Home Page

The Arts Gotta Get Cookin’

October 3, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

In a piece in on the Harvard Business Review site, food industry consultant Eddie Yoon notes that even as audiences show interest in cooking shows, the desire to cook is waning.

Early in my career I gathered some data for a client on cooking…At the time, the sizes of the three respective groups were about 15% who love to cook, 50% who hate to cook, and 35% who are so-so on the idea.

Nearly 15 years later I did a similar study for a different client. This time, the numbers had shifted: Only 10% of consumers now love to cook, while 45% hate it and 45% are lukewarm about it. That means that the percentage of Americans who really love to cook has dropped by about one-third in a fairly short period of time.

Beyond the numbers, it also suggests that our fondness for Food TV has inspired us to watch more Food TV, and to want to eat more, but hasn’t increased our desire to cook. In part, Food TV has raised our standards to discouragingly high levels: How many of us really feel confident in our cooking skills after watching Iron Chef? (My high school chemistry teacher quit the cello in college after playing a semester next to Yo-Yo Ma.)

He goes on to talk about how consumption trends and technology may force grocers to abandon whole categories of foodstuff that are aligned to the practice of home cooking. The article is worth reading if only for its discussion of food preparation technologies that will retain the fresh taste without preservatives or need for refrigeration, providing greater opportunities to fight hunger around the world.

The article raised a number of questions for me in terms of efforts to increasingly engage communities in creative expression.

We are told people would rather do something creative and participatory than to sit passively. Does the fact that people would rather watch cooking shows than to cook themselves belie that? Is this a situation that applies differently for cooking than for other creative pursuits? Is Yoon correct in suggesting that people are intimidated by cooking shows?

The intimidation factor is something to keep in mind when trying to engage people in creative activities and help them understand their capacity to do so. The equivalent of a cooking practice as an egg wash that seems simple to insiders may intimidate people. (If just reading “egg wash” caused slight anxiety, you know what I am talking about.)

The other thing to consider is that cooking may suffer from the same problem as other artistic and cultural pursuits. It may be perceived as something other people skilled in secret techniques do that is outside personal ability. By pursuing a goal of empowering creative expression in others, the arts and culture community could help revive an interest in home cooking.

Consider, while the percentage of those in Yoon’s survey who love to cook has dropped 5% in 15 years, there are also 5% fewer people who hate it. Presumably both groups have moved toward lukewarm impression given that has increased by 10%. There may be a potential to move the dial closer to love again.

On the other hand, Yoon says cold cereal consumption is shrinking and buying breakfast at Taco Bell is growing, so it may almost be too late for some people.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts

No Comments

Portland Vs. The Overhead Ratio Beast

October 2, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

You may remember that back in 2012 voters in Portland, OR approved a $35 flat tax to benefit arts education in schools. The tax has survived a number of legal challenges, but according to a piece on Artsy, may fall prey to the dreaded overhead cost beast.

Even with the tax’s successes in schools, accounting concerns remain. The cost of administering the tax has risen above the allowed limits, while returns still have yet to reach the expected $12 million annually estimated at the time of passage.

In a memo to the city council last week published by the Portland Mercury, Thomas Lannom, Portland’s revenue division director, detailed some of the challenges—namely, that 7.7% of the total funds raised over five years has gone to administrative expenses related to collecting the tax….

Under the existing law, only 5% of the total raised by the tax should go to administering it. Think of it this way: Since the art tax began in 2013, the city has spent $3.69 million to collect a total of $47.99 million. Under the official cost cap, the city should have spent, at most, $2.4 million.

[…]

…. 7.7% of the total funds raised over five years has gone to administrative expenses related to collecting the tax. Averaged over the last three years, that figure is an even higher 8.9%.

Much of the overhead costs are due to the fact that residents are mailed a tax notice which they must pay separately from federal and state tax. If they don’t pay, the city staff has to take follow up actions and assess penalties.

The process is partly to blame for relatively low compliance with the arts tax. Original estimates predicted that 85% of Portlanders would fork over the funds. But only 73% of residents on average paid in the first three years of the art tax.

While a city government isn’t a non-profit organization, imposing a 5% overhead cap on the program feels just as much an unrealistic expectation as those imposed on non-profits. In the Portland Mercury article, the revenue division director says as much and mentions the 5% cap polled well. What I had hoped the article would mention is the overhead cost typically involved with collecting other taxes in the city.

The other taxes Portland collects are business and occupancy related. People are more habituated to paying these taxes so if those collection costs hovered around 4%-5%, you know it isn’t practical to assume a once a year tax assessed on individuals would have comparable expense levels.

Government Relations, State of the Arts

No Comments

You May Be Dead, But Thanks To A QR Code Your Memory Can Last Forever

September 27, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

Over on ArtsHacker today, Ceci Dadisman wrote a post suggesting that the dreaded/derided QR code may be making a comeback thanks to improved functionality on Apple’s new iOS11.

I have been keeping an eye open for close to a year to see if QR codes might return given that they are used on and for E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G in China. With that sort of massive usage, it isn’t hard to foresee that companies will recognize the utility in transactions and encourage people to use them. When I say they are used for everything in China, I mean beggars on the street have signs with QR codes on them so you can donate. A village planted trees in the shape of a QR code that can be scanned from the air.

There are some other interesting uses like the shopping mall with a giant code on the side of the building so you can discover the hours as you drive by rather than pulling up and squinting at the sign on the door. QR codes also allow all those people waving signs on the side of the road/middle of the sidewalk get paid for catching your attention when you scan their sign to learn more.

The one use that really caught my eye, and you almost miss it in the article, is putting QR codes on tombstones so that people can learn more about the person.

But QR codes appear for dead people, too… Since people in China believe that QR codes are here to stay, even tombstones are engraved with QR codes that memorialize the life-story — through biographies, photographs, and videos — of the deceased. From the leadership of the China Funeral Association: “In modern times, people should commemorate their deceased loved ones in modern ways”.

While some obvious uses for QR codes in the arts would be to provide information about art works in museums and performers and their characters in performances, (especially interactive ones where a printed program might get in the way), I wonder what innovative uses for storytelling people might come up with.

One idea that just popped to mind is a quest that wasn’t dependent on the presence of physical objects. If you scan a treasure chest or information source without having first found and scanned a key/preceding information source, you won’t receive the treasure/solution. That way you can have multiple people play a game without having to make multiple versions of an item for people to claim.

Anything else pop to mind for people?

Arts in an Age of Technology, creativity, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Looking To The Countryside

September 26, 2017

by:

Joe Patti

As a person who has lived and worked in rural locations, I read an article about the Catskill Mountain Foundation (CMF) on the Inside Philanthropy site with great interest. I thought some of the observations made in the piece were valuable both for funders who might be reluctant to fund rural organizations, and for organizations who were rallying support for creative placemaking and related endeavors in rural locations.

Writing for Inside Philanthropy, Mike Scutari suggests that some of the assumptions funders have about getting the most bang for their buck by supporting programs based in urban locales might not be entirely accurate.

Scan Inside Philanthropy’s archives and you’ll find examples of huge urban philanthropy efforts whose return on investment is murky at best. Most recently, David Callahan wrote that despite an influx of $1 billion from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to Flint, Michigan, life has mostly become worse in the city over the past half-century.

Finn’s smaller-is-more-impactful approach flips conventional wisdom on its head: Funders can move the dial more effectively by operating in more concentrated communities.

CMF Founder Peter Finn identified four challenges that particularly face rural organizations in addition to the perennial general concerns about the shrinking pool of available funding.

First, a feeling among some locals that change is not welcome. It’s an idea we sometimes see in urban creative placemaking, where some longtime residents can view arts organizations as interlopers and gentrifiers. Finn’s experience suggests that rural organizations aren’t immune from this perception. “The Catskill Mountain Foundation encountered this at times during the past 20 years,” Finn noted, “but seems to have finally gotten beyond this.”

Second, attracting sustained participation from the local community….

Third, finding talented staff. “We have been lucky that we were able to hire several excellent staff members…But in rural communities, the pool of talent to select from is limited.”

And lastly, the perennial specter of donor fatigue. “It is relatively easy to attract money in the early years for an energetic new arts organization that seems to be on path to success. All organizations encounter bumps in the road, and some donors are lost in this process. There has to be a core of key donors committed to sticking with the mission for the organization to become both successful and sustainable.”

Some of these points probably aren’t groundbreaking revelations. Still, it takes living in a rural community to appreciate the particular nuances of some of these points. I included the entire quote about CMF encountering resistance to change over 20 years because acceptance of the new tends to be a lot faster in urban environments. In many places rural locations you are considered a newcomer if you haven’t been around for about 50 years. I don’t doubt that some people may have finally warmed to them after 20 years.

Fundraising, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

No Comments