Back in April, I was an invited panelist in the Wallace Foundation’s annual gathering of its audience development grantees in Philadelphia. Because of the foundation’s deep and longterm investment in audience innovation and engagement, the event drew some of the best and brightest arts professionals for a series of thoughtful conversations. In a down economy, […]

Since so many cultural facilities are inward-looking behemoths (massive stone or glass facades, seemingly with their backs to the outside world), I’ve become increasingly interested in any efforts to animate those facades. This one (video below) is particularly cool, designed and developed by UrbanScreen in Germany. Other initiatives have included David Michalek’s Slow Dancing, and […]

I’m attending a Slow Money Institute all day today in Madison to learn more about this growing movement and the ideas and innovations within it. While the primary topic is local food systems and promoting ‘slow food’ infrastructure, the core challenges that Slow Money tries to address are common to many industries (including the arts). […]

A few years back, there was a lot of effort and a good amount of buzz around the Concert Companion, a handheld device designed to enhance and inform the live symphony experience with text and multimedia. As patrons listened in the concert hall, the CoCo (as it was called) would stream synchronized program notes, images, […]

Forbes offers a ‘told you so’ overview about arts endowments, suggesting the significant declines in endowment funds during the recent crash exposed inappropriate risk strategy among nonprofit boards and investment managers. Says the author: The reductions in arts endowments reported over the past year have been significant, raising the question of how they have been […]

Leonard Jacobs at The Clyde Fitch Report bestows honor and queries upon Michael Kaiser’s latest essay in the Huffington Post, which explores ”Why the arts don’t pay for themselves.” Jacobs answers his first question quite ably — the arts DO pay for themselves, but through multiple marketplaces, including consumer and philanthropic. But his final question […]

The LA Times show business blog summarizes a new report for the film industry that suggests the best way to return to profit in bad times is not through cutting production. It might seem counter intuitive to make more movies when budget constraints are so severe. But the analysis showed that a bigger slate of […]

Greg Sandow offers some tough love to Chorus America, and others who engage research to promote the public value of the arts. Although it seems that his post is tough for him as well: So why am I sad to talk about this? Because the study suffers from an elementary misuse of statistics. But it’s […]

Doug McLennan provokes a rather central question in his blog post this week: are arts organizations in the business of selling tickets? Says he: If you believe your business model is the classic consumer transaction (I make the performance, you buy the ticket) then you’re done. Sorry. He goes on to suggest that arts organizations […]

A lot of early chatter about the web and its impact on community and place-based enterprise (like arts organizations) talked about the elimination of the local. In an on-line world, your ‘neighbor’ could be defined by common interests, shared profession, or similar purchase behavior, just as easily as by geographic proximity. In fact, in an […]