In recent posts I have complained about the ‘all good news all the time’ interactions among members of the nonprofit culture community…between funders and funded, between board and staff, between arts administrators and their local legislators. As usual, management luminary Peter Drucker made the same point a decade ago. In the promotional materials surrounding the […]
Word of the Day: Invidious
Whose Muse?, an upcoming book from Princeton University Press on the conflict of market and mission in the museum world, gets a summary treatment in this month’s ARTNews. Among the lectures and discussions of five leading museum directors contained in the book comes this wordplay from MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry: ³There has been an […]
If you only have a hammer.
There are some great quotes from former Talking Heads artist David Byrne in a recent edition of Wired News, about his use of Microsoft Powerpoint presentation software as an artistic medium. Says Byrne: “American culture is becoming a culture of pageants….We’re surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to […]
Owning Culture
The question of who owns creative expressions has been a brain-buster for centuries now. Thomas Jefferson struggled with it in the early days of the United States, as did his lofty peers. The high-speed transmission of the Internet and my cheesy little photocopy machine have just made matters worse. Two articles rehash the troubles in […]
The Anti-Annual Report
In response to yesterday’s entry about airing our mistakes as well as our successes, weblog reader Tiffany Wilhelm forwarded this link to Ben Cameron’s latest editorial in American Theater. Titled ‘The Anti-Annual Report,’ the reflection on Theater Communications Group’s past year does all the things I felt were lacking in such public discussions. It highlights […]
What about discussing ‘worst practices’?
A story on NPR yesterday discussed current research on medical training, and specifically the formalized exploration of errors in medical practice (you can find the audio stream here). The intro to the story, and the report itself, were oddly resonant with issues in the management of arts and culture. Said the intro: It’s a basic […]
Where it rains, it pays
Columnist Neal Peirce addresses the issue of cities and population growth in a recent column. According to one report (‘The Changing Dynamics of Urban America’ by Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry, available for download here), a traditional measure of city success is no longer valid. Quoth the report: For the first time in modern American […]
What, exactly, are we sustaining?
An interesting sidebar from the Discovery Channel web site suggests that the human race is too big to be sustainable. According to the researchers’ algorithm, there are 1000 times too many humans, as compared to a representative sample of other species (here’s a groovy graphic that says so). Said report co-author Charles Fowler: “It is […]
Happy Thanksgiving
I’m off for a few days to rest the brain, hang with family, and eat far too much food. Here’s hoping you all have a happy and artful Thanksgiving.
Selling the Grim
The Sunday NY Times piece on how Hollywood sells grim and depressing movies to a mass audience felt like deja-vu all over again. In a nutshell, the article explored the challenge of selling difficult movies with a potential for larger audiences: For moviegoers, dark films raise a basic question: Why subject yourself to death, devastation […]
