Clayton Lord on new art and new audiences
I found out a few days before Christmas that I’m going to be the new Vice President of Local Arts Advancement for Americans for the Arts. The official announcement will be made in a few days, and when it's out there I'm going to post this. I’ll be overseeing a team that generates and disseminates research, programs and services to help local arts agencies, service organizations and advocacy-minded arts groups and artists to put art back in its proper place as a driving force of … [Read more...]
I've been reading The Victory Lab lately, an absolutely fascinating look at how elections are won and lost. And more than it's about anything--even more than it's about technological advancement--it's about messaging, and framing, and rhetoric. Amidst many exciting, soaring scenarios about changing the landscape of public good will towards the arts that have flitted through my head while I read about the rise of modern politics, I've had this constant buzzing of "never gonna happen unless we … [Read more...]
I grew up maybe a half-hour from Newtown, Connecticut, in a town called Ridgefield that, today, became momentarily someplace you might know about when someone spotted someone with a gun (or something) near one of the schools and all of the schools in town went on lockdown. That would have included Ridgebury Elementary School, where I went, high up on a hill in an out of the way part of town, surrounded by woods and bordered by a swampy area at the bottom of a grade that was great … [Read more...]
In a comment on my post from last week about framing, John Carnwath honed in on a comment I sort of tossed off about the threat to the charitable deduction posed by the fiscal cliff. Take a look at his comment, which is very well laid out—he notes that while the tax deduction for charitable giving is surely and important driver for the arts, he’s not convinced that, given the topic of the post, a frame that suggests favoring the wealthy with a “tax break” is the best idea. He notes … [Read more...]
On his way out the door, Rocco Landesman lobbed one final, wonderful bomb out there in a conversation with his counterpart in France (who, by the way, receives $9 billion-with-a-B in annual funding whereas the NEA has about $150 million). He was speaking at the World Arts Forum, and spoke about a “fundamental, visceral distrust of the arts” by the American public. He called the NEA funding level “pathetic,” and who can disagree, and his blunt honesty about what he called the arts’ … [Read more...]
Before getting to the actual entry, a couple places I encourage you to visit. (1) I was humbled to learn earlier this week that I was selected as one of the 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Non-Profit Arts in Barry Hessenius' annual rundown. I'm honored, and thank everyone who reads this blog for the kind attention. (2) A few months ago now, I was equally humbled to learn that a paper of mine, "Shattering the myth of the passive spectator: Entrepreneurial efforts to enhance … [Read more...]
I discovered Jonah Lehrer in 2008 as I was browsing around the internet looking for interesting, accessible blogs about the brain for non-brain-people. Back then, Lehrer’s blog was hosted on a relatively obscure (given where he ended up) blog sharing site called Science Blogs, but regardless of where he was, it had the same name as the subsequent, heavily-trafficked blogs he moved to afterward:The Frontal Cortex. The frontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for most of our … [Read more...]
As I head to TCG to moderate a panel with Diane Ragsdale, Diane Paulus and Chad Bauman on how to better integrate art and artists into a conversation about audience engagement, I feel a little like I'm walking into the set up for a joke and I don't know the end of it. "An arts marketer and advocate walks into a bar full of artists and says, 'Maybe art is really a means to an end...'" Then what? I've been thinking about this shift, from a mindset where the making of art is the center of … [Read more...]
Lately, I’ve had to take a break from this writing in order to catch up a bit on my day job and my more domestic duties. It is interesting, in the absence of being able to write about my random threads of thought, to watch my brain rev and churn on certain ideas without truly having a chance to sort them out. For me, writing this blog helps align the many different strings of thought about the arts (because I’m one of those guys who seems to be constantly thinking about art) into … [Read more...]
I have had some trouble getting up the energy to be upset about the Mike Daisey problem otherwise known as #DaiseyGate. This became obvious to me as I sat at lunch at one of my stops on the Counting New Beans tour with a bunch of mid-twenties junior staffers at major theatres and heard them rail against Daisey and his lying lies, voicing the betrayal they felt as staffers who are sometimes put in the position of lying to an audience, either knowingly or unknowingly, in the service of the art … [Read more...]
I believe that art makes better humans, but that that can only happen when the line from art to audience is as taut, clean and consistent as possible. The interplay between artmakers and audience members is central to what we do and vital to the success of the enterprise. That crackle across the wire, that static in the air at a live event, is good. It makes your ears hum, your hair stand on end--it's what connects people in a room behind and in front of the fourth wall. As Tom … [Read More...]
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