• The new Brooklyn Philharmonic: a “Site-Specific” Orchestra? Katherine’s examination of the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s bold season announcement placed the orchestra’s audience-centric programming within the tradition of “site-specific” visual art.
• Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation is, by any measure, Katherine’s magnum opus for the blog (so far, anyway!). The value of public art has always been hard to pin down, but Katherine’s comprehensive treatment of the subject shows that emerging techniques may yet hold promise for this fiendishly difficult-to-measure phenomenon. On the strength of a pickup from ArtsJournal (only the third Createquity post to earn that honor) and quite a bit of incoming traffic from Australian Policy Online of all places, Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation is now the 5th-most-read Createquity article all time and the highest-trafficked guest post ever. Clocking in at over 5,000 words, it also gives lie to the myth that people don’t have the patience to read long posts.
• Occupy and the Arts: Curating by Consensus in Lower Manhattan is the product of extensive firsthand research into the on-the-ground realities of Occupy Wall Street’s Arts and Culture Committee. The post also contains more pretty pictures than I’m liable to put up in three months, including some of Katherine’s own drawings, paintings, and photographs.
• In Arts Policy Library: Investing in Creativity, Katherine takes an in-depth look at the study that launched Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) along with several other initiatives designed to support individual artists. Her much briefer wrap-up post provides the highlights in short form.

Katherine has indicated that she intends to continue writing here, so you can look forward to more from her in the coming months, including a follow-up to her massive public art evaluation treatise. In the meantime, let’s all give her a big hand!

• Meet the fall 2011 Createquity Writing Fellows
• Wrapping up the Createquity Writing Fellowship
• Apply for the Createquity Writing Fellowship

• A professor’s quest to overturn a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that placed certain foreign works back under copyright after they had already entered the public domain appears to have reached an end.
• The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is thinking about trying out social impact bonds.
• Looks like there were some shenanigans behind the construction of the High Line, NYC’s well-known elevated park. Reminiscent of James Gray’s The Yards, if anyone saw that movie.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The three museums of Abu Dhabi’s $27 billion cultural district have had their openings pushed back to 2015-17.
• The Danish government has merged three national agencies – the Danish Arts Agency, the Heritage Agency of Denmark, and the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media – into one Danish Agency for Culture.
• Good news: cultural funding survives intact in Toronto.

ALL ABOUT PHILANTHROPY

• GiveWell details how charity regulations in various countries make donating to top-rated international charities more difficult than it should be.
• The Craigslist Foundation is shutting down.
• Most foundation leaders have trouble converting evaluation results into “meaningful insights.”

IN THE FIELD

• More on Opera Boston’s sudden demise late last year.
• Bye bye Detroit Children’s Museum.
• Yikes! longtime conductor, author, and inspirational TED talker Benjamin Zander was let go by the New England Conservatory this month over a cover-up involving a videographer who was a convicted sex offender, as NEC clearly wanted no part of any Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky redux.
• LA Opera joins those trying out the dynamic pricing route.
• Interesting new curator time share model being pioneered by the Detroit Institute of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
• When the IRS dumped hundreds of thousands of organizations from the nonprofit rolls last year, people hardly batted an eye – mostly because they assumed those organizations (who had failed to file required forms for three years in a row) were either no longer active or not accomplishing any good if they were. Yet my cultural asset mapping work has suggested that at least some of those organizations who had their tax-exempt status stripped were real and continuing to provide public programs. Thomas A. Kelley provides one such example in this account of an African American community center that is fighting to get its nonprofit status back.
• Jerome Weeks notes the difficulty that Dallas-area arts organizations are having with recruiting top leadership talent, and correctly follows the breadcrumbs to the lack of attractive opportunities for earlier-stage arts professionals:
  

  Jose Bowen says one reason the pickings remain thin is that the starting jobs for arts management graduates generally don’t pay well. And the punishing costs of college don’t help, either. Bowen is dean of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts. It’s one of the few that offers a double master’s degree in arts management – in the arts and business administration.

  Bowen: “Our students graduate and are immediately faced with a choice. Come work for Goldman and make more money or go work for a nonprofit and make less money. And when you have loans, right out of school? That’s a hard choice to make.”

  It’s really very simple, people. If senior leaders with demonstrated records of accomplishment don’t want the job, it’s time to consider either senior leaders without demonstrated records of accomplishment, or junior leaders who haven’t had a chance to demonstrate accomplishment yet. If arts professionals below the leadership ranks are never given an opportunity to take initiative, manage people, or own projects in their roles, they’re never going to be in a position to fill those positions effectively, after the person who did so for so long is gone. And that’s assuming they stick around on low salaries waiting for their big break. Something to think about.

BIG IDEAS

• I’ve been wondering for a while about the effect on the bottom line that election season must have for struggling traditional media companies – especially in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Well, Dave Copeland takes that thought further and notes how well-positioned online audience gatekeepers – such as Google – are to benefit from campaign ads.
• ArtsJournal hosted one of its blog debates last week called Lead or Follow, featuring Diane Ragsdale, Michael Kaiser, and others.  Doug McLennan continues to experiment with the form of these fora, and though I don’t think he’s quite nailed the perfect formula yet, the process is fascinating to watch. As background to this conversation, the Wallace Foundation published 54 stories of audience engagement arising from its Wallace Excellence Awards grant program from the previous decade, as well as four more in-depth case studies on its own site.
• Is your brain constantly bloated because it’s trying to take in too much information? Maybe you should go on an information diet! Beth Kanter reviews what looks to be an important book for folks like me who are constantly trying to drink from the fire hose.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Add a feather to Randy Cohen’s cap: the Americans for the Arts researcher’s National Arts Index project has inspired an imitator across the pond, the UK Arts Index. (h/t Mark Robinson)
• Kickstarter is out with its annual project stats. Kickstarter projects attracted nearly $100 million in pledges in 2011! Also of note, the number of high-volume donors (people who contribute to hundreds of projects a year and presumably seek them out as a kind of hobby) is growing.
• Nonprofit Finance Fund is conducting its fourth annual survey of nonprofits, analyzing how they are responding to and recovering from the financial crisis. The survey is anonymous and takes 10-15 minutes to fill out, and they’re looking for as many respondents as possible. They are taking responses through February 15 and you can participate here.
• Look out, American Red Cross! GiveWell is on the warpath to get you to release your evaluation of your own organization’s relief efforts in Haiti.

ETC.

• We haven’t had any silly links in Around the Horn for a while. Well, that’s about to change…

• Around the horn: staycation edition
• Around the Horn: Far East edition
• Does academic journal content want to be free?

• Fractured Atlas officially comes out against the PROTECT-IP Act, also known as SOPA. The same week, the Senate and House remove the most controversial provision. Coincidence? I think not.
• The state of Connecticut is rebooting its arts agency giving strategy under new leader Kip Bergstrom.
• The mayor of Boston is “asking” local museums and other large nonprofits to pay the city 25% of the property tax they would otherwise owe if they were for-profit institutions, leading to a bill in the seven figures for some organizations. I’m a little torn on this one; it’s well-documented that cities who have nonprofit mega-institutions occupying prime real estate lose out on some pretty crucial tax revenue (New Haven, where I went to school for six years, was one example). On the other hand, so long as this isn’t a universal practice, it will put Boston nonprofit museums, universities and hospitals at a competitive disadvantage compared to similar institutions in other cities.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The Danish Royal Theatre is cutting 100 jobs, including five leadership positions. What’s amazing is that’s only 10% of their staff.
• In last week’s post on corporate vs. government influence on the arts, I made a throwaway comment about preferring to accept subsidy from BP rather than Hu Jintao. The reason is this article by the outgoing Chinese president, which states that China is in an “ideological struggle” with the West and must invest to protect its “cultural security” by doing things like limit the number of prime-time shows on television and require people on microblogging sites (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) to register using their real names. Yes, China is pouring billions into extravagant shows of cultural force in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, but it comes with a price beyond the yuan.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Hutchinson is resigning as head of the Bush Foundation.
• After being rejected by at least six different candidates, the New York Philharmonic finally has a new chief executive: Matthew VanBesien.

IN THE FIELD

• Wow. Nina Simon. In just over half a year as head of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, she’s brought the organization from barely being able to make payroll to having a $100,000 cash reserve, increased attendance 57%, and landed a glowing front-page article in the region’s daily about the museum’s sudden renaissance. Oh, and she’s 30. If she doesn’t make Barry’s List in 2012, I will eat my hat. (By the way, said front-page article has an adorable proud-face moment in the comments from her dad!) Speaking of Nina, she  finally weighs in on the controversy involving the Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia, and makes a persuasive–and rather unexpected–argument in defense of the critics’ point of view.
• The Oregon Symphony has dropped its $17,000 membership in the League of Symphony Orchestras, and its executive director unloads on the League along the way: “Institutionally we are so tightly staffed that we couldn’t find the time to fill in some of the League’s massive surveys in the past few years – and to be honest, we didn’t find the data particularly useful when the results were released…No one else on staff has been to a conference in years – except (former orchestra spokesman) Carl Herko, who like me went one year at his own expense.” Ouch.
• Michael Kaiser is looking for arts management success stories for a new national learning tour. Michael, I have a museum in Santa Cruz to suggest…

NEW (AD)VENTURES

• Americans for the Arts is developing some new web content, including a Local Arts Classroom program for arts professionals with up to 10 years of experience in the field, and a seven-webinar series on arts education.
• Congrats to blogosphere regular Scott Walters for receiving funding to try out a rural arts pilot program in Bakersville, NC (pop. 357). You can follow his progress at the  CRADLE blog.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Interesting experiment testing violinists’ ability to pick out an ultra-valuable Stradivarius or Guarneri violin from its modern counterpart. The violinists were blindfolded while they played the instrument, and asked to guess after they were done. Tellingly, they more often got it wrong than right – reminiscent of the results of fine wine taste tests. Despite no obvious red flags in the study design, however, a professional violinist commentator isn’t buying it.
• A researcher uses the marital patterns of movie stars to test whether couples inherently prefer to mate with people of similar educational backgrounds. It turns out that they (seemingly) do, leading to an unexpected but important insight on the role of marriage and love relationships in promoting and sustaining income inequality.
• Derek Thompson offers an economic analysis of movie theater tickets with an assist from academics Barak Orbach and Liran Einav.
• Bad news: a recent study looks at the unemployment rates of recent college graduates, and architecture students and arts majors are clear outliers on the economic suffering end of the scale, with 13.9% and 11.1% unemployment respectively. Humanities students are third. The phenomenon exists for those with graduate degrees as well; arts and architecture students are unemployed at a rate of 6-8%, versus rates of less than 4.5% for all other disciplines.

THE WIDER WORLD

• I do an end-of-year wrap up of stories from 2011, but two commentators are looking ahead to predictions for 2012: Mark Robinson (who was apparently dared into it by Clare Cooper of Mission Models Money) and Brian Newman. And here’s a round-up of 2011′s top stories from the broader nonprofit sector by Nonprofit Law Blog.
• Nice perspective from Phil Buchanan on the historical basis for many of the hot new trends in philanthropy.
• This gigantic list of 2012 nonprofit and social change conferences is a fantastic resource.
• This article does a great job of summing up why Google+ creeps me the F out. I find myself trusting Google less and less these days (not that Facebook is any better, but at least it doesn’t have access to six years’ worth of my personal emails and search history).
• Did you know that a developer in the United Arab Emirates has created a huge set of man-made private islands designed to look like the world? And that as of now only one of them is inhabited?

• Around the Horn: Far East edition
• Around the horn: staycation edition
• Dispatch from the Bay Area, Part II: Beyond Dynamic Adaptability

“It’s not pure altruism,” says David Nicholas, a media director at BP. “Sponsorship can bring benefits to our reputation.” Even the negative publicity doesn’t seem to bother him.”Everyone has a right to protest – at least it gets people talking about BP!” But he denies that the company is trying to maintain an acceptable face. “If you want to try to put an artsy face on a roughneck in overalls, I leave that to you.”

Marco Compagnoni, a senior partner at the City law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, says objecting to big business sponsorship is “absolutely bonkers” but he rejects BP’s assertion that it’s for employee benefits. “It’s not done for the perks. Law firms aren’t munificent, activities like that are for marketing and keeping close to clients to help your business. We are doing an evening at the Leonardo and one at the Hockney because it’s a good atmosphere to talk to clients. It’s not to be nice.”

One of the most common conservative objections to government support for the arts, one that is sometimes voiced by liberals as well, is the potential for giving up undue influence and control (particularly over content). That’s never made much sense to me, because the fact is that so long as art requires significant subsidy from non-artists in order to happen, whoever’s providing that subsidy has the power to meddle unhelpfully in the artist’s affairs. So it’s really just a question of who you trust most – and least – to keep a safe distance. Is it big corporations or the government? Depends on whose government you’re talking about, I suppose. I’ll take a sponsorship from BP over one from Hu Jintao any day. The system we use in the United States – with its decentralized marketplace of tax-advantaged private foundations and individual donors making up the vast majority of subsidy – is extremely labor-intensive to maintain, but it may be the best we can do for freedom of expression.

• Federal arts funding: a trace ingredient in the sausage factory of government spending
• Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating)
• Consulting giant KPMG doesn’t think much of the arts

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congress has agreed to put aside consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) through the end of the year, but the bill isn’t necessarily dead. Arts and technology commentators have begun to be more vocal in their criticism of the bill, which would, among other things, sanction pre-emptive takedown requests for intellectual property infringement, create an “intermediary liability” for website hosts, and essentially hand over enforcement for all of this to the entertainment industry. It’s that last provision which creeps me out the most; I’m not a copyright anarchist, but I am most definitely against the foxes running the henhouse.
• More on droit de suite legislation, which took effect in the UK on January 1. The policy compensates artists whose works are sold by future owners. As reported last month, similar legislation is under consideration by the United States Congress.
• Interesting interview with the head of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, an intermediary organization based in Lebanon that is funded by the Ford and Open Society Foundations as well as donors in Kuwait and the Netherlands.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Leveraging Investments in Creativity has hired Candace Jackson, an arts consultant, as its managing director. LINC is heading into its final phase of operation, and its concluding work will focus on evaluating its grants and putting out additional research publications.
• The Urban Institute (which has a notable track record of research in the arts) has a new president, Sarah Rosen Wartell.
• Arena Stage’s New Play Institute is splitting up, with two key staff members leaving the organization and taking the program’s media and technology projects to Boston’s Emerson College. More on the transition from David Dower.
• Some strange staffing shenanigans are afoot at the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, but if the article is to be believed, they will be hiring a deputy commissioner and five program directors among other positions.

IN THE FIELD

• An heir to the Walmart fortune has opened the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a community of 35,000 people located two hours away from the nearest large city. The museum apparently has amassed nearly a billion dollars in assets in just five years, mostly funded by the Walton Family Foundation. It offers free admission to the public and is located within walking distance of downtown Bentonville, which happens to be the location of the world headquarters of Walmart. The museum has raised eyebrows on the east coast for buying up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art for its collection and getting into a legal battle with the Georgia O’Keefe Museum over its attempts to purchase a 50% stake in a collection at the financially troubled Fisk University in Tennessee. But from where I sit, it’s a gigantic infusion of money for the arts in an extremely underserved part of the country…hard to argue too much with that.
• Opera Boston, the second-largest opera company in the region, is shutting down due to a $500,000 funding gap, mere months after it won a Pulitzer Prize with composer Zhou Long.
• Ballet San Jose has announced a unusual partnership with American Ballet Theatre that involves implementing ABT’s training curriculum in the local ballet school and performing works from ABT’s repertoire. Officials claim the arrangement is “not a merger,” however.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Blair Benjamin has published the results of his self-evaluation of the Assets for Artists program in Massachusetts. Speaking of Blair, his second annual “headlines you missed” feature is worth a laugh. My favorite: “Alice Walton’s Plan to Demolish and Replace Her Brand-New Museum with a ‘Super Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’ Promises Wider Selection and an Even More Unbeatable Admission Price”
• Robert Flanagan, a Stanford professor who wrote a report on the economic health of symphony orchestras back in 2008, has expanded that research into a book. Sarah Lutman has the details.
• I’ll sign on to this: “We need a national consensus policy to guide our research efforts into the decade.  As good as our research is, and as capable as our researchers are – it is basically piecemeal.  We need an over-arching policy as to what we need to know, on what timeline and to what purpose.  And we need at least some modicum of cooperation so we can pursue research in some linear pattern.  Somebody please convene a national summit to deal with our currently all over the map research efforts.  At least create ways  researchers (can and will) talk to each other on some regular basis.”

ON GIVING

• PhilanTopic has a thought-provoking roundup of predictions for 2012. A couple that stuck out for me:
  

  In fact, we’d be surprised if there isn’t at least one [Occupy Wall Street]-related protest at a high-profile philanthropic conference or event in 2012. (And the folks in Davos can pretty much count on it.)

  [E]xpect to see calls for greater accountability in philanthropy emerge as a movement in its own right in 2012. Adopting the slogan “private dollars for public good,” a social media-empowered generation of young Americans will use the cheap and ubiquitous tools at their disposal to push for more diversity on foundation boards, more transparency in foundation decision-making, and more democracy in the allocation of tax-advantaged philanthropic resources.

  I hope they’re right.

• Around the horn: staycation edition
• Dispatch from the Bay Area, Part II: Beyond Dynamic Adaptability
• The Top 10 Arts Policy Stories of 2011

Of course, not all commentators will make equally valuable contributions to the discussion. Just like art, providing critical analysis and consistently thoughtful, informed, and credible feedback requires considerable skill and practice. In short, we want to be able to open up the process to anyone without having to open it to everyone. What qualities would we desire in those who influence resource allocation decisions in the arts? Certainly we would ask that our critics be knowledgeable in the field they review. We would also want them to be fair—not holding ideological grudges against artists or letting personal vendettas influence their judgment. We’d want them to be open-minded, not afraid to dive into unfamiliar or challenging territory when the time comes. And finally, we’d want them to be thoughtful: able and willing to appreciate nuance, and mindful of how what they are experiencing fits into a larger whole. Technology now allows us to systematically identify and reward these qualities in a reviewer.

—Ian David Moss and Daniel Reid, Audiences at the Gate: Reinventing Arts Philanthropy Through Guided Crowdsourcing (February 22)

So why would anyone form a nonprofit? A nonprofit still makes sense, in my view, if its focus is not on a specific artist or group of artists. Any organization that provides infrastructure - presenters, community arts organizations, arts education providers, local arts councils, service organizations, and the like – is a good candidate for the nonprofit form. Rule of thumb: if an organization would have no reason to continue on if its founder(s) left tomorrow, it probably shouldn’t be a nonprofit.

—Ian David Moss, Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating) (March 24)

The reason stories work for us as human beings is because they are few in number. We can spend two hours watching a documentary, or a week reading a history book, and get a really deep qualitative understanding of what was going on in a specific situation or in a specific case. The problem is that we can only truly comprehend so many stories at once. We don’t have the mental bandwidth to process the experiences of even hundreds, much less thousands or millions of subjects or occurrences. To make sense of those kinds of numbers, we need ways of simplifying and reducing the amount of information we store in each case. So what we do is we take all of those stories and we flatten them: we dry out all of the rich shape and detail that makes up their original form and we package them instead in a kind of mold: collecting a specific and limited set of attributes about each so that we can apply analysis techniques to them in batch. In a very real sense, data = mass-produced stories.

—Ian David Moss, On Stories vs. Data (March 29)

Do you see where I’m going with this? This process of getting attention presents us with a HUGE class issue. Is it any mystery why our arts organizations have trouble connecting with less affluent members of society? It’s not because they can’t afford the tickets. It’s not because they can’t get to the venue easily. It’s not because the genre as a whole isn’t “relevant” to them. Okay, I lied – it is all of those things. But I don’t think any of them are the main reason. I think the main reason is because these less affluent populations don’t know anyone in their communities who is a professional artist with those organizations. Because how could you be, if you grew up poor and couldn’t afford conservatory training and weren’t given lessons in school and anyway now you have to work two jobs to put food on the table and feed the kids? We talk a lot about cultural equity in the arts, and we typically frame it in terms of audience access: who has the opportunity to see one of these amazing artists perform, or witness their creations? But as more and more of us turn to creative expression as a way of affirming our identities in an increasingly connected world, I think the most important cultural equity issue of our time isn’t who gets to see the amazing artist, it’s who gets to be the amazing artist.

—Ian David Moss, TEDx Talk (May 15)

If subsidized arts workers are labeled as something like freeloaders in public discourse, then farmers, homeowners, hybrid vehicle buyers, the airlines, and the oil & gas industry are freeloaders too. Ayn Rand is very popular again among conservatives, so where is the conservative outcry against oil & gas subsidies? Instead, we are offered a redefinition of the “free market capitalist system” as something that requires government subsidy. Oxymorons rule the day when the free market must be subsidized, and arts created explicitly in the public interest, without a profit to distribute, must stand alone.

—Aaron Andersen, Federal arts funding: a trace ingredient in the sausage factory of government spending (June 1)

Over the last five years, the El Sistema “model” has become a sensation around the world as more musicians and arts leaders have visited Venezuela and felt inspired to adapt the program within their communities. Others have learned about El Sistema on programs like 60 Minutes and through the popularity of Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel. I had the opportunity to visit El Sistema in Venezuela in 2007, and everything about it was intoxicating: the enthusiasm of the teachers and administrators to save disadvantaged children through music, the level of the musicianship, the camaraderie of the students and teachers, the music-festival spirit of the program (it felt like my experiences at summer music festivals, only this program is all year long), the concert hall designed specifically to advance the education and performance opportunities of El Sistema participants, the participatory nature of every rehearsal and performance.

—Jennifer Kessler, El Sistema: The Movement (June 3)

So what are the implications of Informal Arts for the role of the nonprofit arts institution? None of the case study activities took place at a formal arts institution. I think that suggests that the majority of our arts institutions are viewed as places to consume art rather than to create it. Should they seek to change that perception to become viewed as places to create as well? The answer to this question will vary from organization to organization depending upon the resources and mission of each. But to ensure the future of any art form, there must be practitioners and consumers. And since practitioners often become consumers (and bring their friends with them), I believe it is in the long-term interest of arts organizations—large and small, presenting and producing, of all disciplines, including service organizations and arts councils—to encourage adult creation of art at the informal level.

—Crystal Wallis, Arts Policy Library: Informal Arts (July 6)

Those elements are clearly important, but the reality is that the arts ecosystem is far more complicated. It includes social service agencies, churches, and others that might provide arts programs. It includes not just for-profit firms that present arts programming directly, but also the companies that manufacture shoes for the ballet dancers, sell the strings for the guitars, and design the postcards for the show. It encompasses a huge range of patron roles from major donors and Board members, to passersby taking in a work of public art or ambient sound installation, to people who experience the arts only in their own homes. Arguably, it even includes Google, Facebook, Staples, and the IRS – entities with which almost every arts organization interacts, even if those entities are not arts-specific at all.

—Ian David Moss, An Ecosystem-Based Approach to Arts Research (October 17)

Is our advocacy goal a widely seen news piece outlining all sides of the issue? Or, do we want a successful budget outcome? I think it’s the latter. And when it can be achieved with a quiet effort, making sure to begin modeling this new way of thinking about the arts in our meetings with decision-makers, that is preferable to another big public debate. Because the big fight in the default way of viewing the arts is very losable. And in our efforts, we’re forced to expand a precious resource: the time and energy of staff and key supporters who have to work so hard to convince public officials that they won’t suffer consequences in the next election.

—Margy Waller, Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Shouting About Arts Funding Bad for the Arts? (October 24)

I’m not suggesting that the concerts that the City of San Francisco produces with the San Francisco Symphony are unworthy of public funding, or that $2 million is not a reasonable amount to pay for the Symphony’s services; I have no reason to make such presumptions. But it does seem to me a perfect example of how large-budget, historic cultural institutions have privileges of access at their disposal that few arts organizations founded within our lifetimes (including, therefore, hardly any organizations founded by or primarily serving racial and ethnic minorities) could ever dream of. Sure, Galeria de la Raza got 12 grants in 5 years from SFAC. But most of those grants had to be won with the approval of a panel of fellow citizens, with panel discussion taking place in public (CEG has one of the most radically transparent review processes in the country; see page 11 of the pdf). The San Francisco Symphony, to my knowledge, does not have its contract up for public review by a panel of citizen peers every year. It just gets the money.

—Ian David Moss, Cultural equity and the San Francisco Arts Commission (December 12)

Here were the most-read articles from the past year, in case you missed them:

1. Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating)
2. Audiences at the Gate: Reinventing Arts Philanthropy Through Guided Crowdsourcing
3. Emerging Ideas: Classical Music’s New Entrepreneurs
4. Kansas Arts Commission vetoed by Governor
5. Okay, it’s official: State arts agencies are in trouble
6. Get a (folk)life: How folklore research helped an arts agency
7. On Michael Kaiser and Citizen Critics
8. Re-envisioning No Child Left Behind, and What It Means for Arts Education
9. Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Shouting About Arts Funding Bad for the Arts?
10. An inside look at Colombia’s “Sistema”

• Createquity in Quotes: 2010
• Meet the Spring 2011 Createquity Writing Fellows
• Apply for the fall 2011 Createquity Writing Fellowship

Grand Rapids LipDub - photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

• The Top 10 Arts Policy Stories of 2010
• The Top 10 (U.S.) Arts Policy Stories of 2009
• Createquity in Quotes: 2011

• Sadly, this is what passes for a victory in arts funding these days: the NEA survived the 2012 budget appropriations process with only a 6% cut from last year. This represents full funding of President Obama’s request; yes, that’s right folks, our fearless leader demonstrated his steadfast support of the arts this year by proposing a $9 million cut to a budget that his own handpicked agency head has already described as “pathetic.” The arts in education budget from the Department of Education survived, despite a proposal by the administration to consolidate the program. Other federal cultural agencies, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian, saw their funding hold steady or increase slightly.
• Grantmakers in the Arts is launching a new Arts Education Funders’ Coalition that “will work with an education policy firm in Washington DC to develop opportunities and policies that will enhance arts education at the federal level.”
• A bill has been introduced in Congress that would impose a new royalty in the amount of 7% of any sales of artwork over $10,000 by living artists or other works not yet in the public domain. The royalty would apply to sales at auction houses and the proceeds would be split evenly between the artist (or his or her heirs) and a new federally-administered fund that will help museums purchase works by living artists. To date, I’ve mostly read arguments against the proposed legislation, some of which are more compelling than others, but I still think the best reason to oppose it is that it seems most likely to help established names at the expense of emerging artists.
• The passage of a constitutional amendment in Minnesota tripling the state’s arts funding was heralded at the time as unmitigated good news. But since then, the additional funds have brought their own set of headaches with them.
• Jan Brennan writes about Denver’s newly merged cultural affairs agency, Arts & Venues Denver.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• More on the recently-announced €1.8 billion “Creative Europe” funding program.
• Emilya Cachapero reports on the aftereffects of Palestine’s entry into UNESCO, and the United States’ legislatively-mandated decision to stop funding the agency as a retaliatory action. The funding cut amounts to $35 million annually, or 22% of UNESCO’s budget.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The director of the program that awards the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grants, Daniel Socolow, is set to retire.
• Daniel Kertzner, arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation, has been promoted to Vice President of Grant Programs for the community foundation.
• The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance has a new executive director, Jeannie Howe. Former director Buck Jabaily is leaving to become co-founder of Baltimore Open Theatre, which sounds pretty cool.
• Also in Baltimore, Ben Stone is the new executive director of the city’s Station North cultural district.
• Theatre Bay Area has a new managing director, Dana Harrison, who formerly played a key role in managing the Burning Man festival.

IN THE FIELD

• The Fayetteville (NC) Museum of Art is shutting down.
• The contract dispute between the New York City Opera and its musicians is getting ugly.
• With Occupy Wall Street in the rear view mirror, the local musicians’ union in New York City is reviving its Justice for Jazz Artists campaign, which I reported on back in 2009. Two years later, the union has not met with any success in convincing owners of the major jazz clubs in NYC to honor verbal agreements to pass the proceeds from a tax break (which was passed five years ago with lobbying help from the clubs in question) to a musicians’ pension fund.

BIG IDEAS

• The cultural equity conversation continues over at GIA. Barry Hessenius says it’s all about boards of directors. Arlene Goldbard offers her response, and a not-so-modest proposal to shake things up from the very foundations (so to speak).
• Tech toys: this video shows progress in 2011 on Arena Stage’s New Play Map.
• The Emerging Ideas series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council continues with Letitia Ivins’s Pop-Ups for the Populi.
• Minnesota’s Walker Art Center has a new website and it is apparently a trip.
• This has got to be the most epic liveblog I’ve ever seen - one post covering four days of madness at the Doris Duke-funded Continuing Innovation Convening last week in New York City, complete with pics, video, you name it. Karina Mangu-Ward has just declared herself a blogger to watch at EMCArts’s new portal ArtsFwd, which is well worth checking out.

PHILANTHROPY WORLD

• “The typical foundation provides just 22% of its grantees with assistance securing funding from other sources.” I’m actually surprised this number isn’t lower. However, about half of the total is accounted for by simply suggesting other prospects to the grantee, a form of assistance that grantees say doesn’t help all that much.
• GiveWell explains how it chose between its top two recommended charities.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Judith H. Dobrzynski reports on the new Art & Finance Report from Deloitte Luxembourg and ArtTactic.

ETC.

• Andrew Taylor points us to a cool story about the role that South African taxi cab drivers played in curating music consumption in the 1990s.
• Off-topic, but…it’s ludicrous that the penny is still around. I remember calls for them to disappear back when I was a teenager. Can we get some movement on this, finally?
• I named Craige Hoover’s YourTownPerforms.com one of the top 5 new arts blogs in 2010, and the thanks I get is that he disappears for over a year. Luckily, he’s back, hopefully for good this time.

• Around the horn: staycation edition
• The Top 10 Arts Policy Stories of 2011
• Around the Horn: Far East edition

(Work for me! Work for meeeeeeeeee!)

Fractured Atlas is seeking Winter/Spring 2012 fellows to play key roles in several mission-critical research and technology initiatives. We’re seeking individuals with a background or interest in the arts who are prepared to bring hard-nosed quantitative analysis skills to creative and strategic challenges in our field. If you get your kicks from creating awesome-looking spreadsheets that actually work, are a database programming ninja-in-training, or fancy yourself the next Alan Brown (or Nate Silver) in ten years, you might be just the kind of nerd we’re looking for.

Deadline: December 28, 2011.

Presenting and Artist Communities Director, National Endowment for the Arts

 The selectee will be responsible for the following tasks:

• Serve as Agency’s nationally recognized expert and authority for the fields of Presenting and Artist Communities in discussions throughout the agency including collaborations with other Divisions.
• Maintain good relations with leaders in the Presenting and Artist Communities fields and related fields and keep abreast of their perspectives on current and future trends.
• Review proposals from the Presenting and Artist Communities fields, manage panel review process for applications, propose funding amounts, present grant recommendations for consideration by the Chairman, Senior Deputy Chairman, Deputy Chairman for Program & Partnerships, and to the National Council on the Arts.
• Select experts in the Presenting and Artist Communities fields to serve as pre-screening and panel reviewers.  Chair advisory panel meetings.
• Ensure accomplishment of Division’s objectives through combined supervisory, technical and administrative direction of subordinates, including the planning/assigning of work, setting priorities and evaluating performance.

Deadline: December 22, 2011, but position may be filled before then.

Arts Education Director, National Endowment for the Arts

The selectee will be responsible for the following tasks:

• Serve as the Agency’s nationally recognized expert and authority for the field of Arts Education.
• Provide national leadership and direction concerning Agency Arts Education funding, programming, policies and partnerships.
• Maintain good relations with leaders in the Arts Education and related fields and keep abreast of their perspectives on trends and innovative developments.
• Study and analyze the implications of research, findings and trends in the Arts Education field in order to formulate and recommend appropriate funding, programming and policy.
• Review proposals from the Arts Education field, manage panel review process for applications, propose funding amounts and present grant recommendations for consideration by Senior-Level staff.

Deadline: January 9, 2012, but position may be filled before then.

Program Assistant, Cultural Development Corporation

Cultural Development Corporation (CuDC), a non-profit organization dedicated to making space for art, is accepting applications for the position of Program Assistant. This entry-level position provides support to CuDC’s Programs team, assisting with: the delivery of capacity-building services to artists and arts organizations; performances and exhibitions in the Mead Theatre Lab and Flashpoint Gallery; production of the Source Festival; creation of arts space.

No deadline provided.

• Cool jobs of the month
• Cool jobs of the month
• Cool jobs of the month

Under its former director, the San Francisco Arts Commission failed to properly track spending and had a fearful workplace, according to a city controller’s audit released Tuesday.

The report lays bare financial and management problems that festered in the $10 million city agency under Luis Cancel, former director of cultural affairs. Appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Cancel resigned this summer when he came under fire for clocking in from Brazil and mistreating staff.

[...]

Among other conclusions, auditors found that the Arts Commission was spending money that violated the city’s reimbursement policies - money held in accounts by Intersection for the Arts, the commission’s nonprofit fiscal sponsor.

(Wait, did I just read that right? The San Francisco Arts Commission, an agency of city government, was using one of its own grantees as a fiscal sponsor? Nothing against Intersection, which does great work, but…huh?!)

Anyway, things just get more bizarre from there. According to the audit in question:

Surveyed employees consistently reported that they did not feel that they could report misconduct or a human resources issue without retaliation. Over one-third (35 percent) of respondents indicated that they felt that staff could not report misconduct without fear of retribution. One response stated, “I certainly don’t feel safe or comfortable lodging a complaint,” while another stated, “historically, we’ve all been terrified of retribution (since 2008) because we all witnessed it in action.”

[...]

Employees reported little to no relationship between the duties they perform and those in their official job classification descriptions. A large majority (62 percent) of respondents indicated that job classification specifications often do not match the employee’s responsibilities and workload. For instance, one response identified a case in which a person hired as an intern continued to work for SFAC for over three years, taking on responsibilities that far exceeded those of an intern, with no change in classification or compensation to reflect the increased responsibilities.

Yikes! So when I tell you that there’s a huge uproar in the San Francisco artist community about the San Francisco Arts Commission, you gotta figure it’s about the gross financial and employee mismanagement of the previous administration, right? Think again.

Among the [audit's] 12 recommendations, two, dealing with the Cultural Equity Grants (CEG) program, are the most controversial. They say that the program should:

• Cease funding and administering four of its eight initiatives, on the grounds that the program’s enabling legislation authorizes only the “Cultural Equity Initiatives Program (CEI), a Program for Commissions to Individual Artists (IAC), the Project Grants to Small and Mid-size organizations (OPG), and the Facilities Fund (CRSP). The other four are recommended for elimination because they are not cited by name in the city Administrative Code: Native American Arts & Cultural Traditions (NAACT), Innovations in Strengthening the Arts (ISA), Arts & Communities: Innovative Partnerships (ACIP), Arts for Neighborhood Vitality grant categories (ANV)
• Ensure that no recipient receives more than one grant at a time, on the grounds that 14 of the 172 grant recipients received multiple grants in FY 2010-11. The guidelines say no recipient may receive more than one grant for the same project, but the Controller finds “some risk that the same recipient may use multiple grants for one project” sufficient grounds to limit eligibility further. Over the last five years, the Galeria de la Raza, a long-lived and highly respected, Latino visual arts organization deeply rooted in San Francisco’s Mission District, received 12 grants totalling just under $237,000, an average of $47,000 a year.

That’s from an article last week by Arlene Goldbard, a Bay Area blogger and longtime champion of the community arts. Her lengthy and excellent post goes on to defend with great passion the CEG program, which despite its small size has been an important national model in reaching immigrant and other underserved communities through arts funding. To Arlene and others in the California arts community who have been contributing their opinions on the anonymous pop-up blog Cultural Equity Matters, the Controller’s audit, which was ostensibly intended as a means of helping SFAC clean up its act, is only making things worse. Artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña goes so far as to call the report a “racist” attack on community arts funding, and even Goldbard criticizes the report for seeming “to have been written by a computer—or human beings impersonating a computer’s pristine disinterest in human events” and “respond[ing] with bureaucratic solutions that would be identical for any city agency, whether it regulated a fleet of trucks or cleaned the streets.”

I’m not in the middle of this thing, and I can’t speak to the motivations of those who instigated the inquiry. From a disinterested vantage point, though, my sense is that some of the criticism being leveled against the Controller’s audit is unfair. Sure, it’s bureaucratic; but look, these people are accountants. That’s like criticizing the San Francisco Mime Troupe for not properly considering the upsides of corporate personhood. On first glance it does seem strange that CEG is singled out, but given that it’s SFAC’s only major competitive grant program it’s perhaps not that surprising. I do think there’s a legitimate argument to be made about whether the audit should have sought to micromanage program operations at all, but once you get into considering specific financial transactions I can understand how it would be hard to know where to draw the line. In any case, the good news is that nowhere in the audit do the authors make a normative statement that CEG as a whole should get less funding, or that the specific organizations receiving multiple grants from CEG did anything wrong; it’s pretty focused on some narrow technical and legal concerns about how the program is operated and administered.

After initially saying that she supported the report’s recommendations (including eliminating those four “illegal” grant categories), interim director JD Beltran has sought to quiet the storm, publicly standing behind CEG and promising that no funds will be cut from the program (emphasis in the original):

The SFAC’s responses to the audit indicated that all programs will be made legally compliant.  It is most important to note, however, that our responses in no way indicated that any funding to the community through our grant programs would cease or decrease.…The report does not suggest or dictate agency policy, it simply recognizes shortcomings in certain agency fiscal, administrative, and staffing practices, and its findings also observed issues in the Cultural Equity Grants Program.

The SFAC remains steadfast in its mission, policies, and full support of its highly valued programs, and especially its groundbreaking Cultural Equity Grant Program.

So at this point, it looks like CEG is likely not in any real danger; that’s the good news. The bad news (although it may ultimately be for the best) is that this whole debacle has laid bare some things about cultural funding in San Francisco that are not, well, so equitable. The Cultural Equity Grants program gave out less than $2.4 million to 172 recipients in the most recent fiscal year, according to the report, or a bit under $14,000 per organization. By contrast, according to Goldbard, the San Francisco Symphony and Opera each received over $600,000 in government funds in the last fiscal year alone through San Francisco’s other city arts program, Grants for the Arts. On top of this, SFAC has an annual contract with the Symphony to “produce a concert series that is intended to appeal to youth, families, and the diverse demographics of the City.” It turns out that in FY11, the size of this contract ($2 million) makes up nearly a quarter of the Commission’s annual budget, and represents almost as much money as that spent on the entire Cultural Equity Grants program!

The dustup with the Arts Commission takes place at a time when cultural equity has been occupying, if you will, a large chunk of the national conversation about the arts, ever since the publication of Holly Sidford’s report Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change. Grantmakers in the Arts even has a whole blog salon going on about it right now. I’m not suggesting that the concerts that the City of San Francisco produces with the San Francisco Symphony are unworthy of public funding, or that $2 million is not a reasonable amount to pay for the Symphony’s services; I have no reason to make such presumptions. But it does seem to me a perfect example of how large-budget, historic cultural institutions have privileges of access at their disposal that few arts organizations founded within our lifetimes (including, therefore, hardly any organizations founded by or primarily serving racial and ethnic minorities) could ever dream of. Sure, Galeria de la Raza got 12 grants in 5 years from SFAC. But most of those grants had to be won with the approval of a panel of fellow citizens, with panel discussion taking place in public (CEG has one of the most radically transparent review processes in the country; see page 11 of the pdf). The San Francisco Symphony, to my knowledge, does not have its contract up for public review by a panel of citizen peers every year. It just gets the money.

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue with such things. The SFS offers world-class artistic programming. Of course the city should be honored, grateful even, to be able to offer that programming for free to its citizens, especially people who are less likely to take in the orchestra’s regular subscription series. But here’s the thing: the Symphony is able to offer that world-class programming in large part because it offers its artists and administrators a lot of money to come from around the world to San Francisco. And it’s able to offer people that kind of money in large part because, like the marquee orchestra in every city, it has friends in high places.

I’ll end with this rant from Maria X. Martinez, posted on the aforementioned Cultural Equity Matters blog:

[T]his report points out 2 small grants (we are talking very small) that do not use peer review…really? In my 15 years of civil service, I have only seen one department employ an open peer review: the SF Arts Commission. Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants are awarded by CCSF without one peer at the table, and we put a light on the tiny-by-comparison small grants within the Cultural Equity Endowment Fund? How many peers were at the table when deciding to bail out and guarantee to keep the Asian [Art] Museum afloat with a $99 million loan this year? [...]

Would not our brain trust…be better spent by auditing WHY La Galeria, for example, has to spend their extremely limited, precious time and energy to apply for 12 small grants over the course of 5 years (not to mention the overhead for SFAC to award and administer those same small [12] grants)? This study chooses, rather to focus on a very small percent of organizations for a very small amount of money who are awarded by their peers (!) because they are deserving.

Oh dear, we must get our priorities straight.

[UPDATE: The San Francisco Arts Commission staff has released a statement in support of the Cultural Equity Grants program.]

• Public Arts Funding Update: May
• Kansas Arts Commission vetoed by Governor
• Fox News gets facts, math wrong in report about NEA grants