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Bring Your Trash To My Open House

July 3, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

This will be the last retrospective post of the series covering the time I am on vacation. I should be back at the helm Monday, hopefully with pictures and thoughts to share.

I am writing this post two days before I go on vacation but I am wishing I saw this old entry sooner.

The day before I am going on vacation, we are having an open house at my theater. A number of people haven’t seen the space since the most recent renovation in the Fall so we want to provide an opportunity to get in and look around. For those that have been to a show since then, we wanted to provide an opportunity to look around and ask questions without the pressure of getting to your seat in time for a performance.

We will be offering snacks, refreshments and such. However, I just came across an old post I made that suggested we encourage people to bring stuff to us, too.

In a post titled, Destroy Your Way To New Audiences, I had a brief moment of inspiration where I suggested renting a mobile paper shredder and inviting people to check out your organization and bring their boxes of documents that were too sensitive to just throw away.

Nowadays, another option might be to bring computers and phones to be recycled.

It struck me that this is the type of community service an organization could offer that will NEVER in a million years show up on a survey as something you could do to help the community. It is one of those things people need but don’t realize they need when asked.

This is also the sort of thing that breaks down barriers to attendance. You advertise an open house barbecue picnic at your organization and as someone who has never been to an arts organization, I might figure the only difference between the picnic and attending a performance is good ribs. Faced with the prospect of being the only person there who doesn’t know how to speak theatre/ballet/classical music/visual art, there may still be a high anxiety factor even if I don’t have to go into the building.

A shredder truck in the parking lot on the other hand is a service I can actually use. While I am there, maybe I grab some hamburgers and look around a little. If things get a little uncomfortable, the shredder provides my excuse as I notice the line is getting shorter, excuse myself and go over there. Heck, there isn’t much danger in bringing the kids either. Even if the arts stuff doesn’t appeal to them, watching papers get consumed by a giant machine is always interesting.

Audience Relations

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Signs Of When Seeds Were Planted

July 2, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

So 2009 was long before ArtsMidwest started their Creating Connection initiative and before I started my correspondence with Carter Gillies regarding the value of the arts, but I found a blog post that made me think the underlying philosophy behind Creating Connect was already entering the collective unconscious.

Writing on a blog post by The Nonprofiteer (which unfortunately does not exist any longer, it appears a consultancy has her URL), I quoted part of her post,

Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

Given that support of public funding education has begun to flag, or is at least less stable than it was a decade ago, it is probably good that Creating Connection evokes the grassroots movement to ban smoking in public places as a model for building public will for the arts.

The idea that exposure to the arts will improve us as a society is a core part of Creating Connection which cites researching finding:

…people believe that the benefits of engaging in or experiencing creative expression are related to their quality of life: increased happiness, reduced stress, improved health, and more time spent with family and friends.

When asked what would be different if we had more opportunity to express or experience culture in our lives, respondents indicated a range of personal benefits that span concepts around growth, voice, well-being, and happiness.

One of things I like about doing these retrospective posts is discovering that these ideas had occurred to me long before I began regularly voicing them. (my emphasis today)

While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.

We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity

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The Arts Aren’t The Cherry, They Are The Yeast

July 1, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Apparently I watched a lot of TED Talks in 2009 as this seemed to be recurring element in my retrospective posts these couple of weeks. However, this is one I have remembered clearly for the last decade.

Mallika Sarabhai talks about using artistic expression to teach as well as deal with sensitive topics like justice and injustice. She starts out her talk telling a story about a monkey who witnesses a rape by the god Indra noting that the way Indra expiates the offense leaves the monkey confused. She says she has told that story around the world more than 550 times at schools and black tie events and has been able to discuss a rape due to the framework of the story.

Now, if I were to go into the same crowd and say, “I want to lecture you about justice and injustice,” they would say, “Thank you very much, we have other things to do.” And that is the astonishing power of art.

The part of her talk that has stuck with me for 10 years though is when she relates the health of people has been improved thanks to a performance that teaches people in villages to use a piece of cloth folded 8 times as a water filter. I think it is the practicality and survival element that has lead me to remember it.

All of these examples lead up to her very memorable policy statement about arts and culture:

What I need to say to the planners of the world, the governments, the strategists is, “You have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake. It needs to be the yeast.”

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Art Is STILL Infecting My Brain

June 26, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Over 9 years ago I wrote about a TED Talk given by Golan Levin where he was demonstrating technology that being used to generate images based on sound input. The things he was doing was fun to watch because it was so interactive for the individual. Now 10 years on, we might be a little more blase about it all.

The one part of his talk that caught my attention was a visualization they had created of Jaap Blonk performing Kurt Schwitters’ tone poem The Ursonate.

At the time I wrote,

Much to my surprise, the cadence of Blonk’s recitation ran around in my head for a few days after. I don’t know if it qualifies as an ear worm since I couldn’t tell you a single word. Though I could spout nonsense syllables in an approximation of Blonk’s performance.

The thing is, it is 10 years later and as soon as I read this entry, Blonk’s recitation started bouncing around in my head. I started trying to recite what I remembered. I want to say I did a good job of recreating what I recalled. It is hard to know what the standards for accurately reciting nonsense sounds are.

In the interests of infecting you, watch the TED Talk (Blonk’s piece starts around 6:30) or watch the full recording of Blonk below.

I keep using the term “infected”, but it will probably evoke the pleasure you experienced as a kid playing with blurting out a made-up language.

I wrote back in 2009,

“Listening to Blonk’s and some of Schwitters’ recitations today, I recognize just how fun language can be. (I haven’t listened to all the different recordings.) Blonk especially seems like he enjoys playing with the sounds, luxuriating in the pleasure of pronunciation and takes joy in the enthusiastic exclamations.”

There have been times when I realized I got yelled at for doing stuff as a kid that is deemed artistic when done by adults. A lot people post Picasso’s quote, ““Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” It seems to me that the appellation “Artist” is the reward you get for reconnecting with the what you got punished for doing when you were a kid.