My blog entries have been few and far between of late, mostly due to back-to-back travel and project activity. Sorry to those who missed the entries (if any of you there be). I’ll work to get back on track.
Last week’s excuse was a four-day Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria, entitled ”The Performing Arts in Lean Times: Opportunities for Reinvention.” It was a gathering of many of the usual suspects (many dear colleagues from North America and the UK), but also including a global participant list that doesn’t appear in my usual conference circuit — Lebanon, Nigeria, Oman, Romania, Russia, Egypt, South Africa, Zambia, Philippines, Morocco, Singapore, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
In this global context, the premise of ”lean times” took on a radically relative tone, where ”lean” for some organizations meant a 30 percent drop in a massive endowment, and for others meant making do with less than nothing rather than the usual nothing. It was a useful context, as it short-circuited the complaining we love to do at professional convenings — audiences are down, corporate contributions are down, ticket sales are challenging — and forced a deeper look.
What is the essence of expressive enterprise? What is our place and our role in the cultural and civic life that surrounds us? And how might we reconceive the systems we’ve constructed over the past five decades to serve those core functions in more dynamic ways?
There was a sense of ex-empire among the very large institutions in the room. And a tension from small and artist-driven initiatives that that empire was crowding them out.
More thoughts to come, as I untangle them. But I’ll admit that a global perspective helped make my usual excuses about the arts and culture field evaporate into chatter. And that’s a start.
