Weekly Work Tips: Growing Productivity
One of the best things about Monday morning is that you have a huge expanse of time ahead of you. You have the chance to feel productive and successful. At the beginning of Monday morning, anything is possible and the to-do list is a set of items that you will do. But, Friday afternoon that …
Keeping it Together: Workplace Organization
For most people, work is more organizing (your space, your time, your emotions) than doing. The challenge is when you feel like the organizing so overwhelms your chance to focus on doing. I now work for myself, but work with a number of different institutions and people. I have noticed that, while everyone has their …
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Work Better: Foster your Curiosity
Two weeks into the year, and statistically speaking, you are probably a failure. Most people who make new year’s resolutions break then before their holiday decorations are down. Why is this? Start with the moment you make your plan. You focus on what is wrong in your life. You don’t exercise. You are not good …
Inequity in The Arts & Culture Economy Equation
The arts and culture present some serious funding challenges for society and represent some serious inequities. Production: The top of the pyramids, like the directors of museums or the owners of galleries, make much more money than those starting out. Many people cannot afford to work in the arts because of the low salaries. …
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Nickles, Dimes, and Tough Times : The Relationship between Visitors, Revenue, and Value
This post is a follow-up on a post last week about the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituting mandatory ticket fees. For many years, I ran a department in a free museum. Perennially patrons would ask for a free parking sticker stamp. If I had been a visitor, I, too, might have asked for this. After …
Let them Eat Cake (Instead of Visiting the Met): The Problems with the Metropolitan Museum’s Ticket Fee
The Metropolitan Museum announced on January 4 that the ticket fee would be mandatory for non-residents. There are many issues that this change bring up for me. Who is the Museum for? This move to make the fees mandatory only makes explicit certain issues. A large percentage of the Met’s visitors are tourists, who only …
A Museum Christmas Carol
In which a museum director learns that he is leading badly. Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This was nonsense! Jonathan still had work to do. Jonathan gazed upon the stack of Change of Status Forms weighing down his desk. They would need to …
Are Museums Neutral? Or are they Neutered?
While I was going to do a round-up of our favorite blog posts of the year today, a recent post by Rebecca Herz made me want to return to one topic: #MuseumsarenotNeutral. I wrote a bit about it last month, and it was one of the five most popular posts. But, let’s dive in: Neutrality …
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2017 in Museums : Year End Quiz
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Museum Education 2018 Trend Forecast
Last month, I put a call out on Twitter for museum professionals to share their predictions for 2018. Before we get into the trends, it is useful to share the respondents’ collective vision of museums and the field. What is a museum? I invited participants to share their definition of a museum in 140 words …