Archives for 2004

There’s some interesting stuff for arts and cultural mavens in Richard Florida’s latest salvo on the implications of the ‘creative class’ mindset. Sure, it’s a bit over the top and chicken-little-esque (that’s what polemics do, after all), but there are bits of wisdom along the way, as well. Florida is alarmed at the efforts of […]

Bernard Holland had a good piece in the Sunday New York Times about arts education. In it, he tugs apart the assumed connection between arts education and arts appreciation: An implicit contract has been signed but is not necessarily being honored. It states that if I understand a piece of music, I’m likely to like […]

I’m on the road AGAIN, this time for a board meeting of the Association of Arts Administration Educators, the professional association of degree programs like the one I direct at UW-Madison (note the shameless link to my place of employment…marketing theory at work). As such, I only have time to point you somewhere else today, […]

The business section of the Seattle Post-Inteligencer carries this corporate intervention story with a twist — the twist being that the corporation in question is a nonprofit museum. Since it opened, the Experience Music Project in Seattle has been in search of a focused mission, and scrambling for a more stable mix of revenue against […]

A successful manager of an arts and cultural organization has to be a good storyteller. Not fiction, mind you (leave that to the Enron executives), but compelling stories of mission, action, money, and goals. They tell these stories to donors, to board members, to staff, to artists, to audiences. And they tell them in several […]

A great segment on NPR last night explored the phenomenon of Mormon cinema, an extremely targeted film genre that seeks to serve an extremely targeted audience. Says Dave Hunter, co-founder of Hailstorm Entertainment: We know where every single Mormon on the face of the planet lives. We have picked our audience and we are catering […]

Apple Computer leader Steve Jobs had an odd statistic in his Macworld conference (see my weblog entry here) that I finally got around to tracking down. He quoted a study that said more than half of all households in the United States contained someone who currently played an instrument. From my Google wanderings, I’m guessing […]

The Arts Presenters conference in New York, like so many other professional events in the arts over the past years, had a special focus on presenting ‘world music’. Lots of sessions explored the state of world music, the particular challenges of programming it to American audiences, the visa issues, the lack of professional infrastructure in […]

Large professional conferences can usually drain the life out of you — with the flourescent lighting and recirculated air serving as metaphors for the vague insights and recirculated ideas that comprise their official functions. But around the edges of these events lives the true inspiration (and the true energy) for cynics like me. Such is […]

I’m traveling today to attend the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York (here’s a good overview of the conference in today’s NY Times). Hoping to get more grist for the weblog mill, and eager to mix and mingle with alumni of the Arts Administration degree program I direct, and other old friends […]