Mad Man Delayed

by

I had marked this video intending to post it during Inside the Arts “Mad Men Week,” but totally forgot about it until coming across it today. The video is Rory Sutherland talking about how ad men create perceived value for objects. The has a great sense of humor so the video is just plain fun to watch.

My favorite bit comes toward the end when he talks about Post cereal’s roll out of Diamond Shreddies which literally turned the old Shreddies cereal on end. Inexplicably, the move was a little controversial and Post issued a “combo pack” of both cereals. (I gotta hope the controversy was manufactured by Post.)

The thing that might be most valuable for arts people is a quote at the end of his talk where he cites a quote “Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new.” Though in the case of the arts and current attendance trends, the familiar may be an entirely new experience.

He says it isn’t a bad definition of what advertising people’s job is: “To help people appreciate what is unfamiliar. But also to gain a greater appreciation and place a far higher value on those things that are already existing.”

Okay no surprise there. Apropos to my previous comment, arts people try to make their disciplines familiar to those who haven’t had much interaction with it every day.

Holiday Memes? Bah! Humbug!

by

So our glorious Inside the Arts leader Drew McManus laid down a challenge of a Holiday Extremes Meme. Now, I think if you are a musician and can only name two of four good holiday concerts and one of the two (of four) worst concerts you name involves YOU performing, it isn’t quite fair to those of us who are non-musicians!

I have been to fewer holiday concerts than Drew, though I do remember the Christmas cantatas of my youth when the Catholic and Presbyterian congregations of my small community would come together so there would be enough people for a decent size choir.

One of my favorite Christmas music memories though was when I lived in Florida. There was a radio station in Tampa at the time which started playing Christmas music for hours on end starting Christmas Eve. There were some really great songs there that I had never heard before. You would go from Bing Crosby to “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and then back to some choir softly singing.

That was when I heard the Bob Rivers’ classic, “I Am Santa Claus”

I have great memories of driving up to my sister’s house at 5 am Christmas morning listening to the music. Unfortunately, there was a year of new management and they stopped that practice.

However, in the spirit of offering new songs for the season, I wanted to turn people on to one. Don’t be fooled by the band name, Hoots and Hellmouth, or the title, A Song for Solstice, I am not trying to undermine the religious nature of the holiday. It is a nice song for the season without being cloying. The music comes courtesy of public radio station, WXPN’s 2008 12 Days of Christmas where they offered 12 free downloads of holiday music from local artists.

A Song for Solstice was smack in the middle at Day 6. If you want to check out other alternative holiday songs, scroll around on the page. I admit to being a sentimental sucker for #4 Dan May’s “Christmas in My Hometown.”

Volunteering Your Way to #1

by

I was listening to Andrew Taylor’s interview with Artsjournal.com founder/editor Doug McLennan today. During the interview McLennan mentioned all the ways in which organizations were creating online communities to help them achieve things. One of the ways he mentioned people’s contributions were rewarded was via a ranking system to show who had been most productive.

I started thinking about whether this might be a useful way for arts organizations to motivate volunteers. At one time, I had heard that creating contests and achievement awards for volunteers could be counterproductive in terms of motivating and retaining volunteers. I wondered if the new online rewards environment may have changed this. After some reading and thinking on the matter, I decided a ranking system is probably still not useful in many of the traditional functions of an arts organization.

One of the things I read which confirmed my recollection advising against rankings is that many volunteers are motivated by other factors than rankings. Also, different people have different ranges of ability. If someone is providing assistance because they believe in the organization but is in a situation where recognition is accorded to those who are hustling for first place, they may become disheartened. One suggestion I read was to have people compete against their own old milestones. Online communities have a certain anonymity that can insulate one from emotional investments. This may not be the case when a volunteer is working to benefit people and causes with which they can personally interact and experience.

There is also the issue that online contributions can be made on ones own schedule. Involvement and duration are self selected. Whereas many arts organizations engage volunteers during certain hours and events. There is also often a person acting as a gatekeeper determining who gets to contribute and when. A person striving to be number one may find time constraints and scheduling favoritism shown others inhibits their ambitions.

Scoring people for activities that aren’t constrained too much by time deadlines may be still possible. You can open up archives and newspaper/props storage and just let people go at it cataloging and organizing things on their own schedule. Though physically getting in each other’s way in cramped storage areas is also a problem that online activities don’t face now that most people have fairly speedy bandwidth.

If anyone has any feedback in terms of reward systems that were meaningful and didn’t alienate volunteers, ideas for ways to motivate volunteers given the expectations of the internet age or even tasks you can turn to the internet group mind to accomplish (like designing Drew McManus’ Twitter page) I would love to hear them.

You Must Be This Naked To Be Appealing

by

I received a call today from a person who had attended the student final performance on Friday. He was complaining about the content of the pieces the students performed, both the dance and monologue/scene pieces. I had actually delivered a curtain speech before the show warning people about this since there were children in the audience, but he had arrived late and missed the announcement.

When I brought the subject up with the drama instructor, I learned there was actually some content he had overlooked when he informed me which pieces might be offensive. Our conversation transitioned to a recent study by the University of Leeds that found women should bare 40% of their bodies in order to attract a mate. Any less and the attraction goes down, any more suggests a chance of infidelity.

We wondered if there was anything to be derived from this in terms of stage costuming. Is a lack of clothing past a certain point considered lewd on stage? Given that the study was done in a dance club, it may be more applicable to dance given that the ratio of clothing plus gyrations must factor in somewhere. Of course, people go to a club with a level of expectation that is likely different from those of performance attendees.

While it would be nice to have a magic number that we knew would be safe to go up to without too many negative repercussions from audiences, it probably isn’t in the best interests of artistic expression to have an exact formula. The ratings of the MPAA have shifted over time due to changing public standards. If point values are attributed to inches of flesh exposed, then people would forever be running around with measuring tapes and parsing percentages. (Ah ha! She is wearing open toes shoes! If we compute those in to the over all ratio of her body, she is 40.1783% naked!! I become more scandalized by the moment!)

There is also the matter of some shows that frequently have nudity like Equus and deciding you want nudity in your show as part of your artistic vision. So while it might be helpful to know what the general tolerance level of an audience might be, there is probably too much opportunity in having it turned into a metric to suggest pursuing research in this direction.

And there would need to be more research because the methodology used for this study seems a little shaky. On top of that, it measured the responses of men. Most tickets are purchased by women so it would be necessary to discover where their perceptions lay.