Archive - Bill Schubart

Arts and Humanities

The Arts: Back to Bohème?

Arts and culture are not exempt from the continuing concentration of great, if not excessive, wealth among fewer and fewer people while the number of poor only grows. Orchestra seats… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Do You Have a Book in You?

Apart from speaking and drawing, writing is one of humankind’s earliest forms of communication. The first written words emerged as cuneiform writing in 3200 BC in Mesopotamia – present day… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Comments to Sheldon Museum Annual Meeting 11/12/19

We have over 6000 non-profits in Vermont with annual revenues of some $6.5B and assets of over $13B. That’s one non-profit, or “for-mission,” as some prefer to say, for every… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Role of the Arts & Humanities in Addressing Society's Problems

I recently attended a quiet conference that brought together leaders and innovators in the arts, humanities, and public broadcast. We met for two days to explore how the arts and… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Our Recorded History: Intellectual Property or Cultural Heritage?

As the magnitude of loss becomes more public and musicians express more anguish about the loss of some half a million music masters in the 2008 archive fire at Universal… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Aretha Brings It All Home

As a student fascinated with recording technology, I had the privilege of interviewing for a job at Columbia Records when I was in my mid-twenties. I was first asked a… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Efforts to defund the National Endowment of the Arts are a quadrennial budget issue here at home. And in many countries, artists, like journalists, are censored, jailed, or even assassinated.… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Brave New World of Publishng

I grew up amid two publishing families. Roger Straus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Alfred and Blanche Knopf. They were both family cousins and close friends of my paternal grandparents.… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Puccini in Middlebury

From as early as I can remember, I’ve been an opera buff. I remember sitting in the orchestra section at the Old Metropolitan Opera House on 39th and Broadway and… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Arts and Media

Many of society’s future creative endeavors will have no physical medium, raising questions about how those among us who choose some artform as a vocation will make a living. Let’s… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Open Letter to the Board of the Vermont Arts Council

February 21, 2009 An Open Letter to the Trustees of the Vermont Arts Council Dear Trustees, I am writing this as an open letter as I was unable to attend… Read More

Arts and Humanities

Use It or Lose It

One casualty of the endless roll-up of entertainment, media and consumer electronic companies into ever larger “media conglomerates” is culture itself. An article in the New York Times two years… Read More