It was exactly one year ago that I posted the very first entry on this weblog. It’s not an astounding milestone, to be sure, but worth a personal note. So far, it’s been great fun to spin, and rant, and connect some dots here and there. And I’ve met some great new colleagues through the activity…some electronically, some in ‘real time,’ as we say in the weblog business.
The more I connect with people and resources around the web, the more I realize that the original impulse for launching the weblog was fairly close to the mark. As I said about the management of arts and culture endeavors a year ago:
The world doesn’t work the way we thought it did, the way our common knowledge thinks it should, or the way our training prepared us for. Either the world is broken, or our eyes and brains aren’t seeing it right. One, I suggest, is easier to fix.
This past weekend I went with my family to a children’s theater production of The Little Prince, which offered yet another useful analogy for the current state of arts and cultural management (my seven-year-old didn’t see the connection for some reason). The analogy came in the form of the poor lamplighter on one planet in the Little Prince’s travels. Here’s the conversation between the two from the book, with the lamplighter speaking first:
”I follow a terrible profession. In the old days it was reasonable. I put the lamp out in the morning, and in the evening I lighted it again. I had the rest of the day for relaxation and the rest of the night for sleep.””And the orders have been changed since that time?”
”The orders have not been changed,” said the lamplighter. ”That is the tragedy! From year to year the planet has turned more rapidly and the orders have not been changed!”
”Then what?” asked the little prince.
”Then–the planet now makes a complete turn every minute, and I no longer have a single second for repose. Once every minute I have to light my lamp and put it out!”
So many of the accepted rules, practices, traditions, and tactics of arts and cultural management now seem designed for a time when the world was different. And yet we seem committed to continue with them, wondering why we never get to sleep.
This weblog has been (and continues to be) a useful place for me to chronicle the symptoms of that problem, and explore its possible cures. I thank you all for coming along for the ride. Stick with me, and as always feel free to lend your voice to the cause.
