The Right Tools Can Make Evaluation Less Painful, More Productive. Hxdbzxy / Shutterstock.com Program evaluation is the “eat your vegetables” of the nonprofit sector. Everyone agrees this is a good idea, but often the nonprofit in constant motion may default to just grabbing take-out. After all, who has time to shop (collect data) and cook (analyze the results)? To torture the metaphor one last time, the nonprofit that wants to stay healthy will take the time for evaluation or suffer the inevitable health catastrophe of a loss of a major funder. Just like the doctor says, it’s really only a matter of time. A solid evaluation plan can get easier with the right tools in place. Yes, this requires data as a first step, but there are many other tools that can make evaluation less painful and more productive.
PerformWell is a series of measurements and tools designed to help professionals in the human services sector – you guessed it – perform well. Not all evaluation data is reserved for funded nonprofits. Nonprofit Quarterly. Will US museums succeed in reinventing themselves? Museums USA The recession is forcing North American institutions to reconsider every aspect of what they do By András Szántó. Features, Issue 209, January 2010Published online: 11 January 2010 “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s hyperactive chief of staff likes to say. By that measure, art museums may have been handed a historic opportunity. As we all know, the Great Recession has been tough on museums, especially American ones. Endowments are now creeping back, but confidence isn’t. To make matters worse, museums on the whole are no longer the happy exception to the shrinking and greying of fine arts audiences. A recent report from the Center for the Future of Museums looked ahead to 2034 and found a litany of challenges.
Of course, the fall-out has been especially vexing for American museums. Museum projects in the Gulf, the former Soviet Union and China are drawing on soaring wealth and national ambitions. Money Opening doors The vision thing. Museum Assessment Program. What art museums should learn from Christianity – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics. You often hear it said that "museums of art are our new churches. " In other words, in a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. It's an intriguing idea - part of the broader ambition that culture should replace scripture - but in practice art museums often abdicate much of their potential to function as new churches (places of consolation, meaning, sanctuary, redemption) through the way they handle the collections entrusted to them.
While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem unable to frame them in a way that links them powerfully to our inner needs. The problem is that modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters, because Modernist aesthetics (in which curators are trained) is so deeply suspicious of any hint of an instrumental approach to culture. To have an answer anyone could grasp as to the question of why art matters is too quickly viewed as "reductive.
" LA Youth » Why museums suck. Most museums suck. Really they do. Museums always have that cold feeling. Very adultish and professional, it makes you uncomfortable. And museums are filled with old people. I don’t have anything against old people, but I’ve noticed that when there are old people around, it’s usually boring. This summer, as I set out to visit six museums, I dreaded it, but then I’d have a sudden surge of happiness when I remembered that I would be able to bash them in this article.
I could make up a painting with blotches of paint and call it some stupid title like, "Inside the mind of an L.A. Phot courtesy Norton Simon Museum So here we go: The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Then there’s The Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Old people, boring art and lots of benches because old people need to sit a lot. At the J. The tour guide talked like an answering machine. The Skirball Cultural Center is one of those rare museums that you can never find. I used to ask my history teacher why art was important.
Are Blockbuster Exhibitions Damaging Art? | Spear's WMS. The rush to the box office. Exhibitions Museums Attendance USA Museums are feeding an addiction for shows that put works of art at risk and allow visitors no time to reflect By Blake Gopnik. Attendance, Issue 245, April 2013Published online: 28 March 2013 Crowd control outside New York’s Museum of Modern Art In Tokyo, 758,266 people rush to see the treasures of Holland’s Mauritshuis museum; in New York, 605,586 people view the photos of Cindy Sherman, by Cindy Sherman; 487,716 Parisians consider the American genius of Edward Hopper—these are just a few of the staggering attendance figures for recent exhibitions. Unless we’re seeing symptoms of florid illness. Almost a quarter of a century ago, Francis Haskell, the late and very great historian of taste, warned in a famous essay that exhibitions “are now replacing museums as the principal vehicles for the transmission of visual culture”, and went on to launch a jeremiad against the change.
Submit a comment All comments are moderated. Email* Name* City* No Future. Conviction? Check. Money? Check. So What's Keeping the Arts Sector from Embracing Active, Diverse Audience Engagement? A couple weeks ago, I had a conversation with a funder that shocked me. If you asked me a month ago what the biggest barrier was to American arts organizations adopting practices that support active engagement in the arts by diverse participants, I would have said two: money and legitimacy.
There are more than enough people in the field who are enthused about active participation, and recent reports like the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change have sparked field-wide conversations about how philanthropy might more equitably support institutions that serve marginalized communities.
We have the arguments and the energy. So what's missing? Turns out it's not that simple. I was talking with Ted Russell, a senior program officer from the James Irvine Foundation, one of the biggest arts funders in California. I was thrilled when this happened for two reasons. But Ted made me realize it's not that easy. Why not?