Ralph Smith, the 2007 Conference Chairman, issued a challenge in his welcome message – “that all who attend will leave with renewed energy, capacity and resolve to make a positive contribution toward meeting the challenges of our time.”
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2008, 327 pages.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849 French critic and writer
We live in a world of "widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies."1 This antipathy is not limited to the countries and peoples that are directly affected by the U.S. "war on terror" and its attendant pol-icies, but includes many of our former allies and fellow democracies. A friend who just returned from a year in Spain reports that she spent a significant amount of time and energy convincing people she met there that the U.S.
Early in 2004, the Graduate Center of the City of New York convened ten small to mid-sized arts organizations to talk about what had happened to them in an experimental, internet-based project funded by the Ford Foundation. The ten, from across the country, are community-based cultural organizations; they share a commitment to emerging and experimental artists and art forms, and a commitmentequally firmto their local or nearby communities. Despite their similarities of mission, the ten were not familiar with each other's work.
In a past report on challenges facing San Francisco Bay Area arts nonprofits (Reader, Vol. 11, No. 2), I wrote at length about space. Many nonprofits had been forced to seek new office, rehearsal, and storage space due to a steep rise in Bay Area real estate costs fueled by demand from a dot-com economy for start-up locations. The situation seems to have eased somewhat, in part due to funder- and municipally-driven programs as well as to a general downturn in the economy.
The remarkable growth of the online sector in recent years can be assessed in many ways — from the rapidly expanding number of wired households (over half are now connected to the Internet) to the sheer explosion of content on the World Wide Web (which now encompasses over a billion pages). Data traffic exceeds voice traffic on the nation's phone lines now, and far more email messages than postal letters are sent every day.
Throughout human history, certain cities and regions have come to be regarded as pinnacles of human creativity and innovation. Sir Peter Hall, in his landmark book, Cities in Civilization, examines the underlying conditions that led to the emergence of "cultural crucibles" in Athens, Florence, London, Vienna, and Berlin.