Lucy Bernholz at Philanthropy 2173 offers a modest proposal to address a vexing question. The question is this: Are there too many nonprofits? Her proposal is this: Let’s let crowdsourcing help us decide. To frame the proposal, she reframes the question this way: Do we have the right number of nonprofits to provide and distribute […]
A virtual museum world tour
I’ve posted in the past about Google Earth, and at least one detailed museum view available as you circumnavigate the planet. Now Google Earth offers a tour of many three-dimensional renderings of major museums scattered around the virtual globe. If you want to see the museums without wandering Google Earth, you can also find them […]
Artist process as public spectacle?
This blog post from Artworld Salon describes a few upcoming TV reality shows focusing on art and artists. The BBC’s School of Saatchi begins tonight. Another effort from Bravo, likely called ArtStar (covered in July by the New York Times), is still percolating. Artworld Salon’s Ossian Ward captures the potential and the tension in such […]
Cultural Workforce Forum
The National Endowment for the Arts is hosting a Cultural Workforce Forum today, from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm Eastern, and has opened the event to the public through a live webcast. You can login and listen in here: Cultural Workforce ForumLive Webcast, November 20, 20099:00 am – 4:00 pm Eastern They’ve also promised an […]
My chat with Bill Ivey
As part of this fall’s special topics course I’m co-teaching at UW-Madison — Arts Enterprise: Art as Business as Art — we hosted a public forum and a class discussion with Bill Ivey, Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, former chairman of the National Endowment for the […]
Rent, buy, build, or borrow
When a for-profit enterprise wants to build its capacity to do something (manufacture a product, launch a new service, provide a new option for their clients, or the like), they face a classic business question — should we rent the capacity, buy the capacity, or build the capacity? If they need a new manufacturing process, […]
Is our fundraising writing wrong?
Many arts organizations work really hard to craft the perfect fundraising message in their letters, their brochures, and their online communications. They strive for strong evidence that what they do makes a difference, they anguish over the specific words they should use to convey that evidence, and they hope to close the deal by making […]
Arts policy, reconsidered
UPDATE: We’ve just posted a 20-minute podcast interview with Bill Ivey online. The video of his public presentation will come later. If you’re in or around Madison, Wisconsin, this Thursday, November 12, consider coming by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at 7:00 pm for a public forum with Bill Ivey on arts and cultural […]
Oh, the power(lessness), the absolute power(lessness)
If you’re getting tired of ‘top 20’ lists of people who are richer, smarter, more attractive, better connected, and more interesting than you are, the folks over at Hyperallergic have a ranking for you! In response to the Art Review ‘top 100’ power-brokers in the art world, they suggest The Top 20 Most Powerless People […]
What if the ‘new normal’ is really the original normal?
Neill Archer Roan posts a rather interesting thought on his weblog about what we’re all calling the ‘new normal’ for our economy, our society, and our work: what if the past 50 years were the exception, not the rule, to human history? What if the conditions we all considered to be ‘normal’ as we built […]
