A new study from Public Agenda, sponsored by the Wallace Foundation, explores the motivations and realities of after-school programming for kids (there’s a news article about it here, and the full report is available here). The study surveyed 609 middle and high-school students and 1,003 parents to discover what they were up to after school, […]

I’ve noticed some recent activity on some weblog entries I posted a while ago. Both related to Boston’s arts market, and both warranted a quick catch-up: The saga of the Boston Ballet and their production of ‘The Nutcracker’ continues as they prepare to open this year’s effort. As faithful readers might recall, the company was […]

My students and I had the great pleasure of talking with the violinist Midori during her recent visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And it struck me to find a touring performing artist so equally committed and creatively engaged to the work she does on-stage and off. She was in Madison for one of her […]

The International Herald Tribune has a useful overview of the European struggle to sustain their museums, as the traditional model of government patronage continues to fade. It’s not really a new story, since privatization of public services of all kinds has been a matter of debate in Europe for more than 20 years. But the […]

The UK National Lottery just turned 10 this week, and celebrated a history of public gambling that brought £16 billion of construction and contribution to the country’s social infrastructure (you can see some of the funded construction projects here). As part of the celebration, they asked the public to identify the lottery projects that had […]

If you haven’t yet recognized video gaming as one of the core entertainment/cultural platforms of this decade, take notice. A single game that went on sale at midnight last night may well hit $100 million in sales within its first 24 hours on the market. For a little perspective, that’s about 25 percent more than […]

It occurs to me that I keep ranting on about the distributed power of on-line technology, and the need for arts organizations to explore new ways of communicating with their audiences, but I don’t provide a whole lot of specifics. So, I thought it would be useful to point you to two of the main […]

The Guardian has a short and clear piece on the London production of The Producers, and more specifically on the cluster of producers that have brought it to the stage. There are as many as 13 individuals and organizations involved in the investor pool (depending on how you count), quite a few steps from the […]

Since arts managers are in the business of curated social interaction, it’s worth keeping an eye on the cutting edge of such things. One area of the world to watch, specifically, is the wide and wild world of social networking software. This includes any combination of computer software, hardware, and/or personal technology devices (cell phones, […]

RAND has a new publication on arts partnerships between public schools and community arts organizations (available in an on-line brief and full download in pdf). The report is actually a commissioned evaluation/analysis of Los Angeles’ ten-year, multi-million-dollar program in K through 12 arts education, which had a core component ‘to build partnerships with community arts […]