The May issue of MIT Technology Review (okay, I read weird stuff) is all about invention — the brain-flexing, rule-bending process of creating something radically new. Throughout the issue, the articles repeatedly make the distinction between ‘invention’ and ‘innovation,’ and warn us not to confuse the two. According to economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘invention’ is […]

The national arts news seems peppered this week with financial Hail Mary’s and returns from the grave, among them the recent salvation of the Cincinnati Symphony (username: ajreader@artsjournal.com, password: access) from a $1.8 million hole, and the New Hampshire Symphony’s slow return from a $250,000 shortfall. The Cincinnati Symphony is clearly the happier of the […]

British museums are still pondering the net effect of eliminating entry fees at the 50 government-funded national museums and galleries, most of which are in London. Announced with great civic pride and pomp back in December 2001, the elimination of entry fees was an attempt to make great art and culture available to all. Depending […]

Back in March, I participated in the latest American Assembly, which explored the co-evolution of the performing arts and higher education in the United States. The convening was based on the premise that these two cultural engines had supported and advanced each other’s work over the past fifty years, and that their future could be […]

The technology and technique of ‘collaborative filtering’ has been around the Internet for almost a decade now, and it’s slowly creeping into everything we do on-line. Collaborative filtering is basically a way of comparing your preferences about something (books, movies, music, whatever) against a huge database of other preferences. When the pattern of things you […]

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal featured a few articles on the Milwaukee Art Museum (one on the finances, one on new director David Gordon). Both articles addressed the museum’s challenging combination of an over-budget signature building and the ‘perfect storm’ of revenue problems facing most arts organizations these days (lower enrollment/admissions, strapped government funding, ‘right-sizing’ corporations […]

It’s the last two weeks classes here at the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, so my posts will likely be patchy and brief for a little while. So many papers to read, students to place, projects to launch. In the meantime, here are some articles worth your attention elsewhere: More on the transaction value of […]

There’s a word that’s guaranteed to cast a glaze over the eyes of my arts management students, to encourage a silent slouch in the nonprofit board room, and to dampen even the liveliest discussion of the arts. The word is ‘policy,’ and it’s arguably one of the most important words that arts managers don’t want […]

So I’m off again to another conference, this time of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (yes, Virginia, there is an association for everything). This is a group of full-time degree program directors (of undergraduate and graduate programs) that prepare managers for the arts and cultural field. Avid readers will recall a point-counterpoint argument I […]

In an add-on to my post last week on engaging school children in the museum experience, a colleague sent me a link to a recent study that’s full of fun charts and graphs. The study, done by Harris Interactive for a December 2003 meeting of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (here’s the meeting […]