2,261 stories by "Joe Patti"
When I was taking a college philosophy class we got into the classic debate about where identity resides in a person or thing. If you have a boat and gradually replace every board over the c…
I don’t regularly crosspost about things I have written on Arts Hacker. I sort of feel like I am cheating readers by trying to make one post do double duty on two websites. However, I …
After attending different regional conferences over the last couple decades the one subject that it seems will never grow stale is contract law. Any session in the subject is always well att…
From what I have been reading, the new Fair Labor Standards Act regulations regarding overtime pay is going be pretty tough for non-profit arts organizations to handle. If you aren’t u…
There is a lot of conversation about the importance of advocating for the funding and inclusion of arts in K-12 education but according to a recent study, some attention needs to be paid to …
Over the years I have frequently cautioned against becoming invested in the current hot thing that everyone is doing because the fad could pass quickly and you will have spent a lot of time …
I was surprised by a recent piece on Non-Profit Quarterly reporting the results of a recent study finding that the more successful an arts organization was in attracting an audience, the mor…
The keynote speaker for the recent Arts Midwest conference was Oskar Eustis who is current artistic director at the Public Theater. Tweets in reaction to his speech have been Storified i…
I have returned from the Arts Midwest Conference in Milwaukee which apparently broke attendance records. I can believe it did because I have never had so much difficulty finding a free momen…
One of the first blog posts I made included speculation about what the arts experience might be like if the arts were covered in the newspaper like sports. A little over eight years ago I ma…
When backstage technical staff have a negative interaction with performers, they will frequently mutter something along the lines of “if not for us, you would be shouting yourself hoar…
If you have been following my posts closely for the last couple months, you know the topic of the prescriptive value of the arts to fix various problems has been on my mind lately. Often we …
I am traveling to the Art Midwest Conference today where I will first take a seminar about using Google Analytics which Drew McManus promises will be akin to a heroic journey. Since I have i…
You may have read about the surprising results of a National Endowment for the Arts survey on creativity that found a stark demarcation in creative activity that mirrored the traditional fre…
Yesterday evening I was hanging out at the local coffee house participating in a send off of an artist who has been creating murals for a public art project in the city for over 20 years now…
Given the Labor Day holiday and the fact that Wells Fargo seems to think kids need to set aside their childish artistic dreams for real career choices, it seems appropriate to do a post on i…
There was a piece on the Dallas Morning News website about how the boards of various Dallas arts organizations were beginning to focus on greater diversity in their membership and accountabi…
A book with an intriguingly different view on pretentiousness was recently the subject in the LA Review of Books. According to reviewer Barrett Swanson, Dan Fox, author of Pretentiousness: W…
Non-Profit Quarterly had a piece last week about an effort to “help” non-profits that is flawed on so many levels. An advertising company has created a site, Clickbait For Good w…
It can be difficult to communicate the different legal regulations that non-profits operate under in order to help people understand what your organization can and can’t do. Non Profit…
This morning, The Atlantic published a story about The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee that addresses the conflict non-profits face between paying employees well and devoting fun…
Harvard Business Review had a short piece about a study that found that having a back-up plan often undermines one’s motivation to succeed. The interviewer specifically uses an exa…
I frequently write about why arguing the benefits of the arts based on their instrumental value (e.g. improves economy or test scores) is a bad approach because it depends on an absence of a…
Maria Popova made a BrainPickings post about Elliott Schwartz’s book, Music: Ways of Listening, about four years ago. The link to it just came to my attention recently. Popova notes, &…
A few months ago, I wrote about How Financial Statements Are Born, which explained how different financial statements were related to one another. A supplement to that is a How To Be A Finan…
