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Mistake Of Viewing Culture As An Industry

July 31, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

Via Artsjournal.com, a thought provoking interview with Professor Justin O’Connor, author of the book, Culture Is Not An Industry.

His basic premise is that if culture was an industry, decisions about it would play a bigger role in international policy and relations.

If we treat culture as a real industry, in the classical sense of the word, a very different picture would emerge. It would involve competing with big players on a global level, making decisions about investing large amounts of money into key areas. You would need to focus on geographical concentrations, drive innovation, maximise profits and exports, and talk about industrial policy in the same way you would about electric vehicles, wine, or dairy industries. However, this is not the same as talking about culture and art.

He uses the example of South Korea’s focus since the 1990s to make music and television dramas into global products.

He says that the misclassification of cultural as an industry has created multiple problems and generally seen funding directed toward a few universities and think-tank groups which reinforce this state.

…the last forty years have shown that the reducing culture to an industry has led to the marginalisation of culture on policy agendas and scrapping it away from transformative policies. The ‘culture-as-an-industry’ discourse has worsened working conditions in the cultural sector pushed to spend increasingly more effort and time on quantifying its impact.

[…]

The beneficiaries of the creative industry narrative include various clusters and consortia centred around universities, research agencies, consultancies, and similar entities. These groups often have more influence on governments than artists and cultural workers.

O’Connor tends to be against speaking about culture in economic terms, but instead as an important element in achieving a livable society. The problem is, that narrative can be in conflict with the goals of governments and business.

Cultural life is an integral part of social and political life, essential in defining citizenship. Culture, therefore, deserves to be considered one of the foundational services that contribute to creating a livable society.

[…]

However, if the conversation shifts to viewing culture as part of the public service sector, as a right, or as a sustainable development goal, large corporations may not find it as appealing to be grouped with culture and the arts. It’s no surprise that the United States has resisted including culture as a sustainable development goal on the UN agenda.

Perhaps most interesting to me is his assertion at the end of the article that the cultural sector not speak in terms of intrinsic value of culture:

Then the distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and social and economic is itself a product of neoliberal economics. Separating out the ‘intrinsic’ is actually a form of neoclassical economic modelling where individual good is purely a matter of the individual and her credit card. It also acts as an oubliette into which art is dropped as policy makers hurry on to the economic value…Art and cultural value are actually established and shared socially, and the individual judgement of a particular piece of art (song, video game, film) is part of our ongoing conversation about what we value as a society.

The world of culture is about the production and distribution of what we call art and culture: highly symbolic things, such as songs, plays, films, books, games, and paintings. The responsibility of the cultural sector is to take care of this world of symbolic things that has historically proven to be highly valuable to societies, and to support the people who create these symbolic things.

This gives me a lot to think about. My instinct is that what O’Connor is proposing is the next phase of my understanding about why we shouldn’t use economic value as a measure of the value of arts and culture. This deepens my understanding of why this argument is problematic. I regret that my old friend Carter Gilles is no longer alive to help me sort through these implications.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Government Relations, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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Did Curiosity About Bugs As A Kid Inform Our Creative Talents As Adults

July 30, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin made a post recently that speaks to the perception you either have innate talent or you can never be successful at something. This outlook seems to operate very strongly when it comes to creative activity.

The first error we often make is believing that someone (even us) will never be good at riding a bike, because riding a bike is so difficult. When we’re not good at it, it’s obvious to everyone.

The second error is coming to the conclusion that people who are good at it are talented, born with the ability to do it. They’re not, they have simply earned a skill that translates into momentum.

There’s a difference between, “This person is a terrible public speaker,” and “this person will never be good at public speaking.”

The older I get, the more I can appreciate Godin’s point about earning a skill that translates into momentum. I suspect that abilities whose development can’t necessarily be observed as a result of physical practice like athleticism and musical performance may be the result of perspective and philosophy about the world people have developed over time, perhaps even since childhood.

Abilities related to creativity, problem-solving, interpersonal relationships, etc., may be the result of 10,000 little instances like observations of clouds and bugs, paying attention to conversations and retaining information as important, attempts at reasoning things about the world that you come across. School, socialization, family, wealth, opportunity, reading books, etc., will certainly play a part, supported by some good genes and brain chemistry perhaps. There are likely millions of musings and conclusions that we have never reflected upon as being productive toward the development of a skillset, much less that anyone around us was aware were occurring. But in the end, as Godin says, we earned the results.

Abilities that manifest as a result of our physical capacity are certainly dependent on genetics. But again as I have gotten older and experience more aches and pains, I have begun to suspect that there are some physical skills that are a result of perceptions and decisions we made as children regarding things as simple as how to walk, run, and stop. One of the things I suspect is that we are all making different decisions about how much to shift our body weight and which muscles need to be tensed when going to the cupboard to get a can of soup. I have lived in apartments where I was surprised to realize the heavy footed one stomping around was the wife who was a foot shorter and probably more than 100 lbs. lighter than her husband.

Even having developed the confidence to act as a result of some combination of decisions, perspectives, musings, etc., over the course of decades, there are often years of deliberate practice required to sit on top of that to truly excel in an area.

While genetics and other opportunities and privilege certainly contribute to the ease in which someone may obtain mastery, the more I read on the subject of innate talent vs. practice, the more I suspect that there is a lot of conscious effect and decision which is invisible to others as well as ourselves that ends up as a foundation for the skills we exhibit later in life.

General Musings

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Economics Of Broadway Show Breaking Broadway Formula

July 29, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

Freakanomics did a two part show about how the Broadway play Stereophonic came together. The first part is broadly about the 11 year creative process playwright David Adjmi went through to make the show. The second part focuses a bit more on the economics behind a Broadway show.

If you have been involved with the performing arts for any length of time, you can probably predict the process Adjmi underwent – cobbled together funds from two commissions and a grant, plus had two architects let him live in their house rent free for years while he wrote. He had to put some pressure on Playwrights Horizons to consider the show and the cost of over $1 million was a lot for an off-Broadway production.

But it became a hit based on essentially breaking the formula of Broadway shows – a straight play about music, but not a musical, no stars in the cast, and runs long at 3.25 hours. Apparently it has a strong appeal to men based on the observation the men’s restroom line is longer than the women’s.

There is a lot more to the story than that. The first episode is 70 minutes alone and the second about 55 minutes.

Being the arts management nerd I am, I was even more interested in the second episode which talked about the economics and decisions that were made. Everything from the cost of putting on a show in NY vs. London, who can and how to invest in shows in both cities, what the actors got paid off-Broadway vs. after the move to Broadway, decisions about pricing tickets, and the marketing mix they used.

In terms of the pricing tickets, the producers say they can now get up to $349 for a ticket though they re-evaluate their pricing three times a week, but they started out much lower during previews:

We had preview pricing that was $40, $80, $120 to start, for the month of April. But you have to catch up to it, because now we can get $229 for them. You kind of play a game of chicken with yourself and with your audience. For something like Stereophonic, because it’s an unknown title — obviously it’s getting more well-known — but two, it does not have a major mega-star in it. It has a group of incredible rising stars, but they’re not household names. The way that we get there is by getting people in the door, and really building to that moment.

Thanks to improved audience analytics tools, the producers have changed their marketing mix from what it once was as well:

Oh, it’s almost entirely all digital now. It’s all mobile. It’s all through Meta — it’s all through Instagram, Facebook. We do still take the traditional behavioral banner ads that follow you around the internet. We still do some prints, but not a ton. We have dabbled into television, but we’re taking specific ads. We’re not taking giant flights with multiple spots on Good Morning America or the Today Show, which was always your bread and butter.

[…]

The R.O.I. is much easier to figure out because you can actually track people. Our zip code reporting is way more sophisticated now than it was before, whereas you had to blanket the market with something and then you didn’t see a direct correlation. Now it’s less things, but you can still see how your wraps jump due to specific things of press, like a C.B.S. Sunday Morning piece, or if your stars are on Morning Joe. There are fewer things that give you that pop, but at least you know, “If I’m on Morning Joe, then we’re going to have a good day at the box office.”

If this sort of information interests you and you have the time, I recommend giving the pieces a listen. Host Stephen Dubner says they are working on a longer, more involved series on the economics of making theater so I am going to keep an eye out for that as well.

Audience Relations, Business Models, Pricing, Working In The Arts

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Smoke And Heat Becoming A Bigger Threat To Summer Theater Than Rain Storms

July 24, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

American Theatre posted a really comprehensive article about the challenges summer theaters are facing.

In the wake of social unrest resulting from things like Covid, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter, many theaters have worked to provide better working conditions for staff. Some of the changes have included shorter work hours, better pay, and childcare.

However, as expenses have gone up and philanthropic support has declined, these changes are raising increasingly difficult questions for summer theaters. Not that theaters haven’t always had a multitude of challenges to address. Staying committed to fair pay and fair hours has meant doing fewer shows, scaling back on customer service, or in one case, back office staff stepping in to sell popcorn when concessions staff exceed their hours in a week. There are concerns about whether having shorter rehearsal hours will result in lower quality performances and disappoint audiences who may be paying more for tickets than in the past.

In response to this some theaters are re-packaging their offerings for audiences. For some destination theater festivals, this may result in better experiences for audiences who felt there was more going on than they were able to experience.

Covid has continued to create consequences for these theaters. Not only have many experienced professionals left the industry, but the pandemic interrupted the continuity of training for younger professionals.

Bahr agreed, adding that “the supply chain of welders or people doing lighting is gone,” and that in Utah, the issue is deepened by the festival’s reliance on local college students, who missed several years of in-person learning. As carpenters and other skilled workers explained to him, seniors used to teach the juniors and they’d teach the sophomores, and so on, but “it’s like they’ve got four years of freshmen now.”

Climate change has also increasingly posed a challenge for summer theaters. In addition to dodging snakes and bears passing through the natural environment in which the theaters operate, forest fires and heat are becoming a central concern.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Tim Bond noted that forest fires caused numerous cancellations in 2023:

“We had 10 cancellations last season,” he said, which is a serious financial hit. “We now have a ‘smoke team’ that monitors the smoke and the direction of the wind. They’ll know when the smoke will arrive, so sometimes we cancel even when audiences are seeing blue skies because we’ve gotten good at knowing when it will roll in.”

Utah Shakespearean Festival leadership said that smoke caused the cancellation of nine shows in 2022 resulting in a loss of $500,000.

American Theater Players in Spring Green, WI has had to cancel for heat and poor air quality and is having to budget to accommodate for increased number of refunds:

Young said that 2021 marked the first time American Players Theatre had to cancel outdoor productions in their 1,075-seat Hill Theatre for extreme heat. (Last year they lost performances due to poor air quality.) She said that while many audiences prefer matinees because they don’t want to drive at night, they increasingly have trouble sitting through them in extreme heat—weather that is also unsafe for actors. To compensate, APT is shifting outdoor matinees to late August, when it’s cooler in Wisconsin.

“We plan into our budget that we’re going to refund a certain number of tickets for weather,” she said, “but that number is getting higher, and we have to look at what it will be like in 10 years. Are we going to need a large indoor space to accommodate that shift?”

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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