Category: Points of View

  • Bye Bye Bloomberg Bucks

    Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City’s richest man and biggest philanthropist, is quietly pulling the plug on an unusual program that has poured nearly $200 million of his fortune into nonprofit groups across the five boroughs, in a sign of major change under way in his charitable giving plans. Yikes! Bad news for lots and…

  • Park Avenue Armory Foolishness

    In this article in the NY TIMES,  Charles Isherwood suggests that the Park Avenue Armory be turned into a grand scale permanent home for classical theater. This is just plain wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to begin. Just because the Royal Shakespeare Company will install a classical theater inside the Park Avenue Armory…

  • Howdy from Los Angeles

    Sorry for the paucity of posts. Have been in L.A. for work. Just a few quick notes – saw the incredible Nick Cave (not the rock musician but the visual artist) exhibit at The Fowler, which is really something to behold. Here’s a video about his work: Then we went to the Frederick R. Weisman…

  • Expressive Life on ArtsJournal

    Over on ArtsJournal there’s a real highbrow conversation by celebrity arts admin bloggers.  Here’s the basic premise: Are the terms “Art” and “Culture” tough enough to frame a public policy carve-out for the 21st century? Are the old familiar words, weighted with multiple meanings and unhelpful preconceptions, simply no longer useful in analysis or advocacy?…

  • After the APAP Storm

    Well, the mayhem has subsided and I survived, if barely.  I know that it is even harder on the local presenters and my hat goes off to all the folks who produced festivals this year. There was a plentiful array of new -and returning- work and the energy generated by the season was exciting and…

  • tom sellar's state of the decade address

    Ten years into the 21st century, it seems a fitting time to look at the state of New York City’s theatrical avant-garde. How has it evolved over the past decade? Who’s doing the most inventive work, and who’s coming up short? What exactly constitutes a vanguard these days, and where is it heading? Tom Sellar…

  • rise of the amateur

    “The whole idea of the professional artist belongs to the 20th century,” says Shan Maclennan, Southbank’s creative director of learning and participation. “Before that, amateurs were everywhere.” This quote is from a Newsweek article on amateurs making art. [link via artsjournal] We’ve written before about the “rise of the amateur” and how that’s affecting the…

  • ticket prices, really?

    Over at HuffPo Michael Kaiser opines on how we have to lower ticket prices for the arts.  He says: …the favored technique used to fill budget gaps has been increasing ticket prices. When we increase prices, typically at budget time, we hope that a small increase will not be noticeable and we need the added…

  • createquity in quotes

    Color me impressed. Createquity pulled together his best quotes from the past year and put them all in one big end-of-year post. Very cool and lots of good ideas. Check it out here.

  • CO2 Cubes

    What do our CO2 emissions look like in tangible, spatial form? Leading up to the Copenhagen Climate Change talks, San Francisco based Millennium Art had an answer. They teamed up with the United Nations Department of Public Information to create a global installation–a collection of three-story-high digital multimedia cubes, each representing the one metric ton of carbon…

  • corporate giving 2.0?

    I’m still digging around  but with Pepsi Refresh and Coke’s Live Positively campaigns we’re seeing a distinctly different tone and approach towards giving. On the heels of the Chase Community giving campaign (which has taken some heat recently) I think we’re definitely seeing a trend. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how each of these…

  • Outrageous Fortune

    Outrageous Fortune: The Life And Times Of The New American Play by Todd London, with Ben Pesner, and Zannie Giraud Voss, examines the “collaboration in crisis” between the contemporary American playwright and the varied people who fund and produce new work. Published this month by Theatre Development Fund, the study draws on six years of…