Most of what I’m doing these is connected in some way to research I’m doing for the book I’m working on about value and the arts. In the process, I’ve come across some resources that make me really happy that data geeks and life-long researchers do their work. Here are a few good resources:
• CPANDA (The Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive – has links to just about every major arts-related data set out there)
• Some 2001 data from Princeton on the question of “How many artists are there [in the US]?” (it has holes, but it’s a great and very digestible jumping off point to larger questions about how we name and count artists)
• Most of this woman’s writing: Ellen Dissanayake
• This book, for many reasons: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
• Not being an educator, I’m coming to find as I dip further into a framework for better understanding the arts, that the term “inquiry” has achieved a vogue in education now, as in “inquiry-based learning.” Inquiring minds want to know…
But it’s not all research all the time. This fall I started a Queer Writing Group with Ella Boureau of In the Flesh Magazine. And in November I co-organized a marathon reading of work by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. My brain can’t sit still these days.
