How far are you willing to believe in what your imagination can do for you and your future as an artist?

The truth of the matter is that as much as I LOVE all of you artists and your creativity,  TOO MANY of you have no idea how to use the resources of your POWERFUL imaginations to help transform your life into whatever you wish it to be. As a result, I see too many of you wondering why you can never get ahead and witness far too often your goals and hopes and dreams slipping through your fingers. Like smoke from the lamp becoming the genie,  artists need to learn to recognize a tiny little smoke stream as opportunity. And opportunity, like smoke, evaporates quickly if you don’t know how to transform it into the genie.   I think there might be a lot to learn here from the smoke….

Look, our imaginations are NOT intangible and elusive resources  that we can access only when the spirit stirs us or swirls around us. Our imagination is NOT like smoke from the genie bottle-only good for creativity and artistry, but actually an ESSENTIAL set of tools that can lift, launch or transform our careers, as well as add to our pocket book, if we are willing to leverage, in new ways, all it offers.

Let me explain.

One of the common barriers for artists in being readily able to building creative ventures lies in their ability to apply the same principals of imagination they bring to their artistry to the real world. The Bite-Size Arts Ensemble, in our presentation What is Your Imagination Worth? A New Kind of ROI looks at 5 essential tools of imagination that are invaluable to creating future creative prosperity.  Here are the five tools and why they are so important to learn how to use in new ways:

A Willingness to Fail
Jane has played the piano and written music since she was a kid. She attended Berkley College and has made a modest living as a gigging musician ever since. In her 40’s, Jane decided she wanted to try and finally improve her life by being able to actually afford to buy a house. She really wanted to move out of the basement apartment she has been renting for the last ten years and have a place of her own she could call home.  So Jane decided that her best asset to try and sell would be her music to high school and college jazz bands. She decided she really wanted to finally try and see if she could actually sell a few of the literally hundred of charts she had written over the past twenty-five years. Jane picked up the phone and started calling every musician she knew ( and she knows a lot of them!) asking for more names of directors in the area she could contact about selling her music. She then proceeded to start compiling email lists from those contacts, created a website as well as her first  newsletter about her music and background. Sounds like Jane was off to a really good start right? Yeah, except for one thing. After three months of sending out her newsletter and writing personal emails to  directors only a few people had expressed interest in knowing more about her music and no one had yet placed an order.  Seemed like a lot of work for nothing, right? So what did Jane do? She complained that her music was not for everyone and repeated over and over to her friends that ” she knew there was a reason why she never had bothered to try and sell it in the first place” and then she gave up.

And yet, when Jane was first learning how to write music she wrote all kinds of dreadful stuff. Music that was simply unplayable and not enjoyable or interesting to listen to.  Over and over and over again she failed until she got it right. Jane had to work hard at it too.  If only Jane was willing to apply one of the most important ingredients of imagination- her willingness to fail- to her emerging music business as she has to her playing and composition that now  has lead her to great success as a big band leader. The audience she plays for today loves all of the music she writes as does her musicians. But her success did not come in 5 minutes or 3 months worth of effort. It took years….

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
Do you remember the first time you performed or exhibited your work publicly? Do you remember how you felt? Were you uncomfortable in your own skin? Nervous? Unable to string a coherent sentence together to someone who came up to you after to performance or at the exhibition? Did your stomach do flips and turns you never knew were possible? Did you notice all your mistakes and feel uncomfortable and vulnerable?

And yet if you are here reading this post, clearly you did it again, and again, and again.  You were willing to step out of your comfort zone and continue to try because it was worth it to you. It was for you! For the love of your art! Well guess what? Building a creative ventures requires MANY MANY MANY moments of feeling the same way. The same creative passion that flowed from your imagination that lead you to that first public moment, is the same one, if you let it, that can lead you to embrace the same kinds of awkward uncomfortable moments as you learn how to build your first creative venture.  Like the same “beginner” on your first appearance, you must be willing to learn and grow as if you were again a beginner.  Because for the moment you are a beginner again– in building a creative venture. 

Flexibility and Fluency
Every artist I know can bend to the left or right with their artistry. Want to hear me play it faster, louder, more dreamy, more staccato? We are taught how to change styles at the drop of a hat and, in our artistry, are constantly willing to be “open” to new ideas.  We listen and accept all the different iterations we can create and appreciate all the new ways we can express who we are with our inflection and style. And yet when confronted with lessons to learn in the business world- like how many different ways you need to be able to communicate to potential clients, how to close a deal with different personality types, why you need to be more agile and adapt to the needs of the audience you wish to serve– seemingly those same principals of flexibility and fluency that are so well known to us in our artistry fly right out the window.

Not every customer is going to like your style of communication. Period. If you want more business you need to be flexible enough to know how to build a relationship the CUSTOMER will value and will appreciate. Not every customer has the same interest level or knowledge about your product or service. As a result, each one needs  exactly the right kind of communication and information specific to their needs in the moment. None of this is all that different from how you use your imagination to create a work of art or a performance that effectively communicates to your audience what you are trying to get across. You simply are learning how to tailor it to the needs of your target market.  Unfortunately,  what I often find in artists is a know it all attitude or the rigid narrow kind of thinking about what they should and shouldn’t do that screams ” I am a beginner at this and need to feel in control”.

Don’t you remember how beginners try and show off what they can do with reckless abandon when they have not yet developed enough skill?  Heck, I tried to play the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with orchestra in 8th grade- God help me. Often adult artists act the same way except that it is harder to help change if you do not have the willingness to learn and reflect on what you need to learn. In our art form we are so good at getting it right and  learning from criticism to create the flexibility and fluency  that our artistry needs- why not bring it with you into other parts of your life and in the building of your creative venture?

Did you always KNOW how to bend and flex your artistry? Were you born like that? Or did you go to a school and learn from a really FINE teacher who showed you how to do it? Building a creative venture requires the exact same tolerance and willingness to learn from and follow someone you respect. It requires a willingness to fail and the ability to get out of your comfort zone and accept that you probably don’t really know what is required to build these skills and likely, as you did with a teacher, must bend and flex the way THAT SPECIFIC TEACHER tells you to until you have all the skills mastered fluently and can decide for yourself. If you are a serious artist, then you know it did not take 10 minutes to develop your talent- it took years. That is why we are opening a school- The IAE- to teach these skills as well as offering a workshop to learn how to apply these lessons by creating your own Bite-Size Arts Ensemble beginning in June.

Improvisation
What does it mean to improvise? Do you know what it means to experiment and play with the elements you have in front of you to see what they can create or do for you? How do you improvise with your audience currently?   How do these same elements  come into play in the creation of a business?  Being able to improvise requires that you are willing to fail, can get out of your comfort zone and you have learned how to be flexible and fluent enough to take a risk and try something in the moment. Creating something new requires “live”  and ongoing experimentation.

You can experiment with how you communicate to a potential client or with the actual product you deliver. You might  experiment by mixing up something in the way you promote yourself or the venue you select to perform. Improvisation is a core tenant to building a business and can take many different shapes and forms.  Improvisation is a very necessary tool to learn how to create authenticity and real connectivity between you and your clients or audience.  What is your imagination worth? Are you really willing to learn what it takes to reach you prospective paying audience with your artistic gifts?

Diverge and Converge
Once you have diverged by mastering how you can utilize all the tools of your imagination in building your creative business, you will be ready to converge them into the realization of a dream. And here is the fun part. This is where- yes you guessed it– that little smoke stream becomes your own personal genie. The genie that can grant you three wishes or fulfill your dream.

The things you want most in life can be yours- in time-  if only you are willing to become a beginner again and learn how to apply the most powerful resource as an artist you have to offer your future– Your imagination.  Are you ready?

And it’s working for these companies, and arguably for the aspirations of underground and compensation-hungry artists around the world.

Once truly unheard of and unheralded skaters, punks, and taggers cavorting with heroin addicts, yesterday’s delinquents have become today’s leading creative directors and ad-agency execs.  They’ve created films like Kids, given street-cred to Urban Outfitters, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, and emblazoned history with the ubiquitous Obama “Hope” poster. And now you can take in the transformation/evolution/destruction-of-purity/ascent-to-legitimacy yourself with Aaron Rose’s Beautiful Losers. One part art exhibit, one part documentary, all parts fascinating….

Beautiful Losers film trailer from beautifullosersfilm on Vimeo.

Not everyone reacts the same and there is no universal fix. Don’t try to use all these fixes at once. Pick out items from this list and try them out until you find the right combination for you.

Visualization strategies that can be used anytime

• Concentrate on how good you are at public speaking.
• Pretend you are just chatting with a group of friends.
• Close your eyes and imagine the audience listening, laughing, and applauding.
• Remember happy moments from your past.
• Think about your love for and desire to help the audience.
• Picture the audience in their underwear.

Strategies in advance of program

• Be extremely well prepared.
• Find a  acting class.
• Get individual or group public speaking coaching.
• Listen to music.
• Read a poem.
• Anticipate hard and easy questions.
• Organize your speaking notes.
• Absolutely memorize your opening statement so you can recite it on autopilot if you have to.
• Practice, practice, practice. Especially practice bits so you can spit out a few minutes of your program no matter how nervous you are.
• Get in shape. I don’t know why it helps stage fright, but it does.

Strategies just before the program Remember Stage fright usually goes away after you start. The tricky time is before you start.

• Be in the room at least an hour early if possible to triple check the public address system and everything else on your checklist. You can also schmooze with participants arriving early.
• Notice and think about things around you to be present.
• Concentrate on searching for current and immediate things that are happening at the event that you can mention during your speech (especially in the opening).
• Get into conversation with people near you. Be very intent on what they are saying.
• Yawn to relax your throat.
• Doodle.
• Draw sketches of a new car you would like to have.
• Look at your notes.
• Put pictures of your kids/grandkids, dog, etc., in your notes.
• Build a cushion of time in the day so you are not rushed, but not too much time. You don’t want to have extra time to worry.
• If your legs are trembling, lean on a table, sit down, or shift your legs.
• Take a quick walk.
• Take quick drinks of tepid water.
• Double check your A/V equipment including the public address system, projectors, etc..
• Don’t drink alcohol or coffee or tea with caffeine.
• Concentrate on your speaking ideas and how they will benefit the listeners.
• Concentrate on your audience.
• Listen to music.
• Read a poem.
• Do isometrics that tighten and release muscles.
• Shake hands and smile with attendees before the program.
• Go somewhere private and warm up your voice, muscles, etc.
• Use eye communication.
• Go to a mirror and check out how you look.
• Breathe deeply with your diaphragm, evenly, and slowly for several minutes.
• Don’t eat if you don’t want to and never take tranquilizers or other such drugs. You may think you will do better, but you will probably do worse and not know it.
• Open your arms wide, in private, and imagine your eneregry filling the room and covering every listener.  Imagine radiation sunshine from your chest, fingers, etc.

Strategies when the program begins

• If  legs are trembling, lean on lectern /table or shift legs or move
• Try not to hold the microphone by hand in the first minute.
• Don’t hold notes. The audience can see them shake. Use three-by-five cards instead.
• Take quick drinks of tepid water.
• Use eye contact. It will make you feel less isolated.
• Look at the friendliest faces in the audience.
• Joke about your nervousness. What’s the right wine to go with fingernails?

Remember nervousness doesn’t show one-tenth as much as it feels. Before each speaking engagement make a short list of the items you think will make you feel better. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations. You never know which ones will work best until you try. Rewrite them on a separate sheet and keep the sheet with you at all times so you can refer to it quickly when the need arises.

When speaking in public use these steps to control stage fright so it doesn’t control you.

Let’s unpack these points a bit. While the origin points are Leni’s (as is the image of the Triple Bridge on Ninth Avenue in NYC), I’m doing the unpacking.

Explore your vision – an artistic vision is like a landscape. It can have breadth and depth, with high points and low points. The artist can move around in this vision and find new and interesting areas to explore within it. To do that, the artist needs to be in motion rather than static, constantly examining and re-examining their vision, moving through the landscape in search of the next project, the next opportunity.

Take Risks to Discover – there are two important concepts here, “risk” and “discovery,” risk being the means to discovery, the goal. Discovery comes at a price, or at least at the potential of a price. Entrepreneurship of any type involves risk. What are you willing to risk to discover a new place in your creative landscape?

Focus your efforts – I’m not a very good pianist. I’m a very good lighting designer. The lesson seems obvious to me.

Expand you medium – at first blush, I thought this was a contradiction to “focus your efforts,” but instead it’s a complement. Once the artist focuses their efforts, they can expand their medium. How? By taking risks to discover – to discover new meanings and new ways of expressing them, by advancing the medium itself technologically and creatively.

Ask for support – that landscape of creativity need not be a desert or deserted. How much more fun is it to work with a team or on a team? More than just fun, how much more productive and creative can one be when joining forces with other smart, productive, creative people. There are resources out there – seek them, find them, ask them.

Next month, we’re hosting a talk by Arlene Goldbard, community arts activist and author. Stay tuned for some thoughts from and about her in mid April.

In these difficult times we have learned through our failures and successes the consummate entrepreneurs are those who learn to juggle multiple projects as well as multiple tasks. Through life dilemmas, nuances and setbacks, we gain the tools and experiences necessary for survival.

As the Principal/Director of the X-ART Entertainment Management Group, I (Reid Hyams) have often found myself wearing numerous hats, having many titles and positions in the music industry. Most recently, within the last sixty days I have decided to venture into Artist Management – something, I never thought I would ever want to be part of …and have immediately learned how wrong I was all of these years!

I have always stated and believed that Expertise comes from Experience, and Experience comes from Failure. Now I am about to embark on that journey once again, with an artist known as TOMI.

With a no-nonsense, do-it-yourself attitude, Slovakian born singer/songwriter, producer and performer, TOMI is quietly rising up the international ranks to stardom. At 18, TOMI packed his entrepreneurial grit and left his native country for Chicago… USA! After learning Chicago for a couple of years, TOMI signed with independent music label Rosehip Records. The relationship with Rosehip lead to the self-titled album “TOMI” released in 2007, which was also distributed by EMI in the states. The album received little attention in this country, but managed to generate an international buzz. Frustrated with the labels promotional efforts, TOMI decided to part ways with Rosehip Records, but at the same time found that his new release was doing quite well in Japan, where the record “TOMI” was licensed to Toy’s Factory Records. Knowing that his departure from his previous label would not mean a complete break from Chicago, TOMI arranged a phone conference from his native home in Slovakia with me, an industry associate, to discuss his newly revived career in the music industry two years later. The meeting of the minds has now lead to artist management. Previously, TOMI had left Chicago leaving me with a lasting impression as being an Entrepreneurial Artist.

Here we are two years later, TOMI has the number one ringtone in Japan this year once again, his song “Baby Get Down” reached number one on Hungary’s music charts, and is actively promoting his newly released 2010 self-produced album “With You” In that late November ‘09 conversation with TOMI we not only resumed talks of management, but… I placed TOMI on the 2010 Japan tour with the Backstreet Boys, which culminates with members of the Backstreet Boys joining TOMI on stage to sing one of TOMI’s original songs “You Can Tell Me” in Nagoya, Japan. Presently we’re making plans for additional touring in Japan and Europe, a U.S. release of the new album followed with a concert tour of the states sometime in the late spring and or early summer of this year.

TOMI & Backstreet Boys’ AJ & Brian in concert February 15, 2010 in Nagoya, Japan performing “You Can Tell Me”

TOMI’s My Space: http://www.myspace.com/tomi

X-ART Entertainment You Tube Video Logo

written by Reid Hyams and Maasai Amewa

This time an outside force has caused me to shake up my mindset, but usually it’s hard to get unstuck and change how we’re seeing a problem or challenge. Creative people hold less tight to their mindsets, constantly seeking out alternative perspectives and foreign experiences–even those that cause discomfort–to keep themselves flexible and more able to adapt to change. Only by cultivating mindset shifts can companies and organizations make breakthrough innovations, like using Gore-Tex fabric for guitar strings and dental floss, or making money through clicks rather than a physical advertisement itself. The mindset of innovation is actually one that moves–that seeks out and considers other lenses all the time.

To facilitate this, we’ve put together a short, 10-question survey that asks some of the important questions that will help continue to shape our program.  It should only take 5 minutes or so to complete and the survey is completely anonymous.  We’d really appreciate hearing from you if you’ve got a moment!

Click here to take survey

As I begin the process of applying for foundation support for The IAE, it will truly be interesting to see who else is willing to climb on board and support the future of arts training. It is going to take a village. Lip service won’t do. Are you one of our tribe?

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It is truly an honor to have been asked to speak with you today at this conference of the National Association of Schools of Music, especially when I consider all the work done by NASM member institutions, their administrators, faculty, and students, to advance music and its study throughout our nation over the last 85 years. As many of you know, I have only recently joined your world formally, but my entire life in music has been one with a strong attachment to music education, and indeed for the past eight years I have taught at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. And there has never been a time when I didn’t think about the roles of music education not only in preparing the future musicians of our society, but in helping to establish the place of music in that society.

I am sorry to say that I think that most schools of music have focused perhaps too strongly on the preparation of musicians part of that mission, and not thought enough about the second part, even though tremendous efforts continue to prepare P-12 music teachers and otherwise build support. But there is no question in my mind that a crucial part of our mission is, in fact, to work harder and smarter toward the establishment of an important place in society for the music we teach. And given the way that place has gotten smaller and more distant from the center of society in recent years, we had better focus on it.

Any careful examination of newspapers across America over a fifty-year span, will demonstrate dramatically the shrinking of arts coverage. Fifty years ago, every small town newspaper had an arts critic, sometimes more than one.  Now, many smaller communities have let that lapse completely, and even many large cities have offered buyouts to retire their music critic, and chosen not to re-fill the position. If you attend a gathering of the music critics’ association, one of the main topics of conversation is the shrinking space they are given to cover the arts.

Look at Public Television if you want further proof of the decreasing importance of the arts in America. Public Television was started precisely to broadcast programming that would have too small an appeal for commercial TV. (Never mind that in my youth, classical music was seen regularly on commercial TV – the Ed Sullivan Show, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s concerts, the Voice of Firestone, the Bell Telephone Hour, and live operas on NBC). Now, PBS considers Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, or André Rieu to be “highbrow” programming. The number of symphony concerts, quality jazz, dance, and even staged operas, available in this country on television has been declining at an alarming rate.

The federal and local governments have contributed to this decline – the National Endowment for the Arts support for arts organizations of all kinds around America has, in real dollars, declined dramatically in the past twenty-five years. State, City and county funding has also dropped significantly in recent years. And then there’s our public education system, which for the past twenty-five or thirty years in city after city has been reducing or abolishing music and the arts, in order to concentrate on testable, quantifiable results like math and science scores, and/or in response to periods of severe budget stress, when the arts are often among the first things to be eliminated. All of this is a sign of the marginalization of the arts in America.

More and more, it seems to me, there is a growing climate of anti-intellectualism in America, and with it a trend to diminish the importance of our cultural heritage. This includes not just Western classical music, but folk music, jazz, blues – the whole range of the musical arts.

I want to share a story with you – a true story, and an instructive one. In 1987, the Chicago Symphony (which I managed at the time) was on tour in the United States. On the way from Arizona to Austin, Texas, the truck carrying our instruments turned over. I wouldn’t allow the instruments to be moved until I and our stagehands were on the scene to assess damage and oversee the process – so a new truck was ordered, the Orchestra flew to Austin, and the stagehands and I chartered a small private plane to fly us to Junction, Texas, which was ten miles from the site of the accident. (The proprietor of the small airport lent us his pickup truck to drive to the site). The pilot of the small plane was right out of central casting for a Texas pilot – tall, silver-haired, sixty-ish.  In fact, he was Lyndon Johnson’s private personal pilot after Johnson left the White House.  Because the incident had already made national news, he knew about it and began to chat with us during the flight. He said that he had never been to a symphony concert, was sure that the music was too stuffy for him, that he didn’t know anything about it and in fact would be somewhat intimidated by the idea of going to a symphony concert. I told him that if we in fact got the instruments to Austin in time on a new truck, I would like him to be my guest – and he somewhat reluctantly agreed. So here, at the age of approximately sixty, this man experienced his first concert – and it wasn’t a beginner’s program: Schubert’s 5^th Symphony and Mahler’s 5^th Symphony, with Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.  At the end, he came back stage visibly moved, saying that he had no idea that this music could reach him the way it did, and that he had just had a transforming experience.  He actually became a subscriber to the Austin Symphony that very week, and remained so until he died a few years ago.

Now – I don’t believe for a minute that by sheer coincidence, I happened to run into the one person in America who might have loved a symphony concert but who was somehow intimidated by the way the classical music industry has presented itself over the past hundred years or so. In fact, I know that he is typical of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people, people who feel that they don’t know enough to enjoy or relate to art music – and that to a large degree this fact is a major reason for the increasing isolation of what we call art music from a central place in our society. Ten years ago the League of American Orchestras conducted focus groups of people who went to the theater, to museums, but not to symphony concerts – and throughout the country, in large cities or small towns, the predominant reason that these people stayed away from “classical music” is that they were intimidated. They felt they didn’t know enough about it to appreciate it; they felt that they might embarrass themselves by, Heaven forbid, clapping at the wrong time; they felt that this music was for “the stuffed shirt crowd,” or was “stuffy.” Those words appeared over and over again.

So what does this have to do with us?  Plenty!  When some of us speak about “advocacy,” we think narrowly, in terms of influencing funding decisions, or government decisions. But we do not think enough about proselytizing, about how those who make music actually talk about it and present it, as part of advocacy – and traditionally many of us haven’t thought of it as part of our job in preparing musicians to make their way in this world.  And we had better change dramatically and rapidly. We are beginning to, but too slowly. I am pleased to see efforts developing in schools and in NASM. But, we need to grow our capabilities rapidly.

There is a serious distortion of values in the world – a set of values that puts the short term ahead of the long term, which puts financial achievement ahead of ethical standards, and a set of values that increasingly diminishes the worth of intellectual achievement and of human expression.  In fact, when future generations look back and judge the civilizations and societies of the past, it is first and foremost the cultural and artistic achievements of those societies that are spoken of.  To be sure, engineering and scientific achievements are major parts of the picture of any society. But whether it is Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart,  Rembrandt, Picasso, James Baldwin, Garcia Lorca, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, or Leonard Bernstein – the artists and the art they created express the deepest and most profound thoughts of the civilizations in which they lived and worked.  And it is the achievements of those artists that, in fact, define civilizations, define humanity.  It is, in fact, the arts that distinguish us.

But it is typical of artists to decry this trend in society, and to blame society – rather than to understand that we who care about culture and music, and who make that music or train those who do, have a very real and critical role in establishing society’s impression of what we do.  We need to understand the role that the classical music world has played in isolating itself – just a few examples:

• Although it is changing now, for many years we presented program notes filled with musicological jargon that the general public could not follow – “the retrograde inversion of the principal fugal theme, resolving on the harmonic seventh…” – an approach guaranteed to make people attending concerts feel inadequate to appreciate the music.
• We refer to 25-year-old assistant conductors as “maestro.”  An off-putting word if ever there was one.
• Classical music announcers or lecturers who speak in deep, reverent tones, to let us know that we are doing a good and hallowed thing by listening to great music.
• Enforcing rituals – such as not clapping between movements. This is a 20^th century invention, historically wrong, but designed to show that “I know this piece isn’t over yet – and you don’t.” I even saw a conductor visibly admonish an audience for applauding after the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, not even a structured symphony! How many more times will people pay money to be humiliated by the people they are applauding?
• I could devote a whole other speech to the issue of diversity. It is of course a national scandal that it took until 1947 for baseball to accept Jackie Robinson. But it was eight years later, 1955, when Marian Anderson was to be the first Black singer to appear on stage at the Metropolitan Opera. And it was two years after that – 1957 – when major American orchestras finally integrated, with a cellist named Donald Whyte in the Cleveland Orchestra. It took another five years for a second, a violinist named Sanford Allen in the New York Philharmonic. I served on panels with the late Donald Whyte, and he told the story of being told by some of our most prestigious orchestras, in the 1950s, not to even apply because “we don’t take coloreds!” That was only about 50 years ago, not ancient history – we’re talking about the parents, grandparents, uncles of today’s young African Americans! And we wonder why so few African Americans have thought of classical music as a career!

So why am I telling you all of this – you didn’t commit those sins, after all.  However, I believe that as a field, those of us who educate musicians, those of us who present or perform music, those of us who not only have a vested interest in the success of our art form in this country but who also should believe passionately in the inherent cultural value to a civilized society of what we do, we have had a tendency to function as if we had no roles in fixing the results of a century of bad practice.  That must change. Simply saying that we are now open to all is not enough to correct the past behavior of our field.

“Advocacy” to me means that in addition to giving technically accomplished and emotionally communicative performances of a wide music, everyone who is involved in music must understand that he or she has a role in breaking down those barriers that we all watched be put up. Everyone must understand the social and cultural context in which we will make our music – our students must be taught that context, and they must be prepared to think and speak about it, and think and speak in a way that tears down those barriers. And I don’t think we challenge our students anywhere near enough to even think about this side of being a musician.

Too often, someone says to me “why should we care about music that was written by dead, white, European males?”  My first response is to ask this: “what city in the world has the largest number of professional symphony orchestras from which musicians actually make a living?” After they guess Vienna, or London, or even New York – I tell them that the answer is Tokyo. Then I might ask in what country today are we seeing the most explosive growth of orchestras? The answer is China.  The people of those countries do not seem to have worried about the fact that western symphonic music is European based, not Asian based.  The same is true across many musical forms and idioms. People of many backgrounds can and do appreciate and relate to jazz. Look at the worldwide audience for the music of the Silk Road, and the incredible non-Indian audience held rapt by Ravi Shankar.  The tired old cliché that the music we believe in is universal, and that it has transformative powers on human beings, is a tired old cliché because it is true.  But too few of the people who actually perform that music understand the cultural and social context in which they are currently functioning, and thus do not think about much beyond the art of performing the music.

Another problem, I believe, in America today is that people in power, people who shape the civic thinking in our country, want simple and quantifiable answers – graphs, charts, numerical indications of progress. So when you talk about the non-quantifiable human qualities of music and the arts, when you start talking about the way in which an understanding of great art leads to a greater understanding of other cultures and peoples and reflects and illuminates the human spirit, you are asked to prove it. Well…I can’t document it with graphs – but every year of my life spent in music makes me more certain of it.  And exhibit A for me is not a chart – it is an orchestra, a very specific orchestra. Many of you, I am sure, have heard of it: it’s called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and it is now in its eleventh year of existence. Founded by Daniel Barenboim, it consists of Arabs, Palestinians, and Israeli Jews – and every year for three or four weeks they live together, eat together, rehearse and perform together. My wife and I were a part of that orchestra from the beginning – and that first year was an experience I shall never forget. Daniel Barenboim, and  famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma working with him, assembled this group of young musicians, ages 17-25, and brought them together in Weimar, Germany. In addition to forming an orchestra, Barenboim and Ma invited them to form chamber music groups which they, Barenboim and Ma, would coach in preparation for a chamber music concert to take place the night before the orchestra concert. There was only one rule – no all Jewish chamber group, and no all Arab/Palestinian group. The resulting chamber music concert was 3 ½ hours long – and each group only played one movement, not whole pieces – or it would have gone on forever. To sit there and watch, for instance, a movement from a Brahms Clarinet trio, played by an Egyptian, a, Syrian, and an Israeli was one of the most moving experiences of my life – to see these kids working out musical problems together, leaning into each others’ phrases, and embracing each other while receiving applause – this was all the charting and graphing I will ever need to demonstrate what it is that music can do that nothing else can.  We know this – you and I and those who are in our fields know this. The question is how can we work together to help the rest of the world to know it – and to get the value, the human value, of this art form across to those who determine what we teach our future citizens?

So the question is “are we preparing our students to go forward in this world and help to shape the America of the 21^st Century?” If we are going to build an America that is something more than faster computers, bigger buildings, more productive factories, and certainly about something other than more devastating wars and conflicts, then we cannot exist in a self-made plastic bubble, unaware of, and unwilling to try to change, the society in which we live.

As I mentioned previously, some schools of music are definitely beginning to address some of these issues. However, I think they are in the minority and those efforts are still in their relative infancy. NASM is urging greater attention by all music schools. What are some of the things that I believe we need to think about in our preparation of the next generation of musicians? And what are things we need to think about ourselves?

• We personally need to involve ourselves with arts advocacy efforts in our own communities, and we need to encourage our colleagues and our students to do the same. Virtually every state has a state arts advocacy organization – in Illinois we have the Illinois Arts Alliance – that brings together all of those who create art, who present art, who educate, and who believe in the centrality of arts to any civilization. My friends who work in that area nationally and locally tell me that arts educators are traditionally under-represented in those arts alliances. I am told that many professional educators in the arts do not feel welcomed as strategic partners in these settings. This needs attention and change because local and state advocacy organizations help to ignite and keep alive a public dialogue about the importance of the arts in our communities, whether advocating to governmental forces, to school boards, or to those who shape public opinion. Those of us who are committed to a thriving arts community should involve ourselves in their efforts and seek their involvement in promotion of what we do.
• It is imperative that we teach musicians to think not just about the music itself, but its place in society – in this particular 21^st century American society – and about their role in ensuring and enhancing that place.
• Musicians need to learn how to speak about music to all constituencies – not just to other musicians. They need to engage with audiences and potential audiences, and they need to be trained to do this effectively.
• Musicians need to understand the need for formal advocacy – for communicating to those who set public policy, whether it is educational curricula in our school systems or our politicians – and they need to be trained in effective ways to make the case for music as an essential component of any civilized society.
• Musicians who are being trained to be orchestral players need to know how orchestras work, and how they can and must play a role in orchestras’ advocacy efforts, fundraising efforts, and audience development efforts. Now most musicians get into orchestras with only one bit of assumed knowledge about orchestras – “the management is the enemy.”  To say that that is not helpful to the successful operation of a symphony orchestra is an understatement. I teach such a course at Roosevelt – and I’ve had graduate students who were surprised to learn that members of Boards of Directors don’t get paid to be on the Board! There is a long history in America of separation between those who make music and those who administer and/or present it – that separation is unhealthy. Administrators must welcome musicians into the decision-making and governing process, and musicians must be trained to function in that process.
• Musicians need to be sensitive to, and supportive of, efforts to diversify our world – strong, pro-active efforts that will help to overcome a century of actual, real discrimination. While that situation has improved dramatically in our lifetimes, it is a very important and real part of our field’s history. Musicians need to hear from people like Aaron Dworkin of the Sphinx Foundation whose organization does a terrific job promoting string playing among young musicians of color, on the need for greater change in this area.
• Musicians need to be sensitive to changes in society. Today’s society is very much more visual oriented than was the case even thirty years ago.  We have the first generation of 50-year olds who grew up with television as a constant in their childhoods. That simple fact has re-wired people, and enhanced their expectation of some kind of visual stimulus as they experience music. Yet if you try to explain to orchestra musicians the importance of, say, risers – so people on the main floor can see something other than the socks of the front row of string players – they get angry at the thought that anything other than the way they play the notes should matter. They need to be exposed to thinking about all manners of the presentation and delivery of music – including electronic and the internet – and to engage in discussions about what that might mean for the future.
• We need to encourage exploration, debate, discussion about the history of classical music in America – how it was, in fact, used for much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries to actually separate social classes in this country – and how as our society has thankfully moved to a more democratic spirit our field has been slow to adapt, and rid itself of some of the ritualistic trappings with which the music business surrounded itself.
• In the performances that we present on behalf of our schools, we need to think about, and experiment with, all aspects of concert presentation. Educational institutions should be on the leading edge of experimentation – we should be laboratories for new approaches to the presentation of concerts. After all, we can easily afford an occasional misstep much more easily than a multi-million dollar orchestra, and we cannot be as glued to tradition as they are.  We can be a catalyst for change, actually helping the industry, the professional orchestras and opera companies, progress. And in the process we must teach musicians to be open to new approaches to presentation, to experimentation.
• If we’re going to be true advocates, we must confront the fact that ticket prices are a barrier to symphony orchestras, opera companies, and many classical concerts. A recent experience that I have had consulting with the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, which almost completely sells out every single performance of a full 30-week season with three performances a week, plus additional chamber orchestra concerts – in large part because the heavy government subsidy they receive allows them to keep ticket prices very low – has underlined the importance of this issue for me. We are of course not in a position to lower the prices that our nation’s orchestras and opera companies charge – but we are in a position to raise the issue, engage the subject in serious discussion, and perhaps even partner with business schools and others in coming to grips with this issue.
• In short, musicians that are being trained for the future need to be made aware of the societal and cultural climate into which they are being sent, and they need to be made aware of the fact that they will be central players in changing that climate. This is absolutely essential if we are not to see a continued marginalization of art music in the future.

In June, the NEA released its national Arts Participation study for 2008, and in case nothing else I have said gives you cause for worry, that study should. It shows a dramatic decline in arts participation and attendance across the board, at all age levels, over the past six years. While we might wish to blame some of that on the economy, reading this study in detail indicates, I think something deeper – a continuing trend toward a distance between Americans and the arts. If we, at the higher education level, continue to train artists without dealing with the climate into which we are sending them, we run a very real risk of contributing to a continuing trend toward irrelevance.

Now that I am a college dean, I look forward to working alongside all of you on these very pressing issues that confront us all.  We must work to bring more and more people to our institutions and our country’s concert halls.   We must expand our audiences so they can experience all of the joys and passion every one of us experience in the concerts halls and opera houses we frequent.

The peak of human achievement, in civilization after civilization, is represented by its artistic and cultural achievements – and any society worthy of respect is a society that respects and preserves the great art handed down to it from the past, and adds to that heritage by the creation of new art. And that society must accept that bringing great art to the center of society is a responsibility that to a great degree rests with its artists.  Since our government will not likely be the body to do this, it becomes the obligation of all of us who work in music to do this critical work.

The great playwright Arthur Miller may well have put it best: “When the cannons have stopped firing, and the great victories of finance are reduced to surmise and are long forgotten, it is the art of the people that will confront future generations. The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of the politicians.” Thank you very much for listening.

An emerging drama troupe wants to develop a better business model. So they meet with other small theater companies and study their structure. Problem is, actors aren’t typically the best business experts.  Wouldn’t it be better to meet with actual small business owners outside the arts world, to learn from their experiences?  They’re not talking to the right people.  

A visual arts cooperative needs to raise capital for an upcoming initiative. So they approach known arts donors in their community.  Problem is, financial resources from these patrons are already stretched thin.  Wouldn’t it be better to cultivate relationships with other wealthy citizens who don’t currently have their fingers in the arts?  They’re not talking to the right people.

A group of college professors hopes to produce artists who are more entrepreneurial.  So they organize an academic conference on this issue.  Problem is, none of the faculty presenters actually make a sizeable living through their art–they’re primarily educators.  Wouldn’t it be better to invite actual freelancers and art entrepreneurs? They’re not talking to the right people.

A community of dancers wants to attract bigger audiences.  So they go to a bar to discuss this issue, and wind up complaining about how no one appreciates great music any more.  Problem is, you can’t solve a problem by kvetching. Wouldn’t it be better to meet with actual people from the demographics they hope to attract, and learn what motivates them to attend an event?  They’re not talking to the right people.

When presented with a challenge, we often approach others who are kind of like us. It somehow feels more comfortable to be in the presence of familiarity.  By networking with clones, we confirm our suspicions and continue further down the same path with increased confidence.

But someone with a different set of experiences, skills, and perspectives may be better equipped to assist. Better equipped to view the problem from a distinct angle, imagining uncommon, bold, and powerful solutions. And often, these are the very people with the greatest potential to actually help.

You hope to advance your career to the next phase.  Are you talking to the right people?

Check out this quote:

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

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

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead [The Atlantic]

Goldbard’s 2006 publication New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development is highly recommended. It is an inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development. Through personal stories, rousing accounts, detailed observation and histories, Arlene Goldbard describes how communities express and develop themselves via the creative arts. This comprehensive, photographically- illustrated book, which covers community-based arts such as theater grounded in oral history and murals celebrating cultural heritage, will appeal to the curious non-specialist reader as well as the practitioner and student.

Claiming Creativity: Art Education in Cultural Transition

April 21-24, 2010
Chicago, USA

Claiming Creativity seeks to re-position creativity as a driver not only for our economies, but also for art making, for transformational processes, and for social and cultural development and change. The working assumption is that the vitality of our common future is linked tightly to creative practice in many forms. This symposium will place artists, designers, architects and other active “creators,” and those who teach in the creative disciplines squarely at the center of these important conversations along with leaders in industry and commerce who share an interest in the life of the imagination and its value to society.

Educators and other leaders in the arts, business, science, commerce, industry, public policy, and environment are invited to attend.

A special feature of Claiming Creativity is the symposium online forum, which is available now to all symposium registrants. Successful proposal abstracts are included on the forum and allow for pre-symposium discourse to begin shaping the Chicago symposium; the forum discussions will also provide additional ideas for special sessions at the Chicago symposium, making Claiming Creativity as interactive as possible for the symposium registrants. Additionally, a symposium “journal” will be published through Columbia College Chicago’s academic press.

Claiming Creativity keynote speakers include Sarat Maharaj (UK), Dany Jacobs (Netherlands), and Amina J. Dickerson (USA). Their vast cultural knowledge and influence will undoubtedly afford symposium attendees new perspectives on “Claiming Creativity” and “the life of imagination and its value to society.”

For details about the symposium, registration, and the keynote speakers, please visit: http://claimingcreativity.com

Find an emotion that needs social approval in order to be easily expressed.  Hook it into something you sell or do.  Discover other organizations that would benefit from the holiday as much as you would.  Voila! Mother’s Day/Valentine’s Day/Festivus/New Year’s. It doesn’t have to be a national one, of course, just one for your tribe. All the great religious holidays started as secular or pagan holidays first, because they filled an essential social need. Spring is here! It’s dark out!

And if your project/product/cause isn’t worthy of a holiday? Time to find a new one.

As savvy artists, I propose we found National Arts Engagement Day.

Here’s how it works.  On this special annual holiday, families and neighborhoods bond together while experiencing art firsthand in at least two different ways.  

We’re not talking about witnessing someone else’s artistic vision here. Arts Engagement Day isn’t simply about attending a museum, viewing a concert, or watching a play as a passive bystander.  On the contrary, participants take time from their busy lives to assume the role of artist during this extraordinary celebration.  They celebrate their own creative capacity, while experiencing the unparalleled power of the arts to build community, tap into self-discovery, and unleash the imagination. All while having a great time.

To ensure this date lives up to its potential, arts organizations from across the land organize interactive events where children of all ages make crafts, paint murals, invent instruments, improvise scenarios, fashion poetry, design wardrobes, and choreograph movement. Some events address pressing social themes (environmentalism, criminal justice, discrimination), behavioral concepts (leadership, collaboration, considering multiple perspectives), or knowledge expansion (African culture, farming, Romantic literature).  Others are just plain fun.  Arts events are scheduled in concert halls, movie theaters, grocery stores, libraries, public squares, home basements, bridges, and anywhere else conceivable. 

Martin Luther King Day has evolved into a pro-active holiday.  With the slogan “A Day On, Not a Day Off,” it encourages all to offer valuable service to their communities through volunteering.  Similarly, Arts Engagement Day provides a persuasive excuse for participants to get involved while giving the gift of art to themselves and loved ones.  

Imagine what Arts Engagement Day could do for the arts world.  Imagine what it could do for our families.  Imagine what it could do for our society.

What do you think?

What is even more cool, to me, is that Create. Innovate. Repeat: Artists and Entrepreneurs Unite! is a new brand for The IAE. It is an entrepreneurial happening. An experiment. What I mean by this is that I envision it as a playground for artists to come learn entrepreneurial skills, hang out and see what we create together and what kind of innovative things we can produce that resonate with the community. One master experiment trying our hand at entrepreneurship after another.

Our next Create. Innovate. Repeat. Artists and Entrepreneurs Unite! happening is going to be an all-artists-invited-to-participate event and along with it a week of classes open to the general public taught by the artists participating in the event. I am hunting for the right vacant Chicago storefront for rent right now for it.

It’s funny how like minds come together. It truly is a small world.  As this concept has been rolling around developing in my head,  one of the most creative and innovative people on the planet I know, Eva Niewiadomski from my favorite meeting place, Catalyst Ranch, sent me this link to Our Goods Trade School.

Our Goods Trade School barters goods, services and knowledge in pop-up storefronts in New York.

Right now you can come to Trade School for the next thirty days.  Classes are being offered every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Here is an example of  Amy Whitaker’s class tonight. Scroll down to Wednesday February 17th and look for:

If your in New York tonight through February 28th you can bring your dinner and attend a class at GrandOpening’s Lower East Side storefront.  And if your in Chicago in April check back with The IAE because we are going to have something ready for you to learn with your dinner of our very own. You might enjoy read summaries of some of Trade School’s past classes at the OurGoods blog . You can also view more of their photos on OurGoods photos on Flickr.

139 Norfolk Street
New York, NY 10002 map
Tel 646 875 8078
info@ourgoods.org

Trade School is a collaboration between and .

Eye Buy Art is a carefully curated online art gallery that represents an array of emerging photographers from Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The site releases a new image every week, each from an artist among those deemed important by a high profile jury of professionals in the field. Limited edition photographs of the works represented are offered for sale through Eye Buy Art at prices starting at USD 25 for an 8-by-10 print; consumers who have signed up for the site’s newsletter get first crack at them before they go public. Artists earn 50 percent from each sale; in addition, Eye Buy Art donates 10 percent to the Flash Forward Festival, its sister organization focusing on promoting the future of photography. All prints come with an edition card signifying the work’s authenticity.

The site explains: “We think art is for everyone and we aim to make buying art easy, friendly, and affordable. Our name reflects our navigation – look, buy, and learn about art – and we hope to inspire new and existing collectors to buy art from these enthusiastic young artists at a pivotal time in their career.”

There are, of course, other like-minded sites out there—most notable, perhaps, is Jen Bekman’s 20×200—but it’s a growing field, and one that could do with a few more international or niche players. Care to be one of them…?

As I continue to speak out, discuss with others, and read/hear thought leaders grappling with how to make our culture more innovative, I am struck by common themes and agreements. Clearly, almost all of us see the need for change, and the need to support efforts that will bring about more creative solutions–in education, in organizations, in cities. We need more stimulation (rather than just stimulus) to get us excited about innovation and entrepreneurship, wrote Thomas Friedman in the New York Times a few weeks ago. “The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things,” he writes, “is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things.”

But an innovation movement needs to shift our quite-stubborn mindsets that are currently not serving us well or promoting creative action. Here are the three key paradigm shifts necessary for cultural innovation that I see, with recent confirmation in the pages of a couple of our few-remaining national publications.

1. The valuing of the right brain. It’s one thing to say we need to be creative, but it’s quite another to support, value and honor those things which improve our creative, right brains. Corporate America in particular still has a hard time valuing anything that appears too “touchy-feely” or that can’t be measured easily through profit and loss. But as Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Recent commentators have been championing liberal arts–which support this blog’s emphasis on right brain power–in order to boost innovation. “If the country is to prosper–economically, culturally, morally,” wrote Jon Meacham in Newsweek recently, “we have to trust the institutions, old and new, that nurture creativity.” Even MBA programs are beginning to find ways to increase right brain education, according to a recent New York Times article. Roger Martin, the new dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.” and other programs are increasing focus on thinking differently and using design thinking to solve problems. The next step is for companies to put actual money behind programs that increase right brain thinking of their employees.

2. Collaboration across Disciplines. We are realizing that new solutions must come from a kind of collaboration that breaks down silos of expertise and combines perspectives and wisdom from many. We are currently set up–in academia, in business, in government–with very little communication between departments and domains. It’s time to be multidisciplinary. CEO of IBM Sam Palmisano recently wrote, “We will need ongoing, structured collaboration among city agencies; across business, the nongovernmental sector, academia and communities; and among cities and regional authorities. And that’s going to require that we develop new skills for both managing people and leading organizations.” Both because innovation comes most commonly from the intersection of disparate ideas, and because our economy demands now that we share best practices and help each other solve difficult challenges, collaboration across disciplines must become a real priority. That means working on our collaborative skills, as some MBA programs in the aforementioned article are doing. It also means we need more people who are comprehensivists, able to facilitate dialogue and problem solving among different groups.

3. Act for the long term and not just the short. This is currently America’s Achilles’ Heel, perhaps the one change of mindset with which most people wholeheartedly agree, but often feel helpless about. To become an innovative culture, we must insist that the quarterly earnings report, the short-term R.O.I., and the next primary election cannot solely determine our behavior. A company can’t be innovative if every new R&D project must prove its worth within a year, a requirement of one local large company that is handcuffing an employee I just spoke with. Short-term thinking, especially one ruled by data and numbers and not human values (Google getting out of China appeared to be a rare exception), is killing us as a culture. It limits creativity and prevents the adoption of unpopular-though-healthy policies and practices, regardless of how much the current system is limping along. Every expert in innovation knows that only by allowing for failure and taking risks, even during hard times, is innovation possible. And yet right now as a country we can’t solve any of our persistent problems–you name them–because of the suffocating idolatry of the short term.

The truth is, given the continued partisan ineptitude of our government, I’m not feeling particular hopeful that we can shift paradigms, despite some convincing clamoring for it. How about a little help from you, my elusive reader? Can you share any signs you see that we are valuing the right brain, collaborating across disciplines and acting for the long term?

I know I do it on a continual basis, daily and yet I also realize that I NEED NEW TOOLS AND IDEAS to more thoroughly examine what needs to be updated, changed or thrown out and re-evluated.

Here a FOUR ways you can re-evalute your enterprise to move it into a more successful mode.

BRAINSTORMING is a great way to get quick, innovative input regarding your enterprise.  This is why large companies hold retreats.

Why not hold your own retreat with the peoplewho can best hel you move forward?  How about a marketing guru, business manaager, accountant, designer, social media expert, all round business consultant, etc.?  It would be worth the money in the long run.

I know I certainly could use it.  My mind gets stuck on  and it would help to have some experts around to brainstrom with in one big meeting (retreat).  Be sure to plan it carefully with the specific topics you want addressed.

A SURVEY of all past clients asking important questions you haven’t looked into lately, could shake things up.  What did they expect?  What did they get?  What was missing?  What can be done better?  What would they like to see next?   You could offer the first five some sort of special attention, gift, etc.

Hire a MARKETING EXPERT to dig around for new ideas to move forward.  Be sure to explain what you have done and what has and hasn’t worked and what you want to know specifically to move forward.

Step into the shoes of your IDEAL CLIENT.  (check out my previous post IDENTIFY YOUR IDEAL CLIENT.)

And schedule regular times where re-evaluation is done more deeply and innovatively.

In a class that may be taken by as many as 80 student artists per year, I have to recognize that not every one of those 80 will start the next great arts-based venture. The take-aways from the class need to be as much the self-actualization mindset as the fiscal literacy and knowledge of business models. In the hierarchy of needs (at least as defined by Abraham Maslow), self actualization is at the very top. Is it ethical to focus on self-actualization without providing some means by which the student artists can achieve the lower rungs of that hierarchy (food, shelter)? Balance will again be key. Students will – hopefully – leave the course not only with an understanding of opportunity creation but also with a solid professional looking resume and some self-management and self-marketing skills that will help them climb above the first two rungs of the hierarchy of needs.

Another question I struggle with is around the teaching of creativity and innovation. My arts entrepreneurship course will have as a prerequisite a lower level course called something like “Creativity and Innovation across Design and the Arts.” My own intellectual struggle is around whether or not it is possible to actually teach people this topic. There’s plenty of literature out there, especially recent literature from the cognitive and behavioral sciences about creative process, literature on exercises that incite creativity, and great inspiring talks on Ted.com by really creative people. My current view is that before creativity or innovation can be “taught,” we need to create an environment in which students are actually allowed to be creative and innovative. Creativity and innovation is rarely linear, so teaching step-by-step processes and testing and assessment can be limiting and counterproductive.

Yet, we live in a culture where evaluation and assessment are valued to the extreme, especially as both private and public arts funding shrinks. Granting organizations often require both self- and external assessments, and academic courses include student assessment and faculty assessment. One of the course modules I’m struggling with the most is the one near the end of the course on self-assessment. Venture success can be measured by the financial balance sheet, but creativity, rather than productivity, is harder to measure. Despite my struggles, I’m having a really good time searching for and reviewing the literature!

Your input is welcome. Send me your comments, suggestions, and resources.