Perpetually Curious

I've had Barbara Kingsolver's High Tide in Tuscon: Essays from Now or Never  sitting on my To Be Read pile for, oh, five or six years now. I picked it up after reading her essays on farm life,  Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,  but then it got shuffled into the stack and sat there, waiting. As usual, the Universe knows the right timing. When you start advocacy, you need to have a pretty clear idea about exactly what it is you're advocating for. When it comes to increased support (financial and otherwise) for artists, I've long been back and forth in my thinking, not really certain what tactic was best. I mean, do we focus on the "arts for arts sake"? (And really what does that even mean?) Do we show how the skills you develop pursuing any of the arts help you no matter what your career path? Or do we talk about the return on investment for municipalities in their artists and arts businesses? Because I'm so close to it, I can argue many different angles about ...

Jonathan Katz, longtime and now retiring leader of NASAA, and Maryo Gard Ewell, second generation community arts activist and teacher, decided to write a book each about the history of their respective areas of arts support. This isn't the start of some fictional novel. This conversation actually happened during the AftA National Convention in Nashville in the middle of June. I was lucky to be standing there when they chatted and vociferously encouraged both of them to write those books. What a blessing for our field that would be, to have these first-hand accounts of what really happened over the course of the last sixty years during the rise of state and local arts support. For all the talk about the coming massive leadership shift (1 in 4 within five years), we have to acknowledge the body of wisdom that has the potential to be lost during it. Marcus Shelby AftA is informally about that delicious tension between learning--and learning from--our history and creating entir...

"Rather, what is valuable is that one's life be actively engaged in projects that give rise to this feeling [a high quality pleasure], when the projects in question can be seen to have a certain kind of objective worth." I stumbled upon this book by complete accident. I don't normally go browsing through the moral philosophy* section in my major university research library, but this author happens to be a patron of ours, and I happened across it in the course of doing some other research, so I thought I'd pick it up. I was pleasantly surprised to hear so many of the arguments we arts folk make about why the arts are "meaningful" to a person. Wolf begins by positing that "meaning" exists somewhere between "morality" and "happiness", the normal two reasons for explaining why we humans do the things we do. Those two options still represent the reasons we do many things (pay taxes, have sex), but Wolf argues that the reaso...