Hacking arts management is a concept that I have been knocking around for some time, trying to shape into a pragmatic engine for pedagogy and practice in connection to my faculty position in an arts management program at a public university. What do I mean by “hacking arts management”? Hacking, in the criminalized cyberworld sense, refers to taking advantage (or leveraging) vulnerabilities—usually in security systems or software. This is, unfortunately, the dominant prominent popular meaning of the word, and many commentators on digital culture have sought to push other, more complimentary or positive meanings out into public discourse. One such meaning is “to tinker with” something: an electronic device, a toy, a household object that doesn’t quite do what you need it to in the way you want it to. Another related meaning is “to improve” something, make it better by fiddling with the innards or reconfiguring the underlying structure (software or hardware, in the broadest senses). Combining these two notions of “hacking” moves toward a “better living through tinkering” ethos that resonates with my thinking about arts management education and work.
As a professional field, arts management comprises a broad set of skills, responsibilities, and settings. It is not a singular or monolithic domain of work, as any arts manager can attest to, and the development of skills, literacy, and competency when it comes to all of the components of administering arts—financial, programming, technology, advocacy, policy—is an ongoing process. “Hacking” in the professional realm is often part of this process: modulating or altering existing practices and systems in order to get things done more efficiently, quickly, or (in many cases) with a diminishing set of resources (often people or money). This is not the world I work in directly, nor is my observation necessarily “new” in that anyone working in the arts and culture sector (especially the non-profit area) can confirm that you often have to figure out how to get something done in a constantly shifting economic, technological, political, and social environment. But naming the process “hacking,” or at least attempting to identify an ethos of hacking within the process, does get me closer to the world that I do work in: university-based training for arts managers.
The program I teach in at the University of Oregon has just begun its twentieth year and is dedicated to educating “cultural sector leaders and participants to make a difference in communities.” For the past seven years or so, I have taught and mentored graduate students in this program through a combination of coursework, research advising, academic guidance, and collaborative field-based practice. Ostensibly brought onto the faculty to oversee a “media management” area of concentration for the Master’s program, I’ve worked hard to make sure that all students coming into the program—those with an interest in media and technology, as well as those who abhor the stuff—build a fluency for the many ways that media technologies, as well as cultural patterns of use and value around them, intersect with arts management work today. As such, I’ve resisted the siloing of “media” into its own fenced-in zone of specialization and sought to get students to see how digital literacies can cut across arts institutions, programming practices, and opportunities for participation. Toward this end, I’ve mad moves to diminish the “media management” area of concentration and instead push the content into the core of our graduate curriculum—not as a galvanized topic, per se, but as an integrated awareness and structure of understanding (with apologies to Raymond Williams and his “structures of feeling”).
What does this all have to do with “hacking arts management”? In tackling the broad issue of “media technologies in arts management,” I seek to strike a balance of critical evaluation and step-by-step “how to” such that students learn through thinking and doing. Something I encourage is ‘tinkering’ with ideas and systems: with the kinds of arts programming and engagement strategies we read about in classes, with the approaches to fund raising and audience development that come out of case studies, and with the technologies and tools that surround us on a daily basis. In encouraging tinkering across ideas and things (digital or otherwise), I hope to instill an ethos of hacking in the emerging arts leaders coming out of our program. Whether they are technologically -phobic or -philic, my aim is to get all students conversant with and confident about intentional exploration of possibility. I want them to be able to “exploit” opportunities (rather than vulnerabilities or weaknesses) in the systems and structures through which arts management occurs, and I want them to do this in order to serve constituents and communities through whom art happens.
I will return to this idea in a forthcoming series of posts, as I hope to turn it into an essay of some sort…In other words, stay tuned!
BTW, I wrote most of the above on 750words.com, a cool writing tool a friend recently recommended.