Friday, December 14, 2007

Harry Ransom Center, UT. Austin, TX.

Friday, December 07, 2007

Art: Transition for SVT

Jason Neulander, Artistic Director of Salvage Vanguard Theater, is leaving. Here is the announcement in the Statesman.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Art: Dashboard


A great example of an operational dashboard from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (from the Artful Manager)

Art: Lessons from the Lincoln Center

Some good advice from the Lincoln Center President - Ronald Levy - in and interview with Kai Rysdall on Markeplace. (From Artful Manager)
"...one of the things we've learned is that social discourse is enormously important to the enjoyment of the performing arts. And, what it will do is provide an opportunity for those who are coming to performances to come early, to leave late, to linger, to actually talk about the work they're about to see or the work that they've just seen. And, it will also allow artists to do the same."

"It's an extraordinary amount of fun to find the intersection between the interests and background of a donor, and the needs of the institution. If you find that intersection, that's the sweet spot. And my personal attitude is that we are really doing the prospective donor an enormous favor by asking for support. Because their gift will provide a meaning and a consequence in their lives that will otherwise not exist. "

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Design: Austin artisans collective

"The Architectural Artisans Collaborative is an organization of professional, highly skilled artisans, architects, and artists dedicated to the renaissance of architectural craft in buildings constructed in Austin and central Texas."

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Zeitgeist: Catalog Choice

Want to reduce the number of catalogs you get in the mail? Head on over to Catalog Choice.
"Catalog Choice is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources."

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Technology: How participatory is the web, really?


From the Artful Manager blog:

"How participatory is the web, really? And how true is the assumption that web technologies create a world of content-creators rather than a world of content-watchers.
According to Forrester's research, a full 52 percent of on-line consumers are ''inactives,'' engaging in none of the identified social networking activities. Some 33 percent prefer to watch, read, or listen, without contributing to content. While those higher up the ''participation ladder'' are more active collectors of content, critics or commenters, or creators of their own pages, blogs or videos."

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Music: New CDs

Okay, time to catch up on all the new CDs I have purchased over the last couple months:

-LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver - a strong album from dancepunk pioneers
-Ojos de Brujo: Techari - contemporarized flamenco
-The Twilight Sad: Fourteen Autumns Fifteen Winters - dense melodic anthems in a thick Scottish brogue
-The Field: From Here We Go Sublime - solid four-on-the-floor house beats with subtle washes of melody
-Deerhunter: Flourescent Grey - great indie band with shoegazer influences

Friday, May 04, 2007

Zeitgeist: Scale for Non-profits

From a post on the Artful Manager Blog about scale and non-profits.
Excerpt:
"With all the obstacles preventing precise measurements of effectiveness and program quality in the nonprofit sector, it is very easy to use size as a proxy for impact and to embrace the idea that programs serving large numbers of people are contributing more to public welfare than those targeting smaller populations. In this sense, scale is much easier to measure than effectiveness and it represents an appealing way to change the conversation.
But the danger of such a move lies, of course, in the fact that scale is not a particularly good proxy for effectiveness and that many large programs do not deserve the support they receive, while many smaller programs deserve greater acclaim. Scale is not the problem in the nonprofit sector, nor is it the answer."

An article linked from this post: How Nonprofits Get Really Big
Excerpt:
"Further, the way funding flows to organizations this large is neither completely random nor illogical. On the contrary, we identified three important practices common among nonprofits that succeeded in building large-scale funding models: (1) They developed funding in one concentrated source rather than across diverse sources; (2) they found a funding source that was a natural match to their mission and beneficiaries; and (3) they built a professional organization and structure around this funding model."

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Theater: Calling all patrons

A good article from the LA Times about the drama Pulitzer going to Rabbit Hole instead of to one of the three other plays nominated.
Our playwrights get lonely on the cutting edge: "Rabbit Hole" is a fine Pulitzer choice, but up-and-coming, daring writers need support.
Excerpt:
"THAT'S where you come in. Every society gets the theater it deserves. We don't need a lecture about the extent of our consumerist depravity. But even the most unrepentant shoppers among us (no peeking at my credit card bills, please) have to grapple with the reality that art isn't something we greedily purchase, like a pair of Prada shoes. Rather it's an experience we collectively enter to learn more about those parts of ourselves and each other that aren't receiving sufficient contemplation elsewhere.
As a professional theatergoer who was once an avid amateur theatergoer, I don't typically have a cranky reaction to plays that stumble if there's a sense that the writer is honestly grappling with something. I must have seen scads of mediocre plays at Circle Repertory Company in New York in the 1980s, but my memory of that Greenwich Village theater group has a golden glow. New plays mattered there — to the playwrights, directors, actors and most especially the audience. What the culturally hungry are after isn't perfection but truth. Few novelists can match Proust, but that doesn't stop me from reading Mary Gaitskill. Nor do I skip Richard Greenberg or Craig Lucas because they're several notches below Chekhov.
What does, however, make me slightly — OK, acutely — dyspeptic is when I feel as though I'm being sold a bill of goods that the producer knows is shoddy but thinks won't cause waves or will please because of the TV personality in the cast or no one cares much one way or the other. Nothing is more enraging than a time waster — especially at big theater prices."

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Arts: I'm sick to death of meddling philistines

An opinionated article in the London Times by Sir John Tusa, the managing director of the Barbican Centre: I’m sick to death of meddling philistines: Government arts policy is forged by ignorant bureaucrats and posturing barbarians, writes the furious Barbican chief
Excerpts:
I’m sick to death, too, with justifying the arts as if there was something specially problematical about doing so, as if funding the arts is irrational or even unnatural. Thinking about the arts, judging their value, explaining particular trends in the arts — this is an essential part of a human activity that takes itself seriously. What is a waste of time is being required to justify the arts as if millennia of arts activity required justifying anew, as if a failure to justify them could — or should — lead to the end of the activity altogether.
....
Arts policymakers judge the education and outreach programme of a major arts institution not by whether it is of high quality and raises the creative awareness of the children it is aimed at, but only whether it is directed at socially targeted groups such as refugees or the socially marginalised.
Valuable as such activity may be, it is far from clear why an education programme dedicated to developing creative understanding in the broadest sense should be limited and defined in this way. Such may well be the priorities of social welfare departments. Why are they the priorities of arts policy-makers? The only possible answer can be that the arts policymakers themselves do not believe in the value of excellence of the arts as such and on their own.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Useful Travel Sites

A good article from the NY Times about travel webistes: If It Is Good, Is It Too Good To Be True? The four websites mentioned:
Farecast.com
FareCompare.com
Kayak
Airfarewatchdog.com

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Art: The (Art) World According to Edward Goldman

Edward Goldman has a radio show in LA about Art. We need an Edward Goldman in Austin.
NY Times article: The (Art) World According to Edward Goldman

Excerpt:
"For nearly 20 years, he has been dispensing his art criticism in five-minute weekly segments called ''Art Talk'' on the public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. That soapbox, expanded through podcasts and the Web, has helped make him a voice of authority in his adopted city.
It also makes him a Pied Piper of art, attracting participants to his classes, which he has taught four times before, and wrangling clients to his art consultancy, which includes individual and corporate collectors. Mr. Goldman doesn't just love art. He loves to talk about it. He punctuates his talks with the wisdom his participants came to hear."

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Art: Let Museums Leave Room for the Troublemakers

A very good essay by Holland Cotter in the NY Times criticizing the state of museums and the art market in the US: Let Museums Leave Room for the Troublemakers

Excerpts:
"A similar trick of illusion surrounds the vaunted populism of museums. Every American city, to be a proper city, now needs to have its own jewel-box art museum. Any existing museum anywhere needs to be expanded expensively. Thanks to all this stretching, art and its institutions have, we are told, grown increasingly democratic, more accessible to all.
In fact, the more successful a museum grows, the more elitist it tends to become. Social distinctions based on money and patronage can assume the intricate gradings of court protocol. At street level, admission prices climb, reinforcing existing socioeconomic barriers. Programming grows more cautious. If you're laying out $20, you want to see ''the best'' art, which often means art that adheres to conventional versions of beauty, authority, ''genius'' (white and male) set in a reassuringly familiar context.
....
Give the art world a break. It can't help being a miniature version of the culture that made it. What can it do about that?
One thing it can do -- that museums can do -- is clear an alternative space in that culture, a zone of moral inquiry, intellectual contrariness, crazy beauty. In this space, artists can simultaneously hold a magnifying glass up to something called ''America'' and also train a telescope on it: probe its innards and view it from afar, see it as others see it. From these perspectives, they might come up with models of a cosmopolitan, leveled-out society for a country in solidarity with the world, in contrast to the provincial, hierarchical, self-isolating one that exists today."

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Art: Bread & Roses

An article from the Guardian - How we can connect head and heart by Helena Kennedy, chair Arts & Business in the U.K. Excerpt:
"In an essay in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes spoke of his hopes for a future of wealth creation where he predicted that "those people who can keep alive and cultivate the art of life and do not sell themselves for the means of life will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes." Keynes recognised the importance of work life balance ahead of his time. Pulling the two sources of our national wellbeing together, the science of economics and the arts of life - bread and roses - is the real challenge of the age. It is vital that we widen art's embrace."

Technology: Top website redesign priorities

A good article from Jakob Neilsen on improving website usability for ROI. I like the focus on basic improvements like better writing and better product photos. I am tired of sites that are poorly done. Excerpt:
"Interface design is about making money for the company. Execution and workmanship are what you need, not fashion and advanced features. Do the basics, and do them well."

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Books: Interview with Dana Gioia

Naghmeh and I went to hear Dana Gioia speak at the HRC (one of the premier literary archives in the US). It was enjoyable and inspiring.
Here are some excerpts from a Statesman interview. He talked about some of these topics in his lecture.

On poetry:
"Poetry is a way of speaking, but it's also a way of listening — and it comes from the same rootstalk as music and song and theater. It's the kind of listening we don't do every day. You might ask, "Well, why do we need to do that?" And I'd say because it's important to have your humanity awakened, and enhanced, and developed, and refined. The trouble and toil we go through in everyday life tends to make us much more withdrawn into our psyches."

On arts and society
"A third trend is that a lot of our institutions — especially academic ones — have lost their ability to reach and speak to society. We have these tremendous subcultures in the arts, but almost no public figures emerging from them, the way Leonard Bernstein or Robert Frost once became part of the public conversation with the United States. Both brought ideas into society, but both brought people to the arts. We're not creating an audience commensurate with our institutions, not affecting society in a way commensurate with the talent that exists in the art world. The arts suffer. The society suffers. And I think youth suffers most because they don't have the power of the arts to fully realize their human potential."

On reading:
"Every group of Americans reads less, and less well than they did 20 years ago. That has terrible personal, social, cultural and civic consequences. Since people read less, they read less well. And since they read less well, they do less well in their academic study, which means they do less well in the job market. . . Reading awakens something to people's humanity. I worry that we're going into an America that's increasingly fragmented, isolated, commercialized, inert. "

On art and emotion:
"Art, especially literature, is one of the ways that cultures have traditionally recognized that you train emotions — you read plays and poems and novels. They allow you to rehearse powerful emotions and see their various consequences. So I think when you take those things out, when you replace novels and theater with video games, you're trading an emotional complexity for a simple adrenaline rush."

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Design: Readymechs


Readymechs look like so much fun! Thanks to Andrew Taylor's Artful Manager blog post for this discovery.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Design: Book cover blog


I love well designed book covers. Here is a book cover blog. Coolio!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Books: The debate about poetry

A good post on the Poetry Foundation website: What to do about Poetry that is a response to a New Yorker article: The Moneyed Muse - What can $200 million do for poetry?
The debate between popularity and elitism continues.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Art: Ancient art as politcal advertising

A great art review of "Glass, Gilding and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran" at the Asia Society by Holland Cotter of the NY Times. Excerpt:
"So, in cosmic terms, which are always basically earthly terms with spin, these images of domination through combat are political art, or more precisely, political advertising. What is the difference, after all, between a carved relief of an ancient king-of-king’s victory in a hunt and a press photograph of a modern leader declaring victory in a war?
Aesthetics is one difference, a big one. Most of the objects in the show — organized by Françoise Demange, chief curator of Asian antiquities at the Louvre, with Prudence O. Harper, curator emerita of ancient Near Eastern art at the Met, and Michael Chagnon, a curatorial consultant — are superbly beautiful in formal terms, beautiful enough to smooth over the reality that control through violence is a primary theme.
When we see comparable violence played out on television news, we are appalled; some people have ethical qualms about its omnipresence, in fictional form, in films. But in high art, we tend to put our scruples on hold and give it a pass, because of beauty, or rarity, or distance in time, or because we don’t know what we’re seeing, or because we just don’t want to acknowledge what is really there.
A large part of art’s allure is its ambiguity; you can take it as you wish, make of it what you will. This exhibition, with its luminous cruelties, is a reminder of that. But the ancient Sasanians were surely clear about what they were seeing in their imperial art. And in some sense the viewers who understand art as political advertising most directly today are iconoclasts, the suppressors and destroyers of art. They may be the only people for whom art actually does speak for itself, but for whom beauty truly is not enough.
So by all means see the rare and fabulous work at Asia Society, for the intense pleasure it gives and for the windows its opens onto history, present and past. But also see it for the hard questions it poses about the profoundly uninnocent nature of art — in particular imperial art, wherever it comes from — and the moral responsibility we should ask of it."

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Books: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

A good review of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra from the New Yorker - Bombay Noir by Pankaj Mishra. Excerpt:
"Playing the endless games of the Cold War, the characters of John le Carré’s novels didn’t think much differently, but Chandra is after something bigger. He has spoken in interviews of the possibility of taking the novel beyond the modern Western conceptions that have defined it, such as of the bourgeois individual who seeks self-knowledge and strives to establish his moral worth before his peers in a historically circumscribed society. Chandra believes that many Indians, pulled between tradition and modernity in a chaotically populous and poor country, have a less psychologically inhibited sense of self and a mythic, rather than a historical, sense of their place in the world.
The philosophical ambition of “Sacred Games” owes much to Bollywood films. To Chandra, these seem to capture the flexible nature of non-bourgeois self-perceptions, moving as they do from documentary naturalism to an epic mode of storytelling without getting bogged down in psychological realism. Dropping his characters into the tumult of recent national history, he occasionally seems to adopt a more conventional mode of novel-writing about India. But his stance, unlike Salman Rushdie’s or Rohinton Mistry’s, is of a calm Homeric objectivity, as he tries to realize afresh what seems, after many long novels from the subcontinent, a particularly Indian ambition to retool the novel as an epic form."

Friday, February 09, 2007

Quote: What lies within

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us - Emerson

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Art: Jasper Johns


Slate has a great series of slide show art reviews. I like being able to see the art along with the words about it. Great use of technology to illuminate art.

This one on Jasper Johns is excellent: Targeting Jasper Johns: Is the artist overrated?

"The small drawings he did of targets are a revelation; no larger than 6 inches square, they are lively, intense, and full of mystery. Unlike the primary colors of the painted targets, the drawings are monochrome: gray, green, white. They look like mandalas, or rubbings of Cambodian temple fragments. The target is almost invisible, pulsing in and out of focus as one looks at, or into, the image. There's a Zen feel to it, as though you yourself are dissolving into the target. "The hits on the target are only the outward proof and confirmation of your purposelessness at its highest, of your egolessness, your self-abandonment," the master tells his pupil in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery. Close your eyes. See the target. The target is within you."

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Monday, February 05, 2007

Art: Martin Ramirez - outsider

A good article from the New Yorker - Mystery Train: Martin Ramirez, outsider by Peter Schjedahl. An excerpt:
"Ramírez’s art is less rich in formal invention than Wölfli’s and in poetic resonance than Darger’s, but it is more stylistically resolved and emotionally concentrated. He has in common with them an extravagant giftedness. All would have been stars in any art school, had they attended one. That they eluded contact with institutions of fine art owes something to personal disarray and something to chance, in a ratio impossible to gauge. It’s a small thing, which makes them hard cases, exceptions proving the existence of a rule—that art, to be recognized as such, requires grounding in both individual biography and common culture. What can we do with and about the rush of pleasure and enchantment that the unlicensed genius of a Ramírez affords? I recommend taking it as a lesson in the limits of how we know what we think we know. Unable to regard such work as part of art’s history, we may still have it be part of our own."

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Quote: The unfamiliar

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

Friday, January 26, 2007

Zeitgeist: Smartest .orgs online

Good things to learn from these 59 .org sites.
"These charities were chosen for their excellence in online storytelling and collaboration with their donors."

Tuesday, January 23, 2007