{"id":1777,"date":"2018-03-25T14:52:36","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T18:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/?p=1777"},"modified":"2018-03-25T14:52:36","modified_gmt":"2018-03-25T18:52:36","slug":"management-and-the-arts-5e-march-2018-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/blog\/management-and-the-arts-5e-march-2018-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Management and the Arts 5e \u2013 March 2018 Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Funding Support. Inversion Thinking. Guarding Art. Re-thinking Facebook<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This month I have four topics to share that can be useful to explore in your classes or simply to ponder as an arts manager.<\/p>\n

Funding Trends and the Arts<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Winter 2018 issue of Grants Makers in the Arts<\/a> (GIA) contains a comprehensive report about giving trends by corporations and foundations over the last 25 years. The article gives a quick summary of key points that update information in Chapter 12 in my book. The GIA research article is free and offers interesting insights and provides a historical perspective that students should find helpful.<\/p>\n

Inversion Thinking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article \u201cThe Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You\u201d will give you a chance to develop or refine your critical thinking skills. I thought the approach of posing an opposite outcome can be very helpful when it comes to making the most of the often-limited resources we have in the arts to execute a project or plan. For example, what if the annual giving plan failed to reach its financial goals? As the article notes, inversion thinking gives you the opportunity to \u201cTell the story of how it happened. What went wrong. What mistakes did you make?\u201d Using our imagination to consider a potential failure can have its advantages. Given the propensity toward over-optimism in organizational settings, inverted thinking seems like a good step to introduce in any decision-making process.<\/p>\n

Guarding Art<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Hyperallergic<\/a><\/em> profile about museum security guard compensation levels lifts the lid on an area we don\u2019t often examine – staff compensation. When considering the context of working in a museum in the NYC area, a starting rate of $14.08 per hour gives one pause. The fact that several museums did not want to share this information was disappointing too. One takeaway that was of interest was at least some of the security guards were in unions and their contract provided overtime compensation, health insurance, and vacation benefits. The non-union guards, like many cultural workers, had to deal with minimal benefits and lower hourly wages.<\/p>\n

The Cost of Free<\/strong><\/p>\n

The opinion piece posting on the artnet\u00ae news site about Facebook being much less a resource for promoting a nonprofit organization is timely given all the controversy about the social media giant. The argument posed by the Center for Artistic Activism<\/a> is that Facebook, when used for free, seems to produces very little in return when it comes to promoting and raising the visibility of an arts organization beyond its fan base. The article raises interesting questions about having a social media strategy. Arts organizations routinely have Facebook pages, but how does that fact translate into producing an outcome that is advancing its marketing and PR goals? C4AA seems to have found more productive ways to spend its promotional dollars.<\/p>\n

Thanks for your interest in Management and the Arts.<\/em><\/p>\n

William Byrnes<\/em><\/p>\n

=========================================<\/p>\n

Closing the Gap: The History of Arts Funding and Where It’s Heading Next<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Mike Scutari, Inside Philanthropy<\/em>, 3\/5\/2018<\/p>\n

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the “first-ever benchmark study of institutional philanthropic support for arts and culture,” Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) asked Steven Lawrence, senior research affiliate at the New York-based TCC Group, to analyze trends in arts funding across the past quarter-century.<\/em><\/p>\n

His robust and illuminating report, Arts Funding at Twenty-Five: What Data and Analysis Continue to Tell Funders about the Field, can be read in its entirety here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ll focus on his key takeaways for the sector moving forward in a moment. But before I do, a quick summary of how arts funding has evolved over the last 25 years is in order.<\/em><\/p>\n

LINK to Inside Philanthropy: https:\/\/www.insidephilanthropy.com\/home\/2018\/3\/5\/grantmakers-in-arts-funding-trends<\/a><\/p>\n

LINK to GIA: https:\/\/www.giarts.org\/reader-29-1<\/a><\/p>\n

—————————————-<\/p>\n

The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n

James Clear<\/a>, Medium, 3\/2\/2018<\/p>\n

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a \u201cpremeditation of evils.\u201d [1]<\/em><\/p>\n

The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their job and become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them. While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today?<\/em><\/p>\n

LINK to Medium: https:\/\/medium.com\/the-mission\/the-crucial-thinking-skill-nobody-ever-taught-you-536191d101ab<\/a><\/p>\n

LINK to The Foundation for Critical Thinking: https:\/\/www.criticalthinking.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

———————————————-<\/p>\n

The Plight of Museum Guards in New York Museums<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Security guards\u2019 annual salaries are less than half the state\u2019s annual median income, hovering just above the equivalent of minimum wage.<\/em><\/h5>\n

Aaron Short, Hyperallergic<\/em>, 3\/20\/2018<\/p>\n

If you want to be a museum security guard, you better know how to stand.<\/p>\n

Guards in New York City\u2019s museums spend most of their shifts on their feet \u2014 usually four to eight hours at a time. They should also be able to carry as much as 25 pounds, trudge up and down flights of stairs several times during their shifts, and jump, bend, and run into action if a situation occurs.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes security guards must inspect bags and packages at museum entrances. They operate elevators and collect jackets from patrons at coat check rooms. And they often help escort people transporting priceless works of art into and out of the museum.<\/em><\/p>\n

A bachelor\u2019s degree helps, although it is not always required, as does familiarity with the museum\u2019s collection. The ability to direct a disoriented tourist to the Costume Institute or the Discovery Room is appreciated. A guard must always be alert and prepared for the unexpected.<\/em><\/p>\n

LINK: https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/433312\/museum-guards-new-york-salaries-working-conditions\/?mc_cid=192b08f30e&mc_eid=1a1932085a<\/a><\/p>\n

——————————————<\/p>\n

Opinion<\/p>\n

Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time\u2014and Money\u2014for Arts Nonprofits<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n
The co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Artistic Activism explains why his company has officially de-friended Facebook.<\/em><\/h5>\n

Steve Lambert, artnet News, 2\/23\/2018<\/p>\n

Like many nonprofits, we use Facebook to connect with our audiences, and they use Facebook to stay in touch with us. It\u2019s not our preferred way, but it\u2019s where more than 4,000 people have chosen to stay informed about what we do at the Center for Artistic Activism<\/a>. Part of our philosophy at the C4AA is to meet people where they are, and, undeniably, hundreds of millions of people (and some bots) are on Facebook. However, looking at the statistics provided by Facebook, we\u2019ve come to realize that the connection we were after isn\u2019t actually made.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we\u2019ve decided to stop putting effort into Facebook. The world\u2019s largest social network has become an increasingly inhospitable place for nonprofits.<\/em><\/p>\n

LINK: https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/opinion\/social-media-steve-lambert-facebook-nonprofits-1230593<\/a><\/p>\n

——————————————–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Funding Support. Inversion Thinking. Guarding Art. Re-thinking Facebook. This month I have four topics to share that can be useful to explore in your classes or simply to ponder as an arts manager. Funding Trends and the Arts The Winter 2018 issue of Grants Makers in the Arts (GIA) contains a comprehensive report about giving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9mams-sF","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1777"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1780,"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777\/revisions\/1780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managementandthearts.com\/5e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}