The International Herald Tribune has a useful overview of the European struggle to sustain their museums, as the traditional model of government patronage continues to fade. It’s not really a new story, since privatization of public services of all kinds has been a matter of debate in Europe for more than 20 years. But the […]
Okay, pretend we didn’t ask
The UK National Lottery just turned 10 this week, and celebrated a history of public gambling that brought £16 billion of construction and contribution to the country’s social infrastructure (you can see some of the funded construction projects here). As part of the celebration, they asked the public to identify the lottery projects that had […]
The stage we can’t ignore
If you haven’t yet recognized video gaming as one of the core entertainment/cultural platforms of this decade, take notice. A single game that went on sale at midnight last night may well hit $100 million in sales within its first 24 hours on the market. For a little perspective, that’s about 25 percent more than […]
Blogging your brains out
It occurs to me that I keep ranting on about the distributed power of on-line technology, and the need for arts organizations to explore new ways of communicating with their audiences, but I don’t provide a whole lot of specifics. So, I thought it would be useful to point you to two of the main […]
The changing role of producers
The Guardian has a short and clear piece on the London production of The Producers, and more specifically on the cluster of producers that have brought it to the stage. There are as many as 13 individuals and organizations involved in the investor pool (depending on how you count), quite a few steps from the […]
Social Networking Software
Since arts managers are in the business of curated social interaction, it’s worth keeping an eye on the cutting edge of such things. One area of the world to watch, specifically, is the wide and wild world of social networking software. This includes any combination of computer software, hardware, and/or personal technology devices (cell phones, […]
Arts partnerships and the public schools
RAND has a new publication on arts partnerships between public schools and community arts organizations (available in an on-line brief and full download in pdf). The report is actually a commissioned evaluation/analysis of Los Angeles’ ten-year, multi-million-dollar program in K through 12 arts education, which had a core component ‘to build partnerships with community arts […]
Telling compelling stories
I was doing a Google search on the elements of compelling storytelling (see the results for yourself), and stumbled on this essay by Bill Johnson on that very subject. Here’s a quote of particular import: A storyteller should to be able to perceive what a story is about at its deepest level, and how to […]
One sign of a maturing technology
Wired has an article on the changing patterns of Internet use. One of the key changes? Less sex searching: ”Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it’s about 5 percent,” said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored Web Search: Public Searching of the Web with Penn State professor […]
Oozing back up
The Chronicle of Philanthropy notes a slightly happier fundraising machine in the nation’s largest charitable organizations. Overall donations in their ‘top 400’ are up 2.3 percent. It’s nothing like the glory days of the past decade, when annual increases in giving hit the double digits. But it’s something. As with all development news, this aggregate […]
