Revolution in the air: Creating the future of expressive media

Ben Cameron knows the arts world is turning upside down. But he has big questions about which part will – or should – come out on top.

As program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York City and former executive director of Theatre Communications Group, Cameron has a good view of what’s happening artistically and financially with performing groups around the country. He sees change taking place that goes far beyond arts and culture themselves.

    ”We’re in the middle of a fundamental realignment between communication and culture in the U.S.,” he said by phone Monday.

Like newspapers and other media, the cultural sector is part of a much larger phenomenon that involves a generational change of leadership and a steady pattern of audience erosion, Cameron said.  

But, he continued, “The most critical piece, in my mind, is the impact of technology on performance.”

By technology, Cameron specifically means the Internet. He wonders if near-instant access to information and virtual experiences is destroying our tolerance for delayed gratification and our appetite for live interactions that make demands on our time, energy and emotions.

“For me,” he said, “we’re facing a crisis of urgency and relevance” in the arts.

The short-term issues tend to be practical ones, he noted. How do you engage a population of 24/7 screen addicts in real-live anything … especially when it has to be experienced at a specific time and place? How do you distribute works of art in ways that allow the creators to earn income from their ideas and labor?

He said he’s been seeing creative attempts by different arts organizations to address those questions. He knows, for instance, of live performers who appeal to the digital nation by putting on shows involving Internet streaming, real-time blogging by members of the audience or audience participation in green-screen effects. He’s seen others develop ”micro-audiences” of diehard fans who willingly pay for the artists’ recorded work online.    

Such artists represent the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em response that has greeted new technology in every era. It’s a logical response that often leads to successful innovations – after all, movies, videos and TV long ago began profitably pulling live performances off the stage and onto the screen. Even before that, recordings captured live sounds and made them infinitely replicable, as photographs did for artwork. Now, the printing press – which, as a long-ago new technology, took what had been strictly oral communications or individually crafted works of writing and mass-produced them – is being supplanted along with theaters, galleries and record and book stores by the wildly more powerful distribution method of the Net.  

Like the print news industry, which is in a death struggle to figure out how to reinvent itself on web sites, artists and cultural workers may be on the verge of finding that bits and bytes are the best (and maybe only) medium in which they can work. Ironically, though, bits and bytes may not provide them with livings, because everything they make will probably end up available for free on computer.

That might force people to make even greater use of donors than they do now, Cameron said. 

But, he pointed out, the crisis poses even more serious questions than where the money’s going to come from: Though humans could gain innovative digital arts experiences, in the long run, we could lose something, too.  

With virtual everything, including virtual friends, we could lose the desire for the suspense and electric immediacy of live performance, for the texture and weight of a fine book in our hands, for the warmth and subliminal richness of a face-to-face conversation, for the delicious anticipation of waiting. And we did lose all that, what kinds of humans would we be then?

Photo by Brian Micklethwaite

Fostering creativity from the top down … and the bottom up

In another week, a new era will begin in the United States. When Barack Obama is sworn in as president next Tuesday, most Americans will likely be hoping that our economy, international relationships, educational and health systems, environmental policies and transportation system will all improve.     

 On top of that, a lot of us will be looking for signs that our professions are priorities for elected leaders – and worrying when we don’t hear our own trades mentioned in the grand plans.

Well, no president, governor or mayor can have public-policy goals on everything from dental hygiene and dog-toy manufacture to baking and bicycle repair. But they often do try to affect the larger sectors those occupations belong to, such as health care, the chemical industry, food production and green business.

Arts and culture, on the other hand, have a legitimate gripe with government. Many leaders never seem to think about culture at all, much less regard it as an essential part of our economy and social infrastructure. When any do give it thought, they tend to see it as merely a factor in areas of larger concern – education or tourism, for instance – rather than as another kind of major system without which our nation could not function.

The truth is, no nation can function without arts and culture, for the very reason that so many other aspects of our lives depend on it.  What aspects? First and foremost, the arts are a medium of information crucial to the ongoing national dialogue required by a democracy. Think about it: We all glean ideas and facts from books, television, movies and videos, music, art and photography, plays and dancing (with the stars or without) and we talk about them with our families, friends and co-workers. They help us create emotional and social bonds, one-on-one and in big groups, from the Jane Austen Society to the Deadheads. They move us to take interest and take actions, just as news stories do. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” anyone?

They also provide the best, most effective basis we have for communication with other countries and peoples, promoting empathy and understanding through shared emotional experiences.

And they offer the most indelibly memorable and enjoyable means of teaching information and critical thinking that humans have yet invented, as increasing educational studies show.

Arts and culture also represent a huge portion of the economy – $166 billion of it, to be exact. According to Arts and Economic Prosperity III, a study released two years ago by Americans for the Arts, those billions sum up the economic impact of just the nonprofit arts. Try to imagine how much greater that figure would be if commercial arts – galleries, Broadway tours, rock-band concerts, CD sales, Hollywood movies, network sitcoms – were factored in, too. 

Arts and culture have always deserved better representation in government. For a nation with so much depending on those industries, it’s hard to justify having cabinet officers and secretaries for commerce, transportation and education, but none for culture.   

Fortunately, our next president does at least have a policy plan for it – or did when he ran for the office. Obama’s arts and culture plan spells out a number of his intentions, including reinvestment in arts education and cultural diplomacy, creating affordable health insurance for artists and supporting the NEA.

But local officials across the country may have some explaining do if they don’t start including arts and culture in their own agendas. Though they can grow in scope to represent a nation, individual artists and arts and cultural groups almost always begin locally, serving the immediate community with enriched lives, jobs, tourist dollars, more effective schooling and growing prestige.

 That’s why it’s strange to find that, here in economically staggering Cleveland, where the arts remain close to a $1 billion-per-year industry, the mayor’s plan for next year includes no mention of arts and culture at all. Read Frank Jackson’s Urban Agenda 2009 and see for yourself.

How many more American communities and leaders are like this one?

Is it alive? Part 2: The nonprofit side of creatively surviving the economy

The Guthrie Theater and Florida Stage differ in size, geographic location and audience demographics. But they’re identical in their determination to get creative about cost efficiency while keeping up the quality of their work.

Though ticket sales remain on target for both so far this season, neither is taking anything for granted. At Florida Stage, a small professional nonprofit theater launched 22 years ago in South Florida’s Palm Beach County, founder and producing director Louis Tyrrell has cut a few positions and decided not to fill others, even though his critically acclaimed company enjoyed robust attendance at its two fall shows and is 60 percent subscribed for the season.                                                               

He knows the margin of survival for a theater is narrow in the best of times – maybe only one failed production – and that in today’s economy, even the healthy need to be prudent. So yesterday’s tactics alone won’t do.

  Tyrrell

“It goes a step beyond that for us and our industry,” Tyrrell said. “You have got to think out of the box.” 

Along with trimming staff positions, Florida Stage has begun telemarketing for the first time.

“We’re being very aggressive in our fund-raising … and using the Internet a heck of a lot more,” said Tyrrell, who has taken on the additional task of development since the company downsized its annual budget from $4.1 million to $3.4 million.   

The company does more TV ads, cuts better deals and “so far, it’s worked fine. But it’s really only an interim step,” he noted.

His company has been in the same space for 18 years and the rent keeps going up. “That’s when you have to start circling the wagons and looking for ways to collaborate. Those are the kinds of innovations the survivors are going to have to make if they expect to be here next year.”

While Tyrrell is getting busy talking with other producing and presenting groups in the Palm Beach area, the famed Minneapolis-based Guthrie - a major, 46-year-old, nonprofit regional theater that is one of North America’s finest -has already teamed with The Acting Company on an upcoming Guthrie run, and national tour, of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Their first-ever collaboration blends artistic and educational aims: The New-York-based Acting Company serves as professional training company for students and young professionals actors, while the Guthrie shares a bachelor of fine arts program with the University of Minnesota. Young performers from both companies will fill the “Henry V” cast.

Trish Santini, the Guthrie’s external relations director, said that teaming up for a production and tour was just one of the methods the theater is trying in order to live within a smaller budget. With revenue on track, the Guthrie still made budget cuts in November. It increased efficiency by such means as limiting the number of hours the theater store is open when no shows are running and it added consumer value by creating reduced-price ticket packages for concurrent productions – all what Santini calls “smart, incremental” changes that add up to impact. 

“Normally, we don’t bundle,” said Santini of their new marketing approach. “That’s a whole different creative look for a campaign.”

But even while they’re inventing new means of saving money and bringing in more, both the Guthrie and Florida Stage remain committed to producing top-quality work.

For Tyrrell, full houses are “really just a function of a 22-year relationship with a community” whose members have come to trust Florida Stage’s quality, he said - if a show get good buzz, 4,000-5,000 single-ticket buyers will turn up.  That’s why he went ahead with Florida Stage’s December-January show, “Mezzulah, 1946” a 10-character play by Michele Lowe whose size and cost were risky, but which is paying off artistically and financially.

 ”The play was so wonderful, and by the time we decided to change it, it would have sent the wrong message. It was worth it” to stage “Mezzulah,” Tyrrell said. But he acknowledged that, for next year, his company will be sticking to smaller, less expensive plays.       

There was a ruefulness to his tone that Santini echoed. “I think everything’s vulnerable right now” from size and number of productions to peripheral programs, she said. 

But whatever else the Guthrie may end up having to cut, it won’t compromise the theatrical excellence for which it’s famed.

“I think it comes down to a diligence about your mission,” Santini said. “And at the end of the day, it’s about protecting the  work on our stages.”

Poster design by Kevin Sprague

      Poster design by Kevin Sprague                                                                                          Poster

Is it alive? Entrepreneurs see marketing as the voltage needed to resuscitate businesses

Americans have only to look to their own dwindling buying and borrowing power these days to recognize the domino effect that the banking crisis, collapsed stock market and shocked economy are having on their lives.

For small-business entrepreneurs in creative industries, the situation has become a scary kind of laboratory, where they must experiment with parts of their operations to see what will best help them and their enterprises to survive. In the Cleveland area, two owners of quite different arts/artisan businesses are finding that marketing may be the juice that keeps their companies running.

Photographer Roger Mastroianni, whose well-established studio works with national firms and many arts organizations, including the Cleveland Orchestra, said he plans to rework his website and launch a stronger marketing campaign to try to make up for business lost to clients’ budget cutbacks.

“What’s happened, for instance: The Cleveland Play House is not using me anymore, because they can’t afford to pay me,” Mastroianni said Wednesday. “They’re using a free intern, instead.”

   Cleveland Play House production of “My Fair Lady”           

Photo by Roger Mastroianni 

Doing it better. During an economic downtown, many people regard arts as nonessentials. But, he pointed out, photography is not a budgetary priority in times like these even among arts organizations.

That’s a grim reality for Mastroianni, who derives nearly 40 percent of his business from arts clients. Yet he does anticipate one improving vital sign: Just as he needs to increase his marketing efforts, so, he hopes, will other enterprises, meaning more advertising-related photo assignments for him.

In the meantime, the Mastroianni plans to “do what I’ve done in the past, better.”

His fellow Cleveland entrepreneur, Michael Feigenbaum, won’t compromise the quality and type of work he does either, but he’s willing to tinker with practically everything else.

Feigenbaum, a highly credentialed culinary artist who owns and runs the storied Cleveland bakery, Lucy’s Sweet Surrender, has tried all kinds of creative strategies to overcome what’s happening to his business in its changing Buckeye Road neighborhood. Once a bustling community, a stronghold of the Hungarian-American culture reflected in Lucy’s Sweet Surrender strudels and European cakes, Buckeye long ago lost most of its middle-class population to the suburbs and sank into poverty.

The bakery had been a Cleveland institution for decades when Feigenbaum bought it in 1994. People were still driving in from the outskirts for the delectable treats they remembered from their childhoods and the neighborhood eventually showed signs of revitalization as other business pioneers moved in. Feigenbaum even opened bakeries in other Cleveland locations. Then Sept. 11, 2001, dawned.

“After 9/11, things really did change a lot,” Feigenbaum recalled. Expenses climbed, including rents; he had to close his other shops. 

He didn’t give up, though. After Lucy’s was featured on the Food Channel, Feigenbaum started a website and began shipping baked goods out of town. He developed a market among local coffee houses, supplying them with fresh pastries. He has a presence at local farmers’ markets, works with the wedding trade as a cake supplier and even opened a cafe recently in another struggling Cleveland neighborhood where a budding arts district promised clientele.

Stretching his market reach. But for all his courage and creativity, it hasn’t been enough. With Cleveland the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis and the national economy tanking, many neighborhoods that had been teetering on the edge of renaissance have fallen back into a moribund state of abandoned, shabby homes and closed businesses, including coffee houses that had been Feigenbaum’s clients. The buyer for one of his closed locations went bankrupt, leaving the baker with debt to pay off.

He and his wife can’t afford to hire another baker; they do the work themselves and so can turn out only so much product to ship. Meanwhile, his walk-in traffic has become limited to bursts of sales at Hannukah and Christmas, Passover and Easter, with little in between.

“Gas stations sell more baked goods than bakeries” do now, he said ruefully. The factory-produced stuff doesn’t taste anything like his strudels, which he concocts from real eggs and butter and flour, but it can be made much more cheaply and mass-shipped to thousands of retailers.

So Feigenbaum, 54, is in danger of having to close Lucy’s, nearly the only business left open on its stretch of Buckeye Road. “Until this catastrophic downturn, I’ve been fine, [but] I can’t keep getting up at 3 in the morning forever,” he said. Plus, Lucy’s is going to need remodeling soon: “It’s a building built in the ’20s with equipment from the ’60s. I’m reaching this difficult point.”

This would be a sad story, indeed, except that, in the almost same breath, Feigenbaum began ticking off the many things he still has working for him. Though the cost of a real marketing campaign is beyond him financially, he’s been getting attention in the local media and his website draws people happy to discover how easy it is to navigate, he said. He’s recently started a blog to increase his market reach. And Lucy’s delivers locally, an important selling point with the many Clevelanders who still hanker for nut rolls, dobos torte and Russian tea biscuits.

The irrepressible Feigenbaum even sees a silver lining to the economy’s dark clouds: “Funny for me, the business is going to do better in these times … because we’re a very inexpensive luxury.”

Even the recession-stressed like cream-cheese pastries.

Sweating the small stuff

I have no formal business training, so when I decided to start my own company, I was prepared to be buffaloed. But what I didn’t anticipate was so much bull.

Some of it’s big stuff, most of it’s little. Oddly, it’s the little things I mind the most because, collectively, they take up so much time. Comment spam, for instance. My blog has recently been discovered by some troupe of virtual ne’er-do-wells who send me endless piles of junk messages that I have to delete one by one. (Yes, I’m trying to do something about it.)

Or the endless hoops I’m having to make a good-faith effort to jump through to satisfy the arcane regulatory demands of certain online service providers who evidently studied their trade at the knee of the IRS – hoops apparently rigged so you can’t actually get from one to the next, but have to double back and start again. And again. And again. (Yes, I’m trying to do something about it.) 

And then there are all the people I try to contact through their websites, only to discover that clicking on their e-mail addresses requires me to create a new e-mail account for myself in their systems. That setup traps me into taking five should-be-unnecessary steps: copying the address, nuking out the new e-mail account page, calling up my own e-mail, hitting “compose” and pasting in the address. Grrrrrrr. 

And how about the security need to create usernames and passwords on absolutely every internet service imaginable and make sure they’re different and still remember them somehow, which amounts to me having to write them all down in a secret place I’ll never divulge even for chocolate and then having to look them up all the time. This is where I start to shred my hair.

Now add the fact that I have no extra time – like zero – to actually sit down and read through the U.N. manifesto-length instructions, terms of agreement and tracking reports that come with all the electronic devices and all the software, much less understand them. And yet, when I do get into a problem and try to follow the official directions, it always takes many more hours and ulcers than when I just perform a metaphorical tracheotomy on whatever it is by grabbing a penknife, calling some friend who knows more than I do and begging them to talk me through the operation over the phone like Father Mulcahey saving the injured GI in that “M*A*S*H” episode.

The life-or-death allusion makes computer emergencies sound important, when they’re totally just exasperating, pointless, USDA-certified bull – like team-building exercises or filing a claim at the post office for a lost insured package. Or sudoku. Stuff that should never have developed in the first place.

Fr. Mulcahey, sans penknife

No one should have to go through such agonizing futilities except the sorry little sadists who invented them. 

And yes, I’m trying to do something about that, too – I’m planning to earn enough money to hire someone else to deal with it. I was born for in-house tech support.

Can you like money and help others, too?

Speaking of doing well by doing good (as I was last time):

There’s an essay in Tuesday’s New York Times by Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser addressing the idea that’s currently in the air about social entrepreneurship, to wit: Is making money for investors a for-profit corporation’s sole legitimate aim or is there something more it should try to accomplish, such as making the world a better place?

After explaining the recent history of this question and quoting people from each side of the issue (Bill Gates and the bleeding hearts, Milton Friedman and the ruthless profit maximizers), Glaeser comes down firmly in the middle, but he does make an important gesture of respect toward creativity and innovation:

“I certainly agree with Friedman that traditional corporations have one overriding moral obligation — to fulfill their fiduciary duties and maximize shareholder wealth. Yet I’m also a fan of organizational innovation, which makes me a little more enthusiastic about the idea of experimenting with new legal entities with more complex objectives.”

Hear, hear. The plan for Geniocity.com is all about helping society through services and goods that also earn serious profits, allowing us to do even more for society and and earn even greater profits. It’s never sounded like a confused or conflicted mission to me. I think it makes perfect sense and I’m hoping more and more people will start feeling the same way, especially since we all can now see the disastrous effects of unrestricted greed on the economy, our quality of life and our nation’s financial security.

Read Glaeser here and see what you think.  

     or? and?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

What do people want?

It’s a poser at any time, but for entrepreneurs looking to profit by answering a need or satisying a desire, the question has never been more urgent or baffling than right now. Business experts have started acknowledging that the economic recovery everyone’s hoping for will be extra slow to come because we’re all cutting back drastically on purchases in order to weather the recession. 

So what can you sell when no one’s buying? 

Well, entrepreneurs are not creative for nothing. They come up with great ideas all the time. But this scenario will challenge even the most imaginative.

I’ve been trying to analyze what’s going on in order to boost my own business, so maybe if we walk through the mental process together, we’ll identify some useful trends, if not specific products and services.

First and most obviously, big luxuries are out for the overwhelming majority of average consumers. So selling some kind of necessity is our best bet. But what counts as a necessity in a global population of so many different tastes, backgrounds, occupations and problems?

Food, of course – but not fancy food. Basic clothing, housing, fuel, transportation, medical care and supplies, education and job training. Certain kinds of equipment, such as computers, home-maintenance items, kitchen stuff (since we’re not eating out). Insurance. Legal help.

Those are things people need and must get somehow. Businesses that provide them will probably survive this slump. But that still doesn’t answer our question. In a time of great uneasiness and growing hardship, what do people want? 

Money, most of all. Jobs. Investments that regain their value. Not that too many entities are capable of providing that stuff right now, but if any could, what would having those things give people? Peace, security, confidence, optimism, comfort – right? 

Emotions. States of mind. Hmmm. If we can’t offer the actual means of achieving security and comfort, maybe we can offer something that makes people at least feel a little better. Inexpensive treats or reassurances of some kind.

Okay, not sweets and junk foods. There’s way too much of that trash available already. And I don’t know about you, but I would never sell tobacco products, booze or similarly addictive stuff that ends up damaging and killing so many people. So ix-nay on the ice-vays. We want to soothe and comfort, not enslave. 

How about access to information, markets, guidance, solutions? When people feel helpless, nothing cheers them up more than discovering they have the power to find answers and take the right steps.

How about groups? We all feel safer and better when we have a group to belong and talk to – a club, support organization, religious center, online community or neighborhood gathering spot where we can believe we’re not alone in our troubles, especially if we don’t have family to rely on. 

How about stories? During the Great Depression, lots of people managed to scrape together a nickel or two for a movie now and then, especially for glamorous, lighthearted escapes from reality such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flicks.  Books, music, dancing, drawings and interesting objects – the arts in general – brighten people up, too.

 And what about light and warmth? After all, it’s winter in half the world, and cold, dark days make the economy and life seem even crueler and more dangerous than they would in lush summertime.

Maybe some entrepreneurs out there (you? I?) will come up with new, creative, inexpensive products from these categories that revitalize people’s crushed spirits so magically they prove irresistible. And maybe if buyers feel helped, comforted and reassured, confidence and hope will return. 

Talk about doing well by doing good ….

Let the progress begin

Welcome to the real New Year’s Day - the Monday when we start another 12 months of whatever our business is … if we’re lucky. For a lot of people out there, there is no business to resume.

It feels like do-or-die time for the whole world. I have a gut feeling, though. I have a feeling that, before next Dec. 31,  we’ll see an explosion of creative enterprise as Americans and others around the globe focus with fire-glass intensity on the problems we face and and begin working to solve them.      

Maybe this willl be the year in which we finally see the surge of highly profitable green technologies and services that environmentalists have long predicted would help save both the planet and the economy. Perhaps we’ll see digital news media make the jump to hyperspace that turns them into the financially healthy replacements for dying newspapers we so need them to be. It’s even possible that we in the U.S. will watch our roads, bridges, water and power systems being rebuilt by thousands of workers getting decent wages and valuable experience while they regain their pride.

And maybe 2009 will be the year that some imaginative people solve our national health-care crisis, finding a way to keep costs down while guaranteeing thorough and proper care for every person who lives in our country.  

Clean solar and wind power. Clean and rigorously conserved water. Chemical-free, humane and environmentally responsible food production. A more efficient manufacturing and delivery system for vaccines. Better means of waste disposal on Earth and in space. A reinvention of public education involving creative learning and teachers who keep their jobs because they’re consistently good, not just tenured. 

We need smart people to think up ways of creating these things. They’re already out there – they just need imaginative leadership and an atmosphere of encouragement to get them going. To get us all going.

Maybe this will be the year. 

,