Don’t forget about the Createquity Fellowship deadline coming up this Friday! ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some areRead More
Around the horn: healthcare.gov edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT A consortium of City of Detroit creditors have made the first legal move towards pressuring the Detroit Institute of Arts to sell city-owned artworks to help pay for debts owed. Executive Vice President Annemarie Erickson defends the museum against Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s demand that the museum find one way orRead More
Around the horn: Big Papi edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Glenn Beck is at it again: the right-wing broadcaster recently attacked the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture along with the Imagining America initiative on his Internet show, The Blaze. Far from a government agency, the USDAC is a “citizen-powered” art project that hasn’t received any public funding to date. Not one to be deterred by facts, Beck claimsRead More
Around the horn: Sweet Caroline edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The New York Times reports on the state of Rhode Island’s disastrous investment in former Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios. Little Rhody gave Schilling a $75 million loan as an incentive to locate in the Ocean State, as part of a new Knowledge District in downtownRead More
Around the horn: diversity edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The Future of Music Coalition’s Casey Rae recaps current policy on orphan works (i.e., creations under copyright but whose owners no longer exist), and outlines a solution that protects the original author/performer in such cases. Casey’s post has instructions if you want to file supporting or additional comments with the Copyright Office. WithRead More
Around the horn: Highly Efffective edition
IN THE FIELD RIP Artnet Magazine; more here. I will always be grateful to Artnet’s Ben Davis for being just about the only arts journalist worth his salt during the whole Yosi Sergant debacle. Congratulations to GiveWell, which has announced a not-quite-merger with Good Ventures, an emerging foundation led by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz (the latter is one of theRead More
Why Teaching Artists Will Lead the Charge in Audience Engagement
As a self-proclaimed enthusiast in audience engagement, I felt compelled to respond to Michael Kaiser’s Engaging Audiences article in the Huffington Post last month. Rather than debate point-by-point Kaiser’s position that audience engagement is possibly new window dressing for an old issue or that arts organizations are using this jargon to target selected audiences, I’dRead More
On Michael Kaiser and Citizen Critics
Michael Kaiser is so hit or miss. Last week he published this truly unfortunate commentary on the slow death of professional arts criticism, and the rise of citizen critics as a result: [T]he growing influence of blogs, chat rooms and message boards devoted to the arts has given the local professional critic a slew of competitors….Many artsRead 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
Around the horn: picking up the pieces edition
Obviously, the big story this week has been the effort to get the NEA funding through the Senate, which as it stands doesn’t look in very good shape with the Coburn amendment having passed. However, Americans for the Arts is taking out a series of full-page ads in several political newspapers and organizing a letter-writingRead More