Ian David Moss offers a fantastic overview and critique of ‘creative placemaking’ efforts now bubbling through the NEA, ArtPlace, and other initiatives. He suggests that the renewed focus on building vibrancy and community through artistic pursuits is missing a few rather essential pieces — mostly the clear description of a desired outcome, and a tested […]
150 friends, or so
In an online world and with a digital rolodex, it’s easy to believe we can manage any number of relationships in our social life, work life, and public life. Want to add a friend? Just click the button and you’re connected. You’ll get updates about their thoughts and life through their feed — new baby, […]
The inside track
I’ve been skimming through Anthony Weston’s 2007 manifesto, How to Re-imagine the World (highly skim-worthy, since it has fabulous ideas and states them quickly), and actually stopped skimming and began to read when I reached the opening to chapter 9:
Fund too little, spend too much
The New York Times offers a bundle of short responses from the arts community on the subject of funding. The setup asks: ‘What can we do to stabilize funding for the arts? Can we learn from other countries’ examples?’ And it offers as inspiration Brazil’s large and growing social service (including arts) funding supported by a […]
Music and motion
There are all sorts of interesting indicators that our discipline-specific thinking in the arts is coming unstuck. What the gatekeepers among us used to call distinct art forms like dance, music, theater, and visual art are becoming dialects of a common language, and those dialects are blending in compelling ways.
Alone together, together alone
Really interesting insights from Sherry Turkle on the opportunity and challenge of our evolving always-on and always-connected lives (if you’d rather read it than watch it, she shares essentially the same message in the New York Times). Paradoxically, she suggests, increasing use of mediated conversation avoids both the depth and nuance of social conversation, and […]
Buy big, stay small
The Stage offers an overview of a new energy-purchase club formed among UK arts venues. Banding together as a buying consortium allows the organizations to buy in bulk without actually getting bulkier. The idea of purchasing groups isn’t new to the world, and not even new to the arts. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has coordinated […]
Who wants my job?
I shared the news last week that I’m joining the faculty at American University in the fall, and leaving the wonderful students, faculty, staff, and alumni family here in Wisconsin. And while I’m truly sad to leave the Bolz Center for Arts Administration and the Wisconsin School of Business, I’m excited to see what’s next […]
Does ‘sustainable’ really mean ‘unnatural’?
Diane Ragsdale raises some fabulous and fascinating points in her latest blog entry on ‘sustainability’ in the arts. Rather than accepting the common-knowledge-but-impossibly-vague use of the term ‘sustainable’ we hear at conferences and read in project reports, she digs a bit deeper into the concepts that lie beneath. When we talk about making an arts […]
Enumerating fresh magical fruit
While I was wandering the wilderness away from my blog (lots of reasons, I’ll tell you over a drink sometime), lots of important and intriguing things happened in the arts world that I didn’t get a chance to share. Chief among them was a fantastic effort by Theatre Bay Area (alongside WolfBrown) to research and […]
