Our 2010 most read posts are interestingly some oldies but goodies. From our top 25, 14 are from 2007 through 2009. Our oldest post from 2007, which also happens to be our #1 post, is about my  journey writing a book.

So for all you writers out there, this list just goes to show you that it’s important to get your writing our there because its more likely to become well read with the passage of time.

#1 Starving Artist Not
#2 The Four C’s of 21st Century Education
#3 Oh the places you’ll go by Dr Seuss
#4 Tongue twisters for actors and speakers
#5 Characteristics of successful entrepreneurs
#6 Ten steps to finding your artistic voice
#7 Best and worst marketing campaigns
#8 How to create a badge for your blog
#9 An artistic entrepreneurial case study: The story of blue man group
#10 Ben Cameron on change transformation and renewal in the arts
#11 One blank piece of paper
#12 Dinner in the sky
#13 Conservatory made me successful in business
#14 How to make your creativity explode create your own strategic implode
#15 North Africa Economic Partership announced between Aspen Institute and U.S. Department of State
#16 Top 20 arts entrepreneur blogs
#17 What does fame mean to you?
#18 I’m not an entertainer. I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker
#19 Artists as social entrepreneurs
#20 Our dirty little family secret
#21 The definition of a calculated risk
#22 Innovating through artistry
#23 Paradigm shifts build innovative companies
#24 Overcoming mediocrity
#25 What is your imagination worth to you?

Does higher education need more cost efficient assessment or unique individualized solutions to be able to access and measure?  This article reveals our most prominent high profile college dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,  views on how we need to approach learning in higher education. While I agree with author Steve Tratchenberg that both views are right, I worry about how we can make the case to stimulate, support and justify, in this economic climate,  programs that focus on the development of an individuals uniqueness and creative capacity.

College students want to know what courses and majors will give them an edge in their careers. But the choices are not always clear, even if you are taking advice from Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

In a talk to the nation’s governors earlier this month, Mr. Gates emphasized work-related learning, arguing that education investment should be aimed at academic disciplines and departments that are “well-correlated to areas that actually produce jobs.”

If this was not music to the ears of advocates of the humanities, they quickly found a soulmate in Steve Jobs. At an event unveiling new Apple products, Mr. Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.”

What do we know about the relationship between college studies and majors and future employment? What gets you a good first job and what leads to career success?

Rival Views, Both Right

Is there an app for improving America’s educational system? Will watching a PowerPoint presentation about the nation’s educational challenge help to understand the opportunities and difficulties facing the country?

Two college dropouts, Steve Jobs (Reed College) and Bill Gates (Harvard University) have articulated theories about education. And their viewpoints are as different as are their companies (Apple and Microsoft, respectively), presenting a contrast in style and philosophy.

Gates hopes to analyze and adjust the education system in order to produce a more efficient and effective learning environment. He advocates sophisticated metrics to measure results. What makes one teacher better at her job than another and how can best practices be shared? Technology enables analysis and is also the delivery mechanism.

Once the education community receives reliable disaggregated research, the policy makers can allocate their limited resources in a fashion that will produce a higher yield. As Gates has said, “…we need to raise performance without spending a lot more.”

Jobs is focused more on individual learning and less on systemic education. Technology is his way to get a well-integrated mind flowing in multiple directions. His learning philosophy gives each person the ability to chart his own course. It is less about the structure of the system and more about free will.

Gates’ recent speech to the nation’s governors stressed assessment, measuring outcomes and tracking students’ progress. Technology and benchmarking are joined at the hip. He feels it is worth charting the effectiveness of particular majors with regional job creation. (Does he favor vocational education?)

Jobs’ approach allows for individual experimentation to find a unique solution to each person’s quest. It is the symbol of intellectual multi-tasking. This is a more experimental, integrated search for a holistic view of the universe, one that has multiple access points. Each student becomes his or her own teacher.

My heart is with Jobs (full disclosure: I wrote this on a MacBook Pro). But my mind fully understands Gates’ mandate to discover ways to maximize scarce resources to best prepare the workforce. It is beyond noble; it is essential. Gates has contributed millions, perhaps even billions, for the study of education. He is looking for the vaccine to cure education’s ailing health. Jobs is tripping our mind with the jazz of life put before us to spark awareness that the more we learn the more powerful we become.

How does this relate to the curriculum of higher education? Keep poetry, architectural history and Russian literature alongside mechanical engineering and agricultural studies. A discerning mind, one that blends science and Springsteen, is the backbone of the creative spirit: ideas fuel entrepreneurship.

Gates is studying the science of education. Jobs is creating the art of learning. I’m sure there is an app for teaching arithmetic by watching the heavens and counting the stars.

About Steve Trachtenberg
Mr. Trachtenberg was the 15th president of The George Washington University since its founding in 1821, serving the university from 1988 to 2007. He combines his role at Korn/Ferry with his continued responsibilities at the university as president emeritus and university professor of public service.Mr. Trachtenberg was previously president and professor of law and public administration for 11 years at the University of Hartford. Prior to that, he was dean of arts and sciences and vice president at Boston University. During the Johnson Administration, he served as secretary for a White House Task Force on Education. He holds a juris doctorate from Yale University, a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University.

January 31, 2011
Washington, DC

Written by Rocco Landesman, Chairman for The NEA

Last week, as part of a new work convening at Arena Stage, I was able to finally spark a conversation that I have been wanting to have for over a year now.

Diane Ragsdale and I discussed the intersection of the commercial and not-for-profit theaters. We talked about the original impulse behind the resident theater movement in this country, the increasing role of commercial investment in shaping not-for-profit theaters’ seasons, and the too limited definition of success in use by many theaters today (attendance + revenue + national attention).

Another topic arose, one that is central to all of us who care about the arts: the mismatch that currently exists in supply and demand for not-for-profit arts organizations in our country.

Diane recently addressed this topic in her blog Jumper, and I cited the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), which reports a five percentage point decrease in arts audiences in this country. This is juxtaposed against a 23% increase in not-for-profit arts organizations, and a rate of growth for not-for-profit performing arts organizations, specifically, that was 60% greater than that for the total U.S. population.

When we released the SPPA results at a meeting of more than 40 national service organizations in December 2009, I said that anyone who hears these two numbers has to ask about balancing the equation, which means either increasing demand or, yes, maybe decreasing supply.

I have made this same observation to a number of audiences, but at Arena, the conversation finally took off. So I decided to write this blog post—not to retract or walk back the observation (as some hope I will do)—but to encourage us to keep having the conversation.

There are two points I want to underscore.

One. In a follow-up comment, I said that the NEA has been increasing the size of our grants, which means (given a stable budget) necessarily making fewer grants. A number of people took this to mean that the NEA should only fund large institutions. That is totally wrong. I have found no correlation between the size of an organization and its creative output. The best work in this country comes out of organizations across the spectrum of budget size—just look at the offerings from Arena’s #NewPlay Festival, which featured productions from the Foundry Theatre, Ma-Yi, Children’s Theatre Company, and the Rude Mechanicals. All four are deeply worthy of support; none of them is “large.”  We should never talk about survival of the largest; we are here to ensure the survival of the most creative and most dynamic.

Two. When I say that “decreasing supply” has to be on the table when talking about the future of not-for-profit arts organizations, in no way do I mean that that is the only thing that should be on the table. Here are some other things that I have lobbed out in conversations:

Increase arts education. We dove deeper into the SPPA data, and discovered that arts education is one of the only reliable predictors of future arts participation. Not age, race, ethnicity, or income level, but arts education. Exposure to the arts—early and often—builds future audiences.

Take advantage of related demand. As we are watching audiences at not-for-profit arts organizations shrink, we are seeing an explosion of demand for singing and dancing. Prime time network television is filled with Dancing With the Stars, American Idol, Glee, and So You Think You Can Dance. Should we dumb down what we are doing as a sector and ask J-Lo to be America’s cultural arbiter? Absolutely not. But to borrow a phrase from Bill Ivey, Americans are hungry for and will seek out an expressive life. Our not-for-profit arts organizations need to also be feeding that hunger with what we offer.

Offer free samples. I have just returned from the opening of the New World Symphony, which is broadcasting concerts for free on the outside of its building. The highest quality video and audio are allowing people to sample what happens inside the concert hall. It is not exactly the same thing as the grocery stores that offer free tastes of hickory-smoked sausage, but if you offer a taste of a high quality product, people will come back for more.

Technology is key in this: the NEA’s Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation shows that people who consume art via the Internet and electronic media are nearly three times as likely to attend live arts events, that they attend a greater number of live events, and that they also attend a greater variety of arts events.

Examine our arts infrastructure. There are 5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists. Do we need three administrators for every artist? Resident theaters in this country began as collectives of artists. They have become collectives of arts administrators. Do we need to consider becoming more lightly institutionalized in order to get more creativity to more audiences more often? It might also allow us to pay artists more.

There are many more things that we as a field need to be considering.

I care passionately about the arts in this country, and I believe that they will always play a vital role in who we are as an American people. But in order to get to where we need to be, we are going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations and prepare ourselves for a not-for-profit arts sector of the future that does not necessarily look the way it looks today.

I want to have the NEA play a role in those conversations, and I encourage you to share your thoughts in comments on this blog post. I will also be inviting other voices to join the conversation on this blog, so look for guest postings in the coming weeks with the hashtag #SupplyDemand.

Written by: Jeffrey Nytch, http://www.jeffreynytch.com/
DMA Director, Entrepreneurship Center for Music
University of Colorado – Boulder

In the 18 months since my arrival in Boulder to run The University of Colorado’s Entrepreneurship Center for Music (“ECM”), I’ve witnessed a number of sessions in which students are asked about the entrepreneurial ideas they are developing. It often takes some encouragement: students are wary of tipping their hands and having someone steal their idea away from them. And while in some situations that might be a legitimate concern (some sort of proprietary technology, for instance), most of the time I’m able to tell them, Look: your idea is much more than just a notion – it’s an authentic expression of you, borne out of your passion, your interests, and your experience. And that means that you’re the only one who can shepherd this thing through to completion.

And then I talk about teamwork. While some entrepreneurial ventures are fulfilled with the work of a single individual, in most cases the process is more likely to succeed when a team is involved. Nobody can be an expert in everything, and most entrepreneurial ventures require a very wide range of skills; there’s the creative idea process, but there’s also fiscal management, taxes, legal issues, marketing, and a host of other areas where somebody else might be more effective. An entrepreneurial venture of any complexity at all takes a team, and for a team to be effective there has to be an openness, a willingness to share our needs and seek help from others. It takes a certain kind of vulnerability.

I got thinking about this because I’ve been to a lot of conferences lately. Being a teacher of entrepreneurship in the field of higher education is an interesting combination: theory can be divorced of practice, and sometimes educators think that entrepreneurship is some sort of magic bullet, some sort of end in itself that they can plug into their curricula and guarantee the success of their students. As someone with an advanced degree (but not in entrepreneurship – I’m a composer), and one who learned entrepreneurship “on the street” (i.e., through trial and lots of error!), I can appreciate both the joy of pure scholarship and the limits of it, and am often the one in the room to gently explain that entrepreneurship is about process, that one best learns it by practicing, and that programs to implement it within an educational context can be a varied as the institutions themselves. Sometimes I’m heard, and sometimes it can be a frustrating conversation.

But one really positive thing that I’ve experienced at these conferences is the sense of teamwork embodied by my colleagues in entrepreneurship education. We share not only an interest in entrepreneurship and its potentially powerful impact on arts education, we also share a passion for our students and for equipping them to go out into the world and find their dreams. There is a tremendous generosity of spirit with these folks, a willingness to share their insights and innovations, to seek out knowledge from each other when we lack it ourselves, and to work together to solve our shared challenges. There is, in essence, a community of higher ed arts entrepreneurs – a community I am both honored and greatly blessed to be a part of.

I write about this, though, not just to express gratitude for that community but also because it’s a great illustration of an important aspect of entrepreneurship itself: the necessity of collaboration and teamwork in order to accomplish shared goals. Because entrepreneurship is more than just the idea. In fact, an idea in and of itself isn’t entrepreneurial at all. Entrepreneurship is the process by which an idea is brought to fruition, and it’s a process that is greatly facilitated by teamwork and collaboration.

I don’t need to look very far to see how this idea plays out, either: my own program in Boulder may be directed by me, but it’s a product of my predecessors, who laid important groundwork in establishing the program, my colleagues at CU, who partner with me to promote our programming and aid with their expertise, and this community of arts entrepreneurs nationwide, whose wisdom and whose own successes inform so many others beyond their institutions. In February, the ECM will be bringing Lisa Canning out to Boulder as our Spring Keynote Guest, and once again this community will be in evidence: as Lisa shares her wisdom and experience with the CU community, I’m sure she and I will also be talking about her ventures and, just possibly, she’ll take home with her some tidbits of her own. That’s the nature of community, of collaboration: the mutual exchange of ideas for the edification of all. It’s also a key component of entrepreneurship – and one I particularly enjoy reveling in.

My good friend Tom Tresser is an educator, organizer, strategic planner and consultant who works in the space of creativity and innovation. I thought all you ETA readers needed to read this post he wrote on January 3rd that appeared on Huffington Post- especially those of you who live and work in Chicago.

Written by Tom Tresser http://www.tresser.com
I’m going out a limb and just answer my own question straight away: “No.”

I don’t see the leaders and managers the thousands of social service, cultural and educational organizations that serve hundreds of thousand of people every week taking much of a role in electing the next Mayor of Chicago.

That’s not to say they shouldn’t take an active role.

There may still be time if they decide they want to.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Due to state and local budget woes area nonprofits are being decimated. Many are operating in a state of perpetual crisis. Here’s the result of a recent survey of social service providers in Cook County conducted by Illinois Partners for Human Service:

I call the state of affairs for nonprofits in Illinois “Death by a Thousand Cuts” – over time every line item is squeezed and nonprofit programs and workers are asked to do more with less. This is especially true in miserable financial times when people seek help in record numbers.

We bailed out the banks, the insurance companies, General Motors, Goldman Sachs to the tune of trillions of dollars. But all over America states, counties and cities are awash in red ink and are cutting back services and even considering declaring bankruptcy.

Our stalwart nonprofit sector is stretched and stressed out to the max. No one is bailing them out.

I’ve lost count of how many desperate emails I’ve received over the past six months from everyone from Voices for Illinois Children, to The Responsible Budget Coalition to Arts Alliance Illinois. They are all begging me to email or call someone.

So what’s on tap for Chicago’s mayoral election? For the first time in a couple of generations, a Daley isn’t on the ballot and there is a fleeting sense of democracy stirring here.

This would be a great time for those progressive social change champions who have been working and fighting for community development, education reform, clean environment and social justice to come together and (a) assess the results of the Daley Era and, (b) articulate a set of priorities that a new mayor must address.

But Chicago’s (and, by extension, Illinois’) nonprofit organizations should do much more.

They need to establish a sense of intentionality to play power politics and then need to organize to deliver the goods. They need to instill a desire to fight and develop the skills to win in the world of politics and policy. They to seek out and develop young leaders who will someday run for local office and whose personal values and priorities reflect what I call “The Human Agenda” that drives all nonprofits that I’ve seen or been associated with – that is, the desire to serve partnered with the ingenuity to invent new solutions to tough problems. How about a Human Agenda PAC to back those candidates with cash, volunteers and creative resources?

Don’t bother to dismiss this idea by saying nonprofits can’t engage in politics. The organizations can’t but their leaders certainly can. The standard way is to create an ad hoc campaign committee. Committee members can list their names and positions with a disclaimer that their organization are listed for identification purposes only.

I ran into a longtime nonprofit consultant and board member last week and we had conversation along these lines. “It’s the rules” she said, explaining why nonprofit leaders don’t engage in this manner. “It’s not about rules,” I said, “It’s habit and fear.”

So how about the organizations and associations that serve and train the various nonprofit categories – education, health care, the arts, social services, etc., getting together and starting down this path. Let them create a new instrumentality to do this work if necessary.

Come on, nonprofit leaders – take advantage of a literally once in a lifetime opportunity here and get involved in the 2011 election for Chicago’s mayor. You can be sure every other sector of the local economy is playing. Just look at who gives who money.

A wise political operative told me a very simple rule for impacting politics. “Elected officials have a reptilian brain,” he told me, “They want to know if you can help them or hurt them.” It’s a simple calculus. If you can help and hurt the candidate – then they listen to you. If you can do neither, then you are invisible to them. Worse, if your enemies can help and/or hurt the elected official then you are at grave risk for being attacked politically and your programs cut.

Hey, all you artists, arts managers, creative professionals and lovers of freedom of expression – remember Culture Wars? We lost that war and America’s arts and creative sector is still paying for it.

It’s much more than lobbying and explaining the reasons why and how Chicago’s nonprofits do so much for so many. You’ve got to show how you can help or hurt a candidate in order to be taken seriously.

It’s the oldest political game in town. It’s time for Chicago’s – and America’s nonprofits to suit up and get on the field.

If you don’t exert your influence now, then reconcile yourself to another four years of cuts, squeezes, unpaid contracts, and unrelenting pressure to do more with less. That’s what you do best, isn’t it?

Follow Tom Tresser on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tomstee

Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, published his New Year’s resolutions for the arts in the Huffington Post earlier this week. How can we apply our entrepreneurial habits of mind to help Kaiser achieve his very worthy goals? His five resolutions are (and I’m paraphrasing here): provide consistent arts education in public schools, continue to make bold artistic choices, bring more 20 year-olds into the arts, train next generation arts leaders (especially internationally), provide arts access to rural America, and use technology to improve arts knowledge. This is an agenda that moves beyond – in fact doesn’t even mention—the popular economic arguments for arts engagement and instead is about improving arts infrastructure for the sustainability of arts and culture. If we can each strive toward achieving these goals by applying entrepreneurial habits of mind, we can, perhaps, individually and collectively advance the arts in America.

What are those entrepreneurial habits of mind? In a recent article in the Journal of Entrepreneurship, my former ASU colleague Tom Duening (now at U of Colorado) adapts Howard Barker’s Five Minds for the Future to entrepreneurial thinking and acting. Duening’s five “minds” for entrepreneurship are:
• The Opportunity Recognizing Mind
• The Designing Mind
• The Risk Managing Mind
• The Resilient Mind
• The Effectuating Mind

Providing consistent arts education in the public schools requires the application of at least three of these minds: the designing, the resilient, and the effectuating. For the next year or two, the resilient mind might be the most important as public school budgets continue to shrink, but the designing mind will be equally critical as entrepreneurial arts educators develop innovative means for integrating arts education into the K-12 classroom.

The risk-managing mind is critical to the maintenance of a bold artistic vision. Kaiser has always been a proponent of making bold choices in light of adversity (see his The Art of the Turnaround). Doing so is risky, but in truly entrepreneurial fashion, those risks are a necessary prerequisite to the rewards of artistic innovation.

The next two resolutions, to train artistic leaders internationally and to provide access to the arts in rural America, seem like they could be entrepreneurially connected to the fifth, to use technology to improve arts knowledge, if we apply our “opportunity recognizing mind.” This is the mind that connects the dots and recognizing patterns. Coupled with the effectuating mind, the opportunity-recognizing mind could put technology to work to bring the arts (and especially arts participation) to rural communities and bring training to nascent arts organizations both here and abroad.

Personally, I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions because I’ve found that the risk of burning out on them by February is greater than the potential reward. This year though, I promise myself that I’ll think about Kaiser’s resolutions and Duening’s five minds and ways to connect them… I may even share a few of those thoughts here.

On another note, there is still time to register for the second bi-annual p.a.v.e. symposium on entrepreneurship and the arts: Creating Infrastructure for Creativity and Innovation, to be held in Tempe AZ April 1-2.
HAVE A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Washington — At the U.S.-Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference, North African and American business leaders discussed the potential, and the challenge, of launching businesses in countries from Libya to Mauritania.

Washington — At the U.S.-Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference, North African and American business leaders discussed the potential, and the challenge, of launching businesses in countries from Libya to Mauritania.

Naeem Zafar, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, moderated the innovation and technology panel at the conference. Entrepreneurship, he said, goes deeper than just running a business.

“The most innate need every human has is of survival, and entrepreneurship is the armor which can prepare you for survival,” Zafar said.

Organized by the U.S. State Department in partnership with the U.S.-Algeria Business Council, the conference was held in Algiers, Algeria, on December 1 and 2. Inspired by President Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo and last April’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship, held in Washington, the conference provided workshops and networking opportunities for North African entrepreneurs. The North Africans were joined by 14 leading American entrepreneurs.

At the conference, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez announced the North African Partnership for Economic Opportunity (NAPEO). NAPEO is a public-private partnership to better link North Africa and American business leaders and entrepreneurs.

“You have to create a website, you have to create videos,” Zafar said. “You have to create local stories and have some Moroccans and Algerians talk about how those stories changed their thinking.”

North African and American entrepreneurs shared their success stories at the conference.

“One of the great things we did was we had maybe half a dozen American entrepreneurs … who told their stories,” Zafar said. “They told them how desperate they were. About how the guy was down to his last 27 bucks, what happened and how did he make it.”

Arezki Daoud, founder of the news and analysis website North Africa Journal, moderated a panel on “Opportunities and Challenges: Stories from Maghreb Entrepreneurs.” Daoud said that although North African entrepreneurs have talent and vision, regional business climates present obstacles to their success.

“The processes of creating, managing and closing a business are not only outdated and antiquated, but also structured to slow the pace of entrepreneurship,” Daoud said. Other challenges include access to startup capital and a shortage of mid-level management, the kind of employees entrepreneurs need to run day-to-day operations.

“Banks do not loan, and the concepts of angel investor and venture capital are still nonexistent,” Daoud said. Entrepreneurs have to rely on their own resources to start a business. “While the entrepreneur can establish the strategy, there is very limited talent to create and manage the tactical aspects.”

A likely solution for these challenges, Daoud said, is for leaders to be proactive in making the business climate suitable for aspiring entrepreneurs.

“It really defaults back to government, policymakers, legislators and to the leaders of those countries,” Daoud said. “There is an enormous amount of interest from the local business community, a lot of people with money, a lot of young people with good ideas.”

Lisa Canning, founder and president of the Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship, discussed how to turn talent into business opportunities. Canning, an artistic entrepreneur who has developed multimillion-dollar businesses, took part in the “Regional Business Incubation of Creative Industry” panel.

“I thought that the conference was an amazing event because of the appetite and the interest in the subject matter,” Canning said. “There were some people on the panel that clearly understood that artists are born with an entrepreneurial bent, but that it remains uncultivated.”

Canning created the Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship to teach artists to leverage what they know into a business. Developing an art-centric business is like learning a musical instrument: It takes patience.

“The reason that this can’t be done overnight is because it takes time to develop the craft,” Canning said. “Just like it took time to incubate your idea [talent] as a 10-year-old.”

For more information, see the websites of the U.S.-Algeria Business Council, the North Africa Journal and the Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship.

Integrating the arts, in innovative ways, into business, education, research, science and world affairs will create a whole new age of “whole brain thinking” leaders who can solve complex problems and bridge ingenuity gaps.

Thanks Toni Antonetti for sending this article ETA’s way. As a compliment to this article, you might want to read Entrepreneur The Art’s: Innovating through Artistry which explores the role of innovation of the arts in business.

This article was written by John M. Eger, a Lionel Van Deerlin Professor of Communications and Public Policy, San Diego State. It appeared on Huffington Post on December 7, 2010

Today, the arts are being cut to one of the lowest points in history. Like politics, funding is the mother’s milk of continued prowess in the arts, but more is at stake than most people believe.

As demand for a new workforce to meet the challenges of a global knowledge economy is rapidly increasing, nothing could be more important in this period of our nation’s history than art and an art infused education.

According to the Americans for the Arts in Washington, D.C., this is the only sector where the growth of arts jobs in publishing, television, graphic design and related fields is a bright spot in the present day dismal economy.

But as important as the traditional creative industries are, the payoff in almost every economic activity will be from people who can draw from both sides of their brain. The folks who have had art or art infused training and exposure to the arts are clearly at an advantage.

A number of think tanks argue that the elements are in place for the advance of the Creative Age, a period in which free, democratic nations thrive and prosper because of their tolerance for dissent, respect for individual enterprise, freedom of expression, and recognition that innovation, not mass production of low-value goods and services, is the driving force for the new economy.

The new economy’s demand for creativity has manifested itself in the emergence and growth of what author Richard Florida has termed the “Creative Class.” Although Florida defines this demographic group very broadly, he does a convincing job of outlining the facts of life and work in the new knowledge economy.

As he points out, “every aspect and every manifestation of creativity — cultural, technological and economic — is inextricably linked.” By tracking certain migration patterns and trends, Richard Florida did a huge service for those struggling to redefine their communities for the new knowledge economy. However, many questions remain.

Can the community, through public art or cultural offerings, enhance the creativity of its citizens? And if the new economy so desperately demands the creative worker and leader, what should schools and universities do to prepare the next generation of creative people.

Until recently, there has been only limited evidence of the connection between education and appreciation of the arts, and success in the postindustrial age of information. But now it is becoming increasingly apparent that arts initiatives will be the hallmarks of the most-successful schools and universities and, in turn, the most-successful and vibrant twenty-first-century cities and regions.

Those communities placing a premium on cultural, ethnic, and artistic diversity, reinventing their knowledge factories for the creative age, and building the new information infrastructures will likely burst with creativity and entrepreneurial fervor.

These are the ingredients so essential to developing and attracting the bright and creative people to generate new patents and inventions, innovative world-class products and services, and the finance and marketing plans to support them.

Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, created “Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative” to provide free arts management consulting to nonprofit performing arts organizations around the United States. Last summer he embarked on a 50-state tour for the program, bringing his expertise to every state in the union, along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

It may seem ludicrous to say it, but we really need to be spending more on the arts and art education.

Much more.

Written by Robert L. Lynch, President and CEO—Americans for the Arts
Appeared on Huffington Post November 18th, 2010

Twenty-five Chinese Ministry of Culture executives just left my office. It was exciting to learn about Chinese cultural investment in projects — from massive contemporary visual art colonies in Beijing and Shanghai to an exploding phenomenon of cultural festivals in cities and villages throughout their colossal country. They in turn were eager to learn how the arts industry is structured and supported in the United States. As they were leaving my office, 35 French, Belgian and Spanish business leaders arrived with the cultural officer from the French Embassy. They, too, were excited to learn how the arts industry is supported in the United States

Last month, I was brought in to speak to arts groups and government and business leaders in Amsterdam; other Americans for the Arts staff members went or will go to Brussels, London, Korea, and Germany just this fall. Each of these countries wants to learn how the arts industry in America is supported and how private sector giving to the arts works. They are especially curious about how business donations “flow” into the bank accounts of U.S. arts organizations, and to capture the compelling arguments that motivate elected officials to “shower” the arts with public dollars and supportive policymaking in America.

What is going on? World governments are increasingly excited about the economic power of the arts and the value of cultural exchange in a changing world. Because the prodigious levels of government support in Europe and Asia are diminishing, they want to better understand our American advocacy techniques. And as they observe the sea of corporate logos on the backs of most U.S. performing arts programs, they want to know America’s secret to eliciting substantial business support for the arts.

However, the leaders from these other countries are often quite disappointed when I tell them that the result of our mightiest, most sophisticated advocacy efforts generates just 9 percent of the total income for U.S. nonprofit arts organizations. Equally disappointing is that private sector support in America is only 31 percent, mostly from individuals. Business support — despite all the logos and brand recognition — is only about 5 percent. Yet these foreign leaders and delegations keep coming because they see the breadth of creative and innovative arts organization we have here. They see the freedom of ideas, the variety and the sheer pluck and entrepreneurial spirit of America’s arts community.

In September 2009, at the Sundance Preserve, Robert Redford and I convened our fourth National Arts Policy Roundtable for CEOs, elected officials and opinion leaders to discuss how the arts strengthen 21st century global communities by helping create better understanding and stronger relationships between the U.S. and the world .

Thinking about this 21st century global marketplace, four key cultural imperatives jumped out:

1. The arts are a global economic force.
2. The arts are an aggressive part of today’s international competitive marketplace.
3. Improved cultural understanding is essential in international dialogue.
4. The arts make dramatic contributions to our national security.

The report complements what has been a recent growth of dialogue and interest in making a case for the strength of the arts in U.S. diplomacy and with key decision-makers. Margaret (Peggy) Ayers at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation has pioneered groundbreaking research on our private sector’s role in supporting U.S. cultural exchange. Former Congressman John Brademas, with his Brademas Center for the Study of Congress’ Project on Cultural Diplomacy at NYU, is spearheading an effort to reinvigorate Congress’ role in supporting the arts in our cultural diplomacy efforts.

Our U.S. State Department is making some positive moves in this direction. Earlier this year, the State Department sponsored a partnership with Brooklyn Academy of Music to take three dance companies on tour throughout the world. More recently, that agency announced a partnership with the Bronx Museum of the Arts to take the work of contemporary U.S. visual artists on tour.

These are good efforts, but more is needed on all fronts. The U.S. government must invest much more than the $10 million or so it now appropriates for use toward international cultural activity. While arts advocacy groups last year proposed that Congress add $10 million to the current amount already appropriated, that dollar amount is just a fraction of what is needed in today’s world. Just peak in my office door to see who is interested from across the globe — our competitors are on our doorstep.

For years, at the local level, city arts commissions and local and state arts councils have hosted cultural and economic delegations from throughout the world and sent similar American delegations overseas in search of economic and cultural partnerships. Sister Cities organizations have often been at the core of such local efforts. This citizen-to-citizen intimacy and the success of such efforts is being celebrated this week in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Summit & Initiative for Global Citizen Diplomacy, where former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts Frank Hodsoll and former U.S. Ambassador Cynthia Schneider have spearheaded an effort recognizing some of our nation’s best cultural diplomacy efforts, and honoring leaders such as Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute.

So bravo to the low-budget (or no budget) individuals, communities and states that reach out, one arts action at a time, to help our nation be better understood. And thanks to our U.S. State Department leaders for taking a step toward renewed, rejuvenated partnerships with our very own United States arts resources. I look forward to even bigger leaps and even more successful participation in the future.

Follow Robert L. Lynch on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Americans4Arts

What’s next?
Thanks again Celina Jacobson. Wow. Great stuff here.
November 3rd, 2010 www.careeroverview.com

Al Franklen is an artist AND a leader! What about you? How could a second career help you better use the ideals and values you learned from your artistry to teach or be of service to others?

These celebrities enjoyed fame, success, and plenty of money but have chosen to pursue other careers, too. Take Al Franken, for example. He’s an outspoken U.S. senator but also an actor and comedian. A Minnesota native, Franken moved to New York after graduating high school — declining acceptance at Harvard — and was soon hired by Saturday Night Live as a writer. He eventually went back to Harvard and graduated with honors in 1973, and then continued with SNL as a writer and performer. Franken, has also written five books and hosted a radio show. He was sworn into the U.S. senate in July 2009.

Here are 15 other former celebrities and their surprising second career choices.

1. Vanilla Ice: The Texas rapper who made it okay for white boys to beat launched a total pop culture phenomenon with Ice, Ice Baby, and break danced his way through the early 90s. By the 2000s, it seemed like Vanilla Ice was relegated to performing at college campuses for orientation weekends, but this fall, he started a surprising new partnership, with HGTV. The channel that’s home to Property Virgins and Divine Design now welcomes host Vanilla Ice for his own show, The Vanilla Ice Project, in which he and his contractors renovate a different room in his 7,000-square-foot home.

2. Michael Schoeffling: Dreamy Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles and Joe from Mermaids had a surprisingly short film career, making his last movie in 1991. He married, had two daughters and now lives in Pennsylvania, making handcrafted furniture.

3. Courteney Cox, house flipping: Courteney Cox is still a celebrity, but she’s fostered a second career outside of acting for several years: house flipping. With separated husband David Arquette, Cox earned big profits on houses that she bought, renovated and resold.

4. Kirk Cameron: Kirk Cameron made such a cute angsty teenager on Growing Pains, but now he’s famous for his Christian book series Left Behind. Cameron had an enlightening experience when he was a young man and devoted his life — and career — to Christian values. Besides the extremely popular Left Behind books, Cameron starred in the movie Fireproof and produces and co-hosts the evangelical TV show The Way of the Master.

5. Mickey Rourke: Mickey Rourke’s sort of on his third career right now, after making it big as an actor in the 1990s, but then leaving Hollywood to become a boxer. He felt like he was a terrible actor, and beat out his frustration around the world, suffering many injuries along the way. In 2008, Rourke — whose plastic surgery left him virtually unrecognizable — became the comeback kid of the year (at least) with his Academy Award-nominated performance in The Wrestler.

6. Soleil Moon Frye: The former Punky Brewster actress has continued in the entertainment industry in the form of cameos and guest starring roles, and even as the voice of an animated TV character on Bratz. But after college, Frye started directing, and she’s now a veritable documentary film maker. Her 2004 film, Sonny Boy, is about her father’s bout with Alzheimer’s, and won Best Documentary at the San Diego Film Festival.

7. George Foreman: If you ask anyone under the age of 20 — and under 30 in some cases — what George Foreman is famous for, they’ll tell you he’s that guy on the infomercials selling the George Foreman grill. But besides his exceedingly successful sales career, Foreman is a two-time World Heavyweight Boxing Champion and has an Olympic gold medal. He boxed on and off during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, during which time he also experienced a spiritual rebirth and became a Baptist minister.
Today, though, Foreman mostly focuses on his entrepreneurial career and occasionally serves as a boxing analyst for matches.

8. Hank Aaron: Baseball legend Hank Aaron started out playing for the Negro American League in 1954 but ended his career with seasons with the Atlanta Braves and Milwaukee Brewers, plus an MLB record for most career home runs. Aaron was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 and has also served as senior vice president assistant to the president for the Atlanta Braves. Beyond baseball, Aaron is quite a businessman, too. He’s corporate vice president of community relations for TBS and owns a BMW dealership in south Atlanta.

9. Rita Wilson: Rita Wilson enjoyed a rising acting career in the 1980s and 90s, appearing in TV shows like Happy Days and Three’s Company before starring and co-starring in films like Sleepless in Seattle. After starting a family with husband Tom Hanks, Wilson’s movie and TV roles came along less often, but she still makes appearances on the red carpet and in movies alongside Hollywood friends, as in Meryl Streep’s It’s Complicated. But one of Wilson’s more regular gigs these days is as a contributing writer to Harper’s Bazaar. She often pens self-deprecating articles and essays about figuring out personal style, attempting to embody the European way of life, and getting older without giving up on fashion.

10. Jesse Ventura: Professional wrestler turned governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura was one of the first entertainers to turn to American politics in recent years (Ronald Reagan not included). Formerly known as “The Body” Ventura usually played the villain in wrestling matches, but also copied evangelical preacher Billy Graham’s stylistic movements and speech. Ventura retired in the 80s and served as mayor of Brooklyn Park, MN, from 1991-1995, defeating the incumbent mayor, who had served for 25 years. Elected to governor of the state in 1998, Ventura surprised many outside of Minnesota, but proved to be a popular, productive governor. He’s now moved on again, hosting an investigative TV show about popular conspiracy theories.

11. Greg Graffin: Bad Religion punk musician Greg Graffin took quite a surprising turn in his career, now focusing much of his time teaching science courses at UCLA, during the cold weather semesters (when he escapes from his upstate New York home). But Graffin has been interested in science, especially evolutionary biology and zoology, for a long time, and has earned higher degrees even while performing with the band.

12. Paul Newman: Legendary actor Paul Newman continued to act even in his old age, but in the early 80s, Newman started another business, which he like to call “the joke that got out of control.” He went into the food business, and now, Newman’s Own makes salad dressing, frozen pizza, popcorn, marinades, salsa and even wines. The company has given over $295 million to charity, a tradition that the entrepreneurial, philanthropic Newman started himself.

Are you outrageous enough to lead? Wanna learn how to? www.TheIAE.com

14. Fred Savage: One of the most popular child stars of his time, Fred Savage took a generation through middle school and high school in The Wonder Years. Since then, he’s appeared on teen and children’s TV shows, and has thankfully avoided the MTV reality show route. But we were surprised — pleasantly — to find out that Savage is one of the witty geniuses behind the irreverent It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: he’s a contributing producer for the TV show.

15. Rick Schroder: Another adorable child star — Rick played Ricky Stratton on Silver Spoons — Ricky Schroder enjoyed a successful career in acting even as a young man, co-starring in Lonesome Dove. But as an adult, besides a couple of seasons on NYPD Blue and one on 24, Schroder seemed content to sit out of the limelight. It turns out that he’s still in the entertainment business, though, as a country music video director. He’s won two awards at the CMT Music Awards: Collaborative Video of the Year and Director of the Year for “Whiskey Lullaby”, by Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss.

Have you ever wondered how you can creatively grow? This new book, Sudden Genius, shares how others have. What path shall you explore to unleash your own?

Chip Hessenflow gets a gold star for this one too!

From The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 21, 2010 written by By Evan R. Goldstein

Jean-Paul Sartre said that the greatest gift a father can give his son is to die early. Sartre’s remark, though harsh, isn’t implausible. In a new book, Sudden Genius: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs (Oxford University Press), Andrew Robinson notes that a remarkable number of super-high achievers suffered the death of a parent at a young age. He cites a 1978 study of almost 700 historical figures that found that 25 percent of them—including J.S. Bach, Dante, Michelangelo, Leo Tolstoy, and Richard Wagner—lost at least one parent before the age of 10.

Robinson entertains the possibility of a correlation between tragedy and extreme creativity. Some psychologists believe that trauma can lead a child to turn inward and cultivate a taste for solitude. “The ability to be alone is critical,” says Robinson, a former literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, in an interview, noting that Mozart, who had an active social life, nonetheless withdrew for long stretches to focus on his work. “You don’t write The Marriage of Figaro in six weeks if you go out and get drunk every night.” Even in the sciences, where collaboration is common, Robinson says, major breakthroughs have been spearheaded by figures—Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein—with pronounced solitary streaks.

What are we to make of all of this? Not much, apparently. The notion that genius is nurtured by childhood adversity “is a tempting one,” Robinson writes, but it crumbles under careful scrutiny. For every figure that fits the bill (Joseph Conrad was a bookish, withdrawn child whose parents died before he turned 12), another genius bucks the pattern (Henri Cartier-Bresson clashed with his wealthy parents, but they were supportive—and alive). Indeed, Robinson dismisses all unified theories of creativity, of which there have been many over the years. “They don’t apply across the board,” he says.

So where do big ideas come from? Sudden Genius looks for answers in the lives of 10 pioneering thinkers and artists, including Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Satyajit Ray, Virginia Woolf, and Christopher Wren. Robinson tries to ferret out the “sources, ingredients, and patterns” of their talents. The big—if bland—takeaway is this: Geniuses are made, not born. Breakthroughs that appear like flashes out of the blue in fact result from at least 10 years of preparation, if not a lifetime of industriousness. When Thomas Edison died, he owned 1,093 patents (that’s about one every two weeks of his adult life); Picasso produced more than 20,000 works; Henri Poincaré published 500 papers and 30 books. The lesson, Robinson says, is that “hard work does pay off.”

If the sources of genius remain something of a riddle, Robinson is emphatic about what does not contribute to creative excellence: higher education. The academy’s emphasis on specialization and its “inherent tendency to ignore or reject highly original work that does not fit the existing paradigm” is an impediment to creativity, Robinson argues. He points to several intriguing studies. One, by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, suggests that creativity flourishes best among those with the equivalent of two years of an undergraduate education—no less, no more. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University, has also looked at the relationship between education and innovation. In his 1996 book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he argued that formal education has historically had little effect on the lives of creative people. “If anything,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls.”

Are you brave enough to become the entrepreneur you need to be to launch a career in the arts? Are you willing to make the investment you need to develop your skills? My good friend Diana Haskell, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, forwarded me this article written by Maria Goodavage. While its a great read I only have one point to add: It takes a MINIMUM investment of 2 years of training to develop the skills you need to build the career you want. While taking a marketing class or reading David Cutler’s The Savvy Musician is a great start, it simply isn’t enough to do the job.

November 16, 2010 San Francisco Classical Voice
The Brave New World of Today’s Music Professional
By Maria Goodavage

Zoe Keating

But at the audition, the confidence she entered with disintegrated quickly after some judges looked at her askance for not having a current teacher. Stage fright kicked in. “My hands shook, my bow shook, I couldn’t remember the music. I could barely scrape the bow across the strings. I even dropped the bow,” she recalls. Someone stopped her after a few minutes, just as she felt she was getting over her shakiness, and suggested “condescendingly, patronizingly,” that she come back when she was more prepared.

“It was so incredibly humiliating,” she says. “It was the moment I turned my back on a classical music career.”

Little did she know it was the best thing that could have happened to her. The loss of a traditional classical music career forced Keating to think of new ways to make a living with her passion for cello playing.

Fast forward 15 years. Keating is a resoundingly successful cellist — a one-woman orchestra who uses her cello and foot-controlled electronics to create music a reviewer recently described as “swoon-inducing. Like taking a triple-shot of Absinthe before stepping outside of the bar just in time to see the sun exploding.”

Her album, One Cello x 16: Natoma, rose to #1 on the iTunes classical charts four times, and to #2 in electronica. She describes her style as a mélange of classical minimalism, experimental electronica, and steampunk. She has more than 1.3 million Twitter followers. Her signature vibrant red dreadlocks, sumptuous outfits, and groundbreaking compositions and playing style have helped bring the cello out of the musty closet and into the vibrant mainstream. “She is awesome! God, I love the cello now!” is typical of comments about her videos on YouTube.

Keating is the poster child for today’s successful musician.

“To succeed these days, musicians have to be willing to diversify, to branch out, and take chances as never before,” says Michael Aczon, a Bay Area entertainment attorney and talent manager who teaches classes on the music business at local universities. “You have to learn the industry as much as you learn your instrument.”

So what does a music career look like today? One thing most experts agree on is that it doesn’t look like music careers of previous generations.

“Gone are the days of being purely a jazz saxophonist or classical string player,” says multidimensional musician David Cutler, associate professor of composition and musicianship at Duquesne University and coordinator of the school’s music entrepreneurship program. “Today’s musicians have to diversify and to be more entrepreneurial than ever.”

That’s because the playing field has changed in just about every square foot of the music landscape. The traditional model of the commercial music business has been in crisis for years, points out Lenny Carlson, instructor in the Music Department at City College of San Francisco. Much music can be downloaded freely; many record labels have downsized, or even gone out of business. “A big part of what a lot of people do for a living in the business doesn’t exist any longer,” says Carlson.

Adding to the pain, in the classical world the number of orchestra jobs continues to dwindle, while highly qualified musicians saturate the market. Competition for orchestra jobs is fiercer than ever.

“The chances of getting one of the major metropolitan symphony gigs in the U.S. can be compared to trying to make it on a major league baseball team,” says Aczon, author of The Musician’s Legal Companion. “It’s not impossible, but the odds certainly have to be taken into account.”

Sure, some lucky and talented souls do make it into long-term orchestra gigs, or manage to make a living doing what they were trained to do without putting a lot of extra time in, beyond practicing their craft. But increasingly, the musicians who don’t have to resort to a day job are the ones who diversify and become highly entrepreneurial.

Take Cutler. He’s a classically trained pianist and composer with all the talent, dedication, and advanced degrees that in the past could have kept him in a single music job for decades. But now, his poster could hang right beside Keating’s for the prototype of the entrepreneurial, diverse, socially relevant, successful musician.

On his bio on the Duquesne Web site, instead of a more traditional description like “pianist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra,” we find this intro to him: “… jazz and classical composer, pianist, educator, arranger, conductor, collaborator, concert producer, author, blogger, consultant, speaker, advocate, and entrepreneur.”

“My brand is that I’ll play anything and I’ll do anything,” says Cutler, who, among his current undertakings, is working on a two-person show with a dancer. They explore music and movement. He even wears a superhero costume for one number he wrote and she choreographed.

His is definitely not your grandfather’s music career.

Cutler also penned a book, The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, and Making a Difference. (Jeffrey Zeigler, of the Kronos Quartet, called the book “Hands down, the most valuable resource available for aspiring musicians.”) In the book and in his music entrepreneurship classes, he highlights the myriad ways musicians can succeed in today’s changing climate.

What surprises him most is that he still sees students who believe that if they practice really hard and get good grades, life will work out for them. He says many teachers still impart this antiquated model.

“But these days, being a great player is not the goal — it’s the minimum,” he says.

So, beyond being exquisitely good at your craft, and being passionate about it, what does it take to make it as a musician today? Fine-tuning your entrepreneurial skills is key to adapting to the changing marketplace, say experts. Here are some of their tips for ways to make this work for you:

“Get outside your music ghetto,” advises Keating. That means thinking of unconventional venues for playing your instrument. For instance, if you’re classically trained on the French horn, look beyond auditions for orchestras and classical ensembles. “Maybe you have friends in a rock band. Talk to them about playing your French horn with them,” says Keating. “It’s unique, and something most people haven’t seen, and it can open many doors.” Aczon concurs that crossing genres is one of the best ways to diversify. “It’s an absolutely huge opportunity.”

“Take advantage of the Internet,” suggests Cutler. The Internet has helped even out the playing field for musicians, who no longer need to have the backing of a major record label to create a national profile. “With the Internet, entrepreneurial musicians are in control of their destinies,” he says. For instance, showcasing your music on YouTube and iTunes can cost nothing and lead to picking up a strong fan base and sales.

“Be really good at building relationships,” says Keating. It’s not new advice, but it’s particularly essential today. Both online and in “real life,” connecting in a genuine way with your audience and other musicians is an essential ingredient in cooking up a successful career. Keating’s 1.3 million Twitter followers are there because of her music, of course, but also because of her outreach to those who are interested in her music —not because of some slick SEO publicity machine. In a recent tweet before a performance at Yoshi’s jazz club in the Bay Area, Keating wrote: “I hope I remember (1) how to play the cello, (2) all the parts at the right time, (3) what button to press when.” Fans love the down-to-earth inside look she provides.

“Be willing to wear many hats,” remarks Cutler. The hats he wears could fill a hat shop. Likewise for Keating. As busy as she is on the musicianship end of the business, she does her own publicity and marketing, produces her own albums, arranges her own tours, and is available at the drop of yet another hat to deal with anything related to her music.

“Realize that TV is the new radio,” says Aczon. Thanks to the tremendous number of channels, there’s a big need for programming and for music to support the programming, he says. “Session recording, production music, composing for TV are all very viable options for the musician who thinks outside the box,” he says.

“Take a marketing class,” advises Aczon. Business courses in marketing can help today’s musician learn about marketing opportunities and come to understand the all-important role of branding in the arts. If you can get hold of an arts or music entrepreneurship class like Cutler’s, better yet.

It may seem like a fatiguing amount of work just to be able to have the joy of making a living as a musician. But while the challenge is certainly great, the potential benefits are even greater.

“Musicians have a job to do that doesn’t always mean playing the music of long-dead white people, in the same concert hall, to the same audience,” says Cutler. “Once you embrace what it takes to be a musician today, you open Pandora’s box, and it’s a whole new world of opportunity for musician and audience.”

Maria Goodavage is a journalist and book author who has written on a wide variety of topics for USA Today and other publications. She has a regular column at www.dogster.com. The seventh edition of one of her books, The Dog Lover’s Companion to California, will be released in May 2011.

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog. )

I was having lunch with a friend who is a retired venture capitalist and we drifted into a discussion of the startups she funded. We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.”

Her response was surprising, “Steve, almost all my CEO’s came from very tough childhoods.  It was one of the characteristics I specifically looked for. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

I couldn’t figure out if I was more perturbed about how casual the comment was or how insightful it was.  What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. My comfort in operating in chaos was something I first recognized when I was working in the Midwest.

Out of the Air Force, my first job out of school was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the mid-1970’s installing broadband process control systems in automotive and manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest. I got to travel and see almost every type of  Rust Belt factory – at the time, the heart and muscle of American manufacturing – GM, American Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, Whirlpool.

Our equipment was installed in the manufacturing lines of these companies, and if it went down sometimes it brought the entire manufacturing line down.

Repairing our equipment could be time critical. One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager.  He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.”

As I’m troubleshooting our equipment scattered across the plant, the manager followed us still yelling.  My understudy looked at me and said, “How can you deal with this chaos and still focus?”  And until that moment I had never thought about it before.  I realized that what others heard as chaos, I just shut out.

A day in the life of a founder
For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.  Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc.  You literally have to take your vision of the opportunity and against all rational odds assemble financing and a team to help you execute.  And that’s just to get started.

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.  And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.

Great founders live for these moments.

Creating the entrepreneurial personality
Fast forward three decades back to today.  The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had.

I’ve wondered, just as a thought experiment, how would we go about creating individuals who operate serenely in chaos, and have the skills we associate with one type of entrepreneurial founder/leader?

One possible path might be to raise children in an environment where parents are struggling in their own lives and they create an environment where fighting, abusive or drug/alcohol related behavior is the norm.

In this household, nothing would be the same from day to day, the parents would constantly bombard their kids with dogmatic parenting (harsh and inflexible discipline) and they would control them by withholding love, praise and attention. Finally we could make sure no child is allowed to express the “wrong” emotion. Children in these families would grow up thinking that this behavior is normal.

(If this seems unimaginably cruel to you, congratulations, you had a great set of parents.  On the other hand, if the description is making you uncomfortable remembering some of how you were raised – welcome to a fairly wide club.)

Over the last five years I’ve asked over 500 of my students how many of them grew up in a dysfunctional family (participation was voluntary.) I’ve been surprised at the data. In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core” entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing.

Founders as Survivors
My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by this upbringing.  But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed.  They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos.  And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

Therefore, I’ll posit one possible path for a startup founder – the dysfunctional family theory.

One last thought. The dysfunctional family theory may explain why founders who excel in the chaotic early phases of a company throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies after they find a repeatable and scaleable business model and need to switch gears into execution.

The problem, I believe, is that repeatability represents the extreme discomfort zone of this class of entrepreneur. And I have seen entrepreneurs emotionally or organizationally try to create chaos — it’s too calm around here — and actually self-destruct.

Lets be clear, in no way am I suggesting that growing up in a dysfunctional family is the only path to becoming a founder of a startup.  Nor am I suggesting that everyone who does so turns out well. And in particular I’m not suggesting that every employee who joins a startup fits this profile, it just seems more prevalent in the founder(s).

And this hypothesis might be a good example of confusing cause and effect. Yet I am surprised given how much is written about the attributes of a startup founder, how little has been written about what “makes” a founder.

I had reason to read the Australia Council report on artists’ careers this week (http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/artists/reports_and_publications/artistcareers) and found the news simultaneously encouraging, grim, and enlightening. Forty-five percent of Australian artists make their living outside of the arts sector – not just day jobs related to the arts, but jobs that are not in the creative sector at all. On the other hand, artists report spending 80% of their time on creative or arts-related work. The overwhelming majority of those employed in the arts sector are employed in the design professions of illustrator, graphic designer, interior designer, or fashion designer. The proportion of arts sector workers employed in these applied fields has been growing steadily since the inception of the study in 1996, indicating that more arts workers are seeking – and finding — employment in the “applied arts” than in the “fine and performing arts.” Ultimately, artists are likely to develop what my (Australian) colleague Ruth Bridgstock calls “portfolio careers,” a mix of employment opportunities that enable artists to be creative in a number of different areas, which, when amalgamated make for a whole career. We see this phenomenon frequently in the US, where artists often combine their creative work with teaching positions or service jobs.  The most touching part of the report was the quote from a young man in whose “portfolio” includes a job as a warehouse manager:  ”I enjoy the balance between working in the warehouse and making art. The warehouse and driving the delivery van give me the headspace to come up with ideas for projects and problem solve projects I’m working on at the time. If I only made art I think I would burn out very quickly.” I guess that’s one way to put a positive spin on it…..

My mom and dad at their foundry, Alpha-Cast, Thur July 8, 1976

What does experiential immersion really teach you about entrepreneurship? Well, welcome to the story of my mom and dad and the lessons I learned from watching my father and mother resuscitate a failing business, turn it into a wild success and then knowingly try and out run their foreign competition and go bankrupt again.

When I was growing up, I watched my father invest in a variety of small businesses. He was making so much money as a criminal attorney and needed somewhere to invest it. He was also very unhappy with his work and was trying to find an exit strategy.

As a result, my father frequently talked about the businesses he was investing in and what their challenges were at the family dining room table. Our dinner table was the place my family talked about business and politics when I was growing up. It became a tradition to learn over dinner. We rarely talked about our day, or routine subjects that might occupy a child’s mind like playing with friends, or some fun I had. Instead my father turned our meals together, especially those when my mother was passed out drunk at the dinner table, but also those where she was not, into an entrepreneurial-living-family-lesson-plan night after night.

But one subject matter that was strictly off limits was my fathers career as a criminal attorney. He would simply never discuss it.  I am sure he represented mobsters, murders and vicious criminals and successfully got them off the hook for their crimes. My dad simply, eventually, couldn’t take their “blood money” any longer and was seeking refuge by investing in other businesses in hopes one of them would draw him in.  This much I knew from his few sparce comments and the jokes he made about his profession. My parents always told me, albeit in a joking manner, that one of the reason my dad had to get out of criminal law was because we didn’t have any more room in our house for any more artwork; our house was filled to the gills with artwork that was sometimes offered, in part, as repayment for my fathers legal services.

My father was in search of something he truly loved to do where he could help people and feel good about it. The investments he made into machines shops, and a fastener business (nuts, bolts, screws) helped him learn that the opportunity at the foundry he named Alpha- Cast was the one where he could really make a difference. Isn’t that what we are all seeking as artists and entrepreneurs- to make a difference? It took my Harvard trained father several investments in different businesses to figure out where he best belonged.

What drove my father was his belief in the power of helping people. Through law he thought he could help others to help themselves but he was wrong. All he did was postpone their wake-up call and allow them to continue to hurt others. His experiences dabbling in entrepreneurial investments taught him where he truly belonged. His work building Alpha-Cast and supporting over 200 families doing it was the best work I ever got to see him do.

And yet while building Alpha-Cast was my parents biggest joy, and the source of my mothers money spicket for clothes and the spoils of riches, it also just about financially destroyed my family when it later went under. ( But more on that for another post in the experiential-immersion- lesson lane.)

Just a couple footnotes about this article. First, my parents were living in a deluxe high rise over looking Lincoln Park in Chicago when they were also ” living in a motel” to jump start Alpha-Cast. Seems, as journalists often do, some of the facts are not quite right. And lastly, my parents did eventually build a chapel in the foundry and a big party room. Babies were baptized and couples were married there. It was the coolest thing to see my fathers dreams for Alpha-Cast come true. And as my father’s daughter, I guess it should be no surprise, that the lessons I learned from my parents have inspired me to want to help others make their dreams come true too.

The Creativity Crisis

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

Experts assess 10 drawings by adults and children for signs of out-of-the-box thinking. View gallery.

How Creative Are You?

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. While some of you may view this thought as a curse- having to become more relevant more “accountable”- I see it as true opportunity. It is time we permeate more than just ours, and others, inner worlds but also fuel others abilities with our gifts and  help them enrich, motivate and achieve greater outcomes as a result of what we can share. This requires that we build more skills and learn how to influence others, lead our followers into action to better themselves AND, while doing so, financially flourish ourselves.

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.

The goal for every artists who builds an arts based business is to work at the intersection of creative inspiration and relevance. Metalsmith Bill Sorich is a perfect example of  someone who has stepped outside of the traditional “art box” and found a niche where he can create, profit, and thrive. And to think we just bought a new Weber grill that certainly does not look ANYWHERE as cool as his…

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.”