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Concerning Trend With Regional Booking Conferences

by:

Joe Patti

I was really disappointed last Friday when I read that Arts Midwest would be pausing their conference.  I have a hard time believing it will gear up again in the future. If you aren’t aware, Arts Midwest ran one of the regional conferences that presenting venues attend to book acts. Back in 2019, SouthArts announced they were ceasing operations of Performing Arts Exchange, the conference that served the southeast.  With Arts Midwest effectively ceasing to operate their conference, that just leaves the Western Arts Alliance as a regional conference for the western region.

The national conference, Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) continues to operate, as do smaller conferences like Arts Northwest, Arts Market which meets every other year, and state base conferences like Ohio Arts Presenters Network. However, the scope and reach of those conferences is limited.  For example, in addition to meeting every other year, Arts Market doesn’t have the professional development opportunities that the regional and nationals offer.

Like many others, I particularly liked the Arts Midwest conference because it was well run and had a smaller, more collegial feel than the NYC based APAP. Even though I moved to the southeast, I continued to attend the Midwest conference. APAP is definitely a great conference and there is more opportunity see performers in their “natural environment” of music clubs, dance studios, and theatres vs. hotel ballrooms, but it is expensive to attend with the added costs of NYC hotel rooms and food.

I enjoy the regional conference because they introduce me to new cities and let me see what is great about them. For people who live in the region, it is easier to drive or take a short flight to a regional than to travel to another part of the country.

Arts Midwest President& CEO Torrie Allen writes that the decision to pause is financial:

We have deep respect and gratitude for this conference family, and we must acknowledge that we are facing a changing industry. Production costs have increased while event revenue has not. We have begun to encounter unsustainable financial losses on this event. While these losses pre-date the pivots we have made in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have grown exponentially these past two years. As a steward of private and public dollars, we have a financial responsibility to our communities, partners, and donors to pause and take the time needed to reimagine our presence in this space.

I don’t envy him this decision. He basically assumed the President & CEO role just as Covid began. Attendees to the 2019 conference got to meet him. I was personally excited to see what the future held for Arts Midwest because he seemed to have the energy and dynamism to take the organization into the future. With the conference program being cancelled, I will only be able to watch what happens from afar.

Ultimately, I am a little worried about what this might mean for touring artists and venues in the future. Learning about artists via their website, videos and Zoom is only going to be so effective. Sitting down and talking with agents in person moved the needle for me in ways that digital promotions did not. Walking up and down the aisles in the exhibition halls opened me to exploring ideas and acts I hadn’t been considering. Some of them I booked, others I didn’t but I now viewed those options as possibilities where I hadn’t before.

I wonder if efforts to advance diversity and equity in the performing arts might stall as a result of venue operators only being exposed to and seeking out artists and agents with whom they are already familiar. The other influential aspect of in person booking conferences is sitting down to see something new, being not quite sure if you like it, but having others in the room clapping and stomping their feet in reaction to what they are seeing.

Some of the other conferences might expand to fill the void, but given the economic uncertainty of the times, it is likely to take time for them to scale up and expand their reach to larger geographical areas.

As much as I write about arts administration and practices, if you have read the blog for any number of years, you know that I always come back from conferences with some new insight to discuss. I had my epiphany about building public will for arts and culture at an Arts Midwest conference and always attend anything to do with legal questions. I think the professional development opportunities and chance to network with all sorts of people is valuable for attendees. I worry that the disappearance of the regional conferences and their ability to put speakers and experts of note in front of large convenings will negatively impact the practice of arts administration across large parts of the country.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Who Gave You Your First Break?

by:

Joe Patti

Tweets responding to UK based Arts Emergency’s new campaign were filling my Twitter feed today. I have written about them a couple times before. They are essentially focused on cultivating the next generation of creative workers through training opportunities, scholarships and mentoring.

The organization’s name and raison d’etre is premised on the idea that cuts in funding nationally have created an emergency for the future of the creative economy in the UK.  Their newest push is #BreakTheGlass, as in “In Case of Emergency, Break The Glass.”

What I really admire about their execution of this awareness campaign is that they aren’t focusing on the negative consequences that cause their organization so much concern, instead they have asked people to tag & tweet about the person(s) who “gave you some key advice or encouragement early in your career.”

Today my feed was packed with people calling out those who helped them get jobs in theater, in broadcasting, print media, etc. I usually view Twitter with a chronological order setting and there were so many people talking about those who gave them their first big break, I was scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling only to find I was still viewing tweets that were only 5 hours old.

I don’t want to horn in on Arts Emergency’s initiative, but maybe folks here in the US need to pick up the tune and call out those for whose help we are grateful. October is Arts & Humanities Month which would make it a suitable time. Or if we don’t want to steal attention from Arts Emergency, next month around Thanksgiving would be appropriate as well.

Ultimately, over the long term I think advocacy for arts and culture needs to have positive messaging like this that doesn’t focus on economic impact, test scores and behavioral outcomes as benefits. Talking about mentors and being grateful for opportunities and investment of trust and faith is a good way to emphasize the benefits of arts and culture in cultivating relationships and reinforcing the social fabric without explicitly making those claims.

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

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Composer Was A Rock Star Of Their Day? Rock Stars Aren’t Even The Rock Stars Of Today

by:

Joe Patti

I often read about classical music composers being the rock star of their day, but don’t often get a lot of detail about what that meant. I just happened upon an article in Lapham’s Quarterly about Franz Liszt which pretty much shows that fans haven’t changed much since the 19th century when people collected his discarded cigar butts, silk gloves and broken piano strings.

Before a concert Liszt mingled with the audience, charming them with his witty remarks. He had a semicircle of chairs placed around the piano on stage so that illustrious guests could sit near him and converse with him between pieces…He brought his silk gloves on stage and threw them down to be fought over by audience members. Women were said to carry his discarded cigar butts in their cleavages. When he broke piano strings, as he often did in his performances, people collected the broken strings and had them made into bracelets. There was even a phase where Liszt invited listeners to write a question for him (on any topic) on a slip of paper and put it into a hat, from which questions would be drawn out for the great man to answer from the stage.

The article says Liszt was the first to organize a program where he was the headlining soloist versus a night which included performances by different people. And some contemporaries regarded his early work as “sheer racket” so there are numerous parallels with rock music and stardom.

Though, as I am sure many before me have pointed out, while there are claims about composers being the rock stars of their day, audiences today aren’t permitted to have the same relationship with the composer as the audiences of their day.

One of the most obvious counters to claims that 200 year old music should be viewed as relevant today because it was the pop music of 200 years ago is that music styles falls out of favor over time. I mean heck, saying someone was the rock star of their day itself is arguably a dated reference since rock isn’t really a mainstream music genre anymore.

So if an appeal is made to potential audiences to view a composers music as the equivalent of current pop music because the composer was the celebrity of their day, people should at least be given the opportunity to freely react and interact as they would to a pop idol.

I have mentioned this basic idea before in a post about a Utah Symphony Orchestra’s (USO) advertising campaign where they had musicians made up as members of the band KISS and had a tagline about their musicians being rock stars. I was concerned people would be disappointed by the difference in energy between a KISS concert and a USO concert, not because orchestra music isn’t as hard driving as rock, the same audience members can equally experience a frisson listening to both, but because they wouldn’t be able to express their appreciation as frehley. (homophonic pun intended obviously)

 

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

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Maybe The Cult Rules Aren’t As Important As We Thought

by:

Joe Patti

Seema Rao at Museum 2.0 shared notes from a session she conducted at the Museum Computer Network conference last week titled “Are Museums A Cult?”

The answer, as I am sure you have anticipated, is that they definitely can be for the same reasons theaters, operas, ballets, orchestras, etc can be. As you read her notes, you can see how easy it is to substitute your own discipline in.

I got to museum bc I loved art. I loved the ideas around art and I loved sharing those ideas. I figured everyone here was the same—excited to share. Then, I got into museum work. I found that people were only excited with sharing if they could control every aspect of learning. Sharing with parameters is not true sharing.

It was disheartening. I realized the field often preferences things to people. Given the capitalistic matrix we live in, I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. I was also saddened.

And I wasn’t alone in my disillusionment. Everyone I knew was wondering if they were in a field that was problematic. We went into this field for good. And we were wondering, if somehow, our idealism blinded us. If we were on the side of the good.

[…]

As a field, we’re in a crisis. Why? Because of the system. It’s trained us, not unlike a cult, to question only enough to keep the system going. It requires sacrifice from most people, and certainly doesn’t sacrifice for Us.

The system sucks. The system gives a few people great tax breaks by giving a few more people the chance to do scholarship. It’s a system reinforcing scarcity. And like all hierarchical systems, it needs a whole lot of other people to get less, and have less say.

This is a conversation that has been ongoing for some time now. While it can feel dispiriting to feel you are working in an industry that is so slow to change, there are organizations and programs that are working toward a more productive relationship with audiences.

A week ago, a new orchestra entity had their first performance in my venue attracting an audience of 900 people. The philosophy of the programming is essentially “not your grandparents’ orchestra” in an attempt to attract new audiences. Based on attendance demographics and surveys, it has started on the road to achieving those goals. Some responses said they didn’t care for the program mix and there were a comments about educating attendees in proper applause etiquette, but those were much fewer than you might imagine.

There were far more notes about people not wearing their masks in the audience chamber–that might have been more a reflection of cocktail consumption since we didn’t experience any resistance to mask wearing at the door.

Strange as it may seem to say in the middle of a pandemic, it is actually encouraging to learn that the programming may factor less into the decision not to attend than lack of social distancing and mask wearing. I would rather be stricter with masks than about when you can respond to hearing something that moves you.

If the people who are showing up in numbers at the fringes of a pandemic threat aren’t reacting negatively to a change in programming philosophy, the resulting word of mouth may literally enable an organization to change the narrative about themselves.

Can the cult persevere if the cult practices don’t seem that important any more?

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Working In The Arts

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