As a reminder, feel free to submit tips for “Around the horn” via the Createquity Tipster, now in convenient spreadsheet format!
- For the next three weeks, UNESCO is holding an international email discussion on “Funding Culture, Managing the Risk,” leading up to an in-person symposium on April 16-17 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The discussion is being held in English, Spanish, and French (all three at once, it’s quite disorienting) and anyone can join – just click “Subscribe” on this page. (h/t Sherri Brueggeman)
- A cultural research bonanza: the Journal of Planning Education and Research has devoted its entire March 2010 issue to art and economic development. Edited by the University of Southern California’s Elizabeth Currid, the issue includes articles from Mark Stern, Susan Seifert, Richard Florida, Ann Markusen, and a host of other writers with whose work I’m not familiar. You can read the entire issue for free here, just don’t print out the articles for a class or post them on your own website without permission.
- Speaking of Markusen, she writes with Marcie Rendon about a new research piece on the plight of Minnesota’s Native artists at Springblog. And while we’re at it, don’t miss Caron Atlas on the arts and gentrification at Community Arts Network. And if you still want more, here’s Colin Mercer speaking on cultural mapping for an hour in Berlin.
- Know an outstanding young (under age 35) cultural policy researcher based in Europe? Tell them about the Cultural Policy Research Award (10,000 euros). Applications are due May 24.
- Out of the mouths of babes: Havard ’09 (yes, that’s Harvard College ’09) grad A. K. Barnett-Hart made the Wall Street Journal recently for her undergraduate senior thesis on the origins of the financial crisis, which “was awarded summa cum laude and won virtually every thesis honor, including the Harvard Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.” Shades of Emily Glassberg Sands notwithstanding, this effort apparently involved substantial original data collection which made the analysis possible. Barnett-Hart reports that “an overreliance on computer models with imprecise inputs” played a key role in the credit agencies’ failure to accurately represent the risk associated with collateralized debt obligations. Tsk, tsk…
- Ugh, my worst nightmare: If Economists Ran the Schools.
- You can catch Bay Area denizen Arlene Goldbard in New York tonight and tomorrow, and later this week in St. Louis. Also, Arlene alerts us to a fundraising campaign on behalf of Community Arts Network, which is in a transition period and looking to continue its excellent work in the meantime.
- Well, this is one way to get my attention. Guy Yedwab wants me to tell you about what looks like a massacre at the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (this is the city’s cultural agency – separate from the LA County Arts Council), which is losing half its staff and spinning off four city-operated buildings to private groups. Meanwhile, good news in Rhode Island – the elimination of the percent-for-art rule for public buildings is off the table. But the state arts council still faces drastic cuts.
- Bloomberg is pulling funding from the NYC arts community? Ruh roh!
- Should we subsidize the arts through vouchers? It would be more democratic, that’s for sure.
- El Sistema (the Venezuelan youth symphony matrix that produced the LA Philharmonic’s music director, Gustavo Dudamel) has received a ton of euphoric press in recent years, but Greg Sandow reports on a darker side of the movement: no new music!
- Not another one: Facebook co-founder creates new social networking site for philanthropists.
- You gotta love wacko foundations. The Judith Rothschild Foundation, which had of the most idiosyncratic grant programs in the arts until it abruptly stopped honoring grant commitments last year, is operated, governed, and evaluated by a single dude who – surprise! – has found himself greatly enriched as a result of his stewardship of his friend’s assets! I mean, a six-figure travel budget? Seriously?
- Two good posts from Seth Godin this week. In this one, he makes a surprisingly crotchety-old-man argument that “the endless search for wow further coarsens our culture at the same time it encourages marketers to get ever more shallow.” And in that one, he writes, “brilliant editors and venture capitalists have the ability to get excited about a project that perhaps doesn’t match their taste–or to criticize it based on experience, not selfishness.” I’d say the same is true for brilliant arts philanthropists.
- Looks like this is gonna be a blog to follow.
- Fascinating, and….a little creepy?