In deference to St. Patrick’s Day, I’m reposting an entry from ten years ago. Titled “Yeats and the Economics of Creativity,” it originally ran on the Arts Endowment website on May 7, 2025.
Last month, at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, I took part in a conference titled “Creative Minds: The Importance of the Creative Economy in...
When we talk about the arts and DIY, we commonly refer to craft activities or teaching oneself how to play a musical instrument. But what could be more DIY than free-form dancing? The adjective says it all. Free-form, freestyle, or free dance is a series of unstructured, personally directed movements in which creativity and improvisation are at a premium....
A new report from the National Endowment for the Arts re-affirms what we have learned from many other previous studies—namely, that arts education is closely linked with positive academic outcomes and social and emotional development.
The report appears in the wake of new data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), based on survey questions that researchers from the...
Call it entrumpy—a “gradual decline into disorder” (riffing on “entropy”), attributable to the unpredictability of our unprecedented President. Exploiting his
It’s been a year since I posted to the Artful Manager, when I reflected on the passing of my dear friend and colleague Diane Ragsdale. Since then, I’ve been focusing my public writing in the ArtsManaged initiative, an effort to create free, online, and evolving resources for Arts Management practitioners. You can subscribe to the weekly newsletter, browse the...
Art that is primarily skill-based -- graphic design, stock music or images, text and marketing, etc -- can be created faster and often better than human artists, and at lower cost. This is particularly true for compound art that requires specialized equipment and/or collaboration of specialists. As for art with high creative quotient, humans will not only be essential, but the automation of skills available to them will likely make them better. Maybe much better. And certainly more prolific.
The Digital Twin idea is the notion of looking at something -- an organization, an eco-system, a city -- and measuring and defining it in as many meaningful ways as possible and creating a digital representation in which elements can be changed or manipulated to see how the rest of the model reacts.
Fear of missing out on cultural turning points is a significant New York preoccupation. My own incessant curiosity takes me to small urban churches, inside security zones requiring a QR code (such as the Columbia University campus) and – as of the early hours of 2025 – to a 3 am video stream of the Berlin Philharmonic Ochestra’s New Years...
At a memorial event in Jordan Hall in Boston on September 29, 2024, these were my remarks:
This concert hall,
this space,
the vibrating air in here,
...
Take a journey of discovery through this retelling of A Christmas Carol where you star as a struggling Marketing Director finding their way in this cold world of 2024.
On many days lately, the last places I've wanted to be are 2020 and 2021. I've been retreating to the 1950s, creating in my apartment a musical time capsule. That's thanks to Brooklynites who have been clearing out their closets while stuck at home, finding all manner of LP records and depositing them in second-hand stores, where I’ve stumbled...
