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Tom Loughlin

Is It The Mastery Of The Medium Or The Idea That Makes Good Art

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Daniel Grant had a piece on the Huffington Post about a new trend in visual arts M.F.A. programs where training is tailored to students’ particular interests. He references the programs at New York’s School of Visual Arts which has a traditional program and a multi-disciplinary degree in arts practice.

“The traditional MFA is media-specific; you are a painter, you are a sculptor, you are a printmaker, and you study those processes intensely,” said David Ross, the chairman of the Art Practice MFA program. “The Art Practice program is for artists working in more hybrid areas, incorporating a number of different media or selecting the particularly medium based on what they are trying to accomplish at a given time. Many schools now see artists choosing to define themselves post-conceptually, in which the idea comes first and the medium comes second, and these artists are more difficult for the traditional program to accommodate.”

There seems to be similar programs at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University which has an MFA in Visual Art and Public Life. Grant describes the students in the Herron School program:

“Their focus is not so much creating something that can be exhibited in a gallery or even in a public square as it is developing projects in association with various business, community, cultural or governmental partners.”

I haven’t quite figured out what I think about these developments. My first thought was to wonder if perhaps these programs might be an outgrowth of the Pro-Am movement. If not directly related to or a result of Pro-Am, perhaps these programs are an expression of a general sentiment of people who are not complete experts but who are looking for a way to better express themselves.

Obviously, people who are seeking training at master’s level have a desire to be a little closer to the professional end of the scale. With a primary focus on the expression of an idea over mastery of a medium, there is much they have in common with the Pro-Am view of art creation and expression.

What I find encouraging is that these artists are looking to develop partnerships with different entities in the community. Their approach to art may result in people viewing it as more accessible and less intimidating. It looks like there is more inclusiveness in the process these artists use. It also appears as if these art students are being trained in business and social skills that can help with their careers upon graduation.

What contributes to my uncertainty is a concern that having a secondary focus on the medium will mean the students will lack the mastery to create truly innovative works. I know that the value of an art work is often more than just the adept use of materials. On the other hand, people wouldn’t value a Stradivarius if making a violin was just a matter of assembling wood well. Experimentation and understanding of how different materials interact when you combine or treat them in different ways can be a crucial to one’s development as an artist.

I am not suggesting artists be relegated to the solitary confinement of their studios. I don’t believe that is ultimately constructive for artists and their work. I also don’t think that the jack of all trades, master of none approach is valuable to artists in the long run.

I am thinking of a recent blog post by Tom Loughlin suggesting that BFA degree programs in Musical Theatre should be eliminated. In the post he points out that in the current state of the industry, those trying to train themselves to be a triple threat- someone who can act, sing and dance – will be beaten out by people trained to be specialists in those areas.

I am not saying that the generalist artist won’t create interesting works of artistic merit. I read the quote by Kenneth Krachek, director of the community arts program at the Maryland Institute College of Art where he says, “all the programs are supportive of each other, but they each have their own momentum and solar system.” Other MFA fine art students at the school “don’t interact much with us,” and that didn’t sound like an ideal dynamic to be cultivating.

I wondered if it might not serve people in both the traditional and new degree tracks if they were encouraged as students to follow a process where the generalist is mentored by the specialist of a specific discipline in the creation of a project. If this was continued when the students graduated and went out to work professionally this collaborative arrangement could be beneficial to both. The specialist would bring experience and knowledge of working in a particular medium. The generalist would bring a the experience of working with community entities and creating work for them rather solely for a gallery.

Farming The Arts

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A couple weeks ago on the Americans for the Arts blog, Joshua Russell suggested a farm system for arts leadership similar to what professional sports teams use. I got to thinking about that concept in the context of arts organizations in general.

My first thought was that there is already a farm team feeder set up for so many segments of the performing arts, going something like: high school —>college/conservatory —> professional. Depending on the discipline, then you might get into different strata for theatre companies, symphonies, dance companies where performing with one is more prestigious than another.

Farm League Actors?
Then I started thinking about whether some sort of system like this might be possible in theatre since that is the area whose training and performance system I am most familiar. There are, in fact, a number of college/conservatory theatre training programs with very close associations to LORT theatres that provide actors, stage managers and technicians with practical experience (and the theatres with less expensive labor.) But there is a lot of room for expansion. Given a huge infusion of money and a shift in funding structures, could Broadway and the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) create a feeder system? Done right, it could shift the focus away from NYC, Los Angeles and Chicago as the ultimate career goal and strengthen theatre regionally. Of course, it would take about 25-30 years for attitudes to shift sufficiently away from the holy trinity as a career destination.

Toledo Tyrones, Guthrie Triple A Team
There is already a tacit acknowledgment of stature, but I imagine some people, as a matter of ego, and there is plenty of that in the arts, might not like to have their local theatre overtly regarded as substandard to the organizations they feed into. On the other hand, a lot of people find minor league baseball games and the parks that house them to be a lot more fun and family friendly than the majors. Presumably, there would be some sort of investment of funds and resources from up the chain to sustain the system of cultivation. That might improve quality on many fronts for the single A to triple A level theatres.

Setting Down Roots
I think it would also go a long way to solve some of the concerns Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin have about the careers theatre training programs are preparing students for if there were viable career opportunities that allowed people to maintain a long term regional residency. It might not stem the tide of too many people pursuing too few opportunities, but it might keep creative people closer to home where they could apply that skill in ways that would bolster the local economy.

The Wise Farmer Plans Long Term
Ultimately, short of an immense shift in thousands of elements, I don’t anticipate this happening any time soon. At least not on a national scale. I think a single regional theatre could make a commitment to sourcing locally. They could go to a couple of training programs and commit to employing their students with an eye to keeping them around for a long time. Every college program I have been associated with has a pretty good idea what high schools feed them. The colleges and the theatre could go to them and say they look forward to seeing their students on their stages and they hope the schools continue to maintain strong arts programs. The theatre could also go around to other theatres throughout the region looking for up and coming talent.

Then the theatre could employ their board connections directly and indirectly to create a program where artists could secure good rents and mortgages and get other incentives to stay locally. In turn some of those who are attracted/retained to the area can target the feeder schools as teachers and visiting artists to help cultivate that resource–and eventually expand to other schools.

By the way, this is partially how the whole regional theatre system was supposed to work. Instead, they turned to NYC to do most of their casting. This hypothetical theatre would be looking to lure people back or give them an incentive to never go. To some degree, it would actually be healthy for the theatre to have people go away to work with other actors and organizations and then return. While Broadway may always be the gold standard in many respects, it might be best to have people going away to work in places that served regional communities because those are the audiences the theatre wants its people to learn to serve.

Shifting The Conversation
But in terms of a national movement, I think there is a better chance of Walters and Loughlin succeeding in changing the way students are trained and the way their expectations are shaped than having most theatres change how they source their talent.

Sports and Theatre
In that context, my mind turned to a comparison of the athletics and farm system for professional sports. The systems aren’t completely analogous, but there are enough similarities to speculate a little. The problem area that Walters and Loughlin identify is the college/conservatory stage where people choose to major in theatre hoping to make a career of it.

For college sports, a lot of athletes are offered scholarships to play for the school. There is a fair amount of controversy about this because there is a lot of money invested in non-academic pursuits at educational institutions. Victories bring prestige and increased donations from alumni. There is also criticism made of the fact that these students generate a lot of money for the school, but often don’t get a good education out of the deal because of low expectations of them or even lack of time to excel in both sports and academics.

Practical Professional Expectations
But the thing is, despite all the investment into the athletic programs and the players, you pretty much know that not everyone is going to get to play professionally. There are far fewer professional teams than there are college programs that can feed them. There are 32 NFL teams and about 120 college football teams in Division I alone. There are only a select few who can successfully operate at the level required by professional sports.

You occasionally hear about athletes getting short shrift on their education or having irrational expectations of being recruited to play pro right out of high school. But how many people will complain if all of Alabama’s defensive tackles didn’t get drafted to the NFL even though the school finished first in the football standings last year?

Status Enumerated
Statistically, every defensive tackle that graduates each year may have a better chance of going pro than every acting student that graduates, but for all practical purposes, the chances are the same. So what is the difference? Why aren’t more athletes taking temporary jobs, biding their time until their opportunity comes?

Well, for one thing, I think its partially that numbers help define your place in sports. You know how fast you can run, how many times you have completed an action successfully and how many times you didn’t. Personality and passion also contribute to whether someone wants you for their team, but the statistics provide a baseline comparison between you and everyone else and you know what teams value. You may think you weren’t used to your greatest potential, but you probably have few illusions about an athletics career going forward.

What Are Ian McKellen’s Stats?
In the arts, things are much more subjective. Assessment is as much about how you have improved and demonstrated you have started to grasp concepts as it is about your overall talent. Just like there are only a few people who have the ability to hit a 90 mph fastball and solve complicated physics problems, there are only a very few with magnificent acting talent. Except that personality and good looks can be just as important at the end of the day as skill. Trying harder won’t get most of us any closer to hitting that fast ball, but with such subjectivity muddying the evaluative waters, it is easy to believe success is just a matter of patience and trying hard.

In an earlier time, I think those who instructed would have had an easier time trying to disabuse their students of this notion. Now that we can watch people try out for American Idol at the mall and make it to the final rounds based heavily on charisma inspired voting, I think it is harder to convince people that the odds are greatly against them period, much less based on lack of ability.

I Didn’t Go To Class Because I Was Practicing Being A Lizard*
One of the great similarities between theatre students and athletes in Division I colleges is that grades often suffer as a result of their pursuits. (Though there is far more pressure on instructors to grade athletes more leniently.) Because of their great emotional investment in theatre, those students often neglect to complete assignments or even attend classes in favor of theatre related activities.

A number of theatre departments threaten dire consequences for students who let this happen by commission or omission. But as I have mentioned before, I think Tom Loughlin’s idea that students need to be trained to employ their abilities more widely becomes more apt. If students are going to cut class and neglect studies to do arts related stuff, you might as well have them channeling their passion toward doing something that will develop skills with wide applications.

*I didn’t skip class, but I did spend a lot of time practicing being a lizard for my scene work in Edward Albee’s Seascape

What If They DO End Up Loving The Arts?

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Barry Hessenius is conducting a massive six week conversation about the future of the National Endowment over at Barry’s Art Blog. When I say massive, I mean it. This week’s entry is so large (and won’t be complete until tomorrow’s Q&A) that I feel guilty about addressing such a comparatively small section of it.

Truthfully, it may be too large an entry for its own good. Few that could benefit from it may take the time to read it. There were many people whose thoughts I value contributing to the entry, (even with Andrew Taylor’s absence), so I did take the time to digest it.

On the topic of arts education, Ian David Moss who blogs at Createquity.com fleshed out the recently oft repeated question about the long term value of an arts education in a way that seemed very compelling to me. (my emphasis)

Before you call me out as the Grinch who stole music classes, let me explain. I think that the conversation about arts education is inseparable from the conversation about the professional arts infrastructure in America. The reason is simple: the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow. If we are successful in our efforts and ensure that every child has the opportunity to experience all the arts they want to during their formative years, what happens to them once they get to college? The arts are a powerful drug, as addictive as nicotine for some. The arts encourage people to dream big, and we’ve developed a post-Baby Boomer culture in America that tells children to follow their dreams no matter what obstacles they encounter. That’s fine so far as it goes, but there needs to be a pot of gold on the other side of that rainbow. When music conservatories, playwriting programs, schools of art—institutions whose ranks and capital budgets have been swelling apace in recent years—blithely charge marginal students tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and fail to offer them even the pretense of “real life” entrepreneurship skills, that’s as close to third-sector malpractice as it gets in my opinion.

[…]

Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 and 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital?

[…]

N.B. Upon visiting Ian’s blog, I happily found that he posted the above material with supporting links not available on Barry’s Blog.

I have discussed the idea of arts training programs graduating students into a glut market before. I certainly have to acknowledge Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin, theatre professors who often question their part contributing to this state. Scott Walters was part of the conversation on Barry’s Blog and alluded to Tony Kushner’s 1998 “Modest Proposal” to eliminate undergraduate arts degrees which he included at some length in a 2006 entry on his blog.

What I never really thought about was what the arts world would do if they realized their ambitions to engender an appreciation of the arts in a large number of young people. I don’t think his suggestion that the push for arts education is motivated by a desire to have more consumers rather than artists is completely fair.

Or rather, I don’t think operating on the assumption that not everyone will become an arts practitioner completely nefarious. No one expects every kid who participates in Little League, Pop Warner Football and various soccer leagues will go on to become a professional athlete after all the time they have invested in practicing. Though certainly a situation where a college athlete isn’t expected to devote themselves to their studies is not something to be emulated. And in fact, as Ian points out, lacking large scholarships to keep their debt down, artists have it worse if they leave college without any “real” skills to fall back upon. The purpose of all these youth athletic activities is to cultivate an appreciation of the various sports which translates into audiences for athletic teams throughout life. (Not to mention a lot of athletic apparel purchases if the national sponsorships by sneaker companies are any indication.)

Still, if we have trouble employing artists now with really crappy arts education, what will happen when we ignite kids’ imaginations and convince them the arts have value in their lives. Yes, there may be an increase in arts consumers if more people grow up valuing the arts, but young artists will be graduating and trying to practice their craft long before their fellow graduates acquire enough disposable income to support them. The one saving grace might be if the economy is moving toward creativity. In that case, the graduates would likely need much different training than they are receiving right now.

Not that it is okay, but the arts are not alone in misrepresenting opportunities. In the last year, I read an article that cautioned people about believing ads that say things like there are plenty of jobs in nursing*, computer programming, tractor trailer driving, etc. The piece evoked the Grapes of Wrath in noting that it was in the best interest of many industries to flood the market with many qualified applicants so they can keep wages low due to competition.

I am not suggesting that this is a situation the arts attempt to cultivate. Other than Hollywood or some of the old Broadway syndicates, I can’t think of any entities who would have both the perspective to recognize this and the influence to bring the situation about. If lower costs were a goal, regional theatres would try to attract more people to their areas instead of casting out of NYC and having to pay to house people locally. Though I suppose high concentrations of actors in NYC does keep prices down in its own way. In any case, given that Baumol’s Cost Disease makes producing art increasingly more expensive, the arts do benefit from having a surplus of talented people.

*Don’t mean to imply nursing doesn’t have the need given all the aging baby boomers. It is just one of those areas for which you hear there will be a lot of demand.

New Efforts, Briefly

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There have been a couple nice developments among the blogs I regularly read.

-Neill Archer Roan has begun blogging again. Unfortunately, the wonderful old material I linked to was retired when he moved to this new format.

-Scott Walters has semi-retired Theatre Ideas in favor of discussing trends and developments in the context of his <100k Project

–Poor Player Tom Loughlin has started a new site, Acting in America, where actors of every stripe can tell their stories.

I see these latter two additions as a sign that arts blogging is maturing. Both men have taken subjects they spoke of passionately over the course of many blog entries and spun them off into projects aimed at serving the arts community as a whole. There may be others whom I haven’t been following who have done this already (and by all means, point me to them.) The fact the numbers are growing only supports my assertion about emerging maturity.

I also don’t mean to imply that their earlier work, or than of bloggers like myself, did not contribute to the arts community. These new efforts look to examine and develop opportunities in ways that haven’t really been tried before.

Vital To Discuss: Graduate Preparation

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In a confluence of good timing, my Inside the Arts compadre, Jason Heath, touched on a subject yesterday aligned with that of two of my favorite bloggers. In an entry with a self-explanatory title, Music School Enrollment Spikes as Economy Tanks, Jason cites a Chicago Tribune article on that subject. Jason discusses the cons of pursuing a degree in music but seems heartened by the article’s assertion that studying music confers skills applicable to other fields. (Given a recent post, that is good news to me too.) My only concern is that in tough economic times, there are so many people with direct experience with jobs, there is no need for those with skills that carry over.

The article notes that music schools are making sure their graduates have training in addition to performance to make them more capable and prepared for the realities of the industry. Theatre schools are apparently not following suit in the estimation of Theatre Ideas blogger, Scott Walters, and A Poor Player blogger Tom Loughlin who met for the first time this past weekend at the Southeastern Theatre Conference where they presented a session on revamping the way theatre students are prepared.

Both gentlemen reflect on the experience in their respective blogs with some disappointment that the conferences do not really allow serious conversations about the state of the industry and how graduates may be better prepared.

Says Mr. Loughlin:

“At places like SETC, NETC, and ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) the emphasis is 97% on “how to succeed in the theatre business by trying a little harder.” It’s self-perpetuating, narcissistic, and almost cult-like. Anybody interested in having an adult conversation about what might be wrong, what might need reform, etc., is faced with the reality that everyone else there has drunk the kool-aid of pre-professionalism. You might as well be talking to a wall.”

[….]

“As I walked through the halls of the hotel complex during the afternoon I grew more and more sad watching all these young dressed-up kids with their audition numbers pinned to their chests waiting for their turn to show everyone what they could do and begin their climb up the great Broadway ladder. They know nothing else at all about theatre except this professional business model, and they have no sense of independent thought in terms of thinking about how to push back against it. They’re just buying it hook, line and sinker. And we, the educators, are tossing them the baited hook.”

Both felt the keynote speaker, Beth Leavel, was the worst offender when it came to underplaying the difficulty of making it in theatre and overselling NYC as the sole source and standard for success.

Scott Walters’ observations were most pointed in this respect.

“The crack she peddled was pontent: she had only had to work two weeks in her entire career at anything outside the theatre. I could see young girls texting their parents with this fact, proof that their choice of a major in theatre wasn’t foolhardy in the least.”

[…]

“Not surprisingly, nobody ever asked, and clearly Beth Leavel never considered, the utter insanity of such an arrangement. Nope, it was all about New York, and Beth had made the leap from SETC to Broadway, and you can too. You just have to want it badly enough. Because we are so lucky to do what we do. Why, she burbled, I’ve never worked a day in my life, and I mean that.”

[…]

“It seemed so appallingly irresponsible. To look at all these young, hopeful people with numbers pinned to their chests, I kept thinking of Biff Loman’s pathetic plea at the end of Death of a Salesman: “Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?” I knew that many, many of these kids were very talented, and that for most of them those talents will go unused and unappreciated in the theatrical Oz to which Ms Leavel had pointed them. And they will limp home thereafter and, like Mr Tanner in Harry Chapin’s heart-breaking ballad of the same name, they’ll never sing again, or dance again, or act again.”

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I found it interesting that both men reference the audition numbers pinned to each person’s chest in what is probably not even an attempted veiled allusion to the “hopes pinned” phrase. According to Walters, they did their best to dash what for most will be false hopes in their session citing dismal employment and median income figures of Equity union actors.

We urged teachers to ” take that phony dream and burn it before something happens” and replace it with something important, something rooted, something that would enrich our towns and cities and states. We urged theatre teachers (and had we not presented before she did, Beth Leavel) to get out of the export business, in which our purpose is to ship off “goods” to New York City.

None of the entries are terribly long and bear reading in their entirety. If you aren’t familiar with Loughlin and Walters, they are both professors in performing arts programs who have been reflecting for some time on the education processes with which they are involved–and on the fate of their graduates.

As a person who came out of a theatre background, I have always felt a little superior to the other arts disciplines because theatre tends to be a lot more together in many regards. In graduate preparation theatre seems to be lagging. Not all music training programs offer the type of preparation mentioned in the Tribune piece, but there are enough to serve as examples for theatre training programs.

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