ART AND THE GOVERNMENT: DOMESTIC
- AFTA’s Narric Rome shares the latest on how arts education has fared in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) reauthorization, which Jennifer Kessler reported on earlier this year. Mostly good news, from what it sounds like.
- Looks like net neutrality advocates dodged a bullet when the Senate rejected an effort by Republicans to turn back regulations that were put in place last year.
- It’s official: the zero-budget Kansas Arts Commission will be receiving zero dollars in matching funds from the NEA. Kansas is now contemplating selling arts license plates a la the California Arts Council.
- Jonathan Arbabanel gives the insider scoop on what’s happening with the newly-merged Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
- Did you know that, by law, artists in California earn royalties from future sales of their work? It sounds like a great idea, but Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman make a compelling argument at the Freakonomics blog that it’s actually not good policy for most artists.
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT: INTERNATIONAL
- Christopher Madden finds a strong relationship between cultural expenditures and cultural employment in Australia and New Zealand.
- Did you know that UNESCO has a Creative Cities Network? Or that the network has a conference coming up in Seoul, South Korea? I didn’t.
PRIVATE DOLLARS
- You’ve no doubt heard of the ArtPlace grant opportunity (letter of inquiry due today!), but the initiative offers just as much money in loan financing via the Nonprofit Finance Fund. There is a separate process to get in on that action, and the deadline is December 1.
- Mitch Nauffts reports on Bloomberg Philanthropies’s emergence as one of the nation’s top foundations.
- The Richard and Rhonda Goldman Foundation, a significant supporter of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, is spending down and has distributed its last set of grants.
- More on the Irvine Foundation’s new arts strategy, from arts program director Josephine Ramirez and foundation president Jim Canales.
- Whoa, I’d heard of composer Ann Southam via Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, but I had no idea she was loaded.
IN THE FIELD
- Two Austin art museums, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse, have merged.
- Yet another orchestra is facing significant financial troubles: this time, the Dallas Symphony. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, by contrast, is doing great under the strong leadership of Deborah Borda, with Walt Disney Concert Hall averaging 95% of capacity.
- Well, this is a novel negotiating tactic: the NYC Opera’s unions have offered to perform for free this season in exchange for health care and power over future venues. City Opera rejected the offer.
- Americans for the Arts’s Amanda Alef scored an interview with the collective voice that is the Occupy Wall Street Arts and Culture Committee.
RESEARCH CORNER
- Mandee Roberts takes issue with the fact that architects are included in the NEA’s recent report on artist professions and income.
- The NEA’s Sunil Iyengar takes on Holly Sidford’s report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” So does the League of American Orchestras’s Jesse Rosen, and Andrew Taylor.
THIS ECONOMY WE LIVE IN
- Applications for art and design college degrees in the UK are down 27% from last year, and officials worry that the rising cost of higher education is squeezing out lower-income students.
- As the cost of postsecondary education ratchets up ever higher, Cooper Union is considering charging tuition to undergraduates for the first time since 1902. (h/t Xenia via the Createquity Tipster)
- The value of the worldwide underground economy (broadly speaking, enterprises that are not registered or licensed and don’t pay taxes to the government) is approximately $10 trillion, according to an economist at Johannes Kepler University in Austria. If it were a country, it would be the second-largest economy in the world after the United States.
IN THE BLOGOSPHERE
- Farewell for now to Sean Stannard-Stockton, who is taking a sabbatical from his excellent blog Tactical Philanthropy. Hope we’ll see him back again soon.
- Chicago Artists Resource has a great behind-the-scenes interview with Thomas Cott of the celebrated email newsletter You’ve Cott Mail.
THOUGHT BUBBLES
- Congratulations to the folks at Animating Democracy for a fabulous blog salon at ARTSBlog, which took place over the past week. Doug Borwick makes a good point in noting the creeping influence of creative placemaking on the discussion there.
- Arlene Goldbard was also at the Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, and she had some things to say about the WolfBrown white paper on participatory arts that was presented there.
- Speaking of conferences, the Independent Sector Conference (about which I’ll have a report here shortly) wasn’t the only social sector gathering that met recently. Bunmi Akinnusotu offers a brief but informative dispatch about the 2011 Net Impact Conference in Portland, OR.
- Imagine my surprise to find this article on the Fast Company website (h/t Mission Paradox) by a former classmate of mine from undergrad, Adrian Slywotzky. Adrian recounts a fascinating pro-bono study by consulting firm Oliver Wyman (in which he is a partner) called the Audience Growth Initiative that looked at audience churn at nine major symphony orchestras.
- Fantastic advice from Seth Godin on how to get hired at a small company (a term that describes virtually all arts organizations).
- Bad Culture has posted Part II of its interview with longtime Bay Area cultural policy wonk John Kreidler. (Part I is available here.)
- Is Wikipedia, arguably the most successful crowdsourcing experiment in history, running out of steam? I sure hope not, but the encyclopedia has a huge backlog of editorial work (adding sources to articles, etc.) that is apparently stretching the capacity of the site’s volunteer contributors.
- Thank you, Beth Kanter, for highlighting the fact that curation (of content or otherwise) is an art form all its own.
- Coolness: Life in a Day, the YouTube project showcasing user-uploaded video all recorded on July 24, 2010, is now available in its 90-minute entirety – on YouTube, of course.