Arts, Culture & Humanities

The Met's aggressive strategy of media initiatives has been a runaway success. In 2006, the company began transmitting live, high-definition opera performances into movie theaters. Last season, 2.4 million tickets were sold to nine different shows. The Met realized over $8 million in net revenue.

Says Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, "… The Met has discovered a new source of revenue that has expanded its capacity and is helping to ensure the education of future audiences at same time."

This October, the Foundation Center will hold its annual Funding for Arts Month with special events, classes, and resources aimed at helping artists and nonprofit arts organizations become better grantseekers and increase their funding.

At free programs in the Center's Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, locations, participants can discover fundraising strategies, network with fellow artists and colleagues, and gain insight into their local arts funding community.

A three-year, $9 million grant program focused entirely on arts and culture in Philadelphia is to be announced Wednesday by the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based philanthropy. Dubbed the Knight Arts Challenge - funding from the foundation must be matched from other sources - the program seeks applications focused on every arts sector and from individuals as well as organizations and institutions.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has received a $4.5 million pledge to its recovery efforts - the single largest vote of confidence to date in its still-evolving institutional vision. The award comes from the William Penn Foundation, which specifically cited the orchestra's new leadership as an impetus and stipulated that the money be split into three separate allocations:

$3 million will go directly to the orchestra's emergency bridge fund, bringing to $13 million the total raised for the effort, which has a current goal of $15 million.

The Board of Trustees of The Prudential Foundation recently approved $3.575 million in grants to nonprofit organizations dedicated to quality public education, enhancing community-based economic development, and sustaining livable communities.

All Mail Direct Inc., a direct-mail, printing and fulfillment services provider, announced that it recently made a donation to the Stephen G. Shore Recovery Trust to support its efforts to help patients at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center through the music creative process.

Even the tradition-bound classical music world has embraced the democratizing influence of new technology, allowing audiences to participate in programming in a way that would have been unthinkable a short time ago. It is less surprising that music organizations are using the technology to sell themselves or raise money.

To one degree or another, many orchestras have experimented with audience texting, a subject that was discussed at a meeting of marketers and public relations executives from the League of American Orchestras in the fall of 2008.

Blame hard times, the spread of social media or the incentives created by a competition, but things have gotten ugly in an online contest among cultural organizations to win a $200,000 grant from American Express.

On Thursday night Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, one of nine nonprofit groups competing for the grant, posted a Twitter message saying: “I know we’ve asked before, but we really need to beat StoryCorps. We NEED your HELP. Show some love & vote for the arts.”

NEW HAVEN — Watching Michael M. Kaiser, the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, speak to arts executives, as he did during two recent swings through New England, is like watching Jack Welch talk to business students.

The executives pay rapt attention, take notes and nod their heads. They ask questions, some of which begin with a heartfelt, “Thank you, Mr. Kaiser, for being here and speaking to us.” Standing ovations are routine, as are the crowds who hover hoping to shake his hand.

The National Endowment for the Arts is inaugurating a new program Monday to give active military personnel and their families free admission all summer to hundreds of U.S. museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection.