ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The Los Angeles Times, via music critic Mark Swed, revives the Secretary of Culture talk, this time nominating Peter Sellars and Leon Botstein for the job. It’s an earnest appeal for an idea worthy of consideration, but if it was a political nonstarter four years ago, it’s hard to see how itRead More
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
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
Microphilanthropy
My first post from the AFTA Convention a couple of weeks ago provoked several comments about microphilanthropy, based on Craig Dreeszen’s observation that “support for individual entrepreneurs” is a growing trend in creative economy efforts internationally. I’ve been interested in microphilanthropy for some time, but I recently came to the realization that I’ve never postedRead More
Thoughts on “Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy”: Lessons from my Summer Internship
As the twenty or so regular readers of this blog will note, I debuted Createquity last October with a rather brash six-episode litany of “Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy” in the realm of the arts. I say brash because, at the time, I had no experience running a philanthropic program; all I had were my outsiderRead More
Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy: Part III – (Dis-)Economies of Scale in the Arts
Note: This is the third of a multipart series on the arts and philanthropy. I hope these ideas are of interest and welcome suggestions and feedback. To view the rest of this series, click here. When we left off last time, I was advocating for funding agencies to adopt a spirit of experimentation in theirRead More
Commongood Careers
On Monday, I attended an excellent presentation by James Weinberg, the founder and CEO of Commongood Careers, an talent search firm for the nonprofit sector. The presentation was primarily geared toward career advice for us students, but it also provided some interesting insights about the industry as a whole. For example, did you know thatRead More