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Expanding The Company To Make It Smaller

April 30, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

About seven years ago, I wrote about a friend who incorporated the company he founded in order to gain the assistance of a board to help him expand operations, only to find that they were moving to contract the operations to a place where the organization was doing less than when he was running it alone.

Now he is mainly employed by another company altogether (happily, exercising his artistic talents) and the company he founded is largely inactive. I have a somewhat better sense now than I did when I wrote the entry what the causes of this situation were.

I wondered though if anyone else had come across a similar situation where an organization ended up worse off soon after the addition of a board. Did you have a sense of what the causes were? How can that be avoided in the future?

Boards, Working In The Arts

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Before There Was Rocco..

April 29, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

…there was Anthony Radich.

Looking back at some of my old entries, I was surprised to find I had forgotten that five years before Rocco Landesman uttered his infamous blasphemy/straight talk about there being too much art, Western Arts Federation Executive Director, Anthony Radich had suggested killing off arts organizations.

So let’s euthanize some arts organizations. Let’s pull some of the nonprofit arts programming off the arts-production line and free up funding and talent for reallocation to stronger efforts–especially to new efforts tilted toward engaging the public. Let’s return to the concept of offering seed money for organizations that, over a period of years, need to attract enough of an audience and develop enough of a stable financial base to survive and not structure them to live eternally on the dole. Let’s find a way to extinguish those very large groups that are out of audience-building momentum and running on inertia. Instead of locking arts funders into a cycle of limited choices, let’s free up some venture capital for new arts efforts that share the arts in new ways with the public.

I guess everybody takes note of the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, but forgets about what the head of an equally important regional arts service organization says.

As with Rocco, the issue is much more nuanced than at first glance. I wrote about it and there was some good discussion on Andrew Taylor’s blog at the time.

Advocacy, Business Models, Government Relations, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts

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Putting Your Best (And Only Face) Forward

April 24, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Between a post Trevor O’Donnell recently wrote on bad press release practices and someone emailing me a press release where they spent two sentences explaining in the email that the price on the attached press release was wrong–instead of just changing the press release, I figured I had the moral duty to revisit a great post I wrote on a number of years ago.

Matthew Stibbe offered tips on writing “Press releases for human beings” He provides some very simple guidelines for writing press releases. Check the related links at the bottom of the post for some other good posts on the subject.

However, as I did when I first wrote the post, I wanted to point out Stibbe’s very valuable advice for clearing the previous version histories from your documents before sending it–or just creating a PDF.

Often what has been deleted from a press release is far more informative to journalists than what was actually sent. By viewing the deleted content, journalists can glean insight into a far more interesting story than the one you are willing to tell.

Marketing/PR

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If They Can’t Come To The Museum, Should The Museum Go To Them?

April 23, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Back in 2006 I wrote on an NPR story that is probably even more relevant now than then.

The story centered around the Museum of Online Museums, a curated list of museums of all sorts around the world that had online presences. As I noted, the philosophy behind it is

The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.

Since the site has a mix of well known museums alongside ones that were curated by amateurs, the story raised the question about who is qualified to call themselves a museum and what actually constitutes qualifications.

My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn’t necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven’t done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)

[…]

Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?

The same questions have been applied to who gets to call themselves artists/musicians/actors as well as what constitutes a legitimate theatre/opera/orchestra/dance company and who are just dabblers.

The answers have become more difficult to arrive at with the proliferation of so many channels of dissemination. You don’t necessarily need to have performed in an established location or be represented by a music label to be a successful and recognized music artist, for example.

Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts

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