Holly Sidford’s seminal report calls attention to longstanding inequities in arts funding.
From Grassroots to Institution, Growing With Integrity
For the past two and a half years I’ve been involved with FIGMENT, a non-profit organization that produces participatory art events in a growing list of cities, including New York, Boston, DC, Detroit, Jackson and Pittsburgh. When I first joined FIGMENT in 2010, it had already grown from a one-day event on New York City’sRead More
The Art School as Artwork
Artist-founded and administered schools have existed for over a century. In 1875, a group of artists pinned a notice to the bulletin board of the National Academy of Design inviting students and instructors to attend a meeting, effectively founding The Art Students League in New York City. In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius startedRead More
Economies and Diseconomies of Scale in the Arts – Take Two
(The following post is part of a weeklong salon at ARTSBlog on the subject of “Does Size Matter?” The entire salon is worth checking out, and former Createquity Writing Fellow Katherine Gressel has an entry as well.) How does scale influence impact in the arts? In 2007, back when I was a fresh-faced grad student,Read More
Burning Man is Dead; Long Live Burning Man
Can Burning Man go mainstream with its values intact? The answer lies in the strength of the burner diaspora.
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
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
I have a confession to make.
It’s true: I participated in the infamous unfinished performance of Nathan Currier’s Gaian Variations at Avery Fisher Hall exactly five years ago today. I was there, on stage, when Harold Rosenbaum calmly closed his music folder, turned around, bowed to the confused audience, and walked off stage, four movements before the piece was supposed toRead More