This being my 500th entry, I thought I would wax a little philosophical.

Back when I was actually taking philosophy in college, I was always intrigued by the basic idea of what it is that comprises identity. Generally, the concept is introduced with a question like-If your arm is chopped off and replaced with a prosthetic, are you still the same person you were before? Then what about a leg? The questioning goes on removing and adding body parts to start the conversation about how much has to be removed before you are no longer you. Accompanying the question is also the idea of whether the loss of certain senses changes you since you no longer experience the world in the same manner.

The final examine for the course challenged us to compare what different philosophers would say about the identity of crew members on the Star Trek television shows given that the process of “beaming down” demolecularized and then reconstituted them.

Sure it sounds strange, but the essential questions of identity come up quite often in conversation on many topics. Certainly, it emerges all the time in regard to art. One of the first questions most arts students are asked explicitly or implicitly is what is art? One of the initial separations people try to make is between art and craft and then pare their definitions down little by little hoping to find that one defining element wherein art resides.

Given that a pieces of clay shaped into water jugs by Incan potters 500 years ago are enshrined as art objects in museums and private collections, people are often uneasy making definite statements about the difference between art and craft and never get beyond that point.

If distilling the elements of art were so easy to do, someone would mix it with the ingredients of quality, bottle and sell it.

If things do get bogged down or boring during your debate about art, you can always introduce James Joyce’s idea that all the art we see these days, including Norman Rockwell’s paintings, is pornography.

The truth is, seeking the ingredients of art can be just as fun as boldly walking into a room and accusing Norman Rockwell of being an arch-pornographer.

Go into the rehearsals for a new play and try to figure out when it becomes art. Does it happen during rehearsals? Does it happen on opening night? Does it happen some 10 days into the run when everyone settles into their stride? Does it happen at different times for different actors? Has the set and lighting always been artistic from the start but the show doesn’t become art until the acting ensemble integrates itself with these elements?

Was art created the moment the platonic ideal of the show coalesced in the director’s head? Since performance is meant to be experienced by others, is it not validated as art until someone has witnessed it?

If the performance is awful, was art created? Given that the work of many visual artists wasn’t appreciated until after their deaths, art can obviously exist independently of perceived quality and value.

Similar criteria can be applied to paint brush strokes, musical notes and poetic phrases.

Engaging in this sort of speculation with a light heart can make an arts experience enjoyable and I daresay will sharpen one’s perceptions as one endeavors to spot the point at which the ingredients transmuted into art.

Now some may think that coming to these realizations is a great argument for the teaching of philosophy. I should note that I believe I got a C+ in the class and that was probably mercy on the part of the professor. At some point, the lessons started to sink in and make sense in the context of the world at large.

Hmm, I wonder if I can discern the point in my life when the knowledge finally turned in to comprehension….

A lot of bloggers, myself included, talk a good deal about engaging audiences, being relevant to the community and getting people to be less passive participants but we rarely point to any examples that work.

You may not agree with their politics, but Bread and Puppet does all of these things pretty well. They are completely dedicated to doing all the things I have mentioned along with keeping art accessible to all. They have been doing it for about 40 years and until 1998, had tens of thousands of people showing up to an unadvertised annual event to participate.

Now granted, it can be easy to get people interested in what you do when they see an immense puppet hovering in the tree (third photo). And the lure of great homemade bread with garlic aioli can’t be underestimated.

They get people involved with the performance of their pieces. During the summer they have shows every Sunday that are rehearsed with members of the community on Saturday.

Back when I was an undergraduate the theatre department at my college had Bread and Puppet come in to get the students involved in a performance. I couldn’t help but be impressed by the costuming and scale of the puppets we were taught to manipulate. I still remember it quite clearly even though it was (mumble) years ago. I also recall how flexible company founder Peter Schumann was with his vision when the number of students who showed up was less than the amount he requested.

So the lesson here is to hone your papier mache and giant puppet manipulation skills, right? Well no. That is their core competency. They are good at it. Chances are you will look foolish if you aren’t. Better to say the lesson is to find a way to tell your community “this is what we do well, come join us in doing it for a day or so.”

Yes, it isn’t appropriate for everywhere. Yet this might be one of the few suggestions I have made that favors the smaller arts organization with more direct ties to the community over the larger ones with the resources to implement new technologies. Getting things rolling might be as simple as an open house with activities. Though I suspect with so many other options available to people, it will take greater cleverness and long term effort to see satisfying results.

I can be pretty dang certain that it will also take an unflinching dedication to the ideals of your effort on the scale of Bread and Puppet’s to realize success. Strange as it may sound, people seem to respond. Bread and Puppet has an apprenticeship program in which they promise apprentices hard work for no pay and a month of sleeping in a tent. Currently, they have filled their 35 apprentice slots for this summer and have a waiting list.

I did plenty of suffering for my art in squalid conditions that didn’t seem to phase me when I was younger. From the description of what the program is not in an attempt to dissuade those with an incorrect understanding of the program, it appears that more than just young students are looking to participate.

I know we would all love that sort of zeal from our employees, audiences and admirerers.

By way of Arts and Letters Daily is the text of National Endowment of the Arts Chair Dana Gioia’s graduation address at Stanford University.

He uses the apparent controversy that he wasn’t a big enough celebrity to address the graduation as a springboard for discussing the decline in appreciation of the artist, scientist and intellectual in the country over the last 50 years. But he doesn’t lay the blame entirely on popular culture and technology–

“Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.”

While he does engage in some lengthy nostalgia for the way things used to be, I think he makes a valid point about the role of culture in general when he comments, (my emphasis)

“The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.”

I liked how he addressed issue of the disappearance of the arts in schools. He supported up his claim that arts classes don’t train artists, but rather create “complete human beings” by noting that people will need the skills they confer in the emerging creative economy.

He also mentioned that studies in civic participation were showing the emergence of two types of groups, those who sat entranced before their televisions, computers and game consoles and those who balanced these things with exercise, charity work and greater social engagement. What appealed to me in this argument was the evidence that- 1) The numbers show that these behaviors are not specific to education, geography or income so everyone is equally able to participate; 2) The elements that defined what group you tended to be in were reading for enjoyment and participation in the arts.

What I appreciated is that this approach takes advantage of the underlying sentiment of the current “get up, get out and do something” well-being campaign you see a lot of these days to bolster the arts make the whole person argument. Since there has been a feeling that the arts may not be best served by advocacy stressing economic benefit, it was important to provide additional support alongside the future employability point.

As he drew his speech to a close Gioia urges the graduates to be cognizant that while the graduates may have spent a lot of time playing and socializing on their computers, their lives were balanced by intellectual rigor. He notes that this equalizing presence they may have taken for granted will now be absent from their lives upon graduation. They will be entirely responsible for how actively they live their lives.

I was having a conversation with a friend from a previous job that brought up a few questions for me about what motivates people who work in the arts to attend arts events.

This gentleman was assistant marketing director and then marketing director for a theater at which I once worked. He eventually left to work for another marketing company, formed his own company which was acquired by another and is now a partner in that combined company.

In the same period his wife has been phasing herself out of a career in which her services were in high demand and is trying to earn her Actors’ Equity card. A couple years ago they both traveled to Scotland, young children in tow, to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe.

My friend tells me he hasn’t gone to see a show at the place we worked or almost anywhere else in years because of the ticket plus babysitter costs. This is a barrier to attendance that is commonly cited so there was no surprise in that.

What I was thinking as he told me was that if a guy who was paid to convince others that there was value for them in surmounting this barrier is unwilling to attend, how much harder is it these days to appeal to those without any background in arts attendance at all.

Granted, there is the element of his daughters’ youth that has to be factored in as well. Arts person or not, there is a necessity of child rearing that must be heeded. He gave the impression that he might be attending events more often now that his girls were getting older. It will be interesting to revisit the topic in a couple years to see if he did indeed start paying to attend shows more often.

I make the specific qualifier about paying to attend because he has been attending the shows his wife performs in using the comp tickets she gets. This fact spawned another train of thought that does not reflect on my friend’s practice, but is something I have observed in general.

I have known about 20 people in the last 15 years who haven’t been able to make the philosophical transition from starving artist to paying member of public. They got used to paying $5 or getting comps when they were students and/or starting out and years after won’t attend a show unless they receive the same treatment. In some cases they appeal to some pretty tenuous connections with people they only talk to when they want tickets. At least once a year I get a call invoking the name of someone 10 years gone.

I am betting some of my readers know these people. I am also willing to wager that some of them are pretty well off and put their ramen eating days behind them or worse, are successful professionals in the industry and feel their importance earns them free admission. (I have to confess, much to my chagrin every year I am sent two season passes to a theatre based on my theoretical importance. I am typically too busy and embarrassed by the idea to attend more than once or twice a year.)

I don’t know that this type of behavior is necessarily solely endemic to the arts rather than just being a component of a personality type. I am sure there are people who expect free food when they return to a restaurant where they once worked. Personally, I would prefer the problem to be personality related than to think that a lot of arts people are parasitic jerks.

The problem with this answer is that it provides more evidence that us arts people just like everyone else. If a guy who has performed and worked in theatres for over a decade leaves the performing arts world and has as hard a time motivating himself past to attend as the couple next door, maybe the arts aren’t a calling for a special segment of the population.

Frankly, I hate to have this sort of pessimism creep into my world view. The idea that being part of the arts confers a special grace and nobility makes being flat broke a little more tolerable. (It also dovetails nicely with a Catholic upbringing replete with tales of suffering saints.) And even though I am in administration, I feel the phrase “run arts like a business” robs it of some value.

I have come to realize that this grace and nobility isn’t the sole providence of those working in the industry but rather can be shared among all those encountering it. (Which is not to say that a dirt poor existence doesn’t sharpen the senses and appreciation of those who are receptive to experiencing art!) Partaking of this grace and nobility as a suffering poverty stricken artist in your youth certainly hasn’t earned you comps for life. You can’t be part of the in-crowd forever. One day you have to join the great unwashed and pay for your tickets.

Via Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog is a three part discussion about Joshua Bell’s experience playing anonymously at a Washington, DC train station back in April.

The three parts were actually recorded on the same day but have been posted periodically on the Polysemy Woodshed podcast/blog page. (Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Their discussions were some of the most thoughtful on the event that I have come across. The participants tackled a lot of the same issues about respect and recognition of talent, appropriateness of venue and curiosity of the children that I and others who have blogged on this topic have.

Among the specific ideas I found intriguing was the concept of an agreement existing between the performer and listener. Another was comments in part two by one of the participants where she talks about how discouraging it was that people walking by Bell seemed determined to ignore him. A short time later she acknowledges the common practice of tuning out information that is not immediately pertinent when she admits that she has only just noticed there were a lot of birds singing in her backyard and she has no idea if they have recently taken up residence there or if she has been tuning them out for a long time now.

The idea that you have have to have a frame of reference of some sort to assist your evaluation of art also came up in relation to art appearing in familiar and unfamiliar situations as well as simply having had enough prior experience that you can make a deliberate choice between stopping or walking away.

Part of the allure of Joshua Bell, one commenter argues is that there are a series of actions one engages in prior to attending a performance that create a sense of excitement and anticipation. Having circumvented these preparatory stages by appearing unannounced in a train station, Bell divested himself of much of the framework that make his performances so valued. He became merely a good violin player in the subway.

For those of you who recoil at the idea that Joshua Bell has much less value unannounced outside the symphony hall as he does inside let me point out that the U.S. dollar has no value outside what we invest in it. It is not backed by gold or silver–just belief. Print the exact design of a dollar bill on the exact same paper using only black ink and it is worth only the paper it is printed on. Add the blues, greens, yellows and reds and suddenly it is worth a bit more. It isn’t perfect analogy but in the same manner do tickets, clothes, dinner arrangements and nice performance halls contribute additional value to Joshua Bell.

As those discussing the situation point out, all these ancillary elements that enhance the value of the experience in our minds don’t actually improve the art. They are just things we as attendees have convinced ourselves are important to improving our receptiveness and enjoyment of the event.

One of the people talks about Matt Haimovitz who looked be one of the next great concert cellists but gave it all up because he felt he was disconnected from the audience and instead started playing in rock clubs, ice cream parlors and malls.

As the third segment ended, they pondered whether it was worth having orchestra musicians busk from time to time in the hopes that some ideas about how things might be changed to reach the man on the street would emerge.

I am not quite sure if there will be another installment or not. Each episode didn’t really indicate either overtly or imply by incomplete discussion arc that there would be additional sections posted. Since each segment was posted in two week intervals, I may just have to wait a couple weeks to find out!

Via Arts and Letters Daily is an interview with Ray Bradbury wherein he mentions that he never intended people to interpret Fahrenheit 451 as a warning against censorship, but rather a warning against the lack of substance on television. At a time when the few people who had televisions were watching shows on seven inch black and white screens, he rather presciently foresaw a world where people had wall sized televisions. (One even dominates the wall of his house these days.)

So often in the arts we are in a position of interpreting meaning for others. In many cases we don’t have the creator alive and available to check our perceptions against. To a certain extent, artists cede control over what a work means as soon as they show it to another person. Artists need to accept that people will see things in a work that aren’t there and then will start deconstructing it looking for more.

Of course, if the artist tells you point blank that they didn’t infuse their work with the meanings you are seeing, you as the observer can revel in your discovery of the unintended, but shouldn’t insist it means something else to the artist’s face. Bradbury apparently walked out of a class at UCLA because students wouldn’t stop insisting he was talking about censorship.

This type of situation raises questions about interpreting the meaning of art. First of all, if thousands of high school English teachers have been disseminating the wrong information about the themes intended by a living author, what are educators and those serving the same role at arts organizations getting wrong about dead artists?

As we write program notes, conduct Q&As or talk to ushers and patrons in the lobby, how much are we getting wrong? Maybe the idea that Hamlet was motivated by an Oedipal complex never crossed Shakespeare’s mind. (Especially since the concept is never considered until after Freud coined the term.)

Second is the matter of balance. Where does the balance fall between telling people what is meant and telling people there is no single correct interpretation? People come to educators and arts professionals for the tools to process unfamiliar material. We try to give them language and lenses to assist in this endeavor but part of the joy of encountering art is to see something no one told you was there.

The problem is that sometimes these realizations are tainted by the context we bring to the work and don’t reflect the intentions or reality of the artist. Now granted, personal context is the basis of some works of art like Impressionist paintings. But you are also in the position of not being able to tell people they are wrong about Hamlet since you subscribe to and encourage the “No wrong answer” school of thought.

There are lengthy essays written on this whole concept. But let me just toss a thought out there for you to ponder–

Who owns the meaning of a work of art? Even if you are polite to Ray Bradbury and believe that he only intended the book to be about television, is he essentially only accorded the status of a equal interpreter of art because he has missed all the other aspects of the book that speak to you?

The funny thing is, in denying an artist’s stated intent one often holds him/her in greater esteem for being such an adept creator, they subconsciously invested their work with multiple layers of meaning.

Since today is Memorial Day there are forces inspiring me in directions other than blogging. It was by a bit of serendipity that I came across this video last week illustrating that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to B-Boy dancing.

This excerpt from “Detours – An Experimental Dance Collaboration,” alternates between B-Boy and dance/movements that preceded and inspired them from ethnic dancing, martial arts and films. Some of the sources have been obvious, but it was intriguing to see some of the more obscure origins of some of the moves.

While B-Boy dance has always been impressive to watch, viewing this video segment has increased it in my estimation as integrating that which is best of human physical expression.

Warning: Strong Language in Interview Section at Start and End.

Over the last few months I have been serving on a subcommittee advising the Salvation Army on the theatre section of the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center they plan to build with a portion of the $15 billion the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc bequeathed to them.

The scope of the entire project which will also include immense athletic facilities, swimming pools, classrooms and daycare, is frankly intimidating so I am glad I am only focused on the performance space planning.

The San Diego facility providing a prototype for the local project was built while Mrs. Kroc was alive. She set very high standards for the project mandating that the normally modest Salvation Army cut no corners. The Salvation Army has some tough decisions to make given that while they want to spread the money around to as many communities as possible, they also need to allocate enough to each to satisfy her wishes.

I think she would be pleased to know that the center will be placed directly adjacent to a burgeoning community that will derive immense benefit from all the services it will provide.

On a related topic, at least three people on the Kroc Center subcommittee, myself included, have been approached by consultants hired by another organization planning to build a theatre nearby. I had been contacted a year earlier by another consultant who was engaged to put a business plan together. After a long discussion I told her I felt one phase of the plan would be valuable to the community but that a second phase was dicey because people didn’t realize what resources were required to run a theatre well. She called me back at the end of her study and essentially told me she agreed.

The second consultant told me they were just double checking the information from the first consultant. Later I wondered if the first consultant hadn’t given her employers the answer they wanted when another arts leader told me the second consultant was trying to persuade him to urge their employers to scale back the project. I wonder if like those living outside Phoenix, the residents of that neighborhood don’t identify with the city core.

I reference this second case not only because I have been pondering if it aligns with the findings of the Rand Corporation regarding arts environments in places like Phoenix, but also to note the different processes organizations go through in construction planning. I don’t know if depending on a consultant is better than putting together a committee of professionals or not. Consultants are probably less likely to have potential conflicts of interest with a project but can impart more sagacious advice based on experience.

Frankly, I was a little concerned that I wasn’t qualified to advise the Salvation Army until I learned the plan had to be vetted by the state, regional, national and international headquarters.

One of the interesting things about serving on the Kroc Center subcommittee is that the people we were advising had no preconceived notions about how the theatre would be used other than wanting to hold a few religious services. At the first committee meeting we were told to outfit the building with everything we wished our theatres had. Most of the meeting was spent with the committee members asking questions about the core purpose of the facility– producing, presenting, rentals, support of the arts classes– with the Salvation Army staff member assigned to us scribbling everything down to pose to her superiors.

By the second meeting the organization had clarified their thoughts in relation to all of our questions and suggestions about the niches the space might fit. It appears they intend to primarily rent the facility to interested parties. This suits me well since the facility will be in my geographic proximity. They won’t compete with my presenting activities but will provide a place for me to refer renters I have to turn away for lack of available dates.

One of the things that impressed me was that they are truly planning for the needs of the community rather than their organization. For example, the seating capacity needed to serve the potential community users will probably exceed attendance at their services for the foreseeable future by a fair amount leaving a lot of empty seats.

There is one more meeting in this phase of the planning and this time we committee members have homework. We have been asked to review three space designs, mostly pertaining to square feet allocated for different rooms and comment on whether it is sufficient for the proposed uses of the facility. We have also been asked to staff the facility with employees and volunteers and generate a list of all the furniture, fixtures and equipment that would fall out if you took the roof off and turned it over.

It has been quite entertaining imagining what would fall out if a giant child caming along, opened the roof of my theatre like a dollhouse’s and inverted it. Given that the assistant theatre manager’s niece turned one of her set models into a dollhouse, it isn’t so far fetched. I’ve been practicing my knots so I can lash myself to the nearest railing or pipe just in case.

When I made my entry on artist neighborhoods and the evicting power of gentrification a couple weeks ago, I meant to link to an additional article in Business Week. Now I am sort of glad I didn’t because it provide me the opportunity to raise the subject of what environments artists really value.

The Business Week article, “Bohemian Today, High-Rent Tomorrow,” obviously deals with the issue of artists making neighborhoods too cool for them to live in.

One of the things the piece discusses is that artists will trade affordability for the chance to live near other artists or at least near people with money to consume their artistic product. The piece is coupled with a slide show of the best places for artists to live. (buttons to advance the slides in upper right hand corner.)

Interestingly, since the list came out in February, people have been regularly posting comments to the site expressing their dismay that NYC and LA and others to a lesser extent were included on the list. (Kingston, NY is the real winner in the comments.) The feeling is that some of the cities on the list are too expensive and inhospitable to artists.

The article had acknowledged this but rated other factors as compensating for these things. Given that one of these factors was a concentration of artists and arts establishments, some people are apparently willing to make the trade off. Whether they enjoy a similar standard of living as artists in the other cities on the list, (i.e. size/condition of housing and number of roommates), is unknown.

So the question for my readers is, what trade offs are you will or not willing to make in regard to the city in which you live?

I am revisiting a couple stories tonight.

The first is some applause for Michael Rice over at Cool As Hell Theatre podcast who has been picked up by station KQED in San Francisco. Michael’s podcast is the first, and at this time only podcast broadcast by the station.

I have to confess, I haven’t been listening to his podcast as often as I would like. Everytime I do listen, I scold myself for neglecting his work. I appreciate that he asks questions you want to know the answers to that most interviewers avoid.

Case in point, in his most recent interview with Alison Jean White. She is the youngest member of American Conservatory Theater’s permanent company, a distinction previously held by Annette Benning. He asks her the requisite questions about feeling pressured to live up to Benning’s legacy. But he also asks her if she felt like she was exploited as cheap labor when she was a student at A.C.T. and talks about how he felt that way when he was in a different acting training program.

Given that she is still employed by A.C.T. and probably wouldn’t want to malign the organization, he probably didn’t expect her to answer negatively if she was disgruntled. I am just always impressed that he asks questions that reveal the inner lives of artists and the struggles and concerns they face. He also makes himself vulnerable to derision by revealing that he felt so exploited and burned out that he turned down offers of employment after a showcase.

Anyhow, I have made up for my past errors by subscribing to his podcast. It will be interesting to see where things go now that he has the potential for greater distribution. (Hopefully those San Francisco Public Radio listeners are hip to podcasts!)

Second issue I wanted to revisit I wrote on a bit more recently. It seems The Independent of London decided to replicate the Joshua Bell experiment the Washington Post conducted a few months ago that I posted about a couple weeks back.

They chose to place violinist Tasmin Little in a station far less appealing than L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. The railway bridge beside Waterloo Station is described as “…amply layered with pigeon shit, blankets belonging to the homeless lie scrunched in a corner, and no doubt the place is used as an impromptu loo by Friday night binge-drinkers. It’s also windy, cold and, with the passing trains, a bit noisy.”

The article admits the environment isn’t conducive to stopping to listen echoing many of the same complaints a French businessman makes as he passes through. In fact, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra are the first to recognize Little and won’t stop because they have a train to catch.

While I feel both the Washington Post and The Independent articles got a little melodramatic as they wailed about the poor children being heartlessly yanked away from the musicians, in The Independent story, far more young people stopped and gave money than older folks who pay large amounts to see Little in concert halls.

It makes me wonder if my earlier thoughts about finding appropriate places outside of the concert hall to perform and then studying the who, what, when, where and how of getting people to sincerely stop and listen as a way of discovering a better method of delivery might have some validity.

The newly opened Honolulu Design Center is really trying to change the way people think about the place home and office furnishings has in their lives by positioning this facility as a gathering place.

If you have never considered your furniture store a center of social activity, you aren’t alone. The HDC figures this is the first time anyone has ever tried anything like this. If you look at their plans closely, you can see they have really done some thinking about their target audience.

The three story building has a cafe, a wine bar offering 90 choices and a 90 seat fine dining restaurant which will feature some of the furniture they are selling in their 6 showrooms. There is also an events area where Jazz is performed on Thursday nights and Wednesday and Sundays are film nights.

Just as Home Depot and Lowes offer little classes for the do-it yourselfers, HDC offers seminars that fit the lifestyle of their target clientele. The Small Business Administration held a micro-enterprise workshop for people wanting to start their own small business with monthly seminars on other topics to come. Another workshop offered helps people view home construction as an interconnected system so that all the segments integrate well together and result in low operating costs.

A television show, “Generation X and WhY Inquiring” will be filmed there featuring students

“-ages 9 to 17 – from various schools who will discuss and debate…the dynamics between boys and girls and issues ranging from harmless teasing to more serious topics like safety, drugs and health. Other important areas like global conservation, pollution, oceans, Social and educational issues…”

A number of thoughts passed through my mind. First that it must be nice to have the money to build the place as well as the money to buy from this place. While I am told there are pieces I could afford, $42,000 leather couches are more in line with what they offer.

Still, even though they are in a good position to recoup part of their investment being located next to the construction site of two towers of condos which need to be furnished, they are taking a big chance with this project. People might buy coffee or wine while perusing furniture–but are they going to go to a furniture store, nice as it might be, for dinner and a movie?

I also wondered if all the performing arts centers that have been built in the last few years at costs the exceed those of that Honolulu Design Center by millions have had as good a handle on how to serve their target audiences as the furniture place does.

In some respects, clues about what to offer and how to position themselves already exist. As mentioned earlier, they have upgraded the classes that Home Depot offers. They also seem to have improved on Target Stores’ Design for All campaign. At the prices they are charging, they certainly aren’t offering design for all, of course.

As I observed in an entry two years ago, humans seem to have an intrinsic need for art/beauty/meaning/purpose in their lives. Target Stores aim to bring the semblance of the aesthetic high end stores like HDC possess within the reach of everyone. HDC has moved a step further and is trying to bring many elements of the lifestyle their furniture already represents into one location.

To their credit, this isn’t some new initiative that marketing research indicated was a good idea. It is just another chapter in the company’s long history of sincere investment in local arts and culture. Their weekly print ads feature local visual and performing artists and promote their work and upcoming performances.

Thinking about what lessons could be derived from this for the arts, I came up with a great deal of “if onlys”- If only arts organizations had the kind of money to do market research to develop a great plan for serving the needs of a target audience; if only they could maintain a consistent staff and cohesive vision to see the plan through (Took HDC 8 years to come to fruition); if only they had the funding enabling them to ignore the distracting noise of earned/unearned income woes.

What I ultimately end up thinking is that HDC may serve as an example of what an arts organization should be– an unexpected arrangement that suits the community in which it is located rather than based on a standard set in other places. Somewhere out there may be a mini-van dealership/daycare/athletics field/community arts center catering to dual career-soccer parents.

Reflecting upon my use of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to discuss the definition of quality, I wondered if my support of his grading experiment might have been an early predictor of my involvement in the arts.

It seems to me that a person who valued insightful comments on their papers might be more likely to gravitate toward professions that provided more intangible rewards like esteem and self-actualization rather than high pay and material perks. On the other hand, I wonder if people who valued a specific letter or numeric grade over extensive commentary might be more likely to join professions with clearer remuneration.

I did a brief search for studies that might have examined this and didn’t find anything. I suspect the failure to do so is more a factor of not knowing what terms to use in a search than lack of research related to this topic.

About three years ago I included a Harvard Business Review article about the single perfect customer satisfaction survey question in an entry about customer service. (How willing would you be to recommend company X to a friend?)

I would be interested to know if there is any research out there that might support the dependability of using a single question to determine if someone in high school or college was disposed toward a career in the non-profit field based on what form of feedback they valued most on their assignments.

If there was a correlation between preferred form of feedback and profession, perhaps the perfect career path question might be: “What do you find more valuable in assessing the progress of your academic career, a letter/numeric grade or extensive written/verbal feedback?”

Does anyone know of research studies that might prove or disprove this notion?