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Buying From The Source

July 20, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

I recently became a member of my local public radio station. I “came out” as a non-member while a guest on the Spring Fund drive and declared I was ready to sign up. My hope was that it would inspire others to do the same. What I didn’t mention was that while I really enjoyed the high quality news and information, what tipped me into the membership column was the show This American Life. I am crazy about the show and wish I had gone to see host Ira Glass speak at the Arts Presenters conference when I was there a few years back.

The thing is, I am not usually listening to the radio when the show is on so I generally consume the program over my computer while I am at home. Consume is an appropriate word because there have been times where I have listened to three shows from the archive in one sitting. (Well, often I am dusting, mopping the floor or folding laundry, but you get my point.) Not long ago, before you could listen to any episode, a short segment would play with Glass asking you to donate to support the rigorous story gathering process they engage in.

If you aren’t aware, generally your donation to the radio station goes to pay for the programming you hear. Your support of the station indirectly supports shows like This American Life. It made me think–I am not listening to the show on the radio. Even though my donation is going to support the show, should I perhaps not be supporting the show more directly? I am using their internet bandwidth to listen to the show. Coupled with some other recent occurrences, I realized this sort of thinking may end up impacting arts organizations in the near future.

In the last week or so, National Public Radio decided it was changing its name to NPR just like Federal Express changed to FEDEX some years ago. Their decision is based on the fact that the content is no longer only delivered and received over the radio and can be heard on the web and in podcasts, among other media. In fact, often you can scan the transcripts of a segment on their website rather than listening at all. They are beginning to increase their focus on online presence and delivery of content. But what if the individual shows do their own fund raising? It might be possible that they will undermine the local stations’ fund drives. This American Life does some really impassioned and well argued promos for the local radio fund drives. But as funding gets tighter, might shows like their shift focus to their own survival?

The national office of PBS is looking at making a nationwide fund raising appeal directly to donors and it is making local television stations nervous that it might undermine their own efforts. It might be a bad idea if it did since PBS needs the television stations as a distribution system. Unless they are seeing more people interested in viewing their content online rather than on television.

But nothing can compare to live performance right? Well, as you may be aware, the Metropolitan Opera has a fairly successful program where they broadcast their shows to movie theatres. And a writer for the London Telegraph says watching the National Theatre in a movie theatre is better than attending the event live. You already have the opportunity see the National Theatre productions at about 50 cinemas around the US this summer.

One thing NPR has going for it is the variety of programming it offers. If I donate $50 to This American Life, that is all I have supported. If I donate the same or more to my local NPR station, I am supporting a wider variety of programming I enjoy. That is the potential advantage the cinema owners have. There is a possibility of curating a wide experience from the very best in the field. This is what I and many others around the country do now, only the guys with the movie screens won’t have to pay for hotels and travel which immensely increases the pool from which to select. Their curated season might include opera from the Metropolitan Opera, classical music from the Philadelphia Symphony, theatre from the Guthrie Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. While I would argue you miss half the experience by not attending the latter two in person, such a program would bring excellent performance to people who don’t have the means to travel. (Though you will still have to shush those damn kids in the back rows.)

Of course, it also changes expectations of performances by everyone else. So the question is, will a rising tide raise all ships as people become more interested and less intimidated by the attendance experience or will the cinema events cannibalize local audiences who would rather see the Broadway production rather than the local production or the bus and truck tour. Likely it is a time will tell situation which hinges upon how wide the cinema project spreads and how invested those with the means become in creating and promoting these shows.

Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts

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They May Be Big Brother, But At Least They Have Good Customer Service

July 19, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

So last week I was deluged with phone calls for the college admissions and records and financial aid offices. For a long while I thought the phone system went haywire and the voice mail system was misdirecting my calls. I pleasantly redirected peoples’ calls, silently reminding myself that it wasn’t their fault and as I am fond of saying, marketing is everyone’s job. I may be king of my castle, but I am a member of a larger organization whose interests I serve.

I soon discovered though that people were actually directly dialing my number and were not being redirected by a voice mail system. I also discovered that people only have a really vague idea about where they get pieces of information. Eventually I deduced that people were being misdirected by search engines –specifically Google. I did a search for the college on Google and to my horror found that my office number was listed as the main switchboard number. This was only true for Google. Yahoo and Bing didn’t have erroneous information.

I am not sure how it happened, but my theory is that someone tagged the theatre on Google Maps and put our phone number. My building is one of the few on campus tagged on Google maps and somehow it may have become the default phone number. Once it became the top search result, everyone started calling.

Fortunately, Google has a link that allows you to submit corrections. In fact, if you have an account, you can fix it right away. So I submitted a couple corrections from different IP addresses and submitted one from my Google account. It took about 48 hours, but the listing disappeared…..

…And was replaced by a listing for the ATM machine in the library, the location of which was also tagged. Since the telephone number listed is that of the bank, I am willing to bet that the bank has been getting calls from people who haven’t been paying attention.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. Today I received a call from someone at Google Maps verifying where it was exactly that the erroneous listing was directing people. Google may be massive, but they apparently aren’t too unwieldy to fix and then follow up on problems in a timely manner. You often don’t get that sort of response from utilities and companies whose service you actually pay for.

Probably the big lesson here is that even when you are depending on other people’s labor to contribute and correct content, the endeavor can never entirely be without cost. It would be inconceivable for Google and Wikipedia to collect and present in a meaningful way the amount of information they do if they depended solely on paid staff, but they still need to create a structure and invest resources to monitor the veracity and suitability of the material they provide. In fact, I just read today that Google doesn’t outsource the review of content flagged as inappropriate and provides counseling to the staff that processes it.

I don’t mean to turn this into a plug for Google. The whole experience just reveals the importance of monitoring and addressing mistakes and that it is possible to do so no matter what your size should you make the conscious decision.

Arts in an Age of Technology, General Musings

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Bringing Hope In A Hopeless World

July 15, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Interesting piece in The Art Newspaper on why the arts should be funded in austere times. The article is basically an argument about the value of the arts. What immediately caught my eye was the story author Robert Hewison tells about the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the UK’s predecessor of today’s Arts Council. In 1940 when some felt it was illogical to be doing so, the British government committed £2 million in today’s money to the council ““to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.” The end of the article notes that the creator and first chairman of the council was “the economist John Maynard Keynes. He believed that in a recession, governments should stimulate the economy.” It was Keynes approach that many were encouraging the Obama Administration to follow to deal with the current economic environment.

Hewison summarizes why the economic benefit of the arts doesn’t work-

“But the Treasury doesn’t buy it. They can see through the “multiplier” calculations of the cultural boosters. They understand the meaning of “opportunity cost”. The money spent on artistic steel and glass could have been spent on an arms factory—and created more employment.”

and notes why the prescriptive argument of how the arts help solve myriad ills isn’t desirable-

“The New Labour government liked this argument, and directed that the arts council should use the arts “to combat social exclusion and support community developments”. The ACE found itself having to meet targets for health, education, employment and the reduction of crime—not truth, beauty or a sense of the sublime….

…. It is difficult to demonstrate a value-chain between art and social enhancement, and difficult to measure the social enhancement itself. Ministers for culture became embarrassed by this…”

Granted the conditions in the US aren’t the same as in the UK. For one thing, I could only dream of a funding structure that had “47% box office, 31% from the arts council, 12% from local authority sources and other public funding, and 9% from trusts, foundations, donors and business sponsorship.” Yes, that is 53% government funding.

The same weaknesses in those arguments exist on both sides of the Atlantic. Right now people are pondering how to make a case for the intrinsic value of the arts backed up by some measurable results for policy makers. While I think there is potential for making the case, it isn’t as easy to do as with previous arguments. There aren’t talking point lists being circulated for the intrinsic value the way they have been for the economic and prescriptive value arguments. It takes a person skilled in persuasive speech or writing to make a compelling argument in this area.

Some of Hewison’s arguments seem tinged with a desperation to employ the arts to preserve society through war or some other cataclysm.

“The value in use of the arts is that they help a society make sense of itself. They generate the symbols and rituals that create a common identity—that is why art and religion are so closely linked. Like religion, the arts give access to the spiritual. Art is a link to previous generations, and anchors us to history. Culture is a social language that we would be dumb without. “

and

“The precautionary principle tells us we have a duty to future generations to ensure that our cultural assets are passed on to them. We also have a selfish interest in sustaining the richness and diversity of those assets.”

and

Culture creates social capital, expressed as trust generated by a shared understanding of the symbols that the arts generate, and a commitment to the values they represent. It sustains the legitimacy of social institutions by ensuring that they are accepted, not imposed. Societies with an equitable distribution of cultural assets will be more cohesive, and more creative. Wellbeing, which is the true end of economic activity, depends on the quality of life that culture sustains.

My only qualms with that come in the context of Ben Cameron’s speech that I covered yesterday. I have this sense is that the manifestation of art and culture that Hewison wants to preserve differs from the direction the arts are going. I think Hewison links culture and religion in a manner that evokes monasteries preserving knowledge through the Dark Ages. I think the reality is closer to the religious reformations Cameron referenced. Both can seem pretty cataclysmic as the unfold. Even though a great deal of what is being created seems ephemeral at best, there are things being created with longevity which can serve to anchor us in history.

The question is, will the government want to support these new manifestations. Perhaps even more importantly, will people whose whole success is due to operating outside of the traditional structures want that support? I am sure it would make many in the different levels of government happy if they could find enough people to say so. (Just for the record, I am not ready to give it up yet!) Right now I think everyone dreams of a either a new operating method that doesn’t require so much funding or a new funding method that will sustain their operations. Perhaps one or the other will emerge to relief the situation.

Even though it seemed to me that Hewison was looking for a hedge against the collapse of society in some post-apocalyptic world (and perhaps I was just imposing my own fantasies on his words), he isn’t wrong to say that expressions of arts and culture do provide stability and that governments have an interest in sustaining them.

Rationally, the government should be putting more funding into the arts because of the social capital they generate. There is a sound economic argument that when the market fails to provide certain kinds of goods thought useful, then it is necessary to intervene—health and education are the usual examples. The economics of the arts are particularly prone to market failure, for it is not easy to make the advances in productivity that technology facilitates in manufacturing

Arts in an Age of Technology, Government Relations, State of the Arts

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The Artisan Reformation Has Begun

July 13, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Nod to Andrew Taylor for providing a link via his Twitter feed to a speech Ben Cameron made at the Association of Arts Administration Educators conference. Cameron talks about many of the worrisome issues I have covered here in the past – finances, shrinking audiences who procrastinate on ticket buying, organizational succession by young arts leaders who want to reshape rather than maintain what they have inherited.

But as he moved past providing this context for his comments, he made one of the more interesting observations about the change that will be necessary in the arts by comparing it to the religious reformations of the 16th century. It seems there is ever a confluence of art and religion. He leaves some room for optimism while noting the necessity for nimbleness (my emphasis).

Both reformations have been spurred by technological breakthrough—the invention of the printing press and the subsequent widespread public access to scripture occasioned by the printing press certainly has parallel in the redistribution of knowledge with the invention of the Internet. Both reformations challenge old business structures—god forbid that the decimation of monastic orders is the metaphoric fate for today’s major institutions but only time will tell. And both reformations essentially challenged the necessity of intermediation in a spiritual relationship, challenging the notion of the gatekeeping priest or now artist.

Now the Religious Reformation did not obliterate the Catholic Church. Just as 500 years later, many people around the world still find deep meaning in high mass and formal religious institutions, I for one believe that the historic institutions that we have funded to date at their best will continue to be worthy of our investment…

…But the Reformation more notably reshaped and broadened the universe of how religion would operate, who would be empowered to act, giving rise to new denominations, new religious rituals, new opportunities for the common layperson to assume responsibility for her own spiritual experience. Similarly in the arts, we are witnessing an explosion of arts organizations operating in new ways and the emergence of the hybrid artist: amateurs doing work at a professional level—a group dubbed elsewhere as the Pro-Ams—….and professional artists who choose to work outside of the traditionally hermetic arts environment, not from financial necessity but because the work they feel called to do cannot be accomplished in the narrow confines of the gallery, the concert hall or the theatre.”

He suggests that the training of arts administrators should include many of the traditional subjects of audience development, fund raising, accounting and entertainment law. But he says that for the next generation of leaders internships and practical experiences “with the political campaign, the sports complex, the environmental justice center” may be just as valid as a similar experience at an arts organization. He cites the MIT five step model of cultivating new businesses, “idea generation, training, mentoring, legal counsel and finally delivery to market capital” and wonders if this along with a more interdisciplinary focus might not serve students and the evolving industry better.

Even though his basic message isn’t anything new, the models and ideas he invokes are intriguing. Both the text and audio of his speech are available so you can pick your poison. You can even download the source audio and listen to his speech on your commute to work or while hiking.

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts

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