The team behind the newly christened Arts Management Program at SUNY Buffalo are holding an inaugural seminar to launch the Program, entitled Why Manage the Arts? on Saturday 24 September, 2005, This inter-disciplinary program is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Faculties of Management and Law. The seminar will provide an important perspective and venue for exchange of practice and research as it combines practitioners, researchers, international students and artists concerning themselves with the question: Why Manage the Arts? Speakers:

Professor Emeritus John Pick - Founding Chair of the Department of Arts Policy and Management, City University, London. Professor Pick will provide an overview of research internationally in this field over the past 40 years and make recommendations for future areas which are critical for researchers, arts managers and policy makers to address; and

Associate Professor Ruth Bereson, Director of Arts Management Program, SUNY Buffalo. "Arts Management matters because the arts manager is the final mediator between artist and public. At the present time the artist faces the dual threat of becoming a service industry, attempting to shape society to the chosen ends of the state - or being used, by the media and the big corporations, as a commodity, with work valued only for its market value. The Arts Manager has to steer a difficult path between those two extremes and, while negotiating the increasingly complex legal, political and economic bonds that constrain arts management, nevertheless find fresh ways of forging independent links between each work of art and its true audience." Break out sessions will be led Mr Matthew Hackler, doctoral researcher in Arts Management. In the concluding session, Ways Forward in Arts Management, Professor Pick and Dr Bereson will address issues raised in the breakout sessions and work with the internationally based participants to form a series of research initiatives. The proceedings will be published in the SUNY Arts Management Occasional Paper series and all participants and their affiliations will be noted. For further information, CLICK HERE