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Art…and the Stagnant Business of Art (an EALS Post)

What happens when an arts organization’s business model no longer works? Well, as with the metaphor of the shark, it must continue to move forward or it will die. For decades, the arts organization model has remained largely unchallenged, because there was no reason to challenge it. It almost served as a microcosm of “The American […]

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The Subversive Tack: Arts + Economy

Thinking about the economy can be rather depressing. For many people, it can seem like a volatile god: a mysterious force that affects everything and we mere mortals have no control over its whims. Let’s start with a basic idea of what I mean when I write about “the economy.” Economic analysis is often an […]

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What Arts Managers Can Learn from Steve Jobs

With the recent release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and several other bios scheduled to come out in the near future, there’s a lot of discussion on what kind of a manager Jobs was. While the management of a publicly-traded tech company and that of a nonprofit arts organization may seem worlds apart, […]

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Emerging Ideas: Seeking and Celebrating the Spark of Innovation

Welcome to the Emerging Ideas: Seeking and Celebrating the Spark of Innovation blog salon. This Salon is part of a larger effort on the part of the Emerging Leaders Council to help Americans for the Arts and the field at-large learn from the best and brightest thinkers and doers in communities around the country. In […]

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Taboo Discussions for Artists & Arts Organizations

Some artists, if you mention the word “business” at all, they recoil, but let us play a field-wide game of Taboo, and have a brainstorm discussion about the future of the arts sans these words or any derivation of them: “innovation” and “business models.” Could the private sector keep itself from using all the jargon […]

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