#bill ivey

[reedology37]

[mystlnewsonline]

American Dream Mortgage and Homes For Our Troops Provide for a Deserving Veteran

American Dream Mortgage and Homes For Our Troops Provide for a Deserving Veteran

  PINE, COLO./ MARCH 22, 2019 (STL.News)

American Dream Mortgage (ADM), a division of Finance of America Mortgage LLC, joined Homes For Our Troops (HFOT) in kicking off the construction of the home being built for Sean Carroll and his family. This HFOT Community Kickoff occurred on Saturday, March 9, 2019 at Elk Creek Elementary School in Pine, Colorado. The ceremony included an escort and…

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[immediatesafety-blog]

Wikileaks - The most shocking Podesta email to date. THIS is what they are doing to your children.

Wikileaks - The most shocking Podesta email to date. THIS is what they are doing to your children.

There are no words to describe what follows. Here is the email in question. We cannot remain silent. Make everyone you know aware! From Bill Ivey From:[email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 2016-03-13 17:06 Subject: From Bill Ivey Dear John: Well, we all thought the...

http://bit.ly/2eqYVO2

[semipartisansam]

Hacked Clinton Campaign Emails Reveal What The Political Class Really Think Of Ordinary Americans

Hacked Clinton Campaign Emails Reveal What The Political Class Really Think Of Ordinary Americans

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Hacked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign are unlikely to provide “smoking gun” evidence which might derail her candidacy, but they do paint a very depressing picture of exactly how the American political class view the people they supposedly serve

With each new release of hacked Clinton campaign emails released by Wikileaks, reporters have tended to swarm over the documents looking for…

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[museummaking-blog]

Reading List: Engaging Art

In the Reading List series, I discuss a book or an article I’ve read recently and how it relates to museums, art, and tech.

Arts audiences are increasingly getting older. Cultural institutions are struggling to get diverse patrons through their doors. Attendance at arts events has never been lower.

Whether you agree with the above statements or not, these are phrases heard over and over again in the arts. To some, such concerns are symptomatic of a larger societal problem: people just don’t care to participate in the arts these days. (Must be those darn smartphones.)

Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life, a volume edited by Bill Ivey and Steven J. Tepper, argues the opposite, and offers a more nuanced explanation to boot. They suggest that engagement with the arts is as strong—and perhaps stronger—than ever. We just need to rethink how we define cultural participation.

First, the instruments we use to measure engagement—those surveys that ask you how many times in the last year you’ve been to the opera—need to be expanded. Arts participation isn’t just happening within established (and to many potential audiences, stuffy, snooty) cultural institutions like concert halls or museums; arts participation can happen at home, on the subway, in afterschool programs. And secondly, participation with the arts isn’t just about appreciation (oh how I seethed at the term). It’s more than taking in art made by a professional, whether watching the staging of a renowned play or examining a Renoir painting; engaging in a personal art practice, whether throwing pottery as a pro or making amateur YouTube videos, is participation, as well.

Take music, for example. In the nineteenth century, pianos were a common sight in households (serving as “the nation’s archetypal cultural hearth”), and families would often gather around the piano to for a sing or a post-dinner performance. As Ivey explains, “Then, the abilit[ies] to sing or play music…were considered everyday skills, integrated into family life as thoroughly as sewing or the canning of autumn garden produce” (3). Domestic piano-playing was how music was circulated and enjoyed. But this would decline in the twentieth century. Ivey writes:

The Great Depression contributed to this decline, but it was more than a crippled economy that pushed the piano sales to their twentieth-century low point. By the early 1930s, America’s new cultural industries were well on their way to transforming the way citizens engaged culture, thereby reconfiguring our definition of participation in art and culture. (4)

The radio, and later the television, replaced the piano as the home’s cultural hearth. Arts and culture participation became passive—the receiving of music rather than the creation of it. Both shifting cultural attitudes and technological changes (such as the introduction of recorded music and broadcast media) were part and parcel to this new definition of arts participation.

Today, in museums and outside of them, we see an expanding notion of what arts participation might be. Amateur practice is making a comeback: just look at the kind of amazing projects on sites like Kickstarter, a few of which are high-profile, professional endeavors but most of which are grassroots and DIY. It’s also increasingly difficult to draw borders between art and media, art and design, or art and technology (and believe me, I spent my whole first year of grad school contemplating these boundaries; I haven’t made much progress).

Museum making initiatives—ones dedicated to experimenting with emerging technology—acknowledge that artistic practice is an important indicator of arts participation. Museums are now spaces to engage with creative production, and not just consuming it passively.

Here’s one thought I’m left with after poring through Engaging Art: The objects on the walls of the museum don’t necessarily match the kinds of production encouraged in museum tech initiatives. How do we reconcile that? I wonder if museum making is the first step toward acknowledging a bigger cultural shift in how we view creative practice—that what people outside of museums might consider “art” doesn’t align itself with what’s coming out of the (market-driven) art world.

Ivey, William, and Steven J. Tepper. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. Routledge, 2008.