Games and the Arts in the 21st Century: An Introduction

The idea of using games as a new way to engage audiences has gained immense traction in the last 5 years. The museum world in particular has seen a great deal of discussion on this topic, from Nina Simon’s dozens of posts to this year’s Museums and the Web conference; these conversations are a naturalRead More

Art and Democracy: The NEA, Kickstarter, and Creativity in America

(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 profoundlyRead More

Around the horn: Obamacare edition

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 SouthRead More

Won’t you be my neighbor?

We’re all accustomed to choosing seats online when booking tickets for a concert or a flight. But what about choosing your seatmates? Airline KLM will launch a program later this year that will allow customers to choose their neighbors on flights. The social seating tool, called “Meet and Seat,” will use social media sites toRead More

Around the horn: St. Patty’s edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Over at NewMusicBox, Mark N. Grant has a wonderful history of American Presidents’ and Founding Fathers’ fascination with music and the arts. Did you know that John Quincy Adams studied the flute and Ben Franklin invented a musical instrument? A bill to legalize crowdsourced investment in startup companies is inching closer to passage in Congress.Read More

Upcoming Speaking (and Singing!) Engagements

A bunch of speaking opportunities have come up over the next six weeks that’ll have me covering a wide range of topics, many of them for students and emerging arts leaders. Especially if you live in the New York City metro region, you’ll have a number of chances to see me in public in theRead More

Around the horn: Whitney Houston edition

MUSICAL CHAIRS Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch has been appointed to the US Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. The advisory board “consists of up to 32 members that advise the Secretary of Commerce on government policies and programs that affect the U.S. travel and tourism industry, offers counsel on current and emerging issues, andRead More

Let us now praise Katherine Gressel

Many of you have probably noticed that this website’s most thoughtful and detailed writing over the past month has come not from me, but rather from Katherine Gressel, who wrapped up her official tenure as a Createquity Writing Fellow last week. I don’t even want to think about how many hours Katherine put into this effort,Read More

Around the horn: Anyone but Mitt edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – DOMESTIC A professor’s quest to overturn a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that placed certain foreign works back under copyright after they had already entered the public domain appears to have reached an end. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is thinking about trying out social impact bonds. LooksRead More

Occupy and the Arts: Curating by Consensus in Lower Manhattan

In late September 2011, I started following Occupy Wall Street’s (OWS’s) Arts and Culture committee with the goal of understanding, and critiquing, its organizational structures for a Createquity article. However, I soon found that the same way the movement as a whole resists neatly following one set of demands (though its anti-corporate greed and incomeRead More