The job posting now on-line for the President & CEO of Madison’s $205-million Overture Center for the Arts includes multiple essay questions along with the resume and reference requirements. Two questions, in particular, are worth a moment for any manager of a large, professional-grade cultural facility:
Describe what you believe to be the central role of a major, multi-venue performing and visual arts center in a city the size of Madison. What should be such a facility’s top three measures of success and sustainability? And what would be your top three priorities for the Center in your first year as director?
How could Overture Center, and you as its leader, promote, advance, and support the vitality of the larger cultural ecology of Madison and Dane County? What would be your responsibility to resident companies of the facility, and to other cultural organizations in the community?
The first question goes to the purpose and function of a huge cultural capital investment — is it about dominating the market? Filling in the cultural gaps in the market? Fostering resident companies and local organizations? Refocusing the community’s economic activity?
The second question goes to the inherent tension between any significant cultural facility and its resident arts organizations and cultural neighbors. As shown in Broward County and at large performing arts centers across North America, the balance between serving the needs of the facility and the needs of the cultural ecology is often a delicate and highly political one.
Feel free to answer either or both of the questions above in comments to this weblog. I’d love to read what people have to say…whether or not they’re applying for the Overture job.
To me it seems like the 2nd question dictates what the answer to the first must be. Nowhere do the questions leave room for the respondant to say “The Overture Center’s prime concern should be taking care of the Overture Center.” The question is set up so that, if you want the job, you have to answer that the Overture Center has a major responsibility to promote, advance and support the local infrastructure. It doesn’t just say “be a part of” the infrastructure. It says you have to figure out how to promote and advance it. And that’s the tension that all major PAC’s face – how many are really equipped to play the role of supporter, advancer and promoter of an arts community’s infrastructure?
“Cultural ecology?” Only in Madison.
It seems to me that we are all in the customer service business. Ticket buyers are one set of customers, donors another, and (depending on the center’s management structure) the constituents and/or renters being another. How can these customer’s best be served? Are they happy with the service they are receiving? can they afford the services they want? I think the new director should learn everything they can about their customers before they can answer those questions.
I concur primarily with the comments made by David Gray. Should it not be expected as a matter of course that any CEO of a major cultural organisation possesses the strategic management skills required for a solution to this omnipresent cultural conundrum? Any arts manager worth his / her salt would take a systematic approach and involve the mapping of internal (first question) and external (second question) stakeholder interests as the starting point?