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The Work of Presentational Art in the Age of On-Demand Technological Empowerment

February 19, 2012 By 4 Comments
tvsets

I have a friend who is getting his Ph.D. in linguistics by resurrecting a dead Native American language.  Working with one member of the tribe, and drawing mostly from hundred-year-old documents that attempted to transcribe a non-written language that has since died, he is recreating, based on educated guesses, other similar tongues that have survived and, well, I don’t know what—he is recreating a lost language from scratch. I was reminded of this effort as I listened today to the … [Read more...]

02/19/12 10:05 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Main |

Funny, Catchy and Not Too Challenging, or “At some point, you’re just an elitist f*ck.”

February 8, 2012 By 12 Comments
sweet_home_alabama

I was having a conversation with Arlene Goldbard about a month ago, and at some point I started getting a sour taste over some of the things we were discussing, but I couldn’t figure out why.  Our subject was the four interviews with patrons that I had conducted as part of our intrinsic impact research (which will be published, along with an essay by Goldbard, as part of the 450-page report out on the whole project, Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, available March … [Read more...]

02/8/12 11:01 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Main |

A Divided Country Still

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

  This post originally appeared on the Theatre Bay Area Chatterbox at http://www.theatrebayarea.org/chatterbox. As we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and remember the great strides that were made, despite tremendous resistance, in the 1960’s by King and many other brave men and women, it’s important to also note that, by and large, the theatre community continues to be a divided country. Our genre, at least in the United States, and at least in the more mainstream … [Read more...]

01/16/12 10:35 PM | filed under: Advocacy, Main |

What Inequality Looks Like and Where and When It Starts

December 12, 2011 By 14 Comments
"Not Equal" by holeymoon on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

A couple weeks ago, I was the recipient of a string of emails that are making the rounds—emails stemming from a lack of diversity in the panelists at this year’s National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) Conference.  These emails, which were, in order: An email from Roberto Bedoya, the executive director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, to Bob Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts, which produced NAMP (ultimately forwarded to a variety of other people by Roberto), An email from Bob Lynch to … [Read more...]

12/12/11 10:31 PM | filed under: Main, Research |

Art and Happiness: New research indicates 4 out of 6 happiest activities are arts-related (!)

December 2, 2011 By 13 Comments
"Happiness" by Aprile C from Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Last week, an article that was actually published nearly a month ago on Chatelaine.com passed through my Facebook feed four times in two days.  The article, titled “The three times people are happiest—you may be surprised,” rather vaguely discussed a research project out of the London School of Economics that was mapping happiness levels associated with various activities—and the results, per the article, indicated that, behind sex and exercise, the next most happiness-inducing activity … [Read more...]

12/2/11 10:33 AM | filed under: Main, Research |

Theatre as an Antidote to Isolation

November 29, 2011 By 1 Comment
"Honeycomb" by nene9 from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

"Honeycomb" by nene9 from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.I'm transcribing some interviews we have conducted with patrons (some of which I've written about previously) about the impact of artistic experiences on them, and I was so affected by one that I'm going to just post an excerpt of it here and let it speak for itself.  Well, speak for itself except to say that the interviewee is a man by the name of Sean McKenna who lives in Oakland, and who attends about 35 shows a year with … [Read more...]

11/29/11 10:33 PM | filed under: Audience Development, Main |

The Uberti Effect, or The Making of Me(aning)

November 17, 2011 By 1 Comment
Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Illustration by Maurice Sendak.

Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Illustration by Maurice Sendak.At this year's National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, which took place this past weekend, I was hit by the Uberti Effect and it took me a while to figure out what it had done to me. Oliver Uberti was one of the plenary speakers. He is a visual artist and design editor for National Geographic magazine, and he is also gorgeous. On top of that, he is what Meredith Grey would probably term a little … [Read more...]

11/17/11 8:44 PM | filed under: Audience Development, Main |

On (in)Appropriate Cultural Appropriation

October 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Nakotah Larance in Totem, photo by Greg Horn.

Nakotah Larance in Totem, photo by Greg Horn.In the late 1800's, William Cody, more popularly known as Buffalo Bill, toured the United States and Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a production that featured sharpshooters, re-enactments of Indian attacks (it was said to have ended with a presentation of Custer's Last Stand) and, later (when the title was appended to include "and Congress of Rough Riders of the World"), feats of derring-do from people from the Middle East, Mongolia, Central … [Read more...]

10/31/11 10:26 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Language, Main |

Directing the Impact Echo

October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
"CCC" by Dylan Boroczi from Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

"CCC" by Dylan Boroczi from Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.Yesterday, I attended the all-day Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference put on by the Wallace Foundation as the culminating event of their involvement in the Bay Area.  There were lots of presenters, but across all of them there seemed to be this theme that we as arts professionals needed to be focusing not only on the work created, but on what researchers Alan Brown and Rebecca Ratzkin of WolfBrown called the “impact … [Read more...]

10/25/11 9:44 AM | filed under: Advocacy, Audience Development, Main |

The Evaluation Problem

October 3, 2011 By 3 Comments
sur-la-table-cooking-tools-12-stainless-steel-twoprong-fork

Diane Ragsdale and Devon Smith have written tandem arguments about the difference and relative laxness of arts incubators over technology incubators. I won’t go into all that they’ve said, as you should be reading their blogs anyway, but in sum it comes down to an argument that arts incubators, rather than adopting the put up or shut up attitude of tech incubators, whose average support time is 33 months and at the end of which they let you fly or fall on your own, instead adopt a system … [Read more...]

10/3/11 3:19 PM | filed under: Language, Main |
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