As I mentioned, I was off early this week at Madison, Wisconsin’s ArtGrowth Summit, one of many such meetings of arts, business, and civic leaders taking place around the country. And yet, preparing myself for the Richard Florida-speak of luring creative workers with creative amenities, I was pleasantly surprised by a more balanced reaction to […]

I’m off today at the ArtGrowth Summit, a Madison, Wisconsin, initiative to explore the place of the arts in creative cities. It’s one of countless such initiatives inspired by Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class. The mother ship of such conferences will be in Toronto in October, the Creative Spaces + Places conference.

The New York Times has a whimsical article on MoMA’s refurbished logo and typeface. While winking throughout about how nobody will ever know the difference, the article also showed the depth of thinking and craft that goes into even the things we never notice. It turns out, for example, that the original Franklin typeface had […]

A new report by the NEA shows a grim recent and future view of dance organizations in a down economy (also covered on backstage.com). Arts Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia puts on as positive a spin as he can on the findings, which predict as much as a 30% drop in earned income for nonprofit dance […]

The late Donella Meadows was a wonderful mix of business theorist, social scientist, and world citizen. As an early student of Jay Forrester at MIT, she was part of a team of academics and practitioners exploring the principals of complex systems (social systems, business systems, ecological systems). I keep returning to two of her essays […]

For those who love the politics and intrigue of cultural facility construction (that’s everybody, right?), Miami-Dade is like “West Wing” and “American Idol” combined. The latest plot twist is the open conflict between officials overseeing the construction and the construction consortium doing the work. It seems that structural flaws might affect the final acoustics and […]

I’m not usually one to pass along e-mail blasts, but this one seemed a particularly elegant way of remembering the events of two years ago today. A “Poetical Happening” On Sept. 11th, join a “poetical happening” and free a book. Because a book is a symbol of freedom, sharing and tolerance. On Sept. 11th, 2003, […]

PBS is running a great series on contemporary art, art:21, that’s rich with metaphor and insight into the creative process…the process we managers are supposed to be supporting, nurturing, protecting, enabling. But it struck me, during the segment on performance/scupture artist Janine Antoni, that discovery and creation are the greatest energies arts organizations have to […]

September 7 was the fifth birthday of Google.com (reported everywhere, including this story from USA Today, and another from BBC News), the little search engine that changed the face of the Internet. While I tend to hate ‘best practices’ listings taken out of context and applied to arts management issues, I’ll break my own rule […]

Thanks to an active reader of this weblog, Drew McManus, for providing a pointer to this article in La Scena Musicale. It discusses an initiative of Canadian orchestras to rethink what they do, and how they do it, and to get beyond the hyperbolic ‘crisis’ metaphors that seem to block our thoughtful view. The article […]