Richard Adams in The Guardian has a great piece on a counter-intuitive result of the Internet on a venerable old retail model, actually helping it rather than killing it. Says Adams: It wasn’t meant to be like this. The internet was supposed to bid farewell to the need for buying books in shops. When the […]

Drive time is one of those quiet variables at work in the heads of our audiences, when considering a night out, a spontaneous group activity, or a season subscription. Who among us hasn’t thought about catching a show, only to consider the hassle of it and visit Blockbuster, instead? Who hasn’t come home after a […]

Russell Smith has some great musings on the value of art in the Globe and Mail. His thoughts are launched by the recent theft from the Munch Museum in Oslo. ‘The Scream,’ specifically, has no market value (since it can’t really be sold), has no bragging value, since any collector that has it can’t show […]

The New York Times Magazine a few weeks back featured a story on military training using the XBox video game player. The idea is to provide cheap and engaging video games that mimic real-life strategy issues or battle environments, so soldiers can learn as they play. ‘Full Spectrum Warrior’ for the XBox is now available […]

The museum world is casting a wary eye on Clear Channel Communications, according to this LA Times report (username: ajreader@artsjournal.com, password: access). The multi-mega-media company, with efforts in radio, outdoor advertising, concert production and promotion, and other industries is touring its third museum show. It’s a bit of irony that the company’s third touring show […]

We’re knee deep in new graduate student orientation this week in my program, so my entries will be patchy, at best. In the meantime, I’m pleased to point you in a completely self-serving and self-involved way to a feature in September’s Madison Magazine about the business of art, and the transition of the degree program […]

Found Magazine is a glorious aggregation of discovered things from the everyday world: to-do lists, photos, cards, ticket stubs, doodled napkins, and on and on. Public radio’s ‘To the Best of Our Knowledge’ featured an interview with Found’s editor Davy Rothbart, with some dark, funny, and sad examples read aloud in the audio stream. Among […]

BlogShares is a fascinating experiment in valuing something vague and amorphous, in this case the individual ‘value’ of any given weblog (on-line column, like this one). Constructed as a fantasy stock exchange, the BlogShares system analyzes any weblog it can find — over 1.3 million of them so far — with a full range of […]

In the search for better management metaphors in arts and culture, and in my work directing an MBA degree program for arts managers, I keep finding myself drawn into the discipline and worldview of system dynamics, or systems thinking, or ecological thinking, or whatever you care to call it. Systems thinking (short definition here) is […]

The Sunday New York Times went on a bit about the on-going trend of ‘selling’ major ballet stars to donors in an effort to squeeze contributed income. Through individual dancer sponsorships, endowments, auctions, and other means, at least seven of America’s 14 largest ballet companies have put their dancers on the block, with four more […]