I began my professional life as an arts management educator just over 20 years ago, in Fall 1995. My focus, since then, has been rather specific: effective management of (mostly) professional (mostly) nonprofit organizations that produce, preserve, present, and support creative human expression. After so many years, it’s embarrassing to admit that I’ve missed a dramatic blind spot in teaching, management, and organizational theory until now:
Humans have bodies.
Flickr: Eva Rinaldi
And yes, I know that I have a body. This isn’t news to me. But what has become suddenly obvious is that the founding logics of both the academic and business world assume that we don’t have bodies, or that bodies are inconsequential to personal, professional, or civic life.
Sir Ken Robinson has remarked on this aspect of academia, and particularly the professors therein:
There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads…. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads…. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.
And sure, when you choose to be a university professor, you’re selecting a life of the mind…where you spend extra attention and bring focused intention to the intellect. I’m cool with that. Again, this isn’t news to me. Professors have long been accused of detachment from reality.
But the news to me is how pervasive this detachment is, not only in academia, but also in business.
On the business side, scholar Antonio Strati observes this bias throughout the history of organizational theory and management studies. And I know I’m talking about theory again, but I’ve worked with enough businesses and professionals to know that these assumptions are commonly held. Strati makes his point by describing the kind of insane working world these shared theories imply:
…as soon as a human person crosses the virtual or physical threshold of an organization, s/he is purged of corporeality, so that only his or her mind remains. Once a person has crossed this threshold, therefore, s/he is stripped of both clothing and body and consists of pure thought, which the organization equips with work instruments and thus reclothes. When the person leaves the organization, the mind sheds these work instruments and resumes its corporeality, and with it the perceptive faculties and aesthetic judgement that yield aesthetic understanding of reality, but only in the society lying outside the physical or virtual walls of the organization. (Strati, Antonio. Organization and Aesthetics. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 1999, p.3)
Even in academia, that doesn’t sound like my institution, nor my job. And thank goodness for that. In my work, I’m informed and deeply affected by my physical environment, by all of my senses and how they make sense with each other, by the muscle memories of my external life, by the sense of myself and my peers occupying space together.
This brain-but-not-body bias is not just bizarre, it can be insidious. Imagine, for example, you decided that a primary goal of public school education, or university education, was to prepare individuals for the work force, to be productive citizens through employment or entrepreneurship or the like. You would draw on your assumptions about work, organizations, and industry (or ask industry for their assumptions, which would carry this bias too), and design a system that prepares them for that impossible world.
Pure intellect, with participants transported by bodies but unaffected by them, working in systems of pure intellect (sure, complicated by politics and power and such, but all described in rational/cognitive terms).
You’d emphasize the skills of reason — like reading, writing, math — and discount anything sensuous or aesthetic. You might keep the arts, but mostly those elements that appeared to build practical skills, or elements that facilitated learning of the ‘important’ cognitive capacities. But you’d discount anything, including art, that strayed too far into the senses or the physical self. Even further, you might flag those things as contrary to intellect or reason, distractions perhaps, and want them out entirely.
Now, imagine you did this for generations.
As an alternative, let’s suppose you believed public school and university education to be intended for something MORE than employment…for whole and purposeful people, with civic vision, global understanding, deep curiosity, and the agency to integrate those things into their lives and societies.
Even then, your deep-seated theories of the world might tilt toward intellect. And you would design an intervention to prepare students for a disconnected and disembodied universe that doesn’t actually exist.
Now, imagine you wanted to design and lead an arts organization, a durable collective effort committed to creative human expression, not only of the mind (although sure), but of the whole person or the whole community. As passionate radicals, you might even admit that the artists and audiences you serve have bodies and complex aesthetic selves. But you likely wouldn’t extend that admission to yourself or your team, your board or your business partners. When doing business, you would want to behave ‘like a business.’ And people in businesses don’t have bodies.
Imagine an organization that disregarded this rather essential bit of human reality. Or perhaps you don’t have to imagine it. Perhaps you already work there.
The first step in addressing a bias is to acknowledge you have one. I’ve glimpsed it in myself. I’m admitting I have a problem. I’m stumbling to correct it. And now that I’m looking, I’m sensing it all around me.
Hmm. I’m thinking my last comment about body/mind dualities hit a nerve. Anyway, I think there are many parts of business that do acknowledge the bodies of employees. The issue is not that bodies are ignored, but that a highly divided and compartmentalized relationship between the body and mind is created. In business, for example, many forms of manual labor are viewed only as corporeal. Thought is often discouraged because it can create dissonance in the organization’s disciplined and highly regimented factory floors.
One need only look at the authoritarianism, regimentation, and steep hierarchies of the symphony orchestra — that world where the conductor is mind and the musicians bodies — to see how deeply the Western tradition of body/mind dualities informs virtually every aspect of our cultural identity.
The most extreme example, of course, is the military. The common soldiers are conditioned to be stupid, to be bodies only, while the officer corps fills the role of mind. The Army’s well-known drinking culture is a manifestation of this, and keeps the lower ranks in their place. The Prussian military even developed the concept of Kadavergehorsmakeit which literally translated means “cadaver obedience.” These views of labor weakened as Western democracies evolved. As workers increased their rights and protections, free trade policies increasingly moved labor to overseas sweatshops. The view of workers as solely bodies and management as solely mind thus continues.
I’ve also noticed that many corporations work to create a competitive atmosphere among the young guns in their top administration, and that they develop programs to keep them physically fit. They are often supplied with workout rooms directly on the premises. Sometimes groups of them are sent to retreats where they are indoctrinated with corporate spirit combined with physical training. These corporations recognize that a strong body can more effectively carry a viciously ambitious mind, and that a strong body even enhances the aggressiveness with which these employees serve their corporation.
At the same time, other aspects of human embodiment and holistically complete humanity are suppressed. These include holistic concepts of ethical and moral behavior, as well as concepts such as compassion and generosity. In a world where only the bottom line truly counts, successful corporate practices are predicated on the suppression of a holistically complete human.
This is the immense problem you and Dianne are confronting: beauty is an anathema to capitalism. How can capitalism be reconceived, or somehow mitigated, to allow for holistically complete people with fully integrated body/mind identities that represent the true beauty of what human beings are? What special role can arts organizations play in creating that vision of the human and society?
Part of this disjuncture, I speculate, is avoidance of Freud and others who uncover our hidden motivations and uncivil desires. Science above all presents itself as purity standing above this sweaty competition and ill feeling, but success as a scientist requires some savvy street-smarts, which I for one deeply lacked as a youth.
Speaking of Freud and our hidden motivations, I think there is a gendered aspect to these new perspectives about mind/body dichotomies. In our culture mind is coded as masculine and the body as feminine. Traditionally, men have been pushed out of their bodies, while the corporeality of women has been stressed to the exclusion of the intellect. As women entered the world of the intellect, they were thus more inclined to bring their bodies with them, thus creating a trend toward more holistic views of human identity. With this comes more integral forms of thought that see an inherent unity between reason and beauty. That streetwise scientist thinks with his or her nose, they play the violin with the hope they will intuit something about unified field theory, they massage their body with a long walk in a lovely forest with the hope that insights about abstract problems will float to the surface of their minds. They embrace string theory not only because it creates interesting mathematical models, but also because the theory is beautiful.
The ancient Greeks saw little separation between beauty and scientific truth. In their Pythagorean world, mathematics even defined the laws of spirituality. Music, as George Crumb once noted, became a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulses. It might be interesting to contemplate how often beauty has led to scientific truth. And of course, how often beauty has led us down the garden path, even if probably not as often as reason…..
Thank you for bringing this concept forth.
Thank you for bringing this concept forth.
The video artist Bill Viola has said “The body is the unconscious mind”.
And I might add, the “research and development department” of our mind. The creative mind draws from the body with its billions of sensing cells, including our microbiome.
And there is compelling neurological research to support this: our two types of memory in learning, implicit & explicit, roughly correspond to the body & mind relationship. I have been researching this concept for the past ten years through my website.
Any practical “physical” solutions to discuss or is this just another academic intellectual studied concept? As a Broadway manager (for-profit and non-profit) of over 180 shows, I have long found arts management education lacking, hoping to improve the practical, experiential education of future arts administrators by teaching at NYU’s School of Professional Studies, guest- teaching, and writing “The Business of Broadway” (Allworth Press 2015). “Good” Management is very creative and physical. Theory does little to prepare our students. Great professors challenge students with real world experiences of crises-solutions, resource-building, backstage activities, extreme budgeting, and creative solutions to match Mgmt history and theory. And that is by nature- active and a full-body education.
You suggest that the practical problems you mention are “by nature- active and a full-body education.” Not necessarily, in the holistic way body/mind integration is being discussed here. Excessive pragmatism can simply lead to hard-nosed sharpies who are anything but moral — something already a bit too common in the NYC mindset. Mind/body integration implies in its fullest and most valuable meanings something much more holistic. The approach is still relatively new and at this point requires broad intellectual discussion to explore and develop the concepts..
Without commenting on all you say, I wiil state that NY theatre managers are the most ethical, honest people I’ve met in life. I hope you don’t mean to talk about NY like Ted Cruz did recently. That said, I am in favor of teaching ethics and philosophy along with the practical. But without the practical, most theatres will continue being in debt and begging for money. There is much more to analyze and change about arts management.
Even if the NY theater community has been reformed since the big scandals with ticket scalping in which the theaters themselves were involved (see link below,) the arts world in NY is cut throat, and even takes a certain pride in that ethos. How does that atmosphere shape cultural identity? For more specific concepts, we might question the ethics of ticket prices for Broadway shows, or that the stage hands at Carnegie have an average salary of $400,000 per year as do several at the Met; that the orchestra members at the Met make $200,000 per year plus $85,000 in benefits; that that the Met’s Director, Peter Gelb, makes $1.8 million; and that Clive Gillison makes a similar sum at Carnegie, that the ticket prices at the Met are on average 3 to 4 times higher than for similar houses in Europe, etc., etc. And all of this in non-profit organizations. NYC provides an excellent context for discussing moral and socially holistic concepts of organizing the arts.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/28/theater/state-presses-inquiry-into-corruption-in-broadway-ticket-sales.html
Mitch, thanks for your comment and your concern. I can assure you that the master’s students in the Arts Management major at American University are thoroughly trained in and prepared for what you call the practical skills of arts management. Managing and motivating people, supporting the logistics and the spirit of the artistic process, building a budget and living by it, engaging and securing resources in their many forms (earned or contributed, borrowed or adapted), finding and securing an audience. These are what I would call the ‘craft’ of arts management…essential, practical, applied skills that lead to carefully considered and fully realized enterprise. I certainly don’t, and don’t plan to, develop arts managers who only engage the aesthetic.
At the same time, I’m convinced that exceptional management craft is necessary but not sufficient to collective effort in the arts. And this is what I’m exploring in these posts, and in my new class at AU (which is an elective, not a core requirement).
Graduating students who can’t work immediately, at the highest levels of professionalism, in their chosen field would be a deep disservice to them, and to the disciplines they serve. All I’m asking is if there’s also an opportunity to engage the aesthetic self, and to think of the process of complex art-making as itself an aesthetic effort. After all, we’re not just making the budget work, we’re also making meaning.
I think I understand better and I can’t agree more. My point is that I am constantly meeting younger folk who love the artform, the purpose and meaning of their work, yet cannot translate that into the practical side that helps them practice the love of their lives. I am still a lover of my artform and it gives me great pleasure and purpose. I still wish the mentoring I’ve received since my school days had prepared me better for the real world as well. This is not a complaint about any one school or teaching technique, only an observation about the people I’ve interviewed, hired and worked with.
And I will always defend the people I’ve worked with because they make me proud to know them. Any complaints about how much a few people earn has very little to do with the highly unionized world of 95% of my fellow arts administrators in NYC. Especially since it’s super expensive to live and survive in NYC. It has nothing to do with NYC managerial ethics. Apples and oranges.
Thanks for the challenging thoughts. I appreciated them and will continue to ponder them.
What we often see in discussions of arts administrators is how they narrowly frame their field of activity and thought to circumscribe themselves from the social issues that surround the arts in America. Lines are drawn, sometimes rather arbitrarily, so that they only have to look at apples and not those troubling oranges. They prefer to conveniently situation themselves in the mono-diet of American cultural plutocracy.
The discussion here is specifically involved with looking at the larger picture outside of the narrow framing in which arts administrators take refuge. It is an attempt to look at the holistic and moral issues that could be improved to give arts administration itself more beauty. The extremely uneven distribution of the arts in America, and the concentration of funding in a few financial centers, which leads to exorbitant salaries, are directly related to these issues. We see for example, that the Met’s budget is twice that of its European counterparts, and yet the USA ranks 39th in the world for opera performances per capita, behind every European country. We see that consumes enormous sums while the USA has only 3 cities in the top 100 for opera performances per year. We see that the CEO of the LA Phil is paid $1.8 million per year while the average yearly salary for a regional orchestra musician is only $13k per year – even though they often serve metro populations of a million people. Problems like these cannot be prettified, which creates challenges for Andrew’s line of thought. Hence the sudden lurch back within the confines of safety.
When we frame these problems of cultural neglect so that they are outside our field of genuine engagement, and at the same time aestheticize this artificially rarified view, we banalize social injustice. – what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han labeled the pornigraphicization of beauty. (See my comments in Andrew’s previous blog for more details about this.) From these perspectives, we see time and again that the way arts administrators narrowly frame their work is not the solution, but part of the problem. And of course, as part of this narrow framing, they meet these concerns with a deafening silence. After all, they’re just oranges……
Thanks, Andrew, for this compelling post. Much of the current literature on organizational leadership, supported by scientific research, stresses the importance of the mind-body connection for optimizing achievement — the need for exercise and healthy eating, the need for solid sleep, the need for time away from the office and mobile devices for self rejuvenation. (Even Steve Jobs made walking an art form to inspire innovation.) There’s also a growing emphasis on the workplace and how its design supports or impedes productivity. Small shifts in attitude (from leaders) about work/life balance, coupled with small changes in the workplace environment (paint colors, organic materials, quiet vs. communal spaces) can make a world of difference towards integrating heart, mind and soul.
This is, of course, only allowed to a certain extent. “Heart and soul” can seriously weaken the bottom line. A good example is Apple Computer’s slogan of “do no harm” while it runs sweat shops in China. Holism is reduced to a marketing and PR slogan.
Heart and soul would also move the arts in America away from its undeomcratic system of cultural plutocracy where the arts are centered in only a few financial centers where the wealthy live. Talk of more holistic and moral approaches to management, especially in the arts, can quickly lead to smug, righteous, new-age hypocrisy.
There are different issues being discussed here. I’m confused by the comment about disgustingly high salaries which is an American problem, not specifically an arts Mgmt issue. And yes it would be great to correct the imbalance. But how does mind-body help do that? Yet someone else here writes about Steve Jobs talking walks. What am I missing in this conversation? I know that I have no power over the money available for any theatre or production. My ethical core helps me make hard, financial, humane choices where possible. That’s both practical knowledge and ethics. Is that’s what this is about, then I agree.
All that you say is true. It all comes down to practicality and caring. Andrew’s comments are part of an earlier discussion initiated last year by him and Dianne Ragsdale about applying concepts of beauty not only to art, but also to its means of production. The basic concept, if I understand it correctly, is to take a more humane and holistic approach to arts administration. In the latest blog, this idea took a turn toward body/mind integration as a manifestation of this sort of holism. The terms and concepts are new and no one knows how to really express them, so we’re all confused, not just you. No one fully understands yet how these ideas might be applicable in practice, but the ideas seem worth exploring, at least in an academic context.