(Our reruns this week have focused intensely on the competition among artists that makes it difficult to make a sustainable living as one. This exact issue blew up in the arts world some three and a half years ago, after then-NEA-Chairman Rocco Landesman dared to invoke the words “supply and demand” at a convening andRead More

(For all the talk of how artists face challenges making a living, they’re not alone. Former Createquity Fellow Jena Lee takes a look here at how individuals in other fields, including fashion and even law, are singing the winner-take-all blues. Some of the lyrics might sound surprisingly familiar. -IDM) Philip Glass drove a taxi, PattiRead More

(By 2011, I was writing pretty frequently on the issue of how high-quality curation connects to the distribution of opportuniteis for professional artists. My views were encapsulated most fully in this talk for TEDxMichiganAve at the Chicago Symphony Center’s Club 8, May 7, 2011, which discusses rationales for subsidizing the arts, the debilitating effects ofRead More

(Individual artist week continues with the introduction, in March 2009, of the concept of an “artistic marketplace” – a parallel marketplace “in which the currency of trade is respect from one’s peers rather than the ability to draw a big-spending crowd.” This idea ended up serving as the intellectual foundation for a number of subsequentRead More

(Welcome to individual artists week at Createquity! The plight of the non-superstar artist has been a common theme here over the years, and this site in some ways rose out of the ashes of a failed artistic venture founded by yours truly. Today we have one of Createquity’s earliest posts on the topic, originally publishedRead More

(With all of the skepticism expressed in Createquity’s Uncomfortable Thoughts week, one might reasonably wonder whether Createquity really believes in the value of the arts at all. In fact, that’s something we’re intentionally open-minded about. This 2012 post explains why we believe it’s important to offer “a perspective on the arts that is independent ofRead More

(It was just nine and a half months ago that Talia Gibas published this awesome post responding to the hullabaloo around Peter Singer’s op-ed in the New York Times arguing that a donation to a blindness charity is morally superior to a donation to a museum. Talia places Singer’s article in the context of theRead More

(Arts marketers and advocates are fond of invoking the arts experience that changed their lives, and the one that presumably could change yours if only you came to this next show. But are most arts experiences on has as an audience member really like that? In this post from three and a half years ago,Read More

(One of Createquity’s hallmarks has been its willingness to entertain questions that many cheerleaders for the arts would prefer not to touch with a ten-foot pole: questions about the effectiveness and relevance of arts programming or advocacy strategies, about the appropriateness of the ways in which we amass knowledge, even about whether the arts reallyRead More

(Emerging leaders week at Createquity concludes with another crosspost from ARTSBlog, this one written with the help of Jean Cook of the Future of Music Coalition and Fractured Atlas‘s Adam Huttler in April 2010. It’s our statement on how we think arts leadership in the early 21st century looks different than arts leadership in theRead More