Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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Info You Can Use: Save The Charity, Save Your Company

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I loved this story on Non Profit Quarterly about a Maine restaurant which actually revived its business when it started holding all you can eat fundraisers for charities.

…the eatery thought of the weekly all-you-can-eat nights with suggested donations flowing to charity as a way to attract new customers. “It worked almost immediately and it revitalized the business,” Benedict said. “We would have gone out of business if we didn’t change the way we did business. Giving back is the first thing we did, and it worked.” She says that a total of $635,000 has been raised since 2009 for local charity organizations and individuals.

It is great to hear that a business saved itself by helping charities in the community. It could be a model for other communities and businesses.

However, the restaurant hit a snag when the state attorney general started to investigate whether it was licensed as a charitable solicitor.

My first reaction was disappointment because the restaurant was doing such good work, but the truth is that there is a lot of fraud and deception perpetuated by companies acting as charitable solicitors. So unfortunately, despite an abundance of good intentions, companies need to be careful about providing assistance to charities in a similar manner.

The Council of Non-Profits has a link to the first chapter of a book about the licensing required for charitable solicitation by 40 states. The chapter provides a good introduction to the issues involved and resources for finding out more about the requirements in your state. I was able to go right to the pertinent sections of my state code and find who is exempt from filing with a couple mouse clicks. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear the restaurant would be exempt in my state.)

Economic Impact Ain’t Everything

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Drew McManus cautions a little today against putting a lot of stock in studies about the economic impact of the arts.

I had been thinking along the same lines because so many people were crowing last week about studies showing arts and culture had a $500 billion impact on the economy.

The problem is, between 1998-2008 the impact of arts and culture on current dollar GDP was between 3.5% and 3.7% of the economy. According to a piece from Pacific Standard, arts and culture has been hanging around at 3.2% of the economy since 2009. When you are talking 500 billion, each tenth of a percentage there represents tens of billions of dollars so a .3%-.5% difference adds up quite a bit of lost impact. (Though the report was measuring where things stood in 2011 we are talking about a 2 year “hang.”)

From some of the responses I was reading, it seemed like people thought this was the first time the economic impact of arts and culture had been measured. It does appear that the criteria and methods are more refined than in the past, so the number may be more accurate. But as Drew suggests, people have been attempting to measure economic impact of arts and culture for quite some time now.

And remember, often economic measurements aren’t always your friend and acknowledging their validity can be a two edged sword if someone else can claim bring equal or better results.

A recent opinion blog on the NY Times reminded me that when it comes to economic impact and earnings potential for arts and culture positions, it is important to note that the figures are a result of specific decisions being made:

Is the crisis rather one of harsh economic reality? Humanities majors on average start earning $31,000 per year and move to an average of $50,000 in their middle years. (The figures for writers and performing artists are much lower.) By contrast, business majors start with salaries 26 percent higher than humanities majors and move to salaries 51 percent higher.

But this data does not show that business majors earn more because they majored in business. Business majors may well be more interested in earning money and so accept jobs that pay well even if they are not otherwise fulfilling, whereas people interested in the humanities and the arts may be willing to take more fulfilling but lower-paying jobs. College professors, for example, often know that they could have made far more if they had gone to law school or gotten an M.B.A., but are willing to accept significantly lower pay to teach a subject they love.

Economic impact of arts activity could potentially be greater if more people choose to charge more (or it could be lower because it wouldn’t be as widespread.) Arts and Culture salaries could be higher if people held out for more money (but again, there might be fewer people employed in those areas.) Choices have been made in an attempt to provide more widespread access and because people have been motivated by considerations other than money.

(And by the way, salaries start to even out around mid-career. Note that liberal arts is tied with medical technology, theatre with health care administration, history with business administration, and philosophy is WAY above both of them.)

People may tell you that back in the old days, people stuck with a job no matter how awful it was instead of pursuing what interested them. That may be true to a degree, but this weekend my mother told me that when my grandfather was working in the garage at a car dealership about 4-5 miles from their house, he was unhappy and bounced back and forth between parts manager and service manager and would curse up a storm every night.

Then he got a job at West Point Military Academy in shipping/receiving in the early 60s, and even though it was 40 miles away which required him to get up earlier every day, she never heard him curse after that point.

Not only do I know that my grandfather couldn’t be the only one who did this, I have heard interviews recently with people who lived in towns with good manufacturing bases who talked about how easy it was to quit a job in the morning and have a new one by the afternoon.

People may characterize following your bliss and studying a topic that interests you as an irresponsible and effete decision, but it isn’t unrelated to decisions people have made in the past. There may have been a good many people who stayed in a soul crushing job all their lives, but that may have been more of a choice than a necessity.

This by no means ignores that there are other forces conspiring to place college educated people in low paying jobs. There is more involved in finding employment than choosing a field of study and embracing the realities of jobs in that field.

But the choice to accept a job at low pay also contributes to the job being low paying. Sometimes it is because there are few alternatives but to accept those jobs. Sometimes it is because the applicants concede the organization has important uses for that money.

Salaries and economic impact are not the sole measure of value of people and their labor. Good thing too because we probably all have more value as soylent green.

Don’t Be Nervous, It’s Not About You

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I do a lot of public speaking and am generally pretty comfortable doing it. The place I get most nervous is up on stage. In a classroom or hall full of 50-100 people, no problem. On stage, in a theatre, and my nervous energy starts to rev up.

It doesn’t approach anywhere near paralysis, but it is there.

At the last theatre I worked at, I got pretty accustomed to the space and the general energy of the people. But now that I am standing up in a new space, I gotta start all over again.

I took a little guidance from a post Seth Godin made about public speaking on Monday to prepare for my appearance before the performance we had Tuesday night.

In his post, “Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear,” he says:

1. You believe that you are being actively judged

2. You believe that the subject of the talk is you

When you stand up to give a speech, there’s a temptation to believe that the audience is actually interested in you.

This just isn’t true. (Or if it is, it doesn’t benefit you to think that it is).

You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged. The topic of the talk isn’t you, the topic of the talk is the audience, and specifically, how they can use your experience and knowledge to achieve their objectives.

[…]

If you dive into your (irrelevant to the listener) personal hurdles, if you try to justify what you’ve done, if you find yourself aswirl in a whirlpool of the resistance, all you’re providing is a little schadenfreude as a form of entertainment.

On the other hand, if you realize that you have a chance to be generous in this moment, to teach and to lead, you can leave the self-doubt behind and speak a truth that the audience needs to hear. When you bring that to people who need it, your fear pales in comparison.

Not the simple advice found in, “imagine everybody in their underwear,” but probably more useful to you in the process of preparing for your moment in the spotlight so you don’t start getting worked up in advance.

Incidentally, this is the same advice usually given about marketing and advertising–It isn’t about you, it is about your audience and what is valuable to them. So you shouldn’t be spending a lot time listing accomplishments trying to justify your organization, but rather make the focus about your audience and how they benefit.

Wishing You Were A Famous Actor, Tenured Professor Or A Drug Kingpin

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This weekend I was reading an piece on Slate that likened new Ph.Ds seeking tenured positions in higher ed to drug dealers hoping to become drug kingpins.

“If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and-file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing,” wrote Alexandre Afonso, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London.

[…]
“The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics,” he writes. “Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labor markets virtually everywhere… Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.”

Since I work in higher education, I thought this theory was interesting and entertaining and then moved on. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized this pretty much describes the same situation faced by people who want to be actors (as well a orchestra musicians, I imagine). I don’t know why it didn’t strike me earlier, I have been reading Scott Walters’ thoughts on the subject of too many acting students being graduated for the available jobs for years.

Just like the rank and file drug dealers and doctoral program graduates, thousands of actors graduate a training program at some level hoping to become a big star, or at least steadily employed at a livable wage, each year.

The problem is, the only opportunities are on the periphery as either a low level drug dealer or adjunct, while the available spots at the core as a kingpin or tenured professor are increasingly few. (Though I will confess that other than increased pressure from law enforcement and internecine conflicts, I am not sure what is limiting the number of kingpin slots.)

It may be much worse for actors because it appears there are fewer and fewer paid opportunities even on the periphery for them to pick up, much less achieve a reasonable career and income. (Though it is difficult to gauge because the surveys aren’t able to comprehensively measure all paid opportunities.)

But I have long known about all these factors that conspire against practicing artists and that students are undeterred and pursue the career path anyway. My realization that the comparison of Phds to drug dealers was apt for actors was pretty much just that– a realization that arts people don’t really diverge too far from the norm in their aspirations.

Not that desiring to be a drug kingpin is normal, but the act of aspiring to achieve a severely limited status is widely shared by all humans and not specific to artists.

This may seem like common sense, but when you hear students urged to pursue practical majors in Business and STEM fields, you might get the impression that aspiring to the unobtainable is embraced by only the margins of society. As the Slate article notes, the similar conditions exist across all areas of the labor market. It may only be pursued to greater extremes by the margins, but the impulse is deep seated in us all.