Q: Describe your role(s) at MAAA
A: I’m a professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in the Master of Arts in Arts Administration Program. I usually teach courses in organizations and strategic planning, legal aspects of the arts, or in public policy in the arts. And occasionally will pick up courses like financial management or audience development and marketing.
Q: From the beginning of your career through now, how have you come to find yourself at the MAAA program?
A: I’ve been here in Bloomington teaching since 2006. For a good sort of ten years prior to my coming here, I’d been doing research on the economics, law, and management of the arts, but I had never been in a program that actually did those things. So I was kind of on my own just studying away at those subjects.
When I was introduced to some members of the O’Neill faculty, they were trying to build up the arts administration program here, which has a long history on campus, if not in the O’Neill School. I just saw this as an ideal opportunity. It’s a great school. It’s a great campus. It’s a great city. The chance to come here and actually be able to teach in the areas I work in was just pretty hard to pass up.
I pursued a Ph.D. in economics at the University of British Columbia. I was not then somebody who knew much about the economics of the arts. I was pretty standard public finance and labor economics in that field. And so I did my Ph.D. I taught a few places in Australia, then in Canada, gradually sort of building myself up as somebody who researched those topics. But when I began university as an undergraduate student, I began as a music student. As a high school student, the arts were my life. It was all music and theater for me. And so I was going to go and get a music degree. I found out it wasn’t really for me. It turns out you need talent to do that, and I was not overly blessed with it. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll just be an economist.” But I always had this love of the arts and when I started to find out that there are actually a lot of really interesting questions in arts policy and so on, I started devoting myself to that. That led to my working more in the arts in terms of doing policy work on copyright, to the point of working on various bargaining problems, even testifying before the Copyright Board of Canada.
Getting into arts administration, I became the dean of an art school in Canada as a result of my research and sort of switched fields and made this my central focus. It still took a while for me to find a place where I would truly be at home working on that, teaching with colleagues who did that as well. That was how I landed at IU. The curriculum is designed to give students a diversity of viewpoints from faculty who come from a diversity of backgrounds.
Q: You were on sabbatical last semester. What was it that you were working on?
A: This was my first sabbatical at IU. I’m writing a book on the moral foundations of public funding for the arts. This is where we ask the question, “Why should the government give money to the arts?” Sort of a very basic question. What happens if there are a lot of people who don’t think it’s a good idea? Do we make them pay those taxes anyway? What happens if people think, “Well, we should just let people decide for themselves what art they like? The government should not be sort of picking favorites and funding this or that.” We talk about whether we should actually think in terms of communities rather than individuals. Questions of multiculturalism. If the government is going to fund the arts, is there one national culture that ought to be promoted or a diversity of culture? There’s a lot of tricky issues there, ones I’ve sort of wrestled with for a long time. My classes have had a chance to see me wrestle with these topics because I don’t know all the answers. And so much of the book will be drawn from ideas that I’ve been trying to explore in class, but now it’s actually time to try and put some of it down in writing. If all goes well, in 2023 we might see something between the covers.
Q: There’s a lot of misconception around what Arts Administration is. How do you explain it to your family or people you may meet that don’t understand what “Arts Administration” means?
A: The way I think of it is we have artists who create works of visual art, who create performances, who create films. We have a public audience who are sometimes artists themselves who want to experience those works. They want to enjoy those performances.
If they want to experience painting and sculpture and film and dance, somebody has to bring them together. There’s no sort of magic out there by which artists and audiences can just easily connect, and everything happens, and it’s beautiful. It actually takes people to do the work, the actual job of making the connection happen, of taking a group of 100 musicians and saying, “This can be an orchestra, this can perform for a group of people in a performance hall.”
It takes a lot of people to make that happen. Arts administrators are doing this invaluable service to the arts and to society in bringing artists and audiences together. And that’s what I think arts administrators do.
Q: And how would you describe Arts Administration to a child?
A: I might use the analogy of a grocery store and I might say, you know, farmers grow food and we eat food. But there’s an awful lot of people involved in getting those blueberries from the field to our breakfast table. A lot of people have to do a lot of different jobs so that it can get from the farm to our table. And arts administrators are doing the same thing, except they’re doing it not with blueberries, they’re doing it with art.
Artists make art. We want to enjoy it. But a lot of people have to work to sort of make it happen so that we can do that, so that we can see the painting hanging on the wall, so that we can see the performance of The Adventures of Frog and Toad that we went to.
Q: When you happen to meet someone who is considering a degree in Arts Administration, what would you say to them?
A: If somebody were considering the degree and I wanted to talk to them about, “Okay, should you do this or not?” I guess I would want to be sure that they understood the deep importance of what this is. The arts matter in a vital way to our society, to our individual lives, to our outlook. They are always under threat.
We live in a world where there are constant distractions. I would say the smartphone actually poses the biggest challenge to the arts of any other invention I can think of in terms of it’s absorbing people’s minds all the time so that we’re doing something really vital and saying we have to keep this going.
We have to preserve this culture. We have to bring into the world new works of art, new poets, new composers, new sculptors. It takes arts administrators to really work to make sure that this continues to happen, that people have this culture we have created and that it continues to grow and develop. I think arts administrators have to know that that’s what we’re trying to do here.
It’s not a trivial thing. It’s actually a vitally important thing to how we live and how we think about the world and how we think about ourselves. And so I would say in the arts, administration has to really want to do that. Right? You have to really want to do that. It is a job that often involves a lot of work, a lot of long hours, and sometimes a lot of frustration.
That requires a real diverse set of skills to be able to do it. You have to know about a lot of different things to be an arts administrator. That’s why the MAAA has all these different classes we have people take. They have to be ready for that. This is not not the easiest job in the world, but it is vital. And if they really want to pursue that and they want a life saying, “I want to be close to the arts, I want to be part of the arts as a way to do it.” This is a degree that can take them there.
Q: What advice would/do you give to arts administration students just entering MAAA?
A: The advice I would give to a new MAAA student is take it all in. You’re here for a short time, right? When you go out in the work world, you have what I sometimes call the tyranny of the present. You just arrive at work, you open up your email, 126 unread messages. You have people knocking on your door saying, “We’ve got a real problem over here. Can you please give us a hand. We need your advice.” You’ve just got a lot of things going on. Managers are busy, right? And distracted. The degree here is your real chance to not have that. It’s your chance to talk with people, to think about big ideas, to think about the very tricky, complex questions in the arts, to really explore things that you have never thought much about. This is your big chance to do that. And so I would say to any new MAAA student, take it all in and just embrace this. Make it your life for two years. Make the most of it because we don’t get these chances very often. So, really take advantage of that.
With your fellow students, you can do so many things together. You can explore the arts. You’re on a tremendously arts rich campus. If you come from the visual arts world, experience all the music that this place has to offer. If you come from the music world, start taking in theater and dance and the art museum. Take it all in.
Q: Who in Arts Administration do you look up to, and think current Arts Administrators should know more about/look into, and why?
A: I’ve had different mentors in my life. I mean, we have tremendous arts administrators here. Professor Gahl-Mills has run orchestras and arts councils. Any student who has had her will say what an influence her thinking and her approach has had on their lives. I don’t doubt that at all. I’ve worked with a lot of people in the policy area. Mark Schuster, out of MIT’s Urban Planning Department, was a very big influence on me. The people I most admire are the ones who essentially bring a human touch to arts administration; really thinking about how the arts affect communities and individuals not at some 30,000-foot level, but right on the ground in terms of people’s lives and how we live and see the world. Arts administrators who think in those very human terms about what they do are the ones that I most look up to.
Q: What books are you currently reading? (can be for professional reasons or personal enjoyment) Is there a particular book you’d recommend to a young arts administrator?
A: I read a lot. So, I’ll just say that. I read a lot of philosophy. Some of it is in connection with the book I’m writing, but some of it is just trying to better understand the world. I’ve recently been reading about the philosophy of novelist Iris Murdoch. I really enjoy her novels. I’m currently reading one of her books called The Bell. It’s one of the novels on my shelf. Another novel I’m just starting is an older American novel by Henry Roth called Call It Sleep. A place I’ve had the pleasure to visit a couple of times, and I would highly recommend to anybody is the Tenement Museum in New York City. This is on the Lower East Side, and essentially it is amazingly preserved and restored apartments of the people who lived 100 years ago from the very impoverished immigrants in the Lower East Side of New York. Call It Sleep is a novel set exactly in those tenements. And so I thought, “Okay, it’s time to read this now that I’ve actually seen these places.”
I read a lot of fiction and philosophy. I try to keep up with economics, not in the sense of what is the most current economic research, but more big-picture things. What are trends in inequality? What are trends in the workplace? What’s happening out there? How do we think about this?
The science of economics has a lot of flaws. It can sometimes be very narrow in its outlook, and I don’t want to be somebody who gets trapped in that narrow path. I want to think about criticisms of how people do economics, and how it’s come to dominate a lot of thinking. I personally think that arts policy people overestimate the power of economics to contribute to debates, and so I read a lot of that as well.
Q: What’s on your arts/cultural bucket list? (i.e. concert, venue, etc.)
A: I think I would like to experience more of the world’s cultural heritage. I’ve not had a chance to really experience more ancient heritage and buildings around the world, but also current cultural traditions. I would love to go to Mali and hear the very unique genre of music they have developed with electric guitars.
I would love to experience more of Latin American culture, which I haven’t had enough chances to do in my life. World cultures would be one thing that is really on my list. That would be probably the top actually.
Q: Favorite work of art (any art form, genre)
A: In high school, I played the French horn, so I’ve always liked Mozart’s horn concertos for a symphony. I have a favorite which is Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fifth Symphony written during the darkest days of the Second World War. Very inspiring, very beautiful.
I like a lot of 1950s jazz. Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue would be a lot of people’s favorite jazz album, but it’s also one of mine. Also Art Pepper and John Coltrane. In pop music, from the time I was four years old, I’ve been a Beatles fan so that has lasted.
A lot of the California sound of the late sixties and early seventies. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are my fellow Canadians so I really enjoy their music. As well as just some good old rock and roll.
In visual art, it’s a real range. If I think of what prints I wanted to make sure I had in my room at home, its David Hockney’s Mount Fuji with Flowers, which I just have always loved, and I cannot explain why. I just do. It’s a beautiful painting.
There’s a lot of authors, I’m not sure I can list them all. I’ve always liked the Russian classics, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev. I’ve enjoyed many English authors. Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell, my favorite author is probably George Orwell.
Q: We are coming up to O’Neill’s 50th anniversary and looking forward to the next 50 years in the art world. What do you hope the next 50 years will look like?
A: If I were to have one hope, and we are really taking steps to try to develop this, it’s that this is a rare public affairs school that has the word environmental in its name. I think integrating our arts programs or arts administration programs with environmental management and sustainability is going to be critical for not only the world at large, but the art world, as well. Really being able to have that cross-fertilization between the arts and environmental work. I would love to see that in the next 50 years.