Helen De Michiel of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) has posted a thoughtful discussion about her organization’s administrative division of labor. Instead of the traditional hierarchy with a single administrative director, NAMAC now has co-directors, sharing equally the burden of executive leadership. Says she: Many arts nonprofits find themselves dealing with […]
Understanding and fulfilling the presenter’s contract
Public presentations — speeches, conference panels, reports, proposals, and so on — can be engaging moments of learning or excruciating wastes of time, depending on how well the presenter understands his or her job and prepares to deliver on that understanding. The ability to make an engaging presentation remains one of the key competencies of […]
Designed to dissolve
We’ve been chatting a lot lately about the lifecycle of the nonprofit arts organization, and whether that cycle is as open as it could be to evolution, dissolution, or dramatic change. Thanks for the many thoughtful comments on the matter (here and here, for starters). But there’s another wrinkle in the conversation worthy of note: […]
But how do you REALLY feel about ballet?
Lewis Segal at the LA Times is fed up with ballet, and isn’t afraid to say why in his recent opinion column. Most ballet is every bit as bad as audiences secretly suspect — and it’s not going to improve until companies stop conning or shaming us into accepting damaged goods. In the meantime, guilt-free […]
Of death and dying
There have been lots of productive comments to my Wednesday post about euthanizing arts organizations. Nothing like a controversial metaphor to spark a conversation. In my opinion, euthanasia is likely the wrong metaphor and approach to address the issue of sick arts institutions, or a supply-heavy industry facing declining revenue on many fronts. The term […]
Thinning the nonprofit arts herd
Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) Executive Director Anthony Radich makes some rather bold statements in a weblog conversation by the Hessenius group (scroll about halfway down the page). In his opinion, the volume of arts production has grown beyond sustainability in many communities, and the oversupply is killing vitality and connection between arts and audience. […]
What makes a museum?
NPR had a story last week about museum collections on-line (both professional and avocational). Central to the story was MoOM, the Museum of On-line Museums, which gathers links to favored sites (from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam to a collection of whistling records). The story explored whether any curated, on-line aggregation of content is worthy of the […]
Act like a business? Why aim so low?
I wrote this opinion piece for the July/August 2006 issue of Inside Arts, the magazine of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. I reprint it here with my permission.
Off again
A cluttered schedule and myriad deadlines will keep me away from my weblogging this week. See you all again on July 31.
The longer narrative on the ”long tail”
I posted back in 2004 about the idea of ”the long tail,” advanced by Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson. The gist of his theory was that emerging (primarily Internet) distribution models were dramatically altering the revenue potential of non-blockbuster material. In other words, while space-limited retailers like Walmart and Best Buy had to focus on selling […]
