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The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

Substrate: The Embodied Brain

October 12, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

It is strangely common to talk about our brain and our body as separate entities. Or to consider our senses and sensibilities as opposites, at war with each other. And yet, even a cursory exploration of the question exposes an obvious truth: our brain is entirely in and of our body, not just in its […]

Substrate: The Predictive Brain

September 16, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

It’s common to consider our brains as reactive – receiving sensory information from our bodies and our environments, making sense of that inbound information, and directing our response thereafter. It’s also common to consider that much or even most of this reaction happens at a conscious level – there’s a tiger-like rustling in the weeds, […]

Substrate: The World Beneath the World of Arts Management

September 3, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

It’s a surprising and sobering truth that, after centuries of scientific inquiry, we only understand a tiny fraction of what makes up our universe. Everything we can see and name and touch – including ourselves, the objects around us, the Earth, the sun, all the other stars, and all the galaxies – adds up to five percent of the mass that evidence suggests is there.

Artful Manager: The Book

June 3, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

Artful Manager: The Book

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of The Artful Manager: Field Notes on the Business of Arts and Culture. This book gathers 50 posts from the first 18 years of The Artful Manager blog.

The STEEP Road Back

March 25, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

Photo by Daniel J. Schwarz on Unsplash

The approaching summer is showing glimpses and glimmers of return to live performance in shared settings. Many theater, dance, and music companies are relaunching or reconfiguring themselves to be outdoors. Others, like The Shed, are threading the needle of audience readiness/reticence, pubic health regulations, and labor union requirements to design indoor performances. And many of […]

The Relativity Switch

February 24, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

NTS-2 Satellite

This story may sound like a metaphor. But it’s actually a case-in-point: When preparing to launch the Navigation Technology Satellite 2 (NTS-2) in 1977, the NAVSTAR GPS engineering team was in a bit of a pickle. The satellite contained the first cesium atomic clocks to be sent into orbit. That highly accurate timing device would […]

The Five Flavors of Strategy

February 17, 2021 by Andrew Taylor

Chess Board

As the chaos and confusion of the global pandemic shows distant glimpses of something less chaotic (by Fall, or Winter, or Spring, or…), the question of “strategy” is emerging once again. In the freefall and free-for-all of the past eleven months, arts organizations necessarily spent most available time on survival and rapid innovation. Long looks […]

The loosely-coupled future of live performance

April 27, 2020 by Andrew Taylor

Chain link

While most performing arts organizations are still in the midst of emergency action around their current reality (safety, solvency, and immediate service, as mentioned in a previous post), most are also looking toward the still-unknowable fall and spring, when their performance seasons and tours would normally begin. The questions aren’t just around whether or when […]

Safety, Solvency, Service

April 3, 2020 by Andrew Taylor

cc flickr Tony Armstrong-Sly

These past few weeks, a whole world of arts organizations have been searching for, revisiting, or assembling-on-the-fly their emergency readiness plans as the pandemic turns that world upside down. Many are finding that “pandemic” wasn’t among the expected disasters in their plans, if they had a plan at all, so they’re diving into the many waves of action as best they can.

The “free range” workplace

January 28, 2020 by Andrew Taylor

Working Outdoors

When we “go to work” in the arts, we often mean actually going to an official and shared physical workspace. There are desks and phones and (sometimes) doors and walls where groups of us work with each other, or at least perform a sort of parallel play.

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About Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is a faculty member in American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC. [Read More …]

ArtsManaged Field Notes

#ArtsManaged logoAndrew Taylor also publishes a weekly email newsletter, ArtsManaged Field Notes, on Arts Management practice. The most recent notes are listed below.

RSS ArtsManaged Field Notes

  • The sneaky surprise of new arts buildings May 27, 2025
    That shiny new arts facility is full of promise and potential, but also unexpected and unrelenting expense.
  • The one and the many of board service May 20, 2025
    How do nonprofit boards balance individual impulse with collective resolve?
  • The relentless rise of pseudo-productivity May 13, 2025
    Visible activity and physical exhaustion are not useful measures of valuable work.
  • The strategy screen May 6, 2025
    A strong strategy demands a clear job description
  • What is Arts Management? April 29, 2025
    The practice of aggregating and animating people, stuff, and money toward expressive ends.

Artful Manager: The Book!

The Artful Manager BookFifty provocations, inquiries, and insights on the business of arts and culture, available in
paperback, Kindle, or Apple Books formats.

Recent Comments

  • Barry Hessenius on Business in service of beauty: “An enormous loss. Diane changed the discourse on culture – its aspirations, its modus operandi, its assumptions. A brilliant thought…” Jan 19, 18:58
  • Sunil Iyengar on Business in service of beauty: “Thank you, Andrew. The loss is immense. Back when Diane was teaching a course called “Approaching Beauty,” to business majors…” Jan 16, 18:36
  • Michael J Rushton on Business in service of beauty: “A wonderful person and a creative thinker, this is a terrible loss. – thank you for posting this.” Jan 16, 13:18
  • Andrew Taylor on Two goals to rule them all: “Absolutely, borrow and build to your heart’s content! The idea that cultural practice BOTH reduces and samples surprise is really…” Jun 2, 18:01
  • Heather Good on Two goals to rule them all: “To “actively sample novel experiences (in safe ways) to build more resilient perception and prediction” is about as useful a…” Jun 2, 15:05

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