This morning when I got to work, there was a little plate of brownies in our kitchen. A little card next to it said that this was from a wife of a co-worker. Specifically, it said "[Name], 3 Mile Cancer Walker."
Now, it's clear to me that she is looking for sponsors, and this is a fundraising tactic. This is the fifth time that there has been brownies or cookies (often with the pink breast-cancer ribbon in frosting or sprinkles). Only one of those five times was there a sponsorship jar to ollect money. Usually, the brownie has simply been consumed by myself and my co-workers without anything being returned.
Has anyone done research as to whether this is a more or less effective fundraising method (if done correctly, with points where the fundraiser does attempt to collect on it)? My hunch is that in the short term, this sort of altruism loses, and in the long term it wins. (Having read The Selfish Gene recently, I wonder if it can be analyzed using the ESS analysis... I digress)
It seems to me that the transactional fundraising model (you buy a brownie from me) isn't as good of a long-term strategy, because the transactional model seeks to finish the business deal in a single moment. Once the money is handed over, and the brownie is given, that's the end of your business.
The passive-aggressive fundraising model (I give you a brownie "on the house," and eventually figure out a way to call in the debt that makes you feel as though I haven't asked) leaves a more entrenched, long-term relationship. Even though the financial rewards aren't immediate, it seems to me that you are building up more of a sense of social connection.
Think of it this way. If you call up your neighbor and ask to borrow his wrench, and he says "Sure... the value of the wrench per day appears, at economic rates, to be 5 cents a day." Even though the cost is negligible, you won't walk away with a connection to your neighbor.
(Actually it occurs to me that this isn't necessarily the best example, because in this case lending for free is the social norm, so charging 5 cents a day will be seen as exceptionally tight-fisted, and actually creates a negative impression--for this example, just pretend that this doesn't happen).
If your neighbor lends you the wrench for free--with the chance of never seeing that wrench again--he's incurring some sort of (probably near negligible) cost to himself without passing it on to the neighbor. But later, when he asks to borrow a hammer and a screwdriver, he won't be charged the same thing.
At any rate, that comparison has turned out not to be my favorite comparison in the world. But the idea is that when we're fundraising, we have to take into account both the financial issues, and the social capital issues. It may be more worth it to incur a financial cost in the short term to incur social capital, and to later use that social capital (to a small degree) to return something financial later.
This is of course pseudo-economics, since I don't have any equations or studies to back that hunch up. But I think that's what my coworker's wife is doing with the brownies. I know that if she asked me today, I'd be willing to pay far more for the brownies I've already consumed than I would have paid up front.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sustainability V: Legitimacy Pt. 4 (Local Context)
Well, over the weekend I finished reading Createquity's fantastic summary of Gifts of the Muse, and I thought that I would come in Monday ready to swing on that issue. But I want to carp on a bit about Sustainibility and Legitimacy for another moment, since this is becoming a dear idea for me.
Recently, there was an announcement that the former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble, would be coming to run the Old Globe theater in San Diego. In one of the articles (not, unfortunately, the one whose link I just found), Adrian Noble joked that he had never been closer to San Diego than the Los Angeles Airport.
Now, Adrian Noble's legitimacy in that position probably isn't up for debate. For one of Britain (and the world)'s leading Shakespeare directors/A.D.s to take over one of America's higher-profile Shakespeare Festivals is such a no-brainer.
On the other hand, there is something jarring to me to have a theater company turn over its artistic leadership to someone who freely admits that he has no experience with the town he's working in. The implication there is that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, no matter where you do it.
Now, I'm sure that Adrian Noble is a talented director, and I'm sure he's going to make good theater, but... well, obviously, creating good theater isn't enough. Plenty of people have been making good theater for a while now, and it still isn't drawing the crowds like it deserves. The point is that our theater needs to speak to its local context, it needs to find a way to make itself relevant to the people of its community. People that Adrian Noble has never met.
I'm torn, because I feel like if I wasn't wearing my "arts community development" hat I wouldn't be criticizing this move. When I heard about it, my gut instinct was "Yay! San Diego gets some good legitimacy!" I didn't mind that it was a British director. But something about never having once been in San Diego... how does he know what will strike a chord with San Diegans?
Is anyone on the same page as me on this issue?
Recently, there was an announcement that the former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble, would be coming to run the Old Globe theater in San Diego. In one of the articles (not, unfortunately, the one whose link I just found), Adrian Noble joked that he had never been closer to San Diego than the Los Angeles Airport.
Now, Adrian Noble's legitimacy in that position probably isn't up for debate. For one of Britain (and the world)'s leading Shakespeare directors/A.D.s to take over one of America's higher-profile Shakespeare Festivals is such a no-brainer.
On the other hand, there is something jarring to me to have a theater company turn over its artistic leadership to someone who freely admits that he has no experience with the town he's working in. The implication there is that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, no matter where you do it.
Now, I'm sure that Adrian Noble is a talented director, and I'm sure he's going to make good theater, but... well, obviously, creating good theater isn't enough. Plenty of people have been making good theater for a while now, and it still isn't drawing the crowds like it deserves. The point is that our theater needs to speak to its local context, it needs to find a way to make itself relevant to the people of its community. People that Adrian Noble has never met.
I'm torn, because I feel like if I wasn't wearing my "arts community development" hat I wouldn't be criticizing this move. When I heard about it, my gut instinct was "Yay! San Diego gets some good legitimacy!" I didn't mind that it was a British director. But something about never having once been in San Diego... how does he know what will strike a chord with San Diegans?
Is anyone on the same page as me on this issue?
Friday, July 24, 2009
Sustainability IV: Legitimacy Pt. 3 (Too Legit To Quit)
Another thought about legitimacy and worldview (see the previous post) strikes me as I was listening to Jaydiohead. If you don't know, Jaydiohead is a quite fantastic mash-up of Jay-Z and Radiohead.
Jay-Z is from the world of rap, and in the world of rap, legitimacy is currency. They work on a legitimacy-currency system called "cred," which is a measure of how "legit" they are. You get your cred on the street, and that's what makes you legit.
If I sound like the whitest person alive in that last paragraph, it's for obvious reasons. I am not from that background, so I don't know what in that phraseology was legitimate and what was absolute horse-crackers. When I talk the talk of art-bloggers, I know the language. I know how to judge "legitimacy." Although I might disagree with my fellow art-community folks, I feel fairly confident of my ability to smell bullshit.
When I listen to Jay-Z, it often sounds to me patently ridiculous--especially the ones where he's talking about his life as "hustler" (a word whose meaning I can't ever hope to grasp in a non-superficial way). One line in one of his songs is "This is black superhero music." I was listening to this at work, and it caused laughter amongst my workmates.
I am not condemning Jay-Z. I'm just showing that legitimacy is highly relative, very localized. It draws upon your knowledge of the world around you, and it's 100% perceptive.
William James, philosopher, spoke in his series of lectures on Pragmatism (collected in a volume called Pragmatism which is one of the books that defined who I am) of how we create and collect worldview. His theory of worldview is that we basically start with a supposition, and then test it in our local world, and if it accurately predicts the environment we live in, we keep it. These beliefs remain in our world-view until something comes along that challenges it, and then we make the simplest reshuffling possible to adjust.
This creates a barrier not of language, but of experience. Because the things I do will not resonate as "legitimate" in the world of "hustlers" and the things that hustlers do seem, well, foreign and strange in the world of an upper-middle-class art-blogger.
If an arts organization wants to be legitimate, they have to understand the experiences that have shaped the local worldview. If you want to change their worldview, you have to figure out what will be legitimate, but will challenge their current worldview.
It's also important to note that those things that you hold to be true will not strike people to be true just because you insist on it. You have to speak their language, and then challenge their notions.
One powerful example of this to me is a report I heard once from Iraq, in which they discussed that part of the reasons Sunnis feel disenfranchised in the current (at the time of the report, illegitimate from their perspective) government is because in the Saddam Hussein era, Sunnis were told that they were 50% of the population, and now the new government tells them they are only 20% of the population. The fact that the Sunni population is objectively 20% of the population doesn't change the social fact that Sunnis believe they are half of the population. This is a huge challenge that I don't have an answer for, but this was an example of legitimacy problems in action.
Jay-Z is from the world of rap, and in the world of rap, legitimacy is currency. They work on a legitimacy-currency system called "cred," which is a measure of how "legit" they are. You get your cred on the street, and that's what makes you legit.
If I sound like the whitest person alive in that last paragraph, it's for obvious reasons. I am not from that background, so I don't know what in that phraseology was legitimate and what was absolute horse-crackers. When I talk the talk of art-bloggers, I know the language. I know how to judge "legitimacy." Although I might disagree with my fellow art-community folks, I feel fairly confident of my ability to smell bullshit.
When I listen to Jay-Z, it often sounds to me patently ridiculous--especially the ones where he's talking about his life as "hustler" (a word whose meaning I can't ever hope to grasp in a non-superficial way). One line in one of his songs is "This is black superhero music." I was listening to this at work, and it caused laughter amongst my workmates.
I am not condemning Jay-Z. I'm just showing that legitimacy is highly relative, very localized. It draws upon your knowledge of the world around you, and it's 100% perceptive.
William James, philosopher, spoke in his series of lectures on Pragmatism (collected in a volume called Pragmatism which is one of the books that defined who I am) of how we create and collect worldview. His theory of worldview is that we basically start with a supposition, and then test it in our local world, and if it accurately predicts the environment we live in, we keep it. These beliefs remain in our world-view until something comes along that challenges it, and then we make the simplest reshuffling possible to adjust.
This creates a barrier not of language, but of experience. Because the things I do will not resonate as "legitimate" in the world of "hustlers" and the things that hustlers do seem, well, foreign and strange in the world of an upper-middle-class art-blogger.
If an arts organization wants to be legitimate, they have to understand the experiences that have shaped the local worldview. If you want to change their worldview, you have to figure out what will be legitimate, but will challenge their current worldview.
It's also important to note that those things that you hold to be true will not strike people to be true just because you insist on it. You have to speak their language, and then challenge their notions.
One powerful example of this to me is a report I heard once from Iraq, in which they discussed that part of the reasons Sunnis feel disenfranchised in the current (at the time of the report, illegitimate from their perspective) government is because in the Saddam Hussein era, Sunnis were told that they were 50% of the population, and now the new government tells them they are only 20% of the population. The fact that the Sunni population is objectively 20% of the population doesn't change the social fact that Sunnis believe they are half of the population. This is a huge challenge that I don't have an answer for, but this was an example of legitimacy problems in action.
Sustainability III: Legitimacy Pt. 2
So, if I just left you with the last post about the importance of legitimacy in arts organiztions as a key component of sustainability, it would be one of those frustrating things I see on the blogosphere where they make a solid claim ("Integrity is important!") without really giving you an approach to applying the claim. I can't promise I'll have a strong recipe for legitimacy, but here's one part of legitimacy, told yet again through our sociopolitical narrative lens.
(by the way, it is important to use the sociopolitical narrative lens to look at this sort of stuff because, as the Thriving Arts Report put it, our strength is drawn from status as a social movement)
So, at the beginning of the campaign, even as far back as the 2004 Keynote Address, it was clear to me that Barack Obama was a different candidate from others. I can't say I knew back then that he'd be a President, but I knew I wanted him to be a President. And it was from the way he spoke--I knew little about his platform, and he certainly hadn't emerged with his practical-idealist hybrid of society-changing reforms.
A lot has been made of his eloquence, but it's more than simple eloquence. In fact, not a lot has been made of the absence of his eloquence for a long time. For me, the greatest of Obama's speeches are far behind him: the rhetorical flourishes of the "Yes We Can" speech in South Carolina are substantively different from solid speeches like the Reverend Wright speech or the Inauguration speech.
For the rhetorical, "eloquent" speeches, he was channeling passion and a beautiful mastery of images and linguistic skill. The Inauguration speech was a far more minimalist speech, but it was simply revolutionary in terms of its content. But it wasn't "eloquent," it was simply straightforward.
Yet I would argue that it was that second mode of speech that got him elected, rather than the "eloquent" speeches that fired his base early in the primary. Why?
Jon Stewart was asked once why he backed Obama so strongly. He had backed John Kerry in 2004, but only a bit implicitly. He still had a lot of scorn for Kerry, and he clearly wasn't happy about the choice. In the time that I've watched The Daily Show, I haven't seen him excited about really any other candidate.
When asked why, Jon Stewart had simple answer. He said that Obama was the only candidate he'd seen in a long time who seemed to describe the world the way he personally saw it. He was sick of standing in the rain and hearing politicians tell him about how sunny it is.
That simple ability to look reality in the face and describe it accurately is what drove Obama into power, not the "eloquence" with which he wrapped those realities. That "eloquence" was him describing the world in the way that the excitable, idealist base of the Democratic party would see it. But when it got to the general election, he espoused a far more Moderate worldview. Because that's the world view that most independents and centrist Dems/Reps could agree with.
When Obama talked about our energy crisis, it rang true with a younger generation who had agreed with Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. When he talked about health care, he talked about it in a way that rang true with all of the uninsured or poorly insured. When John McCain talked about the world, it rang false--and let's not even talk about Sarah Palin. (We should be careful to over-generalize, because there are quite a substantial part of the population to whom McCain and Palin did ring true).
At any rate, this isn't meant as a political post, this is a post about art development. So what is this discussion of Legitimacy?
The point is that if you want to be a legitimate organization, you need to understand the worldview of the people you're trying to serve, and you need to be careful not to contravene it. There are a number of theaters that try to tackle "issues," but rather than trying to tackle the local issues that are close to the hearts of their neighbors, they tackle big global "issues," which to the local folk might not be as crucial.
If you want to be a Legitimate (and therefore Sustainable) organization, you need to tell people it's raining when it's raining, and tell people it's sunny when it's sunny. They have to trust your judgment when you describe the world. You need to look around at the community, and figure out how their day-to-day existence meshes with your artistic aims.
This, by the way, is why artists are most successful at making art for other artists: their personal day-to-day matches the day-to-day of their audience. But it doesn't necessarily match the day-to-day of their audience. And that makes them hard to get legitimacy there.
(not that everything has to outwardly resemble the day-to-day... try not to be overly reductionist with my argument!)
This, I think, is why in Germany they did a "theater piece" in which a man went into a field and farmed every day for a month, and other farmers came to watch. It's sort of a perverse over-the-top version of what I'm describing.
"The Office" is successful because it very, very accurately describes the awkwardness and absurdity of the way people actually interact, not in the way Hollywood thinks we interact. (note: "The Office" is NOT successful because it accurately describes office life. You could make a perfect representation of office life and it would bore the crap out of people. It's an expressionistic representation of the experience of office life).
So, that's one of the ways to cultivate legitimacy: to really strive to understand what people are actually going through, and find ways to represent that.
(a little closing note: this is my 200th post, and is very slowly growing in readership, which I hope might be a sign of this blog gaining just a tiny fraction of that legitimacy!)
(by the way, it is important to use the sociopolitical narrative lens to look at this sort of stuff because, as the Thriving Arts Report put it, our strength is drawn from status as a social movement)
So, at the beginning of the campaign, even as far back as the 2004 Keynote Address, it was clear to me that Barack Obama was a different candidate from others. I can't say I knew back then that he'd be a President, but I knew I wanted him to be a President. And it was from the way he spoke--I knew little about his platform, and he certainly hadn't emerged with his practical-idealist hybrid of society-changing reforms.
A lot has been made of his eloquence, but it's more than simple eloquence. In fact, not a lot has been made of the absence of his eloquence for a long time. For me, the greatest of Obama's speeches are far behind him: the rhetorical flourishes of the "Yes We Can" speech in South Carolina are substantively different from solid speeches like the Reverend Wright speech or the Inauguration speech.
For the rhetorical, "eloquent" speeches, he was channeling passion and a beautiful mastery of images and linguistic skill. The Inauguration speech was a far more minimalist speech, but it was simply revolutionary in terms of its content. But it wasn't "eloquent," it was simply straightforward.
Yet I would argue that it was that second mode of speech that got him elected, rather than the "eloquent" speeches that fired his base early in the primary. Why?
Jon Stewart was asked once why he backed Obama so strongly. He had backed John Kerry in 2004, but only a bit implicitly. He still had a lot of scorn for Kerry, and he clearly wasn't happy about the choice. In the time that I've watched The Daily Show, I haven't seen him excited about really any other candidate.
When asked why, Jon Stewart had simple answer. He said that Obama was the only candidate he'd seen in a long time who seemed to describe the world the way he personally saw it. He was sick of standing in the rain and hearing politicians tell him about how sunny it is.
That simple ability to look reality in the face and describe it accurately is what drove Obama into power, not the "eloquence" with which he wrapped those realities. That "eloquence" was him describing the world in the way that the excitable, idealist base of the Democratic party would see it. But when it got to the general election, he espoused a far more Moderate worldview. Because that's the world view that most independents and centrist Dems/Reps could agree with.
When Obama talked about our energy crisis, it rang true with a younger generation who had agreed with Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. When he talked about health care, he talked about it in a way that rang true with all of the uninsured or poorly insured. When John McCain talked about the world, it rang false--and let's not even talk about Sarah Palin. (We should be careful to over-generalize, because there are quite a substantial part of the population to whom McCain and Palin did ring true).
At any rate, this isn't meant as a political post, this is a post about art development. So what is this discussion of Legitimacy?
The point is that if you want to be a legitimate organization, you need to understand the worldview of the people you're trying to serve, and you need to be careful not to contravene it. There are a number of theaters that try to tackle "issues," but rather than trying to tackle the local issues that are close to the hearts of their neighbors, they tackle big global "issues," which to the local folk might not be as crucial.
If you want to be a Legitimate (and therefore Sustainable) organization, you need to tell people it's raining when it's raining, and tell people it's sunny when it's sunny. They have to trust your judgment when you describe the world. You need to look around at the community, and figure out how their day-to-day existence meshes with your artistic aims.
This, by the way, is why artists are most successful at making art for other artists: their personal day-to-day matches the day-to-day of their audience. But it doesn't necessarily match the day-to-day of their audience. And that makes them hard to get legitimacy there.
(not that everything has to outwardly resemble the day-to-day... try not to be overly reductionist with my argument!)
This, I think, is why in Germany they did a "theater piece" in which a man went into a field and farmed every day for a month, and other farmers came to watch. It's sort of a perverse over-the-top version of what I'm describing.
"The Office" is successful because it very, very accurately describes the awkwardness and absurdity of the way people actually interact, not in the way Hollywood thinks we interact. (note: "The Office" is NOT successful because it accurately describes office life. You could make a perfect representation of office life and it would bore the crap out of people. It's an expressionistic representation of the experience of office life).
So, that's one of the ways to cultivate legitimacy: to really strive to understand what people are actually going through, and find ways to represent that.
(a little closing note: this is my 200th post, and is very slowly growing in readership, which I hope might be a sign of this blog gaining just a tiny fraction of that legitimacy!)
Sustainability II: Legitimacy Pt. 1
I got into a discussion the other day about the future of Iran following the Iran Elections with my mother the other day (just wait, I promise this is about arts development). She was expressing her (understandable) frustration that Obama didn't intervene more in the Iran Election, to do something to help out the protesters. She didn't understand why Moussavi didn't call upon the world for help.
I tried to explain to her the crucial importance of legitimacy in government. An illegitimate government is an unsustainable government. In fact, I wish I had some high-power quotations from Rousseau or Montesquieu, or the founding fathers, because that's what the Enlightenment was based upon. Governments that are illegitimate are unstable, and the Enlightenment sought to bring stability to war-torn Europe by creating more legitimate governments into power.
Moussavi could ask for foreign intervention to help counterbalance the physical force of Khameni's government, but if he did, he'd lose that crucial bit of legitimacy that defines his movement. The movement is based on two key principles:
1) Allowing the Iranian people to self-determine their own government
2) Using legal, peaceful processes to ensure that this happens.
Clearly, whether or not Moussavi would be brought into power by a US-led intervention, or by UN Peacekeepers, is irrelevant. Forcing Moussavi into power violates both of those principles, and he loses his legitimacy. Moussavi understands legitimacy rather intimately, because the only reason he is in the position that he is is because Khameni rather stunningly gave up a huge foundation of legitimacy that the government was predicated on.
If you look at the above two principles, both of them were (at least to a large degree) applicable to the post-1979 Iran, well through Ahmadinejad's first election. There was a high degree of censorship (which is not what the people are protesting) and some election massaging, but in several structural ways you could demonstrate that Iran was holding to those principles more than any other Muslim nation in the area, minus perhaps Turkey.
To bring this to arts groups, which I've really been talking about all this time: the sense of "sustainability" of an arts organization is very much linked to the sense of "legitmacy." The question, really, is how does an arts leader:
1) Identify legitimacy
2) Cultivate legitimacy
I think I have a few posts left in me for today on the subject of legitimacy. But the first thing I want to say is that for an arts community, it is crucial to keep an eye on whether or not your actions are creating legitimacy--and not the window-dressing of legitimacy. For instance, a building is not legitimacy, never mind the fact that it tells the community that you're a powerful, stable organization. It is no more a sign of "legitimacy" than the Basij are symbols of the legitimacy. The demonstration of resources is not a sign of legitimacy (although the demonstration of stability might be, in some cases, part of legitimacy).
I tried to explain to her the crucial importance of legitimacy in government. An illegitimate government is an unsustainable government. In fact, I wish I had some high-power quotations from Rousseau or Montesquieu, or the founding fathers, because that's what the Enlightenment was based upon. Governments that are illegitimate are unstable, and the Enlightenment sought to bring stability to war-torn Europe by creating more legitimate governments into power.
Moussavi could ask for foreign intervention to help counterbalance the physical force of Khameni's government, but if he did, he'd lose that crucial bit of legitimacy that defines his movement. The movement is based on two key principles:
1) Allowing the Iranian people to self-determine their own government
2) Using legal, peaceful processes to ensure that this happens.
Clearly, whether or not Moussavi would be brought into power by a US-led intervention, or by UN Peacekeepers, is irrelevant. Forcing Moussavi into power violates both of those principles, and he loses his legitimacy. Moussavi understands legitimacy rather intimately, because the only reason he is in the position that he is is because Khameni rather stunningly gave up a huge foundation of legitimacy that the government was predicated on.
If you look at the above two principles, both of them were (at least to a large degree) applicable to the post-1979 Iran, well through Ahmadinejad's first election. There was a high degree of censorship (which is not what the people are protesting) and some election massaging, but in several structural ways you could demonstrate that Iran was holding to those principles more than any other Muslim nation in the area, minus perhaps Turkey.
To bring this to arts groups, which I've really been talking about all this time: the sense of "sustainability" of an arts organization is very much linked to the sense of "legitmacy." The question, really, is how does an arts leader:
1) Identify legitimacy
2) Cultivate legitimacy
I think I have a few posts left in me for today on the subject of legitimacy. But the first thing I want to say is that for an arts community, it is crucial to keep an eye on whether or not your actions are creating legitimacy--and not the window-dressing of legitimacy. For instance, a building is not legitimacy, never mind the fact that it tells the community that you're a powerful, stable organization. It is no more a sign of "legitimacy" than the Basij are symbols of the legitimacy. The demonstration of resources is not a sign of legitimacy (although the demonstration of stability might be, in some cases, part of legitimacy).
Thursday, July 23, 2009
IndyMill Publishing gets out a second Book
I'm in the field of self-promotion, like everyone in the not-particularly-profitable field. Today's self promotion is actually only a semi-self-promotion:
IndyMill Publishing (blog here) has just released its second book, Fractal Uni Verses, by Amanda Killian (covers beautifully rendered by Max Reuben).
I say semi-self-promotion because it is my publishing company (well, I am the publishing company), and I did have the distinction of editing the book and making it happen.
BUT! This is also a moment for me to promote a close friend of mine who writes beautiful poetry that glides gently between sparkling wit and quietly reflective poetry. Consider buying it today: http://www.indymill.org/
It's only $2.00 for a digital copy, or $10.00 if you want a beautiful physical copy to hold in your hands.
IndyMill Publishing (blog here) has just released its second book, Fractal Uni Verses, by Amanda Killian (covers beautifully rendered by Max Reuben).
I say semi-self-promotion because it is my publishing company (well, I am the publishing company), and I did have the distinction of editing the book and making it happen.
BUT! This is also a moment for me to promote a close friend of mine who writes beautiful poetry that glides gently between sparkling wit and quietly reflective poetry. Consider buying it today: http://www.indymill.org/
It's only $2.00 for a digital copy, or $10.00 if you want a beautiful physical copy to hold in your hands.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Creative Workplace I: How Did We Fail?
Whereas Richard Florida's statistical observations in Rise of the Creative Class are not necessarily the best (for reasons that people far more qualified than me have gone into), his qualitative analysis of the workplace is fairly on-the-nose. It is, however, an ideal view of the creative class' workspace, and not always the accurate case.
Teachers, I think, can be placed rather squarely in the realm of the the creative class. The creative class, Florida observed, is marked by high job mobility. Instead, it seems like teachers are organized in the manufacturing class model: unionized, entrenched (by tenure), etc. The concept of state-wide curriculums and standardized testing, as well, seems to be an attempt to take the creativity out of the hands of the teacher, and standardize the system of education.
Perhaps this is the success of the charter schools and private schools: they are more likely to create a creative class environment for children. In fact, it may be that the creative class is better served by being taught in a creative class environment simply because it is a creative class environment, and the students will be modeling the place they will have to work for the rest of their lives.
The same applies to arts institutions and arts education. We need to take a look, because in some regards it feels to me like many people in the creative field are not working in that environment. And this may be why some of these institutions fail.
Just a thought.
Teachers, I think, can be placed rather squarely in the realm of the the creative class. The creative class, Florida observed, is marked by high job mobility. Instead, it seems like teachers are organized in the manufacturing class model: unionized, entrenched (by tenure), etc. The concept of state-wide curriculums and standardized testing, as well, seems to be an attempt to take the creativity out of the hands of the teacher, and standardize the system of education.
Perhaps this is the success of the charter schools and private schools: they are more likely to create a creative class environment for children. In fact, it may be that the creative class is better served by being taught in a creative class environment simply because it is a creative class environment, and the students will be modeling the place they will have to work for the rest of their lives.
The same applies to arts institutions and arts education. We need to take a look, because in some regards it feels to me like many people in the creative field are not working in that environment. And this may be why some of these institutions fail.
Just a thought.
A Side-Bar About Ethics, Darwinism, and New Athiesm
I've been trying to focus on arts development and arts communities on this blog now, but I was listening to WNYC's peerless Radiolab, which most recently was basically an interview of Richard Dawkins about Darwinism versus Religion, and Darwinism versus Social Darwinism.
I don't really have the time or inclination to go sorting through all of the arguments-- you should go there yourself and take a listen. I just wanted to say that although Richard Dawkins is just as staunchly anti-religious as Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, I don't think he's quite the same as them, and he's not in quite the same category of New Atheist.
Whereas Christopher Hitchens will argue (in ironically largely illogical arguments) the very foundations of why Religion is wrong and Science is right, Dawkins has a much more elegant and straightforward--and to me, more accurate--rebuttal of religion. His argument against religion is simply that the need to find purpose in systems is an illusion.
Now, Hitchens goes at great length to make Religion the sum total of human evil, and even Dawkins will overexaggerate the evils of religion, but Dawkins is most powerful when he's simply looking at the reason we irrationally search for reason. By showing that our need for purpose overrides the actual reflection of the universe, he's making a far more powerful case than by labeling it as an attack on freedom, or whatever Hitchens' thrust du jour is.
It reminds me this morning of listening to the other incomparable radio show, This American Life, do a fascinating look at the war between Scientologists and Psychiatrists. It starts with the journalist's sense of revulsion at the DSM-IV, with which he managed to diagnose himself with several "disorders" in a manner of minutes, including poor handwriting, poor mathematical skills, etc. He then examined how difficult it is to prove sanity to the psychiatric profession. Through this, he was being guided by a Scientologist who was eager to make an ally out of him. But then at the end of the episode he sits listening to their propaganda about how psychiatrists have caused 9/11, caused rape and slavery, etc. etc., and they've lost him.
This is the position that Scientologists and New Athiests share: they both are facing an institution with many flaws, but by painting the evil with a wide brush, they lose the ability to criticize impartially.
So that was the first part of the Dawkins interview. The second part was Dawkins' elegant defense of a Post-Darwinian rather than Social Darwinian view of society. Listen to the interview. And to hear to a much older, but also well argued version, read Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics.
That's more than I wanted to say on this topic, but I guess it's been on my mind, having just finished The Selfish Gene and halfway through Oliver Sack's Musicophilia and with both Radiolab and This American Life touching the subject.
I don't really have the time or inclination to go sorting through all of the arguments-- you should go there yourself and take a listen. I just wanted to say that although Richard Dawkins is just as staunchly anti-religious as Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, I don't think he's quite the same as them, and he's not in quite the same category of New Atheist.
Whereas Christopher Hitchens will argue (in ironically largely illogical arguments) the very foundations of why Religion is wrong and Science is right, Dawkins has a much more elegant and straightforward--and to me, more accurate--rebuttal of religion. His argument against religion is simply that the need to find purpose in systems is an illusion.
Now, Hitchens goes at great length to make Religion the sum total of human evil, and even Dawkins will overexaggerate the evils of religion, but Dawkins is most powerful when he's simply looking at the reason we irrationally search for reason. By showing that our need for purpose overrides the actual reflection of the universe, he's making a far more powerful case than by labeling it as an attack on freedom, or whatever Hitchens' thrust du jour is.
It reminds me this morning of listening to the other incomparable radio show, This American Life, do a fascinating look at the war between Scientologists and Psychiatrists. It starts with the journalist's sense of revulsion at the DSM-IV, with which he managed to diagnose himself with several "disorders" in a manner of minutes, including poor handwriting, poor mathematical skills, etc. He then examined how difficult it is to prove sanity to the psychiatric profession. Through this, he was being guided by a Scientologist who was eager to make an ally out of him. But then at the end of the episode he sits listening to their propaganda about how psychiatrists have caused 9/11, caused rape and slavery, etc. etc., and they've lost him.
This is the position that Scientologists and New Athiests share: they both are facing an institution with many flaws, but by painting the evil with a wide brush, they lose the ability to criticize impartially.
So that was the first part of the Dawkins interview. The second part was Dawkins' elegant defense of a Post-Darwinian rather than Social Darwinian view of society. Listen to the interview. And to hear to a much older, but also well argued version, read Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics.
That's more than I wanted to say on this topic, but I guess it's been on my mind, having just finished The Selfish Gene and halfway through Oliver Sack's Musicophilia and with both Radiolab and This American Life touching the subject.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Sense of Community II: Arts Factories
One of the interesting historic notes discussed in Rise of the Creative Class is how the original Factory came into being. Obviously, in the original market days, labor was divided into a community: someone would gather raw materials, sell it to a merchant, and the merchant would sell it to an artisan to turn into a finished good.
As the level of finished good grew in complexity, it might go through multiple of these stages: someone gathers raw materials, sells it to a merchant, merchant sells it to an artistan who turns it into a refined good, refined good is sold to a merchant, merchant sells it to another artisan who finishes the good. This was called factoring.
Eventually, someone figured out that the middle-man could be skilled by assembling all of the parts of a product’s development under one roof: in a factory. Now a factory owner buys the raw material, and his workers usher the raw material through all of the steps of its development until the end.
However, it is clear that in the developed world, this model is breaking down, as it is no longer profitable to employ men in a factory at wages they are accustomed to. The cost of each worker has gotten too big. Partly, this is because of the conditions of the worker: back when each artisan was self-employed, he set his own hours and conditions, and would work to produce as much as he needed to support himself. But the factory aims to maximize its own profits, which makes the hours and conditions increasingly difficult.
On a seemingly unrelated subject, my brother and I came to discuss the armies of amateurs who now exist, and seem to want to do valuable but low-quality jobs for no pay. For instance, whereas an amateur couldn’t compete full-time making furniture, because Ikea would drive him out of business, he could create small amounts of low-quality and low-cost items to sell informally, so long has he does this in his leisure time aside from a sustaining job. Once a man takes up this sort of job outside of work hours, he no longer has quite the same pressure to make ends meet through his furniture business, and therefore is free to enjoy himself and make as little or as much as he needs.
As a mindgame, I asked my brother to consider whether it would be possible for a company or project to harness the armies of amateurs to contribute bits of work, remotely, at their own pace. This is the equivalent of Factoring, but without the factory.
It was only later that I realized that this is already being done, largely through the power of the internet. For instance, Wikipedia harnesses large amounts of amateur experts, without compensation, to create a repository of knowledge. Each person contributes in their free time, without expecting pay, up to their abilities.
Other open source projects are equally Factoring projects: Linux, for instance, is entirely built by programmers in their free time pushing around bits of code to build an operating system which now competes with Windows and OS X.
I also came across a curious real-world example of this as well. In Alaska, my family came across a beautiful small Musk Oxen farm. This farm operated by raising musk oxen, then sending those raw materials to various indigenous tribes to be knitted into sweaters or blankets. These tribesfolk were paid the same no matter how much they put out—they were only required to make at least one sweater or blanket. Then the blankets/sweaters are sent back to the farm, which gathers them all and sells them. This co-op structure is basically using an army of skilled amateurs to convert furs into sweaters.
Now, since this is an arts blog aiming to discuss the development of arts communities, it is time for me to cut to the chase. What I am getting at is that this model could be used to build an arts community. Rather than creating a single, complex organization (an arts Factory), the arts could be “Factored” out to a distributed number of arts amateurs, who contribute as much or as little. But once they’ve contributed, they’ve got a tie (at least a weak tie, possibly even a strong tie) in to the arts community.
When I had the conversation with Walt (at <100k Project) and some of Walt’s friends about arts community development, the idea I came up with at the time is to have a project that goes out into the community to collect stories and present them as part of an evening of theater. In a way, this is factoring, inasmuch as it factors the job of the playwright into the community. This is what The Laramie Project did, although the Laramie Project was sort of factoring colonization, because the results of their work left their community (StoryCorps is the same way—and came up for criticism for Walt for this same reason).
At any rate, this is a model for a small number of artists to build a larger arts community. By factoring out the creative work, they start to create an arts community that lives outside of themselves. At the same time, they lower the participation threshold, which is one of the most important barriers to the creation of an arts community.
As the level of finished good grew in complexity, it might go through multiple of these stages: someone gathers raw materials, sells it to a merchant, merchant sells it to an artistan who turns it into a refined good, refined good is sold to a merchant, merchant sells it to another artisan who finishes the good. This was called factoring.
Eventually, someone figured out that the middle-man could be skilled by assembling all of the parts of a product’s development under one roof: in a factory. Now a factory owner buys the raw material, and his workers usher the raw material through all of the steps of its development until the end.
However, it is clear that in the developed world, this model is breaking down, as it is no longer profitable to employ men in a factory at wages they are accustomed to. The cost of each worker has gotten too big. Partly, this is because of the conditions of the worker: back when each artisan was self-employed, he set his own hours and conditions, and would work to produce as much as he needed to support himself. But the factory aims to maximize its own profits, which makes the hours and conditions increasingly difficult.
On a seemingly unrelated subject, my brother and I came to discuss the armies of amateurs who now exist, and seem to want to do valuable but low-quality jobs for no pay. For instance, whereas an amateur couldn’t compete full-time making furniture, because Ikea would drive him out of business, he could create small amounts of low-quality and low-cost items to sell informally, so long has he does this in his leisure time aside from a sustaining job. Once a man takes up this sort of job outside of work hours, he no longer has quite the same pressure to make ends meet through his furniture business, and therefore is free to enjoy himself and make as little or as much as he needs.
As a mindgame, I asked my brother to consider whether it would be possible for a company or project to harness the armies of amateurs to contribute bits of work, remotely, at their own pace. This is the equivalent of Factoring, but without the factory.
It was only later that I realized that this is already being done, largely through the power of the internet. For instance, Wikipedia harnesses large amounts of amateur experts, without compensation, to create a repository of knowledge. Each person contributes in their free time, without expecting pay, up to their abilities.
Other open source projects are equally Factoring projects: Linux, for instance, is entirely built by programmers in their free time pushing around bits of code to build an operating system which now competes with Windows and OS X.
I also came across a curious real-world example of this as well. In Alaska, my family came across a beautiful small Musk Oxen farm. This farm operated by raising musk oxen, then sending those raw materials to various indigenous tribes to be knitted into sweaters or blankets. These tribesfolk were paid the same no matter how much they put out—they were only required to make at least one sweater or blanket. Then the blankets/sweaters are sent back to the farm, which gathers them all and sells them. This co-op structure is basically using an army of skilled amateurs to convert furs into sweaters.
Now, since this is an arts blog aiming to discuss the development of arts communities, it is time for me to cut to the chase. What I am getting at is that this model could be used to build an arts community. Rather than creating a single, complex organization (an arts Factory), the arts could be “Factored” out to a distributed number of arts amateurs, who contribute as much or as little. But once they’ve contributed, they’ve got a tie (at least a weak tie, possibly even a strong tie) in to the arts community.
When I had the conversation with Walt (at <100k Project) and some of Walt’s friends about arts community development, the idea I came up with at the time is to have a project that goes out into the community to collect stories and present them as part of an evening of theater. In a way, this is factoring, inasmuch as it factors the job of the playwright into the community. This is what The Laramie Project did, although the Laramie Project was sort of factoring colonization, because the results of their work left their community (StoryCorps is the same way—and came up for criticism for Walt for this same reason).
At any rate, this is a model for a small number of artists to build a larger arts community. By factoring out the creative work, they start to create an arts community that lives outside of themselves. At the same time, they lower the participation threshold, which is one of the most important barriers to the creation of an arts community.
Sense of Community I: Strong and Weak Ties
(I wrote this entire post, and then hit "save as draft" instead of "publish." Whoops)
The Thriving Arts Report, as well as Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class and most other publications on the subject, regard a sense of community as one of the bedrocks of an artistic community—which, as that sentence clearly reveals, is a tautology. You need community to have a community.
What is generally meant is that a general community builds and supports specific communities: New York City is one community, but it is composed of smaller component communities: the New York Biking community, or the New York arts scene, or the community of people interested in astrology in New York City. Because the city supports the concept of community, it is easy to create specific sub-communities at whim. In a small town with a strong general sense of community, it is much easier to start an arts community, because it builds on that community.
It is important to define our terms, or else they become so vague as to be uselessly philosophical. Here, community is the sum of ties between people. When you have a town in which people’s ties are to each other, it can be said to have a community.
In Irvine, for instance, I personally have a few ties to other people in the city, but I literally have no ties to anyone else on my street. I have been once or twice to a block party, and I helped the woman across the street try and sell something on E-Bay, but other than that I have no ties to anyone on the street.
In New York City, I live in a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburg—also known as Hipsterburg, thanks to the particular community that lives there. I can’t pretend that I know too many of my neighbors who were strangers, but on the other hand I have plenty of friends who live in that part of town. As a matter of fact, I live there now because of the numbers of my friends who live there. It is nice to be looking at moving into a building where a fellow theater-person lives, knowing that my former roommate is around the corner and one block away and my other friends are two blocks in the other direction. When I was in Alaska, I met for the first time the ex-boyfriend of a good friend of mine who also lived one block away from this location.
So in order to build a community, there needs to be an attempt to build ties. Community-tied activities are the way to do this (for instance, I went to a quite successful Annual Cupcake Cook-off in Williamsburg).
The question is, what quality of ties are to be built? There is a distinction created by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and re-used in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class between “strong ties” and “weak ties.” According to both, the new generation has shifted to favor more weak ties as opposed to a few strong ties. The difference between them is that Putnam sees this as something corrosive, and Florida sees this as simply part of the new economic transition into the Creative Class-dominated economy.
One of the failures of the attempt to create arts communities, which I mentioned in my last post (Needed: Secretary General), is the negative side of the “Champion” effect. An arts community is created around a “Champion,” who fights day and night for the arts community. And then they leave or die, and then the movement is done.
This is, perversely, an example of how strong ties may weaken an arts communities. After all, there is a rather high threshold to cross before one can be said to have a “strong tie.” If an arts community is based on strong ties, it will drive out those without the time or inclination to form strong ties. Thus, a champion will invest large amounts of time and effort into forging strong ties around himself. The community becomes defined by those strong ties, and when the champion leaves, those strong ties leave with them.
On the other hand, a large network of weak ties is more stable, because removing any one person only removes a bunch of the weak ties. Of course, if the network of weak ties is too small, then you’ll have a small and dispassionate community. But it is easier to build a small network of weak ties into a large network of weak ties.
In other words, it is much more sustainable to have an arts community in which everyone in the community is invested a little bit than to have an arts communities in which a few people have invested a lot. This, I think, is what the Thriving Arts Report means when it says that the strength of arts communities are not based on the strength of their organizations, but are actually structured like social movements. If you look at the life of a social movement, you’ll see that most of the members of a social movement are in fact only loosely affiliated with the social movement. They enter and leave fluidly. The movement does not demand so much of their time or attention, except at crucial junctures.
For instance, suppose you have a small network of people who start an open-mic night. Every week, people are invited to come sit in a café and read some bits of poetry. Each week, more people are present, and some person who come have a bit of poetry—their own or pre-existing, it doesn’t matter—and they read. Six or seven weeks into this, there are maybe twenty or so regulars, ten of which consistently bring poetry. The originator of the poetry reading stays for a period of time, but after six weeks is forced to leave. Let’s be charitable and say that she is leaving because her grandmother in another city is very sick. Because of the low requirement of resources, and the easily repeatable nature of the evening, the people decide to still show up the next week and read their poetry. The originator may be gone, but the poetry club has a pretty good chance of surviving.
Now let’s look at another champion who wants to create a theater community. She wants it to be a Professional theater, so she goes to the bank and to the local stores and to the municipal government, spends her time filling out grants, and eventually lands $5,000 to do a first production. She attracts a number of people who are interested in acting or crewing, and they do a big production—let’s say The Elves and the Shoemaker. This champion has strong ties to the people who have been helping her run this $5,000 theater, but she still has very little tie to the audience—she won’t until the first production.
Five or six productions later, this theater company has a regular audience of maybe 150-250. The woman herself is forced to leave (once again, let’s be charitable and say it’s another sick grandmother). Suddenly there’s a power vacuum. Are the actors going to step up to be the managing director of a theater company? Did she train someone to do the complicated jobs of hiring, balancing a budget, applying for grants? Certainly, no matter how much her audience appreciates her work, none of them can come in because the structure she created is a complicated one that requires training and knowledge to run.
The poetry group can operate like a movement: it can continue itself. But the theater company can’t operate like a movement. So not only is the Thriving Arts Report right that the strength of an arts community is based on its ability to survive as a social movement, it should further say that the complexity of an organization can hurt its chances to survive.
Obviously, in a more robust community, it is possible to keep a complex arts organization moving, because it will have a broader base of trained administrators and artist professionals to draw from. But if the community audience is not full of professional artists, it will still have a wide gulf between itself and its audience.
So if we’re going to create a Sense of Community, our arts programs should be structured in such a way that any member of the community could perpetuate it, requiring nothing more than the desire to keep it going.
Sense of Community I: Strong and Weak Ties
The Thriving Arts Report, as well as Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class and most other publications on the subject, regard a sense of community as one of the bedrocks of an artistic community—which, as that sentence clearly reveals, is a tautology. You need community to have a community.
What is generally meant is that a general community builds and supports specific communities: New York City is one community, but it is composed of smaller component communities: the New York Biking community, or the New York arts scene, or the community of people interested in astrology in New York City. Because the city supports the concept of community, it is easy to create specific sub-communities at whim. In a small town with a strong general sense of community, it is much easier to start an arts community, because it builds on that community.
It is important to define our terms, or else they become so vague as to be uselessly philosophical. Here, community is the sum of ties between people. When you have a town in which people’s ties are to each other, it can be said to have a community.
In Irvine, for instance, I personally have a few ties to other people in the city, but I literally have no ties to anyone else on my street. I have been once or twice to a block party, and I helped the woman across the street try and sell something on E-Bay, but other than that I have no ties to anyone on the street.
In New York City, I live in a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburg—also known as Hipsterburg, thanks to the particular community that lives there. I can’t pretend that I know too many of my neighbors who were strangers, but on the other hand I have plenty of friends who live in that part of town. As a matter of fact, I live there now because of the numbers of my friends who live there. It is nice to be looking at moving into a building where a fellow theater-person lives, knowing that my former roommate is around the corner and one block away and my other friends are two blocks in the other direction. When I was in Alaska, I met for the first time the ex-boyfriend of a good friend of mine who also lived one block away from this location.
So in order to build a community, there needs to be an attempt to build ties. Community-tied activities are the way to do this (for instance, I went to a quite successful Annual Cupcake Cook-off in Williamsburg).
The question is, what quality of ties are to be built? There is a distinction created by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and re-used in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class between “strong ties” and “weak ties.” According to both, the new generation has shifted to favor more weak ties as opposed to a few strong ties. The difference between them is that Putnam sees this as something corrosive, and Florida sees this as simply part of the new economic transition into the Creative Class-dominated economy.
One of the failures of the attempt to create arts communities, which I mentioned in my last post (Needed: Secretary General), is the negative side of the “Champion” effect. An arts community is created around a “Champion,” who fights day and night for the arts community. And then they leave or die, and then the movement is done.
This is, perversely, an example of how strong ties may weaken an arts communities. After all, there is a rather high threshold to cross before one can be said to have a “strong tie.” If an arts community is based on strong ties, it will drive out those without the time or inclination to form strong ties. Thus, a champion will invest large amounts of time and effort into forging strong ties around himself. The community becomes defined by those strong ties, and when the champion leaves, those strong ties leave with them.
On the other hand, a large network of weak ties is more stable, because removing any one person only removes a bunch of the weak ties. Of course, if the network of weak ties is too small, then you’ll have a small and dispassionate community. But it is easier to build a small network of weak ties into a large network of weak ties.
In other words, it is much more sustainable to have an arts community in which everyone in the community is invested a little bit than to have an arts communities in which a few people have invested a lot. This, I think, is what the Thriving Arts Report means when it says that the strength of arts communities are not based on the strength of their organizations, but are actually structured like social movements. If you look at the life of a social movement, you’ll see that most of the members of a social movement are in fact only loosely affiliated with the social movement. They enter and leave fluidly. The movement does not demand so much of their time or attention, except at crucial junctures.
For instance, suppose you have a small network of people who start an open-mic night. Every week, people are invited to come sit in a café and read some bits of poetry. Each week, more people are present, and some person who come have a bit of poetry—their own or pre-existing, it doesn’t matter—and they read. Six or seven weeks into this, there are maybe twenty or so regulars, ten of which consistently bring poetry. The originator of the poetry reading stays for a period of time, but after six weeks is forced to leave. Let’s be charitable and say that she is leaving because her grandmother in another city is very sick. Because of the low requirement of resources, and the easily repeatable nature of the evening, the people decide to still show up the next week and read their poetry. The originator may be gone, but the poetry club has a pretty good chance of surviving.
Now let’s look at another champion who wants to create a theater community. She wants it to be a Professional theater, so she goes to the bank and to the local stores and to the municipal government, spends her time filling out grants, and eventually lands $5,000 to do a first production. She attracts a number of people who are interested in acting or crewing, and they do a big production—let’s say The Elves and the Shoemaker. This champion has strong ties to the people who have been helping her run this $5,000 theater, but she still has very little tie to the audience—she won’t until the first production.
Five or six productions later, this theater company has a regular audience of maybe 150-250. The woman herself is forced to leave (once again, let’s be charitable and say it’s another sick grandmother). Suddenly there’s a power vacuum. Are the actors going to step up to be the managing director of a theater company? Did she train someone to do the complicated jobs of hiring, balancing a budget, applying for grants? Certainly, no matter how much her audience appreciates her work, none of them can come in because the structure she created is a complicated one that requires training and knowledge to run.
The poetry group can operate like a movement: it can continue itself. But the theater company can’t operate like a movement. So not only is the Thriving Arts Report right that the strength of an arts community is based on its ability to survive as a social movement, it should further say that the complexity of an organization can hurt its chances to survive.
Obviously, in a more robust community, it is possible to keep a complex arts organization moving, because it will have a broader base of trained administrators and artist professionals to draw from. But if the community audience is not full of professional artists, it will still have a wide gulf between itself and its audience.
So if we’re going to create a Sense of Community, the arts programs should be structured in such a way that any member of the community could perpetuate it, requiring nothing more than the desire to keep it going.
What is generally meant is that a general community builds and supports specific communities: New York City is one community, but it is composed of smaller component communities: the New York Biking community, or the New York arts scene, or the community of people interested in astrology in New York City. Because the city supports the concept of community, it is easy to create specific sub-communities at whim. In a small town with a strong general sense of community, it is much easier to start an arts community, because it builds on that community.
It is important to define our terms, or else they become so vague as to be uselessly philosophical. Here, community is the sum of ties between people. When you have a town in which people’s ties are to each other, it can be said to have a community.
In Irvine, for instance, I personally have a few ties to other people in the city, but I literally have no ties to anyone else on my street. I have been once or twice to a block party, and I helped the woman across the street try and sell something on E-Bay, but other than that I have no ties to anyone on the street.
In New York City, I live in a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburg—also known as Hipsterburg, thanks to the particular community that lives there. I can’t pretend that I know too many of my neighbors who were strangers, but on the other hand I have plenty of friends who live in that part of town. As a matter of fact, I live there now because of the numbers of my friends who live there. It is nice to be looking at moving into a building where a fellow theater-person lives, knowing that my former roommate is around the corner and one block away and my other friends are two blocks in the other direction. When I was in Alaska, I met for the first time the ex-boyfriend of a good friend of mine who also lived one block away from this location.
So in order to build a community, there needs to be an attempt to build ties. Community-tied activities are the way to do this (for instance, I went to a quite successful Annual Cupcake Cook-off in Williamsburg).
The question is, what quality of ties are to be built? There is a distinction created by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and re-used in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class between “strong ties” and “weak ties.” According to both, the new generation has shifted to favor more weak ties as opposed to a few strong ties. The difference between them is that Putnam sees this as something corrosive, and Florida sees this as simply part of the new economic transition into the Creative Class-dominated economy.
One of the failures of the attempt to create arts communities, which I mentioned in my last post (Needed: Secretary General), is the negative side of the “Champion” effect. An arts community is created around a “Champion,” who fights day and night for the arts community. And then they leave or die, and then the movement is done.
This is, perversely, an example of how strong ties may weaken an arts communities. After all, there is a rather high threshold to cross before one can be said to have a “strong tie.” If an arts community is based on strong ties, it will drive out those without the time or inclination to form strong ties. Thus, a champion will invest large amounts of time and effort into forging strong ties around himself. The community becomes defined by those strong ties, and when the champion leaves, those strong ties leave with them.
On the other hand, a large network of weak ties is more stable, because removing any one person only removes a bunch of the weak ties. Of course, if the network of weak ties is too small, then you’ll have a small and dispassionate community. But it is easier to build a small network of weak ties into a large network of weak ties.
In other words, it is much more sustainable to have an arts community in which everyone in the community is invested a little bit than to have an arts communities in which a few people have invested a lot. This, I think, is what the Thriving Arts Report means when it says that the strength of arts communities are not based on the strength of their organizations, but are actually structured like social movements. If you look at the life of a social movement, you’ll see that most of the members of a social movement are in fact only loosely affiliated with the social movement. They enter and leave fluidly. The movement does not demand so much of their time or attention, except at crucial junctures.
For instance, suppose you have a small network of people who start an open-mic night. Every week, people are invited to come sit in a café and read some bits of poetry. Each week, more people are present, and some person who come have a bit of poetry—their own or pre-existing, it doesn’t matter—and they read. Six or seven weeks into this, there are maybe twenty or so regulars, ten of which consistently bring poetry. The originator of the poetry reading stays for a period of time, but after six weeks is forced to leave. Let’s be charitable and say that she is leaving because her grandmother in another city is very sick. Because of the low requirement of resources, and the easily repeatable nature of the evening, the people decide to still show up the next week and read their poetry. The originator may be gone, but the poetry club has a pretty good chance of surviving.
Now let’s look at another champion who wants to create a theater community. She wants it to be a Professional theater, so she goes to the bank and to the local stores and to the municipal government, spends her time filling out grants, and eventually lands $5,000 to do a first production. She attracts a number of people who are interested in acting or crewing, and they do a big production—let’s say The Elves and the Shoemaker. This champion has strong ties to the people who have been helping her run this $5,000 theater, but she still has very little tie to the audience—she won’t until the first production.
Five or six productions later, this theater company has a regular audience of maybe 150-250. The woman herself is forced to leave (once again, let’s be charitable and say it’s another sick grandmother). Suddenly there’s a power vacuum. Are the actors going to step up to be the managing director of a theater company? Did she train someone to do the complicated jobs of hiring, balancing a budget, applying for grants? Certainly, no matter how much her audience appreciates her work, none of them can come in because the structure she created is a complicated one that requires training and knowledge to run.
The poetry group can operate like a movement: it can continue itself. But the theater company can’t operate like a movement. So not only is the Thriving Arts Report right that the strength of an arts community is based on its ability to survive as a social movement, it should further say that the complexity of an organization can hurt its chances to survive.
Obviously, in a more robust community, it is possible to keep a complex arts organization moving, because it will have a broader base of trained administrators and artist professionals to draw from. But if the community audience is not full of professional artists, it will still have a wide gulf between itself and its audience.
So if we’re going to create a Sense of Community, the arts programs should be structured in such a way that any member of the community could perpetuate it, requiring nothing more than the desire to keep it going.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sustainability I: Secretary General Wanted!
So, I'm a little swamped since my family's trip to Alaska, and mentally I'm swamped because I haven't been able to sit down with Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class, a book which is step 1 in the project of quantifying the arts. There's a lot to be desired there, but... anyway...
I'm writing this actually about an email I got on a mailing list for Emerging Arts Leader. A decently large dance company named Misnomer Dance Company was looking for a Managing Director.
I was struck by a moment of shock as I looked at this. It seemed to me like putting out an ad for Vice President, or some equivalently crucial position. It just struck me as wrong to be putting out a web advertisement for one of the two most important positions in your organization.
Then I saw a similar, even more worrying ad, which read: NEEDED: Secretary-General. Amnesty International.
How does an organization go about looking for its own head? It seems to me that the day an organization has to search outside itself for a head is the day that organization dies. It's a complete failure for an organization to admit that none of the people who support the head of a company or group is capable of running the organization.
That's what the question of sustainability in a community arts program really means. When the person leaves, who do they leave behind? Who have they trained to continue in their role? Have they groomed the people who work with them to be heirs?
To cite a counter-example, two of my friends who didn't previously know each other but had both attended UCSB in different years chanced to meet. The older one (who graduated a few years ago) inquired as to whether an organization she founded was still in existence. It's purpose was to bring arts to an under-served community: theater to students not majoring in theater (who are often shut out of theater programs in schools that have theater departments).
She was pleased and surprised to find out that the other friend (who she had never met) had served as the chair of the same organization a year after she graduated, and that he had indeed passed it on to yet more students.
There had been a natural line of succession. I don't know if it had been planned or if it simply had the good luck to happen (as had happened at my high school with six successive years of a literary magazine before the ball was dropped).
The key of sustainability, in human terms, is succession. In fact, in this regard, the "Champion," who arts-communities hunger for, may in fact be harmful; many arts "champions" have a 'do-everything-themselves' ethos that actually fails to create the next generation of leaders.
An arts community has gained nothing if, a decade after it begins, it's forced to advertise "Arts Leader Needed. Email resumes."
I'm writing this actually about an email I got on a mailing list for Emerging Arts Leader. A decently large dance company named Misnomer Dance Company was looking for a Managing Director.
I was struck by a moment of shock as I looked at this. It seemed to me like putting out an ad for Vice President, or some equivalently crucial position. It just struck me as wrong to be putting out a web advertisement for one of the two most important positions in your organization.
Then I saw a similar, even more worrying ad, which read: NEEDED: Secretary-General. Amnesty International.
How does an organization go about looking for its own head? It seems to me that the day an organization has to search outside itself for a head is the day that organization dies. It's a complete failure for an organization to admit that none of the people who support the head of a company or group is capable of running the organization.
That's what the question of sustainability in a community arts program really means. When the person leaves, who do they leave behind? Who have they trained to continue in their role? Have they groomed the people who work with them to be heirs?
To cite a counter-example, two of my friends who didn't previously know each other but had both attended UCSB in different years chanced to meet. The older one (who graduated a few years ago) inquired as to whether an organization she founded was still in existence. It's purpose was to bring arts to an under-served community: theater to students not majoring in theater (who are often shut out of theater programs in schools that have theater departments).
She was pleased and surprised to find out that the other friend (who she had never met) had served as the chair of the same organization a year after she graduated, and that he had indeed passed it on to yet more students.
There had been a natural line of succession. I don't know if it had been planned or if it simply had the good luck to happen (as had happened at my high school with six successive years of a literary magazine before the ball was dropped).
The key of sustainability, in human terms, is succession. In fact, in this regard, the "Champion," who arts-communities hunger for, may in fact be harmful; many arts "champions" have a 'do-everything-themselves' ethos that actually fails to create the next generation of leaders.
An arts community has gained nothing if, a decade after it begins, it's forced to advertise "Arts Leader Needed. Email resumes."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)