Back   OpEd News
Font
PageWidth
Original Content at
https://www.opednews.com/Podcast/The-Bottom-Up-Arts-Revolut-by-Rob-Kall-120725-81.html
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).

July 25, 2012

The Bottom Up Arts Revolution-- an interview with Doug Borwick, author, Building Communities, Not Audiences

By Rob Kall

We discuss the future of the arts and arts organizations. Top down arts organizations are in trouble, with defunding of the NEA and big cuts in donations from foundations and big donors. But there's another approach, a bottom up one that's giving these orgs a sustainable future.

::::::::



Building Communities, Not AudiencesEngaging Matters  blog on ArtsJournal.com.  and  www.artsengaged.com .



Rough Interview Notes-- Mostly the questions

What do you mean as the arts as "campfires?"

Art and porous membranes-- 

What kind of artist are you?

PhD in music from Eastman School of Music.

Can you talk about democratization and the arts?

What's the difference between having an audience or a community?

audience sets up a separation of them and us" 

Connection to the European history of the arts?

Where is it moving towards?

Strong relationship with a greater percentage of the community. 

Value of arts, lack of politicians caring about them?

Can you talk about the National  Endowment for the arts,  (NEA) how it decentralized the arts from a few key big cities to art being spread all across America, and then the effect of the Mapplethorpe controversy?

stopped funding individual artists and reduced funding"

What about foundation and individual donors as sources of funding for the arts?

With the money down precipitously from NEA, foundations and private donors, where is money for local arts orgs coming from?

Advances in social media, online giving-- present substantial hope for arts organizations. 

Are there new models for arts

Fractured Atlas

http://www.fracturedatlas.org/

A national non-profit artist service organization providing a range of support services for the independent arts community such as health insurance, publicity,

Can you talk about connection and engagement as core factors?

developing relationships, not sales" 

Community engagement-- understanding that what we're trying to do is to establish a relationship and out of the relationship comes the sustainability. 

How about how occupy wall street, how horizontalism and the we not I approach that the Occupy movement embraced?

Crowd-sourced curating--

Pop-up museums

So, art could, in the future, be community created and even shifting, over time, as more individuals participate it in. 

So, communities MUST be engaged for current arts organizations to be sustainable and viable in the future?

What are the motivating factors that will engage those communities?

What are some of the values of the arts for communities?

Economic: public education-- how to teach basic concepts, how students remember-- "no-one every understood fractions without looking at pictures of pies"  Keeping people in school

Capacity of the arts to build communities-- social capital, better relationships, providing opportunities for celebration, for cultural awareness.

How about museums, where so much space is devoted to huge collections created by highly wealthy people?

What about new forms of arts? Movies, video games, flash crowds?

random acts of culture-- where opera chorus will perform Hallelujah chorus in Macy's.

Libraries that recognize that they are more about information than books are thriving.

Arts companies need to also rethink what they are about" more about the genre

rather than saying that we exist to perform the works of Beetoven, as a symphony orchestra, say we are an ensemble of instrumental musicians that will continue to perform Beethoven but also will"

Rob: What about the future of music?

musicians from around the world play a segment and then they are mixed together" on youtube and elsewhere"

Orchestras and opera companies"

Commissioning that may not be out of western cultural traditions" allowing a far broader segment of the community to know"

Houston Opera company commissioned a Mariachi opera. 

Rob: Excellence, quality, and  participation in the creation and presentation of art is also important.

Another element is equity-- 

Rob: What about the  indigenous world and indigenous cultures? Do you see a change in their role in the future of art?

As we work towards this democratization of culture, we would learn that it's important to value all kinds of cultural expression as valuable to us



Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.


His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


Join the conversation:


On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution


and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation





Back