A Comic Response to Michael Kaiser A few days ago, Michael Kaiser’s DeVos Institute published a study of the top 30 Black and and top 30 Latino arts organizations and made recommendations for how to improve diversity in the Arts and Culture field. This study got the attention of several news organizations:

We are thrilled to honor these innovators and risk-takers who embody the spirit of entrepreneurship and bring the same extraordinary creativity to the office as they do to the studio. By experimenting and challenging conventional wisdom, these four winners have developed new approaches to age-old challenges in the arts field that can serve as models and inspiration for artists everywhere.

This is perhaps a little old, but it’s thought-provoking enough that I had to share it: Colby Cosh on artisan chocolate and social revolution. Cosh’s blog post/essay muses on some very big ideas about the future of labor and society:

In our last episode, I responded to Michael Kaiser’s frustration with “new models” chatter. Well, this week he’s back with New Models, Part 2, and you knew I wasn’t going to just sit here (even if I am supposedly on vacation!) Kaiser once again criticizes the critics for a lack of specificity:

Perhaps the hottest lingo in Silicon Valley these days is “big data”. Once upon a time, the only folks who needed to worry about massive, unstructured (or semi-structured) data sets were scientists running weather simulators or investment banks designing high-frequency trading strategies. Not anymore.

Last week I told you why Fractured Atlas is opposing SOPA and PIPA, a pair of bills in Congress that claim to protect the rights of artists but would be both ineffective at that goal and damaging to the technical fabric of the internet. We were the first major arts organization to take this stand, and we took some heat for it, but I believe we also moved the needle on our community’s understanding of these complicated issues.

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court strongly affirmed that the first amendment’s free speech protections are broad and may not lightly be curtailed. The case at hand dealt with a California law that would have punished retailers for selling violent video games to minors. By declaring the law unconstitutional, the court struck an important blow against censorship, and we in the arts community should consider this an important victory.

So Rocco really stepped in it. The NEA Chairman is under siege because he dared to suggest that perhaps there’s an oversupply of arts organizations relative to the (well-documented) dwindling demand. He’s not the first to bring this up, but it surprised a lot of folks that he used his bully pulpit to express an idea that many in the arts community find repugnant and misguided.