Researchers at the University of Michigan have some helpful insights if you feel like you’re making less money than your peers…you were likely too short as a teenager. According to their study: Using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and Britain’s National Child Development Survey, [researchers] found that each additional inch of […]

Thanks to Media Influencer, I stumbled on this CNET story on two Beethoven enthusiasts working to explore the unperformed archives of the composer’s work. Says CNET: Mark Zimmer, a tax attorney in Madison, Wis., and Dutch composer Willem Holsbergen are the creators of the Unheard Beethoven Web site, a sprawling digital archive of unfinished, unrecorded […]

For those cultural managers who make every extra effort to provide context, background, depth, and framing around their upcoming productions, in an effort to engage the potential audience with meaning and purpose, this story out of the U.K. will likely drive you mad. The new play by film director and playwright Mike Leigh has sold […]

KCRW’s The Business has a great interview with Hollywood CPA/Attorney Steven Sills on the ‘creative accounting’ of movie blockbusters (it’s about 3-1/2 minutes in on the audio file). His clients come to him asking how a movie can gross $100 million at the box office and still show up as a loss on their profit […]

There are a bundle of initiatives out there working to make communities or organizations more supportive and encouraging to artists. But often, these efforts are missing a crucial cog: a definition of what they mean by ”artist.” I’m not suggesting that there should be a single definition that we all claim as true (that would […]

Orientation begins this week for our new batch of MBA students in Arts Administration at UW-Madison. I’m guessing my posting here will be fairly patchy as we welcome the new folks to our program, and get them settled in for two years of arts/business boot camp.

There’s an article archetype in the press every few years, about how difficult it is to fill the top slot at America’s leading museums, and about whether boards should search for business leaders or art scholars to plug the hole. This time around, the article is in the Wall Street Journal. In a nutshell: Who […]

A recent local editorial about the debt refinancing of Madison’s Overture Center (discussed earlier this week) uses an interesting phrase, which lives at the end of the excerpt below: Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is right to express reservations about signing on to a new long-term funding scheme for the $205 million Overture Center for the Arts. […]

Sorry to say that I’ll be disconnected again for a few days, as I make the long drive home from Boston to Madison. Please enjoy (or ignore) another blast from the past while I’m wandering without Internet connections. An interesting sidebar from the Discovery Channel web site suggests that the human race is too big […]

For the [very] few who are interested in how major new cultural facilities are financed and funded, there are interesting conversations on-going in Madison, Wisconsin. The Overture Center for the Arts — half done now, to be completed in April 2006 — is attempting to regain its financial footing after a good idea met a […]