ARTSblog

Ann Daly recently gave a women’s business conference keynote, Finding the Leader in You. She also also spent several days with a think tank on arts leadership sponsored by the Americans for the Arts. Those experiences have got her to thinking.

If you want to be a leader, below are her top ten pieces of advice. Would you add any? Leave a comment.

1. Think big
Our greatest need isn’t for leaders in the arts, it’s for leader of the arts. How can you prepare yourself to speak knowledgeably and comfortably not just about the arts, but about how the arts intersect with the rest of our culture and its most pressing issues?

2. Read widely
Unfortunately, and for understandable reasons, our field tends to be insular. Leaders, however, are drawn to big and new ideas (read on). As such, they are hungry for information, trends, and conversations from everywhere in our world, not just in the arts. Get curious.

3. Create new ideas
Ideas are the essence of leadership. If you aren’t someone who generates new ideas, then you can serve the field well and significantly as a manager. We are suffering from a shortage of great managers, too.
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As many of our blog readers may know, the Arts & Business Council of Americans for the Arts has been a leader in exploring the world of arts-based learning in business through our Creativity Connection program. This program matches artist-practitioners with corporations interested in their services, provides consulting services to artists, arts organizations and businesses, and works to advance the field through publishing, disseminating information, convening and research. We’ve done sessions on the program at both Americans for the Arts conventions and at the National Arts Marketing Project conference. Arts-based learning in business can be an excellent vehicle for establishing a new, more equitable value-exchange relationship between the arts and business. It can also build new sources of income for artists and arts organizations, and can help develop new audiences, by getting corporate employees excited about how the arts can impact their performance and interaction with colleagues, and whet their appetite for more dynamic cultural experiences. I thought you would be interested in reading an excellent interview by Barry Hessenius with Harvey Seifter, director of the Creativity Connection program, posted recently on “Barry’s Blog.” I hope you will find it both informative and provocative.

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Have you been wondering how you’ll get that extra help you need this fall?  Did you know that part of the new services provided in Americans for the Arts Job Bank allow you to post an internship posting for free?
We already have over 650 registered job seekers since our new Job Bank was launched in mid-June.  Once you’ve posted your position, you’ll be able to browse through over 450 resumes posted on our website.  And, all postings receive an average of 146 click throughs.
Simply visit http://JobBank.artsusa.org, create an Employer account and get started!  Questions?  E-mail JobBank@artsusa.org.

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Well, the slow days of summer, as always, prove to be anything but slow. And probably like all of you I am continually snowed under by mountains of articles, magazines, newspapers, books, research studies and other reading material that seem to sit there threatening me with some dire consequence if I don’t get to them.  Herewith, in no particular order of priority, a round-up of what I have been reading and clipping:

Cause-related Marketing Fatigue – As reported in Business Week (July 9/16, 2007) consumers seems to be losing interest in cause marketing campaigns that link products to social causes. Of course, the big “(Product) Red” campaign designed to raise money for African Aids victims got a lot of press for failing to hit its goals, and perhaps serving corporate marketing goals more effectively than fundraising goals. And the support of Avon and others have helped push breast cancer awareness and the pink ribbon into the public consciousness (and has also in some ways suppressed awareness of National Arts and Humanities Month, since both causes share October).  According to the research firm Cone, in May 36% of consumers said they had bought a product during the prior 12 months after learning of the manufacturer’s commitment to a cause they believed in. This is down from 43% in 2004. Only 14% said they intentionally paid more for a product that supports a cause, down from 28%. And only 30% said they told a friend or family member about a product or company committed to a social issue, down from 43% three years ago.  This may make it harder for arts groups to build these relationships in the future. On the other hand, the numbers are probably still high enough to make it worth a company’s while to engage in cause marketing relationships.

Breakthrough Creativity – The same issue of Business Week reviews a new book, “Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas.”  The book attempts to provide new insights into how creative breakthroughs happen, and covers great leaps of genius and creativity in science, business and the arts. Without commenting on the merits of the book, which I have not yet read, it is another example of the growing recognition that creativity and innovation in science, business and the arts are linked, and that this holds great promise for efforts to persuade business and educators that the arts matter if we are to generate the next Francis Crick and James Watson (who discovered the structure of DNA) or Picasso. Todd Siler, an artist with a PhD from MIT who is now working with our Creativity Connection program, does creative training and brainstorming sessions for business using the visual arts, and addresses how creativity intersects science and art in his book Think Like a Genius , which was published back in 1999, so this is not entirely a new idea. However, “creativity” now appears to be hot, and that should be good for the arts.

Tapping Retiring Boomer Volunteers – Again from that same issue of Business Week, is an article (“Pro Bono Perfection“) about the gratification that early retiring boomers are finding through volunteer work. People that don’t volunteer indicate it is only because they have not found the right opportunity or don’t know where to begin.  The article comments how many younger retired Boomers jump into too many superficial volunteer opportunities at once to stay busy, but find themselves unsatisfied. It also cites the mis-perception by many groups using these volunteers that they “just need to keep the old folks busy” and don’t really take advantage of their often high-level skills. Many of this new breed of volunteers eventually find themselves working in highly professional virtually staff-like capacities. The article is major ammunition for a program like Business Volunteers for the Arts, which matches business-people with arts groups as pro bono management consultants.  While it focuses on working professionals, there is no reason why it can’t also target recent retirees, who have so much time, expertise, and energy.

Is Second Life Still Alive?  – Articles about Second Life continue to populate the business, technology and arts press, describing a bustling, growing “virtual world” with its own economy, businesses, art (and naughtiness).  At the same time, a recent Wired magazine article described a Second Life that appears to be vastly underpopulated, with most “users” creating an avatar, looking around and then leaving, never to return.  In The Art Newspaperon July 4th, however, an article was posted that described how Second Life is becoming a viable place for artists to interact and actually sell their work. The Andy Warhol Foundation has funded exhibits in Second Life, and the MacArthur Foundation has just announced a new grant program designed to explore the world of this new digital society.  The Art Newspaper has assembled video tours of exhibitions and performances on Second Life here. It reports that there are now hundreds of galleries in Second Life selling work, both real and virtual. Dealers collect a 30% commission, just like in the real world, and one gallery reports that about 200 avatars a day visit the gallery.  Another artist reports making abut $10,000 in recent months from Second Life generated sales. So maybe Second Life is not so dead after all, and we should all be exploring how to have a presence in this community? I am sure this is not the end of the story.

The Art of Diagnosis – The Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum and the University of Pittsburgh Medical School recently launched Art and Medicine, a new four-week course for medical students designed to hone visual thinking and observation skills through the study of art in the museum’s galleries. A similar program has existed for some time at the Metropolitan Museum working with one or more of the major NYC medical schools. These sorts of innovative programs help highlight the critical role the arts can play in the lives of non-artists, in ways that can make them better at their jobs. While this is not the same “instrumental vs intrinsic” value argument, it points out how artificial that supposed dichotomy is. A strong arts education may or may not (as recent research suggests) help a student get higher math scores that will get them into medical school, but it WILL help that young person develop visual acuity and observation skills that will make them a better doctor. I think this one example highlights how the applied skills developed through the arts have an even impact that we are only just beginning to quantify and communicate.

Okay, my stack is still a few feet tall, but this is already way too long for a Blog entry, so I will spare you further reports. More to come in the coming weeks. Of course, by the time I get around to this again, the pile will have mysteriously replenished itself!

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Doug Skinner, New Media Coordinator at Americans for the Arts, created this random video wall for Americans for the Arts.  Yesterday I got an e-mail from him asking me to check out a cool new website called Blinkx, which creates random video walls from any topic that you chose and then allows the user to embed the video wall into a blog post.  You can check out the website at www.Blinkx.com. In the meantime, enjoy our video wall.

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A letter-to-the-editor from Bob Lynch was recently published on the New York Times website.

The letter calls for a reunification in the debate among arts education professionals about which benefits of arts education should be researched by scientists, designed for by providers, and touted by advocates.

The letter is online.

Guest blogger Nick Rabkin has also offered his thoughts.

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By Nick Rabkin
Center for Arts Policy
Columbia College Chicago
August 8, 2007

It is so rare that arts ed or arts ed research gets coverage in the daily press. The recent article in the New York Times about the “Studio Thinking” research project (1) is significant first because of its rarity. It is already generating a buzz about arts education that we rarely feel.

It is important for another reason as well, though. For the last decade or more a debate has raged about the “intrinsic” vs. the “instrumental” value of arts education. Ellen Winner, one of the “Studio Thinking” researchers, played a very big role in that debate several years ago, when she and colleagues published a “meta-analysis” of arts education research in which she found no evidence that arts learning contributes to student academic achievement. (2) Hence, she argued, it was scientifically irresponsible to make a case for the arts’ place in schools because they improve student performance in other subjects. Furthermore, she suspects that education policymakers will reason that if they want to improve math achievement, they will teach more math, not more arts. In the end, the arts are important in their own right and should be justified in terms of the important and unique kinds of learning that arise from the study of the arts.

Some researchers who believed that there was good evidence the arts did contribute to higher achievement across the curriculum criticized Winner’s meta-study, arguing that it excluded good research from its scan.  As one of many places in the country where teaching artists were inventing new ways to improve schools by connecting the arts to other subjects, many folks here in Chicago felt Winner’s study simply ignored their work and contributions. Others, more committed to arts education traditions, thought Winner bolstered their argument against “arts integration” and for “sequential and discipline-based instruction” in the art forms.

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Uploaded to this blog post, you will find an audio podcast of Rha Goddess’s speech from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention. Rha was the 2007 Leadership Innovator.

Rha Goddess is a performing artist and social-political activist. Her work, combining vibrant images, linguistic brilliance, hip-hop rhythms, and unflappable honesty, has been internationally featured in several compilations, forums, and festivals. Time magazine called her debut project, Soulah Vibe–one of the year’s coolest records. As founder and CEO of Divine Dime Entertainment, Ltd., she was one of the first women in Hip Hop to co-create, independently market, and commercially distribute her own music worldwide. Her activist work includes co-founding the Sista II Sista Freedom School for Young Women of Color. Goddess’s current projects include Meditations With The Goddess and The Next Wave of Women & Power/We Got Issues! We Got Issues! recognizes that young women have the power to preserve, repair, and protect families, communities and the globe, yet this power is often hidden behind unspoken personal and political issues. Goddess is giving voice to young women through visions, songs, and movement,with the goal to transform women’s ideas of leadership and power.

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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An item about Iraq in the last Sunday’s Washington Post caught my attention regarding our ongoing discussion about the arts in a global context. Megan Greenwell says, “Baghdad’s once flourishing community of artists has all but evaporated. Streets formerly lined with galleries are now deserted and the artists who remain say they have not sold a piece since the U.S.-led invasion. Samarrai (a ceramicist) estimates that 90 percent of artists who were working in the capital in early 2003 have been killed or have fled the country.” There is not enough electricity to fire the ceramicists kiln so he will probably leave too.

We talk about and see evidence so often of the community development value of the arts. You have to start by addressing the joy, pain, beauty, ugliness, and questioning that music or painting or theater or dance bring, whether to kids in a school or people living in a neighborhood. We have all seen the arts’ presence become community energy that makes a better neighborhood, a more productive school, a kid with more options in life. And yes, we often get an economic benefit and a social problem-solving benefit as well. We don’t actually need research to see it all around us. But sometimes we don’t think about the opposite situation where the arts are dramatically stripped away, and the unraveling of those very same benefits that occurs, like what the remaining artists in Baghdad see and fear. Shayma Ahmed, a professor at Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts said in the same Post article “The threat to the culture is at least as devastating for Iraq’s future as the political problems. If the artists and the writers leave, who will be here to show what is happening and change the situation?”

When leaders and elected officials recognize the importance of the arts, the very value that the artists in Iraq see eroding, these leaders need to be recognized. The August 3 issue of the Indianapolis Star has a story about such a leader, Mayor Jim Brainard of Carmel, Indiana whom I have had the pleasure of meeting at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. The mayor is fighting City Hall so to speak, insisting on a $700,000 arts appropriation in the 2008 budget. He says “it is very important to economic development that we have art and cultural life in the city.” The article indicates that some city council members disagree and actually voted against the entire city budget in opposition to any arts funding. Mayor Brainard is not backing down even as the dispute shapes up to be a possible fall election issue. Hats off to Mayor Brainard.

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

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by Judith Tannenbaum 

Preserving the important qualities of the Teaching Artist profession, while still moving ahead with its professionalization.

Passing on the vision and practice of art-making is as old as culture itself: creation stories told during long winter evenings, women and young girls weaving baskets, men welcoming boys to their dances. One generation has always taught the next.

This history moves forward into the 21st century. Artists; arts program administrators; school, hospital, senior center, and prison administrators and staff; and professors in a variety of college departments are increasingly asking that the valuable work done for decades by teaching artists be recognized as a professional field. 

One repeated conversation is a fundamental one that questions the ways in which professionalization of the field strengthens or harms this work that we love. In the midst of these conversations, I often think of architect Chris Alexander. When brought to the site of a new project, Alexander is said to have asked community members not only what they wanted that they didn’t have, but also what they presently had that they valued and did not want to lose.

That’s the question I’d like now to ponder: What do we-teaching artists, students, program administrators, site partners, community activists”cherish about the work of art in other places, as Bill Cleveland calls it, as it has been practiced over the decades? What do we want not to lose as teaching artistry becomes a more formal field?

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

Mathew Gross “rewrote the rules of presidential politics” and “put blogging at the center of the Democrats’ nominating campaign” when he left his home in Moab, Utah to launch the first presidential campaign weblog for Howard Dean in March of 2003. As Director of Internet Communications for the Dean campaign, Gross helped to develop and implement the online strategy that raised more than $25 million online and built Blog for America into one of the top weblogs in the world, attracting more than 100,000 readers per day at the height of the primary season.

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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In Thursday’s Washington Post, a column by John Kelly tells the story of a DC artist, Harold MacDonald, who rose to great prominence in the 1890s, but ultimately was institutionalized because of ‘mental illness’ and died there in 1923. Rudolphe de Zapp, the arts patron and journalist who tried to help him, said at the time, “The popularity of artists is a fragile thing. Anyone who sells beauty will tell you that the market rises and falls over night, and there is no forecasting the change in stocks.” How very true then and now.

An article this Thursday in Bloomberg News features our Americans for the Arts Policy Roundtable with Robert Redford at Sundance last fall, and talks about the increasing challenges facing private support for the arts. Noted in the article is the increasing trend among private funders to target dollars for solving social problems and away from the arts which they erroneously perceive as merely entertainment or about ‘beauty’ as de Zapp noted. There is nothing wrong with beauty, but ironically we all know that the arts deliver that and a whole lot more. Multiple stories in Thursday’s papers agree. 

Our Cultural Policy Listserv cites Forbes.com telling the story of how Tacoma, WA is enlisting music the power of symphonies to help combat street gangs and violence. There are literally hundreds of stories in the last month about the economic and jobs impact of the arts. Also on the Listserv, the Orlando Sentinel tells the story of the Davenport School in Polk County, FL, once rated as an extremely low performing D grade school. It enlisted a rigorous arts curriculum in 1999 and vaulted to a high performing A status by 2003 and stays there. We all know hundreds of such stories, yet seeing them in print today was ironic as the Center on Education Policy reported that 62 percent of school districts nationwide increased the amount of time in elementary schools spent on English language and math causing 44 percent to cut science, social studies, the arts and music, and even lunch. Somehow, the lessons of the multiple values of the arts continue to be lost in a quest for practical skills in a world where creativity in developing and using those practical skills will be the competitive edge.

This is not lost on China as I said in an earlier post, nor in the United Arab Emirates where, as pointed out in a Washington Post story Thursday by Hassan Fattah, the arts are being employed to change images and create new avenues of communication. “In nearby Abu Dhabi, which produces Poet of the Millions, (similar to American reality arts star programs) as part of an initiative to preserve historic heritage, the oil-rich emirate has begun a $10 billion plan to build and operate branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim museums on a sprawling arts and culture development meant to preserve Persian Gulf culture even as it embraces the arts and culture of the West.” $10 billion dollars!

On the good-news front, our ArtsVote 2008 project is noting that some presidential candidates are paying attention to the arts. USA Today quotes Governor Bill Richardson as calling for a massive federal program for the arts. Richardson made similar remarks last week in the debate among Democrat candidates. Governor Mike Huckabee, Republican candidate, misses no chance to talk about the value of arts and arts education and even talked about the importance of music and the arts as his closing statement announcing his candidacy on Meet the Press. Other candidates are welcome to chime in.

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

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The Chronicle of Higher Education carried a story about a Carnegie Mellon professor complaining that a film, Smart People with Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker, was being filmed on the Carnegie Mellon campus. He questions whether colleges and nonprofits are getting too commercial. Too late and wrong question. Too late because films have used college campuses and cultural and nonprofit facilities since the beginning of filmmaking. Then the question should be: are they getting commercial enough to stay in the competition? Our Americans for the Arts research shows that some 50 percent of the budgets of most arts organizations comes from earned revenue sources. This means sales and revenue come from something-tickets, coffee shops, bookstores, space rental, or perhaps even film shooting fees. All this is very commercial and necessary in today’s market. In a world where daily life is a blur of sectors and competing influences, this consideration is probably a fairly valuable one if taken as part of an overall learning opportunity. And all this commerce going on in the nonprofit sector today creates the need for commerce skills like branding and marketing. This is why our National Arts Marketing Project Conference and training programs are in such high demand. The for-profit and the nonprofit increasingly blur in creative ways. Ball State University in Indiana plans to name their $21 million communication and media building after television icon (commercial side icon) David Letterman who has been a $20k annual contributor to his alma mater since 1985, according to the Indianapolis Star and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The New York Times also quotes business superstar (and friend of the arts and Americans for the Arts) Sidney Harman of Harman International as saying “get me poets as managers”—a succinct understanding of the value of the arts in 21st century workforce readiness and the value that an arts education can bring to someone whether they are entering the nonprofit or for-profit career worlds. In Business Week, the presence of the arts in airports is celebrated as being both good for airports and the cities they serve, as well as good for the arts. “You’ve got a captive audience,” says Greg Mamary of the American Association of Airport Executives.

And of course in our country, it all comes together in politics, as the Southbend Tribune reports that country music performer Sammy Kershaw announced to run for Lt. Governor of Louisiana. Why not Sammy Kershaw as a candidate, or Clint Eastwood as a mayor, or Arnold Schwartzenneger as governor, or Ronald Reagan as president, or Alec Baldwin, Issac Stern, E.G.Marshall, Uma Thurman and all the other non profit or for-profit artists I have had the pleasure to work with in advocating for the arts and arts education for all Americans. I am for more arts experiences, more arts involvement, more arts presence whether from the nonprofit, the for-profit, or the unincorporated sectors of America. The mix makes working, playing, and just living all the richer.

– Bob Lynch, President & CEO, Americans for the Arts

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The content for this post comes by way of Daniel Adolphson, United Arts Workforce Campaign Director at COMPAS in Minneapolis.

It’s a late night here in the Cities….we are totally shocked and numb here at what has happened.

To bring the importance of our work home…the school bus that was on the bridge when it went down had children on it that were from an organization that we fund - the community theatre project.  All of the children are accounted for…about 8 were hurt.  Never take your work for granted…we just never know what could happen next.

Now, when you see images of the school bus in the disaster, you know.

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