Arts For What They Are, As Opposed To What They Are Opposed To

Back in April, Peter Linett posted about the development of arts organizations during the 50s and 60s, commenting:

This was a negative identity, premised on oppositions rather than intrinsic attributes. The arts were non-commercial, non-profit, “high” culture as distinct from “low.” It’s almost as if the purpose of the arts, as that category came to be defined, was to be an antidote to the rest of culture: civilized because everything else was increasingly uncivil; elegant and “serious” because everything else was coarse and frivolous; formal because everything else seemed to be coming loose.

This oppositional approach has actually brought about some pretty vibrant works as artists rebel against what their contemporaries and those who preceded them do. This is what a lot of marketing and advertising efforts base their appeal to us on- that what one company offers is better than the other options. It may be related to your self-identity or making your life better/easier for an economic price.

Somewhere along the line, arts and culture got out flanked as the appealing alternative. For a long time it was holding its own against radio and television. Other alternatives developed or perhaps there was a shift in what people were looking for an alternative to. The question of “what exciting thing can I do tonight,” may be been replaced with “my life is so busy, what can I do tonight that doesn’t require me to get back in my car.”

Since it is likely that people’s criteria about what constitutes an interesting alternative is likely to shift, and shift rather often, Linett’s suggestion about presenting the intrinsic value of the arts for its own sake makes sense.

Right now the big push is to engage with audiences. If successful, these efforts should result in a much more positive and constructive relationship with audiences. But lets face it, everyone is pretty much scrambling to engage with audiences for the purpose of shifting choices toward them over someone/thing else. The race is to offer better engagement than the next guy and engage the socks off audiences until they don’t know what to do with all the engagement they are getting thrown at them. And god knows, thanks to the support of your board, you have the resources to pull it off and make everyone else’s efforts look puny by comparison.

C’mon, admit it, that is the internal conversation you are having. You have to meet payroll after all, so while part of you is sincere in your efforts, part of you is calculating the value of engagement efforts as a tool for attracting people to you in some manner.

I suspect in spite of any self interested element, individuals will come to value the arts for themselves thanks to the changes organizations make. I also suspect that arts and cultural organizations will come to enjoy providing engagement activities for their own sake and not as a means to secure grant funding or event attendance. In the best of all worlds, there will be a greater alignment between audiences and artists as the former comes to better understand the value of the arts as the artist does and artists no longer see one of their primary roles as interpreter/explainer.

Please don’t take this to mean that I think audience members don’t possess a deep appreciation for the value of the arts. Since engagement programs of necessity need to provide audiences with a different perspective on the arts experience and greater permission to be involved and understand, I anticipate that audiences will gain insights they did not possess before and artists will come to realize they can trust audiences to be smart enough to understand on their own.

Essentially, I am extending the idea of brains rather than butts in the seats toward an optimistic conclusion. Love and understanding can be ours if arts people can get past the idea that they are the arbiters of understanding. Of course, if arts people are going to cede this control, audiences have to embrace the opportunity and make an effort to understand. Good news is, a lot of them already are.

Info You Can Use: Expertise As Entertainment

So much to do and so little time to do it! I am a little short on time for my post today but I wanted to direct attention to Eric Ziegenhagen’s TEDxMichiganAve talk, Expertise as Entertainment.

There have only been 74 views so I know you all haven’t seen it yet!

What Ziegenhagen talks about is the increasing prevalence of expertise being valued as an attraction. He focuses a lot on restaurants. It is no longer dinner and a show, dinner is the show. With the increased appreciation of culinary skills of chefs thanks to myriad television shows, people are valuing exposure to that skill as an attraction.

Restaurants in turn are designing the dining experience in response to this interest by providing information about the different components of the meal and providing more opportunities to watch the preparation process.

Ziegenhagen speaks of one restaurant that sells tickets to their seatings essentially intending them to be scalped. They apparently researched the laws governing resale of tickets and designed their reservation process in a way that permitted them to be transferred.

Ziegenhagen references the burgeoning TED lecture franchise as a evidence that people are beginning to value what is basically the pre-show lecture/post show talk back as much, if not more, than the actual show itself.

Looking at them in that context and taking a look at what makes the TED talks so engaging and interesting may provide some insight into how to make pre and post show talks more valuable to your audiences. (Clue: It might mean bringing in someone with no association to your organization at all.)

The Little Things Are More Engaging Than You Think

If you are like me, the changes in the economy and people’s expectations about their interactions with the arts probably has you avidly watching for the new theories, techniques and technologies that may be relevant to your operations. Faced with uncertainty and rapid change, it is easy to forget that there are simple little gestures which we repeat over and over whose performance our audiences value. The explicit, big gestures using the newest techniques may pique interest and get them in the door, but it is going to be the small, mundane things that help keep them.

Some of these are passive things that are part of the organizational culture which we barely recognize we do. They don’t require a lot of time and energy but result in constructive activity. It can be something as easy as just leaving the door open as an invitation for something to happen.

I met today with one of the architects working on our facility renovation. I am anticipate we will be having a lot of these sort of meetings which cover small changes that will have a significant impact on the way audiences experience our facility.

One thing I talked to him about was putting more outlets in our scene shop. This isn’t to accommodate more power tools, but rather to accommodate the gathering of students and others. At the moment, the table area we typically use for meetings, lunch and effecting repairs has started to turn into a learning commons. Students are plugging in so many computers and other devices that they have extension cords crossing in front of the staircase to my office which I subsequently trip over.

I realized this afternoon that this gathering is actually the result of a decision I made three years ago to make the area more welcoming. Prior to that, on days we didn’t have classes or activities in the shop, I would leave the shop door locked and the lights off. All the better to show how ecologically responsible we were by keeping our energy usage to a minimum. Students were theoretically supposed to enter through another door to attend classes but often passed through the shop if the door was open.

As enrollment grew over the last few years and I saw exterior gathering areas becoming more crowded, I started to leave the lights on and the door open on a regular basis. Over that time, the number of people seeking a place to study or chat grew (granted, a little strange given that scene shops are noisy places, but there you are.)

Now we have faculty from visual arts and music who don’t normally teach in our building coming in to eat their lunch. The area has become something of a learning commons and collaborative space for students and faculty. I have students designing a poster and postcard for the show next month running up to my office with their thumb drives to get feedback on their work. Before the hammering started this afternoon, one of the music teachers was pounding on the meeting tables to teach a percussion sequence to a student.

I don’t know how long this may last. I can definitely attribute some of this activity to the dynamics between specific students and that may disappear when they graduate.

I can’t directly link any increase in attendance to this gathering of students so leaving the door open hasn’t helped my revenue situation much in a time when that is increasingly becoming a concern. However, since no one on staff has to design a poster or postcard for the next show, we are able to spend that time in other pursuits. When it comes time to distribute the materials, I bet the students will be interested in helping given their ownership of the piece. This afternoon, the students helped populate areas of the theatre during a photo shoot we were doing in support of a space naming campaign we hope to launch fairly soon. Potentially, their presence might yield income if those images are used in the campaign.

I know this sounds a little vague and hard to quantify. What I am advocating for is basically not forgetting about the assets you have to offer to your community and making them available for use by your constituencies. Some activities may take a little more effort than just leaving doors unlocked and lights on. For example, even though you want to go home, you leave the concession stand open, the lobby lights on and the restrooms open while people stand around chatting and chatting and chatting because the welcoming environment creates an intangible, but valuable positive impression of the organization even though it isn’t as effortless as it may appear.

In some cases you may be able turn a weakness and inaction into a strength. Don’t have money for landscaping? Plant wild flowers that attract butterflies. The front area won’t seem as much a rambling mess with butterflies flitting around.

What you do may not even be connected with your physical plant. Maybe the diner everyone on staff eats at all the time can turn into the site of an impromptu consultation session on how to create haunted houses and wire up holiday displays. That sort of thing reminds everyone that 1) Your organization contributes to the economy by patronizing area business; 2) Enhances the value of the diner in the community; 3) Makes people aware of the knowledge and expertise represented by your organization. I am sure there are fourth, fifth and beyond reasons, but note none of these have anything to do with specifically trying to attract people to your shows. Yet they engage your community at the cost of making a little extra effort at a place you were going to anyway.

It is key that you treat these sort of activities like giving someone a gift– you can’t have an expectation of something in return. If there are positive results, it may take years for it to manifest in a manner you can attribute to your efforts but it may not do so in the way you anticipated. Just as in personal relationships, what you value and want from your friendship with someone may not be the same as what your friend perceives as the valuable aspects of their relationship with you.

Better ROI Than Thou

The Los Angeles Times has a video of the change over process between the LA Opera productions of Cosi fan Tutte and Eugene Onegin.

My first reaction was how cool the magic of theatre is that such transformations can take place in a short time to generate the illusion of two different places.

Then I started to think about the cost and whether it was all sustainable. They only repeat the same production once so this change over requiring 45 stage hands happens about 4 times a week- Onegin on Saturday, Cosi on Sunday, Cosi on Wednesday, Onegin on Thursday, Cosi on Saturday, Onegin on Sunday. Then I look at the design elements and wonder if they really need to have 800 gallons of water on stage for one act only to drain it and expose the Plexiglas for the second act.

Next I looked at the prices, $270 for orchestra down to $40 for an unobstructed view in the back of the balcony ($20 for an obstructed view). If they cut back on some of the design elements and changed the production schedule, they could charge less and be more accessible, right?

But you know, while I was thinking all this, I was also feeling a little torn. I felt like my grandmother who, having grown up during the Depression, would scowl at us for not washing aluminum foil and Ziploc bags so they could be used again. Was the only reason I was having critical thoughts like this because that is how those of we in the non-profit arts are brought up to think?

Opera is all about spectacle and that is what people expect from the experience. People complain about the high cost of rock concerts and Broadway shows, but there are few people arguing they have to lower the prices to make the shows more accessible. Usually the accessibility argument for rock concerts is about keeping companies from buying up huge blocks of tickets, not that the original price was too much. People complained that the Broadway previews of Spiderman were so expensive, but people kept buying and buying.

So if the demand is there, what business is it of mine whether the LA Opera is operating in a way that requires them to charge so much? The rotating schedule might actually make better financial sense for them after all. I worked at a theatre in a community with a high tourist rate where the rotating repertory schedule actually helped increase their audiences.

Yet, while it does have significant private support, Broadway shows and rock concerts don’t depend on public support the way non-profits like the LA Opera does. So the question is, do we in the arts mount bold productions that employ technology cleverly to bring our audiences delight. Or do we worry that people wanting to reduce the funding the arts receive will use groups like the LA Opera as an example of why the arts don’t need funding since they can afford to operate at such high standards.

Some of this fear comes from the hostile reception the idea of public funding for the arts receives. It is also reinforced by the practice of private funding sources. The big measure of not for profit effectiveness right now is low overhead. I can’t recall where, but I recently read a quote from an influential politician/business person who said if anything could be funded, it should be the arts because they generate such a great return on the investment.

While I am glad to hear this message repeated by people not working in the arts, the pressure to have low overhead and great results for the investment tends to create a mindset where an organization views themselves as more virtuous than a better funded one because they bring the arts to under served populations and children on a shoe string budget. Who needs hostile politicians when we are all too willing to cast a “better-ROI-than-thou” disapproving eye on each other?

That’s all well and good, but this attitude is what also contributes to few people taking an arts career seriously because no one gets well paid.

Is In-n-Out Burger more virtuous than Wendy’s because they have a smaller, leaner operation? Sure, for profits and non profits have different reasons for operating, but few people praise a commercial enterprise as being virtuous because their cost controls have kept them small.

So does it matter how much the LA Opera is spending?