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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What If I Had Only….

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One of the perennial challenges arts organizations face is attracting a younger audience and the tendency of audiences to commit so late that you wonder if there will be one for your event at all. According to a recent blog post by Priya Parker (which includes her talk at TEDxCambridge on the same subject), this is a result of a paralysis millennials feel when faced with so many choices. There is a fear of missing out on a better option.

Parker has conducted many interviews during her research in which respondents discuss the paralysis they feel at the prospect of making the wrong choice.

“Am I setting up my adult life to be the way that it could optimally be?” one of my subjects asked aloud, speaking of her general approach to life decisions. This subject explained how FOMO could even invade the pursuit of a spouse: “On the personal side, there’s this fear of ‘Am I committing to the right person?’”

More and more, particularly among those who have yet to make those big life decisions (whom to marry, what kind of job to commit to, where to live), FOMO and FOBO – the “fear of better options” – are causing these young leaders to stand still rather than act. “The way I think about it metaphorically is choosing one door to walk through means all the other doors close, and there’s no ability to return back to that path,” one subject told me. “And so rather than actually go through any doorway, it’s better to stand in the atrium and gaze.”

Those with the most options in this generation have a tendency to choose the option that keeps the most options open. Wrap your head around that for a second.

[…]

Many of us watch the choices of our peers and predecessors with a blend of admiration and anxiety. What seems to afflict this cohort – more than the political strivings or existential angst that defined earlier generations of elites – is a persistent anxiety about their might-have-been lives, about the ones that got away.”

I don’t think it is much consolation for art organizations to know this is something of a personal problem because ultimately, your audience’s problem is your problem. But once you have created an appealing work, communicated the information through appropriate channels and made it easy for those last minute decision makers to gain admission to your event, there may not be a heck of a lot left to do but watch and wait.

Obviously, this also has some implications about the development of creativity, a quality that seems to be receiving greater amounts of attention. It was apparently the a cover story of this weekend’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Review. Cultivating creative ability requires a lot of trial and error, especially the error part. You get better by learning from your mistakes. If Millennial are risk-averse, they may be too reluctant to commit themselves fully enough to make great creative strides.

In fact, in her TEDxCambridge talk, Parker mentions a number of related practices that inhibit creativity. One in particular was valuing success over mastery where when given the choice of spending two hours networking over coffee or two hours working on honing their artistic abilities, “they will always choose the coffee.”

Granted, every generation has been accused of being less accomplished than the generation before. Though that is usually by the preceding generation, Parker is speaking about her own generation. In the context of so many sources saying creativity is important, it will be worth paying attention to whether this approach to life will ultimately be a problem for the Millennial generation.

Unrelenting Pursuit of Excellence

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I am a little caught up with life issues but I noticed a movie I saw at the Hawaii International Film Festival last October is opening in wide release this weekend and I wanted to mention it.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about Jiro Ono, regarded as the world’s best sushi chef. His was the first sushi restaurant to be awarded three Michelin stars. I don’t particularly like sushi but it was well worth seeing this man’s artistry depicted fifteen feet long on a movie screen.

Jiro has never been satisfied with his accomplishments and always pushes to do better even at 85 years old. He has personal relationships with his suppliers, many of whom adhere to similarly high standards. His rice supplier won’t sell the type of rice Jiro uses to anyone else because he feels they don’t know how to cook it. It actually requires cooking under very high pressure to achieve the results Jiro does.

As I watched the movie, I thought about those in the arts and culture industry and wondered who among us is willing to labor in obscurity perfecting our craft. To achieve what Jiro has, you have to be willing to pursue perfection for its own sake alone and not for recognition in any form.

How long before you compromise your vision or give up in the absence of supportive feedback? How many people have sustained their drive whom we have no knowledge?

There is certainly an argument to be made against the type of single mindedness Jiro exhibits. There have been some less than positive outcomes. Yet it is the sole factor upon which his success is based.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbV6knbeUFE]

Transcending Expectations

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Back in December I wrote about the production of First Person: Seeing America we were hosting. I had described it as something of a live documentary with the narration, images and music all being performed in front of you rather than having the narration and music underscore the images as it might in a documentary on the History Channel.

The performance occurred this past weekend and it was just as terrific as I anticipated. They did an outreach service for the school today where they explained the process they went through in picking the text, music and images from the thousands of available choices. I was pleased that even with the limited exposure the audience had to the content of the show today, they experienced enough to realize how moving some of the pieces were even for the artists. One of the questions asked was whether the artists gave each other the time they needed to work through their emotions when they became affected by them.

But now that the show is over and the group has moved on, I can confess my embarrassment at mistaken assumptions. The production features NPR talk show host Neal Conan, actor Lily Knight and chamber music group Ensemble Galilei. I loved the concept of the multi-media production from the moment I first heard about it. I was disappointed that one of my consortium partners had managed to grab the show before me. Our geographic proximity precluded my being able to present them. I was pleased when he approached us to partner with him on the production. Yes, I wasn’t his first choice of venue, but who cares.

The mistake I made however was thinking that the production was brainchild of Neal Conan. I just figured the guy with the current affairs radio talk show would be the one who pulled people together to create a history based multi-media production. I mean, a group focused on performing something as staid as early music wouldn’t be creative enough to put a production like this together, right?

Actually, yes.

I spoke to group member Carolyn Anderson Surrick and she said that the initial idea came when she saw a phone card with pictures taken from the Hubble Telescope in a shop. She realized that the images were in the public domain and thought she could do a better job using the images than put them on a phone card. Their first project, A Universe of Dreams, brought poetry, music and images from the telescope together.

Their next project, First Person: Stories from the Edge of the World, used images from National Geographic in a piece about exploration. The current piece, First Person: Seeing America, deals with American history. While Conan has been involved with each of these projects, it was Ensemble Galilei which initially conceived of the idea.

I mention the show because this is probably a good example of how arts groups need to transcend expectations in order to make progress these days. Ensemble Galilei didn’t reinvent themselves or really compromise their identities to accomplish this.

Surrick said they played to the strengths of the ensemble which is early music and Celtic. She said people suggested they do a piece about the Works Progress Administration (WPA) but they felt it would be necessary to have more jazz oriented music to do it correctly. While they might be able to fake it, whatever they played wouldn’t elicit the same frisson experienced when the appropriate music and text came together.

I will acknowledge that one of the biggest drawback with transcending expectations is that you also transcend an audience’s familiar frame of reference. As I mentioned before about shows that shared this quality, you have to work all the harder to explain your new approach in the small window of attention people allow you.

In this instance, some creativity with the show description, the name recognition of Neal Conan and Ensemble Galilei with their respective fan bases brought in respectable ticket sales. But we doubled our sales in the 48 hours after a two page spread appeared in the weekend section of the newspaper. Once people invested enough time to read about the show and understood the concept, they really became interested.

Info You Can Use: Many Views of Shakespeare

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Ah March, when a young man’s thoughts turn to love…or backstabbing betrayal. Those cynics among us might says love and betrayal are pretty much the same thing. However, I was mostly referring to the Ides of March upon which day Julius Caesar was famously assassinated. That fact might not be widely known if not for Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar in which the warning to “beware the ides of March” is discussed at some length.

Or was it Shakespeare’s play after all? Shakespeare’s authorship has long been debated and the details which have lead people to believe one way or another can be hard to keep track of. However, last year Blogging Shakespeare created a page to help people understand the controversy a little better. 60 Minutes with Shakespeare provides 60 one minute answers to questions about Shakespeare’s work. (Actually, 61 minutes. Prince Charles has a one minute special guest commentary of his own.)

As you might imagine, most of the segments on Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays refute the notion that it was anyone but he who wrote them. While it is difficult to answer a complicated question in one minute, the segments provide a good starting point to understand the culture and practices of Elizabethan England.

In particular, I think the page provides a good introduction to Shakespeare for people who aren’t familiar or comfortable with his plays (and enlightening for those who are). The tidbits of information help to humanize a figure whose very name is imbued with a deitific aura.

In presenting the arguments about Shakespeare’s authorship in this format, it makes the works even more intriguing. It is easy to gain a basic understanding of all the arguments. It is amazing how many different elements people use as evidence to challenge the authorship and the number of alternatives authors and collaborators that have been proposed. Everyone from Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud and Henry James are cited as having weighed in on the subject.

While literary scholars will have a deeper understanding and much more to say on the subject, the average person can gain a general enough understanding about the topic to identify the elements being questioned when watching/reading one of the plays. Thanks to the short one minute format, you can view a play and then come back to review a specific topic in the context of your experience.

I was left wondering why there are not any similar controversies surrounding some of the great composers. Other than the discredited claim perpetuated by Mozart’s widow that the music came whole cloth from his mind and he never revised or rewrote, I wasn’t aware many refutations of composers’ creativity.

After a little searching, I quickly discovered some questions have been raised about whether Haydn and Mozart wrote everything attributed to them. However, there isn’t much written and I am not sure how much credence the theory has been given.

There is barely anything I could find written on the topic compared with the theories about Shakespeare. I don’t know if this is a reflection of some differences between the way music and plays are composed and performed or simply that the controversies in music have failed to capture popular imagination as well as Shakespeare’s.