On “Antiques Roadshow”

Posted on January 5, 2011 by lindaessig

I caught a few minutes of “Antiques Roadshow” the other night. Whenever I land on “Antiques Roadshow,” I’m reminded of an old episode of Frasier in which Frasier and his dad are arguing over what to watch on TV, not realizing that the suspenseful game show described by John Mahoney’s character and the high-brow art show described by Kelsey Grammar’s were actually both “Antiques Roadshow.” While the situation is played for a laugh, it underlines the power of the arts (or crafts) to appeal to the populist majority and to unite the generations.

On the particular episode I saw, a woman had in her possession a small Calder mobile that had been given to her aunt by the artist as a thank you token for the gift of a needlepointed pillow.  The appraiser ended up giving her what she considered some very good news: it might fetch upwards of $1 million at auction.  While those kinds of appraisals probably help boost the ratings for the show, what I thought was more interesting was the lesson on Calder and mid-century Modern Art delivered as part of the on-camera appraisal.

Of course the populace wouldn’t be receiving these free art history lessons (albeit delivered with a spoonful of sugary suspense and commodification) if it weren’t for the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  Every few years, funding for the CPB, and more recently NPR, is threatened by politics.  In the U.S.’s decentralized approach to arts policy, CPB stands out not only for its content, but because 45 years ago, economists demonstrated mathematically that government subsidy was a requisite for its existence.    Lets hope that in the weeks and months to come, ideology does not get in the way of evidence.

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What Paul Krugman and Arlene Goldbard have in Common

Posted on January 4, 2011 by lindaessig

In his Op-Ed piece Monday in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote, “A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure.”  This put me in mind of Arlene Goldbard’s proposal for a “New WPA for Artists,” which she outlined in two articles on the (unfortunately now defunct) Community Arts Network. She wrote, “I hope that in the Obama administration we will finally be able to write the democratic national cultural policy that has been needed for decades: not just jobs and community development, but how to embody the values of creativity, pluralism, participation and equity that animate a culture of democracy.”

The NEA, as readers of this blog probably know, has launched a new “Art Works” campaign under Rocco Landesman’s leadership.  Unfortunately, the program doesn’t go as far as a WPA for artists, nor could it given the structure of the agency.  Yet, the NEA’s strategic plan cites as its first goal, “The creation of art that meets the highest standard of excellence.”  They advance only one outcome metric: “The portfolio of American art is expanded.”  To expand the portfolio of American art, we need more artists working to create new, and hopefully innovative, art.  As many artists and arts organizations across the country await the release of the new NEA guidelines for funding of arts project next week, I am left wondering if there will be the substantive changes needed to support the creation of new innovative work, by artists who, like scientists, are actually paid to experiment.   For that to happen, we would need Krugman and Goldbard’s level of rationality…. <sigh>.

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Hey, Where’d Your Creativity Go? (a personal answer)

Posted on January 4, 2011 by lindaessig

Over the past eight years, I’ve found myself designing fewer and fewer plays and instead devoting more and more professional time to administration/leadership/management and to research, all by my own choice.  It has now been two years since I last designed lighting (for a production of Anon(ymous) depicted at left). In that time, and especially recently, I’ve been asked on more than one occasion, “Don’t you miss it?”  “Don’t I miss what?” I reply. “The creativity.”  The short answer is “No, not at all.”  The only slightly longer answer follows.

Yesterday, I sat in my new office for the first time following my sabbatical and since moving from the position of the Director of the School of Theatre and Film at ASU to that of a full time faculty member in the school with a focus on arts entrepreneurship.  It’s a small room, maybe nine by ten, that I had painted tangerine.  It’s a repurposed dorm, so there are two closets, into which, behind closed doors, I placed the filing cabinet and shelves of scripts that I haven’t broken open in a long time.  There’s a simple table on which I can put my Mac Book, a Pilates ball for me to sit on, and two green chairs for students or guests that I purchased from Crate and Barrel to contrast with the tangerine walls.  Built-in shelves hold a few pictures of my kids and the books I need for research and teaching the arts entrepreneurship class.

It’s a spare room, and it’s a blank canvas.  Today, I painted on that canvas; I created.

I didn’t create a painting, and I didn’t produce a play, or design lighting cues for it.  I created curriculum.  I sat in my office and collated research materials I had been gathering for months into material for the first class meeting of my first formal class in arts entrepreneurship.  I made connections between ideas and events, selected material, wrote several paragraphs of synthesis, and developed a structure for those first 75 minutes of face-to-face time with undergraduate students from every arts discipline as well as design and business.   Faculty across my university and elsewhere are likely undertaking similar creative activities to benefit their students and their disciplines.

Because the field of arts entrepreneurship is young, there is much original, creative research to be done, and I will be doing that too in my little tangerine office in a repurposed dorm.   (There is also more research to be done in lighting design process and I’ll no doubt continue to do some of that too.) My point is this: you can’t miss something that’s still right in front of you.   Creative opportunities abound; one need only be alert to their possibilities.

So, when someone asks me, “Hey Linda, where’d your creativity go?” I’ll respond, “To a little orange room in a repurposed dorm in Tempe, Arizona.”*

–       Linda

* Hey – if you want to come visit, we’re hosting a really cool arts entrepreneurship symposium April 1-2.

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Compete Less, Cooperate More

Posted on January 3, 2011 by lindaessig

I was catching up over the weekend on the December issue of American Theatre magazine, which had accidently gotten buried under a stack of guidebooks to Prague and Vienna.  I was struck by a short news piece about the new Alliance of Teatros Latinos New York, a coalition of nine Latino Theatre companies joining together to raise funds for their organizations.  Although one might initially thank that these companies would all be competing with one another for the same donor dollar, Robert Frederico is quoted saying, “…rather than fighting over the small crumbs, we decided to unite and go after bigger crumbs.”  This put me in mind of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons in which she examines the cooperative behavior of groups and individuals to manage common pool resources like fisheries or water resources.   Can we think of the philanthropic dollars as a common pool resource? Can organizations or individuals cooperate to maximize the benefits of that resource?

Being a (reasonably) good academic, I did a quick search on the topic of philanthropy as a common pool resource and found a smattering of articles that had some small relevance to the topic, and an abstract for a working paper by Lucas Meijs of Erasmus University (Rotterdam).  Meijs is looking at “philanthropic commitment” as a common pool resource.  However, he and the other scholars I uncovered examine the question from the perspective of the corporate giver, rather than the philanthropic beneficiary.  While I applaud an effort at corporate cooperation to achieve greater impact in giving programs, my applause is louder for arts organizations that cooperate to harvest the maximum dollar out of the seemingly shrinking pool of possible donors.  For the new Alliance, that common resource is the total dollars that corporations, foundations, and individuals are willing to give to Latino theatre companies in New York.  I loudly applaud their effort to compete less and cooperate more.  

Posted in Arts entrepreneurship, Arts funding, arts infrastructure, Arts management, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Howard Gardner’s “Disciplined Mind,” or How to Teach Fishing

Posted on January 2, 2011 by lindaessig

I recently posted on the entrepreneurthearts blog connecting entrepreneurial habits of mind with Michael Kaiser’s New Year’s resolutions.   In the few days since, I not only launched this blog, but delved a bit deeper into Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, which Tom Duening adapted into Five Minds for the Entrepreneurial Future.  I’ve read some of Gardner’s work before and have my own article on signature pedagogies coming out next fall (co-authored with my two amazing colleagues from Queensland University, Tina Hong and Ruth Bridgstock), but while reading Gardner’s book over New Year’s weekend one element came into clearer focus.

Writing of the “Disciplined Mind,” Gardner notes:

Signature pedagogies demonstrate that the life of the professional is not equivalent to the life of the young student.  For these pedagogies to be effective, both students and teachers must operate on a level quite different from that typically followed in the years before professional school.  That is, students must see information not as an end in itself or as a stepping-stone to more advanced types of information, but rather as a means to better-informed practice.  For their parts teachers – acting to some extent as coaches – must provide feedback on their students’ abilities to pick up the distinctive habits of mind and behavior of the professional.

What struck me was the image of the feedback loop.  Of course, I had practiced this very technique for years teaching lighting design at UW-Madison, but I believe that the feedback loop is largely absent from large group instruction.  In order to teach disciplinary habits of mind, our schools will need to provide or maintain an effective feedback infrastructure.  In this age of declining funding for education, including higher education in the arts, how can we provide students with the feedback they need to develop their disciplinary mind? Technology can help, but technology is an enhancement of, not a replacement for, what Gardner calls the coaching that such teaching requires.

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”  Students need to experience fishing to learn it.  They cast the line into the water and the coach provides feedback on the student’s strategy, technique, and results.  By example, a good coach also teaches the student how to evaluate her own results.  And thus, she eats for a lifetime.  Similarly, to teach entrepreneurial habits of mind, e-ship educators need to provide opportunities for students to experience entrepreneurship – to cast their line into the water — and the feedback students need to develop their disciplinary mind.  Easier said than done, I know, but a pedagogic goal nonetheless.

 

(photo “Fishing Lesson” by Michael Latendresse)

Posted in Arts education, Arts entrepreneurship, arts infrastructure, Higher education, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

First thoughts on arts, technology and education

Posted on January 1, 2011 by lindaessig

You’re likely to read a lot on this site about an arts entrepreneurship symposium that the program I work with, p.a.v.e., is hosting April 1-2.  But before that event happens, I’ve accepted an invitation from Southwestern University to participate in its annual Brown Symposium.  One of the “salons” I’m contributing to is on the subject of arts, technology and education.  I have barely begun to prepare for that salon (I’m much further along with my thoughts on “ethics, arts, and public policy,” which I’ll post here soon) but thought I’d share some first thoughts here:

Artists have historically been early adopters of new technology and new technologies have fed artistic creativity and innovation.  Portable paint technology enabled Monet to paint from nature, for example.  New technology opens new art forms.  Emerging technology today enables artists to “paint from nature” as well, only now we call it “locative art” or “augmented reality” art.  Art that allows the viewer to interact in a real place and in real time with other viewers can support community building.  The question is, do we continue to teach older technologies (the charcoal pencil) when new technologies (the iPhone app) are available?

Many of the technologies that support art are cumulative.  Artmaking technology of yesterday is not like the Phlogiston of the eighteenth century compared to the Oxygen of today, borrowing Thomas Kuhn’s example. While science, according to Kuhn, may be characterized by revolutions in which one paradigm for understanding the world is replaced by another, the technologies employed by artists evolve and accumulate so that the world can be understood in different ways simultaneously and expressed by artists using a charcoal pencil, oil paint, or interactive digital media. Art education, then, would need to address the full panoply of art-making technologies in order to support creativity.  Arguably, educators need not teach students to make casein paint medium (and doing so would really stink up the studio), but the public art practitioner would do well to study the fresco technology employed in the Renaissance.

On the other hand, there are technology-dependent disciplines that tend to throw out the old when the new arrives.  My own field of lighting design is one example.  One would not create a lighting design today on a backbone of gaslight or a thyratron tube dimming system.  Yet, the student of lighting design should understand these outdated technologies and their implications, for they effected not only the visual aesthetic of the theatre but also the very structure of drama and it’s staging.

In the end, I believe more knowledge is better than less.  Educators have a responsibility to teach their students the newest and most innovative art-making technologies while providing the important historical and critical contexts in which the technology and the aesthetic it supports developed so that that knowledge – and that technology – can be used responsibly in the service of creativity.

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New Year, new blog

Posted on December 31, 2010 by lindaessig

I think a lot about the infrastructure that is needed to support creative work in the arts.  Some of that thinking led to and subsequently derives from my work in arts entrepreneurship education and is given voice in both scholarly articles and my occasional contributions to the entrepreneurthearts blog.  But entrepreneurial skills and an enterprising mindset are just a part of the infrastructure one needs to sustain creative work.  So, I’m launching this site to enter a dialogue with you on a range of topics related to creative infrastructure – personal infrastructure, organizational infrastructure, economic infrastructure, and sometimes even physical infrastructure.  I’ll still be an occasional contributor to entrepreneurthearts, but here I’m as likely to discuss arts entrepreneurship as any of these related topics:

  • Arts policy
  • Arts management
  • Culture and democracy
  • Higher education
  • Arts education
  • Local economies
  • Technology and arts
  • Creativity
  • Arts funding
  • Evaluation and assessment

If you know me personally, then you know I’m also interested in food (locally grown and for the most part cooked in my own kitchen) so there may be a bit of that too, especially as it relates to the infrastructure issues listed above.

Check back regularly, as I hope to post at least a tidbit of an idea daily… or , more realistically, several times a week.


It’s a great way to start the New Year, don’t you think?

– Linda

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