Last Sunday I read a piece on executive pay in the business section of the New York Times. Ever since, I have been wondering how to write about it. Here are some of the images I did not want to include: bad apples spoiling a whole barrel; pirates (and other types of marauding bandits); weeds …
The world didn’t end yesterday (unless the next world includes a bus from New York to Philadelphia equipped with the electrical outlets and wifi that enabled me to write this essay). Yes, I’ve been on the road all spring, a condition that tends to impair my ability to focus on a single topic long enough …
Dear Car Fairy: I like to think of myself as dauntless (in certain domains, anyway: the only bungee jumping you’ll catch me doing is the figurative kind). For the last two years, I’ve been navigating the new realms that open up when you leave a three decades-long marriage and discover how the world works for …
Someone I know wrote the other day that his friends in Japan are “getting used to the aftershocks; they’ve become normal.” But of course, “normal” doesn’t quite describe what happens when we sustain repeated shocks, becoming inured. What actually happens has more to do with numbing, with defensive insulation, and with the denial or evasion …
Note to readers: based on response to my recent 3-part series on cultural funding, Life Implicates Art, I’m letting people know about my workshop on Reframing The Arts, a powerful generator of new ideas, fresh inspiration, and transformative action. Please contact me if you want to explore sponsoring one. Triage is the process of culling …
My last essay, exploring deeper meanings of the current threats to defund public arts agencies, elicited a great deal of comment. The bulk of it came from people who, like me, perceive the stuckness of mainstream arts advocacy and are seeking alternatives. So, what now? What do we do about it? I have a few …
Does higher education ensure learning? Years ago, I co-taught a semester-long seminar in a multidisciplinary arts graduate program at San Francisco State University. The subject was the economic and policy environment for artists’ work, and as I’ve discovered many times since, most of the students, despite years of arts practice and study, were learning the …
In my last essay, I wrote about class diversity. From an intensely personal perspective, I questioned the practice—just as prevalent in our national discourse as in the realm of family secrets—of entering into tacit agreements to normalize what should never be considered acceptable. I said that it was time to break the pact upholding the …
We are having a conversation about class in this country, but not everyone knows it. For instance, joblessness means one thing to a person whose unemployment insurance has run out and quite another to, say, a business leader who worships constantly growing profits, repeatedly cutting jobs to expand them. Our national conversation about class is …
This is my sixth and final post about the Grantmakers in the Arts 2010 conference, where I was invited to take part as a live blogger. It was tremendous fun: I got to write morning, noon, and night, which is my preferred type of ecstatic meditation. It was also a perfect antidote to the anxiety …