Solving interesting problems

That's our only rule job now . . . to solve the interesting problems.  I didn't come up with that statement, but it is a very true one.

To me, one of the most interesting problems we have in the arts is the relationship between an artist (or arts organization) and it's audience.  This applies to both the current audience and the intended audience.

I mean isn't that what the whole (sad) blow up at the Guthrie Theatre is all about. One group thinks the responsibility is to offer what will fill the seats, getting the donors coming in and keep the institution alive.  Another group thinks the theatre has a responsibility that goes beyond institutional survival and should be serving a broader community with it's programming.

The truth is that most of the easy problems in the arts have been solved.  We know how to "market" our work (if by marketing . . . you mean selling).  We know the mechanics of fundraising.  We have the means to get revenue from individuals.

All that's left are the hard issues:

What's the appropriate relationship between an insitution and a community?

How do you keep an art form relevant?

Our job, as a field, is to keep asking and demanding viable answers to those questions.  Even when it's uncomfortable.  Even when many would like it if we just shut up and keep the wheels of commerce turning.

That's our job.

That's the only job worth doing.

Comments

[James]

And that's a fundamental shift in the way we think about what we do. When I began at my current institution, I had really only functioned as a staff member in large, bureaucratic (education) institutions. Where I am now, I keep hearing about how our offerings (artistic and otherwise) must be true to the spirit of the theatre and authentic and other phrases I wasn't used to. And it's true. It is really what keeps this theatre going, keeps people in the community (the funding community, the geographic community, the artistic community, etc.) believing in this theatre.

We had a consultant in not long ago that was helping guide our decisions on communications initiatives and as I listened to the direction our marketing and PR and audience interaction was going, it dawned on me that our theatre's mission is more akin to a church than it is a movie theatre. By default, everyone, whether they're patrons or not, knows what I would call the one word mission ("performances"). The same way everyone knows a church's one word mission ("worship"). But the closer you get to the organization, the more you realize all of the ways it serves the community (gathering place, service organization, etc.) and it made it really clear to me how I, as a highly visible staff member, have to communicate with our visitors and what kind of experience we are trying to craft for anyone who walks in our doors for any reason.

The storyteller in me wants to nicely sum up this editorial with a meaningful final paragraph, but I got nothing.