Who do arts funders exist to serve?
Submitted by Steve on October 13, 2013
Diane Ragsdale wraps up her coverage of the GIA 2013 Conference on the conference blog:
Rather than writing up a daily roundup of the sessions I attended at GIA I decided to reflect upon them thematically. The overarching theme of this year’s conference was “The New Creative Community.” In my last post I discussed how this theme seemed to manifest in a general orientation toward the role of the individual artist in moving the field forward. I wrote:
For the first time in a long time I was at an arts conference in which artists (rather than organizations) seemed to have primacy. Where are the new ideas going to come from? Artists. Where does the energy to create community organically originate? Artists. Who are the entrepreneurs in the arts and culture sector? Artists.
As I begun mulling over the last two sessions I attended two other manifestations of the conference theme began to emerge—What communities do arts funders exist to serve? and How do those communities participate in the decision-making process?