Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, was the luncheon speaker at Monday’s GIA meeting. His relaxed and likable presence comes across as realness personified. His low-key style gives me a sort of internal headshake. By the time Ito’s presentation ended, I was buzzing with a frequency of intellectual excitement I’d normally associate with verbal pyrotechnics. …
The first plenary session of this Grantmakers in The Arts’ conference focused on the National Capitalization Project, a GIA initiative launched this past January. It was premised on the plain truth that arts organizations are often under-capitalized. A task force of funders and experts studied the literature, agreed on terms, and has just now published …
Shine on me Let the light shine on me The Black Monks of Mississippi I spent the day at Grantmakers in The Arts’ Support for Individual Artists preconference (entitled Artists and Grantmakers: A Shared Enterprise). Dozens of artists and funders took part in the program, performing, offering panel presentations, Web pages, video clips, and PowerPoints. …
Dear Readers: I’m excited that my talk for The Field in New York—”Why America Needs Artists (It’s Not What You Think)”—will be live-streamed online at 7 pm EDT on Monday, 27 September, 2010. Please click on this link to see it. Taste is a complex process. Tasting entails integrating information from our eyes, noses, and …
Of all the powers in which I have placed my faith, my deepest and most lasting allegiance is to the power of speech. I eat, breathe, and sleep words. When I am lucky enough to happen on it, the delicious taste of le mot juste fills my mouth like melting chocolate. If words had volume, …
“Dinosaurs” was a hilarious and unique TV series that ran for four seasons in the early nineties. (You can get it on Netflix if you missed it the first time around.) It’s a classic family-centered sitcom, very much on the model of the original “Honeymooners,” except that Mom, Dad, the kids and pets are all …
A long time ago, when I was a young artist-organizer obsessed with questions of artists’ rights and livelihood, I used to give talks to groups of artists. I often began with the archetypal tale of Sleeping Beauty, in which Beauty must slumber hopefully, entirely passive until kissed into life by the prince. That was the …
Sometimes life delivers moments of irrefutable insight, shattering fragile illusions like so many soap-bubbles. Remember that post-Katrina telethon where Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? There was a great commotion, the President’s compassionate conservatism was vigorously asserted, West was condemned for incivility. Now, five years later, take a look at New …
The gulf between practice and preaching is vast enough to swallow almost anything, but I am beginning to think we have something caught in our collective throat. Despite all our claims for the higher virtues of compassion, truth, and altruism, our common culture has persisted in attaching a positive presumption to material success. Those who …
Back in 1996, Tikkun published my essay, “Let Them Eat Pie: Philanthropy à la Mode.” Fourteen years later, I still get messages from people thanking me for it. I’d like to think that’s because my analysis of philanthropic power relations and their discontents wowed readers with its brilliance. But I’m pretty sure the essay’s biggest …