Next Wednesday, October 20, Slover Linett partner Peter Linett will co-present at the 2010 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in Chicago. He will be part of a panel discussion entitled “Are the Arts Gaining or Losing Ground in America Today?”
The session, chaired and moderated by Donnelley Foundation program director Paul Botts, will also feature:
- Deb Clapp, executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres
- Randy Cohen, vice president of local arts advancement at Americans for the Arts
- Marian Godfrey, senior director for culture initiatives at the Pew Charitable Trusts
The panelists will discuss how the arts and culture sector measures success and whether recent trends in participation amount to a new kind of successes or a worrisome decline.
Linett, who recently blogged about this topic on the firm’s blog, Asking Audiences, says the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts raises questions about the traditional ways arts participation has been tracked.
“Attendance, the typical standard for looking at participation, has been steadily dropping over the last couple of decades in most of the formal performing arts,” he notes. “Yet today there are many other ways of participating than buying a ticket and sitting quietly in your seat. The trouble is, those participatory and informal modes of engagement are harder to measure — or at least we as a field haven’t gotten good at measuring them yet. So it’s hard to know if the whole arts ecology, defined broadly, is actually gaining or losing ground. I’m really looking forward to a great discussion on this topic.”
If you’ll be attending the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference and would like to connect with Linett, please drop him a line.
Category: General
