The Artful Manager

After such a long, arduous, and contentious election season, we can all use a short civic nap today. Make it a power nap, at least for your individual citizen self, but before you nod off make a checklist of what your organizational self needs to do the moment you wake up. … [Read more...]

Cartoonist Hugh MacCleod's post about 'Social Objects for Beginners' is many years old (like an ancient rune in webtime), but I keep going back to it. It's an issue so central to the cultural manager's work and leadership that it deserves recurring attention. MacCleod builds on the insights of anth­ro­pol­ogist and social software maven Jyri Enges­trom, and defines the concept this way: The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the rea­son two peo­ple are tal­king to each other, as oppo­sed to tal­king to some­body else. Human beings … [Read more...]

Two technology innovations have me thinking about 'being' somewhere, and the seemingly divergent forces now at work in our digital lives. The first was this post about 'remotely piloted telepresence robots' -- essentially iPads on wheels running Facetime or Skype or some other videoconferencing system. I'm usually skeptical about prophecies of human-machine hybrids, but this approach seems both practical and inexpensive enough to take a step in that direction. … [Read more...]

The Fall 2012 issue of Grantmakers in the Arts Reader provides exemplary service to us all by revisiting five essential reports on the arts and culture field. While bloggers and professional associations tend to favor the ''new'' research that might inform our work, there's a wealth of insight and information in the stacks of effort and energy gathering dust on our (virtual) shelves. … [Read more...]

For as long as I've been observing the arts and culture world through a 'systems' lens, I've been frustrated by the number of apparently broken systems. Thoughtful people in experienced communities building cultural facilities that are too large for their goals. Smart individuals making odd and upside-down decisions when part of a governing board. Foundations earnestly leading an entire community or artistic discipline into greater instability with their grants. … [Read more...]

For any who missed the live webstream of our American University public forum on How Art Works, the new report and system map from the National Endowment for the Arts, fear not. The entire event is now available in lovely little video segments online. … [Read more...]

One of the benefits of buying a movie in DVD or Blueray is the commentary track that often accompanies the purchased version (often not on the Netflix rental version, darn it). So, once you've watched a movie once or several times, you can watch it again while listening to the director or actors or creative team chatter about what you're watching. … [Read more...]

The discipline of Economics studies and describes the allocation of scarce resources to competing ends. In other words, economists explore how individuals, collectives (aka, businesses), communities, societies, and civilizations decide where and how to spend their time, talent, and treasure -- in a world where each of those things is in limited supply. … [Read more...]

Nikiko Masumoto offers a lovely essay on the idea of family farmer as performance artist. Given her dual background in a family of family farmers, and her education in gender studies and 'performance as public practice,' she seems uniquely suited to the comparison. She suggests that farming can be a performance, according to Elin Diamond's definition of performance as ''embodied acts, in specific sites, witnessed by others… [and] …a thing done, the completed event.'' … [Read more...]

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about metrics and measurement in the arts -- the various ways we look for evidence that we're making progress on mission, or making a difference in some area of our community. And for many I speak with, metrics are a matter of concern and frustration: Why must I shift my focus from the work to measure the impact of the work? Or, why must I bend my artistic vision to achieve some external measure? … [Read more...]