It would be fun to get business bloggers together. I really think it’s an interesting way to connect with customers or possible customers. Of course we have the connection through our shops, but it’s hard, especially this time of year to always find out what people think!
And it occurred to me that it's been a while since Irish bloggers met up in Dublin (Blog Awards I think?)...So, I'm wondering if people would be interested in a summer get together in August? It would be great to get business people out at this one and I'll also be hosting a visit from two US bloggers Gary and Lorianne between 13 and 23 August and I'm sure they'd like to hook up with some Irish counterparts. How about Saturday 19th August? with an open invitation to anyone who blogs, reads blogs, is interested in starting a blog to join us for a summer drink and a get together in Dublin city centre? Leave a message in the comments. Oh yea, I think it would be fabulous PR for those ice cream, champagne and other goodie companies to do shameless self promotion and product placing on the day :)
An Líonra Sóisialta (The Social Network), a series of 64 short episodes over 13 weeks, which aims to introduce the radio-listening, Irish-language community to the world of online social networking.
This is the first time that an Irish podcaster has received funding from the public sector - not to mention - an Irish language podcaster. With all the recent discussion in the Irish blog world about the demise of Rattlebag and the Mystery Train; the demise of the public service remit and the increase in "reality" broadcasting, this investment is money very well spent. Comhghairdeas a Chonn!
RTE 1 is re-broadcasting the True Lives documentary about Frankie Byrne - Ireland's legendary agony aunt - this evening at 10.25pm. I saw the programme when it was first broadcast and I urge you to tune in, it's an extraordinary documentary not alone about Frankie's life but as an insight into the Ireland of the 50s, 60s and 70s. I grew up listening to Dear Frankie on Radio Éireann (as it was at the time) and remember the down to earth advice dispensed by Frankie to husbands and wives throughout the country in an age devoid of Oprah,Dr Phil and agony aunt columns in magazines. If you want an insight into how we got here...then tune in.
When Adam Phillips' American publishers were planning a US edition of his book Going Sane, they insisted on giving it an upbeat subtitle. The idea drove him, if not insane, then to distraction. "The woman at the publishers said to me: 'How about Maps of Happiness.' I thought she was joking, so I said: 'How about Maps Against Happiness?' And she said: "I don't think so. Against is such a negative word.'
The proposed subtitle rankled because Phillips is against guidebooks to happiness. "A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn't it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all?" asks the psychoanalyst, closing his eyes as he does repeatedly during the interview when he wants to clinch a thought, and then leaning forward to put his head in his hands. "It's become a preoccupation because there's so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough and we'll all cheer up is preposterous.
Oh I wanted to clap and cheer when I read that. Philips is railing against the instant-fix, one-size-fits-all approach to being perfect, happy, sorted - call it what you will. I, like him, believe that you can only be happy if you are able to experience the darker side of life - I mean - how would you know what happiness was if you couldn't relate to not happy? And if we don't attend to not-happy then happy is merely a myth that can never be realised in real life. Consulting and coaching must attend to the "nots" in a meaningful way. Simply glossing over them won't work and the energy expended (particularly on change projects) will be wasted.
Is he saying suffering is necessary to the examined life? No: suffering is not essential. It's just unavoidable. All forms of sufferings are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them.
And on the current craze for books on happiness he has this to add:
I've looked at them. They seem to me to be the problem rather than the solution.
We've got to move out of seeing things in such stark polarities - Adams is merely saying that our ability to be happy, be fulfilled is as a direct result of our being able to handle happiness, unhappiness and all that comes in between. Life isn't one or the other - it's both.
It's like [Beckett's play] Endgame: 'We're on Earth. There's no cure for that.
Have people got ideas for a location for a bloggers' meet up on 19th August in Dublin? Previous outings have happened in the Market Bar and Keoghs and have generally started around 6pm. Leave suggestions in the comments and please pass this around..
Why is religious language so common in the world of business? I see people who are "Evangelists" for products and services; Boards go on "retreats"; I've heard of "breaking bread" and "communion" with clients and fellow workers; poor customer service operatives "confess" to their "sins"...Is it because I'm from a (predominantly) Catholic culture that this seems at little odd to me?
I've never met an Irish Evangelist (in a business sense anyway!), and the only retreats I can think of were those we went on at school in the hormonally charged years - much fuel for confession was generated! But what is going on here? Are we asking people to have "blind faith" in products and services? Are we suggesting that a charasmatic leader with an on target message will generate the right business environment for success? Help me out here!
The venue for the bloggers' meet up on 19th August will be the Market Bar just off George's Street in Dublin from 6pm onwards. I'll try and get a table on the first floor and I'll be accompanied by a couple of American bloggers Lori and Gary - so look out for us. Please come along if you're a blogger, a wannabe blogger, a reader - heck come along regardless of who you are :) It would be great to see some business bloggers out at this get together also. Looking forward to seeing you all there.
Thanks to all the bloggers who turned out for the meet up on Saturday in the Market Bar. It was great to see Dick, Dermod, Lorianne, Gary, Kevin, Hugh and Keith, Tom - (have I left anyone out??). Which Irish blogger was strutting his new svelte and bionic body around the place? Which other Irish blogger is a serious braniac? (how many As did you get in the Leaving again?). Sorry to see so few business bloggers about but perhaps we'll organise another get together in the winter months when the ice cream and champagne people can join us.
A new tale of friendship, loyalty, expanding waistlines and bad haircuts, told to the backdrop of eighties male pop duos. Not to be missed.
These are the people who brought you the hugely popular Scenes from a Watercooler.
Trousers or Pants runs until 9 September and will open at 59E59 in New York on 8 October.
Gawker has created a new way to explore the big apple - the New York Subway Smell Map - hover the mouse over your local station and find out if it smells of alcohol, body odour, perfume, food etc. I'll be in Manhattan from Friday next and I notice that my local subway station hasn't got an olfactory tag just yet - maybe I'll add mine before I leave? Union Square is particularly aromatic have to say...not quite what I experienced last time I paid a visit ...Andrew Taylor asks the really interesting question though:
"Will seeing other people's experiences allow us to engage differently with our environment?"
Every trip to New York begins in the same way - being overwhelmed by the assault of images and energy - not to mention battling jet lag! Even though I've been to New York several times, it's always familar and always new. In conversation with some Irish friends the other evening we began to explore the differences between Dublin and New York - after all, money is flowing in Ireland isn't it? We've modernised haven't we? We're rapidly becoming multi-cultural aren't we?
The difference between New York and Dublin boils down to the answer to this question "Is it possible?" the New York answer is always "yes" and the Dublin answer is invariably a variation on "no". Actually the Dublin answer will rarely be a direct "no" (the Irish language doesn't have a word for "no"). Even though there is a price tag attached to every NYC "yes" it's still possible to get stuff/anything done here. I wonder what it's like living in a society where (theoretically) anything is possible...it's only 3000 miles from my home town but it's a galaxy away in psychological terms.
Every now and then a blogger has a block. In fact, bloggers’ block must account for an enormous percentage of blogging posts…I’m currently in that phase myself. Since I got back from the US the muse has been absent and I’m curious about why.
I spent a lot of time reading blogs, pottering around in bookshops and watching TV news footage while I was in NYC. Being back in the sedate surroundings of Dublin is like coming down off some hallucinogenic. The personality driven hysterical “ultimate” solution focussed emphasis of much of what I observed, read and listened to really got under my skin. The dulcet and soothing tones of NPR presenters and now the BBC and RTE are a welcome respite.
I don’t have an ultimate solution to anything. In fact, I don’t believe in ultimate anythings – isn’t life a little richer and more sophisticated than that? I observed such a drive to create “syndromes” around the most ordinary experiences while I was in the US which naturally came with a range of “solutions”. Engaging with the media in most forms was an exercise in confidence eradication. If you thought you might have some kind of issue, well, 15 minutes in front of TV or reading a paper would convince you that you had more than an issue – you had a complex and potentially life threatening situation which needed immediate attention. How do you withstand that constant drip, drip nausea inducing stuff? It’s not possible in a city like New York to “switch off”…advertising is everywhere…my trip to DC was amazing because the streets are devoid of advertising hoardings, neon lights and the assault of images that are everyday realities in New York.
So the blog is sitting here, staring at me, wanting me to come up with 10 tips for the ultimate solution to a syndrome you didn’t know you had until I invented it 15 minutes ago and I can’t do it..maybe someone can offer me ten tips for moving out of my current predicament.
I adore New York…but really…how do you keep your head together in a place where so much of what you see and hear in public spaces reinforces the negative (albeit with “solutions” at a cost, to remedy it)…I’m genuinely curious.
Why are so few Irish arts organisations blogging? Apart from Film Base and some individual artists I can't think of another Irish arts organisation that's talking to its audience base via a blog. What better way to generate interest and an audience in a company's work than to blog? Here are ten things I would like to see Irish arts organisations doing in the service of audience building and artist development
1. Release podcasts interviews with the cast or author of new plays
3. Start a discussion about contemporary art in advance of exhibitions as a gateway for newcomers to the artform
4. Invite audience members to guest blog and review your work
5. Invite readers to create their own work – poetry, prose, photography in response to a new production or presentation
6. Allow audiences into the art making process with regular posts about the rehearsal process from the perspective of various members of the company e.g. designer and choreographer etc
7. Use blogs as archives so that audiences can check out the history of the company and its relationship with people who see the work
8. Create word of mouth on a performance by asking readers the only marketing question that matters “would you recommend this to a friend?”
9. Use the virtual space as a gallery or curatorial space for artists – giving readers a front row seat for the show
10. Ask readers how they want to engage with your work – online discussions with artists? Advance notice of booking options? Use the medium as an idea generation space
Cultural problems are almost never “out there;” they are almost always “in here.” If we all focus on the part of the Culture over which we have control – our own behaviors – the rest will tend to take care of itself.
Imagine what the world of work would be like if instead of looking externally, we focussed on our own contribution to the successes and challenges in the workplace?
“In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present.”
Gregory Colbert, Creator of Ashes and Snow
Christmas is a season of over indulgence and to mark the occasion, I've been over-indulging in the feast of video podcasts from the TED Conference - a once a year gathering of some of the brightest and creative people on the planet. The podacasts are an extraordinary collection of ideas, sensibilities, creativity and down right good viewing. But one of the most amazing is that of artist Gregory Colbert whose Ashes and Snow Project
is an ongoing project that weaves together photographic works, 35mm films, art installations and a novel in letters. With profound patience and an unswerving commitment to the expressive and artistic nature of animals, he has captured extraordinary interactions between humans and animals. His 21st-century bestiary includes more than 40 totemic species from around the world. Since he began creating his singular work of Ashes and Snow, Colbert has mounted more than 30 expeditions to locations such as India, Egypt, Burma, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Antarctica, the Azores and Borneo.
I wasn't aware of his work prior to coming across him at TED and the images in this film are some of the most beautiful I've ever encountered. So if over-indulgence at this time of the year can yield this kind of quality then I'm all for the festive season. See what you think (and while you're at it, check out the TED blog for more goodies.
Stuart is the latest innovation from the art collecter Charles Saatchi in the UK. It's a virtual gallery open to Student Artists wishing to upload images of their work for viewing and sales. While nothing can compare with the experience of seeing art in it's natural (?) environment (for digital artists the cyber space may in fact be the natural environment) - there is much to be said for a virtual space that allows one to wander through the imagery in the comfort of one's own home - hopefully leading to enough curiosity to explore the work in real time and in real life.
The site has a blog, gallery, social networking gizmos (i.e. a MySpace feel in terms of adding "friends" and a chat area etc), listings and a vast array of visual artists from around the globe sharing images, engaging in discussions and (hopefully) selling their work. It seems straightforward enough in terms of signing up. It looks like a fairly substantial site and I'm curious to know how it's serviced, used and the costs involved in running it. I frequently hear artists asking for this kind of environment as a showcase/networking tool but I've rarely seen costings or useage data to see whether it works in practice so I'll be watching developments there closely to see if it turns out to be the marketplace that artists are expecting.
160 people answered that question and their answers can be found here. I was particularly taken with Paul Saffo's (Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University) response in which he says that Humankind Is Particularly Good At Muddling:
I am a short-term pessimist because the Millennium is still clouding our collective thinking and may yet inspire the addled few to try something truly stupid, like an act of mega-terror or a nuclear exchange between nations. But I am a long-term optimist because the influence of the Millennium is already beginning to fade. We will return to our moderate senses as the current uncertainties settle into a comprehensible new order. I am an unshakable optimist because in its broadest strokes, the future will be what the future has always been, a mix of challenges, marvels and endless surprise. We will do what we have always done and muddle our collective way through. Humankind is particularly good at muddling, and that is what makes me most optimistic of all.
Other contributors include:
BRIAN ENO
Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist And Now The Good News
Which brings me to my main reason for optimism: the ever-accelerating empowerment of people. The world is on the move, communicating and connecting and coalescing into influential blocks which will move power away from national governments with their short time horizons and out into vaguer, more global consensual groups. Something like real democracy (and a fair amount of interim chaos) could be on the horizon.
The Internet is catalyzing knowledge, innovation and social change, and, in manifestations such as Wikipedia, proving that there are other models of social and cultural evolution: that you don't need centralised top-down control to produce intelligent results.
Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes and misdemeanors, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration, and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are statistically rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be, and widely condemned when they do occur.
MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow We Are Asking And Answering
I am optimistic for the simple reason that given the incredible odds against the existence of brains that can ask such questions, of laptops on which to answer them, and so on — here we are, asking and answering!
It's a treasure trove of wonderful stuff (hat tip TED Blog) and got me wondering just what I'm optimistic about in 2007. How about you?
Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world
I've become such a lurker over at Post Secret. It's a community arts project where people mail in a secret on a home made postcard to the author. Some of the images and sentiments are extraordinary. Coming, as I do, from a predominantly Catholic country, and as a therapist, the confessional nature of both is familiar to me but there’s something so powerful in the visual representation of unmentionables...more powerful than words alone, more creative than confession and absolution.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
Edit: Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander will be at the Burren Leadership Forum on 21 and 22 July 2007.
Saturday’s New York Times (subscription required) carries a story about the 102 year-old Louis Padnos Iron and Metal Company a family owned business who have come up with their own unique solution to the sucession challenge.
The problem for the Padnoses is an age gap. Third-generation members who run the scrap metal company, which employs about 400 people and has annual sales of about $300 million, are in their 50s. They want to work less. But the fourth-generation Padnoses who might someday want to run the place are still only in their teens.
The company hired a philosophy professor to help them
groom six hired managers to become, well, more Padnos-like.
The article goes on to outline the differences between the founding family (politically liberal, middle class and Jewish) and the managers (conservative, working class and from Protestant backgrounds) and the policy adopted by the Padnoses to encourage the new managers to be “part of the family”
The managers were assigned readings of Thoreau, Sophocles and a recent essay on Freud. They spent a long weekend in Chicago seeing plays, touring exhibitions of art and architecture and eating at fancy restaurants. And in recent weeks they have debated how to give away $40,000 of the Padnoses’ money, an exercise in becoming philanthropists.
The article also goes on to say that although the managers are encouraged to think more like the family they are also denied some of the financial information that would give them more of the family’s power and this is where it becomes really interesting from my perspective.
Family businesses are complex places – you can’t avoid the personal because, well family is personal. On one level this looks like a sensible and somewhat philanthropic gesture on the part of the Padnoses on another it could be a way of them never letting go of the family’s way of doing business. How can you act like an owner if you are not an owner? How can you take the responsibility if you’re not given the authority? Family businesses are fascinating places because the sometimes underlying personal relationships that inform all businesses are much more visible - particularly those that affect competition and leadership. It will be interesting to see what happens in this company when the elder generation have truly moved on and that teenage generation are ready to take over..
One of my favorite shows on TV is called "Intervention" on A&E, which is about the struggles of people dealing with addiction. On the show, families stage interventions with the addicted member of the family in order to get them to seek help and change their ways. One of the principles that is encouraged is not only that the person is willing to change and get help, the family needs to come together in order for the change to work.
I haven't seen this particular programme on this side of the pond but am familiar with the concept - Travis applies the thinking to organisational change processes and suggests that there needs to be a healthy "family" and a desire for change if this process is to work effectively in organisations. He goes on to say:
The dynamic of the workplace, whether it be a team, group, division, or whole organization, has to be in a healthy state for the organization to undergo serious and permanent organization change. It is almost a paradox that in order for change to be successful, there must be some level of stability in terms of relationships, communication and culture before the instability of change takes place.
This got me thinking about the way in which interventionists are used - the 3Cs Counsellors, Consultants and Coaches. Very often (not always) the 3Cs are called in when an individual is perceived to be "unhealthy"...the 3Cs are marshalled in the service of keeping the organisation healthy by splitting off the unhealthy individual to be made more healthy externally and reimported once s/he is sorted out. To take Travis's example above (and addiction is a great example of a systemic approach) there are other questions to be asked about what work the individual does on behalf of the system and how the system itself contributes to and informs how the individual behaves within it. Increasingly I am working with client organisations to feed back into the system the dynamics that emerge within the coaching relationship and this is having significant impacts. The contract with the individual respects the content of the discussion but also makes space for the overall themes to be explored in the context of the whole system and as such is fed back as organisational intelligence.
It is possible to have a PowerPoint free conference
and now I'm wondering if I should pay attention to the conference proceedings or adopt a more post modern approach and read the posts of bloggers who are reporting on the proceedings....(Unlike AntonyMayfield I haven't yet interrupted proceedings with my loud typing.
PS: This is the scariest and most impressive conference I've ever been to in terms of punctuality. Every single session (including breaks and lunch) has started and ended on time..Brilliant!
**Update** Oh the mortification ... somewhere during the day my mobile phone has gone missing..of all the places on the planet to lose one's mobile...a media conference..
Yesterday I attended a workshop on blogging and podcasting organised by Theatre Forum and presented by Susan Hallam. I was there with a couple of hats on – for a start I was the only blogger in the room and as you know, I’m an advocate of blogging for the arts sector. I have written before about the minimal activity in this area for this sector in Ireland but I was really there for selfish reasons to learn a bit about podcasting. The podcasting section was brief and to the point and I got some useful starter material to think about.
The workshop was aimed at Ireland’s performing arts companies and was a basic introduction to the nuts and bolts of getting up and running with blogs and podcasting. Hallam is an advocate of Blogger as a publishing platform because of its integration with Google (makes a lot of sense in terms of SEO) but less sense when one of our main broadband providers can simply drop the connection (as Twenty Major discovered recently). Many of the people in attendance were very new to the whole area of blogging and seemed to get great stuff out of it.
However – I was surprised at Hallam’s stance on commenting.
Hallam doesn’t believe in allowing comments on her own blog (apparently the comments were from competitors critical of her work) – and she disagreed with me that commenting on other people’s blogs should be a part of your blogging strategy. I was genuinely surprised by that stance. Blogs are conversational media and conversations involve at least two people. If you don’t allow comments on your own blog and you don’t deem it to be important to comment on someone else's then the conversation on your own space is a monologue, not a dialogue - and if you're not reading other blogs you won't even know if the conversation has moved. Far too many businesses in my view simply use the blogging platform to update static websites with press release material under the guise of blogging. Hallam’s view of conversation seemed to fall into two categories – the “talk amongst yourselves” forum type of conversation where audience/customers/users discuss their views on a forum of their own - separate and distinct from the originator of the work - or the monologue variation described above.
I’m all for a third way
• One which leaves room for blogs to be informed and influenced by what readers think.
• One that is open to the possibility that our readers and users have an intelligence that’s useful for us in conceiving work.
• One that suggests that the audience is a critical part of the creative process and that conversation is a key way of opening up that creativity in the service of great art.
• One that sugests that our readers are peers, not only purchasers of a product
• One that decides to take on and engage with critical responses to art in a way that can lead to richer conversations about this sector.
Businesses are made smarter by receiving the kind of direct, candid feedback that focus groups and market research surveys rarely succeed in providing
or Bill Gates (courtesy of Tom Raftery)
Another big phenomenon is building communities around Web sites, around products. And virtually every company ought to have on their Web site the ability for their customers, their suppliers, various people, to interact and their employees to see the dialogue taking place there and jump in and talk to them and help them.
Art and culture are never created in a vacuum. The social architecture of the sector is key to its success – not only the “bums on seats” argument (which is such a reductive way of quantifying this community) but the qualitative experience of having access to creators and consumers in equal measure.
Capitalising on the various communities of interest would seem to me to be an enormously important part of that discussion – but then again, maybe some organisations aren’t interested in the immediacy of that conversation?
Of the 20 odd people who were in the room yesterday I think many will go away and assume that setting up a blog is a smart marketing strategy (and they would be right), but I think they may miss the other ways in which blogging makes sense for arts and cultural organisations – as genuine tools for connecting with audiences as active contributors to a community of interest, as peers and as co-collaborators. In an age when most arts organisations are being asked to invest time and resources in “audience development” (oh how I hate that term) blogging is one of the most useful (and one of the the cheapest) mechanisms for addressing that issue. The only real marketing question that matters is - "would you recommend this to a friend?" Arts organisations don't need to sell tickets they need to convert evangelists who will gladly spread word of mouth about their work. Waiting for "them" to come to "us" has proved to be a limited strategy in the world of arts presentation - more and more organisations have outreach and education programmes to connect with new communities of artists and audiences - commenting fulfills the same function in the blog world. You can't passively wait for someone to discover what you're about - you have to engage in a bit of your own outreach by entering into other people's communities and making your presence felt.
I’m all for marketing but if you don't want to be part of a conversation – why use conversational media?
Disclaimer: I have written an article for Poetry Ireland on blogging for the arts community which will be published in their upcoming newsletter.
I attended a Tribeca Talks panel discussion this week on Cinema 2.0: Me, Myself and iPod – essentially a discussion on the impact of social media on the production of art (notably cinema and literature). The line up of panellists included
and moderator Georg Szalai (NY bureau chief and business editor at The Hollywood Reporter)
There were a lot of pertinent points raised about the relationship between the old, the new and the vast space in between.
I can’t do justice to the 90 minute discussion (and subsequent questions and answers) but I did capture a few points which I think it’s worth mentioning here – particularly in the context of Irish arts and cultural organisations – some of whom are out there using social media, many others of whom are ambivalent about the impact on the production of their artistic artefact.
The panellists addressed the issue of giving work away for free, particularly if you’re struggling to make a living in the first place. Kathleen Grace and her crew have created a soap opera about Williamsburg which is viewable free and online. They decided to forget about pitching to the studios at the outset and are hoping that it will be picked up (before they drown in credit card debt I imagine). It’s given them a direct outlet for the creation of their art and an instant audience for the work.
Novelist Jonathan Lentham created The Promiscious Materials Project which was specifically designed to distribute his work (at the cost of $1).
I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling.
Lentham described his online activity as an “analogue gesture in a digital cloak” because he is very clear that he creates the artefact and then allows it to be discussed, modified, mashed-up etc once that creative act has taken place.
Leadbetter posted 11 chapters of his book online and sought feedback and comments – he is incorporating some of those into the final draft and will credit those whose work he includes.
The panellists were in general agreement that creativity is a collaboration, and while the origination of the artefact (book, sculpture, video etc) may be the work of one person – the conversation that surrounds it (both before and after) is the way of entwining both spaces and expanding on the relationship between artist and community.
There was a lot of discussion about the future of the business of social media, particularly from Futurist Jerry Paffendorf (whom I could have listened to all evening and who focusses on ROA Return on Awesome rather than ROI..) on how online worlds are evolving and changing (virtual worlds are increasingly “opt in” and the mantra is “Don’t have sex with Google”) and and notably Brent Weinstein who heads up a division at United Talent Agency that specifically handles artists working in/with new media. There is money to be made and business models are evolving but Paffendorf described it well when he said
The currency we are using doesn’t know how to quantify what we are making
I really enjoyed the discussion, it got my own creative juices flowing and I came away with the following which I think are going to be pertinent issues for Irish arts and cultural organisations.
1 There’s no going back. An active, updated, interactive online presence is a must if you are a creative and it’s about driving traffic to where you will get paid even if in the short term it’s unlikely that you are making money.
2 Circling the wagons and adopting a defensive approach to creativity is self defeating. In the old days (6 months ago as Weinstein suggested) retaining and restraining may have worked – in this new era of social media community is where it’s at.
3 As one producer (in the Q & A) described it - people are in control of their ipod screens, their computer screens, their TV screens and ultimately their cinema screens. This model of drag and drop cultural consumption is only going to increase and impact on all other areas of media/cultural production. If creatives aren’t driving that traffic then they’re going to get stuck in a traffic jam that’s going nowhere fast.
4 There are no residuals on the internet so new ways of creating work and more importantly commissioning opportunities for this medium are going to have to evolve, particularly in countries like Ireland where we have a grant-aid culture.
5 Commerce, community and creativity co-exist in an internet age – the challenge for many creatives is how to make that relationship work for them.
The Tribeca Film Festival broadcasts a daily webcast on Youtube
September 2005, quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife’s guarded blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter. He set a quixotic goal for himself: for the next year, he would write and record a song each week, posting each one to his blog
The piece goes on to say that
More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.
Congratulations to the Arts Council of Ireland for being the first of the National Cultural Institutions to install an RSS feed on its re-designed website. The feed doesn't appear to be working at present but hopefully that's a minor technical hitch. I hope it's not going to be too long before the rest of the members of the CNCI follow suit - some of the websites of these major institutions are very poorly designed and I gave up trying to navigate through the National Library's site in an effort to find out more about their series of talks (I saw a printed brochure about them) but there's nothing on the site for an interested ticket buyer or if there is, it's buried somewhere very secret. Look instead at the New York Public Library's site with 8 different feeds for various areas of its activities...A quick scan of many of the websites of smaller Irish arts and cultural organisations reveals the same thing ... all this great activity going on, in secret, buried in the bowels of dusty websites ... let's not make it so difficult for interested people to spend their money on what you have to offer!
And for those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about here's a brilliant explanation of RSS in Simple English from Common Craft.
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.
The way you enter an organisation has a big impact on how you perceive the place you work. The recruitment process (really part of staff induction) creates a range of expectations and if these expectations are unmet a subtle erosion of trust occurs—not what you want on day 1. A common view of staff induction is that it all happens the day you start and mostly over within a week. A typical induction involves being taken around the floor by you manager to meet your new colleagues and shown the places to eat, then the new employee sits through a session with a group of other new starters where senior people tell what they think you should know—strategy, policies, who's who in the zoo. Invariably there is too much information to take in on day 1.
That's from a great post from Shawn over at Anecdote and he goes on to outline a model of staff induction and learning that might roll out over a year. At the heart of his post is the idea that induction is a learning process - learning how to enter, how to belong, how to reflect on the learning and how to pass it on to someone else entering. It's a balance between formal and informal learning and also creating spaces for people to share their stories and experiences of belonging.
I think this is so important because very often people like me are called in to work with people about not belonging - perhaps it's because a team isn't functioning as well as it might; or there's a disjoin between theory and practice or someone isn't "fitting in" in all the creative ways that we don't "fit in". Shawn's model is an ongoing one where reflection is a critical part of creating the active story of belonging. I wonder what might happen if spaces were created to tell stories of belonging instead of creating mechanisms for helping people fit in?
Today's workshop on Blogging, Podcasting and the Arts hosted by Poetry Ireland and delivered by myself and Conn was great fun. There were nearly 40 people in attendance in the theatre at the College of Surgeons who waited patiently while every piece of technology available failed to work for us in the 30 minutes proceeding the event. All of the sites we wanted to use were initially blocked by the college's firewall and when we got them up and running the projector died, then we lost internet access again and finally, 15 minutes later than scheduled, we were up and running.
Conn and I did a whirlwind introduction to what's a blog? and what's a podcast?; where you can find them and more to the point demonstrated the ways in which artists and arts organisations are embracing these platforms for both the production and promotion of work. I also took the opportunity to introduce TED and used Rives' If I Controlled the Internet as my opening salvo.
We had a number of bloggers in attendance including Omani, Dermod (who's review of the Crucible at the Abbey is number 1 in Google right now); ; Bernie McAdam; Deirdre Eustace (who is looking for some help to move to wordpress so if anyone is inclined - please drop her a line); Eoin Purcell (and there were others - so if you were in attendance today please leave a comment and I'll include a link to your blog here).
Lots of interesting issues came up including the challenges of how to fund artists wishing to create and present new work using these platforms; how publishing online impacts (positively and negatively) on offline book and journal publishing and how bloggers can spread word of mouth about your work if you're not within the reach of the Irish Times. I think if Conn and I tried to do anything it was to instil a sense of confidence in people to give stuff away.because what goes around comes around.
The full list of sites and resources we used (and a few more besides) are listed on this page and I'm looking forward to progressing many of the topics raised in future workshops.
This was the first time Conn and I had presented together. We designed the session via email and over the phone and several people said to me that we looked as though we had been doing this for ages (is that a good thing?). I guess we know each other's work and interests from blogging and I'm thrilled that translated into "real" life this morning. I'm looking forward to catching up with what other bloggers made of the day and if there are suggestions, comments or ideas for future workshops please do get in touch!
I was delighted to attend an event in Dun Laoghaire last night where Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council launched their first published arts strategy. I have to declare an interest here as I worked with the arts office to design and manage the consultation process that informed the shape of the strategy.It's always satisfying to see a final document after a long and complex consultation process, particularly in this case as great care has gone into the design of the plan which includes a series of commissioned photographs by Ros Kavanagh. I was really impressed by the way in which the arts officer Sharon Murphy acknowledged the work of previous staff of the arts office by naming them and inviting others to contribute written material to the documentation - she placed the current plan in a context that is wider and richer than the period of time that she has been in post at the local authority. I am also delighted that Sharon has become the most recent recipient of the Jerome Hynes Fellowship and will take up her role as Clore Fellow from September onwards.
So much of the work we do as consultants is "confidential" and does not result in public documents which can make it challenging to talk about the work with new and potential clients in the absence of something "tangible". That's one of the reasons I started a blog and increasingly I am bumping into people who are reading even if they are not commenting. I'm wondering how other consultants find this issue of the absence of publicly available "evidence" of their work?
I will post a link to the pdf of the plan once it has been uploaded to the DLR site
Pilobolus began as an experiment among three guys and one puzzled professor in a Dartmouth dance class back in 1970. It was survival of the giddiest, as the three non-dancers goofed around with the material they'd been given -- themselves -- and got entangled in science-inspired poses (think: "soft-belly protoplasmic thing") and movements. From these humble, biological beginnings has emerged an innovative, unlikely and almost-uncategorizable dance company that combines athleticism, grace and humor with a profound sense of unity.
Have a look at this 14 minute performance from Pilobolus (where else but at TED 2005). The piece is called Symbiosis and like so many of the arts and cultural events at this conference it blends extraordinary technical skill with a deep emotional impact. I'm going to choose a number of my favourite arts/cultural events from TED to publish here over the next few weeks but for now, enjoy.
Mmm I think there may be a problem with that embedded video - here's a link to the TED site where you can see the video.
In recent years, a handful of chefs and restaurateurs have invoked intellectual property concepts, including trademarks, patents and trade dress — the distinctive look and feel of a business — to defend their restaurants, their techniques and even their recipes, but most have stopped short of a courtroom. The Pearl Oyster Bar suit may be the most aggressive use of those concepts by the owner of a small restaurant. Some legal experts believe the number of cases will grow as chefs begin to think more like chief executives.
Fascinating article in today's New York Times (Free registration required) from Pete Wells about an impending law suit amongst the culinary classes in the big apple. Chef Rebecca Charles is suing Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo and her sous-chef at Pearl for six years for breech of intellectual copyright. She claims that McFarland's new restaurant copies "each and every element” of her eatery and it's going to court.
What makes this case so interesting is that it appears there's nowhere safe from litigation these days. The piece claims that chef's are taking this very seriously and one ..
has applied for patents on a number of his culinary inventions, like a method for printing pictures of food on flavored, edible paper. Mr. Cantu also makes his cooks sign a nondisclosure agreement before they so much as boil water at Moto, his restaurant in Chicago.
If lawyers are now in the kitchen can it be long before they're in the rehearsal room, the gallery or the theatre as well?
So, what do you do? If creativity plays a big role in your life, it’s probably not an easy question to answer. If you work in the creative industries, it’s probably even harder. Reworking concepts,
information, ideas and knowledge for a living often doesn’t lend itself to a job title that adequately explains what you do. If you work in the creative industries, the chances are you work for yourself, for a small organisation or for a small team in a big organisation. You’re probably working in a close network of collaborators and associates. You probably find yourself working on several different things at the same time, and many of those activities are often one-offs not to be repeated. Your job makes sense to people you work with but explaining it to people at parties becomes almost like relaying a joke that you ‘really had to be there’ to get.
or how about this?
Over the last ten years public policy has paid considerable attention to supporting creativity through the provision of education and skills, a copyright framework, business and innovation support,public agencies and the funding of work. But among employers, entrants and people working in the creative industries many of these interventions are resulting in confusion, indifference and, in some cases, irritation. Why? The aggregate result of jobs that are hard to
understand is a sector that is hard to understand, and therefore hard to support.
These are quotes from the new Demos publication So What Do You Do? available for download at their site. I've only just skimmed the document and am looking forward to a more thorough read over the next week or so but so far I'm impressed with their thinking on how creativity can be resourced through increased access to resources, spaces and meeting places and most interestingly stories of how this community actually works in practice, not in theory.
I'm hoping it may also help me answer that age old chestnut "what do you do" - I really need an elevator pitch!
should, for the most part, forget about issues, policies, even facts, and instead focus on feelings.
In an article in yesterday's New York Times (free subscription required) Westen is described as wanting more passion in politics - Bill Clinton thinks it's great so it won't be long before the rest of the Democrats row in behind establishing their USP as the party that's emotionally intelligent. The New York Times piece goes on to outline the rational and scientific justification for attending to emotion in political life which is awfully familiar if you're aware of the EI industry. For the record I'm not a fan of EI - while it may be a useful tool to begin a conversation about emotion in organisations it's still a rational instrument for the control of feelings and largely designed to manage and hide "negative" emotion. Cognitising emotion is reason not feeling and if we don't pay attention to how feelings (and their public performance as emotion) are generated in systems then we get more "irrational" behaviour and less intelligence about what's really going on. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments so feelings are valid intelligence in their own right and not experiences that should be considered toxic, dangerous or 'out of control'.
We also need to be aware that reason and feeling are inter-related and not separate domains that exist in parallel universes...but maybe I'm getting too emotional about this stuff?
Ernie is a 37 year old single male (?) muppet with borderline intellectual functioning (vs. ADD?) who presents with a chief complaint of a "silly squeek" when he plays the saxophone.
The patient is self-referred to Mr. Hoots, a wise psychotherapist & jazz musician, with a full practice (a "busy bird") who is experienced in a number of psychotherapeutic modalities.
After a brief period of observation, Mr. Hoots identifies the source of the squeek: Ernie is holding his support rubber duck while trying to play the saxophone. Mr. Hoots points out this maladaptive behavior pattern to Ernie and identifies corrective measure for him ("put down the duckie"). Despite repeated behavioral directives, Ernie is not able to follow through with Mr. Hoots' treatment recommendations and the issue of compliance is raised. Frustrated, Mr. Hoots uses self-disclosure as a psychotherapeutic maneuver, telling Ernie, "I've learned a thing or two, through years of playing in a band, it's hard to play a saxophone with something in your hand!"
Ernie remains resistant to Mr. Hoots' interventions. In the video rendition of the psychotherapy, during the Put Down The Duckie refrains, Ernie is shown to be participating in group psychotherapy with a number of celebrities (Madeline Kahn, Danny DeVito, Paul Simon, Wynton Marsalis, & Jeremy Irons) who all instruct and encourage Ernie to Put Down The Duckie while modeling the appropriate behavior of playing their instruments without a squeeky support animal.
Acknowledging the failure of these behavioral interventions, Mr. Hoots turns to a more psychodynamic understanding of Ernie's persistant dysfunctional behavior. Addressing the separation anxiety which prevents Ernie from parting with his duckie, Mr. Hoots reassures Ernie that he does not need to permanently part from his duckie, and adding a cognitive component, he takes Ernie through stages of imagining progressively more difficult forms of seperation ranging from putting the duckie in his pocket, to sending him off on a train, and finally to flying duckie off on a rocket! With his internal conflicts identified, his fears exposed, rehearsed, and allayed, Ernie is at last able to Put Down the Duckie in what is truly a successful psychotherapy.
Arguing for the value of the arts is a full time, headache inducing activity that most arts organisations and policy makers know only too well. Unfortunately, many of the indicators reached for are quantitative and economic, making the intrinsic value of the arts for their own sake more difficult to articulate. Liverpool is hosting the European City of Culture title in 2006 and there's an interesting project under way there to broaden out the indicators for precisely this measurement exercise.
Impacts 08 – The Liverpool Model, is a joint research initiative of the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University, which will evaluate the social, cultural, economic and environmental effects of Liverpool’s hosting the European Capital of Culture title in 2008. The research programme, commissioned by Liverpool City Council, will examine the progress and impact of this experience on the city and its people.
This is a five year study organised around "indicator clusters" which include:
* Economic Impacts and Processes
* The City's Cultural System
* Cultural Access and Participation
* Identity, Image and Place
* Physical Infrastructure and Sustainability of the City
* The Philosophy and Management of the Process
More details about the research framework are available here. This is going to be a very interesting project to watch and I hope that it will go some way to offering a more creative framework in which to have conversations about why the arts matter and how we demonstrate more effectively (in a qualitative way) that they do.
The Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar is hosting a weekend of workshops, discussions and screenings on 28 and 29 July entitled Toys on Film. I'll be chairing a panel discussion on Sunday 29th July between 1 and 2pm at the IFI exploring 21st Century Toys – play or dismay?
How does your child play today? As Internet, mobile phone, computer games replace more conventional toys, what might be the long-term effects of such technology-driven play?
Leading representatives from Internet safety, film distribution, classification and parents’ organisations will be present to discuss this question and issues relating to contemporary toys and film.
What an impressive line up of panellists don't you think? Tickets are free (but do book in advance) and if you need further information call the education office at the IFI on 01 679 3477 or contact the booking office. You can always stay around to see Toy Story 2 which will screen after our discussion!
The slam poet/tech artist/paper sculptorRives does eight minutes of lyrical origami, folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours: 4 o'clock in the morning. This elusive hour, both very late and very early, appears often in art and literature as a way to describe the most extreme states of affairs. Rives -- aided by a nimble mind and extensive online research -- reveals 4 a.m. as an iconic moment, drawing hilarious historical connections. (From TED).
I wonder about the state of Irish arts criticism. More often than not the critics begin by telling us how disappointed they are that the show they are about to review isn't the show they want to review so they'll settle for what's in front of them (the sigh is almost audible) and off they go. It's still difficult to find an online listings portal for cultural events in Dublin that includes all art form areas and up until now online reviews were fairly jaded - that is until Dermod Moore decided to put pen to paper and start reviewing theatre in Dublin. Dermod is a journalist with Hot Press and a blogger and he's been attending Dublin theatre events (and a notable gig starring Barbra Streisand), paying for his own tickets and writing some of the most intelligent and informed reviews I've read in quite some time. (His reviews of the shows at the Abbey are top of the Google rankings).I hope the publicity people in Irish cultural venues start paying more attention to Dermod and his ilk, recognising that the power of the blog can be a great marketing and information tool for their events - if word of mouth is what sells a show then shouldn't all arts organisations be courting bloggers?
Another fine TED talk - this time from Charles Ledbetter. I heard Ledbetter speak at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in the year about creative collaboration. There are so many interesting ideas in here for any organisation with consumers, customers or audiences...like - how do you organise without organisations? What do you do when your consumers, customers or audiences know more about what you do than you do? And of course...the advent of the pro-am. Interesting stuff
One incident that’s stuck in my mind was an interview I had 24 years ago for a financial consultancy. The interviewer talked about money, about wealth, about owning yachts.
Then he began to talk about the losers, the [sorry, but I’m quoting] c**** who didn’t recognise money and its importance, that in five years you could walk away, that you could have other people doing the work for you. That the world had two kind of people - people like him and the “stupid c****” who didn’t understand. He went on and on. It was like talking to low-end devil.
Finally, he let me get a word in. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m one of the c****.” And I walked out. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life.
At an individual level, each of us needs to do the same. I have something of an email habit, clicking "refresh" on my inbox like a rat in a Skinner Box - but I don't have a PDA/Blackberry (which is a bit like a meth addict proudly claiming not to touch heroin). I have decided I need to have one email-free day a week. The computer will stay off*.
We also need to examine the relationships that are mediated through these technologies. Are we driving people crazy with our behaviour? How do we manage ourselves to get the best out of our interactions with others? For some of us, this might be too painful. Best get back to hitting them with emails/txts/IMs I guess - that'll learn 'em.
I've just started to read The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld (more about why later in the month) suffice to say it has one of the best opening sections of anything I've read recently.
There is no mystery to happiness.
Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.
But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
inspired by Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to America, accompanied by protégé and rival Carl Jung. When a wealthy young debutante is discovered bound, whipped and strangled in a luxurious apartment overlooking the city, and another society beauty narrowly escapes the same fate, the mayor of New York calls upon Freud to use his revolutionary new ideas to help the surviving victim recover her memory of the attack, and solve the crime. But nothing about the attacks - or about the surviving victim, Nora - is quite as it seems. And there are those in very high places determined to stop the truth coming out, and Freud's startling theories taking root on American soil.
Psychoanalysis rarely takes things at face value so I'm sure Freud would have appreciated the many promotional pieces for the book - award winning works of fiction in their own right. Freud is not a central character, he has nothing to do with solving a murder (the 'killer' confesses); and the interchanges between him, Jung, Firenze and other are interesting diversions but hardly central to the plot of a murder mystery.
As I mentioned here the book has a brilliant series of opening paragraphs but unfortunately it's all rather disappointing from then on. The strength of the book is its attention to detail. The descriptions of turn of the century New York are very evocative and lovingly written. The weakness of the book is also its attention to detail it’s generally over researched, over written, too clever for its own good and could use losing at least 100 pages. There are three stories going on. The murder (or is it?); the solving of the case and an attempt to draw together the areas of expertise of the author – psychoanalysis and Shakespeare.
The novel attempts to gather many of Freud's core ideas and use them as a way of developing and driving the plot. I didn't think it worked. The dinner party scene where Freud gets to have his dilemma about what women really want answered is but one nod to the psychoanalytically inclined reader but again, hardly important in the greater scheme of things. The book is far too contrived for me and I didn't know whether this was a covert lecture on psychoanalysis or a poor murder mystery in need of a credibility makeover. I read the book in three sittings and with over 40 characters I found it hard to keep up with who was talking about what (anyone who reads this a chapter at a time and keeps up with the plot gets my admiration that's for sure) and by the end of it all I didn't really care - I had lost sympathy for the characters and connection with the plot.
Yes, psychoanalysis gets a look in as an 'interpretation' of something (the 'victim' Nora is in fact based on Freud's famous case of Dora); Hamlet's procrastination is given a psychoanalytic makeover and Freud's Oedipus complex is revised so, we have an interpretation of two philosophical and psychological murders. Confused yet? Well join the club - I found the latter two interpretations interesting (and credible) but can't say more because it would ruin one of the more curious moments in the novel.
It's marginally better written than the DaVinci Code but in the same territory in its mixing of fact and fiction and the text reads more like a film script (I'm sure it's already in development) but it's too academic – The author includes an epilogue outlining the research that went to making sure so much of the book is accurate. I've seen several interviews where he talks about the amount of 'fact checking' that went into it. It's a novel isn't it? Would it matter if he took liberties with the 'truth'? I hardly think so. I have an interest in psychoanalysis so that's what kept me reading - I wonder how it reads to someone with no interest or knowledge of the area? One blogger I know said this about it:
That scene under the river made a total farce of the book, which up till then had an interesting take on New York society, Freudian/Jungian theory, sadomasochism, sexual innocence and perversion. After the river scene we were expected to believe the most outrageous stuff that not even a panel of big brother residents could swallow without incredulity.
But Freud gets the last laugh because the author is the
But then again, that's what you get when you search for meaning instead of being happy with what's sitting in front of you!
Tune in and add your own views to the conversation, I'll post the link to the podcast as soon as it's on the Newstalk website.
Update: I see a fictional meeting between Henry James and Sigmund Freud forms the basis for another book Lions at Lamb House by Edwin M. Yoder Jr. I wonder why Mr Freud is making guest appearances? What does that tell us about the state of psychoanalysis these days?
I'd almost given up trying to read the Irish Times online because of the amount of advertising busyness (particularly the flash stuff) you have to wade through to get to the text. So I've become a big fan of Adblock Plus the lovely application that gets rid of advertising noise on websites. Have a look at the difference between the Irish Times home page without Adblock Plus and then with it - almost makes reading the paper online a possibility again doesn't it? I realise that free content sites have to make a living with advertising (Irish Times is not a free content site) but is there really any point if the advertising inhibits readers digesting your content?
In this TED talk Stanford Professor and chair of Creative Commons, Larry Lessig presents his argument that the law is strangling creativity. In particular he argues that amateur culture (those who produce for the love not the money) is not the same as amateurish culture and the internet is moving us back to a read-write culture as distinct from read only one. He makes the compelling distinction between piracy/plagarism and using the tools of creativity for literacy in this new generation of digital technology.
Why is it that you need permission to copy? and if you want to create something 'new' you are defacto a trespasser because you have to copy? And why does copy equal plagarism in the eyes of the law - and indeed those who are resistant to new technologies? He advocates that artists/creative types make their work freely available through Creative Commons licences and finishes by suggesting that we can't make our kids passive - we can only make them pirates. It's a fascinating 18 minutes - do yourself a favour and tune in.
Ben Cameron's keynote address to the Southern Arts Federation contains some of the most compelling insights into the state of contemporary culture and how co-creation is an invitation rather than a threat. Read the complete presentation here.
But just when we think we are beginning to catch up, the economy has shifted again. Those who wish to survive must think, not merely of experience, but of participation—an economy where value will no longer be consumed but where value will be co-created. Let me say that again: in the future, value will no longer be consumed. Value will be co-created.
We already see the power of consumer participation in other industries. The monolithic power of the restaurant critic has been shattered by Zagat where the collective consumer passes judgment and defines a restaurant value. “Dancing with the Start,” “So You Think You Can Dance,” “American Idol”—all are predicated on the active involvement of the consumer.
We are clearly witnessing a veritable tsunami of creative energy unleashed through technology. We are seeing the emergence of a class of amateurs doing work at a professional level—a group dubbed elsewhere as Pro Ams—a group whose work populated You Tube, independent film festivals, dance competitions and more. And knowing that we graduate 400,000 MFA’s in this country every year, this highly skilled, professionally capably yet a vocationally artistic pool is destined to increase—a time predicted perhaps by our Secretary of State, a trained concert pianist who continues to play chamber music with professional musicians, even as her career has called her elsewhere.
This sense of co-creation is an invitation—an invitation to dismantle irrelevant distinctions between professional and amateur, a status once exalted as more precious than professionalism, capturing as it does in its etymological roots the love of practice. This is an invitation to dismantle arts education programs and replace them with community engagement programs. This is an invitation to seeing our mission, not in creating products to be consumed, but in offering experiences that will serve as springboards to our audience’s own creativity—to nurture what Henry Jenkins calls a Convergence Culture, utilizing multi-platform narrative and marketing, inviting everyday people to reassert their right to actively contribute to their culture, channeling creative energies to come together. This is a call to a field to see ourselves, not as presenters, perhaps, but as activators, engagers, animators of creative energy.
There are plenty of us eager to give ourselves to the arts.....But unless we are given the same authority to reinvent and reshape organizations as you yourselves were given, we are not interested. -- a point of view that raises far more questions about an organization's capacity for change than about the identity of an heir apparent.
How interesting is that in the context of new generations? and how relevant for all kinds of organisations?
Apologies for the poor output in blogging terms the last week or so. I've been doing various kinds of writing - for clients and for myself and somehow blogging has come a poor third. Moving between different kinds of voices, vernaculars and themes has been interesting to say the least and there have been a few occasions when I've relied a little too heavily on my automated spell checker for accuracy so I laughed heartily when I watched slam poet Taylor Mali discuss this very issue in a live performance from the Bowery Poetry Club in New York.
A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of the consultation, Adler asked the man, "What would you do if you were cured?" The man answered. Adler replied, "Well, go and do it then." That was the treatment. As in Jack and the Beanstalk, and in many fairy stories, there is a serious problem and a piece of magic; this magic makes strange things possible. The magic is there to show how poor our sense of possibility always is. Jack's beans make him full of beans; they make his world huge. And they show him, as a taste of things to come - living happily ever after with a beautiful princess - that very small things can get bigger and lead you into unexpected and unusually satisfying places. Small boys are not Freudians, but they know that they have their own beanstalk, and that it takes them away from life at home.
The story says that being sensible only gets you sensible things. And whatever else growing up is, it is an initiation into the sensible.
And the Freudian reading of the fairy tale evolves into a fascinating essay on how our desires and our sense of possibility (known to us as wishes when we are children) are turned into sensible options as adults and invariably wished away rather than acted upon.
More than ever, bands must be able to manage themselves. The age of lavish label advances and indulgent A&R handholding is over. Upheaval and stress in the industry means diminished tolerance for chaotic behaviour among band members. There is less money available to clean up the messes created by out-of-control artists.
So says my colleague Mike Jolkovski. in a fascinating article he's written for Music Connection Magazine. Mike is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, musician and organisational consultant working with music groups (of all genres). In this article he's taking on the heady issues of artistic license and what it allows and doesn't; the music group as an organisational unit; working with feelings and psychology as well as technique and politics; dealing with problems as soon as they arise (instead of trashing the hotel room as a minor diversion) and the tricky issue of dividing the spoils. It's a great piece and his blog is full of more fascinating insights into how psychoanalysis can be applied in a practical way to the world of work in the music field.
A few times a month, I stand up and do performance poetry in various pubs & cafes around Sydney. Sometimes the punters love it. Sometimes you could hear a pin drop in the pained silence. Thems the breaks. I've been doing this for a year and I'd like to broaden my horizons.
and he is making a generous offer to his readers
Would you like a poem written for you?
Yes. You.
Matt is offering to write an original poem for anyone who reads his blog...he has a some suggestions for getting you thinking about topics and contents and then comes the catch.
Well, here's where it gets interesting. I had thought of charging for this service but I'm not skint at the moment and I'm more interested in fostering creativity in others than tangling with the taxman. So you have to think of something to give me that you perceive as being of equal value to the poem. But what that is exactly is up to you. This is an exchange of gifts. A potlatch
So I think that's a wonderful idea and I'm signing up ... and now I'm wondering about how to brief an artist who has never met me to write an original work of art about a topic I can pluck from nowhere...not to mention what I might offer in return. How exciting!
This lovely Ted Talk from Lakshmi Pratury is a love letter to the lost art of letter writing. She invites us to think about both/and - email and text messages as well as hand written personal notes both of which should be able to sit side by side. It's a timely thought for me. I've noticed that my handwriting is declining in clarity the older I get - while I can rectify my blurry vision with stronger lenses, the only way I can reclaim my penmanship is to take a pen in hand and practice more often. I tend to hand write envelopes even if the contents are business related and the only real notes I've written in the last year are either Birthday/Christmas cards or summaries of meetings I'm involved in that need to be decoded afterwards.. so a thought for the new year will be to create more opportunities for that personal touch. When so much of what I read is about creating better and more personal relationships it seems to me that a handwritten note might just be the most creative technology we have at our fingertips to make that happen.
Matt's secret life as a poet is well out of the bag at this stage. I told him I was thinking a lot about disappointment right now and he invited me to search Flickr and send him ten images with my comments - but not the search terms I used (you can see the images and the comments here) - I also sent him some of my writing and he has written the following which I love! I particularly like the expression 'imagination mansion'. Now the difficult bit is reciprocating with something interesting for Matt...if anyone has any suggestions..
7H
I draw the plans in hope and 7H pencil
on the back of a flattened cigarette packet (smoking may harm your unborn baby).
They are sumptuous,
stunning,
mine.
They are, however, but a pale shadow
of my house of dreams.
My imagination mansion.
Diamonds and mahogany,
marble in majesty,
but still tastefully done.
I have the plans transferred
onto vellum with gold leaf letters
from the finest oriental calligrapher
stolen money can buy.
The authorities approve my wishes
with only minimal bribing required.
The builders are engaged at
sufficiently exorbitant rates
to appease my ego,
and I plant the opal foundation stone
on the first day of work
to rapturous applause from hired lackeys.
Slowly the house of my dreams
rises from the ground
like the geological event it is;
then burrows under the earth,
a regal mole blind
to its own beauty.
Three months in, there is a stock market correction.
I stand, corrected, humiliated, broke.
The house is half-done and alone.
A perfect ruin already.
I burn the plans
and float away on the smoke.
Political blogs are among the trickiest to capture in a book because they tend to rely heavily on links and ephemeral information. But even blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection—the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line. (And this is probably as close as I can come to defining an essence of blog writing.)
The New York Review of Books has a wonderfully literate piece on blogs by Sarah Boxer- what they are, how they are written and where they fit in the lexicon of the written word.
It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's like, "Dude, the ball."
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)
Damien has a new strategy for announcing the long list of nominated blogs for the Irish Blog Awards this year. The lists in each category are being 'leaked' by those in the know and First Partners (sponsors of the Best Business Blog) have released the longlist for that category. So if the leaks are accurate Interactions has made the first round. Thank you to whomever nominated me (I didn't nominate myself) and what illustrious company to be in. The awards ceremony will be in the Alexander Hotel on Saturday 1 March.
Edit: Interactions has also been nominated for the long list in the Best Blog category - lots of really interesting posts there - thanks again to those who nominated me.
Good to see the Sunday Times Culture section taking an interest in the wider cultural implications of social media. Kathy Foley’s piece in today’s paper Clique Here (for which I was interviewed) touched on the usual stories (Facebook is costing businesses a fortune in wasted time etc) as well as raising some (of what I consider to be really interesting) questions about the implications for arts and cultural organisations about the way in which people are organising their social lives online. If we’re now living in a ‘drag and drop’ culture what does this mean for the quaintly old fashioned notion of gathering people at 8pm in one venue for the shared experience of theatre performance? Why (still…) are so few Irish arts organisations using social media and web 2.0 technologies to produce and present work not alone using those spaces to publicise that work? What are the implications for the funding of artists who may wish to work in virtual spaces? What may be the implications for physical spaces if so much social and cultural activity is taking place online? What about those clearly defined lines between the ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ artist when it comes to funding and credibility? Oh I could go on and on and on about this and there’s a real need in my opinion for intense debate about these (and other issues). I sometimes feel like I'm talking to myself about this one..I’m hoping Kathy and other (note Irish Times) will write more on this subject over the coming months..
I'm one of the lucky ones who has tickets for four of the concerts in RTE's Living Music Festival which is dedicated to the work of Arvo Pärt this weekend. The opening concert on Friday night at the National Concert Hall was magnificent and more than a few people commented on how long it has been since they experienced the kind of electricity in the air that was present in the building that night. Perhaps it had to do with the presence of the composer who received rapturous applause when he came to the stage - combined with the fabulous performance from the RTE Philharmonic Choir and the National Symphony Orchestra (and guest soloist Joanna MacGregor) which made the night a very special and memorable one. It was clear from the mix of people in the building that Arvo Pärt attracts a 'non traditional' classical music audience - 'total crossover' is how one colleague described. When I hear people moan about the licence fee and the paucity of programming on our national station I'd like to point them in the direction of what's happening this weekend. I, for one, am delighted that my licence fee and my taxes are going to support this event.
This afternoon I'm off to hear the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet at the National Gallery, then Crash Ensemble at the Samuel Beckett Centre and back to the National Concert Hall for the final concert in the series tonight. The full programme for the event is here. And here's one of my favourite Pärt pieces Spiegal Im Spiegal (thanks Sinead).
Why, when we can choose any level of happiness, do so many of us choose something less - often much less - than bliss? Most of us - most of you reading this blog - lived truly charmed lives. And yet we choose other emotions like sadness, frustration, envy, disappointment.
So asks Lisa over at Management Craft. I don't believe we can control our feelings .. neither do I really believe we can control our emotions. I also have to admit to being somewhat sceptical of the 'happiness industry' that's blooming right now. I simply don't believe that applying a cognitive frame to our emotional lives works. So much of what we feel is generated in work environments where there are socially negotiated 'rules' about what emotion is acceptable/preferable in that setting. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments - if my team wins a contract and I'm happy is that because I'm a happy person and brought that to work with me this morning or is it as a result of something that happened at work? Likewise with other emotions. Splitting off happiness as something we can have more of by excluding the rest of the emotional spectrum doesn't fit with any frame of reference I know - short of sublimating or splitting it really doesn't work.
Sitting amongst 1000 other people listening to Joe Jackson on Friday evening I was struck by the importance of remembering. I, like many of those present, remembered the first time we heard Is She Really Going Out With Him? Most people knew the lyrics and sang along to the set list..we were transported back to 1979 and the overwhelming feeling was one of nostalgia, belonging and the collective sense of remembering.
Why do we spend so much time in organisations dreaming about the future? Strategising? planning? hoping? moulding ourselves into a fantasy of what the future will bring? Why don't we spend more time remembering? Remembering what brought us together in the first place? the ideas, values and dreams that were supposed to be worked out in this gathering of people.
If more planning processes attended to the reasons why we started this rather than rationalising why we should stay together then like most relationships (personal and professional) we could start from a place of shared commitment..maybe I'm wrong about this .. but sitting in that theatre on Friday night I know that we could have moved mountains out of our shared emotional connection. Remembering is a present tense activity .. maybe we need a bit more of it, more of the emotional connection.. In the meantime...
Artist Alison Jackson's TED talk on why we can't rely on our own perception and how what we thing is real may not in fact be is fascinating..Her work is about how photography removes us from reality and the real subject matter through substitution - the role of the image in seduction and desire- fascinating talk..
I cried on Saturday listening to Nuala O'Faolain talk, in a raw and emotional interview, with Marian Finnucane, about her recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Her shock and anger was palpable and as with so much of her writing, she spoke from a deep place full of honesty and grace. When asked about having more time she said
Yeah, I was just reading about some best-selling man who says 'Live your dream to the end' and so on and I don't despise anyone who does, but I don't see it that way. Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.
O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody resonated so strongly with me. The depth of her emotion was breathtaking, just as it was on Saturday morning. The raw, real experience of one woman's journey which in its total emotional honesty becomes universal in its meaning. It's hard not to project a set of feelings onto someone else's tragedy - to make it about me and not them particularly when I never had the pleasure of meeting her in the flesh. I hope that however she plans to spend her remaining days she'll find some solace and meaning and be surrounded by a lot of love and I also hope she knows that she is somebody.
The full transcript of her interview is here and the podcast of the interview can be listened to here.
Very thoughtful post from Andrew Taylor on the way in which our taken for granted stance in relation to professional arts organisations is changing. He says
Consider, for example, the three-word phrase that often crops up at such conferences: ''professional arts organization.'' This phrase captures, in shorthand, the specific category of cultural endeavor we tend to be discussing. Professional arts organizations require professional management, aesthetic integrity, curatorial control, and stable but responsive structures to hold them together while moving their mission forward. These are the standards that drive our teaching and learning about the field.
But each of those three words -- ''professional,'' ''arts,'' and ''organization'' -- is in radical flux at the moment. That suggests that a phrase (and an assumption) combining all three could mean less and less in shorthand form.
He goes on to deconstruct each of the three words and also says
what happens to the word ''professional'' when works of comparable quality and skill can be conceived, produced, and distributed without expensive or centralized means of production? Flickr has millions of exceptional images, many shot by individuals with no formal training, expecting no pay, and unfiltered by a traditional gatekeeper (curator, publisher, agent)
This is a critically important dialogue that is going to blur the edges of practice. It's going to have profound implications for stated funded organisations (particularly in countries like Ireland where the aspiration to secure Arts Council funding is both fiscal and a mark of integrity. If anybody can make great work then how do we decide who to distribute the funds to?
Each time I come to NYC I'm taken aback by the generosity of complete strangers. New York is a city that's dedicated to capitalism and the contemporary but it's also a city with a huge heart that remembers its friends. This time out I met up with some familiar faces - like Terry Semon at the American Management Association whose blog Here we are now what? I've been reading for some time. He, in turn introduced me to his colleague Bettina Neidhardt who has started a blog called Fearless Leadership. Both of these practitioners are at the coal face of integrating theory and practice and making it work outside the theoretical confines of academia. And then I caught up with Dr Jay Parkinson and his colleague Sean Khozin both of whom are going to turn the way health care is delivered in this country on its head by simply challenging the taken for granted 'rules' about the way things should be done. Then there's Mark Hollander, whom I met a few years ago through blogging, who coaches creative thinkers, accommodates complete strangers, and is the best lunch partner a traveller could ask for in this town. These and many others (most of whom should be blogging because of the wonderful insights and stories they carry around about the work) gave very generously of their time and expertise to me on this trip. I'm grateful to them all (you know who you are :).
The final day of any trip is always a transitional one for me - reflecting, remembering and re-entering. Right now I'm reflecting on the depth of emotion I have felt on this trip. I'm familiar with this city, I know it well. I have developed relationships here - but this time out I have felt those relationships growing deeper - I can say with hand on heart that I have very good friends here, some old and some very new - I have found like minded colleagues here and the New York in my mind is both a construct and a reality at the same time. My parting thoughts are about the sense of privilege I feel to have found a place and people with whom I feel so at home, which makes going home a bitter sweet experience.
How to remain visible in the face of death? Bringing Nuala O’Faolain on her final wish to see Berlin before she died was a sad and memorable journey, but also one of fun and optimism. For the writer whose memoir in German translation was entitled Just don’t become invisible, this was a remarkable way of staying alive
Today’s newspapers in Ireland are infused with images and memories of Nuala O’Faolain. Her radio interview a month ago with Marian Finnucane brought me to tears. Her death, while I was in New York last week, reduced me to silence. The New York Times ran an obituary and an opinion piece in which she was described as ‘fearless even when she insisted she wasn’t’. Fintan O’Toole, in today’s Irish Times, appreciates her understanding of the personal as political and indeed the reverse..
She solved one of the most difficult problems a writer can face – the use of the word “I”. In journalism it can be used to create a comic, self-depcrecating persona, or to bear raw witness to an exraordinary event. …Only very rarely can it be used with sincereity and integrity on the one hand and a cool objectivity on the other.
‘..coming to terms with her life experience was turned into something more vociferous. She felt the need to change things, to fight not only for herself but for everyone else, to expose the damage done by society’
It’s always personal. Even when it’s business, even when it’s framed as something else – it’s always personal. And that’s why I loved her writing because she connected with the humanity of every topic, person and issue she talked about. You were never in doubt as to where her interests and loyalties lay. And perhaps that’s the invitation – each and every time – to see the humanity and the person behind the problem, the issue and the solution. Because if we don’t then we’re missing the point that to be in any kind of relationship means relating on a human level - and that requires feeling and emotion and allowing ourselves to be impacted instead of defending ourselves against the intimacy. There has to be room for love – where ever we are and what ever our task.
University College Dublin's School of Art History and Cultural Policy is holding a conference on Ireland’s arts and cultural management sector which will take place on UCD’s campus on 11-12 July 2008 (Friday & Saturday). The conference is entitled 'How are we doing? Managing culture and the arts in Ireland'.
How Are We Doing? Managing Culture and the Arts in Ireland, 2008 is a practitioner-focused forum aimed at giving cultural sector managers, collectively and personally, an opportunity to take stock of their work in the wider context of policy and practice. The conference will enable practitioners to reflect on their management environment, as well as the skills, training and lifestyle issues that affect arts and cultural managers in contemporary Ireland. Sessions include presentations and keynote addresses by internationally renowned scholars and arts managers, and opportunities to meet and network with colleagues in the field.
There is a conference blog here in which you can have your say about the current issues affecting the arts in Ireland and the organisers plan to disseminate the content an follow up via the blog after the proceedings.
I'll be appearing on the Ryan Tubridy show on RTE Radio 1 next Monday morning talking to Ryan about relationships at work - personal and social ones; how we manage them and don't; the 'rules' and boundaries etc. I'll post some of my thoughts here and a link to the podcast next week. In the meantime if anyone has any comments or thoughts on the subject I'd be delighted to hear from you.
Update: The podcast is here (date 16th June) and I appear at around 44 mins in (you'll need Real Player to listen). Ryan and I talked about negotiating boundaries (formally and informally) and the importance of establishing how much information we're willing to reveal about ourselves and more importantly (some times) how much we're willing to hear. I told a story about one work situation where I was unwittingly involved in a boss's affair by having to tell his wife when she called that he was 'at lunch' - very often it's this type of situation that contributes to difficult personal relationships at work.
We also talked about the importance of personal relationships particularly when work is stressful or dangerous and as a way of decompressing from work place anxiety. If my life is in your hands the chances are we are going to be very close and intimate at work. The reality is though that many of those kinds of intense relationships don't transition long term. But work relationships are about work most of the time and the work context will take precedence over personal - chances are if we're friends we may be competing for the same job one of these days and our friendship may take a battering if we're both after the same position.
Work is a social situation and it wouldn't work without personal relationships but I'm becoming increasingly interested in the splitting that goes on where we have highly formalised 'rules' for good behaviour in the work place contrasted with an 'anything goes' attitude outside of work particularly on social networking sites - as though it's possible to keep both separate. Ultimately I wouldn't want to do anything on Facebook that I wouldn't be comfortable doing in front of friends and family. But it's interesting to me that we can even imagine that we can be 'all good' or 'all bad' and separate and contained in those ways.
We just touched on these and other issues - it would be great to continue that conversation in some way - the feedback and emails I've received since the show have been fascinating .. it seems to be an issue many are interested in.
Playwright Tom Stoppard gave a public interview at this year's Dublin Writers' Festival in which he waxed lyrical about the tyranny of Beckett's stage directions - referring at one point to them as 'control freakery'. The witty and erudite writer described Beckett's fastidious stage directions as an attempt to control a future event that has yet to happen.
And of course he is right. But it's not just Beckett. All of us who work in and with organisations (and particularly those of us involved in strategic planning processes) are up to our own Beckettian activities. All plans are about trying to control a future event that has yet to happen or at least to create some context in which the future will be manageable and controllable. It's doubtful as to whether we can succeed in that endeavour or not and many a planning process is really about creating a context in the present to imagine and re-imagine the future in a safe way.
Stoppard went on to talk about wanting to be present for first productions of his new work but after that he sends it out into the world for directors to do as they wish. So of course he's really talking about succession and our willingness to pass on the torch for reinvention by a new generation as distinct from passing on an artefact that needs to be taken into custodial care. It got me thinking - I wonder what Beckett would have been like as CEO of an organisation; what kind of management style would he have had? and I wonder if Stoppard will go on the management lecturing route any of these days to pass on his wisdom in that context?
I've written about conductor, teacher, speaker and writer (The Art of Possibility) Benjamin Zanderherebefore - and in this superb TED talk Zander outlines his philosophy of possibility in a passionate and witty presentation that had me smiling all the way through. Using a Chopin prelude (the one with a B and 4 sads...) he takes the audience through an engaging and emotional journey about leadership.
Here's what I took from his presentation
Real leaders have no doubt about the capacity of people to realise their vision - the passion and conviction with which that vision is communicated is key
It matters what we say - will what we utter stand the test of time if it's our last utterance - can what we say be a possibility we live in to?
Not knowing is a place of possibility, not a punative place of doubt - creating a context in which we can articulate our not knowing is the place from which real creativity springs.
Spend 18 minutes with Zander in this TED talk and see for yourself
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
This thought resonated very strongly with me this week as I sat on an interview panel for the appointment of a senior arts manager position here in Ireland. Many people told us how important the arts were and how better off we would all be with increased access and better funding. I don't play golf. But I have heard seasoned golfers talk about the impact golf has on their lives. I don't like it when I'm told (albeit in a roundabout way) that my life is somewhat deficient because I don't own a set of clubs. It seems to me that many of us who work in and around the arts make the same claims - our lives are touched because we have seen the light. I don't think so. Access isn't about the arts - it's about the choice to participate - or not - if people so desire. In the meantime I exercise my choice to refrain from the seduction of the golf course and hope that I can make meaning elsewhere. Golf isn't special - neither is art.
Arthur Ganson has been called the Samuel Beckett of sculpture. He makes beautiful objects that explore existential ideas. Objects that are about the joy of their own triviality. There are some beautiful objects and even more beautiful thoughts expressed in this video from a man who searched for a way to turn thoughts into concrete ideas by working with his hands.
Meet Will Gompertz. He isn't funny. So he signed up for a 10-week comedy course - and then tried his gags out on a paying audience. He relives a terrifying ordeal
I can't tell a joke. That's OK: I can't remove an appendix or parse a Latin sentence either; you just learn to avoid the things you can't do. But sometimes you get mugged. It happened to me recently when I signed up to give some lectures on contemporary art on a P&O cruise ship. (By day, I'm director of Tate Media, the arm of the galleries that makes TV programmes, runs the website and produces public events.) P&O wanted my talk to include some "laughs". Laughs? In an art lecture? But it was too late: I'd signed the contract. So I enrolled on a stand-up comedy course.
For the next 10 weeks, every Wednesday evening, in a room above a pub in central London, I learned how to be funny. My tutor was called Chris, and he was the spitting image of Neil from The Young Ones. My fellow students were a mixed bag: wannabe comedians, writers, ad agency types - eight of us in all. Chris provided a microphone that didn't plug in, a tiny whiteboard you could barely read, and a dog-eared print-out listing the contents of each lesson. There was a relaxed, almost romantic feel to the whole enterprise - until I read through the notes to lesson 10. For lesson 10, we had to perform a real live stand-up gig, in a real venue, in front of a real, paying audience. I hadn't signed up for this. It's one thing using jokes to liven up an art lecture; it's quite another performing in front of a bunch of beered-up hedonists who have paid hard cash.
I know I couldn't/wouldn't go this far but this is what Will Gompertz, Director of Tate Media did what would you do to enliven your presentations? For the full story head over to the Guardian Arts Section.
London based artist Christian Nold maps emotion. Here's his description from his website
Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last four years with more than 1500 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops and consulltations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-eplore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.
How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?
I got very excited reading Christian's website about the possible applications of this process in organisations - imagine tracking the emotional temperature of a business over the course of a day, a week or a year and then using this very visual data to have conversations about the systemic conditions in which particular kinds of emotions are generated? This would challenge the old chestnut that emotion is 'personal' rather than systemic...interesting, interesting thoughts...
Here's another one of those - drop everything for 20 minutes videos. Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris creates beautiful artwork about emotion and the soul of the internet. Here's his fabulous We Feel Fine project - an exploration of emotion, in six movements. Harris created a programme that captured data and images describing feelings from blog posts and created a fantastic interactive art work from the findings. He's collected over 11 million feelings so far. unfortunately I couldn't open the site in either Sarari or Explorer (probably says more about my computer than anything else) but If you want to hear Harris talk about his work here's his TED talk
In keeping with the recurring theme of emotions this past week or so today's New York Times has an impressive article by Benedict Carey You're checked out, but your brain is tuned in on the creative potential of boredom. Like so many emotions it's keeping 'bad company' ...
Scientists know plenty about boredom, too, though more as a result of poring through thickets of meaningless data than from studying the mental state itself. Much of the research on the topic has focused on the bad company it tends to keep, from depression and overeating to smoking and drug use.
but
neuroscientists have found that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks, according to Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carey notes five positive attributes of boredom
(1) It allows the brain the creative space to seek options
(2) The brain is highly active when in a resting state-- just 5% less active than when doing routine activities
(3) It is a tool for sorting through information - a 'sensitive spam filter'
(4) It should be recognised as a legitimate emotion central to learning and creativity
(5) It is a state that demands relief therefore seeks some kind of change
So lots going on when we claim to be bored...I must remember that the next time my eyes are glazing over :)
Dermod Moore has written a beautiful piece about recession. Apparently we're in one in Ireland right now - falling property prices, belt tightening, SUVs outside Lidl and Aldi and the list goes on. Dermod wonders if we might have a Great Idea for these straitened times - like the NHS in Britain emerging from the ashes of World War 2 - is there a grand project that we might apply our hearts and minds to now that we've more time on our hands and less money to while away the hours? He also talks about the value of loss and how it presents an opportunity to reimagine a different kind of future.
There's so much here that's rich and important about how we organise our lives; the stories we tell ourselves and the possibilities we imagine. There's a certain kind of 'recession chic' in Ireland right now .... Lidl and Aldi have terrific bratwurst after all and who'd have thought of shopping for that in Marks and Spencer? And let's face it, the 80s might have been grim, but the music was fabulous. Nowhere is there room for an acknowledgement of loss - of the dream of what things should be by now .. and the state we're in.
Great ideas emerge when we're dissatisfied - not when we're basking in the comfort of what is. Dermod writes eloquently about our personal and social response to recession - I wonder what the lessons for our world of work and society might be?
I love this piece by David Armano including his great 'I'm the centre of my universe' graphic
Top 10 Signs You Might Be A "Weblebrity"
Andy Warhol's prophecy was fulfilled with the advent of MTV's programming and widespread reality television. We're now seeing a new kind of micro-fame which lasts well beyond 15 minutes. You don't have to have thousands of friends on My Space, Facebook or Twitter to feel like a "Weblebrity"—you can be the celebrity of your own social system regardless of size. Here are the top 10 signs you just might be a Weblebrity. :-)
1. You have signature clothing such as a certain T-shirt, hat, tie, sunglasses, boas, and occasionally ascots.
2. At internet parties people follow a "drink for link" policy—they buy the drinks, you provide the links.
3. Your internet friends treat you like a star while your real friends tell you to go F@*k yourself.
4. You stopped thinking about yourself as a person years ago. Now you're a "brand".
5. At family gatherings you receive regular taunts like "can the internet superstar please pass the casserole??".
6. You've considered getting your Facebook photo shot professionally.
7. Total strangers you meet at conferences know more about you than your significant other.
8. You fight back the urge to say "do you know who I am?" almost daily.
9. People actually think you're friends with Scoble.
10. No-one in the real world has ever heard of you.
I was saddened to read of the death of Wexford teacher Eileen Flynn. In 1982 Flynn was sacked from her job as an English and History teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co Wexford because at the time she was living 'out of wedlock' with a separated man with whom she had a child.
The 80s were a grim time in Ireland. Apart from recession, high unemployment and emigration we struggled to have coherent conversations about major social issues - remember the abortion referenda? and the attempts to get divorce legalised? (It took until 1995 for the latter to happen and it took until 1993 for the Irish government to decriminalise homosexuality). Eileen Flynn became a symbol of the struggle to separate church and state and was victimised for an act of bravery - albeit a very private one. There were others of course - remember Ann Lovett in 1984? a 15 year old girl whose dead body was found at a grotto in Granard where she had gone to give birth to a baby. Those stories sound like they come from a different era and yet, they are part of my history, my generation - I wonder how far we've really come?
When people vilify scapegoats it's often interesting to pause for a moment and wonder if there's a truth at the heart of 'disruptive' behaviour. Sometimes it's difficult to see beyond the taken for granted culture we're enmeshed in but very often there's the kernel of truth in there that deserves to be heard. Eileen Flynn was scapegoated for our inability or unwillingness to challenge the relationship between church and state in Ireland - how many other lone voices are being stigmatised in 2008 for truths we're unwilling to name?
This TED talk from Technorati'sPeter Hirshberg on how the relationship between TV and the Web has evolved is fascinating. There's a lovely piece at the beginning where he interviews a group of 'tweenies' about which is more important TV or the web...you can probably guess the answer...There's also interesting archive footage of Marshall McLuhan talking about the 'global village' which, as Hirshberg suggests is eerily contemporary if you substitute blogosphere...
the global village is as big as a planet and as small as a village post office
and
Every time new media arrives the old media is the content
The Arts Council of Ireland is hosting a one day working seminar on the arts, new media and broadcasting on 25 November 2008 in Dublin Castle entitled New Media New Audience? (A disclaimer here - I have consulted to the Arts Council on the organisation of this event). The purpose of the day is to explore the ways in which artists and the public are adapting and adopting new ways of producing, presenting and promoting the arts. The keynote speakers are Charles Leadbeater and Andrew Keen and there will be a workshop presentation from international arts blogger Andrew Taylor as well as a series of panel conversations, some hands on workshops on social media and podcasting and there's also space in the middle of the day for attendees to organise their own discussions on matters of interest. As someone who has wonderedout loud for some time about why so few Irish arts organisations are using social media, I'm particularly pleased that the Arts Council is leading out on this discussion. I hope there will be a diverse group of people there on the day (and there's free wireless internet access so I'm looking forward to participation on as well as offline) taking up the opportunity to explore the challenges as well as the opportunities presented by all kinds of new media.
Registration for the event is free - the conference website is here and you can download a pdf version of the conference agenda here.
John Kelly (RTE's The View and RTE Lyric FM's JK Ensemble) has been confirmed as the chair of the upcoming Arts Council New Media, New Audience? conference at Dublin Castle on 25 November. Registration is free for the conference and it's rapidly filling up so I'd encourage arts organisations and artists to get over and sign up. To whet your appetite a little here are some video clips of the keynote speakers.
Charles Leadbeater at TED talking about creativity and innovation:
and Andrew Keen debating web 2.0 with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
This is a 20 minute interview (in two parts) with Ken Robinson put together by British Reporter Riz Kahn in which Robinson outlines his criticism of our western education models - created he argues for the industrial age and predicated on an outdated idea of talent. In part one of the interview Robinson argues for parity of esteem for the arts alongside traditional subjects such as maths and science. When the rhetoric in organisational life is one of innovation the attention paid to creativity in the education system is fairly minimal - certainly here in Ireland the arts play a poor second, third and fourth to more 'valuable' subjects that are quantifiable in examination results.
In part two Robinson goes on to talk about creating the conditions in which creativity can flourish and he also rather poignantly talks about how many people go through their formative education experiences never finding out what they are really good at.
'Can't we have a stationary table?' thunders Katharine Hepburn, 66, to one of the producers on The Dick Cavett Show. Hepburn rarely did interviews. When she did, she wanted it just so. In this case, in prep for the actual recording, Hepburn went on set to veto a wobbly table ('nail it down!') and joke about the garishly russet-coloured carpet: 'Gee whiz. Put a rug over it. Who's idea was that?'
American video-artist Viola has carved out a very definite niche: ultra slow-motion films, imbued with an almost painterly quality, and often tackling twin issues of mortality and spirituality. This early film fixes on a woodland pool and a man frozen mid-air over it. With intimations of birth and death, it's ultimately both creepy and moving.
Though German-born photographer Hans Namuth didn't much rate Pollock's work, he was fascinated by the man. Having taken over 500 photographs of him already, he turned to film. His resulting documentary captures the artist dressed head to toe in black, a cigarette hanging from his lip, drip painting on to glass. Best of all is Pollock's curiously droning narration: 'The method of painting is a natural growth out of a need.'
All quiet on the blogging front for the past week as I have been spending a lot of time talking and corresponding with bloggers, social media specialists, keynote speakers, artists and arts organisations in preparation for the Arts Council's New Media, New Audience? Conference at Dublin Castle tomorrow. Sometimes taking the conversation off line distracts from the conversation on line. I'm hoping that the presence of free wifi in the conference venue, podcasting of sessions and a very interesting delegate list will result in ongoing conversation during and after the event. Please say hello if you see me about the venue tomorrow - it would be great to put faces to names and virtual spaces.
213 people attended the Arts Council’s New Media, New Audience? conference at Dublin Castle yesterday – we hoped for 150 but quickly surpassed that. I’m biased but I think it was a useful and successful event – certainly ‘good enough’. Damien thinks so and then there are views from Emily, Fearghus, Eoin, Conor, Dermot, Dermod, Electric Mill and the Model and Niland too – I’m sure there will be others as the next few days unfold. Andrew Keen and Charles Leadbeater kicked us off with a robust interrogation of the merits and demerits of web 2.0 and certainly set the context for much of the discussion that took place throughout the rest of the day. John Kelly was in suitably wry form and kept manners on the proceedings throughout. In chatting with Keen after his presentation he was surprised (and not too disappointed I imagine) that he had such a sympathetic hearing – he’s used to being the devil incarnate at these events. But like him or love him he’s talking about things that matter to artists – like making a living, keeping some kind of control over your work, and asking questions about the value of the curated space and the value of artistic integrity. Charles Leadbeater showed a small clip of this video and then walked us through how this young man might have been met by the BBC if he’d had this idea and wanted to get it produced through traditional channels. Much hilarity ensued and the point was well made – traditional institutions have to change how they commission and produce and with whom and I think this is going to be a massive challenge for Irish arts and cultural organisations over the next few years. I don’t think Keen and Leadbeater are too far apart from each other and while the presentations were polarised both are passionate about creativity and equally passionate about increasing access to more of it. It does amuse me sometimes how resistant people can be to opposing or different views as though there must be a consensus for us all to live happily together.
It was a particular pleasure for me to spend time over the past few days with Andrew Taylor whose blog I have been following for many years. He gave a wonderful presentation on the Metaphors We Manage By and as a fellow systems thinker, invited us to dispense with boxes, circles and other containers to concentrate on the making of the art and the most helpful and useful ways of doing that. He talked us through the ecosystem as he sees it and there were references to mushrooms also – (I can’t do justice to it but Andrew has promised to let me have his slides in due course) his, and other presentations and the various panel discussions are audio streamed on the conference website here (some of the audio quality is poor because the radio mics weren't used as widely as we would have liked). Over the next week or so we’ll up date the site with slides and feedback from the Your Space sessions.
So what surprised me? Firstly the speed with which the conference sold out. I have had more approaches from people in the last week wanting to get their friends/colleagues into the room and I believe that to be a first – I’m generally not that popular! Secondly the really strong engagement, interest and enthusiasm of delegates who attended. Sure there were moments of boredom, tiredness and crankiness – but overall the conversations I overheard were excited ones. Thirdly the make up of the delegate list – we had the traditional attendees at an Arts Council event but the presence of bloggers, social media specialists, pr, technology, marketing firms and generally interested people made for a very different kind of conversation and engagement. It simply isn't cool to talk to ourselves any longer.
A couple of meta issues stood out for me also – the first is the predictable challenge that happens at every event of this kind that I have ever attended to the ‘organiser’ or those in charge to ‘do’ something about next steps. It’s as though convening a space for a conversation is a disruption of some kind and can’t be valid unless there’s a strategic plan in place. Invariably the responsibility for that plan is with the Arts Council or some other agency ‘in charge’. This challenge came predictably in the final plenary from a delegate. Was the Arts Council going to set up a forum or make some other intervention etc? Andrew Taylor suggested that the something next was already happening in the room and perhaps the delegates might like to think of how they could continue the conversation by taking charge of it themselves (a man after my own heart in that regard). Damien Mulley got into an interaction (just one Damien:) with someone about wanting access to publicly funded broadcast content to distribute, curate and play with. When one delegate asked him ‘why?’ there was an audible sigh in the room. And during the keynotes earlier in the day a delegate challenged Keen to stop being a critic and propose a way forward’ – Keen replied he would when he had one.
These types of comments really depress me – it feeds into this profoundly anti intellectual space we’re very fond of occupying in Ireland. It’s as though ideas for their own sake are useless unless they have some utilitarian function. Beauty, intellect, creativity, emotion – can’t be good unless we have a plan for how to use them. What’s profoundly depressing to me is that these comments should arise at a conference stuffed to the gills with artists and creatives – if the rule is that creativity, ideas, beauty and the intellect have to be useful before being conceptualised then I think we’re in bigger trouble than we imagine.
But, as they say in business, that may be a high level problem – those comments were certainly in the minority yesterday and the difference is always part of the richness. It was a pleasure to meet so many old and new faces and I’m looking forward to following and contributing to the conversations on an off line as they unfold. My thanks go to my colleagues, the panellists, moderators and keynotes all of whom were such a pleasure to work with. Now to important matters - how can we get John Kelly to start blogging? ideas?
I always look forward to Adam Phillips' interpretation of fairy stories at this time of the year. So, from Saturday's Guardian, here's (part of) his take on Cinderella
Freud's infamous question "What does a woman want?" is both silly and mildly insulting, implying as it does that women in general are incapable of knowing what their wants are and making them known, aside from the obvious fact that all women are different and want different things at different times. What Freud really wanted to know is: what do mothers want from their children?
If Cinderella was a story about what women want, the answer would be: women want a mother who does everything she can to facilitate their pleasure; a mother who relishes her daughter's pleasure rather than envies it, or competes with it, or trivialises it.
To pursue her pleasure, a woman has to imagine that there is another woman who enjoys and sponsors this pleasure. In this sense, her fairy godmother, in her unlikeness to her wicked stepmother, is the most important person in a girl's life. Without her, at least in the terms of the fairy tale, she can never leave home and become a woman; without this fairy godmother - the part of herself that will do whatever is necessary for her heart's desire - she will go on believing that her pleasure always harms another woman. Indeed, she could even believe that her pleasure is in harming another woman, whereas this is just sometimes the consequences of following her heart's desire. So guilty is Cinderella about her own pleasure that when she does finally marry her prince, she finds two "noblemen" for her ugly stepsisters.
The moral of the story is: girls must learn not to be intimidated by envy, not to make themselves unenviable by diminishing themselves, and that this requires a certain magic, a ruthless unwillingness to accept things as they are. Rebels, Sartre wrote, are people who keep the world the same so they can go on rebelling against it; revolutionaries change the world.
For the author, and possibly the reader, of Cinderella, the question is not "what does a (the) woman want?" but "how does she want?" How does she go about disregarding her own wishes? What is her wanting like if she can live two such disparate lives, as drudge and princess? Drudgery, the story persuades us, is a bad solution to the problem of wanting. It is not satisfaction the woman fears, but the envy of her satisfaction. Men are the least of a girl's problems, at least from Cinderella's point of view.
there's a grown up conversation happening about the arts the Sunday Tribune publishes this pointless article. Fearghus's very gracious response is on his own blog here.
This is my contribution (or should I say Adam Phillips' contribution) to the current end-of-the-world scenario we appear to be in the midst of right now.
Whether or not there is a gene for worrying -- or indeed a gene for being a geneticist -- a psychoanalytic story about worrying would try to persuade people to see that by worrying they are doing a number of interesting things, many of which may not have even occurred to them.
First, worry is an ironic form of hope. It is a way of looking forward to something -- even if it's something awful -- and that implies a belief in the future. So worrying is a version of desiring; when we worry, we anticipate.
Second, each person has a very specific history of worrying that evolves over time. Each of us chooses certain things to worry about and chooses whom, if anybody, we will tell.
And the way our worries were received when we were children -- whether our parents seemed horrified or indifferent or only too keen to hear about them -- will leave us with a mostly unconscious set of expectations about what we can say and to whom. Worries, like secrets, are part of the essential currency of intimacy.
Last, but not least, worrying is a form of thinking. At one end of some imaginary spectrum, there is something akin to creative rumination. At the other end, there is the stalled thought of obsession. If worrying can persecute us, it can also work for us, as self-preparation. No stage fright, no performance.
In other words, if we can lop off the worry gene, what else might go with it? People without worries are people without self-doubt. And we know what people are capable of in states of ultimate conviction.
Everyone I know is scared. Workers’ fear has generalized to their workplace and everything associated with work and money. We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the box intact.
Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making. Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode to progress. Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left.
I am a neuroeconomist, which means that I use brain-scanning technologies like magnetic resonance imaging to decode the decision-making systems of the human mind. It is a messy business, but a few pearls of wisdom have emerged about the fear system of the human brain and how to keep it from short-circuiting sound decision-making.
The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off. The first order of business, then, is to neutralize that system.
This means not being a fearmonger. It means avoiding people who are overly pessimistic about the economy. It means tuning out media that fan emotional flames. Unless you are a day-trader, it means closing the Web page with the market ticker. It does mean being prepared, but not being a hypervigilant, everyone-in-the-bunker type.
I DON’T care what your business is, but if you think it will eventually come back to what it was — your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect. What I am doing is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience discovery to realms where it hasn’t been used before.
This is an interesting way for a national cultural institution to channel their resources into the artistic community when swinging cuts are making it difficult for arts organisations to think clearly about what the next year will bring. (There's more on the Kennedy Center initiative in this Washington Post article).
Andrew Taylor writes eloquently about the systemic conditions around the Kennedy initiative and suggests that
The crisis in the arts, or any other industry, is an ecological one. Any crisis can certainly benefit from unilateral and independent action. But a more resilient and encompassing response would also include recognition and interconnection of the entire ecosystem that provides coaching, counseling, mentorship, and responsive strategy support to organizations and leaders at the edge of collapse.
Thinking outside the (black) box may be mainstreamed as a result of this recession - again and again I'm finding myself in conversations with practitioners who are struggling to reframe this downturn as an opportunity for self reflection and creative ways of sharing the resources do exist - bartering, mentoring, a spirit of generosity and myriad other non cash alternatives are coming back into fashion and I believe it's only a matter of time before we see some genuinely innovative ideas emerging about organisational design and structure. It occurred to me while reading the Kennedy Center website that an international initiative might be worth exploring - currently you can sign up to be a mentor but only if you're based in North America - wouldn't it be interesting to widen out the boundary and collaborate across geographical boundaries? Watch this space..
TED 2009 is just about drawing to a conclusion and in this talk from author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) she muses on the unrealistic expectations we heap on artists and geniuses....She asks (wryly) 'what is it about creative ventures that seem to make us afraid of each others' mental health?'. Are creativity and suffering inextricably linked? She
shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
I stepped out for a moment and before I knew it a few months had passed - funny how that happens isn't it? Other things take priority and suddenly you forget bits of your routine that seemed so embedded in how you used to do business.
It was while working with a group of artists in Carlow today that I was prompted to put cyber pen to paper again. One's credibility about the value of (social) networking starts to wane when one isn't in fact walking one's talk. Today's workshop was about earning opportunities for artists (the link to the resources for the day is here) and the bulk of the day (once again) seemed to focus on the challenge for individual practitioners who want public recognition for their work to take charge of their practice/business and 'sell' themselves and their wares. It's a perpetual theme in workshops with artists - the personal nature of the work is what makes it unique and distinctive but it also contributes to the dilemma of how to promote yourself without it feeling like a form of prostitution. I really want to run a group or workshop on confidence building/anxiety management for artists - any takers?
Today's workshop was organised by Visual Artists Ireland and Artlinks - both sites have great resources for artists in all disciplines.
Season 2 of In Treatment is already underway in the US - Paul has 4 new clients and has decided that his sessions with Gina are therapy and not the confused hybrid of therapy and supervision from Season 1. What I like about the series is that it gives some insight into the complexity of the therapeutic relationship and in particular what it looks like from a therapist's perspective. I've used some of the episodes as teaching resources with first year counselling and psychotherapy students and they have been a useful tool to explore basic concepts such as boundaries, transference and counter transference etc. Many people come to a training programme with idealised notions of being helpful and transforming their client's lives. Few have any thoughts about the challenges of containing and working with very powerful transference from clients and the feelings evoked that can't always be articulated in the moment.
HBO has produced a 24 minute documentary called In Treatment: Private and Confidential (you can watch it online) - in which therapists and clients talk about what therapy is and how it works and why it can be useful (for some people). It does contain spoilers so you have been warned! NPR also recently interviewed Gabriel Byrne and he has some interesting insights into his character's thinking.
If In Treatment does nothing more than make it possible to generate insight into how therapy works then it will have been a success in my view..and for those of you interested in more insight into how Gabriel Byrne works check out Belinda McKeown's interview with him from February's Irish Times.
Andrew Taylor asks a deceptively simple question over at The Artful Manager - what's your business model? It's a question I imagine a lot of the attendees at Theatre Forum's annual conference might usefully attempt to answer. Andrew quotes from Seth Godin's blog in which the elements of a business model are distilled into four questions.
2. We don't and we can't (nonprofits are designed, after all, to deliver goods and services at below their total cost). So we access revenue beyond the traditional market in the form of gifts, grants, and subsidies (while we also reduce our costs through volunteers, low wages, deferred maintenance, and number shuffling).
Questions 3 and 4 are a wee bit more problematic. Question 3 in particular is a complex one because as well as commoditisation and a price wars (although we don't see too many of the latter) there's also the competition between all other cultural activity (and none!) and the perceived value of the arts in relation to health, jobs etc. I haven't seen much evidence of theatre practitioners really re-evaluating the marketing model - as Andrew suggests - it tends to be retrospective and generally speaking we ask people to take enormous risks in parting with their cash in return for the promise of quality and satisfaction. On top of this traditional marketing strategies continue to be used and social networking, new media are eschewed in favour of more tried and tested methodologies.
I hope as part of the Theatre Forum Conference this week we get an opportunity to delve into some of these issues in more detail.
Fascinating presentation from Dan Gilbert author of Stumbling on Happiness at TED. There's a great Q and A at the end of the talk that's worth watching also. Gilbert makes a number of points that are relevant to the global economy right now (and particularly relevant for cultural organisations). He says that satisfaction or goodness is directly related to our capacity to estimate the odds of getting what we want and the value we attribute to the getting of what we want. Research suggests that we're not great at either set of estimates. But the point that stayed with me was about our tendency to compare what we have/want to the past as distinct to the possibility in the future. What's familiar will always be what we reach for...many, many questions here about how we re-imagine ways of working if our tendency is to compare to the past as distinct from looking to newer ways that have yet to be imagined.
Foresighted are most resilient
Focus and nimbleness are more important than size or discipline
Missions remain fixed
Significant financial losses
Endowments have dropped 20-35%
Corporate contributions down 20-50%
Foundations and individual giving down 10-25%
Programs are being curtailed and/or adjusted for more popular appeal
What I found most interesting though was that their research found that organisations fell into the following categories:
Proactive (about 25% of interview sample): These organizations are aggressive in dealing
with the recession, both short and long term. They have projected budget and program
scenarios across multiple years; they have examined every budget line item and made
surgical and strategic cuts; they are keeping their boards, staff and key stakeholders well
informed about the challenges and the choices they are making. The leaders of these
groups are creative, energetic, and nimble. Some report actually being energized by the
current situation, stimulated by the pressure to think in new ways.
Informed (roughly 60% of interview sample): These organizations are actively
addressing near-term challenges. They have reviewed and adjusted current year
budgets. They are tracking expenses and income more closely than in previous years.
They are not yet thinking about long-term impacts, waiting until Spring to see what
happens to ticket sales, contributions, touring engagements, and other revenue. These
groups appear to have less experience with scenario planning than the first group, and
less data on which to build those scenarios.
In denial (roughly 15% of interview sample): These organizations are living in the present
and operating “business as usual.” Some reported that they have not felt the economic
downturn yet and expect this year’s budget to resemble last year’s. Some appear so
distracted by day-to-day pressures that they have not considered the larger
environment and longer-term view.
I wonder how those response would compare to the Irish situation? Only 25% of organisations consulted are looking beyond the short and near term....More interesting information to consider at the Theatre Forum Annual Conference today and tomorrow.
There's a summary of the research here (in pdf and powerpoint formats).
The Irish Times picks up on Theatre Forum's Annual Conference in Wexford 10 days ago. I'm quoted liberally as inviting the Irish theatre community to reflect on the 'good times'. The points I tried to make on the panel discussion were:
When I think of crisis I think of world poverty, famine, terrorism etc - I think applying the word crisis to the economic downturn (particularly as it relates to the arts community) may be a bit of an exaggeration. If a reduction in state funding is a crisis then the sector is operating under the assumption that there's a form of stability at work which only gets 'more stable' rather than less. That's an illusion - change is the default, not stability - so what's going on that we're surprised?
Complacency and satisfaction are not good bedfellows for the creative impulse. All creativity needs a boundary or limitations - how else can difference and newness be created? I asked the Irish theatre community to reflect on what the great artistic projects of the past 15 years have been and in several follow up conversations with colleagues later in the day we were hard pressed to think of examples. I excluded buildings from the mix.
And speaking of buildings - property developers have been widely criticised for our economic gloom - yet the Irish arts community has willingly embraced its own inner property developer - the proliferation of capital development throughout Ireland in the past 15 years was unrivalled with little attention paid in a lot of cases to ongoing running costs, audiences or the availability of work for presentation - what then of our own contribution to the current crisis?
So rather than crisis I think in terms of disruption or disturbance - and the opportunity contained therein for reflection and redirection.
I'm currently facilitating a series of conversations with Ireland's theatre makers on ideas about a new policy for theatre funding. My client is the Arts Council of Ireland and I've been privileged to have been involved in many of these types of consultations in the past. The current financial climate is weighing heavily on everybody's minds here right now and it's fair to say that there isn't enough existing state funding to resource the current state of the arts so how do we even think about succession and new generations?
The conversations are wide ranging - moving between the very real cuts in budgets that have been visited on organisations and artists and the opportunity that this climate presents for re-imagining how theatre could be resourced into the future. There are lots of good ideas, no consensus, much disagreement, a good dollop of disappointment but also an emerging sense of collaboration. There has always been collaboration in this community but some of the ideas emerging now are an extension of the informal arrangements we've seen in the past.
As ever, it's balancing the tensions and looking after the boundaries that is the most interesting area for me as facilitator. Holding on to what works while also creating a flexible structure that can respond to the 'wild card' as one contributor remarked. Not only viewing 'emergence' as a young or new artist phenomenon; creating environments where mid career is something that occurs at any point in an artist's creative life; investing in what works really well while also recognising that some structures may be temporal.
The conversations haven't come up with firm answers but there's certainly a richness of conversation that extends beyond the immediate needs of this generation happening. The question I have in my mind as I facilitate these discussions is - what kind of theatre (or arts) infrastructure are we envisaging in 20 - 30 years time? and what do we need to do now to ensure we get there?
What we find lacking in bankers is Magnificence. We are incensed not by the quantity of their wealth, but its quality and tone. Bill Gates is always clear he believes himself lucky. This makes him hard to hate. Footballers do something thrilling and beautiful to earn their money which makes them magnificent in our eyes. Rock star decadence is cool and warns us of the dangers of excess. Bankers, in contrast, appear only to have piles of money and the trinkets it buys them. If they could learn from Aristotle to be a little more magnificent they would be easier to love, or at least a little harder to loathe.
Situated among the countless arts organizations in New York City are enclaves of passionate culture hounds who gather under the auspices of psychoanalytic training institutes. "There are approximately 38 (such institutes) in Manhattan alone," notes Alan Grossman, LCSW, director of the NY Counseling Center's Training Institute. Joan Erdheim, PhD, President of the Psychoanalytic Society of the Training Institute for Mental Health (TIMH) noted that along with their primary purpose of educating mental-health professionals in the techniques of psychoanalysis, "Ten to fifteen percent of such institutes provide a rich variety of cultural programming."
And while I am in New York I am taking advantage of as much of this cultural programming as possible. Although regretfully I didn't have the opportunity to see some of the events listed in this Huffington Post article - particularly an evening with Jane McAdam Freud the british conceptual artist and great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. There is a transcript of here interview here in which she weaves art, politics and psychoanalysis into a seamless whole making me wonder why it is that psychoanalytic thinking seems so alien and separate from our daily comings and goings. I particularly liked her definition of the role of artists
Very interesting the idea that artists might be consulted, our ideas tapped. I believe that we (artists) pick up on the collective unconscious that contains no time in a constructed sense and so we are a conduit for ideas and actions (potential and actual) in the ether. The artist's sensibility and imagination are such that we operate like a collective voice for all that cannot be spoken or even thought (thought being a conscious act). All that is unexplained, perhaps unexplainable in terms of human behaviour and motivation that could be put down to a spiritual or other force is in my view, unconsciously driven. The unconscious operates much like we believe God operates but without the sentimentality. Art is not sentimental. It doesn't judge either. It simply presents with all the human integrity possible what is in the ether, i.e., what everybody may feel on some level.
It is the nature of artists to think independently and so have imagination without judgment in other words not to come down on either side but simply to explore and present ideas.
Artists have been and still are seen (in the time they live, i.e., not necessarily in hindsight) as mad, bad and sad. This is a description of non-conformity. Difference spells fear. Unfortunately due to very little publication or positive education about artists' intentions, this myth prevails, adding a sort of credence in the face of a public information void. These beliefs are not of course applicable to the enlightened, the intellectuals or the art-related institutions that conversely hold art in very high esteem as a cultural imperative. Art is culture. Culture is Art. (By art I mean all its expressions: 2D, 3D, film, music, literature, etc.).
and the value of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy
Everyone can benefit from psychoanalysis, a time to reflect, to mourn and grieve the mountain of losses one incurs "daily" over a lifetime - after all every decision evokes a loss of sorts. In each choice made we reject all the other possibilities. It is a pity that there is such a stigma attached to mental health issues. Society would benefit if we treated going to the psychoanalyst as sensible, just as going for a regular check-up to the physician is sensible. We could involve psychotherapy in the preventative medicine programme: after all it is to prevent getting ill that we go for a regular check-up. We go for a fitness check so that we can work on the areas that are getting flabby and need more work.
Charles Dickens left behind one, and only one, manuscript for "A Christmas Carol,'' the tale he wrote in 1843 of an unfeeling rich man and the boy who pricked his conscience. Kept under lock-and-key for much of the year at the Morgan Library and Museum, the manuscript is not widely available, one reason, perhaps, why it has been all but impossible to track the many revisions Dickens made to the manuscript as he struggled to get his story right. A high-resolution copy of the manuscript's 66 pages, which you can examine below, may finally change that.
Today's New York Times unveils digital images of all 66 pages of Charles Dickens' manuscript for A Christmas Carol. The images are exquisite and the manuscript itself is at the Morgan Library and Museum here in New York where only one page per year is placed on view for the public coming up to Christmas. Of particular interest in the New York Times is the capacity to move between the typed version of the book and the manuscript to compare and contrast - there are also notes to the changes made by Dickens. Altogether a fascinating project - there's more here.
It's that time of the year again when newspapers do their end of year round up and we review the past year and hope for a better one next year. I've never been one for making new year resolutions preferring to look at every day as the beginning of a new year and therefore an opportunity to do things a little differently. Mark Vernon from the School of Life however offers a different perspective on living well in 2010, one drawn from the world of philosophy. Here's his list of resolutions - many of which are as applicable to the world of work as they are to our personal lives.
1. Diet, but not to lose weight. For there's a more interesting and enriching reason for eating less. Epicurus, who was known as a hedonist, wasn't like today's hedonists. He didn't argue that the pursuit of more was the key to happiness. Quite the opposite. He said he was as happy as Zeus when all he had to eat was a glass of water and a barley cake. Enjoying less, not more. Pleasure in small things. That's the real test for us in a consumer age.
2. Work to live, don't live to work. Cleanthes, who was a Stoic philosopher and also known as the water-carrier, worked by night so that he could do philosophy by day. He was clear that he would work enough, and only enough, to support his real passion, the thinking and writing. His story is timely, for in a year that will be marked by more job insecurity and credit crises, it will be even easier to work so hard that you miss what you want.
3. Meet a friend face to face, when you might have chatted online. Aristotle is our advisor on this matter. He argued that good friendship - soulmateship - is only possible when friends 'share salt together'. He meant that they sit down with each other, not just over the occasional meal, but frequently and often. Then, you see each other body and soul. Texting and websites are part of modern friendship, but alone, they are not enough.
4. Start each day by contemplating the worst that can happen. It sounds like a recipe for pessimism. But the odd thing is that it isn't. In fact, the day will never look better. Zeno, the Stoic, advised this practice. His point was that we spend too much of our time anticipating the worst, when mostly there's nothing we can do about it. So embrace the worst; it probably won't happen. And enjoy the day.
5. Take a technology Sabbath. Take a break from the relentless churn of emails, blogs and websites. They flitter in front of your eyes, and it's too easy to fritter your life away in front of them. So have one day off a week from IT. Read a book, talk to friends, go for a walk instead. Secundus the Silent is our advisor here. He vowed not to speak, realizing that words are typically wasted. And he found it made him wise.
6. Talk to a stranger. There is a source of knowledge and insight all around us, and yet we barely notice it's there. It's not Google. It's the strangers with whom share our world. Socrates realized this, and so started to ask people questions as he walked the streets of Athens - what is friendship, what is happiness, what is love? It was an extraordinary thing to do, and led to nothing less than the invention of philosophy.
7. Go on retreat. To take time out, away from the world, is an old religious practice. The pace of life is slower. It creates time for reflection. It should be easy to do, but actually it's slightly frightening, for fear of what might emerge. Which is what Onescritus discovered. He went to India, and sat with the sages. He came back a changed man.
8. Write a blog for one week. If there's one quality that you need not just to live, but to live well, it's curiosity. With that, you'll really see the world, and your life, and imagine it in a different light. This is what Sappho could do. Her verse changed the world because she gave women voice. Poetry is hard, so turn your observations into a blog. And see how you see things differently.
9. Do something that will surprise your friends, and you. One day, Diogenes the Cynic observed a mouse running about. He was shocked at how free it was, and how inhibited he was in comparison. Immediately, he took up residence in a barrel. His philosophy was that conventions trap us. So try breaking one or two, he'd say. A real taste of liberty will be yours.
10. Decide what you want at your funeral. We are different from other creatures, perhaps in several ways, but one must be that we often contemplate death. Some philosophers, like Plato, believed that death directly or indirectly shapes our every waking moment, and perhaps those during sleep too. But it can be tamed, by befriending it. To learn how to die, is to learn to live well.
Whatever you decided to do in 2010 I hope it's good enough and may I take the opportunity to thank you for stopping by Interactions in 2009 - I hope I will see you again in the New Year.
Stefana Broadbent's research suggests that the internet and technology is increasing our capacity for emotional intimacy. We may have 100 people on our 'buddy lists' or Facebook pages but we in fact only talk in detail with a handful of people. New technologies enable us to keep in touch across distance and time zones. Broadbent tells a number of touching stories of couples (romantic and family) who keep in touch using phone, Skype and webcams - a baker who every morning washes the flour off his hands to call his wife and a couple who, geographically distant, once a month set up their computers with a web cam and have dinner together.
Have a look at Broadbent's TED talk and see if it fits with your view of how technology is changing how we relate.
Quite a lot if this Newsweek article is to be believed.
In September 2008 English singer Billy Bragg performed at something called the Big Busk. After posting the chords of the songs he would play on the Internet, he invited all comers to bring their guitars. Some 3,000 did, strumming while a crew behind Bragg hoisted signs showing which chord to play. Now Southbank is hosting a nine-month Leonard Bernstein festival, which will culminate in a gala presentation of Bernstein's Mass next May 11 by 500 mostly amateur performers.
It seems that the recession is engendering a new spirit of participation in the arts driven by amateurism - and that's amateurism in its original spirit.
"The word 'amateur' comes from the Latin root for love."
What's interesting about this is that this kind of activity may challenge traditional notions of audience participation and the various (and sometimes) misguided attempts to connect with audiences and get them more involved in the artistic life of communities. If we could focus a little bit more on the expertise that all parties bring to the table and less about the marginalisation that occurs when we 'professionalise' then more magic might just happen....
Somehow I missed this fascinating discussion on the differences between amateur and professional in the arts over at Andrew's blog. It's not a new conversation but the nuances are different in a community where there is less state support for the arts than we are accustomed to in Ireland. The dividing line between amateur and professional tends to be the award of Arts Council funding for many and the capacity to earn a living for others. Andrew's piece contains some more nuanced observations drawn from this blog entry from a photographer and Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody. Andrew makes the point that there has been a conflagration between 'professional' and 'excellent' and that is not necessarily the case. For example the Irish traditional music scene has been (and continues to be) primarily 'amateur' in that the artists involved don't necessarily make their living full time from the craft, meanwhile the quality of much of the music is excellent. 'Amateur' and 'Professional' have become limiting silos that tend to frame our enjoyment of the arts. I agree that funding agencies must have some criteria to fund - and in many cases contributing to a working wage for artists is part of that criteria - but let's not assume that everybody who claims to be 'professional' is creating compelling work while those who are amateurs are responsible for mediocrity. As one commenter in Andrew's post points out (and as I mentioned in the previous post)
The root of the word "amateur" is the Latin "amare" - to love.
Perhaps the more important question relates to quality - how we define it, how we recognise it and how we reward it. Does it really matter what the 'status' of the artist is as long as the work is something that really speaks to us? And bearing in mind that we are never going to reach a consensus on what constitutes quality anyway isn't reaching for the traditional silos of 'professional' and 'amateur' a way of relieving ourselves of the burden of exploring the 'quality' discussion in more depth. I have no answers to any of this but the original post and the enlightened comments are really worth reading. And, as ever, the above applies to the world of business as much as it does to the arts. We don't have to look too far to see how much trouble the 'professionals' have gotten us into over the past 18 months. One wonders what might have happened had we allowed a few 'amateurs' in on the act.
About Culture
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Interactions - Creative Strategies for Business in the Culture category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
