Where to begin?
It looks like the concepts covered in chapter 4, The Adaptive Arts Organization, will be highly relevant for 2017. The new administration in Washington DC is fostering a political environment of uncertainty among artists and arts organizations and most of the world. The link to Alyssa Rosenberg’s opinion piece should be a good resource for a class discussion about how the arts community might respond to shifting government policy. It seems arts organization would be wise to operate with the mindset that the only thing certain over the next few months is uncertainty. It also looks as if there will be ample opportunities for students to engage in a high level of arts advocacy in the coming year. The Americans for the Arts Advocacy Days March 20 and 21, 2017 will carry with it a sense of urgency and clarity of purpose this year.
Examples of Theatres Addressing Wages
The American Theatre magazine article provides an opportunity to discuss how several theatre companies in America are addressing compensation for actors and others. The article also includes a bit about compensation for administrators. “Administrative staff members are often taken for granted in conversations about compensation in theatre, yet many arts administrators work 60 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, often for less than $40,000 annually, and often hold down multiple jobs with no benefits.” That seems an accurate statement based on feedback I have from former students. The article could also be a conversation piece about arts manager/administrator compensation levels in general. This topic could be tied into chapter 7, Human Resources, chapter 5, Planning, and chapter 9 which covers budgeting
Admission Fees or Not?
The ArtsATL (Atlanta) article about admission fees for art museums could be a discussion topic connected to chapter 10, Economics and Financial Management and chapter 9, Controls, Operations, and Budgets. There also is the opportunity to use this article to discuss the Association of Art Museum Directors report entitled Art Museums by the Numbers 2016. The report has 10-pages of informative graphs covering a wide range of topics related to art museums.
Multitasking and Monotasking
The Fast Company article discusses how attention and focus remain two powerful elements of being an effective and successful manager and leader. The work environment in many arts organizations can become distorted by the relentless pressure of too few people trying to do too many jobs. This article offers a few interesting insights about developing mental habits that could help a harried arts manager to be more effective.
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Targeting the arts is the laziest, stupidest way to pretend to cut the budget
Opinion – Alyssa Rosenberg, January 19, 2017, The Washington Post
I suppose I ought to take any sign that the Trump administration will operate by the normal rules of politics, rather than the spontaneous outbursts that defined his campaign and transition, as a good thing. But sometimes the regular beats of politics are stupid, and the early word on Trump’s first budget suggests that he’s going to use one of the dumber Republican fig leaves: pretending that eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are serious parts of a serious effort to cut the federal budget.
Love or Money: How About Both?
Above and beyond union efforts, some U.S. theatres are making better compensation a central mission.
BY KELUNDRA SMITH, Amercian Theatre, Feb. 2017
Art has always been done more for love than money. Actor Hilary Swank revealed in an October 2016 interview with Chelsea Handler that she was paid no more than $3,000 for her Oscar-winning role in Boys Don’t Cry. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) minimum to receive health insurance then was $5,000, which meant she had an Academy Award but no health insurance.
As shocking as her story may seem, many theatre practitioners are all too familiar with the trope of the starving artist and the struggle to make ends meet. Part of the promise of America is the ability to provide for your family while doing work you love, instead of just taking on a job to pay the bills. But for many theatre practitioners and arts administrators, even finding a job just to pay the bills is not in the cards; real living wages are still a rarity in the theatre, especially for freelance theatre workers. With government and private funding for the arts anemic and showing few signs of growth, many theatres are juggling payroll with the overhead needed just to keep the doors open.
LINK TO FULL STORY: http://www.americantheatre.org/2017/01/24/love-or-money-how-about-both/?mc_cid=e372024e6e&mc_eid=1a1932085a
Betting on Increasing Arts Access: Will the Admissions Gamble Pay Off?
Floyd Hall, Jan 25, 2017, Art+Design
While visiting The Broad Museum in Los Angeles over a year ago, I was blown away by both the prominence of featured artists and the fact that I was able to have access to such work for free. Kara Walker, Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, El Anatsui, Jasper Johns, Barbara Kruger and Andy Warhol were just a few of the artists whose work was presented by the contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad that opened in September 2015. By showcasing 2,000 works in a 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building, The Broad could easily get away with charging $15 to $20 for admission, I figured, but to offer it for free?
Free access made the art on display, despite the substantial value attached to many of the pieces, feel more like a priceless resource, a gift available to enrich a much larger community rather than just a financially privileged segment. However, the reality is that most museums and cultural institutions can’t afford to operate with a free admissions model, at least not without causing a significant shift in how they function.
LINK TO FULL STORY: http://www.artsatl.com/betting-increasing-arts-access-admissions-gamble-pay-off/?mc_cid=e372024e6e&mc_eid=1a1932085a
Sorry, But Your Brain Only Knows One Way To Multitask Effectively
Your brain can multitask really well when one of the tasks is a habit you’ve developed in that particular context.
Fast Company, ART MARKMAN, January 18, 2017
The news that multitasking is bad isn’t even news anymore. In recent years, people have begun to recognize what psychologists have known for decades: If you try to do two things at the same time, you’ll likely get worse at both of them.
But even for those who’ve fully embraced “monotasking,” there may be something that still doesn’t quite compute. No matter how good your performance when you focus on a single task, you also do multiple things at once all the time, often pretty effectively. You may even have the lurking suspicion that there are some things you can keep on multitasking at, without paying much of a price in terms of outcome.
And you’d be right.
LINK TO FULL STORY: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067257/sorry-but-your-brain-only-knows-one-way-to-multitask-effectively