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What You Might Learn In That Stupid Arts Requirement Class

September 1, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

I guess because it is the beginning of the school year, a number of online media outlets are devoting some space to talking about the value of different college classes in one’s life. Slate has a whole, well slate, of stories queued up to address about 16 classes across the week.

A few of them address liberal arts classes so they are worth taking note for the perspective they bring to our little corner of existence.

Yesterday, Dan Check, Vice President of the Slate Group promoted Intro to Acting as a way to get you out of your comfort zone.

Throughout life, we all occasionally feel a lack of competence; college is a great time to practice that feeling, to proceed without mastery or certainty or even talent, and to realize both what effort can do, as well as what it cannot. In the technology world, we often talk about being unafraid to fail, and of failing fast, but very rarely do we find opportunities to practice—that is, to seriously try and seriously fail in a situation where the stakes are as low as a single grade in a single semester outside of one’s major.

This idea about permission to fail comes up relatively frequently in conversations among arts people (at least online). Often it is in terms of there not being enough wiggle room in budgets to allow failure.

It is good to be reminded that one of the things the arts can offer to other areas of endeavor is the experience of failing in a low-stakes environment that involves human interaction. I use this term in contrast to competitive environments like sports or individual efforts like learning a language or physical skill (surfing).

Succeeding and failing at each of these obviously have their benefits as well so people who are comfortable in arts situations like acting need to seek out corresponding experiences that take them out of their comfort zone.

In another piece this week, Mark Joseph Stern acknowledged the complexity of feelings involved when faced with people who don’t share the same degree of knowledge and appreciation of visual art. While he says it makes him feel sad when people dismiss a work of visual art at a glance when ignorance is so easily solved, he admits that encountering a work of visual art can be challenging when we are used to television and video explaining themselves to us.

I once saw a woman stop in front of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, scoff, then turn on her heels and walk away. At the time, I judged her. But in retrospect, I suspect she was simply overwhelmed by its skittering vibrancy—and rather than attempt to process her reaction, she got defensive and gave up.

Second, visual art demands analysis. Most movies and TV shows place plot before all else, allowing shallow, distracted viewing. You can watch, and enjoy, almost anything on TV today without thinking about cinematography or set design or most other visual elements. With paintings, you have to do a little more work, …Learning these skills takes practice—not much, but enough to scare away most museumgoers.

As I implied, these articles aren’t just appearing on Slate. On Quartz this week, Brendan Mathews, asserts that the most useful class you can take in college is a fiction workshop.

Before I began teaching, I worked in marketing, digital media and communications. I saw more than one dot-com boom go bust. And at every one of these jobs, I had to consider new ideas from my colleagues—business plans, market analyses, product prototypes, website redesigns—and provide cogent, meaningful feedback. Back then, I counted on a few simple rules that I learned in my own undergraduate creative writing workshops:

“I like it” and “I don’t like it” are equally worthless. When someone asks you to read a story that they’ve poured their heart and soul into, saying you like it or don’t like it tells them nothing….

No playing favorites. No story in a workshop gets a free pass simply because the writer is a senior and you a lowly sophomore. And no story gets shot down simply because the writer’s last story was a tragically ill-conceived mash-up of gothic horror and My Little Pony fan fiction….

No meanies. Students do not eviscerate each other’s stories for sport, nor do they bestow baskets full of rainbows and sunshine on each other. A good workshop teaches you to put your own issues aside and deliver your opinion—especially your highly critical opinion—with some degree of diplomacy…

And no hard feelings. On the flip side, sometimes you’re the one whose story gets a rough reception in workshop. You expected tears of sympathy; instead you got peals of laughter, or even worse, a shrug. What do you do? You take pride in the fact that you put your work out there, you don’t take it personally, and you vow to do better next time…

Like Dan Check’s piece on acting class, Mathews lays this out in the context everyone wants to know about today–how will this class help me get a job?

Yes, there is a need to emphasize art for art’s sake, but art doesn’t serve a single purpose in life or it wouldn’t have any value as a basic element of human identity. It conveys life skills, economic benefits, aesthetic appreciation and exists on its own merits. Articles like these provide tips on making the case we would just as soon be self-evident for art as it is for accounting, biology, finance, marketing, pre-med, etc.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

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Signalling Expectations

August 31, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

Lately I have been seeing many uses of technology aimed at influencing people to drive more considerately and safely. There is a GPS system that will start to give directions in a child’s voice when the vehicle enters a school zone.

On his show, Crowd Control, Daniel Pink put pictures of people in wheelchairs below disabled parking signs and a non-profit in Russia created holograms of people in wheelchairs, both efforts to deter those who didn’t need the spots from parking there.

All these were attempts to use empathy to shape the decisions people made. A question that came to mind was whether technology has desensitized us to needs of others to the point where steps needed to be taken to reassert the need to take care.

Or is the frequency at which people break these rules roughly at the same point it was 20 years ago and this is a case where technology and clever ideas have advanced to the point they can be used to address violators?

As much as I would like to claim we are ceding ever greater amounts of our humanity to technology, I actually suspect in this case the latter is true.

I wanted to use this as a jumping off point to wonder how ideas like these could be used to instill empathy and good judgement in arts audiences. There have been a lot of stories and discussions about talking, texting and other intrusive behaviors in performances.

Two of the ongoing conversations on these matters that I have been following recently are Diane Ragsdale’s Jumper blog and Scott Walters on the Clyde Fitch Report.

One of Walters’ general themes is that the “churchification” of performing arts has made attendance a stale, boring experience.

I am a little wary about what might result from poorly conceived plans to change that, given that people’s online behavior reveals a willingness to do something outlandish to call attention to themselves if they perceive license to do so. But I can certainly see Scott’s point that some sort of social shift is going to be required.

Since every situation will require different degrees of comportment, cultivating a sense of empathy and good judgement in audiences as to what is required and developing a method for performers to signal what the dynamics of the event are, will likely be the crucial element that will make it all work.

Making a preshow announcement and printing the rules in the program book clearly isn’t working so additional methods, channels, whatever, are needed.

Of course, performing arts venues need to do their part by not always having the same rules for every event. First of all, it is difficult to experiment with different ways of communicating intent and expectations if there is no opportunity for practical application. Second, audiences are already probing the boundaries of those rules. Either the boundaries have to loosen from time to time or audiences may defer on entering the boundaries altogether.

Right now some of the more effective and clear methods of communicating that the usual boundaries are not in effect are when people make a curtain speech announcement that riffs on the traditional speech by emphasizing “We ask that you DO take as many pictures as you want. DO tell your friends about the show by making social media posts during the show…”

That is only effective as long as the archetypal announcement exists to riff on. The goal is to ultimately remove it as an archetype even if the rules are still applied in certain instances.

I would suggest that the need to make announcements of any kind will be the indicator that work still needs to be done. The majority of attendees at a classical music concert intrinsically “know” how to behave there just as attendees at a rock concert “know” different rules apply without being told.

When people can enter a room and pick up general clues about expectations from the way the staff and other attendees are interacting and perhaps a glance around for more formal signifiers to confirm, then we are seeing a measure of success.

If events unfold contrary to expectations, either the event host needs consider whether this means they need to do a better job of signalling expectations or they need to do a better job of heeding the audience’s signaled expectations.

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Have You Gotten To The Point You Care When People Steal Your Work?

August 26, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

You know how you are supposed to check the batteries in your smoke detectors every time we go on or off daylight savings time? It may be worth having a similar rule for checking your intellectual property licenses for your online presences. Maybe every time you renew your domain name?

There was a recent story about a photographer who had set his Creative Commons License to allow commercial use with attribution.

When a map company used his image on one of their publications giving him full attribution, he sued them for their use of the image and lost.

The tone of the article is that it was sort of silly of him to be protesting the use of his work in a way explicitly allowed.

But it occurred to me that it would be very easy for many artists and organizations to accidentally find themselves in a similar situation as their online presence evolved.

For example, maybe your website or blog just starts out as a source of information for people about what you are doing. You set your license to require people to quote you with attribution or a link. You aren’t trying to monetize anything and you would be happy if people quoted you all over the Internet.

Later, your organization starts a new exciting program where you are producing all sorts of interesting stuff (or if you are an individual, you take up a hobby/refine your skills and get really good).

You start putting images and examples of your work online, forgetting your license is so permissive and the next thing you know you are seeing your work appearing all over social media, people are selling tshirts and tote bags with your images and are using your video and audio tracks in their own videos.

If you have been publicizing/bragging about achievements and have realized ambitions much greater than when you first established your blog, website, Pinterest, Flickr, etc, presence you may want to go back and review how much permission people have to utilize the content of those pages.

A similar issue may arise if you are featuring other people’s work and their more stringent use requirements aren’t clearly discernible.

Upon review, you may be surprised by how lax your settings are. Or maybe you will despair that no one wants to steal your stuff despite how lax your settings are.

creativity, Info You Can Use, Legal Topics, Working In The Arts

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I’ll Love You Foreve…About A Month

August 25, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

About two years ago, Non Profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a piece discussing the external influences on non-profit organizations.

There are quite a number of external forces that exert pressure on non-profits, but thanks to the ease of communication and dissemination of information, among the latest to emerge are: push for transparency and accountability; the ability of different stakeholder groups to mobilize and influence each other and social media’s ability to make a escalate local issues to national visibility.

While these are all very interesting, the one element that caught my eye dealt with the transitory nature of relationships.

There is much less reliance on cradle-to-grave relationships between people and institutions (no longer the standard). And more free agency and greater reach of communications technology require stronger and more consistently engaging attractors. Maybe a core image here is that of the contracted and relatively unprotected worker—the worker with multiple short-term jobs, or the employee who commutes remotely. Socially concerned people are replicating these shorter term, more tenuous relationships—taking their energy to a Habitat for Humanity construction project one month, a race against hunger the next, and participating in a campaign against constrictive web legislation in between. If you want to compete for people’s attention and money and names, you had better be giving them something that they can get very interested in and over which they can feel a sense of accomplishment and partial ownership. They do not always need to do the work themselves, but they do need to feel engaged at a spirit level.

This struck a chord with me because it illustrates a new stage in the relationship between arts and communities. We have gone from the ability to assume a relatively long and stable relationship that was the hallmark of Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now, to the need to gradual cultivate a relationship through a successive series of steps laid out in the book Waiting in the Wings to this current news that you are lucky if you can get someone to support you for a month.

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it is a little depressing to see it in print. As to what is to be done, I would say make a consistent effort to communicate what you are doing and why they should be excited and interested to keep yourself on people’s radar.

And be prepared for churn. We know it is more expensive to attract new audiences to performances than to retain existing ones. While it is definitely worth working to maintain the loyalty of existing audiences, churn is likely to be a growing issue and needs to be factored into budgets. From the NPQ piece, it needs to be part of unearned revenue projections as well as earned because that is likely to fluctuate as well.

A big rally of support like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of last summer can help you advance your cause and expand your service exponentially, but it may taper off just as quickly so be prepared. This month ALS researchers reported on how much progress the $100 million boost they received last summer benefited their efforts. There isn’t any mention about what percentage of those who gave last year continue to do so now.

(To be fair, the report and Ask Me Anything were delivered by the researchers, not the ALS charities)

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Fundraising, State of the Arts

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