Arts Advocacy Breakfast

I'm going to keep this breif, because I'm starting to lose my temper a little bit, and i've got a tour to book.

Went to the breakfast in the park that Johnathan West organized. There's going to be another one of these in two weeks, and i intend to go to that one too.

From my experience studying and participating in political action, i offer the following reccomendations.

There is one thing that will make this work: combined forces.

Here's how to combine forces successfully:

1. Connect with the remnants of past efforts.
2. Balance the present individual acute problem with broader future efforts.
3. devise two transparent processes one to develop actionable responses to acute problems and one to develop and strengthen a proactive long term presense.
4. hold frequent real life meetings that produce results.

More details on these things.

1. It was very good to see people from MARN and Arts Inc there. This kind of action is cyclical, if you're not building on the efforts of previous advocates, then you're spinning your wheels and going nowhere. MARN seems like it used to do more agressive advocacy (brenner) and now it's more network focused. This is a good thing, cuz MARN's failures in advocacy probably came from too limited a network. This is an opportunity to bring performing artists into MARN, and use the resources they've already built to pursue advocacy.

2. Skylight cannot hyjack the proceedings. Before the next meeting the aggreived members of Skylight ought to develop and two things to present the larger group: first, a consise report on exactly what happened and why. Second, an action plan, what they'd like the broader community to do to support them. It is then essential that Skylight people participate in, make room for and listen to other greivances as well. I'm only using Skylight as an example here because it is the current acute problem, not because i think musical theatre actors are self-dramatizing divas with short attention spans.

3. the first process has to start with what i just described above. The group needs to establish a lean, effective standard proceedure for raising issues, and recommending action. We can't spend the whole meeting time brainstorming ideas, the ideas should be prepared ahead of time and presented. To some degree, the right process was already happening today, but if we have twice or three times as big a group in two weeks, it's gotta happen more to make things effective.

The second process also already started today, some very goal oriented stuff was discussed, both short term and long term goals. Paula mentioned building enough clout to get a seat at the table for artists when the big fancy people are meeting behind their closed doors, she also mentioned influencing elections. These are good ideas. Prioritize them and develop them into either actions (volunteering for arts friendly politicians) or demands ("Hey GMC! if you want any of these 4000 artists to help realize your fancy-pants creative development plan, you've gotta save a seat for us at your meetings from now on, and you've gotta let us elect the person who sits in that seat").

4. If something like these reccomendations are followed, and actions are employed, this group can get results. If the procedures and discussions are made public, then this will grow.

These are my reccomendations, as a scholar of political activism, not my personal feelings (i'm not really a fan of political activism). My personal feelings are: let the 38 people who don't know each other on the board of the skylight pay half attention while eric dillner burns the company down, and then sing and dance in the ashes. Form new companies, use new models, skip that 501c3 bullshit. But, my personal feelings aren't very useful to people who wanna do showtunes, so in the meantime, i'll help you guys do your best to empower artists within the old models.

I am more excited about this than any of the other milwaukee artist community stuff that's been going on. This art advocacy is different than the coalition's, the CA's or the GMC's. This is transparent, personal and grassroots. When Johnathan says "arts advocacy" he seems to mean something more like "artist advocacy". This distinction is important, "arts advocacy" tends to be much more careful, shallow and empty, advocating the arts as an idea, which can perversely undermine art by empowering arts administrators who have no respect for artists. Creative coalition stuff strikes me as a bunch of meetings where people decide who should talk about making plans on how to create the outline of a map for doing things in a way that makes sure they'll not fail, cuz that might make the GMC look bad. Johnathan's is grassroots, transparent, unafraid of getting dirty, and puts the artists first.

More bitching about the local art scene...

I'm begining to think i need to stop paying attention to the intractable problems of Miwlaukee's art scene. I've rode a couple times through the mutually reinforcing cycle of ineffectual organizations that ignore artists and a defeatist artist community that complains about their entitlement to support and their beleif that the work they do feeds our society's soul. I know i've got better things to do with my time.

But, i've always been drawn to apparently impossible challenges. The more intractable the problem seems the more excited i get about confronting it! Unfortunately, this enthusiasm for challenges has created a distraction from the work i've got to do (and there's lots of that: booking a tour, rehearsing for tour, workshopping King Lear, promoting the CCC show, writing essays, printing new merch, editing Ulysses Crewmen, etc etc).

Anyway, i've already followed the current manifestation (or infestation) of art world whinery (an especially infantile discussion started here, about this seemingly irrelevant blog and written the following response, so i might as well say it out loud.

I really really don't think Emily Thomas should be brought into the art community's airing of public greivances. I do appreciate Mike's using her blog post as an example, but i see it more as an example MAM's failure in it's role as a gateway to get the millions of people like her and her children invovled in art. Should our focus now be on this one individual art-viewer, or would our time be better spent looking at the art curator who has many many interactions of this kind daily? Sure, she's much easier to attack than MAM (who are probably either ignoring this conversation or fretting about how to make it go away, depending on how paranoid they are. At any rate, i highly doubt we're going to hear from them) but what good does attacking her do?

Seems to me what Mike's post illustrates is that we're in the present situation (underfunded arts and art-education programs) because MAM and others have failed in their responsibility as gateway to the art world. This failure happened in the past. Perhaps MAM and other orgs coulda done more and better (probably) but perhaps even if if they had, this kind of failure was unavoidable (probably).

I don't care all that much about that, i'm concerned with the present situation: the gateway is broken, from the perspective of the millions of Emily Thomas's, the art world is an insular cluster of increasingly irrelevant and inexplicable artists and curators, doing offensive pornography. The questions we should be asking are not: who is this one individual woman, how did she come to her views on art, how can we change her mind. If we spend ten minutes thinking about it, take an honest look at the art world, it's not hard to infer the answers, and to even sympathize with Thomas. Oh, and liscensing parentage is not only an absurd joke, it's also offensive and stupid because it focuses on regulating and controlling "them" rather than on what "we" can do to change things.

Yes, the questions should be directed at us, at artists. MAM etc failed in the past and now we're in a situation that MAM and the NEA and the CA and the GMC and the great HOPE we just elected president CANNOT fix, even if they tried (and i'm sure they are trying, however muddleheadedly). Now we can either bitch at them while it remains broken, or WE can try to fix it.

Seems to me the question we ought to be asking is: we are YOU doing as an artist to connect with the non-art community, or accross artistic disciplines? If each individual artist can answer that question with a few successful projects, then the ineffectuality of the CA, GMC, MAM, NEA etc etc etc becomes irrelevant.

Or maybe not... maybe i'm a naive optimist. Maybe groups like hotcakes, Theatre X, etc etc did successfully reach accross disciplines and to a non-art audience for a couple years (or decades) and then failed anyway due to lack of community and institutional support. Well, actually... that is what happened. Looks like my efforts are really just repeating their failures. Then, I am a naive optimist, but I guess i'd rather be optimistic about my and my neighbors' ability to change things than pin false hopes on organizations and institutions that i know ain't ever gonna change.

Cultural Summit Progress

Hello,

The cultural summit (aka the MKE Kre8Kamp) has happened, they've documented it on their blog (above) and Jonathan West over at Artsy Schmartsy is spazzing out about spreading the word about all the great work they did.

You all should take a look at all of it and make your own judgements. Jonathan's post is a good place to start. My opinion can be found in various comments on the posts.