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• US computer and video game software sales totaled $11.7 billion in 2008.
• Sixty-eight percent of American households play computer or video games.
• Forty percent of all game players are women.
• The average game player is thirty-five years old and has been playing video games for twelve years.
• Twenty-five percent of Americans over the age of fifty play video games.

Source: The Entertainment Software Association¹

From computer-mediated poetry, read on a laptop computer while sitting in a wireless café in Paris, to touring works of performing arts, such as composer Pamela Z’s Baggage Allowance, an installation and performance based on her world travels, new media artworks are becoming an integral part of the global cultural environment.

Every member of the arts community has been affected by the unprecedented challenges and opportunities proffered by technology. The last decade has observed our field coming to terms with this disruptive force in inspiring and innovative ways. Equally exhilarating and demanding, these transformations have challenged many previous assumptions about the role of the arts and culture sector.

I am fond of telling folks about my arts background, having grown up in the 1960s and ’70s in a town of two thousand people in central Wisconsin surrounded by cranberry bogs and paper mills. I didn’t see a professional arts performance until I was in high school, but from an early age my parents provided me with piano lessons and my school supplied me with an abundance of arts activities: bassoon lessons, chorus, marching band, art classes.

2009, 37 pages, Blueprint Research & Design, Inc., 720 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94102, www.blueprintrd.com.

Thanks everybody for chiming in. I agree Ute; it is nice to simply get a check in the mail. More of those please! I also think that its important that we reflect on why we are being successful and not … Continue reading →

Ute, Aretha was a nice touch. While I rarely play the role of the victim, it IS easy to criminalize funders, partly because young, emerging and even some professional artists have such a complex relationship to money and people with … Continue reading →

“Modelling cultural policy – John Kreidler and Medici’s Lever,” posted July 22, 2010 on Bad Culture. Last week saw the launch of the beautifully named Medici’s lever – a web based tool designed to model the dynamics of cultural policy in … Continue reading →

(6-29-10) Trading Power—a new publication produced jointly by the Council on Foundations, 21/64, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, and Resource Generation—examines themes of multigenerational leadership challenges in today's philanthropy, including the perceived lack of leadership opportunities for the next generation; what each generation can learn from the others while working together; and why and how to engage a new generation of philanthropic leaders.