If you don’t yet know about El Sistema, Venezuela’s extraordinary and wide-reaching music program, you really need to take a moment to learn. The 30-plus-year effort to engage young people — especially those at risk — in choral or instrumental performance opportunities has truly transformed the country, its youth, and the role of music in […]
Archives for February 2009
What can we learn from the ‘netbook’?
While this is NOT a blog about technology (even though I tend to obsess on the subject), there seem to be kernals of learning in the emerging story of the netbook — those mini-laptop Internet appliances that are storming the market. Wired has a good story on where they came from and how they’re setting […]
The dark side of participation
Arts advocates and funders have been avoiding the word ‘attendance’ for the past few years, and encouraging the word ‘participation’ as the better descriptor for the culturally engaged. Attendance is passive and unidirectional, the thinking goes. Participation describes a wider range of involvement with and in the arts. But advocates for that particular word might […]
Shrubs and social systems
If you’re a systems wonk, or a lover of ecosystem/social system metaphors, give a listen to this recent lecture by Dr. Brian Walker on resilience and complex systems. He’s the co-author of the book I’m reading at the moment, Resilience Thinking (which I blogged about last month). And he offers some intriguing insights on what […]
Of art and innovation
I’ve grown a bit weary of our lofty but vague advocacy of the arts. In our rhetoric and our strategy, we’ve become interchangeable with any other industry in search of public money, favorable legislation, or civic priority. Which is why I particularly like the specifics and evidence of this article on artistic endeavor and scientific […]
Following crumb trails
On-line social network systems and user-curated music services have created a new way for individuals to share their thoughts, their favorite music, their random travels. But they’ve also created something else — a trail of evidence about what people actually choose, not just what they say they like. And any respectable market researcher will tell […]
Do arts jobs count as jobs?
Scott Lilly at the Center for American Progress floats a timely reminder to the good folks in Congress currently bristling about the stimulus package: arts jobs are jobs, regardless of your opinion of what they produce. He quotes Rep. Jack Kingston’s (R-GA) remarks when complaining about the NEA funding (now removed) from the bill: “We […]
The pros and perils of the embedded institution
Many bloggers are spinning out the story of Brandeis University and its imperiled Rose Art Museum (see the chatter via Google’s Blog Search, or just read CultureGrrl here, or more recently here…Tyler Green has a great interview with the Rose’s director). In a nutshell, the university is desperately strapped for cash, and inelegantly floated the […]
Diving into oceans, and into art
IMAGE: An extreme close-up of Rogier van der Weyden’s painting, ”Descent from the Cross” (ca. 1435), as seen through Google Earth. Google unveiled two new layers for their Google Earth system, which allows anyone with a reasonably good computer and broadband connection to fly around and explore the globe. The core of Google Earth is […]
Arts in Crisis: Elements of scale
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced their Arts in Crisis initiative this week (covered here in the Washington Post), designed to provide emergency planning assistance to cultural organizations in trouble during tough economic times. Through the system, any nonprofit arts organization can request advice and counsel — both from the leadership and staff […]