The Network Effect of Arts Incubators

Although there has been a proliferation of metrics to evaluate arts incubators, the academic field is still developing. Different models and methods of education are applied to the complex phenomena of arts incubators; therefore, it is crucial to measure the effectiveness of education programs from many different perspectives. Our aim is to propose a metric that can estimate the effect of each incubator activity based on the geospatial distribution of its participants. This GIS-based metric will provide a descriptive measure for the quantity and density of the geographical communities affected by the incubator’s activity as well as a socio-economic and demographic benchmarks. Our study investigates 14 US-based arts incubators that offer entrepreneurial training to their associated 1,087 incubatees. The goal of this study is to provide a metric that can assist arts incubators, program directors, arts administrators, and university programs assess program growth as well as funding and marketing efforts.

Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money and Entrepreneurial Action

A new collection of connected essays and case studies that delve deeply into the relationships between art, innovation, entrepreneurship and money. Arts entrepreneurship is a growing field, and this book is ideal for arts administrators and policy analysts as well as for artists who participate in professional development programmes.

#artoninstagram: Engaging with art in the era of the selfie

This study aims to understand how people engage with art in the era of selfies, digital devices, and social media. It examines the audience experience of an art exhibition, where visitors are encouraged to use social media to share their art experience, to understand how such an approach might change the nature of visitor engagement with art. Arguably, selfies taken in the art space enrich the visitor’s experience and engagement with art and function as co-creational, empowering, and authentic marketing tools for museums. Data for this research were collected through non-participant observation (ethnography) and netnography at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia. The results show that rather than promoting disengagement from the art piece, selfies in the art space become “networked material-discursive entanglements” empowering art consumers to co-create value and arts organizations to reduce their distance from consumers and reproduce the iconic authenticity of the artwork in the virtual space. The article contributes to selfie theory by overcoming the traditional view of selfies as manifestation of narcissistic self-expression. Instead, it promotes an interpretation of selfies as an empowering and democratizing means used by art consumers to develop narratives and identity projects in a context such as the museum where traditionally the development of the narrative is apanage of an elite. A further contribution provided by this research stems from the identification of clusters of visitors (i.e., reality escapers, art lovers, photoholics, and selfie lovers), placed on a continuum of value co-creation, which arts administrators need to be conscious of as they enter a more dynamic era of art consumption. By outlining managerial implications, this study provides an initial reflection on how arts managers can navigate the emerging era of the selfie in the museum context.

When Buildings Become Screens

This chapter outlines various tactics that artists, filmmakers, curators, architects, city planners, and arts administrators can employ to develop works, sites, and audiences that support a more participatory and representative public culture through massive media. These include: the application of analytical tools from cinema studies, namely superimposition, montage, and apparatus/dispositif, high-level coordination and provision of technical support from curatorial groups that see themselves as public space activists and community facilitators, and sensitivity towards context, both digital and virtual, of large-scale public data visualisations centred upon led façades. More study and practice is needed as the technologies and contexts of massive media shift and merge with the practices of digital placemaking and smart cities.

A Mixed Methods Study on the Status of School Orchestra Programs in Oregon: An Explanation of Inhibiting and Promoting Factors

The purpose of this explanatory sequential mixed methods study was to examine the status of school orchestra programs in Oregon and to explain the reasoning behind the descriptive data. The quantitative phase of the study reported the data on the number of school districts and schools by type that offer orchestra instruction as well as the profile of those schools, their orchestra programs, and orchestra teachers. Unexpected findings from the quantitative phase indicated that among the three large school districts that are comparable in size, budget, and students’ demographics, only one offers orchestra instruction in every school within the district ( n = 65) while the other two districts offer orchestra instruction in one high school each. This finding prompted the qualitative phase of the study that illuminated factors that inhibit and promote the quality of education within Oregon schools. The mixed methods findings explained the discrepancy in music offerings among the three large school districts through the perspectives of the three arts administrators, one from each district.

The Grass Society [草草社]

The Grass Society, or Caocaoshe, was a formal group of ink painters founded in Shanghai in 1979. Qiu Deshu [仇德樹] (1948--) founded the group and was its youngest member. Chen Jialing [陳家泠] (1937--), once a teacher of Qiu’s, was the group’s co-founder. From the 1950s to 1990s it was possible to practice art outside the Socialist system. The underground art movement included senior artists condemned by the Cultural Revolution and unofficial artists who had given up state employment. After Mao’s death in 1976, local arts administrators began exploring problematic exhibition themes with no political focus in mediums such as watercolors, considered unsuitable for Socialist Realist art. Caocaoshe emerged within this environment.

Arts-Based Community Engagement in Singapore

Socially engaged artists have to work within a landscape of state-sponsored grassroots organizations and controlled community development in Singapore. This has created both constraints and opportunities for artists. Arts-based community engagement that focuses on building national identity and inter-racial harmony receives much government support and funding. Community art that helps support therapy, health and social care are also welcomed by the arts administrators, social service providers, hospitals and community organizations. Art that is politicized or calls into question government policies are discouraged, and the socially conscious artists who use art for advocacy or public education often have to negotiate with the state where these boundaries should lie. Nonetheless, a strong supportive ecosystem for socially engaged artists is growing in Singapore, made up of intermediary organizations, capability builders and market aggregators.

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

This book presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the first and most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. The festival’s stylistically diverse programs ranged from Soviet-sponsored socialist realism to the modernism of the Western avant-garde. It also facilitated encounters between people (performers, composers, critics, arts administrators, government functionaries, and general audiences) from both sides of the Cold War. Drawing on Howard Becker’s model of the art world, and Stephen Greenblatt’s model of cultural mobility, the book contends that the performance of social interactions in particular institutional frameworks (such as music festivals) have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with “new” music (or “contemporary” music). Moreover, the book contests static notions of East-West division and challenges the metaphor of an impermeable “Iron Curtain.” Chapters 1-3 examine the Warsaw Autumn’s institutional organization, negotiation, and reception in socialist Poland during the post-Stalin Thaw. Chapters 4-6 consider the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the performance of cultural diplomacy, engendered international and transnational ties, sparked change within the Eastern Bloc, assisted the globalization of avant-garde ideas, and facilitated the cross-border circulation of people, objects, and ideas. The epilogue briefly considers how new music is being defined and disseminated in post-socialist Poland.

Arts Wire: The Nonprofit Arts Online

Beginning in 1992, Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, was a social media platform and Internet presence provider, that provided access to news, information, and dialogue on the social, economic, philosophical, intellectual, and political conditions affecting the arts and artists. Initially led by Anne Focke and then by poet, Joe Matuzak, Arts Wire participants included individual artists, arts administrators, arts organizations and funders. This chapter focuses on Arts Wire's social media aspects, such as discussion and projects, including among others: AIDSwire, an online AIDS information resource; the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference; the Native Arts Network Association; ProjectArtNet that brought children from immigrant neighborhoods online to create a community history; NewMusNet, a virtual place for experimental music; and Interactive, an online laboratory for interactive art. It also documents the history of the e-newsletter, Arts Wire Current (later NYFA Current).