{"id":1631,"date":"2009-05-12T23:03:04","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T03:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1631"},"modified":"2009-05-12T23:03:04","modified_gmt":"2009-05-13T03:03:04","slug":"should-artists-know-something-about-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1631","title":{"rendered":"Should artists know something about money?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s cringing time for this union activist: Teaching is an art, not a business<\/em> wrote Hans<\/a>, commenting this evening on a story about a judicial mandate prohibiting a UTLA one-day strike this Friday. That statement is irrelevant in the specific context (teacher layoffs), is a false dichotomy, and is wrong-headed in other ways. Let’s start with the literal claim that art is incompatible with business. The daughter of a friend and colleague went to SMU on a dance scholarship. She was smart and after a minor injury decided to get some business training and is now an administrator in an art-related New York nonprofit. Artists and non-profits need people who are passionate about art and can also manage money (ask members of the Florida Orchestra, which I hear is surviving today in this economy because its new executive director is very competent).<\/p>\n

Or to take another example, there’s a wonderful segment of Stuart Math’s documentary on desegregation in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where one of the old-time activists describes a post-WW2 meeting of residents who were trying to figure out how to create a stable housing market, and a business owner said, “You know, we can be liberal and effective, too.”  And they were, running a neighbor-managed real-estate outfit that was crucial in maintaining a stable, desegregated, prosperous community.<\/p>\n

So much for the claim that art can’t be business and warm-hearted liberals can’t think in terms of getting stuff done. But the whole premise is wrong; I don’t think teaching is an art. You can make a good argument that teaching is a craft, but there has to be solid practice at the bottom of it. In addition, anyone who is skeptical of the value of high-stakest testing, as I am, has to have something that’s just a tad, a teeny, a tiny bit more astute than a statement that screams, “Just let me do what I want when I’m paid with the public purse.” That’s nuts, both philosophically and politically. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s cringing time for this union activist: Teaching is an art, not a business wrote Hans, commenting this evening on a story about a judicial mandate prohibiting a UTLA one-day strike this Friday. That statement is irrelevant in the specific context (teacher layoffs), is a false dichotomy, and is wrong-headed in other ways. Let’s start […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-qj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}