Yesterday I was talking here about GALLERIA, the student arts center I founded and ran back in college, and specifically how that experience has informed the experience I'm having right now, of opening a professional arts center here in Chicago - one that will do the same things as that student one but with a $500,000 annual budget this time, versus the $2,000 annual budget of the student center. (You can click here and here for that two-part entry, if you haven't already read it; in fact, you might have to read it first for today's entry to completely make sense.)

That entry goes into all the basic business issues I gained knowledge about by running this first center back in college - how to successfullly advertise the underground arts to the general public, how to choose your featured artists so that neither the artists nor your patrons are pissed off by the end of it all. Oh, and this also gets into something I forgot to mention yesterday, which is this simple fact - I learned a thousand percent more about the arts by running GALLERIA in college, than I ever did in all my academic classes put together. And if you're a college student right now yourself, I cannot stress enough how important it is to have such real-world experiences while still in school, especially in a smaller city where opportunities are much easier to come by, much cheaper to pull off, and much more likely to be supported by the aging hippies and 19-year-old art majors who comprise so much of a typical collegetown. As you will soon learn without my help, that sneaking suspicion you have about college really is true - about 95 percent of it really is just time-wasting bullshit, done only so they can accept that much tuition money from you without going to jail, with only perhaps 5 percent of it all being stuff you'll actually use in post-school life. If you really want to get some use out of your education, I highly recommend starting up a real-world project as an undergraduate yourself, and especially while you have access to all those great free mentors that one has in college (who, let's face it, hate being teachers almost as much as you hate being a student).

Anyway, my point is that there are all kinds of other things about small businesses that I learned through my experiences running GALLERIA, many of which most small-business owners will never have to deal with themselves, because of them not being specifically in the industry of the arts. And what are these secondary issues, you might ask? Well, here's a list of some of them, as they directly relate to this new arts center I'm trying to open in Chicago:

How to get artists to be good office workers. This one issue really is the downfall of the vast majority of artistic projects in the history of time - now that you have an organization which requires a lot of boring, mundane administrative work to succeed, how do you get a staff of artists to actually do this boring administrative work? You know, simple shit - like calling people who have applied to be a featured artist, reviewing portfolios, getting the latest info out to event calendars, getting flyers hung, licking stamps, addressing envelopes, even things like hammering nails and changing lightbulbs the night of the show, when that employee's normal inclination would be to hang out in the alley behind the show, smoking a joint and complaining about the elitist fucks who run the organization.

For me it started with a real simple policy, which I'm still convinced was one of the major reasons behind GALLERIA's success - namely, GALLERIA staff members were expressly forbidden from showing their own work at the events. And really, a policy like this just accomplishes a whole number of things all at once: it discourages people from volunteering just for the increased chances of being an exhibited artist they think it might get them; it reinforces the idea to those who do volunteer that they are mostly there to help out their fellow artists, not to be an artist themselves; it generates concrete proof to the general public that you are not an insular artistic organization, dedicated only to showcasing your buddies, or all the other narcissistic bullshit usually associated with student artistic organizations.

Ultimately the GALLERIA staff really were this amazingly organized and dedicated group - it was all business with them during the events themselves, with a lot more nail-hammering and lightbulb-switching taking place than cavorting and drug abuse. (Well, okay, there was plenty of cavorting and drug abuse too.) And this can be shocking to learn, considering that my staff was otherwise a bunch of 18- to 22-year-old, acid-dropping, rave-attending, drama-loving, suicide-attempting, chain-smoking art-school students. And I'm convinced that it was mostly pulled off because of me defining such a sharp line at the very beginning of it all, concerning what exactly a GALLERIA staff member is and what they aren't, of where exactly the line laid between being an artistic administrator and being an actual artist. And I have the same exact policies in place for this new arts center I'm trying to open these days, plus lots of others that now come with having a paid full-time staff, not a volunteer part-time one. And with any luck, these policies will once again produce what was produced with GALLERIA - a very serious, very detail-oriented staff, who nonetheless get off work and have these complete trainwrecks of a personal life. I'm convinced that I can hire fairly weird people for my new center and still have them ultimately be good administrative office workers, if just the right care is taken even from the very beginning of the pocess.

Oh, fuck, I still have so much to talk about! And here I am, out of space yet again for the day. (Won't somebody out there invent a blog client for Palm that doesn't top out at 1,200 words per entry? Yes, I know, I am the only blogger on the planet who needs such a client; that shouldn't stop you, though, from inventing it for me!) Okay, so another specific story coming tomorrow - namely, how GALLERIA specifically dealt with artificial "rebels," or those artists who are simply determined to start a fight with authority figures no matter how little of a conflict actually exists, as a way of furthering their own reputation as "gutsy troublemakers." (And gee, I would know nothing about this subject myself, would I?) Keep an eye out for it tomorrow.