Archives for 2016

One of the best arts conferences I attend each year is only steps away from my office door. This is convenient, and also completely awesome. The Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium, which will be held on Sunday, March 6, is planned and presented entirely by American University’s Arts Management students. And it rocks. If you are […]

Arts organizations are in the business of aesthetic experience. I hope this isn’t a radical statement, but an obvious point. Whether the organization is fostering work by artists, connecting that work to audiences, or preserving that work for now and forever, the core of the matter is the aesthetic connection between an observer and an […]

Budgets and balance sheets and audited financials have a tendency to simultaneously over-simplify and over-complicate organizational life. The way they appear on a page suggests a linear, logical, orderly aggregation of resources in clean compartments, even when their categories are deeply inter-related. The right-aligned columns of actual integers can seem rigid and exact, even as […]

Here’s an obvious premise: As we grow from children to adults, we gain proficiency in engaging the world around us. We learn its conventions, assumptions, and physical laws, and we learn to occupy, navigate, and even manipulate those things to our benefit. We learn to dress and feed ourselves, as an example. We operate increasingly […]

I began my professional life as an arts management educator just over 20 years ago, in Fall 1995. My focus, since then, has been rather specific: effective management of (mostly) professional (mostly) nonprofit organizations that produce, preserve, present, and support creative human expression. After so many years, it’s embarrassing to admit that I’ve missed a […]

One of the challenges of connecting aesthetics and “beauty” to arts organizations is that aesthetics and reason work on different terms. We all know the “reasons” to do things as a cultural manager: To attain or optimize a stated goal of the enterprise; to get work made; to connect it with an audience; to do […]

Anyone who took physics or wore a black turtleneck and smoked clove cigarettes will know about ‘entropy’ – the tendency of a system to descend into disorder, to lose working energy over time. Entropy is the reason hot things cool down, and the reason philosophy students are such downers at parties.