Brattleboro Arts Committee Special Roundtable Meeting

by Not Signed In | Town News | 1367 Views

The Brattleboro Arts Committee will hold a special meeting on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 at 4:00pm in the Selectboard meeting room at the Municipal Center

Jan Anderson
Executive Secretary
Brattleboro Town Manager’s Office
(802) 251-8100

…

BRATTLEBORO TOWN ARTS COMMITTEE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2015 – 4:00PM
SELECTBOARD MEETING ROOM
MUNICIPAL CENTER, 230 MAIN STREET, 2ND FLOOR
AGENDA

1. Convene Meeting with Quorum Check

2. Roundtable Discussion – Promotion is a prominent goal in Brattleboro’s 2013 Town Plan, and Brattleboro’s local government feels that there are opportunities to make better use of our cultural resources to attract visitors, jobs, residents and investment. This Roundtable is interested in listening, and in being an interface for partnerships to be created that are bigger than individual organizational interests. We have invited several parties, and this is a warned meeting open to all. We are committed to revealing results for collaboration that have not been seen before. We would like to learn, with your organization’s goals and interests as a starting point, how NEW ideas could emerge that would turn Brattleboro into a magnetic draw, an epicenter. We would like us all to leave this roundtable energized by something we have never seen before, and start to facilitate that into a tangible benefit to the Town of Brattleboro.
3. Adjournment

Comments | 2

  • Submitted by cgrotke on September 18, 2015 at 9:28 am

    public wanted

    This is the meeting mentioned by Donna Macomber at the last Selectboard meeting, pointing out that they are looking for public input.

  • Submitted by Lise on September 19, 2015 at 7:05 am

    Programmed vs. Natural and Organic

    While I think it’s great that the town has an interest in promoting the town as an arts town, I have reservations about how effective such promotion really is. It seems that Brattleboro is thriving as an arts town right now, with artists at all levels of skill, experience, and income. However, if I had to guess, I wouldn’t imagine that the majority are making that much money for themselves or the town. The arts aren’t generally that lucrative.

    The hypothesis as I understand it is that the arts make the area more attractive and soon higher end people and businesses of all kinds, not just the starving artist kind, move in and the grand list grows and everyone is happy. Of course the next thing after that is the less wealthy artists get priced out and have to move but maybe I’m getting ahead of the game there. 😉

    Leveraging a strong arts community into a financially secure municipality is a big question, but I’m glad we’re asking it because I do think the arts are important, and maybe getting more so. I was reading an article about business and finance that posited that in today’s automated, AI, robotic world, the only way to make money will be to do something that can’t be done better and faster by machine. The author’s view was that these new jobs would have to be ‘human’ jobs that require creativity, empathy, and other intangible human abilities, and that they provide the consumer with things that are both beautiful or somehow uplifting as well as useful. In other words, the arts might become important again because you can’t program a computer to create them.

    But now I’ve gone very far afield so I’ll leave this here… I’ll be interested to hear what the roundtable discussion comes up with.

Leave a Reply