COURSE DESCRIPTION
Two seminal issues for arts management education and the new technologies both focus on opportunities:
 

1. Doing the job better while doing a better job
What opportunities do new technologies provide for arts administrators and managers to do their jobs better and/or to help them reconceive their jobs?
o for example, the practical tools of fund raising software, donor research, marketing, product and ticket sales help them do their jobs better;
o virtual museum tours, poetry slams on the web, online concerts help them reconceptualize their jobs for the future.

2. Creating a Meaningful Global Community
What opportunities and synergies can the new technologies offer to create a global community of arts managers?
   

The course is open to outside professionals in the field on a modular basis as well as students on a full-time basis.
   
Need
 

The biggest challenge to the education of arts administrators and managers is that the over-reliance on practical, how-to skills and instruction obscures a felt need for a deeper understanding of the "big picture." The field, in danger of becoming simplistic vocational education (and veering in this direction in the U.K.) needs to transmit, through its graduate-level degree programs, values of social responsibility, diversity and artistic integrity, while acknowledging the skill-based needs of its practitioners in an era starved for leadership and inspiration.
 

Thematic questions about the arts will serve to conceptualize these more practical procedures, since it is only by looking closely at the technological innovations in the arts that arts managers can articulate how their function must change. These questions focus first on the universality of the 'language of art' and second on the potential impact of the use of technology and the arts on culture and on particular cultures.

  • Is art a universal language, uniting disparate communities or is art culturally bound?
  • Will the globalization of technology and the arts have the homogenizing effect that globalization has had in other arenas?
  • What is the appropriate balance between ownership and dissemination of art?
  • Between mission and money?
   
Scholars and artists in music, art, dance, literature and theatre will present current thinking about the transmission of existing art work, translation of an art work into an electronic form, creation of work as/with/for technology, display of such work, interaction, effect on audiences, on learners and on communities. Professional arts organizations and artists will demonstrate cutting edge work in music, art, dance, theatre and literature using technology which serves a variety of functions-education, outreach, creating new audiences, creating new art, gentrifying neighborhoods, plugging artists more directly into the labor force.
These will be followed by participatory work in which the audience is given a series of thematic questions and issues, adds more issues of its own, and breaks into facilitated small group discussion. These discussions, and the rest of the course, will be documented and will promote the model of participatory online learning for which this is a prototype in arts administration.