A dilemma of orchestral proportions

This blog post by Anthony Alfidi is attracting a lot of attention – most of it virulently negative – from professional musicians.  Alfidi, CEO of Alfidi Capital (an investment firm based in San Francisco) describes himself as “founding genius” of Alfidi Capital and says that he provides “commentary that is totally free, totally honest, and sometimes totally funny.”  So you know right away the guy has both a healthy ego and at least a self-described sense of humor.

That sense of humor didn’t help him, though, when he described the striking musicians of the San Francisco Symphony as “union thugs in tuxedos unsatisfied with a base salary of $141,700.” He went on to say that no musician deserved more than the national average of musician’s pay for doing “something that a reasonably talented high school student would do for free.”  He praises the Symphony’s board of directors, because it has business people who “live in the real world free from collective bargaining” and thus, presumably, the only ones who can do the math necessary to save this organization from itself.

While much of the vitriol on Alfidi’s Facebook page comes from professional musicians who are understandably upset at being compared to high school musicians (Alfidi also offered to be a scab tambourine player because it really didn’t look that hard), there has been to this point relatively little blowback from other arts professionals.  To me, the gaping holes in Alfidi’s knowledge are evidenced not only by his lack of understanding of music, but his stunning lack of understanding about the differences between a for-profit business and a not-for-profit arts organization.

Setting aside for a moment the irony of an investment counselor trying to accuse musicians of being greedy, I think the biggest problem with Alfidi’s analysis is that he, like many others, assumes that the arts industry (and especially the not-for-profit arts industry) acts the same way as other industries and is subject to the same market forces.  As any reasonably talented arts management student could tell you, the not-for-profit arts have unique characteristics and management challenges.  One of those challenges is working within a stodgy (some say broken) system where, in order to keep their 501(c)3 status, arts organizations must annually prove to the IRS that they are using their revenues to accomplish the mission that gave them tax-exempt status in the first place, while at the same time trying to explain to their business-oriented boards how they are being cost-efficient and market driven.

An arts organization’s mission usually revolves around providing their community with activities and programs designed to enliven, enrich and educate.  In this context, performing music that will “sell” is not as important — ticket sales are not the bottom line, artistic mission is.  But because the arts live in the real world – yes, Virginia, we do – musicians and artists and actors and filmmakers still have to go to the grocery store and pay rent and send their kids to college.  It is in the organization’s best interest to have a stable artistic roster of well-paid, happy employees.  Unionizing symphonies in the 80s was one of the ways this happened, and unions are also strong in the theater and film industries (those who want to demonize unions would do well to remember that we union thugs at the lower levels have some powerful friends in Hollywood and in the ranks of professional athletes.  And you probably shouldn’t call an NFL player a thug).

Arts organizations also have stakeholders beyond the ticket buyers.  Cities count on the reputations of their premiere arts organizations for tourist dollars, image enhancement, and auxiliary spending.  That’s a lot of pressure to put on arts organizations who seldom get much, if any, government support for providing all of those community benefits other than the afore-mentioned tax exempt status.

Yes, contemporary arts organizations face many challenges.  So do a lot of other businesses.  But it won’t do any good for people outside the industry to take cheap shots at something they know nothing about.  It would be much better for those of us inside the industry to help people like Anthony Alfidi understand the difference between a not-for-profit arts business and a for-profit arts business.  While we’re at it, we might also be able to explain to him why music education is needed in the schools – so he could learn to tell the difference between a high school band and an orchestra composed of the world’s finest musicians.

If you liked X, you’re gonna love Y

We’re all familiar with the concept of algorithmic marketing.  Each time we put something on our Netflix queue, for example, we get a popup suggesting a dozen other films we might like, chosen based on similar characteristics.  Facebook assigns us ads based on what we have liked and also what our friends like (if 10 of Ellen’s friends like this, she might too).  Amazon tells us that other people who bought the product we are about to buy also bought X, Y and Z.  This may lead to some unintentionally comic pairings (I once bought a steamy romance novel and some wool yarn the same day, which led to some interesting suggestions) but it works often enough that algorithmic suggestion marketing is not going to disappear appear anytime soon.  It is, in fact, likely to get even more sophisticated, to the point where Eric Qualman suggests that we will not need to go searching for products in the future: they will find us.
Now, Netflix is set to release the first agorithmically developed program.  Based on data collected from users over a period of time and learning, for example, that users who liked the BBC series House of Cards also liked Kevin Spacey movies, they decided to remake House of Cards starring – you guessed it – Kevin Spacey.

This kind of programming would probably be scorned by most not-for-profit programmers, but the marketing part of it has some intriguing possibilities.  Wouldn’t it be interesting, as Jamie Bennett, chief of staff and director of public affairs at the NEA told Barry Hesenius in this interview, if we were able to find people who enjoyed jazz music and liked the movie The Color Purple and suggest that they might enjoy the Bill T. Jones Dance Company?   Of course, we’ve done it informally for years: pulling the names of matinee audiences from our database to announce a new Wednesday afternoon series; comparing our offerings to other performers with which our audiences might be more familiar (if you like movies about the 1920s, you’ll love this music written in the 1920s!).  But creating programming based on audience preference?  That goes against our mission.

Or does it?  Adam Hutter, the creator of Fractured Atlas and one of the most innovative people I know, says that when we hide behind our mission argument, that can become an elitist copout, or at the very least an excuse for doing just what we want to do and not considering our audiences at all.  After all, says Hutter, Shakespeare was popular and sold a lot of tickets.  And he was a ruthless promoter and marketer, too.

Of course, I don’t want us to go all the way down the road to Dumb and Dumber II, but I do think that we need to recognize that, within the context of mission, we can certainly be a little more sophisticated about understanding what our audiences are likely to buy.

What are we innovating?

To prepare for my senior seminar this semester, I’ve been reading a lot about innovation. Here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. Innovation is linked to business growth. According to Making Innovation Work: How to Measure It, Manage It, and Profit From It, “Innovation is the key element in providing aggressive top-line growth, and for increasing bottom-line results.”
2. Business is currently experiencing an “innovation gap.”  Several sources I read stated the need for students to be better trained in creative and critical thinking skills in order to be able to help businesses improve their profits through innovation.
3. The arts are commonly cited as a tool that can be beneficial for innovation.  Exposing students to the arts, we read, is a wonderful way to help them learn the creativity that they will need in order to succeed in business.

You might think that this post is going to be about increasing funding for arts education, and how wonderful it is that the corporate world is starting to understand the arts.  It’s not. Aside from the obvious concern that the arts seen in this context as merely a means to an end, and not an end in themselves, my question is about the very nature of innovation.

I have never thought of innovation as a word that applies to business alone.  Is innovation something that happens only when there is a purpose for it; i.e. to create a new product to sell or an efficiency that spurs growth and creates profit?  Is it possible to have innovation for innovation’s sake?

And, if innovation is linked to product or profit, how does that definition fit into what arts organizations do?

Your thoughts would help me and my students sort this one out.

Storify me

There are so many new tools out there that I can’t absorb even a few of them.  But occasionally, something comes along that promises to be useful.  Storify allows users to collect pictures, articles, websites, and other detritus from the internet and link it together into an online story.

I could think of dozens of ways to use Storify in arts organizations.  What about a presentation for a prospective donor, or background for the media?  Or, a website posting giving detail on an upcoming exhibit? The format emphasizes the links, which keeps writing and design minimal.  It’s very user-friendly — although based on my limited experiments, using it on a laptop works better than on the iPad at this point.

Here’s my first attempt.  I’ll be sharing this with my Seminar students next week — and I’ll let you know how it works.  Click on the Fortune cover to begin.

The music between the notes

Debussy once said that “music exists in the space between the notes.”  Samuel Beckett said that “All art is the same – the attempt to fill an empty space.”  One of the first exercises I did as a drawing student was to draw, not the objects in front of me, but the space in between and around the objects — the space artists call negative space.

My colleague and friend Andrew Taylor, whose blog The Artful Manager has long been an innovative commentary on our profession, has posted a commentary on a new book that offers some wonderful insights.  The book is called NONOBJECT, and it explores “designing the intangible space between the object and the user.”  This exercise leads to some interesting places — some of them exciting, some completely impractical but beautiful nonetheless.  Here are some of the ideas presented in the book.

Andrew’s point in sharing this book was to ask if the thought of thinking about the space between the audience and the art had any value for us as arts managers.  He says:

“We invest sweat and contributed income to build ever-more technically effective cultural environments. We request grants and huddle in the marketing office to explore the needs of the audience, and how to make them feel more welcome and connected to these machines of cultural production. We make continual, incremental improvements in our policies and processes that don’t look radically different than the practices of five decades ago.

Instead, what if we considered ourselves designers of the space between? Between a person and an extraordinary act of expression. Between a creative collective and the witnesses that bring their work meaning. Between people in that electric moment when it’s hard to know who is creating and who is receiving.”

How might this idea play itself out in our organizations?  It would be fun to explore.

Are you a creative person?

One of the essential questions about creativity is whether everyone possesses it.  In our society, I think many believe creativity is the domain of an eccentric few, and if you don’t have it, you can’t develop it.  This seems to be the theory behind school arts programs; by the time you get to high school, most people who enroll in choir, drama or art class are those who are “talented” or at least those who self-select based on their interest — and they are overwhelmingly tilted toward practice of the art, not appreciating it.  Please note: I have not done any research on this and so this is just based on my own observation, but it does seem to me that we are teaching the lesson that music is only for musicians, and art is only for artists.

If you believe in brain lateralization (the brain has two hemispheres, one controls logic, sequence, and order; the other is creativity, intuition and empathy) then you also believe, at least in theory, that every person is biologically wired to be able to experience the traits that each side controls.  Some may show a preference for one side or another, but nobody (with the obvious exception of those with brain injuries or neurological diseases) is completely disengaged from the ability to create.

Can hemispheric dominance be trained?  Perhaps.  It may well be that traits carried by the right brain are like muscles — if you don’t use them, they don’t disappear, but they may be harder to access after a while.

Elizabeth Gilbert has a wonderful TED talk in which she expresses her theory about the creativity inherent in every person.  Give it a watch – you won’t regret it!

It’s been a while

You know that you’ve neglected your blog when you get a snippy e-mail from Amazon warning you that they might delete your blog if you don’t make any new posts. Yes, it’s been a while. Those who know me know that I have an excuse. But I also have been storing up ideas to share with you for quite some time.

This semester, I am working with the theme “Creativity, Innovation and Vision” in many different ways. It happens to be our University’s common theme for the year, and since I am on the committee I am finding a lot of ways to incorporate the theme into my classes as well as my personal activities. So, I will also be working with this theme on Artini this fall.

The idea behind working with this theme has to do with the thought that there have been a number of items in the media lately discussing the need to encourage creativity, like this one.  And this.  The death of Steve Jobs last year sent many pundits into a tizzy, wondering where the next visionaries were going to come from.  As the Newsweek article put it:

“Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike.”  (Po Bronson, The Creativity Crisis: Newsweek, July 2010)

My cynical self wants to say, gee, how nice of you all to start worrying about creativity and the need to think outside the box to solve problems after a decade of standardized testing, math and science drilling and No Child Except Musicians, Artists and Designers Left Behind.  But I’m glad we’re at least starting the conversation.

So while I’m tempted to concentrate on creativity education (and I’m sure we will touch on it more than once), it’s more appropriate for Artini to consider how the need for creativity, innovation and visionary thinkers affects the arts, arts organizations and arts managers.  Our first reaction might be to rejoice — finally, people will start paying attention to the arts!  But hold on there, cowboy.  We need to take a good long look at ourselves before patting ourselves on the back for being the Next Good Thing.  Does walking silently through a gallery or sitting quietly in a darkened concert hall observing the creativity of others have any relationship at all to encouraging creativity in our audiences?  And, have a few decades of hammering arts organizations with the need to plan, budget and “act like a business” kicked the creativity out of us?

We’ll get to all of these questions and more in the next couple of months.  In the meantime, I’m anxious for your thoughts.  What would you like to talk about?