Two large performing arts projects dealt publicly with costs last week, but with dramatically different public buzz. The Miami-Dade Performing Arts Center, 20 months late in its construction and $67.7 million over budget, got grudging approval to move forward (username: ajreader@artsjournal.com, password: access) from the county commissioners. While Madison, Wisconsin’s, Overture Center for the Arts […]
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Steven Johnson has a way with complex subjects, which he proves again in this fascinating book on the pattern-forming behaviors of complex systems (like ant colonies, cities, artificial intelligence software, mold spores, and other fun stuff). Believe it or not, it’s all directly relevant to the manager of arts and culture.
Value revisited
In any business, social, or personal endeavor, value weaves through like a underground stream. In non-commercial arts activity, value has proven to be an elusive stream to discover and define in a public way. Witness the NEA battles of a decade ago, the current debates in state and city governments about funding arts in a […]
Go somewhere else
Interesting and important things are happening elsewhere in the ArtsJournal blogisphere starting today, so I’ll cede my usual rant to encourage you in that direction. ArtsJournal is hosting a short-term weblog called ”Critical Conversation: Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music” that gathers a dozen of America’s leading critics for an on-line conversation. Just […]
Regretting the Walkman
Norman Lebrecht takes a backward glance at the Sony Walkman on the occassion of its 25th birthday, and decides that the devices were the source of much evil in the world. According to Lebrecht, the advent of the personal stereo not only brought with it sub-standard audio reproduction, but also a disconnection of music from […]
Strategic calisthenics
Long-range planning is a lot like dieting and exercising: We all have a sense that we should be doing it more, but figure we’ll get to it after the current doughnut on our desk. We hear the nagging voice of reason whispering: ‘People don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan.’ We glare at […]
Selling out or sifting through?
Lots of conversations recently have been leading me back to a series of nagging definitional questions about cultural endeavor: What defines art from entertainment? What determines whether a work is ‘independent’ or not? When does an artist or artwork move from being an increasingly popular individual voice to an audience-pandering sell-out? These are not questions […]
And stop displaying such old stuff
Parliament in the UK suggests in a recent committee report that the nation’s museums should be more business-like in their operations and more strategic in their planning. The report by the Public Accounts Committee (here’s the whole thing if you care to read it) praises recent efforts by museums to build their revenue streams, but […]
The gift that keeps on taking
Clara Miller of the Nonprofit Finance Fund writes some of the most clear and useful discussions of finance issues you’re likely to find. Her current article in The Nonprofit Quarterly is a great example. The topic here is major gifts, and particularly their tendency to warp, distort, and sometimes destroy the mission and capacity of […]
Mike Wallace of the weblog world
As a case-in-point for my post yesterday about allocating value in cultural production, fellow weblogger Drew McManus has some great volleys about the Philadelphia Orchestra’s musician negotiations. Philly has been cutting staff and requesting musician compensation cuts while it has been giving raises to key staff and leadership. In Mike Wallace fashion, Drew corners Joe […]
