The technology and technique of ‘collaborative filtering’ has been around the Internet for almost a decade now, and it’s slowly creeping into everything we do on-line. Collaborative filtering is basically a way of comparing your preferences about something (books, movies, music, whatever) against a huge database of other preferences. When the pattern of things you […]
Archives for April 2004
Debt, spin, and intrigue in Milwaukee
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal featured a few articles on the Milwaukee Art Museum (one on the finances, one on new director David Gordon). Both articles addressed the museum’s challenging combination of an over-budget signature building and the ‘perfect storm’ of revenue problems facing most arts organizations these days (lower enrollment/admissions, strapped government funding, ‘right-sizing’ corporations […]
Knee deep in the hoopla
It’s the last two weeks classes here at the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, so my posts will likely be patchy and brief for a little while. So many papers to read, students to place, projects to launch. In the meantime, here are some articles worth your attention elsewhere: More on the transaction value of […]
The hot topic that leaves us cold
There’s a word that’s guaranteed to cast a glaze over the eyes of my arts management students, to encourage a silent slouch in the nonprofit board room, and to dampen even the liveliest discussion of the arts. The word is ‘policy,’ and it’s arguably one of the most important words that arts managers don’t want […]
Conferences, conferences, ever more conferences
So I’m off again to another conference, this time of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (yes, Virginia, there is an association for everything). This is a group of full-time degree program directors (of undergraduate and graduate programs) that prepare managers for the arts and cultural field. Avid readers will recall a point-counterpoint argument I […]
More on the Neglected Audience
In an add-on to my post last week on engaging school children in the museum experience, a colleague sent me a link to a recent study that’s full of fun charts and graphs. The study, done by Harris Interactive for a December 2003 meeting of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (here’s the meeting […]
Those pesky indirect costs
The Board of Directors of Independent Sector, a service and research organization representing nonprofits, recently endorsed and posted a statement on the dreadfully dry but essential issue of operating costs. Authored by Paul Brest, president and CEO of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the statement seeks to encourage a new dialogue between funders and […]
The neglected audience
Christine Temin in the Boston Globe has a nice piece on several Massachusetts art museums reconsidering how they welcome and engage schoolchildren. Instead of the cattle call of the traditional annual school field trip, these museums are working to connect with children on many levels, and reinforce the museum as a place to discover their […]
Metaphor marketing and the arts
I just stumbled onto an older article in Fast Company on professor Jerry Zaltman, a marketing and consumer behavior maven at Harvard. He’s been working on ways to discover the hidden metaphors behind the way consumers view their world. His assumption is that we can’t just ask people what they want, because they honestly don’t […]
Of unions and antitrust
In New York, union workers are preparing to picket the use of a new machine that threatens their jobs. In DC, a professional association on the other side of the table has just released an antitrust policy to help its members avoid indictment under the Sherman Antitrust Act. No, it ‘s not about steel or […]