I spent this past Friday and Saturday in Philadelphia with my fellow members of the Association of Arts Administration Educators board, of which I’m currently president. It’s a group of some of the smartest, funniest, and warmest folks you’re likely to meet…all earnestly committed to advancing the field by preparing extraordinary leaders for it. Our […]

Given the regime change enacted in last night’s election results, it might be a good time to reread (or read for the first time) the Obama campaign’s arts policy document, which is reprinted in full below. You can also grab a PDF version here. Just knowing a president elect has an arts policy document is […]

Nina Simon in the Museum 2.0 blog has a great think-piece on the tensions of social networking and established cultural organizations (in her case, museums). As user-generated content and other participatory practices evolve on the web, many traditional cultural centers are getting increasingly woozy about eroding standards, populism over excellence, and loss of the ”pure” […]

Eight-year-old Milwaukee Shakespeare had a bad bit of news this month, with the loss of funding from the Argosy Foundation. It’s certainly not the only arts organization seeing losses of foundation funding, as assets for most have taken double-digit percentage declines, and cash is getting tight. But Argosy was a particularly important foundation to the […]

I’ll be traveling a bit in November to speak at and facilitate some industry conversations. If you’re near Chicago or Dublin, please consider stopping by: Beyond the Rhetoric and Toward Real Change:A Symposium on Diversity in Arts and Cultural OrganizationsMonday, November 10, 8:00 am – 2:45 pmChicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinoishosted by the Cultural Policy […]

NPR’s recent story on the national ”free night of theater” initiative explores the lure of ”free” tickets for new and distracted audiences. The Theater Communications Group effort began in 2005, and expanded in its last iteration (on October 16) to include more than 600 theaters in over 120 cities. It’s an extraordinary and intriguing story, […]

The general assumption about all forms of philanthropy in economic hard times — individual, foundation, corporate — is that as money tightens, contributions decline. All such gifts are influenced, after all, by the donor’s actual or perceived level of wealth and income. When assets deflate by 30 percent, and cash gets more scarce due to […]

If you’re still stuck on the idea that ”arts audiences” are people who attend formally organized, professionally produced cultural events, you’re only seeing a sliver of the pie. So suggests a new study commissioned by the Irvine Foundation and prepared by WolfBrown. Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions (available here in various versions) offers a […]

The MBA program in Arts Administration that I direct here in the Wisconsin School of Business hosted our bi-annual alumni conference last week, launching our celebration of our 40th year. It was a rewarding and intriguing event, as I knew it would be — get smart and fun people in a room and lob a […]

I’ll be offline next week (and have been much of this week as some might have noticed) preparing for the 40th anniversary alumni conference of the MBA program I direct. Should be a great gathering of smart and fun folks, among them will be our Friday keynoter Doug McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal. The […]