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Researchers, like Linda Babock, have found that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations. The American Association of University Women released a study in April 2007 shows that the pay gap for women starts at around 80% out of college but widens to 69% after ten years. On Monday July 30, the Washington Post/MSNBC profiled new study, published by the Kennedy School of Government,  that found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations.

“It is not that women always act one way and men act another way; it tends to be moderated by situational factors,” Bowles said. “The point of this paper is: Yes, there is an economic rationale to negotiate, but you have to weigh that against social risks of negotiating. What we show is those risks are higher for women than for men.”

Given that the workforce of our arts & cultural sector is predominantly female and we work with an abudance of scare resources, are we perhaps more conditioned not to ask for more? Or, do arts professionals view negotiation (in all its forms and manifestations) differently? Or maybe by placing the arts at the core of our work, we approach the construction of “value” quite differently?

Care to share some negotiating tips for the common good?

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Direct arts coverage in newspapers is often seen as sparse but I always like to look for where arts issues seep in unexpectedly in articles in the business section or front page. On July 29, in The Washington Post’s Opinion Page,  art is at the center of an editorial about whether three statues of Former Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that blacks had no rights, should be removed from public land in Maryland. The Post says no and a reason they cite references why public art or memorials are important in the first place: “Memorials are meant to cause reflection and not always celebration or even respect. The Taney statues should remain but be supplemented with signs explaining the significance of Taney’s contributions to American law, warts and all.”  The Post is pointing out the power of art as a teaching tool.

The power of art is increasingly understood internationally. A China Daily article this week references improving China’s “soft power” through increased cultural exports. This is exactly what I saw happening last month when I visited Shanghai and Beijing.  In my podcast this month, Artcast II, I point out that the main reason I was in China was to speak at a conference on building audiences and marketing the arts. The article quotes senior Chinese government officials calling for “a clear national cultural development strategy” and saying “some forms of cultural development have not been fulfilled and lack strong government support.” Recently China has established 15 cultural centers outside the country. More cultural investment, supporting cultural exchange, understanding the “soft power’ of the arts. In America the reduced investment in international arts exchange has been a severe mistake for which we are now paying. Our government and all of us might need to pay attention.

And apparently it is now okay to admit, and I assume, make mistakes. Thursday’s New York Times talks about the new trend among foundations to admit and examine failures. Actually I see this as very healthy, in both the recognition that not every foundation investment or every program that gets the money can or will be a complete success, and secondly that we can learn something from the effort. “Foundations are supposed to take risks,” says Paul Brest president and CEO of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  He is right and I would say it is equally healthy for arts organizations and arts enabling organizations to understand this for themselves, for the projects that they produce and for the programs that they support.

Finally in Sunday’s New York Times a great article explores a potential problem in the art museum community. Twenty-four of the two hundred members of the Art Museum Directors Association are looking for new directors. All twenty-four are highly significant institutions. On the other hand the vacancies are only about 12 percent of the whole and so it is not at a disaster level yet, although it certainly bears watching.  My observation of the arts industry as a whole is that this need for new leaders is an industry-wide issue.  And I assume it is going to get worse as more leaders approach retirement.  I am pleased that at Americans for the Arts several years ago, we began our Emerging Leaders Program to help identify and nurture young or new leaders. I was equally pleased to see that the young arts administrators who sought out the program were not only leaders from arts-enabling organizations like arts commissions, united arts funds, and arts and business councils but professionals from dance, theater, music, the visual arts, and more. I am excited about the passion and the ability of the young leaders I have met through this Emerging Leaders Program and if the New York Times is right it is an area that all arts organizations need to develop more thoroughly and perhaps a bit more quickly.

- Bob Lynch, President and CEO, Americans for the Arts

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The National Arts and Humanities Month website is fresh with new content in anticipation of October’s activities. One of the new features is the National Arts and Humanities Month Events Map. The Wayfaring website hosts user-generated Google maps that track everything from the best places to go ice fishing to art district walking tours.

Americans for the Arts is encouraging you to share your NAHM events by using the map and create your own Waypoints. After the jump is a short tutorial to get you started.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 52:31 — 18.1MB)

Uploaded to this blog post, you will find an audio podcast of Dave Hickey’s speech from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention. Dave Hickey was the 2007 Public Art Innovator.

MacArthur “Genius” award-winner Dave Hickey is the author of Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. Hickey has served as owner-director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place Gallery in Austin, Tx; as Director of the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City; as Executive Editor of Art in America magazine; and as Contributing Editor to The Village Voice. He has written for most major American cultural publications, including Rolling Stone, Art News, ArtForum, Interview, Harper’s Magazine, Vanity Fair, Nest, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Reviewer Lawrence Weschler describes Hickey’s writing: “The generosity of the man’s verve–the suppleness of its profusions–can get to be downright ravishing. On top of which, the guy’s really funny.”

Audio and video files from previous events, as well as Americans for the Arts’ monthly podcast, can be accessed from our website. To listen to this podcast, please click on the play button below.

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Find me a sofa without a picture hanging above it. It might not be original, fine art bought in a white-walled gallery. Most of us choose to hang a framed print of people kissing in Paris, or a reproduction of an Impressionist master picked up as a museum souvenir, or a poster of beer bottles from around the world held in place by thumb tacks. Whatever the medium, whatever the image, we all put something on that blank stretch of wall that runs between the furniture and the ceiling.  What unites all of the different things we put there is that we choose them; we want to hang them there. “I think this one should go above the couch, we say. 

Ask a person why they chose to hang a particular thing in their living room, and they’ll give you an answer that doesn’t take a masters degree in art history.  They like the way it makes them feel. It complements the colors in the room. It’s interesting to look at. It matches the mood of the room. It’s happy.

In other words, without consciousness or recognition, we acknowledge that art has a role in our everyday lives.

Now here’s the question: how can we take this collective assumption, that art belongs in our homes, and use it to redefine how we make the case for the arts? I am by no means suggesting that arts professionals should walk into funders’ offices, and demand operating support because there’s a picture on the wall. What I am suggesting is that we as a culture broadly accept art plays an integral part in our lives. So why do we find it so difficult to translate that into case-making?

A recent Monograph,* based on a research study that was an outcome of the 2006 National Arts Policy Roundtable, asks corporations with a steady history of funding the arts why they think corporate support for the arts is declining. For many of the respondents, it came back to the perception that the arts are not relevant to a company’s business, their goals, their employees, or the communities in which they operate.

But we know that’s not true. The arts are just as relevant to communities, and therefore businesses in those communities, as paintings are to living room walls. Without them, we have a blank spot.

*The April 2007 Monograph, “The Quality and Nature of Corporate Support for the Arts’ A Pilot Study,” is one in a series of in-depth issue papers published by Americans for the Arts throughout the year. Monograph is a benefit of Americans for the Arts professional membership at the Standard level and above, and is also available for purchase in our Online Store.

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The second edition of ArtCast, the monthly podcast of Americans for the Arts featuring President and CEO Robert L. Lynch, focuses on a recent trip that Bob took to China.  Bob traveled to China to speak about arts marketing at a conference held in Shanghai.  In this episode, Bob discusses the tremendous changes that China is going through and future plans for international collaborations.  While in China, Bob had the opportunity to interview several arts administrators and excerpts from the following interviews are included:

• Sun-man Tseng, Chair and Professor, Department of Arts Administration, Shanghai Conservatory of Music
• Pan Yong, Assistant Director, National Grand Theatre, Beijing
• Juliet Yang, student in the Arts Administration Department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music

To listen to the podcast, please click on the play button below.

National Grand Theatre of Beijing

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Uploaded to this blog post, you will find an audio podcast from the MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series Culminating Event: The Role of Arts Education in Lifelong Productivity featuring arts education innovator Sir Ken Robinson from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention.

This session featured an interview with Sir Ken Robinson, followed by a panel of respondents on the relationship between arts education and workforce development.  Exploring this theme allowed for a comprehensive discussion of the central role the arts can play in helping to create a workforce capable of achieving corporate and citizenship objectives.

Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. Now based in Los Angeles, he has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. They include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the Royal Ballet, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the J  Paul Getty Trust and the Education Commission of the States. For ten years he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick in England and is now Professor Emeritus.

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Uploaded to this blog post, you will find Lyn Heward’s keynote speech from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention. As they become available, Americans for the Arts will post the audio files from all six Innovators, the Annual Awards, and the AEPIII Plenary Session on the Audio and Video section of the website.  They will also be featured on the blog, and will be sent out via our RSS feed.

Cirque du Soleil is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and creative companies in the world today. As the President of Creative Content for Cirque du Soleil, Lyn was responsible for managing, guiding, and channeling the incredible creative force of the company’s designers, performers, artisans, and technicians into a product that was both breathtakingly original as well as commercially successful.  In this talk Lyn goes behind the scenes of this global enterprise to explore the nature of creativity and innovation. She provides practical suggestions as well as the inspiration to find and develop the creative spark that lives within us all. Making brilliant use of images and video from Cirque du Soleil’s groundbreaking shows, Heward concentrates on key issues-risk-taking, leadership, and teamwork-relevant to arts leaders and their partners in education, business, community, and government.

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I recently had the pleasure, with an Americans for the Arts colleague, of participating in a “stakeholders convening” for The Conference Board on the issue of workforce readiness. Their recent study, “Are They Really Ready to Work,” found that businesses rate their incoming workforce (college educated, 2-year college educated, and high school educated) as poorly prepared with the skills needed in the workplace today. In contrast to the national obsession of the past few years on “basic skills” (see No Child Left Behind) – particularly math and science – the corporate folks surveyed (mostly HR execs) rated “applied skills” as particularly critical, and relatively poor in their incoming new workers. These include creativity and innovation, communications skills and teamwork.  Sound familiar?  We arts and arts education advocates often press our case based on the role the arts can play in building these skills, and in fact many of the HR leaders interviewed for this research cited the arts in talking abut the importance of creativity. But one thing made clear by this stakeholders meeting (the actual content of which I  can’t report on because confidentiality was promised in order to foster an open dialogue) was that we don’t seem to have enough data to support this linkage.

Do we really know that the arts foster creativity, innovation and imagination, in ways that make people more creative, innovative employees? (Not just in creative industries, but creative scientists, or financiers or factory supervisors.) It may seem obvious to us – one of those “duh!” questions - but can we prove it?  What about the other applied skills – teamwork, collaboration, cultural sensitivity, communications, etc. Again, seems obvious that the arts build these skills, but what research do we have that backs it up, particularly in a workforce context?

Americans for the Arts is now looking at how we might partner with the Conference Board and others to do some research that might build a clearer definition of creativity and innovation in a business context, and more clearly show how the arts can foster the so-called applied skills. The relationship between the arts and workforce development was also one of the themes of our MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series this year. And our Creativity Connection program fosters the use of arts-based learning with the current workforce – but this is different than making a case that arts education better prepares workers for 21st Century business challenges.

I would love to know if any of our ArtsBlog readers know of any good existing research in this area; if so, please share it with us. This could even include case studies – for example, a business that finds that new hires that have studied a musical instrument and played in a school orchestra or band excel in some measurable way in the workplace over those without such a background. The more data and tangible examples we can gather, the more powerful a case we can make for the arts and arts education as critical to business competitiveness. Making this case better could be the key to reversing the slippage in corporate arts support we have seen over the past ten years.

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If you are reading this, chances are you probably have some idea at how blogs are changing the world we live in. The ramifications of the blogosphere are affecting the arts perhaps more than other realms. Should I, a fresh college grad with little money, spend my money to go to a concert when it’s streaming for free on NPR? In attempts to democratize the arts and make them available for everyone all the time, many organizations and companies have come across a problem.

Local newspapers are experiencing a similar kind of conundrum—should they keep their arts critics? (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118376085517659621.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)  As newspapers all over the country are ‘trimming the fat,’ the arts writers are the first to go. So while we can mourn the loss of regional and local voices in print, we can also celebrate the explosion of a level playing field of opinions worldwide. In local blogospheres, you can access with a click the whole spectrum of viewpoints and perspectives that newspapers might miss.

So you can either learn how to best use all modes of communication, like incorporating your own ArtsBlog, or you can continue to spend money you might not have on sometimes inefficient mailings. The new world is scary for all of us in the arts, which means that we have more potential than ever.

Americans for the Arts is here as your tool and resource. This November in Miami, we’ll be hosting the National Arts Marketing Project Conference–Flourishing in the New Frontier: New Media, New Audience, New Opportunities. This conference deals with technology and how best to tailor it to your new audiences. You’ll learn how to incorporate and deal with RSS feeds, pod casts, blogging, texting, and of course e-mail to reach the most diverse audience, and one that you might not even know you had, that might be the jump-start you need into the New Frontier.

Elizabeth Van Fleet, Communications & Marketing Associate

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At last month’s Americans for the Arts convention in Las Vegas, Victoria Saunders facilitated two morning meetings around mid career. A summary of the key issues raised in these conversations is below.

Do these points resonate with your experience? Some more than others, perhaps?

Defining mid career is not as straightforward as, say, defining emerging leader. The age range can be anywhere from maybe 35 years to 55 years. Much depends on when someone entered the field and how long they’ve been in it.

Mid career is a time for both looking back and looking forward. These are people who aren’t on the trajectory that emerging leaders experience, that is, a new path filled with adventure and momentum. At mid-career for many, the momentum is gone and the adventure has worn off and they are looking for something that will bring that kind of energy and hope for their futures back. Some have found it in new positions, but not all are convinced that what they need will be found in a new job.

While many are not necessarily looking for a new job or for a step up the ladder, they are looking for new challenges and new learning opportunities. They see the next generation coming in with degrees in arts administration that they don’t have and there is, for some, a feeling that they are about to get rolled over. However, they also want to believe that their experience accounts for something and that they continue to have something to offer.

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The U.S. House of Representatives approved a new historic level of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The bill provides a $35 million increase to the NEA – the largest in the history of the agency!  This accomplishment didn’t come easily — the debate took place over two days and of the many amendments offered to the bill, three specifically targeted cuts to the NEA.

Below are the details of the debate, the votes and what’s up next!

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