Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

Winslow Homer's Lost on the Grand Banks, for which Bill Gates paid $36 million in 1998 A recent interview in the Financial Times with Bill Gates, that was widely quoted and shared in the media, including this piece in Hyperallergic , reported his equating of giving to a museum with blinding people. Seriously. Essentially he was citing the work of ethicist Peter Singer, whose work has fostered a new "effective altruism" movement, and posing the question that if a significant gift could prevent illnesses that lead to blindness, was giving that money instead to build a new wing of a museum effectively blinding people? [Gates] questions why anyone would donate money to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness. “The moral equivalent is, we’re going to take 1 per cent of the people who visit this [museum] and blind them,” he says. “Are they willing, because it has the new wing, to take that risk? Hmm, maybe this ...

October 20-23 Denver was host to the National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture , organized by Emc Arts , locally sponsored by the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation , and nationally sponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation , James Irvine Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation . The roughly 250 participants included staff from organizations in several different communities such as Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Minnesota/Dakotas, New York, Oregon, San Jose, St. Louis, the Bay Area and Washington DC.; as well as staff from funders in most of these cities. Participating organizations were chosen by their local funders, which also covered their cost of participating. Many of the organizations had already done some work with EmcArts locally on innovation and adaptive change. This was a unique opportunity to bring together arts leaders - management and artistic leadership - from many communities around the country, all grappling with challenges of how to build...