When you’re in the business of building loyalty and coaxing repeat purchase from your audiences (and aren’t we all?), a positive experience with your programming is only part of the battle. The real impact comes in how the experience is remembered over time. Brain science is starting to discover how and why the actual experience […]

Three foundations — Pew, Wallace, and Philadelphia — are ponying up $6.3 million to boost cultural engagement in Philadelphia over the next 12 years. It’s a bold initiative by any measure, but vulnerable (already it seems) to some common sandtraps around goals and means. The biggest sandtrap is to conflate observed attendance with ”engagement” or […]

Thanks to Lex Leifheit’s reference to one of my posts, I found a really cool programmatic innovation through one of her posts (such is the way the weblog world works). The DAISY system provided by New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas encourages visitors to explore the entire content of the festival through many […]

One of my MBA students (thanks Michal) connected me with this useful article about creative play and its importance in childhood development. I particularly like the list of tips for facilitating play (included below). It seems that cultural managers could use some version of this list in many situations, by substituting the word ”children” with […]

In the visual art equivalent of the much-blogged-about Joshua Bell in the subway experiment, a Belgian arts channel placed an influential contemporary painter out of context to see who would take note. How many stopped to watch Luc Tuymans painting? About four percent. It’s a bit of a rigged experiment in both cases, as commuters […]

During the recent Association of Arts Administration Educators conference here in Madison, the increasing proficiency and professionalism around our collective conversation was both a source of pride, and a cause for pause. As a field of educators, researching and teaching cultural management and leadership, we’re clearly growing in reflection, connections, and success. But what if […]

www.flickr.com I’m still working to dig out all the deferred detritus on my desk following the ramp-up and hosting of the recent Association of Arts Administration Educators conference here in Madison last week. It was an extraordinary event, with rooms full of smart, funny, and insightful people, all eager to learn and share about developing […]

I’m playing host to an international conference later this week, welcoming my colleagues from degree-granting programs in arts and cultural management from around the world. I expect great conversations and engaging arguments about how we all find, enroll, prepare, and support innovative and productive leaders for arts and cultural organizations. I also expect to drink […]

The field of arts and cultural management lost a glorious voice this week with the passing of Fan Taylor at the age of 94. I am a direct beneficiary of Fan’s extraordinary and field-defining work in managing and advancing the arts. And I had the great pleasure of a continuing conversation with her over the […]

Since I seem to be on a ”’technology and society” kick this week, I might as well point to this fascinating keynote (at least to me) by science fiction author Bruce Sterling. Speaking to a conference of interface and interaction design professionals, Sterling deflates a whole series of common assumptions about the future of digital […]