What Cleveland Cultural Institutions Need to Succeed
This excerpt from Charles Michener's opinion piece in today's PD is absolutely eerie, in that it echoes almost word for word what I said in our staff meeting last Tuesday:
Indeed.
"[T]he event that may have done more to lift the spirits of this town than any other in recent memory was the "Summer Solstice" party the Cleveland Museum of Art threw on June 20 to celebrate the opening of its new East Wing of impressionist, modern and contemporary art....
...Cleveland's leading cultural institutions have not been exactly renowned for festive spirits....when was the last time you heard of anything festive happening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, PlayhouseSquare or the Cleveland Institute of Music?" [emphasis mine]
Indeed.
posted by Christine Borne at 4:30 PM
6 Comments:
I think the problem lies in the fact that our cultural institutions SUCK at marketing. For instance, I didn't hear that Run DMC was speaking at the Rock Hall the other week until about an hour before they actually spoke.
The really astounding part is that marketing has gotten so much easier and cheaper (hey, Facebook and Twitter don't cost you a dime!) I don't understand why the ball is still getting dropped.
Not to rub it in, either, but the WRHS doesn't even come up on the first page of hits when you Google "Cleveland history." This really disappoints me that they're letting themselves keep going unnoticed.
Michener's comment is retarded on many levels. First of all, the Solstice party was just a well-marketed (and incredibly expensively marketed) fund-raiser. Places like Spaces, MOCA, and other smaller and less-public places have events ALL THE TIME. In fact, MOCA is having a casual cocktail event this Wednesday. Not everyone can afford to have a mega-event like the CMA just had - and count how many months/years it will be before they have another on like that.
Second, These events are constantly written about in the Cleveland Scene, discussed on community radio and programs on the local NPR affiliate, and all over the internet. If you guys STILL can't find them, there is something wrong. I never have any problem doing so. Then again, I don't like to sit back and whine about why things aren't the way I want them to be either. I just get involved myself.
People seriously need to quit bitching that they aren't being spoon-fed their daily calendars. Join a email list, check the websites of your favorite places every few weeks. The only people I know in this town that are unhappy about what is going on are the ones that like to sit around at home and revel in their unhappiness.
Our cultural institutions, by and large, do NOT suck at marketing. They SUCK at having enough money to create an event like the reopening Michener salivates over in the PD today.
Can you estimate at all what that party cost? (Don't quote ticket prices to me - they don't cover the freight.)
But from the same article, I don't mind the hoo-haa about the party itself. I take huge exception to the idea that Timothy Rub is the greatest leader since sliced bread. He quit.
He QUIT. So much for leadership.
CB, here's the thing. Aggressive marketing is *essential* in a city where there are a crap-ton of cultural entities and a limited number of people to attend events -- i.e., Cleveland. No one is disputing that there's a lot of stuff going on here. Every reasonable, non-Cleveland.comhole knows that.
As someone who used to plan cultural events for public libraries, I can tell you how nerve-wracking it is to plan big events and hope people come in the door. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes we did a great job getting the word out, other times, not as much. The program itself, however, always caused the same amount of pain and stress to arrange, so why not at least try to "spoon feed" the public their daily social calendar?
(It's worth mentioning that one of those libraries was here in Cleveland, where there's a lot going on, and one was in an outlying exurban community in NJ, where there wasn't as much to do, particularly outside of beach season. It was much more difficult to get people to come to events here, and if we hadn't done any PR at all and simply hoped that people would take the time to find us on their own, no one would ever have come.)
In the past few weeks, talking with dozens of people about the CMA event (which I attended, and actually thought was pretty fun - my delightfully snobby friend who has since departed for Chicago even said, "wow, this is like being in a real city!"), this issue has come up again and again: "CMA spent a lot of money on that. No one else is going to be able to do that."
This presupposes two things.
1. That everyone should be doing something AS BIG as the CMA event;
and
2. That the money CMA spent on this event was magically delivered by some money fairy from heaven, rather than solicited through hard work.
And it misses Michener's larger point - that this was a "statement" event. The statement was, "hey, we're going to do something that's never been done before in Cleveland." And that's exactly what I heard people saying at the event. That's how *I* felt at the event. To look around in a crowded museum at midnight and see at least four generations of people from all walks of life -- not just the blue blooded uppercrust -- having fun, well, to me, that was definitely a statement that something amazing is possible here.
At the end of the day, that's really all I care about.
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