One of the most experienced authors in arts management, Alvin H. ("Skip") Reiss, recently wrote an essay for ArtsReach.com about the cultural building boom. Perhaps you will be impressed as we were about the number and financial dimension of arts investment projects around the world. There are two questions for us related with this issue: how to decide whether it is reasonable to renovate or to build new? And secondly where the protagonists have fairly considered for the costs for operating and curating the venues?

 

With all the dynamic changes going on in the world, could there be any better time for a new prototype of the human personality? D. Paul Schafer from Canada established the term of Cultural Personality. It provides a new and very different prototype of the human personality, based on the belief that culture in general and the arts and humanities in particular - should constitute the foundation and cornerstone of personality development in the future. In this newsletter, We'd like to give you an inside view on Paul's model.

In the last two years, Portugal has appeared regularly in the international economic press for all the wrong reasons. In common with other European countries grouped together under the vexing acronym PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), the country has seen itself denied access to funds from the international financial markets, obliging the IMF, ECB and the European Commission to rescue Portuguese state finances in 2011 with a loan of 78,000 million euros. With an accumulated public deficit of 110% of GDP, an unemployment rate of around 16%, a recession forecast of 3% for 2012 and almost 1% of the population emigrating every year, it is difficult to find a more depressing combination of factors. Against this background, to talk of the art market may seem a somewhat idle and irrelevant activity. However, there are many lessons to be learned from the Portuguese auction market. Thats why we publish a brief summary of a research project that the University of Lisbon have conducted about the Portuguese art market.

We finally introduce a collection of papers on empirical and theoretical aspects of sharing. The authors have tried to answer the question, how new practices can flourish and the roles of sociability and sharing are being re-examined. They want to contribute to this collective effort of rethinking sharing and its role in society. The individual texts in this volume where first presented at the conference "Cultures and Ethics of Sharing", which took place at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in November 2011.

In each issue, the journal focuses on a central topic from different perspectives to assess it in its entirety for the international arts sector. The journal also includes the series “Recommended Reading“ and “My working world“.

 

Arts Management Quarterly is published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.