As I’ve worked and talked with arts professionals, funders, artists, and boards over the years, I’ve been continually struck by a nagging question: Why isn’t this work more fun? After all, many of these people are doing the very thing they longed to do — connecting audiences to art, creating or enabling new work, performing […]

Classes begin this week in the Wisconsin School of Business MBA program, and I’ve got a fresh batch of brilliant students straining at the gate. As such, I’ll be focusing on the tidal wave of planning, prep, logistics, and advising that accompanies the start of each school year, rather than posting to my blog. I’ll […]

Madison, Wisconsin, had a great public conversation with the Kennedy Center’s Michael Kaiser yesterday, who is less than halfway through his 50-state ‘Arts in Crisis’ tour to discuss arts leadership in tough times. I was fortunate to be the on-stage interviewer and facilitator, among the several hundred arts leaders from around the state gathered in […]

By the time Imogen Heap’s new recording, Ellipse, was released today, fans and followers already had two years of previews, insights, sneak peeks, and personal reflections about what was to come. Because for two years, Heap — a socialite of on-line systems — had been sharing her journey: on YouTube (through 40 video blogs from […]

Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser is coming to Madison on Monday (August 24) for another stop in his 50-state ‘Arts in Crisis’ conversation tour. Hundreds have already signed up to attend the free event in Overture Center for the Arts. Even if you haven’t pre-registered, you can likely show up to join the crowd (2:00 […]

My milestone tracking devices were a bit slow to notice that I just recently posted my 1000th post to this weblog. It doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme, but it’s a moment to mark. So I’m doing so here. Woo hoo! If you had asked me back in July 2003 if I thought there […]

NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross offers a fabulous rebroadcast of a 1992 interview with guitarist/inventor Les Paul, following his death last week. Paul was a prolific jazz guitarist, and quietly invented or innovated many of the techniques and devices that define contemporary music (the hardbody guitar, multitrack recording, a full range of audio modification […]

My neighbor blogger, Judith H. Dobrzynski, already heralds the successful milestone of Artprize, the international competition drawing artists and arts conversation to Grand Rapids, so I don’t have to (I blogged about the launch of the initiative back in April). But 1000 artist applications, and 900 already matched to exhibition venues scattered around downtown Grand […]

One of the more wonky aspects of nonprofit management involves the endowment (if you’ve got one) and how much you can draw from it each year. As most will know, an endowment is a bucket of money that has been permanently restricted as an asset, intended to spin off interest and build equity over time […]

The New York Times offers an interactive and visual window on the American Time Use Survey, that massive longitudinal research project of the United States Department of Labor. Through over 85,000 interviews spanning five years, the ATUS has gathered ”nationally representative estimates of how, where, and with whom Americans spend their time”…information that should have […]