If you're getting tired of 'top 20' lists of people who are richer, smarter, more attractive, better connected, and more interesting than you are, the folks over at Hyperallergic have a ranking for you! In response to the Art Review 'top 100' power-brokers in the art world, they suggest The Top 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World. Among them:

• Independent curators without trust funds -- There's a saying, ''No trust, no love.''
• Artists who can't speak English, French, German, or Spanish. While the world is filled with approximately 6,800 languages, artwork must adhere to the linguistic realities of economics.
• Beleaguered Administrative Assistants at MoMA -- This is a group that knows what it's like to be underpaid, under-appreciated and powerless -- the trifecta!
• Anyone living in only one place, as opposed to ''between Berlin and Beijing,'' or ''based in London, Amsterdam, Sao Paolo, and Los Angeles.'' Where have you been, mono-urbanity is so 20th century...

It's nice to find a list that we all have a chance to actually get on!

Thanks Bruce Sterling for the link.

Neill Archer Roan posts a rather interesting thought on his weblog about what we're all calling the 'new normal' for our economy, our society, and our work: what if the past 50 years were the exception, not the rule, to human history? What if the conditions we all considered to be 'normal' as we built our businesses, our industries, and our common sense were actually  anomolies? He quotes a recent interview with Jim Collins in Fortune, who says:

It turns out that 1952 to 2000 was an aberration. We had a combination of tremendous stability brought on by two monolithic superpowers -- danger, yes, but stability, combined with unprecedented prosperity. Very rarely in human history -- maybe the Egyptian empire or 200 A.D. in Rome -- only a few times you can go back and find those.

And yet, most of the nonprofit arts industry was born and evolved in that aberration. And what we consider 'standards of practice' could be standards for a universe that's not coming back.

Which is not to suggest that arts organizations throw in the towel, but rather that it's a good time to check ALL of our assumptions about what we do, how we do it, and what we define as success. And it also might be a good time to dust off our history books to see how arts and culture worked before 1952. There might be some useful ideas from the OLD normal that could be revived.

If you thought you were just bouncing from gig to gig, juggling multiple part-time or limited-term jobs in the arts and elsewhere, or just patching together a living from a seemingly diffuse bundle of clients, employers, and projects, you may not have realized that you were engaging in the job strategy of the future, the portfolio career. The phrase and the concept seem to be popping up in organizational theory circles as a way of capturing an age-old practice that's becoming an emerging trend.

The ''portfolio worker,'' defined by organizational and management theorist Charles Handy a few decades ago, doesn't work for a single company, but rather gathers a ''portfolio'' of jobs around a common theme or skill set, and balances that portfolio much like an investor manages a bundle of stocks.

I've been using the phrase a lot lately, as it describes both the reality of so much cultural work, but also the tension and intention of managing such complex working relationships. We've seen lots of evidence lately that policy-makers don't consider portfolio jobs to be ''real jobs'' (which are defined, it seems, as permanent, persistent employment opportunities). Further, our career counseling for creative professionals, and our training for prospective professionals in higher education, does little to engage the challenge.

Anyone know of an organization or a research cluster that's specifically looking at this issue in the arts? Would love to know who already knows about it.

In an era when our economy is in flux, and many are revisiting their penchant for buying more stuff, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats offers another way: buy the opposite of stuff. His upcoming exhibit on The First Bank of Antimatter (BoingBoing blog here, and here's the exhibition site) suggests a mirror marketplace to reinvigorate our current one. Says he:

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth.... My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

The exhibit creates a new form of currency, backed by antimatter stored in a vault. Sounds like a plan to me.

 

In this job market and this economy, it's challenging to consider leaving a job. But it's never a bad idea for any cultural manager to at least ask the question: Am I in the right place, doing the right work? CompassPoint's Tim Wolfred offers six signs that it might be time to move on. Among them:

1. I keep returning to this thought: the organization needs to go in a new direction (or to a new level) and I'm not the right person for it.
2. I'm burned out and I know it.
3. I don't think I'm burned out, but other people think I am.
4. I can't stand my board anymore . . . and/or, I can't seem to please the board no matter what I do.
5. My clock is ticking.
6. Family roles are calling me.

For most of the above, there are alternatives to departure -- such as additional training or professional development, refreshing your perspective with your board (or refreshing your board), or redefining your job or your place within the organization. But even these take proactive identification that there's a problem to be addressed.

Worth a read, and a ponder.

[Thanks to Barry's blog for the link.]

Anne Midgette at the Washington Post offers a short slap in the face to those who suggest the orchestra conductor as a model of modern management (a la Roger Nierenberg, et al). Sure, in theory, conductors work to bring different talents together into a single expression. Sure, in theory, conductors engage a complex range of knowledge, context, and personnel to achieve a creative goal. But Midgette counters that, in practice, orchestras are a bit of a mess.

Orchestras are notoriously dysfunctional places, often filled with talented people suffering from acute frustration at their lack of autonomy or of artistic self-expression. And the conductor of stereotype is an autocratic figure who doesn't care if his musicians are happy or not.

And while those archetypes are changing by necessity, increasingly toward collaborative leadership and venture-friendly conductors, it's still not clear that the orchestral metaphor holds much water for the modern manager. Says she:

...orchestras with conductors have not traditionally been the happiest places for their employees; orchestras without conductors do not necessarily make the best music; and yet orchestras are being presented as holding keys to business success.

Discuss, indeed.

Slate's ''The Big Money'' blog offers a fascinating analysis of the new Barnes & Noble eBook reader, the Nook. Author Marion Maneker suggests that while the Nook is designed to compete against Amazon's Kindle, it might only underscore the fundamental differences between Barnes & Noble's business model and that of Amazon.

In brief, Amazon is in the business of delivering books through on-line sales. If that book can be delivered digitally, rather than in physical form by mail, Amazon wins by delivering a comparable product with vastly lower cost. Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is a bricks-and-mortar retailer. And while their Nook strategy offers incentives to actually bring the device to one of their stores, the cost implications are vastly different -- prices drop, more digital books are purchased instead of physical books, but the retail side of that equation gets hammered in the process.

Barnes & Noble still needs to stock shelves, pay rent, and hire staff...at least for the immediate future. And if they're successful with the Nook, their margin to do so will get narrower and narrower (and perhaps negative) really quickly.

For arts and cultural managers, the analysis offers a sideways glance at the challenge of adding on-line strategies to place-based businesses (theaters, museums, galleries, and the like). It's a necessity if your goal is really to engage an audience. But it can have consequences that accelerate the business problems you already have in your primary endeavor. And you don't get a lot of time to decide. Says Maneker: 

In an orderly world where change takes place incrementally, the Nook might be a smart long-term strategy to shift Barnes & Noble's base from physical stores to e-readers. But we don't live in that world. The book business has shifted into hyper-space with dramatic change taking place within a compressed time frame.

The annual Grantmakers in the Arts conference has long been a closed affair -- gathering foundations and funders for several days of discussion, workshops, and panels to inform their work. The reasons for the closed circle are obvious: Funders can speak more freely about their challenges and opportunities if they're aren't being swarmed by potential grantees. Plus, as a community of practice, they can benefit from reasonably pure peer-to-peer connections.

Nonmembers can come if they're invited (I've been to two of them, which makes me cool). But otherwise it's a bit like Fight Club and its first rule. Which is why it's rather nice to have a blogger on-site this year, in the form and phrases of Ian David Moss of the Createquity blog. Ian engaged the tension of blogging from a closed conference in one of his posts:

The conference is traditionally closed to all but staff of grantmaking organizations and invited speakers. In addition, there is a strict policy against solicitation of any kind... The result is that the conference creates, as GIA board member Janet Rodriguez characterized it, a ''safe space'' for the sharing of ideas among colleagues. However, at the only major national convening for arts funders every year, this strategy can also remove the possibility of healthy confrontation in a field in which getting honest feedback can be a challenge.

Lots of great summaries and perspectives. Although I'm rather eagerly awaiting the reports from the morning workshop entitled ''The Future and Our Role in Shaping It'' where Ian was not invited. If ever there was a topic for funders to engage with transparency, openess, and full-on critical engagement, that's it.

A breadcrumb trail of conversation (from Twitter to Flux Theatre to Stolen Chair) led me to Stolen Chair Theatre's new initiative to support new works. Instead of grants and traditional subscriptions, they propose a community support system modeled on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Says Stolen Chair:

Like the CSA model, Stolen Chair hopes to build a membership community, a "CST", which would provide 'seed' money for the company's development process and then reap a year's worth of theatrical harvests.

The organization has received a grant to create the model as part of The Field's Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) initiative. More on the model and the metaphor in a future post. But in the meanwhile, I was struck by an extended quote from Stolen Chair's Jon Stancato (transcribed in his blog), which seems to suggest the motivation for their CSA idea:

There is no such thing as an arts economy since non-commercial arts by their very definition don't follow market logic and can't compete in the market place without dependence on non-profit support structures and the government. So we can embrace our role in the margins of the economy and struggle the way that performing artists have struggled since theatre and religion parted ways, or we can model ourselves on the only other two positions left to us in a market-driven economy: as charity (quite like an endangered species) or as community resource (like a neighborhood garden)....

I don't want to be a charity, in large part because I don't think our social cause has enough merit to compete with other charities who actually change lives on a grand scale.  So, the only round hole we can force our square peg of a "business model" into is as community resource.

In this interconnected, digital age, if our art can serve as a meeting place for communities of like-minded individuals to connect, celebrate, and be challenged, then we might find a way of restoring theatre's primacy in people's lives and creating sustainable theatre-making organisms (not organizations).

For which he received both boos and applause. While I would nudge Stancato's definition of an economy, which seems to assume an exclusively commercial marketplace (which is only part of an economy), I think his central question is a rather important one:

Is unprofitable theater (or other arts endeavor) a charity, a community resource, an entitlement, a labor of love, or some combination thereof? Whatever we choose as our cluster of definitions, it will be helpful to align our business models and our resource strategies accordingly.

It will be fascinating to watch Stolen Chair, and the other recipients of the ERPA funding, explore these new alignments.

I don't spend much time on this blog talking about my day job, as I figure its a relatively commercial-free zone. But I do have a day job, directing an MBA degree program in Arts Administration in the Wisconsin School of Business. And that day job is entirely intertwined with all that I do online and offline.

Essentially, I work closely with my colleagues here in the business school, with alumni, and with international innovators in professional practice to do three things:

1. Search for and select high-potential professional leaders for arts and cultural enterprise;
2. Connect those individuals to curriculum, hands-on learning, and professional networks to help them become not only masters of the task at hand, but also ready for the task ahead;
3. Build and grow an international network of alumni and colleagues in the professional world and in academia to ensure we know what success looks like for items one and two, and that we have the capacity to achieve it.

Around this time every year, my focus narrows onto item number one: search and selection. Each February, we accept applications for fall admission. And each March, we select from that extraordinary international pool to build our incoming class. We already get a strong, competitive, and compelling group of applicants each year. But I'm concerned that we're missing large numbers of high-potential cultural leaders who aren't aware of the option.

Which is where I'd appreciate your help.

If you are (or if you know) an exceptionally passionate and focused professional in arts and culture, with two tor more years of full-time, post-undergraduate work experience, an aptitude for business thinking, and a commitment to innovation in the way arts organizations run, we should know each other. You provide the application, the transcripts, the GMAT score, and the compelling essays. We'll provide a fully funded (yes, all of our admitted students are funded through hands-on assistantships), intensive, immersive, conversational, and challenging two-year MBA degree in Arts Administration for those who are selected.

I know it sounds like a sales pitch, but it's really a call for partners. Our students, our graduates, our network, and our faculty have defined professional practice in arts and culture for 40 years. We need your energy and your insights to redefine the field for the next 40 years.

Interested? Send me a note!