Some great thoughts from singer/conductor/composer Bobby McFerrin on the Berklee College of Music podcast. He’s recounting the experience of colleague Yo Yo Ma on a visit to Botswana, where a small village had no concept of why someone would schedule a performance in a specific place at a specific time. Says McFerrin: They don’t have […]

CEOs for Cities has just launched the latest in a long line of serious cash prizes to encourage and reward innovation. The X Prize famously created a new space race with its $10 million prize for a new space-bound craft. More recently, ArtPrize has offered big-money incentives for artists to aggregate and innovate in downtown Grand Rapids, […]

You might not expect the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts to suggest that there could be too many nonprofit arts organizations, and that those organizations might be overstaffed. But Rocco Landesman is rather fond of saying unexpected things. In his latest blog post, Landesman points to the five percent decline in arts […]

Beth Kanter offers a great overview of how and why a nonprofit might visualize the essential network it brings to its mission and programming. Using only sticky notes and markers, a group of staff members and board members can discover their most essential connections, identify shared connections, and observe critical gaps that need to be […]

Diane Ragsdale pulls on the ‘broken business model’ thread in her Jumper blog, and triggers a bunch of interesting comments on the subject. She wonders what, exactly, her colleagues mean by a ‘business model,’ and what specifically is broken about it. It’s an essential conversation, and worth every moment of attention it gets (even when […]

Americans for the Arts released their second edition of the National Arts Index yesterday (here’s a useful overview from the L.A. Times), crunching numbers from a wide range of sources to define the health and vitality of the arts in the United States. As one would imagine from the economic pit our entire economy was […]

The New York Times has a compelling story on the latest high-end architecture in Miami Beach, in high demand as an event space, and drawing the attention of the local community and the architectural world. No, it’s not a museum or a new performing arts center. It’s a parking garage. Real estate developer and contemporary […]

During the ‘lightening round’ session at the Arts Presenters conference, performing arts facility consultant David Taylor pointed us to the challenge of traditionally designed and constructed performing arts spaces, particularly in the face of evolving consumer trends. At the heart of his presentation was the ‘Ten Trends of 20-Somethings‘ identified by Marian Salzman in the […]

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference in New York was as hectic as ever this past weekend, and jam-packed with presenters, artists, agents, managers, and other supporting professionals from the world of professional performing arts touring. As the world’s largest annual marketplace for (primarily) nonprofit presenting, Arts Presenters is a great place to […]

It’s time again for the annual pilgrimage to the Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference in New York City, where some 4000 performing arts professionals, artists, managers, and service/support organizations gather to plan their seasons and build their tours. I’ll be there with a team of my MBA students, who have been commissioned to […]