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Showing posts with the label Maine Arts Commission

High Brow Art VS the Marketplace and the Maine Juice Conference

TWEET THIS http://goo.gl/xdwZDk Continuing with my story from HERE ...(and incorporating a few paragraphs from this earlier but incomplete telling ) Finally, after a year of receiving stimulus fund notices for non-profits only, in the fall of 2009, I received an email from the Maine Arts Commission about a competition for small businesses for what I took to be, a modest grant for the sum of 30000.00 from an "anonymous source". In a moment of hopeful delusions, I imagined that the Maine Arts Commission had come to its senses and realized that they needed to support the private sector. The competition was called an "elevator pitch competition" which means a pitch delivered in five minutes. Even the written answers to questions on the application were required to be answered in a minimal number of words, brevity being stressed as being so important that if your couldn't explain a business idea in five minutes, then one's business idea is simply not

Baldacci and Richard Florida- A Love Affair.

In the last post we met Lego-Man , the face and voice of redistribution economics  whose avatar appropriately portrays a mechanized man as opposed to a living organic being . Lego-Man implied that I was too stupid to get in on the gravy train of government redistributed wealth. In fact I have a long history of trying to work with government resources. I first became involved in what our state government was doing at the beginning of the Baldacci administration. In my younger days I was not at all involved in politics, I hardly knew the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans and I had no idea what the left and the right were. And yet, even in my ignorance I leaned right.  I initially took an open minded approach to Baldacci's "creative economy"  but interpreted through my own lens to mean creative thinking about the whole economy, I soon realized that Baldacci did not share my way of seeing. Baldacci was a disciple of Richard Florida whose writings emphas

Can Art and Culture Thrive Outside Of Government Oversight?

The Tea Party Movement in Maine is often described in terms of its “radical fringe” which is depicted as a gun-toting crowd. Although I support the right to bear arms, I have never held a gun and yet, based on the general Tea Party Platform, which primarily targets welfare reform as the means by which the size of government should be reduced, I find myself in small company in suggesting a different set of government agencies that deserve to be examined in consideration of reducing the size of government. I have written frequently about state capitalism in Maine and its unconstitutional foundation. The Maine Arts Commission works in conjunction with state capitalism and is a more highly visible player within “the creative economy” The Maine Arts Commission recently sent a survey, which included its long and short-term vision for arts and culture in Maine. I selected the “other” category in order to describe my interest in arts and culture as a private economy arts related business. In