More on jazz audiences

At the beginning of last month, Createquity Writing Fellow Jennifer Kessler posted a round-up of efforts underway throughout the jazz community to modernize and broaden its relationship to audiences. Since then, several new publications and articles shed further light on the ongoing evolution of one of this country’s bona-fide homegrown art forms. First up, anRead More

The Critical Supporting Role of Curation in Making Innovation Possible

(This post was originally published on Americans for the Arts’s ARTSblog as part of the “Emerging Ideas: Seeking and Celebrating the Spark of Innovation” salon going on this week. Read the other contributors’ posts here.) Through the work of the Emerging Ideas Committee this year, I’ve become acquainted with a wealth of new approaches toRead More

Emerging Ideas Blog Salon on ARTSblog

This week, a number of folks including yours truly will be participating in a salon discussion on Americans for the Arts’s blog, ARTSblog. The topic is “Emerging Ideas: Seeking and Celebrating the Spark of Innovation,” which came from a subcommittee of the AFTA Emerging Leaders Council that I’ve had the honor of co-chairing this yearRead More

The challenges we face

Michael Kaiser wants us to focus on the reason why we do it (the art, silly!), but I’m more struck by his succinct diagnosis of why arts institutions are in scary times: The development of new technology has given our audience members new forms of entertainment and new ways to spend their discretionary time andRead More

Apply for the fall 2011 Createquity Writing Fellowship

As mentioned earlier this month, the inaugural Createquity Writing Fellowship was a resounding success, and we’re going to do it all over again this fall. The application process has been slightly revamped, but otherwise the basic deal remains the same: five months of intensive writing, collaboration with colleagues, and exposure to field leaders between SeptemberRead More

Wrapping up the Createquity Writing Fellowship

When I re-launched Createquity two years ago following its website redesign, I put a brash new descriptor of the site on the “About” page: “a unique virtual think tank” for the arts. I loved the idea of Createquity being a place for the exchange of ideas, not just a platform for their dissemination. For theRead More

Arts, Inc.: brevity version

This article is a much shorter version of this. If you want the full force of my verbosity, read that one. In Arts, Inc., Bill Ivey, former Chair of the NEA, makes the case that our artistic heritage is a set of public assets that should benefit all, but instead are often squandered by existing cultural institutions.Read More

Arts Policy Library: Arts, Inc.

This is a long piece. If you’d like the very short version, you can find it here. In Arts, Inc., Bill Ivey, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998-2001 and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University (more expansive bio here) makes the caseRead More

Around the horn: Independence edition

Whew! I think this past month might just have been the craziest ever for me. Two research contract proposals, a final report, visits to Chicago, DC (twice), San Diego, LA, and Boston, a birthday, committee work for the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Council, editing Arts Policy Library pieces by the Createquity Writing Fellows,Read More

It Don’t Mean a Thing (If There’s No Audience to Swing): Jazz Audience Development in 2011

My earliest memories of attending live jazz events as a child include my father taking me to hear alto horn player Dick Carey at a club in LA, and an outdoor jazz festival with hundreds of Hawaiian-shirt clad middle-aged people swaying to the grooves on stage. For the past 3 years, I’ve spent a goodRead More