Around the horn: Trayvon edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The National Endowment for the Arts has shared a draft of its strategic plan for FY14-18, and in what I believe may be a first, is inviting public comment on it via SurveyMonkey. Ah, these modern times we live in. Now let’s just hope House Republicans don’t succeed in slashing itsRead More

Everyone is a Lot of People

(This essay was originally written in my role as an outside consultant to the city of Calgary’s cultural plan. You can read all of my contributions to that process here.) For my second essay responding to the #yycArtsPlan process, I thought I would focus on the last paragraph of the “Summary of Vision Statements fromRead More

Helping Calgary Navigate its Cultural Planning Process

For the past several months, I’ve served in my Fractured Atlas capacity as a “consulting critic” to Calgary Arts Development (CADA)’s Arts Plan process, also known as #yycArtsPlan. Calgary is a fast-growing oil and gas boomtown in Canada’s western region that has been characterized to me by more than one person as the “Texas ofRead More

Two reminders

Fellowship: applications for the Fall 2013 Createquity Writing Fellowship close this Friday, July 19. Previous participants have found this to be an immensely valuable experience; one even recently characterized it as “life-changing.” I can’t guarantee Createquity will change your life, but if we pick you and you take it seriously, you absolutely will get a lot out of it. All the detailsRead More

Paging Michael Rushton

Future of Music Coalition Policy Intern Cody Duncan describes some recent innovations in video game bundling, and suggests that musicians (and presumably purveyors of other digital content) can learn a thing or two. As a systems geek, I’m particularly impressed by some of the thinking around combining pay-what-you-can with gamification: Taking a cue from the successRead More

Something you can do for me

Hey there. I have something I want to say to you. Yes, you! I’ve been writing/editing/publishing/thinking about Createquity for almost six years now, along with, for the past two and a half of those years, the help of a select group of Writing Fellows and guest posters. Together, we’ve collectively devoted about 5,000 hours (almostRead More

Midsummer public arts funding update

FEDERAL The United States Senate is considering an update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as No Child Left Behind. The bill contains several pro-arts revisions, but as Narric Rome explains, political constraints probably mean an agreement is still far off. The Senate did, however, add the Arts Require Timely ServiceRead More

Around the horn: General Sisi edition

Happy 4th of July! I’m going to be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, but Createquity is not. You’ll continue to see new posts and comments will be approved, albeit at a slower rate than usual. Don’t let the world blow up while I’m gone! ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Future of Music Coalition hasRead More

Applications for the Fall 2013 Createquity Writing Fellowship now open

I know, I know: you’ve been reading Createquity for a while now and you’ve been thinking, “is that the best you’ve got? I could write better blog posts in my sleep!” Well, hot shot, this is your chance to show us how it’s done! The Createquity Writing Fellowship was designed to continually bring new voicesRead More

Announcement: the Createquity team is expanding!

Something you might not know about Createquity is that a lot of behind-the-scenes editorial work goes into bringing you the quality commentary and analysis you’ve come to expect from us. It’s not uncommon, in fact quite typical, for longer articles to go through three, four, or even five drafts before they finally appear on theRead More