Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

Filling Freed Up Space With Generosity

by

Seth Godin often posts on the theme of generosity.  Looking back at my past posts, I quickly came up with a handful I made about his discussion of the links between generosity, creativity, and leadership.

He recently made another post on the theme of fear being self-centered and generosity allowing you to overcome fear.

Jumping in the water to save a struggling swimmer stops us from worrying about how we look in our suit or whether the water is cold. And if you’re worried about the customer instead of your quota, making a sales call is easier too.

The key scene at the climax of the Wizard of Oz happens when Dorothy intercedes on the scarecrow’s behalf. Once again, she finds the courage to overcome her fear when she’s generously supporting a friend.

It’s more than a shift in narrative. It’s a shift in intent.

His reference to a sales call actually reminded me of the early days of my career when I worked in a ticket office or supervised people in a ticket office. Because there was always a deluge of calls and people standing at the window, there were often instructions about who to prioritize (e.g. phone before in-person, in-person before phone, alternate between the two). Likewise there was often discussion about techniques to move conversations along to attend to the next customer so that people weren’t waiting in a queue either physically or over the phone.

Overall it was a matter of providing a good customer experience over wanting to sell as quickly as possible. However, I would really get anxious as I saw a queue growing. There was a certain degree of fear in being perceived as not effective and efficient at processing the orders. In most cases, it was the immediate customer that had questions or was indecisive that was holding things up. But the anger and frustration was likely to fall upon staff rather than the departing customer.  And the mentality that you had to move a person along quickly probably wasn’t conducive to creating a positive interaction.

Since the increase in the use of online ticketing, that sort of situation has greatly abated allowing staff to take a little more time to answer people’s questions and allow them to mull their choices. In some respects, it may not be a really effective use of time to allow people to monopolize your time, but there is more opportunity to allow customers to feel attention is being paid to them.

Technology like online ticketing allows people to select the level of attention they need. Obviously, there are two sides to this situation. Technology makes it easier for businesses to ignore customers and force them to navigate confusing processes. Likewise, in the absence of past demand, live staffing of box offices is often scheduled for shorter periods of time.

But even at times immediately prior to a performance, the fact that people can pull up their tickets on their phones or flash a piece of paper they printed at home, the demands on ticket office staff are less than they once were. There may be problems with online orders that need to be resolved and people who requested the ability to pick up tickets at the door, but the ability to take more time to address these requests is comparatively greater than it once was.

While this doesn’t illustrate Godin’s point of making a decision in the moment to be generous to help others allows you to overcome fear, it is helpful to consider that we have more tools at our disposal that free us up to be generous.  There is more opportunity to fill that vacuum with generosity and attentiveness rather than reserve it for our own use.

Dancing And Singing Scientific Study Data

by

I recently caught this story about an anthropologist at the University of South Florida (USF) who studied the impact of algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico and was concerned no one would read her reports which indicated consequences for the tourism industry.  She was concerned no one would read the study and wondered if there was a way to raise awareness. (I am going to say a more accessible title than “Non-linear impacts of harmful algae blooms on the coastal tourism economy” might have helped.

However, the story aligns with the recent trend of my posts about the intersection of art and science because the professor ended up collaborating with the USF school of music to compose a work based on the data.

Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O’Leary says, in ways it simply does not on a spreadsheet.

“My students were really excited to start thinking about how the other students, the music students, heard patterns that we did not see in some of the repetitions,” she says. With music, she added, “you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they’re important.”

You can watch a video of the composition via the link to the story or right here. Other departments are getting involved, including an effort to create an augmented reality experience based on the data and composition.

This story reminded me of the Dance Your Ph.D. contest that was started years ago with the same intent of translating a summary of doctoral theses in the sciences into a visual format. It was originally intended as a one off event to lighten things up for students who were defending their theses, but people started asking when the next competition deadline would be.

This year was the 16th iteration. I found an article announcing the 2024 winners and it seems like things have evolved since the last time I watched. The one on the “Epigenetics of Early Life Adversity“, depicting how stressors in childhood can impact adult health really caught my attention.

However, the winner, “Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population”, aka “Kangaroo Time” is far, far, far, more fun than it’s title would suggest. I am glad the NPR story reminded of the contest and lead me to check it out.

 

How Important Is Creativity? Let The Census Director Count The Ways

by

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) posted a slightly longer than usual podcast episode a few weeks back with a conversation between NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson and US Census Bureau Director Robert Santos.

If you missed the introductions at the art, you might be forgiven for thinking Santos was the NEA Chair the way he went on about the importance and value of creative practice in one’s life. He talked at some length about being a live music photographer at the SXSW festivals in Austin, TX for eight years and the different perspectives he received while watching all the creatives present their work. He talked about how innovation doesn’t just emerge from scientific hypothesis and data, but by creativity fueled by an artful life.

Later, he discusses the use of art and creativity in healing, relating it to his time as President of American Statistical Association during the pandemic and using his monthly newsletter to depart from the usual messages about checking out webinars about statistic practice, but rather

“…send personal messages and reflections that would help folks understand that we’re all in this together and that we need to help each other out and we can do so virtually. So I would tell stories about of resilience and how we need to tap into them and I told stories of creativity and mentoring and it was specifically focused on thinking as creatively as I could to help the folks that were suffering so much because they were stuck in their homes.”

At another point, he mentioned the way the Census Bureau had used familiar cultural touchstones to engage with people to navigate the challenges Covid presented during the 2020 Census:

…we had artistic reincarnations of things like the Loteria, — there are cards that have little icons, very colorful, of different types of characters, and birds, and skeletons, and scorpions, and things of that sort. And because of the pandemic, we could not use our usual face-to-face methods, or community organizations couldn’t do that. So rather than having a table in a grocery store saying, “Come fill out a census,” they were going out and distributing in community centers that were giving out water, and talking about best practices for vaccines and things. They were handing out these Loteria cards that, instead of the usual icons, they had different census characters on them, like an enumerator, or a little graph, or things of that sort. So it was reinforcing the necessity and the importance of civic participation, but doing it in an artistic way that was very pleasing to the eye, and got you to think, “Oh, this is really interesting.”

The example of Albert Einstein playing violin is often used as an example of a scientist who embraced his creative side, but I am thinking it is time to find new examples to amplify this concept, starting with Santos and anyone else he might identify. Not to relieve the NEA and other creative entities from doing the same, but Santos seems really adept at identifying the bridges between creative and science based approaches and is a vocal advocate.  I mean, there was a point where he was saying, credit where credit is due, the NEA inspired me to think all federal departments should have artist-in-residence programs.

Alignment of Storytelling

by

Back in February I caught a broadcast of NPR’s podcast show Code Switch where the episode was about the music that came out of or was inspired by Japanese internment. Artists like Kishi Bashi and Mike Shinoda of the band Linkin Park are among descendants of internees and wrote music how that impacted their family, especially in terms of the silence that was maintained about the experience.

The story particularly resonated with me because our local art museum had just closed a show of Ansel Adams photos taken at the Manzanar War Relocation Center during the internment as well as a show in another gallery depicting life at Granada Relocation Center, here in CO, better known as Amache. The museum apparently didn’t know at the time the show opened that President Biden would sign an act creating the Amache National Historic Site a couple weeks before that show ended.

In 1944, while the war was still going on, Adams displayed the photos he took in a controversial show titled “Born Free and Equal,” referring to the fact that most of those interned had been born in the US, perhaps generations prior.

The show here in town had a significant impact in the greater community. Attendance was at some of the highest rates the museum has experienced. I happened by the front doors one day and a family exited in silence until one of the parents said, “Well that was something. What did you think of that?” A man who had been interned at one of the camps as a child traveled some distance with his family and brought a book he made of his drawings and remembrances he created while there. He presented a copy to the museum director and one to the curator.

While I was listening to the Code Switch episode, I wished they had run it a few weeks earlier to align with the shows at the museum so they could have expanded the story they told about the relevance of the shows.

I also wondered why there seemed to be such an alignment of information about the Japanese internment recently. The hosts of the radio story mentioned that the US government had issued an apology some years ago and paid out reparations to internees and their families. Those people in turn have donated money to organizations who promote Japanese culture and history in the US, including increasing awareness about the internment.