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The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

About this Blog

For six decades now, nonprofit arts and culture organizations have focused on a corporate ideal. Using the mantras of for-profit America — effectiveness, efficiency, professionalism, best practices, change management, accountability — a generation of arts leaders has struggled to graft business basics onto the world of creative expression.

But what if, all along the way, we fundamentally misunderstood what it meant to be run “like a business”? What if our management metaphors actually contribute to the problems we hope they will solve — separateness, disengagement, inflexibility, entropy, and stress?

The Artful Manager seeks a new set of metaphors for administrative leaders of arts and culture. There is a need for business thinking, to be sure, with an intensity and deftness we have only begun to understand. But there is also an energy beyond money and markets that the artful manager must channel. What if, in the end, the arts organization is not a problem to be managed, but an instrument to be played?

Site launched on July 14, 2003.

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About Andrew Taylor

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Andrew Taylor is a faculty member of American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC...
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Recent Comments

  • Jim O'Connell on It’s complicated, or complex, or chaos, or…: “Thank you, Andrew. This has me reviewing a half-century of experience in performing arts presenting. It all rings…” Jan 8, 11:02
  • Bill Byrnes on It’s complicated, or complex, or chaos, or…: “Thanks. This was a very interesting and useful video.” Jan 5, 12:20
  • Julia on Sovereignty or service: “Thanks for this article. It was years ago when I was studying accounting while pursuing my MA at the Bolz…” Oct 14, 21:34
  • William Osborne on Sovereignty or service: “These views (in short, the corporation as a person,) could be correlated to the market fundamentalism reflected in neoliberalism.…” Oct 13, 20:39
  • Michael Cochran on Concept Test Kitchen, Episode 1: “As the Executive Director who has worked for an organization for 30+ years the challenges you speak about are a…” Oct 13, 12:34

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