So I’m back at the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York (I was here last year, as some might recall). It has become a monster of a conference, with over 3900 participants this year. For those that don’t know, Arts Presenters is the national service organization for performing arts professionals that book, present, and represent touring artists all across the country. If you went to see the Peking Acrobats anywhere near you, odds are the venue booked that act while visiting this conference in January, or at a smaller regional version throughout the year.
The theme of this year’s conference is change (‘Moving Forward on Shifting Ground,’ to be exact). In fact, the theme of every conference I’ve been to for the past several years has been change. The pundit that said ‘the only constant is change’ must have been an arts conference planner.
But all this hand-wringing and sweat-wiping surrounding change management has me wondering: how much of our current struggle is really due to changes in how the world works? And how much is just a discovery of truths that have always been there?
I’m thinking of an analogy in physics. In the past few centuries, Newton framed and deduced the forces of gravity; Neils Bohr mapped out the path of an electron; Einstein suggested curved space. Throw in quantum physics and string theory, and you could certainly say that physics, as a discipline, has undergone radical changes far beyond what we could claim in our infant industry of arts management. But despite all that radical rethinking about the physical world, did reality change at all in that time? Or did physicists come to see that same reality in different ways?
When you start to tease out some of the common claims of a changed arts environment, the ‘new issues’ start to unravel into eternal truths: audiences never came just for the art, but for a complex set of reasons; the power and production relationship between donors and artists has always been complex and vexing; and on and on. Perhaps some of these changes aren’t changes at all, but rather a more nuanced view of what was always the case. I’ll grant you that communications technology and other factors have intensified some of these variables, but that doesn’t make them new.
It sounds like a semantics game, but it has specific impact (at least in my head). ‘Change’ means we are victims…we are tossed around in tidal forces that sap our strength and cloud our way. ‘Discovery’ means we are explorers…knowing we can’t ever be right, but learning as we go how we can match our models of the world more closely with our experience of the world.
One of those metaphors feels crushing and oppressive, and leads us to posture in defense. One feels expansive and encourages us to question. What if we shifted our collective rhetoric from ‘change’ to ‘discovery,’ to see if the weight on our shoulders is reduced just a touch? It may just be semantics, but symbol and metaphor are the heart of our business. We might as well take them out for a spin.
