Will the Real 20UNDER40 Please Stand Up…

The June 14 & 21 double issue of the New Yorker announced it’s highly anticipated “20 Under 40” list of the twenty most promising literary artists under the age of forty.  Because this well-hyped list has to do with “artists” (and more importantly because it is in the New Yorker) several people

The cover image of the New Yorker's Summer Fiction issue featuring the twenty most promising literary artists under the age of forty.

have asked me how I feel about this.  My answer is—I feel just fine about it.

The New Yorker “list” is a lot different from the 20UNDER40 publication.  What’s so different? The primary difference is the fact that, well, it’s a list.  20UNDER40 is an anthology of critical discourse that highlights not the most promising artists under forty, but instead, twenty essays that epitomize the sometimes radical, practical, controversial, or even commonsense ideas about the future of the broader arts sector that arts professionals under the age of forty are thinking of and talking about.

Lists like the New Yorker’s are quite common.  They highlight individuals whereas the 20UNDER40 publication highlights ideas.  While the people behind each chapter in the 20UNDER40 anthology are indeed significant individuals in the field, it is the ideas that they bring forth and the conversations they are sure to incite that are the primary focus of the publication.  I have full confidence that each of the authors represented within the 20UNDER40 anthology has a strong career in front of them, and I stand firmly behind these individuals.  However, it has been the primary concern of the publication to not create celebrities, but instead to enter new thought into the discussion around the future of the arts sector with the ultimate goal of changing the way we make, experience, administer, educate, fund, research, and advocate for the arts in the 21^st Century.

Despite the commonsense behind 20UNDER40’s focus on domain changing ideas from individuals vs. the New Yorker’s focus on the individuals themselves, the New Yorker list-approach to highlighting young talent is the more popular manner of investigating the future of any given profession.

How popular?

I’ve got a Google alert set on “20UNDER40.” Every night a complex algorithm trolls the Internet for mention of any combination of 20+UNDER+40 and sends me an email detailing what it’s found.  Seldom does a night go by where I don’t get something, and usually I get quite a lot—sometimes as many as a dozen or more links.

What’s all this 20 Under 40 business about?  Largely it’s information from the corporate or financial sectors printed in local newspapers or specified professional journals: Miami’s 20 most influential real estate agents, Cleveland’s 20 most promising brokers, America’s 20 most experimental pastry chefs—you name it, they’re all under the age of forty.

When I first set the Google alert it was a means to track mention of the 20UNDER40 project on blogs and websites across the country and around the globe (if you’ve blogged about this project, I likely know about it).

What’s interesting is how much information the Google alert has turned up.  Mainly, the idea that highlighting the twenty most whatevers under the age of forty is no new concept—and certainly nothing to get upset about.  Why then when 20UNDER40 released its call for chapter proposals just over a year ago did so many people in the arts sector freak out? If I had to venture a guess, I would say because in the arts—particularly in the non-profit arts sector—we’re not good at recognizing anybody at any age and there are so few opportunities to bring new voices into the discussion.  So when an opportunity does open up—and there are people who are excluded—there’s gonna be some noise.

Overall, while I find the concept behind the New Yorker list of the twenty most promising literary artists under the age of forty to be ultimately flawed (as all such “lists” are), I welcome it as a concept. Regardless of what the New Yorker’s list means for 20UNDER40, one thing is sure—it validates the importance of looking forward to the future and providing a voice for the next wave of talent in any domain.

AAAE @ Washington, D.C.: You Are Not An Empty Vessel

After the the emerging leaders panel at the AAAE conference in Washington, D.C.

My girlfriend Angela and I get into a cab outside of our hotel in Georgetown. It’s pouring outside.  Thunder.  Lightning.  I’ve got 45 minutes to get to the Phillips Collection to catch Michael Kaiser speaking and to meet up with Caralyn Spector, a colleague from the NEA.  I tell the cabby “Phillips Collection.”  He pauses for a moment and then puts the car into drive.  I’m not sure about the pause so I ask him if he needs an address. “No,” he responds, “I know where.”

The Phillips Collection is the largest, most estimable, private modern art collection in the D.C. area.  I’m guessing they see at least a million visitors a year.  Maybe more.  It’s a destination.  An icon.  An institution. A phenomenon. And tonight they are hosting the kick off keynote speech for the Association of Arts Administration Educator’s (AAAE) Annual Conference, Making Connections: Preparing Cultural Leaders for Future Challenges.

But kick off keynotes be damned.  It’s raining in downtown D.C. and traffic grinds to a halt.  Roads are closed.  Lights are out of sorts.  Tempers are flaring.  Our cabby squeezes between cars, whips around corners—fishtailing, screeching.  We ask if traffic is always like this.  He says no, only when it rains.  We ask what happens when it snows.  “It’s worse.”

The meter hits $10.00, then $15.00, then $20.00, then $25.00.  We ask if we’re far.  The driver says we’re almost there.  “Waterfront,” he says, “a nice place.” Finally we whiz by the Washington Monument and emerge from the rain-soaked commuter traffic.  Our driver takes a turn, then another, and then a third.  Out the window a building with a large electric sign comes into view: Phillips Crab House. Despite having the largest seafood buffet in D.C., now an hour late and who knows how far we were from our destination, suffice it to say I had little interest in Phillip’s famous lump crab meat.

Never mind lump crab meat—when I finally did arrive at the Phillips Collection for cocktail hour I had the pleasure to knock a few back with Professor George Sampson of University of Virginia—who is currently turning a denied 20UNDER40 chapter proposed by one of his students into a book-length, inter-generational project that intends to redefine arts education as we know it.  Awesome stuff!  After the formality of the Phillips session Caralyn and I hashed it out over gelato at Pitango’s in Dupont Circle.  The AAAE conference was on.

The next day was down to business.  I started the morning having breakfast with Americans for the Arts’s Stephanie Evans, a true advocate of the 20UNDER40 project and an incredible voice in the movement to foster the next generation of arts leadership.  After Stephanie finished her coffee and I wolfed down an unnecessary amount of breakfast goodies at Whole Foods we headed over to American University’s Katzen Arts Center to engross ourselves in the AAAE conference.

After getting to know some of the American University Arts Admin grad students I dipped into a session entitled Arts Entrepreneurship, facilitated by Eastern Michigan University’s Susan Badger Booth.  It seemed like every time someone brought up an issue in this session, I had a reference to a 20UNDER40 author who was writing about it.  When the group spoke of new models for arts organizations, David McGraw’s idea of a limited-lifespan organization was incredibly relevant as was Brian Newman’s notion of “with-profit” arts business models and Rebecca Novick’s ideas about new structures for arts organization that defy the typical 501(c)3 straight jacket we’ve all come to know and loathe.  But the conversation wasn’t all about business models.  At one point someone suggested that the “elephant in the room” was how originality and intellectual property rights were going to be handled in the 21^st Century.  I couldn’t help myself.  Casey Lynch’s chapter “Ctrl C + Ctrl V” directly addresses this topic—I had to squeak a few teasers that hinted at his ideas.  It was at this point the room wanted to know who the hell I was and what was this book I kept talking about.  After the session I met a host of cool people from the arts admin sphere, including Xela from Drexel University who studies fringe festivals and Bernard from Savannah College of Art and Design who is working to bring these big idea conversations to the policy level to institute change on a broader scale.

Following the entrepreneurship session it was show time and me and the other “young leaders” who were highlighted at the conference were on.  I was part of a four person panel called “Emerging Leaders: What Do They Have to Tell Us?”  Oddly enough, it was suggested during the preparatory phone call for this session that, since this conference was largely for professors engaged in arts administration programs, the audience would want to know what it is that they can teach us to be better equipped for the future.  Of course I couldn’t help but point out the inherent arrogance and hubris laden within this prompt—the notion that young leaders are empty vessels waiting to be filled with—dare I say—Baby Boomer wisdom.  But I get ahead of myself…

The session was moderated by Stephanie Evans who kicked things off by releasing some early findings from an AftA survey of young arts leaders conducted earlier this year.  Next Allison Dornheggen—a recent American University grad, Michael Bigley—a program officer from the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, and myself spoke.

Sure, the question was asked: “what didn’t you learn in graduate school that you really wish you knew now?” (and I did indeed serve them my line about empty vessels) but for the most part, the crowd seemed intrigued by what they could learn from the young arts leaders assembled before them. Folks were interested in knowing more about young people’s mentorship needs, how to integrate the voices of young leaders in larger arts conversations, and what are the new business models young arts leaders foresee as shaping the future of the arts landscape.

Uday and Desiree at the 20UNDER40 Happy Hour in D.C.

After the session I spoke with about a dozen arts professors and other arts professionals—of all ages.  Several people were interested in using the 20UNDER40 anthology in their classes, and talk about desk copies and pre-ordering the book was in the air.

After the AAAE sessions Angela and I made our way back to Georgetown for the 20UNDER40 Happy Hour at Garrett’s Tavern. After bumping into the nicest D.C. local ever—Marla, she called her son to find out where the young people like to go these days and even made us dinner reservations at her favorite restaurant—we were quickly joined by recent Kennedy Center Arts Management Fellow Uday Joshi and his colleague Desiree.  We rapped about the state of the arts and the gossip on the conference circuit about the 20UNDER40 anthology from Uday’s behind-the-scenes perspective—and then carried on.  I’m not usually one to admit things like this but I’ll come clean: yes, karaoke was involved.

It was a solid, if not complicated, visit to the D.C. area.  Despite the chaos of the Capitol City, the conference was a great experience.  Big ups to everyone at AAAE for hosting me—especially Sherburne Laughlin and Barbara Harkins.  It was also great to meet so many arts admin and management professors.  If any of you are reading this, shoot me an email and let’s definitely talk about getting the 20UNDER40 anthology onto your arts administration, arts management, arts education, and studio arts syllabi!

Kamsahamnida Korea!

Just another night in Seoul...

On a cramped thoroughfare where vendors are selling everything from street meat to silk scarves out of little improvised stalls, I hear the ping of aluminum bats swatting baseballs coming from an urban batting range.  Around the corner there’s the faint sound of a low bellowing hum—I follow it through an unexpected collection of art galleries and Italian restaurants to shortly arrive at a temple where dozens of people are praying before a three-story tall gold statue of Buddha.  A couple of blocks away Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” is being performed al fresco for a few hundred people sitting on the grass in the middle of a busy city square… and all of this just on my way to find the subway.

Last week arts educators from around the globe made their way to Seoul in South Korea for UNESCO’s Second World Conference on Arts Education.  This four day event brought together hundreds of artists, teaching artists, arts researchers, and arts administrators hailing from six different continents.  I can’t be more appreciative to UNESCO and the Korean Government for inviting me across the international dateline to participate in this event.

I was lucky enough to be presenting as part of a four person panel that included Professor Kevin Tavin from Ohio State University in the US, Professor Meki Nzewi from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and visual artist Kira Kim from South Korea.  The session was moderated by none other than Dr. Judy Burton who, coincidentally, was my advisor during the one year I spent in the Arts and Arts Education program at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

The title of our session was “Towards a New Concept of Arts Education.”  Kevin kicked things off by discussing his research on visual culture, noting how images define the self and others and that “meanings and identities are both created and contested” through the application of contemporary imagery and the gazing of artwork back at the viewer.  Next Professor Nzewi led the group through a discussion that focused on the importance of traditional dance and music, and the necessity to maintain local customs in order to uphold a “spiritual voice.”  Nzewi suggested that we are “destroying the world with modernist stuff” and that “contemporary education is cheating our children.”  I was next up presenting a paper entitled “Envisioning the Future of the Arts and Arts Education: Challenging Core Assumptions, Addressing Adaptive Challenges, and Fostering the Next Generation of Arts Leaders” (you can access the full text of this paper by clicking here).  After me, Mr. Kim took to the podium and free-associated his way through a complex, sometimes emotional, verbal collage of ideas.  The room had 100 seats which were shortly filled, and before long the conference assistants were hauling in extra chairs and interpretation devices for the 20-30 people standing along the edges of the round room.   Dr. Burton invited questions from the audience after each speaker, and though no one had anything for Kevin and Meki, by the time they got to me folks started lining up behind the microphone.    Maybe the crowd was finally warmed up… or maybe it had something to do with me suggesting that relying on Baby Boomer arts leaders to redefine our field would actually impede progress in our domain rather than push it forward.  Whatever the reason, the discussion was lively, though many of the questions from the audience were in hard to follow monologue form.  Dr. Burton capped my end of the event off by asking perhaps the most important question of the day: “Edward, even though I’m a Baby Boomer,” she said,  ”will you still dance with me?”

Answer: Any time Judy!

I was really pleased with the presentation and following discussion (despite having trouble getting the remote control doo-dad to advance my slides properly) and very excited to have met so many interesting people: Ratnaganadi from Indonesia, Dr. Meen Sheng from Singapore, Ji-Sun, Soojin, Lim, Jeong, and Jiyoung from Korea, and of course, Erin from Wisconsin.  I was especially excited to meet Professor Sedky and her student Dina from the College of Art Education in Cairo—both of them are doing tres cool stuff!  I’m also incredibly in debt to a Mexican actress/teaching artist named Althair who, although she ultimately wound up spilling a glass of wine on me, had an uncanny knack for engaging me in conversation precisely when I needed somebody to talk to the most.

It was great to see that the generational distribution of the room for the panel session I participated in was incredibly diverse.  In fact, I don’t think I had been in another session during the entire conference that had so many younger people filling up the seats.  Overall though, throughout the conference I was surprised—dare I say disappointed—to hear such an unexpected emphasis on maintaining tradition, supporting localism, and clinging to the past coming from presenters representing countries that ranged from France to South Africa to Japan.  I’m not suggesting that we need to kill traditional culture off and develop a universal digital aesthetic, but denying the spread of contemporary technologies in the arts seems to me an act of resistance that will do more harm than good for 21st Century arts learners—no matter what continent, country, or community they come from. It’s the old dichotomies thing, and I can’t help but quote Eric Booth quoting David Bohm in saying “anytime you see seeming polarities, look for the greater truth that contains them both.”  I guess I was hoping to hear more language geared towards “fold-it-in” rather than “push-it-out.”

Ehh… but what do I know.  I’m just some silly American dude trying make things happen…

20UNDER40 Authors Announced! Books on Sale!

After months of review, the twenty chapters for the 20UNDER40 anthology have finally been announced.  The provisional titles for each of the chapters, the authors of those chapters, and brief descriptions of those chapters can be viewed on the 20UNDER40 website.

The editorial and revision process has now begun.  The completed 20UNDER40 manuscript is due to the publisher by August 1, 2010 with an anticipated publication date of December 1, 2010.  Limited pre-order sales of the anthology are now being offered for a special promotional rate of 1/3 off the cover price. Visit the 20UNDER40 website to pre-order your copy today!

San Francisco: Do or Do Not—There is No Try

I don’t know what it is, but as an East Coaster there has always been something about California that has made me feel a little… off.  Despite my own personal weirdness about the West Coast, there is something incredibly they’ve-got-it-going-on about the emerging arts leadership scene in San Francisco.

On May 9-10, 2010 I was lucky enough to be in San Francisco to participate in the Theatre Bay Area’s (TBA) annual conference.  20UNDER40 author and TBA development director Rebecca Novick teamed up with Ebony McKinney, the director of the San Francisco Bay Area Emerging Arts Professionals (SFBAEAP), to invite me out for two events geared towards promoting issues of interest to individuals concerned about the impending generational shift in arts leadership.

The first of these two sessions was an emerging arts leaders panel entitled “Adapt or Die: Challenging Core Assumptions.”  With me on this panel were Adam Fong of Other Minds and SFBAEAP, Ron Ragin of the Hewlett Foundation, Jessica Robinson of CounterPULSE, and Rachel Fink of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.  The purpose of this session was to bring together a consortium of young arts leaders to challenge some of the core assumptions of the field.

The idea of “challenging assumptions” is not a new one, but it is a concept that is often said with very little behind it to make it make sense or meaning anything.  I started this session off by providing a summary of the ideas in a paper I will be presenting later this month at the UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education.

After some context setting, my colleagues jumped in by each offering an assumption they chose to challenge.  Ron kicked things off by suggesting there is an assumption in the arts sector that the not-for-profit model is the way to go (an interesting assumption to challenge coming from a representative of one of the field’s most prominent funders), Adam then suggested that there is a widely held belief that people who work in the arts “love what they do” and are “passionate about their work.”  Suppose this isn’t the case?  Jessica then came up with a really curious notion to bring up at a Theatre conference.  She wanted to challenge the assumption that “live” performing arts experiences are better than mediated online experiences that users can control from the comfort of… of wherever they feel comfortable.  Lastly, Rachel reflected on her recent extended tour of Europe where she was researching how overseas arts organizations fund the work they do.  She challenged the manner by which we fund the arts here in the US as the best way to do business.

The room was packed with at least 75+ inter-generational conference participants all eager to engage in discussion.  Despite the interesting topics my colleagues brought up for discussion, the crowd largely got stuck talking about funding.  In my role as moderator, I made an effort to diversify the conversation to touch on other issues, but time was short—and apparently access to funding is even shorter.

It’s no surprise that given the opportunity to discuss alternate approaches to funding, cash strapped arts organizations are going to want to get in on the conversation.  Given this focus on funding when much more interesting topics are up for discussion seems to me to validate the notion that our current models for funding, as Ron had suggested, are broken beyond repair.  The young leaders I spoke to in San Francisco were buzzing with ideas about how to move forward, how to break from traditional 501(c)3 structures, and what to do next.  These individuals are thinking radically about future business models for the cultural sector—if for no other reason, so that we can finally stop moaning about funding and start getting to the much more interesting aspects of our work in the arts.

A crabcake and a cocktail later, the second session I facilitated was entitled “Omni-Directional Mentorship: Going Beyond Yoda.”  This workshop was co-sponsored by TBA and SFBAEAP as part of SFBAEAP’s New Growth series.  This session was designed to introduce participants to a new approach to mentorship that goes beyond the traditional top down model of a seasoned professional passing down knowledge and expertise to a protégé, and also includes the practice of “mentoring-up” and “lateral mentorship” between peers acting at comparable levels of practice.  This theoretical model reframes mentorship as a multi-directional teaching and learning exchange that promotes the sharing of knowledge and expertise within and across generational cohorts.  The theory is outlined in a chapter I have forthcoming in A Closer Look 2010: Leading Creatively which is due to be published by the National Association of Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC).  About 25-30 people representing multiple generations turned up for this workshop.  Amongst the participants was Dewey Schott, arts leadership advocate extraordinaire and editor of the NAMAC anthology.

After the conference, I got to hang out with Dewey, Ebony, Adam, and a handful of others to knock back a couple of glasses of wine and keep talking about the issues discussed throughout the day. I can’t state enough how invigorating it was to dig into these issues with my West Coast colleagues.  In San Francisco, there’s more than just talk about advocating for conceptual change in the arts and supporting the young leaders who will carry out these changes—people like Rebecca, Ebony, Dewey, Adam, Marc, Jessica, and Rachel are actually doing something about it.  I guess that’s why the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations have designated so much cash  to one golden state.  It’s almost enough to make a guy like me think about moving West… almost.

20UNDER40′s Selection Process is Complete!

Narrowing it down to twenty... not an easy task.

It was no oil spill 5,000 feet beneath the sea, nor a record rainfall that flooded the home of honky tonk, but on May 1 there was a major water main break just outside of  Boston.  For 72 hours everyone in the metro area was told not to drink from the tap and advised to boil water two minutes before using it to cook, to clean, or to brush your teeth.  Like a lot of people, I just tried to go the weekend without water—drinking Poland Spring sparingly while the plates piled up in the kitchen.  By the time Monday hit I was nearly out of utensils and there was a funk coming from the clay pot I’d used to make Friday night’s roasted chicken—I’d never had such a burning desire to do the dishes…

But despite the Boston water crisis of 2010, I had work to do… and the variety of work I had to do was not the least bit easy. It had finally come time for me to choose the twenty essays that will be published within the 20UNDER40 anthology.  Having received 304 chapter proposals and then invited 32 authors to submit full chapters, the level of quality and the wealth of ideas I was dealing with was overwhelming.

But this was not new work for me.  Since the March 1 deadline for full chapters I’ve been walking around with each of the prospective authors’ chapter ideas floating in my head.  Mulling over them.  Playing mix and match with themes, balancing issues upon issues, weighing idea x against idea y and dividing both by through-line z.

In the end, the decision making process wound up being a jigsaw puzzle of content—placing one essay next to another, switching them around until the pieces started to fit together and I began to see it in front of me—the book.  On the surface, this was the work of deciding what would be included.  And all this deciding reminded me of what a professor once taught me—that the words decision, precision, and incision all share the root word cis which is a French translation of the Latin caedere: to cut. Perhaps the hardest part of this process was deciding what would not be included.  What to cut.  In order to stick to the twenty essay quota, I had to sadly let a lot of good work go, and write a handful of emails that I really didn’t want to address.

If you do the math, twenty chapters out of 304 proposals is a less than 10% acceptance rate.  This makes getting a piece in the 20UNDER40 anthology more competitive than getting into our country’s most elite art schools, universities, or professional journals.  But just because something is competitive, just because something is selective, just because something is elite doesn’t mean it’s good.  But I can assure you, though 20UNDER40 may not be the last word on the future of the arts (nor should it be!), it will be a powerful one. Each chapter that has been selected for publication pushes the boundaries of our field, goes against the grain when necessary, blazes a trail here and there, and reorients us back to why we do the work we do in the first place.

I couldn’t be more excited to blurt out everything about the selected chapters, but it’s still too soon to make such exclamations.  As of right now the authors are reviewing their publishing contracts and slowly confirming my publication offer.  Once all the authors have signed on we’ll be jumping into an intensive editorial revision process geared towards finely tuning each chapter.  This will take the bulk of the summer, and then it’s off to the publisher.

I’ve been incredibly protective about the ideas of 20UNDER40‘s prospective authors.  The best anyone has been able to squeeze out of me are over-arching themes that pertain to all of the chapter proposals I’ve read—and all of the people I’ve spoken to about the future of the arts sector in the 21st Century.  I plan to continue to protect 20UNDER40‘s authors’ ideas until there’s a book to be read.  In the months to come, however, I hope to upgrade the 20UNDER40 website to include interactive discussion platforms that preview the content in the book.  I hope to direct the attention the project has garnered off of me and onto the authors who will be the backbone of the anthology, and I hope to find a way to increasingly promote dialogue that highlights not just these twenty ideas, but the great mass of ideas that are out there, waiting to be tapped, hungry to be articulated, thirsty for an audience.  Until that day comes… watch this space, remember to stay hydrated, and don’t forget to do your dishes.

Seven Lessons Learned About the 20UNDER40 Project: A Curious Conversation in NYC

Ask me a question...

On Thursday, April 29, 2010 I left Boston at 11:30 a.m. en route to New York.  I was on the Megabus and had a front row, top tier spot with two seats all to myself.  It’s amazing how much work a guy can get done with an outlet, an Internet connection, and four or five hours with nowhere to go.  On the ride down I bounced drafts of a publishing contract back and forth with my lawyer friend Josh all the while writing up some ideas for the talk I had been invited to present for two organizations: the New York City Arts-in-Education Roundtable and Young Educators in the Arts (YEA).

As soon as I landed in New York I hopped an R train and headed down to Astor Place to print out twelve pages of “notes” for my talk and then bopped into Other Music on East 4^th Street to pick up Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s latest LP… aptly titled Kollaps Tradixionales.  Right about then I scooted over to the Bowery Wine Company to meet Aliza Greenberg and the rest of the YEA crew.  This was their first event and they were all set up—uber-prepared far before I got there.  They had copies of This is Our Emergency strewn about, as well as little note cards that were designed to provide a quiet space for people to ask me a question whenever they saw fit.

YEA had newly established themselves as a consortium of young arts education professionals working in and around NYC.  They partnered with the NYC Arts-in-Education Roundtable on this event that they called “Emerging Leaders in Arts Education: Needs, Networking, and Next Steps.” And networking they did!  They had 118 RSVPs of which about 80-90 people showed up.  Not a bad turnout for an arts education event during happy hour in New York…

My role in the evening was to primarily talk about what it was I had learned through my work on the 20UNDER40 project.  I’ve been talking about this with friends and colleagues all along, but have never formally written anything down.  Just earlier this week I had been on the phone with Eric Booth and he was sort of asking me the same question.  From my perch on the Megabus, moving at 70 mph through New England, I came up with the seven top tier takeaways from my experience with the project thus far.  And that was the plan, to discuss these seven takeaways.  And the plan never changed, however, as people began to show up, the tone of the room did.

As the clock ticked closer towards show time, this or that person started to express anxiety about the whole affair.  I was asked to try not to make it too controversial.  I was told to keep it “PC.”  “It’s a mixed crowd,” someone said, “we’re not really sure how they’ll react.”

If I wasn’t nervous before, now I was.

I went for a walk.  I made a phone call.  I had another beer and then I told folks, “Don’t worry.  I got this.”  And I didn’t even know what it was I did or did not get.  What’s this fear all about?  What are people so afraid of?  For a minute, I sort of felt like a monster.  What variety of venom could possibly spew out of my mouth that would send people up in arms?  I went to the bathroom, futzed with my bow tie, and then it was show time.

I got on a tiny stage in the corner of the place and was handed a microphone without a stand.  I knew from back in my spoken word days that holding a microphone, typed notes, and a beer all at once was not only a challenge, it was more or less impossible.  Oh well.  Here goes…

Right away I told people I had no intention to cut them any slack, no intention to go easy on them.  This is a difficult conversation to have, but if we deny ourselves the conversation, if we whimp out and avoid it, we’re doing a great disservice to ourselves and to the work we do.  And with that, I went into it—not changing a word I had planned on saying.

And in the end, everyone was fine.  The work of the 20UNDER40 project has nothing to do with the younger generation usurping power from the older generation and flicking them—with all their history—out onto the street like some stale cigarette that’s burned passed its filter.    The crux of the project is to bring voice to those who feel voiceless and then to fold their voices into a broader dialogue.  This was ironic as I later heard rumors that the cards with all of the questions on them were designed not for efficiency of dialogue, but so the audience’s questions could be monitored, so the very voices in the room could be censored, to protect themselves—to protect me from potential hecklers or angry Boomers.  Protect me?  Whether this rumor is true or not—I’ll never know.  And it’s not important to know.  What’s important is what happened, and what happened is that 80-90 people hung out in an East Village bar and listened to me yammer on for about a half hour, and then we mingled, we talked, we communed, we exchanged business cards, we wrote email addresses on the backs of our hands, and then we left.  But nobody went anywhere without going there.

I can’t really say to what extent, but to some degree, everyone I spoke to—Sobha, Julie, Jeanine, Cappella, Jeremy, Edie, Jonah, Kaya, Susan, Jake, Jonathan, Amelia, Patrick, Karen—everyone had a conversation with someone else about the issues at hand: about fostering young arts leaders, about building intergenerational dialogue, about seeing the teaching and learning opportunities that lie beneath the surface of the formidable veneer of false conflict posited by differences-in-the-workplace business texts.

Discussing issues of generational change and succession planning is, for some reason, incredibly hard for us to do in the arts sector.  I say high fives all around to organizations like the NYC Arts-in-Education Roundtable and YEA for taking the first steps towards giving these conversations a shot.  The dialogue isn’t perfect yet, and there’s still a lot of anxiety where there doesn’t need to be—but at least we’re talking.  And what d’you know—we seem to be enjoying ourselves all the while…

After the event at the Bowery Wine Company I headed out into the Village.  It was a perfect spring night and it felt good to be in my old neighborhood. I hit up my favorite basement-level Indian place on East 6^th Street, and then caught up with a good pal for a pint in one of my old familiars.  My bus back to Boston left at 1:30 a.m.  It was far more crowded than the one on the way down, but luckily I still had two seats to myself.  I slipped the new Silver Mt. Zion album into my laptop, put on my headphones, and as the lights of New York began to fade, I fell asleep to some of the most tragically sad, sad, saddest—but most hopeful—music I could imagine.  I couldn’t have scripted a better way to end the night—and start the day.

So that was New York.  But I’d hate to leave you hanging, so here are my top seven lessons learned (so far!) from working on the 20UNDER40 project:

• Lesson Number 1: There are thousands of young arts professionals eager to implement conceptual change throughout the arts sector, and by asserting this interest, many people in the field, young and old, have been thrown off balance.
• Lesson Number 2: The entire arts sector suffers from an insecurity complex and operates from a position of fear—and this isn’t a Baby Boomer thing, nor a Gen X thing, nor a Millennials thing—it’s an all of us thing.
• Lesson Number 3: Many young arts leaders are great at going 80% of the way there, but balk at pushing past their limits and truly asserting their most innovative ideas about the future of the arts. I don’t see this “holding back” as a short-coming of any one or another arts leader.  Instead, I see it as an “immunity to change” protecting a field that resists new ideas.
• Lesson Number 4: The arts sector does a poor job of nurturing young leaders.  While this isn’t anything new, what I feel is important to note is that too few of us are bold enough to stand up and make a point of this.  Too few of us don’t feel safe enough, or supported enough to say this out loud.  Again, I don’t see this as cowardice on behalf of any one or another person.  Instead, I see it as a symptom of a field that makes itself unavailable to self-critique.
• Lesson Number 5: Through my conversations with young arts leaders around the country, I’ve learned that many of the findings my colleague Ann Gregg and I arrived at through our pilot study of emerging arts leaders are more or less true.  These include the necessity to treat young arts leaders like leaders, not as subordinates; young arts leaders’ desire for a connection to a sense of greater common purpose; a plurality of interests that need to be capitalized upon, not suppressed, through one’s work in the arts; a hunger for new approaches to mentorship within and across generational cohorts, and; time to waste time—time to mess around with ideas, to innovate, to experiment, to fail now and then in order to find new ways to move forward.
• Lesson Number 6: I’ve learned a ton of things through the 304 proposals that have been submitted to 20UNDER40.  A short list of the themes that have come up again and again have been a concern about the “survival” and “relevancy” of the arts in the decades to come; a questioning of the core arts disciplines; the influence of digital technology and remix culture on art making and arts education, especially as it pertains to intellectual property rights and traditional notions of “authorship”; a call for an increased exchange between the arts and the sciences in a myriad of ways for a multiplicity of purposes; innumerable new approaches to arts leadership, management, and business strategies; new definitions of “success,” and; an overall recognition that the arts sector is an old growth forest with a thick canopy that allows very little light to seep down and reach the younger trees—amongst other topics.
• Lesson Number 7: The full chapters I’ve been so privileged to review for the 20UNDER40 anthology kick ass!  The anthology we are building will be an important one, if not an historic one.