I've been spending the week here talking about GALLERIA, a student-run art gallery I founded back in college, at the University of Missouri; you can click here, here and here for the first three entries in this series, if you haven't read them already. Specifically, I've been spending the week talking about all the things I learned by running GALLERIA in college, that will be directly applicable to this new big-budget arts center I'm trying to open in Chicago these days - lessons on small business, lessons on arts administration, lessons on the tricky way one has to deal with artists themselves, when you're the one in a position of authority. I thought today I'd share a few more thoughts specifically on this last subject.

Let's face it - by their very definition, artists are a strange lot who can sometimes be very difficult to work with. In fact, it's my belief that this is the very first thing one needs to come to grips with, if one has decided to pursue a career in arts administration - that unlike almost any other industry one can get involved in, artists will not act in the ways that they're supposed to act, will not give a damn about the things that usually motivate workers (401k's, etc), and will sometimes even self-sabotage their own efforts, usually through a combination of low self-esteem and rampant substance abuse. A person needs to understand this, I think, and be comfortable with the fact that these things are going to happen, to have any chance of being a success as an arts administrator.

In my opinion, ultimately the actions of a whiny artist can be boiled down to one of two motivations: either they're legitimately upset about something going on, and are afforded so little power in our modern society that they literally have to scream and yell and throw bottles to even get noticed; or they are deliberately starting a fight with you on purpose, no matter how little they're actually upset, specifically to further their career as an artist without having to do such tricky things like actually making decent art. Now, don't get me wrong - I believe that the majority of whiny artists fall into this first camp, and not the second. Nonetheless, both groups have to be dealt with in order for your project to be a success - and this applies just as much to a 20-year-old running a student gallery as it does to the head of the NEA himself.

As someone who was a whiny artist himself for many years, I know exactly how to deal with whiny artists, and can virtually guarantee that this one solution will solve 95 percent of all conflicts in such cases - fucking sit down and listen to what the whiny artist is saying. I mean, Jesus, just look at my recent bullshit experience with Wired magazine's Nextfest, for a perfect example of how to deal with this issue in exactly the wrongest way possible. For those who missed it, I basically signed up to be a volunteer for the festival, then had a comically pathetic experience my first day that I wrote out in detail here at my journal; Wired's response, instead of addressing any of the issues I brought up, was instead to simply fire me. (Yes, welcome to the life of Jason Pettus - the only guy out there who can get fired from a job he wasn't getting paid to do in the first place.) And see, this plays directly into the hands of the whiny artist, and gives them the exact justification they need to spend the next 18 months of their life talking endlessly about what a bunch of yuppie money-grubbing scumbags the staff of Wired magazine is, and how they deal with criticism the same way a Nazi might deal with a Jew.

Now imagine - what if the staff of Wired had read that entry of mine and said, "You know what, Jason? You're right. We've been treating you like an uneducated child, when obviously you're not, and we also accidentally placed you in a volunteer position way beneath what your abilities actually are. How about maybe writing a daily behind-the-scenes report for us instead, that we'll run at the Wired website? How about we pair you up with a couple of fellow tech-head exhibitors your age, instead of sending you out to the Loop to pass out flyers with all the other high-school volunteers? We think it's great that someone with such high skills and such a large audience has volunteered for such a lowly position with our festival; and we want to acknowledge that, acknowledge that you're a lot smarter and have a lot more experience than the vast majority of the other volunteers, and move you into a position where we can take advantage of that more."

Well, I can tell you what would've happened if Wired had done that - I would've been the hardest-working motherfucker in the entire Navy Pier that week, would've loved Wired for acknowledging these things, probably would've named my first child Chris Anderson out of sheer gratitute. And so this is how I dealt with similar situations with GALLERIA, because I knew those whiny artists would react in the same way. Ultimately the key to successfully dealing with artists is never money, never power, never perks, which is why I think so many non-artists have such a hard time dealing with artists in a job situation; the key is simple respect, of actually listening to what that artist has to say, acknowledging that they have valid things to say, changing the things that legitimately deserve to be changed. When a couple of my GALLERIA staff members bitched about the same two or three people hosting each event, I changed the policy so that everyone got a chance to host. When artists bitched that the lighting at our events sucked, we ran out and bought stronger lightbulbs. When an artist bitched about where in the club we had designated their work to hang, we'd ask them where they'd rather hang their work, and then let them.

As you can see, we're not talking about either difficult or expensive solutions - which is what makes me more confounded than ever, that so many people in a business environment can't even manage to pull off this one tiny thing. I mean, just how difficult could it be to keep your damn mouth shut for five minutes, to actually listen to what someone is telling you? I guess plenty difficult, based on my experiences with most humans over the years; and this, of course, is yet one more advantage I have going into this center that many others don't, because I do have this ability, and do realize exactly how important it is to your business's overall success.

Of course, now we've got that second group to deal with - the artists who don't actually have a complaint, but are simply bitching because they're "hardcore" and they're "raging against the machine," and all the other thousand bullshit justifications bad artists come up with to avoid actually creating art. And it works, too, which is why people are still doing it to this day - I mean, Jesus, Geraldo Rivera has made an entire career out of this behavior, just to name one really famous example. This is yet another topic that is virtually guaranteed to be something that an arts administrator will have to deal with, and yet another topic that has the potential to destroy your artistic center for good.

And again, these people can be surprisingly easy to deal with, as long as you understand what makes them tick. Ultimately what a fake rebel is trying to achieve in these situations is easy publicity, easily-made fans, by moving the entire conversation away from their own behavior and towards yours. An artist doesn't actually have to produce decent work to get a lot of publicity, if they can instead simply court controversy; no matter how shitty their work, no matter how sloppy or amateurish, the conversation will always shift to your behavior by taking a fascist approach with such people.

I refused to play this game with "rebels" when I was running GALLERIA, so I did the one thing guaranteed to diffuse the situation; I put the focus back on them, back on their behavior, and forced them to justify themselves in public whenever someone wanted to make a case. Like, I'm thinking of this one student we had to deal with back then, who had turned in a portfolio full of violent and misogynous cartoons - women shooting heroin into their vaginas, guys beating up women and calling them cunts, etc. And this unto itself wouldn't actually have been that bad, but the work was shitty as well - it had been done with ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, if you can believe that shit, and he had been planning on just tacking up the loose sheets to the gallery wall the night of the show. Just, you know, it was patently obvious to everyone involved of just what was going on - this 19-year-old schmuck had gotten high one night and scribbled out a bunch of offensive cartoons, and was now wanting to present them as finished, professional work.

So we rejected his work, the one and only time the entire year we did so to an artist. And immediately, the very first thing he did, was run down to the student newspaper and start complaining about how GALLERIA was now in the business of censorship, how we were these big bad Nazis who were quashing the rights of this poor, simple, pure little artist. And the newspaper contacted me about it, and I simply told them the story as I just told it to you, and then ended it with this little nugget (paraphrased in this case), that the paper ended up publishing in the article - "We have no problem with the content of his work, but simply in the sloppy, amateurish way he was presenting it. We believe that it's an insult to our audience for an artist to present their work in such a sloppy, unprofessioonal manner, and an insult to all the other artists that night who took the time and energy to do something special. If this person would like to explain the reason behind this sloppiness, explain the reason he has so little respect for his audience, we would be more than happy to reconsider his portfolio."

And this, of course, shut up the "rebel" real fast, because suddenly the burden was back to him - instead of us being the stormtroopers stepping on a poor artist's neck, we suddenly became the audience advocate that was simply shielding our customers from shitty, sloppy, amateurish work. And it made the paper indeed go back to him, and ask him to respond to all the things I had said; and sure enough, he had no response, and the entire matter was quickly dropped without a single bad piece of publicity coming our way.

Ultimately, I guess everything I'm talking about today can be boiled down to this - that a company is not a human being itself, but is being run by a bunch of human beings. And no matter what the situation, a lot of things in the business world can be solved by humanizing the situation itself; to approach it as one person having a conflict with another person, instead of a corporation having a conflict with a person. Amazing things can happen within the realm of a small business, when the person in charge simply takes the time to treat their customers like human beings, not like cattle or numbers in a spreadsheet or all the other ways you see people getting treated by companies these days. And like I said, this is especially crucial in the arts, where anti-authoritarianism already runs rampant, and the human qualities of people run pretty much as wild as they get. I learned all of these things for the first time while running GALLERIA fifteen years ago, and they are lessons that have stuck with me to this day.