Having a wonderful time at the CAPACOA conference in Ottawa. Wish you were here. Please send money and duty-free liquor. As promised to my wonderful audience this morning, here’s the text of my keynote address delivered fresh and piping hot: [ If Culture Counts, How Do We Count It? ]

I’m off to Ottawa to speak to the good folks at CAPACOA for their conference, Culture Counts: Measuring the Value of the Arts. As always, I’ll post my keynote to this weblog shortly after I deliver it. Hope to see some of you there!

The Chronicle of Philanthropy outlines the unique tax benefits available to donors if they give to any nonprofit before the end of the year. Says the article: President Bush last month signed into law a measure that allows donors to write off up to 100 percent of their income for cash donations they made from […]

Mark Swed of the LA Times poses some great questions in his recent Critic’s Notebook. The core of the issue is this: how much do we really need to know about an art work to connect with it? Says he: Do you understand a piece of music better if you know its secrets, or does […]

In response to my post last week on Stanford’s iTunes initiative, several folks wrote to tell me about arts organizations entering the on-line distribution business. Here are a few: The Gürzenich Orchestra in Germany offers concert-goers a CD of the performance as they leave the hall. They now make available the ”best versions” of the […]

Kind of a cool initiative over at Stanford University, where they’ve created a special section of the Apple iTunes music store to distribute audio and video content to the world and to their own. Their overview says the initiative has two parts: a public site, targeted primarily at alumni, which will include Stanford faculty lectures, […]

Urban and Regional Planning professor Peter Fisher offers a wonderful dressing down of five national ”business climate rankings” that seek to define the best places in the nation for business. His primary concerns: The underlying problem with the five indexes is twofold: none of them actually do a very good job of measuring what it […]

The on-line arts research warehouse CPANDA has a new ‘quick fact’ this month that’s bound to annoy the aesthetically pure. Drawn from a cultural participation study in 1998, the summary shows the stated motivations of surveyed Kansas City residents who had attended an arts event in the prior year. The answers shouldn’t shock any of […]

Not sure how I missed it when it aired, but a link from the gang at Next Generation Consulting pointed me to the PBS Frontline past series on persuasion and persuaders — in advertising, in media, in politics. Fascinating stuff to watch and learn about high-concept advertising, emotional branding, the science of selling, narrowcasting, and […]