NaBloPoMo Day 24: The Most Important Lesson from Graduate School

I recently graduated with my Masters in Arts Administration from Goucher College's MAAA program.

I'm not writing today to talk you into or out of applying for a graduate program in arts administration. I could espouse either side at length.

I would like to tell you, though, my personal most important lesson learned from graduate school.

Keep Asking Questions.

As time- and people- and resource- strapped arts organization administrators, we get caught in the mundane tasks of answering daily business questions. Did the press release get written? Did last week's box office receipts get deposited? Did we ever look into that children's programming?

Graduate school gives an arts administrator space to ask bigger questions. Questions like:

--What if?

--Why do it this way?

--What came before that I can learn from?

--Who cares?

--Why isn't there [insert idea here]?

--Why now?

--What happens if we don't do [insert action here]?

--the 5 Whys (my personal anathema but so so helpful)

Mundane questions require a yes or a no; answers that don't necessarily lead anywhere (unless there happen to be severe negative consequences).

Graduate school (the good ones, anyway) set up space for the provocative questions, whose answers could potentially shift not only a particular student's course of life, but the very foundation on which our arts world sits. We never know where the next Nancy Hanks or Hallie Flanagan may come from.

I did not graduate with all the arts admin solutions. All I have are more questions, and a daily desire to live into the answers.

Comments

New Year, New You Vision Board

VISION BOARDS! Let's get a couple of things clear, right at the start. THERE IS NO WRONG WAY TO MAKE A VISION BOARD. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. You believe that putting pieces of pretty paper on another piece of paper calls into your life your deepest hopes and dreams, then you believe it with all your heart and soul. These are inspirational devices, not architectural blueprints. Ok, now that we have some caveats taken care of, the briefest of background before we get to the supplies and instructions (OH MY GOD THIS IS WHY THE ONLINE RECIPE BLOGS ARE LIKE THIS) I've been making vision boards consistently every year for my birthday (ish, usually on the new moon closest to my actual natal day) for a decade and before that on and off since college. I've always considered paper art as my chosen visual artistic medium, so vision boards were right up my manifestation alley. At one point in my life I wanted to work in magazine publishing (scratch that, I still do) so buying and keeping...

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...

Theater in the Age of Netflix

I read a great article in the December issue of Fast Company titled " Retail in the Age of Amazon. " Long-time readers know of my penchant for following retail conversations and seeing how they are applicable to the theater world and this article was no different. (New readers: hello! do you think retail and theater overlap, too?) I sat down to write notes on all the topics and details from the article that I wanted to flesh out on for theaters. I thought it would be 4 or 5, since the article itself had 4 sections to it. Instead, I had TWENTY-TWO points to hit. To flesh out each of those points, even a paragraph a piece, seems a tad much for a blog post. Some of them I've written about before, like defining success on your terms and using heretical ideas . A lot of them are about how going back to basics and focusing on differentiation rather than competing at the same game can help retail businesses survive and thrive in the age of click-and-buy. This is...

Perpetually Curious

Search This Blog