Arts Motivation

Arts Leadership readers might start to see evidence of a slightly obsessive professional crush on Albert Einstein. He says, "One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires."

In both teaching and performing improvisation, I agree. 

However, this DOES NOT mean to say that when we become involved in an Artistic or Scientific Enterprise as a Leader we should ignore the realistic needs of everyday life and the ever-shifting demands of the public that would support our Enterprise. 

If Leaders ignore the needs of everyday life, we will no longer have the privilege of running sustainable Arts organizations. If Leaders ignore the ever-shifting demands and desires of the public, our work will cease to be relevant to the audience. And then, as an Arts Leader, we will have FAILED at providing that escape for the audience.

Sustainability

"In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create." - David Ogilvy

In the Arts community disagreements about sustainability and subsidization have created a divide between actual working artists and "artists" who wish the world would see what they have to offer. The second group are the people who often fail to engage audiences in the way a business might engage the consumer of its product, so the audience (the Arts consumer) fails to support these people as artists, or the work they produce enough (monetarily) to justify the work itself.

I agree with David Ogilvy.