For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.

Ever wonder why Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, our white gazelle’s who define entrepreneurial success, never finished college? Is what made them hugely successful creating their own kind of lifestyle simply all based on their ability to out smart everyone or write THE BEST business plan? How did their creativity fit into all of this and what can we learn from how effectively they used it?

Artists, after all, have GREAT ideas all the time. An idea a minute it seems- many spectacular.  And yet all the studies show most cannot even make a modest living most of the time.  And while this article below demonstrates that we increasingly are going to now see programs popping up to teach artists how to write a business plan, or teach them the business skills they need through an 8 to 12 week one day a week program, I believe, most may be wasting their time.  It’s NOT  book smarts OR a well crafted business plan that is FIRST IN LINE to turn our situation around. Sure, its on the list. Don’t get me wrong. It’s in the IAE’s curriculum for sure. But what is REALLY REQUIRED to do the job, is repairing the WAY WE EMOTIONALLY THINK about who we are and what we do that WILL FINALLY MAKE THE DIFFERENCE. And this is NOT an 8 week course! IT IS AT A MINIMUM an interdisciplinary 2 YEAR PLAN.

Thanks to what I have learned from observing highly emotionally intelligent people to help myself, and then some who were not- like my mother- I have learned very well where the differences lie; as well as how to help others deepen their own.

Entrepreneurial intelligence does not rest on what you know. You can know very little. It rests on learning HOW and WHEN to discover WHAT you need to know; and then knowing HOW TO MANAGE the context of what you have learned to achieve your result. All very subtle and it requires close, regular, personal contact to uncover. What will make artists entrepreneurs is building emotional intelligence. I am opening The IAE to build VIBRANT STRONG ENTREPRENEURIAL Emotionally Intelligence Artists. Please help me find the right artists who want to join our first class to SHOW THE WORLD how we TRULY CAN redefine our own lives in positive, healthy and life changing ways. No More Starving Artists. Let’s Change History.

If you doubt a word I am saying, just read the last line of this article. Mr. Barman’s comment says it all…

Creative Types Learning to Be Business Minded By KATE TAYLOR

Published: June 18, 2010 in the New York Times

He calls them Audioketubah and, at $1,500, they come in the form of handwritten scrolls and CDs, perfect gifts for a couple who cannot stomach another set of stemware.

Juan Hinojosa makes collages from found materials like Metrocards and food wrappers, and clothing tags that he filches from high-end stores. He often brings an attractive female friend along to distract the staff while he snips off the labels, though he said he has never actually taken anything of value.

On five Saturdays this month and next, Mr. Barman, Mr. Hinojosa and 54 other artists are attending a class paid for by the City of New York that is intended to help them turn their creative works into money.

“Does everyone have Excel?,” Peter Cobb, a lawyer and administrator at the New York Foundation for the Arts, which runs the program, asked the class last Saturday. “For next week, your assignment is to make a list of all your expenses for 2009.”

The sighs and complaints that followed were proof of the challenging task Mr. Cobb and his colleagues have taken on: trying to teach people who like to color outside the lines about drawing up business plans, budgeting and making a sales pitch.

The city’s cultural sector “attracts very, very creative people who have incredible ideas, but they don’t always know how to turn their ideas into financial sustainable entities,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. His agency is spending $50,000 on this program and a similar one being run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, with Creative Capital.

It is harder than it used to be to live as an artist in New York City, given the cost of housing, studios and rehearsal space, and the Bloomberg administration does not want artists to leave the city. Culture is a magnet for tourism and a major reason why people in other professions (and often higher tax brackets) want to live here. Ergo, two city-financed courses devised to help artists help themselves.

“It’s kind of the teach-a-person-to-fish school of cultural support,” Mr. Pinsky said.

The group attending the five-week program includes painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, creative writers, actors, directors, dancers, singers, musicians — and some who defied categorization, like Ryan Murdock. He said his work encompassed filmmaking, radio documentary and photography, as well as organizing events that brought together “silent films, live music and homemade pies.” He said he had recently quit his job in public television, and hoped to arrive at “a business structure that will allow me to do everything I want to do, because I’m too curious to pin myself down.”

Along with group sessions covering subjects like intellectual property and Internet marketing, each artist has a 20-minute meeting with a New York Foundation for the Arts staff member or an outside adviser to review his or her business plan. At the end of the course, the students can apply for subsidized studio or rehearsal space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, courtesy of Chashama, an organization that transforms vacant properties into art spaces.

“Artists are not taught to plan,” said Jackie Battenfield, a painter and the author of “The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love.” Too often, she said, they’re “going in circles, and that’s very demoralizing.”

This is the first time the city has financed such a program, though others, like one at the Bronx Museum called Artists in the Marketplace, have long strived to help artists manage their careers.

Most of the artists in the class had some kind of day job. Many teach. Mr. Barman, who has released several albums, does freelance journalism and teaches hip-hop to high school students.

Mr. Hinojosa works as an assistant to a more established artist, Shinique Smith. He has also sold his own works for as much as $2,000, and thinks that he’ll eventually be able to make a living from his art. One benefit to art made from found materials, he points out: “The supplies are free.”

Eric Wright, a lanky puppeteer, is one of a few students who already have a successful business. With two partners, he runs The Puppet Kitchen in the East Village, which has built puppets for the Disney Channel, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, the Public Theater and the noted puppeteer Basil Twist.

They have more work than they can do themselves and want to expand, but, being artists, Mr. Wright said, they need help with the financial side of things. “Most business development courses are for restaurant managers” and people in other traditional businesses, he said, so he was thrilled to find one geared to artists. “People think that art and business are at odds,” he said, but “you can create great art and have it also be a business.”

Mr. Pinsky said the city plans to follow up to see how many participants succeed in implementing their business plans.

Mr. Barman said that when it comes to his Audioketubahs, he is motivated by much more than just profit.

“It’s the most positive, fun, exciting, deep and funny thing I’ve ever been involved in,” he said of writing the songs, for which he often interviews the bride and groom at length, over drinks. “Every single one I do makes everyone so happy.”

We need more than ever to hang on to the arts as the crown jewel of giving us life experiences. And we also need to simultaneously give them tangible purpose by using their gifts more potently as a vehicle to help others achieve, both for ourselves and others, unprecedented economic opportunities.

And yet the kind of narrow thinking David Brooks describes in this NYT piece is exactly what we all should fear if we do not find a way to create meaningful work that has some measure of practical applicability. Thanks James Willney for passing it along for our readers.

History for Dollars By DAVID BROOKS Published: June 7, 2010 in the New York Times

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.

But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levee of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.

Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.

Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.

Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates investment bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.

Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again.

The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.

Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?

Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

Written by Nancy Davis Kho, Special to The San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Standing next to a barbecue shaped like a flying buzzard on a recent sunny afternoon, the winds coming over the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains to ruffle the ashy edges of a cooking fire, metalsmith Bill Sorich can be forgiven for waxing poetic. “Fire was the first entertainment, the first television,” Sorich says, adjusting the height of the grill holding homemade elk sausage by means of a pulley system rigged through the mouth of the bird, which stands 6 feet tall. “People just like looking at fire.”

Architectural designer Kristen Harrison understands the appeal – so much so that in the 20 years she’s known Sorich, she’s purchased five of his custom-made barbecues. “I keep two at my office, two at my house, and one at a house up in Oregon,” Harrison says. “I’ve had perfectly good steak cooked on a propane grill. But with these barbecues, once we’re done cooking, we throw a few logs on and everyone gathers around the fire. It’s really the original concept of barbecuing.”

This being Memorial Day weekend, there will be plenty of people flipping on the gas barbecue or dumping charcoal briquettes into a Weber. But for those who see grilling as more contemplative, there are a few Bay Area artists who have elevated the humble barbecue into art – art that cooks.

Surrounded and inspired by nature, Sorich, 62, lives with his wife, Lisa Hedstrom, a textile artist, in a house the couple built high in the Los Altos hills, near Skylonda. The house and expansive workshop, like much of Sorich’s art, make liberal use of recycled materials, and power is generated in part through solar panels and a windmill. Given the seclusion of the rustic property, it’s no surprise that animals are a recurring motif in Sorich’s whimsical fire pits and barbecues.

There’s an armadillo made from a discarded beer barrel, its individual stainless-steel tiles welded on and the sinuous tail working as a handle to open and close the top. With the top closed, the grill looks like garden statuary. “That one took me 10 years to think up, and three weeks to make,” says Sorich. Two tall iron barbecues, one shaped like an emu and the other a flamingo, have weathered to an orangey red, while a mini-grill shaped like a sea turtle looks ready to swim into the current.

“My idea of art isn’t something you hang on a wall,” says Sorich. He trained as an industrial welder and worked for Westinghouse for years but liked the creative challenge of making something from discarded materials. “I come from industry, so they have to work,” he insists of his fire pits and grills, which range in price from $500 to $15,000. “They’re guaranteed, for my life or yours.”

Q-ing up the ‘cues

By day, Don Carlson, 47, teaches welding to middle school students at Marin Country Day School. But by night, Carlson, who learned his skills as a pipe welder in the Navy, creates monstrous barbecues from recycled materials in his Richmond garage. Bobby-Q, Rooster-Q and Q-Ball are a few of the Monster-Qs that have emerged from found objects through Carlson’s artistic vision.

While they share a certain asymmetry and ferocious looking “mouths” that act as the grill’s opening, each barbecue is unique. “Finding the right pieces takes a while,” he says. “It’s a good thing I don’t do it to make a living,” Carlson quips, “because I have to make them at my own pace.” A typical Monster-Q, most of which are built around empty halon tanks once used in fire extinguishers, might incorporate wrenches, railroad spikes and chipping hammers in its quirky design. One Monster-Q even sits on discarded cafeteria table wheels for easy rolling.

“I go in with an idea of what I want to make,” Carlson says, “but the personality evolves as I work on it.” Carlson’s otherworldly barbecues, which cost $500 to $3,500, are mostly sold by word of mouth and at open-studio events. His next open studio is in conjunction with Pro Arts East Bay Open Studios.

Carnivorous art

After Brian McConnell finally finished redesigning his backyard in Twin Peaks, he didn’t want the standard barbecue setup. “I wanted to have a grill that looked like part of the garden and that was not immediately recognizable as a grill,” McConnell, an entrepreneur, said.

He turned to Oakland blacksmith Daniel Hopper to create something that would fit into the plant theme. Hopper, who tends toward organic, industrial designs, came up with the perfect form for a backyard barbecue: a carnivorous Venus flytrap. Using a cut-up Weber grill as a form around which to shape the sheet metal, Hopper designed two enormous flytrap-shaped barbecues and three companion metal pitcher plants for lights. Originally, one of the forged steel flytraps was meant for vegetarian fare and the other for meat, but McConnell says, “I think we lost track of which side is which.”

Of the design Hopper says, “I like my work to incorporate an element of danger that people feel compelled to address physically.” In the case of the flytrap, it’s evident in the long metal trigger hairs made from forged pipes: They’re handy to hang a utensil on but undeniably menacing. Extending well beyond the barbecue’s closed mouth, guests ignore them at their peril.

McConnell appreciates the fact that Hopper’s art isn’t static. “I entertain a lot and like the idea of functional art that people interact with. Paintings are nice, but a barbecue does something useful.”

In the new jargon of the Creativity Economy, this process is called “paradigm shifting.” Old ideas about products and services are reframed and replaced by a new concept, a fresh sensibility. So old ’60s Birkenstock sandals, reborn as “birkies,” still have an ergonomic, ecological feel to them but appeal to another generation. Give it some thought, and you can come up with plenty of examples of paradigms shifting from the old to the new .

And as you can see from an article I found below dating back to 2005, these kinds of paradigm shifts are no longer ” new” but in full bloom and becoming mainstream…  Now we, as artists, need to bring them into Main Street businesses. We need to take the concepts of Fortune 100 and bring them into pizza parlors, beauty salons, chinese restaurants and are favorite dry cleaners.  The time is ripe and there is economic opportunities here for artists to realize…

This article appeared in August of 2005 in Business Week and was written by Bruce Nussbaum
Listen closely. There’s a new conversation under way across America that may well change your future. If you work for Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) or General Electric Co. (GE ), you already know what’s going on. If you don’t, you might want to stop what you’re doing and consider this:

The Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new — call it the Creativity Economy. Even as policymakers and pundits wring their hands over the outsourcing of engineering, software writing, accounting, and myriad other high-tech, high-end service jobs — not to mention the move of manufacturing to Asia — U.S. companies are evolving to the next level of economic activity.

What was once central to corporations — price, quality, and much of the left-brain, digitized analytical work associated with knowledge — is fast being shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians, as well as Hungarians, Czechs, and Russians. Increasingly, the new core competence is creativity — the right-brain stuff that smart companies are now harnessing to generate top-line growth. The game is changing. It isn’t just about math and science anymore. It’s about creativity, imagination, and, above all, innovation.

What is unfolding is the commoditization of knowledge. We have seen global forces undermine autos, electronics, and other manufacturing, but the Knowledge Economy was expected to last forever and play to America’s strengths: great universities, terrific labs, smart immigrants, an entrepreneurial business culture.

Oops. It turns out there are a growing number of really smart engineers and scientists “out there,” too. They’ve learned to make assembly lines run efficiently, whether they turn out cars or code, refrigerators or legal briefs. So U.S. companies are moving on to creating consumer experiences, not just products; reconceiving entire brand categories, not merely adding a few more colors; and, above all, innovating in new and surprising arenas.

The U.S. has a lead in this unfolding Creativity Economy — for the moment. The new forms of innovation driving it forward are based on an intimate understanding of consumer culture — the ability to determine what people want even before they can articulate it. Working in what is still the largest consumer market in the world gives U.S. companies a huge edge. So does being able to think outside the box — something Americans still do better than most. But Toyota Motor Corp. (TM ) has a feel for U.S. consumers, and Samsung Group can be pretty creative, too. Competition will surely be intense.

A New Dance
For managers, the biggest challenge may be making the leap from their Six Sigma process skills to new ways of thinking. For corporations, transforming themselves will require new sets of values and organizational principles. Have you heard of design strategy? It’s probably the Next Big Thing after Six Sigma. How about consumer-centric innovation? It may be the most powerful way to raise a company’s innovation success rate. Do you know what innovation metrics your company needs? Have you heard of CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize, and realize)? It’s the post-Six Sigma dogma GE is spreading far and wide among its managers. Are B-schools on top of all this change? Not really, but Stanford University is starting a “D-school” — a design school where managers can learn the dynamics of innovation. Teaching elephants to dance is never easy, but that’s the task ahead if you want your company — and your career — to prosper.

You’re thinking “this is all hype,” aren’t you? Just another “newest and biggest” fad, right? Wrong. Ask the 940 senior executives from around the world who said in a recent Boston Consulting Group Inc. survey that increasing top-line revenues through innovation has become essential to success in their industry. The same BCG survey showed that more than half of the execs were dissatisfied with the financial returns on their investments in innovation. They should be. By one measure, from innovation consultant Doblin Inc., nearly 96% of all innovation attempts fail to beat targets for return on investment. No wonder innovation frustration is the talk of corner offices.

BusinessWeek is joining this growing conversation about getting creative by launching a new online Innovation & Design portal — www.businessweek.com/innovate — to present the best research and thinking on the subject. Take a look at the interactive self-assessment feature developed by Larry Keeley’s Doblin Inc. There are six innovation metrics available. Keeley is the guru of the evolving field of innovation science. Some compare him to W. Edwards Deming, who revolutionized the field of quality measurement.

There is, in fact, a whole new generation of innovation gurus. They are not the superstars of the ’90s, such as Clayton Christensen, who focused on what might be called macro-innovation — the impact of big, unexpected new technologies on companies. The new gurus focus more on micro-innovation — teaching companies how to connect with their customers’ emotions, linking research and development labs to consumer needs, recalibrating employee incentives to emphasize creativity, constructing maps showing opportunities for innovation.

When creative mojo gets going, it can explode into innovation. An example: the mundane mop. Cleaning used to be done with mops and water. Design Continuum Inc. in West Newton, Mass., researched cleaning for P&G and observed that water tends to slop dirt around, while dry rags pick it up (thanks to electrostatic attraction). Ergo, the Swiffer. In the design-speak of the Creativity Economy, this is paradigm shifting. Design Continuum helped P&G shift the cleaning paradigm. Now the Swiffer may become P&G’s newest $1 billion brand.

Think out-of-the-box consumer experiences, and you get the idea of paradigm shifting. Old paradigm: corner coffee shops. New paradigm: Starbucks (SBUX ). Old: radio. New: satellite radio. Old: crowded electronics stores. New: Apple Computer (AAPL ) stores. Old: grungy, smelly circuses. New: Cirque du Soleil. Old: any airline. New: JetBlue Airways (JBLU ). Old: Macy’s (FD ). New: Target (TGT ). Old: Earth-toned Birkenstock sandals. New: colorful beach “Birkis.”

The evolution of the economy toward creativity has been underway for some time. Steve Jobs, of course, has turned Apple into the paragon of the creative corporation. Companies throughout the world are deconstructing Apple’s success in design and innovation, and learning the lessons.

Today all kinds of blue-chip CEOs are signing on to creativity. A.G. Lafley, P&G’s CEO, and Jeffrey R. Immelt, GE’s CEO are at the core of the new movement. Lafley started it when he took over in 2000, but Immelt’s conversion to creativity when he became chief executive in 2001 is giving the shift to creativity more momentum. Because of GE’S size and scope, when it moves, the economy moves with it. The vocabulary of business may be changing as well. It’s hard to imagine former GE boss Jack Welch saying: “Creativity and imagination applied in a business context is innovation,” as Immelt recently did. Or “we’re measuring GE’s top leaders on how imaginative they are. Imaginative leaders are the ones who have the courage to fund new ideas, lead teams to discover better ideas, and lead people to take more educated risks,” as he added. That’s a sea change from rewarding GE managers for a career of floating from operation to operation, massaging the process for incremental improvements.

Lafley sits on GE’s board, so two of America’s most powerful and effective CEOs now meet regularly, talk about creativity, discuss which of the new breed of innovation gurus is offering the best advice, and exchange notes on what works and what doesn’t. When the history of the transition from the Knowledge Economy to the Creativity Economy is written, these two will probably get much of the credit.

To understand why the creativity movement is becoming so important, you need to go back to its roots at P&G. By harnessing the power of design, P&G has transformed itself from a stagnant brand manager into a model of innovation efficiency that outperforms industry rivals.

Before Lafley, P&G’s volume growth was basically flat. The company cared more about how its products functioned than it did about how customers felt about them. “P&G had the best chemical engineering and marketing operations in the country,” says Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. “It didn’t care about the user experience.” P&G could tell retailers to stock eight kinds of Crest, and they did. As power shifted to big retailers, P&G couldn’t do that. “It had to create new products, and to do that, P&G had to get closer to the consumer,” says Whitney.

Fresh Eyes
Lafley turned to design. In 2001 he established a new executive post: vice-president for design, innovation, and strategy, naming Claudia B. Kotchka, now 53, to fill it. She and Lafley knew they couldn’t change P&G’s culture without fresh eyes from the outside. So they made a major decision: Even as P&G began laying off thousands of top executives, middle managers, scientists, and others, it quadrupled its design staff. For the first time it hired a legion of designers who had worked at other companies and in other industries.

In a second crucial decision, Kotchka dispatched designers to work directly with R&D staffers to help to conceive new products. This changed P&G’s entire innovation process, making it consumer-centric rather than driven by new technology. To open up the company further, P&G started hiring different kinds of consultants. Among them were Design Continuum; ZIBA Design in Portland, Ore.; Chicago’s Doblin Inc.; and IDEO in Palo Alto, Calif.

Here’s how it works at P&G: Kotchka contacts P&G’s divisional heads, asking for a list of possible opportunities designers might address. Recently, the head of home care said it was time to look at bathroom cleaning. Kotchka brought in IDEO with the goal of helping out. IDEO and P&G’s designers went out and observed people cleaning bathrooms around the world. In South America they saw women using brooms to clean walls and showers effectively and built a prototype combining a small hand cleaner with a long pole. P&G tested the idea via a survey. People hated it.

But P&G hung in there. What is fast becoming the Holy Grail of innovation — the “unmet, unarticulated” needs of consumers — didn’t show up in the survey. Instead, P&G relied on the informed intuition of designers and tested the idea again, using working prototypes. People loved the real thing. P&G then broke down the walls of its Mr. Clean brand, reached in and used the Mr. Clean detergent for the new product. The Mr. Clean MagicReach was introduced in April — with a four-foot detachable pole. Mundane as this example may be, it shows how design strategy can generate innovative new products and sales.

To build a design infrastructure, Lafley also established what he calls his innovation “gym,” a place to train managers in the new design thinking. And he created a Design Board of non-P&Gers who provide an independent perspective on products, brand extensions, and marketing.

Jeff Immelt inherited one of America’s most successful companies. GE’s incredible process culture, which brought so much to the bottom line in the ’90s, was no longer enough to maintain its leadership in the 21st century. Like Lafley, Immelt needed to create an innovation culture quickly. One of his major goals was to raise GE’s average organic growth to 8% from the 5% of the past decade. The skills Jack Welch prized — cost-cutting, efficiency, the continual improvement of operations — couldn’t deliver that.

Big Bets
Immelt launched a series of what he calls Imagination Breakthrough projects, investing more than $5 billion in 80 initiatives that take GE into new markets, product areas, and industries. He told his managers to connect with consumers, learn to take risks, and place big bets. GE is already reaping major benefits from previous bold moves. Its latest quarterly profit surge of 24% is due in part to reframing the idea of power generation. The company expanded it from gas turbines to wind and solar, which paid off.

Also like Lafley, Immelt is pushing to change the corporate structure to spur creativity. He appointed Beth Comstock to the newly created position of chief marketing officer in charge of generating innovation and creativity. He’s bringing in many of the same design and innovation gurus Lafley uses so effectively. And GE being GE, has its new acronym, CENCOR, for its innovation process.

Call it CENCOR, creativity, or imagination, GE is doing it. Comstock recently held a “China market discovery” session, bringing together some 90 people for three days. Outside innovation consultants pushed the envelope. “We forced the group to get outside itself, to look at China with new eyes,” says Comstock. The effort appears to be working: Sales to China soared in the latest quarter.

What is the methodology of the new design strategy that Lafley, Immelt, and others are adopting? The basics are simple. They start with observation — going out and directly seeing customers shop at malls, families eating in restaurants, or patients being treated in hospitals. Gap Inc. (GPS ) and others have found that social shopping — in pairs and threesomes — is the norm in its stores, so it’s making dressing rooms bigger. Trying out lots of ideas fast by making models or videos (prototyping) is the next step. This lets managers visualize concepts, make decisions on which to improve and which to discard, and launch products faster.

Storytelling is very important. Designers have found that placing a potential new product within an emotional story that connects with consumers raises the chances of success. The design of the new line of MINI_motion watches and driving shoes, for example, captures the story of the Mini Cooper’s cool urban driving experience. It’s about the driver, not the car.

The final ingredient in design strategy is building an organizational process that does these things all the time. This kind of change can be wrenching for a company, but the payoffs are enormous. “You can build a kind of culture of routine innovation through design thinking,” says one of the pioneers of the new discipline, David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO and head of the new D-school at Stanford.

So watch out, consultants. A whole new cadre of advisers is out to lead CEOs into the Creativity Economy. They speak a language different from Establishment consultants’ (more anthropology, less technology) and advise differently (more hands-on workshops, fewer companywide surveys). Mainstream consultants, such as BCG, are building their innovation expertise, but they’d better hurry.

The new gurus have emerged from the depths of the late ’90s meltdown and the shock of Asian competition to show CEOs a path beyond the Knowledge Economy to an even higher-value-added business model. They say they have found a way to play a high-margin game in a low-priced world, a means of differentiating products in a commoditized marketplace and a methodology for staying ahead of Asian rivals. They are the keepers of creativity in a world awash in technology, the champions of innovation in a globe drowning in commodities. Meet seven of them and many more on our new site.

There’s a lot of talk about America becoming a 97-pound weakling. But the naysayers don’t get the strength inherent in a truly Creative Economy. This revolution has barely begun, and building creative, innovative companies is the great task ahead. In the stories that follow, you’ll find the tools, methods, and metrics to help make it happen

On April 16, more than 900 Harvard Business School students will be introduced to a new case study, “Creative Capital: Sustaining the Arts.” The study explores Creative Capital’s history and unique system of supporting individual artists and looks ahead to the organization’s second decade. Professors Felda Hardymon, Frank Cespedes and Elisabeth Koll will teach the case in Entrepreneurial Management classes to the entire HBS Class of 2011. The case, which touches on many of Creative Capital’s signature activities—including its unique application process, Professional Development Program and Artist Retreat—was prepared by Professor Hardymon and Teaching Fellow Ann Leamon.

HBS was drawn to Creative Capital because of the organization’s unique adaptation of venture capital concepts to the arts. Creative Capital was conceived following the culture wars of the mid-1990s, as dot com companies were reinventing ways of doing business and venture philanthropy was born. A perfect alignment of cultural and economic conditions allowed Creative Capital to harness venture capital concepts and apply them to the art world at a time when a new system of support for individual artists was most needed.

Creative Capital’s integrated, multi-faceted and sequential system of support adapts business concepts to suit the fluid trajectory of the creative process, offering both financial and advisory support to help artists realize their projects and build individual capacity to sustain their careers.

“Creative Capital: Sustaining the Arts” features quotes and insights from Creative Capital President Ruby Lerner and former president of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Archibald Gillies, as well as board members, grantees, Professional Development Program participants and other members of the Creative Capital family.

Lerner will attend all three Entrepreneurial Management classes on April 16 to help teach the case. “This case study demonstrates how far Creative Capital has come since 1999 and asks students to consider how we can keep moving forward,” says Lerner. “We are proud to share our story with HBS and its students, and I am excited to have the opportunity to hear what the students have to say about our future.”

For more information, or to order copies of “Creative Capital: Sustaining the Arts,” visit http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu.

Pink was in O.C. to talk about the importance of arts education in forming a well-rounded, competitive job-force warrior — apparently a subject of intense interest in Orange County, not only among teachers (of which there were many in the audience) but within the business community as well (they were the ones in the dark suits thumbing away on their Blackberries).

Teachers and school administrators are looking for new ways to justify the conservation of arts curriculum in an era of draconian cutbacks. H.R. types, trying to keep abreast of the rapidly changing needs and conditions of the workplace, are rethinking the definition of the well-trained and adaptive employee.

I think it’s hilarious that big companies are now realizing that an MBA isn’t the only route to well-formed business savvy.  It’s a recent change…I remember my freshman year of college as a film major, one of our professors spent an entire day of class discussing why a theatre and film degree would soon be the new MBA.  Despite still being in full-on “art for art’s sake” mode at the time, the idea stuck with me…and it’s great to hear it validated more and more in legit circles.

Check this out:

Pink’s approach…makes a much bolder claim: in a world where entire industries can disappear seemingly overnight and highly trained workers are made redundant by new technology and outsourcing, arts education isn’t merely a marginally helpful addition to the well-rounded curriculum; it’s an essential rung on the ladder that will lead American workers to full and meaningful employment in fields of the future — a level of preparation that American education does not currently provide.

Do they know about the Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship?  Should we tell them?  He also discusses the concept of turning the curriculum core of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) into STEAM (science, technology, engineering, ARTS and math).  I love it.  Because unlike a lot of technology systems, the arts are a constantly learnable field that continues to evolve without ever becoming outdated.  You can learn to think creatively and not have to worry about your creativity becoming redundant in six months time…because you CREATE how you CREATE.

Check out the whole article at the Orange County Register. For more info on Daniel Pink, check out his website. Dan!  We should talk!

A Case for The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship™

Introduction:

Founded in 2009, The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship™ (The IAE) is a Chicago-based 501c(3) organization committed to helping artists create sustainable artistic careers through achieving self –sufficiency.  Our mission is directly tied to the belief that artists have an extraordinary amount of yet-to-be-realized value they can provide to society, especially in these economically challenging times, if they can be taught to apply their artistic capacity in new ways to allow their talents to become relevant and necessary.

The 2009 Artists and the Economic Recession Survey created by Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) demonstrates how financial difficulties can impact an artists’ ability to sustain a productive creative life:

• Artists often have to hold multiple jobs to make ends meet – 66% hold at least one job in addition to their artistic practice, while 21% hold two or more additional jobs.
• Two-thirds reported their total 2008 income was less than $40,000, including nearly one-third who earned less than $20,000.
• Artists have experienced a decrease in sales of work (48%) or a need to lower fees/rates charged for work (44%), both of which suggest the arts are experiencing the contraction in consumer spending as much as many other industries.
• More than a third of artists reporting a decrease in the monetary amount of grants (37%), the number of awards granted (36%), and the number of grant opportunities available (35%). More than a third of artists’ report that compared to 2008 they have fewer bookings scheduled (38%) and fewer opportunities to exhibit/perform/present their work (35%). About three in 10 say there are fewer services available by nonprofits (31%) and fewer teaching (30%) and artist residency (27%) opportunities.

And yet these financial challenges pose more than the obvious problems they reflect in an artists’ ability to create their art or deliver quality cultural experiences to their audience. It is the belief of The IAE that the economic stability of artists, or lack thereof, has not only significantly contributed to the erosion of the demand for cultural and artistic expression in general but, in today’s economic environment, has put at risk the very need for it to exist entirely.

With roughly 100,000 fine arts majors graduating each year from institutional arts programs around the country, and no decline insight of prospective students who want to study art, the fact that only 2.1 million tax payers in the US report that they earn a living as artists demonstrates the attrition rate after graduation is quite high.

While the romantic stereotype of the “starving artist” to a young artist/student initially often serves to only further fuel their artistic imagination and desire of what life can be like living a bohemian lifestyle, comments from family, friends, employers, colleagues, and distant admirers as to their career prospects as an artist, once he/she graduates, creates both external and internal pressure to embrace a profession that assures stability. After all, even the bohemian lifestyle of an artist gets old when you can’t afford your car payment, let alone buy a house and raise a family—which an annual income, at best, of $40,000 a year income does not provide.

The IAE believes that the rate of attrition of post-graduates has contributed to the decline of the creative sector. The value of the full-time work these artists could have been doing has never been realized inside the communities they would have served. And the communities in which these artists began to work experienced, on some level, these artists inability to survive — reinforcing the lack of relevant value the arts must hold, despite their patron’s attraction to them.  Thus the notion of the starving artist syndrome continues. And as we know, perceptions create reality. And as such, over the course of a 40-year career span, the impact those artists could have made, we believe, has had a slow, steady and now significant and measurable impact on society’s view of the need and relevance for consuming cultural experiences in daily life today.

Henry Fogel in a speech he gave to the National Association of Schools of Music in November 2009 said this: “Any careful examination of newspapers across America over a fifty-year span, will demonstrate dramatically the shrinking of arts coverage. Fifty years ago, every small town newspaper had an arts critic, sometimes more than one.  Now, many smaller communities have let that lapse completely, and even many large cities have offered buyouts to retire their art critic, and chosen not to re-fill the position. Look at Public Television if you want further proof of the decreasing importance of the arts in America. Public Television was started precisely to broadcast programming that would have too small an appeal for commercial TV. (Never mind that in my youth, classical music was seen regularly on commercial TV – the Ed Sullivan Show, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s concerts, the Voice of Firestone, the Bell Telephone Hour, and live operas on NBC). Now, PBS considers Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, or André Rieu to be “highbrow” programming. The number of symphony concerts, quality jazz, dance, and even staged operas, available in this country on television has been declining at an alarming rate.”

Specifically, as a result of the absence of proper training to ensure more artists who graduate from art school can fill needs in their communities and financially afford to remain in the creative sector, we believe society has been left with little choice but to be unable to perceive the impact, value and relevance of the arts in their daily lives as a whole.

According to a 2003 major study, Investing in Creativity, completed by The Urban Institute and financially supported by over 38 foundations, only 27% of adults think artists contribute “a lot” to the general good of society, far fewer than recognize the social contributions of teachers (82%), doctors (76%), scientists (66%), construction workers (63%), and clergy (52%). The public perceives the contributions of artists in much the same way it perceives those of elected officials (26% say they contribute a lot to the general good), and just slightly better than it perceives the contributions of athletes (18% think they contribute a lot).

And yet, as noted by John Cimino, Creative Leaps International, scholar Thomas Homer Dixon says the space between problems that arise and our ability to solve them- the “ingenuity gap”- is growing today at an alarming rate in business, scientific research, education, the environment and world affairs. And innovative thought leaders like Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink and Richard Florida are helping to create a mindset that the arts, and artists, are capable of offering so much more to society. Author Ken Robinson proclaims we are “Out of our Mind” to have sidelined creativity and the arts when every layer of American society from elementary education to supply-side economics is starved for more imagination, more original thinking, and more creative intelligence”. According to business writer/entrepreneur Daniel Pink, “Artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big-picture thinkers – can now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.” Economist Richard Florida argues that artists and other members of the “creative class” are vital to regional economic development.  He suggests that they comprise the vital cultural core essential to attracting and developing workers for knowledge industries, which are increasingly important to the U.S. economy.

In these economic times, innovation is a critical tool that can grow revenue like never before and catapult our largest companies and newest start-ups to new levels of international competitiveness and profitability that we truly need to not only save, but redefine how we achieve our future economic vitality. Certainly the arts offer, with training, fertile ground to devise new ways to contribute and become vital, integral and again relevant to society.

After all, the visceral nature of the arts provides a unique barrier breaker -a unifier- regardless of race, religion, gender, age, status or income across all sectors of society and industry. No matter what the subject matter, using the arts in new interdisciplinary ways can bring people to new levels of understanding and simultaneously create new sustainable financially viable career paths for artists.

According to the Investing in Creativity study by The Urban Institute, their research suggests there is a substantial demand for artists in hybrid markets and yet few programs exist to support their development. Artists are involved in art and community development, social services, education, health, civic engagement, and youth development, among other areas through arts-based organizations such as Project Row Houses in Houston, Street Level Youth Media and Little Black Pearl in Chicago, Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles, El Centro de la Raza in Seattle, Life Pieces to Masterpieces in Washington, D.C., Zumix and Troubador in Boston and many more examples can be found in every one of LINC’s case study sites.

Although many artists do important work primarily in the context of conventional cultural markets, LINC found scores of examples like the ones listed above.  Investing in Creativity research suggests that many artists work in all of these sectors, either at the same time or switching from one to another. Their field research in fact highlighted this pattern.  It also reveals that artists seem to benefit when there is a wide range of different sector opportunities in which they can engage.

And yet demand for what artists do is not fully conceived or well articulated, in large part because the formal validation mechanisms in both arts and non-arts contexts are relatively narrowly developed.  For example, if an artist is working at the intersection of arts and community development and making contributions in both areas, it is very likely that the full extent of those contributions will not be recognized or valued in either the cultural realm or the community development realm.  Moreover, adequate language to describe such practice and contributions currently does not exist.  The IAE seeks to bring clarity to the value of these hybrid roles to the community by focusing on the development of self-sufficient career paths for artists who will be motivated to illuminate the value of their hybrid roles to society.

Additionally, arts administrators, researchers and analysts, funders and policymakers tend to view the public, commercial, nonprofit and informal sectors as separate realms with little connection to each other.  Often artists seem to be categorized as “nonprofit” or “commercial,” as if those categories were mutually exclusive and as such funding sources are difficult to obtain and not rising in priority as demand, and need, is growing because of the cross pollination that occurs in a hybrid artistic role.

Respondents to the Investing in Creativity study emphasized the critical nature of peer-to-peer and mentoring relationships for training and professional development across the discipline spectrum and how important these relationships are to successful career transitions. Artists working at the intersection of arts and other fields, such as community development, education, health, justice, or other areas noted that the public validation and training programs needed to sustain and advance these practices is generally weak. Furthermore, many artists feel they lack the skills to market themselves to the wide range of realms where they could potentially be successful.  Our own survey, currently underway, indicates the same results. Over 83% of all respondents have said they would undertake a two year course of study to increase their skills to earn a living as a self-employed artist.  Additionally, LINC’s research revealed that many higher education and training institutions for the arts are not proactive in developing markets for artists or teaching them the business skills they need to succeed and that funding for such programs is virtually non existent.

The IAE believes that by helping artists imagine and create new innovative career paths we can play a significant role in helping both artists and the community rediscover new ways for artists to be recognized as contributing “a lot of good” though the development of self-sustaining hybrid careers that can become relevant to the communities these artists will serve. As such, through our programs at the IAE, we seek to helps artists grow their artistic imaginations about what is possible, while teaching them tangible necessary skill sets to give them the assortment of tools they need to turn their creativity into self-sufficiency.

The IAE seeks to make it possible for artists to develop a business arising from identifying gaps in the market place they can uniquely fill with a form of their creative practice. These businesses will be varied and may relate directly to a product, societal problem, service or process, a form of expertise, consultancy, or their values, beliefs or knowledge.  IAE training will provide the means for artists to understand how to create the infrastructure and environment for new creative opportunities to be realized.

Although there are increasingly quality arts entrepreneurship courses and programs in colleges and universities around the country, given the attrition rate of artists exiting the field, the need for more quality programs is self -evident. Furthermore,  The IAE knows of no other school focused exclusively on the development of self-sustaining hybrid career paths in the arts leveraging the strengths of ongoing one-on-one mentorship and experiential learning across all artistic disciplines. The most notable nationally recognized program happens to be here in Chicago, at Columbia College. Unfortunately,  the Arts, Entertainment and Media Management Program,  not for a lack of student enrollment or interest, but instead because of a change in institutional priorities, it is in the process of undergoing a major restructuring that will result in a majority of its programs being eliminated or significantly diluted.

The IAE is committed to bringing artists and their creativity into the center of economic activity.

Check out this quote:

According to Barnes, the decision [to let fans tape shows] was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.

It’s inspiring stuff, and shows that a little bit of innovation (and goodwill toward your audience) can go a long way.  I’m not even a Grateful Dead fan, but I think I might be now.  Full article is in the link below.

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead [The Atlantic]

Admission being your email address.

Well, it looks like I was wrong. All of you fine people keep going to the landing page for it, but few of you have become paying customers…

SOoo  guess what?

You now can get in the door for FREE!

No line and NO WAITING to improve your entrepreneurial know how.

FREE!! ABSOLUTELY STINKING FREE!  OVER 1000 researched resources and growing…..

Are you ready to learn how to earn a living with your gifts? www.TheIAE.com

It is no surprise when I say that our country is obsessed with celebrity. Celebrity sells and celebrity images are pumped out to the point of exhaustion.

I think that most young artists, if honest with themselves, would admit to having celebrity lust. They, themselves, in fact, may be using their educational environments as a stepping stones towards what they believe will increase their odds towards achieving celebrity and the schools that cater to these dreamy eyed prospective students, do not always guide them differently.

But why do so many of us desire to be famous?

Is it the potential deification we give celebrities for a time?
Is it the money? * Duh. *
Is it the freedom that money brings?
The parties?
The flirtations with strangers?
The public eye being cast upon you?
Mass appreciation and praise to stroke your ego?
Mrs. O’Reilly from World History will finely see?
A feeling of success?
A feeling of having overcome others or having “won”?
Again, the parties? Come on. On a scale of 1 to 10…where do parties rate?

The celebrity game is like high school, but high school with money…and all that that brings. Do you desire to be in the circle of the “cool kids”? Is that what this is about? Does it really come down to the fact that you were a nerd and wanted to be a cool kid in junior high? Surely for some it is.

Are celebrity dreams what brought you into artist training or was it something else?

For a large number of artists, it’s the love you had/have for the work, ‘cuz it was fun and inspiring. Is it the joy and pride you feel while creating? Did it or does it give you a feeling of self-expression (an outlet with form) and even self-knowledge? Is your “art” (or the act of creating)? Is creating enough? Is that what it is about? Would it be enough to simply make a living with your craft or will the dreams of starlight haunt you, indefinitely?

Would it be enough for you to live a life, with a modest income (but one that is much more potentially sustainable), doing what you love? Would it be enough on your “happy meter” to make much less, potentially never have fame, but get to do that thing that gives you bliss?
What kind of artist do you want to be and where in the market? What city would you love to live in, if you could live anywhere in the U.S.?

Tricky thing about survival jobs…is that they take up all of your energy and time. If you are an artist who has waited tables (or some other non-desired, but necessary work) while trying to make a living, you know how you NEVER LEAVE a restaurant or survival job. In such catch 22 scenarios, it is very difficult, when engaging in the act of creating your art, to create anything of significant worth…as when you do get around to creating, you’ll often find you are very tired…from delivering meals for other people (and while not working as an artist).

If you surrender your driving ambition of fame and fortune, the field of opportunity expands. I call this a need for a “wider directional perspective”. Suddenly, we are potentially talking about local markets, which may be non-saturated markets (with less competition). Granted, many of these markets have fewer possibilities, due to their size. However, if you create a market, if you build what is necessary, if you command greater control over your creativity and output as an artist, suddenly, your chance of living wherever you might like to live (with some limitations, of course), becomes possible.

Now ask yourself…do you need to make a living in your small area of interest? Note: I say small in comparison to all of the roles possible to play in the field of artistry. Ex. Nearly everyone begins their career in theatre in an acting class. Many then shift and  go on to discover other interests and talents (like writing, directing, producing, designing, etc).

Or

Do you just need to make a living via your creativity?

I will rephrase.

Do you desire to:

A.    Simply make a living with your creativity

or do you need to:

B.     Reach glory in your one dreamed about role? Ex. A TV or movie star.

If you answered yes to A, the field of possibility and opportunity expands incredibly. There are simply more possibilities when you are active on a plane with more opportunity and possibility. As more opportunities arise, more possibilities follow.

Must celebrity continue to be the goal? If so, why? Beyond ego, what drives our desire for celebrity? Whatever your conclusion, is that what you want your motivating energies to be committed towards? If yes, God speed you. If you answer no, look, listen and dream. What community do you want to be a part of? Where does that community need you, your creative energies, your vision, your leadership capability, your many skills acquired through your artistic study?

Jim Hart is the founder of The Hart Technique and The International Theatre Academy Norway (TITAN Teaterskole). www.harttechnique.com

NO. We can’t have that!

What’s so wrong with having an agenda? What’s wrong with the arts being vehicles for additional reflection on an issue, revealing deeper meaning to key messaging and shedding a bright light on agendas? That’s not ‘Partisan’ or ‘Socialism.’ That’s passion.

WHO IN LIFE DOES NOT HAVE AN AGENDA? Agenda’s are a part of life- they run our meetings efficiently and they allow us to know where someone stands. Can’t we learn to WORK TOGETHER with all our agenda’s? Can’t we learn how to compromise and appreciate different points of view? Does it all have to be about conquering and overpowering? What about sharing ideas and leveraging combined strengths ethically to create a truly awe inspiring win-win?

Where is the open mindedness this country needs to utilize the power of the arts in new ways going to come from? It is going to take a village…… Who is going to build that bridge to the White House? Could it be you and me?

Sit down and let these two reads strengthen your resolve and faith in just how innovative the arts really CAN BE- RIGHT NOW. President Obama gets it. There IS Hope and it DOES float.

Remember the rules that apply to true revolutionary change: Step #1 dismiss it, ignore it, turn your back on it, Step #2 rebel violently against it (I think these articles reflect this point of view- and how) Step #3 Fully embrace the change and accept it as if it were the standard and expected all along.

As I see it– this is really good news. The call to the battle field has rung. We are in the beginning of Step #2.

So, will you join me on this battle field and support Innovating Through Artistry?

For God’s Sake– please won’t you join me and help me?

I have a box of home made machetes if you prefer to imagine our joint combined efforts more akin to beating back the bushes together discovering what happens when we use our imaginations to help others deepen their own– its amazing but they usually become more of who they are and hopefully more tolerant and open minded. Pigs really can fly. Minds and hearts can open and change. Peace can be reached. Interdisciplinary collaboration is our future. Our economic life-line is arriving- its finally almost here…. but not without you. I need you to join me- actively.

What can you do to start a dialogue with your village- your army of friends, fans and family, about ETA’s point of view? What’s your ETA to Entrepreneur The Arts? Are you ready to serve and discover how you too can make a difference? And YES, THIS IS MY AGENDA! Someone, please tell me what is wrong with it? I am trying to create a win-win-win-win-win….. and another win. There ARE ways to do this. Business as Art, Government as Art and The University as Art do mix- this combination offers loads of feature and benefits for artists to deliver, just like the taste of oil mixed with vinegar does. But all this starts with you sharing a vision– one that will help the world find a new way to perceive and utilize the strengths of your gifts.

Explosive New Audio Reveals White House Using NEA to Push Partisian Agenda written by Patrick Courrielche. Patrick Courrielche is a filmmaker, marketer, and art community consultant based in Los Angeles.

And also from the ULTRA conservative U.S. art critic and social commentator, Roger Kimball. National Endowment for the Arts Renamed National Endowment for Propaganda. Stay Tuned. “This is Only the Beginning.

In an article published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, David’s mention of 5HE’s dual business model was mentioned. When we formed in 2005, we created both a 501(c)3 nonprofit (Fifth House Ensemble) and an LLC for our private events business (Amarante Ensembles, LLC). Same folks, different purpose.

As a young group, we knew we wanted to provide a wide variety of services, including those that would serve the public good (performances, educational programs), as well as those that would help to keep us fed (weddings, private events). We formed both businesses at the same time in order to be able to keep these activities separate financially, and in order to be able to market them in completely different ways.

Since the article was published, I’ve been getting many inquiries from arts organizations both established and emerging about how and why we did this, wondering if the same model would work for them. Interestingly, in most cases the concern is less about the types of services being provided and the best business structure to manage them, and more about how to raise the most money in the shortest amount of time. Inevitably, those who began as a for-profit think that they will raise more from donated funds as a non-profit, and vice-versa.

My first question is always, “why do you want to do this?” A business structure is about the most effective way to manage the types of services you want to offer, so you have to consider what is a good fit for your goals, not just your bank statement.

If you are a performing arts organization that is committed to work in the public schools and bringing performances to underserved audiences, changing from not-for-profit to an LLC will not help you raise funds from venture capitalists, unless something changes about the services you offer. What will you tell them about their return on investment? And do the people you are serving have the resources to pay big bucks for what you do?

Conversely, if you are a for-profit company that has been successful selling tickets to shows, merchandise, and DVDs, and you are attracted to the extra money you think you will bring in as a non-profit but loathe paperwork, is switching to 501(c)3 status really a good fit? Given that you don’t want to be the one to do grantwriting, annual reporting, financial management worthy of public scrutiny, board agendas, and all of the other tasks that go into managing a nonprofit, you may end up paying staff a large part of the added revenue you would see from changing structures.

The only real reason to have a split structure (in my opinion) is if you have services that are distinctly different enough to warrant that. If there is overlap, not only is the purpose for your choice not clear, but you also risk running afoul of the IRS. I remember fondly the conversation I had with Mr. Botkins, the IRS agent who reviewed our 501(c)3 application, about how we had created these two entities for the sole PURPOSE of keeping for- and non-profit activities separate. The IRS doesn’t like seeing for- and non-profit organizations to be connected in any way, via common control (similar officers/managers), contracts, or other financial arrangements.

Know yourself, the type of work you want to do, your tolerance for paperwork, and the types of people you want to serve. Be realistic about how much you have the potential to earn or raise. If the structure you are considering isn’t a good fit for your services, don’t be tempted to follow what you perceive to be the greener pasture, or you may certainly find yourself out in the cold. The best way to get more green is to make sure that what you do is serving the people around you in the best possible way, which will inspire customers to pay for your work, or donors to support its creation.

Melissa is the flutist and Executive Director of the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble. Like what you read here? For more music entrepreneurship tidbits, visit www.playingclosetothebridge.wordpress.com, brought to you by members of 5HE.

Out of 100 individuals selected 22 artists ( or those from what is considered classic artistic disciplines) made the list– leaving the remaining 78 of the most creative people in business working very creatively without artistry. While the arts are often thought of as being highly creative, artists represent only 26% of Fast Company’s top 50 and 22% of the entire list. What does this say about the arts and its role in business? Are we not creative enough to impact business or are we not trained and skilled enough in the areas of business to make an impact?

Of the 26% in the top 50, all of these artists have developed a multi disciplinary approach to their art, using more than one artistic skill set, while intertwining business skill sets into the vision of what their art can produce.

Creative writing is the single most common unifying skill amongst the most creative artists in business and a couple of academics made the list!

Each of these artists have taken all of their passions in life and exploited them to their fullest in their careers.

The list includes 5 artists, 4 from fashion, film and music, 3 writers and 2 chefs.

5 Artists #22, 55, 70, 86 94
4 from Fashion #13, 24, 42, 92
4 from Film #14, 21, 31, 60
4 from Music #36, 47, 69, 83
3 Writers #10, 40 and 41
2 Chefs #44, 73

# 10, James Schamus, Chief executive officer, Focus Features
Perhaps the only person in Hollywood who can rival Meryl Streep’s versatility is James Schamus. In addition to being a CEO, he’s a veteran screenwriter, Columbia University film professor, producer, marketer, distributor, and sometime composer. “There’s nobody else like him in the entire industry,” says Bill Mechanic, former chairman of 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment. “For a writer of his caliber to choose to be an executive is completely abnormal.” Schamus, 49, cofounded Focus in 2002. Known for its sophisticated and daring film slate, Focus produced Oscar winners Milk and Lost in Translation. Coming soon: Taking Woodstock, Schamus’s latest screenplay for director Ang Lee. — by Chuck Salter

Website:http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/

#13, Stella McCartney, Fashion designer
According to her boss, PPR CEO François-Henri Pinault, fashion designer and Beatle progeny Stella McCartney is the new face of responsible luxury. “Stella has set the bar,” he told Britain’s Sunday Times. Across the pond, the Natural Resources Defense Council honored her this spring for her “outstanding environmental leadership.” McCartney, 38, a PETA pet, uses no leather or fur; her skin-care line and ready-to-wear collection are both organic. Lest this sound too hair shirt to be stylish, consider Women’s Wear Daily’s review of the designer’s latest fall collection: “McCartney’s biker jacket in ‘nonleather sheen cupro’ can vroom with the best of them, and her thigh-high boots, in silk knits and perforated faux, strut the killer instinct she can live with.” — by Linda Tischler

Website: http://www.stellamccartney.com/

#14, JJ Abrams, Founder, Bad Robot Productions
J.J. Abrams warps Time at will. Past, present, and future coexist as a kind of fluid that cannot be contained. The camera jumps back and forth in time. Characters age and grow younger again. Time itself accelerates, then slows. “It’s intriguing to play with exactly when you learn elements in a story,” says the Emmy-winning writer-director-producer, referring to Lost, his biggest hit on the small screen. “It engages audience members in a puzzle where they begin to question everything. It makes them look for clues in what they’re watching in a way traditional narrative doesn’t.”

Website: http://www.badrobot.com/

#21,Tyler Perry,Owner, Tyler Perry Studios
He writes, directs, produces, acts, and scores — Tyler Perry controls an entertainment empire and moneymaking machine that includes the hit show Tyler Perry’s House of Payne and movies featuring his alter-ego Madea, a jumbo, no-nonsense granny with a knack for physical comedy. Perry’s creative impulse was forged in the crucible of personal pain. Channeling years of abuse by his father into writing plays with beautifully rendered characters, Perry bested homelessness and despair to transform black urban theater (pejoratively called the “chitlin’ circuit”), and expanded his audience as quickly as he released hit movies. His seven films, which rarely cost more than $20 million, have grossed upward of $300 million combined — four of them opened at No. 1 — and sold 25 million DVDs. And last October, he made history, opening the first black-owned film studio in the United States. — by Ellen McGirt

Website: http://www.tylerperry.com/

#22, Damien Hirst, Artist
Hate him or loathe him, Damien Hirst is an artistic and business provocateur. Who else could render a photo of Bill Gates standing in front of his own famous work (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and turn it into a painting that sells for more than half a million dollars? Bill With Shark is a shrewd bit of philosophical and capitalist commentary: the once-voracious, aging Gates catching his own reflection and contemplating the work’s title. Of course, the deeper reveal came to the art world when Hirst sold this and other works at Sotheby’s last September for nearly $200 million, cutting out the middleman and raising the real possibility of the death of the art dealer. — by Mark Borden

Website: http://www.damienhirst.com/

#24, Jil Sander, Designer, creative director, Uniqlo
The high-fashion/mass-marketing movement seems to be reaching a new phase with Jil Sander’s new project: The German designer, who became famous for her luxurious if minimalist couture, has signed on as the creative director for Japanese retailer Uniqlo. Sander, who sold her namesake label in 2004, took on the clothing chain as her first consulting client, and then agreed to oversee its fall and winter collections — possibly including one of her own design. — by Abha Bhattarai

Website:http://www.jilsander.com/

#31,Hayao Miyazaki, Cofounder, Studio Ghibli
When Pixar’s animators need inspiration, they watch Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. The giant of anime has been elevating cartoons into epic cinematic events for more than two decades, with fantastic, award-winning films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. The writer-director’s stories are mostly hand-drawn, with strong female characters and morally ambiguous plotlines that make his work a harder sell than, say, Shrek 10 would be. But this summer, Miyazaki may finally get his commercial due in the U.S. with Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. Disney/Pixar creative chief John Lasseter worked with megaproducers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy to build a stellar voice cast (Tina Fey, Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson) and to secure Miyazaki his widest U.S.-theater release yet. — by Jennifer Vilaga

Website: http://www.studioghibli.net/

#36, Pharrell Williams, Musician
Pharrell Williams knows it all starts with a beat — he got his start on the snare drum in his high-school marching band back in Virginia Beach, Virginia. As half of the production duo known as the Neptunes, he has helped everyone from Britney Spears to Justin Timberlake to Madonna to the Hives find time on the charts. Williams also fronts the funk-rock band N.E.R.D., produces a clothing line called Billionaire Boys Club, hawks a line of shoes under the Ice Cream Footwear brand, and designed sunglasses and jewelry for Louis Vuitton. Most recently, Limelight, an updated version of Fame that he created with film director McG, was picked up by ABC. Tapping Williams’s own beat, the show is loosely based on his performing-arts experience in high school. — by Mark Borden

Website: http://bbcicecream.com/blog/

#40, Neil Gaiman, Author, screenwriter
“Writing is, like death, a lonely business,” according to Neil Gaiman. But the prolific wordsmith has made it a bit less so, building a global community of fans of all ages and in many media, including comic books (Sandman), novels (American Gods), TV (the BBC’s Neverwhere), and a children’s novella turned 3-D movie (Coraline). In January, Gaiman won the Newbery Medal, kiddie lit’s top honor, for The Graveyard Book, the enchanting, daringly dark tale of an orphan protected by the long-dead residents of a cemetery. Gaiman also blogs at neilgaiman.com, discussing everything from his computer setup to his success. “I liked the idea of a world in which I could feed my family by making things up and writing them down,” he wrote recently. “[But] I’m not quite sure how it happened.” — by Danielle Sacks

Website: http://www.neilgaiman.com/

#41, Maurice Sendak, Writer, illustrator, producer
The extraordinary Maurice Sendak has sold millions of copies of Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and In the Night Kitchen (1970); most recently, he collaborated with Tony Kushner on Brundibar (the book debuted in 2003, the play in 2006). Sendak, now 80, has designed operas, won myriad honors, spawned everything from stuffed monsters to lunch boxes, and inspired generations of dreamy kids. In October, the Wild Things feature film will premiere. An improbably hip, moodily gorgeous affair, it’s being brought to the screen by a formidable team: director Spike Jonze; screenwriter Dave Eggers; stars Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, and James Gandolfini; and Arcade Fire and Karen O (of Yeah Yeah Yeahs), who are providing music. Let the wild rumpus begin! — Anya Kamenetz

Website: http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/HarperChildrens/Kids/A…

#42, Marc Jacobs, Fashion designer, LVMH
Marc Jacobs has “made fashion hip, but not inaccessibly hip,” says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Accessibly hip enough for him to build a $5 billion empire within LVMH that delights both the moneyed elite and the allowance-driven economy (his junk-store concept — $11 flip-flops, $55 rubber totes — is still thriving in the retail slump). Jacobs’s knack for forecasting trends (this fall, neon and ’80s nostalgia), anointing muses (hola, Anne Hathaway), and playing the media keep him in the spotlight. But it’s his endless inspiration that drives sales. “It’s very organic. We say, ‘Let’s make this happen and see what the reaction is,’ ” Jacobs says. “It’s not like a creative person sits down with a mathematician. That’s a hard thing for a lot of businesspeople to understand.” — by Mark Borden

Website: http://www.marcjacobs.com/

#44, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Chef
In this era of celebrity chefs and haute cuisine gone less haute, Alsace-born Jean-Georges Vongerichten is the rare talent who has grown his empire without resorting to the indignity of slapping his face on a frying pan or frozen pizza. He already has 18 restaurants — eight of them in New York, including Vong and his flagship Jean Georges, which has three Michelin stars — and for a sense of the size of his plate, consider that Spice Market alone rakes in about $15 million a year in revenue. His unprecedented partnership with Starwood Hotels has given the cuisinier license to unleash his creativity — and trademark Asian flavors — in 50 new restaurants over the next five years. That’s still not enough for him: “If I could have my dream,” he has said, “I would open a new restaurant every month.” — by Kate Rockwood

Website: http://www.jean-georges.com/

#47, A.R. Rahman, Composer
You might know A.R. Rahman as the Oscar-winning composer behind Slumdog Millionaire’s “Jai Ho,” which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times on iTunes and was re-recorded as a hit collaboration with the Pussycat Dolls. But Rahman has been writing Bollywood hits since 1992. His soundtracks have reshaped Indian pop, adding influences from jazz, reggae, and Western classical music, and have sold more than 100 million copies. Rahman also created the musical Bombay Dreams and has been testing new forms of music distribution; through a tie-up with Nokia, he recently released an album just for the company’s music-phone users in India. — by Dan Macsai

Website: http://www.arrahman.com/

#55, Gregg Gillis, Mashup artist
Gregg Gillis, 27, is the first truly postmodern rock star. The ex-biomedical engineer layers unlicensed song samples and “performs” them live, with him and his laptop center stage. Last year, he released his fourth album, Feed the Animals, online, using Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want model. So artful are his mashups — Feed the Animals’ 300-plus samples include unlikely pairings such as Nine Inch Nails and Kelly Clarkson, and David Bowie and 2 Live Crew — that even the notoriously litigious record labels have offered their ultimate compliment: silence. — by Jennifer Vilaga

#60, Josh Schwartz,Television producer, writer
Josh Schwartz has made his name chronicling the young, pretty, and privileged on TV, first with The O.C., then with Gossip Girl. But after his Girl found unexpected success online — new episodes routinely top iTunes’ most-downloaded chart — Schwartz, 32, pitched his latest beautiful brainchild, “Rockville CA,” to TheWB.com as a series of five-minute Webisodes. “Kids are going to college with laptops, not TVs,” says the former USC frat boy. “I figured, Why not?” Not that he’s swearing off old media: His as-yet-untitled Gossip Girl spin-off debuts this fall on the CW, and he’s directing a new film version of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. — by Dan Macsai

#69,Dave Stewart, Musician and record producer
You may know Dave Stewart as the Eurythmics cofounder and a singer’s songwriter — he’s written hits for Tom Petty, Celine Dion, and No Doubt. But it’s the rest of his CV that’s unexpectedly impressive. He started the consulting company DeepStew with Deepak Chopra, acts as U.S. creative director for the Law Firm ad group, serves as president of entertainment for fashion designer Christian Audigier’s brand-management unit, and is an official Change Agent for Nokia. “I’m willing to receive a smaller percentage and relinquish control, as long as the idea goes into the minds of a brilliant company,” he says. “I’m not going to run out of creativity or ideas, so I don’t hang on to stuff for dear life. If you’re terrified to release control, nothing gets made!” — by Mark Borden

#70, Brian Donnelly (KAWS), Artist and Designer
Brian Donnelly has been compared to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, both of whom straddled the divide between street and institutional art. But Donnelly has arguably surpassed them with his one-man empire. Business at his Tokyo-based company OriginalFake, created as an outlet for his art and related merchandise, is thriving. During his February L.A. gallery show — just his second solo exhibition ever — the line to enter snaked seven blocks; Lance Armstrong bought the biggest painting. The guy who just a few years ago was hiding in bushes to evade anti-graffiti officers is now being courted by megabrands that want his signature graphic treatment on their products. Mostly, he’d rather not. “I only like to work with companies that are part of my life already,” says Donnelly, who has said yes to Marc Jacobs, Nike, and Levi’s. — by Jana Meier

Website: http://www.davestewart.com/

#73, Dan Barber, Executive chef and co-owner, Blue Hill restaurants
“Manhattan’s answer to the Farmer in the Dell,” as Dan Barber was called by a New York Times restaurant critic, is more than the foodies’ latest locavore darling. The driving spirit behind the two Blue Hill restaurants, Barber, 39, is a passionate advocate for regional farm networks. They’re the answer, he says, to big agriculture’s economic and ecological abuses. A 2009 James Beard Award nominee for Outstanding Chef, he practices what he preaches on his own family’s farm and at the Stone Barns Center, a not-for-profit that promotes sustainable agri-culture. One of his trademark dishes is This Morning’s Farm Egg, with hen broth and root vegetables — tasty proof that the farm-to-table movement is not just high-end menuspeak. — by Linda Tischler

Website: http://www.bluehillfarm.com/

#83,Brian Eno, Musician
Brain Eno, the father of ambient music, is still in the vanguard. Take his recent collaboration with David Byrne. Byrne wrote lyrics in New York to the instrumental tracks Eno had sent from Lon-don. Then they prereleased the album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, online. Now he’s curating a lights-and-music festival in Australia that includes his own light show projected on the Sydney Opera House. — by Genevieve Knapp

Website: http://www.enoshop.co.uk/

#86, Cai Guo-Qiang, Artist
When not drawing — and detonating — pictures made from gunpowder or staging massive outdoor “explosion events” like the fireworks at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Cai Guo-Qiang is busy breaking records. His 14 gunpowder pieces sold at Christie’s in Hong Kong in 2007 for $9.5 million, an all-time auction high for contemporary Chinese art. He’s the first Chinese artist to snag a Venice Biennale award and the first living artist to have a solo show in a state-operated Chinese museum. The seven white sedans he suspended from the ceiling at the Guggenheim in New York last year left the art world chattering about American car culture. — by Kate Rockwood

Website: http://www.caiguoqiang.com/

#92, Simon Collins, Dean of fashion, Parsons
After 20 years in the industry, Simon Collins is grooming the next wave of Tom Fords to be as prepared for the boardroom as they are for the run-way. In less than one year, he has devised a new model for his 1,300 students to collab-orate with companies such as Ellen Tracy, Henri Bendel, and Gap. Collins, 41, who began his career as a bespoke tailor in London, designed for Ralph Lauren, Ermenegildo Zegna, Reebok, and Nike, and spent a brief spell opening a New York design office for Wal-Mart. Now he aims to trans-form Parsons — which produces some 70% of the designers on Seventh Avenue — into the breeding ground for the first generation of sustainability-minded designers. “If we taught our students it’s all about red, they’d go into their careers thinking it’s all about red,” Collins says. “Hopefully we can do that with sustainability.” — by Danielle Sacks

Website: http://www.parsons.edu/faculty_and_staff/faculty_details.asp…

#94, Kevin Adams, Lighting designer
Kevin Adams is on the leading edge of the post-incandescent age on Broadway, exploiting the potential of CFL bulbs, fluorescent tubes, glass and flex neon, and the latest LED technology. His work for Spring Awakening — brilliant white light for the 19th-century play’s scenes and saturated color from what he calls “electric objects” for the songs — won him a Tony in 2007. He picked up a second Tony in 2008 for The 39 Steps. Another Adams hit: a fabulous wall of light for the musical Passing Strange. One admirer said it looked “like Mark Rothko meets Japanese pop.” Adams also lit the current revival of Hair. — by B. Martin

Website: http://www.ambermylar.com/

By ROBIN POGREBIN, May 13, 2009, The New York Times

Rocco Landesman, the colorful theatrical producer and race-track aficionado who brought hits like “Big River,” “Angels in America” and “The Producers” to Broadway, has been nominated as the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House said on Tuesday.

The appointment, which is expected to be announced on Wednesday, surprised many in the arts world. It ends months of speculation about who would be selected to lead the nation’s largest and most important arts organization.

The White House declined to discuss the appointment before the announcement. Mr. Landesman, whose appointment must be confirmed by Congress, also declined to comment.

“It’s potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman,” said the playwright Tony Kushner. “He’s an absolutely brilliant and brave and perfect choice for the job.”

Choosing Mr. Landesman, 61, signals that Mr. Obama plans to shake things up at the endowment. While a major source of money for arts groups around the country, it has historically been something of a sleepy bureaucracy, still best known to some for the culture wars of the 1990s.

Since then, the agency has been trying to rebuild its image on Capitol Hill, along with its budget. The current allocation stands at $145 million, and though Mr. Obama has requested $161 million for 2010, that is still short of its high of $176 million in 1992.

Mr. Landesman, who would fill the post vacated by Dana Gioia, is expected to lobby hard for more arts money. But he is not famous for his skills as an administrator or diplomat. Rather, he is known for his energy, intellect and irreverent – and occasionally sharp-elbowed – candor.

In 2000, for example, he caused a stir by accusing nonprofit theaters of being too much like their commercial counterparts. And, as a producer of “The Producers,” Mr. Landesman created the controversial $480 premium ticket to combat scalpers.

“Rocco speaks his mind, which is probably one of the reasons he was chosen,” said Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale and American Repertory Theaters. “Rocco does not defer his opinions.”

As the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway houses, Mr. Landesman is accustomed to calling the shots, not working within a bureaucracy. Arts executives say this is a plus. “He is a great entrepreneur and producer and it indicates to me that the administration wants to have somebody in this position who will be much more than simply a distributor of funds,” said Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. “The relationship between the government and the arts needs to be energized. It
needs someone like Rocco.”

Mr. Landesman is expected to resign from his position at Jujamcyn, but to retain his ownership stake in the company.

His directness may prove refreshing to official Washington, and his affinity for country music, horse racing and baseball may help grease the wheels in his conversations with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

While Mr. Landesman has spent his career in the commercial theater, he earned a doctorate in dramatic literature at the Yale School of Drama and stayed on there for four years as an assistant professor. “It’s an odd
choice,” said Mr. Brustein, who taught Mr. Landesman at Yale. “It’s certainly not one that I would ever have thought of because Rocco’s always been associated with the profit-making world and the N.E.A. is nonprofit.”

Though a creature of the for-profit theater, Mr. Landesman has put his force behind work that other producers might have considered too risky for Broadway, like Mr. Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Angels in
America,” and the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam.”

“He’s really smart and he’s really savvy and will really fight if he believes in something,” said George C. Wolfe, who directed both productions.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Mr. Landesman had his undergraduate education at Colby College and the University of Wisconsin. In 1977 he left Yale to start a private investment fund, which he ran until his appointment as Jujamcyn’s president in 1987. In 2005 he purchased the company.

Rocco is married to Debby Landesman and has three sons.

All of Jujamcyn’s five theaters currently have shows running: the St. James (“Desire Under the Elms”), the Al Hirschfeld (“Hair”), the August Wilson Theater (“Jersey Boys”), the Eugene O’Neill (“33 Variations”) and the Walter Kerr (“Irena’s Vow”).

In recent years, Mr. Landesman has stepped back from active producing, although Jujamcyn still occasionally invests in shows. This year, the company made a $250,000 investment in the revival of “Desire Under the Elms” to help transfer the play to one of its Broadway houses from the Goodman Theater in Chicago.

Mr. Landesman’s nomination means a potential loss for Broadway underscored by the death, in November, of Gerald Schoenfeld, who had been chairman of the Shubert Organization since 1972. Mr. Landesman was among those who had begun to fill the role of elder statesman during this theater season.

Joe Allen, the theater district restaurateur, said that Mr. Landesman would be missed on Broadway, but that the industry would be lucky to have him in Washington. “To have a member of the club running the endowment is a good thing,” Mr. Allen said. “He knows the theater world. He knows how artists
work, what their concerns are, what their personalities are like.”

Mr. Landesman met Mr. Obama before he was a presidential candidate and was a strong supporter and contributor to the campaign.

If confirmed, Mr. Landesman would be the 10th chairman since Congress created the endowment in 1965. Other names circulated as possible candidates included Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center; Michael C.Dorf, a lawyer who served on Mr. Obama’s arts policy team during the campaign; and Claudine K. Brown, the program director for arts and culture at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

Mr. Gioia officially stepped down on Inauguration Day. Patrice Walker Powell, the endowment’s deputy chairwoman for states, regions and local arts agencies, has been serving as interim chairwoman since Feb. 2.

While previous chairmen have tried to argue the case for a stronger agency, this task will fall to the next chairman in an even tougher economic climate. “The day of the N.E.A. being this political football of the right – maybe those days are over and we’re going to start to take it seriously,” Mr. Kushner said.

Mr. Landesman is expected to be a vigorous and provocative face of the agency.

“Rocco is bored,” Mr. Brustein said, “if things just go routinely.”

What is wrong with our world to judge ones artistic capacity by ones style (or lack there of), or body shape or weight? Many have said about Susan Boyle ” Oh an ugly woman who can sing!” Does this kind of statement not speak to how desperately the world needs to be taught the value of creative self expression and the authenticity required to create artistic mastery? What on earth does appearance have to do with it?

Why is it that becoming a celebrity means shifting your focus on appearance or taking the wrath from the media if you don’t? It is no wonder that most of the world has trouble recognizing the true capacity of the arts to teach, enlighten and change who we can become when all that we as a country focus on is the appearance of it all. It’s not what’s on the inside that matters right?

I believe for many it is not because of the incredible insecurity and fears we hold about our true potential in life. It is the bright light that shines within us that most frightens us, which makes it far easier to focus superficially on others and avoid having to face ourselves.

But you see- here is where the rub comes- if you don’t ever take the time to discover and then share the gifts you have hidden inside of you– who will ever know?

I applaud Susan Boyle and Paul Potts and anyone else like either of them willing to risk sharing their gifts- their true purpose in life- with the world. Susan Boyle’s so called “fumpy” appearance is not what I see when I hear her sing. I see a woman who is allowing her life to be revealed to all who will dare to see and hold her close.

What a brave woman to come as herself to sing. What astonishing wisdom to not get caught up in the trappings of superficial illusions but instead stay true to herself and the richness of her true self expression.

And to you Simon Cowell– your initial reaction to Susan Boyle’s appearance, and attempt to conceal it with your comment at the end of this clip, makes it clear you have little room in your life for emotional intelligence. But that’s Hollywood for you, right?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
By Ben Quinn | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the April 21, 2009 edition
LONDON – It was to her elderly mother, sometime before she passed away, that Susan Boyle pledged she would “do something” with her life.

Two years on from that loss, she honored that promise with a now almost legendary appearance on a British television talent show.

A video clip of the Scot winning over skeptical judges and a cynical crowd with a rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream.” from the musical “Les Misérables” has been viewed more than 40 million times, making it one of the most popular YouTube videos ever posted.

The youngest of nine, Ms. Boyle is an unlikely global star. Or is she?

She’s a middle-aged woman from a village called Blackburn in Scotland’s West Lothian region, where she lives alone with her cat, Pebbles. Her unruly hair and spinster image have long attracted taunts from local children, an echo of the bullying she endured as a girl. Several times a week, she serves as a volunteer at Our Lady of Lourdes church, visiting elderly members of the congregation.

The mass media – especially in the United States – are now hugging Boyle close ahead of a second performance (May 23) on the television show “Britain’s Got Talent.”

CAPTURING THE DOUBTS – AND HOPES – OF MILLIONS

But her sudden rise to popularity is prompting many commentators, even those not usually noted for their interest in light entertainment, to find a deeper meaning in her performance.

“Boyle let me feel … the meaning of human grace…. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until the tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective,” wrote Robert Canfield, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., in his blog where he typically comments on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

Dr. Canfield says, in response to emailed questions, that Boyle captured “the hopes of a multitude.”

Her performance resonates with millions, he says, because “most of us in our heart of hearts have severe doubts about ourselves.

“So when a Susan Boyle appears on stage before a clearly condescending audience in a society that can read class status in every move, the hairdo, the dress, she appears as a loser. And we feel for her. We see how precarious her position is, how vulnerable she is, and we feel for her,” he writes in his email.

“We can see in her an objectification of what we fear about ourselves. So when she comes forth with that voice, that music – as if we have discovered Judy Garland at the age of 47 – we are thrilled. She’s going to make it, we think. She’s going to win (!). And we unconsciously invest ourselves in her achievement.”

IS BOYLE LIKE OBAMA?

Patricia Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University in New York, likened Boyle’s story to the election of Barack Obama in an op-ed piece for Britain’s Observer newspaper headlined: “I know those sneers. I’ve heard them too.”

“Boyle’s ability to up-end conventional preconceptions is akin to what the ‘black is beautiful’ movement of the 1970s tried to accomplish: a debunking of surface-based biases in favour of deeper commitments to fairness, intelligence, courage, humility, patience, re-examined aesthetics and the willingness to listen,” wrote Professor Williams.

“Dismissing her – or anyone – based on careless expectations about what age or lack of employment supposedly signify is the habit of mind common to all forms of prejudice.”

The Times of London asked Boyle, given how much importance the entertainment industry places on appearance, might she succumb to pressure to have a makeover?

“Maybe I’ll consider a makeover later on,” she told the Times with a laugh. “For now I’m happy the way I am – short and plump. I would not go in for Botox or anything like that. I’m content with the way I look. What’s wrong with looking like Susan Boyle? What’s the matter with that?”

THE SIMON COWELL FACTOR

One of Boyle’s fellow Scots, Alison Kennedy, a writer and comedian, says that some cynicism has also emerged around her meteoric rise and who might profit by it. But it’s focused on Simon Cowell, judge, producer and creator of “Britain’s Got Talent.” Yes, the same Simon Cowell on “American Idol.”

Mr. Cowell stands to make a lot of money from Boyle, who he has predicted would have a No. 1 record in the US.

Nevertheless, Ms. Kennedy adds: “People are still pleased for her, and it’s clear that she has a particular talent. People are fond of her, even if they are not fond of Simon Cowell.”

All eyes are now looking to Boyle’s May 23 performance on the talent show, which promises the ultimate winner – the opportunity to perform in front of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Elaine Paige, the singer whom Boyle has said she would like to emulate, has also suggested the two might one day record a duet.

In the meantime, Boyle herself has told reporters camped outside her home that she is “taking it all in my stride.”

“It’s all been complete mayhem, like a whirlwind going like an express train. I never expected all this attention. It’s been indescribable and completely mad. But I could get used to it,” she told the Observer.

I know we all want to believe that the Obama Administration will do wonders for the arts and humanities. But so far, the news is not so good.

Yes, the $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts in the stimulus bill was great news. But while we wait for appointments to head the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the appointment of Kareem Dale (below) as mini-czar — which is now likely to be temporary — and two lesser appointments suggest politics-as-usual.

Yes, you heard right- late last week, the White House seems to have appointed an arts czar — but no one seems to have noticed. His name is Kareem Dale, according to a short item in Saturday’s New York Times. As of 1 p.m. on Monday, there’s no press release on WhiteHouse.gov and no reports of the appointment at the Associated Press or Reuters.

I don’t know Mr. Dale, a lawyer from Chicago who is partially blind, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a profile. Searches on Google and Kosmix and in Factiva (which has articles from most major newspapers and many minor ones) turned up very little.

According to published reports, Dale hails from Chicago, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in advertising from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and stayed there to earn a law degree and an MBA, which he received in 1999. He founded and is CEO of The Dale Law Group, which has no website. Campaign finance records show that Dale contributed $2,300 to Obama’s campaign in 2008 (and about the same during the primary season); then he volunteered for it. At some point, he became the campaign’s Disability Vote Director. The only mention of arts I could find was during his campaign volunteer days, when Dale was a member of the campaign Arts Policy Committee, plus service on the board of Chicago’s Black Ensemble Theater.

I can’t help but think this is not what many people in the cultural world had in mind when they asked President Obama to appoint a powerful person in the White House to raise the profile of the arts in the U.S.

Another oddity: in mid-February, the White House announced that it had named Dale to the post of Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy. He still seems to hold that post.

Last night, The Daily Beast published my report on this and his appointment is not likely to last very long. It’s sad that his name was discovered by, or leaked to, The New York Times in the first place.

The most disappointing element of the story, however, is the appointment of Hollywood fundraiser Jeremy Bernard as the NEH’s White House and Congressional liaison; it’s an important job. Bernard claims a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College on his website, but Hunter says he did not graduate. When queried, the NEH said the degree is not in his documentation for the appointment. But the whole thing, not just the resume inflation, makes him a bit of an odd fit for the scholarly NEH.

I am pretty sure, by the way, that the White House has recognized this whole situation as a personnel snafu that has to be fixed. And it will — the question now is how and when.

While this article points out some of the value social media brings to the film industry, I am not sure social media will ever be anything more than a great way to connect with others. And, as such, a way to market your product, but not a substitute for selling it to a target market who will pay for its value. Yes, ladies and gentleman, it is time we learned how to sell our value to the niche market who wants what we have to offer. Selling is not a dirty word. And it doesn’t have to be one to artists, either. And creating a niche is very lucrative and rewarding, not only for you, but for your customer too. (Trust me when I say that niching creates a win-win situation. Everyone is happy.)

We all buy things we want and love. And every time we do, and are truly happy and content with our purchase, rest assured someone did a good job selling it to us!

I am really looking forward to what Gwydhar Bratton, our new filmmaking blogger, will share with us about her experience as a small independent film company. I am looking forward to seeing her new short, titled The Visionary, too.

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Written by Sharon Waxman

A new online distribution system for documentaries launched in July has found widespread consumer adoption, but is still not close to providing substantive income to documentary or low-budget filmmakers.

SnagFilms, launched by former National Geographic Films chief C. Richard Allen and former AOL executive Ted Leonsis, is geared to using the social networking tools of the web to feed a new distribution model for low-budget films.

Users can download widgets for any one of more than 550 documentaries available on the site, and watch the film — which has about 90 seconds of advertising interspersed through it — for free. SnagFilms shares the revenue, half and half, with the filmmaker.

But the films need to be seen hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of times before filmmakers can see substantive income from advertising revenue.

On the other hand, the site allows filmmakers to earn full revenue from any DVD sales, which are promoted along with the free download. And viewers are also encouraged to donate money to non-profits associated with some of the films.

“We want to start to open up the expansiveness of the audience by making it free, reducing the friction of trial and error,” said Allen. “A lot of people love documentaries but if you say documentary, they say ‘Ugh, that’s a little too much work.’ So we make it easy for viewers to find it, explore, and check things out.”

So far, so good. The widgets, thanks to an alliance with AOL, has been embedded on some 20,000 websites since July, and by this week will have placed on more than 300 million web-pages, Allen said in an interview with TheWrap.

“That’s a significantly bigger number than what we had projected,” he said.

Films featured on the site include well-known and already successful documentaries such as “Paper Clips,” a documentary about the Holocaust, and “Supersize Me,” a cult hit about the fast food industry.

But it also promotes more obscure docs. The site’s homepage now features a documentary about the TED technology conference, “The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED,” and “Life is for the Living,” a documentary about the debate over embryonic stem cell research.

The system comes as low-budget documentaries and independent films struggle to find distribution outlets in a landscape of shrinking opportunities. Traditional theatrical exhibition has been overwhelmingly dominated by big studio releases, crowding out independent films that have small marketing budgets and little time to gain a word of mouth following.

If it works, the model could prove useful for many low-budget films, as independent film distributors have been shuttered by major studios are gone bankrupt in the past year.

But “The Secrets of the Pharaohs,” a documentary promoted by AOL, demonstrates the revenue limitations for the model. The advertising rates online — known as “cpms” — do not add up to much income for the filmmakers until the number of viewers gets to be in the millions. “Pharaohs” was downloaded 60,000 times in a period of two weeks, said Allen; but at a $20 cpm, that amounted to only $1200 in advertising revenue.

Allen declined to discuss precise revenue amounts, saying that was proprietary information.

As viewers turn increasingly to their computers for entertainment, the web has provided a potential outlet for distribution, but the problem has been how to let viewers know that any given small film exists.

Allen says the rapid acceptance of Snagfilms made him optimistic about the future of movies on the web.

“Do you need another revenue stream?” asked Allen. “Absolutely. Is the revenue stream going to be something that starts out so large that you’re going to be able to do distribution? No. Do we believe it’s a revenue stream that you can track is growing? Yes.

“And we’ve seen it dramatically, number of views going up dramatically. It starts with the product being out there.”

I agree Donna, this is a marvelous find! Thanks for sharing it with us.

Below is the lead article from the Nova Craft Canoe website.
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With only two days before the big event, the excitement in Roch Prévost’s voice was audible as he described his vision: three new canoe designs, manufactured in secret and concealed under canvas at the front of a large hall. Their looming, oblong shapes create an air of suspense as 74 Nova Craft Canoe Design Challenge participants – London, Ontario Fanshawe College Art and Design students – mingle with canoe industry folks, potential employers and the media. Everyone casts glances at the cloaked canoes, but the temptation to peak is tempered by two foreboding bodyguards. At the appointed hour, the overhead lights dim and spotlights draw every eye in the room toward the cloaked objects. The music rises, the fog machine whirs, and at last, the MC begins the great reveal.

That’s right. Bodyguards, fog machines, sweeping spotlights and canoes. In an industry dominated by tradition and the aged beauty of birch bark and wood canvas, dramatic tension is something canoeists are used to experiencing at the head of rapids, not over the release of a canoe design. But dramatic tension is what they got on Wednesday, February 18 in London, Ontario when Nova Craft Canoe revealed three new designs aimed at attracting a younger audience to paddlesports. And if fog machines send ripples across the placid waters of the canoeing industry, then these designs make waves. The three chosen designs, all equal winners, merge graphic art with the function of a canoe to completely change the artistic vision of the industry.

Manufactured by Nova Craft staff using the artist’s renderings, each canoe is completely unique and speaks to the wide range of entries Nova Craft received. The round, yellow eye of a white octopus looks out from the bow of a canoe in Lurking Octopus; inspired by Jenna Greogry’s submission, its tentacles intertwine down the length of the canoe. Combining elements of stylized cartoons with the bold graphics of graffiti art, it commands a second look. Escape city, a more subtle yet equally striking design, invokes a dreamscape where the city gives way to nature, carrying its paddlers away from the worries of civilization. And finally, Blue Ribbon by Erik Reutz, introduces graphic elements and textures to create a design that feels like an abstract landscape, the clouds at the bow melting into the water and land toward the stern.

This isn’t the first time that Nova Craft has shaken up canoe designs; last year Canoe and Kayak Magazine gave the company kudos for creating a new plaid canoe. Prévost’s daughter made the unique request, and Nova Craft, already looking to bring a little innovation to traditional canoe designs, brought it to life. The company discovered that nearly any fabric or design could be laminated onto a composite canoe and adapted this process to mount fabric onto the canoe itself. By the end of the year the original plaid was joined by a tie die canoe, several additional plaids and even a design inspired by the Canadian flag, custom-made for canoeing author Kevin Callan. Prévost and Nova Craft president Tim Miller saw tremendous potential in customizable canoes, but taking these innovations to the next level took on special meaning when the Paddlesports Industry Association gave Nova Craft a mandate to attract younger generations to canoeing.

The popularity of canoeing has been on the decline as youth and young adults spend less time outdoors. According to a 2008 Outdoor Recreation Participation Report released by the Outdoor Industry Foundation, youth participation in outdoor activities decreased 11% between 2006 and 2007. Young adult participation hovers around 5.4%. The take home message is clear: younger generations are not embracing canoeing, and inspiring passion or peaking their interest has become an industry-wide goal.

“Generation X and Y don’t want to do what their parents do. They probably don’t want canoes that look like their parents’ ” Prévost said. Recognizing that much of their technology and recreational equipment – iPods, cell phones, computers, skis and even skateboards – have color, patterns, or images, Nova Craft hypothesized that customizing designs might be a way to increase appeal among these generations. Prévost approached Fanshawe College Art and Design instructor Robert Chilver about partnering with their design students; the result was a semester-long project last fall. Nova Craft provided the specs for a banana-shaped skin that would fit over a canoe, and students created designs that would appeal to 25 to 35 year olds and adhere to the unique shape of the canoe. The contest itself was optional, but all 74 students chose to pitch their designs to a panel of five canoeing and artistic heavyweights: author Kevin Callan, Canadian Canoe Museum representative James Raffan, local artist Philip Aziz, Fanshawe Marketing and Communications representative Jeff Sage and Nova Craft president Tim Miller.

The students, whose actual paddling experience varied, had three minutes to make their pitch. Prévost estimated that a third based their designs on personal canoeing experiences, a third had paddled only occasionally and a third had never been in a canoe. But experience wasn’t crucial; knowledge of their generation was, and the resulting range of artwork was so good it was hard to pick only three. The panel selected six or seven that Nova Craft then shopped around to friends and family of all ages for final advice. Once chosen, Nova Craft staff manufactured the designs in secret, and no one – not even the winners – knew which designs would be revealed at the big event.

And was the suspense everything the Roch Prévost had hoped for? Simply put: “Yes, completely.”

Nova Craft will retain exclusive use of the winning designs, and the winners will receive $500 bursary scholarships from Nova Craft as well as the opportunity to paddle their boats at a celebration on the second annual Canoe Day in June. But Nova Craft and Fanshawe College also worked hard to make the event a success for all participants, inviting not only canoe industry representatives but also employers looking to hire fresh designers and media to give the students exposure.

Now, one question remains: how to get these ambitious new designs in front of Generation Y? Again, Nova Craft will defy tradition, moving into waters not often paddled by traditional canoeists: YouTube, Facebook – all the mediums where younger audiences communicate. Only time will tell if the contest or the designs truly draw potential paddlers closer to the water, but in the meantime, Nova Craft has brought fresh inspiration to a very traditional industry, inspiring creativity and, dare we say it? Rocking the boat, just a little bit.

Want to see the Nova Craft Design Challenge winners? The canoes will make appearances at the Toronto Outdoor Adventure Show, Canoecopia in Madison, WI, the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough and the 25th Anniversary of the Canadian Heritage Rivers System conference in Ottawa.