Happy Monday, everyone. Rush Seats is my occasional series of shorter posts sharing a quick observation, a resource, a timely topic or in-process idea. Check out the first post here. Here's a TikTok video from opera singer Mary Rice* about a concert in a canyon at the Moab Music Festival. It is definitely on the all-in experience end of the spectrum - the concert itself was about 90 minutes (with the best acoustics Mary says she's ever heard), but the whole experience was six hours end to … [Read more...] about Rush Seats: Mary Rice on the pure enjoyment of classical music
Strategy
Where’s the $500 million fund for the arts?
Row X by Hannah Grannemann Last week, four big name funders, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and the Knight Foundation, announced a $500 million initiative called Press Forward. The goal of the fund is to support the local news sector (both nonprofit and for-profit) to revive and modernize local news. Funds will support infrastructure for community-centered news, new journalistic practices, increasing diversity in newsrooms, and new business models. I shook my … [Read more...] about Where’s the $500 million fund for the arts?
Nonprofit theater is in crisis. Want to know what the “dropped out” audience thinks? Read the comments
Theater leaders, Board members, and arts marketing experts have been the featured characters in the recent flurry of articles and opinion pieces about the crisis in the American nonprofit theater*. This makes sense, since these articles focus on how the theater institutions are responding to reduced audience demand and the resulting financial pressures. How can we find out what the audience thinks? There’s one source right at our fingertips: the comments section. These three pieces**: 1) … [Read more...] about Nonprofit theater is in crisis. Want to know what the “dropped out” audience thinks? Read the comments
Rush Seats Series: Arts Explainers on TikTok
New Series I’m starting a new occasional series with this post: Rush Seats. These will be short posts sharing something I think you’ll find interesting and useful. I can see a few different types of posts fitting in this series: Let me know what you’d like to read in the Rush Seats series in the comments. First up in Rush Seats is a collection of people I’m following on TikTok sharing explainers that are friendly for new arts audiences and arts insiders alike. What I like about each … [Read more...] about Rush Seats Series: Arts Explainers on TikTok
Are the arts “building back better” with new audiences?
Row X blog by Hannah Grannemann When arts organizations went into shutdown in 2020 and 2021, they asked audiences, donors, staffs, and their communities to continue supporting them even when they weren’t producing and open to the public because they were working hard during the shutdowns to improve themselves in myriad ways, including building new audiences. They weren’t going to let a good crisis go to waste, they said. In other words, they were going to “build back better”. I’m … [Read more...] about Are the arts “building back better” with new audiences?