NOTE: This entry is part of a continuing series sprouting from a leadership roundtable hosted by the Getty Leadership Institute and National Arts Strategies in June 2004. For links to all posts in the series, see below. In the exploration of the differences between nonprofit and commercial cultural enterprise, we’ve already touched on the challenge […]
Archives for August 2004
New museum model or Trojan horse?
The museum world is casting a wary eye on Clear Channel Communications, according to this LA Times report (username: ajreader@artsjournal.com, password: access). The multi-mega-media company, with efforts in radio, outdoor advertising, concert production and promotion, and other industries is touring its third museum show. It’s a bit of irony that the company’s third touring show […]
GETTY: Some capital ideas
Any extended conversation of nonprofit cultural enterprise will eventually wind its way to a certain business term: undercapitalization. The term and the challenge certainly came up often at the Getty Leadership Institute/National Arts Strategies roundtable I attended back in June. The general gist of the conversation is that the nonprofit arts lack sufficient capital to […]
Orientation and orienteering
We’re knee deep in new graduate student orientation this week in my program, so my entries will be patchy, at best. In the meantime, I’m pleased to point you in a completely self-serving and self-involved way to a feature in September’s Madison Magazine about the business of art, and the transition of the degree program […]
The art of the everyday
Found Magazine is a glorious aggregation of discovered things from the everyday world: to-do lists, photos, cards, ticket stubs, doodled napkins, and on and on. Public radio’s ‘To the Best of Our Knowledge’ featured an interview with Found’s editor Davy Rothbart, with some dark, funny, and sad examples read aloud in the audio stream. Among […]
Value solved: This weblog is worth $4,992.64
BlogShares is a fascinating experiment in valuing something vague and amorphous, in this case the individual ‘value’ of any given weblog (on-line column, like this one). Constructed as a fantasy stock exchange, the BlogShares system analyzes any weblog it can find — over 1.3 million of them so far — with a full range of […]
Finding Forrester
In the search for better management metaphors in arts and culture, and in my work directing an MBA degree program for arts managers, I keep finding myself drawn into the discipline and worldview of system dynamics, or systems thinking, or ecological thinking, or whatever you care to call it. Systems thinking (short definition here) is […]
GETTY: In search of elbow room
NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of entries on a roundtable discussion I attended in June…more details in the first post. When discussing the challenges of for-profit and nonprofit enterprise in the creative industries back in June, there was much talk of ‘elbow room,’ that small amount of extra space (financial space, physical […]
Will dance for cash
The Sunday New York Times went on a bit about the on-going trend of ‘selling’ major ballet stars to donors in an effort to squeeze contributed income. Through individual dancer sponsorships, endowments, auctions, and other means, at least seven of America’s 14 largest ballet companies have put their dancers on the block, with four more […]
GETTY: Fun with Fungibility
One of the clear differences between nonprofit and for-profit creative enterprise is how each can use cash and financial resources to advance its work. This distinction seemed to stick during the GLI/NAS roundtable in June (see my original post for background, also note that the Getty Leadership Institute has now posted a summary of the […]