ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Weird, the very day that the Huffington Post published my “debate” with Carla Escoda about arts funding, the New York Times published a “Room for Debate” feature on a very similar topic. Something in the water? Anyway, Sean Bowie has a nice summary if you don’t have time to read all eight entries. The [...]
“I feel like whenever I talk to artists these days, I should be apologizing,” says Kevin Stolarick, Research Director for the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. To most in the arts community, Stolarick is better known as Richard Florida’s longtime right-hand man and research collaborator on his bestselling [...]
Over the last decade, you’ve probably known someone who took up dance or music classes, or maybe someone who joined a knitting or craft group, or started a novel. According to a 2008 NEA study, 74 percent of Americans participate in the arts through attendance, art creation, or media. Whether you call it the Pro-Am [...]
That’s the title of a slightly silly “debate” on the Huffington Post Culture section in which I am featured, perhaps surprisingly, as the spokesman for the “no” camp. The debate is with former dancer and research scientist Carla Escoda, whose writing I had come across thanks to Thomas Cott’s highlighting of a very good article [...]
FEDERAL Breaking news: the government is cutting its funding to PBS! Wait – sorry – hold that. It turns out the NEA is cutting its funding to PBS - to the tune of more than $1 million, to be exact. Talk about irony! The money had been earmarked to support organizations that produce arts-oriented programming on public television through [...]
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The California Arts Council is in danger of losing its right to solicit voluntary contributions from California citizens through their state income tax returns. Though that wasn’t proving to be a very effective way of raising money anyway – the agency banked only $165,000 from CA’s nearly 40 million residents last year. Arts [...]
Recently, this story popped up in my Facebook feed, via one of my former teachers from high school: STOCKHOLM (FRIA TIDER). A macabre scene with racist undertones took place on Saturday when Swedish minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth attended a tax funded party for the Stockholm cultural elite. The self-proclaimed “anti-racist” Liljeroth declared the party [...]
(Reminder: the Fractured Atlas Research Fellows deadline is this Friday!) Executive Director, South Arts South Arts seeks a dynamic, multi-talented executive director to build on its exceptional 37-year track record of strengthening the south through advancing excellence in the arts, connecting the arts to key state and national policies, and nurturing a vibrant quality of [...]
(This article was first published on NewMusicBox on April 4, 2012. I’m grateful to Molly Sheridan, Kevin Clark, and Frank J. Oteri for their helpful comments on previous drafts.) Every once in a blue moon, an arts policy story breaks into the mainstream media—and as with most poorly understood subjects, it’s usually for some profoundly [...]
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Mike Boehm has more on the important role California’s soon-to-be-defunct community redevelopment agencies have had in shaping Los Angeles’s cultural development. Gene Takagi provides this extremely helpful dispatch from a session on new “hybrid” legal forms such as the Benefit Corporation and L3C. Culture360 has published a helpful two-part history and analysis of cultural policy in South [...]
Great thinking, Ian! As you observe, measuring success must reflect the nature of the Creative Placemaking project...
Yes! We are on the same wavelength! Nice one.
The LHC is also featured in Liz Lerman’s latest stage work, The Matter of Origins. The piece was a really...
Great article and more fuel for the fire beneath the long long simmering, never quite finished arts stew: how to align the...
As a former director of museums and board member of several arts groups and now consultant – my perspective is less...