2012 Year In Review

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I often tell people that it surprises me what postings take off. There are things I write that I think are really insightful that barely get any notice. Other posts that I just dash off after hours of trying to think of something pithy to write about will garner all sorts of attention.

I pretty much see it as a parallel for the whole non-profit arts experience so I don’t take it personally if I don’t get a lot of attendance at the stuff I deem to be brilliant masterpieces.

However, looking back at the posts that garnered the most attention in 2012, I am assured that my dreck isn’t rising to the top.

The most traffic by far went to my post Forget Dynamic Pricing, Use Placebo Pricing

The Next Most Visited Page was The About Me page (you like me, you really like me!)

But the second most visited post was Your Mouth Says Innovative, Your Pictures Say Status Quo

Third, is unexpectedly, Dramaturgy Is Everyone’s Responsibility. In the coming year I may have to explore the subject more often.

Fourth and Fifth were June’s Embracing The (Cost) Disease and last month’s Expectations Feed The Disease. I wrote about Baumol’s Cost Disease three times last year and two of those entries popped into the top 5 so apparently the subject is of some interest.

What I was most inspired by this year was an animated typographic video of Ira Glass’ advice about creativity. The post I included it in is a little long and doesn’t do justice to the frisson I experienced when I watched the video so I won’t link to it. However, I used the video in a couple presentations this year, including a middle school career day.

My favorite line is right near the beginning where he talks about how when you first start out, what you are making isn’t really all that good, “But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer.”

Like Glass, I wish someone told me that when I was first starting out.

Do Arts Really Need A Tax Status Of Their Own?

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. If you saw Spielberg’s movie, Lincoln, you will know that there were many concerns about the legality of trying to make the proclamation stick, especially upon reunification of the country, which necessitated the adoption of the 13th Amendment to ensure the abolition of slavery.

The movie actually reminded me a lot of an episode of The West Wing where legislative wrangling was set against the backdrop of a president’s daily national and personal concerns. Either the job hasn’t changed a lot in 150 years or Spielberg was presenting the story in a familiar context.

Let me state clearly from the outset I don’t want to equate slavery with non-profit art organizations. The anniversary and the relationship between the proclamation and 13th amendment is just a convenient excuse to revisit a topic.

The concept that a situation only had tenuous legal support has parallels in the non-profit status most arts organizations enjoy. There is no mention of arts organizations in the 501 c 3 tax code. I made note of this in an open letter post to President Obama on the occasion of his inauguration four years ago.

In that post I asked the president to help the non-profit arts sector by providing a specific, better designed tax structure in which arts organizations can operate. Thinking back I wondered if that was still necessary given the continued emergence of the L3C model, B corporations and the crowd funding/investing options allowed by the JOBS Act.

Don’t get me wrong, none of these options are well suited to arts organizations. I just started wondering if the arts are really best served if the government legislates a specific structure within which they must operate. Experimentation with planned organizational expiration may do more to cultivate viable, community/situation specific models than asking for one to be legislated.

Having arts organizations making common cause with for-profit corporations and other interests to advance laws and regulations they mutually favor may do more to raise the profile of arts organizations in general than had the arts groups worked among themselves to carve out something specific to the arts sector.

Just something to think about at the start of a new year and a new presidential term since many ideas and opportunities have emerged since the last one.

New Year’s Resolution: Play With Your Family

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A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I often mis-credit my role in my 8th grade play as the start of involvement in performance and that it all really started when my siblings and I put on plays for the rest of our family.

Back in November there was a great article by Lawrence McCullough on Creativity Post about how families can use play making as a communication and learning tool. I was interested to see him suggest this is something you could do with kids as young as four.

Even if you have been in the performing arts for 15 years and think you know what you are doing, it is worth reading the article. These are your kids, not adult professionals or even students you are working with and the goals for the activity are much different. For example, one of the things McCullough warns against is getting an idea and then casting the show before you have any dialogue written.

Even though you don’t work that way professionally, it might be something you would be apt to do with a story the while family knows–telling the story of why Santa delivers presents and deciding who will play Santa, the elves, etc.

If you cast before you know what characters are going to say or really be about, you’re painting children into a corner, locking them into thinking about just one part of the play when they should be exercising their creative abilities to the max.

McCullough talks about many of the benefits of these activities from showing events from your kids’ points of view to providing a tool for resolving problems and, of course, nurturing creativity.

The thing that I oriented most on was his suggestion of using playmaking to tell the family’s stories. I wondered how many families really communicate their stories these days. Are grandparents fulfilling their stereotypical roles of telling stories about the old days for their grandkids to groan about? Since 60 is the new 40 (or whatever) grandparents may be leading too active a life to bother their grandkids with such things.

Yet there is a lot to be learned and bonds to be formed by these stories. My family has a lot of stories: my Sicilian great grandmother being “taught” to speak English resulting in her cursing out her work supervisor instead of wishing him good morning; my father being rewarded for helping out a customer after he clocked out for lunch; my mother and her roommates at an all-girls Catholic college being far more mischievous than my father and his college drinking buddies.

I credit my knowledge of these stories and their attendant lessons to the fact there was no cable television, much less internet when I was growing up. Nowadays, you probably have to make a special effort just to bring everyone together to communicate your family’s struggles and triumphs. Which is why I am suggesting this as a potential New Year’s Resolution.

Stuff to Ponder: Get Thee To A Start Up Weekend!

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I was intrigued to see that the Scion car company is running a contest to help cultivate new entrepreneurs. Scion has always positioned themselves as a lifestyle brand, (disclaimer: I own one of the first 100 Scions sold in my state.), but I thought this was an interesting approach for them.

Basically, they will fly up to 50 semi-finalists to LA to participate in a three day event where they attend seminars, meet up with mentors and receive advice on writing press releases, forming LLCs, getting loans, soliciting investors and copywrighting ideas (I am guessing they mean trademarking since you can’t copywright ideas.) The semi-finalists then rewrite their proposals and finalists are chosen from the best revamped proposals.

I am sure there is a lot Scion will get out of it, but free advice directly applying to their own business isn’t one of them. One of the first restrictions on the contest is that it can’t be related to the car industry or Scion’s business activities.

This idea isn’t new. There are tons of entrepreneurship competitions out there as well as start up weekends where people from all sorts of background come together to meet and potentially launch a start up in the course of 54 hours.

The Scion contest got me thinking about two things- First, could an arts oriented project end up as a finalist in one of these type of competitions? Could someone go into one of the Start Up Weekends and emerge with a viable arts oriented company and business model after tapping into the brains of those present?

My second thought was from the other direction–should arts professionals participate as advisers in these sort of events in order to exhibit the value of the arts in the community beyond just entertainment? This might go a long way toward making the case not only for arts organizations, but perhaps more importantly toward the value of arts in education, if it was shown that it can contribute to the development of products and ideas that are indeed marketable.

The success of the design school teams over the business school teams in a University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management challenge already started to provide some indications of this.

I have written about articles on what private enterprise can learn from non-profits.

I also pointed that it is important to note that the value of many of the creative exercises arts organizations can offer business lies not so much in the superficial motions of the activity as the fact that performing them means you are carving time out of your day to devote to creativity.