Our weekly feature, The Tipster, brings you easy-to-digest tips on topics that matter to your innovative work.

This Week: What are 8 new organizational features emerging in the new era in the arts?

In the past 10 years, unprecedented developments in the operating environment have placed radical new demands on arts and culture organizations.

After 50 years focused on growth and longevity, changes in public participation, technological access to the arts, demographic shifts, and new forms of resource development have revealed that there are critical new organizational structures needed to thrive in this new era for the arts.

Below are 8 old structural features – those that typified the first 50 years of the professional arts sectors – and 8 new structural features – those that we see emerging in response to this new era for the arts.

Old and Emerging Structural Features

• OLD: A mission that focuses on organizational outputs and achievements
• EMERGING: A mission that focuses on community impacts and value

• OLD: A singular creative vision and direction, handled by one or a few insiders
• EMERGING: Pluralized curation that includes dialogue with external voices

• OLD: A select, high-level artistic group, separate from the community and presenting to it via formal seasons of activity
• EMERGING: Acknowledging and embracing the creative capacities in the community — guided by, and working with, professionals, year-round, on demand

• OLD: Strong boundaries to the organization, serving to differentiate it from others and from the wider community
• EMERGING: Loose organizational boundaries, porous to the community, that blur distinctions between organizations and emphasize commonalities

• OLD: Specialist administrative departments with consistent technical competencies working in hierarchies
• EMERGING: “Post-specialist” workers with varying responsibilities, working in artistically centered teams

• OLD: Marketing of products to passive consumers
• EMERGING: Engagement of audiences as active participants in process as well as product

• OLD: Boards as core funders and solicitors for established work
• EMERGING: Boards as champions of change and as informed ambassadors to enroll others

• OLD: Balance sheets focus on building long-term permanent assets
• EMERGING: Financial profile that emphasizes working capital and reserves, including risk capital

You can also download a PDF version of these 8 old and emerging structural features here.

Download PDF: 8 Emerging Organizational Features

In your organization, which emerging structural features are you moving towards or would like to move towards? How might you do that?

There has been a lot of chatter in recent years about the “death of the curator.” But is the role of the curator really dead, or is it just evolving? Once a position that glorified specialized knowledge on niche-like topics, this role is expanding, becoming user-friendly and reaching beyond the walls of institutions. It has grown well beyond the selection and placement of art or artifacts in a space; it has equally become about empowering the audience, collaboration, and innovation, both in a physical space and in the virtual world.

Why is the role of curator changing?

There are many factors that have influenced this change in recent years – an emphasis on education in museums and the arts, advances in technology, racial demographic changes, the coming-of-age of the millennial generation – to name a few. Today’s curator is more like a television producer than an academic scholar – they need to capture the attention of the audience through entertainment and engagement. (Think live tweeting during a TV show and customized iPad apps). While being knowledgeable of the subject matter is important for the integrity of the arts, it’s only one slice of the pie for today’s curators.

Alan Brown and Steven Tepper wrote in a recent white paper that the twenty-first-century curator will be “called upon not only to select and organize arts programs, but to diagnose need in their communities, seek out new and unusual settings for their work, forge partnerships with a wide array of disparate stakeholders, and, in some cases, cede a certain amount of artistic control in order to gain broader impact.” If we use this definition, then the days of getting a curatorial position based on specialized knowledge are over. Curators need to be open, curious, communicative and collaborative. They are sociologists and anthropologists as much as they are art historians. The breadth of this new job description does seem a bit overwhelming – how can one person put on all of these hats at once? How are successful curators doing this?

How does one become a twenty-first-century curator?

Traditionally, a curator was required to obtain undergraduate and graduate degrees (and sometimes, a Ph.D.) that allowed them to specialize in a particular area. This specialization came with a great deal of research and publishing typically done alone. The exhibitions they developed were based on these specialties, whether or not it interested the organization’s visitors. One way that some current and aspiring curators are proactively challenging this traditional position is through educational programs that have been designed to train curators to look differently at program development in the arts.

In 2010, Wesleyan University founded a graduate-level certificate program called the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). This program was designed to develop the participating students’ aesthetic perspective, deepen their familiarity with the range of contemporary performing artists, and develop entrepreneurial skills. The instructors are artists, scholars, curators, cultural leaders, writers and theorists. The goal of the program is to not only provide the students with strong theory and academic knowledge, but also to spark innovation and collaboration and challenge them to think about their role beyond the confines of their institutions.

What’s next?

For those who want to become curators, stop worrying that your career goals are going the way of the dinosaurs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment opportunities for curators, museum technicians and conservators will grow by 16 percent from 2010 to 2020. People still want to go to museums and attend gallery shows and performances; they just want to do it in a way that they find stimulating and interesting.

The role of the curator isn’t dying, but the out-of-date definition is. The idea that only a small, select group of people can determine the best way of displaying and contextualizing artistic programming is patronizing. Today’s curators can be informed and have expertise, but they should also be educators and entertainers. Contemporary museum and arts audiences have numerous options when it comes to their entertainment, and it is up to museums and arts organizations to make sure their programming evolves and stays competitive; otherwise, they run the risk of going extinct.

The twenty-first-century curator can lead the way to change that will keep audiences coming back and bring in new patrons. Curators create the soul that people connect to and invest in by sharing their knowledge with audiences on many levels. It seems that, thanks to the virtual world of Facebook and other websites, everyone can call themselves a curator these days – but it takes a special set of skills to put together an exhibition or a performance series that an audience will want to attend. In a way, these new curators are going to teach their audience how to be their own curators; they can teach them to curate their own experience in a way that works best for them.

Has the curatorial role changed at your institution? Does the job description of the twenty-first-century curator help address the adaptive challenges facing today’s arts-centered non-profit organizations?

After gathering adaptive challenge submissions from arts and culture organizations around the country over the past two months through our Business Unusual National Challenge, we are excited to announce an exceptional group of 14 Semi-Finalist organizations. However, only 5 Finalists will make it on to the crowdsourcing round in June.

To determine these 5 Finalists, we need your help. Read each of these important National Challenge entries and vote for a Semi-Finalist here!

You may vote once per day, every day, from now through Friday, May 31, 2013 at 11:59PM ET.

If you have any questions about the voting process, please send an email to kdanowski@emcarts.org.

Our adaptive challenge

Because existing institutional structures no longer correlate to how art is being created, produced and attended, the performing arts sector is in a state of transition being framed as a crisis. Culturebot will mitigate this crisis by building a horizontal, grassroots movement to transform cultural criticism from reactive, “thumbs up, thumbs down”  reviews and opinions to collaborative discourse that fosters deeper community engagement and audience literacy. We will do this by extending Culturebot’s reach beyond the web into live space with events that model nonhierarchical conversation tactics and seamlessly integrate with our online network.

What are the foundational assumptions that have reliably predicted success in the past that we are now questioning?

The performing arts sector is in a state of transition being framed as crisis. Existing institutional structures no longer correlate to how art is being created and produced, nor do they meet the changed expectations and behaviors of current audiences. This disconnect has led to systemic dysfunction that resists traditional remedies. New methods are needed to question prevailing assumptions and ingrained attitudes in pursuit of new solutions for creating a sustainable arts ecology. Culturebot is leveraging the idea of ”horizontalism” to introduce the transparent and collaborative behaviors of the social web into the arts discourse; and building a grassroots movement to support new thinking and constructive dialogue and creating virtuous cycles of positive change.

What is the evidence that is causing us to question our assumptions?

Between studies confirming overbuilding, audience attrition and varied perceptions of resource scarcity, there is no lack of evidence that prior assumptions have engendered unsustainable practices in the arts. Creating systemic change requires behavioral change predicated on attitudinal change. Attitudinal change begins when diverse stakeholders convene as equals to acknowledge systemic dysfunction and envision new solutions. Current discourse in the sector is mostly unilateral, reactive, and unlikely to lead to positive change. What is needed is a platform for conversation and collaboration where all stakeholders are represented fairly and their concerns respectfully acknowledged in pursuit of mutually beneficial outcomes.

What are the bold new directions we are imagining for our organization?

Culturebot’s longstanding efforts to reframe discourse have been oft-validated as the death of print journalism and the rise of social media reinforce the need for new platforms for meaningful, constructive discourse between artists, audiences, and institutions. Events, always a part of Culturebot’s efforts, have grown increasingly central to our mission. Aware of the value of moving discourse from mediated space to live space and back again, we are attempting to process map the iteration of discourse, building a unified platform to document, disseminate, and grow the discourse. Ideally, this will integrate with emerging technologies of the semantic web, supporting seamless knowledge sharing across life, mediated space and multiple platforms.

Our vision of success

Culturebot.org launched in 2003 as a community engagement initiative for Performance Space 122. Over the past ten years, the scope of our mission has expanded to being a transmedia platform for rigorous, thoughtful discourse in and on the arts. We are where artists, audiences, institutions, and administrators come together to discuss big ideas and issues. We are developing innovative frameworks for criticism, discourse, and cultural contextualization to advance our vision for deepening community engagement, increasing audience literacy and expanding arts awareness. Success for us would be creating a national community of practice to further develop these open, shareable frameworks and proactively implement them in communities nationwide.

Our adaptive challenge

Because Dance Films Association (DFA)’s current archive is inaccessible and there is a demand for more dance film content than we can currently provide from both our core constituency of seasoned and emerging artists and from new audiences such as the film industry, we will meet the demands of this re-energized interest in the dance film genre by re-examining what it means to enliven archival footage in today’s media climate, and will dedicate our time to find a new model that empowers individuals to customize their discovery of dance film, in turn encouraging the use of our archive not only as a library, but as an open-ended, interactive vault of content that will serve a full range of needs from inspiration to entertainment.

Our adaptive challenge

Because of the steadily declining trend in institutional philanthropic giving, Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) will empower American dance artists (and, conversely, the national dance sector at large) by providing the infrastructure, support and encouragement to practitioners in the field to research, develop and implement innovative entrepreneurial artistic and business practices that will enable a renewed direction towards sustainability and longevity in the field.

The vision of Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) is to support the artistry, longevity, and sustainable careers of dance artists in the United States, and to offer a meaningful and flexible range of services and opportunities to artists over extended periods of time. DNA has pursued this vision for nearly 30 years, and is currently implementing a wide-reaching strategy in response to the crisis of the arts philanthropy to encourage, develop and support artists as they incorporate entrepreneurial business initiatives into their practices, which will ensure longevity and sustainability of their careers in the arts.

Our adaptive challenge

Because sustainability for media arts organizations, and the field, requires the emergence of visionaries who can innovate and challenge dominant aesthetics and forms, Global Action Project (GAP) will design and implement pathways to leadership for and by young people that generates a more responsive, nimble, and youth-driven organization that can meet the needs of communities whose stories must be told.

Why it is important that our organization address this challenge, and why now?

GAP is in a moment of organizational transition (i.e., reconfiguring our leadership structure to a co-director model) and beginning a process of creating a new strategic plan. We have also generated much momentum around this issue, having hosted a youth retreat last year focused on the subject and created an intergenerational committee, called The Take Over!, charged with visiting other youth-led organizations to examine their leadership models and make recommendations. These activities support our a holistic approach to sustainability: we consider not just the financial side but the dynamism, strength, and diversity of our leadership, including the degree to which it reflects the communities we serve.

What are the foundational assumptions that have reliably predicted success in the past that we are now questioning?

It has been our working assumption that young people can, and should, step into leadership roles within GAP beyond their creative participation in programs, and that doing so strengthens our organizational culture, ensures relevance of the art form to the next generation, and creates a pipeline for youth to move into staff and educator positions, for example. We have experimented with this in many ways over the years, but have relied on it being an organic process.

What is the evidence that is causing us to question our assumptions?

While our core belief that youth should move into organizational decision-making roles is still central, and affirmed by retreats and dialogue with youth who want to take on more responsibilities and leadership, our assumptions about what the process is has shifted. We must address youth governance as a culture-building strategy that is structured to make participation meaningful and sustainable. For example, it must intentionally include all stakeholders — current youth, alumni, board and staff — in honest conversations about what it takes to foster an authentic process that, by design, has us making decisions together in our practice as media-makers and leaders.

What are the bold new directions we are imagining for our organization?

As we continue to strengthen our social justice framework and partnerships, we know that having youth participants function with more power and responsibility within GAP will allow us to create programming that maintains relevance, enhances community impact, formalizes a leadership pipeline, and expands our grassroots fundraising efforts in new ways. Our goal is to fundamentally change the way that youth relate to GAP so that we are able to thrive with our values in action: we seek a radical reimagining of the central role that youth can play in the future of the organization and in modeling possibilities for the field.

Our vision of success

Global Action Project’s vision of success is a thriving, creative community of youth leaders who make vibrant media for change, and who are the driving force and future of the organization. This includes the implementation of a dynamic cohort of youth who are tasked with evolving our organizational sustainability through their participation in all levels of decision-making within GAP — from creative programming to community-driven fundraising strategies to strategic visioning.

Our adaptive challenge

Our adaptive challenge

What are the foundational assumptions that have reliably predicted success in the past that we are now questioning?

The assumptions that we are questioning are:

1. It is not in the best interest of an art journal (whose readership is well-informed and relatively affluent) to address the social needs of people who are outside of this demographic. In other words, that a successful business model for an art journal must be based on serving our core constituency and their interest in reading about fine art.
2. African and African American visual art generally is only of great interest to black people.
3. The use of visual arts as a means to address social problems is an outdated approach of the 1960s and ‘70s Black Arts Movement.
4. A print publication is sufficient to cover visual arts and inform the visual arts community.

What is the evidence that is causing us to question our assumptions?

The assumption that African American visual art is of greatest interest to black people is countered by the evidence of many Asians downloading the digital IRAAA. The assumption that use of art as a social tool is an outworn Black Power-era approach is countered by a more expansive African American ethos and the art applied to our social issues will emanate from this sensibility, not from an old, black nationalist ideology. Unlike other print media that has had to diversify to compete, the IRAAA staff felt that our print medium could stand alone because art lovers want art tangibly in their lives via a physical publication that can be put on coffee tables and repeatedly perused, but we’ve realized that a web supplement is also needed.

What are the bold new directions we are imagining for our organization?

SB participants will include visual artists and other arts professionals who will grapple with the problem of developing an aesthetic manifesto for application among African-descended people whose appearances range from African to Caucasian. Many visual artists see originality and uniqueness as more pleasing than the banal prettiness of, say, a conventionally-rendered painting of a bowl of fruit. With this perspective, the visual artist/participants will help develop online visual and text content that demonstrates the aesthetic attributes of forms that deviate from conventional norms. Such visual literacy will help young people struggling with self-image develop personas based on their own uniqueness. Additionally, being a socially responsible publisher will be good for business.

Our vision of success

Linking art appreciation and personal empowerment through the Seeing Beauty in Difference project will be a culmination of IRAAA’s credo: “the world through the prism of art.” Beauty can be successfully emulated but beauty that is owned is even more empowering. A self-affirming African American feminine aesthetic is a fundamental aspect in lessening black-white disparities in education, health and income. Achieving success in these areas can derive from the self-empowerment that begins in beauty and extends to love, marriage and strong families. The viability of our communities begins in self-empowerment and so does the viability of the IRAAA as young people attain various forms of connoisseurship.