Happy 2015 International Women's Day!

I love what I do and I'm so blessed to have so many other fantastic women who have walked this path before me and are on it now with me (and those yet to come!). I hope everyone takes a second to reflect on how far we've come... and then gets back to work on where we're headed.

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High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle? art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com

Doing Your Best Work With Others When You Feel Alone

I love any piece of writing that covers "creatives" and "artists." Even more, I love it when business magazines like Fast Company, Inc, and Harvard Business Review write articles about us arts folks. In one of the latest at Fast Co, author Jeff Goins tackles the idea of why you'll never do your best work alone . I want to riff on his three takeaways for the small theater and performing arts communities. Find a "Master" Goins uses the idea of Renaissance artists but this idea is also one used by Austin Kleon in his book Steal Like An Artist . However, this task may feel impossible for those of us living in smaller communities that may not have an established performing arts scene. Where are we to locate these masters? This may mean turning to online communities, diving into Youtube, or doing a lot of interlibrary loan exchanges to read what's been written by or about your chosen artists. Emulate your mentor's work. As most of my readers

Theater in the Age of Netflix

I read a great article in the December issue of Fast Company titled " Retail in the Age of Amazon. " Long-time readers know of my penchant for following retail conversations and seeing how they are applicable to the theater world and this article was no different. (New readers: hello! do you think retail and theater overlap, too?) I sat down to write notes on all the topics and details from the article that I wanted to flesh out on for theaters. I thought it would be 4 or 5, since the article itself had 4 sections to it. Instead, I had TWENTY-TWO points to hit. To flesh out each of those points, even a paragraph a piece, seems a tad much for a blog post. Some of them I've written about before, like defining success on your terms and using heretical ideas . A lot of them are about how going back to basics and focusing on differentiation rather than competing at the same game can help retail businesses survive and thrive in the age of click-and-buy. This is

Perpetually Curious

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