This month, the city of Chicago has been taking the traditional arts auction on-line in The Great Chicago Fire Sale, which they claim to be ‘the first-ever municipally sponsored eBay charity auction.’ While it’s an evolutionary idea, rather than revolutionary, it did catch the attention of the UK Guardian a few weeks back. Funds from […]

There’s a new form of audio distribution bubbling up around the Internet, in the form of ‘Podcasting,’ a combination of Internet news feeds, downloaded audio files, and personal audio players like the Apple iPod. Here’s the gist of it: There are a wealth of new ways to automatically grab text-based news and information to your […]

Americans for the Arts has always been a vast resource for data, research, publications, and especially advocacy materials for the arts. Now they’ve finally reconceived their web site so that people can actually get to that material. Chief among the newly organized goodies are: The Arts Education Online Resource Center has stats and resources for […]

Back in 1999, the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia did a study of arts coverage in major metropolitan news sources (including newspapers, network television, online media, the alternative press and the ethnic press). The report intended to be a benchmark for future studies, tracking trends in arts reporting, arts attention, and even arts column […]

A colleague recently reminded me of a wonderful keynote speech given many moons ago about arts advocacy and connecting the arts to their communities. I’m usually not a big fan of lists (the seven habits of highly effective habit-book writers, for example), but this one is useful for describing an essential management skillset. Diane Mataraza […]

In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, architect/space maven David Rockwell had an interesting jab against the mother of all multi-venue performance spaces. As an aside in a quick Q & A about his latest design project — the reconceived flagship F.A.O. Schwarz store in Manhattan — he had this to say about Lincoln Center: […]

The news over the holiday break was chock-a-block with tidbits about performing arts centers, especially those in smaller markets. Just as Kansas City was announcing resident companies for a $304-million performing arts center (see architectural renderings here), a PAC in Saratoga Springs, New York, was reeling from a scathing outside assessment of its management practices […]

NEWS FLASH: For those tracking the progress of the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich discussed in an earlier post, the auction closed on eBay this evening with a final winning bid of $28,000. For those that came in with lower bids than that, congratulations! For the winner, bummer. I’m taking this week off from my […]

Arts consultant Adrian Ellis has a nice piece about the problem of perspective and scale in arts and cultural management. He suggests, as most would agree, that arts managers are often so buried in the detail and daily demands of their work, they lose perspective on the patterns that might actually help them address causes […]

So, here I am, burning up perfectly good brain cells pondering the public value of culture, how audiences attach value to the creative experience, and how arts organizations can make a better connection…and along comes this little tidbit to throw it all akimbo: A grilled cheese sandwich is now for sale on eBay, with a […]