- Wow, “sustainability” is definitely the word of the month. It was plastered all over the recent Americans for the Arts Convention, my own treatment of the subject was linked by jazz blogs everywhere (thanks, Darcy) and is now the top-read Createquity post of all-time, and now this week two bloggers have given it their own take. Holden Karnofsky takes a look at sustainability from a theory-of-change perspective: what does it mean for an organization to pursue sustainable change? This essay makes me think, once again, about how different the arts are from other charitable causes. For the most part, we’re not really about eradicating problems. The arts’ raison-d’etre is fundamentally positive rather than negative in orientation – looking at possibilities rather than deficiencies. Meanwhile, Guy Yedwab considers sustainability from an organizational leadership perspective, defining a sustainable organization as one that has set up processes such that new heads can “graduate” from within when old ones leave. It’s clear we have a ways to go before we can all agree on what we mean by the term.
- Well, as far as economic sustainability is concerned, Scott Walters reposted an earlier essay this past week on that old chestnut, Baumol and Bowen’s Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, and makes the case that we have adjusted our cost structure to the subsidized spoils available to us. Walters also gets this week’s BLOGGER ON FIRE award for a new project to pull together what data we have on the arts into one place, and this essay on the necessary centrality of participation in arts policy.
- But hey, who needs money when you can have attention? (h/t GIA blog) After all, according to Nielsen Soundscan, fewer than 6% of all new albums released in 2008 sold as many as 1,000 copies (and that’s just counting the albums that were official enough to be listed with Soundscan!). Given the winner-take-all nature of arts markets, Richard Florida predicts we’ll soon see a celebrity even bigger than Michael Jackson. (By the way, it’s much easier to be happy at celebrities’ success when you know them personally – like Caleb Burhans, previously mentioned on this blog, who has won the $153,000 Annenberg Prize.)
- Via the Nonprofit Law Blog, Iowa bar and club owners are complaining that the River Music Experience, a nonprofit organization, represents unfair competition. Meanwhile, this excellent Jody Dalton series on the contemporary classical recording industry reveals that the vast majority of commercial record labels specializing in this music (and most of them are, in fact, for-profit companies) are either a) subsidized by the artists, b) made possible by family wealth, or c) both.
- Not to beat a dead horse, but Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer lays waste to the “efficient markets” hypothesis here.
- Google Chrome personnel took a camera out into the streets of New York and found that most people don’t even know what a browser is, much less have heard of Google Chrome. MaryAnn Devine susses out the implications for arts marketers.
- Rosetta Thurman busts out a great post on nonprofit service organizations, really digging into the potential conflict between generating earned revenue (there’s that sustainability thing, again) and serving their constituency. I think this is a huge issue and Rosetta does a wonderful job tackling it.
- Guess those creative economy initatives don’t always work out for everyone: Hollywood is feeling the pinch from film companies looking for cheaper opportunities elsewhere.
- Michael Kaiser weighs in on federal arts policy, just before starting a 50-state tour as part of the Arts in Crisis initiative, calling for more coordination between agencies and departments. Judith H. Dobrzynksi was at the White House press conference introducing new arts liaison Kal Penn, the man to whom part of this responsibility might fall, and lived to tell the tale.
- The NEA is finally out with the stimulus grants, and the Art21 blog has analysis here and here.
- Oops, never mind: Looks like Jazz Times will march on after all, and Shepard Fairey is guilty of vandalism (but only on a couple of counts).
- Do you know what the future of arts journalism holds? Doug McLennan wants to talk to you.
