The Artful Manager

Faithful blog reader Drew McManus had a bone to pick with me about my most recent post, that questioned whether cultural facilities behave as assets (as they are booked) or as liabilities. I’m hoping other will join the argument, as well. With his permission, I quote: Actually, I think you are wrong. A building is […]

Here’s a story in the Guardian about the current status of the UK’s arts building boom, funded in part by their public lottery fund a few years back. Many of the new facilities are struggling to find audiences to fill their glorious new spaces, and stumbling for income streams to keep the lights on. It’s […]

As I mentioned last week, I participated in the annual Grantmakers in the Arts conference in Seattle, as part of a panel discussing web technology and the arts. The travel and time kept me from posting much to the weblog, but as usual, launched a thousand new questions in my head. Here’s one for today: […]

I’m in Seattle early this week at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference…lots of foundations and program officers trying to make sense of a down economy. The upshot is that I’ll likely be patchy in my posts this week, but that I’ll also emerge with some new links and fresh thoughts (okay, perhaps not fresh, […]

In checking some broken weblinks from past posts, I stumbled onto the fact that the National Endowment for the Arts has a new website, and a new catchy slogan to go with it. Take a peek at the new site, which features the tagline: A Great Nation Deserves Great Art It’s an interesting return to […]

A recent survey by Encyclopaedia Britannica shows that Americans aren’t the only artistic illiterates (although we still do it with more flair). In the homeland of so much Western culture, the United Kingdom, the basic awareness of artists and art is just as grim. A few excerpts: Nearly half (49%) of those questioned were also […]

The boom of nonprofit arts organizations over the 80s and 90s had much to do with the economy, and with the rise of philanthropy, but also with the massive inflow of educated, passionate individuals into the workforce. As outlined in John Kreidler’s classic article on the dynamics of nonprofit arts in America Leverage Lost, these […]

Last week, I was attending one of my personal favorite conferences, Social Theory, Politics & the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a favorite because of the funky mix of presentations you’ll find there (although decidedly less funky this time around)…from tatoo art as social identity to the sociology of public art in Berlin to cultural […]

The Sunday New York Times had this interesting article on the price of recorded music. It tracked the relative price of each new recording medium, from vinyl to eight-track to cassette to CD and now to the on-line world, noting that prices often doubled with the introduction of each new medium. The difference, of course, […]