In response to yesterday’s entry about airing our mistakes as well as our successes, weblog reader Tiffany Wilhelm forwarded this link to Ben Cameron’s latest editorial in American Theater. Titled ‘The Anti-Annual Report,’ the reflection on Theater Communications Group’s past year does all the things I felt were lacking in such public discussions. It highlights […]
What about discussing ‘worst practices’?
A story on NPR yesterday discussed current research on medical training, and specifically the formalized exploration of errors in medical practice (you can find the audio stream here). The intro to the story, and the report itself, were oddly resonant with issues in the management of arts and culture. Said the intro: It’s a basic […]
Where it rains, it pays
Columnist Neal Peirce addresses the issue of cities and population growth in a recent column. According to one report (‘The Changing Dynamics of Urban America’ by Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry, available for download here), a traditional measure of city success is no longer valid. Quoth the report: For the first time in modern American […]
What, exactly, are we sustaining?
An interesting sidebar from the Discovery Channel web site suggests that the human race is too big to be sustainable. According to the researchers’ algorithm, there are 1000 times too many humans, as compared to a representative sample of other species (here’s a groovy graphic that says so). Said report co-author Charles Fowler: “It is […]
Happy Thanksgiving
I’m off for a few days to rest the brain, hang with family, and eat far too much food. Here’s hoping you all have a happy and artful Thanksgiving.
Selling the Grim
The Sunday NY Times piece on how Hollywood sells grim and depressing movies to a mass audience felt like deja-vu all over again. In a nutshell, the article explored the challenge of selling difficult movies with a potential for larger audiences: For moviegoers, dark films raise a basic question: Why subject yourself to death, devastation […]
Fun with mission statements
The parody newspaper The Onion has a fabulous tradition of satirizing the arts within its pages…from the article on Congress’ accidental approval of more funding for the NEA to the artist protests outside a new exhibit that contained no combined religious iconography and excrement, to the classic story on the ‘Tony Danza Curriculum’ that harvested […]
Arts Administration Training: A rebuttal
My blog neighbor, Drew McManus, posted an entry earlier this month on ‘The trouble with arts administration degrees’. The underlying flaw with these programs, he suggested, was this: Simply put, arts administration degrees are too vague and don’t spend enough time focusing on the unique attributes of managing a particular medium of art. Each branch […]
A little whimsy goes a long way
If you’ve grown weary of the catch-phrases, slogans, taglines, and hucksterism of arts marketing, or the endless efforts to motivate an increasingly corporate staff, two nonarts organizations may hold the cure: Despair, Inc., and the Church Ad Project. One’s a joke (and a great one), the other is an honest attempt to market religion in […]
Says you…
If there were a encyclopedia entry on the challenges of high-power nonprofit cultural boards, American Ballet Theater’s board would certainly be the group photo. Yet another case in point for the uber-board’s dysfunction comes thanks to Movado watch chairman Gedalio Grinberg, who plucked his company’s traditionally generous annual support from ABT and gave it to […]
