As some of you know, I’ve been thinking about what cultural institutions might gain if they let their own personalities and motivations shine through a little more. Maybe that’s why I’m seeing examples of subjectivity everywhere, including places far from concert halls or science museums.

I was camping last week with my family and some others in the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Our group had arranged for a visit by the “raptor lady,” Gayle Bruntjens, who runs Upper Michigan Raptor Rehab with her husband. Working with a few volunteers and a network of other nonprofits and government agencies, they take in injured eagles, hawks, and owls from all over the U.P., give them veterinary care, and eventually re-release the ones that heal.

The less fortunate birds — victims of accidents or human abuse, some of it mind-boggling — end up residing permanently with Gayle and making unexpectedly adorable appearances in her educational presentations at schools, camps, etc.

On the surface, her talk to our group was just like the animal demonstrations that go on at nature centers, zoos, and science museums all over. She explained what differentiates the raptor family from other birds, told us what to do if we see an injured or orphaned bird, helped a few hawks and owls out of their wicker hampers to show around to us, and gave us some information about her nonprofit and its mission.

But before all that, she did something that I rarely see in more established, professionalized settings. She told us, in personal and forthrightly emotional terms, how she got into this work and what it means to her. She told us her story, as context for the birds’.

And it happens to be a good one: beating the odds on a rare form of brain cancer, switching careers to a dead-end night job that gave her time to dabble in genealogy and discover her Native American heritage, and serendipitously running into a friend who needed a hand with some wounded birds of prey. She now sees her work as a fruition, even maybe a destiny, and she feels connected to the birds on a spiritual level as well as an ecological one. In Anishnabe teaching, raptors are the Creator’s messengers, and Gayle sees herself as being a messenger for the messengers. ...

Sarah and I were in Phoenix these last few days for the Visitor Studies Association conference, where the debates ran well into the night over drinks. At the “marketplace” session on Thursday, we posed a question to our fellow attendees. Here‘s the data we collected…and an invitation to add your own.

Phoenix was hot, both meteorologically and politically. But in the cool confines of the Wyndham, we set up our table (see photos, a first for the firm) next door to our friends from Randi Korn & Associates. I scrawled this question on a flip chart:

“In your humble opinion, what should the visitor studies field be thinking more about?”

As people stopped by, Sarah and I invited them to write short responses on another pad. Here’s what we got. I‘ve re-ordered the responses to group and link the ideas, but left the wording verbatim.

The visitor studies field should be thinking more about…

• Visitor studies as a tool for organizational change → need to work with CEOs
  

• Accessing boards

• Influence

• Organizational culture

This was a frequent theme at the conference this year. Museum evaluators and other visitor researchers naturally want their work to make a difference to the institutions they inhabit (or work with as consultants). And they’re thinking big about visitors, impacts, values, and effectiveness — thinking in ways that could really help those organizations. But the fact is that most trustees and museum directors, not to mention many museum and informal learning professionals in other disciplines and departments, are kept at a distance from visitor studies because of institutional hierarchies, silos, and communication dynamics. So the field feels a little stymied, and its members are asking themselves what they should be doing to educate their colleagues and better communicate the value of their work. (Note this year’s conference theme: understanding the public value of visitor studies.) ...

I've written a bit here about the downsides of our highly professionalized cultural sector (the lack of passion, personality, and sense of community). Is it my imagination, or is the non-professional side of the arts becoming bigger and healthier while the professional institutions continue to struggle? 

Okay, that’s a little black-and-white. The two can coexist, of course, and they’re even necessary to each other (which I'll come back to in a moment). But there's more evidence every day that non-professional approaches are succeeding in new ways, and in new corners. Consider what caught my eye when I came back after the July 4th weekend and leafed through a few days’ worth of the New York Times:
 

• An article about a cool place in Brooklyn called the 3rd Ward, which appears to be a blend of arts collective, small-business incubator, design and craft workshop, DIY school, and party venue. Which spawned a restaurant. “True to their mission, they created a real community,” says someone from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce in the article, and it sure sounds that way: the people who use the space are all members, and they range from amateurs taking a woodworking class to established designers, craftsmen, artists, and entrepreneurs. 
  
  So the hobbyists and the pros work side by side in an atmosphere where that distinction isn’t particularly relevant. Which may be why the 4-year-old experiment is such a success. “Demand was so great that last year 3rd Ward opened its overflow space in Williamsburg, across from where its Goods restaurant now sits.” This will be my first stop next time I’m in New York.

• An interview with Gareth Malone, host of “The Choir,” a BBC reality show in which Malone struggles to create top-tier choirs and opera singers of kids from the most unlikely, hardscrabble schools. Like the meteorically popular American show, Glee, Malone’s show presents music as something everyday people do, not just highly-paid virtuosos in tuxedos. There’s music in all of us, it seems to say: we don’t have to farm it out to professionals.
  
  And like the much-discussed Venezuelan model of music education, el Sistema, The Choir has a deep social agenda. The lives of a few young participants on the show have apparently been transformed, not by eat-your-vegetables exposure to classical music’s greatness but by the hard work and sheer heart involved. “[R]eally, it’s about getting people to aspire to come together to learn something,” says Malone.

• A roundup of big issues in the design field today, in which the biggest of them all is how to “empower” people to contribute to the design of the things they use: in other words, “co-designing, customization, design democracy, participation, individualization and whatever else it is called.” Some museums have begun thinking about their exhibitions in just that way, thanks largely to Nina Simon’s work on participatory cultural experiences. (Her blog and new book will be of interest to all kinds of people in the arts and culture, not just museum professionals). ...

You may remember a quote from Holly in my recent post about “pipeline” vs. “parallel” strategies for young artsgoers. Holly knows this turf far better than I do: she runs Seattle Center Teen Tix, a thriving program that lets teens buy $5 tickets to almost any arts organization in the Seattle area. And she has a secret wish.

Guest blogger Holly Arsenault is the program manager of Seattle Center Teen Tix and has taught theater and writing to students from kindergarten through college. She is also a playwright and dramaturg. I asked her whether engaging young people requires a shift in artistic programming to accommodate their distinct needs, or whether we can attract them to existing programming with targeted marketing messages, social events before or after the program, etc. Here’s her full response:

Ha! Yes. That is the question. I’ve always said (actually, I’ve rarely said, but I’ve always thought) that my secret, subversive goal with Teen Tix was to drag the median age of Seattle arts audiences down enough that it would start to have an impact on programming.

I’ll tell you this: if you were to look at our show-by-show numbers, you’d see that there’s no amount of packaging I can do that’s as impactful on our ticket sales to teens as a show simply being compelling to teenagers. Of course, I see a difference in our numbers when I’ve done a good job of illuminating for our members why a particular show is relevant to them in a way that might not have been apparent, but I can’t make something that’s clearly irrelevant seem like it is.

Nor would I want to. The last thing you want is to convince a young person to go see something by claiming that it’s something that it’s not, then have them bored or alienated by the experience. So, despite our success at growing this audience, I do spend a lot of time wishing that I had better (meaning: more youth-friendly) material to work with.

That said, I do find that teen audiences, particularly at the younger end of the age spectrum, tend to be more conservative in their tastes than you might expect. I think some of them have a preconceived notion of what an arts experience should look like, and they like to have that notion confirmed before they become interested in branching out and trying new things. ...