2,241 stories by "Joe Patti"
Last month on Americans for the Arts’ Arts Blog, Elizabeth Laskowski, wrote about how she welcomed standardized testing for the arts because it was making her school finally take her s…
I didn’t know what to write about today. I have a bunch of articles bookmarked, but I haven’t read enough of any of of them to do them justice. I have a bunch of stories I want t…
The Drucker Exchange quotes an article in Bloomberg Businessweek claiming "truly passionate U.S. employees" make up "a scant 11% of the workforce." My first reaction was to wonder if the art…
So tonight is the first event in the season at my new job, a concert by a group called Cordis which bills their music as chamber-rock. Now if you are asking, “what the heck is chamber-…
Would you volunteer for a non-profit if there was a better chance of becoming employed? Would you do it if you were forced to? If you were a non-profit, would you welcome either set of volun…
Apropos of my post yesterday about community engagement, the term has so recently been bandied about as something arts organizations should aspire to, it is easy to forget that it isn’…
I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is…
You may have heard the phrase, “He who yells first, loses.” This is a rule that is often used in beginning acting classes because anger is an easy emotion to go to when faced by …
There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other a…
I know the days of Danny Newman’s subscription parties has probably long past, but I was clearing out some old files a few weeks ago and came across what might be described as an artif…
I just wanted to share this cool video that truly embodies the term “creative placemaking” courtesy of WFPL. Artist Matthew Mazzotta used materials from a blighted house in York,…
Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes an…
I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself. This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This Americ…
Given that I am working on a university campus, there is always a conversation about how do you get more students to attend performances at the performing arts center. One of the easiest ans…
I was reading an article on The Atlantic about why employers often have a hard time finding workers even during periods of high unemployment. I saw the sentence, “And workers now reall…
So Minnesota Orchestra Association CEO Michael Henson declared that “blogs are senseless and must be ignored,” and he is right. At least in the same sense that people think Congr…
As the summer comes to a close, I wanted to share something that caught my eye back in May. I bookmarked it and looked back at it periodically throughout the summer because I liked the idea …
Hat tip to Jari-Pekka Raitamaa who tweeted an article about mistakes people make when considering founding a tech start up. It occurred to me that the same basic advice could be given to peo…
So here is a question which may seem obsolete in an age of internet and mobile apps: Who is more important, the customer at the window or the customer on the phone? Even though you may not f…
A few weeks ago the directors of the local museum invited me to an after hours talk by an artist whose work was showing in one of the galleries. Apparently the artist had floated the idea of…
In the wake of Richard Florida’s advocacy for the creative class as harbingers of vitality in a city, a number of locales subscribed to the notation with mixed results. Things arenR…
Broadway Producer Ken Davenport wonders why Broadway doesn’t do an American Idol type audition either having open auditions or putting casting directors on a bus to tour the country. T…
I have only been at work for three months, but already they have me on a search committee. When we were meeting to talk about interview questions before human resources gave us the applicati…
A few months back, Seattle based artist Clayton Weller, wrote a piece addressing what he feels is a self-limiting outlook held by many artists that theatre is dying and there is no money out…
I have been pondering whether we should start offering a “Choose Your Own” subscription series in future years. In my past jobs, we never programmed with an eye to filling slots …
