Survey reveals perceptions and insights to help forge common ground between business and art cultures

Photo by Joe Angeles / WUSTL PhotoWashington University art students forge common ground with businesspeople.The perception is that art and business speak different languages, inhabit different worlds, and “orbit different suns,” says Jeff Pike, Dean of the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. But in reality, the visual arts play an active role in business culture, he says. The Washington University School of Art surveyed how artists and businesspeople view each other and came up with some important insights.

More mainstream than ever, children’s literature remains hard to define, poorly understood and frequently underestimated

Illustration from a Hans Christian Andersen story.What is “children’s literature?” As we pause between the perfect, all-ages storms of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film adaptation, the answer seems less clear than ever. In the current issue of Belle Lettres, a bi-monthly publication of Washington University’s International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences, a culture critic and a director of teacher education explain that the genre, always hard to define, remains poorly understood and frequently underestimated.