Long before people poked and liked and friended each other on-line, they nudged and prodded and provoked each other in person. And a new exhibit at MoMA maps a particular social network that invented the Abstraction movement in modern art.
Archives for January 2013
Carrying costs
In the for-profit world, there’s a category of expense called ”carrying costs,” which includes all costs involved in holding an asset (inventory, for example, which costs money even when it’s sitting in the stock room…insurance, security, spoilage, storage, finance, and such). The game in inventory-based businesses is to balance your carrying costs against the cost […]
Defending the spectrum
Diane Ragsdale takes on happiness, joy, and meaning in the current post of her Jumper blog. In a think piece about using ‘happiness’ as a metric for success in the nonprofit arts, she wonders: What’s the happiness exchange that we’re striving for?
Gigantism and extinction
It may be because I’m reading the new book on Resilience by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy. It may be because I taught two courses this past fall, one on each end of the scope and scale spectrum in the arts (one on cultural organizations, one on scrappy, start-up arts enterprises). Or it may […]
Are you the puppet or the puppeteer?
A reasonably long while ago, one of my master’s students (thanks Syrah Gunning!) was writing her thesis on professional development, and she discovered and shared a theory on human cognitive development that keeps coming back to haunt me. While the name of the theory sounds clinical and detached, the concepts of Constructive-Developmental Theory are rather […]
The Curse of the Generic Topic
You may have noticed (or may not have, which is cool) that I’ve been away from blogging for a rather long while. And when I WAS blogging, the posts were few and far between. Part of that gap, I’ve come to recognize, was because my brain is still moving. My body and my business location […]