In my previous post on the Newark Museum of Art’s dicey deaccessions, I didn’t analyze the overall sale totals, my customary practice when covering auctions. Here’s why: It took a while for me to assemble the information I needed, because Sotheby’s now intentionally withholds the figures that I’ve habitually relied upon to evaluate results. – Lee Rosenbaum

The Music Director of the Oakland Symphony speaks about innovation and helping train promising young candidates for the podium. – Aaron Dworkin

Chicagoan Bob Koester, proprietor of the Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records for nearly 70 years, is a model of music activism and entrepreneurship from an era rapidly receding. – Howard Mandel

As part of her reinvention and rebranding of the Newark Museum (which, in 2019, added “of Art” to its name, even though it also includes science exhibits and a planetarium), its current director, Linda Harrison, less than three years into her tenure, appears to be running roughshod over its own policies, not to mention the AAMD’s deaccession guidelines. – Lee Rosenbaum

The return to the stage (though not their own) of the Met and of Opera Philadelphia, along with a streamed Aïda from the Paris Opera, have a few lessons for us. – David Patrick Stearns

The Artistic Advisor to the President and Chair of Composition Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, also Artistic Director of Curtis Summerfest, speaks about the role of technology in today’s conservatory. – Aaron Dworkin

Real care has to be taken with comparing data on prices and audience characteristics, because the prices were set in the first place as a result of local audience characteristics. There is no universal ‘demand curve’ for the arts: each company has a unique situation based on where it is. – Michael Rushton

New York City has announced a new program, City Artist Corps, inspired by FDR’s Works Progress Administration. There are two major problems with launching a WPA-styled policy in 2021, one in terms of the choice of policy, and one in terms of the very conception of arts policy. Let’s look at these in turn. – Michael Rushton

As I put it in a program note: “It’s a COVID-period entertainment: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive.” – Joseph Horowitz

“Everything I’ve done in my life,” he told me at the beginning of our wide-ranging conversation in his office, “has really been to challenge the status quo—not to be satisfied with the way things are, but to try to improve them.” I “get” Eli, perhaps because (as I learned from his book) we had a lot in common. – Lee Rosenbaum

The Senior Program Coordinator of the National Accelerator at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts speaks about the impact of collaboration and fellowships on students. – Aaron Dworkin

The pursuit of audiences and artists who come from, and speak for, various subgroups can enrich any shared arts experience aesthetically, emotionally, and socially. Longer term, it can translate to broader support and buy-in for arts organizations — in short, to more staying power. Still, it’s not always clear which business decisions can drive this objective. Re-enter SMU DataArts. – Sunil Iyengar

Two years ago, when the Salem, Mass. museum named Brian Kennedy, then director of the Toledo Museum, to succeed longtime director Dan Monroe, I wondered why Lynda Hartigan hadn’t gotten the nod. Now, after a brief detour to Toronto as deputy director at the Royal Ontario Museum, Lynda is returning to direct the museum that she so ably served, beginning as chief curator in 2003. – Lee Rosenbaum

The President & Executive Director of the Merit School of Music shares about the importance and impact of collaboration between arts organizations. – Aaron Dworkin

The verdict in the George Floyd murder trial provides your arts organization with an opportunity to take a very simple quiz to determine its readiness for engaging with communities. Here are three questions. – Doug Borwick

At this writing, the Metropolitan Museum is safe and so am I. That said, for a brief time during my visit there Monday afternoon, I feared for my life. (Admittedly, I tend to panic when being evacuated due to a bomb scare.) – Lee Rosenbaum

The only thing that’s certain about the fate of this elusive painting is that the story about why it hasn’t publicly surfaced since it was sold more than three years ago for $450 million keeps on changing. – Lee Rosenbaum

The dean of Juilliard’s Preparatory Division and trombonist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra speaks about transforming young artists’ lives and incorporating diversity across the breadth of an institution’s programs. – Aaron Dworkin

The intent is to overcome the very real danger that the nonprofit arts industry’s “equity statements” could easily become like the “thoughts and prayers” responses to mass shootings — worthy sentiments that lead nowhere. Without “feet to the fire” targets of some kind it’s too easy to slide into the comfort of the status quo. – Doug Borwick

The Assistant Director of the Colburn School’s Center for Innovation and Community Impact shares the impact of Colburn’s EDI initiatives and strategies on being an “intrapreneur.” – Aaron Dworkin

The pertinence of A Soldier’s Tale today is self-evident. It is a COVID diversion: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive. – Joseph Horowitz

A guest post by actor/writer/arts administrator Selena Anguiano, who shares some concerns about the use of benchmarks in the process of pursuing equity in nonprofit arts organizations. – Doug Borwick

As I hear my student playing the piano through Zoom, just for a moment, I think I am hearing Paderewski in 1912. The sound is imperfect. At moments it drops out. There are distortions of speed and rhythm. Yet, my ear, my mind is hearing music: completing and linking together the aural information that is there. – Bruce Brubaker

As it happens, I don’t care at all for Childe Hassam’s better-known etchings — I find them fussy — but lithography brought out a freer, more adventurous streak in his work, and there is one print of his that I have long sought, Avenue of the Allies. Also made in 1918, it is a lithographic monochrome pendant to the well-known series of thirty-odd brightly colored “flag paintings” that Hassam made during and after World War I. – Terry Teachout

Taking a page from the problematic playbooks of the Berkshire, Everson and Baltimore museums, the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, has become the latest poster child for deplorable deaccessions. – Lee Rosenbaum