The National Endowment for the Arts is hosting a Cultural Workforce Forum today, from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm Eastern, and has opened the event to the public through a live webcast. You can login and listen in here:

Cultural Workforce Forum
Live Webcast, November 20, 2009
9:00 am - 4:00 pm Eastern

They've also promised an archive version of the event by next week.

There are some great funders, researchers, and policy-makers on the agenda. And you can pop in and out for the parts of the agenda you want to watch (assuming they stay on schedule).

As part of this fall's special topics course I'm co-teaching at UW-Madison -- Arts Enterprise: Art as Business as Art -- we hosted a public forum and a class discussion with Bill Ivey, Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and recent leader for Obama's transition team for arts and humanities.

Bill is working hard to reframe and refocus the realm of cultural policy from its traditional emphasis (almost exclusively) on the public and nonprofit arts. From his perspective, this frame excludes some rather important elements of our nation's cultural life -- including copyright, media ownership and consolidation, and even international trade.

During his visit to Madison, I recorded this 20-minute podcast about his current work. Give a listen (also available on the Internet Archive, or on iTunesU).

When a for-profit enterprise wants to build its capacity to do something (manufacture a product, launch a new service, provide a new option for their clients, or the like), they face a classic business question -- should we rent the capacity, buy the capacity, or build the capacity? If they need a new manufacturing process, for example, they can either outsource the manufacturing to a third party (rent), purchase a fully operational plant or a competitor that already does the work (buy), or construct a new facility from scratch that will become part of the company's assets (build).

The answer to a rent, buy, or build question is usually determined by the math (which pays the highest return on investment over an identified period) and by the strategy (will owning the process give us a strategic advantage, or will renting keep us quick on our feet). But smart businesses recognize and engage the choice whenever such decisions present themselves.

Yet, experience with nonprofit arts organizations suggests that they tend to make rent, buy, or build decisions without such reflection. Rather, these choices are made based on tradition or common practice without full analysis of the dynamics in play. Should we build or buy a theater to call our home? Should we hire a consultant to run our capital campaign or develop an internal board capacity to do the job? Should we hire professional staff? These are all rent, buy, or build decisions with complex implications behind them.

And since nonprofits have a fourth option to the question -- borrow at no cost -- such decisions should demand even more consideration at every step.

Rent, buy, build, or borrow decisions live at every level of an arts organization, especially if we use broad definitions of the terms:

• Rent - pay for limited-term use of a reasonably complete capacity. This can be for a physical asset like a performance venue, or for a professional capacity like strategic planning consulting or third-party box office solutions.
• Buy - find and internalize the capacity to your organization, either by purchasing a capacity outright (like a theater or gallery space), or by adding the capacity to your professional set (hiring artists, staff, or administrators through an on-going salary contract rather than per service).
• Build - identify an individual, group, or asset that's not quite ready to deliver the new capacity, and prepare it to do so (building out an old warehouse into a performance space, sending current staff to professional development for a new skill set, constructing your own software solution).
• Borrow - leverage your organization's access to volunteer labor, shared space, and community goodwill to get the capacity without direct expense.

Since most arts organizations are very lean and highly leveraged, it's useful to explore these options for every major growth or strategic choice you make, and every asset you currently use.

Many arts organizations work really hard to craft the perfect fundraising message in their letters, their brochures, and their online communications. They strive for strong evidence that what they do makes a difference, they anguish over the specific words they should use to convey that evidence, and they hope to close the deal by making the rational case for financial support. But somewhere in there, many of us forget to tell a compelling story.

So discovered Frank C. Dickerson in his dissertation research on the language of philanthropy. After running more than 2000 fundraising letters through a text analysis system, he found a frightening consistency with a similar, smaller study, which discovered that fundraising discourse:

• failed to connect with and involve readers on a personal and emotional level, and
• failed to tell stories about real people whom readers might actually care about

Instead, messages were clinical, detached, evidence-based, and academic.

Of course, I'm a big fan of evidence, and supporting your impact with sufficient credential to prove your point. But that evidence need not be exclusively rational, linear, or statistical. A good story -- the transformation of a key constituent or participant, the revelation of another, the influence on a child's daily life -- is evidence of a different kind. But also of a more compelling kind when asking people to support you with their attention, passion, and cash.

UPDATE: We've just posted a 20-minute podcast interview with Bill Ivey online. The video of his public presentation will come later.

If you're in or around Madison, Wisconsin, this Thursday, November 12, consider coming by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at 7:00 pm for a public forum with Bill Ivey on arts and cultural policy. I know, I know, ''arts'' and ''policy'' together often bring to mind dry and detached discussions of standardized test scores and economic impact. But Bill Ivey has an alternate and rather compelling view.

Former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and recent transition team leader in Arts and Humanities for the Obama administration, Bill Ivey is working to reframe the conversation about arts, culture, heritage, creativity, and policy, and reconnect them to the daily issues of expresive life. From his home base at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, he is connecting the dots between the public sector, nonprofits, commercial entertainment, and community arts. And his recent book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed our Cultural Rights, blasts away at our traditional approach to the arts in American life.

The event is one of three public forums curated by the UW-Madison Arts Institute, and the special Arts Enterprise course I'm co-teaching with Stephanie Jutt. Should be a fascinating conversation. I'll be facilitating the Q&A with Bill, and with our friends from the state, county, and city arts agencies. The event is free, and open to the public. Directions and parking information are available here.

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.]