I’ve been noticing a common thread in many of the conversations I’ve been having and hearing among arts professionals. There’s the tension between what a ‘curator’ presents and what the public wants; between ‘teaching’ an audience that doesn’t yet value our craft and ‘learning’ what they value; between being more engaged with a community but standing separate to be recognized and noticed as unique.
It seems to me that all of these tensions are part of the same evolution in arts and cultural management — from monologue to dialogue, from lecture to conversation.
I’ve touched on this issue before, but it keeps bubbling up. We’ve grown used to the ”lecture,” the assumption that we know what is good and valuable, that we have the wisdom society so desperately needs, and that our job is to talk until they understand. And we quietly have a fear that if we truly listened and engaged, honestly and openly, we might stray from that wisdom or water it down.
So, what does this dialogue look like? A quick Google expedition discovered at least one useful description of dialogue and its essential elements, excerpted here:
Suspension:
Suspension of thoughts, impulses, judgments, etc., lies at the very heart of Dialogue…. Suspension involves attention, listening and looking and is essential to exploration. Speaking is necessary, of course, for without it there would be little in the Dialogue to explore. But the actual process of exploration takes place during listening — not only to others but to oneself. Suspension involves exposing your reactions, impulses, feelings and opinions in such a way that they can be seen and felt within your own psyche and also be reflected back by others in the group. It does not mean repressing or suppressing or, even, postponing them. It means, simply, giving them your serious attention so that their structures can be noticed while they are actually taking place.To suspend thought, impulse, judgment, etc., requires serious attention to the overall process we have been considering — both on one’s own and within a group. This involves what may at first appear to be an arduous kind of work. But if this work is sustained, one’s ability to give such attention constantly develops so that less and less effort is required.
Leadership:
A Dialogue is essentially a conversation between equals. Any controlling authority, no matter how carefully or sensitively applied, will tend to hinder and inhibit the free play of thought and the often delicate and subtle feelings that would otherwise be shared. Dialogue is vulnerable to being manipulated, but its spirit is not consistent with this. Hierarchy has no place in Dialogue….Guidance, when it is felt to be necessary, should take the form of ”leading from behind” and preserve the intention of making itself redundant as quickly as possible.
Do those sound like the qualities and tendencies of your organization’s programming, outreach, education, market research, fundraising, and audience interaction? If so, post a comment to tell us all.
A friend posted on my blog directing me here — and I have to say I am greatly moved by these words: “A Dialogue is essentially a conversation between equals. Any controlling authority, no matter how carefully or sensitively applied, will tend to hinder and inhibit the free play of thought and the often delicate and subtle feelings that would otherwise be shared. Dialogue is vulnerable to being manipulated, but its spirit is not consistent with this. Hierarchy has no place in Dialogue….”
Those words strike true in all walks of life — and finding that truth here is very cool. As an emerging/postmodern Christian thinker I find truth in many places and at this point in time your words add great truth to a stance I am making — I will be quoting you on this in the future 🙂 very cool stuff, thanks a ton.
NOTE FROM ANDREW: Thanks for the comment. Just to be clear, however, those weren’t my words, but quoted from the linked source. I *wish* I had said them, but I didn’t.
Your post struck a responsive chord with me, as someone involved with a Midwest arts organization. However, I would state the question somewhat differently than you do. I do not believe that there is so much a tension “between what a ‘curator’ presents and what the public wants” or “between ‘teaching’ an audience that doesn’t yet value our craft and ‘learning’ what they value”, but rather a tension between what the curator is presenting and what the curator is willing to communicate to the audience in advance of the performance or the presentation.
Today’s audiences do not want to pay significant sums and give up their free time without understanding in advance in a way that is meaningful to them what is being offered and how they will benefit from it. Audiences do value your craft and what you have to offer, but they are not prepared to come on faith alone. Rather, they expect the curator to share with them up front why it is they should want to go to a performance or take in a show and what it is that they are expected to take from it that will have made it worthwhile. A brief, totally abstract description that can only be understood by someone who has already seen the performance is of little use to the average ticket buyer.
For example, even if you were a baseball fan, would you buy tickets to a baseball game if you could not figure out in advance which teams were playing, simply because you were advised that it would be ‘a performance rich in history and filled with excitement and suspense’? Probably not, because that can be said of any baseball game. You would feel entitled to know more before you pay so much money and spend so much time on what you fear could be a game that is in no way out of the ordinary. On the other hand, if someone told you that even though you will not know the teams, the best pitcher in baseball will be starting for one team, three hall of famers would be playing for the other, every time these teams met this season the game has been a classic and that this particular game may be a preview of who will go to the world series, you might rush to get your tickets.
The job of a curator is to explain to its audience what it needs to know to make an informed decision. The curator today needs to share his or her thinking with the audience–it is that knowledge and experience which makes what a curator does valuable–not just the ultimate decision about what is presented. If the curator is excited and passionate about the event and can communicate why, the audience is likely to be convinced to come. If the curator has built up a reputation and immense quanities of good will, perhaps he or she can say “trust me, you’ll like it” but that curator better be right 90% of the time.
Part of the educational mission of an arts organization is to explain to the community why it chooses the performances that it does and why the community should want to experience them. There is, of course, the risk that the community will reject the choices offered, but at least that will be due to an honest difference of opinion about value; if the organization is correct that it has something uniquely valuable and special to offer, it needs to trust its audience enough to explain how and why and then let the audience decide after the performance if its expectations were met–or even exceeded. If the answer is that we can’t adequetely articulate the value of the experience, then either the curator can’t do the job or it needs to expect that the audiences won’t come. No one can expect the advance explanation to equal the experience of the event, but if a curator cannot make a compelling case for risking the expenditure of time and money, the audience is only being sensible in making a different choice.
Suspension is a discipline that really must be learned if one is to progress, let alone achieve a significant break-through in thinking. Einstein’s famous, but often misunderstood, saying ”Imagination is more important than knowlege,” speaks to suspension, the ability to bring significant knowledge to a subject, but able to ”suspend” conclusion to allow consideration of other ideas, other, sometimes radically different, ways of seeing the same issue or problem. Few can actually do it.
Ron Chew at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle has been working outside the curator-driven model for a number of years. A summary of his approach is on the API website at: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2005/02/five_keys_to_gr.php