Back on the Soap box

I'm off the diary for the moment and back on the soap box.

This diatribe began as a comment on Andrew Taylor's Artful Manager Blog and spiraled out of control. Man, I love that guy's blog.

You'll have to read the original post - it's better than me describing it. It might help to listen to Taylor's comments about metaphor and structure. Also, his blog is an excellent source for more on this topic, but you can catch it up with threads of it all over the place - try any marketing blog, for instance, and you're bound to come across these ideas: namely, giving away content, and what I call "theatre 2.0" which is a broad concept that involves inter alia the notions of self-curation, self-directed creation or ur-collaboration (everyone throwing things in the soup), and any manner of internet-based interface with your organization.

I feel like such a Luddite when I read these ideas, because I always get this sinking feeling along with the question "how do you pay for professional art without a boundary and little or no state funding?" Given the philanthrocapitalist sentiments sweeping away our financing models and cyberspace sweeping away our production models, what are we to do?

I'm sure I'm simply wont of imagination, but are there resources that take these ideas to the next level and address the nitty gritty of how to create content and support a class of professional artists with no capital resources and giving the art away for free to all and sundry? Aside from augmentation and marketing of the real substance of art, what does the internet have to offer to the hands-on, personal experience of the intrinsic art as a creator and appreciator?

There are two worlds operating in separate vacuums right now - the folks developing the concepts and exploring the rapidly changing cultural landscape and market place; and the world of the day-to-day arts managers who have to plan and implement the next season or the next concert and work with boards who are usually struggling to grasp the basics of marketing and nonprofit financial structures.

The resource I'm looking for is the technical and financial capacity to implement any of these new ideas without imperiling my payroll. Creating Facebook and Youtube experiments uses valuable and scarce time to create projects that simply have no short-to-mid- term ROI, and possibly no significant ROI in the long term. Yes, they help my stakeholders create the experience and build the brand with our company, but there is a fundamental disconnect between something like live theatre and an electronic form of communication that lacks even the person-to-person interaction of a long-distance phone call.

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