Author: Douglas McLennan

Martin Amis: Within A Generation Literary Culture As We Know It Now Will Be Gone

Zadie Smith said to me years ago, “Everything we think of as literary culture will be gone in a generation and a half.” She said, “It will last your time, but it won’t last mine.” I don’t think it will ever disappear, but it will shrink. It will go back to what it was when I started out, which is a minority interest sphere, which some people happen to be very interested in.

The Museum Industrial Complex Is Thriving (But Did The Art Get Lost?)

“By the numbers, museums have become thriving enterprises, competing and ballooning into what we might call a museum industrial complex. Today there are 3,500 art museums in the United States, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000. At the same time, and hand in hand with these numbers, billions of dollars have been spent on projects that have largely focused on expanding the social-service offerings at these institutions—restaurants, auditoriums, educational divisions, event spaces—rather than additional rooms for collections. At the present rate, the museum of the future will virtually be a museum without objects, as new non-collection spaces dwarf exhibition halls with the promise that no direct contact with the past will disturb your meal. As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum once advertised, the museum of the future will finally be a café with ‘art on the side’.”

Janet Brown To Step Down From Grantmakers In The Arts Next Year

“Under Brown’s leadership, GIA’s membership increased thirty-four percent and the budget was nearly doubled from 2008 to 2017. The organization also saw a large expansion of its programs, including the development of webinars, research, workshops, and forums on a wide array of topics including arts education; support for individual artists; cross-sector creative work in medicine, environment, and corrections; and many more. The 2016 GIA Conference was the largest in the organization’s 32-year history.”

Another Big City Newspaper Arts Critic Takes A Buyout

It’s Mark Stryker, longtime arts writer for the Detroit Free Press. “Some of you will be surprised – maybe shocked – to learn that after 21 years as an arts reporter and critic at the Detroit Free Press, I am leaving the paper. Frankly, I’m kind of shocked to have just typed those words myself. I’m taking advantage of the voluntarily severance package that was offered to all newsroom employees. My last day is (gulp) Dec. 16.”

Study: Creative Accomplishment Helps Us Deal With Death

“Our findings suggest that those who pursue creativity, and produce significant creative contributions, may benefit from existential security in the face of death,” the researchers conclude. Artists follow their muses for a myriad of reasons, of course. But this research suggests that, whatever their catalyst, doing creative work — and especially getting recognized for it — conveys an invaluable emotional benefit.

Why Would A Performing Arts Center Raise Millions Of Dollars to Fund Other People’s Work?

Ottawa’s National Arts Center has spent the past eight years raising $23 million so it could give the money away. Why? The NAC is a performing arts center, a presenter and home to several of the Canadian capital’s biggest arts groups. But it hasn’t been a traditional funder. At a time when arts groups are scrambling to support their own operations, why raise money to fund other artists’ work, particularly when it might never see your own stages?

It’s a brilliant move, actually. There are many ways to have impact in your field. Certainly producing or presenting great work is one of them. But there’s also tremendous power in being a convener of ideas and people, a connector of resources or an investor in work that you like. Engaging in artistic conversations with other artists and institutions outside your own walls broadens and challenges your own work.

How do you build constituency for your aesthetic? The aesthetic you produce on your own stages might not travel much beyond your building, even if it gets critical acclaim. But funding artists and work beyond your own fingertips extends your influence and promotes your ideas. It’s a bold bid for artistic leadership that extends NAC’s reach well beyond Ottawa.

“We’re looking for bold, compelling works that have a strong artistic team, a strong producing partner and ambitions to be national or international,” said Heather Moore, the veteran NAC artistic producer who will run the NAC’s new National Creation Fund. “This is not about the germ of an idea that doesn’t yet have a potential life. We’re talking about filling in that mid-development stage of a project that’s brewing, and that already has somebody intent on putting it on the stage.”

The main idea,NAC president and CEO Peter Herrndorf said, is to put enough cash into the hands of artists to make an exponential difference in artistic outcomes. “We want to get as much of that money into artists’ hands as possible, as quickly as possible,” he said.

– Douglas McLennan