Keynote speech by Ben Cameron
A friend from Zwolle told me I should begin by saying ‘Bent u de gemiddelde nederlander?’ I’m not sure which he thought would be more amusing — the line itself, or my Dutch accent. In any event, I apologize for my mauling of your native tongue.
That said, I am deeply honored to be here among you all. Many of us in the United States have long looked to the Netherlands as a beacon of sorts not only for the vibrant, exciting work produced here — for the extraordinary artists and groups in every discipline, ranging from small, experimental organizations to large institutions — many of whom I must thank for their impact on my life — Edo de Waart, Elly Ameling and more recently Christianne Stolijn, the Concertgebouw, the Mickery Theatre, Scapino Ballet, the great Ivo van Hove — a man I have never met — but whose Misanthrope, Hedda Gabbler and Streetcar Named Desire productions will stay with me always — and even Traintche, whose Burt Bacharach recordings sustained me flying over the Atlantic just yesterday.
In preparing for my time with you, I was especially interested to read your own VSCD report — a report that registered significant concern about multiple pressures on organizations, difficulties in finding new audiences, inadequate facilities, pressure on marketing budgets and lack of cooperation between producers and venues. In many ways, these mirror concerns we ourselves heard in New York where I work at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, an organization that convened more than 700 performing arts professionals in a series of 22 meetings in 14 cities in 2006-07 to discuss the current state of the arts in America.
In those conversations, we heard a great deal about under-compensation, not only of artists, but of managers, technicians and administrators, whose salaries and benefits tend to pale in concern with their for-profit counterparts; we heard concern about organizational fragility and the undercapitalization of arts groups — many of whom struggle to meet annual expenses — often unsuccessfully — and who lack long term investments or monetary reserves — real challenges to be sure but, frankly, challenges that have plagued the nonprofit performing arts in the United States and that we heard ten years, twenty years, thirty years as well.
Four urgent issues
Four issues rose in these most recent conversations that seemed to us more urgent or more specific to the time in which we live. We heard increasing concern about the very nonprofit structure, as more and more professionals, challenged now, not only to produce art, but to engage in intensive fundraising, monitor public education policy, recruit board members, lead increasingly complex staffs, and more — all with the results that weeks or months pass without visits to rehearsals, performances or to the artists who they have given their lives to serve, ask ‘Isn’t there another way to finance this artistic work we are called to do?’
We heard concern about an impending generational shift of leadership as the current generation of leaders retire or move on — indeed a recent study indicates that 75% of NGO leaders in the United States in all fields will leave their jobs by 2012. And while many of us older folks have long worried about where and how to identify our successors — how to find those young people who will want the long hours, the nominal pay, essentially the lives of financial masochism that my own generation has embraced — the young people themselves offered a different perspective. ‘There are plenty of us ready and willing to lead,’ they said, ‘but we are uninterested in being the custodians of those organizations you have created. Unless you give us the same autonomy and power to reinvent and shape these organizations as you yourselves had in forming them, we are not interested’ — a challenge more about organizational flexibility and ability to embrace change than about the identity of the heir apparent per se.
We heard about mystifying shifts in audience behavior — the change post-9/11, when seemingly overnight, audiences went from reserving tickets — not two or three weeks in advance — but more typically 24 hours or, if you’re lucky, 48 hours in advance — a shift that continues to plague marketing departments and box offices who struggle to interpret correctly on a Tuesday the prospects for a dismally sold upcoming Saturday performance. We live in a culture where our lives rush at a faster and faster pace and arts groups seek to attract an audience from a populace characterized by unprecedented exhaustion and over-scheduling, a time in which (according to a Yankelovich poll) half of US consumers across all income levels say that lack of time is a bigger problem than lack of money, when 42% of men and 55% of women say they are too tired to do the things they want to do and when the #1 answer about most eagerly anticipated use of a free evening is no longer socializing, dating or attending a special event but ‘a good night’s sleep.’
Trumping all of these was the issue of technology — that force which increasingly defines the world in which live and a topic that seems especially fitting for our time together today — and its yet not fully understood impact on the arts. While many of us initially embraced emerging web technology for its marketing potential, we now realize that it is if anything, too effective: in trying to attract the attention of potential ticket buyers, we now compete with (depending on whom you read) at least 3,000-5,000 different marketing messages a typical American sees every single day. In fact, technology has emerged as our biggest competitor for leisure time: Gen X-ers spend 20.7 hours every week on television and online combined. Gen Y-ers spend even more — 22.8 hours — with the majority on line and growing, and last year, computer gaming outsold movie and music recordings combined. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a new blog is being created every second of every day. Most profoundly, perhaps, technology is altering the basic assumptions of consumption: thanks to the web, we believe we can get whatever we want, whenever we want it, customized to fit our personal needs. We can shop at 8 at night, 3 in the morning, expectations of customization and personalization that live performing arts organizations — a field that demands set curtain times, specific geographic venues and the attendant inconveniences of travel, parking, forced scheduling etc. — cannot meet. In an age when young people especially can get their culture on demand through You Tube and iTunes any time they want it and at little or no apparent cost, we must ask what will it mean in the future when we ask someone to pay $100 or more for a symphony, opera or theatre ticket when that customer has become accustomed to downloading on the internet for a mere 99 cents a song or for free?
In every performing arts field in America, audiences are shrinking, foundation funds are down, government funds in aggregate are down, and — especially in light of the highly unstable economy — individual giving is expected to fall — shifts that place more pressure on box office and lead to escalating ticket prices that threaten to place attendance beyond the reach of many in our communities that we wish to serve.
However powerful these issues may feel to the arts in particular, we need to remind ourselves that we are experiencing a larger realignment of American cultural expression and communication — a realignment that is shaking the newspaper and television industries, the publishing and book industries, and (in an indication of what may be yet to come for many of us) has left the music recording and distribution industries largely in disarray. As poet Adrienne Rich has written in, ‘The Dream of a Common Language XIII’: ‘We’re out in a country that has no language, no laws….Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us were out of date by years…’
And aren’t you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?
How to skate to where the puck will be
In a time of such seismic change, I am inspired by the words of two different thinkers — of the 19th Century American President Abraham Lincoln, who said, ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew.’ And Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky, who, when asked why he was such a great hockey player, said, ‘Because I skate to where the puck will be.’
How do we in the arts skate to where the puck will be?
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail — sees in technology the unleashing of a veritable tsunami of creative artistic energy. With the invention and now affordability of cell phones, mini cams, computer software and more, he notes, the means of artistic production have been democratized. In the 1930’s if you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Brothers or RKO, for who could afford a movie camera, studio space, lights, editing equipment and more? Now who among us does not know a 14 year old hard at work on her second, third or fourth film?
Furthermore, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized. Warner Brothers and RKO again played this role in the 1930’s, but today anyone can release anything on line, through blogs, through YouTube and more.
This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of authorship and the cultural market. Today, everyone is a potential author. 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 populates You Tube, independent film festivals, dance competitions and more. And knowing that we graduate 400,000 MFA’s in our country every year — a number far too high for the arts industry to absorb — this highly skilled, professionally capably yet avocationally driven artistic pool is destined to increase — a time predicted perhaps by our Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a trained concert pianist who continues to play chamber music with professional musicians, even as her career has called her elsewhere.
In this shifting landscape, the increasing challenge and opportunity for us in the arts world lies in this new marketplace defined by participation — a participation 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 emerging power of consumer participation in other industries. The monolithic power of the restaurant critic in the United States has been shattered by Zagat where the collective consumer passes judgment and defines a restaurant value. ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ ‘Pop Idol’ and its United States counterpart ‘American Idol’ even the iPod — a device which cornered the market — not by its technological superiority or its easy of use, neither or which are at the top of its field — but by its emphasis on co-creation, by moving beyond downloading to invite the user to create a personal play list, to podcasts which could be shared by others — all of these predicated on the active involvement of the consumer.
Properly seen, this rising sense of co-creation is an invitation — an invitation to think less about ‘arts education’ and think more about ‘arts engagement.’ It is an invitation to see our missions, not as creating performances, but as the orchestration of social interaction in which the performance is a piece but only a piece of what we are called to do—and moreover in offering artistic 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 merely as presenters, perhaps, but as activators, engagers, harvesters of creative energy.
This is, if we have the courage to face it, a moment of renaissance for the arts—a rebirth, a moment, as media specialist Doug Rushkoff says, of a ‘collective renegotiation of old ideas to reach a new consensual reality’ — a rebirth in which the salient challenge lies in nourishing the aspirations and hopes of an emerging and future generation of artists without dismantling the still vibrant achievements of the past.
What can we do?
In our correspondence, Guido van der Hulst pressed at this point for me to be more specific: what can we do, he asked? Without a deep understanding of how Dutch organizations work, I can only share advice I give to your American counterparts in hopes that you will find some resonance or potential parallels in your own work.
I think we must all begin with some hard questions: Why must we exist today? Because we have a building is not enough. Because we have a history and awards and a reputation is not enough. Because we produce work that our parents told us was important is not enough. What is it in the world — in an external world — that mandates the flourishing of live arts and culture in our communities today?
On the one hand, this invites groups to be value specific about what we do. Indeed, every cultural organization needs to be able to answer three questions:
1. What is the value my organization brings to my community?
2. Harder: What is the value my organization alone brings or brings better than anyone? else? Second rate or duplicated value will not stand for long in this economy.
3. Hardest: How would my community be damaged if we closed our doors and went away tomorrow?
While I’ve pushed arts organizations to ask these questions for years, I now wonder whether they aren’t a trap — essentially filtering our communities through the lens of our organizations as we know them to be. Too often we try to serve orchestras and forget that we are really called to serve symphonic music; we try to fix theatre companies without the larger lens of examining the connection between dramatic art and our communities. Perhaps the better sequence of questions — and the scarier set — would be (to use dance as an example):
1. What is the value of dance for my community?
2. What is the value dance alone has or that dance fulfills better than anything else?
3. How would my community be damaged if it were abandoned by dance tomorrow?
4. And how might my organization be optimally structured, poised and focused to be my community’s best conduit to dance? — a question that invites us not to jettison all we do, but to keep what is most central and viable, to expand to embrace the new possibilities we may not have seen, and to discard past behaviors that do not and will not serve us in the future.
Armed with this answer, we must prepare an argument that talks not only about the quality of our artistic work but about that embraces its larger social value, backed by quantifiable research — its economic impact, the way it leverages additional dollars in city economies through employment of citizens, by the dollars it leverages for others through parking nearby restaurants, at the fabric stores where fabric for costumes are purchased, at printers where programs are printed, even — as we found in a NY study — in baby sitting fees, where more than $1,000,000 was generated in conjunction with theatre attendance; or its educational impact where tests in the United States have shown that students engaged in the arts typically are four times more likely to participate in science fairs, four times more likely to run for class office, demonstrate greater verbal acuity, greater self-esteem, greater tolerance for ambiguity, are exponentially more likely to graduate from high school and score more than 120 points higher on their SAT’s than their non-arts colleagues; and or its social impact—indeed, as a UCLA study notes, showing that a kid who has been in a play is 42% less likely to tolerate racist behavior than a kid who has never been in a play. We need to be prepared to say and prove that if you care about the local economy, you must care about the arts; If you care about educational achievement for your children, you must care about the arts; if you care about a tolerant, inclusive society, you must care about the arts.
Within these larger philosophical constructs, we must change the way we operate on the day to day. If we are serious about engaging a diverse society — and about engaging young people — we must hire our staffs, not merely to solve our current problems, but to reflect the very audience we wish to engage and serve. We must commit to never making a major organizational decision without at least three different generations of citizens represented in the room, including at least one person or group who — either by gender or race — does not look like the organizational leader.
We must dedicate at least 10-15% of the annual budget to organizational innovation — not to faddish opportunism, but to true innovation — new pathways to mission fulfillment, discontinuous from previous practice, resulting from shifts in underlying organizational assumptions. We must be willing to embark on this journey of exploration whether new monies can be found or not, and must be prepared to give up current activities or programs that do not serve us well in order to free up the resources to embark on new paths.
We must recognize that, in today’s world, every arts organization is a media organization and every artist a media artist, whether they know it or not. We must integrate media into every aspect of the organization — not merely for its broadcasting potential but for its social networking potential and its open source potential, inviting audiences to become co-creators of work and events.
We must engage in the emerging world. We must require every staff member and ourselves, regardless of generation, to spend at least three hours each week on line, exploring new websites, investigating blogs, joining social networks, learning in how bones how the world works, even as we invite others to enter the world we already know and treasure.
We must dismantle old divisions that separate us from our communities. We need to move rehearsal halls to street level and open rehearsals to anyone who wants to observe at any time. We must introduce artists to audiences. We must engage, rather than present.
We must support one another, even as competition between us intensifies. We need to move beyond the competitive — a viewpoint that sees a fixed pie and the arrival of every new organization or artist as taking some of the pie away — and value coopetition — cooperating to grow the pie for us all, through collaborative advocacy, collaborative advertising, collaborative producing, even as we continue as we inevitable will to compete with one another for time and attention.
And we must risk — not be irresponsible (which is how many hear the word risk) but arm ourselves with our best knowledge, our best instincts, the counsel of others more expert than we, and push past our traditional points of comfort and behavioral custom, recognizing that the business that does not risk does not grow; the relationship you have with husband wife or partner without risk does not grow; that the artist who does not risk — however technically capable — never reaches that transcendent moment, that moment beyond the predictable, the true moment of artistic inspiration. Indeed, the three greatest regrets of retirees are that they did not spend more time in reflective thinking. They were not clearer about the purpose of their lives. They did not risk more. We can not lead lives or organizations that we will regret.
I for one am hopeful about the future for the arts, even though I may not have sounded so until this moment — not least of all because of my experience at PopTech, an annual high tech conference in Camden ME for 500 high tech folks. Contrary to my expectations, this conference does not focus on startups or financing: it was — and is — a conference where we the tech community and thought leaders from various fields gather to think about the human brain. Global warming. International warfare and terrorism. AIDS research. To consider, in essence, not how how to survive, but how to change the world.
Central to this entire conference, however, is the arts: artists sit on many panels — indeed, Elizabeth Streb knocked their socks off, for example, with her explanation of the relationship of physics to dance — and every session is followed by a performance by a live artist — a solo cellist playing using technology to create a quartet of sound, a hip hop dancer dancing on crutches, a remarkable spoken word artist Vanessa German who blew the roof off with her passionate poetry and raw release of feeling.
On the one hand, I find hope in the live nature of the conference. Camden, ME is in a relatively remote area of the US and not an easy place to access, and if any community can convene virtually, this one can. Yet through PopTech and TED and more, this community insists on coming together because of the unique value of live, face to face, collective experience, to conspiring — meaning in its Latin origins ‘to breathe together.’ And throughout PopTech, a minor chord, a palpable hunger throbbed in the background. These tech leaders were desperate to slow down, to lead less frenetic lives, to find more consistent connection to their passions. More and more, they placed premium on contemplation, on captivation, on focus and extended surrender to single experience — experiences that would captivate, resonate emotionally, stimulate intellectually, at its best enhance spiritual value — to the very things that we in the arts do.
They recognized the ultimate irony of their own success — that prosperity without spiritual enrichment does not bring fulfillment, and in the face of a growing culture dedicated to convenience — to no-iron shirts and microwave meals, to hands free parking and more, all striving to convince us that ease is good and effort is bad, there is value — irreplaceable value in the difficult, in the complex, in the ambiguous and the real.
We have the potential to serve that need: we need only to accept their invitation — to lift our thinking and to constantly challenge ourselves about how we too will change the world.
Family photographs
Let me close by sharing a public opinion poll conducted in the United States more than a decade ago. When asked, ‘If your house is on fire, what’s the first thing you’ll grab when you run out the door?’ the overwhelming answer returned was ‘my family photographs’.
And I say to you, the arts ARE our family photographs.
As a man whose ancestors came from England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany, the plays of Beckett, the plays of Shakespeare, the plays of Goethe, these are my family photographs. As a man born and raised in the southern part of the United States, the plays of Tennessee Williams, the stories of Carson McCullough, the novels of William Faulkner are my family photographs. As a man in contemporary New York, the plays of David Mamet, the plays of David Rabe, are my family photographs. As a gay man, the dances of Bill T. Jones, the plays of Tony Kushner are my family photographs. But as citizen of the world, the novels of South African brothers, the poetry of Philippino sisters, the songs of my Australian aunts and uncles, the poetry of my Cambodian cousins, these are our family photographs. And if we do our job right, they will live and breathe as testaments to who we were, what we thought, what we felt, — just as we turn to the plays of Aeschylus, Socrates and Euripides as the living photos of ancient Greece — not to some record of wars worn or lost.
Many of us did not choose this work; it chose us. But when we choose to answer that call, what we really do is, we honour the past, we commemorate the present, we shape and we change the future in a way that does honour to all and violence to none. I don’t care how much opponents may try to shame us from that path. For those of us who are spiritually inclined, it is God’s work we do.
I’d like to thank you for your part in doing such work — whether he in Zwolle or in Amsterdam or Delft or wherever your home base. I’d like to assure you that the hands of the American arts community are outstretched to you, both now and for many years to come. And I’d like to thank you for your kindness and patience in listening to me this morning.
Thank you and God speed.
Ben Cameron is sinds 2006 Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York, NY. Hij beheert vanuit die functie een fonds van $17 miljoen dat beurzen toekent aan organisaties en artiesten die werkzaam zijn in het theater, hedendaagse dans en jazz.
Eerder was hij werkzaam als Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG) in New York City. TCG is de nationale koepelorganisatie voor het nonprofit professionele theater in de VS. TCG telt meer dan 440 aangesloten theaters en 18.000 individuele leden en biedt diensten aan op tal van terreinen. In de periode dat hij er als directeur werkzaam was, startte TCG met een eigen website, gekoppeld aan een scala van electronische diensten; wist het zijn ledental met meer dan 45% te vergroten, lanceerde het human resource programma's en programma's gericht op de training van bestuursleden; breidde het z'n onderzoeksactiviteiten aanzienlijk uit en startte een nationaal 'pilot program' voor 'audience development' (Free Night of Theatre). Ook wist het z'n jaarlijkse budget voor beurzen met meer dan 300% te vergroten.
Voordat hij directeur werd bij TCG was Ben Cameron onder meer werkzaam bij de Dayton Hudson Foundation in Minneapolis als Senior Program Officerbij Target Stores als Manager of Community Relations, bij de National Endowment for the Arts als Director of the Theater Program. Hij was als Associate Artistic Director verbonden aan het Indiana Repertory Theater (1981-84), was Literary Manager van de PlayMakers Repertory Company (1984-86) en vervulde een serie free-lance regie- en dramaturgie-opdrachten bij theaters als het Yale Repertory Theater en Center Stage in Baltimore, MD. Hij gaf daarnaast les aan de Yale School of Drama, Yale College, de Universiteit van North Carolina en Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA en is op dit moment als gastdocent verbonden aan de Yale School of Drama
Cameron heeft een ruime ervaring als gastspreker, onder meer bij de Canadian Arts Summit in Montreal, bij de jaarlijkse conferencies van Opera America, de American Symphony Orchestra League, Dance USA, Americans for the Arts, ASSITEJ, TCG en LORT en tal van andere lokale arts councils en arts communities.
www.ddcf.org
www.ispa.org