ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Seems that New York City’s recent bill forcing schools to report out on the availability of arts education in its schools comes not a moment too soon: an audit from the state comptroller found that roughly half of seniors graduated from high school without having met arts education requirements. Denver isRead More
Around the Horn: Rob Ford edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The even playing field that is the Internet might be about to tilt in the favor of the powerful, in this case AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and the like. Net neutrality is in the hands of the DC Circuit Court. The National Initiative on Arts & the Military has released a newRead More
Around the horn: GIA recovery edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Twitter, Facebook, and now the Minnesota Orchestra: everyone’s going public these days. State legislators announced a bill last week to save the troubled ensemble and gauge public support for its continuation by making it “a community-owned entity in which any individual or group could buy stock.” MUSICAL CHAIRS Robert Vagt, theRead More
The Virtues and Pitfalls of Open Contests
An interesting back and forth on “contest philanthropy” took place recently in the pixel-pages of Stanford Social Innovation Review between Mayur Patel, the wunderkind VP of Strategy and Assessment for the Knight Foundation, and Kevin Starr, managing director of the Mulago Foundation. Patel started things off in July with a blog post on six reasonsRead More
Around the horn: Kim Jong-un edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The NEA has unveiled a new four-point plan for its arts education program, and Kristen Engebretsen has the details. Yo-Yo Ma gave this year’s Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at Arts Advocacy Day, and you can watch the video here. Fascinating account of the Norwegian jazz scene and how government fundingRead More
Around the horn: Newt edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – DOMESTIC Sadly, this is what passes for a victory in arts funding these days: the NEA survived the 2012 budget appropriations process with only a 6% cut from last year. This represents full funding of President Obama’s request; yes, that’s right folks, our fearless leader demonstrated his steadfast support ofRead More
Dispatch from the Bay Area, Part I: Navigating the Velocity of Change
(Note: over the years, I’ve gotten out of the habit of reporting live from the conferences I attend. Several factors contributed to this development, including the proliferation of other blogs in the arts management/policy space that cover the same events, the advent of Twitter and live streaming, my own life getting busier, and frankly becauseRead 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
Around the Horn: Far East edition
Posting has been light because I’m just wrapping up two weeks in Japan, my longest vacation in three years. As much as I attempted to disconnect from the world while I’ve been away, I couldn’t make myself let go completely, particularly since I knew that Google Reader would get very, very angry with me ifRead More