The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Ben Cameron had yet more productive, provocative, and insightful things to say about the present and future of the nonprofit arts in his keynote to the Southern Arts Federation in September [just posted in audio (mp3) and transcript (pdf) form, on the Federation’s web site]. The bulk of the speech […]

In an interesting twist on more traditional arts education, Bruce Springsteen sidekick ”Little Steven” Van Zandt is pushing for new emphasis on the classics in middle and high school — that is, classic rock ‘n’ roll. Van Zandt’s foundation is announcing a new curriculum resource today. Says the USA Today article: The plan is to […]

Neighbor blogger Tyler Green switched me onto this new feature on the Indianapolis Museum of Art website: the Dashboard. It’s a user-friendly view into all sorts of operational data from the museum — electrical consumption, percentage of membership attendance, current expenses against budget, percentage attendance from the museum’s Metropolitan Statistical Area. For arts administration nerds […]

It’s a bit of a thicket to untangle the impact of law on the expressive life of a nation. Law is dry and detached. Expression is explosive and personal. And yet the laws that govern ownership and property do define the context and quality of expression. That makes them the direct business of arts and […]

UPDATE: The folks at Trendwatching revealed that their entire series of trends posted in November were fakes, were jokes, were intentionally fraud — including the ‘Generation Z’ trend I posted on below. What can I say, they got me…perhaps because even the bizarre seems reasonable these days. I leave the original post as evidence that […]

American Public Media’s ”Marketplace” radio program took time off from its usual coverage of commerce and finance to explore philanthropy, as advanced by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts President Reynold Levy. Rather than a chore and a burden, Levy describes the philanthropic process as a joy and a gift, in itself: It’s an extraordinary […]

I generally don’t talk a lot in this blog about my direct work in higher education — finding, fostering, teaching, and connecting cultural managers through a two-year, resident, MBA degree in Arts Administration. I figure that I serve a wider audience by talking about the industry itself, rather than that tiny, tiny subset of the […]

Is someone in your life having trouble picking a major in college, or a purpose in life? This handy little graphic of college majors and their relative skills should help sort things out (permalink here). Taken from the ever-humorous and graphically inclined Indexed blog.

Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones has ten nice things to say about the Guthrie’s new theater space in Minneapolis. And he lists them as a tip-sheet for theaters yet to be built. For those who haven’t seen the new venue for the venerable organization, it’s worth a look on the Guthrie’s website, but even […]

My academic home, the UW-Madison School of Business, announced a rather unique gift this past weekend — a naming gift that defers the need for a naming gift for the next 20 years. The $85 million contributed to the school — the largest single gift ever given to the university — came from a partnership […]