Phhsst! You Think You Are As Good As Me?

Often when the concept of Professional-Amateurs or the capability of everyone to be creative comes up, there is a feeling of resistance that rises up among arts professionals. The study on creating public will for arts and culture that I have been citing this week addresses that a little.

Finally, our research found A POTENTIAL FOR PUSH-BACK FROM EXISTING CONSTITUENCIES for arts and culture (e.g., some arts leaders, working artists, arts educators, and arts and culture enthusiasts). Here, some respondents expressed concern that a focus on creative expression represents a dumbing down of the conversation about the value of arts and culture. Some artists, for example, chafe at the notion that “amateurs” and “hobbyists” might be lumped into the same category as those who have dedicated years of study, practice, and exploration to their art.

…Rather, the question of framing the subject is not either “creative expression” or “arts and culture,” but both/and. To those ends, our research suggests that framing the discussion in terms of creative expression is an entry point through which more people are receptive, increasing and diversifying the audience for whom the conversation has relevance.

Getting more people engaging in a conversation about arts and culture is a good thing. One of the benefits to people becoming more interested and invested in their hobby or area of interest is that the more they learn, the more they realize what they don’t know.

The only problem is that people are often satisfied with what they already know and don’t seek to learn more. As involved in the arts as I am, when I saw the “I Could Do That” video I included in a post last week, I had new respect for Piet Mondrian’s Tableau I. I wasn’t aware how difficult it is to execute using oil paint.

While I have never been dismissive of the work, I could have gone my whole life unaware of the technical skills necessary to create it.

But it can be valuable to remember that the arts aren’t the only arena in which people underestimate the degree of skill required.

Every year millions of kids around the world play baseball. It is a game that is easy for amateurs to participate in. Everyone understands, however, that only a select few have the skill to hit a baseball traveling in excess of 90 MPH…except for thousands of fans jeering at the ineptitude of the losing team.

Sports are still better served by having leagues of people of various ages, abilities and degrees of organization participating rather than athletes feeling threatened by the idea that people are being encouraged to think they have athletic ability.

It bears noting that participation in sports is waning both among those interested in playing and audiences. There may be a growing opportunity to engage people in creative expression as an alternative pursuit…or this may be a sign of a decreasing trend in participation in all types of activities.

Arts and Culture Bad, Creativity Good

Last week I attended the Arts Midwest conference in Kansas City, MO. From what I saw of the city, it can still lay claim to the appellation, “Paris of the Plains.” The Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center left most attendees amazed and a little green with envy.

I ended up staying at the gorgeous Hotel Phillips which I was excited to learn has its own artist in residence.

Building Public Will For Arts and Culture

The conference session that unexpectedly grabbed my attention was Arts Midwest President David Fraher’s session on Building Public Will for Arts and Culture where he presented the results of the research findings on the subject.

If nothing else, the session reconfirmed the value of attending live performance over recorded because Fraher provided a good deal of insight and nuance that doesn’t come through when reading the report.

Essentially, building public will for arts and culture involves something of a reversal of the current focus in favor of grassroots efforts. As an example of what is envisioned being needed, Fraher and the report cite the way smoking bans emerged.

The Surgeon General never changed the advertising message that smoking and second hand smoke was bad for you, it was a grassroots desire not to have one’s health impacted by second hand smoke that brought about the change in laws. From the research results report:

For years, those seeking to reduce the incidence of smoking found themselves stymied. Facts and data about the harmful effects of smoking had motivated some to quit, but had failed to create fundamental change in social norms, systems, and policies. The facts were compelling, but they were overpowered by opponents who framed the issue in the context of individual freedom (i.e., “I have the right to smoke if I want to; I’m not hurting anybody.”).

Even the growing body of evidence around second-hand smoke had difficulty finding fertile ground until advocates realized they could reframe the same core argument to their own advantage (i.e., “I have the right to be protected from exposure to smoke.”). Co-opting the individual freedom value—backed by facts and data—allowed the sustainable changes in policies and systems that we experience today.

Fraher noted that currently, the arts and culture community generally put their effort into effecting one time change vis-a-vis staving off government policy decisions rather than long term, enduring change.

When you want to effect immediate change, you put 80% effort into advertising and 20% into grassroots. To effect long lasting change, it is reversed. 80% effort goes toward grassroots effort and 20% effort into advertising. Engaging in the latter course they are advocating will therefore require a shift of mindset and priorities in the arts and culture community.

One of the central precepts in this effort is a focus on community values. This means asking what do the arts have that align with community values rather than focusing on what the arts value and looking at what the community has that aligns with them.

Arts and Culture Are Poison

Among the findings that caused the biggest reaction in the conference session was that the term “arts and culture” is poison and turns people off, keeping them from entering the conversation. The perception is Art is something someone else does. Something to be watched passively that is inaccessible and intimidating. The search found that “creative expression” has a more positive association that opens the door to a conversation that eventually ends up at a discussion of art.

While they don’t suggest scrubbing every mention of art and culture from your conversations and literature, they do say it may be some years before the terminology trends back to a positive association.

People feel that creativity is part of who they are. They may not call themselves creative, but once they start to talk about what they do, they will admit they engage in creative expression. Even if people don’t feel they are creative, they apparently have an easier time envisioning themselves capable of creative expression than envisioning themselves creating art. (Again, the idea that art is something other people do.)

Another term that turned people off was “diversity.” It is better to promote an event as providing an authentic experience rather than providing/promoting cultural diversity.

Personal Health, Not the Economy

When talking about the benefits of an experience, mentioning that the arts improve the economy, make kids smarter and brings safety to communities are arguments that work with policy makers in government and foundations, but don’t really have resonance with individuals.

Generally people believe creativity makes them less stressed, happier, healthier and more connected with family and friends. (One thing Fraher emphasized was that family was family of choice rather than biological immediate family.) It probably comes as no surprise that despite the appearance of hyperconnectivity, research has found that there is currently a crisis of loneliness, perhaps the greatest in history. So promoting arts and culture in the context of health, relaxation and connectivity is more effective messaging.

The study cites the NEA’s finding that not having someone to attend with is a significant barrier to attendance. Fraher commented that they weren’t suggesting arts organizations start a dating service, but since I and others are experimenting with something along those lines, I would suggest not dismissing the idea too soon.

Survey and focus group respondents also had a strong, positive reaction to the idea that creativity helped one connect with oneself, but would back way from their initial enthusiasm out of apparent embarrassment that it made them sound self-centered. (Most frequently among parents with young children.) Appropriate subtlety and restraint may make this another effective approach to take.

Not Everyone Who Values The Experience Is Attending

As the effort to build public will for arts and culture moves forward, the key audiences it will focus on are women, young people and people of color. The study found strong interest among all these groups. Fraher joked that he felt bad for women because according to the study, men didn’t like to do anything. Men would respond that they valued spending time with their family, but when asked what they did with their family, they indicated Nothing in every category.

Fraher commented that there was a disconnect between the groups that say attendance is important and the groups that are currently actually attending. For example, there were a large number of responses in the under 40 category that said attendance at art performances, festivals, etc, were important to them but obviously the demographics found in arts venues track older. The lack of connection is due to familiar barriers of time, money, no one to attend with, etc.

One Message, But Not One Ad, To Rule Them All

The plan for the National Engagement phase for building public will is to develop a more unified message and create tool kits for groups to use. The expectation is that it will take at least 8-10 years before any type of measurable results begin to emerge.

Fraher mentioned a desire to be agile and share the messaging that works in one community with other communities. In what I felt was an indication that they understood what the research was telling them, he re-emphasized the focus on the grassroots nature of the effort saying that there wouldn’t be single national ad buys disseminating whatever the effective messaging might be.

While there was a lot in David Fraher’s presentation that doesn’t appear in the research results report, there are some interesting observations in the report that didn’t come out in the hour he had to talk about it. I am trying to decide whether I am going to do a second post on those parts of the report or not.

But don’t wait for me to decide, give it a look.

(When I originally posted, I identified KC as Paris of the Prairie rather than Paris of the Plains. Chicago and Saskatoon have both been called Paris of the Prairie.)

Could You Really Do That? Maybe You Could

Apropos to my post last week about the value of college fine arts requirement classes, someone on my Twitter feed posted a link to a Huffington Post article about why you shouldn’t dismiss a work of visual art as something you or you kid could have done.

The article is actually based on on episode from PBS Digital’s series, The Art Assignment

Many of The Art Assignment episodes get people to go out and do or find things associated with their topic. However, some like the video above tackle how to relate and interact with art. As such, they provide a good starting point for novices, arts education programs and even arts educators seeking a way to communicate on these topics.

What is great is that everything comes back to the philosophy of experiential learning. So even though they say, yeah it isn’t as easy to do as you think, bub. They immediately follow with, but you should totally try to do it!

Among the videos I found that work along these lines are episodes on How to Critique, what works you can and can’t touch and why, and how (and why) to learn about Contemporary Art.

Recently it appears they have started to an effort to help people understand the work of specific artists in The Case for Mark Rothko and The Case for Andy Warhol.

This looks to be a good resource for visual arts organizations and something to keep an eye on as they continue to develop episodes.

The series leads to the inevitable question– can something this effective and humorous be created for theater, opera, dance, classical music? (Yes, of course it can.) I am sure there are some out there. Even some visual arts ones similar to the Arts Assignment episodes.

Heck, Thug Notes points out things in literature I didn’t catch when I was reading the works and is very entertaining.

So maybe someone is doing it right now and I don’t know about it. Let me know.

Maybe someone is thinking about doing something similar but is worried about the funding and should contact the Venture Arts Incubator.

Don’t Worry, No One Will Call You a Noob

I just realized this week that one of the hurdles the arts needs to surmount to attract younger audiences may be steeper than assumed. One of the issues people identify as a point of anxiety is not knowing the rules of behavior at an arts event.

I have always equated that with awkwardly feeling out of place, but in the last day I wondered if younger audiences might equate that with the vulnerability one feels when being assailed by strangers online.

For older audiences a worst case scenario might be a few people around you looking askance at your faux pas.

For younger audiences, the worst case scenario might be a perception that EVERYBODY is aware of your mistake and are all preparing to declare their derision on social media. It may seem an illogical conclusion, but social fear generally is and the context for that fear is different for younger generations than older generations.

What brought this to mind was a conversation about explicit and implicit signalling of the rules of behavior at arts events occurring in the comments section of the post I made Monday. My thought is that the ideal is to provide frequent, varied experiences so that you can socialize audiences to the range of rules and move from explicit to implicit signalling.

The conversation we have been having on Monday’s post has been about how much explicit signalling is needed for new audiences unfamiliar with the rules.

As I was considering this last night, I got to thinking how at a certain level of detail communicating how to behave, even skilled practitioners of audience relations are going to sound condescending. Less skilled practitioners, which I will number myself among, are going to sound condescending long before that.

Another issue is that really detailed instructional signage and materials will end up reinforcing what we are trying to avoid, namely reinforcing a perceived division between experienced people and novices. I had the image of people in the know looking at all the explicit instructions for behavior and saying, “stupid noobs need to have their hands held.”

For a moment, it popped in my mind that there really aren’t any people at an arts event who are going to use the term “stupid noob.” Maybe arts organizations need to have a campaign slogan, “Nobody will call you noob” to assure people it was safer to make mistakes at an arts event than online. (Philistine, on the other hand…)

That is when I realized, that the psychological stakes some people associate with making a mistake may be much greater than we imagine. I would really be interested to know if anyone has studied any connection between depth of social media involvement and risk aversion.

All this adds another dimension to question of how much information needs to be delivered to allow people to navigate an arts event confidently and what the best channels of delivery are so as not to draw undue attention to the uninitiated.

Some people aren’t comfortable or aware of how to access information online while at an event. And besides, the hallmark of live experience we keep emphasizing is the whole live thing–being able to ask and answer questions in person should always be an option.

Even if the venue prepares online resources for a show, they can’t provide answers to all possible questions. You can go to a soccer match knowing nothing about the game and google information about the off-sides rule.

It isn’t as easy to get an answer if you type in “Why is the Shakespeare play I am watching set in the 1920s.” (Actually, I lied, while you can’t get a definitive answer using that search term, there are apparently a lot of adaptations of the Bard to the 1920s so articles are available about why the decision was made and how well it works.)