ArtsJournal.com has a rich discussion underway with many contributors. The question being considered is this:
Increasingly, audiences have more visibility for their opinions about the culture they consume. Cultural institutions know more and more about their audiences and their wants. Some suggest this new transparency argues for a different relationship between artists and audience. So the question: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?
Matt Chaban at The New York Observer takes another look at how artists affect gentrification of neighborhoods:
Everybody knows the old saw about how artist migrations and subway access help drive gentrification in the city, but we never realized the two were quite so intertwined.
The Nonprofit Quarterly has published the text of remarks made by Bill Schambra to the Wallace Foundation on January 12, 2012. Schambra offers a critical examination of The Wallace Foundation's focus on measurement and evidence-based approach to philanthropy:
This should be the moment when foundations realize that metrics, no matter how promising, do very little to sway policy decisions. Instead, they tell themselves that were it not for this one little election or unfavorable school board vote or budget crisis, the project would have worked wonderfully.
The Future of Music Coalition looks at the state of the legislation:
In the aftermath of Congress delaying further action on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), there’s been a rush to summarize what the debate might mean for the future of technology and copyright policy. Naturally, we have a few thoughts.
According to a press release from the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, executive director Sharon Gersten Luckman will step down in 2013 to pursue other plans. Luckman has held her position at Ailey for 16 years and is largely credited with breathing new life into a program which was on the verge of bankruptcy when she took over.
The American version of London’s annual Frieze Art Fair, which makes its debut in New York in May, wants to be more than just another place to see and buy contemporary art. Using its unusual and remote location – the 256-acre Randall’s Island, in the East River between East Harlem, the South Bronx and Astoria, Queens – it has commissioned eight artists to construct what is calls “a temporary pop-up village.”
The Media Arts funding area of the National Endowment for the Arts continues to evolve in tandem with the dynamic nature of the media arts field. Public feedback on our approach to this funding category will be taken and discussed during a webinar on Thursday, January 26. You’ll be able to hear directly from NEA staff and members of the Arts in Media panels and text to us your questions and comments.
Filmmaker David Hoffman set up his dream studio on a hilltop in the Monterrey Bay area of California, complete with his archive of almost 200 films, his equipment, and other collections, including his father's photography. As he was completing his fifth film his studio burned down. Only a week after the fire he spoke at a TED talk about his very bad week. Another film maker, John Vincent Barrett, created this hour-long video that portrays an artist coping with the aftermath of the loss of a life's work.
The online documentary Here Comes the Neighborhood is a seven-part series that examines Wynwood Walls, a mural and graffiti project in Miami, Florida. The project was designed in 2009 to revitalize a warehouse district and began with the idea that “Wynwood's large stock of warehouse buildings, all with no windows, would be my giant canvases to bring to them the greatest street art ever seen in one place,” according to Tony Goldman, the project creator. Murals by renowned street artists have covered the walls of the Wynwood Walls complex since 2009, and to create more canvases and bring more artists to the project, Goldman opened the Wynwood Doors in 2010 with 176 feet of roll-up storefront gates. The painted exteriors and interiors of the doors reveal a portrait gallery.
