The second edition of ArtCast, the monthly podcast of Americans for the Arts featuring President and CEO Robert L. Lynch, focuses on a recent trip that Bob took to China. Bob traveled to China to speak about arts marketing at a conference held in Shanghai. In this episode, Bob discusses the tremendous changes that China is going through and future plans for international collaborations. While in China, Bob had the opportunity to interview several arts administrators and excerpts from the following interviews are included:
- Sun-man Tseng, Chair and Professor, Department of Arts Administration, Shanghai Conservatory of Music
- Pan Yong, Assistant Director, National Grand Theatre, Beijing
- Juliet Yang, student in the Arts Administration Department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music
To listen to the podcast, please click on the play button below.
National Grand Theatre of Beijing
Tagged with: BusinessPodcastPresident-and-CEO
July 20th, 2007 at 01:06pm
Chad Bauman
Uploaded to this blog post, you will find an audio podcast from the MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series Culminating Event: The Role of Arts Education in Lifelong Productivity featuring arts education innovator Sir Ken Robinson from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention.
This session featured an interview with Sir Ken Robinson, followed by a panel of respondents on the relationship between arts education and workforce development. Exploring this theme allowed for a comprehensive discussion of the central role the arts can play in helping to create a workforce capable of achieving corporate and citizenship objectives.
Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. Now based in Los Angeles, he has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. They include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the Royal Ballet, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the J Paul Getty Trust and the Education Commission of the States. For ten years he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick in England and is now Professor Emeritus.
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Tagged with: About-UsArts-EducationBusinessEventsPodcast
July 17th, 2007 at 01:53pm
Chad Bauman
Uploaded to this blog post, you will find Lyn Heward’s keynote speech from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention. As they become available, Americans for the Arts will post the audio files from all six Innovators, the Annual Awards, and the AEPIII Plenary Session on the Audio and Video section of the website. They will also be featured on the blog, and will be sent out via our RSS feed.
Cirque du Soleil is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and creative companies in the world today. As the President of Creative Content for Cirque du Soleil, Lyn was responsible for managing, guiding, and channeling the incredible creative force of the company’s designers, performers, artisans, and technicians into a product that was both breathtakingly original as well as commercially successful. In this talk Lyn goes behind the scenes of this global enterprise to explore the nature of creativity and innovation. She provides practical suggestions as well as the inspiration to find and develop the creative spark that lives within us all. Making brilliant use of images and video from Cirque du Soleil’s groundbreaking shows, Heward concentrates on key issues-risk-taking, leadership, and teamwork-relevant to arts leaders and their partners in education, business, community, and government.
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Tagged with: About-UsBusinessEventsLeadershipPodcast
July 16th, 2007 at 02:01pm
Chad Bauman
I recently had the pleasure, with an Americans for the Arts colleague, of participating in a “stakeholders convening” for The Conference Board on the issue of workforce readiness. Their recent study, “Are They Really Ready to Work,” found that businesses rate their incoming workforce (college educated, 2-year college educated, and high school educated) as poorly prepared with the skills needed in the workplace today. In contrast to the national obsession of the past few years on “basic skills” (see No Child Left Behind) - particularly math and science - the corporate folks surveyed (mostly HR execs) rated “applied skills” as particularly critical, and relatively poor in their incoming new workers. These include creativity and innovation, communications skills and teamwork. Sound familiar? We arts and arts education advocates often press our case based on the role the arts can play in building these skills, and in fact many of the HR leaders interviewed for this research cited the arts in talking abut the importance of creativity. But one thing made clear by this stakeholders meeting (the actual content of which I can’t report on because confidentiality was promised in order to foster an open dialogue) was that we don’t seem to have enough data to support this linkage.
Do we really know that the arts foster creativity, innovation and imagination, in ways that make people more creative, innovative employees? (Not just in creative industries, but creative scientists, or financiers or factory supervisors.) It may seem obvious to us - one of those “duh!” questions - but can we prove it? What about the other applied skills - teamwork, collaboration, cultural sensitivity, communications, etc. Again, seems obvious that the arts build these skills, but what research do we have that backs it up, particularly in a workforce context?
Americans for the Arts is now looking at how we might partner with the Conference Board and others to do some research that might build a clearer definition of creativity and innovation in a business context, and more clearly show how the arts can foster the so-called applied skills. The relationship between the arts and workforce development was also one of the themes of our MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series this year. And our Creativity Connection program fosters the use of arts-based learning with the current workforce - but this is different than making a case that arts education better prepares workers for 21st Century business challenges.
I would love to know if any of our ArtsBlog readers know of any good existing research in this area; if so, please share it with us. This could even include case studies - for example, a business that finds that new hires that have studied a musical instrument and played in a school orchestra or band excel in some measurable way in the workplace over those without such a background. The more data and tangible examples we can gather, the more powerful a case we can make for the arts and arts education as critical to business competitiveness. Making this case better could be the key to reversing the slippage in corporate arts support we have seen over the past ten years.
Tagged with: AdvocacyArts-EducationBusinessPartnershipsResearch
July 16th, 2007 at 09:32am
Gary Steuer
If you are reading this, chances are you probably have some idea at how blogs are changing the world we live in. The ramifications of the blogosphere are affecting the arts perhaps more than other realms. Should I, a fresh college grad with little money, spend my money to go to a concert when it’s streaming for free on NPR? In attempts to democratize the arts and make them available for everyone all the time, many organizations and companies have come across a problem.
Local newspapers are experiencing a similar kind of conundrum—should they keep their arts critics? (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118376085517659621.html?mod=googlenews_wsj) As newspapers all over the country are ‘trimming the fat,’ the arts writers are the first to go. So while we can mourn the loss of regional and local voices in print, we can also celebrate the explosion of a level playing field of opinions worldwide. In local blogospheres, you can access with a click the whole spectrum of viewpoints and perspectives that newspapers might miss.
So you can either learn how to best use all modes of communication, like incorporating your own ArtsBlog, or you can continue to spend money you might not have on sometimes inefficient mailings. The new world is scary for all of us in the arts, which means that we have more potential than ever.
Americans for the Arts is here as your tool and resource. This November in Miami, we’ll be hosting the National Arts Marketing Project Conference–Flourishing in the New Frontier: New Media, New Audience, New Opportunities. This conference deals with technology and how best to tailor it to your new audiences. You’ll learn how to incorporate and deal with RSS feeds, pod casts, blogging, texting, and of course e-mail to reach the most diverse audience, and one that you might not even know you had, that might be the jump-start you need into the New Frontier.
Elizabeth Van Fleet, Communications & Marketing Associate
July 13th, 2007 at 09:28am
Chad Bauman
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