Skip to main content

The 3 People You Need On Your Team

If you want to get better at your art, you need a master practitioner to give you critical feedback (a "personal dramaturg" is what one friend called this person, to frame this relationship in a positive supportive way. Mentor, coach, etc etc).

If you want your art in front of a lot of people, you need a personal champion.

A lot has been written about the former: the student/teacher relationship. Within the context of the "10,000 hour" rule, the sometimes-overlooked half of that is "with a master teacher" portion. You become a master not simply by doing something a lot (but that's important) but by doing it a lot with someone who is better than you giving you insight, support, and correction.

I've read less about the notion of a champion.

The pervasive myth is comprised of bootstraps, and DIY, and the "overnight success," at least in America anyway. Especially within the past twenty years, when the means of production and distribution have flattened and been put within everyone's reach, we are primed with

"if we promote our art enough, we'll be successful"

OR "if we follow the path exactly as it's laid out, we'll be successful."

Truth: we don't have to wait to be picked, we can create our art and put it out there and build relationships and find our tribe.

And yet, we still need a champion. We still need a neutral third-party who says to a fourth person, "Have you seen this artist? I like this art." The telling is the key. A champion is not just a tribe member: they bring other people into the tribe for you.

The champion used to be the picker. The book editor who said "this book will be published" or the producer who said "this play will be on our stage." Even a wealthy patron who said "I will pay you, particular artist, for your art."

Then we went the other way and all became our own brands, publicists, and marketers. Bootstraps.

It strikes me that journalists used to play this role to some extent. But in these days of "pay to play" local story writing and the sheer amount of information available across media, it is unlikely that they are brandishing any one particular artist's work before that artist is already famous in their own right.

But we haven't lost the need for champions. While we've likely built a relationship with this person, they are not our best friends, they're not in it for the money, they don't do it because we've asked them to. They like our art and want others to experience that same joy.

Doesn't have to be someone famous [to whatever degree]. Doesn't have to be someone who is wealthy. It could be someone who shows up at every show and always brings new friends who then come with their new friends. It could be someone at the next level adjacent who gives you a hand up the ladder. It could be someone who has all the connections and convinces people to donate to your organization (this is the one area--capital campaigns--that I do hear about champions on a somewhat regular basis).

Champions are the ultimate raving fans. You can't buy them, you can't hire them, you can't steal them. But they are as critical to your success as any other member of  your team.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle?  art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com

Death & The Theater

I was listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast and the guest, happiness scholar Arthur C. Brooks, was discussing death meditations. And the little lightbulb in my brain turned on with the thought, "We need to talk more about death in theaters." I know, I know, that seems like an illogical statement because it feels like we're always talking about the death of theater. This whole summer has been filled with articles and op-eds from across the country about how large regional theaters are dying in major cities. But that's not the kind of death Brooks was talking about, and in reality, it isn't death these articles are complaining about, either: they are trying to stay alive in a “E’s just resting” fashion, to find some kind of life-support for the theaters, to keep them going, receive new money from new audiences or donors, new shows, new gimmicks to draw more or different people in the door. Anything to keep from dying. We don't talk about death

Pass the Collection Plate, Please.

Various sizes of buildings, with some sort of seating arranged in rows, facing a slightly raised platform. may have curtains around the platform. people --primarily men-- take the platform to orate to the audience seated before them. A plea for donations is made at some point, either before or after the show, which may have music and will definitely have directives masked as stories on how to be a human in this day-and-age. children will be seen, maybe, but definitely not heard. the men in charge will believe they have been given a special gift for leading this particular group of people. and the people, for whatever reason, will also believe this. and this group of people will believe that their building and person and each other are completely different and somehow better than all the other exact same groups around their town/city/county/state/nation. If theater wants to be treated as church and church as theater, then both are getting exactly what they have been setting up for the p