Bureaucracy vs. creativity

This print ad for the "Masterpieces in Little" exhibition at VMFA never ran, but it sure did get a lot of laughs. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Life was fun -- and creatively satisfying -- at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for the first half of my career.

I went to work in the VMFA public relations department in 1978. There were two of us, plus an excellent secretary who had been there since dirt was clean. My immediate supervisor's background was with a for-profit PR consulting firm. My background was in commercial TV and print, primarily journalism. My boss was mostly focused on advancing his career in management. My focus was on writing. The advertising work for the museum sort of fell into my lap, since my boss somehow missed out on the creativity gene. That was fine by me.

Before the late 1970s, no arts organizations in Richmond had explored the use of TV, radio and print advertising to any great extent. That empty playing field, plus the elite reputation that VMFA enjoyed, made it fairly easy in those days for us to rise above the noise and clutter of the for-profit ads and commercials that people in Richmond were accustomed to seeing.

It was also a time before bureaucracy reared its hydra-like head and before committees made decisions. In other words, I was fairly free to create an ad campaign without much interference from above. I created a couple of award-winning radio campaigns for Virginia Museum Theatre productions, another that won a first-place award for an exhibition, and other print and broadcast campaigns that woke Richmond up to the presence in their city of one of the nation's foremost art museums.

One of my favorite print campaigns was for an exhibition in the 1990s titled "Masterpieces in Little." It presented portrait miniatures from Queen Elizabeth II's collection. The portraits -- smaller than the palm of your hand -- depicted faces that went with some of the memorable names from British royalty's past, names very familiar to Americans, including King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and King George III.

On a slow day about a month before the show opened, I went to the VMFA library and began doing some research. I was looking for attention-getting facts about the lives of some of those whose portraits we'd be showing. I wanted little nuggets that would grab attention in a headline. I found a wealth of information to work with.

For an ad featuring a portrait of George III, who was king during the American Revolution, my headline was "If not for him, we'd still curtsy to the Queen." For one with a portrait of Elizabeth I, the big, bold type at the top proclaimed "She ruled a nation, but no man ruled her heart."

Jean Kane, who worked in the museum's graphic design department, agreed to make some mock-ups of the ads for me to show to my boss and to the exhibition's curator.

When you're pitching copy, it can sometimes be important to throw in a loser or two -- ideas that you know will never fly. It gives those with approval authority something to toss out, and they feel like they've been a valuable part of the process. There were two ringers in the eight print ads I offered up for approval. For one, with a portrait miniature of Henry VIII -- he who had the many wives -- my headline was "He solved his problems with an axe." I had some minor hope for that one, but deep down I knew it was too harsh.

The other loser, which featured a portrait of James I -- for whom Jamestown and the James River were named -- is the one you see in the image above. Everybody who saw it laughed long and hard, but as I fully expected, it got a thumbs-down. However, for months, the whole series of mock-ups hung on my boss's office wall. He bragged about them, and told his visitors that this was the kind of creativity VMFA needed to nurture.

The other half-dozen ads did run frequently in the Times-Dispatch, Style Weekly and the Free Press. It was great fun to create that campaign and see it succeed.

The fun went out of creativity at VMFA a few years later. Committees began to make creative decisions. Any fresh ideas that might draw an objection from anybody in the increasingly bureaucratic world we functioned in were quickly shot down. Nobody wanted their name on a decision to which somehow, somebody, somewhere might object for any absurd reason at all. Decision-making became part of what some of us began to call the blame game, a top-down management style that emanated from the museum director's office.

That director is long gone, but the fear persists. The blame-game approach lingered until earlier this year when I retired and still does as far as I know. The result was that most of us who had original, fresh ideas simply gave up working hard to be creative. The game was no longer worth the candle.