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- What Happens When You Expose Octopuses To Art?
The Japanese artist Shimabuku wanted to find out — so he started making artworks for them. – CNN
- The Power Of Gossip And Spiritual Ease
I was able to differentiate between types of gossip through this association: the kind that aims to bring a rival low, that tries to set the record straight about some unfairly maligned individual, or that is akin to a secret stock tip and meant to benefit a shrewd listener. Every subject was fair game. – The Walrus
- Just Whom Is Spotify’s New Time-Limited Audiobook Subscription For? Not Enough Time For The Whole Book.
The 30-hour limit won’t get you through titles like George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones or Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, for example. You could listen to two or three smaller novels instead, but if you want to re-listen to them in the future, you’ll have to sacrifice those hours again. – The Verge
- Yale Art Gallery Withdraws Grant Applications After NEA Anti-DEI Rules
The Yale Art Gallery, the renowned university museum in New Haven, Connecticut, has withdrawn two federal grant applications for an African art exhibition after rejecting the new, anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) stipulations introduced by the Trump administration. – ARTnews
- Director of Marketing and Communications, Mark Morris Dance Group
The Mark Morris Dance Group is seeking a Director of Marketing and Communications to strategically advance our visibility, reputation, and audience engagement. The Director is responsible for promoting the Mark Morris Dance Group’s performing company, Dance Center, Dance for PD, school, and community programs. As we approach our 45th anniversary this position will play an integral role in ensuring the organization’s brand is effectively communicated to diverse audiences, including ticket buyers, donors, students, community members, press, presenters and other industry professionals.
As a member of the senior leadership team, the Director collaborates closely with the Executive Director, Chief Financial Officer and Director of Development to align marketing efforts with institutional goals. The Director will also lead external communications, represent the organization publicly, and play a key role in driving messaging for major initiatives.
Reporting to the Executive Director, this role manages branding, content strategy, digital and print communications, advertising, public relations, and audience development initiatives. This role oversees a team of three to four staff members, including a Marketing Manager, Creative Content; Marketing and Digital Engagement Associate; Dancer Social Media Liaison and external consultants.
Key responsibilities include but are not limited to:
Strategy and Leadership
- Develop and implement a comprehensive marketing and communications strategy to enhance local, national, and global awareness of the organization’s mission and programs.
- Communicate regularly with the Executive Director and department heads to align marketing strategies with institutional priorities.
- Collaborate closely with the Development Department leveraging marketing strategies to design and execute integrated campaigns that build and diversify the organization’s base of support, strengthen donor relationships, and drive philanthropic engagement.
- Lead and mentor a high-performing marketing team, providing strategic direction, professional development, and performance management.
- Promote a culture of collaboration, innovation, and creative thinking, encouraging the team to experiment with new strategies to stay motivated and bring fresh ideas to the table.
- Oversee and manage the marketing budget, effectively allocating resources to achieve marketing goals within budget.
- Develop and implement crisis communication strategies to safeguard the organization’s reputation and ensure clear, transparent messaging during challenging periods internally and externally.
Audience Development and Revenue Growth
- Drive audience development, engagement, and revenue growth by creating and managing marketing campaigns for performances, education programs, and community engagement initiatives.
- Develop and execute strategies to support the recruitment and retention of students across all education programs.
- Partner with the Development Department to enhance audience engagement through targeted email automation, segmentation, and personalized donor journeys that drive sustained support and increased giving.
- Support Artistic department and booking representative in the active promotion of the Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble to presenters, venues, and festivals, leveraging marketing materials, media campaigns, and strategic partnerships to expand performance opportunities.
- Advise, assist, and support presenters in their efforts to sell tickets to MMDG performances.
Marketing Execution and Content Development
- Manage all marketing efforts, including digital and social media advertising, SEO, and email marketing.
- Lead brand management efforts, ensuring consistent messaging and visual identity across all digital and print communications.
- Develop and implement comprehensive social media strategies to drive engagement, visibility, and community connections, including influencer and partner collaborations.
- Oversee content creation and media production, collaborating with designers, photographers, videographers, and copywriters to develop compelling storytelling materials.
- Leverage marketing and development automation tools to streamline campaigns and enhance personalization at scale.
- Create and execute inclusive, culturally responsive, and accessible marketing strategies to engage a diverse audience.
- Lead e-commerce marketing strategies, including online merchandise, Digital Dance Center, and virtual offerings.
Data, Analysis, and Innovation
- Track, analyze, and report on campaign performance; use data-driven insights to optimize strategies and improve outcomes.
- Implement testing frameworks (A/B testing and multivariate analysis) to continuously refine campaign strategies and ensure marketing initiatives deliver optimal results.
- Collaborate with cross functional teams—including IT, operations, and program leads—to ensure marketing technology and initiatives are fully integrated and support overall organizational objectives.
- Monitor industry trends in arts and culture to ensure the organization’s offerings remain relevant, competitive, and community focused.
- Conduct surveys and gather feedback from constituents to evaluate and enhance programming, ensuring offerings meet community needs and align with organizational goals.
- Oversee the ongoing integration of Salesforce, consolidating audience, donor, and participant data from multiple platforms.
Partnerships and External Relations
- Develop strong relationships with press and external partners to maximize coverage and visibility.
- Manage external consultants and vendors, including PR/media firms, digital agencies, freelance designers, and content creators.
Supervisory Responsibilities:
Yes
Minimum Education & Experience Requirements:
- 8-10 years of marketing experience, preferably in the cultural or performing arts sector.
- Proven expertise in branding, digital marketing, audience development, and content strategy.
- Strong background in campaign management, media relations, and storytelling.
- Experience with Salesforce (or other) CRM systems, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, email marketing platforms, Google Analytics and other digital metrics platforms, and SEO.
- Demonstrated ability to leverage data and analytics tools to measure campaign performance and inform strategy.
- Proficiency in Microsoft O365, MS SharePoint, Google Workspace and WordPress (or similar tools).
You will be successful in this role if you:
- Are an Outstanding Leader – You have an inspiring creative vision and see obstacles as opportunities. Once you have a goal in sight, you are dedicated in your pursuit. You thrive on continued learning and professional development.
- Have Launched New Programs and Initiatives – You know the ins and outs of audience/customer-base segmentation and development. – You have a track record of significantly growing fans or customers.
- Have a Strong Aesthetic Sensibility – You have a great eye for design and understand how to support and interpret the artistic director’s aesthetic and vision.
- Are an Extraordinary Project Manager – You are incredibly organized and can manage multiple initiatives, keeping the larger group on track to meet deadlines.
- Love our Work and Align with our Core Values – You’re inspired by the ways in which we celebrate our diverse community, pursue excellence in all that we do, advance access, exposure and opportunity to dance and music, and cultivate creativity. You’ve seen a show or taken a class, and you’re hooked!
SCHEDULE: This is a full-time, exempt position that requires on-site work. A flexible hybrid schedule may be considered after the successful completion of a six-month on-site introductory period.
We offer a comprehensive benefits package including:
- Paid vacation, sick/personal leave, holidays and bonus days
- Employee Health and Life insurance covered 100%, Flexible Spending Plan, Voluntary vision and dental coverage, Pre-tax commuter benefit, 403(b) retirement plan
- Access to special events and MMDG performances (when available)
- Access to free and discounted classes at the Dance Center and online
- Invitations to cultural events are extended to staff members by community partners.
To join our team, please include a cover letter addressed to Nancy Umanoff, Executive Director, with your resume submission. Your cover letter must highlight relevant experience; resume submittals without a cover letter will not be considered.
- Stephen Petronio Company To Give Its Last-Ever Performances At Jacob’s Pillow Next Week
The 69-year-old choreographer announced earlier this year that this season, the company’s 40th anniversary, is its last. Two years ago, he announced that the dance center he had opened in upstate New York would shut down after only six years. Both closures are fallout from the COVID pandemic. – MassLive
- How Trump Managed To Kill Bipartisaan Support For Public Broadcasting
Trump had campaigned on retribution and made the news media a core element of his grievance. Public broadcasting has offered a ready target, given the government funding, and he has repeatedly claimed NPR and PBS demonstrate ideological bias. – NPR
- How Trump’s Attacks On Journalists Are Weakening The First Amendment
They show Trump has found tactical ways to prevail in his nonstop battle to discredit outlets that report critically on him and his activities. – Variety
- Fantastical Set Designer John Conklin, 88
The term “prodigy” rarely applies to set designers, but Mr. Conklin’s instincts were on full display in his youth. Growing up in Hartford, Conn., he attended symphonies and operas with his family, and by the age of 10 he was building his own models, based on photographs he found perusing the magazine Opera News. – The New York Times
- The Most Dangerous Book In America?
“What has been labeled the ‘bible of the racist right’ has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can. … There is no exaggeration in saying that The Turner Diaries and books like it have played a part in spreading hateful ideas that now even influence government policy.” – The Atlantic (MSN)
- The search for the very nice arts philanthropist
Last month, the Scottish government came up with a one-time grant of £300,000 to cover the Edinburgh International Book Festival, after pressure from environmental protestors caused the previous sponsor, Baillie Gifford, to back out.
This week in Canada, its premier book award, the Giller Prize, having lost its primary sponsor, Scotiabank, after protests, has appealed to the Canadian government to keep things afloat:
Without stable funding, the Giller Foundation says the prize will be forced to end operations at the end of 2025, according to a report Wednesday in the Globe and Mail.
The annual $100,000 prize for fiction ended its 20-year partnership with lead sponsor Scotiabank earlier this year. At that time, Giller Foundation executive director Elana Rabinovitch did not comment on the financial effect the loss of the lead sponsor would have on the prize’s future.
The foundation has drafted a letter to the federal government asking for $5 million in funding over three years to help it continue operations, the Globe reports. The letter has reportedly not yet been sent to Ottawa.
“We are incredibly bullish about the future of the prize and all of its various programs and activities, and are actively engaging with potential sponsors,” Rabinovitch said in an email to Q&Q on Thursday. “Our aim is to host an amazing event this fall that not only champions Canadian authors but also upholds our long-standing tradition of honouring exceptional Canadian fiction. Our focus remains steadfastly on celebrating Canadian authors and their books.”
Rabinovitch told the Globe that the foundation is considering scrapping the televised gala event and national author tour in the future as a way to keep the prize alive, but did not provide Q&Q with any further comment.
The goal here seems to be to find a corporation or an individual who accumulated billions of dollars in assets, which they are willing to use, in part, to patronize the arts, who earned those billions doing very nice things. Failing that, when a long-time sponsor is found lacking in some moral dimension, it is then up to the government to fill the funding gap, though in the long run this is bound to change the nature of the prize, and also brings with it the need for a justification of why the government ought to use its funds this way. “But the state should fund the arts” isn’t a good enough response, because state support for the arts can do many things besides giving $100,000 prizes for fiction. I like fiction, and I like public funding of the arts, but were I still a Canadian taxpayer I would balk at the suggestion that this is a good use of $5 million, money that a Canadian bank was, in the past, pleased to provide.
I hope that the planet can reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, and I think the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza are immoral. But if I feel so strongly about those issues that I refuse to have anything to do with any company that has any ties to such things, then I have to accept that I might not have a book festival or a fiction prize anymore – that would be a price to be paid for my convictions. Saying “well, the government can fund it” is a cop out, too easy.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- “Citizen Kane”‘s Rosebud Sleigh Sells For $14.75M
Film director Joe Dante had owned the piece since 1984, when a person was clearing out a section of the Paramount Pictures film lot that had once been owned by RKO, the defunct studio which produced “Citizen Kane.” – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
- The Art Of Extra-ing
In gaps between jobs, an assortment of artists, coders and labourers played policemen, caterers and journalists. As one of the extras playing a journalist, I could draw on personal experience. – The Observer (UK)
- Cancelling Colbert: The Ideological Purge Comes To Late Night TV
CBS knows what all this looks like. They’re trying very hard to address the optics. – Washington Post
- Detroit Opera, Facing Big Budget Shortfall, Cancels Next Season’s First Production
Following steep drops in donations and especially government funding, the company has called off all performances of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West this fall. It was to be the only traditionally presented staging of the coming season; the remaining productions are of unconventional repertoire. – Detroit Free Press
- Why Liberal Arts Education Is Really In Decline At American Universities
The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power. – The New York Times
- Canada’s Giller Prize Will Close Down This Year Without New Sponsor Or Government Funding
“The annual $100,000 prize for fiction ended its 20-year partnership with lead sponsor Scotiabank earlier this year. At that time, Giller Foundation executive director Elana Rabinovitch did not comment on the financial effect the loss of the lead sponsor would have on the prize’s future.” – Quill & Quire
- Meet The New Champion Of The Left-Hand Piano Repertoire
Nicholas McCarthy, a 35-year-old Briton who was born without a right hand, has not only conquered the well-known works such as the Ravel concerto, he has commissioned new pieces for piano one-hand and revived little-known pieces from a repertoire that number more than 3,000 scores. – The New York Times
- Making The Gisèle Pelicot Trial Into Theatre
“The three-hour performance (at the Avignon Festival) has been created by Milo Rau, the Swiss director and playwright acclaimed for his theatre interpretations of court proceedings, including the Moscow trial of the Russian punks Pussy Riot and the trial of the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu.” – The Guardian
- Steve Benson, Provocative, Pulitzer-Winning Editorial Cartoonist, Is Dead At 71
“(He) evolved from a conservative, high-profile member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into an outspoken atheist and liberal, all while using his pen to skewer presidents and the powerful.” (He liked to describe himself as an “editorial harpoonist.”) – The Washington Post (MSN)
- Woody Allen Is Now A Novelist
Since the 1970s, Allen has written several books of short stories and essays, as well as a memoir, Apropos of Nothing, published in 2020, but this is his first novel. What’s With Baum, to be released later this year by Swift Press, is about a middle-aged Jewish journalist-turned-novelist ‘consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun.” – The Guardian
- Congress Approves Trump’s Clawback Of All Public Radio And TV Funding
The bill reclaims the entire $1.1 billion previously appropriated for the next two years for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB distributes two-thirds of its funding to over 1,500 local public radio and TV stations, with most of the rest going to NPR and PBS to support national programming. – AP
- CBS Cancels “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” In A “Purely Financial Decision”
The cancellation, effective next May, of US late-night TV’s highest-rated program comes as CBS’s corporate parent, Paramount Global, seeks FCC approval of an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media. Colbert has long been a strong and high-profile critic of Donald Trump, including in his monologues on The Late Show. – CNN
- Rediscovering Harry Burleigh — via Sidney Outlaw
When my wife and I heard Sidney Outlaw sing Harry Burleigh’s “Till I Wake” a few years ago,
- Wisconsin Has A New Professional Ballet Company
Wisconsin Dance Theatre, based in the southern part of the state between Milwaukee and Madison, just opened its debut production — A Hero’s Homecoming, a World War II story which artistic director Samuel Huberty believes is more resonant with today’s audience than are classic story ballets about royalty and the supernatural. – Wisconsin Public Radio
- The School Teacher Who Was Selling “Creepy” Art Made By His Students
The page was entitled “Creepy Portrait Art,” and the pictures were, as promised, incredibly creepy. Dozens of student portraits, mostly in crayon, depicted a grab bag of nightmarish externalization: twelve- and thirteen-year-olds with bleeding wounds, sutured mouths, and dangling eyeballs. – The Walrus
- Editors Used To be The Gatekeepers. Now That They’re Largely Gone, Should We Bring Them Back?
We still live in the world Condé Nast and its intimidating editors created. We just don’t know how to make sense of it, because we lack the requisite curatorial eyes. – Washington Post (MSN)
- Folk Rock Band Hits Big On The Music Charts. Trouble Is, The Band Is AI. So Now What?
As the project rises on global charts and dominates Viral 50 playlists, artists and industry professionals are asking urgent questions about authenticity, consent and the future of music creation. – ArtsHub
- India’s Nationalist Government Is Pushing Hindi To Replace English. Non-Hindi-Speaking States Are Pushing Back Hard.
It’s the latest outbreak of a recurring argument: the central government in Delhi (in Hindi-speaking north-central India) pushes for Hindi in place of the British colonizers’ tongue, while other states argue that with English, every region is on an equal footing and Hindi won’t crowd out their own languages. – Deutsche Welle
- How Misinformation Infects A Community
Social connections establish pathways of influence that can facilitate the spread of germs, mental illness and even behaviors. We can be profoundly influenced by others within our social networks, for better or for worse. – The Conversation
- Republicans Propose Big Cuts To NEA, NEH, Kennedy Center Budgets
House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee recommended 35 percent cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) budget, and a 17.2 percent reduction in the Kennedy Center’s budget. If passed, this would be the NEA’s lowest allocation since 2007. – American Theatre
- Jacob’s Pillow Gets A New Modern Addition
It is unmistakably a work of contemporary architecture, a radical departure for Jacob’s Pillow. As such, it must be judged not only on how successfully it performs its programmatic duties but also on its implications for the character of the campus. In other words, is it a good neighbor? – The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
- US Senate Votes To Kill Funding For Public Broadcasting
The measure, known formally as a “rescission package,” is a request from President Donald Trump to take back $9 billion in funds that Congress has already appropriated for foreign aid and public broadcasting. – Poynter
- Russia’s Private Art Museums Are Targets In Putin’s Crackdown On Dissent
“Many cultural workers and some billionaire museum founders have chosen to leave Russia; others have felt compelled to do so after warnings that they could be imprisoned. Here is how four private Russian museums are faring in this difficult environment.” – The Art Newspaper
- Why Did Supercool Indie Film Studio A24 Buy An Off-Broadway Theater?
Since A25 bought the Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan’s West Village two years ago, the house has been closed. Turns out the studio has been renovating, and the theater will reopen in September as A24’s first live performance venue. – The New York Times
