Cal. State San Bernardino (CSUSB) will be hosting its inaugural Arts and Music Festival on Friday May 17, 2013 from 4-9 p.m. Admission is 100% free.
Attendees can expect to experience a day of fun, including:
From the always inspirational, educational, and pretty fantastic Arts Biz Blog! Thank you Alyson B. Stanfield.
|
When you are struggling with a decision, remember this . . . You have everything you need to make the right decisions for your art business.
You have read the books, listened to the recordings, and taken the classes. You have paid attention. You have been doing the work. You’ve asked good questions. You’ve sought outside expertise. You know what’s right from what’s wrong. You feel it when something doesn’t sound right. You know what is best for you. Trust. Then, take action. |
It’s 7:59 PM at a one-hundred-seat venue and a show is about to begin.
Seventy-five seats have been sold since the on-sale date. The first tickets were sold to buyers who were eagerly waiting for the event to happen. As time went on more tickets were sold, but the relative enthusiasm of the buyers tended to wane as the sales campaign unfolded. Finally, in the days and hours before the event, a few stragglers tipped into the ticket-buying category and shortly before curtain time, the seventy-fifth buyer walked up to the box office.
Who’s the most important customer?
Tradition would suggest that the first thirty or forty buyers — the subscribers, members and loyal patrons who responded first — are the most important. They’re on the most responsive lists, they come to a lot of events, they have the closest relationships with the organization, they’re more likely to give money, they have more in common socially with the people who run the organization and their motivations are well understood by the managers and marketers who craft the sales messages. Who wouldn’t value them? We love them! Customer number one is customer number one for a reason and the rest follow according to their relative avidity.
Buyers forty-one through sixty-five are a little tougher. They’re more expensive to reach, they’re less committed, they’re less passionate about the art form and they may not show up again until next year. They’re vitally important to the bottom line but they’re an unpleasant necessity. Life would be so much easier if we didn’t have to worry about the vagaries and expense of single-ticket-buying audiences.
And sixty-six to seventy-five? Who the hell knows? They’re late, they’re fickle, they’re unreliable, they’re hard to find, they respond mostly to incentives or discount offers and they have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that’s almost insulting. They may help us with our goals, but they’re a pain in the ass and they’re not really our people anyway. And besides, we may never see them again.
So who’s most important to you?
I loaded those last few paragraphs with a bias that reflects some deep-seated attitudes in our industry. We tend to know and care the most about the people who know and care the most about us; and conversely, we know and care the least about the people who know and care the least about us. It’s human nature. And it makes sense that such an attitude would shape our priorities. After all, why invest too much time in audiences that don’t share our passions and preferences? Why bother with people who don’t even have the decency to behave like proper arts patrons?
But if I were to pick the most important customers in this example it would be a tossup between number seventy-five and seventy-six — the last one to purchase a seat and the one who came closest to filling the next seat but for some reason didn’t make it. The rest are important — there’s no doubt about that — but they represent the past and the present; we already know how to talk to them. Seventy-five and seventy-six, on the other hand, define the difference between old and new audiences and they have more to teach us than anyone who’s ever walked though our doors.
Personally, I’m curious to know what made seventy-five get off the couch and drive down to the venue. He almost didn’t make it. I can’t help wondering whatmoved him to get here in time. We have twenty-five empty seats and if we can learn what motivated this guy, we should be able to use that information to persuade more people like him to come to our events. I wonder if there’s something we should know about him that would make it easier for us to persuade him to buy earlier or come more often.
And my heart goes out to number seventy-six who thought she might come but wound up somewhere else. Where is she tonight? What did she decide to do instead? Why didn’t she come to our venue to see our show? What was it about what we said to number seventy-five that got him in the door but failed to capture seventy-six? Could we have said something different that was slightly more persuasive — something that would have tipped her into the ticket-buying category, too? What should we know about her that would make our messages more persuasive?
No matter what size the venue or how popular the show, the unsold seat next to the last seat sold has somebody’s name on it. And the only way to fill that seat is to make whoever isn’t sitting there a priority.
We can talk endlessly about new audiences while continuing to put all of our energy into making customer number one happy. But as far as I’m concerned, the key to new audiences lies in making the customers who can’t decide where to go as important as the ones who wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.
Spearheaded by the Goldhirsh Foundation, LA2050 believes in the power of Angelenos to shape the future of our region. LA2050 has looked at the health of the region along the following key indicators: arts & cultural vitality, education, environmental quality,health, housing, income & employment, public safety, and social connectedness. And we’ve made informed projections about where we’ll be in the year 2050 if we continue on this current path.
We are asking that after you review our application, then vote for A LOT. If you feel so inclined to further support A LOT by sharing it on your social networks or sending it to friends that would be most appreciated.
What does a successful Los Angeles in 2050 look like to you? The My LA2050 challenge invites you to dream of the most innovative and creative ways to tackle Los Angeles’ biggest problems. With your help, we will shape the LA story anew – and build the LA2050 of our aspirations.
Artist Jeff Rau is stirring up Long Beach in all the right ways. Jeff recently was awarded the Artist Fellowship through the Arts Council for Long Beach and has lived up fully to the award. He curated the exhibit Place ”Place and Time“ at The Collaborative Gallery (421 W. Broadway, Long Beach CA 90802), with the 4 other fellows this year. This will be up until He currently collaborates with other curators in a group called Sixpack Projects. Jeff also recently curated an art exhibit THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY at the Biola University Art Gallery. That show will be up until March 21st. Below, we get a glimpse into Jeff’s life as an artist. Enjoy!
Give us a summary of your artistic practice.
This should be a very easy question, but I find it really hard to boil it down to a quick response. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that my work spans a great variety of media: photography, video, performance, journaling, audio, installation, mapping… All of these have played a role in my work. I could perhaps say that I am a conceptual artist who works through projects or series, establishing systems of documentation and engagement that unfold over time… But that doesn’t really help describe it in any useful way. Maybe the best answer is to mention my recent interest in exploring how we interact with the landscape, both individually and as a society. Several of my recent projects have explored this topic in a variety of ways.
What are your goals as an artist and curator?
My curatorial practice and my studio practice very much go hand-in-hand. In both cases it is my goal for the art to challenge the viewer to re-consider the usually unconscious assumptions behind our actions. Often the best work raises more questions than gives answers and prompts us to engage in unexpected conversations. Sure, I would love to be a rock-star artist/curator, showing at major museums around the world … but as long as I can get people to pause, ask new questions, and leave the gallery thinking about the world a little differently, then I am inspired to continue bringing new work to the table! So I guess my goal is just to begin as many meaningful conversations as possible.
Are you currently developing a body of work? If so, do you have any plans of exhibiting?
I do have a couple of new projects in the works, but I’m not sure that any of it is developed enough to talk about quite yet. There are two recent bodies of work that I have been exhibiting, and I have been kept very busy recently with several curatorial projects. HAZE was a two year long project documenting and studying the cloud of smog/grit/marine-layer that frequently cloaks city of LA; I expect to be exhibiting this project again later this year in a gallery up in LA, but I do not yet have the specifics. Climbing Trees was a 30 day performance project documented in video, image, and journaling; prints from this project are currently on view at The Collaborative gallery in downtown Long Beach in a show that I also curated, featuring a group of this year’s Arts Council grant winners. There is also another exhibition that I curated currently on view at Biola University; that exhibition entitled The Violent Bear It Away explores many different forms of violence that we encounter in this world and the various ways artists have responded to violence through their work. Both of the current exhibitions close later this month.
Here at the Arts Council for Long Beach, we want to be able to help with your organization professional development. We all need a little tune-up here and there. Never thought we would talk about soup, but this article from the Arts Journal by Andrew Taylor about “carrying costs” makes a lot of sense. so put on your accounting caps and indulge this Food (bad joke) for thought!
In the for-profit world, there’s a category of expense called ”carrying costs,” which includes all costs involved in holding an asset (inventory, for example, which costs money even when it’s sitting in the stock room…insurance, security, spoilage, storage, finance, and such). The game in inventory-based businesses is to balance your carrying costs against the cost of not having that thing available when you need it.
If you hold inventory that never turns, you’ll eat your profits with carrying costs. But if you suddenly have a bump in sales and run out of inventory, you’ll lose all the profit you would have made.
As it turns out, there are a few good reasons for holding more stock than you can immediately sell, and for eating the carrying costs in the process. Among these reasons are the following types of stock:
Nice to see you are not alone! 16 Habits of Highly Creative People gives us all a little more pep in our step.
Many people believe that creativity is inborn and only a chosen few are creative. While it is true that creativity is inborn, it is not true that only a chosen few are creative.
Everyone is born creative. In the process of growing up, educating yourself and adapting yourself to your environment, you slowly add blocks to your creativity and forget that you had it in the first place.
The difference between a creative person and a person who is not so creative is not in the creativity that they were born with but in the creativity that they have lost.
How can you enhance your creative ability? One possible way is to observe the habits of creative people, identify the ones that you feel will work for you and then make a plan to cultivate them.
Here are 16 habits of creative people. If you cultivate some of them, you will feel an increase in your level of creativity. In the process, you will also feel tickled by life!
1. Creative people are full of curiosity.
Creative people are wonderstruck. They are tickled by the newness of every moment. They have lots of questions. They keep asking what, why, when, where and how.
A questioning mind is an open mind. It is not a knowing mind. Only an open mind can be creative. A knowing mind can never be creative.
A questioning stance sensitizes the mind in a very special way and it is able to sense what would have been missed otherwise.
Having trouble grasping the concept of what Creative Placemaking actually is? You are not alone! It seems like the new buzzword in the arts world has more than a few of (ahem) us confused.
Here is a great article about Creative Placemaking and how it can change communities! Even more reason to look forward to our very own A LOT initiative!
This article was written by Greg McKeown for Linked in:
“A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, “Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap all of us fall into sometimes. In just one example, it is easy to become so consumed in our careers we fail to really think about our careers.
To avoid this trap, I suggest carving out a couple of hours over the holiday break to follow these simple steps for reflecting on your career.
Step 1: Review 2012. Review the year, month by month. Make a list of where you spent your time: include your major projects, responsibilities and accomplishments. No need to overcomplicate this.
Step 2: Ask, “What is the news?” Look over your list and reflect on what is really going on. Think like a journalist and ask yourself: Why does this matter? What are the trends here? What happens if these trends continue?
Step 3: Ask “What would I do in my career if I could do anything?”Just brainstorm with no voice of criticism to hold you back. Just write out all the ideas that come to mind.
The Arts Council for Long Beach is issuing this Request for Qualifications (RFQ) seeking performers, artists, artist groups and organizations able to engage City of Long Beach residents through participation in the A LOT Initiative, a program of the Arts Council for Long Beach supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant.
Date Issued: Wednesday, November 14, 2012; Submittal Date: Wednesday, January 9, 2013
DESCRIPTION
The Arts Council for Long Beach seeks qualified performers, artists, artist groups and organizations capable of and committed to creating performance-based artwork that activates vacant lots, buildings and other non-traditional locations within Long Beach neighborhoods. We seek qualified community-conscious partners committed to close-to-home collaboration and artistic engagement with local residents. Underserved neighborhoods will enjoy the benefits afforded by dance, music, theatre, spoken word, video, installation, and multi-media performances, all offered free to the public. This initiative is intended to increase access to the arts and expand audiences so as to include both intentional viewers and casual passers-by.
Indulge- Travel, Adventure, & New Experiences
Stuff and things.
Arts Council for Long Beach
Capturing the world through photography, video and multimedia
Arts Council for Long Beach
Arts Council for Long Beach
Arts Council for Long Beach
The Official Blog of Art21, Inc. and the <i>Art in the Twenty-First Century</i> PBS series
Arts Council for Long Beach
Arts Council for Long Beach
