Worthy Ideas

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I have been coming across a lot of interesting information lately. It’s just that very little of it is pertinent to arts management. At least, not in a way that my brain has been able to perceive connections.

As a believer in the need to expose ones mind to myriad ideas in order to stop thinking about work and day to day concerns all the time, I will step out of the usual theme of this blog and suggest some thought stimulating material.

In this case, I would like to point you to the TED website. They hold an annual conference where they invite thinkers and performers who have something interesting to share. Every week they post need video of sessions that were conducted during the conferences.

I have been checking a couple out each week for a month or so now and can attest to the quality of thought being presented. I hate to admit it, but I haven’t watched any of the performances yet because so many other topics are so compelling.

The videos are only about 20 minutes long so they fit a lunch break or short quiet moments you might be able to grab at home.

Among some of my favorites of the ones I have watched thus far-

Charles Leadbetter talking about creativity.

Sir Ken Robinson discussing the problems inherent to removing creativity from education (very funny guy)

Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell talking about marketing and answering unrealized needs.

Now granted, some of the above talks will cover areas of interest to people in the arts. But I was also intrigued by-

Barry Schwartz talking about being overwhelmed by choices. An interesting supplement to Gladwell’s praise of offering more choices and Godin’s discussion of how people are so bombarded with advertising, they tune out.

Steven Levitt talking about why crack dealers still live with their mothers.

Peter Donnelly discussing how, when even mathematicians are mistaken about statistics, the layperson can make enormous errors in believing them. (A caution to us, perhaps, about the validity of survey data.)

Hope you find something that fires your imagination and interest.

The Local Doesn’t Get Local Work

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Interesting developments in Buffalo, NY coming to me via A Poor Player blog. Facing a large deficit, the management of the Studio Arena took a number of cost cutting measures including eliminating 14 positions and reducing the number of designers for each show.

They also decided to collaborate with local performance groups and present two of their productions as part of the Studio Arena season. This is the type of thinking I, among others, have encouraged performing arts groups to engage in– partnering up rather than competing.

There was a little catch though that anyone seeking to follow my encouragement should heed. These partner organizations were comprised of non-union actors and the Studio Arena is an Equity house. Tom Loughlin who write A Poor Player includes links to three &nbsp stories about the conflict between Studio Arena and the Actors Union to provide the back story. (All Acrobat documents)

The theatre and union eventually came to a resolution and arranged for the non-union groups to be paid according to the lower LORT D payrate rather than the LORT B rate that the Studio Arena usually needs to pay actors at. The non-union actors will have the option of applying for their union cards after the performance runs are complete.

In his blog Tom raises some issues the newspaper articles don’t, issues I suspect won’t be unique to the Buffalo area. He feels that local Equity actors have never been able to win with the Studio Arena. He points out that the regional theatre movement was started with the idea that local actors could find employment. Instead, actors from New York City were hired with few local actors getting more than token smaller roles. (A long time trend I recently noted.)

Now, in tighter financial times you might think local actors would see more employment given that there is no housing and transportation expenses to pay. Instead, Tom says, the local Equity actors are being skipped over in favor of even cheaper labor from non-union actors.

The whole concept of partnering on efforts remains a good one. I hate to have to qualify my feelings in the context of this incident by adding: as long as it is done with the intent of strengthening all those involved rather than circumvent obligations. There is no evidence that Studio Arena sought to exploit perceived loopholes other than the suspicions people have about its motivations.

As one of the articles notes, union membership has always been a mixed bag for actors hindering opportunities as much as facilitating them. With an increasing number of theatres finding themselves on financial unstable ground and the Studio Arena precedent, I wonder how many more concessions Actors’ Equity might find themselves making in the near future.

With the movie studios calling for an end of residual payments to writers, actors and directors, it looks like some tough years ahead for union members on many fronts.

Playing with Reality

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There was an article on Salon.com yesterday that tickled the edges of my intuition a little. It was one of those things that I wasn’t sure about the applications to the arts but seemed to bear watching and considering.

The article was about a woman who develops Alternate Reality Games where they propose “What if” scenarios and use the combined brain power of participants to play the situations to help predict what might happen. In a “World without Oil” scenario, not only did people talk about where they would acquire resources and how they would go about their lives, “document[ing] their imagined scenarios in blogs, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and podcasts,” some people actually took action and planted gardens and converted their vehicles to run on bio-diesel.

The concept was used to hype the release of a Microsoft game and political action groups have made appeals to members/readers to help sift through large government documents. Darker applications have occurred to some who have begun exploring how the structure could be used to manipulate the public or use large groups for surveillance activities.

On a less somber note, the article mention flash buying mobs that have formed where 100 people will show up at a store and commit to buying products if they are given deep discounts. I know a lot of arts organizations who would readily extend discounts if that many people would pop up at their door.

While the temptation to use this sort of thing to manipulate the public may be great, I was thinking of something along the lines of leveraging collective brain power to discover how altering practices may make attending performances and exhibits more enticing. How to do it effectively rather than as a hi-tech survey, I don’t know.

Partnering with a company so they will include your organization in one of these souped up scavenger hunts is probably also counterproductive. No matter how entrancing a performance or gallery show is, the participants’ attention will be on gathering information. God forbid they decide they have gotten what they need in the middle of a performance and then head for the doors.

It would be fascinating to see if some sort of performance work or even a theatre facility could be created in this manner. I am not talking about creation by committee, which tends to generate awful results, but rather tapping into the collective knowledge to do research on a time period or on architectural features that work. I imagine people sending video and pictures of weaponry and costumes to a creative team. Or perhaps they send images of hallways, door knobs and light switch placements that work well in buildings.

Mayoral Support of the Arts

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Last month, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed four resolutions regarding the arts.

The resolutions, which may be found on pages 7-10 of the Acrobat document were (my emphasis)

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United States Conference of Mayors supports the conclusions of the Arts and
Economic Prosperity III study and urges mayors across the
country to invest in nonprofit arts organizations through their local arts agencies as a catalyst to generate economic impact, stimulate business development, spur urban renewal, attract tourists and area residents to community activities, and to improve the overall quality of life in America’s cities.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United States Conference of Mayors urges mayors to consider these recommended arts policy strategies to help stimulate private giving to the arts and arts education in America.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United States Conference of Mayors urges mayors to build partnerships with their local arts agencies and other members of the arts and humanities community in their cities to proclaim, to participate in, and to celebrate the month of October as National Arts and Humanities Month.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United States Conference of Mayors reaffirms its support of the National Endowment for the Arts (and specifically the valuable Challenge America program), National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Office of Museum Services within the Institute of Museum and Library Services and calls upon Congress to restore full funding for these agencies in the FY’08 appropriations bills.

Now granted, these resolutions aren’t binding in the least. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to your benefit though. Plug your mayor’s name (or city) into the search field in the upper right hand corner of the web site to determine if your mayor is a member of the conference. Then contact his/her honor and congratulate them for joining with their colleagues in ratifying these items and provide suggestions on how you can collaborate.

The better prepared you are with your proposal and the more unity you can show with other arts organizations, arts councils and even chambers of commerce, the more effective I imagine your efforts will be. It doesn’t matter if your mayor voted for the resolution or not, as noted in an earlier entry, if you give him/her an opportunity to look like a good person, there is a good chance of success. Of course, the better the local economy, the better your chances of getting direct financial support from your city.

Getting the mayor to take these resolutions to heart and advocate on behalf of the arts community to businesses and other governmental entities may end up being of greater value than what the municipal budget could provide.

The these four resolutions were submitted by the committee on tourism, arts, parks, entertainment and sports. Unfortunately, the Conference of Mayors website only lists the committee chair. It would be interesting to learn who else serves on the committee since the citizens those mayors serve would have a greater claim on those politicians to step up to their convictions.