The Artful Manager

A favorite line from a favorite poem is dogging me these days. It’s from Wallace Stevens’ “Man Carrying Thing“, which begins: The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

It’s been a long, long while since I posted to this blog. For those who were annoyed by that, apologies. For those who didn’t notice, hello.

As a member of the editorial board for Artivate, a journal on entrepreneurship in the arts, I was asked to write a short reflection on what “arts entrepreneurship” is, exactly, and how we might think about the phrase and the field (or bundle of fields) it represents. Full text is below, and other essays in […]

Imagine that there was a commonly-held theory of gravity that said objects will fall at an increasing rate, pause halfway, do a little spin, and then continue to fall. Imagine, then, that you never actually observe any object falling in that particular way. A little like that, sure…the falling part. But not exactly like that, […]

KCRW’s The Business has a fabulous interview with Ava DuVernay (starts at 07:22), director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., biopic Selma. DuVernay transitioned from film marketing and publicity into film making, originally in small documentaries and indie films, and now a major motion picture.

The American University’s Arts Management Program celebrated our 40th anniversary this week, with a grand bash of alumni, students, faculty, and friends. For the occasion, I was challenged to condense the entire Survey of Arts Management course I teach over 15 weeks into a five-minute version (okay, they asked for four minutes, but I couldn’t […]

In a story that seems too odd to be true, a Barcelona comedy theater company has experimented with a ‘pay per laugh’ scheme, where entry is free, and each laugh costs you money. Each seat has a tablet computer, with facial recognition software, tracking and charging for every guffaw. You settle up the tab on […]

I’m traveling to Taipei, Taiwan, this week to speak at a symposium for performing arts designers, architects, technicians, and managers on the subject of large-scale performing arts venues. Taiwan and much of Asia is in the midst of a massive cultural construction binge (as part of a more general massive construction binge). It will be […]

There’s been lots of breathless Internet chatter about the sudden social network phenomenon, Ello. Constructed by a group of seven artists and programmers in Vermont, Ello seeks to be the anti-Facebook — an ad-free, exploitation-free social system built on a manifesto that exclaims: “You are not a product.”

My local post office in DC offers a rather helpful decision point that I only just noticed today. Below the slot where you place your mail is a convenient receptacle for trash. I’m fairly confident they didn’t design this as a cognitive prompt. But I’m going to take it as one, anyway.