mention of whether the ubiquitous “Shave and a Haircut” riff was played anywhere.

While the pandemic is certainly going to force arts organizations to rethink their business models, I am not sure that salon services are going to become the next trend. Exercise and yoga classes at museums and galleries was a thing pre-pandemic so I wouldn’t completely discount the idea.

The story does remind us that arts people are very creative thinkers. If arts leaders are willing to exercise this skillset in defiance of governments, perhaps they will be more willing to try new ideas without fearing the reactions of funders and donors as much

 

Audience Relations, Government Relations, Leadership, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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