One of the early super sessions I participated in at the APAP conference earlier this month featured Rebecca Ryan speaking about how to attract young people to the arts. Ryan is the principal at Next Generation Consulting which did a pretty good study for the Arts Council of Indianapolis about just that topic. They ask about behavior rather than intent--what is the last arts event you attended rather than what type of event do you think you might like to attend.
She shared some of the conclusions of that study at the conference, the executive summary of which may be found on her website. Some of the more interesting findings about the under 40 set may be found on page 3 where she talks about why young people attend the arts, how much they are typically willing to pay and what the best media for reaching them can be.
The whole summary is only 7 pages long so read it! But in order to entice you into doing so, a few highlights-
(Their site has a blog entry giving an example of this during a visit to MoMA)
"Young patrons attend arts and cultural events for reasons beyond the art itself. Specifically, young patrons want experiences that foster learning, connecting, and sensing." (page 3)
• The most popular reason 20-40 years olds attend arts andculture events is to learn something;• Being social is the second most popular reason young patrons attend arts and culture events;
• Supporting an artist or arts organization ranked third among the reasons all arts patrons (regardless of age) attend arts and culture events. (page 4)
Pay attention to this one (my emphasis):
Our research shows many young people who, when asked for examplesof their arts participation, mentioned for-profit galleries, house concerts, rock shows, and music clubs. These young people didn’t consider arts events to only be non-profit arts events, but rather had a much broader definition of “art.” (page 4)
One of the ways she suggested was easy to tap into the younger generation's desire to share an experience is to include a "Tell A Friend" link to each event page. Since we here at Butts In the Seats are all about inexpensive, practical solutions, (well, that and attractive arts management groupies, but we haven't found any yet), I thought I would provide the HTML code for doing a tell a friend link.
The following method will launch a person's email program (so it won't work if they access email via web browsers), insert a subject line and put a short blurb about your show in the body of the email. You can do much more attractive jobs with java script set ups, this method doesn't even allow for blank lines between information, but if you choose your information wisely, you can do an effective job.
Code:
<a href="mailto:?subject=Your Subject Here&body=Description of a really great show with lions and tiger and bears, oh my! on Saturday, February 3, 8 pm. $23 adults/$19 students, seniors, military. More information at http://mytheatredomain.com">Tell A Friend!</a>
Note: The ampersand before body has to be &"amp; without the quotes. I couldn't make show up correctly without making it confusing.
Assuming you have a mail client that will launch, click on the following to see this in action:
And I would be remiss if I didn't provide an opportunity for you to tell your friends about Butts In The Seats-
About 18 months ago I did an entry about the strange approach to arts funding in NYC. I was happy to see via the NY Times (free registration required) and the NY Sun that the city is moving to depoliticize the whole process.
In the past lobbying for funds diverted great deal of arts leaders' time and energy. A number of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, are quoted as being pleased that with this change arts administrators can turn more attention to running their organizations. In the past, the mayor would regularly cut funding and the city council would restore it. Under the new plan, organizations would be certain what their funding was and know it much earlier, facilitating budget planning.
Part of the new funding criteria is peer reviewed applications assessing accountability and advancement of the organizational goals and impact. “What this does is tell groups, ‘You’re going to move forward, or we’re going to take away funding and give it to groups that are moving up,’ ” said Dominic M. Recchia Jr., chairman of the City Council’s Cultural Affairs Committee. “It’s a sign that you have to produce.”
According to the Sun article, even arts organizations located on city owned property will be held to these expectations. Historically, this group, known as the Cultural Institutions Group, has been funded at higher levels and had more of their funding guaranteed.
"To encourage good governance and counter the common complaint from other institutions that the CIGs receive their generous levels of funding without being held to any standards...Ten percent of an institution's operating support will be dependent on a performance-based review process called CultureStat."
The following bit really caught my eye.
"Several cultural leaders expressed surprise that the City Council would, in the interest of a more transparent and fair system, relinquish its power over the cultural purse strings. "I am really impressed that [City Council Speaker] Christine Quinn would, in a day and age when people need to raise money for their campaigns, take her member item allotments and give that to the peer review panel process," Ms. Pasternak said.
Very interesting. I don't know quite what to make of it not being really up on my NYC politics. I suspect that somebod(ies) is responsible for exhibiting no little wisdom and maturity in public service.
In an attempt to give students a reason to disseminate the information on and existence of the Myspace page I created over Christmas break, I added student events that we don't normally promote to our event listings. I figured asking the students to tell people about our events might meet with resistance, but providing information they would want to let their friends know about might help increase awareness about our site. So I added the student created events and then posted notes around the building letting them know about our site and the opportunity to forward event info to their friends.
A little aside here a moment. When I was attending an early morning roundtable at the APAP conference I mentioned that I had been reluctant to have a presence on Myspace due to the material I saw there. I added that recently artists and other arts organizations had been appearing on Myspace and that since the neighborhood seemed to be undergoing some gentrification, I decided to stick my toe in.
Someone at the table likened my reluctance to not wanting to get a cell phone because I was turned off by hearing people cursing on the phone and suggested I really needed to be more open minded about new technologies.
I disagree with his analogy since a cell phone like televisions, radios and computers all provide you with a mechanism to control what information you see and hear. While I take his point, I also maintain that it is not necessary to jump on every new trend and some trends are simply not appropriate for everyone.
You can imagine then that I emitted a groan when the first friend request we received after I let the students know about our site was from "Raunchy Asian Woman # 4." My worst fears about the grade of clientčle frequenting our site looked to be playing out.
On further investigation I recognized the person behind the site and realized the screen name was more bluster than substance. Since she and those like her are the type of people I am hoping to attract more of, I just have to take a few deep breaths, try to relax and shift my way of thinking when it comes to our Myspace presence.
To pick up a little where I left off yesterday.
A good part of the rest of the first day was devoted to reading literature and discussing the difference between leadership and management and how you can exhibit leadership even if you aren’t an area or department head.
The second day we were a little bit more crunched for time because it had been requested that the ELI participants attend the plenary session and super sessions planned that day. (More on them in a later entry.) One of the exercises the institute leaders had us engage in was August Boal’s Forum Theatre practice. Members of the group were given a script and scenario and then the rest of us were encouraged to stop the action and replace one of the actors to move the situation in a more positive direction. I had heard about Forum Theatre before but never witnessed it in action. It was quite an interesting experience.
Another exercise we engaged in was Story Circle (explanation starts on pg 3). This activity is often to assist with conflict resolution. We used it to talk about people who have exhibited leadership in our lives and then examine the common elements.
There were a number of observations that came out of these activities. Some members of the group felt they would put their jobs in jeopardy if they attempted to shift the direction of meetings to make them more constructive. By which I don't mean trying to use these activities in their organization, but rather recognizing where things were falling apart and trying to shift the tenor of the conversation. Other than working very gradually and subtly, we didn't see any solution to this dilemma.
One of the biggest issues that came out of our discussions was succession planning. Many felt there wasn’t any effort being made to secure succession in arts organizations in general. A few felt like the discussion about it in their organizations was going something like this:
Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! WHO WILL TAKE OVER WHEN I AM GONE? THE NEXT GENERATION HAS NO DEDICATION. WHO WILL TAKE THE REINS?Emerging Leader: me! me! mentor me! i love all this. look over here. i am energetic and excited.
Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! ALL THAT I HAVE WORKED FOR DOWN THE DRAIN.....
To some degree we wondered if the existing leadership might be holding out for a clone of themselves when changing times required different skill sets.
After discussing the plenary and super sessions we had attended, we met with alumni of the Emerging Leadership Institute. This was apparently something that had never been done before. The alumni had been meeting earlier to discuss plans for Institute graduates.
Many of the alumni still felt a strong bond to those with whom they had gone through the program and some kept in touch. Unfortunately, the graduates as a whole didn't keep in touch. At one time there was a person who put a lot of work into keeping the members abreast of each others' activities. Once she stopped, everything fell apart.
The alumni (including the most recent batch) have expressed an interest in not only staying active on the listserv/discussion forums but also increasing the visibility of program graduates at the conference. Among the ways the graduates would like to participate are moderating panels and introducing speakers so that the same people don't have to hustle from session to session.
Also, since participants in the institute are early in their careers and rather poor, the plan is to request some sort of break in conference fees for 5 years in return for volunteer work on the conference. The alumni that attended this year is only a small portion of those who have gone through the institute. The thought is to make it easy for graduates to continue to stay involved with APAP and the conference allowing them to expand their network of contacts and improve their leadership skills.
One of the concerns the alumni had was that the Emerging Leadership Institute isn't perceived as important or valuable to arts organizations. One graduate was in the position to encourage and approve the participation of a colleague from her organization. She said her decision to do so was second guessed by her superiors who questioned it as a waste of time and money.
This was one of the reasons why the alumni are so interested in keeping everyone communicating. The better a resource of advice and answers the group becomes for its graduates, the more valuable attendance at the institute may be seen. This is also the reason why we want to be more visible at conferences as well.
I just wanted to observe--Like social networking sites (Myspace.com) and technology sites like YouTube, this is an example of users essentially taking the initiative to promote something they value and asking the host company for assistance in doing so. This was a theme that came up a lot during the conference--but I will talk about it later.
I should mention that despite the poor image organizations might have about the ELI, the 22 or so accepted were culled from a much larger pool of applicants. The process is fairly competitive and hopefully will become more so with alumni input.
Okay, so obviously there was a lot I liked about my experience. There were also a few places I felt things fell short. I have already submitted a written evaluation and had a discussion about all this with the group leaders so I am not telling tales out of school.
First- The application to the institute required us talk about the strengths, weaknesses and threats to our organization. I went expecting part of the conversation to include that. It never was.
According to one of the ELI leaders, they had been trying to get rid of that application for quite some time now since it did not reflect the content of the program and hoped to revamp the form for next year.
I don't know if any sort of discussion in that area was supplanted by the request that we attend the plenary and super sessions or if it never occurs. I do think a discussion of the threats to the industry could have been valuable. I wouldn't have been interested in an open grousing session where people laid out a lot of blame on the K-12 education system, home entertainment systems and the internet. The second day would have been the right time to have it. By then the ground rules for thoughtful discussion would have been firmly established.
But really, you can engage in discussion about threats to the industry in a lot of locations. What I think would have been really essential was an opportunity to address weaknesses in ones own leadership and how to better take a leadership role in ones current position. The environment was specifically designed to preserve confidentiality and to create bonds between participants to serve as resources for each other.
The more I think about it, the more I believe this was what many attendees were looking for. There were a lot of clues throughout the two days. Early on people specifically admitted they weren't good at dealing with conflict. As I noted earlier, others mentioned that they were in dysfunctional environments. I went up to a person and told them I empathized with their situation based on my own history. And of course, some felt they were being overlooked as potential inheritors.
We were given some good tools and activities for dealing with conflict and affecting change when we returned to our organizations. I strongly suspect, however, that many in the group would have welcomed the opportunity to essentially engaged in a group therapy session, air their concerns and fears with colleagues and receive some advice and guidance in return.
I imagine that would have run things into a third day and even at the conference rate, it was pretty dang expensive to stay in those hotels! The whole experience was absolutely worthwhile. I am going to put some effort into making it even more so for those who follow by providing feedback and encouraging increased alumni involvement.
As I noted earlier, I was at the Arts Presenters Conference over the last week. I will be writing about the experience over the next couple days and maybe even longer. I took a lot of notes and picked up some literature I still need to digest.
On the whole, it was really a great experience. I took the opportunity to see a lot of artists and to talk to many colleagues. I debated my theories about press release writing and marketing.
I also spoke at some length to one of the APAP board members about creating discussion forums as I recently vowed to do. Of course, she challenged me to step up to my convictions and join the communications committee.
What I wanted to talk about in today's entry was my participation in the Emerging Leadership Institute. The Institute is one of many conference leadership training efforts associated with a conference. I listed many of them in an earlier entry. In that same entry, I cited Andrew Taylor's frustration that there are so many of these programs and none of them talk to each other.
At one point during the institute I spoke to the aforementioned board member, (who was helping to lead the institute), suggesting that if APAP was pondering conducting leadership activities regionally, they should first look to tap into the existing leadership seminar infrastructures like the National Arts Leadership Institute (NALI) rather than reinventing the wheel. I then sought out Philip Horn who is associated with NALI, asked him how things were going with the organization and told him what I had suggested.
Anyway, there were about 22 people attending the institute. Everyone was in the first 5-10 years of their career in presenting. Almost everyone was a presenter with a couple artist agents, a couple of service organizations but no artists. Apparently, this year was unusual in that there were no artists participating.
I also noticed and commented that nearly everyone was from either a university, city or state associated institution. There were few people from "independent" presenting organizations. I was told this was reflective of the general membership--it started 50 years as a university presenters organization and remains generally so. I noted this as another reason I think APAP should host open bulletin board forums. If the website is viewed as a resource for many, perhaps the conferences will be as well and attendance will diversify.
One thing I was surprised at was that the institute sessions were lead by an artist agent and a presenter rather than a professional leadership consultant. In my mind this was a strength because the leaders had a practical understanding of the environment in which the attendees were operating. Consultants tend to live in a more theoretical place. This type of objectivity is certainly useful in many cases.
In this particular instance I think the arrangement helped the group develop a trust bond with each other and the leaders much faster than if it had been lead by consultants. And lord knows, we had little enough time to waste.
One of the first major activities we engaged in was splitting into groups based on our major leadership style. One group was comprised of those who look at the big picture and storm full speed ahead toward it pulling everyone else along. Another group was the process oriented people who make sure everything is well organized and accounted for. The third group were people who took the feelings and concerns of others into account. The last group were those who celebrate every little victory and act as cheerleaders. Only two people identified themselves in this last group so they merged with the third group.
Each group was then assigned to go off and list what they felt were the hallmarks of that particular leadership style. I was in the third group and had joined it semi-reluctantly because it sounded a little too touchy-feelie, but suited me better than the descriptions of the other areas. Come to find out, most people in the group didn't feel the category wholly defined them and that they had strong elements from the other areas. Many, like me, were very much lovers of spreadsheets and databases as decision making tools. The institute leaders are going to transcribe our notes and email them to us so I can touch on the specific elements of each style at a later date.
Briefly, my group decided our style was focussed on generating consensus and buy-in from people. It was felt that involving people in this way was important because the pay in the industry was so unrewarding. Many of us said that we knew we needed to be decisive at the end of the day even knowing that some people disagreed. A few admitted that they shied away from confrontation and these type of decisions. We felt it was important to have people like us around in a presenting environment because often artists visit us as the 35th stop on a 50 city tour and people like us work hard to make them feel safe and comfortable.
When the groups came together to discuss the hallmarks of our style, we had a little bit of a surprise. While we compared and contrasted ourselves against the other groups privately, we realized we were an amalgam with the other styles. One of the other groups, (I won't say which) essentially dismissed our leadership style publicly generally characterizing us as touchie-feelie and really only good for organizing receptions, parties and soothing hurt feelings.
Now to be honest, a couple people in my group did admit that their boss was the yeller and their role was to motivate and organize the traumatized staff when meetings were over. That wasn't what we saw as our primary function. For many of us, throwing parties and making people comfortable wasn't even something we did directly but rather delegated and enjoined others to do.
After this stage of the exercise, we were asked to go back in our groups and create a definition of leadership. This information too will be emailed to me so I will address it more directly at a later time. When we got back in our group, we discussed the comments directed at our style during the session we just left. Then a number of us wryly observed we were probably the only group actually doing so. One member confirmed that before he left the other room he overheard one group launching into a discussion before all the members had assembled.
Despite the differences in our leadership styles, each group created remarkably similar definitions of what leadership was. Even though we used varying tactics to demonstrate leadership, we agreed what the ultimate product of those actions should be.
At this point my entry is getting pretty long so I will continue with my ELI experiences tomorrow.
One thing I want to say before I end is that the attendees of the institute really developed strong bonds with each other fairly quickly. I can't speak for everyone in my leadership style group, I will say that while I can remember which leadership style group made the unflattering comments, I can't remember who was actually a member of that group. In speaking with others from my particular sub-group at other times during the week that followed, no one ever said anything critical about any other institute attendee, much less commented that they were going to keep an eye on X because he/she was a member of "that" group.
I won't be posting for a couple days because I am at the Arts Presenters Conference in NYC. I hadn't posted earlier because I was using the opportunity to surprise my sister who works there and she occassionally reads the blog.
I have been participating in the Emerging Leadership Institute and been talking and listening to a whole bunch of interesting folks so I will have much to post when I return.
I have also met, albeit briefly, Andrew Taylor and Neill Archer Roan. Watch their blogs as well. This is a big conference and their experiences will undoubtably be wholly different from my own.
So my question is what is better for an outreach activity? An hour long lecture/demonstration for 300 kids with limited exposure to the arts in an auditorium where 20 students get a chance to participate for 5-10 minutes or a master class with 20 students with some exposure to the arts get a solid hour at least to actively learn something new.
It is the old quality or quantity debate.
Most people will probably say that both have their place in a well-designed outreach program. The problem for me is that with No Child Left Behind the opportunities for outreach are tilting toward the latter option and that worries me.
Maybe the granting agencies' preference for big numbers served has become attached to my guilt sense and I have unrealistic expectations. Heck, the blame hardly can be directed at them. Their preference is only a reflection of the larger societal idea that the greater the number of people who like something, the more worthy it is. Reading about how students are bereft of any arts exposure at all also contributes to the sense that one provide the opportunity to as many as one can.
I know for certain that the smaller groups have a higher sense of satisfaction from the experience they receive. (I have decided, from our surveying, that right around 5th grade everything a student sees is dumb and one learns nothing from any experience.) Many of them are artist-teachers who will pass along the insights and knowledge they acquired.
I certainly walk away from both outreach activities feeling that I have made a wonderful contribution to people's life experience. As time passes though I look back at the smaller events with less satisfaction than the larger ones. To be honest, it will probably be like this forever, or at least until I get old and crotchety and don't give a hoot any more.
Or maybe funding philosophy will shift on a large scale and focus more on the quality experience for smaller groups thereby reinforcing an ideal with money.
Of course, then they will be criticized for not serving all those poor souls bereft of the experience....
If you are considering applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Humanities, or any program run by the government, you will have to go through Grants.gov. My last grant application went in just before they implemented this new program through which all US government related grant applications must pass so I haven't had to negotiate the system myself.
I did try to get the registration portion of the process out of the way when I got the email telling me that my next grant would have to go through that process. The complexity made my eyes cross and I decided to forgo my usual "get it done well in advance" ethic.
A couple days ago I saw an account of the hair-tearing frustration a woman at Hood College went through trying to assist a colleague submit a grant. I figured maybe I should warn others about what is involved as well.
If you go to the applicant FAQ page on the Grants.gov website you can start to see where the problems arise. First, you can only use Internet Explorer and Windows operating system as that is only thing the grant application software runs on. (Didn't the government sue Microsoft for monopoly practices?) Firefox is out. If you have a Macintosh, you need to log on to an emulation program that only accommodates so many people at once. (They suggest logging on between 10 pm and 10 am.)
Then you need a DUNS number, register with the Central Contractor Registry from which you will get a Marketing Partner Id Number and will be able to designate an e-Business Point of Contact. Then you need to register with the Credential Provider who will give you a username and password so you can register with Grants.gov as an authorized organization representative.
You may feel lucky if you discover your organization has already acquired all this information. Of course, now you have to discover who it is that has all this information and who Grants.gov recognizes as the person authorized to authorize you as a user. And pray that they have saved all the usernames and passwords for the hoops mentioned above.
All this before you actually get to fill out the grant application. The government really doesn't want to give you any money. Now I understand better why the United States Artists group I mentioned previously is focusing on funding individual artists. It is said that the best artists are troubled and tormented to some degree. This application process will push those artists over the edge and make mediocre artists better.
In the course of writing my entry two days ago, I noted that the Theatre Communications Group had hired Teresa Eyring as the new executive director just before Christmas. Teresa was most recently the managing director at the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis and will take up her new role in March.
Given that TCG's previous executive director, Ben Cameron, had worked as a director of Target Stores arts philanthropy efforts, also in Minneapolis, you have to wonder if there is something about that city that makes it a finishing school for executive directors of national arts organizations.
Well, you don't have to wonder, but it is fun to do so. In light of the new gorgeous facility the Guthrie Theatre just completed, there definitely is something intriguing going on with the arts in the Twin Cities areas.
I kept poking around the TCG website looking for interesting tidbits as I am wont to do. I found one survey about the benefits (health, dental, life, retirement, vacation) theatres give to their employees. Not surprisingly the people working for organizations with budgets of $10 million were better off than those with less than $500,000.
The report provides a reference if you want to cross reference what you might get from your job with the trends in the same budget group. It also mentions some of the non-traditional benefits some places give that might be adoptable to make life more pleasant at your place (Subsidized Yoga, etc).
The other thing on the TCG site that caught my eye was a link to the United States Artists, a joint venture of Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson Foundations. The organization was formed from the realization that while support for arts organizations waxes and wanes with the times, the individual artist is never funded very well. Every year they plan to give $50,000 to 50 artists based on the idea that "$50,000 is a common entry-level salary for art college faculty in America today. Hopefully, this funding will enable some artists to pursue their art full time."
If you are thinking "Oooo, how can I get one of those," the only way is to work hard at being good at what you do. USA solicits nominations from a group of people whose identities remain secret. Not even the nominators know who else is nominating. The $20 million from the aforementioned foundations is just seed money to start the program. With additional fundraising, they hope to increase the number of awards per year.
Check out the 2006 Fellows awarded last month.
..and it is one of the many reasons I have a rule against quoting review blurbs provided in press packets. Contextomy is the practice of quoting people out of context. (The term caught my eye while I was brushing up on logical fallacies.) It has found applications in many arenas, but is widely practiced with movie and theatre reviews as noted in this Wikipedia article.
If you don't like Wikipedia as a source (though most of that article is footnoted and cited pretty well) here is an article from Gelf Magazine on the subject with many amusing examples of the lengths publicists go to in order to make a dud sound great.
(Added: This article is actually the inaugural entry for a continuing series where the magazine tracks misleading quotes. Didn't realize that when I first posted.)
I have a suspicion that this practice which is already being recognized by an increasingly skeptical audience may be approaching its final days. The difference is that in the past audiences were suspicious. Now they can access information on the web via their cell phones. As people walk out of movies and performances thinking "Geez, that was godawful, how could she say it was a cinematic tour de force?" they are going go online with their cell phones and search (reviewer) (show name) and discover that the reviewer said the show made Teletubbies look like a cinematic tour de force.
Without the drive home with a stop at Starbucks to buffer the disgust that will inspire them to go online and check things out, the distrust level could skyrocket. That is assuming people weren't skeptical enough to check things out in advance.
And hey, if I am wrong and the practice flourishes for years to come, at least you have a fancy vocabulary word with which to impress your friends as you mutter "'Superb and invigorating?' Bah, it is probably just another case of contextomy.."
Over Christmas Break my theatre was more or less empty so in the interests of not turning on lights I didn't need, I pretty much ended up eating lunch at my desk. On a whim I started perusing the Chronicle of Higher Education's forums.
It wasn't long before I was asking myself why there was nothing like this in the arts world. These forums are a great resource for people in higher education. It is mostly geared for professors, but grad students and administrators have their places too. The different areas deal with various issues from how people spend their free time to thorny ethical issues over student cheating and plagiarism.
One of the areas I think is strongest is jobs. The posters pose and answers questions about interviewing- how to dress, what to expect at a conference interview vs. campus interview, what a job talk might entail, what foods you should avoid during a meal interview- it really runs a gamut. People even solicit advice about particular towns and institutions.
What really impressed me is that there seem to be a couple of Wikis created by the forum members rather than by the Chronicle staff. One is essentially a collection of the basic wisdom covered in the forums about where to find a job and what to do when called for an interview.
The other, quite interestingly, acts as a status board about what stage different jobs are at. Since many institutions are pretty bad about communicating where a job search is at and may not even start committee review until months after the deadline, the forum members make notes about when they hear anything about a job. If there is a note saying they are calling for interviews and you don't get a call, at least you know where things stand for you.
If one of the prominent arts entities hosted these types of forums, it would be fantastic. There could be discussions about everything-advocacy, marketing tips, law, unions, interviewing tips, technology, audience relations, fundraising, board relations, philosophy. I could really go on and on. In addition to helping arts organizations make their external relations more effective and efficient, it might bring about an improvement to employee relations too. After some posts saying "you ain't going to be paid well anywhere in the arts so if you gotta starve, you couldn't find a nicer group to starve alongside," some places might experience a little bit of a brain drain.
Some of the large entities like Americans for the Arts and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters do have listservs but they are only open to the membership. I have access to a couple and they are like ghost towns. I have more discussions with people who comment on my blog. I think part of the problem is that access is closed. The other is the old chicken and egg thing. There is no discussion because nobody posts and nobody posts because there isn't enough discussion to get them visiting.
It won't be long though before the up and coming youth who are used to holding long conversations online start showing up and looking for some place to talk. Absent any place to do so, they will start creating their own discussions. The problem with that is the discussions will be decentralized. I can start a forum right now. The software comes with my blog account. My forum would add to the conversation and be an improvement over the present status, but not as much as one at a more highly trafficed site would.
A central forum should be started now and all the bugs ironed out so that it is ready for when the next wave of artists, managers, designers and technicians arrive on the scene. They will have a certain set of expectations from their experiences with MySpace, YouTube, internet chat, texting and whatever else may come next. If they are disappointed in what they find and go elsewhere, an opportunity to harness their energy is lost.
Whatever organization creates a good forum for discussion can have a hand in directing the energies of artists. I understand that these things take resources and that is why some of these organizations are limited access to dues paying members only. Whomever does this well will gain at the very least tacit recognition of leadership. Giving it away for free could garner greater membership and support than keeping it locked away will. Which is why I think a group like Americans for the Arts should do it. Though I wouldn't discount ArtsJournal.com from stepping up and making a success of it.
Maybe there are highly active forums out there and I missed them. I would love it if someone could point me in the right direction. Before writing this entry, I checked out Americans for the Arts, the NEA, TCG, ASOL, DanceUSA, and Arts Presenters.
I also hit regional presenting conferences and the regional arts granters- NEFA, Mid-Atlantic Arts, WESTAF, and Southern Arts.
(All of these have great resources to check out though which is why I am going link crazy here.)
I even checked out the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carniege Mellon University. They will license forum and listserv software to you, but they don't actually host any public forums that I can see.
On the other hand, they don't list Butts In The Seats as an arts management resource, so really, how good can they be?!
Anyhow, I really feel strongly about this so I am going to ponder a little more, put together a nice letter making my case and contact some likely hosts suggesting something like what I am proposing. I might enlist some of my gentle readers to lobby alongside me if I discover any promising opportunities.
I know that all solutions do not solve the problems of all people. What is creating great discussion for educators may not work for the arts world. But seeing as how no one has really tried it yet, it is worth turning over the stone and seeing what we find. Maybe there are forums in Butts in the Seats' future.
I heard a poem today that really electrified me because it succinctly and adroitly summarized the relationships between artist, consumer and a work. I was excited by "The Secret," by Denise Levertov, because it points out that your perception of a work doesn't need to be in synch with that of the creator for you to have an authentic experience.
For that reason alone I think every beginning level fine art and literature class should start with this poem. Handing it out at arts events to assuage the fears of attendees that they are stupid if they don't "get it" would be valuable, too.
The only flaw with this is that people have to understand the message of the poem without much need of explanation. Lengthy instruction about what they are supposed to think runs counter to the whole intent after all.
The poem also talks about how revisiting a work multiple times can be rewarding. Often I wonder if people don't recognize this about art: How there are valid reasons to read a book, listen to a symphony work, see a play, a sculpture, a dance piece many times over the course of your life.
I could go on and on for a bit talking about what great messages I see in the poem. As I said though, that is a bit counterproductive. I am including the poem below and hope if you don't find it particularly inspiring, you at least enjoy the sentiment.
"The Secret" Denise LevertovTwo girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line.I love them
for finding what
I can't find,and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so thata thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
linesin other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
forassuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
I began this blog (nearly 3 years ago! Holy Crow!) talking about evangelism for the arts. Thoughts of religion have never been too far from my mind since then, mostly because a church has always been pretty close to my stage.
I have mentioned before that a number of churches have taken turns renting our facility. The rent helps balance the budget and the church understands that the theatre's needs come first so they need to work around our sets. (Though when we did Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses they saw the large pool of water as an opportunity for baptisms.)
There are more churches locally than there are facilities to accommodate them. I think they are basically subsidizing the public school system here because I can't pass by a school on Sundays without seeing a directional sign for a church. Whenever a suitable building becomes vacant, there is a lot of competition between the churches as well as businesses to rent it. In fact, one of our previous church tenants built a new facility, out grew it within 6 months and were asking to come back.
One of the insidious (though they don't mean to be) things about the churches is all the money they have to throw around. Even though they rent a storage room for us, every Sunday they bring in a large U Haul truck full of equipment. Among this is a large sound system because ours is not adequate for the number of musicians and singers they have every Sunday. They put up television monitors in our lobby for nursing mothers and over flow (a previous tenant put them in classrooms in adjacent buildings so large was their overflow.)
The insidious part isn't that they have so much money. My envy would be my problem. It is that the money gives them the ability to offer us so much of what we need in return for concessions. A prior renter bought lighting instruments with the stipulation that half were for our use and half were to be left permanently focussed where they wanted. They also bought a projection screen which we could use any time we wanted. When they left, they only took the permanently focussed instruments and sold the screen to the next church. All in all, we haven't done too badly.
The current church has proposed replacing our entire sound system--a $40-50,000 proposition--in return for a 3 year guaranteed lease (vs the renewable 1 year one). They say they will vacate at the end of that time regardless of whether they find a place or not and leave the sound system--and will put it all in writing.
Most of my crew has been salivating at the idea, of course. They also have their reservations. Some are small, but important, like whether they will be more lax in taking care of the facility if they know they can't be kicked out. Others are of greater concern. Will every request that is made have an unspoken "because we bought you a $50,000 sound system, after all" tacked to the end.
There is also a cautionary tale of a local high school that was grateful to have a huge renovation and upgrade of equipment in their auditorium paid for by a local church in return for guaranteed use of the facility on certain days for which they would pay rent, of course. The problem is, now the high school can't use their own facility on weekends and some weeknights. (And if you think that is bizarre, a local high school marching band couldn't use their own field this Fall because the school had rented it out for use by a private school's marching band. Such is the state of education funding.)
But this story isn't about the growing power of churches, not really. It could have just as well been about an extremely wealthy donor or a corporation. Churches are just an emerging figure in an old story about non-profits and the hard decisions that need to be made in the face of expectations attached to the receipt of money and goods.
My particular story is interesting only because it is the offer of a church which has the potential of corrupting the soul of my organization. From the way I read things, it doesn't appear as if those I answer to would accept the proposal despite the benefits. While I initially wrestled with the whole situation as I pondered the pros and cons, I would have to generally agree with my staff's reservations.
I daresay, smarter people than I have had to wrestle with bigger proposals which necessitated greater compromises. The whole controversey with corporate naming rights at the Smithsonian comes to mind.
Its a situation all arts managers need to ponder. Most of the time, you think you wish you had the problem of people wanting to give you lots of money and how you would snatch it up while blithely saying "Oh you only want one of my kidneys, what a bargain!" Like most daydreams, you don't realize how attached you are to your body parts, or organizational soul as the case may be, until you receive a genuine offer for it.