So what’s this blog called ‘The Artful Manager’? Sounds a bit glib. Sounds a bit like a Highly Effective Habits for Habit-Listing People approach to arts management. I hope it’s neither…but it may be both.
This blog is intended to be an on-line extension of the conversations I’ve been having throughout my work with arts managers, foundation leaders, students, academics, friends, colleagues, and unwitting strangers on airplanes. There seems to be a growing feeling of disconnection and frustration among those who manage, fund, market, and support nonprofit arts and culture organizations. In a professional field that’s really only forty-something — having its roots in the mass migration to nonprofit status in the 1960s — there are classic indicators of a middle-life crisis.
The world doesn’t work the way we thought it did, the way our common knowledge thinks it should, or the way our training prepared us for. Either the world is broken, or our eyes and brains aren’t seeing it right. One, I suggest, is easier to fix.
This blog will explore the idea that there’s another way to see the creation, support, delivery, engagement, and advancement of nonprofit arts and culture. I won’t claim to know what it is, just that I’m looking. To that end, the exploration will move on several tracks:
- Short links and notes on news, reports, and commentary around the web (which you’ll find on the blog’s home page — ie, the page you’re looking at right now);
- more extended discussions and issue overviews in this site’s Thoughtbucket;
- a growing list of Uncertain Terms I’ve been tracking that often seem to block our better vision (mine included);
- and links to Readings, Etc., where others are carrying the conversation in interesting directions.
I hope it’s a discussion, even though I’m the one with the microphone. Please send your thoughts, comments, criticisms, connections, and I’ll post a few as we go along.
But enough spin. Let’s get to it.
